Book 1 - Doomstalker by Glen Cook Page A

loose from
the pile kept for use in a possible raid, but they had trouble. The
ice storm had frozen the pile into a single glob.
     
    Kublin called the alarm during his afternoon watch. The
huntresses immediately assumed his imagination had gotten the best
of him, he being a flighty pup and male to boot. But a pair of
huntresses clambered up the tower, their weight making it creak and
sway, as had been done with several earlier false alarms.
    Kublin was not a victim of his imagination, though at first he
had trouble convincing the huntresses that he was indeed seeing
what he saw. His eyes were very sharp. Once he did convince them,
they dismissed him. He returned to the loghouse to bask in
unaccustomed attention.
    “I saw smoke,” he announced proudly. “A lot of
smoke, far away.”
    Skiljan questioned him vigorously—“What direction?
How far? How high did it rise? What color was it?”—till
he became confused and frustrated.
    His answers caused a stir.
    Marika had less experience of the far countryside than did her
elders. It took her longer to understand.
    Smoke in that direction, east, at that distance, in that color,
could mean only one thing. The packstead of their nearest
neighbors, the Laspe, was burning. And packsteads did not burn
unless intentionally set ablaze.
    The Degnan packstead frothed with argument again. The central
question was: to send scouts or not. Skiljan and Gerrien wanted to
know exactly what had happened. Many of those who only hours
earlier had demanded the gate be opened now wanted it kept closed.
Even a large portion of the Wise did not want to risk huntresses if
the nomads were that close.
    Skiljan settled the question by fiat. She gathered a dozen
huntresses of like mind and marched out. She had her companions arm
as huntresses seldom did, with an assortment of missile weapons,
hatchets and axes, knives, and even a few shields. Shields normally
were used only in mock combats fought during the celebrations held
at the turning of each season.
    Marika crowded into the watchtower with the sentry on duty. She
watched her dam’s party slip and slide across the
ice-encrusted snowfields till they vanished into the woods east of
the packstead.
    When she returned to her loghouse, they gave her the iron axe
her dam had been sharpening, and showed her what to do. Skiljan had
taken it from the nomads she had slain. It had not been cared for
properly. Many hours would be required to give it a proper
edge.
    Not far away, Pobuda and several others—Wise, males, and
huntresses who pretended to some skill in metalworking—were
etching the blades of arrowheads and spears. Bhlase sat in the
center of their circle with his pot of poison, carefully painting a
brown, gummy substance into the etchings with a tiny brush. Marika
noted that he wore gloves. The young huntress who carried the
finished weapons away also wore gloves, and racked them out of the
reach of the younger pups.
    Marika soon grew bored with grinding the axe’s edge. She
had too much energy to sit still all the time. Too many strange
thoughts fled through her mind while she ran the whetstone over
that knicked piece of iron. She tried to banish the thoughts, to
touch her dam.
    There were distractions. The touch came and went. She followed
the scouting party peripatetically. Mostly, she tasted their fear.
Kublin kept coming to her with questions in his eyes. She kept
shaking her head till his curiosity frayed her temper. “Get
away!” she snarled. “Leave me alone! I’ll tell
you when there’s something to tell.”
    Sometimes she tried to touch Grauel, who carried the
Degnan’s message to the packfast. She could not find Grauel.
But she did not worry. Grauel was the best of the pack in field and
forest. If she did not get through, none could, and there was no
hope from that direction.
    The scouts returned at dusk, unharmed but grim. Again
Skiljan’s loghouse filled with the adult female population of
the packstead. This evening they