LITMIR.BIZ

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until Dane, watching with dazzled eyes, saw the wheel become a blur of light, hiding Tau within its fiery core. His own wrists ached with the strain of his drumming as he lifted one hand and tried to shield his sight from the glare of that pillar of fire.

      Lumbrilo was chanting—a heavy blast of words. Dane stiffened; his traitorous hands were falling into the rhythm of that other song! Straightaway he raised both from the drum head, brought them down in a discordinate series of thumps which bore no relation to either the song Tau wanted or that which Lumbrilo was now crooning. Thump—thump—thump—Dane beat it out frantically, belaboring the drum head as he wanted to sink his fists home on the body of the Khatkan witch doctor.

      The pillar of fire swayed, fluttered as if a wind drove it—and was gone. Tau, unmarked, smiled.

      “Fire!” He pointed his fingers at Lumbrilo. “Would you try earth, and water, and air also, wizard? Call hither your whirlwind, up your flood, summon the land to quake. None of those shall bring me down!”

      Shapes came flooding out of the night, some monstrous, some human, streaming past Lumbrilo to crowd into the circle of firelight. Some Dane thought he knew, some were strangers. Men wearing space uniforms, or the dress of other worlds, women—they strode, wept, mingled with the monsters to laugh, curse, threaten.

      Dane guessed that Lumbrilo sent now against the Terran the harvest of the medic’s own memories. He shut his eyes against this enforced intrusion upon another’s past, but not before he saw Tau’s face, strained, fined to the well-shaped bones beneath the thin flesh, holding still a twisted smile as he met each memory, accepted the pain it held for him, and set it aside unshaken.

      “This, too, has no power any longer, man who walks in the dark.”

      Dane opened his eyes. Those crowding wraiths were fading, losing substance. Lumbrilo crouched, his lips drawn back from his teeth, his hatred plain to read.

      “I am not clay to be molded by your hands, Lumbrilo. And now I say that the time has come to call an end—”

      Tau raised his hands slowly once again, holding them away from his body, palms pointing earthward. And beneath them, on either side of the spaceman, two black shadows gathered on the surface of the ground.

      “You have fettered yourself with your own bounds. As you have been the hunter, so shall you now be the hunted.”

      Those shadows were growing as plants might issue from the packed soil of the camping ground. When his hands were shoulder high, Tau held them steady. Now on either side of his tautly held body crouched one of the black-and-white lions with which Lumbrilo had identified his own brand of magic throughout the year.

      Lumbrilo’s “lion” had been larger than life, more intelligent, more dangerous, subtly different from the normal animal it counterfeited. So now were these. And both of them raised their heads to gaze intently into the medic’s face.

      “Hunt well, brothers in fur,” he said slowly, almost caressingly. “Him whom you hunt shall grant you sport in the going.”

      “Stop it!” A man leaped from the shadows behind the witch doctor. Firelight made plain his off-world dress, and he swung up a blaster, aiming at the nearest of the waiting beasts. That flash struck true, but it neither killed nor even singed the fine fur of the animal’s pelt.

      As the blaster’s aim was swung from beast to man, Dane fired first. His ray brought a scream from the other, who dropped his weapon from a badly seared hand to reel back, cursing.

      Tau waved his hands gently. The great animal heads turned obediently, until the red eyes were set on Lumbrilo. Facing them, the witch doctor straightened, spat out his hate at the medic:

      “I do not run to be hunted, devil man!”

      “I think you do, Lumbrilo. For you must taste fear now as you have made other men drink of it, so that it fills your blood and races through your body, clouds your mind to make of you less than a man. You have hunted out those who doubted your power, who stood in your chosen path, whom you wanted removed from the earth of Khatka. Do you doubt that they wait in the last dark for you now, ready to greet you, witch doctor? What they have known, you shall also know. This night you have shown me all that lies in my past that is weak, that was evil, that I may regret or find sorrow for. So shall you also remember through the few hours left you. Aye, you shall run, Lumbrilo!”

      As he spoke, Tau approached the other, the two black-and-white hunters pacing beside him. Now he stooped and caught up a pinch of soil and spat upon it three times. Then he threw the tiny clod of earth at the witch doctor. It struck Lumbrilo just above the heart and the man reeled under what might have been a murderous blow.

      The Khatkan broke then, completely. With a wailing cry he whirled and ran, crashing into the brush as one who runs blindly and without hope. Behind him the two beasts leaped noiselessly together and all three were gone.

      Tau swayed, put his hand to his head. Dane kicked away the drum, arose from his cramped position stiffly to go to him. But the medic was not yet done. He returned to stand over the prostrate native hunters and he clapped his hands sharply.

      “You are men, and you shall act as men henceforth. That which was, is no longer. Stand free, for the dark power follows him who misused it, and fear no longer eats from your basins, drinks from your cups, or lies beside you on the sleep mats.”

      “Tau!” Jellico’s shout reached them over the cries of the rousing Khatkans. But Dane was there first, catching the medic before he slumped to the ground; but he was dragged with that dead weight until he sat with the medic’s head on his shoulder, the other’s body resting heavily against him. For one horror-filled moment Dane feared that he did indeed hold a dead man, that one of the outlaw Hunters must have struck a last blow for his discredited leader. Then Tau sighed and began to breathe deeply. Dane glanced up, amazed, at the captain.

      “He’s asleep!”

      Jellico knelt and his hand went to test heart beat, then to touch the medic’s worn and dirty face. “Best thing for him,” he said briskly. “He’s had it.”

      It took some time to get the facts of their triumph sorted out. Two of the off-worlder poachers were dead. The other and the spaceman were prisoners, while Nymani rounded up in addition the man Dane had burned to save Tau. When the younger spaceman returned from making the medic comfortable in the shelter, he found Asaki and Jellico holding an impromptu court of inquiry.

      The dazed native Hunters had been expertly looped together by Nymani and, a little apart from them, the off-worlders were under examination.

      “An I-C man, eh?” Jellico, smoothing a mud-spattered chin with a grimed hand, regarded the latest arrival measuringly. “Trying to run in and break a Combine charter, were you? You’d better spill the facts; your own head office will disown you, you ought to know that. They never back any failures in these undercover deals.”

      “I want medical attention,” snapped the other, cradling his seared hand to his chest. “Or do you plan to turn me over to these savages?”

      “Seeing as how you tried to blast our medic,” replied the captain with a grin which was close to shark-like, “he may not feel much like patching up those fingers of yours. Stick ‘em in where they have no business, and they’re apt to get burned. At any rate he’s not going to look at ‘em until he’s had a chance to rest. I’ll give you first aid. And while I’m working we’ll talk. I-C going into the poaching trade now? That news is going to please Combine; they have no use for you boys anyway.”

      His answer was lurid and uninformative. But the uniform tunic the other wore could not be so easily explained away. Dane, worn out, stretched his aching length on a pile of mats and lost all interest in the argument.

      *

      Two days later they stood once more on the same terrace where Lumbrilo had wrought his magic and met his first defeat. This time no lightning played along the mountain ridges and the blaze of the sun was so bright and clear that one could hardly believe in the fantastic happenings of that swamp clearing

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