• “They’re coming here,” said Sam, annoyance in his voice and his stance. “Here. To question me.”
“Why?” asked Theseus. “What have you done?”
“Nothing!” Sam cried. “Everything! Production is down. Not much, not overall, but it’s down. Or, we’re a curiosity. So they’re coming here!”
“Who? Can we fight them? Challenge them? Set an ambush?”
Sam shook his head, half-laughing. “No, no. It’s not an invasion. They’re harmless. Just people. Like the courtiers in your father’s court.”
“Who plotted,” said Theseus loftily. “Always!”
“Well, these plot too, but they don’t go about killing people.” Sam shook his head, amused once more.
“Who are they?”
“Horgy, Jamice, Spiggy. A crazy woman named Zilia Makepeace. Harribon Kruss, the Topman from Settlement Three, but he’s coming later on. It’s no problem, really, just an annoyance. We’ll show them around, they’ll ask a few questions, they’ll go back home.”
“They don’t need to come,” said Theseus. “Whatever happened was only temporary. Everything will be as it was. Better than it was.”
“Settlement One will be first again?” asked Sam, doubtfully.
“How can you doubt it? With you in command?”
Comforting words, which Sam wasn’t sure he understood. How would Theseus know about farm quotas? Hardly his kind of thing.
As though aware of this scepticism, the hero whispered, “Have I told you about the monster? Of course I haven’t. I’ve been saving it!”
“What monster, where?”
“Just a little west of here. In a cave. It hasn’t been there long. I found it. You don’t have your sword yet, so you’ll have to kill it with your bare hands, but you can, Sam. I know you can.” The hero moved toward the west, beckoning.
“Tomorrow,” Sam suggested, feeling a bit weary.
“Now,” whispered the hero. “Tonight!”
At the western edge of the fields, Theseus left him, just beyond the dorge crop, tall rustling stalks bearing globular clusters of almost ripe grain heads, the rows alive with hunting cats. Sam carried a glow-bug lantern, and everywhere he turned he saw twin disks of cold fire, cat eyes, reflecting his own light back at him.
“Out there,” Theseus said, pointing westward. “There.” Then he turned on his heel and vanished among the dorge, glowing through the leaves, though none of the cats turned their heads to follow him with their eyes.
Sam looked westward, in the direction Theseus had pointed. Nothing was out there except undulating plains covered with sparse growth, dotted with short curlicue trees, runneled with streams so insignificant they did not even gurgle as they ran. Here and there water sneaked along the ground, over clean pebbles, silent as a snake. Nothing was out there but dullness and more dullness. Sam thought of refusing to go, then reconsidered. The walk wouldn’t hurt him.
His feet found water, first, and then a flattened trail beside the water, one easy for the feet to keep to. Something walked here, something cropped the scanty grasses, keeping the trail low and flat. Pocket squirrels, maybe, coming to drink. Legions of ferfs, marching by companies and battalions. Maybe an upland omnivore or two, fallen off the heights to be bored to death by the plains. There wasn’t anything larger native to the place.
The sound stopped him, one foot just lifting, so that he stood heronlike, poised, unable to move. A howl. A strangled paean of fury or hunger or … A guttural sound, a coughing roar. What?
Westward, whatever it was. Where silence was now, not even echoes to tell him he had really heard it.
Sam ran his hands over himself, taking inventory. Sword belt, helmet, work clothes, lantern. Tools on his belt: spy-light, knife, memorizer, trouble-link. His hands lingered on the link. If he triggered it, Africa and Jebedo Quillow would be alerted to his location. Both of them would arrive within minutes.
Not yet. He took off the sword belt and helmet, placing them carefully beside the trail. The memorizer went in the helmet, along with the spy-light. It wasn’t good for anything except disclosing the innards of machinery. Knife he would keep. Trouble-link he would keep. Lantern he would keep, though, just now, he would turn it off.
When his eyes had adjusted to the starlit surfaces around him, the faint glimmer of water, the barely discernable trail, he went westward once more. Up a tiny slope and down a tiny slope, the streamlet cutting through, between dwarf banks, edged with white flowers. The scent rose from them, dizzying. He had never seen them before.
At the foot of the slope, the stream dropped, suddenly and shockingly, over a bank. The sound of falling water alerted him before he stepped off into air, and he lit the lantern to find the source of the sound. It lay beneath him, the height of two tall men, a pool at the head of a … a canyon?
Hobbs Land had no canyons, Sam told himself, quite seriously. Therefore, he was dreaming, sleep walking, or in some other place.
The sound came again, closer. A coughing roar. A growl of fury. He turned off the light and scrambled over the edge of the bank, dropping onto a soggy patch beside the pool. More of the white flowers bloomed beside the pool, filling the canyon with their sweet smell, spicy, faintly resinous. A trail led along the stream, a larger stream than the one above, augmented from some source, some spring or underground brook which had joined it at the pool. The canyon grew deeper and wider as he walked. The little stream became a small river. There were holes, large and small, in the canyon walls, the smaller ones full of the flutter of wings. Trees rustled along the banks. Large stones stood blackly in the water, making it purl and chuckle as it roiled around them, starshine gleaming on the curved ripples.
The thing attacked him from behind. Sam fell forward, dropping the lantern, feeling teeth at the back of his neck, rolling frantically to get out from under it. It stank. It held on with clawed feet, clawed
