Baal

WITHOUT WARNING the wind died away and was replaced by an utter calm that, oddly, played on Virga's nerves until they were as raw as the flesh across his windburned cheeks. Even the harsh breathing of the team quieted until all Virga could hear was the sound of runners on the ice, a smooth hissing as if they were nearing the nest of a coiled white reptile.

They continued on into the North, Zark correcting their course with only a slight movement on the handlebars. Looking up, Virga could see stars clearly and individually against a backdrop of total darkness. There was no moon, but the stars seemed to radiate a dim silvery glimmer that splashed down across the plain and painted it in deepest blue.

They reached a point where the land gradually began to slope down. Zark halted the team with a single soft command, and as the dogs milled about he stood with his lantern at his side and looked out to where the distance became a drawn curtain.

Michael stepped beside him. "Is something wrong?"

"Be quiet," Zark said. He was listening for something. He narrowed his eyes and swept them back and forth along the horizon. He looked briefly to the stars and then back at the far landscape.

"There are no lights," Zark said.

"What?" Virga asked.

"No lights," the man repeated. "Sagitak is on the horizon. There should be lights in windows."

"They're nomads? Maybe they've left," Virga suggested hopefully. The man would have to take them on.

"Shit," Zark muttered. He walked to the sledge and retrieved his flare gun and the sealskin bag. Virga watched as he popped open the breech and inserted a red cartridge. Holding it at arm's length over his head, he fired it with a soft plop! in the direction of the settlement. In another few seconds they could see, bathed in red light as the flare arced in the sky, the dim outlines of huts far away and something else, something like a dark semicircular scrawl. Zark tightened; Virga felt the response repeated in Michael. The hunter bent on one knee in the snow and waited for either a light or the reply of another flare.

There was nothing.

One of the dogs whined. Another answered. The black animal stood grim and unyielding; when another animal began to whine the big black snapped in its direction.

Zark shook his head. "I don't know," he said quietly, almost to himself. He said, "Gamma!" to the dogs and the sledge moved off again toward the lower plain.

In another fifteen minutes they had reached the flat. The flare had faded, returning them to darkness. Virga was aware Zark's breathing had become heavier. The dogs strained at their leads, perhaps recognizing by habit a place of food and rest. Virga tried to pierce the gloom but his eyes were not good enough. He cursed his weakness.

And suddenly the dogs yelped, stopping and then tangling together as if they had run collectively into a wall of glass.

Zark cursed. He tightened his grip on the handlebars and cracked his whip over the head of the lead dog. It wanted to go on and pulled mightily at its lead, but the other animals balked, thrusting their tails between their legs and digging in with their paws. Zark struck his whip directly into their midst, but still they refused to move.

The ground was rutted with the marks of sledges that had passed in the same direction, so Virga reasoned that they had not run into rocks or some obstruction. The settlement, if he had estimated the distance correctly, still lay some hundred yards ahead.

Throwing his whip down, Zark cursed the animals and retrieved his rifle from the sledge. He said to the two men, "These animals are not moving. I'm going ahead. Are you coming?"

"What's wrong?" asked Virga, afraid to know. Beyond Zark the darkness was awesome and absolute.

The man's eyes blazed briefly. "I'm going to find out." He held the lantern with one hand and followed its yellow track on the scarred snow. Virga and Michael followed behind. Zark stopped twice to bend down and examine the sledge tracks.

As they walked toward the settlement, the dogs still whimpered behind them. Zark stopped abruptly and sniffed the air, his face intent in the yellow light. "Can you smell it?" he asked Michael.

"No. What do you smell?"

"Blood," the man said. He raised his lantern and walked on.

Patches of it, black and frozen, were scattered about on the snow. Virga avoided it, feeling his heart hammering in his chest. They could no longer hear the dogs. Virga longed for any sound, even the wind's piercing wail.

Zark stopped again. He held out the lantern. Its illumination splashed onto the bloody snow and crept along a narrow path that broadened and broadened until it fell upon something that made Virga gasp and stiffened Zark as if he were suddenly frozen.

It was the body of an Eskimo, clad in bloody furs, bound with rawhide thongs to a cross of splintered wood. The cross had been hammered upside down into the permafrost, so the man's staring eyes were near ground level. Virga had a sudden recollection of having seen an inverted cross over a doorway, but the frantic rush of blood in his brain prevented him from remembering exactly where.

As Zark moved the lantern slightly its glow revealed a deep gash across the man's throat. Bone glinted; the blood made a black oily pool beneath a face open-mouthed in absolute, primal terror.

And he was not alone.

Zark swung the lantern to both sides. The three men saw a row of bodies, some disemboweled, some decapitated, hanging from obscene crosses and stretching on both sides into the darkness beyond the range of the lantern, seemingly into infinity. Virga caught the scent of blood that Zark had mentioned and noticed with a dulled sense of alarm that he was standing in a frozen puddle. The red snow covered his boots.

"Thirty-six men," Zark said suddenly. He spoke as if he were totally drained of strength. "Twenty-eight women. All of them have been murdered."

"A barrier." It was Michael speaking.

"What?" asked Virga, tearing his gaze away from those terrible agonized corpses.

"This is a warning to anyone who has reached this point. An example of what lies beyond for anyone crossing the barrier."

"All of them," Zark was saying. He shifted the lantern and looked, disbelieving, down the line of gruesome crucifixions. Faces caught the yellow light and stared back through ice-filmed eyes. Open straining mouths screamed at death blows. Curled fingers of outthrust hands clawed at the last remnants of life. They had died in much pain and, worse, a terrible certainly of what lay before them.

Zark stepped forward and shined the light on an upturned face, here another, another, another. Some he touched gently. Some he stood over and spoke to, quietly, in their native tongue. Virga shuddered and, glancing toward Michael, realized that the man was looking beyond the row of corpses out toward the black wastes.

"These were good people," Zark said. "They were good hunters with loyal wives. And now..." He turned suddenly upon Michael. "Who did this thing?"

"Baal," Michael said softly.

"The man you seek?"

"The man we seek."

"One man did this? One man murdered these people and left them staked out like dog meat?"

"He's not alone. There are others with him."

"How many?"

"Three or four."

Zark cursed bitterly. "How can a man do anything like this?"

"They were your friends?"

"I knew them," Zark said. "They asked my advice. They trusted me. I knew them."

Zark's anger was wild and churning behind his eyes; it seemed on the verge of breaking free. Virga shifted his weight, crunching through blood-caked snow.

"What kind of man," Zark said, "is this Baal?"

"The thing Baal has done here is nothing compared with what he's done below," Michael replied. "It's nothing compared to what he can do. We must find him very soon."

The hunter turned, his eyes sweeping along the row of crosses. He shook his head at the awful carnage. "This has the stink of evil," Zark said.

"Yes," Michael said in a voice Virga had to strain to hear.

Zark said, "This is the final settlement before the great plain. I'll guide you along the route taken by their birds. But I must ask one thing. I want to deal with this man Baal."

Michael regarded the other man and finally shook his head. "No. That I can't promise you and I will not explain why. I know you want revenge. Revenge can be noble. But in this case revenge is a lost cause."

Revenge. Revenge. Revenge. The word thudded inside Virga's head. He'd heard it before and it had terrified him. Where? Where?

"Lost or not," Zark thundered. "I'll have it!"

"No," the other man said. "You will not because you cannot."

"Do you want him for yourself? Then I'll tell you something right now. You'll have to fight me for him. And I'll break you in half."

"Perhaps."

The two men glared at each other as if expecting a confrontation.

"We should be leaving this place," Virga said. "We can't do anything here."

Zark blinked. His gaze flickered over toward Virga. He fired a last red stare in Michael's direction and then turned away. He stood for a moment, the lantern down at his side and blood all over his boots. "Something is wrong," he said. "Damn me if something isn't wrong!" He stalked down the row of corpses, shining the light on agonized faces. "There were over twenty children in this settlement. There are none here. There are no bodies."

"We should be leaving," Michael said.

"Where are their bodies?" demanded Zark, pacing up and down the barrier like a great hulking beast.

"Zark!" It was a command for attention, sharp and cold. The hunter stood in his tracks and very slowly turned his head toward the lean, authoritative figure standing beside him. Michael put his hand on the man's shoulder. "We are leaving now."

Zark drew himself up to curse in Michael's face but, seeing the grim determination on the other's features, let his anger subside before he spoke. He shook the hand off and wheeled around in the direction of the sledge. "We're leaving," he said.

Walking back, Michael stepped beside Virga and said quietly, "Prepare for the worst."

"What do you mean?"

"The children's bodies were taken for a purpose, the same purpose for which children by the thousands were induced into Kuwait."

When Virga did not reply Michael said, "No matter. We shall see what we shall see. To attempt to explain to Zark the depth of Baal's power would be futile."

Walking fifteen yards ahead, Zark turned and said, "You talking about me back there? Come on. I'm not waiting for you."

Zark cracked his whip into the left side of the lead dog to guide the team around the grisly barrier. The dogs were still shy but the ferocious head animal strained at its lead and growled until the others, sensing that they were not headed any further into that death-smelling place, shared the weight. The sledge tore away on a horizontal line a hundred yards beyond the barrier. Though Zark cursed and whipped them, the team refused to turn on a northern path for what seemed like almost an hour. Finally Zark cracked his whip over the lead's head and wrenched with all his strength at the handlebars. The sledge shuddered as the dogs began to turn and, minutes later, they had regained the correct course and left the visage of death behind.

They traveled in silence. Zark was grim and brooding, his eyes fixed on the indefinable, at least to Virga's untrained vision, horizon. The air was still and calm; it yet smelled of blood even though the settlement was far behind.

On all sides there was nothing but empty black and the ever-present stars. Virga saw the red and blue trails of particles streaking across the heavens, burning in Earth's atmosphere. Once a meteor flashed along the horizon and burned itself out in dazzling red hundreds of miles to the east. To primitive peoples, Virga thought, it would be a sign from God, perhaps a warning that the entity of the skies was displeased. The priests would sit over ceremonial fires for days debating the meaning of the flaming skywriting. Drought, famine, or even a war yet to come: the priests would argue as to which it was. And the mysterious result was that a great percentage of ancient predictions based on sky observation came about. There was no fall from heaven, the priests said, that did not foretell a fall on terra firma.

Another two hours - or so Virga thought - passed before Michael turned to him. "Are you tired? Do you need rest?"

Virga shook his head. It was a lie but he didn't want to delay them. He felt weak and hollow-eyed but he didn't want to sleep. The images of the frozen dead faces were too sharp in his memory to allow peace; he knew he would dream of them and in his dream he would be one of them, struggling to escape over bloody snow but knowing always he could never get far enough away.

Several times Zark stopped the sledge and walked a few yards ahead, where he would bend down on one knee and just stare without moving, his eyes fierce slits. Then he would walk back and systematically make certain everything was still lashed securely to the sledge. He checked the rifle repeatedly and refilled his lantern with kerosene from a small metal container.

"How far would you say?" Virga asked.

"Can't say. Maybe one kilometer, maybe ten. Maybe one hundred. But I'll know. This is land that even the Eskimo avoids. There's nothing here."

"You're sure we're headed in the right direction?"

"We're swinging east, the same route as the birds. You trust me and I'll trust these." He touched the corner of one eye and his nose.

The stars disappeared. The harsh breathing of the dogs, the crack of Zark's whip became a regular rhythm. Virga, his eyes and limbs heavy, hung on to the sledge and let it pull him. Soon the terrain about them began to change; ice-crusted black rocks tore their way out of the permafrost and huge mountains of ice, veined in deep green, squatted like Eskimo attempts at skyscrapers.

The sledge began to slide, slowly at first then roller-coasterlike, up and over the slopes. Zark kept control by holding back on the handlebars and dragging his heels along the ground.

Then the ground simply fell away with breathtaking abruptness. Its runners hissing, the sledge came up a slope and hurtled down like a rocket-sled over glimmering blue ice. Michael was thrown to one side, sliding down the incline on his belly. Zark scrabbled for a foothold but there was none. He lost his grip and fell, cursing.

Virga, hanging on, saw the dogs trying to scramble out of the way or, impossibly, outrun the vehicle with its overload of equipment. The sledge slipped to the right, throwing the team off balance and scattering them into their leads. A wall of snow and ice fragments collapsed over Virga's head, blinding him. He heard Zark shout, "Jump clear!"

At the base of the steep slope was a flat ice plain. The sledge was going to crash down on it. The dogs were yelping in fear. Virga released his hold on wood and threw himself to the left, wide of the hurtling sledge. He landed on his side and spun around and around on a surface of glass, trying to protect his injured hand. Below him, on the plain, there was a sound of metal grinding over rocks. Sparks flew up. The team whimpered, a chorus of pain. Then Virga slid to the base and lay there, breathing heavily, on his stomach.

Zark had regained his footing and was walking carefully down the lower third of the slope. Beyond him, Michael struggled to his feet.

Virga cleared his vision and cursed. Damn! Possibly three or four dogs had been injured. The dark hulk of the sledge lay ahead and the dogs, though still bound by their leads, were scattered everywhere. Most had already regained their footing to wait for instructions, but a few had not stirred.

And, as Virga counted the remaining uninjured dogs, he saw a light flash perhaps half a mile away.

He tensed. Michael had almost reached him. Virga stood, heedless of the new pain that throbbed in his hand, and motioned. "A light," he said. "I saw a light out there."

"Damn it to hell!" Zark said from behind them. He was brushing snow off his furs as he walked. Ice had completely caked his beard and made him appear an old man. "That probably tore a fucking runner loose! And my dogs - "

"Zark," Michael said quietly. He pointed into the distance and the hunter looked along the finger toward the flashing light.

The man grunted. He whispered, "Could be another group of hunters on the ice. But hunting isn't good here. Still..."

"How far is that?" Virga asked. "About a half-mile?"

"Maybe," Zark said. "No, more than that. You can be sure the sound of that sledge hitting bottom carried over there. Looks like someone with a lantern walking... moving too slow to be on a sledge." He watched the light for a few more seconds and then quickly stepped to check his sledge and dogs. He moved among the team, speaking softly to them.

"You're all right?" Michael asked Virga.

"Yes. I'm fine."

"Good. I believe that light is shining in Baal's camp. There is a possibility that Baal himself may already be gone. If that's the case I'll go back to Avatik and continue somewhere else. Will you go back to America?"

"I don't know. I don't know what I'll do."

One of the dogs cried out sharply. They turned to see Zark raising his rifle and clubbing a second dog in the head. Then a third and a fourth. He bent down and with a knife from his coat cut loose the leaders of the dead animals. Then he carefully checked the runners and walked back to the two men. "Three dogs with broken legs, one with a broken back," he said. "The sledge has a damaged runner. We'll be slowed but I don't have the means of repairing it. Both of you are okay? No broken bones? Good." Zark gathered up a few supplies that had been thrown free and relashed them to the sledge frame. He coiled the whip around his hand and made certain all the leads were free. "From here on in," he said, "I want no talking. None. Don't even breathe hard. Someone up there knows we're here. He may not know who we are or how many but he has heard us. We won't be showing our light." He grasped the handlebars and said very quietly, "Gamma."