Voodoo Planet by Andre Norton (big ebook reader txt) 📕

drink sparingly from his canteen, could not lose that sense of eyes upon him, of being tracked. Rock apes? Cunning as those beasts were, it was against their nature to trail in utter silence, to be able to carry through a long-term project. Lion, perhaps?

He noted that Nymani and Asaki took turns at rear guard today, and that each was alert. Yet, oddly enough, none of them mentioned the uneasiness they must all share.

They had a dry climb, finding no mountain stream to renew their water supply. All being experienced in wilderness travel, they made a mouthful of liquid go a long way. When the party halted slightly before midday, canteens were still half full.

“Haugh!”

They jerked up, hands on weapons. A rock ape, its hideous body clearly seen here, capered, coughed, spat. Asaki fired from the hip and the thing screeched, clawed at its chest where the dark blood spewed out, and raced for them. Nymani cut the beast down and they waited tensely for the attack of the thing’s tribe, which should have followed the abortive lunge on the part of their scout. But there was nothing⁠—neither sound nor movement.

What did follow froze them all momentarily. That mangled body began to move again, drew itself together, crawled toward them. Dane knew that it was impossible that the creature could live with such wounds. Yet the beast advanced, its head lolling on its hunched shoulders so that the eyes were turned blindly up to the full glare of the sun, while it crawled to reach the man it could not see.

“Demon!” Nymani dropped his needler, shrank back against the rocks.

As the thing advanced, before their eyes the impossible happened. Those gaping wounds closed, the head straightened on the almost invisible neck, the eyes glared once more with life, and slaver dripped from the swine snout.

Jellico caught up the needler Nymani had dropped. With a coolness Dane envied, the captain shot. And for the second time the rock ape collapsed, torn to ribbons.

Nymani screamed, and Dane tried to choke back his own cry of horrified protest. The dead thing put on life for the second time, crawled, got somehow to its feet, healed itself, and came on. Asaki, his face greenish-pale, stepped out stiffly as if each step he took was forced by torture. He had dropped his needler. Now he caught up a rock as large as his own head, raised it high with arms on which the muscles stood out like ropes. He hurled the stone, and Dane heard as well as saw the missile go home. The rock ape fell for the third time.

When one of those taloned paws began to move again, Nymani broke. He ran, his screams echoing thinly in the air, as the thing lurched up, the gory mess of its head weaving about. If his feet would have obeyed him, Dane might have followed the Khatkan. As it was, he drew his ray and aimed it at that shambling thing. Tau struck up the barrel.

The medic’s face was livid; there was the same horror in his eyes. But he moved out to front that monster.

A spot of shadow coalesced on the ground, deepened in hue, took on substance. Crouched low facing the rock ape, its haunches quivering for a deadly spring, narrowed green eyes holding on its prey, was a black leopard.

The tiny forward and backward movements of its body steadied, and it arched through the air, brought down the ape. A pitting, snarling tangle rolled across the slope⁠—and was gone!

Asaki’s hands shook as he drew them down his sweating face. Jellico readied a second clip in the needler mechanically. But Tau was swaying so that Dane leaped to take the shock of the other’s weight as he collapsed. Only for a moment did the medic hang so, then he struggled to stand erect.

“Magic?” Jellico’s voice, as controlled as ever, broke the silence.

“Mass hallucination,” Tau corrected him. “Very strong.”

“How!” Asaki swallowed and began again. “How was it done?”

The medic shook his head. “Not by the usual methods, that is certain. And it worked on us⁠—on me⁠—when we weren’t conditioned. I don’t understand that!”

Dane could hardly believe it yet. He watched Jellico stride to where the tangle of struggling beasts had rolled, saw him examine bare ground on which no trace of the fight remained. They must accept Tau’s explanation; it was the only sane one.

Asaki’s features were suddenly convulsed with a rage so stark that Dane realized how much a veneer was the painfully built civilization of Khatka.

“Lumbrilo!” The Chief Ranger made of that name a curse. Then with a visible effort he controlled his emotions and came to Tau, looming over the slighter medic almost menacingly.

“How?” he demanded for the second time.

“I don’t know.”

“He will try again?”

“Not the same perhaps⁠—”

But Asaki had already grasped the situation, was looking ahead.

“We shall not know,” he breathed, “what is real, what is not.”

“There is also this,” Tau warned. “The unreal can kill the believer just as quickly as the real!”

“That I know also. It has happened too many times lately. If we could only find out how! Here are no drums, no singing⁠—none of the tricks to tangle a man’s mind that he usually uses to summon his demons. So without Lumbrilo, without his witch tools, how does he make us see what is not?”

“That we must discover and speedily, sir. Or else we shall be lost among the unreal and the real.”

“You also have the power. You can save us!” Asaki protested.

Tau drew his arm across his face. Very little of the normal color had returned to his thin, mobile features. He still leaned against Dane’s supporting arm.

“A man can do only so much, sir. To battle Lumbrilo on his own ground is exhausting and I can not fight so very often.”

“But will he not also be exhausted?”

“I wonder.⁠ ⁠…” Tau gazed beyond the Khatkan to the barren ground where leopard and rock ape had ceased to be. “This magic is a tricky thing, sir. It