I

Bullets hammered the north wall of the last redoubt, Akard's communications center. Mortars crumped. Their bombs banged deafeningly. Bullets leaking through the two small north windows had made a shambles of the communications gear.

Marika had done what she could to stem the nomad tide, and she had failed. She had only two regrets: that her pack, the Degnan, would go into the darkness unMourned, and that for her there would be no journey to the Reugge cloister at Maksche. For her there would be no next step on the road that might have led to the stars.

The hammer of savage weapons rose to an insane crescendo. The nomads were closing in for the last kill. Then the uproar ended. Braydic, the communications technician, whimpered into the sudden silence, "Now they will come."

Marika nodded. The last minutes had arrived. The inevitable end of the siege had come.

Marika did something never done before. She hugged the only surviving members of her pack, the huntresses Grauel and Barlog. The scent of fear was heavy upon their rough fur.

Pups of the upper Ponath packs hugged no one but their dams, and that seldom after the first few years.

The two huntresses were touched deeply.

Grauel turned to the tradermale Bagnel, who was teaching her to operate a firearm. His comrade, last of those who had survived last week's fall of the tradermale packfast Critza, had fallen defending one of the north windows. Someone had to hold that against the savages. Grauel's heavy spear was too unwieldy.

"Wait!" Marika gasped. Her jaw went slack. "Something ... "

The universe of the touch, the ghost plane into which silth like Marika ducked to work their witchery, had gone mad. Some mighty shadow, terrible in its power, was raging up the valley of the Hainlin River, which this last bastion of the fortress Akard overlooked. For a moment Marika was paralyzed by the power of that shadow. Then she flung herself to a south-facing window.