'Holy Christ!'

'Really, Rudy,' Ingold returned, in the mildest of tones. There's no need for concern. They're only dooic.'

'Famous last words.' Rudy stood irresolutely in the sunken roadbed, warily scanning the filthy host of semihumans that had appeared with such suddenness on the banks above. 'That's what Custer said about the Indians.' Ingold blinked at him in surprise. 'Never mind.' He drew his sword and set himself for a fight.

Back in Karst, Rudy had seen tame and enslaved dooic shambling along after their masters with frightened, doglike eyes; he had thought them pathetic. Feral and naked, baring their yellow tusks along both sides of the empty road, they were an entirely other matter. There must have been twenty or more big males in the band; the tallest of them, standing in the centre of the road with a huge rock grasped in one distorted hand, was close to Rudy's own height. Ingold had told him once that the dooic would eat anything, including burros - possibly even including human beings, if they could kill them. He wondered how much effect his and Ingold's swords would have against so many.

Ingold clicked his tongue reprovingly and placed a comforting hand on Che's head. The burro was on the verge of hysterics - not that it ever took much to reduce him to that state - but he quieted under the old man's touch. Rudy, who stood a little in the lead, risked a glance back at them.

'Would those things attack people?'

'Oh, possibly.' Ingold took Che's headstall in one hand and brushed past Rudy, making his way calmly toward the half-

dozen or so hairy, two-legged animals blocking the route. 'In this part of the country they're hunted and put to work on the treadmills in the silver mines. I don't believe the wild ones know where the captives are taken, but they associate humans with horses and nets and fire, and that is enough.'

The big male in front of him raised its weapons with a threatening shriek. Ingold pointed unconcernedly toward the main mass of the band, the females and infants, grouped on the hillside above. 'You see how the weaker members of the tribe travel in the ring of the stronger? It's for protection against the prairie wolves or the hrigg, the horrible birds.'