The Dogtown Tourist Agency by Vance Jack

Author:Vance, Jack
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780575109797
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2012-04-15T16:00:00+00:00

The sun moved around the sky. Two hours before sunset, Hetzel and Janika toiled up from a vine-choked ravine and out on an upland meadow, watered by a small stream. Gasping, sweating, smarting from scratches, stings, and bites, they sank down upon a flat rock. A sward of small heart-shaped leaves carpeted the meadow. A hundred yards east stood a forest of growths that for the most part Hetzel could not name: a few bloodwoods, with trunks dark red, and clotted black foliage; purple tree ferns; clumps of giant galangal reeds. A quarter-mile west stood an even denser forest of bloodwoods. Certain areas of the meadow had been trampled, and an odd reek hung in the air—an odor musky and foul, which Hetzel associated with organic decay, although nothing dead was immediately visible.

From time to time on their way up the mountainside they had glimpsed wild creatures: bounding black weasels, all eyes, hair and fangs; a long, low creature like a headless armadillo, creeping on a hundred short legs; white grasshopperlike rodents, with heads uncomfortably similar to the crested white skulls of the Gomaz. A torpid reptile twenty feet long had watched them pass with an uncanny semblance of intelligence. In the ravine they had disturbed a shoal of flying snakes—pale, fragile creatures sliding through the air on long lateral frills. They had seen neither ixxen nor bantlings, and nothing but thorns and insects had caused them discomfort. Hetzel now noticed a dozen square-winged shapes wheeling through the air, with heads drooping on long muscular necks—gargoyles. They had glided down from a high crag, to swoop and circle a hundred feet above the eastward forest. Most unpleasant creatures, thought Hetzel. Their flight, so he noted, seemed to be bringing them closer to the meadow.

Hetzel now became aware of a strange strident sound, shrilling up and down, in and out of audibility, to a complex cadence which Hetzel could not quite grasp. He knew at once what the sound portended.

“Gomaz!” whispered Janika. “They’re coming toward us!”

Hetzel leaped to his feet; he looked this way and that for a covert. The ravine from which they had only just emerged would serve; more appealing was a tooth of rock a few yards north, a little crag of rotten basalt, luxuriantly grown over with iron plant. He took Janika’s hand; they scrambled up the crag and threw themselves flat on the crest under the massive black leaves.

At the same instant, the Gomaz emerged from the east forest—a column four abreast, marching to a skew-legged goose step. At the east bank of the stream the Gomaz halted; the ululating whine of their song diminished into inaudibility. They broke ranks and went to wade in the stream.

Janika whispered in Hetzel’s ear, “They’re Ubaikh—a war party.”

Hetzel peered down at the Gomaz. “How do you know they’re Ubaikh?”

“By the helmets. Look! See that one standing off to the side? Isn’t he the one who just returned from Axistil?”

“I don’t know. They all look alike to me.”

“He’s the same one.

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