“If we march straight into those trees, we will be ambushed.”

“That doesn’t mean that we will all be killed. Our weapons are far superior to theirs.”

“While they last.”

“We’ve got to be willing to make the sacrifice,” Adena insisted. “You risk your own life, and mine. Why draw the line at theirs?”

“Because they don’t understand what’s at stake.”

Adena turned away from me and glanced up at the lowering sun. Already the trees were throwing long shadows toward us, like fingers reaching for our throats.

“Check your weapons,” she called to the handful of troops. “We’re moving into the forest. The brutes will probably spring an ambush in there. Be on the alert.”

They nodded and began checking their guns and power units. Within a minute we were all marching forward again, without a protest or even an instant’s hesitation from any of them. If anything, they looked glad to be coming to grips with the enemy.

There was nothing I could do. Nothing I should do, I kept telling myself, except move forward and find Ahriman. But deep inside my mind a voice was telling me that there was more to the world, far more, than hunting and killing.

It made no difference. Adena was right, we were all players in a cosmic game, and we all had our roles to fulfill. I stayed at her side, pistol in my hand, and peered into the shadowy hollows between the trees as the forest swallowed up our meager little band of warriors.

Birds called back and forth among those dark trees. Small furry animals chittered at us and scrampered up to the higher branches, as if they knew that danger surrounded us. The sunlight was mottled and weak. It grew colder the deeper into the woods we tramped, cold and still as death.

The ground beneath the thickly clustered trees was barely touched by the snow that had drifted so thickly out in the open, but we could still see the trail that the brutes had left. as clearly as if they had deliberately laid it down for us to follow.

A squirrel, the biggest and reddest squirrel I had ever seen, jabbered angrily at us as we neared the tree on which it was standing; all four paws gripped the bark of the pine’s huge bole. When it saw that we would not turn away, it raced up the tree trunk toward the safety of a lair high up in its branches.

I saw a shadowy form move up in those branches, something as big as a man.

I reached out and touched Adena’s arm. “They’re up in the trees,” I whispered.

She barely had time to look up before they attacked. Mountain lions leaped out of those branches, their saber fangs huge and glittering white. Adena had no time even to shout an order, but the troops automatically formed a circle as they shot the beasts in midair. One snarling, spitting cat landed in our midst and I blasted his skull open with a burst from my pistol.

“Wolves!” somebody yelled.

They came loping through the trees, eyes gleaming balefully as they charged at us. We gunned them down by the dozens.

I searched the trees as we fought the howling, roaring, bloodthirsty beasts. The saber-toothed cats lay dead in our midst, and the bodies of wolves ringed our tiny defensive perimeter. But I was looking for Ahriman and his kind. They were up there in the trees, I knew, waiting for the moment when our weapons ran out of power. Already four of our troopers had dropped their rifles and were using pistols, which were powered by the suits’ power packs.

I called to Lissa. “Let me have some grenades!” She was scanning the trees, too, looking for more cats to kill. The wolves were skulking out in the deepening shadows for the moment, working up the fury for another attack. We could see their eyes glittering in the darkness.

“What kind?” Lissa called back, cheerful as ever. “Concussion, fragmentation, gas…”

“Concussion,” I answered.

She rolled four of them to me, shouting instructions on how to set the fuse’s time delay. I picked one up, turned the timer to five seconds, then reared back and threw it high into the trees in front of me.

The blast was much smaller than I had expected, but a shower of snow and shattered branches rained down us. Adena looked up sharply.

“What are you…”

I silenced her with an upraised hand. A howl of pain echoed through the trees; it was not an animal’s howl either.

“They’re up there!” Adena realized.

As I picked up another grenade, the brutes launched their real attack, swinging out of the concealing branches of the trees on long, thin ropes and slashing at us with those crystal spears of theirs. We fired at them as they fell upon us, but they were wearing glittering crystal armor that splashed our laser beams harmlessly away. Out of the corner of my eye I saw that the two troopers who still had rifles in their hands were the first to be swarmed under by the brutes. I fired at them but my pistol’s beam could not penetrate their armor.

Their electrostatic spears, though, were deadly effective. Both our riflemen were cut down in showers of blue sparks, and the beasts turned to charge at the rest of us.

Lissa threw herself at four of them, grenades in each hand. Twin explosions tore all of them apart and knocked the rest of us down. Groggily, I clambered to my knees, threw my useless pistol into the face of the nearest brute and kicked the legs out from under him. I grabbed his spear and jammed it into his neck, where his crystal armor did not protect him. He screeched and died in a blast of electrical agony.

Adena was on one knee, coolly shooting one of the brutes through the head as two others rushed at her. She turned slightly and shot at one of them, who raised his armored forearm over his face to deflect her shot. Her pistol went dead.

I leaped at the two brutes, knocking them both away from her.

They snarled at me, spears raised in their hands. I parried the first thrust that the nearer one made, then rammed the butt of the spear into the head of the other. Someone’s pistol blast took the head off the first one as I killed the second with the spear’s electrical bolt.

Suddenly the fighting was over. Four of our people lay dead at our feet, and seven of the brutes.

“One got away,” Adena said.

“Ahriman.” I knew.

“We must find him. We mustn’t let him escape.”

“I’ll go after him,” I said.

“No,” Adena countered. “We all will.”

CHAPTER 40

For two days we followed Ahriman’s trail southward, until another storm darkened the skies and began to pelt us with grainy snow driven by a fierce, howling wind.

I led Adena’s little band back to the relative shelter of the pine forest as quickly as I could. Our suit packs were running out of power, one by one. We had only a handful of food capsules remaining. If we’d stayed in the raging blizzard, we would have starved and frozen.

I showed them how to make a lean-to shelter from the pine boughs and how to make a fire. We used the last ergs of energy in the pistols to cut the tree limbs for the shelter and to start the campfire. When the last power pack finally was exhausted, our little troop was suddenly plunged into the Stone Age. None of the equipment they had with them would work anymore. We had to make do with what we could take from the land itself.

The storm moved off after three hungry days, and we started back toward the cave where we had left Kedar and the other wounded. Adena let me become the leader, and I remembered from my time with Dal’s clan how to make primitive spears and how to find small game hidden in the snow. We did not starve, although we were a ragged, hungry, lean and very cold straggle of soldiers by the time we got back to the cave.

For the next several days we were all busy every waking moment. I showed them how to survive in the wilderness, how to start a fire by the friction of rubbing two sticks against each other, how to flush out the hares and squirrels that lived unseen in the snow-covered fields, how to skin and cook them over the open fire.