Thai gaped at him.

“Not stop to plunder?”

“Ghek won’t!” snapped Hoddan. “Hell take Fani on to his castle, leaving most of his men behind to massacre us! We’ve got to catch up to him before he shuts his castle gate in our faces!”

Thai reined aside and Hoddan pounded on at the head of the tiny troop. This was the second time in his life he’d been on a horse. He held on doggedly, riding with all the grace and spirit of a sack of cement. This adventure was not exhilarating. He was badly worried about innumerable things that could go wrong. Even if everything went right he’d still have plenty of troubles! It came into his mind, depressingly, that supposedly stirring action like this was really no more satisfying than piracy or the practice of electronics as a business. It was something one got into and had to go through with. Fani, for example, had tricked him into a fix in which he had to fight Ghek or be disgraced — and to be disgraced on Darth was equivalent to suicide.

His horse started up a gentle rise in the ground. It grew steeper. The horse slacked in its galloping. The incline grew steeper still. The horse slowed to a walk. Soon the dim outline of trees appeared overhead.

“Perfect place for an ambush,” Hoddan reflected dourly.

He got out a stun-pistol. He set the stud for continuous fire — something he hadn’t dared trust to the others.

His horse breasted the rise. There was a yell ahead and dim figures plunged toward him.

He painstakingly made ready to swing his stun-pistol from his extreme right all the way to the extreme left. The pistol should be capable of continuous fire for four seconds. But it was operating on stored charge. He didn’t dare count on more than three.

He pulled the trigger. The stun-pistol hummed; its noise was inaudible through the yells of the charging partisans of the Lord Ghek.

CHAPTER FIVE

HODDAN swore from the depths of a very considerable vocabulary.

“You” (censored), “get back on your horses or I’ll blast you and leave you for Ghek’s men to handle when they’re able to move about again! Get back on those horses!”

The men got back on their horses.

“Now go on ahead,” rasped Hoddan. “All of you! I’m going to count you!”

The dozen horsemen from Don Loris’ stronghold rode reluctantly on ahead. He did count them. He rode on, sheep-herding them before him.

“Click,” he told them in a blood-curdling tone, “has a bigger prize than any cash you’ll plunder from one of his shot-down retainers! He’s got the Lady Fani! He won’t stop before he has her behind castle walls! We’ve got to catch up with him! Do you want to try to climb into his castle by your fingernails? You’ll do it if he gets there first!”

The horses moved a little faster. Thai said with surprising humility:

“If we force our horses too much, they’ll be exhausted before we can catch up.”

“Figure it out,” snapped Hoddan. “We have to catch up!”

He settled down to more of the acute discomfort that riding was to him. Hoddan knew that his party was slowed down by him. Presently he began to feel bitterly sure that Ghek would reach his castle before he was overtaken.

“This place he’s heading for,” he said discouragedly to Thai, “any chance of our rushing it?”

“Oh, no!” said Thai dolefully. “Ten men could hold it against a thousand!”

“Then can’t we make better time?”

Thai said resignedly:

“Ghek probably had fresh horses waiting, so he could keep on at top speed in his flight. I doubt that we will catch him, now.”

“The Lady Fani,” said Hoddan bitterly, “has put me in a fix so if I don’t fight him I’m ruined!”

“Disgraced,” corrected Thai. He added mournfully, “It’s the same thing.”

Gloom descended on the whole party as it filled their leaders. Insensibly, the pace of the horses slackened still more. They had done well. But a horse that can cover fifty miles a day at its own gait, can be exhausted in ten or less, if pushed. By the time Hoddan and his men were within two miles of Ghek’s castle, their mounts were extremely reluctant to move faster than a walk. At a mile, they were kept in motion only by kicks.

The route they followed was specific. There was no choice of routes here in the hills. They could only follow every twist and_ turn of the trail, among steep mountain flanks and minor peaks. But suddenly they came to a clear, wide valley; yellow cressets burned at its upper end, no more than a half mile distant. They showed a castle gate, open, with the last of a party of horsemen filing into it. Even as Hoddan swore, the gate closed. Faint shouts of triumph came from inside the castle walls.

“I’d have bet on this,” said Hoddan miserably. “Stop here, Thai. Pick out a couple of your more hangdog characters and fix them up with their hands apparently tied behind their backs. We take a breather for five minutes.”

He would not let any man dismount. He shifted himself about on his own saddle, trying to find a comfortable way to sit. He failed. At the end of five minutes he gave orders. There’ were still shouts occasionally from within Ghek’s castle. They had that unrhythmic frequency which suggested that they were responses to a speech. Ghek was making a fine, dramatic spectacle of his capture of an unwilling bride. He was addressing his retainers and saying that through their fine loyalty, cooperation and willingness to risk all for their chieftain, they now had the Lady Fani to be their chatelaine. He thanked them from the bottom of his heart and they were invited to the official wedding, which would take place some time tomorrow, most likely.

Before the speech was quite finished, however, Hoddan and his weary followers rode up into the patch of light cast by the cressets outside the walls. Thai bellowed to the battlements.

“Prisoners!” he roared, according to instructions from Hoddan. “We caught some prisoners in the ambush! They got fancy news! Tell Lord Ghek he’d better get their story right off! No time to waste! Urgent!”

Hoddan played the part of one prisoner, just in case anybody noticed from above that one man rode as if either entirely unskilled in riding or else injured in a fight.

He heard shoutings over the walls. He glared at his men and they drooped in their saddles. The gate creaked open and the horsemen from Don Loris’ castle filed inside. They showed no elation, because Hoddan had promised to ram a spear down the throat of any man who gave away his strategy ahead of time. The gate closed behind them. Men came to take their horses. This could have revealed that the newcomers were strangers, but Ghek would have recruited new and extra retainers for the emergency of tonight There would be many strange faces in his castle just now.

“Good fight, eh?” bellowed an ancient, long-retired retainer with a wine bottle in his hand.

“Good fight!” agreed Thai.

“Good plunder, eh?” bellowed the ancient above the heads of younger men. “Like the good old days?”

“Better!” boomed Thai.

At just this instant the young Lord Ghek’s personal servant appeared.

“What’s this about prisoners with fancy news?” he demanded. “What is it?”

“Don Loris!” whooped Thai. “Long live the Lady Fani!”

Hoddan carefully opened fire with the continuous-fire stud of this pistol — his third tonight — pressed down. The merrymakers in the courtyard wavered and went down in windrows. Thai opened fire with a stun-pistol. The others bellowed and began to fling bolts at every living thing they saw.

“To the Lady Fani!” rasped Hoddan, getting off his horse with as many creakings as the castle gate.

His followers now dismounted. They fired with reckless abandon. A stun-pistol, which does not kill, imposes few restraints upon its user. If you shoot somebody who doesn’t need to be shot, he may not like it but he isn’t permanently harmed. So the twelve who’d followed Hoddan poured in what would have been a murderous fire if they’d been shooting bullets, but was no worse than devastating as matters stood.