"Andre Norton - Solar Queen 03 - Voodoo Planet" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norton Andre)

“Death pit,” supplied the Hunter.

“Poachers?” Jellico inquired.

Nymani nodded. Asaki continued his task, but there was a glint in his dark eyes as he butchered with sure and expert strokes. Then he glanced at the shadow extending beyond the rocks.

“I, too, would see,” he told Nymani.

Jellico arose, and Dane, interested, followed. Some five minutes later none of them needed the native keenness of smell to detect the presence of some foulness ahead. The odor of corruption was almost tangible in the sultry air. And it grew worse until they stood on the edge of a pit. Dane retreated hurriedly. This was as bad as the battlefield of the rock apes. But the captain and the two Khatkans stood calmly assessing the slaughter left by the hide poachers.

“Glam, graz, hoodra,” Jellico commented. “Tusks and hides—the full line of trade stuff.”

Asaki, his expression bleak, stepped back from the pit. ”Day old calves, old ones, females—all together. They kill wantonly and leave those they do not choose to pelt.”

“Trail—” Nymani pointed eastward. “Leads to Mygra swamp.”

“The swamps!” Asaki was shaken. “They must be mad!”

“Or know more about this country than your men do,” Jellico corrected.

“If poachers can enter Mygra, then we can follow!”

But not now, Dane protested silently. Certainly Asaki did not mean that they were to track outlaws into swamps the Khatkan had already labeled unexplored death traps!

V

SITTING UP, Dane stared wide-eyed into the dark. A handful of glowing coals, guarded by rocks, was the center of their camp. He hunched up to that hardly knowing why he moved. His hands were shaking, his skin damp with sweat no heat produced. Yet, now that he was conscious of the night, the Terran could not remember the nightmare from which he had just awakened, though he was left with a growing apprehension which he could not define. What prowled out there in that dark? Walked the mountainside? Listened, spied and waited?

Dane half started to his feet as a form did move into the dim light of the fire. Tau stood there, regarding him with sober intensity.

“Bad dream?”

The younger man admitted to that with a nod, partly against his will.

“Well, you aren’t the only one. Remember any of it?”

With an effort, Dane looked away from the encircling dark. It was as if the fear which had shaken him awake, now embodied, lurked right there.

“No.” He rubbed sleep-smarting eyes.

“Neither did I,” Tau remarked. “But both of ’em must have been jet-powered.”

“I suppose one could expect to have nightmares after yesterday.” Dane advanced the logical explanation, yet at the same time something deep inside him denied every word of it. He had known nightmares before; none of them had left this aftertaste. And he wanted no return of sleep tonight. Reaching to the pile of wood he fed the fire as Tau settled down beside him.

“There is something else . . . ” the medic began, and then fell silent. Dane did not press him. The younger man was too busy fighting a growing desire to whirl and aim the fire ray into that darkness, to catch in its withering blast that lurking thing he could feel padded there, biding its time.

Despite his efforts Dane did drowse again before morning, waking unrefreshed, and, to his secret dismay, with no lessening of his odd dislike for the country about them.

Asaki did not suggest that they trail the poachers into the morass of Mygra. Instead the Chief Ranger was eager to press on in the opposite direction, find a way over the range to the preserve where he could assemble a punitive force to deal with the outlaws. So they began an upward climb which took them away from the dank heat of the lowlands, into the parched blaze of the sunbaked ledges above.