Free Book 1 - Doomstalker by Glen Cook Page B

did not think. She hurtled forward, buried the knife in
the nomad’s back. He jerked away, heaved blood all over his
dead packmate. He thrashed and made gurgling sounds for half a
minute before finally lying still. Marika darted out and tried to
recover the knife. It would not come free. It was lodged between
ribs.
    Another nomad dropped down, teeth bared in a killing snarl.
Marika squeaked and started to back away, eyeing the spear her
victim had dropped.
    The third invader pitched forward. The old Degnan female who
had fallen from the palisade had gotten her feet under her and
leapt onto his back, sinking her teeth in his throat. The last
weapon, meth called their teeth. Marika snatched up the spear and
stabbed, stabbed, stabbed, before the nomad could shake the weak
grasp of the old female. No one of her thrusts was a killer, but in
sum they brought him down.
    Yet another attacker came over the stockade. Marika ran for her
loghouse, spear clutched in both paws. She heard Rechtern calling
the males out.
    More nomads were over the stockade in several other places. A
dozen were looking for someone to kill or something to carry
away.
    The males and remaining old females rushed upon them with
skinning knives, hatchets, hammers, hoes, and rakes. Marika stopped
just outside the windskins of her loghouse, watched, ready to dart
to safety.
    More nomads managed to cross the stockade. She thought them
fools. Badly mistaken fools. They should have cleared the defenders
from the palisade before coming inside. When the huntresses
there—few of them had been cut down—no longer faced a
rush from outside, they turned and used their bows.
    There was no mistaking a nomad struck by an arrow on which
Bhlase’s poison had been painted. The victim went into a
thrashing, screaming, mouth-frothing fit, and for a few seconds
lashed out at anyone nearby. Then muscles cramped, knotted, locked
his body rigidly till death came. And even then there was no
relaxation.
    The males and old females fled into the loghouses and held the
doorways while the huntresses sniped from the palisade.
    The surviving invaders panicked. They had stormed into a death
trap. Now they tried to get out again. Most were slain trying to
get back over the stockade.
    Marika wondered if her dam had planned it that way, or if it was
a gift from the All. No matter. The attack was over. The packstead
had survived it. The Degnan were safe.
    Safe for the moment. There were more nomads. And they could be
the sort who would deem defeat a cause for blood feud.
    Seventy-six nomad corpses went into a heap outside the stockade.
Seventy-six leering heads ended up on a rack as a warning to anyone
else considering an attack upon the packstead. Only nineteen of the
pack itself died or had to be slain because of wounds. Most of
those were old females and males who had been too weak or too
poorly armed. Many fine weapons were captured.
    Skiljan took a party of huntresses in pursuit of those nomads
who had escaped. Many of those were injured or had been too weak to
scale the stockade in the first place. Skiljan believed most could
be picked off without real risk to herself or those who hunted
her.
    The Wise ruled that the Mourning be severely truncated. There
was no wood to spare for pyres and no time for the elaborate ritual
customary when one of the Degnan rejoined the All. It would take a
week to properly salute the departure of so many. And they in line
behind the three who had fallen near Stapen Rock, as yet unMourned
themselves.
    The bodies could be stored in the lean-tos against the stockade
till the Degnan felt comfortable investing time in the dead. They
would not corrupt. Not in weather this cold.
    It occurred to Marika that they might serve other purposes in
the event of a long siege. That the heaping of dead foes outside
was a gesture of defiance with levels of subtext she had not yet
fully appreciated.
    So bitterly was she schooled against the grauken within that her
stomach turned