Free Doomstalker by Glen Cook Page B

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 at the very thought.
    She volunteered to go up into the tower, to watch Skiljan off.
    There was little to see once her dam crested the nearest hill, hot on the tracks of the nomads.