She broke off. Something brushed against her arm, and, looking down, she gasped and thrust herself back abruptly. The long, thin shape that had found its way to the river's surface was not a water snake as she had thought. There was an open ring of teeth where its jaw should have been, and it had no eyes.

  “Ugh!”

  She yanked her knife from its sheath. The mudsucker swirled. It avoided the knife easily and curled back at her naked hand. It was not a large sucker, but even a small one should not have been in a stream like this ... The wolf­walker stumbled back, keeping her eye on the mudsucker and trusting her feet to find a way toward shore. She shoved the sucker away again, using the sleeve of her leather jerkin to thwart its sinuous dodge toward her bare skin. The water was still thigh deep, and she could wade only slowly, stabbing at the eel until her knees came clear and she could thrust her way to the shore. In a second, she was perched on a boulder a long meter above the stream, and the mudsucker, unable to find its prey, circled aimlessly before tucking its tail down into the rocks again, · anchoring its length in the mud and letting only its head float to the surface. With its mouth closed, its head looked like a fish holding its position in the current; the suckers often fed on birds lured into trying their luck on such a fish. This sucker was only three feet long, but its anchor would hold against a pull of fifty times its own strength. A victim would be drawn down slowly and surely until the water closed over its head and it drowned, drained of blood by the rings of hollow teeth that spiraled down inside the sucker's gullet.

  Dion swallowed her bile. There were few things that dis­gusted her as much as parasites.

  Still clutching the wet washcloth, she made her way cau­tiously from one boulder to the next until she was far enough upstream that the mudsucker was out of sight. She did not understand what the sucker had been doing there in the first place. Mudsuckers should not have been able to find their way up or down this stream—there were too many rocks; it was too shallow, the water too clear, and the current too fast. They could live in clear water, yes. But they did not travel in such streams. They needed the mud to warm themselves and breed in. Glancing back once more to make sure the sucker had not eased its way after her, Dion shook her head. Perhaps a bird had caught it, flown a ways, and then dropped it again when it became too heavy. An easy explanation—but she was still disturbed.

  Dion wrung out the cloth and tucked it into the same pouch that held the threads. With their lives at stake, that Namina could be so careless ...

  Worried, the wolf­walker tracked Hishn in her head, listening for a moment to the Gray One's thoughts as the wolf ran across the ridge rocks. Cross where the river runs fast, Dion warned the wolf. If there is one sucker in this stream, there may be others, as well.

  Hishn, sensing Dion's repulsion, bared her teeth as she streaked across the trails.

  It was an hour past dawn, and it had taken Dion three hours to get this far. But she had moved carefully. Now, having learned how the scouts had found Gamon's group, she did not have to move as slowly. The trail that had taken three hours to follow would take less time to retrace. By the time she got back, Aranur would just be ready to lead the others out of the gully. She dragged herself along a sharp, flat rock that stuck out just above the surface, then waded quickly upstream, keep­ing to the east side of the river where the shadows still stretched into the water. She could not help thinking that if she had found the washcloth and the threads torn from Namina's tunic only that morning, what else had the girl lost to mark their trail? The scouts would be close enough now that Dion would probably see them before she caught up with Aranur again. He would have to be careful.

  And you also, Hishn sent, catching Dion's thoughts on the run and baring her teeth. The pack is far away, and you run where the hunter can become the prey.

  1 know, Gray One. But Zentsis's men should have been on the trail for an hour now. They will not cross back to the creek until they find where we camped. The wolf­walker glanced up at the sky and judged her. time. It was more difficult to walk the creek against the current; where the water was deeper and the footing more treacherous, the river pulled her back two meters for every three she swam forward.

  She was coming to the short sets of waterfalls that ran the length of the canyon. As she struggled around a small, deep pool, the creek took a sharp bend, and she came up against a row of rock stairs that splashed water across her face as she climbed them. Twice the force of the water almost washed her off the steps, but she did not have time to climb around. She made her climbing holds beneath the surface, her wrists dis­appearing underwater into the cracks between the stones while the river surged up her arms and blinded her with its changing course.

  A kilometer away, Hishn paused on the trail. Her eyes gleamed. Humans, she sent, fading like a ghost from the trail.

  How many? Dion pulled herself up and slipped over the edge of the waterfall into water that was chest deep. Her bow, still slung across her back, caught for a moment in a crack of the rock, but she eased it free and made her way along the rocks until she reached shallower water.

  Two, Hishn finally sent back.

  Stay hidden, Gray One.

  They cannot see me. They could not see their own shadow in the sunlight.

  Dion smiled, then slipped and cut her hand on a sharp rock. She swore silently, sucking at the ragged gash. The water was not cold enough to numb the pain as it had the bruises that marked her shins and knees. By the time she reached the fork in the stream, she had bashed one of her elbows against a stone, as well. Though her leather mail protected her from getting cut, she knew that her skin would be mottled black and blue for a ninan.

  She examined the banks critically. Longear's scouts would have maps, made by Zentsis's soldiers during their long occu­pation of the territory. So they would know that the river forked here. Unless they were following Aranur's trail exactly, and she doubted that, she should see signs of them where they kept close to the banks to watch for other telltale debris.

  She waded upstream another half kilometer, not daring to take to the trail. The scouts were somewhere close, and her wet clothes would drip enough water on land to leave marks even a blind man could follow. She had to wait to go to ground until she found a place where there were enough leaves or rocks to let her run without turning the trail into mud.

  In her head, the Gray One's thoughts had grown sharper, but Dion locked all but Hishn's surface thoughts out of her mind. The river had become a tumble of rocks again, and she could not risk the confusion of seeing through two sets of eyes and hearing through two sets of ears. The next kilometer would consist of knee- and thigh-deep wading through fast water, and her footing would be treacherous enough without trusting her weight to a rock that was not there except in her head.

  The scouts—was she ahead of or behind them on the trail? In spite of her care, the rocks clacked softly under her feet. The shadows pulled back from the river and left it to the sunlight. Even though she could move faster in the shallower water, she kept her pace slow. At each new stretch of the stream, she stood motionless until she knew the natural movements of the trees and the sounds of the river. Only when she was sure that she did not share each stretch with the scouts did she continue.

  Sunlight glinted suddenly in the corner of her eye, and glanc­ing over her shoulder, she froze. There, not twenty meters behind her, were the scouts she thought she had been follow­ing. They were making their way along the river, and the only reason they had not yet seen her was that she was standing on the other side of a fallen and floating tree, and the branches of it were thick and tangled. The scouts' leather mail was, like Dion's, the color of the earth and trees, and Dion herself would not have been lucky enough to see them first except that the lead man, a left-handed fighter, wore his sword on his right hip, and the sun had flashed on it.

  The wolf­walker sank slowly into the water until only her face showed, then pulled herself along by her arms as quickly as she could. They were coming directly toward the river, but she hoped the snag would hide her long enough for her to make it around the next sharp bend in the river, and by then Hishn would be near enough to help out. In her mind, the sense of the wolf had sharpened with her fear until it had a bitter taste of its own. Hishn had crossed the river and was coming, and coming fast.

  Dion hesitated to watch in puzzlement as the scouts dipped their basket into the river, but she saw nothing she could un­derstand about it, and could wait no longer. If the moons were with her, the scouts would go back into the forest and leave the river for a time; they seemed to be stopping only at the deep pools—where debris would be caught in the eddies, she re­minded herself. She submerged again. She was chilled to the bone, but she still could not risk running the trail with the scouts so close behind.

  She was forced to pull herself along the center of the river as it widened and silt began to build up. If the scouts downstream saw mud suddenly stirred into the water, they would not wait to hunt her down. But she had gone only another fifty meters when she came to another deep pool. She had forgotten that pool. And there was no cover on the opposite bank—there was no real bank, only a wall of rock against which the water curled and flashed away. Hishn, who was ghosting after the scouts, was uneasy as Dion had been earlier. There was an odor to Zentsis's men that brought a snarl to her muzzle, and Dion, reflecting the gray wolf's emotions, found her own teeth bared. She shook off the wolf's images and struck out for the near shore, where there were enough snags and rocks to hide among that even a sharp-eyed scout would miss her. She hesitated once, her toes bouncing her off the bottom of the river as she stood briefly in the sluggish flow, then chose the snags.

  She kicked hard to bring herself off the bottom. But her mail dragged her back, and her weapons pulled her down. She was already tired. She ducked her head under the water and pulled the last strokes with the river blinding her eyes until she broke the surface with a silent gasp. Strangling her harsh breathing, she sucked in a breath and held it a second until she could release it more slowly and take another. The scouts? There. By the banks. Fortunately they were not looking in her direction; their attention was on the basket one of them had set down. Dion heard Hishn's snarl in her mind, but ignored it, pulling herself along a thin rubbery branch until her head was flush against the slimy trunk of a snag.

  The shadow of a stretched-out log hid her and left a slit where she could watch the scouts from safety. Her legs slipped once on the slick underwater branches, and she cursed at the small splash she made, then pulled her legs as far under her as she could, crossing and tucking them under the log while she wedged her shoulder in tight at a broken bough. The underside of the log was slick with green tendrils that curled around her body, but she could hear the scouts clearly now, and she did not move.

  “... set another out here, Harris.” The man's voice carried easily across the short stretch of water.

  “I don't see why we bother. We're close enough now that we'll have them by tomorrow evening.”

  “Longear will stretch our necks if we don't follow orders. You saw what happened to Errol—there wasn't a big enough piece of him left to pick up.”

  The third scout nodded. “Besides, ever since we found the hair from that girl's combings three days ago, we've known that they were out here. We hardly needed to see that cloth this morning. We can pick them up within days.”

  “Not without a lot of men to back us up,” the shortest man said.

  “Longear knows what he's doing,” the first scout returned. “He'll have the manpower ready when he needs it. There's still too much chance our friends from Ramaj Ariye could slip away in the hills if we made our move now. No, Longear will wait till they're closer to the cities.”

  “And in the meantime ...”

  “And in the meantime, we put the suckers out. Then we keep track of our friends from Ariye. Once they get near Wortenton, we'll nab them neat as a chicken in a pie.”

  From beneath the debris, Dion was like a log herself, frozen in the wash of the water. The scout had said they would wait till Aranur and the rest of his group were closer to the cities. Did Longear know so much? And what did they mean about putting out the mudsuckers? Were the scouts hunting the eels? If there were any suckers in this water now ... By the moons, she realized, her hand was still bleeding—a signal for a suck­er's supper if ever there was one. And then an image flashed in her mind, and an answering picture from Hishn doubled the vision. Longear. The basket the scouts had been carrying. The pools. The mudsuckers where none should be

  Dion's hands crept to her tunic, pulling it tight about her at her waist and neck where it swirled about, exposing her taut flesh to the water. The scouts were not hunting the suckers.

  No, Longear would not have ordered them to do that. But “putting the suckers out?” Gods, it could not mean that they were seeding the eels in the streams! She strained to hear the men's voices as they leaned over and muffled their sounds.

  “ . . only three left,” she finally made out.

  The tallest scout nodded. “We'll need only two for the last two pools.”

  “Why seed the pools at all if we're behind the Ariyens?”

  “Because they've escaped Longear twice now. They stay close to the water to hide their tracks, and they backtrack almost as much as they go forward. The suckers are insurance. Those eels will keep the Ariyens from crossing the rivers as casually as they have been doing. Even if the suckers get only one of the Ariyens, it makes one less for us to catch. Watch your hand,” he said sharply. “They're venomous.” He paused, then snapped, “Careful with the lid. Once those things latch on, they don't let go.”

  “Like Longear,” another man muttered.

  “Let's just shut up and get this over with,” the third man said.

  A small splash reached Dion's ears, and she stiffened. She was upstream of the scouts by meters. Had her hand stopped bleeding? She twisted her jerkin tighter.

  “Look at that sucker go,” one of the scouts said, satisfac­tion in his voice. “What I'd give to see it latch onto one of those Ariyens. Bet they'll jump clear to the eighth moon when the suckers hit 'em.”

  “Better get the next one into the release chamber. I'm not going to run trail with the last two loose.”

  Something touched the wolf­walker's back, and she caught her breath audibly.

  All sounds on the banks stopped abruptly.

  On the banks, steel came free of its scabbards, and Dion froze. She could still see the scouts, and one of them motioned for the others to spread out. Their eyes darted from one side to the other. Dion glanced wildly over her shoulder. The thing on her back nudged her again, edging down toward her waist.

  Hishn? she called urgently. Her neck—was it far enough out of the water?

  I am near, the wolf returned quickly. The scent of the scouts is hot in my nose.

  Come ... Hurry ...

  In the water, the sucker mouthed her leather mail, testing it for flesh, then sliding around to her side. She hunched further under the log. Her warcap was too round—if the scouts got too close, they would see it for what it was. Or they would see that her legs were not the branches they pretended to be. Hurry ...

  One of the scouts stepped into soft mud, and his foot made a splucking sound. But she could not duck under the water. If the sucker found her neck or face, it would kill her. As if drawn by her thought, the eellike creature prodded its way to her stomach, then pressed against her arm.

  Wolf­walker, 1 am here.

  The scout stepped into the water.

  The sucker touched her wrist. Draw them away, Hishn. Hurry!

  And then something tore into her hand. She stifled a scream, ducking her face underwater to muffle the sound. The sucker's teeth gashed her clenched hand, and her flesh was sucked up around the hollow fangs. She could not move. Her lips peeled back from her own teeth, which clenched in a silent shriek, and the muscles on her neck stood out.

  Hishn's mind grew chaotic. Dion could not read her thoughts. No! Don't attack, she cried out in her head. Hishn, draw them away ...

  The sucker's teeth ground down, and its tail whipped down to find an anchor in the silt under the log. Dion's hand was yanked from her tunic. No! She balled her fist onto her leather mail and wedged her shoulder harder back against the log. On the shore, the scouts searched the water with their eyes. She must not move. But oh, moons, her hand was be­ing crushed ...

  The sucker yanked again, and Dion jerked, one of her legs hitting a loose snag.

  One of the scouts pointed, and the others moved quickly. And then the brush snapped behind them, and they whirled.

  “There—”

  “In the bushes—”

  Hishn streaked away, and the scouts burst after the wolf, crashing through the growth after the sounds of snapping twigs. Dion, her mouth streaming water, raised her head, then threw an arm around the log and unhooked her legs. As they touched the edge of a rock, they brushed against the rigid length of the sucker where its body was a line of steel that bound her to the bottom of the river. She drew her knife from its scabbard and cut at its body near the head. But the blade did not slice

 

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