Book 1 - Doomstalker by Glen Cook Read Free Book Online Page B

whispered, “They
won’t get him to tell them anything.”
    Kublin nodded. He sensed it too.
    Marika examined him. His nerves seemed frayed. Hers surely were.
While she did not feel the prisoner’s pain, she did catch the
psychic scent of his fear and distress, the leak-over from his
scrambled mind. She did not know how to push it away.
    Kublin seemed to be feeling all that, too.
    Pohsit looked up at them. Her lips pulled back over her teeth in
a silent, promising snarl. Kublin inched closer. Marika felt his
frightened shiver.
    She did not need to touch the sagan’s mind to know what
she was thinking.
    Probuda, Skiljan’s second, beckoned. “Down, pups.
There is work to do.” A massive rock of a female, she stood
unmoved as pups tumbled about her, eager to be entrusted with
something important. For that was what her tone and phrasing had
implied. She had spoken as huntress to huntress.
    “Marika. Kublin. You go see Horvat.”
    “Horvat? But—”
    Pobuda’s paw bounced off Marika’s ear. Marika
scooted around the prisoner and his tormentors. He was unconscious.
She and Kublin awaited recognition at the edge of Wise territory.
Receiving a nod from Saettle, they crossed over to the males’
firepit, where Horvat was supervising some sort of expansion
project. He was snarling because the hide umbrella, which gathered
smoke to send it up a thin pottery flue, was cooked and smoked hard
and brittle, and wanted to break rather than bend.
    Marika said, “Horvat, Pobuda told us—”
    “See Bhlase.”
    They found the young male, who had come to the pack only two
years earlier. “Ah. Good,” he said. “Come.”
He led them to the storage room. “Too dark in there. Kublin.
Get a lamp.”
    Marika waited nervously. She had not visited this end of the
loghouse since she was too small to know better. All the usual
rules were falling . . . 
    Kublin arrived with an oil lamp. Bhlase took it and pushed
through the doorskins. It was cold and dark in the storage room. It
was more crowded than the loft.
    But it was neat—obsessively neat, reflecting
Horvat’s personality. Bhlase moved about, studying this and
that. Marika gawked. The male handed the lamp back to Kublin. Then
he started piling leather bags and sealed pottery jars into
Marika’s arms. “Those go to the firepit.”
    Though irked by his tone, Marika did as she was told. Bhlase
followed with a load of his own. He ordered their plunder neatly,
set the pups down, gave Kublin and Marika each a mortar and pestle.
He settled between them with his legs surrounding a kettle. He drew
a knife.
    Marika was astonished. The kettle was copper, the knife
iron.
    Bhlase opened one leather bag and used a ceramic spoon to ladle
dried, crushed leaves into Marika’s mortar bowl. “Grind
that into powder. I’ll need ten more like that.”
    Marika began the dull task. Bhlase turned to Kublin. More, but
different, dried, crushed leaves went into his mortar bowl. These
gave off a pungent odor immediately. “Ten from you, too,
Kublin.”
    Marika recalled that Bhlase had been accepted by Skiljan because
of his knowledge of herbs and such, which exceeded that of
Pohsit.
    But what were they doing?
    Bhlase had brought several items Marika connected only with
cooking. A sieve. A cutting board. A grater. The grater he set into
the kettle. He cut the wax seal off one of the jars and removed
several wrinkled, almost meth-shaped roots. He grated them into the
bowl. A bitter scent rose.
    “That is good enough, Marika.” He took her mortar
bowl, dumped it into the sieve, flung the bigger remains into the
firepit. They flashed and added a grassy aroma to the thousands of
smells haunting the loghouse. “Nine more will do it. How is
yours coming, Kublin? Yes. That is fine. Dump it here. Good. Nine
more for you.”
    “Are you not scared, Bhlase?” Marika asked. He
seemed unreasonably calm.
    “I have been through this before. When I was a pup, nomads
besieged our packstead. They are ferocious