The Hunt

      Gray clouds hung low over the Hills.  Altana looked up, licking cracked lips.  If only it would rain!  Not that it would make much difference to the pursuit; anyone driven enough to follow her into this blighted nightmare of a land would hardly be put off by a mere storm.  Two had already passed within the last three days, leaving the earth with a treacherous, greasy feel.  But fresh water would be welcome.  Altana licked her lips again, grateful for any respite from the blazing sun, and wondered how long it might be before the rain came.
    As if answering her thought, the wind rose sharply.  A few stubborn tufts of scraggly grass bowed and lashed in the gusts.  With the gale came an ominous rumble of thunder.  Altana looked around.  She had taken refuge in a tiny cave when the day’s heat had forced her to rest, but the same ravine walls that had helped keep the place shaded and relatively cool would make it a death trap if a heavy rain came down; she could read the signs of previous flooding as easily as she could read the approaching weather.  Still, she hesitated as a lurid blue-white light glared briefly, followed by a heavy peal of thunder.  Lightning could easily be as deadly as flood, and quicker too.  But –
    Her body suddenly went rigid, ears straining.  On the edge of her hearing, the sound came a second time: the unmistakable bay of a hound, piercing a lull between gale and thunder.  They were still on her trail, then.
    The girl grimaced but did not waste time wondering how her pursuers had kept her trail despite weather and...other hazards.  If they had not lost the trace during the previous storms, they would not now.  The ground here was mostly bare clay over shale; she could not avoid leaving signs that an expert could follow.  Nor could she hope that they would give up the chase, not with a High Lord’s death to avenge.  Nonetheless, she still nursed a faint hope of escape.  If only she could elude them long enough, she might yet win free of pursuit and Hills both.
    Moving quickly but without haste, she turned her back on the cave and began working her way up the side of the ravine.  She needed hands as well as feet to make the climb and placed both carefully, as much to save what was left of her battered shoes as to avoid the unpleasant scaled and clawed denizens of this weird country.  The earth beneath her fingertips felt uneasy, and she tested each hold before trusting her weight to it.
    Fortunately, the ascent was not a long one.  She pulled herself over the rim, took a quick look back, and squatted down to place a hand flat on the earth.  She closed her eyes, concentrating.  What she felt made her skin crawl, but after a moment she nodded to herself and rose.  Better the heart of the Hills and whatever it was that lay there than blundering into a blast zone – or back into the arms of the pursuit.  Literally into their arms; if they caught her, they would use her as Lord Ranall had intended to do.  If Laefmar favored her, she would die under them.  If not, rape would be the least of what they would inflict on her.  She might spend hours or even days wishing for death with every breath she took.  Like her parents....
    She shivered, forcing the memory back, and headed west.  A brief, feral grin crossed her face as she considered her hunters.  No doubt they'd find her trail down to the cave, but to continue the chase, they'd either have to haul the dogs up the ravine wall by rope or search for an easier crossing.  Since the ravine deepened to the southwest, she doubted they'd find any better crossing there, and north – well, if they went that way, there would soon be fewer on the trail.  It might even kill them all if they circled deeply enough into the blasted area, but Altana doubted she would be that lucky; they would surely recognize the signs once they got into the fringe and pull back.  Still, even that limited exposure might kill off one or two; the aftereffects of the Old Empire’s weapons were still potent.
    West....She faltered, wondering if she was really making the best choice.  She had long since learned to trust the strange instinct that had come to her through her mother's blood; it was that, as much as any skill with bow or knife, that had made her among the best of the Freeholt's scouts.  But what she had sensed in the west was so alien that it was almost unreadable.  That it was also inimical, she knew with certainty.  But she had sensed its presence all the way to the fringes of the Hills, and she was still alive: whatever its effects were, at least they weren't immediate.  And in any event, she had no choice.  She went on.
      Rain began to pelt the ground around her, sparsely at first, then in earnest.  Altana eagerly licked the moisture from her lips but did not stop, increasing her pace to a weary trot.  Thunder was rolling almost continuously now, and the smell of ozone filled her nostrils.  She needed shelter if there was any to be had, pursuit or no pursuit.
      Nothing offered itself, so she kept moving, nearly blinded by the downpour and only half aware that the ground underfoot was rising more and more steeply.  Most of her attention was reserved for the ground one stride ahead as she concentrated on avoiding small pits and the odd splotches of yellow slime that she had learned ate like acid into cloth, leather, and flesh.  One ankle still burned from an encounter with the stuff, and only happy chance had taught her that clean wet clay could draw the burn and bring relief.  She would have an ugly scar, but that was the least of her concerns at the moment.
    Lightning struck, blindingly close; Altana felt the thunderclap as concussion rather than sound.  She staggered, slipped, and went down, a stab of pain lancing up one leg.  She felt the earth giving way beneath her as she slid and twisted desperately, scrabbling for handholds.  One hand caught in a tussock of the tough grass, giving her enough purchase to fight her way back upwards.
    As if at a signal the rain lessened, then dropped off to a mere patter of isolated drops.  Altana wormed her way up the last few feet of the slide and pulled herself onto a relatively safe bench of bare rock.  Still gasping with the effort, she tested her bad leg with probing fingers.  It hurt, but a moment’s examination convinced her that the damage amounted to no more than a sprain.
    Only a sprain, sure.  She looked back along the way she had come, her stomach cold.  It'll still slow me, and the greenest novice couldn't miss that scramble where I slipped.  Too bad it couldn't have rained hard for a few minutes more.
    She stiffened suddenly, listening.  The sounds came again, faint but menacing on the rain-stilled air: the sharp yelps of hounds on a fresh trail, closer than before.
    "Laefmar's eyes!"  She turned, flinging herself at the upward slope.  "How did they keep going in that?  Anything with sense would have taken cover!"
    You didn't, an impertinent voice commented from within, gaily indifferent to the prospect of trailing death.  Besides, who says they have sense?  If they did, they wouldn't be in these Hills; they'd let the country do their work for them.
    "Point taken," she gasped before the remains of sanity stifled the improbable conversation.  The ridge was growing steep, and she had no energy to spare for useless thoughts.  Her world narrowed to a tiny radius: place a foot, test for security, thrust upwards, steady with fingertips, move the second foot, secure a second handhold, move the first foot....
    It was a bad climb, and one Altana would have avoided had she any other choice.  It wasn’t just that the earth felt treacherous and unstable, though that was bad enough to have every nerve jangling like an overtuned harp string.  The worst of it was the strange feeling that flooded through Altana's hands at every contact with rock or soil.  The alien quality had grown more intense even in the small distance she had covered, and beneath it was a drained deadness that sent clammy fingers playing up and down her spine.  She ignored the sensations as best she could and continued climbing.  In an odd way, the pain in her injured ankle helped; it gave her a distraction from the weird impressions streaming through her hands and helped her narrow her focus to the purely immediate tasks of placing her hands and feet.           
    The breath was burning in her lungs, her muscles were shot with molten lead, and her ears were roaring by the time she dragged herself up to a saddle between the weathered crags of the ridge’s spine and collapsed into a bedraggled heap.  In a few moments her ragged gasps subsided, but the roaring in her ears did not subside.  Altana shook her head, to no avail, and staggered to her feet, wearily rubbing a mud-smeared hand across her eyes.  As her vision refocused, it slowly dawned on her that the roaring noise was coming from somewhere ahead and below.
    She looked, and caught her breath in a sob.  As if mocking her earlier desire for water, a river raged through the gorge below, its muddy course swollen by the recent rains.  Beyond it, the air seemed strangely disturbed, as though it had been spun into an insubstantial wall of shimmering glass...or perhaps it was merely the distortion of the river mists, flung high above the watercourse as the torrents dashed over hidden obstructions.
    No time to worry about that now. A distant shout jerked her head up; she plastered herself against the nearest outcrop, silently cursing the carelessness that had left her silhouetted against the sky.  Had they seen her?
Doesn't matter.  They'll find that slide, and when they do....  Altana bit her lip hard, clenching her fists so tightly that the ragged nails bit into her palms.  Can't think about that.  Got to think of getting away, not of getting caught.
Her eyes drifted back towards that insubstantial wall of mist.  It was rather pretty, but there was something about it –
    She wrenched her gaze away.  Worry about that after you've crossed the river.  If you can.
    She looked at the raging water, her heart sinking.  She was no great swimmer, and even one of the river-daughters of legend would have found a crossing nearly impossible.  Nonetheless, she scanned the scarp in front of her, seeking a path down.  There had been wilder escapes told of among the Freeholt's veterans – men who had hidden in mud, or underwater with reeds to breathe through –
    And not a reed in sight, the mocking inner voice said.  She ignored it, scrabbling for a foothold downslope.  Dogs couldn't climb that ridge, she felt sure; if she could only stay out of sight of the closing hunters, there might still be a chance to hide in some cave or side pool –
    A sudden hissing roar drowned out the river's thunder.  Altana had no time for action or even thought as the world slid out from under her.  There was only a chaos of greasy mud, the sickening feel of plunging downwards, and then a violent roil of water – blackness – disorientation – she couldn't breathe –
    Her head broke the surface as the river flung her up, careless of her as a child might be with an outgrown doll.  She pulled in a great gasping breath, her limbs moving automatically in the patterns of long-ago survival lessons.  Distant cries greeted her appearance, but her hunters could have been on the moon for all she cared.  Wild as an unbroken stallion, the river carried her onwards, spinning, bobbing, and plunging: now at the surface, now sucked into some underwater current, then tossed up with other flood debris: striking rocks and underwater snags, but never able to catch any handhold that might have allowed her to tear free of the flood's grip.
    The river rushed on, making a wide turn to the west.  For one wild moment, Altana swept tantalizingly near the shore, close enough to make out the twisted roots of some long-dead tree protruding from the bank.  She struck out, grabbing frantically, but grasped only air as a sudden eddy spun her around.  Her cry of despair was lost in a rising roar of water.  Then the world plunged away, and she was suddenly falling.
    Water, struck from high up, feels like stone; there was a burst of sheer agony, then a tattered boil of air and water that saw her lungs half-filled before she was flung clear into swift but calmer currents.  Blackness came and went through a red haze of pain.  She was only vaguely cognizant that the river's flow had become less turbulent, or of crossing and recrossing the line between the darkness of near-unconsciousness and the unexpected darkness of her surroundings.  Then light returned, bursting into her numbed brain.  She turned towards it, still feebly going through the motions of swimming.  A line of pale gold drifted into view, becoming pebbles and sand as her broken hands found purchase at last.  With the last of her strength, she dragged herself half onto the bank.  Movement flickered in the edges of her vision, but she no longer had strength to care; if the hunters had found her, they had found her.  A dazzling whiteness shone briefly in her eyes; then the pain flooded back and dragged her down into darkness.