The Bats of Elvidner

by Danielle L. Parker

part 4

On the harsh world of Elvidner, a third generation of colonists struggles for survival. Their conditions are primitive, and they are menaced by a native life form: intelligent vampiric bats.

The colonists are largely ignored by the scarcely human “immortals” of the original starship — the “wizards” and “crew.” But a reborn crewman and a wizard who loved and lost a mortal wife have formed a bond with the mortals, one that offers hope for a better life for all.

Day never lingered on the high slopes, and when the sun sank beyond the endless peaks to the west, winter fell instant and bitter. The man on the eight-legged steed reined in and watched the diffuse disc slip beneath the distant jagged edge of the horizon.

His beast complained of the cold in strange squeaks and hisses, pawing irritably in the snow with its front pair of clawed feet. The man dismounted and patted its chitinous neck. Then he drew his spear, and leaned upon it, as he turned to pensively regard the shape that rested no more than a few yards away.

Fresh snow dusted the figure deceptively arranged like a mere sleeper, its arms folded neatly across its chest. But the snow was only a thin drift: the body had been abandoned less than an hour ago. Yet how gray and chill its face was; how sunken its somber cheeks, as if more than life had been taken from it! Around the corpse’s mouth and nose were characteristic small boils. The boils on the throat were blacker and larger, but still, the fatal bite was surprisingly small and neat.

The acidic bite was the mark of the mother — she who sustained her warriors. Only she took the blood, and gave it in turn to her clave. This was an unusually large clave of nine warriors, requiring much nourishment: this was the twelfth drained victim Elian Tellen had discovered in his pursuit.

He knelt to examine the tracks at his feet. The wheels of the first cart gouged deep into the stony soil. The second cart rode much lighter than it had begun. The mother was swollen but had not paused to feed her warriors. Vengeance was on their heels, and they knew it. They were hurrying to the shelter of Lichtlos, where no sane man had ever followed — or ever would.

He feared they had already reached it.

Tellen stood up and gazed upwards into the dim heaven. Above him were the fliers that had escorted him for the last three days and nights, now only distant, tiny dots wheeling in a patient, watchful circle. They were almost too high for vision. But their eyes were even keener than his, and they used more than sight to hunt. With his human ears he could never hear them, but in the other shape he could take at will, he might have heard their constant high-pitched squeaks and chattering, and the strobe-like pulse they emitted for echolocation.

He hung his spear once again in its sheath upon the neck of his beast. Then with deliberation he unpinned the great furred cloak he wore and laid it upon the snow; he drew off his boots and his tunic and trousers. At last he stood naked except for a long leather thong about his neck. Its pendant ring, resting on his broad chest, flashed like a mirror as a last ray briefly caught it.

He shook his waist-long night-dark hair out of its braiding until it fell loosely upon his great shoulders. His powerful body was almost as white as the snow, seamed here and there, mostly upon the arms, with old bite rings, and in a few places with a puckered healed slash or burn.

Then he knelt and tied up his clothing in the cloak, and tied that, in turn, upon the saddle of his beast, and looped its reins around the high horn of its leather saddle.

“Go,” he wished it. It could not reply, but they had long ago come to understanding of each other, all the same. He had named it Sleipnir in an instant of bitter humor; for he, almost alone upon this cloudy world, remembered the name of an eight-legged beast that served one who had also paid hard price for wisdom. “Go, until I call again. Good hunting!”

The beast lowered its head in obedience. It turned away from him, picking its way among the snow-covered rocks and boulders with surprising delicacy. It would hunt, for it was not an eater of grass. Grass had never flourished on Elvidner. The cattle that men had brought with them had grown thin and then at last died, following the seedlings that also failed, in a soil that would never easily nourish Earthly shoots.

It was cold upon the high peak. For a time the man seemed to simply wait, except for the visible trembling of his naked body. Then after a longer time, as the first of twin moons began to rise in the night sky, his shivers became more pronounced, and yet more rhythmic. They became great rippling shudders that shook his whole body.

The man’s posture changed. His head sank lower, and his arms extended stiffly, and his shoulders hunched. There was a hint of a color change, and a mute suffering, in his starred-light eyes as they sank beneath thickening brows. His body convulsed, and bones cracked like gunshots in the still chill air, and poked against taunt-stretched skin like fighting sticks.

The man fell to all fours and groaned and whimpered with all the agony of a woman in birthing. As the light of the first moon fell upon him, he was hairy all over, and there was now the look of a beast in his animal-yellow eyes. And when the light of the second moon shone, a huge white wolf with a bar of black fur ridging its back and tail rested panting in the snow, and lifted its muzzle to howl, and lapped the glittering shards of its teeth with its long red tongue.

Then the wolf bounded to its feet, and with its nose now and then dipping to the snow, began to follow the tracks of the carts in its long, light-footed lope. Occasionally, it whined. After a time, it ran swiftly as a galloping horse, and no longer paused to sniff the fresh trail.

Proceed to part 5...