"An outland weapon, Grih! Out of the tunnel, quick!"
Nelson had a second to remember that Tark had seen grenades in action in Yen Shi before his own grenade exploded.
The explosion in the confined tunnel felt titanic. A giant scorching hand smashed them down flatter against the silted floor. Nelson leaped up, still dazed and shaky from the explosion, and shouted to the others. "Now — back out of here!"
They scrambled down through the tunnel, over broken shards of glass masonry the grenade had ripped from its walls. Now a dim circle of starlight ahead showed their exit.
They burst out of it into the starlit gully of the little dry stream, and tripped over a huge, striped, prostrate body. The tiger, Grih, had not escaped the tunnel quite in time and the outblast of the grenade had stunned or killed him.
"I hope it got that cursed wolf too!" raged Lefty. "I should have killed him when I wanted to first!"
Nelson, at that moment, heard a wolf-howl from nearby, and realized that Tark had escaped the blast in time.
"He rouses the city!" Shan Kar cried furiously. "But Barin shall pay the penalty for his trick! If we can reach our horses—"
They scrambled furiously up the gully of the dry streambed to the forested ridge. Nelson, gasping, turned and looked back. Out of torchlit Vruun, four-footed shapes were racing swiftly on their track. A terrific wolf-cry echoed up from that band of racing creatures, a heart-stopping sound.
Nelson seemed to himself in the next minutes, to be watching from another dimension as the three of them fled through the forest along the ridge. He was two men, and one of them was watching like a disembodied ka of himself while the other self expended every ounce of energy in flight.