While he had still a goodly distance to go he heard the sounds of shouting voices and caught an occasional glimpse of a flaming torch through rifts in the foliage ahead. Evidently Gerdak was not lightly giving up hope of getting his hands on the man who had made fools of him and his warriors.
An unerring instinct developed through years of travel through uncharted terrains brought Tharn to the very tree where he had left his new found friend. But even as he entered its branches his nose told him what his eyes verified.
"Trakor," he called out, keeping his voice down lest some nearby enemy warrior hear it. "Trakor, where are you?"
There was no answer. Trakor was gone.
Even as Sadu left the ground in a final leap aimed at crushing Dylara's fleeing figure to earth, the girl sprang for a low-hanging branch of a jungle giant. As her fingers closed about its rough bark she flung her body to one side, Sadu's cruel talons raking the air scant inches away. Before the beast could turn and leap a second time she was twenty feet above it and climbing with the speed of desperation.
She heard the sound of tearing foliage as the lion sprang blindly into the lower branches, a thump as it toppled back to earth, then an angry roar of protest at being cheated of its prey. She stopped her climb then and leaned her head weakly against the bole, panting and shivering from strain and utter relief.
Below her, Sadu stalked back and forth a time or two, voicing his displeasure. This lasted for no more than a moment or two, however; Sadu was too much of a realist to waste time in bewailing his ill luck. The rumblings of satisfaction from his fellows as they bore their kills into the forest, the screams of dying men, told him there was food aplenty back among the fires.
Dylara caught a glimpse of the brute as it slunk swiftly toward the terrified encampment. She crouched there, watching the awful scenes of carnage while gradually her heart stopped its mad pounding and the trembling left her legs and arms. She knew regret that many of the men she had learned to know and respect were dying so horribly, but the sight of what went on did not affect her beyond that. Except for these last few moons all of her eighteen years had been spent practically cheek by jowl with the jungle and its denizens, the only life she had known. The fiercest animals had stalked her at times, just as the warriors of her father's tribe had stalked them. She knew first-hand the stinging insects, the loathsome snakes whose bite or coils could bring a lingering death or a quick one. She knew the chill nights of the rainy season, the unbearable heat and humidity at other times. As a result death and suffering were able to touch her deeply only when they affected some one close to her.
It was a kind of life that had its compensations. She was far more self-reliant and much better equipped for survival under her present circumstances than the average Ammadian would have been. Her eyes and ears were more sharply attuned to impending danger, she could climb far better, she knew how to find water where her recent companions would perish of thirst, she could distinguish between poisonous and non-poisonous fruits and roots.