“For what-a lot of broken buildings?” Cully wanted to know.
“I’d like one of those bands of color around that doorway,” Dard answered. His idea that the bands had a meaning was perhaps silly but he could not push it away.
“All right, kid.” Kimber unpacked the small recorder and focused it on a place where the sun was strong. “No pattern I can see. But, it just might mean something at that.”
That was the only picture they took when on the ground. But once again in the air Cully ran the machine for a bird’s-eye view of as much of the ruined area as could be recorded.
They were approaching the outer reaches of the city to the east when Santee gave an exclamation and touched Kimber’s arm. They were over a street less cumbered with rubble than any they had yet crossed, and there was a flicker of movement there.
As the sled coasted down they disturbed a pack of grayish, four-footed things that streaked away into the ruins leaving their meal behind them on the blood-smeared pavement.
“Whew!” Cully coughed and Dard gagged at the stench the wind carried in their direction. They left the sled to gather around the tangle of stripped bones and rotting flesh.
“That wasn’t killed today,” Kimber observed unnecessarily.
Dard rounded the stained area. The dead thing had been large, perhaps the size of a Terran draft horse, and the skeleton-tumbled as the bones now were-suggested that it was four-footed and hooved. But that skull, to which ragged and blood-clotted hair still dung, was what he had moved to see. He had been right-two horns sprouted above the eye sockets. This was the horned horse of the game set!
“A duocorn?” mused the pilot.