The Andre Norton Megapack - 15 Classic Novels and Short Stories

your own people if they can,” Buck warned.
    Menlik pulled at his upper lip. “That is also truth. But now they have no eyes in the sky, and with so many of their men away, they will not patrol too far from camp. I tell you, andas , with these weapons of yours a man could rule a world!”
    Travis looked at him bleakly. “Which is why they are taboo!”
    “Taboo?” Menlik repeated. “In what manner are these forbidden? Do you not carry them openly, use them as you wish? Are they not weapons of your own people?”
    Travis shook his head. “These are the weapons of dead men—if we can name them men at all. These we took from a tomb of the star race who held Topaz when our world was only a hunting ground of wild men wearing the skins of beasts and slaying mammoths with stone spears. They are from a tomb and are cursed, a curse we took upon ourselves with their use.”
    There was a strange light deep in the shaman’s eyes. Travis did not know who or what Menlik had been before the Red conditioner had returned him to the role of Horde shaman. He might have been a technician or scientist—and deep within him some remnants of that training could now be dismissing everything Travis said as fantastic superstition.
    Yet in another way the Apache spoke the exact truth. There was a curse on these weapons, on every bit of knowledge gathered in that warehouse of the towers. As Menlik had already noted, that curse was power, the power to control Topaz, and then perhaps to reach back across the stars to Terra.
    When the shaman spoke again his words were a half whisper. “It will take a powerful curse to keep these out of the hands of men.”
    “With the Reds gone or powerless,” Buck asked, “what need will anyone have for them?”
    “And if another ship comes from the skies—to begin all over again?”
    “To that we shall have an answer, also, if and when we must find it,” Travis replied. That could well be true…other weapons in the warehouse powerful enough to pluck a spaceship out of the sky, but they did not have to worry about that now.
    “Arms from a tomb. Yes, this is truly dead men’s magic. I shall say so to my people. When do we move out?”
    “When we know whether or not the trap to the south is sprung,” Buck answered.
    The report came an hour after sunrise the next morning when Tsoay, Nolan, and Deklay padded into camp. The war chief made a slight gesture with one hand.
    “It is done?” Travis wanted confirmation in words.
    “It is done. The Pinda-lick-o-yi entered the ship eagerly. Then they blew it and themselves up. Manulito did his work well.”
    “And Kaydessa?”
    “The woman is safe. When the Reds saw the ship, they left their machine outside to hold her captive. That mechanical caller was easily destroyed. She is now free and with the mba’a she comes across the mountains, Manulito and Eskelta with her also. Now—” he looked from his own people to the Mongols, “why are you here with these?”
    “We wait, but the waiting is over,” Jil-Lee said. “Now we go north!”
    CHAPTER 18
    They lay along the rim of a vast basin, a scooping out of earth so wide they could not sight its other side. The bed of an ancient lake, Travis speculated, or perhaps even the arm of a long-dried sea. But now the hollow was filled with rolling waves of golden grass, tossing heavy heads under the flowing touch of a breeze with the exception of a space about a mile ahead where round domes—black, gray, brown—broke the yellow in an irregular oval around the globular silver bead of a spacer: a larger ship than that which had brought the Apaches, but of the same shape.
    “The horse herd…to the west.” Nolan evaluated the scene with the eyes of an experienced raider. “Tsoay, Deklay, you take the horses!”
    They nodded, and began the long crawl which would take them two miles or more from the party to stampede the horses.
    To the Mongols in those domelike yurts horses were wealth, life itself. They would come running to investigate any disturbance among the grazing ponies, thus clearing the path to the ship and the Reds there. Travis, Jil-Lee, and Buck, armed with the star guns, would spearhead that attack—cutting into the substance of the ship itself until it was a sieve through which they could shake out the enemy. Only when the installations it contained were destroyed, might the Apaches hope for any assistance from the Mongols, either the outlaw pack waiting well back on the prairie or the