Renegade of Callisto

They flew on all that day, following the rear guard of the migrating clan, and when darkness fell they still had not conceived of a plan for the rescue of their friends that had the slightest chance of succeeding.

Ironically enough, at the same time that Prince Valkar and his lieutenant were racking their brains to think of some plan for rescuing their friends from their plight, Koja and his fellow captives were similarly engaged.

Chained together in the wains with the other slaves, they conversed by whispers pitched too low to attract the attention of the other captives. It had occurred to Koja that unique and favorable opportunities for making their escape were open to them, now that the Horde was on its great southward trek. That is to say, during the migration virtually the entire attention of their guards was focused on the dangers that might threaten from without. Busied with watching for the approach of enemies from elsewhere upon the Great

Plains, they were less alert and wary in guarding their captives.

In part this was due to the difficulty of trying to do two different things at the same time. But another element was the peculiarly Yathoon attitude toward slaves, which I have already described. A slave is an item of property, soulless and devoid of rights; and, moreover, a slave possesses no freedom of will, being completely subject to the whims or wishes of his master. To the coldly logical brains of the Yathoon, it is hard to conceive of a slave seeking his freedom. How can a piece of property be capable of such independence of thought? To the Yathoon way of thinking, an escaped slave is almost a contradiction in terms. And such is the grimly fatalistic philosophy to which they adhere that most of the Yathoon slaves, being themselves of the Yathoon race, unconsciously share the same outlook.

But young Taran and Xara of Ganatol were of a different breed from the Yathoon, and were in no way subject to this bleak and hopeless philosophy. And Koja, although a Yathoon born and bred, had been exposed for so long a time to different modes of thought that his adherence to the beliefs of his kind had deeply eroded. And as for Borak, such was the strength of his desire for revenge upon his enemies that he had been persuaded to abandon va lu rokka for freedom of will.

And if ever they were to make their escape, it was now. Now or never, in fact: for with every league that they continued to be carried southward in their chains, they came closer to Sargol.

And escape from the Hidden Valley, whose every point of egress was heavily guarded by alert warriors, Koja knew, simply was beyond the realm of the possible.

What was needed, Koja and his fellow conspirators at length decided, was a diversion.

This was precisely the same decision that Valkar and Kadar simultaneously had reached.

But―what diversion, and how arranged, and by whom to be set into action?

It was the day following the discussion by Koja and the others of this aspect of their escape that Fate, or Destiny, intervened.

The first sign that Koja or his comrades had that Fate had decided to intervene on their behalf came in the form of a distant sound of drumming.

At first it was but faintly audible over the sounds of the wains creaking, the wind in the long crimson grass, and the heavy, lumbering tramping of the feet of the glymphs. But gradually it became louder as it came nearer, until at length it was noticed by all. It sounded like ten thousand tomtoms beaten all at once with an irregular rhythm.

Scouts and outriders craned to look in every direction, searching the horizon for the source of this mysterious and omnipresent sound. Like the steady roar of the surf it was, but here there were no seas. Like the drumming of a thousand hoofs it was, but if that was the explanation of the sound, which grew louder and louder with every passing moment, then where were the beasts whose .pounding hooves were the cause of that drumming?

Then, like a long wall of smoke athwart the horizon, stretching from north to south, a cloud of dust became visible. And the outriders of the Horde, who had observed such phenomena before, knew the origin of that distant drumming and realized at last their danger.

For it was a vast and numberless herd of vanth hurtling across the plains in the direction of the Garukh caravan. As yet there was no clue as to the nature of the disturbance, but a stampede is a stampede, and no matter what it was that had disturbed the herds of the vanth and had panicked them into flight, in flight they surely were, in all their thousands.

The Great Plains of Haratha experience no phenomena more perilous or more deadly than a stampede of the vanth. So vast are the herds of these huge, staglike quadrupeds that, once goaded into mass flight, there is no barrier that can stand before them untrampled, save for the very mountains of the south themselves. Whole encampments of the Horde have vanished from knowledge because they stood in the way of such a stampede. No army, however barricaded, could have stood in their path for long.

And now the caravan in which Koja and Borak and Taran and Xara were captives stood directly in the path of the mightiest stampede of the vanth that could be imagined. Ten or twelve thousand of the mammoth heavy-footed beasts, maddened into flight by some still unknown cause, came thundering down upon the caravan like a living ocean of hurtling flesh from which no escape was possible or even imaginable.