Tooth and Claw - Doranna Durgin [40]
Think of the daleura. Never mind the discomfort, the effort, the wearying state of vigilance … it was only a few days of inconvenience, compared to the daleura he’d earn. Even Tehra would acclaim him now, and quit looking at his younger sibling with such an attentive eye. Yes, he’d trained for his time here on Fandre … trained hard. And he was determined, and strong, as were all his guards—even the injured ones. Against all that, walking out to the portal would surely present no obstacle he could not overcome.
Riker slashed a clinging, thorn-covered vine out of his way and hoped that Worf never learned he’d used the bat’leth for such a purpose. The Tsorans had it somewhat easier, ducking obstacles that met Riker at chest level—but even so, their progress remained slow. At least the deluge of rain had eased, although he had the suspicion that he was likely to mold before he managed to dry off. In that, at least, the Tsorans had a disadvantage; their fur, despite use of the simple rain slickers, had turned damply dark, a baptism from the thick foliage at then” level. The Tsorans trained and prepared for their time here, he knew … but they’d never come this deep into the preserve before.
Apparently it made a difference.
That difference hadn’t fazed Akarr, who forged ahead with unflagging determination—aside from his occasional covetous glance at the bat’leth. Riker would have preferred to move more slowly, take better stock of their surroundings. He’d already learned to spot the sticky vines at several meters, and the thorny vines had gotten his quick attention as well. There was also a certain broad-leafed bush he’d pegged as responsible for the stinging red welts across the back of his hand; that one was harder to see at a distance.
But it wasn’t the plants that worried him, or the insects —which, so far, had all been of such a size that there was no subtlety to them at all, no chance of one landing unnoticed to take a chunk out of him. Even if he was bitten, he specifically remembered reading that
none of the local insects were anything more than annoying; for all their size, they left no more sting than a mosquito.
Although he didn’t imagine it would take as many of them to drain a man dry.
No, the plants were so far only an annoyance. The insects were an annoyance. But the various hoots, calls, and chattering that he heard in the distance, he took as warning. And the one oft-repeated call—where it came from, he wasn’t sure, except that it seemed to bounce among the trees, swelling significantly before it finally faded away—that one, he found alarming. Damned alarming.
It came again—to his ears, closer than ever. More than anything, it reminded him of the sound of a stick running across the boards of a snow fence … if amplified many times and imbued with an underlying tone of menace that no fence had ever produced.
He stopped, engulfed in foliage, unconsciously lifting the bat’leth closer to a guard position as Ketan stumbled past him, followed by Rakal, their last man. Slowly, he turned a complete circle, searching the layers of green on green—dark greens, shadowed greens, green spreading to reveal glimpses of grayish tree trunks, green splashed with the vibrant color of arboreal flyers and flowers—hunting for the owner of the haunting cry.
If he hadn’t viewed the reports, if he hadn’t paid close attention in the museum, he’d have been struck by the strong suspicion that the carnivores they sought to avoid were also green.
The carnivores, he corrected himself, that most of them sought to avoid.
And then there was Akarr.
Some part of him couldn’t blame the Tsoran’s resistance to abandoning the kaphoora. He was a kid, after
all, a kid trying to impress not only his parents and peers, but his entire society. A kid with