Suddenly there was a loud crash from within the mountain. Dust puffed out the entrance to below. Several men cheered.

“The Judge is dead,” said Ethera.

Then Noplis said what Flatear would later agree were the wisest words the bard had ever spoken: “Thanks be to all the gods.”

Yelloweye

by Steven Barnes

Steven Barnes is one of those rare writers equally at home in both books and television. He has written two novels, Streetlethal and The Kundalini Equation; collaborated on two others with Larry Niven, Dream Park and The Descent of Anansi, and has yet another collaboration coming out this fall, cowritten with both Niven and Jerry Poumelle, called The Legacy of Heorot. He has also written several television screenplays, mostly for Twilight Zone. In his copious spare time, he both instructs and studies various forms of the martial arts, among them Tae Kwon Do, Kempo Karate, Kali Stickfighting, and Aikido.

He currently lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Toni, and their daughter, Lauren, two dogs, a cat, and a houseful of tame, invisible Tyrannousaurs (Caveat Burglar).

Winter was dying softly in the ’Ginni mountains. Under the soft, insistent touch of sunlight, the milky ice crystals melted into water. It trickled down, formed shallow, rapid streams that cut through the banks of snow, whispered promises of spring.

Hoofprints dappled the snow. Here goats and sheep foraged for winter grass under the watchful eyes of their herdmaster. In places the hoofprints were scattered, barely impressions in the sparkling white carpet. Where the herd had been guided back and forth regularly the trail cut deep, exposing rock and dark earth below.

A rabbit lay burrowed into the snow, nose pressed against a skewed fence of barren twigs. Its coloration made it nearly invisible, but its pink eyes were nervous, frightened. The smell of Man was strong here. Man, and . . . something else. Something terrifying. An unfamiliar sound wound its way through the trees. The rabbit paused, ears perked.

Paused for a moment too long.

Snow flew in a flurry of sudden motion. With an impossibly fast blur, claws and teeth ripped into the rabbit’s flesh, crushed its body into the snow before the thought flee! could fully congeal. There was a flash of pain too intense for consciousness to bear, and then numbness. It saw its own blood spatter onto the snow, its intestines fill the crimsoned mouth of its slayer. Then, there was nothing.

But the sound wound on. Now lilting, now stringent, the trilling of a flute coaxed by nimble fingers.

“Ar’tor!” The cry rang from a distance, and the music paused. Up above the bloodied twigs, a tuft of snow puffed gut, and a boy thrust his head out of a slit in the rock beneath. If one hadn’t known the cave was there, it would have been impossible to find, so well protected was it by snow and overhanging rock and dead brush.

The boy was as easy to overlook. His neck was thin and clumsily long. His hair was shadow-dark, shoulder-length, and looked perpetually windblown. His mouth and nose seemed too wide for his narrow face. His eyes were huge, dark, inquiring. Somehow, they made the balance work.

“Karls,” he muttered, and popped his head back into his little hideaway. He had five more minutes before his brother would appear. Ar’tor twirled his flute like a baton, then set his lips to it again. There was the thread of melody that he sought. It vibrated in the cave, a clear, intoxicatingly mellow tone.

He should have been scouting for strays, as his brother and friends had for the last three days. But there was no pleasure in that, or in the hundred small and large duties that fell to him as youngest nephew of the chief of the Windrunners. Ar’tor’s greatest satisfaction was to recreate the songs that the old men sang and played around the campfire. To feel them vibrate in his flute, to hear the music buzzing in the back of his head.

Leadership of the Windrunners would never be his. Regardless of his lineage, he would be a songsinger, a Bard, not a warchieftain of the Hilltribes. He would see his sixteenth spring in two more moons, but his brother Karls had seen twenty summers, and was already a blooded warrior. Better for Ar’tor that he accept the gifts that Spring had given him.

The thought of Ar’tor leading the Windrunners was absurd. His singing and playing were tolerated, but not totally understood. He was of a warrior line. His father had lived a warrior and died a warrior’s death, a Lowlander sword in his guts. His uncle, the mighty Syman, was like Karls, a giant in physical strength and a leader of men. Syman was respected by all hundred factions of the Tribes. Ar’tor could never bind them with the power of his words, negotiate treaties, make war on the savage Lowlanders. The very thought terrified him.

Uncle had parlayed with Lowlanders, the mighty Horseclans themselves, winning an honorable peace. Then again, the role of peacemaker came easily to the leaders of the Windrunners, whether such peace was won by treaty or force of arms. Ar’tor remembered seeing his uncle contending with the chief of the Steelteeth for water rights. His cudgel had broken on the second pass, but his mighty fists lashed out, striking Old Keeshan senseless by the light of the council torches! The Windrunners celebrated loud and long, the hills ringing with their songs and drunken revels until dawn.

No, that was not a role that he could claim for his own.

Ar’tor rucked his whittled bone pipe into the leather pouch at his waist and felt out around himself in the dark. His fingers closed on his spear. Had he forgotten anything? This was his hidey-hole, but if he ever made the mistake of leaving something edible it would be quickly discovered by the scavengers that haunted the hills.

Ar’tor crawled out of the crevice and looked around.

“Ar’tor! Where are you, boy?” Karls’s rough growl of a voice called him, echoed by the laughter of his two companions, Rollif and Marrin. Ar’tor knew that his backside would sting if Karls found out that he had been loafing again.

Ar’tor brushed the dirt and snow back into place, tidied up the trail, turned the rocks so that the damp sides were down, and prettied up the brush. There—anyone who came across it now wouldn’t know what was there.

The wind changed, and for an instant he smelled it. Oh, yes, it was a cat, and it was strong. Ar’tor was not the hunter that his uncle and brother were, but his senses were sharp in ways that theirs were not. And when the wind shifted for that moment, he smelled Old Cat, strong and clear. Ar’tor froze, sudden terror bitter in his mouth.

True, Old Cat had never been known to hunt Man, only cattle, only the wiry goats and chickens of the Hilltribes, and those mostly in the wintertime. But hunters sometimes vanished into the howling wind, never to return. When this happened some said that the ’Ginni Truce had been broken.

But there were also whispers that Old Cat had lost his taste for goat, and now found manflesh more to his liking.

The Hillpeople had hunted him for more years than Ar’tor had been alive. They had never found Old Cat. The flowing feline shape floated through Ar’tor’s dreams like a bleeding moon. Mothers hushed the cries of their children by telling them that Old Cat would hear and come.

Ar’tor slid his right heel back to brace himself and gripped his spear. Terror made his stomach feel heavy and hot, made his breath sour.

“There you are, boy!” Karls laughed. He grabbed Ar’tor and spun him around, spanking his broad hand against Ar’tor’s narrow leather breechbottoms. “Where’ve you been?”

Ar’tor winced, but threw his shoulders back. “Patrolling. Keeping the edge secure.”

Bearded Marrin howled with mirth. “Secure from songbirds, certainly. They flee when they hear that noise you call music.”