Hiero Desteen (Omnibus) Read Free Page A

creatures, hitherto unknown, riding bareback on giant, brindled dog-things, had attacked a convoy on the great western highway while he had commanded the guard. Despite all his forelooking and alertness, and the fact that he had a hundred trained Abbeyman, as well as the armed traders, all good fighters, the attack had been beaten off only with great difficulty. Twenty dead men and several cartloads of vanished goods were the result. And not one captive, dead or alive. If a Leemute fell, one of the great, spotted dog-things had seized him and borne him away.
    Hiero had studied the Leemute files for years and knew as much as anyone below the rank of abbot about the various kinds. And he knew enough to know how much he did not know, that many things existed in the wide world of which he was totally ignorant.
    The thought of forelooking made Hiero rein the morse to a halt. Using the mind powers, with or without Lucinoge, could be very dangerous. The Unclean often had great mental powers too, and some of them were alerted by human thoughts, alerted and drawn to them. There was no question of what would happen if a pack such as had struck the convoy found a lone man ready to hand.
    Still, there had to be some danger anywhere, and forelooking often helped one to avoid it if not used to excess. "Your wits, your . training, and your senses are your best guides," the Father Abbots taught. "Mental search, forelooking, and cold-scanning are no replacements for these. And if overused, they are very dangerous." That was plain enough. But Hiero Desteen was no helpless youth, but a veteran priest-officer, and all this by now was so much reflex action.
    He urged the morse off the track, as he did so hearing the buffer herd just at the very edge of earshot. They are traveling fast, he thought, and wondered why.
    In a little sunny glade, a hundred yards from the trail, he dismounted and. ordered Klootz to stand watch. The big morse knew the routine as well as the man and lifted his ungainly head and shook the still-soft rack of antlers. From the left saddlebag, Hiero took his priest's case and removed the board, its pieces, then the crystal and the stole; draping the latter over his shoulders, he seated himself cross-legged on the pine needles and stared into the crystal. At the same time he positioned his left hand on the board, lightly but firmly over the pile of markers, and with his right made the sign of the cross on his forehead and breast.
    "In the name of the Father, his murdered Son, and Spirit," he intoned, "I, a priest of God, ask for vision ahead on my road. I, a humble servant of man,, ask for help in my journeying. I, a creature of earth, ask for signs and portents." As he concentrated staring into the crystal, he kept his mind fixed firmly on the road and especially the area to the east and south, the direction in which he was headed.
    In a moment, as he watched, the clear crystal became cloudy, as if filled with swimming wraiths of mist and fog. Thousands of years after western anthropologists had refused to believe the evidence of their own eyes when watching Australian aborigines communicate over hundreds of miles by staring into two pools of water, a man of the seventy-fifth century prepared to see what lay ahead of him in his travels.
    As Hiero stared, the mist cleared and he felt drawn down into the crystal, as if he were becoming a part of it. He shrugged this familiar feeling aside and found himself looking down on the buffer herd and the road from hundreds of feet up in the air. He was using the eyes of a bird, almost certainly a hawk, he thought with a detached part of his mind. As his vision swayed to and fro over a wide arc of country, he fixed everything he saw firmly in his memory. Here was a lake; there, to the south, a river next to a big swamp over which a distant road seemed to run on pilings (no mention of that in his briefings; better look out). The bird was not conscious it was being used. Hiero was not in