grabbed me hard,
saying insistently, "Quick! Where's the girl! Go back and tell her it
won't work! If Kyral suspected--"

He never finished the sentence. Just behind us came another of the long
eerie howls. I knocked Cuinn away, and suddenly the night was filled
with crouching forms that came down on us like a whirlwind.

I shouted madly as the camp came alive with men struggling out of
blankets, fighting for life itself. I ran hard, still shouting, for the
enclosure where we had tied the horses. A catman, slim and black-furred,
was crouched and cutting the hobble-strings of the nearest animal. I
hurled myself on him. He exploded, clawing, raking my shoulder with
talons that ripped the rough cloth like paper. I whipped out my skean
and slashed upward. The talons contracted in my shoulder and I gasped
with pain. Then the thing howled and fell away, clawing at the air. It
twitched and lay still.

Four shots in rapid succession cracked in the clearing. Kyral to the
contrary, someone must have had a pistol. I heard one of the cat-things
wail, a hoarse dying rattle. Something dark clawed my arm and I slashed
with the knife, going down as another set of talons fastened in my back,
rolling and clutching.

I managed to get the thing's forelimbs wedged under my elbow, my knee in
its spine. I heaved, bent it backward, backward till it screamed, a high
wail.

Then I felt the spine snap and the dead thing mewled once, just air
escaping from collapsing lungs, and slid limp from my thigh. Erect it
had not been over four feet tall and in the light of the dying fire it
might have been a dead lynx.

"Rascar...." I heard a gasp, a groan. I whirled and saw Kyral go down,
struggling, drowning in half a dozen or more of the fierce half-humans.
I leaped at the smother of bodies, ripped one away with a stranglehold,
slashed at its throat.

They were easy to kill.

I heard a high, urgent scream in their mewing tongue. Then the furred
black things seemed to melt into the forest as silently as they had
come. Kyral, dazed, his forehead running blood, his arm slashed to the
bone, was sitting on the ground, still stunned.

Somebody had to take charge. I bellowed, "Lights! Get lights. They won't
come back if we have enough light, they can only see well in the dark."

Someone stirred the fire. It blazed up as they piled on dead branches,
and I roughly commanded one of the kids to fill every lantern he could
find, and get them burning. F