Manhounds of Antares by Alan Burt Akers

with various bloodthirsty weapons. It infuriated me to see, for instance, a plump and laughing woman, her hair looped up in a net of priceless pearls, leaning on her crossbow and talking to her companion, who kept digging the point of his vosk-spear into the ground. They all looked a little self-conscious in their hunting leathers and they handled their weapons rather as tourists handle implements with which they are not totally familiar.
    All this spending of money and time and effort — to hunt a raggle-tail bunch of half-naked slaves through the jungles!
    Half-naked: we were issued with gray slave breechclouts which we put on, out there, on the ground, in sight of everyone. Lilah acted as though the hunters did not exist.
    I waited for the clothes and the knives, but Nath the Guide whispered fiercely and at his words I forbore to inquire, sensing a part of the secret the guides kept against the man-hunters of Faol.
    In this little group of slaves — sixteen of us — only Lilah and I and two others, a man and woman, were humans. All the rest were halflings. I couldn’t equate Nath as a slave. Despite the air of docility and fear he assumed there was about him the unmistakable sense of the free man, the man who fought against odds, and expected to win.
    This fine morning Nalgre had his little pet with him.
    He clicked his fingers and a jiklo ran across the clearing toward him, tongue lolling, eyes bright, frisking about him. I watched, sickened. This jiklo was a woman. She panted about her master on all fours, pricking her ears, emitting little gobbles of pleasure at his notice of her, and at the dribble of ground vosk he let fall, which she lapped up greedily. She wore a red bolero jacket, and a gray breechclout, and she ran on all fours, and she was a manhound of Antares, and she was a woman.
    The studs and plaques on her leather collar were all of gold. Her brown hair frizzed up into that angry matted crest, and blonde streamers of hair fell back in a tail from the central mass. Her naked rump frisked about Nalgre, and had a tail sprouted there, I suppose, one might have accepted the picture more.
    Lilah’s supple figure quivered at sight of the jiklo, then she controlled herself. The halflings were whispering to one another, and a couple of Fristles unashamedly clasped each other in their furry arms.
    I had no doubt why Nalgre played with his pet before us. “Look,” he was saying. “This is a manhound. These are the creatures who will chase you and hunt you and pull you down.”
    The jiklo trotted over to us. The halflings went rigid with fear. I looked down as the red bolero swung past. The thing emitted little gasps and wheezes, and the pug nose wrinkled up. The thing was smelling us! She was taking our scent!
    “Get away, you filthy kleesh!” snarled the human man, a husky youngster called Naghan, who came, so he said, from Hamal itself. He told us this with pride. The girl with him screamed as the jiklo’s tongue, all lolling and wet and red, rasped down her naked calf. Naghan kicked out and then he, too, screamed and writhed as a guard lashed his back with a cunning whipblow called the rattler.
    “Stay in line there, you rasts!” shouted Nalgre.
    He turned and spoke quietly to his customers the hunters, and then they glanced swiftly and at an angle beneath their hands at the suns, to tell the time, and then all turned and walked off out of the clearing, back to their comfortable Jikai villas to await the time to be off.
    The time for the slaves to leave was now.
    With the whips cracking about our heads, and words of advice from Nalgre, we set off. His advice amounted to: “Run and run, cramphs. If you do not afford good sport and are taken without a good chase, you will be more sorry than you may imagine!” He snickered as he said this, and fondled the female jiklo, who crooned in pleasure at the touch of her master’s hand.
    We set off due east.
    The jungle closed above our heads and strange noises