Stalking the Beast

by Howard Andrew Jones

  Elyana snatched her bow and followed, motioning the others to remain where they were. "Keep track of your horse," she snapped at the paunchy wizard, for Votek's animal had wandered off to nibble at a mulberry bush.

  Two of Cyrelle's hounds came with her, loping to either side of Elyana and Cyrelle. A hundred feet out Elyana saw a third, presumably Barten, with his head lowered beside a juniper bush.

  Elyana kept watch while the huntress examined the site. "Horse tracks," Cyrelle relayed to Elyana. "Unshod. From about the same time as the beast's prints."

  "Probably another victim," Elyana said glumly.

  "Let's be sure, and find out."

  Elyana assumed they'd find a body, or a skeleton picked clean by scavengers. But after they'd trailed the horse prints east for some twenty minutes, they learned the prints paralleled those of the beast's. For several leagues the tracks lay very close to one another, up until the ruins of a dead forester's fortified home. Here the unshod horse seemed to have waited in the distance while the monster rampaged. Elyana and Drelm had searched the ground thoroughly a few days ago, and buried the poor forester and his wife. But Elyana had not looked far enough out to find the hoofprints.

  A careful examination of the situation took more than an hour, and Elyana was none too pleased with what she learned. She stood contemplating the nearest run of trampled dirt, where she'd located the beast's prints. A few hundred yards away those same prints disappeared into a bog. She stood with the others, studying the unwelcoming terrain.

  Insects whined and frogs croaked. A dragonfly flitted past and settled onto a rotted stump. Elyana had seen enough to shatter her earlier suppositions about the beast's nature, and she wasn't liking the directions those lines of thought led her.

  "What's troubling you?" Lisette asked. "This is good news, isn't it? The more we learn about our enemy, the better our chances."

  Cyrelle answered. "There're some weird bits about all this." She scratched a spot of dried mud off her cheek. "Elyana, you notice that there aren't any horse droppings?"

  "I did."

  "And the horse wasn't shod," Cyrelle continued.

  "Even I can see that," Lisette admitted. "But a lot of frontier horses don't have horseshoes."

  "It's a ghost steed," Votek said softly, and Elyana looked over at him.

  "A ghost? What are you talking about?" Cyrelle sounded both troubled and confused.

  "It's not really a ghost," Votek said, a little apologetically, "but a spell. An old spell, and a useful one. A wizard—or a sorcerer, or a witch, I suppose—can call up a magical animal and ride it."

  "Like conjuring a demon," Lisette offered.

  "Well, not really," Votek said, then waggled his hand a little. "I suppose it's a little similar. The horse isn't a demon, though, it's just a...spell that functions like a horse. Anyway, an illusory steed would leave prints, but it surely wouldn't leave droppings, because it's not alive and doesn't need to eat." The wizard shifted his pack, then eyed Elyana. "I think you guessed this the moment you saw the horse tracks."

  Elyana shook her head. "Not until we saw the horse tracks alongside those of the beast. But I've been wondering for a while whether or not the beast had a reason."

  "A reason?" Lisette prompted.

  Elyana frowned. "Somebody has a reason for making it attack. It has a handler, or a wizard. Maybe it really is some kind of demon. I'm wondering now how many other times there were horse tracks near one of the attacks that I just didn't see. I wasn't focused on looking for horse prints, and there usually are horse prints near settlements..."

  "In this line of work," Cyrelle said, "you've got to look at what's there rather than what you expect."

  Elyana nodded. "Well said." And something that Elyana should have known, given her own long years in the wild. Until recently she'd been assuming they tracked some kind of sorcerous abomination, out on its own and killing. Like a rogue bear or dog. "So it's probably being guided."

  "The question is why," Votek said. "Why would anyone want to do...this?" He turned a pudgy hand toward the splintered logs of the cabin.

  Elyana didn't answer. She was thinking back to the horse tracks they'd found when she finally got back to the sorcerer Onderan's miserable shack, a day after Melloc's funeral. Many days had passed since Drelm had axed Onderan by then, but she'd discovered the trace of an unshod horse's prints in some of the loose soil a few yards from the weed patch that passed as the sorcerer's vegetable garden. Could those, too, have been made by a ghost steed?

  Cyrelle shook her head in disgust. "So assume someone is commanding the attacks. It seems like an awful lot of effort to kill a bunch of folks that don't own anything worth taking."

  "Some people get a real thrill from killing." Lisette's lips were downturned. Elyana eyed her keenly, wondering if she spoke from experience. "I've seen all kinds of bastards over the years," Lisette went on. "Oh, some of the men I hunt, they just got real angry one day and took it out on someone. But some of them, they get a taste for it. I suppose wizards can be like that, too."

  Karag had been standing silently at watch for the whole of the conversation. He hadn't said a word since before dawn, and the only sounds from the dwarf had been him occasionally shifting his foot in the undergrowth as he watched the distance. Now, though, he turned, put a leg up on a log, and declared, "It's a summoner."

  "A summoner?" Cyrelle repeated.

  Elyana had heard the term, although she had no personal experience with any practitioners from that branch of magical study.

  Lisette looked just as surprised as Elyana to hear an opinion from the dwarf. Either the bounty hunter was a fine actress, or the dwarf's words had caught her off guard. Might that mean she was somehow involved in the beast's attacks and didn't want Karag revealing anything? Or just that Karag didn't normally know much about magic?

  Once again she cursed the added complication of Venic and his letter. She had enough to trouble her without constantly having to worry about Lisette's true motives. She turned to Vatok. "Is Karag right?"

  The wizard folded his hands over his protruding belly and tapped it rhythmically. "He has a point," he said, then added sheepishly, "I should have recognized that personality earlier. It makes a kind of sense—absent motive, of course. Summoners have to stay close to the creature they call, which would explain the tracks."

  "It's the only good answer," Karag declared truculently.

  "What's a summoner?" Cyrelle asked.

  "A magic-worker who's linked to a creature," Votek explained in that same amiable tone. "Like you are to your animals." "Except a summoner calls something up from the pits of hell," Karag said with a snarl.

  "You sound as though you speak from experience," Votek said to the dwarf, not unkindly.

  The dwarf's expression grew even more sour. "My uncles had to face down this bastard who could conjure up a leaping, fiery thing that looked like a skeleton horse with a scorpion sting. Except that it put out waves of heat, and fear. He was extorting a silver mine. Almost twenty warriors died fighting him before it was all over."

  While Elyana listened, she caught sight of Lisette's intent expression. She wondered if the bounty hunter had heard the tale from the dwarf before.

  "Is there anything we need to know to fight a summoner?" Cyrelle asked.

  Karag pressed his lips together in thought for a long moment, then nodded. "The summoner will hide, but you have to remember if you kill him—like any wizard—the spells stop."

  "That's not necessarily true—" Votek started to object.

  Karag looked as though he were about to explode.

  "Certainly a dead magic-user can't cast any new spells," Elyana said quickly. "When we attack, we need to make fighting the summoner as much of a priority as the beast, if not more so."

  "Which will be tricky," Votek added, "especially if he's invisible. Which seems likely to be the case."

  "How do you figure that?" Cyrelle asked.

  "It only stands to reason." There
was a note of pride in Votek's voice as he spoke on. "No one has ever reported seeing a steed during any of the attacks, have they?" He looked to Elyana for verification.

  "No," she admitted.

  "So, there you are. He can make himself invisible, he can make the monster invisible, and he can make his magical steed invisible."

  "A summoner can call his beast to him, too, whenever he wants," Karag said. "Or make it vanish. The summoner's been toying with you, then calling it back to him."

  Votek cleared his throat. "I still want to point out that this is conjecture, not certainty. It takes an inordinate amount of effort each day to prepare spells like those I use. I'm not a summoner, but I'm sure the training is similar. Why spend years honing your craft just to go hunting people in the River Kingdoms? We lack a reason."

  "You haven't seen what I've seen," Lisette said darkly. "Where are you from, wizard?"

  "Gralton."

  "I'm from Cheliax," Lisette pressed on. "And believe me, there're people there who put a whole lot of thought into just how people should be killed. And have you ever heard of the priests of Zon-Kuthon?"

  Elyana winced a little at that. She'd never faced one directly, but she'd dealt with the traps they left behind.

  There was a nervous quaver in Cyrelle's voice. "You think we're dealing with some of them?"

  "No," Elyana and Lisette said as one. They then looked at each other.

  "They'd be a lot more obvious about it," Lisette explained.

  "And there'd be a lot more blood," Elyana went on.

  Lisette nodded. "Sounds like you've dealt with them."

  "Once or twice. Once was enough."

  "That's the truth," Lisette agreed. She might have meant to reassure Cyrelle as she addressed her. "If this was the work of those rat-humpers, you'd find their victims staked out, half skinned. They would have lived for days in excruciating pain. The people the monster kills die too fast to make the Kuthite priests happy."

  Cyrelle shook her head in disgust, then spat and muttered a prayer to Calistria.

  Elyana decided a subject change was in order. "It's not them. And I don't think we're going to find an explanation right now."

  "There aren't any stories of anything...important going missing from the attacks, are there?" Votek asked. "Do you think this summoner—if that's what he is—might be looking for something?"

  "Nothing's ever missing," Elyana said. "Not even the people, or the houses. They're just shredded."

  "Maybe that's why he keeps doing it," Votek suggested. "He's looking for something and hasn't found it yet."

  Even if Votek remained doubtful, Elyana was convinced they faced a summoner, and supposed he'd been watching, perhaps even listening, as she and Drelm and Illidian met that first time beside the bodies of Illidian's patrol. Where would the summoner have been, though? "When Drelm and I fought the monster," she said, "the summoner would have seen how outclassed we were. We'd hurt his monster, but I don't think we'd done any serious damage. It could have kept on killing. Why did he stop?"

  "If he, or she," Lisette said, "gets his jollies killing and frightening, it helps to have a few survivors now and then. So people can hear just how scary the monster is."

  "Maybe you hurt it more than you realized," Cyrelle said, "or he was afraid you had."

  They rendezvoused with the other squads and, after updating them about their findings, spent the rest of the day searching for any sign of tracks that had exited the bog from another direction. They found none. The last sign of either beast or horse was a large hanging bough that had been bent to one side. No backtracking turned up anything more, except leeches that Grellen acquired while dropping into an especially deep waterhole.

  Elyana was in a dour mood that evening as they set up camp. One day was gone, and while she now had a better idea about the nature of their enemy, she had no idea how to find him.

  So she decided on a different course. She led them to dry ground in a small hilltop clearing, surrounded on three sides by trees. Her thought was they could better see if something came toward them, for the monster would set tree limbs swaying. She set Drelm and the mercenaries to arranging wooden spikes in the gentle slope that made up the fourth side.

  She sent Illidian, Galarias, and Aladel out on a long-range patrol to search for tracks and paths, and appointed sentries while the rest of the expedition prepared the camp. She then pulled Votek aside.

  "I see you have a lute," she said.

  "I do. I'm a fair player." He smiled slyly.

  "Play for us, then."

  "For morale?"

  "Something like that."

  Votek looked surprised. "Wouldn't you rather I look over the wand?"

  She shook her head. "Not just yet. I want you to play."

  Elyana had never yet met a musician truly reluctant to demonstrate his gifts, and Votek proved no different. But he likewise proved better than Elyana would have guessed, with a low, sweet voice. Soon he was strumming one of the ballads of Fife and Darvin, and Cyrelle, Drutha, and the old Oaksteward, who were overseeing the cooking, joined in happily with each chorus.

  There was no missing Drelm's thin-lipped disapproval. He rose from his work with Marika, Grellen, and Calvonis, and was striding directly toward the wizard when Elyana called to him.

  The half-orc's large head swung slowly, then his eyes widened into almost comical surprise as she motioned him over. By the time he'd reached where she stood brushing Calda, he'd regained his composure.

  "I want him playing," Elyana said softly.

  Drelm cleared his throat. "Shouldn't we make smokeless fires, and silence the music?"

  "No."

  She waited for the half-orc to work through it. His jaw moved, almost as if he were chewing over the possibilities. After a long moment, his expression cleared.

  "You mean to draw the beast to us."

  "Yes."

  He chuckled, then smacked her shoulder in delight. Elyana pretended it hadn't hurt.

  "Brave Elyana." Drelm chuckled once more. "I should have guessed. Baron Stelan always said you should make the ground fight for you."

  "A lot of people say that," Elyana pointed out. It was basic tactical doctrine, and, much as she was fond of Stelan, Drelm should know the motto had not originated with him any more than "prepare for the morrow by planning today" had come from the mayor. The half-orc cherished wise maxims, but always seemed to think they originated with the person speaking them.

  "The baron said it a lot," Drelm countered, then strode back to his work, whistling the same tune Votek played.

  At the footfall behind her Elyana turned slowly, hand dropped to her knife. She'd set Karag up to watch ten paces back, but this wasn't Karag. It was Lisette, polishing the end of one of her muskets with a gray rag. The markswoman kept the wood so clean it could bear reflection, and the metal portions of her weapons gleamed.

  Elyana had only ever seen guns in use one time before, in a siege, and hadn't been especially impressed. Until she'd seen Lisette they hadn't seemed particularly useful in combat. She'd dismissed them as a way for normal men and women to simulate the powerful attacks of wizards, with less accuracy and more complexity, and didn't expect them to last. Lisette's skill had her questioning her earlier judgment.

  "You're really trying to lure it in?" the bounty hunter asked.

  Elyana returned to brushing Calda's flank. "Never let your enemy choose your battleground."

  Lisette stepped to her side and smiled knowingly. "And you're not sure which way to go anyway, are you?"

  "That's right. So I'm presenting a target. A juicy one."

  Lisette gestured to the encircling trees. "Suppose he's out there watching, right now?"

  "Let him."

  "But won't he know what you're doing?"

  Elyana returned the brush to Calda's saddlebag and patted the side of her nose. The animal snorted in response, lowering her head and tilting it. Elyana chuckled and scratched behind the offered ear.

&nb
sp; "Aren't you afraid he'll know what you're doing?" Lisette pressed.

  "We're facing someone very arrogant. Even if he sees our preparations, he'll think us overconfident. I'm hoping he'll be tempted to show us his power. He can see us making these spikes and setting our sentinels, and think that we feel perfectly prepared. Especially if we put on a show."

  "And then you'll hit him with the plans we've laid."

  "Exactly."

  Lisette shouldered her weapon. "Suppose our fat wizard is right and we've got an invisible summoner. What's to have kept him from sneaking in and hearing all the plans you told us back in Delgar?"

  It was a fair question. She doubted someone could have done it—not with guards and wizards and dogs so close—but that was the problem with wizardry: it defied normal limits. Perhaps more interesting, though, was Lisette's manner. If she really was an assassin, what better time to attack than during a monstrous assault? It would be easy to claim she'd shot her target accidentally. Why, then, make it so obvious she was thinking about the tactical situation?

  Possibly because Lisette wasn't in league with the summoner, and because she wasn't really an assassin. Yet she'd identified herself as hailing from Cheliax, just as Venic's letter claimed. But as Elyana's foster father had once told her, the best lies were always grown with a sprinkling of truth.

  "You're the bounty hunter," Elyana said at last, finally ending Calda's long scratch. "What do you think?"

  "I think killing a wizard's harder work than you think."

  "So you've killed some before?"

  "Maybe I have. A few more than you, I wager."

  Elyana smiled grimly. "I think you'd be surprised."

  "Maybe I would, at that," Lisette said after a moment. "I have a hard time getting a read on you."

  "A read?"

  "I can't usually tell what you're thinking."

  "That's what humans always say about elves when we're not doing what they want."

  Lisette allowed a faint smile and reached over to pat Calda's side. "So what is it you want out of this, Elyana? Seems pretty clear the mayor has something for you...but you don't return it. And I don't believe any of that talk about you and the half-orc."