"Is there trouble?" the half-orc asked. He gawked at Isiem's near-white hair, pale complexion, and deep gray robes. Although their inky color was faded by his time in Devil's Perch, the garments were distinctly Nidalese in cut, and the severity of their lines was emphasized by the sparing silver accents that suggested piercings in the cloth. Even to one who did not recognize their provenance, the effect was unsettling.
"There is not," Isiem assured him, although he looked at Caffoc when he said it. "I only want to talk."
"We've nothing to say to the likes of you." Caffoc tried to urge his horse past Isiem's, but the animal shied away from the wizard and refused to go forward. Otter looked uncertainly from one man to the other, staying to the side.
"Perhaps not," Isiem said, "or at least not yet. But I have some things to say to you."
"About what?"
"The Beast of the Backar Forest. You will do your young ward a disservice by asking him to stand against it. He trusts you, and you would send him to his death." Isiem kept his attention on Caffoc; he did not give Otter so much as a glance. But he saw the addict's eyes flick toward the half-orc, saw the pain that flitted across the man's thin face, and knew he'd hit his mark.
"Are you sure of that?" Caffoc asked weakly, dropping his gaze to the ground.
"For centuries the Beast has lived in that wood, slaying entire companies at will and leaving no survivors. Unless you and your young friend are heroes out of song, yes, I'm sure."
"We're not," Otter broke in. From the suddenly defensive jut of the half-orc's lip, it seemed he thought Isiem was mocking them with the suggestion. "We're not heroes. We're just people."
Caffoc's head tipped forward. His thin, seamed face was a study in conflict: self-loathing, desperate need, and recognition of his own weakness warred with whatever better angels his nature could conjure. Isiem didn't know which way the man would fall, and he doubted that Caffoc knew either—but after a tortured stretch, the red-haired soldier swallowed, glancing sidelong at his young ward.
"That we are," he muttered, turning his horse away from Isiem's. This time the animal obeyed him willingly, eager to move away from the unnerving encounter. The wizard could scarcely hear him above the animal's relieved snort, so quietly did the man speak. "Just people."
Without another word, Caffoc moved away. Otter followed him, casting a troubled glance over his shoulder at Isiem. The wizard waited a moment longer, then returned to his own party, still clustered loosely around the wagon. It did not appear that anyone else in the caravan had cared to eavesdrop on their conversation, nor that his absence had attracted much notice from his own companions, but Ascaros gave him an inquisitive look as he fell in beside the shadowcaller.
"Your plan won't work," Isiem told him. "The addict's backed out. We'll have to do this the hard way."
Chapter Nine
The Hunt
I wish you hadn't told me about that half-orc and his addict friend," Ena grumbled as she funneled colorless fluids into a row of round bottles. After filling each one, the dwarf inserted a slender pin into the top of each bottle with the care of a jeweler setting a priceless diamond into her life's masterwork. "It makes it much less fun to complain about how I've got to do all the dirty work now."
"Very sorry," Isiem said without looking up from his spellbook. It was hard to read by the soft white light of his floating glow-globe, particularly as he'd sent it to shine over Ena's work and was sitting on the shadowy periphery of its illumination, but he had little alternative. Dawn was still two hours away, and they needed to be off before the rest of the camp awoke. After dealing with the Beast of the Backar Forest, Teglias hoped to continue separately into the Umbral Basin, and none of them wanted to be followed by the curious or greedy when they broke off from the caravan.
Ena didn't answer. When she'd filled the last of the dozen bottles she'd brought, the dwarf rose from her squat, pulling each arm over her head in turn to stretch away the stiffness. She rubbed her eyes with the backs of her fists and looked over to Isiem. "You still reading?"
"No." He closed the compact book and tucked it back into a pocket. The words of magic were etched in his mind. If he shut his eyes, the wizard could almost see them, written in incandescent gold on the inside of his eyelids. He let the glowing sphere wink out. "I'm ready."
"Then let's not waste time." Ena slid each of her newly prepared bottles into a padded carrying case. She slung the case over a broad shoulder and led Isiem away from the caravan and into the woods.
The trees of the Backar Forest closed around them almost as soon as they stepped off the road. Twenty yards past its periphery, there was no hint that any civilization existed in the world. Although it was well into autumn, and the farms they'd passed had been nearing harvest, there was no sign that the wood's wild growth was slowing for winter's approach.
Broad-leaved brambles with tiny black berries wound around the thinner trees' trunks, while spindly shrubs with pointed grayish needles crowded the scant spaces between them. The forest's low, damp hollows were thick with skunk cabbage and threaded with glimmering ribbons of water; its hills and rises were green with wilder tangles of vegetation. As dawn began to filter through the autumn trees, it shed a misty gray haze across the layered loam of past years' leaves.
Isiem had never seen any forest so verdant. It was easy to imagine fairies dancing across its dawnlit boughs, or satyrs romping through the forest's riotous fertility. Much more difficult, he thought as he picked his way clumsily through the undergrowth, to imagine an undead monster lurking in this place so full of life.
For almost half an hour they walked through the wood without speaking, accompanied by the trills of unseen birds and the babble of hidden creeks. The rich green-brown scents of moss and fallen leaves enveloped them, punctuated occasionally by a pungent note of crushed skunk cabbage.
Ena worked her way through the forest methodically as dawn melted into morning, casting from side to side like a hound following a scent. She tied the ends of her weatherstained blue cloak around her waist to keep the garment off the wet earth and tucked her trousers into her boots. Forgoing any notions about trying to look dignified for the deer and squirrels, Isiem quickly emulated her precautions.
Other than the odd mutter to herself when she came across something she didn't like, Ena made no sound in the forest. Even her footfalls were nearly silent, in sharp contrast to Isiem's constant snags and blunders. He hadn't expected a dwarf to have any real skill in the woods, but she did, and her ease left him both envious and mystified.
Just as Isiem was plucking his sleeve off another bramble—somehow he'd gotten the cloth wrapped around thorns on all sides of the vine, a feat of baffling ingenuity—Ena held up a hand, signaling that she'd found some sign of their quarry.
Isiem approached. The scarred dwarf stepped aside, pointing a booted toe to the patch of earth that had drawn her attention.
Under the broad, veiny leaves of two nearby skunk cabbages was a patch of withered ground. A fine web of dead white roots, brittle and impossibly fragile, lay over the earth like frost that refused to melt. Isiem stooped to touch them, and found that they'd been completely drained of moisture.
A few feet away, obscured by undergrowth and visible only while looking sideways near to the ground, the wizard noted several grayish, shriveled stems just barely poking out of the damp earth. Wrinkled black shreds clung to their tops: skunk cabbage leaves, dehydrated almost past recognition. The dead plants appeared to have been pulled upward by some unearthly force, drained of life, and abandoned in the mud. While new growth had sprouted around the remains, nothing had touched the dead things themselves. No animal had eaten them; not even mold blemished those wizened black leaves.
"Bit unnerving," Ena said, straightening and moving to the left. "It continues this way, and the other way, too. Looks like a circle." She paced back across the arc, this time in a straight line, measuring her steps. "Thirty or forty feet across, by my estimation. What would do tha
t?"
Isiem shrugged. He knew of nothing that would make that circular blast of death, but that meant little. The world held stranger creatures than he could imagine. "Some type of life drain, maybe. Ascaros suggested it was a wizard's creation. It may have aspects of different undead bound together."
"Or it might be something completely unique." The dwarf chuckled humorlessly and moved forward through the wood.
Three more times she stopped, twice to point out similar circles of long-dead vegetation, the third time to note a badly rusted suit of chainmail that had sunk deep into the mud beside a sparkling creek. Yellowed bones poked out of the chainmail, and withered hair matted the moss beneath it. Although time and weather had stripped the corpse of its flesh, its bones did not appear to have been disturbed by any scavenger.
The remains were in a sorry state, and it was impossible for Isiem to determine what had killed the chainmail's wearer. He couldn't even tell if those half-buried bones had once been human. But he felt a prick of apprehension as he walked away from the bones. In this place, so full of life and its hungers, something should have dragged away a limb to gnaw or stolen that hair to line a nest. That the corpse had lain undisturbed for so long suggested they were facing a profound desecration—and that was a frightening prospect.
"You're not going to tell me what killed him?" Ena asked when she saw Isiem leave the bones. "I was hoping you'd have a spell for that."
"None I know," the wizard replied. The spells he had readied were only able to confirm what he'd already guessed: even if the chainmail's wearer had been slain by some arcane force, no magic lingered in those old bones now.
"Well, that's useless," the dwarf said, although there was no heat to it. She walked on another half-mile, veering from side to side, then stopped and picked up a long deadwood stick. Poking the loam ahead of her, Ena continued until she found a suitable spot, where she paused and dug a narrow, shallow hole by stabbing the stick into the ground and wiggling it in circles. She dropped one of her glass bottles carefully into the hole, then covered it up and went on. A few yards later, she buried another.
"Are we that close?" Isiem asked. The dwarf only had a dozen or so traps; he doubted she'd be setting them if she didn't think they'd catch prey. "Should I tell the others to come?" They had left the others with the caravan, partly to deflect possible pursuit and partly because they were not sure where, exactly, the Beast lurked in the forest. By now the rest of their party would have filtered into the wood in twos or threes, each group leaving half an hour after the others and searching along a slightly different course.
Ena dug another hole and planted a third device, arranging them along the arms of a rough V that funneled toward the path she and Isiem had taken to approach this point. Using a shirtsleeve, she wiped a smear of mud off her brow. "Unless they've struck better sign on their own, yes. You can tell them that I anticipate we'll draw the beast out at nightfall."
"Do you think it fears the sun?" Many undead creatures did, but Isiem hadn't considered that the Beast of the Backar Forest might be among them. It seemed a glaring design flaw, and he wouldn't have expected an intentionally constructed undead to share it.
"I think there's a fair chance of that. We're near its lair—those blasts have been converging in this direction, and there've been old and new ones overlapping for about a hundred yards now—but it hasn't come out to greet us. Not while the sun's still shining.
"Anyway, its choice to lurk in this particular forest in the first place suggests it might not care for daylight. There's not much here to draw undead. Not many humans around to feed on, no graveyards, no sites of historical atrocities as far as anyone's bothered to record. What's left?" The dwarf thrust a stubby finger at the surrounding wood, turning a slow circle to emphasize that they were hemmed in on all sides. "All these trees, and year-round protection from the sun."
"And you intend to lure it out," Isiem concluded with a sigh. "At night. Where it will probably have the advantage on us even if it isn't hindered by the sun."
"That's about the shape of it," the dwarf agreed. "Do you have any spells you want to lay down for our ambush?"
"Not particularly. I expected that it would come after us first."
Ena snorted and thrust her stick back into the ground. "If we had to rely on you, it would." She shook her head in exaggerated derision. "Wizards. Here I thought you were supposed to be masters of planning and plotting, and you can't even lay a trap for a pile of bones in the woods."
"Not until it's a little closer, no." Isiem plucked a small compass from his pocket. Its face was a flattened cabochon of polished bloodstone framed in spiky steel. The compass's needle was sharply serrated on both sides, as befit a creation of Zon-Kuthon's torturous faith.
Ascaros had loaned it to him, and Isiem had agreed with its necessity, but the wizard still found it deeply uncomfortable to hold Kuthite magic. The thing felt treacherous as a scorpion in his palm. The Midnight Lord was not known for his kindness to apostates.
Inwardly wincing, outwardly tranquil, Isiem nicked a finger against the needle's point. He squeezed a bead of blood onto the compass face, splashing more crimson onto the red specks and striations that mottled the dark green stone. Immediately the needle began to spin, faster and faster, revolving on the bloodstone until Isiem whispered: "Ascaros."
The needle stopped, pointing south-southwest. A second drop of blood caused it to resume its twirling, until Isiem said: "Teglias." And then, a third time: "Ganoven." With each name, the needle stopped abruptly, pointing southward in a slightly different direction. Each of his named companions carried a compass similar to his own, and the steely needle located them unerringly.
When the needle stilled on the last one, Isiem focused a thread of magic into the bloodstone. We are here, he sent into the stone, following it with a carefully surveyed image of their position in the forest. As Isiem woke the compass's magic, the blood he'd spattered onto the stone sizzled and hissed, burning off in curls of iron-scented smoke. North. Ena has found the Beast. Join us.
The last of the blood burned away. A dusting of ash clouded the bloodstone's gloss and dulled the needle's serrations. Isiem blew the ash away, silently relieved that the compass had gone inert so quickly, and returned the bauble to his pocket.
"They're coming?" Ena asked, leaning on her stick. She'd stopped digging to watch the wizard work, but once he put the compass away, she strode another few yards north to bury her next trap. "You told them where to find us?"
"I hope so. If the compass works as it should."
"You are so bad at reassuring me," the dwarf muttered, thrusting the stick into the wet earth and churning it around.
An hour later, Ena had buried all the traps she'd brought. The dwarf melted back into the woods, scouting ahead, while Isiem waited for the others to join them.
They came in a scattered trickle: Teglias and Kyril first, then Ganoven with his thugs, and finally Ascaros, alone, stone-faced and jarringly out of place in his stark Nidalese attire.
When they arrived, Kyril's lips were tight with frustration, and her cloak had picked up so many new snags that the cloth looked fuzzy. Ganoven sucked the back of his left hand as he came up the last rise; the skin was reddened with a crosshatch of scratches, as if he'd tried to backhand a bramble for its insolence in pricking him. Isiem wondered if the Aspis agent was actually stupid enough to have done that. It wouldn't have surprised him.
The rest of them seemed to have come through the forest none the worse for wear. Pulcher had a pink daisy tucked behind one ear, apparently unbeknownst to him. Isiem stared at it for a moment, puzzled as to which of their companions could have been frivolous enough to plant the flower on the man. The twinkle in Teglias's eye, and his not-quite-suppressed smile, suggested that the Sarenite cleric might have been the prankster.
"What is that idiotic thing?" Ganoven snapped when he finally left off nursing his injured hand long enough to notice Pulcher's decoration.
The t
owering thug just blinked at him in blank confusion while, beside him, Copple tittered behind a pudgy hand. Visibly irritated, Ganoven rose onto his toes, snatched the nodding daisy from behind the man's ear, thrust it in his face, and then hurled it into the mud. "That thing."
Pulcher stared at it for a while. His spectacles slid slowly down his nose, and he pushed them back up with a sausage-thick finger. After a long deliberation, he grunted and stepped past the flower. "I didn't put that there."
"No, of course not," Ganoven snapped. "It must have been your fairy godmother who planted it there. Maybe she thought it would finally make use of all that dirt between your ears."
Teglias coughed into a hand, both to interrupt them and to hide a chuckle. "These woods are known to be filled with fey," the cleric said gravely, his mirth betrayed only by a slight wrinkling at the corners of his eyes. "Some of them have quite childish senses of humor. They might be amused to see us turning against one another so easily."
"Well, we're not here for them," Ganoven said stiffly. "We're here for the Beast." He turned to regard Isiem. "You claimed you'd found it?"
"Ena did," the wizard replied.
"I did," the dwarf agreed, stepping out of a nearby bush and brushing stray leaves from her cloak. Ena was less than ten feet away, yet Isiem had had no inkling she was there. He wondered how long she'd been hiding.
Ena plucked a clinging bramble from her sleeve and released it gently, leaving no pull in the cloth. "It's not far from here, but not as close as I'd thought, either. We'll have to lure it out to get it across my traps."
"We will?" Ganoven objected.
"I will," the dwarf amended, giving him a caustic look. "Wouldn't want you to have to do any extra work. You might get the idea we expected you to help."
"You're the one who chose to plant your traps in the wrong place," the Aspis agent said.
"That I did, and I'm glad I did." Using her scavenged walking stick, Ena carefully scuffed the loam around one of her traps. Its silver pin had become a shade too exposed, jutting out from the surrounding dirt. "The earth is desecrated where that creature lairs. Up there, my traps might have detonated the instant I buried them."
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