He seemed to spend a lot of time hiding in rock crevices lately. Whatever had happened to hiding in rooms, behind drapes, or under furniture?
He had a moment to think—Oh, no, not again—and then Cymry braced all four legs for a sudden stop, skidding to a halt beside the dyheli. At least the owls did seem to have some idea of what constituted a good shelter for the rest of the party. The crevice would be a little crowded for three plus the two humans, but it was better than facing what howled on their backtrail with nothing to protect their backs!
All three of them crowded into the narrow crevice between two halves of a huge boulder; the rock was easily two stories tall, and the crevice ended in the stone face of a second stone that was even taller. There was barely enough room for Cymry to turn around, but that was fine; less room for them meant less room for those things out there to try to get past them.
A strangled hoot and the booting of K'Tathi's head against his chest reminded him to turn the poor owl loose. He raised his arm and launched it clumsily into the air, thrown off by the confined quarters and the fact that the owl was considerably heavier than a merlin. It wasn't much of a launch, or much help to the owl in gaining the air; K'Tathi hit him in the side of the head with a wing, recovered, and got free of the crevice, just as the pack reached them.
Skif looked up when a note of triumph entered the wailing. A strange, yellowish flood burst through the bushes and into the area around the rocks. Dear gods—
He needn't wish for night-sight after all. The damned things glowed. Now that he saw them, he wished, perversely, he didn't have quite such a good view.
They looked—superficially—like dogs; they had the lean, long-legged bodies of greyhounds, the close-cropped ears, the long, snaky tails and pointed muzzles. But their faintly-glowing, pale yellow hides were covered with scales, each scale outlined by a darker yellow. Their heads, shaped like an unholy cross between dog and viper, held eyes that burned a sulfurous yellow much brighter than the bodies, and rows of sharply pointed fangs.
They flowed, they didn't run; they drifted to a halt outside the entrance to the crevice and wound around each other in a vicious, impatient, ever-moving tangle. A snarl of ropes, with teeth at one end. A ball of vipers. They confused the eye and baffled the senses with their hypnotic restlessness. Wintermoon slid off the back of his mount; Skif followed his example a moment later.
They couldn't get in; the sharp hooves of Cymry and the dyheli bucks awaited them if they tried, not to mention the bows that Skif and Wintermoon unlimbered from the sheathes at each saddle. But those who had taken refuge here couldn't get out, either.
Stalemate.
Skif strung his bow and nocked an arrow to the string, Wintermoon shadowing every movement. All right, here we are. Now what?
"What are those things?" Skif asked quietly, as the creatures continued to mill about in front of the crevice. He blinked his vision clear as they blurred for a moment. Was that just his tired eyes acting up, or were they doing it?
"Wyrsa," Wintermoon replied, frowning as he sighted along his arrow. He loosed it in the next moment, but the wyrsa that was his target writhed aside literally as the point touched its hide, evading the deadly metal hunting point in a way that Skif would have said was impossible if he hadn't seen it himself. He'd never seen anything move so fast in his entire life.
Wintermoon muttered under his breath; Tayledras words Skif didn't know, but recognized for intention if not content.
The Tayledras nocked another arrow, and sighted, but did not fire. "They have no magic weapons, but they do not tire easily, and their fangs are envenomed," Wintermoon continued, watching as the beasts flowed about each other. "Once set on a quarry, they do not give up. They know how to weave patterns that confuse the eye, and as you see, they are swift, agile. Alone, we do not consider them a great problem, but together in a pack, they are formidable."
"Great," Skif replied, after a moment. "So what do we do about them?"
"We kill them," the Hawkbrother said calmly, and loosed his arrow. This time, although the beast he aimed at evaded the shaft, the one that was behind it could not get out of the way, and took the arrow straight in the chest.
In any other beast, the wound might not have been fatal. There was no blood, and Skif honestly thought the creature was going to shake the strike off, even though it had looked like a heart-shot. But it stood stock still for a moment, jaws opening soundlessly, then toppled over onto its side. The light died from its eyes, and a moment later, the light faded from its hide, until it was a dull gray shape lying on the darker ground, revealed only by the moonlight.
The entire pack surged to one side, leaving the dead one alone. For a moment they froze in place, unmoving and silent.
He thought for a moment that they might prove Wintermoon wrong, that after the death of one of the pack, they might give up and leave their quarry to go its own way.
But then they all turned burning, hate-filled eyes on Wintermoon, then pointed their noses to the sky and howled again.
The sound was much worse at close range; it not only raised the hair on Skif's head, it rang in his ears in a way that made him dizzy and nauseous. The pack of wyrsa wavered before his blurring eyes, and he loosed the arrow he had nocked without even aiming it.
Luck, however, was with him. Two of the wyrsa dodged aside, accidentally shoving a third into the arrow's path. A second wyrsa dropped to the ground, fading as the first had done the moment it dropped. The pack stopped their howling, and tumbled, hastily, out of the way.
They stood near the bushes at the head of the path, this time staring at the cornered quarry. Skif got the feeling that there were cunning minds behind those glowing eyes; minds that were even now assessing all five of them. Two down—how many to go? I can't make out how many there are of them, they keep blurring together.
They advanced again, as a body, but with a little more separation between each of the beasts, so that they could dodge out of the way without sending another into the line of fire. He and Wintermoon loosed another five or six arrows each without hitting any more of the beasts. At least they had stopped their howling; Skif didn't think he could have handled much more of that. After the last fruitless volley, Wintermoon nocked his arrow but did not bother to draw it. Instead, he looked out of the corner of his eye at Skif and said, "And have you any notions?"
Skif had been trying to think of something, anything that could be done about the beasts, shook his head, wordlessly. Wintermoon grimaced.
One of the wyrsa separated from the pack, when they held their fire, and slunk, belly-down to the ground, to stand just in front of the crevice, as if testing them. When they didn't fire on it, another joined it, and another, until all of them had gathered directly before the entrance to their shelter. While they were moving one at a time, Skif got a chance to count them. There were eight in all, not counting the two dead.
He'd gone against worse numeric odds, but never against anything with reactions like these creatures had. We're rather outnumbered.
"If this were a tale," he offered, "our rescue would come out of the woods at this point. A herd of dyheli, perhaps, something that would come charging up and flatten everything in sight. Or a mage that could kill them with lightning."
"Would that it were a tale," Wintermoon muttered, his eyes following every move the beasts made. "The things move too swiftly to shoot."
If we had a way to distract them, it might be possible to get at some of them before they figured out what we were doing. "Are K'Tathi and Corwith fast enough to avoid those things?" he asked. "Could they—oh, fly down and make strikes at their heads and eyes, keep them busy while we tried shooting?"
Wintermoon shook his head, emphatically.
"No," he replied. "Owls are agile flyers, and silent, not swift. If they were to dive at the wyrsa, the beasts would have them. I will not ask them to do that."
Well, so much for that idea. Unless—well, they don't have to dive at them to distract them
.
"All right, what about this," he said, thinking aloud. "Can they fly just out of reach, and hiss at them, get them worked up into forgetting about keeping an eye on us, maybe tease them into trying to make strikes even though they're out of reach?"
"Not for long." Wintermoon frowned. "Not long enough for us to pick off all the wyrsa with arrows."
"But what if we used the last of the arrows, waited, got the owls to tease them again, then charged them, all of us? Cymry and the dyheli, too?" Skif had a good idea that the hooved ones might account for as many as one wyrsa apiece—that would leave less for him and Wintermoon. "We can always retreat back here if we have to."
"It is worth a try." Wintermoon left his arrow nocked, but did not sight it. Even as Skif did the same, two ghostly white shapes swooped down out of the dark treetops, hissing and hooting. The wyrsa looked up, startled, as the owls made another swoop. At the third pass, even though they were plainly out of reach, the nearness of the owls, and the taunting sounds they made, broke through their control. They turned their attention from their trapped quarry and began lunging upward at the birds.
Wintermoon gave the wyrsa a few moments more to fix their attention on the "new" targets—then pulled up his bow and fired his last three arrows, just as fast as he could get them off. Skif did the same.
The wyrsa quickly turned their attention away from the owls, but it was already too late. Each arrow had found a mark; two more wyrsa lay dead, and four were wounded. It seemed that only a heart-shot was effective in killing them; the wounded wyrsa limped, but did not bleed, and in fact took a moment to gnaw off the shafts of the arrows piercing front and hind-quarters.
Now they were even more angry; Skif felt the heat of their gaze as a palpable sensation on his skin, and the hatred in their eyes was easy to read. As he put up his now-useless bow and drew his sword, he thought he read satisfaction in those eyes as well.
Wintermoon drew his sword as well, and K'Tathi and Corwith swooped down again, harrying the wyrsa from above, carefully gauging their flights to keep them just barely out of range. Skif would have thought that the ploy wouldn't work the second time, but either the wyrsa had not made the connection between the owls and the attack, or now that the last of the arrows was spent, they had reasoned as a human would that the quarry would not be able to use the owls as the cover for an attack.
They grew frustrated by their inability to do anything about the flying pests, and, sooner than Skif would have thought, turned their full attention back to the owls. That was when Wintermoon gave the signal to charge.
Cymry, larger and heavier than the dyheli, charged straight up the middle of the pack, striking with forehooves and kicking with hind, before whirling and retreating to the safety of the crevice. The dyheli came in on either side, just behind her, and trampled the wyrsa that dodged out of the way. They too retreated, as Skif and Wintermoon followed as a second wave, swords out and swinging.
Skif's world narrowed to his enemies and himself; nothing more. As always, fear temporarily evaporated, replaced by a cool detachment that would last only as long as the battle. Talia had told him that he was really temporarily insane when this came over him—as emotionally dead and uncaring as an assassin. He hadn't always been this way, but like so many in Valdemar, the war with Ancar had changed him.
He ducked away from snapping jaws, and decapitated one wyrsa. Two more came for him, poisoned fangs gleaming in the moonlight, but one of the dyheli got in a kick that distracted the first, and he fatally disemboweled the second when it couldn't limp out of the way fast enough.
Cymry screamed a warning, and he ducked the one that the dyheli had kicked; hit it with the flat of the blade, and knocked it into Cymry's path. She trampled it; bones crunched and popped, and a hoof crushed its skull as it snapped at her.
He saw movement out of the corner of his eye, and struck at a third as it jumped for Wintermoon's back. His strike wasn't clean; he only sliced at its foreleg, but that disabled it. Wintermoon finished that one off, and Skif looked around for more of the beasts.
There weren't any more.
"We did it." Skif could hardly believe it. It had happened so quickly—he leaned on his sword, panting, his heart still in his mouth over the near-misses he'd had with the creatures' poisoned fangs. Very near-misses; the cloth of his breeches was torn in one place, and his tunic damaged by claws.
"We were lucky," Wintermoon said flatly. "Very, very lucky. Either these were very stupid wyrsa, or your tactic took them by surprise. One touch of a fang begins to dissolve flesh far worse than any poisonous serpent. And wyrsa often travel in packs twice the size of this one. We would not have defeated a larger pack this easily."
Skif nodded, and the battle fever that had sustained him drained out of him in a rush, leaving him weak-kneed and panting. He cleaned his sword on a handful of dry grass, and sagged against the stones that had sheltered them. "Havens. No, if there had only been one more of those things, I don't think we could have done this. I've never seen anything move as fast as they did." He closed his eyes as a rush of exhaustion hit him.
"I think," Wintermoon said, in a voice as drained-sounding as Skif felt, "that we should camp now."
Wintermoon decreed a fire, after they cleared the carcasses of the wyrsa out of the way, pitching them into the forest, upwind of the camp, for scavengers to squabble over. Not the easiest task in the dark; they were heavier than they looked, and their fangs were still deadly and had to be avoided. Then they collected arrows and arrowheads, all that could be found. There were more arrows in their packs, but every arrow was precious, and every broken-off head might be needed. By the time they had the fire going in front of their crevice, there was something out there, fighting over the remains with other somethings, all of them squalling and barking. Skif wondered how they would dare to sleep; he kept glancing at the forest where the noises were coming from, even though he knew the chances that he'd actually see anything were remote. Hopefully, they hadn't attracted anything too large....
"We stay awake until they carry away the remains," Wintermoon said, as if answering his thought. Skif was only startled by it for a moment; he was probably pretty transparent, and Wintermoon had read his expression. "Once the carcasses are gone, the scavengers will go. The fire will keep them away until then. The night-scavengers are cowards, and fear fire. We had best not move away from it."
The Hawkbrother settled down on his blanket roll, got one of his packs and took out a small, fire-blackened pair of pots, and filled both with water from one of their bottles. He looked up to see Skif watching him with puzzlement.
"So long as we are confined to the fire we might as well make use of it," he said. "The owls will only be able to hunt enough to fill their bellies; they are too weary to hunt for us tonight. I prefer not to resort to unembellished trail rations if I have any choice at all."
With that, he reached into his pack for a slab of dried venison and a few other things. He broke off bits of meat and dropped them into the first pot, which was already simmering, following that with the multicolored contents of a gray paper packet, and a sprinkling of what looked to be herbs. Into the second pot went more herbs, dried fruit, and several small, round objects that Skif didn't recognize.
"Can I help?" Skif asked. "I should warn you, I tend to ruin anything I cook on my own, but if you keep an eye on me, I should do all right."
The scout chuckled, and handed him a wooden spoon. Skif pulled the edges of his cloak a little closer around his body, and stirred the meat pot as he'd been directed. He was very glad of the fire; now that they weren't moving or fighting, the air, though windless, was very chilly. He expected to see thick frost on the ground in the morning.
"I have needed this myself," Wintermoon said, breaking the silence. "I am often out alone, and the hertasi do not care to be outside the Vale or their settlements. My lovers have always been casual, so there has never been anyone to share such—domestic chores with."
"Forgive m
e if I am stepping beyond the bounds," Skif said, "But I can't imagine why. You seemed popular."
Wintermoon coughed politely. "Well, none of the scouts have felt easy about having long-term affairs with one who hunts the dangerous hours of night by choice, and no woman of the Clans would ever consider a long liaison with a man who has no magic."
"But you have magic," Skif felt moved to protest. "Better than mine, in fact."
Wintermoon shrugged. "It is not magic by Starblade's definition," he said, too casually. "I do not know how these things are reckoned in other Clans, but it is that way in k'Sheyna."
Skif stirred the pot vigorously, and tried to think of a tactful way to approach the subject of Starblade. Darkwind had been so relieved at the release of his father, that he was likely to look no further, but Skif did not trust Starblade's ability to assess his own strengths and weaknesses. Tact had never been his strong suit; he finally gave up searching, and tried bluntness instead.
"What do you think of Starblade?" he asked. "Now, I mean—now that he isn't being manipulated. Do you trust him?"
"Much the same as I have always thought of him," came the surprising answer. "Not often, and not a great deal. This revelation has changed very little between Starblade and myself, whatever it has done for Darkwind."
"But—" Skif began. Wintermoon looked up from his task, briefly, and the firelight flickering over his face obscured whatever faint expression it might have held.
"Starblade disassociated himself from me when testing proved me to have no real magic," he said carefully. "Do you really wish to hear this? It is not particularly interesting."
"Why don't you let me judge that?" Skif replied, just as carefully. "It will help me to know k'Sheyna through you."
Wintermoon raised an eyebrow at that, but made no other comment. "So, then," he began. "My mother was a k'Treva mage, who came to k'Sheyna to look for a father for outClan children. She bargained with Starblade for twins, male and female, the male to leave, the female to take back with her. I do not know if my sister had mage-powers, but I did not, and I am told I was a great disappointment to my father. I did not know that, and I only knew he was my father because I was told, for I scarcely saw him."
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