“Well,” she said, as lightly as possible, which was not very, “now you’ve got my brain going, and I’m never going to be able to get to sleep. I’ll just lie awake thinking.”
He yawned hugely. “And I am warm and sleepy. I always get worn out listening to people’s reasons why they won’t be happy. Shall we switch watches?”
He didn’t wait for her to answer, settling his head back down on his foreclaws. She shrugged. “We might as well,” she replied, and edged over until she was in a position where she could see through a gap between two of the branches hiding the front of their shelter. She memorized the positions of everything in sight while the light was still good enough to identify what was visible through the curtain of rain. The flashes of lightning helped; if she concentrated on a single spot, she could wait until the next lightning bolt hit to give her a quick, brightly-lit glimpse of what was there, and study the afterimage burned into her eyes.
Tad hadn’t been lying about his fatigue; within a few moments, she heard his breathing deepen and slow, and when she turned to look behind her, she saw that his eyes were closed. She turned back to her vigil, trying to mentally review what she had done when she constructed the shelter.
She had tried not to take too many branches away from any one place. She had tried to pile the ones she brought to the shelter in such a way that they looked as if they were all from a single smaller tree brought down by the larger. With all this rain, every trace of our being here should have been washed away. No scent, no debris. . . .
Smoke, though—the smoke Tad had used to drive out insects had been very dense and odoriferous, and she wondered if the rain had washed all of it out of the air. If not—how common would smoke be in a forest that experienced thunderstorms every day? Common enough, she would think. Surely lightning started small fires all the time, and surely they burned long enough to put a fair amount of smoke into the air before the rain extinguished them.
Well, there wasn’t anything she could do about the smoke—or the shelter itself—now. If there was anything looking for them, she could only hope that she had done everything she needed to in order to cover their presence. Last night it would have been difficult for their possible followers to find them; she hoped tonight it would be impossible.
The rain turned from a torrent to a shower, and slowed from a shower to a mere patter. Then it wasn’t rain at all, but simply the melodic drip of water from the canopy above, and the sounds of the night resumed.
She breathed a sigh of relief, and checked the fire. No point in letting it burn too high now; the inside of the shelter was at a good temperature, and with two walls being the trunks of trees, it should sustain that level without too much work. She rebuilt the fire, listening to the hoots and calls from above, tenting the flames with sticks of green fuel and banking the coals to help conceal the glow. This should let the fire burn through the night without needing too much more fuel or tending. It would burn slowly now, producing a bed of deep red, smokeless coals instead of flame. That was precisely the way she wanted it.
With the level of light in the shelter down to the point where Tad was nothing more than a large, dark shape, she turned her attention back to the outside.
Nothing had changed; the creatures of the canopy continued to go about their business with the accompanying noise, and now the luminescent insects she had noted before began to flit about the foliage. She allowed herself to relax a little further. It just might be that whatever had been following them had decided to leave them alone.
But don’t count on it, she cautioned herself. Assume the worst. Assume that they’re still—
Something moved out in the darkness.
Just a shape, a shifting of shadow, but she knew that there should not have been a shadow in that place, much less a moving one. Instantly she was on the alert.
Whatever it was, it was big. Bigger than the tame lion she’d seen in Shalaman’s menagerie. She knew to within a thumb’s breadth just how wide a distance lay between each bush, how tall a young tree was. The head of the shadow would rise a little above hers, she thought, though she had the impression of a very long, slender neck; the chest briefly obscured one bush while its hindquarters still lay behind another. Altogether, that would make it about the size of a horse, perhaps a little smaller. She couldn’t quite tell how bulky it was, but the fluid way in which it moved and the fact that it melted in with the other shadows so well suggested that it had a slender build.
Her view was a narrow one, limited to the wedge of forest between the two long walls of log—yet in a moment, as she concentrated further, she knew that there was more than one of those creatures out there. One shadow flitted as another froze; further flickering in the distance suggested that either they were incredibly fast, or there might be a third.
Two, at least, for certain. But they don’t seem to know we‘re here.
The first of the shadows darted suddenly out of sight; a heartbeat later, and a bloodcurdling scream rang out into the night.
Blade’s heart leaped into her throat, and she felt as if she had been plunged into ice water. Tad only wheezed in his sleep. It took all of her control to remain frozen in place. She had an impression that those shadows possessed extremely sharp senses, and that if she moved, even obscured by branches as she was, they might spot the movement, or hear it.
Silence descended, as Blade tried to get her heartbeat started again. It was a good thing that she had heard the death scream of a rabbit before, or she would have thought that one of those somethings had just killed a child.
Now, as if the canopy dwellers had only just noticed the shadows’ presence, the silence extended up into the tree-tops. Only the insects and frogs remained unaffected, chirping and trilling as calmly as they had a moment before.
She blinked—and in the time it took her to do so, the shadows vanished, at least from her view.
She did not breathe easier, however. From the silence, she knew that they were still out there, and she had no intention of letting them know her location.
I can only hope that they haven’t had the bright idea to come take a walk on top of the sheltering logs.
The very idea made her want to shiver. The back of her neck crawled as she imagined one of those creatures sniffing around the brush piled above her head. There was nothing between her and these hunters stronger than a layer of canvas and a pile of flimsy branches and leaves. Surely if one of the hunters got close, no amount of brush and herb juice would obscure their scent. Surely the scent of the fire alone would tell the creature that they were here—
But I’m assuming that the thing is intelligent, that it would associate a fire with us. I’m assuming that it’s hunting us—it could simply be here, we could have wandered into its territory. We haven’t seen any large predators nor any sign of them; this could simply be the local equivalent of a lion.
And yet. . . something about the way it had moved had suggested intelligence and purpose. That could be her imagination, but it might be the truth. It was wary; it moved carefully, but when it did move, it was quick and certain. That was an indication of something that either had incredible reflexes, or something that decided very precisely what it was going to do before it acted.
In any case, there was no reason to take any chances, and every reason to be painfully cautious. No matter what else, these creatures were hunters, predators. The behavior of the canopy dwellers showed that, and demonstrated that the animals that lived in the treetops recognized these beasts and feared them.
Even if those things are just the local equivalent of a lion, they’re still big, they’re still carnivorous, and they’re hunting. There’s no reason to put myself on their menu.
A new thought occurred to her; what if they were not dealing with one enemy, but two? One that had brought them down, and a second that was hunting them? In that case, there were two possibilities; the shadows were either wild hunters that had nothing to do with what brought them down—or they were allied w
ith it. In the second case, the shadow shapes out there could be the equivalent of a pack of hunting hounds, trailing them for some unknown master.
It was not something that was unheard of; that was the problem. Urtho wasn’t the only mage that created living things. Ma‘ar did, and so did others who never participated in the wars. The ability to create a new species was a mark of prestige or a symbol of ability above and beyond the status of being an Adept. Among the higher mages there were a handful that had created new creatures for centuries before the war with Ma‘ar.
That gave her yet another possible scenario; a mage who hunted other intelligent creatures, and had chosen them for his next prey. Their chasers were his dog pack—
Ma’ar had been one such, and she’d heard tales of others, both from her own people and from the Haighlei. That, in fact, was one of the reasons why the Haighlei restricted magic use to the priests; they had a tale of a sadistic, powerful mage who captured men and brought them to his estate to hunt them like beasts. A brave young priest had suspected what was happening and allowed himself to be taken, thus giving his fellows an agent within the spell-protected walls through which they could channel their own power to destroy the mage.
That was how the story went anyway.
She grew cold all over again, and restrained herself from running her hand through her hair nervously. Her imagination went wild again, taking off all on its own. She had never had any difficulty coming up with scenarios for trouble. So—suppose that one of the neutral mages came down here to hide before the Cataclysm. Even if he wasn’t Urtho’s equal, he could have guard-beasts and birds to warn him when anything was in the area. The Haighlei never travel through the wilderness in groups of less than ten, and that includes a priest, but all he‘d have to do would be to stay quiet while they passed by. Unless they actually stumbled over him, they wouldn ‘t find him. Then he could hunt individuals at his leisure.
There was just one problem with that hypothesis; no one had ever been reported missing from here. Unless a Haighlei was so antisocial as to sever all familial and clan ties and go off wandering the wilderness, someone would have raised a fuss by now if anyone had vanished, wouldn’t they? Woodcutters, explorers, trappers, hunters—they all told friends, neighbors, and fellow workers where they were going, what route they intended to take, and when they should be back. They did so especially if« they were going off into poorly-explored lands; if something happened, they would want others to mount a rescue as soon as possible.
Perhaps there had been a few Haighlei hermits who had wandered in here only to vanish—but not enough to provide sport for a maniacal manhunting mage.
Well, all right, then—what if he came here to escape all the conflict. What if he wants to be left alone, and he brought us down to keep us from revealing his presence?
But that didn’t make any more sense than the first hypothesis. There had been others through here; they had all flown overhead on the same route. Why hadn’t they been brought down?
Because we were the only gryphon-human pair?
But there had been Aubri and Judeth. . . .
Oh, winds. I should be a storyteller.
She gave it up as a bad notion. It was getting too complicated, and usually, the more complicated a hypothesis was, the more likely it was that it was incorrect.
Stick to the two possibilities that work best. Simple answers work best and are more likely. First: we hit some kind of accidental—thing—that brought us down, and now we’re having to guard ourselves from the local predators which are following us because we ‘re hurt and look like easy prey. Second: something down here brought us down for reasons of its own and now is hunting us. And the first is more likely than the second.
That didn’t mean they were in any less danger. Wolves and lions had been known to trail wounded prey for days, waiting for it to die. And if her guess about the size of the shadow-creatures was right, they were a match for Tad, which would make them formidable opponents indeed. If the shadows knew that she and Tad were hurt, that might well put them in the category of “wounded prey.”
A bird called; another answered. And as if that tentative call had been meant to test the safety of the area, or to tell other creatures that the menace had gone for the moment, the canopy above began to come to life again.
She sighed, and let her shoulders relax. She cast a wry glance at her slumbering companion.
Somehow, Tad had managed to sleep through it all.
Tad yawned, and stretched as best he could, blinking in what passed for light in their shelter. When
Blade woke him for his watch, she had looked tired, but that was to be expected. She also looked nervous, but how could she not be? He would be nervous on his watch, too. Nervous sentries remained living sentries; relaxed ones had short epitaphs.
“I saw something out there that might account for the way everything goes silent every so often,” she offered. “It was pretty big, and I think there were two or more of them. I didn’t see anything more than a shadow, though. One of them caught a rabbit, and every bird and beast in the canopy shut up and stayed that way for a long time.”
Well, that accounts for the nerves, and for the fact that she looks tired. Nerves wear you out and she didn‘t have much of a reserve when she began her watch.
“Huh.” He glanced out into the darkness, but didn’t see anything—and some of the local creatures were acting as if they were in the middle of a singing competition. “Well, if silence means that there’s something out there we should be worried about, I’d say you can sleep in peace until dawn. I’m surprised I slept through it. I must have been more tired than I thought—or my medicine is stronger than I supposed.”
She managed a ghost of a chuckle. “It got my hackles up, I can tell you that much. It’s quick, very quick, and I didn’t hear a rustle of leaves or a single broken twig. I’d say the one I saw was about the size of a horse, which would make it a formidable predator in a fight. It might have been my imagination, but I thought that it acted fairly intelligent.”
“So do the big cats, hunting,” he reminded her. “Everything acts intelligent in its own realm. Drink your painkillers, get some sleep. We’ll see what’s out there in the morning. I set some snares before the rain—”
She chuckled again. “Don’t count on there being anything left. I think you were robbed. That may have been where our shadows found their rabbit.”
He sighed. “Probably, but it was worth doing. And we’ll know how intelligent they are by how the snares were robbed. If it was just snatch-and-eat, then they won’t be any more intelligent than the average lion.”
“Good point.” She settled herself down at the back of the shelter; he was certain she was going to get a good rest for the rest of the night, so long as things stayed noisy up in the canopy. The mattress of boughs and leaves he’d made was very comfortable, and she should be able to lie cradled in a way that permitted her to sleep soundly, rather than fitfully. With her shoulder supported so that pressure was off her collarbone, she should be in less pain.
He had not wanted to mention it before this, but he had already seen signs on their backtrail that something was following them. It could have been anything, and he hadn’t seen any signs that their follower was particularly intelligent—just alert and incredibly wary. The trouble with telling her now was that there was nothing to prove whether or not the shadowy creature that was following them was something they had just picked up today, or if it had been following them all along and only now was feeling bold enough to move in where he might catch a glimpse of it. It could certainly match the description that Blade had given him of the creature she saw tonight.
That basically was all that he knew as a fact. This, of course, had nothing to do with what his own imagination could conjure up.
In his imagination, the sighting confirmed the fear that he’d had all along, that they were being followed for some specific purpose. The only question in his mind now was if the purpose was
a simple one—kill and eat the prey—or something more complicated than that. If it was simple, then these creatures were simple predators, and relatively “easy” to deal with. If, however, there was a larger purpose in their minds—if his imagination was right, and in fact these creatures had something to do with their accident—then he and Blade were in very deep trouble.
Such extreme caution combined with curiosity as these “shadows” had exhibited was very unlike most predators he was familiar with. In general, large predators tended to shy completely away from anything that was not familiar, at the most watching it from a distance. Only if the unfamiliar object continued to remain in a predator’s territory would it gradually move in closer to investigate it.
Predators are very nervous, very jumpy. They have a lot of competition, and normally they can only take down large creatures if their prey is old, sick, very young, or wounded. Prey that fights back is to be avoided, because the predator can’t afford to be injured in the struggle. Being a carnivore is an expensive business, as I well know. When your dinner can run away from you, you’re going to spend a lot of energy hunting and killing it. Vegetarians have.it easy. Their dinner can’t move, and they don’t have to do anything other than walk up and open their mouths.
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