"What's served for breakfast, barkeeper?" he asked the woman in Arakite. She was middle aged, with graying black hair and more than a few wrinkles creased into her face, but she was still a rather handsome woman. Her age wasn't an anchor weighing her down, it was a distinguishing characteristic that made her seem wise.
"I think you're wandering around in the wrong place, stranger," the woman replied easily.
"They've already tried that, madam," he said calmly. "The survivors learned to leave me alone."
"By the looks of you, you're Ungardt. That means you can kill without weapons," she surmised.
He only smiled in reply.
"That's an impressive accent you have, stranger," she noted. "Not many can speak the true tongue like a native."
"I was taught by a native," he replied. "Now, what's for breakfast?"
"Mutton," she replied. "Three silver kangs if you're interested."
"Bring me a plate," he replied, sitting at a stool at the bar. "And a cup of water."
"Water? That's no way to wash down damned mutton!" one of the patrons said in a slightly slurred voice.
"Sounds like someone likes his mutton with something a bit stronger," Tarrin noted.
"Old Bray likes to wash everything down with something a bit stronger," the woman said with a slight smile. "What brings a stranger this deep into the city? Shouldn't you be in the trades district?"
"I'm a circus master," he replied. "I've been hearing stories of a strange monster running around this part of the city. I'm always one to find a good attraction for my troupe, so I came to see if it's just another myth."
"It ain't no myth, gold-hair," the man Bray said, standing up. "I done seen it! Tall as a Troll, it was, with wicked talons for fingers an' burning eyes that sucked a man's soul from his body!"
"That's a pretty broad description," Tarrin said. "What does it do?"
"It leaves mangled corpses laying around," the barkeep answered before Bray could respond. "Some people think it's some animal that got away from one of the circuses that came for the festival. There's been a couple of city guardsmen trying to track it down, but they haven't found it yet."
"You don't sound very worried."
"It doesn't come this far," she replied. "They see it the most about a longspan east of here. That seems to be where it's made its hunting grounds."
"I'm surprised," Tarrin said. "If there's a wild animal running loose in the city, why doesn't the city guard do something serious to trap it?"
"Because it's hiding out in a slum," she shrugged. "The only people it's killing are street rats and beggars. Nobody cares about them too much." She tapped the cask they had just placed. "When it kills someone important, they'll get serious about trapping it."
"It ain't no animal," Bray said grandly, standing up. "I seen it, I have!"
"Yah, Bray, just like you saw an Aeradalla last month!" another patron said with a raspy laugh.
"I seen that too!" Bray protested. Tarrin turned from the barkeeper and looked at the man. He was an older man, with a fringe of gray hair around his bald head. He was thin and short, bony, and it was obvious from the shaking of his gnarled hand that he was a man much in love with drink. He wore a dirty tunic that hung down to his knees, leaving dirty, bony legs bare down to where his old shoes started, and he had an old walking stick sitting by his table. "Flyin' over the city as happy as ye please! But the monster, she's a true demon, she is! Twisted by evil magic!"
"She?" Tarrin asked curiously.
"Ain't no doubt it's a she," he said with a wink. "I seen it, I have! Half woman, half monster, tall as a Troll! With a luscious woman's body, but with fur, and talons for fingers, and a tail. And eyes, glowing eyes that steals away men's souls!"
A human's body, but with fur. Talons for fingers, and a tail. And tall as a Troll. Tarrin's expression turned serious for a moment, because that sounded alot like him. No wonder that woman ran screaming. If she heard the same description, she could easily mistake him for this monster. "Fur? Fur everywhere?"
"Naw, just on her arms and legs."
"Big hands?"
Bray nodded.
"Long tail, but not very thick? Very tall? And were her eyes green?"
"Aye. If you seen it, why you asking what it looks like?"
A Were-cat? What was a Were-cat doing in Yar Arak? And why was it rampaging? Was this one of the Western Were-cats, or was it native to this region. If it was a Were-cat at all. It could be some other kind of exotic creature. Sphinxes were reputed to have the heads and torsos of humans, but the limbs of lions.
There was certainly one way to find out.
"A longspan south?" Tarrin asked. "If I just walk that way, will I get there?"
"Aye. Just go down Twostep Street, and you'll be right in the middle of it."
"I think you're a bit nuts if you want to try to find this thing alone, friend," the barkeep said. "It's killed quite a few people that I heard about."
"I can take care of myself," he said seriously, putting a few coins on the bar. "For the trouble of cooking a meal I'm not going to eat," he explained.
"You should think twice, stranger," Bray said. "That thing ain't human."
"Neither am I," he replied bluntly, turning from the barkeeper. "Thanks for the information."
Outside the tavern, he found Twostep Street just down the block from the building, then turned south and started walking quickly, his mind racing the entire time. It didn't make much sense. A Were-cat shouldn't be here, at least none of the ones he knew. If it was a Were-cat native to this area, that could be an explanation, but it didn't explain this behavior. Even if they didn't adhere to the Strictures of Fae-da'Nar, a Were-cat wouldn't be going around killing people for no reason. Unless she had no control over what she was doing. She could be insane. That was a very real possibility. But that too seemed illogical. A Were-cat wouldn't bite someone, and if she did, she'd either take the victim as a bond-child, or kill her on the spot. She would have never gotten away from her sire, unless the sire either let her go, or didn't know about her. But she had gotten here somehow, and it was obvious that she wasn't just trying to blend in.
He found the area that Bray had said was her territory. It was blocked off by an unmanned barrier sitting across the street, with signs in Arakite nailed to it. Tarrin didn't read Arakite, but he had little doubt that the signs were some kind of warning to anyone who was educated enough to read them. He had to climb over the barrier to continue, and when he did so, the few people near enough to see were shocked he would be so bold. He paid them no mind, moving past the barricade and finding himself at the end of the street, turning to the left and walking into what he knew was her domain. It was an area of crumbling, abandoned buildings, some of them laying on the street. And it was deserted. There wasn't even a dog or cat to be seen milling about the abandoned neighborhood. Normally, this would be the haven for homeless and street rats, but the presence of the monster had caused them to flee the area. And he had to admit, it was the perfect place to hide. With all the empty houses and buildings and the occasional pile of debris to break up the streets and create hiding places, it was a predator's ideal hunting ground. This kind of a place was perfect. The unwary would wander in, ignorant of the dangers, and they would be ambushed. The only issue would be water, and that explained why the neighborhoods surrounding this territory were so afraid. She was leaving her hunting ground to find water, and that was why people outside this area were seeing her.
He was never going to find her by walking around. With a quick look around to make sure he was alone on the street, Tarrin shapeshifted into his humanoid form, then sank down to all fours and tested the scents laid down on the street. There were alot of them, many of them fresh. The vast majority of them were human, but there was one scent that stood out, a scent that confirmed everything. Were-cat. The scent itself teased his memory in a strange way, almost as if he had smelled this Were-cat before. But he knew the scent of every Were-cat he knew, and it was n
one of them. The scent was a couple of days old, too degraded to determine which direction she was moving when she passed this way. He moved deeper into the maze of abandoned buildings, his every sense open and alert, ears scanning for the slightest sound as his eyes sought out any motion, and his nose tracked the old scent on the ground even as it searched for any new scent to waft in on the still air. His nose picked up the smell of decay, or rotting flesh, and he detoured into a crumbling alley to track it back to its source.
What he found was the mauled corpse of a short human male. Either very short or rather young, dead nearly three days. What was left of it was blackened and bloating, exuding a powerful smell of rot, and from the looks of it, the entire body wasn't there. An arm was missing, as well as the lower half of one leg. The scattered condition of small bits of flesh and cloth, and the patterns of blood on the alley's cobblestone told him that the attacker ate a portion of the victim.
So that's why she was killing people. She wasn't just running around killing people, she was eating them.
He felt it was time to think like a hunter. She wouldn't be out right now. Cats were nocturnal by nature when it came to hunting, preferring to hunt at night. Nobody would be on the streets during the day anyway, with those barricades on the streets. That meant that she was laying around somewhere in the area, sleeping or resting, or possibly eating whoever she'd killed that night. So, he was looking for a Were-cat that was hiding, and that meant she would find a dark, small space with an easily defendable entrance. She would be in a basement, or the end of a narrow alley partially blocked by debris.
It came down to finding her scent trail. Tarrin roamed around the area for nearly an hour, moving in a methodical fashion both on the street and on the roofs above them, picking through her crisscrossing scent trails to find the most recent one. Her territory was a large one, he found, many blocks, and it took him a while before he finally found a fresh scent. Once he had it, he determined which direction she was moving by finding a pawprint in some dust near an alley, then turning back around to track her. He wasn't really sure why he was taking the time to do this. Now that he understood what she was doing, his curiosity was satisfied. But a part of him couldn't leave it alone. If she was eating humans and living in a hunting territory, she couldn't be sane. He did feel a little bit of duty to his people to find her and discover if she was insane or not. To uphold the laws of Fae-da'Nar if anything else, even if he had little respect for them.
It took him another hour to systematically track her movements. He must have found her scent at the beginning of her cycle of activity, and it led him out of the territory. He was forced to track her along populated streets, attracting a great deal of attention from the pedestrians, until he reached one of the city's many public fountains. She had come for water. Her path then turned back towards the slum, but at an angle that took him in a different direction. He saw no reason for the change in direction, until he found the signs that she had attacked and killed someone not far from the fountain the night before. Most of the blood had been cleaned up, or licked up by dogs, from the smell of it, but the smell of it was still in the stones of the alleyway. Two blocks away, on the roof of an empty house, he found the remains of a teenage female, the flesh completely stripped off an armbone, but the rest of the kill untouched. Her path went back to the fountain after that, to drink more water, and then it went back towards the slum along the rooftops.
He was starting to get close. The scent trail was fresher and fresher, and the possibility that he was going to get blindsided while trying to follow it was now a serious possibility. He moved slowly and carefully, with utter silence, tracking the scent laid down on the street step by step as he kept himself alert to any change in the environment around him. He began to get nervous when the scent trail led him to a series of resting places, one with signs that she had been there recently, for she had relieved herself in a corner, and her urine was still damp. He was very close. Still his memory teased him over the scent. It seemed familiar, like he knew the scent, but he knew for a fact that no Were-cat he knew had that scent. That distracted him a bit as he left the resting place, on the second floor of an old house where she had piled up old blankets and bits of soft materials to form a bed under a window, but he knew this wasn't her den. This was just a place she laid where she could look out onto the street and see prey.
The trail led him into a very small house that had one wall fallen out of it. It was nothing more than a single room, a single story, and half the roof had caved in when the wall fell down. That littered the floor with small rocks and piles of debris, and he had to pick his footing carefully towards an open trapdoor in the corner of the room to keep quiet. He was right on top of her, he was sure of it. He could smell her now, not just her scent trail, a Were-cat smell mixed with dirt, excrement, and the smell of rotting flesh and bone. She had picked a good place to make a den, for the broken house made sneaking up on her very difficult. It only had one way in, the trapdoor, and anyone trying to enter would have to negotiate the narrow opening without alerting her to his presence. She may be insane, but she wasn't stupid. Her only mistake was picking a den where her scent emanated from it without allowing her to scent the approach of an invader. The air in the basement would warm and flow out the opening without allowing air to flow in carrying smells from outside. Anyone who tracked by scent could, and did, find her scent without giving away his own, just as certainly as if he would have approached her from downwind. She wouldn't smell him until he was literally inside the basement. That was a mistake of inexperience, not an error of instinct.
Reaching the trapdoor, Tarrin squatted down on all fours and poked his head into the opening, looking down. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness of the cellar, but the scene below him slowly took form. There was a ladder that led to an earth-floored basement that looked to be used to store food. It was as large as the room above, and was littered with empty jars and an overturned shelf. In the corner of the building was the Were-cat, curled up on her side in the corner with her back towards him. She had blond hair, this one, nude, and she was absolutely filthy. She was so dirty that he couldn't tell what color her skin was. She had dirt, excrement, and even what looked like bits of flesh tangled in her unkempt hair. Scattered on the floor around her were bones and scraps of cloth from past victims. There were a great many flies in the den, and the female swatted at them with her tail absently as she rested.
He found her. Now he had no idea what to do about it. He hadn't really had any idea of what he was going to do about it when he started, he just wanted to find her and figure out what she was doing, and who she was. She was a stranger, that much was certain, and now he knew what she was doing. He debated about trying to stop her. It really wasn't his business what she did, outside the fact that she was violating the strictures of Fae-da'Nar. But the city had no idea who or what they were dealing with. They'd never capture her, and she would go on killing until they either brought in a wizard to deal with her or completely abandoned her territory. Getting into a fight with her was the last thing on his mind, but on the other hand, it really wouldn't be right to just leave her here and let her keep doing this. It wasn't what Were-cats did. It was wrong. It did prove that she was insane, though. She had been completely dominated by her instincts, instincts gone out of control from the human part within her. That told him that she wasn't born Were. A natural Were-cat wouldn't go insane like that. She'd been bitten, and her sire had either no idea she was infected, or she had abandoned her.
The Were-cat's ears picked up. She knew he was there. She pulled up onto one paw and turned to look back over her den. And when she did, Tarrin nearly fell into the basement.
It was Jula!
Jula! Impossible! Tarrin caught himself before he fell inside the den and pushed himself out of the opening, falling backwards so hard he landed on his rump, right on a big rock. But he didn't feel a thing. A whirlwind of emotion roared up inside him, fear, anger, rage, astoni
shment, confusion. Jula! How did Jula get here? How did she survive? And how in the hells did she become a Were-cat? It made no sense! He'd ripped out a good span of her backbone and left her to die. There was no way any Sorcerer could have saved her, even if one had been close enough to help! And even if the impossible had happened, it didn't explain how she was a Were-cat. He'd never bitten her. He'd never gotten any part of his blood or spittle anywhere near her! When he left her, she was a dying human, but now she shows up, half a world away, as a living Were-cat! Just seeing her triggered a nearly overwhelming desire to go down there and rip her apart. She had collared him, she was reponsible for everything that had happened to him since then! But that need to destroy her found competition in a singular, odd need to know how she had gotten here, what had happened, how she had survived. But answers wouldn't be easy to get, because it was obvious that she was mad.
All other thoughts scattered when a growling roar issued from below, and Jula erupted from the opening like a dark angel of death. In the air above the stunned Tarrin, her filthy body rose over the opening from her leap through the trap door, her eyes glowing green in her mindless anger, her challenge to this invader to her territory. She descended on him with her claws leading, claws stained with dried blood, and the sight of that banished his confusion as the Cat within rose to meet this challenge.
Tarrin Kael Firestaff Collection Book 2 - The Questing Game by Fel © Page 100