Extraordinary Zoology
TALES FROM THE MONSTERNOMICON VOLUME 1
EXTRAORDINARY
ZOOLOGY
HOWARD TAYLER
Cover by
WAYNE ENGLAND
Illustrated by
WAYNE ENGLAND
CONTENTS
MAP
PROLOGUE
The Widower’s Wood, Early Autumn, 606 AR
T
he rich, peaty ground under the tiny village of Bednar rumbled, and Nally almost dropped her bushel of walnuts. She looked to the twisty tree line just forty paces beyond the village fence, but nothing came pounding out of the Widower’s Wood.
“You all heard that, right?” she shouted.
In the green, the north field, the orchard, and the doorways of their thatched-roof homes, Nally’s neighbors and family stood staring into the woods.
Nobody said a word. Nally shivered.
“Aye, lass.” Her uncle Bairyck finally spoke. He stood at the woodpile, his old Radcliffe Roar service carbine held at the ready and a heavy splitting axe within easy reach. Bairyck had once felled a charging gorax from that exact stance: one shot through the eye with the large-bore carbine and a bloodletting sweep below its belly with the axe as it charged. Bairyck wore three parallel scars across his shoulder, acquired before blood loss finally laid the monster low.
Bairyck wasn’t the only one with scars. Nally’s family had been one of a dozen to claim this fertile patch at the edge of the Widower’s Wood a generation ago—with nothing but gumption, three Radcliffes, and a low, sturdy fence. Trouble, typically with teeth and claws, was never far off, but Bednar always fought back.
Nally hurried across the small village green to her home, pausing twice to look over her shoulder at the woods, where everyone else’s eyes remained fixed. She set her walnut harvest next to the door, unslung the small kindling axe at her hip, and faced the tree line again. Whatever shook the ground was no gorax.
“Morrow preserve us,” she said. One hand gripped her axe, while the other went to the Morrowan sunburst pendant she wore. As she pulled it forward, the tightness of the chain against the back of her neck was a small, sharp comfort. “Strengthen our hands, and steady our feet, that we may master tribulation.”
The ground shook again, harder. Steady our feet, indeed. Nally heard a groan from deep below, as if Caen itself was speaking, and the voice of the world was quite close.
“Sounds like your house, Nally!” Bairyck yelled.
Nally turned, facing her door just a pace away. Then her house exploded in an eruption of dark, wet earth.
PART I: LYNUS
L
ynus Wesselbaum gingerly turned pages as he searched for woodcuts of carrion flies in Professor Viktor Pendrake’s laboratory. The professor’s collection of texts was formidable. One might kill half a day just reading the spines, and any of Pendrake’s junior students would have been at this particular task for hours. As Pendrake’s senior assistant, Lynus already knew what all the spines said—and where they were.
He drew a deep breath as he paged through the book in his hand. This end of the large, ever-cluttered laboratory smelled pleasantly like leather covers, aging paper, and the book glue Lynus used to maintain the tomes. He had earned the responsibility for maintenance thanks to his habit of hauling books along on expeditions. Saddlebags and satchels were rough enough, but over the last four years he had dropped, thrown, and tripped over more than a few books, usually at a dead run with something dangerous close behind.
Scholarship was terrifying. And Lynus wouldn’t trade it for anything.
The rest of Pendrake’s lab smelled of alchemy, particularly of the preservative sort. Pendrake insisted that no number of fresh cadavers, old carcasses, or stripped skeletons were an excuse for the stench of death, and the liberal application of antiputrescent agents was the first duty assigned to new students of extraordinary zoology.
That tangy, caustic smell was strong of late. Lynus and Edrea had been testing a theory of Lynus’, that even weeks-dead corpses could be dated by patterns in the generations and species of blowflies.
The battered book in Lynus’ hands was a favorite of his, but he never carried this one in the field. It looked like it had seen years of service and had almost been eaten by a dog. The truth was more interesting: it had seen years of service and had almost been eaten by a two-headed dog.