Extraordinary Zoology (15 page)

“Military advantage,” Horgash said. “Kind of like you Cygnarans and your cortex secrets.”

Pendrake shrugged. “Perhaps there is something fundamental shared between these practices, but we have too little data to say for certain. There are so many differences between farrow and trollkin, let alone the enigmatic blackclads, that I hesitate to draw firm parallels in this matter. Not without more information.” He pointed to a sunlit clearing ahead. “And on the subject of information, I think I know what that young farrow was begging Rorsh for help with.”

The woods opened up into a wide glade. The thicket had been cut away, trees felled to provide lumber for building.

The village was in splinters, the ground throughout the clearing torn in a rippling pattern.

Edrea’s heart sank.

Lynus pointed into the mess. “Those berms look like the ones in Bednar. Like a giant snake or worm pushed the ground around as it crushed people.”

“My people,” came a voice from the edge of the woods. An old farrow stepped into the sunlight. He wore furs over armor fashioned of reptile skin. The white hair on the ridge of his back was braided and festooned with colored beads, countless bits of bone, and rune-inscribed chips of metal, wood, and stone. “Viktor Pendrake, you have come too late.”

“Groth!” Pendrake strode forward. “Dear friend! When did this happen? We have been tracking this beast and its masters, but lost their trail at least two day’s travel west of here.”

“Yesterday afternoon,” the farrow said sadly. “My . . . how do you say, skill-suckler?”

“Apprentice?” Pendrake said.

“I like skill-suckler,” said Horgash.

“My apprentice and I, we gathered herbs, and heard the thundering, distant screaming. I sent him for help, sent him after the wanderer Rorsh, who studded our sows and left with yesterday’s dawn.”

Pendrake nodded sorrowfully and put his hand on Groth’s shoulder. “Your apprentice reached our camp early this morning, badly wounded. He spoke just a few words to Rorsh, and then his injuries claimed him.”

Groth held up a tiny tuft of hair that had been bound with string and thrust through a bead. “I know. I used the . . .” he scratched his head, “far-seeking, deep-tasting.”

“I don’t know enough about the arcane to help you with the word you’re looking for,” said Pendrake.

Edrea’s jaw dropped. There was an Iosan practice involving such magic, a powerful scrying that allowed one to find people or things. It required one to be familiar with who or what they sought, and in possession of something that had been close to them. Edrea had left Ios with only the barest knowledge of the sigils. Her instructors were unwilling to let young students like herself reach deeply enough to tap this power.

That it could be wielded by a farrow hermit shaman, and over such a great distance, came as a shock.

“That’s some of your apprentice’s hair?” Lynus asked.

Groth nodded sadly.

“That’s brilliant!” Lynus continued. “You cut it before he left, and then your magic could tell you how he fared!”

Tears welled in Groth’s eyes. He turned to the ruined farrow village, reached into a pouch at his waist, and withdrew a fuzzy, beaded cord. Dozens of tiny clumps of hair, each with a different colored or shaped bead affixed, were strung along this cord, at least two paces’ worth of tiny tokens.

“My children. Litters I tended. Sucklers I fed.” He drew a pattern in the air in front of him, paused to wipe his snout with a hairy knuckle, and continued. Runes appeared before him. Edrea did not recognize the shapes, but she felt finely honed power pulse outward from Groth.

“All dead,” Groth said after a moment. “Some here, some out there. All dead.”

Such power. Not just a single seeking, but dozens. Not just living forms, but the freshly dead. Edrea had once thought the farrow barely sapient, but this one had just displayed tremendous strength, control, and artistry with the weave. She expected it might take her decades to develop similar skills, if she ever managed them at all.

Edrea shook her head with amazement at this. Then the gravity of the situation reached her, and she felt heavy sorrow for Groth’s loss. She had lost Aeshnyrr, but Groth had lost everything. Perhaps his great reach was powered by his grief.

Great reach
 . . .

“Groth, you said ‘some out there.’ You can tell where the bodies are?” she asked.

Groth wrinkled his snout and scowled, then nodded. “They are swallowed whole.”

“Oh no,” said Kinik, looking around at the village. “Page eighty-four?”

But how?
Edrea thought, even as Lynus turned to Pendrake, his brow furrowed.

“It does seem like the only conclusion, if it weren’t for the creature’s size. I’ve seen the tooth you recovered; nothing that large could fit in the burrows we’ve seen.” He rubbed one temple. “I can’t help but think there’s something I’m missing.”

Pendrake looked somewhat chagrined, for the first time Edrea could remember. “I’ve been thinking about that. All this time I’ve been going on what the legends say, which is that they are no natural beasts, immortal and unkillable, only four in number. But what if they are just animals after all, only with a life cycle stretching untold centuries rather than decades? What if one finally spawned? What we witnessed could indeed be the work of a wurm—one not fully grown.”

Edrea and Lynus shared a grim look. It was bad enough that a monster from legend was making itself known. But if the thing could spawn . . . Edrea shook the thought from her head. Time enough for speculation once they had dealt with the problem at hand.

Kinik nodded and said, “Just a grub, then.”

Lynus exclaimed, “Some grub! It eats entire villages!”

“Professor,” Edrea said, “the beast travels underground, so it is likely slow. If its masters have decided where they want it to attack again, I should expect them to send it along the most direct course, while they meander to lose trackers like us. But if the beast travels straight, and we know the direction . . .” She trailed off.

“Map and compass!” Pendrake said. He thrust a hand into his field kit and withdrew both. He flipped the map open and pointed. “We’re here.” He indicated the small stick-farrow he’d drawn on this map years ago. “Groth, which way ‘out there’ are the bodies of your children?”

Groth snorted heavily and again traced a sigil in the air while thumbing over the string of tokens. He closed his eyes and groaned, as if in pain. Illegible farrow-scrawl spun glowing around him, and Edrea felt the weave pulse and thrum, as if Groth had struck it with a hammer. The farrow walked into the clearing and turned a slow circle before returning to the group. He stopped and pointed to the north and east.

Pendrake stepped alongside the farrow, adjusted the compass, and sighted along Groth’s arm. He oriented the map beneath the compass and stared for a moment.

“Horgash,” he said, “the line I’m drawing misses the Mirkar kriel by less than two miles.”

“These Tharn and their monster preyed upon defenseless humans and farrow,” Edrea said. “A trollkin village doesn’t seem like their sort of target.”

“That village,” said Horgash, “has sent its warriors to fight alongside Madrak Ironhide in the east.” He shook his head. “It’s nearly as defenseless as Bednar was.”

They stood in silence, staring at the map.

Pendrake reached out with both arms, grasping Lynus and Edrea each by a shoulder. “Then we need to get there first, and warn them.”

And we’d better do so with time to spare
, Edrea thought to herself,
or we’ll merely add our own mass to the size of the monster’s meal
.

The beast on page eighty-four of the
Monsternomicon
, the gorgandur, was not something you fought. It was something you fled.

PART III: THE MIRKAR KRIEL

C
mija stood on a wooded knoll overlooking a broad, cultivated clearing. Deeper in the forest behind him, his Tharn allies were well-hidden from the distant eyes of the trollkin whose walled village he surveyed.

He drew in a deep breath of midday autumn air and savored its mild crispness. The weather was kinder here than in his homeland among the foothills of the Glass Peaks, a kindness that made even the hardiest of these southern people soft, at least by Cmija’s standards. They would feed the Wurm.

The stones of this village would offer the inhabitants cover, but when the Avatar surfaced they would be forced to flee that haven, straight out the gate and into harvested fields. Tharn spears and arrows would rain death upon them, and those fields would be harvested for a second time this season.

This was Cmija’s third autumn away from his homeland, and it would be his last in hiding. The Devourer’s Avatar grew quickly, and more quickly still when encouraged to feed upon the living, rather than swallowing and excreting peat like a common worm.

He touched the rune-inscribed shell shard hanging at his neck, a sliver of the Avatar’s sacred egg. Closing his eyes, he sought a sense of the Avatar, a connection through which he could see, feel, and draw power.

The connection came to him at once—warmth, darkness, the familiar press of rock and soil. Movement. The Avatar was coming, and Cmija was still its chosen voice. The Avatar would feed again, and soon the Circle Orboros would have no choice but to acknowledge Cmija as voice of the Devourer Wurm, chief among the children of Orboros. Then Cmija and the Avatar would roll forth across all of Immoren.

Cmija had felt the wilding when particularly young and been taken in by a reclusive blackclad of his own people, who heeded well the voice of the Wurm. Cmija had learned at his side, become versed in the lore of the Devourer, but then later discovered the distrust the other blackclads had for his master. They claimed he had not truly learned their ways, and that Cmija’s teachings were corrupt, incomplete. They had denied him welcome among their inner circle. He had vowed to prove them wrong.

There was movement in the trees nearer the trollkin village. Cmija watched as five people emerged from the forest and into the broad clearing. A trollkin rode in front, atop one of the woolly bison common to the northern kriels. Four walked, leading a heavily laden packhorse.

Cmija counted two firearms among the small band of travelers, along with a single bow and several swords. The ogrun carried one of their traditional polearms. She alone looked to be formidable in a fight, though the mounted trollkin and the older man did carry themselves confidently. The two skinny ones, a man and a cursed Iosan, they were just more prey.

“Run them down, spill them,” came a woman’s voice just behind him. It was uncanny how these Tharn could sneak, even when one knew they were about. “Bloodtrackers ready, Cmija.”

“Hold, Iskaa. It is not yet time for bloodshed.”

“Spill by ones, spill by twos,” she growled. “Deny strength to the trollkin.”

“And deny the Devourer further prey?”

“Spill—”

“The Great Wurm will rise soon enough.” He placed his hand on the mule-deer skull Iskaa wore as a mask. “You, your sisters, and your brethren, you have my word that bloody scraps shall fall from the table of his feast. He shall slake your thirst.”

Iskaa growled again. Or perhaps she purred. Even after a year among these primitive Tharn, bending their blood-worship to the Wurm’s own turnings, Cmija remained unsure of the nuances of their communication.

The distant group made their way across the clearing, advancing upon the rough stone buildings of the village. Cmija smiled. Whether they planned to stay a night or a fortnight, that weary little band would be spending the rest of their lives here.