Extraordinary Zoology (9 page)

“Can’t you use your Iosan magic to see better?” Lynus asked.

Edrea sighed. She was tired, having walked all morning while the others rode, and she’d never been able to weave
vossyl liumyn
effectively when exhausted.

Not that she was about confess this.

“There is magic that will help me see through the mist, yes, but it also helps me see through underbrush. Some of the best signs I’ve found along this trail have been bent branches, and when I weave for sight I’m more likely to miss those.”

“Oh,” Lynus said, “I never thought of it that way.”

“Indeed, it is truly fascinating,” said Pendrake. “But like any imperfect or questionable experiment, if it provides us with more information, it is preferable to remaining in ignorance. Wouldn’t you say?”

Edrea sighed. The professor was right. And perhaps she wasn’t that tired after all.

A true master arcanist might enact such a weaving with but a thought, but she was not quite ready for that. She traced the sigils for
vossyl
, an Iosan word for “sight,” in the air before her, the rune glowing as she wove, then expanding into a ring. A deft twist of her hand traced
liumyn
, a word meaning both “light” and “knowledge,” the gesture also serving to wrap the runes about her wrist, forming a glowing bracelet of Iosan script. Then she passed that hand across her eyes. They watered and stung for a brief moment.

To her sight, the mist was now gone, the landscape clearly visible out to a hundred paces but rendered in sharp shades of grey, colorless, like an etching on tin. The water’s edge lay just two paces ahead and to the right. The murky water was transparent to her. Amber outlines surrounded numerous small aquatic creatures—mostly fish, but a few frogs, and even a snake or two.

Just twenty paces along the shore to the left, wrapped around and amid a stand of giant cypress, stood the remains of the gobber village. The outermost structures had been smashed, but high within that stand of trees Edrea saw intact buildings, connecting catwalks, stairs, and more.

“I don’t see Tharn tracks,” she said, “but I found the rest of the gobber village.” She told them of the ruined lower levels.

“Smashed like Bednar?” asked Kinik.

“A little.”

“Where is it?” asked Pendrake.

Edrea pointed. There were amber-outlined signs of life within it, but it was all birds and rodents—nothing gobber-size. “If there were survivors here, they’ve fled.”

“It certainly merits investigation,” Pendrake said. “Perhaps we can learn some more about our quarry. And if we tie our team well away from the water, they shouldn’t need a close guard.”

Pendrake, Lynus, and Kinik led the horses a dozen paces upslope from the water’s edge and tied them where Horgash had Greta tethered. Aeshnyrr relaxed, but Codex remained tense.

Edrea continued to scan the area. She hadn’t seen signs of gators, dracodiles, or other large predators, but that didn’t mean there weren’t any hiding beyond the range of her woven sight. She concentrated again, reaching for the power to see farther. She thought she caught a hint of amber far out in the water, well past what she should be able to see. Her eyes watered. She clenched her teeth. The sigils spinning about her wrist pulsed a little more brightly.

“Edrea, what—
aaugh!
” Lynus was right behind her, and suddenly they were both in a heap on the ground. The etched-tin clarity of the hollow went misty and grey. The mists swept back in on her vision, a throbbing headache rushing with them.

“Scyrah’s rest,” she muttered. “Now I can’t see.”

“Sorry. I came over to see what you were looking at and caught my foot on a root. Did I hurt you?”

“Just startled,” she said, rolling clear of the clumsy youth. She tried to keep the anger out of her voice. “The sight is gone, and I’ve given myself a headache.”

“That sort of disruption is unfortunately common among less practiced arcanists,” Pendrake said, offering her a hand up along with a wink. “Proof positive that natural ability remains secondary to diligently focused practice.”

Edrea fumed. The professor’s jesting wink didn’t change that he would prefer to see Edrea formally enroll at the university, as if the seventeen years she’d spent studying the world at her own pace counted for nothing, as if Professor Victor Pendrake, man of no magical ability whatsoever, could teach things he could barely even see, let alone practice. Iosan arcane tradition was older than human civilization, not to mention Corvis University.

Worse still, “diligently focused practice” in the university environment would place Edrea’s use of Iosan magic under the scrutiny of actual spellcasting humans, something more than a few Iosans would take exception to—the same Iosans who believed the decline of their civilization corresponded rather too closely to the awakening of human magical abilities for it to be mere coincidence.

Edrea identified more closely with the Seekers among her people than with the Retribution, but even those committed to gleaning knowledge far beyond the borders of Ios knew to keep secrets. Edrea’s muttered curse, “Scyrah’s rest,” actually crossed the line.

Edrea blew out the breath she’d been holding, the string of additional curses unspoken. It was unfair to be this angry. She couldn’t tell Pendrake any of this, so how could he know better?

“Edrea?” said the professor, a note of concern in his voice. “Are you fit to proceed?”

“Apologies, Professor,” she said. “Just . . . taking a little mental inventory. I’ll be fine, but I won’t be seeing through the mist until this throbbing ceases.”

“Sorry,” Lynus said, more meekly than before.

“I’ll lead,” said Horgash. He strode past Edrea and Pendrake and quickly faded into the fog. Pendrake followed, and Edrea hurried after him, Lynus and Kinik behind her.

They picked their way through the smashed, splintered planks at the shore, taking additional care to stay close to one another. Horgash led them deeper into the stand of giant cypress. Fallen debris lay everywhere.

“Overengineered, as usual,” said Horgash, thumping on something in the deep mists ahead. When Edrea caught up with him, he was bouncing up and down on the third step of a flight of steep stairs. “It may look like it was bodged together in a rush, but this stair will hold all of us, and Greta.” Rotting ropes attached to the bottom suggested the flight was originally devised to be lifted into the trees, but it now stood permanently grounded.

They climbed the stairs, passing two destroyed landings as they ascended. The first intact deck was twenty feet above the barely visible floor of the marshy vale. They walked along it, navigating meandering catwalks and peering into the high, empty habitations of gobbers. Most of the doors were only five feet high—easy enough for Edrea or Lynus to duck into, but little more than crawl—holes for Horgash or Kinik. Furnishings remained, as did some larger, heavier tools, including an anvil that Edrea couldn’t imagine any number of gobbers maneuvering up to this height, but all the cupboards and tables were empty.

“I figured out where that counter-threaded whatsit came from,” Horgash said, pointing down. There at the edge of the lake lay the wreckage of a steamjack, face up in the mud.

“That head looks like it’s from a Lancer,” said Lynus, “but the hull is a real mongrel. Some Khadoran parts, some Morrow-knows-what, and I think that left pauldron is part of the cow-catcher from a railway engine.”

“It went down fighting,” Pendrake said. “I judge it to have been knocked backward, boiler-down. If the water were just six inches higher, perhaps during the spring rains, that would have put the fire out and taken the ’jack right out of the fight.”

“If that’s true,” Lynus said, “then whatever happened here happened four months ago.”

Edrea considered the signs around her and shook her head. “More like sixteen.”

“Really?”

“Look at the splintered edge of the second-story catwalks.” She pointed at a hairy growth one level down, back the way they’d come. “That’s more than four months of fungus in the wrecked wood. The ’jack fell there when the water was high, during or just after the spring rains. Then there was a full summer of growth, autumn spores, a winter, and then another full growing season.”

“Tharn arrows in Bednar,” said Kinik, “but none here. If gobbers were fighting in the trees, arrows would be stuck in wood everywhere.”

“Maybe sixteen months ago the Tharn had different tactics,” said Lynus.

“And a smaller pet,” Horgash said. “No flattening here.”

“
Not flattened,” Edrea said, “
clawed
. Right there, on that tree trunk.” The claw marks, healing from a season of tree growth, reached almost to the level of deck they stood upon. Something huge and hungry had attempted to scale the tree to get at the highest gobber-sized morsels.

“As there were no claw marks in Bednar, we find no arrows here. And from the absence of the usual bric-a-brac, I think many of the gobbers survived, grabbed what they could, and fled,” Pendrake said. “I think we can conclude that this was something other than a giant burrowing serpent and a Tharn war party.”

A gurgling, huffing noise sounded out across the lake.

Lynus looked at Pendrake, wide-eyed. Pendrake scowled and cocked his head to the side.

“That noise sounded very big,” Kinik said.

“Shhh,” said Pendrake.

“Mother Dhunia,” Horgash said. “This
is
an ambush. The Tharn laid tracks for us, led us right into the middle of a fog drake’s feeding ground.”

“Fog drake. Yes, that’s the sound,” said Pendrake.

“Not a true dragon,” Kinik said, “but big, dangerous, and can see us even in mist, yes?”

Yes
, Edrea cursed silently. She traced
vossyl
and was rewarded with a single, flickering half sigil, followed by sharp pain behind her eyes.

“Exactly, Kinik. You’ve done the assigned reading,” Pendrake said. “Now, reading those claw marks, we’re safe up here, but our mounts are staked out like bait.” He began to run back along the catwalk. “Bah!” he shouted almost immediately. “Horgash, which way to the stairs?”

“Wurm take the stairs!” said Horgash. He dropped over the rail, grabbed the deck on the way down, and hung from his hands for a moment. “We’re on the third story, but gobbers are short.” He dropped into the mist.

Kinik peered over after him, threw her war-cleaver like a spear into the mud below, and followed.

Edrea watched her vanish and thought better of taking that route herself. If she hung from the deck, her feet would still be a full fourteen feet above the mud and debris below. She turned and ran along the catwalk, quickly catching up with Pendrake.

“I remember the way,” she said, slipping past him.

“We’ll follow you, then,” said Pendrake.

The huffing sound came again, accompanied by splashing. If Edrea could trust her sense of direction at all, the drake was headed toward their animals.

Aeshnyrr, I’m coming.

She breathed deeply as she ran, attempting to clear her head. Past the big room with the anvil, left around the largest tree, then straight ahead, and she could see the stairs.

Her breathing deepened with exertion as she ran down the stairs, and by the time she reached the bottom, the pain in her head had subsided. She inhaled, closed her eyes, traced again. She felt the ring of Iosan runes flare to life about her right wrist, and when she opened her eyes she could see everything.

Outlined in amber, the horses and Greta stood straight ahead forty paces. All stamped nervously. The shore and the pier’s pilings lay to the left. Also left, and a bit behind Edrea, lay the sodden ruins of the gobber tree-homes. The amber silhouettes of Horgash and Kinik ran through those, slowed by the debris. Out in the lake, the small shapes of fish, frogs, and snakes were scattering in the path of a much larger outline.

It was a fat, vaguely reptilian silhouette with stubby wings and a head like a snake’s, only closer to the size of a pony. Not a pony’s head. A whole pony. This thing was huge. Abruptly, it turned, and Edrea realized it must be hearing footfalls along the shore.

“It’s coming for us!” she shouted. “What’s the plan?”

“Poke holes in it until it stops moving,” Horgash said, running toward her. His paired swords were in hand now, each as long as a great sword and twice as broad.

“Edrea,” the professor said, his own ancient-looking sword in hand, “the beast is huffing fog, thickening it. I can’t see much past the end of my blade. This ‘poke holes’ plan needs a spotter. You can see again?”

“I can spot, and I can shoot.” Edrea shouldered her rifle. “Everyone form up on me!”

Lynus and Kinik came stumbling toward her, their hurried steps hampered by poor visibility and soft ground. Kinik had retrieved her war cleaver and held it at the ready. The enormous weapon had to be close to six paces long from butt to blade, which was farther than Edrea thought any of her friends could currently see in the thick fog.

“Kinik,” she said, remembering how Lynus had stumbled into her earlier. “Stop right there. Any closer and you’ll hit one of us with that thing.”