“They’ll find no trace of your body,” Borac snarled.
As he pulled the old man into the tent, the sight in his eye fled forever.
Nature of the Beast
Teri McLaren
Falon, the chief scribe of Outpost Twelve, was having a very bad day.
“Pardon me for one moment, please. Blot, see to that fire! It’s all smudge and no heat. My feet are freezing!” Falon shouted to the dirty-faced inkmaker, who spilled a pint of bubbling, jet black pigment across his hand in startled response.
“All right, gentlemen, shall we begin again?” The chief scribe rubbed his forehead and tried to focus his smoke-stung eyes on the two hunters before him. “I apologize. As you can see, I have a lot on my mind. Now, Kale, is it? Yes. You tell it this time. Edrin, you just be quiet until he is finished.”
“But, sir-”
“I said be quiet. You have been shouting and my ears hurt. Go ahead, Kale.”
“Well…” Kale began, his words barely audible. “We was up the mountain after bighorn and, uh, well, we hadn’t seen nothin’ all day but a half-eat carcass, and it was gettin’ cold and late, so me and Edrin here said to Rilliger, let’s go on back down, have a couple of pints down to the inn, ain’t doin’ no good anyway. But Rilliger had him a new knife, and he wanted to stay. Said it was maybe a bear got the dead sheep and we could get him instead, so we stayed, me and Kale over by a big rock and Rilliger at the edge of the clearin’. And then next thing, they was this big ol’ dark shadder come over us, an’ a real bad smell kinda like somethin’ had died about last week, an’ I hollered to Rilliger, ‘Hey, Rilliger, that ain’t like no bear I ever seen, take cover,’ and Edrin said, ‘I’m in!’ but Rilliger . . . didn’t answer.” Kale paused, his face red from the effort of so many words and few pauses for breaths.
“And that’s when you heard-” the chief scribe prompted.
“We heard something flappin’ way overhead, ‘bove the cloud cover, and then it got s’ cold all the sudden we couldn’t hardly move, but I saw an old cave ‘hind us an’ we run to ground there, and then it got dark, and we stayed til mornin’, shivered up together, half froze with no fire, and when it got light, we hunted for sign of Rilliger, but he was…”
“Gone. Just gone! No tracks atall!” cried Edrin, unable to hold back, his booming voice cracking with pain.
Falon nodded, at last getting the story straight.
“You say there was a bad smell? And a shadow passed over you? And there was a sudden coldness? Did you notice a lot of ice in the air?”
Kale and Edrin nodded, the two big hunters shuffling uncomfortably in the tight quarters of Falon’s one-room scribal outpost. Falon understood that closed-in feeling. He was a big man himself, and he had been shut up in this room for five years, day in and day out, gathering information for Astinus’s Bestiary, with only Ander and Del, his assistants, and the dwarf Blot, his latest inkmaker, for company. But just one more entry complete enough for the Bestiary-something like, say, a rare white dragon-would put him in the spacious offices of the Palanthan library itself. Where they had warm rooms. And the finest inks. And the smoothest vellum. The best of everything. This was the chance of a lifetime. The day had suddenly improved.
“Sir?” Edrin stepped closer. “What d’ ya suppose it was got Rilliger?”
Falon raised his bushy gray brows and did his best to look concerned. “Gentlemen, at this point, without making an observation, I just don’t know. You hadn’t had a spot of grog on the hunt, now had you?”
Kale’s face clouded with anger as he shook his head. “Sir, Rilliger’s gone. We was his friends. We come a hard day’s ride out here and we’re asking f’ yer help. Somethin’ big and bad up there on our mountain, and we need to know the nature o’ that beast. If it could take Rilliger, it could take anyone.”