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CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

After a long night in the cold, wet pit, Druadaen climbed up the slimy embankment, pulling and cajoling his mount back over its crest. He led it on a slow walk around the rim, studying the chaos of fresh tracks that had churned its margins until he discovered what he was seeking: two clear and distinctive sets of prints.

One pair of footprints was broader and more spatulate than a human’s but otherwise unremarkable except for longer, claw-tipped toes. However, the other pair of prints were like nothing he’d seen before. Or more accurately, they combined parts of tracks with which he was familiar but, in this case, they had been perversely mixed and fused.

Druadaen felt a sudden primal aversion that he couldn’t understand at first. It hadn’t been caused by counting the eight mismatched human toes that ran halfway around an almost circular sole the size of a newborn elephant’s. It wasn’t even the heel which ended in a bony spike that left a hard-edged, pristine hole in the ground. No, it was that the two feet which had left those prints were only similar rather than identical. Closer study revealed that he was looking at four, not two prints; either the creature had a bizarre gait, or its limbs were so asymmetrical that its entire body moved in a skewed fashion. Whichever it was, Druadaen could not create a mental picture of it.

He leaned away from the tracks. And that’s what you’re going to go capture and bring back to the coast. Druadaen scanned the horizon but was only half aware of what he was seeing, because his mind’s eye was focused on two diametrically opposed paths.

One led west to the Sea of Hystzos, where he could probably survive until the Fur-Drake’s Oath returned and bore him back to Sarma. There he would report that he’d given up within a day’s ride of his intended destination, and would return all the equipment they’d lavished upon him—probably with fees for wear and interest due.

Or, as his mind’s eye settled on the hills to the east, he could press on. Alone. Just like he had on the Gur Grehar. Where, by all rights, he should have died. Granted, the weather here was not lethally cold, and if the prints of these two abominations were daunting, the others’ tracks agreed with what the viziers had asserted: that smaller specimens were not uncommon and probably quite manageable.

Druadaen frowned as he recalled the Sarmese oligarchs’ hasty assurances that they meant to keep the specimen for observation. Vivisection, one had added, was unthinkable. But the more Druadaen had learned about the remarkably fluid relationship the Princes and the viziers had with the truth, the more he’d begun to wonder if that addition had been a bit too swift, too easy. But there was no way to determine that now, and he was at the point where he had to go forward or turn back.

He rose, patted the flank of his horse, swung up, and stared east. The fog having cleared south with the rain, he could see that horizon clearly now: open woodland that led up into scattered knolls.

Urging his horse in that direction, he reflected that things were better than they might have been. In actuality, last night’s danger had become today’s good fortune. Because the band of abominations had come so close and left such clear tracks, he no longer had to wander into their hills uncertain of how best to find one, alone and unsuspecting. Now, he simply needed to follow one to its den and take it captive, albeit before being discovered by a much larger number of its kind.

Yes, so very simple.

Ignoring what he knew might be the voice of reason, he eased the horse into a canter that would put the pit—and hopefully, his misgivings—that much further behind.


While the horse drank its fill from a stream chuckling over its rocky bed, Druadaen glanced up from the foot of the knolls, studying their flanks. The midday sun revealed the lower slopes to be grassy, but above that, scant vegetation rapidly gave way to bare rock. Traveling from one point of concealment to the next would become impossible if he had to ascend that far. And the possibility of finding and following tracks in that kind of terrain was low, at best.

He glanced down at the stream’s muddy banks. Prints of several abominations were there, notably the one with the round, asymmetrical feet. Midway to the hills, he’d lost the tracks of the group that had passed the pit; the night rains and swards of high, heavy grass had erased or hidden the signs of their passing. But they had kept a steady direction up until that point, so Druadaen had continued on that heading, which had eventually brought him into less thickly thatched meadows which showed fragmentary signs that they had indeed stayed their course. And from the looks of the muddy prints that left the other side of the stream and mounted toward the hills, they would be easy enough to follow for a little longer, at least.

Which meant he could not tarry here as long as he would have liked. Not knowing the habits of the abominations in any detail, he was highly—indeed, overly—dependent upon the tracks they left. It was unknown whether they favored high, open reaches or the more vegetated fringes of the hills, just as it was not a certainty that they tended to lair singly. All of which was made more confounding by the probability that they were as diverse as their strange traits. Logically, then, some were likely to pursue prey while others preferred ambush. Some were likely to have extraordinary senses, others less so. Some were likely to be day-hunters, some night-hunters, and some which did not care.

In short, Druadaen had to be prepared for a wide variety of situations. And because they might arise without warning, he might not have the opportunity to use anything except that which he had ready at hand. And if he had to flee swiftly, he might have to abandon parts of his kit to lighten the horse’s load.

In the end, he hid almost all his camp-related kit in the high branches of one of the trees overhanging the stream and surveyed not only the Sarmese compounds, but the ones he’d taken from the bodies of the three men who had tried to ambush him on the road to Pakobsid. In the end, he attached two of their smallest, poison-anointed daggers to his belt. He frowned as he settled them into the small of his back; had his survival not hung in the balance, he would have gladly left them behind. But moments such as these were the only reason he had kept them in the first place.

Mounting his horse and urging it across the stream, he could not dispel one last, nagging uncertainty:

Will I ever cross it again?


The tracks of the abominations ended at a small opening in the side of a rocky spur flanked by fir trees. His horse already tethered halfway down the slope, Druadaen readied his weapons and studied the dark crevice.

Soon after the tracks from the stream had risen up from the scattered copses into the hills, their numbers began to wane. In groups of six or more, they’d begun to split off in different directions. Druadaen had originally planned on following the smallest group with the smallest tracks: that seemed to promise not only the easiest fight, but also a small captive that would be easy to control and even easier to keep sedated.

But Druadaen discovered that while he was able to distinguish all the unique prints, it took a great deal of time. Many looked similar unless one stopped to kneel and study them carefully. Also, with other abominate prints appearing as he climbed higher, it became harder to determine which prints were from the group he had followed, a different one, or had been left by others who had not even been at the pit. Both situations had the same drawback; sorting out the tracks took increasingly more time. And time was in very short supply.

So ultimately, Druadaen decided to follow the group that it was easiest to track: the one which was traveling with the abomination with perverse baby-elephant feet. He could detect those large, unique tracks at a glance and although there were four others with it, their prints were no larger than his and an intermittent spattering of drops told him that the lightest of them was bleeding. A smaller, wound-weakened abomination would be comparatively easy for the horse to carry and for Druadaen to keep sedated.

Two miles into the hills, the group of five split: three who were headed into open woods and two who made for higher ground. The one that was bleeding, as well as the one with the strangely round footprints, were both among those bound for the trees. Druadaen followed carefully; the tracks were getting steadily fresher, so he was traveling faster than they were. And unless he was willing to raise the hills against him, he didn’t dare overtake them in the open.

Instead, he had trailed them to the very spot where their prints disappeared into the rocky spur, which he had now been observing for a quarter of an hour. Chief among his concerns was that it might prove to be a side entrance of a much larger warren, teeming with wide-eyed and wide-mawed creatures that wanted nothing more than to gorge on his entrails. But his inspection of the area around the entrance revealed it to be only lightly trafficked and completely unwatched. Nothing suggested that this was anything other than it appeared; an entry to a den without multiple entries or underground connections to others.

But that was not his only concern. First among the others was the probable lack of light in whatever cavern or tunnels lay beyond. Most abominations lacked traits that conferred superior vision in darkness, but it was not unknown among them. So Druadaen resolved to enter with a pertinent vial in his left hand: one with an alchemical compound that created sudden brightness.

Of almost equal concern was the narrowness of the entrance. If the entire cavern was comprised of similarly constrained spaces, his sai’niin sword would be useless. Although it seemed to intuit his needs at times, it wasn’t as if he could simply ask it, “How short can you become?” so he could not risk having it in hand as he entered what might prove to be a labyrinth of tunnels and chambers so small and tight that he could not use it.

He ran a hand over his equipment, made sure it was both secure and handy, carefully adjusting the mallet-backed hatchet he’d kept from his kit. If it proved necessary to subdue his target, he might need the dull side of that tool, and if so, he was likely to need it very quickly.

Druadaen’s third concern was the one which had dogged him since he’d arrived within sight of the knolls: time. And all he could do about that was to act.

With the vial in his left hand and shortsword in his right, he courted the rock-spur’s shadow as he approached the cleft, crouched next to it, and listened.

Two voices. One was moaning, made faint by distance and occasionally interrupted by words that may have been slurred or simply poorly spoken. The other was muttering in short, annoyed bursts that were not in reference to the other exchanges, or anything else, apparently; it seemed more like a person having, and possibly losing, an argument with themselves. There was almost no echo or muffling to any of the voices or sounds; whatever else the interior might hold, there were probably not any sharp twists or turns just beyond the opening. Probably.

Either way, he knew as much as he was going to; now it was either act, or waste time until he did.

Druadaen shaded his eyes, counted to twenty, took a deep breath, and charged in, shortsword out in a guard position.

The passage was even narrower than the opening, and before Druadaen could throw the vial ahead of him, he almost ran headlong into the abomination that had been muttering to itself. It had apparently stopped and risen in response to the sounds of Druadaen’s movement. Startled and squinting into the daylight streaming in around Druadaen, it flung one hand up across its eyes, while grabbing for a club leaning in the passage. Druadaen thrust the shortsword at its chest: the swiftest and easiest attack he could make in tight quarters.

But his wrist scraped against a dark outcropping on the right-hand wall. The bump skewed his thrust to the side and the point went wide, plunging into his opponent’s shoulder.

The abomination—which had the face and ears of an urzh—stumbled as the thrust drove it backwards into what was either a chamber or widening passage. It let out a surprisingly shrill cry as it tripped backward into the darkness, using the hand opposite its wounded shoulder to break its fall.

Teeth grinding, Druadaen followed and thrust again.

And again, he did not hit the target as he’d intended. Instead of transfixing the being—for there was nothing beastlike about it—the point caught the side of its neck as it was attempting to roll to the side.

Blood ran freely, the abomination howled, rolled the other direction, and started scrambling to get around Druadaen. Twice wounded and with its weapon arm useless, its initial reflex to fight had become a reflex for flight—particularly now that the attacker’s advance into the cave had also unblocked the only exit. Druadaen, still trying to determine the shape of the space he’d entered and recovering to either attack or defend, heard as much as saw his opponent stumbling past him. Which presented an opportunity to use what was, for him, a wholly novel move in combat:

He stuck out his foot.

The abomination, about to complete its first long stride toward the bright opening, hit the unexpected obstacle, tripped, and fell—forehead first—into the side of the passage. With a resounding crack! the wiry, urzh-faced creature bounced back from the wall, hit the ground at an angle, and was still.

Victory by prat-fall? Druadaen might have taken another moment to damn his swordsmanship had he not seen a hint of movement at the farthest corner of his vision.

The strange-footed abomination loomed large and swift out of the darkness just a few feet deeper within the narrow cave. There wasn’t time to assess: only to react.

Druadaen spun in that direction, shortsword sweeping through a wide arc before the point lightly touched the neck of the tall, heavy creature—and the neck screamed at him, spitting teeth as it did. Startled, Druadaen stumbled backward, barely keeping his feet before remembering the vial in his left hand; he dashed it to the ground at the feet of the new attacker.

The glass shattered and light exploded from it, as bright as a bolt of lightning. Druadaen, forgetting to shield his eyes, blinked hard against it. When he opened his eyes, blue-green spots swirled across everything. He put his shortsword forward in a half-blind guard.

But the creature was wholly sightless and roaring—from a fang-lined vertical mouth that began as a slit at the bottom of its thick, flexible neck and rose all the way to the base of its button-small nose. Lambent fish eyes blinked furiously on either side of its head as one immense arm raised a hand to shield them. The other was wielding a massive club—except, not with a hand. The end of a tentacle was wrapped tight around the cudgel’s grip, the sinuous appendage writhing angrily, swatting in a blind fury at the space Druadaen had occupied but a moment before. When it didn’t hit anything, the creature reared up, revealing that it had four, rather than two legs. The front pair lashed at the same area, heel-spikes flashing out from their sheathes.

Druadaen shifted tactics; he threw his shortsword against the right wall—hard—and then, in one fluid motion, slipped toward the open space to the left of the creature, reaching for the small of his back as he did.

The abomination—its torso almost as heavy as the one he fought at the hilltop ruins—spun toward the sword’s metallic clatter, its front two legs coming back to the ground as the club-wielding tentacle cut an arabesque that first struck the air and then, reaching farther, glanced blows off the wall.

As it turned to do so, Druadaen’s side step brought him to the creature’s rear flank just as he drew one of his poisoned daggers. He buried it in the closest of the heavy rear legs—which instantly lashed out at him, the heel-spike emerging with a meaty pop!

But Druadaen had kept moving, leaving the first blade in the wound, and drawing the next before the creature could recover enough to kick backward. He jammed the second dagger into the plane of muscle just beneath its shoulder, jumped away—and bounced off a bulge in the shadowed wall. Stunned, Druadaen rolled farther back into the irregular cavern, hoping that there wasn’t another ready adversary waiting in that direction.

Happily, there wasn’t and, in the same moment that he regained his feet, the numb, swaying abomination finally toppled over. It hit the ground with a grunt, exhaled a great sigh, blinked sharply three times, and fell silent. Its eyes seemed to collapse inward, as if they were each housed by sphincters instead of lidded sockets.

A whimper from the darker recesses at the back of the fissure-like cave reminded Druadaen that the third, presumably injured, abomination was still to be confronted. He lit a torch and entered a small, final chamber.

The wounded abomination was half-buried in a pile of blankets that its fellows had not woven and hides they had not tanned. From a few yards away it appeared quite human, if small. But as Druadaen drew closer, he saw that instead of teeth, the mouth housed grinding plates, and in place of lips, a thick ring of fleshy polyps writhed at him.

It moaned and snarled when Druadaen came within touching distance. It tried to rise and bite him, but collapsed with a groan; its left foot was noticeably askew and just below the midpoint of its shin, there was a dark, swollen lump. A few more steps and it would become a compound fracture, if Druadaen was any judge of such things.

He readied the tool he’d used to sedate his horse, put several drops of the least powerful opiate in it, and baiting the abomination to snap at a strip of cloth, found an opening to drive the liquid home. It shrieked in pain, then rage, then its eyes lost focus and it fell back on its squalid nest.

Like any other limp body, it was difficult to handle, and since it was uncertain how long any given opiate would act on any given abomination, Druadaen had to be watchful for its reactions. But once its hands were bound behind it, and its legs tied off—the broken one lashed tight against the other—he was able to drag it to the door. In that process he discovered other features he had not noticed before. Its hands were as webbed as an otter’s and it had almost invisible gills behind its ears. Also, its eyes were not the light gray he’d initially assumed, but almost white and strangely round—almost enough to make Druadaen suspect that it may have signified a common family root with the larger one.

He flinched at the memory of attacking it from behind with two poisoned daggers, pushed it away as he went back inside to retrieve the blades. As he did, its fantastically misshapen and mismatched parts brought to mind the strange polyglot monster the group had defeated in the Library of Imvish’al.

He frowned as that image was replaced by one even more similar, and which made him wonder if whatever had made this creature had touched his own world as well. He remembered standing amidst the dead after defeating a shaman in the Under of Grehar, staring down at the most fearsome—and arresting—of all the beings they’d had to vanquish: a blugner sow. At first, he’d presumed it was a product of profound inbreeding. But some primal part of him rejected that, told him that he was not simply looking at natural breeding gone awry, but the ghastly result of some fundamental and intentional perversion of the species’ normal form. The creature’s unnatural lack of symmetry seemed like a malign and purposeful handprint left by some capricious—or vindictive—god.

The same handprint was on the body at his feet, except many times greater and more arresting. It was difficult to anticipate what such creatures might be able to do, what unrevealed traits they might have. At which another memory rose up, the one that had ultimately led to him removing the head of the automaton the night before. Wouldn’t that be prudent here, too?

He recoiled: that was disabling a machine, but to remove the head of a being? Whether a creature was hideous or beautiful was of no count; mutilation was repellent unless it was clearly necessary. And in this case it wasn’t. Besides, he consoled himself, the neck was so thick and uneven that he’d have needed a saw and an hour to get through it. And that was an hour he didn’t have to spare.

Not if he wanted to make it back to the plains of the Godbarrows before more abominations found him or his tracks.


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Framed