The Carnelian Throne

“Gate!” he bellowed over the storm, his dripping lips at my ear. The deluge had made us sparing of words. Under leathers soaked to thrice their weight, I shivered in spasms. Arms clutched to my sides, I stared into the rain. The driven sheets slashed me for my audacity. Lightning flared, illuminating the riverbank white. A moment later, the bright noise cracked through my head. The hillock trembled.

Over the gate danced the lightning. Its crackling fingers quested down thick-crossed slabs of iron, seared flesh. Emblazoned as they tumbled were those six-legged amphibians, their streamered tails lashing, scaled, fangful heads thrown back in dismay. I saw their afterimage: beryl and cinnabar, aglow upon the storm. Then their charred remains splashed into oblivion, spun away on the fast current.

“Down!” One man shouted, the other shoved me, and as I staggered to kneel in the sedges, the god that washed this land shook it, grumbling. I crouched on my hands and knees on the bucking sod, between them. Little protection could they offer up against shaking earth and searing sky, not even for themselves, without divorcing themselves from the reality they had come here to explore. And that they would not do.

Somewhere far off the weather struck earth again. We knelt on a fast-declining shore. On our right and left, steeps ascended, cresting in a plume of dense rainforest. In that moment of illumination the whole river valley and the gate set into the river stood bared of shadow. Six times the height of a man was that gate. Its bars must have been driven deep in the riverbed itself, into the rock far below the choppy water. Where the shore reared up, the gate was fitted into a wall: featureless, towering undulant up the banks, extending undiminished into the forest. For a swath about its base the earth was black and devoid of vegetation.

“Did you see that?” I yelled into the wind, which, like a hymn to power in its last stanza, trailed off to a murmur as the rains recommenced.

“Higher ground, before any of those six-legged toothfulnesses decide to take a stroll!” His roar echoing in the abating gale’s last howls, the cahndor of Nemar lifted me bodily to my feet. The other man shaded his eyes with his hand and peered up into the enshrouded sky before he abandoned his squat. He has borne many names, before that time and since: we will call him Sereth.

“Chayin, I would take a closer look,” Sereth called, wiping his streaming brow. Chayin rendi Inekte, cahndor of Nemar, co-cahndor of the Taken Lands, Chosen Son of Tar-Kesa, and in his own right a god, ceased dragging me across the suck and slide of the sedges. The nictitating membranes snapped full over his black eyes. For a silent moment the gazes of the two men locked, and the worth of  a thousand words was exchanged therein. Then Chayin nodded and propelled me toward the gate. Or to where it must be, beyond the sheeting rain, white as if boiled, through which little could be seen for farther than a man might extend his hand.

Sereth dropped back behind, blade drawn, sidling through the grass with his eyes turned riverward, that he might see a slither, a shifting of reeds, a muck-covered, armored snout before its owner could make  a strike.

We had seen few of them, these legged ones. We had seen their larger cousins, who have no legs, in the open seas to the north. They were much the same: iridescent scales striped their lengths; their wide-hinged jaws, fringed round with glowing streamers ever-changing in hue and deadly with poisonous barbs, boasted two rows of blade­-sharp teeth; their eyes were bilious, side-set under protrusions of bone. One of them could doubtless shred a woman-­sized carcass free from flesh in less time than it takes to realize dreaming in sleep.

Though some might say I am sufficient protection unto myself, I was glad of Sereth’s sword behind me, and Chayin’s upon my left, on that shore. I squinted into the rain, straining for sight of the sun. Somewhere, unvanquished, it lurked behind the black-bellied clouds that had come so fast down from the north to envelop us. Beneath my booted feet, the reeds gave way. I lurched, gasped, sank angle-deep into the mush.

Chayin whirled. Then, chuckling he offered out his free hand. I took it — his, deep, rich brown, surrounded mine, copper with a muted tinge of light — and he pulled me from the slurping sink. Sereth, brows down-drawn, stepped with care.

Once again the angered giant hurled firebolt to earth. At that flashing signal the rain stopped, asudden as if the lightning’s heat had razed all moisture from the land. The sedges began to steam, throwing off their putrid perfume.

The sound came, slowly growing, ineluctable as an injured limb reporting its message. Renewed, thunder roared and rippled toward us, borne on a wind that bent the reeds whooshing flat. Before that wind the clouds took flight. But the sound remained, redoubled. Above the gate, day-sky crawled shakily upward as the thunder, disheartened, slunk away before the other sound: It pealed like some mountainous bird screeching to its mate: It made a chalybeate taste come into the mouth, and water into the eyes. Might the earth’s bowels scream that shrilly? If the continents sob as they pulverize each other beneath the sea, might such a sound be their dirge? It sanded nerve and quickened blood, and stopped us each in our tracks.

Searching amid the mists for its source, I made it out, even as Sereth’s eyes sought Chayin’s for confirmation. Ahead, swathed in dusky green shadows, the gate continued to draw itself back. With querulous protest, the lower half of that iron lattice split, each section retreating into its wall of stone.

Chayin, with a grunt, ran. Sereth, motioning me before him, followed. High reeds jabbed us. I stumbled in the gaseous mist, broke my fall with outstretched hands. My palms, when I raised them, came away speckled with burrs. Chayin gained the water’s edge. Sereth, his hand at the small of my back, urged me silently.

Running, I scraped the burrs off onto my tunic. Harsh in my ears, my breathing and the break and hiss of the marsh grass beat time to my stride, as did the ever-welling clouds of insects released by the storm’s retreat. A flying thing as large as my hand, vermilion and gold with great staring eyes upon its wings, hovered before us. An eager ray of sun struck it, bejeweled it, passed on. The ground under my feet had spongy strength. Sereth loped easily at my side, accommodating his pace to mine.

“Move!” implored Chayin, half-blended into the dark brown, towering wall before him. So skillfully joined were those blocks that there was no shadow of stone upon stone. Nor did mortar show between them. As we quit the last of the rushes a silver-winged bird screeched and burst upward, scolding, its curved cobalt beak open wide.

“Kreeshkree!” it accused, diving so low I shielded my eyes. A wingtip brushed my temple. “Kreeshkree! Breet, breet iyl!” it blared, whirling in midair to hover above my head.

In a single motion, Sereth pushed me aside and struck out at it as it dived. His blade flickered. The bird (“Kreesh . . .”) dropped to the ground, its severed head covered by the plummeting body where it fell into a bier of red flowers.

“Come on,” urged Sereth. “Look!”

And I looked. And saw. And heard: the great gate, mysteriously as it had opened, had begun to close. Vibration and rumble grew loud, then unbearable. We ran for it. Chayin hesitated, poised in the crural water of the wall’s lee edge, imploring, body tensed to spring.

“Go on,” urged Sereth. In a handful of bounds, the cahndor had disappeared between the gate’s drawn-back portals.

Over the cindered swath that paralleled the wall’s extent, we ran. Sliding down the bankside, over the wall’s plinth, we splashed into the water. In moments I was hip­-deep, slogging with sinking feet through the sediment. As we assayed the crossing, the screeching noise began once more: the gate, in stately approach, paced us, drawing us with it toward the river’s center.

Sereth’s needless, urgent demand for speed ripped through my mind even as my numbed fingers grasped the slow-closing iron bars. I grabbed the lattice of body-thick, slimy iron and pulled myself through. The wail of metal was deafening. I stood, frozen, gaping at the gate while its sides rejoined, to present once more an impenetrable barrier.

Sereth pushed me ungently toward the shore. I stumbled and cursed him as, thoroughly soaked, I waded to the bank. He himself stood up to his hips in the water, oblivious of danger, bow and blade held high, staring with narrowed eyes at the gate. It was silent, suddenly. No longer did the screams of tortured metal ride the wind. The air was still. The water, earlier dark and gray, shone warm with the reds of day’s end. The sky was fired green, cloudless.

It was Chayin who called him out from before that gate of iron, latticed like some giant’s garden trellis. He came, shaking his head, taking short backward glimpses. He joined me where I stood on the plinth and ran his hand over the groove where gate met brown stone, then over the woven iron bars, through which nothing larger than a hand might pass. There was no sign now that the gate had ever opened (save that we were now within whatever this barrier had been constructed to protect), nor that it might ever do so again.

With a toss of his head Sereth sheathed his blade, shouldered the bow, and aided me up the bank to where Chayin sat amid a puff of dark-capped weeds on a hillock.

My feet sloshed and squished in boots filled with silt and water. I sat beside Chayin and emptied them, tearing up handfuls of grass with which to scour the muddied leather clean. In the puddle I poured out from my left boot onto the ground, a tiny, red-striped fish flopped, wriggled, then lay still. A tremor, then many, coursed over my flesh.

The wall, dour, devoid of feature but for its gate, dwarfed all else. On this inner side, extending from its base three man-lengths outward, the turf was blackened, free of weed or twig. Everywhere else, the shore was wildly fertile. From the dappled forest, gibbering, trilling, came the sunset songs of unnamed beasts. Mewling, snorting trebles mixed with deeper, hissing growls as the rain forest reaffirmed its celebration of life. But the wall spoke not of life. In the blackened, time-and-again-singed earth were set iron stakes. Not more than a pace apart, as high as my knee, they flowered the scathed earth. Like the armies of Chayin’s Nemar formed up for review did the black-iron sentinels flank the sheer brown wall. As far as my eyes could see ran that wall, and the blackened earth, and the sharp, pointed iron stakes.

“Iron rusts,” observed Chayin as I pulled from my boots the last of the muddied, sharp-edged gray grass.

“The sun sets,” I snapped, and winced as a thorned weed made its sovereignty clear to my right thigh. Carefully I disengaged it from my flesh and continued what I had started — the working of wet, muddy feet into wet, muddy boots.

Sereth, who had been doing likewise, gave up the task as a bad job. Wriggling his toes, he leaned back on his elbows and stretched, grinning at me with that sly, under­-the-brows demeanor that has ever boded ill for the universe at large, and for me, especially, has come to signify his readiness to collect that tribute which he chooses to call humor. I bristled, like the countless women before me subject to the tax imposed by such a man.

“I would not, if I were you.”

“Would not what?” he inquired innocently, while hiding his smile with a hand rubbed across his jaw.

I did not answer, but turned to Chayin, who raised up both palms toward me and cringed theatrically.

“I was only going to say that it seems we have found some sign of man,” spoke Sereth, not to be denied. We had wagered upon this point.

“Not living man. That,” said I, sweeping my hand over gate and wall, “could well be an artifact left from before the rebuilding.” It was a halfhearted objection, even to my own ears.

“Iron rusts,” said Chayin again.

“And it is getting dark. I am wet. I am cold. I want a fire.” I sighed. “And something to eat — you promised me a local meal.” I had grounds for complaint on that score: we had been eating the ship’s stores far too long. Three days past we found this river’s mouth and sailed the Aknet up it, as far as Chayin had deemed safe. There we left her, and her crew, making a twenty-one-day rendezvous. If we did not by then reappear, they were on their own. And the ship’s commander had not been happy; but what objections he voiced had been only wasted breath. These two men, who between them reigned over all Silistra, listened no more to their shipmaster than they had to me. It had made me feel, somehow, less useless when they heeded not the sage council of Neshub, the ship commander. Though I agreed with him, in substance, I was pleased when they ignored his demands that we take an armed party — he was a man, one they respected, and their heedlessness in his case made less stinging their heedlessness in mine. It was not that they ignored my advice because I was a woman, but that they ignored all advice that did not agree with their plans. And what were those plans? In sum, they were simple; self-indulgent, if any stranger had been present who might have dared judge them: we had no purpose there, at that time, other than hunting.

Sereth, with a squint at the sky, nocked into his bow one of the arrows he had demanded I fletch. “If your arrow flies, you will have the game meal you crave.” he grunted, rising.

“Straight,” Chayin amended. My first attempts had evinced a marked rightward propensity. Sereth, soundless, slipped into shadowed trees.

I peered around me, taking stock. The shore on this side of the gate rose less steeply. The marsh and riverbed knew no boundaries, but entwined each other’s domains. Just north of us, the shore was treed to the waterline and beyond with white-barked giants (which we would come to call memnis) whose leaves depended in places to trail along the river’s surface. The bend along which we had come, the bend that had revealed the gate, continued its twisting course northward.

“Estri, did you open the gate?” asked Chayin, touching my shoulder.

“No. I was going to ask you.” I turned from the river view.

“Sereth surely did not.” No, Sereth would not have set his will to opening the gate. We had pacted with him to refrain from such activities, that we might calm ourselves and the time around us. Nothing was known of this place upon whose banks we sat. Perhaps there was nothing to know here. It would have suited me, had such been the case.

“If you did not,” Chayin pursued it, stretching out on his side, “and I did not, and Sereth did not, then who did?”

“I told you: the wall is doubtless left from before the rebuilding. The lightning hit some old mechanism.”

“Conveniently, just as we happened to be passing by?”

“Coincidence?” I offered.

“Even you know better than that, by now.”

“Make a fire,” I suggested. “No fire, no portentous discussions.”

“Without skills? In this all pervasive dampness?” he objected, but rose up with mutters about women on hunting trips and stalked about in the bushes. I turned away, surreptitiously seeking with mind for intelligence secreted near the gate. I found none who might have triggered its opening.

Chayin’s voice, out of the rustling leaves, was determined: “Iron rusts. Those stakes are in good shape. That ground is kept cleared.”

I suppressed a guilty start, momentarily sure that he had caught me seeking — a thing Sereth had forbidden. But Chayin, grunting and cursing as he sought materials for fire in the sopping  wood,  had  not  noticed. I watched him, pensive. It was he whose aegis had underwritten this trip. It was he whose couch-mate, Liuma, had been slain by those we hunted. Or would hunt, when spring thaws made the northern rivers navigable. This plausible excuse served us, each one for diverse purpose. True, we all hunted here: peace, and nature, and a respite from our concerns. We had left, each of us, all that we had so recently acquired. Or tried to: what we had lost could not be regained, and what responsibilities we fled trailed determinedly at our heels. As in the mythical book of prophecy to which Chayin felt us bound, we had sailed an ocean, bearing with us a sword which might — or might not — be Se’keroth, Sword of Severance, and the material sign of that long-prophesied age, the coming of the divinity of man. Sereth subscribed not at all to that belief. So he said, now, though it had been he who first voiced the possibility. I was uncommitted. Or rather I did not want to be convinced, yet half believed. If the sword that Sereth had acquired with his accession to Silistra’s rule was Se’keroth, the blade would be quenched in ice. Until that time, I withheld both support and censure. In this place, I thought, looking around me, ice might be hard to find.

But then, dry wood should have been hard to find.

Chayin unburdened his arms and arranged brush and branch to his satisfaction. He lit it with a flint device, and not his mind, bending low to the piled tinder. Though Sereth was not here to see, Chayin honored his will. I might not have been so patient. It was the third try with the sparking wheel that caught. He blew into cupped hands, cajoling the spark.

By the time I knelt at his side, the spark, judiciously nursed, had become a flame. Chayin sat back, staring into the fire.

“I am very sure that we are being watched, and not by any artifact. Sit still! You might sense it.” Casually, he met my eyes.

“He asked me to forgo such things,” I reminded him, unable to resist. “And you also.”

“So scrupulous? This is no time for it. He asked, yes. Whenever possible, and if we met no men, and not to any extent that might endanger our lives. We are about to meet men.” Out of his loam-dark face the fire shone back at me, red-gold, from enlarged pupils.

It was then that Sereth, with no more sound than a gust of wind between the trees, emerged from the swamp. Over his shoulder were two red-furred, motionless animals, tied together by the tails at his shoulder. Their black muzzles dangled around his knees. Their staring eyes, even in death, were gentle.

“Local meal,” he announced, dropping the two warm carcasses in my lap. “Your arrows are improving.”

I stroked the soft fur of my dinner-to-be. Then I thanked it for its flesh and took my knife to it.

“What did you see?” Chayin demanded.

“Plants and animals with which I am not familiar. No men. But man-sign,” added Sereth, taking one of the carcasses into his own lap.

“It has come to me that we are being observed. What think you?” growled Chayin, scratching beneath his tunic.

“I am sure of it,” said Sereth quietly, and nothing more until the little animal lay gutted and skinned before him. Then: “There is a path, very straight, wide, well-­tended. It runs northwest from the wall, just beyond those trees.” He rose, scrutinized my novice’s butchering, and went to cut a spit pole.

By the time the meat spattered above Chayin’s fire, the constellations were beginning to poke their way through the haze. Sereth had helped me with my preparation of the meat; patient, soft-voiced as always when concerned with what he termed “life-skills.” The more deeply I had involved myself, during that long sea voyage, with affairs of mind, the more insistent he had become that I take instruction from him in weaponry, in survival on land and sea, in hunters’ lore. I knew, by then, more than I wished of butchering and the catching of fish; and less than I had hoped of what lay in his heart. Of his turmoil, I had been instructed only by omission: he never spoke of it.

“Why do you think it is that none of these plants and animals are known to you?” I asked him.

“Because I have never been here before,” he answered, hacking off our dinner’s left hind leg. “Chayin, take what you will.” He who hunts eats first of the kill. They observed the old rules ever more closely, with fervor. Perhaps with desperation: that which is invulnerable is unnatural, and though they were not truly immortal, nor as yet all-powerful, they were no longer, even in their own eyes, “normal” men. This deeply troubled them, those reluctant gods. As it had troubled me when I first discovered what latitude I might exercise in this that we call life. So I said not a word while the cahndor and Sereth ripped bites from a steaming joint of the nameless meat, but waited until they were satisfied that no immediate symptoms of illness developed. For only a quick poison, one that could strike in an instant and catch the victim unawares, could incapacitate such strengths as we now possessed. Between thoughts, must a crippling blow be landed on an intelligence so highly skilled. I waited, hardly tense, sure in my capacity to intervene should the beast-flesh prove deadly. But it did not, and soon I was crunching happily the crisped outer flesh of Sereth’s kill. The meat did hold one surprise, however: it was neither gamy nor tough, but sweet and rich. Even as I thought it, Sereth spoke:

“We may well be expected to pay for this meal when we come upon the owner of this preserve.”

“Why wait?” mumbled Chayin around a mouthful. He gestured with a greasy forefinger. “Our observer still lurks. Let us go greet him. Perhaps we could take a live pair home, and breed up a herd ourselves.”

About us, the insect shrills grew strident and rhythmic. I put down the meat and lay back, stretching full-length on the alien grass. My mind, denied the search of the woods for which it clamored, peopled the forest’s orchestra, gave the nascent choir a sinister aspect as it wailed low ululent homage to the darkness. From all around us, even echoing back from the river’s far bank, waxed that numinous evening chant. I liked the sound of it not at all.

Further disquieted, I twisted around to face the gate. Thereupon danced a soft nimbus, surely marsh gas rising. Over the stakes it flowed, maggot-white, sentient. I pulled at the clammy straps of my stiffening leathers, shivering, and shifted my gaze back to the fire.

But the foreboding, the ineffable hostility I sensed from the encroaching wilderness, would not be dispersed by that reassuring crackle. Its heat did not warm me, its light could not chase from my flesh the touch of a hundred hidden eyes. Sereth’s fingers enclosed mine where I fumbled with my tunic’s closures. He shook his head. I let my hand fall away, and shrugged. Chayin leaned forward, stirred the branches. A knot popped, showering sparks. Somewhere inland, a beast roared. It was a roar of rage and vengeance, hovering long in the air before it tapered to a growl indistinguishable from the forest’s deep-throated mutter.

“Sereth, free me from my vow — let me seek the sense of this place.” My voice, calm, unwavering, did not betray me. The principle on which he had based his decision of noninterference was right. The decision, I had long felt, was wrong.

“Not yet. I would explore Khys’ — this land for what it is, not what I might assume it is, or want it to be.” I did not miss the stumble of his tongue over his predecessor’s name. It was Khys’ work here that he would explore. And alter, if he could. Khys, the last dharen, or ruler, of Silistra, had spent long periods absent from his capital. None knew where, in those days. He had made quite certain that his successor would undertake this journey to the east, to this shore so long isolate from our own culture. And, despite himself, the inheritor had come to take stock of what had been left to him.

“Chayin, let us toss for watch,” suggested Sereth, his head slightly cocked, closing indisputably the subject I had broached. A second roar, fainter than the first, echoed to us from the far bank.

“I will take it. Sleep is not within my reach,” offered Chayin. Sereth grinned, shrugged, sought my side. Before he lay down to sleep, he spent a while staring around him, though it was mind and not eye that could penetrate the mist and darkness and denude them of their menace. But he would not do that. Finally he blew a sharp breath through his teeth and stretched out on the damp ground. I fit myself to him, my head resting on his arm.

“If those roars get close, wake me,” he rumbled. Chayin chuckled. Sereth’s sleep is light as an insect’s wing. The familiar smell of his leathers, as I pressed my face to them, almost masked the rank, salt-laden river odor. Almost, I could mistake the river sound for his pulse. Almost, I could quiet the whispers my mind spoke, the oddly framed thoughts that touched mine, timid, and withdrew.

I twitched and tossed beside him, sleepless, until he growled and pushed up on one elbow. Chayin, ministering to his fire, hummed softly under his breath.

“What troubles you, ci’ves?” Sereth whispered, using the lover’s name he had given me, that of a pet kept as talisman in the hills where he was born. In his tone was no annoyance that my restlessness chased sleep from him.

I thought about it, seeking proper words. I did not find them. At the river, he had sought Chayin’s counsel without words. When he sought me that way, I would give him what he asked. Now, he was not ready to hear me. So I said instead: “Hard ground, a number of itching bites, and the scratch on my thigh.”

I put my arms around his neck and pulled him down beside me, willing my body still. It would not be I who mouthed portents. They were surely as clear to Sereth as to Chayin or myself. It would not be I who broke my word and searched owkahen, the time-coming-to-be, accepting and rejecting and thereby conditioning what might, in these lands, occur.

Sereth sought respite from just such manipulations of time by mind, at least long enough to determine what forces were at work here. And why, by his predecessor’s will, enforced for countless generations, this land had been a shore of which nothing was known, of which none were empowered to speak. By my side lay he who might, if he wished, call himself dharen. The dharen before him had forbidden all commerce between this land and the one from which we had come. The impression had been fostered in the minds of the people of Silistra that nothing had survived the holocaust, on this farther shore. Even in the “autonomous” southlands ruled over by cahndors such as Chayin, none had disobeyed that injunction; or if any had, in silent defiance of the law, made the journey, they had not returned to speak the tale; or had, returning, kept silent.

As I have said, Sereth might have called himself dharen of Silistra. At that time he was not yet willing to do so: he did not wish to bear that burden.

I was — a number of things. Once, keepress of the premier Well on Silistra, with seven thousand people under my care. Later, with Chayin, I held a high commission and for a time served as regent in his southern principality. At still a later time, I was dhareness to Silistra’s ruler, when Khys held the title. With all else, I passed into Sereth’s hands at his predecessor’s demise — a place I had long coveted. I might have called myself dhareness yet or chosen among certain other dignities which were mine by right. My left breast hosts a spiral symbol that twinkles as if bejeweled. It eloquently bespeaks my Shaper heritage; would that it did not. I could rid myself of it, but that I will not do.

Chayin, least changed of us up until that time, sought not forgetfulness, nor was his name abrasive to his own ears. Raised from childhood to believe in his personal divinity, he alone was not compromised in spirit by the affairs of the preceding years. And yet, he had turned away from those lands over which he ruled rightfully by blood and birth and effort. He, as Sereth, for the moment sought no reign over men. He, as I, had looked upon the burdens of his heritage and shuddered. With Sereth, he shared in love as fully as I; and between Chayin and myself, first cousins, there existed a long-standing intimacy. Let no one tell you that such a relationship is easy; and likewise, let none demean it. For the three of us, upon any one commission, are as close to a surety as exists in this ever-changing universe. And that — the realization of the possibilities in our merged skills — more than even the multifaceted affection we shared, entitled us in our own sight to this reconnaissance of an unknown land. We had come, two men and a woman, each divested by their own will of all but one another and those skills we had given so much to acquire, to explore the potentials inherent in our triune nature. Or so I saw it.

But Sereth, giving scant explanation, would not allow us their use. I sighed, and burrowed closer. I would try. I understood his thought. But even Chayin chafed under Sereth’s constraint.

It was not far to my father’s house, I thought in the dream, just as the trees bowed down to make of my path a darkened tunnel, and from the tunnel’s end came light and a great roaring. I turned and ran, but my feet, after the second step, would not be raised up from the soil. Struggling, I fell to the ground. Up through wave after wave of dizziness rose my body. Sitting upright, hand to my forehead, roars louder in my ears, I made at first no sense of it.

Then the shadows that danced in the low-burning firelight took form. My ears sorted sounds. The sounds became voices: Sereth’s, Chayin’s. The flamelight flickered off their blades, and out from the eyes of the thing that roared.

Its pale paw flashed out, claws extended.

“Estri, stay back!”

I stopped, not recollecting how I had come there, past the fire, to where they held the wounded thing at bay.

Its huge jaws gnawed its own chest, where a dark wound gleamed wetly. It half-lay, haunches bunched, yet unable to spring. Again it struck; a sideswipe at Chayin; near-miss with that massive paw. He vaulted backward in clumsy retreat. Sereth, at the beast’s far side, darted in to divert it. His blade raised over his head, he brought the full force of that honed edge down upon the creature’s extended neck. Still reaching for Chayin was that immense, clawed forepaw as the roaring head struck the turf. The beast convulsed, rolling over, legs thrashing the air. Its final shudder, explosive, rent the air. Then, limp, it rolled to one side and came to rest, right-side-up, its dead eyes reflecting the fire’s light. The fanged jaws were closed. Its tongue, half-severed, flapped weakly, then lay quiet between knife-long, gory teeth.

I backed away, staring at that head; at the great, furred body, no longer even twitching, pale like some mist­-spawned apparition in the firelight.

Sereth’s hand touched my arm. “Estri, look at me.”

I tore my attention from the wedge-shaped head, from the dark-tufted ears. Our eyes met. The thing on the grass closely resembled our western hulions, but one somehow wingless and stunted. Hulions have great intelligence. I would rather kill a man than one of those beasts. Sereth knew. . .

“It is dead,” I said dumbly.

“It came at us as a predator,” he said, staring into me intently, his grip tightening. When my tremors ceased, he released me, crouching to wipe his blade clean in the grass.

Chayin, limping slightly, slowly circled the corpse. When he reached us, he said: “Had Sereth not awakened when he did, it would likely be me lying there.”

“And it might have been my sudden movement that precipitated its attack.” Sereth, in his turn, examined the pale, furred form. When he had finished, he gave equal scrutiny to the stars before he spoke.

“Let us build up the fire. It may be a long night. Estri, stay in the light.”

Chayin set about his search for more fuel. I, equally obedient, walked over to the fire’s edge, my fingers worrying the thick braid of my hair, wondering if the furred beast was the largest predator in this land’s chain; and, if not, what might prey upon it.

When the flames burned high, Chayin sought the dead beast. By its tail, he dragged it into the firelight.

“What are you doing?” Sereth demanded, judiciously poking at the smoking branches.

“I thought I might skin it. Such a beast has never been seen in Nemar.”

“Think about it later,” Sereth said sharply. His countenance, grotesqued by the flame’s dance, was severe. The light poured molten down the scar that furrowed the left side of his face from cheekbone to jaw. Later I asked him, but he would admit to no foreknowledge come upon him then, though his eyes met mine and held them a long time.