the weight of them one afternoon, Birke took one and walked with it cradled like a baby in his arm. “You’ll have to name them, you know?”
“Yes, I guess I will.”
“You must geld them. Not yet, but before too long.”
“Cut their balls off? No, I don’t think that’s-”
“Scoop it up, Dariel,” Birke cut in. “They’re cathounds. Male ones. The Anet used them to hunt lions. In six months they’ll be almost as tall as you are. At least they’ll be lighter without their balls.”
“Be sane! I saw their mother. She was-”
“Young. They birth children young. And the females are smaller anyway. No, Dariel, believe me, you’ve got more on your hands than you know. Snip them. I could do it for you if you like.” Birke made his fingers into shears and demonstrated the ease of the action. He smiled. What should have been fearsome-the thick hair that covered his entire face, the canine incisors that shone savagely through his grin-usually managed to cheer Dariel. Not so this time.
Dariel reached for the pup. “I don’t mind carrying him after all.”
He still carried them both an hour later when they stepped into a clearing in the woods created by an enormous fallen tree. A man stood atop it, arms crossed and still. Blinking in the unaccustomed bright light, it took Dariel a moment to believe that he was really there. Mor shouted something to him in Auldek; the man responded and pointed to a route up onto the tree. Without a word of explanation, Mor led them up.
The man was slight of build. His head was clean-shaven, with a splattering of tattoos across his scalp, patterning that Dariel had not seen before. “So this is him?” the man asked, switching to Acacian. “There is much talk of him in Avina. The destroyer of the soul catcher. The Rhuin Fa.” He studied the prince with a trader’s critical eye, as if he were considering a purchase. “Funny, he just looks like common Shivith clan, not even ranked. I hope he is what he promises.”
“I never promised anything,” Dariel said. The pups churned in the sack, trying to get a view of the stranger. Dariel tried to stand without flinching, but they really did have sharp claws. “And I’m standing right in front of you. You could address me directly.”
The man gave no sign that he heard him. “Last word from Avina was that the clans are squabbling and that league ships are patrolling the coastline. More each week. If this Dariel Akaran wishes to prove himself, he’ll have ample opportunity, and soon.”
Before Dariel could respond, Mor asked, “Tell me, messenger, why have you come?”
“With a message, of course.” He drew himself up and spoke more formally. “I carry an elder within, a voice meant for your ears.”
Mor said, “May the vessel never crack.”
As she and the messenger moved away together, Dariel unslung his sack. He poured the pups out onto the wide tree trunk, across which they surged with bumbling enthusiasm, greeting one person and then the next and then starting over again.
“What’s this about?” Dariel asked Birke, once the others had settled down to wait.
Birke stroked a puppy’s head. “The council sent him with a message.”
“About what?”
“We’ll see shortly,” Tam said, laying out a spread of hard crackers and cucumbers on the tree bark. He set out a wooden bowl. Above it, he used his knife to cut off the bottom of a plee-berry, a nondescript fruit, brown, slightly hairy, and oblong. The liquid inside it gushed out as he squeezed the length of it. The juice looked like a collection of frog eggs, blue tinted, slimy. The first time Dariel had seen it he had gagged and stared in horror as the others drank it with relish.
“Some of your favorite drink, Dariel?”
After having made a show of being disgusted by the frog-egg look of the fruit pulp, Dariel had to admit he had grown to rather like it. It was like drinking liquid sugar, and the strange texture of the seeds had actually become his favorite aspect of it. He took a slurp from the offered bowl, rolling the slick orbs around on his tongue.
Tam pulled his tiny instrument from his pack and began plucking it. Dariel watched Mor and the messenger, but could gather little from their distant exchange. He thought he saw stiffening in Mor’s spine, an indication of anger, but the next moment it melted into something softer as she gestured with her hands.
“What’s he mean he has an elder within him?”
“It’s quite a trick. Can’t say I understand it, really.” Birke pushed one of the pups into Dariel’s arms. “Here, take your pup. I shouldn’t handle them so much. I’ll end up liking them. Have you named them yet?”
The pup climbed happily enough into Dariel’s lap, churning in a circle around the geometry of his folded legs. Dariel stilled it with his hand, rubbed under its chin, and looked into its eyes. They were the same color as its fur, which was a reddish-brown, soft, short coat. Only the ridge along its back was different. There the hair bristled back against the grain, almost spiny. It was the only part of him not completely adorable. “I was thinking of this one as Scarlet.”
“Scarlet?” Birke asked. “That’s no name for a cathound!”
“No? What is, then?”
Birke did not hesitate. “Ripper. Killer. Punisher.”
“Jaws of Death,” Tam said.
“Devothri-grazik,” offered Anira. “It means ‘Devoth’s bane.’ ”
Tam said something in Auldek, pointing at the other pup, who had just tumbled over in an effort to lick his bottom. The others laughed. No one offered a translation.
A little later, they all stood as the two rejoined them. The messenger looked as pleased as ever, but Mor’s lips pressed a new measure of annoyance between them. She barely opened them when she said, “The council has spoken. We have new instructions. From here we go to Rath Batatt. We seek the Watcher in the Sky Mount.”
“Na Gamen?” Birke asked, a measure of awe in his voice.
“Yes,” Mor said. “Na Gamen. Let’s go. Time is more important now than ever.”
Dariel came close to asking who Na Gamen was, but the group was already in motion.
T he mountains that the People called Rath Batatt sprouted like bony crests along the backs of horrible, reptilian beasts. Rank upon rank of them, stretching off unending into the west.
“Beautiful, eh?” Birke asked.
“Not the description I had in mind.”
“They say the Sky Mount is not far in. We won’t hike more than a day or so in the mountains. Just along the edge of them.”
“The edge?” Dariel asked. “How far do these mountains go?”
“I don’t know. No one has been all the way through them. This was once Wrathic territory. My clan’s home. They lived at the edge of Rath Batatt but ranged into it, hunting. I’ve always wanted to do that.”
“You never have?”
“How could I?” the young man asked. “The time that the Wrathic hunted in Rath Batatt is but legend now. Tales they tell the children to bind them to the clan. Wonderful tales of packs of wolves and how they hunted mighty beasts together. I never even thought I’d live to see these mountains with my own eyes.”
Dariel placed a hand atop his shoulder. “I imagine the hunting is good now. Shall we? We haven’t had fresh meat in a while. Even Mor would like that.”
That afternoon Dariel and Birke loped away before the others. They climbed a steep slope, navigated the pass at its peak, and dropped down into the alpine valley on the other side. They picked their way through massive boulders, some of which pressed together so that they had to squeeze through or beneath them. Beyond the boulders stretched a long descent to a crystal blue lake, rimmed by short grass, abloom with purple wildflowers. A herd of woolly-haired oxen grazed-stout creatures thickening to face the coming winter, with flat horns that spread across their foreheads like helmets welded to their scalps. At first they were unaware of the humans, and then unfazed, and then-when Birke sank an arrow into one’s shoulder-furious.
The insulted beast charged them. After a brief moment of consideration, Dariel and Birke turned and fled. They reached the relative safety of the boulders with the ox’s hooves pummeling the ground just behind them, grunting insults into air suddenly thick with its musk. The creature pursued them in. It rushed through the narrow crevices between the stones. Dariel, trapped in a dead-end corridor of granite, had to scramble up it.
“I don’t think it was quite like this before!” Birke shouted, laughing as he hopped from boulder to boulder. The
