hideous shriek they'd heard in the night. He jerked his sword out of its sheath, Van pulled the mace from the loop at his belt on which it hung, and the two of them pounded toward the tumult as fast as their legs would carry them.
'It's us!' Gerin yelled as he ran. 'Don't shoot-we're not monsters.' Whether any of the men was cool-headed enough to note and heed his cry was an open question.
Because he thought that way, the arrow that hissed between him and Van neither surprised nor infuriated him. He had a moment to be glad it had missed them both, then burst through the bushes into the little open space where the stag had died and been butchered.
Several of his men had already emerged from cover, too. 'The thing went that way,' Raffo exclaimed, pointing south. 'We all shot at it, and hit it at least twice, maybe three times.' What he'd seen suddenly seemed to sink in. His eyes went wide and staring. 'Lord Gerin, forgive me that I ever doubted your words, I pray you. The creature is all you said it was, and more and worse besides.'
'Yes, yes,' Gerin said impatiently. 'Enough jabbering-let's catch it and kill it. Lead on, Raffo, since you know the way.'
Looking imperfectly delighted with the privilege he'd been granted, Raffo plunged into the woods. The trail was easy to follow, blood and tracks both. Before long, Gerin could hear the monster crashing through the undergrowth ahead. 'The things have weaknesses after all,' Van panted. 'They aren't woodswise like proper beasts, and they aren't what you'd call fast, either.'
'You don't know about that,' Gerin answered. 'How fast and careful would you be with two or three arrows in you?' Van didn't answer, from which Gerin concluded he'd made his point.
With a roar, the monster sprang out from behind an elm tree. Four men shot arrows at it. Two of those missed; excitement could ruin anybody's aim. The creature screamed when the other two struck. But despite them, and despite the other shafts that pierced it, it rushed at its pursuers.
Its claws scraped against the bronze scales of Gerin's corselet. He could feel the force behind them, even if they did not wound; as he'd guessed, the monster was stronger than a man. He slashed with his sword. The thing screamed again.
Van clouted it with his mace. The blow would have crushed the skull of any man. It knocked the monster to the ground, but it got up again, blood streaming from the dreadful wound to the side of its head. Cursing in half a dozen languages, Van smote it again, even harder than before. This time it fell and did not rise again.
'Father Dyaus above,' said a warrior named Parol and called Chickpea after a wart by his nose. Gerin's heart pounded in his chest. He felt as if he'd fought against a Trokme rather than hunted a beast. The monster's strength, even badly wounded, accounted for some of that. More, though, came from how much the thing resembled a man.
'Will you look at it?' Raffo said in wondering tones. 'Take the ugliest scoundrel you've ever seen-old Wolfar, for instance-and make him five times as ugly as he really was, every which way, I mean, and you've just about got this thing here.'
'Oh, not quite everything,' Parol said. 'I wouldn't mind being hung so good, and that's no lie.'
That comment aside, Raffo's remark was to the point. Gerin had noted how manlike the monsters were from the moment he set eyes on them. Then, though, he hadn't had the leisure to examine one closely; he'd been more concerned about getting away from Ikos with his life and Van's and the Sibyl's.
Squat, muscular, hairy-the thing did resemble Wolfar, he thought, unkind to his old enemy though he'd killed him five years earlier. But Wolfar, except when he turned werebeast, had not been armed with claws on hands and feet both, and even as a werebeast his teeth had hardly matched the ones filling the monster's long, formidable jaws.
Above those jaws, its features were also a vicious parody of mankind's: a low nose with slit nostrils; large eyes set deep under heavy ridges of bone; thick hair, almost fur, rising to a crest on top of its head and nearly disguising how little forehead it had.
'There it is,' Gerin said. 'Dyaus above only knows how many of these things are spreading over the northlands.'
'Are they all of the same sort as this one?' Raffo asked.
'Some of 'em are likely to be females or bitches or woman monsters or whatever the right name is,' Parol put in.
'They're ugly enough so it'd only matter to another monster.' Raffo made a gesture of distaste. 'What I meant was, is this one pretty much like the others? You'd get a different notion of what people were like from Van's corpse and the one I'd like to make out of that weedy little jeweler who may have run off with Duren.'
'Otes.' Gerin heard the growl in his own voice as he supplied the name. How could he properly search for his son when catastrophe was overtaking all the northlands? More and more, he feared he'd never again see Duren alive. But Raffo's question raised a serious point. 'I haven't had enough experience with them to answer that, though Ricolf' s man said some seemed smarter than others,' he said. 'One way or another, we'll all find out before long.'
The warriors trooped back to where they had slain the deer, leaving the monster's body where it lay. 'We may as well camp, as Raffo said,' Van remarked. 'No point in pushing further in the little daylight left.'
When evening fell, the ghosts were very quiet. 'Likely gorging on the creature's blood,' Gerin said. He looked up to the sky. Math should have been at first quarter, with Tiwaz and Elleb rising in the early hours after sunset, but he saw only clouds. The wind was picking up. 'We'll have trouble gauging watches tonight, and it feels like rain, to boot.'
'I'm not looking forward to tramping along through the mud,' Van said. 'We won't be able to do much in the way of looking for monsters, either, not with rain making it hard for us to see our hands when we stretch our arms out at full length.'
'Aye, you're right,' Gerin said morosely. 'I hadn't thought so far ahead yet.' The gobbet of venison on which he was gnawing suddenly lost a good deal of its flavor. How was he supposed to set a perimeter to keep the monsters out of his holding if they could shamble past fifty paces away without getting noticed?
For that matter, if other nobles in the northlands didn't fight them as hard as he would himself, how was he supposed to keep the monsters out of his holding at all? The most obvious answer to that was depressing: maybe he couldn't. He hadn't had much hope of besting Balamung, either, but he'd persisted and come through. He had to believe he could do the same again.
He stood an early watch, then rolled himself in his blanket and fell asleep at once in spite of his worries. When he woke, he looked around in confusion-why was everything still dark? Then a raindrop landed on the end of his nose, and another in his hair.
The rain started pattering down in earnest a few minutes later. Men swore sleepily and rigged makeshift tents from their blankets and saplings pressed into service as tent poles. In spite of those, the rest of the night was chilly, wet, and miserable.
Day came with rain falling steadily from a leaden sky. The fire had gone out. Some of the venison from the night before had been cooked; along with hard bread, it made a decent enough breakfast, but not as good as it would have been, hot and juicy from the flames.
The warriors donned their armor and squelched off westward. Gerin felt as if he were moving inside a circle perhaps a bowshot across; the rain curtained away everything beyond that distance. Every so often, he or one of his comrades would slip in the mud and get up covered with it. Little by little, the rain would wash him clean once more-until he slipped again.
Echoing what Van had said the night before, Raffo grumbled, 'How are we supposed to search in this? We'll be lucky if we can keep track of ourselves, let alone the cursed monsters.'
Gerin did not answer, for he feared his driver was right. With rain and clouds concealing sun and landmarks, he wasn't even altogether sure he was still heading west. 'Have to wait to see which half of the sky gets dark first,' Van said. 'Then we'll have a notion of how to head back toward the Elabon Way, anyhow, if not just where we'll strike it.'
Raffo said, 'Poor old Rihwin. He could be sitting under one of those red tile roofs south of the High Kirs that he never gets tired of talking about, with wenches to fetch him meat and grapes and wine. And he was silly enough to trade all that for this life of luxury.' He shook himself like a wet dog to show what he meant.
Just thinking of being dry made Gerin wish he were somewhere other than tramping through the mud. He
