Extraordinary Zoology (7 page)

Edrea spoke up. “A wattle-and-daub wall, crushed in place.”

Lynus stepped closer. The wall had been reduced to kindling and splinters, but all of the pieces were still quite close together.

“Crushed in place!” Pendrake said. “A heavy steamjack might be able to flatten a house in this manner, but not a gorax.”

“Professor,” Lynus said, “even in all this ripped-up ground, a steamjack would leave sharp-edged footprints, right?” He looked around the ruined village. “And perhaps some ash?”

“Indeed. So once again, we know what this was
not
.” He smiled. “We have ourselves a genuine puzzle here. Something big flattened this village, and pushed and churned the ground, but for all the tracks I can find coming and going from Bednar, it might as well have dropped out of the sky.”

Kinik looked up, wide-eyed, then began flipping through her
Monsternomicon
.

Pendrake noticed. “And since the entire area hasn’t been scorched, frozen, or otherwise blighted, I don’t suspect this is the work of one of the dragons.”

Kinik relaxed.

Lynus stepped over to her and pointed at the illustration she had flipped to. “I cross-referenced several passages from
The Wyrmsaga Cycle
for scale. Those little dots are people.”

Kinik stared down at the book. Lynus thought he’d done a pretty good job with that picture. He hoped to never learn exactly how good.

He walked over to the shattered home that the larger gorax had been sheltering beneath. The thatched roof was gone, and the ground around it was particularly well-churned. A bushel basket, crushed flat, had walnuts spilling out of it. A hand axe lay pressed into the mud.

Midday sunlight shone into the hole. Mud, blood, and scraps of what used to be people—this was where the last of the bodies had ended up, dragged in here by a scavenging pack of gorax. Blowflies swarmed, and Lynus briefly considered attempting a field test of the “carrion clock,” but thought better of climbing down there.

The hole was deep, with pooling water at the bottom. The gorax pack would have had the opportunity to bathe, something your average gorax didn’t do nearly often enough. Even if they’d just wash their faces, get rid of the drool, and remove the rotting food from their teeth, maybe they wouldn’t smell quite so foul.

Lynus stared into the hole.
Teeth.
There was something about the shape of the hole. It didn’t look like any burrow he’d seen before. He turned his head sideways. Layers of loam were stretched and pulled, along with long, questing roots from the nearby grove of apple and walnut trees. They weren’t dug out with gorax claws, but punched through from below. Like an argus tooth punching through an entomology text, stretching bits of the cover, tearing pages, dragging the raw edges of the hole with it.

The hole in the ground looked like an exit wound.

“Professor Pendrake?” he said. “This isn’t a basement, and it also isn’t a gorax burrow.”

Pendrake walked over, adjusting his glasses. “Go on.”

“Something punched up from below. Something about as big around as this hole.”

Pendrake nodded and rubbed his chin.

Edrea, Horgash, and Kinik joined them at the edge of the hole. The stink of the still water wafted up.

“Mother Dhunia, he’s right,” said Horgash. “Is there anything in your book that could do this?”

“This, and worse,” Pendrake said. “I’m taking heart that this hole seems a bit on the small side for a gorgandur to have returned.”

“This hole is small?” Kinik stared down at the festering pool.

“Small enough that the rest of us missed it,” Pendrake said. “Good eye, Lynus. Good eye.”

Edrea stared into the hole, then strode back toward the center of Bednar, stepping lightly over the ridges of buckled ground and torn sod. “If it punched up there and left no track through the trees, then it must have burrowed back down someplace else.” She looked at Kinik and winked. “Or it flew away.”

“We need to check more basements for holes,” Kinik said matter-of-factly.

“Like I said before, these people don’t have basements.” Horgash shook his head and gestured at the wet mess. “Too close to the water table. Any good hole will silt in and fill up, just like this one did.”

“Horgash, did Bednar have a well?” Pendrake asked.

“Aye. It used to be right in the middle of that pond. Oh.”

Lynus looked at the “pond,” and saw it for what it was. The banks were all scraped down and in. The water was black with mud and debris. Whatever had burst out from under the home with the walnuts had left Bednar by burrowing where the village well had been.

Edrea spoke first. “Now that we know what to look for, the track is an obvious one, but even the most experienced woodsman would be hard-pressed to follow it any farther.”

“Indeed,” Pendrake said.

Lynus frowned. If it wasn’t big enough to be a gorgandur, perhaps it was a new breed of Thornwood mauler or a burrowing species of troll. But there were no footprints. Were there giant versions of the toxic tatzylwurm?

“People in Bednar,” said Kinik, “they had guns, yes?”

“They did,” Horgash said. “A couple of older carbines, Cygnaran surplus from Vinter’s era. I offered to buy them last year, trade them up to proper hunting rifles, but Bairyck wouldn’t hear it. Pride, plus they were just scraping by. Make do or do without, he said.”

“Oh,” she said. “But so few. They used bows too?”

Edrea stepped over to Kinik. “You’ve found something. You don’t need to wait until you know what it means before you share it with us.”

Kinik held up half an arrow. “It was hiding in the splinters.”

The head was gone, broken off and lost somewhere, and the fletching was muddy, but it was obviously an arrow.

Edrea accepted it and splashed some water from her canteen over the fletching. She stared at it, then looked over to Lynus.

“What kind of feather is this?”

He took the arrow and examined it. The mud had soaked in and sullied the lighter colors, and the fletching was made from small parts of what had been the full feathers, but a clear, banded pattern remained.

He imagined that pattern on multiple feathers. Broad, stiff, flight feathers? Tail feathers? Yes, definitely tail feathers . . . for display. Fletching needed to guide the arrow, but it could also be pretty.

He walked over to his satchel and dug for a sketchbook. What was that pretty pheasant he’d seen two summers ago? He turned pages, sometimes flipping the sketchbook upside down, sometimes flipping the arrow over.

“At least it’s a proper picture book he’s lost in,” said Horgash.

“Shhh,” Pendrake said. “He’s not lost. He’s never lost in a book.”

“Kinik, let’s you and I cast about for more of these arrows,” Edrea said.

Lynus ignored them. Their conversation barely registered now that he was reading, seeking . . . He turned pages, rotated his sketches, and shook his head. It wasn’t here. He dug a small bound tome out of his pack.

“Dhunia help us, is he going to read all of them?”

Lynus kept reading. Hunting.

“Turrigan’s banded pheasant, principally found in the southeastern quarter of the Widower’s Wood,” Lynus announced, holding aloft his small, sturdily crafted copy of
Velden Ornithologie
. “This pattern is quite distinctive.”

The others were sitting on camp stools in the late-afternoon sun. Kinik had three more muddy, feathered shafts in her hand, and Lynus could see that the striped fletching was from the same type of bird.

Horgash scowled. “These arrows still could have been anybody’s.”

“Actually, no,” said Lynus. “After cleaning this one I got a better sense of the heft of the thing. They’re dwarfed by Kinik’s hands, but in my own hand this one is obviously quite thick-shafted.” He walked over to Kinik and looked at the others. “As are these. A bow capable of launching such heavy arrows with killing force would have a draw strength greater than most men could pull. Farrow favor firearms, and gatormen use spears. That leaves only the Tharn. They’re not really men. Not anymore.”

Lynus gestured around them at the smashed village. “Last night I was wondering why, if this was a fight over territory, the village hadn’t been burned. Well the Tharn, Wurm take them and their blood magic, don’t set fire to things.”

Horgash stood up angrily. “If these shafts are as good as them writing their bloody, blood-drinking name on the arrows, why’d you make us wait for twenty minutes while you kept reading about the muddy bird?”

“Because,” Pendrake said with a smile, “Lynus likes to get the whole answer.” He strode forward, took the half arrow from Lynus, and pointed it at the tree line. “We have the arrows and the unburned village placing the Tharn at this scene, and thanks to Senior Assistant Wesselbaum, we can be relatively certain that this particular band of blood-drinkers is from the eastern quarter of these woods.”

Kinik scratched her head. “Friend Lynus, was the village smashed by Tharn, or by burrowing thing?”

That was a good question.

“Tharn didn’t smash the village with arrows, but they definitely loosed arrows into it,” he said.

But why?
he thought.
Were they shooting at the beast?

“Tharn magic is poorly understood,” Edrea said, “but there have been rumors of them forming magical bonds with beasts.”

Pendrake withdrew a kerchief from his pocket and began wiping his spectacles. “Reviewing some of my recent conversations with those among the Circle,” the professor said, “I believe they may have accidentally intimated the same sorts of things.” He put his glasses back on. “I imagine, though, that my reputation discouraged them from being as open with me in these matters as I might have liked.”

Lynus had a horrible thought.

“Suppose the Tharn did bond with a burrowing beast large enough to smash houses. If it burst into the center of the village, most everyone would panic and flee for the fields.”

“I can see why you’d assume that, whelp,” Horgash said with a scowl.

“He’s right, Horgash. And I see where he’s going with this,” said Pendrake. He nodded for Lynus to continue.

“But as they flee, a volley of Tharn arrows starts dropping them, and they are corralled back into the village. When it’s over, the Tharn leave, gathering the arrows they can find and covering their tracks. They might also cover any tracks the beast left here in the village.”

Horgash looked around the village and scratched at the stony growths on his chin. “When he tells the story that way, I wonder why I didn’t see it before.”

“And that,” said Pendrake, “is the benefit of six years at Corvis University.”

Lynus knew he’d made a mess of things today, but in that moment he felt taller than any ogrun, and as regal as a Raelthorne.

They made another pass through the ruined village before packing out. Lynus was walking through the scattered walnuts near the hole when a glint of metal caught his eye. A bit of fine chain. He reached down and pulled on it, drawing a Morrowan sunburst medallion from the mud. The clasp on the chain was broken, but it was obviously intended to be worn as a necklace, probably a woman’s if the weight of chain was any indication.