Verminaard scooped up the runes and pulled himself into the saddle. His companions already raced ahead of him, their horses spurred to a brisk trot toward the northern horizon, where his centicore rumbled and his glory would come thrashing through the high grass.
Their horses were good ones, swift and tireless. By mid-morning, the centicore was clearly in sight, lumbering ahead of them, its stout legs churning with a slow and ceaseless power.
It was an ugly thing, Verminaard agreed, as he had been told it would be. Its thick skin was armored with dried mud and algae, its arm-length tail bulbous and spiked like a mace. As tall as a man at its shoulders, the centicore was a young one, no doubt, since its horns were smooth and unscarred. An old folktale said that to meet its stare was death, that the very rocks of the Khalkist foothills were the remains of hapless hunters who had been turned to stone by its gaze.
Of course, Daeghrefn maintained that the legends were nonsense. He had killed two centicores himself, and both times, he claimed, he had looked the thing full in the face as he took its life. There was no magic in the creature, Daeghrefn said, no power except the fear prompted by the wild imaginings of the mountain peoples.
Osman was one of those mountain folk, however, and as the horsemen closed on the centicore, he ordered the young men to each side of the plodding creature. With a grunt, the monster lurched into a small box canyon between two cliff faces. After all, Daeghrefn had appointed the huntsman as a guardian of sorts, and if the centicore turned to charge, the lads would be at its flanks, at a safe distance from its swiveling horns and its legendary gaze, and the shortsighted focus of its anger would fall on Osman and the troopers alone.
Circling to the right of the beast, his horse brushing against the rock face, Verminaard leveled his lance. The horse quivered nervously beneath him, the foul smell of the beast thick in the moist, windless air. Verminaard stood up in the stirrups, locked his legs at the knees, and leaned forward in the saddle.
To his left, skidding over the black volcanic rubble, the centicore reached the rocky cul-de-sac. Slowly and stupidly the beast turned, facing Verminaard. In that time- two seconds, perhaps three-their eyes locked in the shadow of the cliff walls, and the boy saw the dull, shallow stare of the beast, its eyes as drab as wet slate.
It barely knows I am here, he thought exultantly. And now as it turns, I shall charge it and…
Then something flickered deep in the eyes of the monster.
Verminaard weaved above the saddle. For a moment, he believed he had imagined that strange, cold light that seemed to emerge from the heart of the beast, chilling yet beckoning him with some deeply malignant pressure. And yet it was not imagined, was not his own superstitious promptings, for how could his own mind freeze him, confuse him, and fascinate him so?
Verminaard blinked and fumbled his lance. The language of that light was something he almost knew, as though the thoughts of the beast had reached out across half the canyon and across a thousand years, embracing his thoughts and beginning a long and cold instruction. And yet he was not sure what it meant. The look had been cloudy, elusive, as indecipherable finally as the runes he tried vainly to read.
I shall charge it, he thought. I shall drive it into precious Aglaca.
His thoughts wrenched back to the moment, and he spurred his stallion. The beast turned and fled him, rumbling through the rough, gravelly stretch toward the other wall of the canyon where Aglaca waited, his lance leveled, his horse calm and steady.
Now! Verminaard thought, goading his horse after the barreling centicore. Now, while the thing is intent on Aglaca!
It would be a tough kill for an untried lad. The centicore lumbered toward Aglaca, its mouth agape, its horns swiveling like scythes. Aglaca blinked nervously and steadied his trembling lance, drawing again on his extraordinary courage as the monster closed the distance by half, the plodding strides gaining fluidity until the beast moved surprisingly fast over the gravelly edges of the cul-de-sac.
Then, unexpectedly, Osman rode between the lad and the charging animal. The older man had seen disaster unfolding from his post at the mouth of the cul-de-sac, and he realized at once that the post he had taken, chosen because it was the most likely place the beast would charge, was barely close enough to rescue the imperiled Solamnic youth. He spurred his horse over the gravel, shouting and whistling to distract the monster, and he reached Aglaca not a moment too soon, turning to face the centicore and raising his lance to receive its charge. The soft flesh at its breast lay exposed by the centicore's reckless assault, and all the veteran huntsman had to do was hold the lance as the creature drove itself upon the tapered shaft, then return with his seventh kill. His deeds would be sung in Castle Nidus, in the villages among the foothills, and by huntsmen as far away as Sanction and Zhakar.
So the hunt would have ended, had not Verminaard's pursuit distracted the beast.
Wheeling awkwardly on its forelegs, scattering gravel and earth as it turned, the centicore stumbled toward the charging youth. Alarmed, seeing the danger to his master's son, Osman spurred his horse forward, riding beside the centicore, seeking a soft spot, a vulnerable place in the filthy array of scales along the monster's back.
Suddenly the beast lashed out with its thick, macelike tail. The barb whistled through the air and crashed into the side of Osman's helmet with a ring that Robert's pursuing column heard a hundred yards from the mouth of the canyon.
Osman toppled from the saddle and fell heavily to the ground. For a moment, he tried to rise, his arms extended weakly above his lolling head, but then he shivered and lay still just as Verminaard's lance drove deeply, with a crackling of gristle and bone, into the breast of the centicore.
The impact of lance against the monster thrusted the young man back into the bracings of his saddle, and the breath fled from him as the air spangled with red light. He remembered only falling and being caught by the cords.
Then he remembered nothing at all.
Aglaca was kneeling beside him when Verminaard came to his senses. The huge hulk of the centicore lay not ten yards away, the broken lance embedded deep in its vitals. The shadows of horsemen surrounded him, and as he tried to stand, the seneschal Robert grabbed him under the arms, lifting him and bracing him.
"What happened here?" Daeghrefn's sharp voice asked, like a distant humming in his ears.
"The centicore is dead, sir," Aglaca volunteered. "And it was Verminaard's brave charge that killed it."
"And not only the centicore," Daeghrefn declared icily. "Osman has fallen to the same rash assault. Attend to his body and leave the centicore here for the ravens and kites. The beast is a shameful kill."
Verminaard could not believe his bad fortune.
He'd had scarcely a second's exulting, scarcely a moment to look across the churned and broken ground to the steamy, hulking body of the beast, to revel in his courageous act.
It was Aglaca's fault, the Voice soothed, gliding into his deepest thoughts as he sulked in the saddle. He could have joined the ceremony, closed the circle of the hunt with a simple cast of the spear. He refused, out of a stupid and blind loyalty to a vanished god
… and Osman died for Aglaca's pride and his helplessness. If he'd been man enough to kill the centicore…
Verminaard rode home in the middle of the column, Aglaca beside him. Over the mile and a half from the box canyon to the edge of the plains, the smaller lad never spoke, but when they reached the foothills and the narrow pass that led through Taman Busuk and south toward Castle Nidus, Aglaca finally addressed him. The brisk wind that met them erased all memory of the grasslands, the rank smell of centicore, and the sweat of terror-stricken horses.