“What does Inyene wants with all of these, anyway?” I murmured as I hurriedly dropped it behind my head into the woven carry-basket on my back. It would take a long while to fill the basket, but I had until evening, didn’t I?
Which isn’t too far off, Nari, I told myself. The sun had sunk lower between the mountains – it went down early up here.
“Oh, tozut!” I swore as I picked up my pace and tried to remember what Mother had told me.
“The other animals are just like you and me. They have friends. Favorite places. Spots they go when they are tired, hungry, or injured,” she had said. This had been on the night before my Testing – three days out in the wilderness with nothing but my wits to keep me alive. Every Daza went through it, and not every Daza came back.
“You find the signs and follow them. Where there is one, there will be another.”
“Right,” I turned my attention to the rocks and scrubby grasses around me and tried to remember the lessons my mother had taught me.
“Close your eyes.” I did.
“Relax.” That was much harder to do, especially as the wind was growing colder and was starting to make me shiver. And the fact that I had a heavy set of shackles attached to my feet. And that I was still hungry. And exhausted. And a slave for no reason whatsoever.
“Just breathe, Nari,” I muttered to myself, allowing my lungs to fill with the biting-cold mountain air, and then letting it out slowly. In, out, in, out.
Right. What do I hear? The high whine of the winds. The rustle of the grasses and scrubby trees. What do I smell? The metal-like tang of rock, all around me.
And then something else. Right there, right on the edge of my abilities. It was something fragrant but also heavy, like the scent from one of the rarer bushes of the plains. I could still remember the squat, heavy bush had sap that almost smelled like a Trader’s Frankincense. We children of the Western Wind had tapped and harvested it. But this scent was mixed with something acrid, like the charcoal from a day-old fire.
But there shouldn’t be any of those bushes up here, should there? I opened my eyes for the final test. What do I see? There were the slopes of the Masaka mountain around me, now picked out in fresh detail after I had calmed and focused my mind. There was the flatter patch of rock and scree that I thought of as a ‘path’ that led up to the cliff.
And there was the claw-print.
It was obvious now that I had stopped to really look at my surroundings. The scree of small gray and yellowing rock chips had scattered across the ‘path’ in front of me in a natural spreading pattern. Apart from one place, where there was a slight depression in the gravel chips, and three deeper ‘cuts’ down into the softer brown earth below.
And it was big. The depression of the foot must have been almost the entire length of my hand and forearm together, and the three scrapes at the end – from the talons – were about one hand’s breadth apart. There wasn’t much of anything that could make that large of a print.
Well, anything other than a dragon that was.
So I had found a scale, and there was the print. The dragon with the black scales had definitely come this way. I picked up my feet and moved a little further towards the cliff, hoping that it was long gone.
Another one! Right there between two tumbled boulders, where it must have been scraped off, was another large black scale. Now that I really looked, I could even see the slight striations of scratch marks across the boulders. A good scratching spot in the full sun, I thought with a small smile. That would have been midday, wouldn’t it? Hours and hours ago now.
I grabbed the next scale and continued my search in the wide bowl of broken rocks underneath the cliff, finding two more scales, and then a further few here and there. It looked as though the great beast had stopped to preen itself!
I was so overjoyed with my lucky find that it was only when a tumble of smaller rocks spilled from the slopes nearby that I realized that I wasn’t alone – and in fact, I was being hunted.
Stonedogs!
Fear tore through me. Gone was my exhaustion and tiredness, to be replaced by the sudden need to get away from here as fast as possible.
The first of the creatures known to us as stonedogs was already padding slowly, warily, down the slope towards me. It was about half my size, about as large as one of the small mountain ponies that occasionally picked their way around Inyene’s keep.
But that was where the resemblance ended. The stonedogs had skin like plates of rock that sighed as they moved. How had I not heard it coming? I cursed myself for being so enamored of the six black dragon scales that were even now sitting in the carry-basket on my back.
Stonedogs were the most fearsome predators of the World’s Edge mountains – or at least, that was what the gossiping guards always claimed. They had squashed muzzles, and a set of four eyes, two large oval ones in the front like a wolf’s, as well as two smaller ones that never closed on their temples. This was one of ways that made them so deadly – they could see all around themselves.
The first stonedog was the biggest. I heard a rasp of breath and the hiss of rocks as the ‘plates’ behind its ear-holes rose and flared, like a mane.
“N-nuh… nice doggy?” I took a step backward, my chain clanking between my feet.
The thing growled, a deep echoing rumble of a sound in the back of its throat – to be joined by the growls of two more, slightly smaller stonedogs padding down the slope, flanking it.
They were between me and the path down the slope. I couldn’t go back that way. There was a cliff at my back, and the rise of the slope on the other side.
But a low growl told me another stonedog was approaching from that way, too.
“Predators exist to hunt. That was the story whispered into their blood at the Beginning.” My mother’s words fluttered up to me. Not comforting.
But they did help. Hunting things chase smaller things. That’s what they do. As soon as I ran, that would trigger their hunting instinct, and I would be doomed.
“Easy, easy now,” I heard myself say, my voice quavering as I slid my foot back across the rocky ground, and then the next foot.
No sudden movements. Don’t give them an excuse.
With a thump, my ankle hit the rocky wall behind me. Oh no. I hadn’t thought that I was that close. What was I going to do? I risked flicking a glance up to the cliffs around me – maybe there was a handhold, a ledge.
With a guttural bark, the bigger ‘lead’ stonedog jumped forward as soon as my head turned. Panic filled me.
I slammed one of my feet on one of the tumbled boulders at the base of the wall and jumped, my hands slapping the rock, sliding.
“Ach!” I had caught a handhold and was swinging my legs up just as there was a furious scrabbling beneath me, right from where my legs had been.
Oh no oh no oh no-
My heart beat in time with my panic as I hooked a foot onto a rock and exchanged hands for a higher hold, and then another. There was a deep, grating bark from beneath me and the snap of air against one of my calves. The lead stonedog was trying to leap up at me, and it was very close indeed.