The beast, a juvenile not much bigger than Galpook herself, was let out of the stockyards. It ambled out stupidly on all fours, then tipped back on its thick, flattened tail to sniff the air. On its head was a semicircular crest of bone. Its face was long and drawn-out, ending in a flat, toothless prow. The thing’s flatulence, like that of many herbivores, was constant, and the thick methane smell made Galpook woozy.
She walked over to the creature, patted its rough gray hide, and, in one fluid motion, moved beneath the beast and closed her jaws in a swift chomp on the underside of its neck.
As it died, the shoveler let out a massive scream, pumped through its head crest, reverberating, the sound almost deafening Galpook. Blood poured as though through a sluice. The taste of blood helped to heighten Galpook’s senses. She thought in passing that perhaps such a kill might be a good prelude to future hunts.
Then she and her assistant set to work practicing a skill she’d learned from her father’s companion, Cadooclass="underline" butchery. With long, sharp knives they flayed the beast, removing its skin from the base of the neck to the tip of the tail in one neat, thick, fat-layered sheet, gray on the outside, blue, white, red, and yellow with membranes, connective tissue, blood, and fat on the inside. The ground was soaked, a mud of blood and dirt squishing underfoot. The skin was carried quickly to one of the equipment carts. Other carts were already loaded, including one with a massive spherical object covered by a sheet of leather.
Egglings—some fifty or sixty, for none had been culled from the most recent hatchings—had been brought by their creche master to watch the great hunting pack depart. Galpook motioned for them to come close and eat of the shovelmouth. Timidly, they did so, waddling up to its now-hideless carcass. “Go ahead,” said Galpook. “Dig in.” First one, then another, then, finally, all of them set to work on the corpse. Galpook always found it cute, watching little children claw and tear at massive bones, trying to get their muzzles around, say, a thick femur. She clicked her teeth in satisfaction, then walked over to the caravan. Using the foothold pockets hanging from the saddle—designed to prevent her toeclaws from piercing the bossnosed brute’s hide—she scrambled up into her seat, and with a loud cry of “Latark!” urged her beast into motion.
Although a hornface could easily accommodate four large riders, Galpook’s primary group consisted of ten animals each with but one rider. They headed off in single file to the west. The sun, a fierce white point, was about halfway up the purple sky. Wisps of white cloud were visible, as were three pale daytime moons, two crescent and one almost full.
Off in the distance, Galpook thought she saw a giant wingfinger, rising and falling in the sky. Such giants mostly fed on fish and aquatic lizards, but there were a few who would simply follow a blackdeath for days, waiting for it to make a kill, knowing that even the most famished of the dark horrors would leave huge amounts of meat on a carcass. Perhaps this one, far away, was indeed following the blackdeath Galpook and her team were now pursuing.
Like shovelmouths, lumbering hornfaces were also known for their pungent flatulence. Galpook, in the lead, was taking the full brunt of the excesses of ten beasts, for the steady daytime wind was blowing from behind. Conversely, her own pheromones—Galpook had been named hunt leader because she was one of those rare females who were in perpetual heat—were being blown ahead of the pack, instead of back on the hunters. It was too bad: exposure to such smells honed the senses.
The Ch’mar peaks made a ragged line ahead, like torn paper. Galpook thought back to how they had looked before the great eruption of sixteen kilodays ago. It still startled her sometimes to see them as they now appeared, the cone of the leftmost caved in on one side, one of the mountains in the middle now half again the height it used to be, a third burst open like a puckered sore.
Galpook didn’t really like riding. The constant up-and-down heaving of the hornface’s flanks was uncomfortable. But she needed to save her strength for what was ahead. She looked over her shoulder. Behind her, nine more hornfaces lumbered along, each with a Quintaglio rider. Four of the brutes hauled wagons. And behind them, mostly on foot, the secondary team.
The sun was rising with not-quite-visible speed. Insects buzzed. The hunting party continued on. The Ch’mar peaks grew closer, closer still, until at last they loomed before the caravan, black and gray bulks, their stony perfection marred by some scraggly vegetation here and there. At intervals, little waterfalls trickled down the tortuous rock faces, black sands accumulating around the bases of the mountains. The pounding of the hornfaces’ round feet kicked up gray clouds of rock dust. The great wingfinger Galpook had spotted earlier continued to glide high above in vast, leisurely circles. Occasionally it cut loose its call, a high-pitched keening that also seemed to waft on the hot currents of air.
Night fell. They continued on. As they passed the foothills, early the next day, the members of the secondary team stopped, waiting until they were needed, but Galpook’s primary team forged ahead. At last they came to the ruins of the Temple of Lubal, one of the five original hunters.
Much damage had been done to the temple grounds in the last great series of landquakes, sixteen kilodays ago. Dybo’s mother, Lends, had been contemplating ordering excavations here shortly before her death, but the latest lava flows had plugged up the ruins so severely that no practical digging was possible and Dybo had abandoned the idea. There was a smooth gray plain of stone, looking like a calm lake on a leaden morn, stretching out before them. The tops of buildings poked through, like half-sunk ships, but they were strangely twisted, as if in the heat of the eruption they had partially melted, flowing into malformed shapes. Of the Spires of the Original Five, representing the upward-stretched fingers of the Hand of God from which Lubal, Katoon, Belbar, Mekt, and Hoog had sprung, only two were still intact, poking like lances out of the basalt plain. The other three had tumbled, breaking into the tapering stone disks from which they’d been assembled, like chains of vertebrae half-caught in the volcanic rock.
Everything was still, frozen in congealed lava, a tableau, the aftermath of the volcanic fury that once had come close to destroying the Capital. From here, three days ago, a blackdeath had been sighted. But where was the beast now? Where?
Galpook looked up. The center point of the wingfinger’s circular gliding was almost directly overhead. If it had been following the blackdeath, then that creature must be nearby. But perhaps the giant flyer had given up on the blackdeath, and had decided instead that the hunting party itself represented the most likely source of its next meal. Galpook wondered idly what defense she’d employ against the beast should it swoop down upon her, its great hairy wings flapping, its long, pointed prow snapping opened and closed.
Galpook swung slowly off the shoulders of her bossnosed mount and lowered herself to the ground. Her toeclaws ticked against the gray basalt, but the underside of her tail, callused though it was, slid smoothly over the flat, dry rock. She walked back to the first of the hornfaces that was pulling a wagon and motioned for her assistant, Foss, who was riding that creature, to help her. He slid down to the ground and came over to join Galpook. Together, they clambered into the wagon and uncovered the device Gan-Pradak, the chief palace engineer, had built for them. At its heart was the skull of a tube-crested shovelmouth, glaring white in the sun, which was now well past the zenith. The skull, including the giant backward-pointing crest, was longer than Galpook’s arm-span. The engineer had plugged the pre-orbital fenestrae and eye sockets with clay and had attached a great bellows supported by a wooden brace to the back of the skull.