Before it could make a sound, something exploded out of the darkness beneath the thick branches of the fallen pine, a dark-furred blur that moved in perfect silence and hit the wax spider like a stone from an old Romanic war engine. The spider was driven across six feet of croach, its legs flailing helplessly as its attacker ripped savagely at the joint of its head and body.
Before Tavi could fully register that the attack was happening, the creature ripped the spider’s head from its body, and the rest of it collapsed to the surface of the croach, its legs twitching and flailing.
Tavi blinked. The animal that had dispatched the wax spider crouched atop its corpse. Its fur was dark, and it had a long, sinuous body. Its limbs were powerful, solid, spreading into clawed paws like those of a mountain lion. Its head, though, was more like that of a wolf, or a bear, with a broad muzzle full of sharp and-obviously-wickedly effective teeth upon what looked like incredibly powerful jaws.
Tavi recognized a deadly predator when he saw it-and even if that one weighed no more than the wax spider, it had dispatched the Vord as easily as it might have a rabbit.
The beast turned its glittering yellow eyes toward Tavi and Varg, and silently bared its impressive, green-spattered fangs.
“Do not make eye contact,” Varg rumbled quietly. “Back away slowly. Do not lift your hands.”
Tavi glanced at the Cane, then they both began backing away. Tavi glanced back, and saw the other Canim looking on, weapons actually drawn and in their hands. The Hunters hadn’t drawn when the Vord had come close to them-but this creature, it seemed, merited more of their respect.
Once Tavi and Varg had reached the Hunters, they all continued backing away, until the site of the kill was a good fifty or sixty yards off, before the Hunters seemed to relax, putting their weapons away.
“Close,” Anag said.
“What was that thing?” Max muttered to Tavi. “I couldn’t see.”
Tavi described it briefly to Max, and turned to Varg. “Is that animal native to this land?”
“To all of Canea,” Varg said. “One of the finest hunters in it. Strong, swift, intelligent.”
“Smart enough to set a trap for the Vord,” Tavi mused. “It had clawed open the croach specifically to attract a wax spider.”
Varg flicked his ears in assent. “It does not surprise me. They are wise enough to use such ruses.”
“They are mad,” Anag said. The golden-furred Cane crouched, watching in the direction of the small hunter, his body language tense, wary.
“Mad?” Tavi asked.
“Brave to the point of insanity,” said the eldest of the Hunters. Tavi turned to blink at the Cane, who had been silent since he had spoken to Varg on the roof of Lararl’s headquarters. “It will fight anything to protect its territory, or its kill. It fights without hesitation, without fear, without reservation.”
Tavi lifted his eyebrows. “But it is so small.”
The Canim looked at each other, amusement in their body language. “Aleran,” Varg said, “do not be deceived by its size. I’ve seen one kill a full-grown, armed warrior. It gutted the fool while it tore his throat out, and was gone before the body hit the ground. Even if you fought and killed one, it would do everything in its power to take you with it. I’ve never heard of one being slain without leaving scars.”
“Look,” Kitai said quietly.
Tavi looked up, and saw three more wax spiders approaching the area. The hunting beast was nowhere to be seen, nor was the body of the dead spider. Instead of raising an outcry, though, the worker Vord simply went about repairing the damaged croach, then beat a hasty retreat.
“Not even the Vord want more trouble from him tonight,” Varg rumbled.
The Hunter nodded, and said, in the tone of someone quoting a proverb, “Only a fool seeks a quarrel with a tavar.”
Tavi blinked again, first at the Hunter, then at Varg.
“Come, Tavar,” Varg growled. “Let us go around, and leave your little brother to his meal.”
Twice more, Kitai signaled them to halt, and twice more, enemy Vord passed by. Once, they were more of the frog-things they had already seen. The second group was farther away, larger, and more indistinct. Neither encounter resulted in an outcry.
Tavi was sure they were getting close when they encountered the first active wax spiders, gliding silently through the glowing green pines in a row that stretched out into the distance to the north, like a line of ants trundling back and forth from their nest to a fallen fruit tree, each bearing a swollen bellyful of glowing green croach with it, partially visible through their translucent bodies.
It wasn’t hard to imagine where they were going-to spread the gelatinous substance over the bodies of the dead. It wouldn’t matter to the spiders whether the corpses were of their own kind or of the Shuaran warriors who had already engaged them. To the Vord, any dead flesh was simply food to be covered and consumed by the croach.
At a nod from Tavi, Kitai adjusted their course, and they began following the wax spiders’ back trail, searching for their point of origin. As they did, they saw other Vord, traveling in a solid file on the far side of the spiders, also heading to the north. These creatures, though, were far larger. Many were the tall, lean, Cane-shaped forms they had seen at the fortifications. Most were the thin-limbed frog-things. Others were larger than either of the first-much larger, nearly the size of a gargant, but scuttling along like crabs or lobsters. They must be the warrior forms his uncle had described from the Vord incursion into the Calderon Valley, but they were too far away to be seen any more distinctly. He proceeded with caution.
A shape rose through the trees in front of them, something that looked like an enormous tumor on the smooth surface of the croach. It was the size of a small building, and Tavi recognized it at once. Whirls and loops of the eerie wax substance had been piled up to form the building. He had seen two others like it-once in the Wax Forest, back near Calderon, and once in the labyrinth of caverns beneath Alera Imperia.
In the croach all around it were hundreds of smaller shapes, almost identical to the structure in form, but on a much-reduced scale, perhaps the size of a large pitcher of beer. The nearest of the lumpy shapes was no more than thirty feet away, and Tavi stared intently at it.
Something inside the lump of croach stirred fitfully, a movement of shadows against the green luminescence, and went still again. A small portion of green-black chitin pressed wetly against a surface as translucent as murky green glass.
Tavi inhaled slowly, understanding.
It was a nursery.
That would be the time to enact the plan, then.
He signaled the others to hold their position and, to his considerable surprise, they complied-even Kitai. That had been the part he was most concerned about, the most unpredictable part of the plan. He’d had a number of different contingencies thought out, if they’d been necessary, but it looked like the basic shape of the past couple of days had carried some momentum. They’d listened to him without question.
One worry down, he supposed.
He moved slowly forward, studying the nearest alien blister, or egg, or whatever it was, fascinated, comparing it to the far larger hive structure in the near distance. Each of the smaller shapes contained a Vord of some kind, perhaps taking sustenance from the croach that surrounded the blister. He thought he could see the vague shape of one of the frog-form Vord, in miniature, in the nearest hive. A few feet away, a second blister of croach contained a half-sized version of a wax spider. The queen, it seemed, was already working on creating more of her kind.