Gawain shuddered in gloom. Whatever was tracking the caravan must also possess some mystic vision, something of at least the power of the eldengaze. Hopefully it hadn’t glanced over its shoulder lately.
It was almost noon, as far as Gawain could tell from the slivers of light above the forest canopy, when he cut across the trail left by the darkness Eldengaze had seen. Gawain simply stood and stared, stunned. It wasn’t one track. It was nine, as best he could tell. Eight men, though for all he knew it could be eight Grimmands, and some kind of beast, four-footed by the spoor. What manner of beast, he couldn’t say, except that it was large and powerful, because from the drag-marks in the soft earth around him, it looked very much like four men were struggling hard to contain and control the beast. It was heavy too, from the depth of the strange footprints it left; three toed, like an enormous clover-leaf, with a broad lobe of a heel, and at least eighteen inches across. Gawain had never heard of the like, much less seen it.
Large though the beast might be, and heavy too, it was still able to keep pace with the caravan travelling north along the Jarn road. As Gawain followed the trail, loping along quietly in the soft and churned earth, his eyes told him of the occasional struggle that the men running either side of the beast had endured, and their attempts at keeping the creature moving roughly parallel to the unseen road a good mile to the east. The unknown group had made no attempt at concealing their tracks whatsoever, and from the gouges in the earth, whatever it was clearly wanted to veer away from its present due-north course and head straight for the caravan, and that was worrying indeed.
Gawain had to be cautious though, and remember the hunt, forget all else lest worry for Elayeen and the others fogged his judgement or clouded his senses to the point where the enemy became alerted to his presence. His face grim, an arrow tightly strung in his right hand, he set himself a gentle pace, one that would allow him to hear his enemy’s progress through the forest long before they became visible, and one that would keep the enemy from hearing his approach.
An hour later Gawain paused to drink from a stream of cool clear water, up-flow from the point where the darkness had crossed. He emptied his water skin and refilled it, and then sat quietly, listening intently. He thought he heard a guttural, unnatural sound, far in the distance, but the gurgling of the stream had drowned it. When he’d drunk his fill, and heard nothing more save the woodland sounds he expected to hear, he moved off again.
It was mid afternoon when he heard the sound again, much louder this time. It was an explosive, deep and resonant cry, more like a bark than a growl, a short kraaahl! of a cry which seemed to bounce from the trees and sent a tingle down Gawain’s spine. Nothing in nature made such a sound, Gawain knew it instinctively. And instinctively he slowed his pace, and moved off the track that the darkness had made through the forest, and began to close upon his quarry with the greatest of caution.
22. The Beast
It was perhaps an hour later when he heard the heavy beast snorting, and an accompaniment of rattling chains. He moved a little further to the west of the darkness, so that his scent couldn’t possibly swirl through the trees to reach whatever foul nostrils waited in the gloom. And waiting was what they seemed to be doing. A little later, Gawain was stunned to hear voices, accents thick, and Gorian from the sound of it. Silently, and using all the skills of concealment and stealth he’d ever been taught by every forester and woodsman, hunter and soldier he’d ever known, he crept closer.
“…they keep stopping!” a voice hissed, irritated, but sensible enough to understand that noise carries even in a forest.
“It is obvious. They are moving faster so they are tiring faster, and need more frequent rest periods. Stop your whining,” a second said softly, the voice carrying a sneer of authority in its nasal tones.
“The beast knows they’re there and it’s hungry! But for the black chains we’d all have been Kraal-food days ago!”
“Aldayan is right,” A third voice muttered, “The chains and collar are the only thing keeping us alive, though they didn’t do Karayan much good when the Kraal had him for breakfast three days ago. If you hadn’t gotten us all lost in this threken Eastland forest we could’ve loosed the beast and been back across the river days ago.”
“And whose task was it to obtain a map of Callodon, Brayan of the Eastguard? Who was it who guided us across the river Ostern using a map obviously made by some Pellarnian resistance scum!”
There was a sullen silence, broken only by the snorting of the beast, and the clink of chains being drawn tighter. Gawain eased forward, keeping low, moving from tree to tree.
“Now that we have that settled,” the sneering voice asserted, “Be silent while I use the Jardember.”
“If they really are travelling straight along a road, Darimak,” the one called Aldayan announced, “Then after keeping that pace for the best part of four hours they’ll be resting for a lot longer yet. Besides, it’s time to eat, I’m starving and so are the rest of the boys. Keeping this threken Kraal under control is threken hard work!”
“Then eat! But do it in silence and stop your whining or by Morloch’s Eye I swear, Jerraman demGoth will hear of your insubordination!”
“Jerraman demGoth ain’t here. Jerraman demGoth ain’t the one hanging on the end of a threken chain with a threken Kraal at the other end of it. Jerraman demGoth is probably sat on his black arse in his black tower on the banks of the Eramak in Pellarn Province stuffing his face with roast beef an’ feeding sheep to his pet threken Graken.”
Not if Jerraman demGoth and his pet threken Graken were on the Jarn road two days ago, Gawain thought to himself, slowly inching his way up into a tree. People so rarely look up, and up would give him a better view of his quarry with far less risk to himself than creeping any closer would entail.
“I warn you, Aldayan you witless oaf of a guardsman, one more word and I shall feed you to Jerraman demGoth’s pet Kraal-beast! It would rid me of your constant whining and sate the beast’s appetite enough to make the rest of us safer, at least until those Eastlanders lead us to the town that lies at the end of their road!”
More silence, except the clink of metal upon metal.
Gawain eased himself out onto a stout bough, and froze. Below him, and about twenty yards away, stood the beast, and the eight men with it. The sight of it was blood-curdling.
The Kraal-beast was immense, standing at least seven feet tall on its four stubby and knee-less legs, though the weight of the monster in the soft earth of the forest floor had left the four-lobed prints some six inches deep in places. It was short-necked, broad chested, and its skin, if skin it was, seemed to consist of great armoured plates, as though sheets of steel had been riveted together to give it form, the blackness of aquamire swimming and moving within them. Its head was awful, so large that a great hump of bone and muscle on its shoulders was needed to support it. A single horn, black and sharply pointed, rose up from its nose, perfectly positioned to rip open the underbelly of a horse, and Gawain didn’t doubt for a moment that with a single toss of that immense head, a horse could be flung clean over the creature’s back. One round black aquamire eye at least twelve inches across bulged from the top of the flat forehead, though from time to time a pair of crusty armoured lids blinked over it, like the lids of the grotesque eye-amulets worn by Morloch’s emissaries. Short, boar-like tusks protruded from each side of the creature’s mouth, but its teeth, if any, were not visible.
The size and weight of the Kraal-beast was staggering. Gawain could scarcely believe what he saw. Certainly no arrow thrown or shot from a bow wielded by man or elf could hope to defeat such a creature. A grappinbow of the kind Martan of Tellek had described, used to fire immense iron bolts and ropes across a gorge or river for bridge-building might put a dent in the Kraal. Perhaps. The thing looked as though it could charge through a village of stone-built houses, end to end, and not be troubled in the slightest.