With the level of light in the shelter down to the point where Tad was nothing more than a large, dark shape, she turned her attention back to the outside.
Nothing had changed; the creatures of the canopy continued to go about their business with the accompanying noise, and now the luminescent insects she had noted before began to flit about the foliage. She allowed herself to relax a little further. It just might be that whatever had been following them had decided to leave them alone.
But don’t count on it, she cautioned herself. Assume the worst. Assume that they’re still—
Something moved out in the darkness.
Just a shape, a shifting of shadow, but she knew that there should not have been a shadow in that place, much less a moving one. Instantly she was on the alert.
Whatever it was, it was big. Bigger than the tame lion she’d seen in Shalaman’s menagerie. She knew to within a thumb’s breadth just how wide a distance lay between each bush, how tall a young tree was. The head of the shadow would rise a little above hers, she thought, though she had the impression of a very long, slender neck; the chest briefly obscured one bush while its hindquarters still lay behind another. Altogether, that would make it about the size of a horse, perhaps a little smaller. She couldn’t quite tell how bulky it was, but the fluid way in which it moved and the fact that it melted in with the other shadows so well suggested that it had a slender build.
Her view was a narrow one, limited to the wedge of forest between the two long walls of log—yet in a moment, as she concentrated further, she knew that there was more than one of those creatures out there. One shadow flitted as another froze; further flickering in the distance suggested that either they were incredibly fast, or there might be a third.
Two, at least, for certain. But they don’t seem to know we‘re here.
The first of the shadows darted suddenly out of sight; a heartbeat later, and a bloodcurdling scream rang out into the night.
Blade’s heart leaped into her throat, and she felt as if she had been plunged into ice water. Tad only wheezed in his sleep. It took all of her control to remain frozen in place. She had an impression that those shadows possessed extremely sharp senses, and that if she moved, even obscured by branches as she was, they might spot the movement, or hear it.
Silence descended, as Blade tried to get her heartbeat started again. It was a good thing that she had heard the death scream of a rabbit before, or she would have thought that one of those somethings had just killed a child.
Now, as if the canopy dwellers had only just noticed the shadows’ presence, the silence extended up into the tree-tops. Only the insects and frogs remained unaffected, chirping and trilling as calmly as they had a moment before.
She blinked—and in the time it took her to do so, the shadows vanished, at least from her view.
She did not breathe easier, however. From the silence, she knew that they were still out there, and she had no intention of letting them know her location.
I can only hope that they haven’t had the bright idea to come take a walk on top of the sheltering logs.
The very idea made her want to shiver. The back of her neck crawled as she imagined one of those creatures sniffing around the brush piled above her head. There was nothing between her and these hunters stronger than a layer of canvas and a pile of flimsy branches and leaves. Surely if one of the hunters got close, no amount of brush and herb juice would obscure their scent. Surely the scent of the fire alone would tell the creature that they were here—
But I’m assuming that the thing is intelligent, that it would associate a fire with us. I’m assuming that it’s hunting us—it could simply be here, we could have wandered into its territory. We haven’t seen any large predators nor any sign of them; this could simply be the local equivalent of a lion.
And yet. . . something about the way it had moved had suggested intelligence and purpose. That could be her imagination, but it might be the truth. It was wary; it moved carefully, but when it did move, it was quick and certain. That was an indication of something that either had incredible reflexes, or something that decided very precisely what it was going to do before it acted.
In any case, there was no reason to take any chances, and every reason to be painfully cautious. No matter what else, these creatures were hunters, predators. The behavior of the canopy dwellers showed that, and demonstrated that the animals that lived in the treetops recognized these beasts and feared them.
Even if those things are just the local equivalent of a lion, they’re still big, they’re still carnivorous, and they’re hunting. There’s no reason to put myself on their menu.
A new thought occurred to her; what if they were not dealing with one enemy, but two? One that had brought them down, and a second that was hunting them? In that case, there were two possibilities; the shadows were either wild hunters that had nothing to do with what brought them down—or they were allied with it. In the second case, the shadow shapes out there could be the equivalent of a pack of hunting hounds, trailing them for some unknown master.
It was not something that was unheard of; that was the problem. Urtho wasn’t the only mage that created living things. Ma‘ar did, and so did others who never participated in the wars. The ability to create a new species was a mark of prestige or a symbol of ability above and beyond the status of being an Adept. Among the higher mages there were a handful that had created new creatures for centuries before the war with Ma‘ar.
That gave her yet another possible scenario; a mage who hunted other intelligent creatures, and had chosen them for his next prey. Their chasers were his dog pack—
Ma’ar had been one such, and she’d heard tales of others, both from her own people and from the Haighlei. That, in fact, was one of the reasons why the Haighlei restricted magic use to the priests; they had a tale of a sadistic, powerful mage who captured men and brought them to his estate to hunt them like beasts. A brave young priest had suspected what was happening and allowed himself to be taken, thus giving his fellows an agent within the spell-protected walls through which they could channel their own power to destroy the mage.
That was how the story went anyway.
She grew cold all over again, and restrained herself from running her hand through her hair nervously. Her imagination went wild again, taking off all on its own. She had never had any difficulty coming up with scenarios for trouble. So—suppose that one of the neutral mages came down here to hide before the Cataclysm. Even if he wasn’t Urtho’s equal, he could have guard-beasts and birds to warn him when anything was in the area. The Haighlei never travel through the wilderness in groups of less than ten, and that includes a priest, but all he‘d have to do would be to stay quiet while they passed by. Unless they actually stumbled over him, they wouldn ‘t find him. Then he could hunt individuals at his leisure.
There was just one problem with that hypothesis; no one had ever been reported missing from here. Unless a Haighlei was so antisocial as to sever all familial and clan ties and go off wandering the wilderness, someone would have raised a fuss by now if anyone had vanished, wouldn’t they? Woodcutters, explorers, trappers, hunters—they all told friends, neighbors, and fellow workers where they were going, what route they intended to take, and when they should be back. They did so especially if« they were going off into poorly-explored lands; if something happened, they would want others to mount a rescue as soon as possible.