Perhaps there had been a few Haighlei hermits who had wandered in here only to vanish—but not enough to provide sport for a maniacal manhunting mage.
Well, all right, then—what if he came here to escape all the conflict. What if he wants to be left alone, and he brought us down to keep us from revealing his presence?
But that didn’t make any more sense than the first hypothesis. There had been others through here; they had all flown overhead on the same route. Why hadn’t they been brought down?
Because we were the only gryphon-human pair?
But there had been Aubri and Judeth. . . .
Oh, winds. I should be a storyteller.
She gave it up as a bad notion. It was getting too complicated, and usually, the more complicated a hypothesis was, the more likely it was that it was incorrect.
Stick to the two possibilities that work best. Simple answers work best and are more likely. First: we hit some kind of accidental—thing—that brought us down, and now we’re having to guard ourselves from the local predators which are following us because we ‘re hurt and look like easy prey. Second: something down here brought us down for reasons of its own and now is hunting us. And the first is more likely than the second.
That didn’t mean they were in any less danger. Wolves and lions had been known to trail wounded prey for days, waiting for it to die. And if her guess about the size of the shadow-creatures was right, they were a match for Tad, which would make them formidable opponents indeed. If the shadows knew that she and Tad were hurt, that might well put them in the category of “wounded prey.”
A bird called; another answered. And as if that tentative call had been meant to test the safety of the area, or to tell other creatures that the menace had gone for the moment, the canopy above began to come to life again.
She sighed, and let her shoulders relax. She cast a wry glance at her slumbering companion.
Somehow, Tad had managed to sleep through it all.
Tad yawned, and stretched as best he could, blinking in what passed for light in their shelter. When
Blade woke him for his watch, she had looked tired, but that was to be expected. She also looked nervous, but how could she not be? He would be nervous on his watch, too. Nervous sentries remained living sentries; relaxed ones had short epitaphs.
“I saw something out there that might account for the way everything goes silent every so often,” she offered. “It was pretty big, and I think there were two or more of them. I didn’t see anything more than a shadow, though. One of them caught a rabbit, and every bird and beast in the canopy shut up and stayed that way for a long time.”
Well, that accounts for the nerves, and for the fact that she looks tired. Nerves wear you out and she didn‘t have much of a reserve when she began her watch.
“Huh.” He glanced out into the darkness, but didn’t see anything—and some of the local creatures were acting as if they were in the middle of a singing competition. “Well, if silence means that there’s something out there we should be worried about, I’d say you can sleep in peace until dawn. I’m surprised I slept through it. I must have been more tired than I thought—or my medicine is stronger than I supposed.”
She managed a ghost of a chuckle. “It got my hackles up, I can tell you that much. It’s quick, very quick, and I didn’t hear a rustle of leaves or a single broken twig. I’d say the one I saw was about the size of a horse, which would make it a formidable predator in a fight. It might have been my imagination, but I thought that it acted fairly intelligent.”
“So do the big cats, hunting,” he reminded her. “Everything acts intelligent in its own realm. Drink your painkillers, get some sleep. We’ll see what’s out there in the morning. I set some snares before the rain—”
She chuckled again. “Don’t count on there being anything left. I think you were robbed. That may have been where our shadows found their rabbit.”
He sighed. “Probably, but it was worth doing. And we’ll know how intelligent they are by how the snares were robbed. If it was just snatch-and-eat, then they won’t be any more intelligent than the average lion.”
“Good point.” She settled herself down at the back of the shelter; he was certain she was going to get a good rest for the rest of the night, so long as things stayed noisy up in the canopy. The mattress of boughs and leaves he’d made was very comfortable, and she should be able to lie cradled in a way that permitted her to sleep soundly, rather than fitfully. With her shoulder supported so that pressure was off her collarbone, she should be in less pain.
He had not wanted to mention it before this, but he had already seen signs on their backtrail that something was following them. It could have been anything, and he hadn’t seen any signs that their follower was particularly intelligent—just alert and incredibly wary. The trouble with telling her now was that there was nothing to prove whether or not the shadowy creature that was following them was something they had just picked up today, or if it had been following them all along and only now was feeling bold enough to move in where he might catch a glimpse of it. It could certainly match the description that Blade had given him of the creature she saw tonight.
That basically was all that he knew as a fact. This, of course, had nothing to do with what his own imagination could conjure up.
In his imagination, the sighting confirmed the fear that he’d had all along, that they were being followed for some specific purpose. The only question in his mind now was if the purpose was a simple one—kill and eat the prey—or something more complicated than that. If it was simple, then these creatures were simple predators, and relatively “easy” to deal with. If, however, there was a larger purpose in their minds—if his imagination was right, and in fact these creatures had something to do with their accident—then he and Blade were in very deep trouble.
Such extreme caution combined with curiosity as these “shadows” had exhibited was very unlike most predators he was familiar with. In general, large predators tended to shy completely away from anything that was not familiar, at the most watching it from a distance. Only if the unfamiliar object continued to remain in a predator’s territory would it gradually move in closer to investigate it.
Predators are very nervous, very jumpy. They have a lot of competition, and normally they can only take down large creatures if their prey is old, sick, very young, or wounded. Prey that fights back is to be avoided, because the predator can’t afford to be injured in the struggle. Being a carnivore is an expensive business, as I well know. When your dinner can run away from you, you’re going to spend a lot of energy hunting and killing it. Vegetarians have.it easy. Their dinner can’t move, and they don’t have to do anything other than walk up and open their mouths.