On the other hand, there wasn’t a lot of damage to the tree trunk itself; the hunters had made several attempts, but it didn’t look as if they had tried mindlessly, over and over, until they were exhausted.
That meant that they were intelligent enough to know when their task was impossible.
Or intelligent enough to recognize that the decoys were just that. In that case, they might well have reasoned that we would have to come back to get the packs before we left, no matter where we hid ourselves overnight.
And if it had been anger that motivated their attack, their anger did not overcome them for long.
Blade looked around, shivering, as if some of the same thoughts had occurred to her. “Let’s get the packs and get out of here,” she urged. “Fast. They haven’t shown themselves by day before, but that doesn’t mean they won’t now. We might have given them a reason to.”
He swarmed up the tree far more quickly than he had thought possible a few moments before, and this time he didn’t notice his sore muscles. There was no need to concern himself with ropes on the way up, which made things simpler. He untied the packs when he got there, and dropped them and the rope that held them in place down to the ground, leaving the decoys stuck in the forks of the branches. If the shadow-lurkers were still deceived by the decoys, they might linger, giving him and Blade that much more of a head start.
He went down the tree twice as fast as he had gone up. Every nerve in his body jumped whenever an unexpected sound occurred, and the quicker they left, the happier he would be. There was just a moment more of delay during which they stowed the rope and donned the packs, and then they were on their way without even a pause for a meal.
He wasn’t hungry, and he suspected that Blade wasn’t either. His insides were all knotted up with tension, and he kept hearing old gryphon proverbs in the back of his mind, about well-fed gryphons and the inability to fly out of danger.
Not that I can fly out of danger now—but it’s better to run or fight on an empty stomach than a full one!
It was barely dawn by the light, and the morning fog had not yet lifted. The entire world was painted in dim grays and blues, vague gray shapes and columns appearing and vanishing in white mist. In a way, that was all to the good, for rather than using the trees as cover, they counted on the fog itself for primary concealment. They were able to make much better time that way, and since they were taking their bearings from the north-needle rather than the sun, it didn’t matter that everything was obscured and enshrouded.
The fog itself had an odd, bitter aftertaste to it, nothing at all like the sea mists Tad was used to. The air felt heavier and thicker, although that was probably his imagination. The fog condensed on his feathers, and he kept shaking himself so that it didn’t soak in. Poor Blade had no such ability; her hair was damp, and she would probably be shivering if they weren’t trotting along fast enough to stay warm from exertion.
He found himself trying to think what kind of creature the hunters could be. Those stories about Ma‘ar and all the creatures he made—what sort of things did he do? Father said that most of what he did was to make copies of the creatures that Urtho developed. . . .
The makaar had been analogs of gryphons; had there been analogs of hertasi and kyree? The tervardi and dyheli were natural creatures, surely Ma’ar had not bothered to make analogous creatures to them; why would he? But then again, why not? Ma’ar had never hesitated to do or try anything he considered might give him an edge.
He made cold-drakes and basilisks, but those weren‘t analogs of anything Urtho made, so there goes Father’s theory. There were smaller creatures, but I can’t remember anything that might correspond in size to the hunters. Did he do flightless makaar? But why would he, when a makaar on the ground would be more helpless than I am? The shadow-hunters can’t be analogs of hertasi, because I’m certain that what we’ve been seeing is four-footed, not two-footed.
Had anyone else involved in the Mage Wars made a four-footed hunter the size of a horse?
I just can’t remember anyone ever going into a lot of detail about the mage-made creatures. Maybe Snowstar would know, but he’s rather effectively out of reach at the moment.
He kept his ears trained on the trail behind them, and his eyes on Blade’s back. She was a ghost in the fog, and it was up to him to keep track of her and not lose her. Her pale beige clothing blended in beautifully with the fog—but so would his own gray plumage. For once, it would probably be harder for the hunters to see them than vice versa.
Whatever is behind us is clever, very clever. They weren‘t deceived by my false trails, and they either gave up on the decoys or recognized them as false, and if they gave up temporarily, there’s no guarantee that they won’t realize what’s going on when they come back. They didn’t find us, but they might not have bothered to look. Or they might have needed to hunt and feed, and they couldn’t take the extra time to figure out where we were. Why should they? They knew we’d come out in the morning, and all they have to do is wait for us to come out and get on our way and they could trail us again. They could even be hoping we will stay put in that campsite, since it has been proven to protect us once.
He wanted rock walls around him; a secure place that these shadow-hunters couldn’t dig into. He wanted a steady food source that the shadows couldn’t frighten away. Once they had both, they could figure out ways to signal the help that must be coming.
And he wanted to see them. He wanted to know exactly what was hunting them. Traps might give him more of a chance to see one, provided that any injured or dead hunters remained in the trap. And there was no guarantee of that, either.
They freed the injured one from the deadfall. That was what I heard last night; they were freeing him.
That meant cooperation, which meant more intelligence. Wolves might sniff around a trapped fellow, might even try to help him gnaw himself loose, but they would not have been able to remove parts of a deadfall trap except by purest accident, and then only after a great deal of trial and error effort.
He had heard them last night. It had not taken them long at all to free the trapped one. And they had done so without too many missteps, if there were any at all.
The snare—they didn‘t just chew the leg or head off the rabbit it caught and then eat the rest. The noose of the snare was opened. They killed the rabbit, pulled the snare open and removed it, then pulled up the snare and looked it over.
That was evidence of more intelligence, and certainly the ability to manipulate objects. What that evidence meant to their survival, he couldn’t yet tell.
But he had his fears, and plenty of them. He could only wonder right now if Blade shared those fears. Maybe it was time to stop trying to shelter her and start discussing things. Maybe it had been time to do that a couple of days ago.
Blade stopped in the shelter of a vine-covered bush.