“And the cliff could have come down by itself, doing the same thing,” she answered. “There’s no point in getting upset until we know. I doubt that we’re going to see any further trouble out of them for tonight, anyway.”
She was quite right; the rest of the night was as quiet as anyone could have wished, and with the first light, they both went out to see what, if anything, Tad’s trap had caught.
When they got to the rock-fall, they both saw that it had indeed come sliding down into the river, providing a bridge about halfway across, though some of it had already washed farther downstream. But as they neared it, and saw that the trap had caught a victim, Blade was just as puzzled by what was trapped there as she had been by the shadows.
There had been some effort made to free the creature; that much showed in the signs of digging and the obvious places where rubble and even large stones had been moved off the carcass. But it was not a carcass of any animal she recognized.
If a mage had taken a greyhound, crossed it with a serpent, and magnified it up to the size of a horse, he would have had something like this creature. A deep black in color, with shiny scaled skin just like a snake or a lizard, and a long neck, it had teeth sharper and more daggerlike than a dog’s. Its head and those of its limbs not crushed by the fallen rock were also doglike. They couldn’t tell what color its eyes were; the exposed slit only showed an opaque white. She stared at it, trying to think if there was anything in all of the stories she’d heard that matched it.
But Tad had no such trouble putting a name to it.
“Wyrsa,” Tad muttered. “But the color’s all wrong. . . .”
She turned her head to see that he was staring
down at the thing, and he seemed certain of his identification. “What’s a wyrsa?” she asked sharply.
He nudged the head with one cautious talon. “One of the old Adepts, before Ma’ar, made things like this to mimic kyree and called them wyrsa. He meant them for a more formidable guard dog or hunting pack. But they couldn’t be controlled, and got loose from him — oh, a long time ago. Long before Ma’ar and the War. Aubri told me about hunting them; said that they ran wild in packs in some places.” His eyes narrowed as he concentrated. “But the ones he talked about were smaller than this. They were white, and they had poison fangs and poison talons.”
She bent down, carefully, and examined the mouth and the one exposed foot for poison sacs, checking to see if either talons or teeth were hollow. She finally got a couple of rocks and carefully broke off a long canine tooth and a talon, to examine them more closely. Finally she stood up with a grunt.
“I don’t know what else is different on these beasts, but they aren’t carrying anything poisonous,” she told him, as he watched her actions dubiously. “Neither the teeth nor the claws are hollow, they have no channel to carry venom, and no venom sacs at the root to produce poison in the first place. Venom has to come from somewhere, Tad, and it has to get into the victim somehow, so unless this creature has poisonous saliva. . . .”
“Aubri distinctly said that they were just like a poisonous snake,” Tad insisted. “But the color is different on these things, and the size. Something must have changed them.”
They exchanged a look. “A mage?” she asked. “Or the storms?” She might know venom, but he knew magic.
“The mage-storms, if anything at all,” Tad said flatly. “If a mage had changed wyrsa deliberately, he wouldn’t have taken out the venom, he’d have made it worse. I’ll bet it was the mage-storms.”
“I wouldn’t bet against it.” Blade knelt again to examine the head in detail; it was as long as her forearm, and most of it was jaw. “Tad, these things don’t need venom to hurt you,” she pointed out. “Look at those canines! They’re as long as my finger, and the rest of the teeth are in proportion. What else do you know about wyrsa?”
He swallowed audibly. “Aubri said that the bigger the pack was, the smarter they acted, as if part of their intelligence was shared with every other one in the pack. He also said that they were unbelievably tenacious; if they got your scent, they’d track you for days—and if you killed or hurt one, they would track you forever. You’d never get rid of them until they killed you, or you killed them all.”
“How comforting,” she said dryly, standing up again. “And we’ve hurt one and killed one. I wish we’d known this before.”
Tad just shuffled his feet, looking sheepish. “They might not connect us with the rockfall,” he offered tentatively.
“Well, it’s done and can’t be undone.” She caught something, a hint of movement out of the corner of her eye, and turned her head.
And froze. As if, now that she and Tad knew what the things were and the wyrsa saw no reason to hide, a group of six stood on the bank across from them. Snarling silently. Tad let out his breath in a hiss of surprise and dismay.
Then, before she could even blink or draw a breath, they were gone. She hadn’t even seen them move, but the only thing across from them now was a stand of bushes, the branches still quivering as the only sign that something had passed through them.
“I think we can safely assume that they do connect us with the rockfall,” she replied, a chill climbing up her spine. “And I think we had better get back to the cave before they decide to try to cross the river again.”
“Don’t run,” Tad cautioned, turning slowly and deliberately, and watching where he placed his feet. “Aubri said that would make them chase you, even if they hadn’t been chasing you before.”
She tried to hide how frightened she was, but the idea of six or more of those creatures coming at her in the dark was terrifying. “What charming and delightful creations,” she replied sarcastically. “Anything else you’d like to tell me?”
He shook his head, spraying her with rain. “That’s all I remember right now.”
She concentrated on being very careful where she walked, for the rain was getting heavier and the rocks slicker. It would do no one any good if she slipped on these rocks and broke something else.
Well, no one but the wyrsa.
“Has anyone ever been able to control these things?” she asked. “Just out of curiosity.”
The navigable part of the track narrowed. He gestured to her to precede him, which she did. If the wyrsa decided to cross the river, he did make a better rear guard than she did as soon as he got turned around. “Not that I’ve ever heard,” he said from behind her. “I suppose that a really good mage could hold a coercion-spell on a few and make them attack a target he chose, but that would be about the limit of ‘controlling’ them. He wouldn’t be able to stop them once they started, and he wouldn’t be able to make them turn aside if they went after something he didn’t choose. I certainly wouldn’t count on controlling them.”
“So at least we probably don’t have to worry about some mage setting this pack on our trail after bringing us down?” she persisted, and stole a glance over her shoulder at him. His feathers were plastered flat to his head, making his eyes look enormous.