Wyvern
Kate Emerson wasn’t sure what pissed her off most. Was it being jerked off her first trip back to the states in years, to be shoved into an alternate dimension filled with undocumented zoology, real magic and snotty elves? Or was it that her smattering of ten human languages and knowledge of dozens of Earth’s more obscure cultures weren’t worth a damn with the Elfhome natives? Or was it that this time around, her native guide managed to always make her look frumpy?
Stormsong came up the mountainside with all the fluid grace of a big cat, annoyingly beautiful in the muggy August heat. The nimble elfin bitch didn’t even pant. She paused at the edge of the kuesi’s blood, and murmured, “I told you that your ‘tracer’ would not work,” and continued up the rock face in bounds that would impress mountain goats.
“I found this much!” Kate shouted after Stormsong.
“What an idiot couldn’t see of the blood trail,” the elf’s voice came from somewhere above, “a blind man could smell.”
Kate picked her way through the swimming pool’s worth of viscera to rescue her tracer off of the massive kuesi skull. When she’d heard that the railway project manager for the elfin crew was a female, Kate expected to skip all the normal macho butthead stuff.
Stormsong waited on the summit beside Godzilla-sized footprints. The feet of their kuesi-snatcher mimicked the structure of birds: three digits pointed forward, one backwards. The talons had gouged the granite as deep as eight inches in places. Old, weathered scratches indicated that the stone outcropping was a common perch site.
“Dragon?” Kate had checked her zoology reports last night, but they varied wildly from gigabytes of data on wargs — frost-breathing cousins of wolves — to three words on phoenixes: still believed mythical. The dragon section was nearly as scant, it stated “While apparently dragons vary in size, they are reported to be very large, fire breathing, and dangerous. Approach with caution.” Duh.
Stormsong shook her head. “Too small. Wyvern.”
Kate tucked into an overhang and scanned the nearby mountain peaks with her binoculars. In the broad valley below them, the railroad right of way cut its straight raw path through the primal forest of the elfin world. Out in the vicinity of Pittsburgh — which fate chose as the human portal into this dimension — they had bulldozers, dump trucks and earthmovers working their way east. The low-tech elves, though, working from the sparsely settled coast, only had hand tools and the kuesi. Until a connecting road was complete, trading between the two races was at an impasse. Construction had been going smoothly until the wyvern decided that the work crew was a moveable feast.
Speaking of which, Stormsong had poised herself on a rock projection like a piece of bait.
“Get down.” Kate pointed to the protected ledge beside her. That only earned her a cold stare. Damn elves. “Move over here.”
“I see better from here.”
“The wyvern could take you from there.”
The elf made a noise of understanding. “The wyvern. It sleeps. It hunts at night like a whou.”
“Whou?”
Stormsong sighed at Kate’s ignorance. “A night bird! It flies very quietly, and calls whou, whou, whou.”
Kate caught herself gritting her teeth and worked her jaw to ease the tension. What was it about Stormsong that pissed her off so much? Kate wasn’t sure if it actually was the elf girl herself, or just the irritation with the general situation finding focus on the only breathing target.
Kate returned to her scanning. “These wyverns. Do they den alone or in mated pairs?”
“Mated pair. Like falcons, females are larger. The nest will be on a peak, high up, on bare rocks with dead branches and such to keep the young in. One mate will stay on the nest and the other will hunt while there are eggs in the nest. Once the eggs are hatched, both will hunt to keep the young fed.”
So they were either dealing with a solitary creature, perhaps a youngster, or two beasts — which meant near the nest they’d have to be careful watching their backs.
“Your viceroy wasn’t completely clear,” Kate said. “What are we supposed to do with the wyvern?”
“Do?”
“The viceroy said this was a royal hunting preserve. On Earth, when an animal on a preserve causes a problem, we trap it and move it to another location where it’s not in conflict with humans.”
Stormsong shook her head. “Wyverns return to their nesting site, year in, year out. If we moved them, they would return next year.”
“Zoos on Earth might take a mated pair.”
Stormsong gave a musical laugh. “You might want to risk your life to trap such beasts, but not I. And no. Wyverns need magic to exist. They would die on Earth. Here on Elfhome, they nest on the strongest ley line in their range.”
Native guides always believed in magic, but here it was a real, measurable force. Trying to determine reality from superstition was going to be a real bitch.
“What else about this animal can you tell me? What does it look like? Is it a bird?” Damn big bird if it was, carrying off the elfin cousin of an African elephant.
“Wyverns have four limbs like a bird, not six, so they have no front limbs. Their bones are light but strong, as are their scales.”
“Scales?”
“These are wyvern scales.” Stormsong tapped the vest she was wearing. Kate had never seen the elf without the vest of overlapping scales. Earlier attempts to look at it closer had been rebuffed. From the distance, the stuff looked like steel hammered into seashell shingles, and then somehow dyed blue.
“It would be nice to know what the fuck I’m dealing with here. Can I see the scales?”
Stormsong hesitated and then undid something on her left side and peeled back part of the scales. The scales were attached to a leather undergarment with a slit laced shut. The elf female undid the lacing and then wriggled a bit. If Kate had been a man, the show would have been extremely interesting.
The vest was lined with hard leather. Over it had been tacked a strong cloth, to which scales were sewn into an overlapping pattern. All in all, the vest weighed only ten pounds, but a goodly part of it would have come from the leather. The edges of the scales were sharp and slowly cutting through the leather.
“Why don’t you grind down the edges?”
“It is organic carbon. There is nothing stronger that we forge that would grind it down. It can take a pistol bullet at close range without breaking. It is permitted only to the domana and sekasha caste.”
“So this thing…wyvern…is bulletproof?” How the hell was she supposed to kill it?
“It has points of weakness.”
“How does it grow? Does it ever shed, like a snake?”
“No.” Stormsong wriggled back into her vest and laced it back up. “The young are born with down, which is why the parents are so protective. They are vulnerable until they molt.”
So Kate was fighting an armored attack helicopter. Oh golly joy. She wished that she’d thought to bring a missile launcher. She doubted that even her Winchester African with its.458 caliber rounds had enough stopping power for this, but she had nothing bigger back at camp, or on this planet. Kate studied the blood pool. If this splattering of blood and viscera on the southern exposure was from the wyvern arriving from their camp, then the blood trail on the northern exposure was probably from the wyvern taking off. She climbed up to another summit, hoping that Stormsong was right about the wyvern’s sleep habits. She’d seen falcons strike like bullets enough times to be nervous as she scanned the northern horizon.