Stormsong stood waiting as patiently as any other native guide Kate had ever used. The wind played with the few strands of golden hair that dared to come out of Stormsong’s thick braid down her back.
In the north lay several mountains offering possible nesting sites. Hiking for days through virgin forest without GPS, blindly looking for something that could swallow her whole wasn’t Kate’s idea of smart hunting.
“You said that they nest on ley lines. That means they’re attracted to magic?”
“They will nest where it runs strongest.”
“They say magic is measurable. Can you tell, from here, which of those mountaintops has the most?”
The elf girl shot her a hard look and then, reluctantly, nodded. “Yes, of course I can.”
Stormsong cleared a flat rock of twigs and dust. From her waist pack, she produced a small, loosely bound, hand printed book, bundled in a layer of suede. She flipped through the pages of complex designs until she found what she wanted. Laying the book flat, Stormsong copied the page out onto the rock with what looked like a grease pencil, only the black lines glittered in the sunlight, like it contained flecks of ground metal.
Kate frowned at the design as Stormsong carefully rewrapped the book and tucked it away. So far it wasn’t any more impressive than Earth “magic,” although a hell of lot more orderly.
“Stay back,” Stormsong whispered, blocking Kate’s closer inspection with an outstretched arm. “Do not get metal near it, or make any loud noises.”
That annoyed Kate, although she wasn’t sure why. Normally natives using magic didn’t piss her off, even when it was blatantly nonsense. What Stormsong had copied out looked oddly similar to computer circuit board design.
Taking a deep breath, Stormsong chanted out a series of deep, guttural vowels. As if the mantra had thrown a switch, the black lines suddenly gleamed gold. A glowing sphere appeared over the spell, and slowly a model of the local mountain range took form. From the distinctive stone outcrop, Kate recognized that the centermost mountain was the one they stood on. Watery lines appeared in the model, of varying width and brightness, bisecting the mountains.
Stormsong peered at the model and then looked up, scanning the horizon. “There,” she whispered as she pointed at a far peak. On the model, the line crossing over it was the brightest and widest. “That’s the strongest ley line in spell range.”
The elf extinguished the spell, and smudged out the lines on the rock with her foot.
Kate examined the distant mountain with her binoculars; it looked like the rest of the Allegheny range, an oversized rounded hill. One section of it seemed slightly bald. She unpacked her digital camera and its tripod. She had reluctantly packed these, but it seemed that they were going to come in handy. Training the telescopic lens onto the treeless area, she set the automatic capture on it, took her hands off the camera and let it capture a perfectly still image. Once the timer hit zero, she gave it another second, and then started to enhance the image.
The bald area enlarged to a wasteland of rock, strewn with broken timber.
“Well, what do you think?” Kate asked the elf girl.
Stormsong eyed the picture and then glanced out at the mountain, featureless to the naked eye. “Yes,” she said flatly. “That’s a nesting site.”
Well, let’s not jump up and down with joy. Kate packed away the camera. “What exactly are the wyvern’s weak spots?”
Stormsong picked up a stone and scratched out a rough drawing on the rock. “The joints in the wingtips, here, here, and here. If you can cut this membrane,” she indicated the taut skin of the wings, “you can ground it, which will keep it from striking and flying off. Its mouth and eyes are weaknesses. Death magic works, as does light magic.”
Yeah, right. “Poison? Or does it avoid poisoned bait?”
“It’s an indiscriminate eater, but it takes massive amounts of poison to affect it, which we don’t have.”
“How big is this?”
“They are not as large as a dragon, but they are considerable in size.”
Considerable my ass, Kate thought, it has to be huge. But she kept her verbal opinion to a snort. “How do your people kill these things? Or do you just pick up the scales after they die?”
Stormsong lifted up her bow in answer.
Well, that explained the declining elf population.
“It’s stupid to attack it on its own grounds,” Kate stated. “We’ll lure it to us, and we pick the shots.”
“This is not a simple animal.”
“The smarter it is, the better. We give it an option. To land in among the trees and hope for a clear takeoff, or take something here on its favorite landing site.”
Stormsong gazed at the blood-splattered rocks. “We will try it your way.”
Baiting a trap should have been simple. Kate had done it a thousand times before, but she hadn’t counted on the size of the wyvern compounding the process. Stormsong maintained that nothing smaller than one of the kuesi would do as bait. There was getting the beast up the steep mountainside, and then trying to control it once it smelled the blood. Luckily she thought to bring her tranq pistol, although the dosage, set for a tiger, was only enough to make the massive beast groggy instead of putting it down completely.
“Well, you have some uses,” Stormsong said, looking toward the setting sun. “It will not be long. It will come soon.”
As a byproduct of working too long in the third world, Kate carried a computer attachment to detect incoming planes as standard equipment. She set it up, unsure if it would work on the wyvern. She liked to cover all bases.
The sun set and the sky slowed deepened into violet and then color leached out to total black. Kate had tucked herself in among the rocks, and as the sky went to dark, tugged on night goggles. She could pick out Stormsong close by, silent, an arrow nocked but not drawn.
From her computer stick tucked in among the rocks, she heard quiet pinging.
“It’s coming,” she called to Stormsong.
She’d made the mistake of setting it up so she couldn’t see the screen, worried only about keeping her hands free. Now, with the gentle chime indicating a closing wyvern, she didn’t want to move out of her niche to check the screen for its direction.
Then she saw it, and wasn’t about to leave hard cover.
She hadn’t accounted for how much space the massive creature would take up on the rock ledge. She’d tucked herself into a niche that seemed a safe distance from the kuesi. She scuttled backwards along the overhang as her vision filled up with monster. Stormsong’s drawing had been anatomically correct — a wedge head on a snake neck, wings of membrane like a bat’s, a lizard leg redone on a falcon template — but lacked scale.
My God, that can’t possibly fly. But it was. Or to be more precise, plummeting — rocketing down out of the night sky toward the kuesi. She planned a shot to the wyvern’s vulnerable eyes; she’d expected them to be wide and round as an owl’s, specialized for night hunting, done on a more massive scale. In the blur coming toward her, she couldn’t see anything remotely looking like an eye.
The wyvern came out of its dive, wings unfurling with an audible crack, legs swinging forward, hooked talons longer than her arm flaring into overextension. Even drugged, the kuesi saw death and bleated. The cry cut short with the impact of bodies that she felt through the bottom of her feet. The kuesi, that had stood another head taller than her, was suddenly rabbit-small under the wyvern.
“Oh God, oh God,” she whispered. Was Stormsong insane? Kill that? With what?