Stalking the Beast

by Howard Andrew Jones

"What do you mean?" Onderan shouted back. "You're offering me gold?" Again came that cackling laugh. "You'll pay me to expose myself to your arrows? How stupid do you think I am?"

  Elyana's response was immediate. "That's not what I'm suggesting."

  Drelm inched a little farther down the cliff, then slipped out of her sight behind an outthrust rock.

  There was a sudden silence, and Elyana felt a stab of fear. If Onderan were to turn his head he'd spot Drelm, and that wand would make short work of him.

  She steeled herself to hear a sudden cry of triumph and to see the heavy body of her best friend plummeting through the air, half-dissolved by a sorcerous blast.

  But the silence continued. Finally, Onderan asked a question. "What are you suggesting?"

  Melloc's smile was wry. "I was wondering the same thing," he whispered.

  She ignored the boy and raised her voice once more. "You know I don't care about backwoods farm rats, Onderan! What I need is a sorcerer. One who can do a lot of damage!"

  There was still no sign of Drelm. Where had he gone?

  Onderan's laugh was shorter this time, not mocking so much as incredulous. "You want to work with me?"

  "It's not about wanting, Onderan. The River Kingdoms aren't exactly swimming in competent sorcerers. I had no idea how dangerous you could be."

  Elyana knelt, head low so that it didn't rise higher than her cover, then lifted three arrows from her quiver and set one to her string.

  "Hah! I'm full of surprises!" Onderan shouted back. "What do you want, and what will it pay?"

  She waited until she saw Drelm's foot and leg extend from behind the outcrop that blocked him. Fifteen feet lay between him and the ground now.

  "Answers," Elyana shouted. "And there are—"

  Onderan's voice rose in a strangled cry of fear and surprise.

  A green bolt of energy soared through the air toward the figure on the cliff. Drelm's body stiffened on impact. There was the briefest delay, and then he dropped feetfirst.

  Elyana was already launching arrows, seized by cold dread. It was no easy thing to shoot a hidden target, so she was thankful for Onderan's screams of outrage. Each time he shouted impossible things about Elyana's ancestry she had a better chance of homing in on his exact location.

  Beside her, Melloc was chattering some worry about Drelm, and asking if it were alright to charge, and how she knew she wasn't hitting the captain. She was too busy firing arrows skyward in rapid succession to answer him. Ten were airborne in as many seconds. The moment the last one left the string she whistled for her horse.

  Calda galloped up from where she'd been hidden in the thicket behind them. Elyana vaulted into the mare's saddle without touching the stirrups. At the same moment, she heard a scream of pain. Onderan, not Drelm.

  A single touch to her horse's flank set the animal galloping forward.

  "He might be faking it!" Melloc called.

  Elyana's answer was only a mutter. "Not for long."

  The dun mare raced across the meadow at full speed, but it felt impossibly slow to Elyana until she'd rounded the large boulder and saw an armorless Drelm standing over the prone, motionless body leaking blood from a gruesome head wound. A hand axe, the proximal cause of all the blood, was buried deep in the sorcerer's forehead. One of her own shafts was stuck through his thigh.

  Elyana grinned in relief, and her keen sight caught the smoking armor a few paces beyond Drelm, discarded by the half-orc. Arrow shafts sprouted like strange plants in the vicinity of Onderan's hiding place.

  "Nice work," Drelm said in his low, deep voice. "He was too busy with the arrows to spell me again."

  Calda let out a long snort as Elyana swung down. The mare danced lightly with ears erect.

  "It looks like you and Melloc are both going to need armor repair," Elyana said. "Any serious injuries? You could have broken your legs."

  Drelm patted his left shoulder. "A little scorched. Nothing serious."

  Elyana knew better than to ask if he wanted her to take a look.

  There was a thunder of hoofbeats as Melloc rode into view, his eyes brightening in relief as he reined in his gray gelding and dropped down. "Are you alright, Captain?"

  Drelm grunted, and his small eyes looked briefly over Melloc. He must have satisfied his own curiosity about the young man's health, for he didn't speak.

  Melloc then joined Elyana in looking down at the body. He let out a low whistle. "I thought we were going to catch him alive."

  "I planned to." Drelm pointed to the axe. "That would have hit him in the arm, but he ducked."

  Elyana looked over the body. Onderan didn't look so much like a sorcerer as he did a trapper who'd survived in the wild alone for long years. He wore a furred hat, leather pants, a filthy white shirt, and a threadbare blue vest that seemed mostly fashioned from patches and mud. His beard was wild and thick, its gray shot through with a little brown.

  Elyana bent to the long, rather elegant black wand that lay beside the dead man's gnarled fingertips.

  "Is that safe to touch?" Melloc asked her.

  "Likely so," Elyana told him, although she was scanning it now without laying a hand to it.

  Melloc's mouth twisted sourly. "I know you're

  not supposed to search sorcerers because they trap

  their clothes. But I'm not sure we'd want to touch him anyway."

  "I've never met a spellcaster who trapped his or her clothes," Elyana answered. She didn't add that she'd searched her fair share of dead shadow wizards. Her old friend Arcil had once snorted in contempt at the idea that wizards and sorcerers would booby-trap their belongings, as they'd constantly be triggering the traps themselves.

  "Check the horse." Drelm pointed to where a black gelding was tethered by its reins to a spindly elm a good arrow flight toward the end of the gorge. Onderan's mount stood in a bed of clover, munching contentedly.

  The horse had been stolen from Hamdan's farm, and, judging from their worn but cared-for look, so had the saddle and saddlebags.

  Melloc hesitated. "Do you think the saddlebags are trapped?"

  Now the boy was being cautious? Elyana answered without looking up, and kept the rebuke from her voice. "Onderan didn't seem to be much of a planner. They're probably fine."

  While the boy stepped away, she crouched and considered the blood-smeared face with its slack, gap-toothed jaw. The protruding haft of Drelm's throwing axe was distractingly just a finger span off true center.

  She began the grisly business of searching the corpse by putting her right hand to first his arms, then his chest, then his legs. The battered dwarven bracelet she wore around her bicep was ugly enough that she always hid it beneath her sleeve, but it had served her well for many years. In addition to lending a small enhancement to her physical prowess, the bracelet, by accident or design, thrummed whenever she made contact with any other enchanted item, or a limb favored by one.

  Onderan proved remarkably free of any sort of magic, apart from the wand. That and the gold in his coin purse were the only clean things in his possession, unless you counted the stolen food and wine in his saddlebags.

  She stood puzzling over the matter with Drelm while Melloc brought up the horses and retrieved the half-orc's gear.

  Drelm had grown accustomed to Elyana's methods over the years, yet couldn't seem to leave off pacing as he waited. He didn't push her to speak until she'd been staring down at the gold she'd dumped in the grass for a long time.

  Drelm's explanation was simple. "Sometimes," he said in his low rumble, "people are just born wrong. They can fake it for years, and then something breaks inside them. All the hate and crazy comes out at once."

  "Yes," Elyana acknowledged. "There's an awful lot of gold here, though, Drelm."

  "Surely. Stolen from the farmers."

  "I don't think so. For starters, Onderan went on a spending spree in Delgar a few nights ago. Remember? Demid told us about it last night. And I'm pretty sure that was before Onderan killed Ha
mdan and his family. You saw how recent the kills were."

  Drelm grunted at that. "Maybe he killed someone else, first."

  "Who? A tax collector from Daggermark? This is Livondar's coinage, and it's freshly minted. How'd he get it? Everyone says Onderan's been living alone in that nasty shack since before Delgar's founding."

  Drelm frowned, and Elyana could almost see him working through the possible conclusions. "Do you think someone paid him to kill Hamdan and his family?"

  She shook her head. "Not unless Hamdan was a lot more important than we realized."

  Drelm scratched his jaw. "Well, Hamdan wasn't any kind of warrior or wizard in disguise, but I suppose there might have been a bounty on him."

  There were a lot of bounties on Riverfolk—part of the region's draw was how far it lay from civilized lands, so it attracted its fair share of those with prices on their heads. "Even if that's true," she answered, "why pay someone who's not a bounty hunter to go kill him instead of killing Hamdan yourself?"

  Possibly because someone didn't want to get his hands dirty, she thought to herself. She didn't believe that, though.

  Melloc returned with Drelm's horse, Charger, and stepped slowly over, clearing his throat to announce himself.

  "What if Onderan here got paid to do something else, but needed a horse and some supplies to get there?" the young man asked. "It was just his bad luck we stopped at Hamdan's place to water our horses this morning."

  "Maybe." Elyana frowned. "We'll let your father decide what to do with the money. If Hamdan has any relatives, I suppose they should get a cut of it."

  "That sounds fair," Melloc agreed.

  Drelm grunted appreciatively. As a devout follower of Abadar, god of laws and civilization, Drelm was ever concerned with fairness, though he applied the principles rather bluntly.

  "Let's gather up the gold." Elyana reached down to gingerly touch the wand beside the dead man's fingers.

  Its surface was mostly smooth, and cool to the touch. Her bracelet hummed gently against her upper arm, as she'd expected.

  A set of decorative rings was set a thumb-width from the wand's slimmer end. There was an unfamiliar sigil carved on its lower haft, but no obvious activation word. "This seems a little odd too, doesn't it?" she asked.

  Drelm just looked at her, so she explained further. "If he'd ever had a wand like this before, we would have heard about it."

  "That's a fair point," Melloc agreed. "There's a lot about this whole thing that's strange."

  That was an understatement. From the horrifying moment they'd come upon the massacre of man, woman, child, and beast at the farm, through the moment they'd tracked the horse and rider into the wilderness, Elyana had been puzzling over the explanation. Melloc, though, was being groomed for an officer's post, so she wanted to see what he would make of it. "What do you think should be done?"

  The young man required little time to reach his conclusion. "We should look at Onderan's shack. And we should approach carefully."

  "Why?"

  "In case there's been a visitor. Someone who paid him. We don't want to ruin the tracks."

  Elyana smiled. "Well reasoned. A visitor would almost surely have arrived by horse, particularly one who came with gold."

  Drelm grunted agreement. "Smart as his old man," the orc said.

  Elyana wasn't quite as impressed, but said nothing as Melloc flushed a little at praise from the half-orc. It was easy to see how much the boy looked up to his father, Avelis. He practically lived for hope of a good word from him.

  Melloc cleared his throat and feigned composure. "What do we do with the body?"

  "Leave it," Elyana said.

  "For carrion?" Melloc sounded horrified.

  "We'll bury his victims. He can rot."

  Melloc looked to Drelm for reassurance, but the half-orc was already climbing onto his great warhorse.

  Elyana slid the black wand into her pack and swung into her saddle. In a few moments they were moving at a good clip over the rolling grasslands toward the Sellen River.

  They were halfway to Onderan's wretched shack when the screaming started.

  paizo.com #3236236, Corry Douglas , Aug 10, 2014

  Chapter Two

  The Thing by the River

  Drelm

  It was easy to see why some people acted without regard—they lacked balance. Drelm understood the struggle for balance because he fought for it every day. Achieving it was no simple matter, and, being a warrior, he even allowed that not every battle could be won. What mystified him were men like Onderan who'd so clearly decided to give up fighting their baser instincts. If the old wizard had but followed the teachings of Abadar, he wouldn't now be worm food. Such power as he'd wielded with that wand might have been put to some useful purpose.

  Drelm was a practical man, and usually put as little thought into the death of bad men as he did the end of mad dogs. Yet he'd not been able to shake the memory of Hamdan's two dead boys, one with his face melted away. The same horrors had been visited upon a half-dozen geese, a donkey, and two draft horses.

  Drelm's lips curled in anger as he rode out from the site of Onderan's end. He was proud to have killed the wizard. But if what Elyana said was true—and what Elyana said was usually true, for she was very clever—then there was some greater danger. And it was Drelm's goal to make the village of Delgar and its surrounding environs as free from danger as he could.

  Yet it did no good to worry about what one didn't know, and a warrior was always better served to focus on his surroundings, so Drelm put his concerns aside.

  It was good to be in the saddle, after all, astride his great black Charger. He'd never owned a finer animal. The horse was almost tireless. Some horses seemed to live for eating, but Charger lived to move, growing impatient if too many days passed without new sights. Like many of the best things in his life, Charger had come to him through Elyana, who had personally trained the horse.

  It was good to sit so fine an animal, and to ride with his best friend. It was good to have a home where they both belonged. Elyana was not the outsider she'd been in Lord Stelan's village, loved by some and mistrusted by others. Here, in Delgar, she and Drelm were equally valued. Drelm had known respect under the great Lord Stelan, and he thanked Abadar every evening that he had served so fine a man. Yet Delgar was even a better place.

  Someone screamed.

  The sound had been forced from a male voice. Drelm's hand went instantly to the haft of one of his throwing axes.

  Elyana gestured for them to halt and cocked her head to one side as the horses stopped and shifted restlessly. She pointed southeast as the scream trailed off, then nudged Calda. The light brown mare sprang into a gallop.

  Drelm and Melloc quickly followed, and Drelm had to restrain Charger so he did not race past the elf's horse. The animal was fiercely competitive.

  Elyana looked over at him as they galloped. Her auburn hair, tied off behind her, thudded against her back and the top of her quiver with each hoof fall. "That was an elven voice," she called.

  Drelm didn't question how she knew—when Elyana said a thing, it was true.

  The scream resumed at a higher level. At the same moment a clear horn call pierced the air, sweet and plaintive.

  A strange fire blossomed in those violet eyes, and Elyana kneed her mare forward to greater speed as they rode past a copse of willows.

  Drelm never thought of his friend in a romantic way—she was his sister warrior, and his heart belonged to another—but he admired her easy grace. Elyana was like a hunting cat, sleek, agile, a beautiful predator. He had never met anyone quite like her, even other elves. Oh, she might resemble them physically, but she never projected that weary, aloof superiority. And she didn't waste her time with pointless talking, which annoyed him even though he didn't understand a word of the elven language.

  He and Melloc followed Elyana through the roughened upland that gave way to rolling grass. After almost two years patro
lling outside Delgar, he'd learned the countryside well enough to recognize the thick stand of trees that lay ahead. He knew that as soon as they reached them they'd be on a hill looking down toward the eastern run of the Sellen.

  Elyana signed for Drelm and Melloc to go left while she circled in from the right.

  Drelm motioned Melloc after him, then reined in the eager Charger so he trotted in along the edge of the trees.

  Much of the woodland of the River Kingdoms was old-growth forest—towering oak and ash. Drelm always liked the crisp, clean smell of the stately old trees, but this day the air was marred by the scent of blood. His horse caught the scent and snorted in warning, ears swiveling back. Drelm shot a glance to Melloc, but the boy was sharp and already had one hand to his sword hilt.

  They saw the bodies the moment they cleared the woodland. Midway between the trees and the two long boats drawn up neatly on the sandy shore were the remnants of an elven hunting party.

  Two of the corpses lay scattered near the blood-smeared grass north of the boats, but two more were crumpled by ash trees at the forest's edge. One of them held a hunting horn.

  Drelm rode into the midst of the massacre and dismounted heavily, battleaxe to hand. Melloc was there a moment later, and both were bending down over the body clasping the hunting horn when they heard the cold, crisp words of command behind them.

  "Throw down your weapons! Press your faces to the dirt!"

  The speaker was male. Drelm was fairly sure he was an elf just by the musical quality of his voice. What he didn't understand was how the elves had managed to sneak up behind him.

  He and Melloc turned their heads slowly, discovering at the same moment that three elves had stepped from the woods. They were garbed like their dead brethren, in forest greens and browns, their long straight hair tied back from their foreheads. If it hadn't been already clear from the commands, their expressions left no doubt that their anger was barely held in check. Drelm was used to seeing a sort of permanent condescension stamped on elven features, but the eyes of these three were narrowed in fury.

  "You heard me, orc! Drop or die!"