Extraordinary Zoology

by Tayler, Howard

  “It certainly merits investigation,” Pendrake said. “Perhaps we can learn some more about our quarry. And if we tie our team well away from the water, they shouldn’t need a close guard.”

  Pendrake, Lynus, and Kinik led the horses a dozen paces upslope from the water’s edge and tied them where Horgash had Greta tethered. Aeshnyrr relaxed, but Codex remained tense.

  Edrea continued to scan the area. She hadn’t seen signs of gators, dracodiles, or other large predators, but that didn’t mean there weren’t any hiding beyond the range of her woven sight. She concentrated again, reaching for the power to see farther. She thought she caught a hint of amber far out in the water, well past what she should be able to see. Her eyes watered. She clenched her teeth. The sigils spinning about her wrist pulsed a little more brightly.

  “Edrea, what—aaugh!” Lynus was right behind her, and suddenly they were both in a heap on the ground. The etched-tin clarity of the hollow went misty and grey. The mists swept back in on her vision, a throbbing headache rushing with them.

  “Scyrah’s rest,” she muttered. “Now I can’t see.”

  “Sorry. I came over to see what you were looking at and caught my foot on a root. Did I hurt you?”

  “Just startled,” she said, rolling clear of the clumsy youth. She tried to keep the anger out of her voice. “The sight is gone, and I’ve given myself a headache.”

  “That sort of disruption is unfortunately common among less practiced arcanists,” Pendrake said, offering her a hand up along with a wink. “Proof positive that natural ability remains secondary to diligently focused practice.”

  Edrea fumed. The professor’s jesting wink didn’t change that he would prefer to see Edrea formally enroll at the university, as if the seventeen years she’d spent studying the world at her own pace counted for nothing, as if Professor Victor Pendrake, man of no magical ability whatsoever, could teach things he could barely even see, let alone practice. Iosan arcane tradition was older than human civilization, not to mention Corvis University.

  Worse still, “diligently focused practice” in the university environment would place Edrea’s use of Iosan magic under the scrutiny of actual spellcasting humans, something more than a few Iosans would take exception to—the same Iosans who believed the decline of their civilization corresponded rather too closely to the awakening of human magical abilities for it to be mere coincidence.

  Edrea identified more closely with the Seekers among her people than with the Retribution, but even those committed to gleaning knowledge far beyond the borders of Ios knew to keep secrets. Edrea’s muttered curse, “Scyrah’s rest,” actually crossed the line.

  Edrea blew out the breath she’d been holding, the string of additional curses unspoken. It was unfair to be this angry. She couldn’t tell Pendrake any of this, so how could he know better?

  “Edrea?” said the professor, a note of concern in his voice. “Are you fit to proceed?”

  “Apologies, Professor,” she said. “Just . . . taking a little mental inventory. I’ll be fine, but I won’t be seeing through the mist until this throbbing ceases.”

  “Sorry,” Lynus said, more meekly than before.

  “I’ll lead,” said Horgash. He strode past Edrea and Pendrake and quickly faded into the fog. Pendrake followed, and Edrea hurried after him, Lynus and Kinik behind her.

  They picked their way through the smashed, splintered planks at the shore, taking additional care to stay close to one another. Horgash led them deeper into the stand of giant cypress. Fallen debris lay everywhere.

  “Overengineered, as usual,” said Horgash, thumping on something in the deep mists ahead. When Edrea caught up with him, he was bouncing up and down on the third step of a flight of steep stairs. “It may look like it was bodged together in a rush, but this stair will hold all of us, and Greta.” Rotting ropes attached to the bottom suggested the flight was originally devised to be lifted into the trees, but it now stood permanently grounded.

  They climbed the stairs, passing two destroyed landings as they ascended. The first intact deck was twenty feet above the barely visible floor of the marshy vale. They walked along it, navigating meandering catwalks and peering into the high, empty habitations of gobbers. Most of the doors were only five feet high—easy enough for Edrea or Lynus to duck into, but little more than crawl—holes for Horgash or Kinik. Furnishings remained, as did some larger, heavier tools, including an anvil that Edrea couldn’t imagine any number of gobbers maneuvering up to this height, but all the cupboards and tables were empty.

  “I figured out where that counter-threaded whatsit came from,” Horgash said, pointing down. There at the edge of the lake lay the wreckage of a steamjack, face up in the mud.

  “That head looks like it’s from a Lancer,” said Lynus, “but the hull is a real mongrel. Some Khadoran parts, some Morrow-knows-what, and I think that left pauldron is part of the cow-catcher from a railway engine.”

  “It went down fighting,” Pendrake said. “I judge it to have been knocked backward, boiler-down. If the water were just six inches higher, perhaps during the spring rains, that would have put the fire out and taken the ’jack right out of the fight.”

  “If that’s true,” Lynus said, “then whatever happened here happened four months ago.”

  Edrea considered the signs around her and shook her head. “More like sixteen.”

  “Really?”

  “Look at the splintered edge of the second-story catwalks.” She pointed at a hairy growth one level down, back the way they’d come. “That’s more than four months of fungus in the wrecked wood. The ’jack fell there when the water was high, during or just after the spring rains. Then there was a full summer of growth, autumn spores, a winter, and then another full growing season.”

  “Tharn arrows in Bednar,” said Kinik, “but none here. If gobbers were fighting in the trees, arrows would be stuck in wood everywhere.”

  “Maybe sixteen months ago the Tharn had different tactics,” said Lynus.

  “And a smaller pet,” Horgash said. “No flattening here.”

  “Not flattened,” Edrea said, “clawed. Right there, on that tree trunk.” The claw marks, healing from a season of tree growth, reached almost to the level of deck they stood upon. Something huge and hungry had attempted to scale the tree to get at the highest gobber-sized morsels.

  “As there were no claw marks in Bednar, we find no arrows here. And from the absence of the usual bric-a-brac, I think many of the gobbers survived, grabbed what they could, and fled,” Pendrake said. “I think we can conclude that this was something other than a giant burrowing serpent and a Tharn war party.”

  A gurgling, huffing noise sounded out across the lake.

  Lynus looked at Pendrake, wide-eyed. Pendrake scowled and cocked his head to the side.

  “That noise sounded very big,” Kinik said.

  “Shhh,” said Pendrake.

  “Mother Dhunia,” Horgash said. “This is an ambush. The Tharn laid tracks for us, led us right into the middle of a fog drake’s feeding ground.”

  “Fog drake. Yes, that’s the sound,” said Pendrake.

  “Not a true dragon,” Kinik said, “but big, dangerous, and can see us even in mist, yes?”

  Yes, Edrea cursed silently. She traced vossyl and was rewarded with a single, flickering half sigil, followed by sharp pain behind her eyes.

  “Exactly, Kinik. You’ve done the assigned reading,” Pendrake said. “Now, reading those claw marks, we’re safe up here, but our mounts are staked out like bait.” He began to run back along the catwalk. “Bah!” he shouted almost immediately. “Horgash, which way to the stairs?”

  “Wurm take the stairs!” said Horgash. He dropped over the rail, grabbed the deck on the way down, and hung from his hands for a moment. “We’re on the third story, but gobbers are short.” He dropped into the mist.

  Kinik peered over after him, threw her war-cleaver like a spear into the mud below, and followed.

 
; Edrea watched her vanish and thought better of taking that route herself. If she hung from the deck, her feet would still be a full fourteen feet above the mud and debris below. She turned and ran along the catwalk, quickly catching up with Pendrake.

  “I remember the way,” she said, slipping past him.

  “We’ll follow you, then,” said Pendrake.

  The huffing sound came again, accompanied by splashing. If Edrea could trust her sense of direction at all, the drake was headed toward their animals.

  Aeshnyrr, I’m coming.

  She breathed deeply as she ran, attempting to clear her head. Past the big room with the anvil, left around the largest tree, then straight ahead, and she could see the stairs.

  Her breathing deepened with exertion as she ran down the stairs, and by the time she reached the bottom, the pain in her head had subsided. She inhaled, closed her eyes, traced again. She felt the ring of Iosan runes flare to life about her right wrist, and when she opened her eyes she could see everything.

  Outlined in amber, the horses and Greta stood straight ahead forty paces. All stamped nervously. The shore and the pier’s pilings lay to the left. Also left, and a bit behind Edrea, lay the sodden ruins of the gobber tree-homes. The amber silhouettes of Horgash and Kinik ran through those, slowed by the debris. Out in the lake, the small shapes of fish, frogs, and snakes were scattering in the path of a much larger outline.

  It was a fat, vaguely reptilian silhouette with stubby wings and a head like a snake’s, only closer to the size of a pony. Not a pony’s head. A whole pony. This thing was huge. Abruptly, it turned, and Edrea realized it must be hearing footfalls along the shore.

  “It’s coming for us!” she shouted. “What’s the plan?”

  “Poke holes in it until it stops moving,” Horgash said, running toward her. His paired swords were in hand now, each as long as a great sword and twice as broad.

  “Edrea,” the professor said, his own ancient-looking sword in hand, “the beast is huffing fog, thickening it. I can’t see much past the end of my blade. This ‘poke holes’ plan needs a spotter. You can see again?”

  “I can spot, and I can shoot.” Edrea shouldered her rifle. “Everyone form up on me!”

  Lynus and Kinik came stumbling toward her, their hurried steps hampered by poor visibility and soft ground. Kinik had retrieved her war cleaver and held it at the ready. The enormous weapon had to be close to six paces long from butt to blade, which was farther than Edrea thought any of her friends could currently see in the thick fog.

  “Kinik,” she said, remembering how Lynus had stumbled into her earlier. “Stop right there. Any closer and you’ll hit one of us with that thing.”

  Kinik stopped in place.

  Edrea stepped behind Pendrake and Horgash and aimed her rifle between them, at the fog drake only she could see. “It’s big, Professor. Too big. Coming from that way, underwater, swimming with its wings.”

  “Hah!” Pendrake exclaimed. “Lynus, I told you that was what those were for! Too small for flight on any specimen we’ve examined.”

  Much too small on this one, Edrea thought.

  Lynus arrived at her side, great sword out and wavering, far too large for his grip.

  “Where do you need me?” he asked.

  “Behind Horgash,” Edrea said. The trollkin would be more effective leading a charge.

  “Last time the boy fought behind me he shot me,” Horgash grumbled.

  Edrea made a mental note to be very careful not to shoot Horgash. She’d only get one shot, anyway. Had to wait until the beast slowed down a bit . . .

  “It’s speeding up. I think it means to lunge out at us.”

  Then the drake changed course again, and Edrea realized that by putting Kinik out of accidental cleaver-reach, she’d staked out much closer bait than the horses.

  “Kinik! It’s coming for you, just a little to your right.” As she shouted, Horgash started to move. “Blade up, butt down, you might be able to—”

  The fog drake burst out of the water, wings flat against its side. It was easily three times the size of Horgash’s bison, thirty feet long, and all thirty of those feet were airborne.

  Horgash was already running toward Kinik, shouting. It was a horrific sound, like he was screaming through a slit throat, the Molgur-Trul words from his tongue distorted.

  The drake turned its head to Horgash and twisted in the air, presenting its throat and flank to Kinik, who took a half step back and planted the butt of her war cleaver in the mud.

  The blade, however, pointed at empty air. Even at this range, Kinik couldn’t see what was coming. She probably couldn’t see the end of her weapon.

  Ogrun, fog drake, and trollkin all collided in the same screeching, screaming instant.

  “Fish anatomy, not lizard!” shouted Lynus, starting forward with his sword in front of him. “No jugular in front!”

  “Take my left, lad!” Pendrake shouted and charged toward the din.

  Lynus ran behind and to the left of Pendrake, both hands gripping the haft of his sword over his head, the trailing blade readied for a wicked chop.

  “Biggest vessels run along the spine! Hard to get to!” Lynus yelled.

  Kinik was pinned in the mud beneath one of the drake’s three-clawed feet, the center claw resting in a dent in her breastplate. She had one hand just above the butt of her polearm, but even with one hand and no leverage she was able to swing the massive blade around and swat the drake’s hind flank in a failed attempt to get it to lift its foreleg.

  Edrea looked for a good target, and found none.

  Horgash struck thrice at the drake’s head, leaving only shallow wounds against the heavy scales. The creature snapped at him, clearly hoping to brush him off so it could focus on turning Kinik into a proper meal.

  Pendrake ran to Horgash’s right and lunged at the snapping drake. It saw him coming before he had a target and drew its head back.

  Pendrake’s sword flashed through empty air.

  Horgash lunged as the creature began another strike, his counter perfectly timed and aimed straight for sensitive sinus cavities until Lynus’ blade arrived. His overhead swing came down hard on Horgash’s sword, deflecting it, and both blades went point-first into the mud. The drake’s enormous head slammed into Horgash and Lynus simultaneously, knocking them apart and five paces back.

  Edrea had a clear shot.

  She squeezed the trigger, her rifle thundered, and the drake’s left eye exploded. The monster bellowed in rage and swung its head, fixing its remaining eye on Edrea.

  Then it charged.

  Fog drakes, Edrea recalled, were swift aquatic predators but seemed lazy on land. The advantage their fog glands provided them meant they could usually waddle up to their next meal while it grazed stupidly on swamp heather.

  But this charge was no waddle. The fog drake was wounded and angry.

  No time to reload, no time to draw her sword. There were spells, but . . . Edrea reversed her grip on the stock and swung the rifle like a club.

  The drake was leading with an open maw, a behavior ingrained, perhaps, by eating prey that couldn’t see. Edrea’s swing connected with a tooth and broke it.

  She used the momentum of her swing to throw herself out of the way. The drake barreled past her, a clawed foot just missing as it ran. It redoubled its howling. It was certainly disoriented, running away from the safety of the lake.

  Terrified whinnying pierced the air, closely followed by a horrific crunch.

  Not running away. Running toward the easiest meal.

  Edrea rolled to look. The drake had taken Codex to the ground and was now curled atop and around him, tearing off chunks as the poor animal shuddered. The horse’s amber outline vanished, like an extinguished candle.

  Aeshnyrr and Oathammer had broken their leads and were galloping pell-mell up the rise and out of the hollow. Greta was snorting and stamping, as if preparing to charge.

  “The horses!” shouted Pendrake.

/>   “Over here!” Edrea called back. She pulled a round from her belt and chambered it. She snapped the breach closed and aimed again at the fog drake, stepping to where she could see its remaining eye.

  Of course, she thought, a half-second too late, that also means its remaining eye can see me.

  The drake lashed out with its tail, slamming hard into Edrea and sending her sprawling. She lost hold of her rifle but retained the spinning band of runes about her wrist, her arcane vision still sharp. The rifle did not, she noted with relief, land muzzle-first in the mud. It would be a shame to survive this only to get dressed down like Lynus had.

  “To me!” Pendrake shouted. Kinik, Horgash, and Lynus were up and running after him.

  But Pendrake was charging Greta, whose snorting was louder than the drake’s.

  “Bear left!” Edrea yelled. “And watch out for that tail!”

  Pendrake stopped to reorient himself. Kinik and Horgash were now closer to the drake than he was, with Kinik in the lead. The ogrun seemed perfectly on target this time. Edrea guessed that the mist thinned farther from the lake.

  Kinik delivered a powerful, crouching sweep with her cleaver and took the fog drake’s right hind leg out from under it. The blade stuck deep in the shank.

  Horgash ran straight up the drake’s back, reversed both sword-grips as he ran, and plunged them down toward its spine.

  Both swords hit scale and bone, skipping out to the sides.

  The drake twisted and bucked, turning to face the others, and Horgash flew off its neck into the mud. Kinik wrenched her blade free but dropped to one knee with the effort.

  Pendrake ran up behind Kinik as she crouched. “Kinik! Brace!” She froze, then grunted in surprise as the professor planted a running step squarely in the center of her back and leaped onto the drake’s neck.

  He too reversed his grip, one hand on the hilt of his ancient, unnatural sword and one hand on the pommel. He thrust the blade deep into the base of the fog drake’s long neck, piercing scale like it was paper. The drake screamed in agony, arching its back. Pendrake clung tightly to the sword, twisting viciously. The drake continued to thrash.