“I can smell the fetch of the kill.”
You smell your flask, thought Caliph.
“Let’s ride,” King Ashlen shouted, raising his spear. “To hunt the minds of the peasants for this fearsome beast.” The fact that they were after a monster made the outing less of a diversion in the eyes of the press. If they had been going out strictly for sport, the papers would have had a heyday.
The hunting party roared. They followed Ashlen out of the Hold, onto West Wall Road and away from the city, up into the hills.
The hounds seemed to glide before the horses.
Caliph supposed that none of them (himself included) really believed a creature haunted the foothills, but he was glad to get out, to escape for even a few hours. Horse claws provoked the marshy spice of fallen leaves and trampled turf. Clammy, fenny odors soaked the pungent air above the hills.
“Is that the old Howl estate?” Caliph heard Marsden shout. Caliph answered that it was.
The hunt meandered far above the old keep, twisting into ravines choked with bracken.
They crossed numerous gullies carved by seasonal runoff, taking occasional switchbacks to avoid rampant undergrowth. Invariably they turned uphill again.
At ten o’clock the party lunched in a clearing at the north end of Summit Wood. Afterward, they followed a beast track south. It felt unsettlingly primitive to be surrounded by horses and soughing woodland things after so much time in the city. Caliph checked his pocket watch as if to make sure the gears were still spinning.
An hour later Baron Marsden’s sons, Meredith and Garrett, downed two boars. The dogs cornered them and a concentration of spears finished them off.
The hunt was about to turn home with its kill when Vaughan, Kendall’s youngest son, discovered strange tracks in a nearby meadow. Everyone rode up to have a look.
The grassy patch where the tracks were located overlooked Stonehold. Far below, Isca sprawled in a halitus of gray and brown mist beside the sea.
“Come see these,” Vaughan called to his brother.
Sheridan dismounted and stood with his hands braced on his knees.
“Odd,” was all he had to say.
King Ashlen and his son Newl stood at the far end of the meadow. They had followed the tracks from one end to the other and were holding the dogs on leashes, allowing them to sniff and whimper.
“The thing runs with a wide limping gait.” Vaughan pointed through the grass. “Mother of Mizraim! Look at that! It’s like it runs on two feet and uses a hand to help push itself along!”
Prince Mortiman jumped from the stirrups and paced between the marks. “Three strides to its one,” he declared.
Sheridan shrugged.
“It stands to reason not all the farmers are crazy. They’ve seen something up here and we’ve found the proof.” He made a bit of a ridiculous show with his arms.
Caliph looked at the footprint closely. King Lewis crouched beside him and touched it as though skeptical.
The indentation was narrow and long and deep. The heel and the balls of the foot were hardly wider than a man’s, but their length nearly doubled any boot among them. The toe impressions were also thin and long. Occasionally a tiny hole poked the ground a finger’s breadth from the tip, as though a nail curved sharply down at the end of each digit.
The handprints followed the right side of the tracks nearly six feet from the footprints. They were different with every stride. Sometimes the thing had supported itself on the backs of its knuckles, sometimes on the side of the palm. One clear handprint was found in a spot of mud between patches of grass. Fingers two and a half times the length of Vaughan’s and a palm that was surprisingly small, spread out under the men’s eyes like the mark of a giant spider someone had mashed into the clay.
The hunting party divided and agreed that half would follow the tracks one way and half the other.
King Ashlen and his son along with Baron Marsden and his two boys went with King Lewis and his guard. Caliph, Sena, Baron Kendall, Sheridan, Vaughan and the prince took the rest of the dogs across the meadow, traveling in the same direction as the creature.
The sun had already drifted into late afternoon and the autumn day was quickly losing heat. Sena rode closer to Caliph now. She held her spear across her hips.
Despite the altitude, the underbrush remained oppressively thick. The horses had to wade through it and the ground was invisible.
They weren’t following tracks anymore.