could be found there. Or maybe the ghaureg would just use it to jump down on top of them.
Then Tsata was with her, taking the lead. They ran at a crouch down the decline, the ledge screening them from view. The ghaureg bellowed again, terrifyingly close. Over the thump of her heart and the scuff of their footsteps she heard the creature loping nearer, its heavy tread reminding her of the sheer mass that their pursuer possessed. If they got within reach of those arms, those rending hands, they would be ripped to pieces.
The apparent disappearance of its prey gave the Aberrant pause. Tsata and Kaiku took advantage of that to put distance between them and it. The decline became shallow and fractured, depositing them into a wide, flat-bottomed trench scattered with rocks. On the far side, a natural wall rose to higher ground, pale and grim in the combined light of Aurus and Iridima, whose orbits had lately begun to glide closer, threatening the prospect of a moonstorm if the third sister joined them in the nights to come.
Kaiku struck out for a cluster of rocks. They were too exposed here. If they could get out of its sight for long enough, she was sure it would give up the chase. Though the ghauregs were brutal and dangerous, they were not the most intelligent of the predator species that the Weavers had collected.
But Shintu was not on her side that night. They had almost gained the shadow of the rocks when the Aberrant appeared on the ridge. Kaiku caught a frightened glance of its shape, its head low between its hunched shoulders as it surveyed the trench. Then it saw them, its eyes meeting Kaiku’s and sending a shiver down her back. With a howl, it leaped from the ridge down to the floor of the trench, a clear twenty feet; Kaiku felt the impact of its landing through the soles of her boots.
Ghauregs. They were the largest of the Aberrants that Kaiku and Tsata had yet encountered in the Fault, and by far the most vicious. But they were also the most disturbingly akin to humans, and that struck Kaiku worst of all. When she had first heard their roars and seen their shaggy outlines in the night, she had found them unsettlingly familiar; it was only days later when she realised that she had hidden from those very creatures in the Lakmar Mountains on Fo, huddling and shivering in the snow during her lone trek to trace her father’s footsteps back to the Weaver monastery. Then, they had been ghostly, half-seen things, glimpsed against white horizons; now they were brought into relief, and she found that they were worse than she had imagined.
They stood eight feet high, though their habitual slouching posture meant that they would be even taller if fully upright. They were somewhat apelike in appearance and though they could run on all fours, their back legs were thick and large enough to allow them to stand on two legs, and they tended to walk that way, contributing to their grotesquely human-like appearance. Their skulls were huge, dominated by enormous jaws that were heavy enough to account for their slouch. The jaws were like steel traps, bearded with shaggy fur and full of omnivore teeth, blunt at the sides and sharp at the front. Small, yellow eyes and a snub snout were little more than mechanisms for locating what to eat next.
Their bodies were covered in a thick grey pelt, but their hands and chests and feet were bare, and the skin beneath was a wrinkled black. Though they did not have the natural weaponry of some of the other predator species, they made up for it in sheer size and power: their strength was truly appalling. And they were not slow, either.
Kaiku froze for the shortest of seconds as it landed in the trench and began to pound towards them on all fours, paralysed by the sheer size of the beast. Then Tsata was pulling her again, and she fled.
Her kana boiled inside her, fighting for release, as they raced across the trench. She dared not let it go. She had only been able to get away with using it before, on the dead shrilling, because she had employed it in an extremely subtle way. If she did something as violent as attacking the Aberrant, the Weavers here would detect it and spare no effort to find her.