Page 14 of His Human Believer

“Two-point-one seconds. Upper canopy. Sector four.”

“Which is where?”

He points with one silver-tipped claw. Forty nanco down the wall, where the foliage overhangs the stone.

We stare at it, but nothing moves. Then the sensors chirp again.

“Sector two,” Vidar says. Something in his tone has changed. “Sixty nanco in the opposite direction.” He looks up from the screen and out into the black. “Margaret. Nothing crossed the intervening arrays. It did not walk between them along the ground.” His claws move over the readout. “Meaning it went above them. Through the canopy, over the top of the field, from one end of my equipment line to the other, in under ninety seconds, without registering on four intervening sensors.”

The hum of the resonance meter is very loud now.

“Heh. That’s not wind,” I say.

“No,” he answers quietly, and he is not talking to me. “Wind does not choose a direction and travel the length of a wall. That is a search pattern.” And then Dr. Vidar Coalstone, Senior Fellow of the Royal Hyrrokin Academy, walks over to where the sound originated.

Of course I follow him.

Skylo goes ahead of us both, moving absolutely silent. The wulver stops and all three heads sniff the ground.

Vidar’s arm comes across in front of me, not touching, just there, a barrier of red skin and silver claws hovering an inch from my collarbone. He turns on a work light for the first time all night and scans the ground. “The ground here is soft,” he says. “There was rain ten diurnals ago and this stretch never dries because the wall keeps the suns off it.”

The light shines on animal prints in the ground.

Vidar crouches. “Four of them, in a line, coming out of the tree line and stopping at the base of the stone wall. Four-toed, deep, clawed impressions at the front of each one, dragged slightly. And they’re spaced like something that walks on two legs. I’m going to measure for stride length.”

He goes down onto both knees in the dirt with his face about nine inches from the ground. Then he takes out a scale marker and sets it beside the nearest print and uses his screen to document it from four angles. He measures the stride and measures it a second time. He sits back on his heels and looks at the number. “One hundred and ninety nanco,” he says.

“Is that a lot?”

“The largest bipedal predator in this hemisphere has a stride of one hundred and ten.”

“So what made them?”

“It must be insufficient data.”

“Vidar—”

“Insufficient data, Margaret.” He is already opening the case for the casting compound, already working, already reaching for his tablet. “I have four prints in soft ground at night. I do not have a gait analysis. I do not have depth-of-impression against a known mass. I do not have a second track line to establish a pattern. I have four prints and a stride measurement and nothing else.”

He works. The casting compound goes down white and thick in the beam of the work light. Skylo lies on the path with his center head on his paws watching. Somewhere out past the tree line the jungle has gone completely back to normal, as if nothing came out of it tonight at all.

“Vidar?”

“Mm.”

I’m looking at the prints, not at him. “You’ve been at this for years you’ve said?”

“Yes.”

“And during that time, how many tracks have you found that could be attributed to the Skyggjar and not attributed to any other animal on Tarvos?”

His claws stop moving in the compound. He looks up at me. “None.”

Chapter Five

Vidar

Islept four hours and I do not require more.