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He’d chosen his spot well. She couldn’t cross behind him, not without a climb in the open, though a brief one, perhaps exposing her to the noisemakers in the thickets.
But a good deal of thornbush filled a gentler slope leading up to his vantage. He amused himself by relieving himself into it.
Wistala was downwind, and the odor struck her nose like a challenge, the clattering in her ears a rattle of an enemy drake’s griff. She crept slowly through the densest brambles, sliding around the clusters of branch with their pitiful clumps of earth held tight by roots, until his shadow practically fell on her through the thorny lattice.
She took two steps closer, marked the route she’d use in the final dash—
He saw her approach too late and extended his hand, not the one holding a weapon, but rather to show some kind of talisman.
Wistala exploded out of the thorns, touching rock once as she leaped onto the hunter. She struck high, throwing her weight into his chest to knock him off the narrow crest of the hill.
They tumbled off the hill and down the other side—the direction she needed to go anyway. She dug in with her claws and shut her eyes to keep out the dust. Down—they both broke against a rock, its impact harder on her lighter body but bloodying the unprotected skin on his arm—and she went for his neck.
Vertebrate prey were most vulnerable there. If you got a good grip, you opened windpipes and blood vessels, and they couldn’t bite or gore you back. Her teeth closed, and she tasted blood and heard a strange high wheeze. The man’s hands raked at her face but found a nostril instead of her more vulnerable eye or ear holes.
He went limp.
She dropped the crushed neck, the man’s eyes dry and empty. She opened his gut with her saa to make sure of him, and his body gave a reactive twitch. . . .
The corpse twitched again as she found his liver.
Tearing the oblong organ loose, she raised her head and let it slide down her throat in two big gulps. She sucked blood from the wound, and saw something in his hand shining in the sun. Tarnished gold or brass—either would be welcome. She nibbled it free from the leather thong fixed to it that the man had wrapped about his wrist.
It was a thin round device of hammered heavy metal, a hominid figure in a circle. Hominids had strange superstitions and believed in invisible forces that attracted or repelled evil or good. Was this some kind of proof against dragons?
She licked it. No sharp taste of poison, just the thick metal-saliva. Satisfied, she sent it down her gullet to join the liver, where it would gravitate to the pocket of her innards that absorbed metals.
Smelling, listening, she picked her way south.
All the way across the next flat, the terrified, dead eyes of the man stayed with her. She’d killed a hominid from ambush. Rainfall might call it murder. While hungry, she wasn’t starving, and attacking him had been a foolish risk.
The fact of the matter was, she’d let her temper get the better of her and killed to spite the beaters behind.
She heard a faint, wailing horn. The beaters had probably come across the body. Two more blasts, some kind of signal?
The wind out of the southwest whistled as it cut through the thick thornbushes all around her. The gorge must be near; she couldn’t see any more hills to the south.
A faint and rising sound of hoofbeats came across the wind. Wistala found a rock and climbed near the top, keeping to the shadow side so light wouldn’t reflect off her scales.
Riders! A dozen at least, traveling in pairs, their horses and legs garbed in some sort of leather tenting, perhaps to keep out the thorns, trotted through the brambles, lance-tips sparkling in the sun.
All moved to cut her off from the south. She heard howling; they had dogs with them. Even if the riding men blundered past, the dogs would smell her out.
The thane’s men no doubt wanted her hide in return for some burned shingles and draperies! From Rainfall’s description, Hammar wasn’t the sort to leave an account unsettled.
Wistala gulped, the blood she’d wetted her throat long since caked over by the dry dust she breathed. Her thoughts felt slow and thick as her blood. The men would probably . . .
Dry!
She came off the rock, spat one jet of flame into the tangle right, then trotted a few steps and started another fire left.
The thin branches supporting the thorns caught fire easily, and the wind pushed the flame northwest.
She’d set up a signal to every beater in sight.
But the men would keep from downwind if they knew what was good for them.
Wistala walked along between her two columns of conflagration, nostrils held low to keep out the smoke. At new thickets, she helped spread the flame with another torf or two.
