Almost certainly.
He edged around the stricken beast, still not certain that it was dead. If his earlier battles with chimera had taught him anything, it was that such creatures were extraordinarily hard to kill. As he passed along its immense flanks, he reached out and laid a cautious hand on its belly.
Still warm. Though given the stifling environment, that counted for little. If it was dead—and surely it must be—then it had expired recently, a day or two at most, but possibly only a few hours.
The low growling noise repeated, and he felt a faint vibration against his palm. He drew back as if scalded and raised his club again, but the creature remained completely still. After recovering from being startled, he ventured closer once more. It was dead. Of that he felt sure. And yet the noise had come from the beast.
Curiosity replaced both his sense of caution and urgency. He leaned his club against the tunnel wall, knelt down and tried lifting one of the massive front paws. It was stiff and heavy, but he managed to raise it as high as his own waist.
The growl came again, and this time he realized that the sound was not from the beast, but from beneath it. He pushed against the forelimb, straining with all his might. The carcass rolled onto its side, revealing a second, much smaller hellhound, with all three of its jaws clamped tight on the exposed breast of the first.
A mother and its pup.
He stared at the thing for several seconds, wondering if it would attack. The noise repeated, much louder now that it was no longer muffled by the bulk of the dead mother, but the little creature had no intention of letting go. Nor did it appear capable of doing much harm. Despite its size—it was as large as a year-old ox—it was wasting away. Any milk the mother might have produced was long since gone.
He felt a pang of sympathy for the strange-looking pup, and then frowned it away. Sentimentality was a weakness, and in a place such as this, a fatal one. Better to crush the creature’s skulls, spare it the misery of a slow death by starvation.
Yet, as he started to reach for his club, intent on delivering a killing blow, something stayed his hand.
Not compassion. He felt none for the hellhound, but something else.
There was an opportunity here.
This creature was a scion of the Well of Monsters. It was a living vessel in which the essence of the Well might be transported back to his home on the far side of the world. A self-sustaining supply of blood and tissue that he might study and experiment with at his leisure, to develop a weapon against Typhon and his creations. Perhaps he would make even greater discoveries.
It was the very thing for which he had come.
He reached out slowly with his free hand. The pup growled again but did not unclench its jaws to snap at him. He stroked the side of its rightmost head, scratching gently beneath the ear.
A low, steady, terrified rumble issued from its throat, and he could feel the creature’s rapid breathing, its heart fiercely pounding. But after a few long minutes, long enough for the torch to burn nearly down to a stub, the growling ceased.
“Well, that’s progress,” he murmured softly. “But what am I going to feed you?”
It occurred to him that the journey home might not be so easy after all.
1
Liberia
At the top of the low hill overlooking the narrow trail cutting through the rain forest, Nils Van Der Hausen wondered why anyone would choose to build a village in such a place. He understood why settlements and cities sprang up along coastlines or on the banks of a river, but he could not fathom what madness possessed people to hack out an existence in the middle of the jungle, miles from the nearest road.
‘Village’ was too generous a term for this collection of huts that occupied the small clearing. It was a five mile walk to the nearest road and two miles from St. Paul River. There were dozens more just like it scattered throughout the river valley. Hundreds, even. The government in Monrovia was vaguely aware of their existence but made no effort to regulate them or provide even the most basic of services to their inhabitants. The people who called the place home subsisted on bush meat, which included anything that walked in the rain forest. The exact whereabouts of the villages and the names of the families who lived in them were unknown to the outside world.