Nin was passing a few scrolls to the monks sitting in the front row. “I’d like to know, first, if anyone has seen these tracks before.”
He waited patiently for the scrolls to circulate slowly toward the back of the room. Kaden watched as each monk took the paper, memorized it, then passed it on to his neighbor. The novices required more time, careful to make sure they etched the correct details on their memories, and a few minutes passed before the paintings reached the back. Someone handed a parchment to Akiil, who held it out where those around him could consider it.
Kaden wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting: a variant on a crag cat print maybe, or something with the broad paws and deep claws of a bear. What he found himself staring at, however, was unlike any animal track he’d encountered. It wasn’t made by a paw or pad—that much was clear. He couldn’t even tell how many feet the thing had.
“What in ’Shael’s name is that?” Akiil asked, turning the parchment in an effort to make sense of it.
The painting showed a dozen indentations, the kind of marks a medium-sized stick might make if driven repeatedly into the ground—a sharp stick. None of them measured more than two inches across, but the spacing suggested a creature the size of a large dog. Kaden looked closer. Half those marks appeared to be divided in two by a thin line, as though the foot, or whatever it was, was split.
“Cloven,” Akiil observed. “Maybe some sort of hoof.”
Kaden shook his head. A cleft would be wider, separating the two toes—the whole point of a cloven hoof was to offer the animal stability; it was what allowed the goats to keep their footing on the uneven terrain. Besides, the shape of the prints was wrong. They didn’t look so much like hooves as they did like claws with the pincers squeezed shut. Reluctantly, he called to mind the saama’an of the goat’s mutilated carcass, studying the severed neck, the shattered skull. Claws could inflict those sorts of wounds—big claws, at least. An uneasy chill tickled his spine. What kind of creature the size of a goat had twelve pincered legs?
“Now that you’ve had a chance to see the paintings,” Nin said, “has anyone come across tracks like these before?”
“I’m not convinced that they are tracks,” Serkhan Kundashi said, stepping forward from the wall. “Looks like the scratching of a stick on the ground.”
“There was no stick,” the abbot replied.
“I’ve lived in these mountains for thirty years,” said Rebbin, the overseer of the refectory. “I’ve cooked everything there is to cook, and I’ve never seen anything like it.”
The abbot nodded grimly, as though he had been expecting as much. He opened his mouth to continue when someone near the front spoke up.
Kaden couldn’t see over the crowd, but from the slow, gentle voice, it had to be Yerrin, the hermit. Although Yerrin wore Shin robes and followed the Shin discipline, he kept himself apart from the rest, sleeping in a cave halfway to the Circuit of Ravens, appearing unexpectedly two or three times a month to scrounge food from the refectory or a scrap of thread from the storeroom. The man was dirty but kind. He had named every tree and half the animals in the high mountains, and sometimes Kaden would run into him on a ledge or in a narrow defile checking on “his friends” as he called them, splinting branches broken in a hailstorm, or gathering fallen leaves for his bedding. Kaden hadn’t expected to see him here.
“I know these tracks,” Yerrin said. The hall fell to absolute silence as everyone strained to hear the quiet voice. “Or tracks much like them.” He paused, as though gathering his thoughts, then went on. “My friends leave these tracks around my cave.”
“Who are your friends?” Nin asked, voice patient but firm.
“Why, the frost spiders, of course,” Yerrin replied. “They come for the ants, who live in their great dirt mound.”
Kaden tried to make sense of this. He had studied spiders, of course, all kinds of spiders, including the frost spider. He hadn’t been aware that they left tracks.
“These aren’t quite like the footprints my friends leave,” Yerrin added genially. “There are more legs.”
“And the thing is the size of a large dog,” Serkhan interjected, pointing out what Kaden thought was the obvious objection. “Spiders don’t grow to that size.”
“True,” the hermit agreed. “True. Still, the world is wide. I have many friends, but there are many more to make.”
Kaden glanced over at Rampuri Tan. The man was standing in the shadows at the far end of the hall. It was hard to see the look on his face, but his eyes shone bright in the dimness.
“Well,” Scial Nin concluded, once it was clear that Yerrin had nothing more to say. “We cannot let the creature destroy our flocks. We have little chance of following it. That means we will have to lure it to us. Rampuri has suggested that we stake out goats a half mile from the monastery. Several monks will wait in the rocks to watch for some sign of this creature. As for the rest of you, no one is to leave the central square alone. Novices and acolytes are forbidden to leave the monastery at all without an accompanying umial.”
That got a response. Chalmer Oleki, Kaden’s old teacher, rose from his bench in the first row. He was the oldest of the Shin, half again as old as the abbot, and his voice was reed-thin when he spoke. “This thing has killed goats, yes. It is a problem for us, yes. But do you believe it would come against grown men?”
Scial Nin opened his mouth, but it was Tan who answered, stepping forward from the shadows. Kaden had always found his umial menacing, even before being forced to study under the man. In the past, however, something had held that menace in check. Tan had reminded him of a vast, silent slope of snow high on a peak, poised to break loose in avalanche at the first peal of thunder, or like a sword, still and suspended at the height of its arc, held indefinitely by some myserious power. There was nothing strange in Tan’s movement now, nothing more than a simple step forward, and yet Kaden shivered, as though the small movement marked a change, a tip in a balance long held.
“When you know nothing about a creature,” the monk ground out, his voice hard as a rock slide, “expect it has come to kill you.”