"So what does he say about the werewolf?" Galileo Blake asked.
"Nothing too obvious," Richard said. "That wasn't his way." He was tired and angry, and having to hike across the moors in the dark had set him on edge. He had been to many strange places — underground tombs, forgotten temples, graveyards to myth and memory — but these misty, mysterious plains really got to the heart of him. Perhaps because everything was so of the here and now, yet they could have been walking across a landscape ten thousand years old. The fears of the moors were timeless. And that was why he and Gal were here.
"But he says something that led us here, now, to this pissing place? Yes?" Gal was obviously tired and edgy as well.
Richard smiled at his brother, but perhaps the moonlight distorted it into a grimace. "It's obscure," he said.
"Isn't it always?"
Richard closed his eyes and let the coolness of the moor wash over him. He felt the breeze whispering secrets, felt the age of the land beneath his feet, sensed the mysteries it contained if only he were prepared to dig. He would be digging, but not here and now. Later. This evening probably, the following morning at the latest. And if the Book of Ways turned out to be as accurate and trustworthy as they had found it over the years, by tomorrow lunchtime his brother would be sending a trace of werewolf back to their father.
His brother. Galileo had aged over the past few years. His hair had thinned, its remnants turning gray, and his face had taken on the contour lines of a map of sad places. His eyes still showed the heart of him, the pain there, the anger, consuming and as rich as the day they had found their mothers body in the burning house. But there was something else there that Richard had grown to fear. He had suspected it for several years ... but this was his brother, his own flesh and blood, and the last thing he wanted to believe was that Gal was mad.
"Well?" Gal said.
"It tells a tale and draws a map," Richard said. "I can follow both, given time."
"Good." Gal groaned and pulled his coat around his shoulders, trying to shield himself from the breeze.
"Gal, are you sure you're ready for another sending?"
"Never ready," Gal muttered.
"Maybe we should wait?"
Gal shook his head but did not answer. In the stark moonlight, as the mist thickened and settled on their clothes like rain, Richard thought he looked like a walking corpse.
* * *
"They chased it," Richard said. He had cast a spell of course and was hunched over the book, reading by moonlight. It gave the words a particularly sharp edge. "It had taken a child, a farmers baby, and the father was killed trying to fight it off. But they thought it was wounded. Its familiar call was higher and more frequent. They saw a shadow as they ran — the creature with the child in its mouth. Out of the village and across the moor toward the rock like a pointing finger. There." Richard nodded at a distant hillside, where a single weathered rock pointed skyward. He set off, and Gal followed.
Richard kept the Book of Ways open before him, staring down and trusting instinct not to walk him into a hole. The spell of course was still rich and potent, and he could still see the truth threaded between Zahid de Lainree's words and diagrams. The book's stories were as hidden as the creatures it talked about.
"How did they wound it?" Gal asked.
Richard stared at the book and shook his head. "It doesn't say. I suppose even a werewolf will develop an itch with a pitchfork in its throat."