‘Damned big one,’ Urko muttered.
Indeed, a looming dark shadow was now moving behind the shifting curtains of mist. One impossibly large. A trick of this strange light, Cartheron told himself. No beast could be that large. Probably just as high as his knees – not damned near the size of a bull. Just a distorted shadow.
A low growling rumble reached them then, as of rocks being ground together. The very cobbles beneath their feet vibrated with it. The brothers shared a glance: run or freeze?
Cartheron slowly reached down and drew his boot knife. The tiny weapon looked comical compared to the monster that was edging in upon them. That was, if the shadows, and their fears, were not playing tricks upon them.
A long, broad muzzle parted the vapours. It was fully as tall as their own heads. Lips drew back snarling from wet gums, and slit eyes glared an eerie near-black before them. A heady waft of desert scent, like spice, nearly made Cartheron dizzy.
Before he could act, his brother leapt upon the beast, wrapping an arm about its neck, bellowing, ‘Run!’
But Cartheron did not run: he stared, frozen, while his brother tightened the crook of his elbow upon the beast’s throat and its eyes widened in something almost like surprise – if such a creature could be capable of such an emotion.
It reared, snarling, and threw itself against the wall next to them. Both it and his brother gave animal grunts as bricks crunched and wood splintered. It staggered off, attempting to shake this impudent fool from its back, but Cartheron knew that nothing short of decapitation would ease his brother’s arms once he’d clamped them round anything.
They disappeared into the mist, the hound rearing and snarling, Urko half hopping, half dragging his feet. Cartheron moved to follow, but stopped – there was no way he would ever find them. He swore then he would honour his brother’s damned fool move by beating this confounding miasma. He would escape it. Standing there, his back pressed against chill damp stone, he decided that perhaps the way to beat it was to remain still; it may be that some logic or pattern would emerge amid the confusing chiaroscuro.
Just as at sea when caught amid thick fog. You didn’t look, you listened. And so he closed his eyes, listening to the night.
*
Nedurian soon found that he no longer had to warn the citizens of Malaz against entering the streets. It appeared they were quite familiar with these uncanny happenings: doors were slammed and barred and heavy shutters banged shut over windows. In no time he was alone in a tiny mist-laden square, and only then did it occur to him that he had no idea exactly where he was.
A low rumbling reached him then, as of a beast the size of a bull exhaling, and he thought, Well, perhaps not so alone …
He raised his Rashan Warren to its sizzling heights about him and waited, motionless, in a pool of absolute dark. Whatever this was, it ought to pass him by.
Instead, however, twin pinpoints of a sullen bluish glow emerged from the dark, closing, growing in brilliance, and he realized with a renewed prickling of his skin that he was being stalked through the paths of his own Warren of Night.
He shifted, then, blindly – a very dangerous move as one cannot predict just where one might emerge – and found himself in a new, equally unfamiliar cobbled way. Quickly, he crossed the street to put his back to a stone wall and tried to still his hammering heart. He had never seen that before. Some creature able to follow spoors through Warrens? Gods! No one would ever be able to escape such a—
He stared with mounting panic at the spot where he had emerged, for there, from the shifting shadows, a monstrous paw and forelimb was emerging, followed by a long greying muzzle and twin blazing sky-blue eyes that peered right and left, scanning the street.
Nedurian slowly reached over to a door next to him, offered up a silent prayer to Apsalar, Lady of Thieves, and tried to lift the latch – it rose, and he ducked into a shop-front stuffed with household goods manufactured of tin: a tinsmith’s. From a rear workroom he heard someone weeping in terror.
It occurred to him then to wonder why the creature had singled him out, and he realized that it must be one, or both, of two factors: he had been outside, and he possessed a raised Warren. Reluctantly, he understood what he must do, though it scraped against the grain of decades of habit. He let his Warren fall away, then froze, almost not breathing, listening to the night.
Outside, claws grated against the stone cobbles of the narrow street. He swallowed and fought the mad urge to flee. No running – they are hunters.
A great bull-bellows of an exhalation rattled the door and sent up a massive cloud of dust from the gap beneath. The air became redolent with a sweet spicy scent, as of mace, or anise seed. The frantic need to run made his legs quiver, but he fought it, though he expected at any instant the beast to crash through the flimsy barrier.
A last reverberating snort and the claws grated once more, swiftly, as the monster ran off – called perhaps by some other scent or spoor.
He let out a long hard breath, sagging in exhaustion and relief. He reached clumsily for the door. Ancient gods! I am definitely too old for this.
*
Tattersail passed through the streets of the high manor district then descended into the thick fogs that cloaked Malaz City proper. The haze was so dense she had to raise her Thyr Warren to its highest extent just to penetrate the coils and hanging curtains.
In the apparent quiet she began to wonder what she was doing here and just what it was she hoped to accomplish. Clearly, some sort of manifestation was taking shape in the city, but what? And what could she hope to contribute?
Perhaps it was one of the legendary Shadow Moons, though she understood such arrivals were always known long beforehand. Agayla spoke of them as highly regulated and predictable, like eclipses.
She turned a corner in the merchants’ quarter and came face to face with several men loading goods into a wagon drawn up before an open shop-front. She stared and they froze, arms full of bolts of cloth, baskets and kegs.
One tossed his armload into the wagon and turned to his fellows. ‘Well, well, mates. Look what we have here.’
‘What are you doing…’ she breathed in complete disbelief.
The one who had spoken hiked up his trousers and gestured to her, grinning. ‘Some sort of social affair, is it?’
Looking down, she realized how absurd she must appear wandering the streets in a full evening gown, and that tattered and torn. Then she blinked, frowning – what she looked like was completely irrelevant! ‘Run, now,’ she told them.
They chuckled together, two circling behind her. ‘First give us a kiss, lass,’ the spokesman urged. ‘Just a kiss, Miss High-and-mighty…’