The creature they sought was something out of stories. He’d never imagined they were real, much less that he would ever track one.
“Don’t underestimate yourself, faranji,” Ruza had replied, his voice full of assurance. “I can always push you into its mouth and run. So you see, you’ll have saved my life, and I’ll never forget it.”
“Nice,” Lazlo had said. “That’s exactly the sort of heroism that inspired me to play Tizerkane as a little boy.”
“It won’t come to anything,” Tzara had cut in, giving Ruza a shove. “We’re just going to poke it. You can’t appreciate a threave until you’ve seen one. That’s all.”
Just poke it. Poke a monster. And then?
“Behold the horror,” Eril-Fane had said, approving the excursion. The caravan had adjusted its course to give the thing a wide berth, but Ruza had been keen for Lazlo to see the Elmuthaleth’s ugliest species. Threaves were ambush predators. They burrowed under the sand and lay in wait, for years even, for prey to happen along, and they were only a threat if you had the poor fortune of walking over one. But thanks to the caravan’s threave hawks, they knew exactly where the thing was.
Low in the sky, one of the birds flew circles to mark the place where the threave lay buried. The caravans had always employed falconers with special birds that could scent the stench of the creatures and avoid them—and occasionally to hunt them, as they were doing now, though with no intent to kill. They were only twenty yards from it, and the back of Lazlo’s neck prickled. He’d never stalked anything before.
“It knows we’re coming,” Ruza said. “It can feel the vibrations of our footsteps. It must be getting excited. Its mouth will be filling with digestive juices, all bubbly and hot. It would be like falling into a bath if it ate you. A really awful bath.” He was the youngest of the Tizerkane, only eighteen, and had been the first to make Lazlo welcome. Not that any of them had made him unwelcome. It was just that Ruza had an eager nature—eager to tease, more than anything else—and had taken it upon himself to teach Lazlo basic skills, such as riding, spear-throwing, cursing. He was a good language teacher all around, mainly because he talked so much, but he was unreliable—as Lazlo had discovered early on when he’d asked Azareen, Eril-Fane’s second-in-command, what turned out to mean not “Can I help you with that?” but “Would you like to sniff my armpits?”
She had declined.
That was early on. His Unseen had improved enough now to know when Ruza was trying to trick him.
Which was most of the time.
“Hush,” said Tzara. “Watch the sand.”
Lazlo did. The hawk drew a circle with its shadow, but he saw no hint within of buried beasts. There was nothing to distinguish the sand there from the sand anywhere.
Tzara stopped short. “Would you like to do the honors?” she asked him. She was another of the younger warriors. Her face was smooth and bronze, with a high-bridged, regal nose and a scar bisecting her right eyebrow. She wore her head shaved—all but an inch-thick strip down the center of her scalp, which she left long and wove into a single braid.
“Honors?” asked Lazlo.
She handed him a pebble. “Just throw it in.”
Lazlo held his spear in one hand and the pebble in the other. He stared at the stretch of sand and the shadow of the bird going round and round, took a deep breath, and… tossed the pebble. It arced through the air. And… he did expect something to happen. He even expected it to be monstrous, but perhaps there was no preparing for one’s first monster. The instant the pebble struck the surface of the sand, the desert floor erupted.
Sand flew. It stung his face and got in his eyes so that the thing that sprang up in front of him was at first sight just a big, bristling blur. He leapt backward, spear heavy in his hand, and managed to trip over his own feet and land with a thud sitting down. Ruza and Tzara didn’t fall back, though, or even heft their spears, and so he took his cue from their calm, wiped the sand from his eyes, and stared.
It was like an immense spider, he thought, his mind groping for comparisons that might make sense of the thing. But it didn’t make sense. It might resemble a great, bloated abdomen bristling with legs, but the proportions were wrong. The legs were too short, and couldn’t possibly lift the creature’s bulk. They weren’t legs at all, Lazlo realized. They were chelicerae.
Mouthparts.
They were moving wildly—a dozen black-bristled appendages roughly the size of his own arms and with pincers for grasping prey and dragging it toward… its mouth.
Lazlo couldn’t tell how much of the threave lay buried still beneath the sand, but from what he could see, it was made up almost entirely of mouth. It didn’t even have eyes, just a great, pulsating sphincter, gaping, tooth-spiked, hot, and red. The chelicerae writhed, questing for prey, and the sphincter-maw spasmed, teeth clicking open and shut, searching for something to bite into. Finding nothing, it hissed out a blast of hot air flecked with something foul—the digestive juices Ruza had mentioned?
Like “a really awful bath” indeed. Lazlo had to wonder how many adventurers, crossing the desert without the benefit of threave hawks, had ended their quest in jaws like these. “Nature’s booby trap,” Ruza called it, and they left it there, unharmed, to await the next wave of faranji adventurers foolish enough to attempt the crossing.
They rejoined the caravan, which had stopped to make camp. “Well?” asked Eril-Fane. “What do you say about threaves?”
“I need to amend my ‘Ways I Hope Not to Die’ list,” said Lazlo.
Eril-Fane laughed. “Indeed. We might have come west sooner, you know, but no one had trained a threave hawk in two hundred years. We decided to wait until that had been mastered.”
“Wise decision,” said Lazlo. Two hundred years. The first mystery of Weep, the one that had opened his mind like a door. “My city lost the world, and was lost to it,” Eril-Fane had said back in Zosma. Lazlo had been daily in his company ever since, and was no closer to knowing what any of it meant.
Soon, though.
Tomorrow.
“I’m going to put up the fog nets,” he said.