Chapter 6 Thaleo
THALEO
Irose before the sun the morning after the vaklok. I’d not slept well, plagued with dreams of green sight stars that I offended and cold, fragile fingers that I protected. More than once I’d half-woken, reaching for hands that were not there. My claws closed upon nothing.
I was a large male. My bed was an appropriate size. It had never felt so oddly empty before.
Until now.
It was an unnerving sensation that I tried and mostly failed to shake off as I left that bed behind for the day.
My sleeping cave was one of the smaller ones.
I washed with cold water, as my cave did not have a hot spring of its own.
As Gahn, I would be more than entitled to such a thing.
I had no doubt that Gahn Errok maintained the most lavish sets of caves in his mountain for himself and his Gahnala.
No one would question me if I were to claim a better cave for myself.
But I had no need for such a thing. No desires of my own.
Gahn Seerak – Uncle Seerak – had ensured it. And I was grateful to him for it.
I always had been. He’d died in service of his people.
Compared to that, sleeping in a sparse, small cave so that others in my tribe had access to better luxuries was nothing at all to me.
My hair dripped, sodden after washing as I ran a comb of carved bone through it. I put on a fresh loincloth, strapped a single blade to my back, and was just reaching for my quiver of arrows and my bow – a bow which had once been Gahn Seerak’s – when I heard hurried footsteps from beyond my cave.
“My Gahn!” Warrek’s voice sounded strained. This was unlike him. I beat down a wing of panic, my mind flashing to the new women. To Nazreen.
“Enter,” I said, looping the quiver over my shoulder and holding my bow at my side. Warrek did so at once, his sight stars bright in the gloom.
“Arton and Jael have returned from their patrol. They bring news of a borog trail in the new territories.”
My knuckles ached as my fist clenched my bow.
A borog…
One had not been seen since Gahn Seerak’s death.
“Where-” I broke off in sudden confusion. I’d wanted to ask him where Arton and Jael were so that I could question them on what they saw.
But instead, I’d almost asked him, “Where is Nazreen?”
“In the new territories,” he said again, misunderstanding my half-formed question. “They believe they have found evidence of burrowing where our new territory borders the neutral lands near the Vrika’s peak.”
This was territory that was ceded to us in the alliance with the new women and, by extension, Gahn Errok.
Territory that had proven flush with meat for our hunters.
But if there was a borog present, it would be safe for no one.
Not hunter, not Gahn. Borogs were largely solitary creatures.
They could live twice as long as a man, and the older they got, the larger they grew and the deeper they were capable of burrowing.
Sometimes they slept for ages upon ages, their position unknown to the people living above. Until they woke up.
And wreaked havoc.
“Where are Arton and Jael now?”
“In the braxilk cave.”
Together, Warrek and I moved with purpose through the mountain, travelling upwards until we reached the braxilk cave.
The braxilk cave was not a closed room, but rather a cave that was open to the air.
The cave was deep, stretching back far enough and then turning slightly to give ample shelter from the elements and creating a safe, windless haven for nests.
But the open quality allowed the braxilk to come and go, to stretch their wings upon the sky and plunge down to the pools of water in the valleys below for fish.
Adult braxilk were scattered about the place, some resting on high ledges, others standing near the edge of the cave, as if deciding whether or not to go into that cool, pre-dawn light.
Arton and Jael stood close together, their braxilk with them, their faces grave.
My own braxilk, a sturdy male named Yeralk, watched me with his six silver eyes.
“Tell me what you saw,” I said to the men.
Together, they described their flight through the new territory. They spoke of the broken stone, the churned-up ground, the yawning mouths of new tunnels.
“But you did not see the creature itself,” I pressed them.
They both snapped their tails. “No, Gahn,” Arton said.
I was about to ask them about the scent – but then I remembered.
Arton and Jael were both much younger than I was.
They were mere children the last time a borog had plagued our people, and they certainly wouldn’t have been close enough to any of the confrontations we’d had with it to remember such a thing.
But I remembered. The scent of the borog, forever intertwined with that of Gahn Seerak’s blood.
Warrek was younger than me, but not so young as these two. He would remember, just as I did.
“Get some food and some rest,” I told the two young hunters. No doubt Arton in particular would want to get back to his newly pregnant mate, Zaria. But before I let them go, I made them describe exactly where they’d seen the new tunnels.
“What would you have us do, Gahn?” Warrek asked once they’d left, sombre, but not afraid.
“For now, you and I will fly to confirm what they saw,” I said. “We will not do anything beyond that yet.”
A borog was an incredible foe. We were not prepared to fight one today.
We hadn’t truly recovered from the last one, even though it had been ages ago by now.
But one advantage we did have was flight.
Borogs were ground dwellers. Even if we encountered the creature this morning, as long as we had our braxilk, we would be out of its reach.
Warrek raised his tail, a quick gesture of acknowledgment of my command.
He clicked his tongues, and his female braxilk, Peeley, flew down from a higher ledge in the cave on her wide grey-and-purple wings.
Yeralk must have sensed I wanted him, as he was already walking towards me on his many nimble legs, adjusting his wings at his back and dipping his head towards me.
I gave him a brief stroke along the elegant crest of his head, down his long neck, before I gripped him and mounted him, settling myself upon his back, just behind his wings.
Warrek did the same. Together, we leapt from the cave and dove into the sky.
The mountains came into vivid life as the sun hauled itself up into the sky around them, then above them.
The shapes and colours of the landscape seemed all at once more beautiful than they had to me at any other point in my life.
And I could not account for this, except for the fact that some unspoken part of my mind had suddenly compared the stark soar and plunge of the mountains to the arresting beauty of Nazreen’s features.
The sharp wings of her dark brows. The high, bony arch of her nose.
The twin peaks of her pink upper lip, and the curving valley of the lower.
And then there were those eyes, which seemed to have no equal.
I had never seen anything in my mountains that came close to the precise shade of her sight stars.
Warrek and I kept quiet, bent low over the necks of our mounts, as we sought out the place that Arton and Jael had described. I smelled the borog before I saw its tunnels. The foul scent, for a moment, sent me tumbling ages into the past.
“There,” Warrek called to me, indicating an area below by pointing his bow at it.
By now, the sun was climbing higher, everything bright, glinting light and shadow.
The evidence of the borog was grimly clear.
I directed Warrek to land with me along a stony mountain ledge, and we descended there together.
A great hole had been dug across the valley from us, stones upturned and turned to dust. I had not seen one in ages, but I could immediately recall the incomprehensible strength of the beast; the huge, pointed crest on the top of its flat head, almost like the shape of an arrowhead, that it used as a hammering pick.
The unbreakable, digging claws, each one nearly as long as half a man’s height.
And now it was here. Again. A new one to replace the one Gahn Seerak had killed and been killed by.
I strained to listen, but heard nothing. I asked Warrek, and he admitted the same. The creature had likely burrowed deep below ground in this place, and was now in silent slumber.
“Shall we descend?” Warrek asked. “I will follow you anywhere, Gahn.”
Including into the bleak darkness of that hole, it seemed. Warrek was a good man – the best of them. I found myself hoping, both for his sake and for Tilly’s, that they might be meant for one another.
“We cannot seek it out like this,” I told him.
Entering its tunnel would be certain death for both of us.
We’d be crushed by it instantly. A borog slept curled up in a ball, the vulnerable point of the underside of its throat hidden.
I also knew that it would waken if approached.
It could sense the minutest vibrations of movement in its tunnels.
Warrek raised his tail in understanding, though he looked warily down at the tunnel again, his grip on his bow tightening.
As if he wanted to shoot arrows down into it, as useless as we both knew arrows would be against the rock-hard scales that covered most of its body.
I doubted even the advanced weaponry of the new women would affect it.
“For now, we will wait,” I said, thinking rapidly through my plans. “We will send riders out here twice daily to monitor the burrowing and any progress it makes towards our mountain. Are any of the new women currently stationed in neutral territory below the Vrika’s peak?”
The Vrika’s peak was not far from here. I could see it easily, a tall spire with the Vrika’s nest at its peak – the source of its mate visions.
The area below the Vrika’s peak was where they had created their settlement when they’d first arrived in the Deep Sky.
I did not believe that any of them slept there now, but some of the group returned to that area from time to time.
“No,” Warrek replied, confirming what I’d already thought. “The mated women and their males have taken up residence with Gahn Errok.”
I clenched my fangs together, but the mention of Gahn Errok was not as thorny as it would once have been. Because his mountain was far from these tunnels, and despite the strength of the borog, it lacked speed in its burrowing. Gahn Errok’s mountain would be safe.
Mine would be, too. For now. So long as the burrowing borog did not make its way closer. It had to come up to hunt for food, which created holes that we could track. It could not simply burrow its way all the way to my mountain from here and surprise us.
Another hole was on the other side of the valley, opposite the first I’d noticed.
Although, strangely, there was no evidence of disruption between these two holes.
No tell-tale path of the borog dragging its heavy body and tail across the valley from one tunnel to another.
I stared at the pristine and apparently untouched floor of the valley, puzzling over the logistics of such a thing.
Perhaps one hole, or both, had been created a long time ago. Though the borog’s scent was fresh…
“Shall we return, Gahn?”
“Yes,” I said at once. Again, I was struck by the near dizzying need to know of Nazreen’s whereabouts.
Of course, she would be within my mountain still.
No new woman was to leave the mountain alone, and now that Valeria and her male Grim were gone, I could not imagine that Nazreen and her friends would have ventured anywhere.
I doubted even their own Sea Sand escorts would allow such a thing, let alone my own men.
Not that they would be prisoners in my mountain. As I’d told Nazreen last night, I’d gladly show her anything she wanted to see, so long as it was safe to do so. Any questions she had, I could answer. Anything she longed to gaze upon, I could show her.
Them, I reminded myself firmly as I urged Yeralk back up into the air. There were more new women to impress than just Nazreen. And anything they wanted to see, I would show them.