Chapter 22 Venim
I smell the ashmaws long before I can see them. To be precise, I smell their blood. It is one of the scents my vomeronasal organ can detect most intensely. The scent of blood, in all its myriad forms.
I land my thrumwing beside the corpses; the others land nearby.
“Light,” I demand.
Grindal has a sack of live glowgrubs behind his saddle. He opens it and skewers one of the thumb-sized larvae with a sharpened stick. Then he holds its wriggling, bioluminescent body over the nearest carcass, allowing me to get a closer look at the damage.
It is immediately clear we are not dealing with an ordinary attack.
The ashmaw has been explosively disemboweled. Its innards lie strewn across the ground beside it in a pool of congealed blood. Based on the degree of coagulation, it has been several draleths since the creature died.
Three more ashmaws lie nearby. One is missing half its head. Another is missing its head entirely. The last one is mostly intact. It takes me a few sareths to find the knife wound at the base of the skull. Skillful work, that.
“What in the null did all this?” Grindal asks.
There is blood on the final ashmaw’s fangs. I dart my tongue out, tasting it. Just as I suspected.
“Hassaith,” I say. “Again.”
“Again? D’you think it’s the same one?”
“Of course it’s the same one,” I answer drily. “There aren’t that many Hassaith here on Ul. It would be quite a coincidence if two of them went on separate killing sprees in such close proximity, don’t you think?”
“But this damage,” Grindal says, sweeping his eyes over the devastated carcasses. “A Hassaith couldn’t do this with his bare hands.”
“He obviously had a weapon.”
Of course, weapons that do this level of destruction are uncommon here on Ul.
Or at least they were until today. I happen to know that the concubines have energy pistols in the survival packs.
Earlier today, a frightened female managed to blow the head off one of my men before we disarmed her, much to the amusement of his fellows.
I wonder…
My tongue darts again, searching for other scents. It doesn’t take me long to find them.
“The Hassaith wasn’t alone,” I say. “He had company. A Grangorian. A longstrider…”
I notice something moving beside my foot. A small thing, half-buried in the ashes, fluttering softly in the breeze. I stoop and pick it up. Then I hold it up to the light.
It is a tiny keratinous structure, flat and leaf-like, with a thin central shaft surrounded by branching arrays of filaments and sub-filaments.
A feather.
Instinctively, I lick it, and an instant later, fire fills my veins. My cock swells painfully inside my armor. It requires every atom of my will to keep from removing my codpiece and pleasuring myself the way I did at the wrecked ship.
Her.
It’s her!
I have seen enough humans now to know they do not have feathers, but the female’s scent is all over this one.
The female. Great Monad, I want so very badly to lick the feather a second time, a third, a fourth.
As many licks as it takes to gather every molecule of the female’s delicious scent inside my body.
Then I want to lick every square snik of ground in the vicinity, searching for more of that exquisite aroma.
The scent of perfection. The scent of madness.
By some miracle of self-discipline, I manage not to do that. I have to keep up appearances in front of the men, after all.
“Boss?” Grindal intones.
I stand and snatch the glowgrub torch from his hand. Then I walk in an ever-widening circle, searching the ground around the kill site. The day’s wind has erased the longstrider’s tracks, but a lingering odor of dreamweed tells me which way the travelers must have gone.
I scan my mental map, thinking about what lies in that direction. An old abandoned mine. Good place to camp for the night, as long as you don’t go inside.
And beyond that… the Weedians’ territory. That must be their ultimate destination.
They will not reach it.
We’ll be on them by sunup.