26. The Problem
The Problem
Kain brought the monster guide back to Sam the next morning, but the rider wasn't back yet, so he went home. He didn't look for another attack right off, and until the notes came in there was nothing to do but the work in front of him.
He kept his head down and his eyes off the steady traffic of folk who had all at once found reasons to ride past his place, and he worked.
The day after, he went back to the store, and Sam looked up at him the moment he came through the door, keen as a dog at a gate.
"You read them?" Kain asked. It hardly needed asking, and Sam only nodded.
"Glanced through. I'll own I don't know how you warriors do it."
"Same way anybody goes at a problem too big to handle from the front." Kain came up to the counter. "One step at a time. Where are they?"
"In the back. I'd sooner you read them here and leave them, they're guild property. I'm not rightly meant to have them at all, but I was owed a favor."
"I'll read fast." Kain went through into the storeroom. The big doors at the back stood open to a warm breeze, and he found the packet on a crate near the back, took it up, and sat down to look it over.
It was less than he had hoped for. The top sheet read, in a clerk's neat hand, Reported gryphon activity in the south-central province of Greyhaven. Below it sat just three entries, and no more than that.
He read down through the first of the three accounts.
Twenty years back, a tame gryphon had got loose from a traveling circus and settled on a hillock upstream of Redwater, and the Red Fists, an A-ranked company, had been hired and had killed it.
That was the whole of the entry, and there was little in it to go on.
The second account ran longer than the first. A wild gryphon had been driven down out of the northern mountains by a frost dragon and come to roost on the snow cliffs, and when it took to killing a merchant guild's caravan stock the guild had hired six against it.
Two shields, two archers, two mages, an alliance the guild rated a hair above B.
They had killed it, in the end, but one man went over the cliff edge in the doing, and two more came home short a limb.
The gryphon had broken off and dragged itself back into the mountains, and was found dead of its hurts some weeks after.
The third account was nearer to home in every sense.
A wild gryphon had turned up close to Greyhaven, where it came from nobody knew, maybe run in for sale on the black market, and a bounty had gone up, ten gold on its head.
Green Bow, a B-ranked company, had taken the work.
They spent two whole days working the ground around the nest before they ever closed with it, and three of them went in.
The fight ran long and ugly, and one of them came out short an arm.
A shoe scuffed behind him, and he turned to catch Sam leaning over his shoulder, and Sam blinked and found something to look at across the room.
"You've already read it," Kain said. "Let me read it in peace."
Sam put up his hands and drifted off, and Kain went back to the pages. The thing could be killed, but it cost every time, even with the numbers and the ranks to bring it down. He set the records aside and took up the next sheet.
The second sheet was a plain list of what a gryphon was.
Its weaknesses were few, and simple enough to count.
It fought like a terror in the air and turned clumsy on the ground.
It could be caught in its nest, where it had no room to open its wings.
And it took poison about as badly as anything did.
Everything else about the creature was pure strength.
Its hide was tough and its bones near as hard as iron.
It would throw a limb into a blow to spare its body, which made a clean killing strike a hard thing to land.
It could pull out of a killing dive and walk off the fall, so that once it had the air above a man there was little to stop it from dropping, crushing him, and lifting away again.
Its talons were rated A, hard enough to punch through good plate. Its beak the same, and the note said it was no rare thing for one of them to take a man's arm off at the shoulder with it.
The rest of the sheets spoke to the country hereabouts, and none of it gave him much. A gryphon did as well in these hills as in its own mountains, a touch slower in the worst heat of summer and no more than that. Nothing that grew here and nothing that ran here moved it one way or the other.
There was no ground he could turn against it, no plant or beast of the place that would do a part of his work for him.
It was at least some comfort to know the thing wouldn't swell to thirty feet because it had eaten a cedar; dragons and their kin took the shape of wherever they sat, but a gryphon stayed a gryphon.
What the pages left him was the three angles he had walked in with: get it down onto the ground, catch it in the nest, put poison in it.
A straight fight, one man against the thing, and he would lose.
When he had read it through he gathered it back into the packet, carried it out, and handed it across to Sam.
"Done already?"
"Enough." Kain nodded.
Sam took the file and leaned on the counter. "Give it to me straight, Kain. Can you kill this thing? I'll raise a bounty. The town would want to show what it's worth to us."
"It's not about the money. I'd do it in a heartbeat if I could." Kain glanced around to be sure the store had cleared out. "It's not that simple."
"What's not simple about it?" Sam asked. "You did this kind of work for a living. A year gone you were still out at it. What's changed?"
"Nothing about me. I hired out to guard people and move goods down bad roads, and I fought men a great deal more than I ever fought beasts. A gryphon was never my line." Kain set his arms on the counter. "And it wouldn't matter much if it had been. You know how monster ranks work?"
"A-rank's stronger than B, and on up, with S at the top. That's the size of what I know."
"That's half of it. The other half is they're ranked by what it takes to put them down. What kind of team it takes. A gryphon's B-ranked, which means it takes a B-ranked team to kill one."
"And what makes a B-ranked team?" Sam asked.
"Strength enough among them to take a B-ranked monster. There's a whole reckoning behind it, skills and numbers and how well they fight together. The trouble is, I'm one man. I don't rate as a team at all."
"But you're strong."
"Not strong enough for this." Kain shook his head.
"Some of the best swords alive will rate as a whole team on their own.
I met a man once, S-ranked, and he came out a C-ranked team by himself.
I wouldn't rate near that. F's the bottom of the scale, and on my own I'd come out somewhere under it, an H if they bothered to make one. "
"Why's that?" Sam pressed.
"Numbers. Two of you, three of you, and you can split its eye. One holds its front while the rest come in from the side. One man on his own takes the whole of it, every time, with nothing to pull it off him."
"Makes sense, I suppose." Sam said. "Two men on a fence get it done better than twice as fast."
They stood a moment with that between them. A handful of wolves had been one thing; a gryphon was a long way past it, and Kain knew it as well as Sam did, and he turned to go.
"I'll do what I can. That I'll promise you. How it comes out, I can't."
"Thank you, Kain," Sam said, low, as Kain went out the front.
Out in the street he stopped a moment. He looked at Roan, and then at the stable, and then he took up the reins and led the horse instead of mounting it.
He drew a few odd looks for walking a sound animal through town, and he let them pass. He wanted the slow way home, and he needed the room to turn the thing over.
He put his eyes up to the ridge line as he walked, where the thing most likely lay up through the day. "Just where in there are you," he said to it. His hands closed into fists and opened again.
Partway home Ghost came up out of the ditch and fell in at his side, and Kain went on studying the trees.
He swept the treeline with his eyes, over and over, and played the thing through behind them.
He set a gryphon above those trees, watching, and dropped it, from low and then from high, working out how fast it would be moving at the bottom and how hard it would come down, how well a nest might hide up in that timber and how long a man would have in one before the thing came home to it.
He didn't work it in words but ran it, the fight playing out behind his eyes. He took it asleep in the nest, the best he could hope for. He took it head-on with no warning, the worst. He ran through every turn that lay between the two.
When he came up onto his own ground he put Roan away and went inside.
His sword lay in the bedroom drawer where it had sat since he came to the farm, and he pulled the drawer and lifted it out. It sat solid in his hand, firm and familiar for all the time it had spent put away.
He drew it, held it a moment, and made two short practice cuts. Then he sheathed it and laid it back in the drawer. There was no sense sharpening for a fight he didn't yet understand.
He couldn't take a gryphon alone, which left him a team to find. The farmers had heart and little else, and they hadn't been able to handle wolves. The men he had known on the road, other companies, other swords for hire, would come only for coin he didn't have and the village could never raise.
There was no team to be had, and no money to buy one.
So there was nothing for it, for now, but to sit with the problem and turn it over until it gave. That, at least, was work he was good at.