30. The Ridge
The Ridge
Kain left the Kettle and stood a moment in the street. The sun was just now creeping over the horizon, which likely meant the gryphon would be settling in for the day.
From what he had gathered, the thing hunted hardest in the morning and the evening, though nothing in the guild papers had said as much. He turned Roan and rode for the forest.
Roan didn't balk as they struck off across the rolling hills, over grass that bent and swept under the wind. A dark shape came shooting over the rises, angling in toward him. Ghost.
The wolf had worked out somehow that Kain wasn't pointed home, and had come to see about it, and Kain was glad enough of the company. Ghost would give him fair warning if trouble came around, and he was sure enough that it would, sooner or later.
The ridge rose ahead of him, southeast of the village. The trees stood at the edge of the hills a mile or so out, with no farm anywhere near them.
No one had ever taken up that ground, which left it lonelier than the country around it. Good ground for a gryphon to den on.
Kain rode up to the edge of the trees and took out the map. "Let's see. There's a dead tree marked here at the edge." He lifted his eyes from the paper. "There it is."
A little ahead of him a great dead tree stood tall, its old branches still aloft after long years gone grey and rotten. "And a trail just past it."
The trail ran back toward the ridge, which was where he wanted to be. He wanted the wolfsbane and the berries and the nightcaps too, but none of that was the main thing today. Today he only wanted a look at what lay up there.
He rode for the dead tree, found the trail just past it, and turned Roan onto it. The horse paused, blew at the air, and went on like the good animal he was.
They went on quietly through the forest, Ghost darting ahead and circling back and shooting off again. The wind worked through the leaves overhead, and rabbits and a few deer broke and bounded off at their coming.
The ground began to climb, and the trees thinned into scrub brush, which to Kain's eye meant rockier ground underneath, the kind that wouldn't hold a cottonwood or a hackberry. The path bent back on itself as it rose, and he held to it.
The scrub gave way to pines, and in places the branches grew so thick across the path that Roan could barely push through, and a horse hemmed in like that would be no good for a quick way out. Kain found a small clearing well roofed over by the trees, tethered him there, and went on afoot.
The path got harder to follow and in places ran near straight up. The pines held to the bare stone with thick, gnarled roots. The slope steepened toward a cliff, and he knew he had come up onto the ridge proper.
It stood higher than it had looked from the hills below.
He had left Roan well behind him when he came to a sheer cliff some twenty feet high. The path ran along the foot of it. That wasn't the thing that stopped him.
A set of claw marks ran across the limestone, gouged deep, near six feet from end to end.
He reached up and ran his fingers along them. They came away dusted with fresh stone powder, the scrape no more than a few days old.
He looked about and caught sight of feathers snagged in a snarl of branches a little way off, and he worked one free. It was golden-brown, the quill stiff, longer than his forearm, and he tucked it into his pocket.
"There's a fine quill in that one," he said. "Might give it to Sasha for the Kettle. Or to Carol."
He pulled a few more loose, since Sasha would find a use for them and Carol might like something to make from them, and then he pressed on along the foot of the cliff.
The cliff rose taller as he went, near thirty feet over his head before long. He kept his place on Sasha's map as he walked.
Then the wind shifted through the trees and brought a smell with it, one he knew at once. Rotten meat.
Ghost stopped beside him and pressed close against his leg, its hackles up. Kain set his jaw and eased forward, looking through the trees ahead.
A kill lay on the ground some thirty feet off. A deer, and long dead. He went toward it, the buzz of flies rising as he came, and Ghost held back well behind him.
The wolf knew the work of a bigger predator when it smelled one, and it wouldn't go near a thing the gryphon had marked.
He looked the kill over, and it was the same as the others. Claw marks scored the stone around it, though it had been long enough that the dirt held no tracks.
He looked up and saw the canopy torn open overhead, not yet grown back, big branches hanging askew where they had been snapped clean off.
He looked down at the carcass, the whole of it gone black and soft, with black ooze in the dirt around it and maggots working in and out of the holes in the hide. One foreleg had been torn away and was gone. The belly had been ripped open and the guts hauled out.
It had all been pulled apart the same way the rest had, the breaks in the bone clean, the hide stretched ragged where the meat had been dragged loose, and nowhere on it the mark of a tooth. Kain stood over it a long moment, then turned and walked away.
Ghost seemed easier the moment they turned back, and Kain let the wolf lead him down the path a few hundred feet before he stopped. He took out the map, and so as not to lose the place, drew a charcoal pencil and marked both the claw marks and the kill.
He could turn up more sign if he gave it the time, but this wasn't the day for it. He had what he had come for, and now he needed his supplies.
The wolfsbane and the berries he could get ahead of time. The mushrooms would take more doing, and he would want a satchel set aside just for them, one he could fill without ever putting a hand to them.
He turned it over as he started back down toward Roan. There was a great deal left to weigh. He needed a look at the nest, above all else.
Without knowing where the thing laired, he had little hope of setting the poison anywhere it would do him any good. He worked at the problem the whole ride home.