Huge Ajax's Arc

Chapter 302 of 619

The party rode through the gate at midday with the two Verath lashed across three horses. Men gathered in the yard to see them. Ajax dropped from the saddle and pointed to the flat ground by the smithery. "Lay them out here," he said. "We strip them today, while the hides are fresh." Aldric knelt by the larger carcass and ran a hand along its flank. The scholar had studied these beasts from a torn fragment before Ajax ever hunted one, and he read the body like a page. "Cut here, along the spine," he said. He drew a line with his finger. "The hide peels clean if you follow the ridge. Force it and you tear the leather." Tarron came from his shed with his skinning knives rolled in cloth. The woolwright said nothing at first. He crouched, tested the blade against the hide, and nodded once. "Thick," he said. "Warmer than bear. This makes coats that outlast the men who wear them." He set to work. His hands moved fast and sure, the same hands that had read fleece for forty years. The hide came away in a long sheet. Ajax worked beside them, pulling the loosened skin as Tarron cut. By dusk both hides lay stretched on frames. Aldric packed the teeth in a padded box and set the bones aside for Vello's forge. Nothing was thrown away. Chalam waited until the carcasses were bare. Then he opened the throat of the first beast and cut free two dark glands the size of fists. He carried them to the smithery bench and set them in a clay bowl. "These hold the sound-muffling oil," he said. "Raw, they rot in a day. Rendered, the working lasts a season." Ajax watched him mash the glands and heat them over the coals. A sharp smell filled the shed. Chalam skimmed the oil into a numbered vial and stoppered it. He held it to the lamp. The liquid inside swallowed the sound of his own voice, dulling it to a whisper. "One potion," Chalam said. "Enough to silence a man's steps for a full night. Traders pay for this in silver." He set it on the bench. "But it drains fast. The glands from two beasts make three vials, no more." Ajax turned the vial in his hand. He thought of the hides drying, the teeth boxed, the bone waiting for the forge. Every part of the beast had become a good to sell. "Then we hunt more," he said. "The north woods are full of them." Aldric closed his ledger. "You have a house that clothes and feeds itself," he said. "Now it makes what no other port can." He met Ajax's eye. "Merchants will come for the coats. The oil brings the ones who whisper." Ajax nodded and sealed the vial in the vault himself.