Huge Ajax's Arc

Chapter 405 of 619

The three hides hung in the workhouse, salted and stretched. Aldric's men had pulled the teeth and turned them into needles. Bran's smith had cut the bones into blades. Ajax stood over the last of the work and knew none of it answered his real question. The Verath had fled south from something worse. He would not wait for it to reach his walls. He called Rowan, Chalam, and Kael to the hall and told them they were riding north to find the source. Rowan spread a strip of bark on the table. He had drawn the drag marks on it in charcoal. "They came in a straight line," he said. "Fast. That means open ground behind them. Something drove them out of the deep woods." "How far?" Ajax asked. "Half a day to the kill. Another half past that." Rowan tapped the top of the bark. "The trail keeps going. We follow it to whatever made them run." Chalam set his staff against the table and opened his satchel. "I can read a binding at distance if one is breaking. If a god is waking up north, the staff will feel it before we see it." He looked at Ajax. "Last time I read one older than I expected, it cracked my staff and took two weeks of my thoughts. I want you to know that before we go." Kael said nothing. He checked the edge of a bone blade with his thumb, then slid it into his belt beside his knife. He had ridden with Ajax to the coast door and taken the gold chain at the fire. Now he stood ready to leave without being asked twice. "Grayson holds the gate," Ajax said. He had left Tucker and Marco at the crossing to hire fighters. That could not wait either. "Four of us ride light. We track it, we name it, we come home. We do not open anything." He looked at Chalam. "If your staff feels a binding, we stop and think. No blood, no salt, until we know what it is." Chalam nodded. "Agreed." They took the northern trade route out of the compound at dawn. The bone-blade sacks rode behind Kael. Rowan led, eyes on the ground, calling the trail as he found it. By midday they passed the three dead Verath. By dusk the drag marks split into deeper grooves, older and wider than any beast Rowan had tracked before. Rowan crouched over the widest groove and went still. "This is not Verath," he said. "Bigger. It moves through the soil like they do, but the mark is twice as wide." He looked up. "Whatever the Verath ran from, it is a full day north. And it is still coming this way." Ajax marked the spot in his mind and turned his horse. The hides were stored. The threat had a direction. Now he needed a team large enough to meet it before it reached Black Oak.