Huge Ajax's Arc

Chapter 526 of 619

The new staff held. Chalam could reach across the sea now without breaking. But Ajax sat with Aldric one morning and counted a different weakness. His trade rested on beasts he already knew. Verath. Pale-fur. Gray coast beasts. Each hunt thinned the woods further. Rowan kept reporting the same tracks moving north, away, gone. Ajax knew the truth. He was living off a shrinking store and had never once gone looking for what else the land held. "We hunt what we stumble on," Ajax said. "That ends. I want to know what walks the coast we have not walked." Aldric spread his maps on the table. He set a finger on the blank stretches south of the marked coves. "We have never sailed past this line," he said. "No man of ours has. There could be beasts worth ten Verath there. Or nothing." Rowan stood at the door, arms crossed. "Groves go quiet in the far south," he said. "Same rot smell. Something feeds there." He said it flat, the way he said everything. Ajax had learned to weigh Rowan's short words heavy. The man missed nothing in the trees. Tucker leaned against the wall, chains catching the light. "Empty coast is bad for the bar," he said. "But new fur is good for it. Captains buy stories. Give me a pelt no other port has seen and I sell it twice over." He grinned. "I'm in favor of anything I can lie about later." Ajax weighed the risk. Uncharted water could wreck a ship. But he had a second hull now, one built for the shore. He would not gamble the northern route. He would gamble the small boat and four men. "Rowan leads," Ajax said. "Chalam masks scent and reads for old workings. I go. Tucker holds the bar and the tongues while we're gone." He looked at Aldric. "Mark every mile of new coast we find. Every water source. Every track. We come home knowing what the south holds, or we come home knowing it holds nothing." They sailed two days later. Rowan found the first shore by the smell before Ajax saw it, a cut in black rock where fresh water ran to the sea. Chalam wetted the ground with oil to kill their scent. They waited at dusk. The beast that came to drink stood taller than any Verath. Long-legged, quill-backed, quick. Rowan's arrow took its throat. Ajax drove his father's blade through its open mouth. It dropped without a cry. Chalam knelt over it and named nothing familiar. "New," Chalam said. "No binding. No mark. A clean creature." Rowan cut a strip of hide and rubbed it between his fingers. "Warm," he said. "Thick. Worth more than pale-fur." Ajax looked at the quilled hide and the dark coast running south past his sight. He had one hide now, and a map with a hundred miles left to fill. His store had stopped shrinking.