Extraordinary Zoology by Howard Tayler Read Free Book Online

protection. Probably toughening us up. Might be why Horgash still has his leg.”
    “Horgash has his leg,” came Edrea’s voice from across the green, “because he is trollkin, and as such, his leg is made of stone and stubbornness.”
    Horgash laughed, the sound like a rasp on a barrel. His bison chuffed heavily, as if it were in on the joke.
    “More to the point,” she said, walking toward them, “I only thought to cast after all our shots were fired.” She bowed her head deeply. “I regret this. My failing was more than a match for Lynus’ misfire.” She turned to Horgash and bowed deeply. “I must apologize.”
    “And I’m sorry for the wasted trip,” Horgash said with a shake of his head. “It looks like the mysterious monster I promised you was nothing more than a gorax pack. They smashed the place on their first pass and came back to dig burrows later. That’s the only way I could have missed them when I first came through. Even so, I should have at least caught a whiff.”
    “Everybody makes mistakes,” Lynus said.
    “Indeed,” said Pendrake. “But Horgash did not.” He walked over to a thatch-and-splinter pile. “What do you see here?”
    Edrea spoke up. “A wattle-and-daub wall, crushed in place.”
    Lynus stepped closer. The wall had been reduced to kindling and splinters, but all of the pieces were still quite close together.
    “Crushed in place!” Pendrake said. “A heavy steamjack might be able to flatten a house in this manner, but not a gorax.”
    “Professor,” Lynus said, “even in all this ripped-up ground, a steamjack would leave sharp-edged footprints, right?” He looked around the ruined village. “And perhaps some ash?”
    “Indeed. So once again, we know what this was not .” He smiled. “We have ourselves a genuine puzzle here. Something big flattened this village, and pushed and churned the ground, but for all the tracks I can find coming and going from Bednar, it might as well have dropped out of the sky.”
    Kinik looked up, wide-eyed, then began flipping through her Monsternomicon .
    Pendrake noticed. “And since the entire area hasn’t been scorched, frozen, or otherwise blighted, I don’t suspect this is the work of one of the dragons.”
    Kinik relaxed.
    Lynus stepped over to her and pointed at the illustration she had flipped to. “I cross-referenced several passages from The Wyrmsaga Cycle for scale. Those little dots are people.”
    Kinik stared down at the book. Lynus thought he’d done a pretty good job with that picture. He hoped to never learn exactly how good.
    He walked over to the shattered home that the larger gorax had been sheltering beneath. The thatched roof was gone, and the ground around it was particularly well-churned. A bushel basket, crushed flat, had walnuts spilling out of it. A hand axe lay pressed into the mud.
    Midday sunlight shone into the hole. Mud, blood, and scraps of what used to be people—this was where the last of the bodies had ended up, dragged in here by a scavenging pack of gorax. Blowflies swarmed, and Lynus briefly considered attempting a field test of the “carrion clock,” but thought better of climbing down there.
    The hole was deep, with pooling water at the bottom. The gorax pack would have had the opportunity to bathe, something your average gorax didn’t do nearly often enough. Even if they’d just wash their faces, get rid of the drool, and remove the rotting food from their teeth, maybe they wouldn’t smell quite so foul.
    Lynus stared into the hole. Teeth. There was something about the shape of the hole. It didn’t look like any burrow he’d seen before. He turned his head sideways. Layers of loam were stretched and pulled, along with long, questing roots from the nearby grove of apple and walnut trees. They weren’t dug out with gorax claws, but punched through from below. Like an argus tooth punching through an entomology text, stretching bits of the cover, tearing pages, dragging the raw edges