In a very small voice, someone said, "Is that the cry these monsters make?"

"Don't know what else it could be." Van sounded amazingly cheerful. "Noisy buggers, aren't they? 'Course, frogs are noisy, too, and a frog isn't hardly anything but air and legs."

Gerin admired his friend's sangfroid. He also admired the way the outlander had done his best to make the creatures from the caves seem less dangerous; he knew they were a great deal more than air and legs.

The frightful cry rang out yet again. "How are we to sleep with that racket?" Widin Simrin's son said.

"You roll up in your blanket and you close your eyes," Gerin said, not about to let Van outdo him in coolness. "We have sentries aplenty; you won't be eaten while you snore."

"And if you are, you can blame the Fox," Van put in, adding, "Not that it'll do you much good then."

Off in the distance, almost on the edge of hearing, another monster shrieked to answer the first. That sent ice walking up Gerin's back, not from terror at the faraway cry but because it said the creatures that made those dreadful sounds were spreading over the northlands. Gerin wondered how many more were calling back and forth farther away than he could hear.

The one nearby kept quiet after that. Exhaustion and edgy nerves fought a battle over the Fox; exhaustion eventually won. The next thing he knew, the sun was prying his eyelids open. He got up and stretched, feeling elderly. His mouth tasted like something scraped off the bottom of a chamber pot. He walked over to a tree, plucked off a twig, frayed one end of it with the edge of his dagger, and used it to scrub some of the vileness from his teeth. Some of his men did the same, others didn't bother.

Rihwin, who'd grown up south of the High Kirs, was so fastidious that even frayed twigs didn't completely satisfy him. As he tossed one aside, he said, "In the City of Elabon they make bristle brushes for your mouth. Those are better by far than these clumsy makeshifts."

"If you like, you can teach the art to one of the peasants who makes big brushes for rubbing down horses," Gerin said. "We might be able to sell them through the northlands—not many southern amenities to be had here these days."

"My fellow Fox, I admire the wholeheartedness of your mercenary spirit," Rihwin said.

"Anyone who sneers at silver has never tried to live without it." Gerin looked around. "Where'd Van go?"

"He walked into the woods a while ago," Widin said. "He's probably off behind a tree, taking care of his morning business."

The outlander returned a few minutes later. He said. "When you're done breaking your fast, friends, I want you to come with me. I went looking for the spot where that thing made a racket last night, and I think I found it."

Several of the men were still gnawing on hard bread and sausage as they followed Van. He led them down a tiny track to a clearing perhaps a furlong from the camp. The carcass of a doe lay there. Much of the hindquarters portion had been devoured.

A scavenging fox fled from the carcass when the men came out of the woods. Van said to Gerin, "I hope your name animal hasn't ruined the tracks I saw. I'd be liable to think ill of it if it has, and I know you wouldn't like that." He walked over to the doe, grunted. "No, looks like we're all right. Come up a few at a time, all of you, and have a look at what the ground shows."

Gerin was part of the first small group forward. When he got close to the dead doe, Van pointed to a patch of bare, soft dirt by the animal. The footprints there were like none the Fox had ever seen. At first he thought they might be a man's, then a bear's—they had claw marks in front of the ends of their toes. But they didn't really resemble either. They were—something new.

"So this is the spoor we have to look for, is it?" he said grimly.

"Either that or someone's magicking our eyes," Van answered. "And I don't think anybody is."

The Fox didn't think so, either. He waited till all his men had seen the new footprints, then said, "They have claws on their hands, too. Now that we know what their tracks look like, let's get moving and see if we can't hunt down a few."

The warriors were quiet as they trooped back to the campsite. Now they had real evidence that Gerin and Van hadn't made up the tale about the monsters. They'd believed them already, likely enough, in an abstract way, but hearing about something new and terrible wasn't the same as seeing proof it was really there.

A couple of hours after they started tramping west, Gerin detached another band of men from his force to scour the area where they were. The rest slogged on; grumbles about aching feet got louder.

Around noon, Rihwin said, "Lord Gerin, something which may be of import occurs to me."

"And what is that?" Gerin asked warily. You never could tell with Rihwin. Some of his notions were brilliant, others crackbrained, and knowing the one bunch from the other wasn't always easy.

Now he said, "My thought, lord prince, is that these may in sooth be creatures of the night, wherein we heard the two of them giving cry. For does it not stand to reason that, having lived an existence troglodytic lo these many years, perhaps even ages, their eyes, accustomed as they must be to darkness perpetual, will necessarily fail when facing the bright and beaming rays of the sun?"

"Troglo—what?" Van said incredulously, no doubt speaking for a good many of the Fox's warriors.

Gerin was well-read and used to Rihwin's elaborate southern speech patterns, so he at least understood what his fellow Fox was talking about. "Means 'living in caves,'" he explained for those who hadn't followed. To Rihwin, he said, "It's a pretty piece of logic; the only flaw is that it's not so. Van and I saw the things fighting the temple guards in broad daylight the morning of the earthquake, and heard one behind us coming out of Ikos later that same day. Their eyes work perfectly well in sunlight."

"Oh, a pox!" Rihwin cried. "How dreadful to see such a lovely edifice of thought torn down by hard, brute fact." He sulked for the next couple of hours.

The Fox detached another team late that afternoon, and camped with his remaining two teams not long afterwards. The night passed quietly, much to his relief. Standing first watch was not so onerous—better that than being torn from sleep by a horrible screech, at any rate.

Early the next morning, he gave Rihwin's team their area to patrol. "Good hunting," he said, clapping his ekenamesake on the shoulder.

"I thank you, lord Gerin," Rihwin answered, and then, "Do you know, there are times when I wonder how wise I was to cast aside my life of wealth and indolence in the southlands for an adventurous career with you."

"There are times when I wonder about that, too," Gerin said. "A lot of them, as a matter of fact. What you're saying now is that your heart wouldn't break if you didn't happen to run across any monsters?"

"Something like that, yes."

"I feel the same way, believe me," Gerin said, "but if we don't go after them, they'll end up coming after us. I'd sooner make the fight on my terms, and as far from my keep as I can."

"I understand the logic, I assure you," Rihwin said. "The argument takes on a different color, however, when it moves from the realm of ideas to the point of affecting one personally. Logicians who cling to abstract concepts seldom run the risk of being devoured."

"No matter how much they may deserve it," Gerin added, which won him a glare. He gave Rihwin another encouraging swat. For all the southerner's talk, Gerin didn't worry about his courage. His common sense was another matter, or would have been if he'd had any to speak of.

The Fox led his own team westward. Alarmed at their advance, a young stag bounded out of a thicket. Van pulled an arrow from his quiver, nocked, and let fly, all in close to the same instant. "That's a hit!" he shouted, and hurried forward to where the stag had been. Sure enough, blood splashed the grass. "Come on, you lugs," the outlander said to his companions. "With a trail like this to follow, a blind man'd be eating venison steaks tonight."