Chapter 1

Ilna looked down the valley to the gray limestone temple and the slaughtered bodies around it. There were many corpses, though she didn't know precisely how many: when a number was higher than she could count on her fingers, she had to tell it with beans or pebbles… if she cared. Mostly she didn't care. These folk, the humans and the catmen who must've killed them and been killed in turn, were all dead. The dead didn't matter. Ilna had loved her family, Chalcus and Merota. They didn't matter either because catmen had killed them also. "It can't've happened long ago," said Asion, the small, dark man who cropped his hair and beard with a knife at long intervals. Ilna'd known the hunter for nearly a month, and she hadn't seen him trim it in that time. "I don't smell them in the breeze."

"There's no breeze," said Karpos, his ginger-haired partner, equally unkempt. He crushed a pellet of dry soil between the thumb and finger of his right hand, letting the dust drift to the ground. It fell straight, so far as Ilna could see. "You're just pretending you feel one." "There's a breeze," said Asion crooking his left index finger without taking his eyes off the valley. "The fuzz on my ears feels the wind even when dust won't drift. There's breeze enough that I'd smell them if they'd started to stink." Karpos' left hand held a short, very stiff wooden bow with an arrow nocked; its point was bronze, thin but with broad wings that'd require only a few heartbeats to bleed out the life of whatever he hit fairly. Asion had a sling with a short staff and linen thongs. For ordinary hunting he shot smooth pebbles, but he carried a few pointed lead bullets in a pouch; one of those was in the pocket of molded leather now. A word was cast into the metal of the bullets. Asion seemed to think it was a valuable charm, though he wasn't sure because the hunters couldn't read any better than Ilna did.