"Yeah." Her lips felt puffy, the side of her face a balloon of air. She put up her hand and remembered, tore off her sodden glove, brushed her lips, then the corner of her right eye with her fingertips. The wounds were along her cheekbone and jaw, sticky with blood and slobber. "What was that thing?"

"Lie still a little more." Ingold unslung the pack from his shoulders and dug in it with swift hands. "Then you can have a look."

All the while he was daubing a dressing of herb and willow bark on the wounds, stitching them and applying linen and plaster-braiding in the spells of healing, of resistance to infection and shock-Gil was conscious of him listening, watching, casting again the unseen net of his awareness over the landscape that lay beyond the courtyard wall.

Once he stood up, quickly, catching up the sword that lay drawn on the muddy marble at his side, but whatever it was that had stirred the slunch was still then and made no further move.

He knelt again. "Do you think you can sit up?" "Depends on what kind of reward you offer me."

His grin was quick and shy as he put a hand under her arm. Dizziness came and went in a long hot gray wave. She didn't want him to think her weak, so she didn't cling to him as she wanted to, seeking the familiar comfort of his warmth. She breathed a couple of times, hard, then said, "I'm fine. What the hell is it?" "I was hoping you might be able to tell me." "You're joking!"

The wizard glanced at the carcass-the short bulldog muzzle, the projecting chisel teeth, the body a lumpy ball of fat from which four thick-scaled, ropy legs projected-and made a small shrug. "You've identified many creatures in our world-the mammoths, the bison, the horrible-birds, and even the dooic-as analogous to those things that lived in your own universe long ago. I hoped you would have some lore concerning this."