Another sound came from somewhere to his left and Konowa moved toward it, allowing his senses to guide his feet as he kept his eyes searching the shadows ahead. The stillness of the forest hung like a veil from the branches, and the longer he walked the harder it seemed to push forward. He had decided he would only walk another fifty yards when he stepped into a clearing, and what had only been an exceptionally bad day became a waking nightmare.
FOUR
Not more than thirty yards away across the clearing crouched four rakkes around a fallen tree.
Four seven-foot-tall, boulder-shouldered, black, scraggly haired rakkes all staring at Konowa with milky eyes deep-set in scarred, leathery faces.
But rakkes were extinct.
What Konowa was seeing was impossible, yet he knew they were rakkes. He'd seen the drawings on stretched hides handed down from generation to generation, heard the ancient tales, even held a skull of one of the creatures in his hands. They had lived high in the mountain, coming down like nightfall to ravage the land below. The elves of the Long Watch had hunted them down and destroyed them. Centuries ago, and an ocean away.
Yet all of that meant nothing now. Four rakkes were only thirty yards away from him. They stood up as one, teetering slightly in this new bipedal stance, like drunks one round away from falling. Long, curving claws slid out from pawlike hands that hung down by their knees.
The largest of them opened its mouth to reveal long, yellow fangs glistening with saliva. It screamed a high, mewling cry and the other three responded in kind, shaking the forest floor.
It was a sound as cold and black as the depths of time it should have been lost in.