Chapter 5: The Overlooked Clue

They went to the hall. Erlich had the baron clear it — steward, dogs, serving men, all out — and Haden set the slate on the table in the grey morning light. Godwin laid out his notes, the scratched map of the stockade and the ford and the river camp. Erlich put his pouch on the table and opened it and took out the scale.

It sat there on the oak between them, dull and grey-brown and heavy, the size of a man's spread hand. He had been carrying it for days. He had turned it over once in Tomas's yard and put it away and not looked at it since.

"Now," Erlich said. "Read it."

Haden read the tally. Three goats. Two cows. A horse. Two men — the Dellwood boy, old Brennan. The dog. Wulf the stable-hand. All night-takings. All gone without blood, without bone, without hide.

"No blood," Godwin said. "No bone. Nothing left behind."

"Prey taken whole," Erlich said. He said it the way Godwin had said it in the yard, days ago, when he had not been ready to hear it.

"And the marks," Godwin said. He pointed at his map. "The furrow. Wide as a man's body. Smooth. Belly-marks, drag-scars in the middle. Nothing with legs made those marks, Captain. Something low and heavy, pulling itself. Something that drags its prey whole."

"And this," Erlich said. He picked up the scale and held it flat on his palm. It was thick, dull, curved like a shallow bowl, rough on the inside where it had torn away. Serpentine. There was no other word for the shape of it. "Tomas found it caught in the fence-post where the marks went through. I put it in my pouch and I said it was bone, or harness, and I did not look at it again."

Godwin said nothing. Leofric, in the corner, said nothing. There was nothing kind to say, and they would not have said it if there had been.

"It is not bone," Erlich said. "It is not harness. It is a scale."

He looked at it for a long moment. Then he put it back in his pouch and stood.

"Send for the wizard," he said.

Godwin raised an eyebrow. "Vaelin."

"Vaelin."

Leofric went. He came back in a quarter-hour with the wizard in tow, Vaelin climbing down from his tower in the morning light with the offended look still on his long face. He came into the hall and saw the rangers standing around the table and the slate and the map, and his eyes went sharp.

"You have work for me," he said. It was not a question. Wizards could smell a fee the way a dog smells meat.

"I have a question," Erlich said. "It has a price. Name it."

Vaelin named a price. It was a high one. Erlich did not haggle. He counted the silver out of the baron's purse — the baron had left it on the table and gone — and pushed it across.

Vaelin swept it into his sleeve. "Show me."

Erlich put the scale on the table.

Vaelin went still. His long hands came out of his sleeves and took the scale up, and he turned it the way Erlich had turned it, and then he did what Erlich had not done: he held it to the light, and he scraped the rough side with a thumbnail, and he held it to his nose. His face changed.

"Where did you find this," he said.

"A fence-post," Erlich said. "In a yard where something took a goat and a cow whole and left no blood. Where the drag-marks are wider than a man is tall."

Vaelin set the scale down. He looked at Erlich the way a man looks at another man who has been holding a lit match and not known it.

"This is a wyrm scale," he said.

The word sat in the hall.

"A wyrm," Vaelin said, slow, the way wizards say things when they are earning their fee. "A great serpent. Not a dragon — do not make that error. A wyrm is a beast, not a thinker. No fire, no hoard, no mind. It is hunger given a body. It eats without ceasing, and it grows with every meal. It kills by fang and by constriction — it is not venomous — and it swallows its prey whole." He tapped the scale. "This is why you have no blood and no bone. It does not leave scraps. It does not leave anything. It takes the whole beast, or the whole man, and it grows."

"How big," Erlich said.

"At a guess, from this scale?" Vaelin turned it over. "Thirty feet. Maybe more. It has been feeding for weeks. It will be larger now than when it took the first goat."

"How large does it get."

Vaelin looked at him. "Large. The old books say the great ones can swallow nations. Left unchecked a wyrm will eat until there is nothing left to eat. Ordinarily—" he paused, and a thin smile crossed his face—"ordinarily the dragons curb them first. A wyrm grows fat and slow and a dragon takes it. There are no dragons here, Ranger. Not near Eastbrook. So this one grows."

Erlich stood very still. He was thinking of the Black Dragon of Westreach, and the spear in its brain, and the three days it had lived after. He was thinking of how he had sworn off that work, and how the work had found him anyway, wearing another face.

"Not goblins," he said.

"Not goblins," Vaelin said.

"Not orcs."

"Orcs do not take a man from a loft and leave no blood, Ranger. A wyrm does."

Erlich picked up the scale and put it in his pouch. He looked at Godwin, and then at Leofric.

"Leofric," he said. "Ride. Now. Hard as you can. Bring back every ranger you can raise. A dozen, if there are a dozen to be had."

Leofric straightened. The joker was gone out of his face. "The capital is four days at a hard ride."

"Then ride four days. And four back. We will hold it until you come."

"Three men against a thirty-foot wyrm," Godwin said. It was not a protest. It was a sum.

"Three men do not kill it," Erlich said. "Three men lure it and hold it and keep it from feeding until there are enough spears to put it down. We do not fight it. We hold it."

"How do we hold a thing like that," Leofric said.

"We bait it," Erlich said. "We set out what it wants and we keep it on the hook. It comes for the bait. We keep it coming." He looked at Godwin. "You will work out the ground."

Godwin nodded, slow, already turning it over behind his eyes. "Tomas's pasture," he said. "The pen it gutted. Open ground, one way in, the stockade at our backs. We pen a steer there and we hold the edges with fire and spears until Leofric comes."

"Do it," Erlich said.

Leofric was already at the door. He turned once. "Four days out, Captain. Four back. Hold it."

"Hold it," Erlich said.

Leofric went. They heard his horse on the lane, and then the hooves at a canter, and then nothing. Erlich stood in the hall with the scale in his pouch and the wizard's word in his ear, and the wrong thing in his chest had turned solid and cold and had a name now, and the name was a beast that ate without ceasing and grew with every meal, and there were no dragons here to curb it but him.