Bitter Gold Hearts by Glen Cook Page A

like four or five ogres had been on Saucer head’s trail when they were recalled by their buddies. The other trail ran down into the woods east of where I stood.
    I didn’t need to follow Saucer head to know where he’d gone. I turned east.
    Five hundred yards along I paused, planted the back of my lap on a fallen tree trunk, and told my brain to get to work. I knew what I would find if I went on a little farther. I could hear the flies buzzing and the wild dogs bickering with the vultures. Much closer and I would smell it, too. Did I have to look?
    Basically, there was no getting out of it. There was maybe one chance in a hundred that I was wrong and the centerpiece of that grisly feast was a woods bison. If I was right, chances were ten to one against me finding anything that would split things wide open. But you can’t skimp and take shortcuts. The odds are always against you until you do stumble across that one in ten.
    Still, dead people who have been lying around in the woods for days aren’t particularly appealing. So I spent a few minutes considering a spider web with dew gems still on it before I put my dogs on the ground and started hoofing it toward a case of upturned stomach.
    Five years in the Marines had brought me eyeball to eyeball with old death more times than I cared to remem­ber, and my life since has provided its grisly encounters, but there are some things I can’t get used to. Conscious­ness of my own mortality won’t let me.
    The conclave of death was being held at the downhill end of an open, grassy area about twenty yards wide and fifty long. Patches of lichened granite peeked out of the soil. I collected a dozen loose chunks of throwing size and cut loose at the wild dogs. They snarled and growled but fled. They have grown very cautious around humans because bounty hunters are after them constantly. Espe­cially farm kids who want to pick up a little change for the fair or whatever.
    The buzzards tried to bluff me. I didn’t bluff. They got themselves airborne and began turning in patient circles, looking down and thinking, Someday, you too, man. In the pantheon of one of the minor cults of TunFaire, the god of time is a vulture.
    Maybe that’s why I hate the damned things. Or maybe that’s because they’ve become identified with my military service, when I saw so many circling the fields of futility where young Karentines died for their country.
    So there I stood, a great bull ape, master of the land of the dead. Instead of pounding my chest and maybe forc­ing myself to inhale some tainted air, I moved as upwind as I could and started looking at what I’d come to see.
    There wasn’t a woods bison in that mess.
    I muttered, “I ought to remember Saucer head’s tend­ency to exaggerate.”
    I counted up enough parts to make at least seven bodies. Four or five he said he’d taken. Even torn apart they remained ogre ugly. They’d been buried shallow beneath loose dirt, leaves, and stones. The lazy way, I might call it, but I look at comrades differently than ogres do. They don’t form bonds the way humans do. For them a dead associate is a burden, not an obligation.
    No doubt they were in a hurry to quit the area, too.
    You do what you have to do. I got in and used a stick to poke around, looking for personals, but it took only a minute to figure out that the living hadn’t been in too big a hurry not to loot the dead. Even their boots had been taken. That wasn’t the behavior of a band expecting to be in the big money soon. But with ogres you never know. Maybe their mothers had taught them the old saw, “Waste not, want not.”
    I circled the burial site three times but could find no sign of comings or goings other than by the route I’d followed, and that the second group had taken down from the road. In places the soil was very moist from ground-water seepage. Such places sometimes hold tracks. I started looking those over, trying to cut the trail of a guy on crutches or one