Extraordinary Zoology by Howard Tayler Page B

the creek, near the mounts. Oh, Aeshnyrr, that monster sounded hungry. Edrea opened her mouth to speak.
    “We need them both,” said Pendrake. “I’ll pay eighty crowns.”
    “Crowns don’t feed Brine. Four hundred.”
    “Five times my offer? Please. One sixty.”
    “A horse is worth at least that in these woods,” Rorsh said. He drew on his cigar. “Two fifty.”
    “Two twenty cleans me out.”
    “Two twenty and a pound of that bacon.”
    Pendrake tossed a bag of coins at Rorsh. “Money down. Bacon on delivery.”
    “Done,” Rorsh said, catching the bag and dropping it into a coat pocket already bulging with other things. Cylindrical things. Edrea thought she saw fuses.
    “Lynus,” Pendrake said, “what can you tell us about spine rippers?”
    “Spines everywhere, thumb claw is poisonous, belly is like a long, shallow mouth edged with spines. Food works its way up that track to the true mouth. If they pounce on you, you’re food.”
    “Arterial placement? With these odds we need quick kills.”
    “On it.” Lynus speared his sword into the ground, grabbed his satchel, and began digging through it.
    “I bet it’s not in your trollkin songbook.”
    “Stow that, Horgash,” Pendrake snapped. “Circle up while Lynus finds us the best place to cut. You take the south side, Kinik on the north, I’ll take the east, Edrea and Lynus in the middle. Rorsh, you take the west, where you can see Brine and the horses.”
    “Don’t need to see ’em,” Rorsh said, tapping his head and waggling his heavy brows. “Magic.”
    Edrea wondered at this. Vossyl liumyn let her see things clearly through brush or fog, but she couldn’t actually see through the bluff.
    The young farrow wheezed and collapsed. Its amber outline flickered once, then vanished.
    “Ran his dumb self to death,” muttered Rorsh.
    “Those are big and very ugly,” Kinik said.
    Lynus looked up and his eyes went wide. Edrea realized the spine rippers were now close enough to the fire’s light that everyone else could see them too. She blew out a breath and released the spell, conserving strength for the fight to come.
    “Quickly please, Lynus,” said Pendrake. “I remember that false maw being tender, but that’s the extent of it.”
    Lynus flipped furiously through a stack of papers loosely held inside a makeshift cover of worked leather. “I’ve got dissection notes in here somewhere.”
    The spine rippers prowled the edge of the firelight, their eyes flashing in reflected yellow as they glared at the group. A pack of wolves would have been intimidated by six bipeds with weapons drawn, but these beasts were too big and too hungry for that. And their prey, the poor farrow who had run himself to death to deliver a message to Rorsh, lay in plain sight. They grew bolder, moving farther into the circle of firelight.
    Edrea moved closer to Lynus traced fheyissa, the sigils for “fortress,” in the air. She drew in as much power as she could and clenched her fist around the symbols. A circle of runes appeared, flat on the ground with Edrea at their center.
    “We’ve only just met,” Rorsh said, “but I accept.”
    “Accept what?” asked Pendrake.
    “I’m weaving for protection,” Edrea said. “It reaches everybody. I didn’t know Rorsh had a choice.”
    Rorsh snorted. “I brought my own. You’ll see.”
    “Found ’em!” Lynus announced. “No big arteries in front. Two two-chambered hearts, one inside each lung, left and right of a heavy sternum. Massive artery and vein pair running up the ventral face of the spinal column. You’d have to break its back to sever that.”
    “Or go in deep through the false mouth,” Pendrake said. “I really had hoped to have forgotten something more convenient.”
    “What’s this note here?” Lynus asked, half to himself. “Smudged it in the lab.”
    Edrea thumbed back the hammer on her rifle with a click.
    Rorsh snapped a glance at her. “You fire, they pounce,” he grunted, waving