The manticore cub’s shrill whistling shriek had barely bounced back from the high quartz crags when loose shale exploded down the upper chimney.
Oru came down the forty-degree slope in tremendous, silent bounds, twenty feet at a leap, his chipped dorsal crystal plates flashing pale in the thin morning sunlight. The dragged fourth claw on his right forefoot tore long sparks and white scratches from the gray slate as he landed on the terrace lip, his ears pinned flat to his skull and his yellow eyes fixed entirely on the timbered trench where the cub was screaming.
“Get back from the pit, you fools!” a harsh voice yelled from a turf-roofed blind fifty yards up the hillside. “That’s company wire!”
Four syndicate hunters in greased sheepskin coats rose from behind a breastwork of stacked stones. Two of them leveled heavy steel-prod crossbows toward the trench to keep the travelers back, while the other two threw their combined weight onto a long ash lever projecting from a timber A-frame anchored into the rock above the gully.
“Oru, back!” Ysabet shouted, waving her left arm furiously as she ran toward the pit edge over the frozen turf. “There’s a second loop in the floor!”
