They found the place where it had been feeding the following afternoon, about a mile off the road, and it was the crows that told them.
Not the high column-riders from the fenback valley. Ordinary crows, four or five dozen of them, going up in a cloud and settling and going up again over a dip in the moorland.
Osric took four men out to look at it, came back for Marcus, and Marcus went. Sito went too, because nobody thought to stop him, and he had become extremely good at that.
It was a shallow bowl in the heather, about a hundred yards across, with a spring in the bottom of it.
"Gods," said Ramsey.
The first thing was a marrow-hog lying on its side at the edge of the water.
Sito recognized it, because Willem had hauled him off a pot of stew of it at the border and he had thought about that a few times since.
It was the size of a small cart. Black-bristled, with tusks that came up past its own eye line, and a hide that had clearly turned a spear or two in its life.
It was entirely intact except for a hole under the ribs about the size of a fist.
Fifteen feet further on was a thorn-elk.
Sito had never seen one, but he'd read about them and knew what it was immediately, because there was nothing else it could have been.
Nine feet at the shoulder, with a rack of horn that came off its skull in flat overlapping plates like roof slate, still carrying half a bush it had been fighting with when it died.
Same hole. Nothing else touched.
And then, spread up the slope on the far side, the wolves.
There were nine of them. Grey going white at the muzzle, long in the leg, and bigger than any wolf Sito had ever read about. They had died in a rough line, about thirty feet apart from one another, and Osric stood looking at that line for a long time.
"That's a pack running a hunt," he said. "That's not nine wolves getting jumped in their sleep. That's nine wolves going at something, in formation, doing the thing they've done their whole lives — and it went down the line and put a hole in each one and kept walking."
"Ash-wolves," said Willem.
"Aye."
"What's an ash-wolf?" said Sito.
"An ash-wolf is what a village pays the guild forty marks to come and deal with, and the guild sends three men." Willem was not looking at him. "That's nine of them."
Sereth had walked out into the middle of it and stopped, and was standing very still with his eyes shut.
"Surveyor?" said Marcus.
"It is thin here," said Sereth.
"What is?"
"The air."
He opened his eyes.
"Do you understand what I am standing in, ambassador? Eleven beasts. A marrow-hog, a thorn-elk and nine ash-wolves. This should be the richest ground for six miles in any direction. The blood is still fairly fresh. Every one of these animals should still be leaking into the air, and would go on doing it for a week yet. I should be able to feel it on my skin."
He turned around slowly, with his hands slightly out from his sides.
"It is thinner here than it is on the road," he said. "It is thinner than the open heather. There is less of it here than there is where nothing has died at all."
---
Osric worked it out on the walk back, out loud, in a flat voice, mostly at Marcus.
"Notice said farmsteads first. Farmsteads means sheep. Cattle. A dog or two. Little cores, hardly cores at all."
"Yes."
"Then a peat crew. Men. Bigger."
"Yes."
"Then that." Osric jerked his head back at the bowl behind them. "A marrow-hog's a real beast. A thorn-elk's a worse one. And nine ash-wolves is a job I'd want a full squad and a battle mage for, and I'd still expect to bury somebody."
"It is climbing," said Marcus.
"It's climbing because it's getting fed." Osric's jaw worked. "That's what that thing is. Every core it takes, it keeps, and the bigger it gets the bigger the thing it can take next. It ate the hog, so it could take the elk. It ate the elk, so it could take the pack." He spat into the heather. "And the guild put a gold on that notice eighteen days ago, and seven went out at it, and four came back — and they went out at what it was three days before that. Not what it is now."
Marcus said nothing for about twenty paces.
"Double the pickets," he said. "Nobody alone after dark. Nobody outside the firelight at all after dark, including to piss — go in twos."
"And the elves?"
"The elves sleep in the middle," said Marcus.
---
Sito could not leave it alone, and that night he asked Willem, and Willem told him.
"It's not a monster," Willem said. "That's the first thing. It didn't come out of a dungeon. It's a beast. It's born, it lives out there, it dies out there, same as a wolf does."
"So what is it?"
Willem looked at the fire for a while.
"Every beast has a core," he said. "That's the whole difference between a beast and a cow. Bigger the core, worse the beast. And a beast with a core grows up and eats grass or eats deer or eats whatever it eats, and the core sits in it getting slowly stronger off the mana in the air, and the mana of any magical beasts it consumes. Similar to yours will be when you've got one. Minus the beast meat of course, you know how dangerous it can be for us humans"
"I know all that."
"Aye. Well." Willem turned a stick over in the coals. "Sometimes one gets born with nothing in it."
Sito went very still.
"No core at all," said Willem. "It doesn't happen often at all. When it does, the thing generally dies inside a week, because there's nothing in it to catch the mana with. It's got no cup to hold it in. It starves."
"So then they die."
"Some don't." Willem poked the fire. "Some of them work out quick enough that there's another way to get it. There's cores walking about everywhere, aren't there. In deer. In cattle. In men."
"It eats cores."
"It eats cores. That's all it eats. Leaves everything else." Willem shrugged. "The meat's no good to it. It doesn't want the meat."
Sito thought about that for a while, and about eleven dead animals lying in a bowl in the heather with nothing taken but one thing each.
"How does it find them?"
"It doesn't find them, your highness," said Ramsey, from the other side of the fire.
His tone was solemn.
"It finds the core," Ramsey said. "That's all there is to it. You and me and a cow and a duke — all the same thing to that. A light, moving about in the dark. And it comes over and it puts the light out."
"It cannot see mana," said Sereth.
Ramsey looked across at him. "It's a beast that eats mana."
"It eats cores. That is not the same thing, and the difference between those two things is the whole of the animal." Sereth shifted closer to the fire, which he had done every single night since they left the forest. "Mana is everywhere. It is in the air. It is in the grass. It is in that fire and it is in every one of you, all of the time, leaking out steadily and going nowhere in particular. You could not hunt by it. It would be like hunting by smell inside a tannery."
"So what's different about a core?" said Sito.
"A core is a point."
Sereth held up one finger.
"It is small. It is bright. And it beats — slowly, but it beats, and there is nothing else in the world that does that. Everything else is a haze."
He lowered the finger.
"A core is the only thing in creation shaped like a place you could bite."
Sito looked into the fire.
"And that's all it can see," he said. "Points."
"That is all there is to see," said Sereth, "if you are built the way that thing is built."
---
It came the next night, and nobody heard a thing.
There was no warning of any kind. No sound. No smell. The horses did not shy, and Osric could not get past that afterward, because horses always know.
What happened was that one of the picket horses was standing where it had been standing all evening, and then, between one sweep of Willem's lantern and the next, it was lying on the ground twenty feet away.
There was a hole under its ribcage about the size of a fist.
Everything else about it was untouched.
Willem did not shout. He set the lantern down on the grass, which was the correct thing to do and cost him a great deal, and drew his sword, and walked backward toward the fire at a steady, even pace without turning around.
"Up," he said, in a completely level voice. "Everyone up. It's here."
The camp came apart into movement.
Marcus came out of his blankets already speaking, and Sito — scrambling for his blades, heart slamming — got his first look at what a Master of Epiria actually was.
Light came off Marcus like water going over a wall.
It poured up out of him and gathered forty feet overhead into a single burning point about the size of an apple, and then that point opened, and the whole hillside went white. Two hundred yards of moorland, lit hard enough to throw shadows as sharp as noon.
Sito had to put a hand up over his eyes.
He had seen Marcus argue a kingdom into a treaty. He had never once seen him do this, and standing there in that white light with his arm across his face, he understood for the first time, properly, in his gut, what the gap was between a man like Willem and a man like Marcus.
'Fifth Circle,' he thought. 'That's what Fifth Circle is.'
The whole camp was lit like a stage.
There was nothing on it.
"North," said Sereth, and his voice had gone up an octave. "It is north of us. Ambassador — it is north, I cannot fix it, it will not hold still — "
"How far?"
"Sixty feet. Forty. It is fast — "
Marcus swore.
Sito heard him do it, and that was the moment he understood that this was serious, because in four months on the road Marcus Benedictus had not once used language like that in front of him.
"It has no eyes," Marcus said.
He said it flatly, the way a man reads out a number he does not like.
"The light is nothing to it. I can see it perfectly well and it does not care in the slightest that I can see it, and I cannot blind a thing that was born blind."
He pulled the burning point overhead down to a dull orange — enough to see by, not enough to cook anyone's night vision — and moved to put himself between the dark and the four elves.
"Osric. Form on me. Nobody stands alone and nobody runs — if you run, you are the only light moving out there, and it will come for you first."
---
Sito saw it twice in the next four minutes.
The first time it went through the outer edge of Marcus's light about thirty feet out, and he got half a second of it: low, long, grey, far bigger than he had pictured, moving with a horrible smooth speed that had no sound underneath it at all.
The second time was when it came through the horse line and took Bertram.
It did not maul him. That was the thing Sito could not get out of his head afterward. It came in from the left, where the elves were bunched and Bertram was standing in front of them with his sword up doing exactly what he had been told to do, and it went past him, and it was gone into the dark again on the other side.
And Bertram stood there.
He stood there for a full second with an expression of mild confusion on his face, like a man who has just remembered he left something behind at an inn.
Then he sat down on the grass.
Ramsey got to him first. Sito heard him shouting for Marcus, and heard the shouting change into something else halfway through, and by the time Sito got there Ramsey had gone quiet and had both hands pressed flat against a hole under Bertram's sternum that was exactly the size of the one in the horse.
There was almost no blood. That was wrong too.
Bertram Ault was already dead.
Out past the edge of the orange light, in two hundred yards of open with nowhere to hide, something that eleven beasts had not been able to stop was turning around and coming back.