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You lean forward into a shallow dive, allowing the tension in your wings to ease as you quickly fall to the ground. Angled toward the fleeing creatures, you squint your eyes against the rushing wind, and soon notice something odd.
Two of the reindeer, both impressive specimens, are lagging behind the rest, at first only by a little but rapidly losing ground until their herd has left them well behind. Their gait is awkward and stiff as they struggle, quite hopelessly, to rejoin the collective, until their flagging strength finally runs out and they slow to a halt in the middle of the open plain. For a moment they stand together, looking about as though calm and unbothered, until one of them lowers its head, shudders, then keels over into the shallow snow.
By now you are coming in to land, and as you drag on the air beneath your wings the deer still on its feet can only stare at what must seem to it some winged mass of darkness given substance. It stands on shuddering legs, and is almost bowled over by the force of your landing as you touch down nary a wing’s breadth from the two creatures, but it somehow manages to keep its footing. And, whether by animal courage or the sheer weight of its exhaustion, it does not move as you loom over it.
For a moment you simply meet one another’s stares, soft golden-brown and blazing orange. You do not even bother to exert your will over it, as weakened and close to death as is so clearly is, and there you both stay until the deer at last gives in. It billows steamy air from its nostrils and lets out something halfway between a keening cry and a wet gurgle before its legs finally give out and it joins its companion on the ground, limp. By the time you make it over, it has already breathed its last.
Although the scent of fresh meat makes you slaver at the mouth, you restrain your hunger for the time being and instead inspect the corpses. It takes you only a moment to find dark, damp patches on the creatures’ flank from which small bundles of black feathers sprout, almost completely burrowed into the fat and muscle like flesh-eating beetles. The wounds have a sickly-sweet smell to them, and the bundles even more so, and you are certain they are no product of nature.
It was wise of you to follow your hunch. These kills were not made by simple woodland predators hunting for a meal, nor by the man-folk who you know to favour arrows, which leaves only one group as culprit. And sure enough, as you hear footfalls and turn to face their source, you find yourself face to face with an unkempt pack of orcs.
—
“Up with the pace, you maggots! You make me set foot in sunlight, and there’ll be a lashing for the slowest pair of legs!”
Ishmoz spurred himself onward as he weaved through the trees in pursuit of his fellow orcs. As the last member of their little party of four, the Gundabad orc’s snarled threat had an especially potent effect on him, and worked his short legs with strength he did not have.
