Alexey Pehov - Chasers of the Wind

True, his crawl through the blackberry bushes had taken its toll. His entire body, including his face, was covered in shallow, bleeding scratches. But he could deal with this aggravating trifle later. A Burnt Soul was not a Mort; its sense of smell was not as strong and so it wouldn’t catch the scent of his blood.

Keeping low to the ground, Ga-Nor ran from the bushes in brief dashes from tree to tree. He didn’t turn back until he’d run about eight hundred yards into the forest.

If not for Luk, he would have kept going. It would be quite a while before his disappearance was discovered. He could cover his tracks so well that not even one of the Damned could find him. But he had to return. Ug would not approve of a Son of the Snow Leopard abandoning his comrade. The reckoning after death would be terrible. Wallowing in the icy abyss of Oblivion was far more terrifying than any Burnt Soul.

Changing direction from the north to the east, he ran for another four hundred yards or so. To an outside observer it would seem that the northerner was meandering throughout the forest without rhyme or reason. But in reality, Ga-Nor was outflanking the ensconced archer in a steep arc, planning to come upon him from behind. It took over an hour of these meanderings for him to quietly draw near the front of the cabin unobserved by his adversary.

The cabin was no more than fifteen yards away. He could already see the closed door with the arrow sticking out of it. But the Burnt Soul was absent, even though all his suppositions led him to believe that it was somewhere nearby, judging by where the shot had come from.

Had it changed position?

This was bad. The creature was sitting under cover and there were many trees and bushes around the cabin. Where could it be hiding? The northerner had hoped to calculate the places from which the Burnt Soul could have taken an easy shot through the window. The first spot was the very place where the Son of the Snow Leopard was lying; the second was thirty paces from him behind a sycamore. But it seemed that there was no one there. Obviously he couldn’t be hiding in the first spot either, or else Ga-Nor would already have departed for Ug’s judgment.

“Where have you gotten to, you filthy little toad?” he whispered through clenched teeth.

Time passed but he still couldn’t find his adversary. There was every indication that for some reason he’d up and left. Ga-Nor did not even begin to pay attention to that idiotic thought. He was far too cautious for that. He was going to wait for as long as he needed to.

A large spotted woodpecker flew over the bushes and caught his attention. The bird alighted on the trunk of a nearby sycamore and then instantly took wing, as if something had frightened it. The tracker peered avidly into the thick brush growing beneath the tree. He’d examined it earlier but he hadn’t noticed any signs of danger and had been content to ignore it in his search for other hiding places where the Burnt Soul could have secreted itself.

There was nothing suspicious. Just the bushes. Very little to frighten a bird.

Again, endless minutes of waiting passed by. Ga-Nor did not take his eyes off the bushes. Then the wind changed. His nose was immediately assaulted by the scent of almonds.

The northerner nearly cursed. The beast was hiding all of twenty paces from him. He was so blind that if it were not for the bird, he would never have noticed his enemy. Thank Ug that when his eyes betrayed him, he still had his nose.

He began to crawl backward and to the side. When the distance was shortened to ten paces he saw the Burnt Soul. A head, an upper body, and two arms. Instead of hips and legs these creatures had a short, scaly serpent’s tail. It wasn’t clear what purpose it served, since the brutes moved through the air as if by magic, hovering over the ground. But not very high. It was rumored that they could rise up to the height of a grown man.

The creature’s skull seemed misshapen. A too high and heavy brow, a sunken face, delicate cheekbones. Sparse hair, into which the red-and-purple feathers of some unknown bird were braided. Yellow, shriveled skin, a small lower jaw; the face of an old man. It had no nose or ears. In their place were black holes. Its long arms, as thin as a skeleton’s, looked deceptively weak but they could easily bend a horseshoe. A dirty gray-green tunic was thrown over the desiccated, angular body. A quiver with a bundle of arrows was on its back. Another three arrows were planted in the ground. The bow grasped in the creature’s hands was so large that Ga-Nor began to have some misgivings. You’d use a bow like that to hunt Snow Trolls, not humans.

The archer was completely focused on the cabin. The Burnt Soul didn’t bother to look around and had no clue that a human had been hiding near it all this time. Ga-Nor unsheathed his sword. He took a step toward his enemy. He froze. Another step. He froze again. Now more than ever he resembled a large, redheaded snow leopard. A cat stalking its unwitting prey.

The Burnt Soul shifted and the northerner stopped stalking him and rushed forward. The beast heard him, yelped, turned, and raised its bow. It was far more nimble than he had thought it would be.

At the last moment, Ga-Nor leaped aside and the arrow flew past his ear with an aggravated buzz. He brandished his sword and swept downward, driving it into the creature’s face. The sword sheared through skin, flesh, bone, and brain, destroying the head of his opponent. Its back arched and it flew upward a good two yards; then it fell back to the ground, crashing into the bushes. Ga-Nor did not stop at this and struck the already dead Burnt Soul with three more tremendous blows. In the tracker’s opinion, the creature deserved it.

The Son of the Snow Leopard returned to the cabin and drummed on the door.

“Luk, get out here!”

The door creaked open and the soldier gingerly stepped out of the cabin.

“Screw a toad! I was thinking he’d done you.”

“It was I who ‘did’ him.”

“You’re covered in blood.”

“It’s from the blackberry bushes. The beast almost shot me.”

“Was it alone?”

“Yes. Let’s get out of here.”

“I want to see it.”

“Why?”

“I’ve never seen a Burnt Soul.”

Ga-Nor shrugged his shoulders indifferently and indicated the spot where the body lay. He went into the cabin and quickly packed his things into his bag. When he got outside, he could see Luk circling the carcass. The redhead walked over to the guard and also looked at the corpse. The tracker couldn’t really see why it was so interesting.

“You got to kill several of ours, you viper,” spat Luk, pointing to three human scalps attached to the Burnt Soul’s quiver.

“Good riddance,” Ga-Nor responded gloomily.

The soldier pulled a red-and-purple feather from the hair of the slain creature. The feather had miraculously escaped being covered in blood.

“I’ll take this to remember. Do you know the legend of how the Burnt Souls came to be?”

“No,” said the northerner as he tried to draw the captured bow. It was useless. You needed to be a real leviathan to do that. The northerner wistfully dropped the useless weapon to the ground.

“In ancient times, the race of the Burnt Souls was exactly the same as the Je’arre. They lived together in the south, beyond the Great Waste. It was only afterward that the winged (one of the names given to the Je’arre in the Empire) flew to the north. According to the legends of our feathered friends, the tribe of the Burnt Souls, which was called something else before, violated the covenants of their god and he punished the heretics. He took their wings away, cast them from the sky, and burned their souls. The beasts grow up, live, die, and then nothing awaits them. They have no chance at all of finding themselves in either the Blessed Gardens or in the Abyss. Only the void and oblivion. And that’s who these Burnt Souls are.”