Клэр Белл - The Named - The Complete Series

“You who will journey have been first to eat from the kill,” said Ratha. “Your bellies are full, your legs strong, and the hope of the Named goes with you.”

At her word, the scouts started on their search. Thakur glanced back as he took his first steps from the sunning rock. The glow in his eyes and the sheen on his fur told her of his eagerness. The treeling on his back fluffed her fur petulantly, as if saying she was getting too settled for traveling, but she gave her tail a jaunty wave in parting.

Ratha watched the scouts as they left, but her gaze lingered longest on one copper coat.

Though you are not taking the Red Tongue itself, Thakur, she thought,may the power of its spirit guard you.

Newt’s ears swiveled forward as she woke, crawled from her sandstone cave, and limped onto the beach. Her pricked foot was tender but no longer painful, and she soon forgot about it. She tested the wind, finding the smells of creatures she had already encountered, such as the short-tusked walrus, butthere was an unfamiliar scent among them. Through the background of wind and waves, she heard a distant clamor with odd hooting sounds breaking through.

Warily she hunched down in the sand, all senses extended for danger. She wondered if she should retreat from the beach and was surprised by a possessive anger that welled up inside her. No. This was her place. She had claimed it, left her footprints here, laid down her scent.

She circled downwind, guided by the strange smell. It had a strong seaweed-and-fish tang, resembling the scent of the blubber-tusker, but it differed enough from that animal’s smell for her to identify it as new. Peering up the beach, she saw a natural jetty of gray sandstone thrusting out to sea beneath a cliff. On the promontory, gray and black shapes sprawled in the sun.

At first she thought these animals resembled the blubber-tusker, but their broad bodies were less blubbery and more compact, slate colored on top and cream below. Chunky fore- and hindlimbs folded back against sleek sides as the creatures lay on their bellies. Their heads were long and tapered, reminding Newt of the muzzle of a forest dappleback rather than the snout of a blubber-tusker. They also had leaf-shaped ears that swiveled and twitched.

Newt narrowed her eyes against the morning sea glare. She felt the sun heat her back while her shadow inched along the sand. The wind gusted, bringing her the briny food-scent of shellfish. She remembered how she had plundered the blubber-tusker’s leavings.

As she came around the foot of the steep bluff, she saw a small cove that was sheltered from the wind by sandstone cliffs jutting up on either side. Within that refuge she saw another sea-beast and two smaller companions that resembled it. The large beast wallowed in the surf, while the small ones lay higher on the beach. Newt hid behind the rocks and crept closer for a better look.

The animal lifted its head and pricked its ears, then settled back complacently, chin resting on a short, fat neck. It grunted to itself as the waves washed its sides. Again Newt saw the elongated muzzle, resembling that of a dappleback, but instead of a rounded nose and chin, the creature had a tapered snout with a pronounced overbite. It yawned, revealing downward-pointing incisors in the upper jaw and a cluster of tusks thrusting from the lower.

The sight made Newt uneasy and she hid, but soon the sound of splashing coaxed her to peer out again from her hiding place. The glistening form of the sea-beast slapped against wet sand. With splay-toed webbed forefeet, the creature hauled itself onto the beach, jaws wedged wide open by a huge, muck-covered shell.

The beast seemed to ignore its hind legs, letting them drag behind while it humped and heaved along on belly and stout forelegs. As it crushed the clamshell in its jaws, seawater spurted from the clam’s leathery siphon.

Waves of tantalizing scent reached Newt. She licked her chops but forced herself to remain still, waiting. She listened to the scraping and grinding sounds while the shellfish smell made her drool.

The small sea-beasts wiggled on their bellies in the sand. They lurched up on thick legs and bumbled around until they fell against each other or the big one. From the forbearance the large beast showed the two, Newt sensed she was looking at a female and her young.

Newt marked the youngsters as prey, for they were small enough to kill easily. She would have to wait until their parent wasn’t paying attention. For the present she would settle for clam scraps.

Her hunger was no longer strong enough to blunt her curiosity, for she had eaten from the blubber-tusker’s leavings, and she was intrigued with this new creature. Though this beast ate shellfish, lived on the beach, and had tusks, its face, neck, and ears reminded her of a dappleback, and it was those attributes that made the strongest impression on her. Once she had seen a small mare with two spindly foals, and now this memory emerged as an image, coloring her feelings about the sea-beast family. She stared at the strange mare that swam in the sea.

This creature, whom Newt now thought of as a“ seamare,” continued to wrench apart a huge shell with forefeet and tusks. The seamare’s black forepaws, with their wide tapering toes and the webbing between, were nothing like the flippers of the blubber-tusker or the hoofed toes of a dappleback.

The longer she watched the seamare, the more Newt focused on those odd, splay-toed feet. As she had once identified with an image of herself as the newt, so she identified the seamare with the image of those strange feet. To her, the creature became Splayfoot.

Newt stayed hidden until the seamare finished gorging on clams and fell asleep on a low sandstone shelf, with both seafoals sprawled nearby. Newt smelled a few savory bits remaining from the seamare’s feast of shellfish. Carefully she hobbled from her hideaway down through the rocks to the terrace where Splayfoot lay. She got so close she could smell the salty beast-scent and hear the seamare’s rumbling snore. Quickly she snatched up the nearest morsel and went for the next.

Suddenly the seamare’s neck muscles tightened as the beast lifted her head, her tapered muzzle pointing at Newt. With an ungainly heave, the beast swept both chunky forelegs around and heaved up her forequarters. From her open mouth came a booming roar that echoed between the rocks of the cove and made Newt skitter back with flattened ears.

For an instant the two confronted each other. With surprising speed, Splayfoot humped herself toward Newt, swinging her tusks. The seamare’s anger propelled her up onto her rear legs, and Newt discovered that they weren’t as useless as they had first appeared.

Newt hadn’t expected the seamare’s sudden transformation from belly-dragger to walker. Splayfoot had a clumsy gait, with out-thrust elbows and turned-in feet, but it served well enough. Now the seamare was a four-footed behemoth lumbering toward the enemy that threatened herself and her young.

With a mouth full of sandy clamshells and meat, Newt couldn’t use her teeth, but she wasn’t about to drop her takings. Gathering her hind feet beneath her, she leaped as high as she could, clinging and scrabbling at the rocks above.

Once she had gained a secure perch, she started to eat, looking down at the seamare. Unable to hold the shell down with both forepaws, she wedged one side of it under a boulder and held it there with her good leg while she worried the meat away with her side teeth.

Splayfoot strained her head back as far as her thick neck would allow and gave a bellow that almost made Newt choke on the rubbery clam flesh she was gulping. The agile youngsters scrambled back to their mother’s side as the seamare pointed her muzzle in the air and sniffed suspiciously. Splayfoot lumbered along on her belly, probing the way ahead with the long bristles on her muzzle and stabbing the sand with her tusks, as if she thought the menace might still be lurking there.