A piercing yowl was clearly audible and then there was silence. The excited fairs swirled back over the two dragonriders’ heads, chittering and chattering with their news. Faranth looked up, her eyes wheeling as she absorbed the dragonets’ images.

“There’s some kind of very large spotted beast out there,” Sorka told Sean. “And something else that is even larger but silent.”

“We’ll need trank guns, then,” he said. “Sorka, have Faranth call up some reinforcements. Marco and Duluth, if possible; Dave, Kathy—we may need a medic. Peter’s Gilgath is sturdy, Nyassa won’t panic, and ask for Paul or Jerry. I think we should evacuate Mary and the two children until the beasts can be captured.”

Her ordeal ended, Mary Tubberman wept copiously on Bay’s shoulder. Her son, Peter, usually a cheerful seven-year-old, watched poker-faced and taut with anxiety. His two little sisters clung together on a lounger and would not respond to Pol’s efforts to comfort them, though he was generally very deft with children. Mary did not resist the suggestion that she move to a safer location.

“Dad’s dead, isn’t he?” Petey asked, stepping right up to Sean.

“He could be out trying to recapture the beasts,” kind-hearted Bay suggested. The boy gave her a scornful look and went off down the corridor to his room.

The dragon reinforcements arrived with the trank guns. Sean was pleased to see them landing in the order they had been drilled in. Sean gave Paul, Jerry and Nyassa the trankers and sent them off on their dragons to see if they could find and disable the escaped animals.

Leaving Sorka to help the Tubbermans assemble their gear, Sean and the others, armed with the pistols, cautiously approached the wrecked compound. Inside the building, the reek of animal was heavy and mounds of recent dung littered the place. They found Ted Tubberman’s mauled and gnawed body pitifully sprawled outside his small laboratory.

“Fardles, nothing we have kills like that!” David Catarel exclaimed, backing out of the corridor.

Kathy knelt by the corpse, her face expressionless. “Whatever it was had fangs and sharp claws,” she remarked, slowly getting to her feet. “His back was broken.”

Marco grabbed up an old lab coat and some toweling from a rail and covered the corpse. Then he picked up the remains of a chair, made of one of the local pressed vegetable fibers that were used for interior furnishings. “This’ll burn. Let’s see if we can find enough to cremate him here. Save a lot of awkwardness.” He waved in the direction of the main house. Then he shuddered, clearly unwilling to move the mangled body.

“The man was insane,” Sean said, poking a rod into the dung pats in one enclosure. “Developing big predators. We’ve enough trouble with wherries and snakes!”

“I’ll go tell Mary,” Kathy murmured.