“I heard you moving through the brush, then just saw your outline. I did not know it was you, that is why I let fly the arrow. I thought it was the others. They attacked this morning, just after dawn. The hunters on guard were killed, but gave the warning. They killed one of the mastodons too, perhaps for the meat, but we drove them off before they could do anything to it.”

“Who were they?”

“Not Tanu.”

“Murgu!” Kerrick heard the terror in his voice as he spoke the word. Not here, no, not here too.

“Not murgu. But not Tanu as we know Tanu. There is one we killed, you will see. They had spears but no bows. Once the arrows struck among them they broke and ran.”

They walked along the trail and Sorli stopped and pointed to a dead body.

The corpse lay where it had fallen, face down in the brush. There was a bloody hole in its back where the arrow that had made the mortal wound had been cut out. There were furs tied around the waist. The corpse’s skin was darker than theirs, the long hair black instead of light. Herilak bent and heaved the corpse over, pushed the furs aside with the butt of his spear.

“A hunter. He could be Tanu except for the skin and that hair.”

Kerrick bent and pulled up an eyelid; a misted black eye stared up sightlessly at his blue one. Munan leaned over to look as well, then spat with distaste.

“Harwan,” he said. “When I was small I used to be frightened when they told stories about the black men from beyond the high mountains who came in the dark to steal children and eat babies. They were called the Harwan and were ferocious and terrible. Some said that the stories were true. Others laughed.”

“Now you know,” Sorli said. “They were true. And there is another thing. Look at this.”

He led them a short distance up the hill to the dark form stretched under the trees. Herilak looked at it and grunted with amazement. “A longtooth, one of the biggest I have ever seen.”

It was immense, half again longer than a man. The creature’s mouth gaped in death, the two long teeth that gave it its name projecting, large, deadly, sharp.

“It came with the dark Tanu—and there were others as well. They marched with them like mastodons, attacked when they were told.”

Herilak did not like it in the slightest. “This is dangerous. Armed Tanu and these creatures. Where did they come from?”

“From the north—and they went back to the north. It may have been a hunting party.”