Page 21 of Kill the Beast
“Sort of.” She stood, handing the chalk back to Rags and dusting her hands off on her pants. “Typically, I would stalk a Hound for weeks on end, trying to get a good enough look at its glyph to re-create it for Rags. Every once in a while there’s a decent photograph of one, or we find a drawing somewhere. But the Beasthas been so elusive that we’ll have to make do with one person’s memory of it.”
“What if it’s wrong?” he asked, eyeing the chalked lines warily.
Lyssa bristled. Before she could comment, though, Ragnhild said, “Then the deciphering spell could fail, and we won’t be able to move forward.”
“Alderic knows where the Beast is, though, right?” Nadia said. “Couldn’t you sneak in and get a good look?”
“And risk leading the Hound-wardens right to it? No thank you,” Lyssa said, crossing her arms.
“It’s hibernating right now, anyway,” Alderic told the little apprentice, his tone far gentler than Lyssa’s had been. “We likely wouldn’t be able to see the glyph very well, if at all.”
Ragnhild set the claw down in the middle of Lyssa’s drawing. “As long as the glyph is close enough, the deciphering spell should be able to glean the information we need.”
“And if it can’t?” Alderic asked.
“Then we make our best guess,” Lyssa said, “and hope the weapon doesn’t fail.”
“Has that happened before?”
“Once,” Lyssa told him. “The Serpent of Ire, actually. Its glyph was small and hard to see. High up on its neck, with parts of it obscured depending on the angle of the head. The parts I was able to transcribe made it seem like a glyph of general hatred towards humans, and the deciphering spell didn’t give Rags much more than a vague sense that we needed water from the place where the Hound was created. We made a logical choice, but we got it wrong.” Armed with a canteen full of water from a pond in Ire, Lyssa had forged an axe that was doomed to fail. “The damned thing almost bit my head off when I fought it the first time. But I managed to get away, and once the poison was out of my system and my arm healed up, we tried again.”
He gaped at her. “How did you do it the second time?”
“Someone snapped a photograph when its head was raised. Blurry, but clear enough to see that it was actually a revengeglyph—retaliation for a specific transgression. Rags was able to use that to guide her deciphering spell and figure out the exact type of water we needed. Once that was incorporated into the axe, I chopped the thing’s head off without much trouble.”
The old witch grunted. “I seem to remember you coming back home half dead.”
Lyssa shrugged. “Maybe it gave me alittletrouble.” Still, the way her double-headed axe had sliced through the serpent’s neck, the squelch as its lifeless head hit the ground… there was no more satisfying feeling than that. It was worth a little poison and pain.
“What type of water did you need?” Alderic asked.
“Tainted river-water from a village in southern Ibyrnika.” That was another thing: they’d gotten the place of the Hound’s origins wrong, too. Ire was just the town the Serpent was terrorizing, and it took scouring the area for water poisoned by humans for Lyssa to realize their error. With a little digging into the local history, she’d found the village where the monster was created—one with a name that was mostly consonants and accent marks, impossible to spell and even harder to pronounce. She’d wondered, afterward, if the newspaper-writers had been relieved the Serpent had chosen somewhere else to attack, if only because “Ire” was easier for them to type.
Alderic wrinkled his nose. “Tainted river-water? Why tainted river-water?”
Lyssa shrugged. “Every weapon requires one really specific ingredient. The Harrow of Hardock’s spear needed a ‘bleeding-tooth’ mushroom from the forest that borders Hardock’s eastern edge, and the Death of Darlington’s poleaxe needed a blackthorn berry from the Myrtlewood.”
“Why?”
“One ingredient must always relate to the creation of the Hound,” Ragnhild said. “For example, the Serpent. A tannery tainted a nearby river with its runoff, destroying an entire ecosystem, and the aelfs made a monster to punish the villagers for it. Since the taintedwater was the key reason for the Serpent’s creation, it was a crucial ingredient in its destruction.”
“Why—” Alderic started, but Rags held up a hand to stop him, her expression weary.
“Are you all right?” he asked her.
“Of course she isn’t,” Lyssa said. “You’re pestering her to death with your questions.”
“I’m fine,” Rags insisted. “It’s just the dust. Always gives me a splitting headache when I come in here.”
“Didn’t Nadia just clean?” Lyssa asked. She smirked at the little apprentice. “Must not have done a very good job.”
Nadia scowled. “Well, maybe ifyou—”
“Cut it out,” Rags said, sharply enough to silence them at once, then looked at the smithy ceiling as if trying to find a scrap of patience in the cobwebs there. “We have work to do. Alderic, I would be happy to answer any further questions you might have once we are finished, but this headache is only going to get worse, and I would like to be in my nice cozy kitchen with a cup of tea before it does. Nadia, dear, please smoke-cleanse the room.”
While Nadia struggled valiantly to light a bundle of sage with flint and steel—why the witches didn’t just use matches for their rituals was beyond Lyssa’s understanding—Ragnhild walked clockwise around the drawing of the glyph three times, muttering under her breath.
“What is she doing?” Alderic whispered.
