Hans Draiger. 9 Sextilis, 1582 AAA. Trackford.

Hans Draiger could tell there was dead souls ahead. Three of them, wyverns from the looks of them. He didn’t see them, or feel them, but sensed them just as sharply as if he’d noticed them through his eyes or ears or fingers.

There were other souls with him, still alive. One was not a rational being, but an animal, the tyrant sicklehawk they were here to kill. Another was Uln, his wife. The rest would be crows, watching in the trees, waiting to move in on the carrion.

He opened his physical eyes, squinting against the glare of the snowbank that lay between himself and the dead bodies, and shut his third eye. The forested wilderness around him was entirely white, the tall pines and ground and the distant mountain range that they were in the foothills of all coated in snow.

They’d been tracking the sicklehawk all day, stalking it by its two toed footprints and the blood it was dripping. Eidre, their landlord, had shot it after she’d gotten sick of it taking sheep and cattle, and then paid them to come out here and finish the job.

“Corpses, three of them, wyverns. And something that I suspect is our sicklehawk.” Hans said.

He forced any concern about the bodies out of his mind and focused on his prey. He had a job to do.

Uln nodded, crouching beside him. “What did them in?”

“Don’t know. We’ll have to deal with the sicklehawk, if we want a closer look.”

“Shit. You take it down with witchcraft, I go in and pike it?” Uln asked.

Hans smiled at his wife. “Like we always do.”

They moved as quietly as possible up the snowbank, keeping one hand on their 8 foot hunting pikes and the other on the ground.

The only sound was that of bone crunching and flesh tearing. He winced, but he knew the dead wyverns would approve. The faster a corpse was destroyed, the faster they believed the soul could escape and be reincarnated.

They reached the top of the slope. He quietly put down his pike, and unslung his musket, while Uln removed her raven feather cloak and unbuttoned her light woollen coat, for freedom of movement. She was a woose. Her people had been in Carfane for forty thousand years if the wyverns were to be believed, and after that long they’d gotten rather good at dealing with cold.

He blinked his eyes shut, letting his mind briefly concentrate on seeing through his third eye. The sicklehawk’s soul still hadn’t moved.

He slowly slid up to the top of the ridge and looked down into the clearing, levelling his musket.

Three wyverns lay dead on the ground, their corpses dark grey with red painted scales, contrasting starkly with the white snow and the darkening blood spattered around them.

The sicklehawk stood over them, a sleek, avian predator half a ton in weight. Its wings had taloned hands poking out from under spotted brown feathers, while the muzzle was scaly and full of small, needle sharp teeth. The sicklehawks up north were barely bigger than a dog, The sicklehawks up north were barely bigger than a dog, but tyrant sicklehawks, like this one, were the biggest land predators around-so big that they were named after proper tyrants, hulks of muscle and feathers that stalked the steppe far to the west.

It had a torn off wyvern’s tail in its mouth, and there was dried blood in its feathers.

“Damn”, Uln muttered besides him, frowning.

“The flesh is strong, but the sprit is weak” Hans said, ignoring the sick feeling in his stomach that came from looking at such a fearsome predator. He’d done this hundreds of times before, hunting reapers and tarandrus, wargs and gryphons, but the feeling that this could be the time it all went wrong was always with him.

He shut his physical eyes and opened his third eye, letting his mind manipulate his soul, instead of his body.

He reached out a tendril of his soul through the roiling aether, aiming for the pinprick of a soul that the sicklehawk had.

He felt his soul’s arms wrapping around the sicklehawk’s spirit, trying to strangle it. More skilled witches could manipulate a soul, letting them influence or even possess a victim, but Hans focused on trying to stun it’s mind and body with the raw psychic backlash of having its soul attacked.

Uln’s soul moved from his side.

He jerked his eyes open, trying to see with all three eyes at once. The sicklehawk jumped down from the corpse and tried to charge Uln, only to pitch over as its leg caught on the wyvern’s wing, its sense of balance ruined by his witchcraft attacking its mind. As it staggered to its feet, Hans squinted down the sights of his musket and fired. The heavy crack shattered the silence. The ball hit in a puff of feathers and blood, but it didn’t deter the predator as it continued to rise. The sulphur scent of black powder hung in the air.

He hit it again, this time with his soul, watching it fall into convulsions. Uln stalked into striking distance, her pike held ready. It staggered to its feet and hissed. Eidre had shot it through the thigh; that must have stopped it fleeing, but it could still fight.

It charged in a savage, lurching rush, trying to dodge left around Uln’s hunting pike. Uln leapt back and to the side while thrusting with the pike, moving with the speed and balance of a fencer despite her squat, burly frame, driving it through feathers, hide and muscle with unnerving ease. It slumped to the ground, croaking in pain and twitching. Uln stepped back, let go of the pike, unslung and cocked her musket, and shot it, point blank through the head, kicking up a spray of blood and brains. It was all over in seconds.

The soul seemed to jerk in his tendril’s grip as its mind and body died.

Hans pulled himself up, grabbed his pike and musket, and slogged down the slope.

Uln staked her pike into the ground, her face still flushed from victory, her eyes gleaming from under her thick brow.

“Well, that was easier than I thought it was going to be” Uln said.

She lunged forwards and hugged him, slamming the air out of his chest, then went for a kiss. Hans managed to pull back. “Not now, the wyverns…”. He had the feeling that his guts were trying to climb up out of his belly and strangle his lungs.

“Yeah” muttered Uln, coming down from the rush of close combat.

Hans staked his pike down next to Uln’s, slung his musket, and padded over to the nearest corpse. The one the sicklehawk had ripped a wing off. The wyvern was clearly a warrior, with razor edged steel war spurs strapped to her clawed legs. He crouched down next to her triangular head. The patterns of ritual scars on her snout were easy to read, for someone used to dealing with wyverns. She was a warrior, born to the West Point clan, with five kill markings. A member of the Commonwealth army’s auxiliary forces. She had painted her grey scales red and yellow down her back; the markings of a skein leader. A veteran.

Hans winced. There was a fair chance he’d talked to that wyvern at some point or another.

“Arrows!” Uln yelled.

He saw Uln standing over the second wyvern, with a thin, short shafted arrow in her hand, and padded over to her.

She passed it to him. “Doesn’t look like a local arrow” Hans said. It was thin, fletched with grey feathers he’d never seen before, and tipped with a needle point, like a bodkin. Not anything like the broad heads the local Carfani militia used.

“Another arrow in the hip. This one got stuck twice. Any arrows in the others?” Uln said.

“Couldn’t see any on the body I checked out. This one only got feathered?” Hans asked.

Uln shrugged. “Can’t tell. Scales might be hiding some”. Wyvern scales were concave, and able to fold in and out, trapping layers of warm air against the body.

Hans nodded, kneeling down to check the markings on this one’s snout. Nothing unusual.

“Whoever did this knew what they were doing. Got all of them on the ground, before they took off” said Uln.

“Makes sense” Hans said, his voice deadened.

Uln scratched her head. “I’ll check this one for gunshots, you check the third body?”. She pulled out her hunting knife.

Hans nodded and walked across to the third body. This one was male, judging by the fact that the long, thin scales on his wings were bright red.

That’s odd. Male wyverns weren’t normally warriors, although this one was. He had war spurs like the others, and there was dropshot, razor sharp pieces of flint intended to be released onto enemies from above, gripped in his claws. All the bodies had a faint metallic smell of blood about them, the usual smells of death delayed by the cold, but this one smelt like a copper coin was being forced into his nostrils. He checked the face, and retched when he saw what had happened to the wyvern. The left side of the head had been blown open, spattering blood and brains and bone across the snow. Hans had killed, skinned and butchered plenty of animals in his time, but he’d seldom seen anything like this done to a rational being.

There was another trickle of blood, coming down from the shoulder. Hans stuck his finger in it, trying to control his sense of disgust. It felt too ragged to be a sword or pike wound. “Gunshots got this one!” he yelled to Uln.

“No gunshots on mine. She got piked through the lungs from above after they feathered her, though” Uln shouted back.

“Father above”. That meant they hadn’t just been killed in battle-someone had finished at least one of them off.

Murder. Hell, not just murder. An act of war. His heart was beating faster, and he realized that he was unconsciously fingering the blade cover on his hatchet.

“Could you check the first corpses for shots? I’m going for tracks” Hans said, forcing himself to think like he was tracking a predator, not a near witness to murder.

“Yeah, alright”. Uln was crouching by one of the corpses, levering up its scales with a knife.

He began to search the killing ground in ever widening circles. There were crows perching on the snow covered trees that surrounded the clearing, watching, waiting for an opportunity to feed. He walked with the fast, methodical pace he always had when angry.

He soon found what he was looking for. Footprints of at least two people, with blood smudged into them. They’d walked right up to the wyverns, though the snow around them must have been too disturbed to clearly track their movements. The fact that the footprints hadn’t been obscured by fresh snowfall, or melted away suggested that they were fresh. From today, most likely.

Hans followed them out into the pines and brush around the clearing. He quickly reached a point where the two sets of tracks were replaced by a dozen or so, creating a trampled mass of snow. He followed that, until it became even messier, with horse dung lying on the ground.

He retraced his steps, back towards Uln and the killing ground. When he passed the point where the tracks were replaced, he realized that wasn’t what had happened at all. The single set of tracks split out into a fan, a half dozen fighters spreading out from single file and taking up positions along the tree line. Only two of them had actually moved out into the clearing, though.

Finishing the wounded.

He walked back into the clearing. Uln was digging about in the first wyvern, the skein leader. As he approached, his wife lifted up a bloodied hand, holding a tiny, flattened lead ball.

“Looks like rifle shot” Hans said.

Uln nodded. “Right under the left wing”

“Bows, guns, pikes. Must have been a lot of them”

“Or one very well armed attacker” Uln said.

Hans laughed despite himself.

“I found the tracks. They must have fired all along the treeline, after coming in single file. They knew where the wyverns were, since they fanned out ahead of time. They had horses and what looks like carts too”

“Reckon we could track them?”

“Possibly. They wouldn’t be long gone. Don’t fancy catching up with a dozen armed and mounted killers, though”. He forced himself to think pragmatically. They would be no use to the wyverns dead.

Uln patted the hilt of the two-handed falchion hanging from her belt. “I reckon we could take them, if we could get on top of them without being spotted”

Hans shook his head. “They’ve probably got a witch with them, if they could stop all three wyverns taking off. It’s too damn risky”

“So what now?” Uln asked.

“We find out who did it” said Hans.

Uln stood up and pulled him close. He could feel the warmth of her body through their layers of fur and wool.

“And then we make them pay” Uln finished for him.