The Ghost's Crusade

XX: Tiernan

After learning that bit of cynical information, Hallia swore she was never, ever going to visit Harenholl. Akkali had praised her wisdom and Tiernan wondered for the countless time since departing Sonnes why he hadn't just left with Hallia while she was invalid in the Antenox outpost. There was no way she could have tracked him down if he chose to hide his trail and putting up with her cynical snipes was taxing his patience.

They kept to the main road on the three day journey to Wessinberg and the trip was as uneventful as trips came through the normally bandit-filled countryside. Even before the attacks at Baedorn the area had been conspicuously lacking in cutthroats and raiders; seeing how many homunculi had been on the field there he guessed that most of them ended up as spare parts for Basilides, Cyril and whatever cohorts they had conspired with. It wasn't a fate he would wish on most people, but given the stories he had heard from travelers a fair share of them probably deserved such a fate.

The worst thing that happened until they reached the city's outskirts was that he caught the dog happily chewing on the leather strap of his notebook satchel one morning. Apparently Jansa decided gnawing on his gear was a funny thing to do and she had taken off with it up the road, barking at them in what he decided was the dog's mocking voice and daring them to chase her down. Reclaiming his satchel required the three of them wresting it from her vice-like jaws when they finally caught her up and she then decided a game of tug was in order. The only one amused by the entire thing was Hallia, surprisingly enough.

After almost a month of being dutifully fed and cared for the dog had developed the strength of a wolf and was now just as large, her paws easily the size of his own hands and her head towering over Hallia's when she raised herself up on her hind legs. The way she followed Akkali's spoken instructions was uncanny and he spent most of his time in the saddle puzzling over whether the dog had been trained before it was abandoned or if the woman was using magic to allow an animal to comprehend speech. And the animal itself was oddly out-of-place. Normally only the frontiersmen of the western Oribian kept such large hounds, breeding them with captured wolves for the purposes of guarding their masters against cougars and bears. How one had ended up starving in the alleys of Baedorn was a mystery.

It was the middle of the night on the first day that the Winter Moon began its yearly arc across the sky, the distant chalky white orb just barely showing above the northern horizon, when something worth noting finally occurred. Since Akkali rarely slept in his presence, likely because she was still convinced he would be knifing her in the back at the first opportunity, she was sitting off on her own with her back against a nearby tree silently watching the camp. Hallia usually found a spot to sleep halfway between them both, using Jansa as a warm pillow. The mutt hardly seemed to mind the extra weight on her side and seemed to have decided that the girl was her own pup to look after.

He was half-asleep himself when he felt a hand come to rest lightly on his shoulder. Opening his eyes slowly he saw the Enkiri crouched beside him, her eyes fixed on the treeline to their west. "To kill a werewolf you must destroy its heart. Rip it from the chest and pitch it in the fire. They can re-attach even severed heads but their hearts are the source of the demon blood that sustains them. And don't let it bite you."

Sitting up he looked around at the road and the forest and saw nothing but their own horses and the waning light of their fire. "What?"

Her eyes narrowed but before she could make any sort of snide comment every sleeping bird for a hundred yards burst from the treetops and scattered into the night sky with cries of fright. Akkali was upright the instant the first bird took wing and tearing off at a dead run towards a loping and shadowed shape in trees in the next. She collided with something solid and dragged it away into the underbrush, markings seething with white-blue light as she was swallowed in the darkness.