No pockets in the leather knickers either, and nothing under the leather except more monster. She couldn't just leave the body lying in front of the Oracle's cave like an invitation to every bug and carrion-crow in the forest, either. She was going to have to move it. Somehow. Glory sighed and got to her feet, staggering just a bit with weariness. It wasn't much past ten a.m., judging by the position of the sun, and it had already been a very full day.
She brushed herself off thoroughly, feeling imaginary and not-so-imaginary bugs crawling all over her, then used the tip of her sword to prod the monster's body over the edge of the slope. It rolled a good distance, but she'd rather have it where she couldn't see it. The heavy carpet of fallen pine needles that lay everywhere on the ground should make it easy for her to drag it at least a few yards, providing she could shift it at all.
There's always work in the Land of Erchanen for Vixen the Slayer, she told herself with gallows humor.
Before she followed the body down, she dug up a few handfuls of earth and used it to scrub her sword-blade as clean as she could, then slipped the sword into its shoulder-sheath again. This time, the practiced flourish took her three tries to achieve; her hands shook, and every muscle ached and protested, sending shooting aches down her arms and back. Then she went down the hill again.
Seeing Kurfan's ruined head again made her throat ache with pity. The poor beast had done his very best for them, and died a hero's death. She went to the monster and stripped off its leather vest, then used it to lift Kurfan's head off the stump of the branch and wrap it tenderly.
She took the dog's head and set it on the monster's chest. Let the monster be Kurfan's honor-guard across the Rainbow Bridge. That done, she dragged the head and the body as far into the woods as she could, a hundred meters or so off the edge of the trail. Bigger things than birds would find both of them soon, and in a day or two everything would be reduced to anonymous bones. It was the best she could do.
She stood for a moment among the pines, working up the gravel to go back up the trail and start the long business of getting the cart holding Belegir down the corridor, when she became aware of a peculiarly familiar odor.
Smoke. Burning meat. And in this time and place, not a good smell.
Investigate? With Belegir hurt, she didn't know how bad, and only her to care for him, and herself hurting? Not one of her brighter notions, even if it were an inevitable scriptwriter's gambit.
But if she didn't, if she did the sensible Normal Person thing and turned away, she might be leaving a whole pack of monsters at her back to ambush the two of them at leisure. And she didn't know for certain that the monsters couldn't go into the Oracle cave. She only knew that she hadn't seen this one inside.
She sighed, sniffing smoke. She couldn't afford to ignore it. But the morning had shown her that she wasn't really equipped to fight monsters, either, at least not excellently. So she'd just go see if this was something really close—and by the smell, it wasn't far—and then run off and hide. Quickly. And maybe a miracle would occur and this wouldn't turn out to be some new problem after all. Maybe it was a rescue party.
Ha.
She checked the direction of the wind, and backtrailed the smoke as quietly as she could, moving through the forest. The smoke thickened the closer she got, until she was walking through low-roiling clouds of it thick enough to make her stifle a cough, and soon enough she saw why.
Somebody had left dinner on while they nipped down to the pub and never came back. And now dinner was burning.
She stopped, hidden behind a tree, and looked carefully over the scene, searching for trouble. Vixen would have charged right in with a battle-yell, but Vixen had a nice sharp sword and no hostages to fortune. And in fact, Glory realized with an unfamiliar pang of insight, Vixen had never played for stakes this high. If Vixen failed, if Vixen lost, there were always others to take her place in the battle against the Darkness. In this time, in this place, there was no one else to take up the fight. There was only Glory, and because that was so, Glory could not afford to take chances. And so she studied the situation before her very carefully.
It was a camp, one that had the look of long-usage. The fire-pit was well-dug, ringed and lined with large stones. The camp also had the smell of long-usage, the strongly ammoniac stench of something big that liked to mark its territory.
Two of the Allimir ponies were there, forelegs hobbled, and tied, for good measure, to a large log by nooses of coarsely-braided leather around their necks. They looked concerned, but not distressed enough to be making serious attempts at escape.
By the look of things, the third Allimir pony was the source of the smoke. A large portion of some good-sized beast had been spitted and left to roast over the fire, and when the fire's owner hadn't come back, the meat had begun to burn.