Chapter 358: Movement in the Brush

Chapter 358: Movement in the Brush

The posting had been on the Hollowmere board for six days, and nobody had taken it.

[Hollowmere — Interior Bounty]

[Target: Brushfang Jackal pack. Ambushing supply deliveries, Knuckle Track, between waystation and eastern holdings.]

[Reported: 4 animals. Leader estimated Rank 2. Followers Rank 1.]

[Minimum: Combat Rank 2. Licensed hunters only.]

Jin read it on Monday evening, sitting on the feed crate with Flicker on his knee, and then read the incident notes underneath.

Three deliveries in two weeks: a feed cart, a medical supply runner, and a fuel trailer. One driver had been bitten through the forearm, and a beast-handler’s dog had been killed. No human deaths. The jackals attacked from several directions, going for the draft animals and anything that ran, then vanished into cover before the escorts could respond.

Coordinated, Jin thought. Not just hungry.

It fit his license. It paid better than the boars. And it was the kind of job where a beast that could see over the brush would be worth a great deal.

He looked down at Flicker. She was gnawing at his sleeve button.

She’d been practicing for a week. She came back when called nearly every time. She had held her Ember Shot through every wait signal in their last two sessions. She’d been doing short dashes and returns in the flight yard until her landings were clean. Verrick had cleared her that morning for supervised fieldwork, with the note: Strong, steady, enthusiastic. Don’t let her overdo it.

She’d flown in the family courtyard, but the new skills had only been practiced in the netted yard.

Jin sat with that for a while.

He pictured her high above the brush, with Glitch between her landing place and the pack. She could warn him without going near a jackal’s teeth.

Keep her within recall. No chasing anything into cover.

He accepted the contract.

The rest went quickly, because he’d done it once before.

He checked the waystation’s online zone bulletin that night: Rating 3, no closures. He booked the hauler for six the next morning, with an extra crate strapped inside the trailer for Flicker. He packed his field kit and checked it twice, and added a second flask of water and a folded fire blanket at the bottom, because Flicker was going to be shooting fire into brush and he had no intention of burning down a managed zone on his second job.

Okonkwo was driving again. He looked at the crate, looked at Flicker inside it, and raised his eyebrows.

"New one?"

"Flicker," Jin said. "The one I left at the academy last time. She grew."

"Hm," said Okonkwo, and chewed.

The Knuckle Track was a narrow supply road that left the main Hollowmere route about two kilometers past the waystation and wound east toward the outlying holdings. It got its name from the ground, which rose and fell in low, rounded humps covered in chest-high brush. The gray-green stems grew so thickly that Jin couldn’t see more than a few meters into them from the road.

The waystation dispatcher who met them at the turn-off was a thin, tired woman with a clipboard.

"They hit on the third knuckle every time," she said, pointing. "Where the track dips into the creek cut and comes back up. Carts have to slow down there. The jackals come out of the brush on both sides."

"Always both sides?" Jin asked.

"Twice both sides. Once from behind, too. The fuel driver said one came up the track after the cart had passed." She shook her head. "They’re clever. They wait until you’re committed."

Jin walked the ground himself after that, with Glitch beside him and Flicker on his shoulder.

The third knuckle was exactly as she’d described. The track came down a gentle slope into a dry creek cut, crossed a short stretch of flat, stony creek bed, and climbed out the other side. On both sides, the brush grew right to the edge of the road. The creek bed itself was open, bare stones and dry sand about ten meters across, running away north and south between the knuckles.

He picked his landmarks carefully, because once things started moving in brush, he would need to know where everything was without thinking.

Just north of the crossing, a lightning-split pine rose from the western bank, its trunk forking about four meters up. It was the only tree within fifty meters.

Across the creek, beside the road’s eastern climb, a squat concrete headwall marked a drainage pipe. It stood at the southern edge of the road, waist-high and solid. Jin walked from it to the pine; they were close enough for a shot across the crossing if Flicker had a clear line.

Between them lay the creek bed, open and stony. Nothing could hide there.

Pine. Culvert. Creek bed, he thought. Hold onto those.

The tracks were everywhere: narrow, four-toed prints in the sand of the creek bed, crossing and recrossing, some old, some much fresher. He crouched over the freshest set. The prints were big for a jackal, and they crossed from the western bank to the eastern brush, where they turned back. A smaller set paralleled them. Another came down the creek bed itself from the north.

He followed one set until the prints disappeared under a branch, then returned to the open stones. The jackals knew more routes through this patch than he would find in a morning. He wanted them somewhere he could see their feet.

He set the team up with the time he had.

Glitch would stand in the open creek bed, right in the middle, where the track crossed it. It was the one place where the jackals couldn’t hide while they attacked him. Anything that wanted him would have to come out of the brush and cross open ground. Tremor Sense would hear them coming before they arrived, and Glitch had a straight line to either bank.

Flicker would sit in the fork of the split pine. She could watch the creek and the exposed edges of the brush from there, though she wouldn’t see beneath the thickest growth. The trunk gave her a clear launch into open air if anything approached it.

Jin would stand beside the culvert headwall, with concrete between him and the brush to the south. The road climbed east behind him; westward, a short slope led down to Glitch. He walked that slope twice, testing the loose stones with his heel. Arthur’s question about his landing had stayed with him. He shifted one rocking slab aside before returning to the wall.

Down to Glitch if they come from the brush. I can manage that without spraining anything.

He ran Flicker through the signals they’d practiced: a raised fist to wait, a pointed finger for the target, and a flat hand swept sideways to return. She followed the recall from the pine to his wrist, and he sent her back with a rub beneath her beak.

"Anything you see that I don’t," he told her as she settled in the fork, "you shout."

She looked at him with one bright eye, the sun mark glowing on her forehead, and fluffed her feathers.

He walked back across the creek to the culvert.

They waited forty minutes.

The sun climbed. The brush ticked and rustled in the heat. Glitch stood motionless in the creek bed, his head low, his armored bulk dark against the pale stones. Jin leaned on the headwall and tried not to fidget.

Then Glitch’s attention changed.

Jin felt it through the bond: Tremor Sense, picking up movement. Light, quick, spreading feet. Several sets of them, in the brush to the north, moving parallel to the creek and fanning out.

In the fork of the pine, Flicker’s head snapped round. Her whole body went still and pointed, like a compass needle.

The brush on the western bank parted, just north of the crossing.

The leader came out onto the creek bed alone, at a walk. It was lean and long-legged, its coat the same dusty gray-green as the brush, with a heavy, wedge-shaped head and a mouth full of long, hooked teeth.

[Brushfang Jackal]

[Combat Rank: 2 — 1-Star]

It looked at Glitch. Then, slowly, deliberately, it lowered its head and began to circle, keeping well out of reach.

It wasn’t attacking. It was holding his attention.

Through the bond, Glitch’s Tremor Sense picked up the others. One moved through the upstream brush behind the leader. Another was slipping downstream along the creek’s edge. The third was farther off, moving quickly east before turning south across the road above the cut. Then its steps grew faint. It was somewhere beyond the culvert, on Jin’s side of the creek.

The leader stopped circling.

It crouched, its eyes on Glitch, and then it came forward in a long, low rush, straight across the stones.

Glitch met it head-on.

In the surrounding brush, the followers began to spread.