Hyenas

A hyena stands somewhere between a wolf and a big cat, heavier in the jaw than either, with a coat that belongs to neither. It laughs, and the laugh is what comes first: a cackling that carries down a mountainside ahead of the pack that owns it, and everyone who has heard it reaches for the word demonic. They belong to the gnolls, who train them, keep them, and set them on people.

They open the fight. Ambushed at dawn on the Goat Trail, Koa took one at a run: teeth through the thigh, and it thrashed him flat and held him on the ground while the spears worked from a distance. In the chase back to the keep later that season, the beasts came up both flanks of a party already blown from the road and reached the door before the gnolls behind them did. They can be broken. A scream pitched into one skull left the animal whimpering and dazed on its feet, Yara’s axe opened another end to end, and a bolt finished the first. But they arrive first, and a hyena is what a man is dealing with while something else takes aim at him.

What was inside one of them settled an argument. Mikhail wanted to know what the pack had been fed, so the company cut a hyena’s stomach open on the trail and found it full of recent meat, in a season and a country where the game was thin enough that they were hunting fawns to feed themselves. Nothing that size had been dying up there on its own. The pass had a reputation for a curse, and the curse was that the pack was eating whoever came through it.

The call can be counterfeited. Koa threw one across a mountainside to reach two strangers running ahead of a war party, and they heard it and shouted back, which is the nearest anyone has come to using a hyena for anything. A camp left standing gets turned over by them as thoroughly as by the gnolls. Four gnoll heads went up on pikes above the Goat Trail after the dawn ambush, as a warning to whatever came next; the hyenas were left where they lay.

None has been seen with the gnolls who later came down into Idir carrying fire. Those packs brought shields, dressed spears and a habit of arson, and whatever they travel with, nobody has reported a beast among them.