Plains cats

Idir is grassland with city-states scattered through it and roads that run for days between them, and the animal that owns those roads is the plains cat. The advice given to anyone about to cross is a number rather than a description: never fewer than six, and all of them armed. The warning that goes with it on the way out of town is that they are bigger than your horse. Nobody who has come back has stood next to one to check.

They take travelers, and the traveler alone is what they take. They run in pairs, which is the ordinary case, and a pair with a grown litter behind it can come to seven, so the season decides the risk: autumn, with the young at full size, is the worst time to be in the grass, and spring, when the pairs are pairs again, is the safest. They can be frightened off, which is the one mercy in them and the whole difference between a plains cat and a gnoll, since a gnoll that has taken an interest in a man will work through his family. Dwayne has culled them under contract for the council at Loshev. Caravan crews on the northern route go round them by reading tracks a day ahead. Size alone is not what makes them dangerous: the mountain lions above the plains run bigger and are not known to hunt people at all.

Nobody in the company has ever faced one. What they have seen is the aftermath.

Hunting in the tall grass west of the river, moving in on a fawn they had just brought down, they smelled rot and found a middle-aged Peren man in washed-out robes the color of the Arcane Congress, torn open, a month dead, a long way out from anywhere and alone. His pack still held a rolled sheet of vellum too fragile to open, a well-made weighted staff, and four vials, two of them smashed. Identified a season later, one of the sound ones was a draught for hiding from animals. He had not opened it. They laid two coins on his eyes for the Wyrd Twins, which is what buys a dead man luck in the afterlife, and left rather than stand about in a plains cat’s hunting ground.

Otherwise it is a sound. On the road Koa has lain awake and listened to a hunt going on close enough in the dark to place, and it went the other way and took something else.