Wyverns

A wyvern carries better than animal wits, and possibly better than a goblin’s, which is what makes one dangerous in a way a bear is not: a keen animal can be outthought, and a wyvern cannot, or not easily. No language of theirs has ever been found. In the air one reads as a shape longer behind than before, and even a good eye needs a solid minute on that elongated frame to be sure of what it is looking at.

The venom is the thing to know about them. One came at the balcony door of Al-Sāmiyah’s eyrie above the keep in the Valley of Doom while she was away, gouged deep claw marks into it, and left deep puncture holes in the wood with the venom drying around them. The door held because it was very well made, because she had jammed hunks of metal into it before she left so that it could not be clawed open, and because the thing outside stopped. Given another few minutes it would probably have been through, and the reading at the time was that it had simply lost interest.

They are working with the gnolls now. Below the same keep, the Burning Blood were signaling, and Mikhail got no more than an impression off the exchange, which was that the camp had reported the company up there and that the order coming back sent the wyverns at a keep the gnolls themselves could not climb to. None of it could be translated exactly. What binds the two together nobody could say at all, though the half of the traffic coming back read as the authoritative half. It leaves Mikhail’s other question where it was. There are gnolls in the valley below, and the wyverns are not eating them.