[Desmodus]

The saurid did not stop gearing up while it answered Dego's question: "The redhair issss right. I have not usssed thessse. No one hassss ussssed thesssse. Perhapssss the gnomessss who built them." His pack in place, the large green creature reached behind a tree to produce a spear some eight feet long with a knotty, unfinished shaft and a matte-black spearhead of uncertain material. He then turned and waited for the other two to finish getting their gear ready, then with a terse "Follow," he set off through the woods, eastwards and slightly south.

Ri'i did not hike at the sort of steady pace that most humanoids were accustomed to. He would scurry forward very quickly for about a fifty long paces, leaving Eyvind and Dego behind so that they could just barely see him. Then he would stop abruptly, usually standing stock-still next to a tree, or crouching behind a rock, waiting for the humans to catch up. Once they did, he would usually dart abruptly off again for another short sprint, until he reached the next, apparently arbitrarily-selected tree. It was a bit like following a child playing a combination of hide-and-seek, freeze, and capture-the-flag, except the child was seven feet tall, green, noiseless, incredibly fast, and deadly serious.

Among other things, this mode of travel made engaging their guide in any sort of small talk impossible. Occasionally, the saurid would pause longer than usual, not immediately darting off to the next rock when the humans caught up with him, and he would spend a few moments peering at them curiosly, perhaps waiting to see if they had any questions or concerns. Every once and a while during these pauses, the saurid would point out some feature that lay ahead on their path: a dry creek bed with loose rocks and possible snakes, a clearing they would need to skirt, an old farmhouse that might nor not still be abandoned.

They went for a candlemark or so, and the suns by now had cleared the treetops and were slanting down into their eyes. At times it looked like the something drew across the saurid's big black eyes like a sheer veil, causing them to become blurry and less glossy.

As they got further away from the old farmsteads, the trees began to be larger, with less and less undergrowth on the forest floor. The ground here was rocky, with quite a few small outcroppings; the farmers had not cleared out here, for the soil was too thin for good farming. This was to have been the site for the next wave of timbering, to be followed by the development of pasturage, had the Pox and all the other catastrophes not cut short the townsfolks' plans. As things were, it was a relatively pristine bit of woodland.

Ri'i took one of his longer pauses in this part of the woods next to an outcropping just large enough to conceal all three of them, should the need somehow arise for them to hide out here. When the others had caught up, the saurid pointed a long green finger ahead. "There it isssss," he hissed quietly. His claw was pointing at a wide, low outcropping that had been overgrown with vines, but in which the three of them could now discern the dark outline of a hole. It faced slightly west, towards them, or at least the rock outcropping rose to the west behind it, so the suns would not be shining into the hole yet.

There was a moment of silence, and then the lizardman's wedge-shaped head jerked abruptly from one side to the next. He froze once more. "Sssssomething issss moving," he hissed, slowly and very very softly. "Ssssomething big." The humans, if they stopped to listen, would hear nothing at first, then they would hear a faint creaking noise, a bit like a house's timbers or a ship's mast creaking as it bent in the wind. Except that there was no wind, and the other trees weren't stirring at all.