On-Site Investigation
The investigation party reached Antler Forest just as the unseasonably early first snow of late autumn finally ceased.
More precisely, they arrived at Drywood—the village nearest the forest, and the one where disappearances had lately been most frequent.
Just as Coldon had been thrown into chaos by the sudden snowfall while winter had yet to truly begin, Drywood was in an uproar of its own with frantic snow-clearing work.
When a large company of armed men appeared in the midst of all that, the villagers trembled with unease—until they saw the seal on the banners and exhaled in relief. Even the rough folk of Iceland knew the roaring dragon crest of the Felwinter family.
As it was, the men Alfred had previously dispatched to investigate had entered Antler Forest and simply vanished. Those who had gone along as guides had vanished with them, of course.
With more people this time than the last party, perhaps the problem would finally be solved. While the aged village chief and the people of Drywood submitted to questioning under that vague hope, Catherine led a detachment of soldiers under the villagers’ guidance toward the forest’s edge.
They were going to examine whatever traces the thing that had taken the people had left behind.
“But Lady Atanita… with this much snow, won’t everything be buried?”
“No need to worry. It’s a forest.”
She had a point. The Antler trees looked odd at first glance, yet when one lifted one’s eyes along their thick trunks—scaled, almost—the deer-antler branches were thick with blue-green leaves that kept the forest floor from accumulating much snow at all.
Still, it had been an enormous snowfall.
One of the villagers guiding the party—the chief’s son—spoke up as if to set them at ease.
“Don’t you worry, my lord.”
“My lord… hmm.”
“Have I given offense somehow…?”
“No, it’s nothing.”
It really wasn’t. Karem simply found the honorific awkward coming from the chief’s son.
If he had wandered Winterhome more often he might have grown used to hearing it from others, but Karem only left the Mage’s Tower when he needed to request provisions.
Seeing the young man grow nervous, Karem waved a hand as if to say it was nothing.
“Please, go on.”
“Ah—yes. The moment it looked like snow was coming, we covered the pit with blankets and hides.”
“A pit?”
“Yes. That is… well, you’ll see for yourself, my lord.”
The place the chief’s son and the villagers led them to was not far from the village at all—an outermost fringe of the forest where the undergrowth was sparse.
What looked like nothing more than a snow-covered patch of ground was carefully brushed aside; the young man and several others caught hold of the blankets and lifted them with care so the snow would not spill in. Beneath, exactly as promised, was a pit.
“A pit, is it. Not a hole that was already here?”
“No, my lord. This pit appeared after the previous party disappeared.”
“The previous party—those who wore the Felwinter crest?”
“Yes. Not nearly as many as you who have come this time.”
“Hm.”
Catherine murmured the sound and examined the pit from rim to floor.
There were no marks of shovels or hands digging from the outside in.
She briefly considered whether some creature might have excavated a food cache, but such work would have left clear traces.
Moreover, most of Iceland’s ground began to freeze from autumn onward. Yet the pit now revealed by the lifted blankets showed none of that.
No—it had not been dug from without.
Irregular, saw-toothed gouges ran from the inside outward.
“This looks as if something tore its way out from underground and dragged them down…”
“Could the groundwater underneath have drained away?”
Karem thought of sinkholes.
There were several causes, but most often deep groundwater withdrew, leaving a void whose ceiling could no longer bear the weight above, so the ground collapsed.
Catherine shook her head.
“In other regions of the Seophon Kingdom, perhaps. Not in Iceland. Here the groundwater freezes solid before it can drain, or if it does drain, it refills almost at once.”
“Is that so?”
“It is.”
At her words Karem studied the pit again.
It certainly did not look like a sinkhole.
The depression was too shallow for that, and where sinkholes were usually vertical shafts, this one flared like an inverted cone.
The sides were a little uneven, stepped in places. And between those uneven layers something smooth was lodged—smooth?
When Karem tilted his head, the chief’s son asked,
“My lord?”
“Isn’t there something visible halfway down the pit?”
“Where do you mean?”
“There—that spot.”
Karem pointed. To everyone else it was merely a rock or stone exposed by the collapse.
But the eyes of a brownie—the spirit of housework, the very incarnation of thoroughness—could not be deceived.
“There’s dust on it, but that’s metal. And… bone? No. A tooth?”
“Metal?”
“Yes.”
One person might have been mistaken; two people seeing something was another matter. Catherine waved the villagers back. The soldiers waiting behind her climbed down into the pit.
The slope was diagonal, yet the frozen earth made the descent easy enough. They dug at the place Karem had indicated.
* * *
A metal helmet that covered the forehead and the back of the skull.
A design that swept down from the temples to guard the nose.
Fur lining finished inside against the cold.
Though caked with dirt and scored with scratches, the leather riddled with holes, there was no mistaking it. It was the helmet issued identically to every soldier of the Felwinter domain.
“The condition is wretched, but—”
Zoric had been resting with his squire after finishing his own survey when they burst in without warning, and he was startled. The sentries outside had not even been given word.
Yet when he saw the state of the helmet Catherine set on the table, Zoric examined it with full seriousness.
And he was certain.
“This is without doubt a helmet belonging to the soldiers previously dispatched to the village.”
“It was half-buried in a pit at the forest’s edge.”
“A pit. A monster, then?”
“I’ve written everything down. Check it. And this tooth as well.”
Catherine handed over a scroll detailing what she had seen at the forest’s edge, along with the helmet and the other evidence found with it. Zoric passed the scroll to his squire as a matter of course.
He could not read.
The squire began reciting the contents with practiced ease. Listening to the findings, Zoric turned the rough tooth over in his fingers, matching it against long experience and memory.
The pure-white tooth was blunt at the tip, widened toward the base, then narrowed again at the root.
Not a tooth meant to wound prey, but one designed to seize and drag. As proof, when Zoric tried to stroke it against the grain his hand locked as if fixed in place.
Zoric had originally been a common-born Iceland native, an adventurer who specialized in hunting monsters.
He had distinguished himself in a large-scale subjugation, finally becoming the knight of his dreams and changing his fortunes—yet the nature of his work had not changed at all.
“First, every monster that operates on the surface can be ruled out.”
“Bandits, then?”
“No. People are not moles; they would never leave a pit like that. Not unless they had deliberately prepared a trap.”
Zoric shook his head in denial.
“I cannot be certain without seeing the site myself, but it is clearly a monster that lives primarily underground.”
“Underground as well… Kobolds, perhaps? No, that can’t be it.”
Catherine dismissed the creature that had risen unbidden to her tongue.
“There are no mountains nearby, no ore veins. It cannot be kobolds. Unless a burrow appeared out of nowhere.”
“In my opinion, it is a deathworm.”
“A deathworm?”
“Yes. The village chief said some people felt a strange vibration. Folk from other villages felt it too.”
A monster that swam through the earth like an earthworm or a snake, hunting prey both above and below ground.
Their numbers were small, yet not so small they could be ignored.
Above all, deathworms possessed one defining trait.
“If it’s a deathworm of Iceland… an Iceworm?”
“Being at the forest’s edge there was only the one pit, but deeper in there will be more. And this tooth is the proof.”
“Hmm. An Iceworm…”
Catherine was not without experience hunting deathworms.
Though few in number, deathworm-type monsters could be found across the whole of the Europa continent.
Her own experience had ended with hunting sandworms a dozen times or more.
An Iceworm, however, would be her first.
“I’ve hunted sandworms often enough.”
“They are not greatly different. Only more ferocious than other deathworms, harder, and far more territorial.”
In a harsh and barren land, people, beasts, plants, and monsters alike grow strong to survive. Ordinary deathworms claimed a territory and stayed within it, hunting only when hungry. Iceworms were different.
Barren Iceland offered far less prey than other regions.
Naturally, Iceworms claimed vast territories for efficient hunting, and the moment they sensed prey—hungry or not—they attacked first and asked questions never.
Against the day when they might go long without finding food.
“Winter, for example.”
“Exactly. And this year winter has come earlier than usual. I believe they failed to store enough.”
“So they sensed the change in weather early and began attacking people.”
“Monsters are generally more sensitive to such changes than we are.”
“What do you intend to do?”
At Catherine’s question Zoric tapped the helmet lightly.
“If we assume the forest has already become an Iceworm’s territory, going in to search for it ourselves would be foolish.”
“Then?”
“We lure it out. We’ll need bait.”
Before that, however, Zoric rose to examine the pit Catherine had described with his own eyes.
“From here on I will handle the preparations myself.”
“Call if you need help. That’s why my lord sent me, after all.”
“Yes. As it happens, I already have a request concerning the bait.”
“I did say the words, yet you accept them rather quickly.”
Reputation first, practicality second? First she would need a medium—under normal conditions it would have been fine, but in her present state she was liable to make a mistake, so better to prepare thoroughly in advance.
And now she had even more work piled on her plate.
Catherine sighed as the already overflowing tasks multiplied further.
But there was no time.
Before the tent’s owner could even speak, Catherine stepped outside. The moment she did, Zoric issued orders to the squire waiting beside him and rose to his feet.
There was a great deal to be done.