He was amazed to find Tharn on his hands and knees sniffing at the ground. Those nostrils appeared to quiver, to expand and contract, like an animal's when it picks up a fresh spoor.
A prickling sensation tugged at Trakor's scalp. Was it possible that this god-like human could actually scent, and recognize that scent, where a man or woman had stood days before? No human nose had any business being that efficient!
Tharn looked up to find him standing there. "She slept here for several hours," he said. On hands and knees he began to move in a straight line across the ground, swerved to one side near the former location of the fires, then on again across the wide ribbon of open ground between the heaps of ashes and the forest's edge. At the base of a large tree, he stood up and beckoned to Trakor.
"Sadu chased her to this tree," he explained, his voice as confident as though he had witnessed the entire proceedings instead of reconstructing them through the mediums of sight and smell. "He did not get her. Come."
Lightly Tharn swung himself into the branches, Trakor close behind him. To the cave lord this was an engaging sport—a sport made more interesting because happiness for him depended on his ability to follow a cold trail.
Here a bit of lint from Dylara's tunic had caught beneath a segment of bark; there a newly budded shoot had been crushed by a naked foot. A speck of green moisture on an adjoining branch marked where that same foot had come to rest a little later; and further on a scuffed section of bark, almost too small to be detected, showed where a foot had slipped slightly.
To Tharn, guided by uncanny powers of perception and a woodlore second not even to the beasts themselves, all these marks were as evident and recognizable as words on a printed page to a scholar.
Dylara's progress had been snail-like that night as she worked her way through impenetrable darkness; Tharn moved along her pathway speedily and without faltering, Trakor following.
In ten minutes the cave lord covered the distance Dylara had required an hour to travel. Abruptly he altered his course upward toward the forest top, until, high among the smaller branches, he stopped and looked to his nose for information.
Almost at once Trakor noticed a troubled expression carve itself on Tharn's handsome face. "What is it, Tharn?"