Up on the mountainside, the climate was radically different from that of the desert below.

  The temperature even in the lower elevations was relatively cool, and there was occasional rain. Despite the desert biome below, much of the mountain supported forest growth. At the uppermost levels of those forests, the death’s-head leopard stalked.

  Here, he was king. The apex predator of the Durus Mountains.

  The morning was settling in, but the usually nocturnal hunter still moved through the brush in search of his next meal. The night’s hunt had not been fruitful, but there was time before the light would grow too intense for him to maintain stealth.

  His dappled spotting—every one of the hundreds of rosettes that decorated his coat looked like a dark-colored human skull, as with other leopards of his species—would still aid him in blending into the underbrush. So he pressed on.

  Then the leopard stepped around a tree trunk and saw something strange.

  His thoughts, such as they were, emerged in non-verbal fashion, but if he could use human terminology to express them, he would have thought, What did this?

  He instinctively darted behind the tree again, wary that whatever had perpetrated the eerie display before him might still be nearby. His head darted up to scan the branches above, just in case there was a predator he was unfamiliar with perched there.

  Nothing.

  After a few seconds of looking and listening, the leopard became convinced the potential enemy had already gone. He poked his head out.

  He saw what he had observed before: carnage.

  Four gazelles, he recognized now. It had been difficult to be certain of the number at first, as they had been ripped limb from limb. The leopard padded closer, still looking around cautiously, wary of a trap.

  But nothing emerged from the trees.

  Eventually, the forest king reached the bits of gazelle that lay scattered along the ground. The closest specimen he saw was ripped in half. The top of the gazelle lay at the leopard’s feet, eyes staring fixedly forward forever, while the legs that he surmised had belonged to the lower half of the body stuck out of two different bushes. Each gazelle was dismembered in a slightly different way. One had its head ripped off, only. Another was a torso, with its head mostly attached, but missing all four of its legs; it had clearly bled out.

  The leopard nosed around the bodies for a few minutes, gathering information with his keen senses. What he saw did not add up. The gazelles being killed was not surprising. This species was small and weak, exactly the animals the leopard might have wished for in its own search for prey. But this appeared to be a family. One male, one female, and two offspring.

  It boggled the mind that none of them had gotten away, considering their keen senses, high capacity for speed, and dark coloration—good camouflage in the forest.

  If the leopard had hunted them, he would have killed at least one.

  But the gazelles would have sensed him coming. One would have alerted the others. Somehow, whatever predator had taken these animals had successfully slaughtered all four of them—yet had eaten nothing. The leopard could not fathom the reason for this. A part of him instinctively suspected the hairless apes that lived at the bottom of the mountain, or the hairless apes with bestial features that lived on the mountain itself, at lower elevations.

  Even that did not make sense, though. Humans almost never ventured up this high. If they had been so desperately hungry that they scaled the mountain to find food, they would have taken the gazelles’ bodies.

  If it was the hairless apes, the leopard would have to consider some action in response. He had thought of himself as having a delicate truce with them, on the rare occasion when he thought of the primates. They respected his territory. He respected theirs. He had no reason to do otherwise.

  Perhaps now…

  But there were too many things wrong with the idea that it was humans. For starters, the gazelles had a strange mixture of smells on them. An unpleasant, musty smell that the leopard did not quite recognize, a smoky odor reminiscent of the aftermath of a fire, and a sickly sweet aroma that was more familiar to the leopard than the others: rot. Yet the gazelles had died recently. The remains were still warmer than the ground around them.

  As a secondary matter, the leopard doubted that humans were strong enough to do the damage that these creatures had suffered, at least without those fearsome killing tools they carried. And the markings on the gazelles did not have clean edges. They were bestial.

  The leopard finally gave up on solving the mystery from these remains alone.

  The only clear truths were that the gazelles had been killed—and the direction the killer or killers had taken. This unfamiliar predator had smashed a pathway through the ground cover ahead of the leopard, apparently disregarding stealth entirely as it went in pursuit of some other objective. Perhaps it had been chased away from its meal by a leopard like himself.

  The leopard considered whether he should investigate further. He had already spent ten minutes on this.

  If he did not find some prey soon, he would have to spend the day hungry and wait until night to hunt once more.

  Then again, there might be some very large prey at the end of this obvious, easy to follow trail. Prey that could be eaten over a period of days. Framed that way, the choice was easy. He made such gambles regularly. They usually paid off.

  The leopard stepped into the shattered bramble pathway the intruder had left, and the hunt began. He walked for only a few minutes before he came upon the scene of another bloody slaughter. A family of hedgehogs, smashed with sheer blunt force.

  He stopped for a moment to stare at one of the juvenile hedgehog corpses. It was barely recognizable as a body—just a blood and flesh smear—but there was something interesting to its condition. It held the shape of what had crushed it in the form of a footprint.

  The foot appeared to lack claws.

  Was this the work of the hairless apes after all, then?

  The leopard shook its head and moved on. These bodies were actually cooler than the gazelles from earlier. Either the predators had killed these hedgehogs before the gazelles, or they were actually gaining ground on the leopard, despite not knowing that they were being pursued.

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  At any rate, there was another trail—completely with broken tree branches and trampled shrubbery, even clumsier than the path these creatures had left before.

  The leopard was confident that there was more than one of this enemy now. The size of the footprint in the hedgehog’s body, compared with the size of the trail left, strongly suggested at least two creatures walking abreast from place to place, hunting.

  This explained how the gazelles had been unable to escape. They had been cut off from possible retreat, surrounded by enemies or at least stuck between two of them. On a mountainside, there were always limited movement options.

  The leopard set out on the path of his quarry once again. Already, he was thinking of how he would ambush these predators. His mind was occupied with this as he followed the obvious trail—so thoroughly occupied that he almost failed to see the body ahead before he came upon it.

  Then the furry shape was obvious. The leopard stopped dead in his tracks. All his fur stood on end.

  Before him, a single striped hyena’s corpse hung, impaled on the branches of a tree. One of its legs had been torn off, and an eye was gouged out.

  Looking from side to side and moving gingerly forward—as if the trees would come alive with predators at any moment—the leopard approached the hyena’s body. He laid a paw on the chest of the scavenger. Still warm—the warmest yet, in fact, though there was definitively no heartbeat.

  The leopard was on the right track. He was closer than ever to finding what he had been looking for.

  Yet this discovery gave him pause. Certainly, he could have defeated the striped hyena himself. The hyena probably would have fled rather than face the death’s-head leopard head-on.

  But it was not easy prey, not like a gazelle or some little hedgehogs.

  The leopard began to wonder if he might have misjudged this situation.

  He took a step to the side, thinking that he might retrace his steps—and he put his foot down in something hard.

  The leopard looked down and saw a bone that had been snapped in half. There were obvious bite marks on the fragments. They looked to be from the hyena. Around the bone, the leopard saw chunks of torn flesh, and the soil was darker and smelled slightly of blood.

  The hyena had defended itself. And it seemed to have done better against these enemies than it would have against the leopard.

  So he told himself. And the leopard advanced after its prey. The quarry had once again left a trail so obvious that a blind beast could follow it.

  He quickly arrived at the scene of yet another killing, a body laying splayed on the ground. It was one of the leopard’s more challenging prey—a wild boar. Its body was almost intact, just its throat ripped out. Perhaps the predator had not been able to play its strange, brutal game with this one—the one where it killed its enemies in ways that mutilated their bodies horribly.

  The leopard looked around and verified that there was no sign of the predators. There was nothing.

  Then he touched a paw to the boar’s neck. The body was still as warm as when the beast lived.

  The leopard nodded to himself. It was well done. The predators he was shadowing had become more efficient through the process of killing.

  He felt a mixture of hesitancy and tense excitement at the idea of following them further.

  But it was not a decision that had to be made immediately. He felt the emptiness in his stomach keenly now that he stood in front of the very recently deceased boar.

  The leopard was pleased that the intruders had left him such a delicious hunk of meat, more or less perfectly intact. A boar’s body would feed him for days.

  He grabbed the boar by the back of its neck and began to maneuver the corpse away from its position atop the first fallen leaves of autumn. First, he dragged the boar over to a tree, and then he managed to climb it, pulling the body up after him. His claws were almost as well adapted to climbing as they were to killing, and he was in the prime of his physical powers.

  He made it to a branch that was out of reach of the ground for anything jumping, even himself. He laid the boar in a fork between two thick branches, to ensure it would not smash through the tree with its weight and fall to the ground below.

  And he tore out a chunk of the boar’s neck. He ate it. A snack, to tide him over.

  As he climbed, he had thought about it. Following this predator—or these predators, as the case seemed likely to be—further remained a tantalizing idea. The leopard wanted to know what it was that was stalking his mountain. No, it was more than curiosity. He needed to determine if this was a threat to him, either in the present or the future.

  Killing a wild boar was impressive enough that he could not afford to ignore this.

  If it was a truly dangerous enemy, the leopard should snuff it out now, before it became fully accustomed to the thin mountain air and learned to navigate the forest more deftly.

  He descended and renewed the hunt. This time, as he walked, the leopard almost immediately heard noises. High-pitched cries. He recognized them.

  Macaques. Easy prey, individually. But he heard more than one.

  He slowed and moved more cautiously, prioritizing stealth. The leopard was an ambush predator.

  He passed a tree and saw them in the distance. His brow furrowed in slight confusion. This was not the first time he had seen something he did not understand in this world. But it might be the most perplexing.

  His eyes must be deceiving him. The leopard inched closer, step by cautious step, his skull-patterned rosettes blending into the dappled shadows but providing him less and less camouflage with the slowly strengthening morning light.

  What he saw still did not make sense as he drew closer. It looked as if a few of the hairless apes had three macaques—two males and a female—almost fully surrounded, their backs to the open air. That was comprehensible enough. Humans hunted animals sometimes.

  The strange part was that filling in the circle cutting off the macaques from retreat appeared to be moving assortments of bone. Skeletons.

  But the dead could not move.

  The leopard’s hair stood on end. He felt deeply uneasy. For the first time since he began this hunt, he seriously wondered whether he could actually take on these enemies. They were more numerous than he had anticipated, and there was so much off about them. Aside from the walking skeletons, the others smelled wrong—the odor of corruption of the flesh.

  His mind worked over the rare occasions when he had seen things he did not understand. Usually, in his experience, that meant magic. He did not understand it, but he did not need to. He knew enough. It was something that could injure him, or even kill him—as it had done to his mother when she encountered a hairless ape wielding seeds and wood as weapons. That had been most of the leopard’s lifetime ago, but the lesson stuck.

  As he considered his options, the macaques cried out again—a desperate effort to summon help. The hairless apes and skeletons seemed to take those noises almost as a signal. They leaped upon the macaques and began—with strength beyond what the leopard would have expected of humanoids—ripping the monkeys apart. This was more efficient than the earlier kills, but messier than the boar had been, perhaps because the macaques were too numerous to be dispatched by holding them down and quickly ripping their throats out.

  The leopard stood frozen, staring at the sight for several seconds as he considered what to do. He shook his head. It was time to retreat.

  He took his first step backward.

  A twig snapped underfoot.

  The leopard heard rather than saw a movement from above and to his side, up in the trees. He twisted his head to look. His peripheral vision was a weak point.

  He saw a human cub sitting in the branches of the tree above him. The human must have been sitting impossibly still to have avoided the leopard’s notice at such close range. Still as death. Pale, too. The cub said something in the hairless apes’ peculiar language.

  The leopard could not understand the words, but he could interpret the tone. Mockery.

  He was tempted to respond with a lunge for the cub’s throat. But he sensed the other hairless apes shuffling in his direction. They seemed to have finished with the macaques rather quickly.

  Without further thought, the leopard ran. Behind him, the dead gave chase.

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