While Mr. Reeves, Joseph, and Matthew took photographs of the bear’s corpse, Martin and Mr. Leeds played each other in an old board game that predated not only chess, but chess’ inspiration chaturanga.

Mr. Leeds was once again tied into his suit and his stiff arms rested at his side as Martin moved the pieces for the both of them. The sawdust filled gloves of Mr. Leeds’ suit couldn’t pick up the pieces.

The board and its pieces came from the Antarctic palace of the Necromancer King Tekeli-Li, the White Necromancer, and Tekeli-Li himself had found the board within the ruins of a gaeite spire that once loomed over Pangea. The game was called zilodarp, which meant conquest in the ancient language of the Dyeus.

The zilodarp board was, as with chess and chaturanga, composed of 64 squares arranged in eight rows and eight columns. The board was red, and was built from the wood of a tree that no longer grows on Earth, but a 2X2 square in the center was made of a bright silver alloy that was nearly the exact color of olprt radiance. The game pieces numbered 52 in total, 26 for each player, but only twenty of the pieces had survived the aeons. The rest were modern glass replicas.

The original pieces were made out of a material known as perkunite and were colored blue and yellow. Very little was known about perkunite. What the Ror Raas could glean from their psychic visions of the past told them that perkunite was created from gaeite, but retained none of its metaphysical properties. Perkunite was an indestructible metal, vastly stronger than even Krupp steel, and could do strange things to heat and energy. It was not without good reason that the Dyeus sacrificed their most precious material to create perkunite. Dragons from distant stars invaded Earth back when the continents were one, hungry for the secrets of gaeite. The Dyeus and their ghost armies fought the dragons back, pushing most of them back to the stars and a few to distant underground caverns where they slept dreaming to this day. That the pieces to a wargame were made out of material used for weapons perhaps indicated a sort of “swords-to-plowshares” statement on the part of the craftsman--it was one of many things Mr. Leeds and Martin discussed over their game.

The pieces depicted two Dyeus kings and their spectral forces. The kings were easy to identify, they wore robes and gaeite crowns similar to what the Ror Raas saw in their visions of the past. But what their forces represented was a matter of dispute. Their forms were highly abstract. Some looked like stacks of building blocks, others like billowing clouds, and others still like frozen waterfalls. Some said they represented ghosts, others said they represented thought-forms similar to Martin’s dogs. It was also possible that they were a mixture of thought-forms and ghosts.

The game was played with each player taking turns placing two pieces in the center of the board which represented the Astral. Each piece moved a different way and had different rules for how it could be captured. The goal of the game was to fill one’s back row with summoned spirits while preventing one’s opponent from doing the same, though victory could also be achieved by slaying the opponent’s king, an action accomplished by placing three pieces adjacent to the king.

As the game currently stood, the board was filled with a mixture of blue and yellow pieces. Even an intermediate player familiar with the rules would have struggled to figure out who was winning. To a novice, it looked like two boys playing with toy soldiers. There was a suggestion of structure and rules, but only a suggestion and nothing more.

“So, who’s winning?” Joseph asked as his group entered the station.

“I am. I think.” Martin said. “But I think Mr. Leeds may have a different take on the situation.”

Mr. Leeds made a sound that was as close as he could come to laughing. It was highly unsettling to those that didn’t know it represented laughter.

“Perhaps.” he said.

“So, did you affix the Red Ghost?” Martin asked.

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“No.” Joseph said.

“No? But you’ve been tracking it all day!”

“The Red Ghost is a tricky one, unfortunately.” Matthew said. “Its external manifestation field is extremely sensitive. As soon as I sense the very fringe of its Astral hand, it teleports away.”

An Astral hand was the manesological term for the faintest part of a ghost’s manifestation, as it was a “hand reaching down from the Astral and entering the physical world.”

“Oh, another teleporter. Damn!” Martine exclaimed. “Those are so annoying to deal with.”

“But not impossible to deal with.” Mr. Leeds said. “Old Bloody Bones was a teleporter, and there’s his sack up there under the Snallygaster’s tentacle.” Mr. Leeds gestured to the sack with a stiff glove as if he were slapping the air. “We will get him.”

“Yes. It’s just a matter of time.” Joseph said. “Our minds are gradually adapting to the Red Ghost’s presence. If we put in a full day of hunting tomorrow, we should be able to use the Zacare Operation on it, and reel it in towards our location like a big, furry trout.”

Joseph pointed to a fur-bearing mounted on the wall. “We’ll hang him up there!”

“That’s quite a way of putting it, but yes.” Mr. Reeves said. “We just need to make sure people know to stay indoors for the time being, because the Red Ghost didn’t slake his bloodlust with Mrs. Richards.”

Mr. Reeves placed the photographs of the bear on the table.

Martin gasped--then gave a sigh of relief.

“Oh. I thought it was a person!” he said.

“We did, too.” Joseph said. “Until we got a good look at it.”

“Still, poor creature. Nothing deserves to die like that.”

“Ever seen what a bear does to a fish it catches?” Mr. Reeves asked. “It’s not too dissimilar to what was done to it. You could call this justice, albeit a very strange form of it.”

“It looks like it…ate parts of it.” Martin said.

“Good eyes!” Mr. Reeves said. “It took me a few moments looking over the remains to figure that one out.”

“Thank you.” Martin said. “I’ve always had good eyes.”

“Yes, we think it tried to eat the bear, but it couldn’t hold any of it down in its ectoplasmic body.” Mr. Reeves said. “Those piles are bits of bear that got chewed up and swallowed down to a stomach that didn’t exist.”

“Oh, you poor creature!” Martin frowned at the pictures. But at least you weren’t a human.”

“Given that the Red Ghost killed a woman but ate a bear, we’re thinking that the Red Ghost isn’t the ghost of an animal but the ghost of a man. A man will kill another person, but not eat them.”

‘And so the bloodshed of the Red Ghost continues, regrettably.” Martin said. “We need to send an electrogram to the authorities. Who would that be in Arizona territory, exactly?”

Mr. Leeds pointed to the electrograph room. “Directions for how to contact Fort Bowie are on the wall. They should be able to send an alert to all the post offices and they’ll send riders to alert the homesteads.”

“I’ll get to it.” Matthew said before heading to the electrograph room.

“I’ll be leaving soon.” Mr. Leeds said. “For my nightly business.”

“Don’t let us keep you.” Matthew said. “You’ve seen what we’ve found today, so go ahead and take off.” With that, he walked into the electrograph room and closed the door behind him.

“Leave it to Matthew to volunteer to do some writing.” Joseph said. He turned to Martin. “Tomorrow, be sure you wake up so you can come with us,” he said.

“An extra manesologists won’t help you three acclimate faster to the Red Ghost’s telepathic signature.” Martin said.

“True, but you going out with us has got to be better than sticking around here all day playing magic man chess with Mr. Leeds.”

“Actually, I didn’t spend all day here.” Martin snapped his fingers and several canvas sacks levitated onto the table through the power of his dogs. The dogs then pulled back the drawstrings to reveal the yellow and red contents of the sacks.

“Good lord!” Joseph exclaimed. “You really were serious about this bird pepper business!”

Martin nodded. “If it all goes well, I’ll have all the bird pepper sauce I could ever want. I may even sell some in little bottles and donate the profits to Asphodel Street.”

“That’s not a bad idea.” Mr. Reeves said. “There’s a man by the name of Edmund McIlheney down in Louisiana, a friend of the Bisclavret clan, though he’s not a shapeshifter himself. He owns an island about three miles from Vermillion Bay called Avery Island. It’s not a good land for growing things, on the count of a salt dome beneath it, but what does grow good on Avery Island is peppers.”

“I like this man and his salt island, and I’ve never met him.” Martin said.

“McIlheney learned about a unique variety of bird pepper that grows down in Mexico, in a state called Tabasco. He imported some and now these Tabasco peppers grow like a weed around Avery island. He makes a sauce out of it, vinegar, and salt--which is dirt cheap on Avery Island, literally from the dirt.”

“Is it good?”

“I’d say so. The Bisclavret siblings love it, they drink it like its water.”

“I see you two have the tastes of not only birds but loup-garou. Charming.” Joseph said.