The Scent

Chiron knows the living man because the stones shift under his feet, and seven centuries later it is still the rule the whole thing runs on: no creature in this game can read where you are. It reads one grid, in which the smell of a living body settles, spreads, drifts on the wind and dies away. The rule starts in the dark wood, on the first step, and holds from there down to the ice.

The grid is sixty four cells of one metre a side and steps forward twenty times a second; smell does not cross rock, so the trace turns down the corridors by itself and there is no path map to keep aligned with the geometry. Whatever is sniffing asks two different questions: which way, which is the slope and is for moving, and how much, which is the concentration and is for deciding. The Beast samples sixteen directions at two distances and climbs the slope, but it turns no faster than a hundred and twenty degrees a second: turn tighter than it does and you lose it.

What you give off is what you are plus what you carry, multiplied by six separate factors: how far the place masks you, effort, whatever you have got on you, the weight of the book of names, breath, and shelter. Running doubles the trace, and concentration falls by a factor of ten every four metres or so, which is the yardstick every threshold is set against. The lit moths are the same data the Beast smells: not a picture of the grid, the grid itself.