Spurred Hounds

Overview

Spurred Hounds are war dogs pushed past any dog's measure by magic. Nature Magic's Latent Spur urges a beast towards a more extreme form already latent in it. Human kennels of the Confluence Basins and the Headwater Marches have spurred their war dogs litter after litter, breeding the biggest, until the change holds without the spell. The result is the most feared dog of the cradle-web: huge, fearless, and never wholly safe.

Appearance

A spurred hound stands as high at the shoulder as a man's waist or more and weighs as much as a man, deep-chested and heavy-headed, with a short coat of brindle, fawn, or black and a skin that hangs in folds at the throat. The jaws are broad and the teeth large; the eyes are small, red-rimmed, and restless. Many carry the marks of the spur's excess: a too-long jaw, a shoulder heavier on one side, overgrown claws. They move with a heavy, rolling trot and charge with startling speed. Their bark is a deep, cracked bay; at rest they pant and grumble constantly. They smell strongly of dog and of the kennel.

Habitat and Range

They are kept in lords' kennels, keeps, and war camps in the Basins and the Headwater valleys, by the households that can afford to feed them and pay the conjurers who keep the line. They are not loosed to range and are never kept in villages.

Behaviour and Temperament

Trained hard, a spurred hound is loyal to its handler, fearless in a fight, and savage against whatever it is set on: men, horses, wolves. It is also unstable. The spur that made the line works on in it, and a hound can turn without warning on another hound, on a stranger, or on its own handler, in a fit of rage that passes as quickly as it came. Old hounds grow worse.

Abilities

It is stronger, heavier, and harder to stop than any common dog, and bears wounds that would drop a war horse. Its senses are sharpened, especially its nose, and its handlers say it can follow a trail days old.

Life Cycle

They breed true, mostly, and litters are small; a share of every litter is born malformed and is put down at birth. Hounds grow fast and are trained from their first months. Few live past six or seven years, burnt out by the excess, and fewer die of age.

Uses and Dangers

They are war dogs and hunting dogs for the most dangerous quarry, and a lord's kennel of spurred hounds is a show of his strength. Their cost is meat, conjurers' fees, and blood: handlers lose fingers, hands, and sometimes their lives, and a hound loose in a village is a disaster. By custom a lord owes for what his hounds do; a village is paid only when it has a stronger lord of its own to ask.

Lore and Belief

Village folk say a spurred hound has a wolf's soul trapped in it, or that something from beyond the Veil was bred into it; it is a dog, changed by magic over many generations. Handlers say a hound loves one person and tolerates no one else. Fugitives fear them above all other hounds. Conjurers who keep the lines say each spurred generation pushes the change further, and some refuse the work.

The songs of the Basin wars remember the spurred pack loosed on a fleeing village, and the miller's son who held the bridge against it with a pitchfork until the last of the women were over.

Where It Appears

• Overview: Touched Beasts