Korath leads a hunting pack in the southern reaches of Edari, where the golden savannah breaks against the Shepherds' Stones. By every rule his people live with, he should be the last person an outsider ever meets. The Korel hold Edari as its apex predators, and they grant strangers two categories, prey and competitor. The pack-lead is the one who enforces that judgment hardest. Korath enforces it on everyone but one man.
For three years he has guided a single outsider through the interior: a Nameless One out of Keshwindi who goes by the use-name Norwen. No one not born to the savannah crosses Edari's heart twice and lives. Norwen has done it through every season for three years, because Korath's pack walks the open ground ahead of him and nothing in the grass will touch a man a pack-lead has claimed.
What Norwen comes for is people. The convoys he meets Korath to intercept carry the freshly name-stripped of Shyona, marched west toward the Hills of Dolor to die of thirst before they ever reach Keshwindi's wells. Most are children, or barely older. Their houses, having paid the courts to disown them in the open, pay a second time in secret to have them vanish off the route instead, a death on paper that is not a death in fact. Norwen lifts them off the western track. Korath's pack carries them across the one stretch the Hills funnel all travel through, the bare savannah where an exile alone lasts a day, and hands them on past the Stones toward the desert city that will take anyone.
Korath does not take gold for this. The Korel mint nothing and have no one to spend coin on; a purse is dead weight to a man who carries his whole life on his back. He takes blades. The exiles arrive with their confiscated property still on the carts, the short swords a Shyonan child is handed before it can read and the bound training-manuals of houses now sworn to forget those children ever held a blade. That is Korath's price, and it is a strange one, because his pack cannot read a word of it. They are learning. A pack that worships Korn reads the daemon's gift as the labor of killing, not the labor of building, and Korath has decided that the most devout thing he can do with his grip on the world's neck is to learn a better way to close it.
Six manuals in oiled cloth, lashed under the belly of the lead carry-frame where the rain won't reach them. The script means nothing to the hands that turn the pages, so they have learned it as shape and sequence: this guard answers that thrust, this footwork crosses that ground. One of the older hunters can now run the first form of a Tazumori drill from memory, slower than any Shyonan child, and exactly correct. There is no house to keep the books in. When the pack moves, the books move.
The other packs of Edari hunt Korath, and they do not hunt him for the mercy he shows an outsider. They hunt him for what he is gathering. A pack-lead who falls is absorbed, his hunters and his ground and everything he knew taken up by whoever brings him down. Every form Korath's pack commits to memory is a thing that passes to a rival the day he dies, and so the longer he lives the more dangerous his death becomes. They call what he is doing contamination, the outside let into Edari and into the blood of the packs. Whether that is the true name for it, or only the word a pack has for being out-hunted by neighbors who fight a way it never learned, the savannah has not settled. Korath has not slowed.
None of this has made him less a Korel. He keeps Korn's festival and works the dedicated field the one ceremonial day, same as any pack-lead. His loyalty runs to his own and no further; he would not cross the Stones to save a single one of Norwen's exiles for its own sake, and has never claimed to. He hunts a foreign people's war because it will make his pack the most dangerous thing in the grass, and that same loyalty is exactly why the rest of Edari wants him dead before the lesson finishes. The devotion that drives him and the threat that condemns him are one thing, read from two sides.
A leopard that learns the spear is still a leopard. It is only a leopard you can no longer meet in the open. — Kord, pack-lead of the northern grass, on why Korath has to fall