Falcon Hunt Attack

Falcon Hunt Attack is a violent episode at the royal falcon hunt that leaves people with a rapidly developing, often fatal illness. It sets off a medical investigation into the disease’s speed, transmission, and uneven effects, then becomes part of a wider inquiry into whether apparently animal attacks were orchestrated by human beings. The accumulating evidence makes deliberate planning increasingly plausible, but does not establish who was responsible or conclusively rule out coincidence.

Background and First Assessment

Hohsalle’s early reasoning begins with the pattern of deaths at the salt mine and the lack of subsequent illness among people who continued working there. The victims appeared to have been exposed, developed symptoms, and died at nearly the same time; he reasoned that a gradual person-to-person outbreak would likely have given someone time to report it. The disease was exceptionally virulent, affecting not only weakened slaves but also the slave keepers. These observations led him to doubt transmission between people, by fleas or ticks, or through the air, and to consider bites from an infected animal as the likely route. That was a working conclusion, not proof that the cases at the falcon hunt had a single identified cause.

The proposal to hunt down wild dogs or wolves also required refinement. Hohsalle noted that if the wolves or ossam involved in attacks on sheep had carried the disease, shepherds would have been bitten and died; Yotalu had received no such reports. Rather than treating every wild animal as a carrier, the investigators would need to identify which animals posed the risk. The distinction matters to the later inquiry: an animal bite could explain how a person became ill, but it did not by itself explain the wider pattern of attacks.

Illness and Human Cost

When Hohsalle later reported on the falcon hunt cases, he described their manifestation and course as rapid and severe. The Zolian falconer bitten near the chin showed the most dramatic effects and developed severe symptoms fastest. Sulumina showed the greatest resistance among the patients Hohsalle discussed, followed by Mazai and Olimu. Because all the patients had been given the new medicine, however, Hohsalle could not tell whether any would have survived without treatment. The contrast between the falconer’s course and Sulumina’s resistance thus offered a question for research, not a settled explanation.

The illness also imposed a human cost that medical precautions could not soften. When a falconer died, his wife and daughter could not approach or touch him because of concern about contagion. Milalle covered his face with a white cloth and then led the grieving family to another room while she prepared the body. Mana, identifying himself as a priest-doctor, offered them religious consolation: he told them that God had witnessed the man’s suffering and promised the family a future reunion in heaven if they lived well. Their grief unfolded at a distance from the dead, with care for the bereaved taking place just beyond the barrier imposed by the illness.

From Medical Case to Suspicion

Makokan’s account of what happened to Sae gave the investigation another troubling detail: the beasts had attacked from a cliff. Tomasolle regarded that approach as unnatural, and Hohsalle agreed that it seemed suspicious. The possibility arose that someone intended to prevent the capture of the escaped Gansa slave—the only man said to have survived the disease. If so, the attack at the falcon hunt and the massacre at the salt mine might not have been random animal violence, but parts of a premeditated scheme. The suspected connection was a hypothesis, not an identified perpetrator; the Gansa clan was considered potentially involved, while its members and neighboring clans were also described as wary and difficult to investigate.

Hohsalle nevertheless said that, after seeing the conditions at the salt mine and the falcon-hunt attack, he believed a human hand was guiding events toward some goal. He also insisted that investigators could not afford to cling to a single explanation. Few cases of mittsual-like illness had appeared since the hunt, and if the King of Aquafa had been directing events, Hohsalle reasoned, he might have abandoned the plan after being explicitly threatened by the governor and after it became clear that Aquafaese people could die from the disease too. This remained conditional reasoning: the king’s possible motive could make the pattern intelligible, but it did not demonstrate his involvement.

Wider Evidence and Unresolved Mechanism

A map assembled from reports of earlier cases complicated the picture. Red marks extended across the territory of the former Kingdom of Aquafa, from the Yukata Plains in the south to the Oki forests in the north. The reports included a case as old as eight years, predating the salt-mine incident and the falcon hunt. Cheehana explained that Servants of the Inner Circle had supplied information that investigators had not previously recognized as relevant. The records were not a chain of successive outbreaks: they described separate attacks by wolves or ossam, generally with no more than one or two people becoming ill and no reported spread from those cases.

That distribution challenged the first, animal-bite explanation without disproving it. Hohsalle reasoned that if infected wolves lived in packs, later cases should have appeared more often around a pack containing a carrier. Several years had passed—enough for ticks and mosquitoes to reproduce through multiple summers—yet the disease had not spread widely in the way he expected if such vectors were maintaining transmission. Instead, the evidence showed sparse cases scattered over a broad territory. He therefore asked what was preventing the disease from spreading.

One possible explanation was that infected host animals did not remain in a place long enough to pass the disease to ticks. But a natural-transmission account still faced a geographic problem: attacks were widespread, and wolves from the north could not have mingled with those in the south. Tomasolle raised transmission between neighboring packs as the remaining natural route to examine, while pointing out that this possibility brought its own further mystery. The falcon-hunt attack therefore sits at the intersection of two unresolved investigations: how the illness reached particular victims, and whether the series of attacks was natural at all. The evidence supports serious suspicion of deliberate intervention, but the inquiry remains open rather than resolving the disease’s spread or naming the hand behind the attacks.