Malefactor

by Robert Repino

  At the main gate, Mercy stood on four paws while two of the humans fitted a pack onto her shoulders. Even when not fully upright, Mercy stood almost as tall as the human. Over the last few days, she finally learned their names—or at least, the names Augur called them. They never spoke themselves, choosing to respond only with hand signs or body language. If they were merely pretending to communicate like wolves, they had not let their mask slip this entire time.

  Urna paced among the sleeping bodies, watching them nervously. Mercy tried to ignore her, yet she felt her presence like a thorn lodged in her skin.

  Nearby, Augur strapped on his own rucksack made of salvaged canvas and leather belts. When the woman, Preeta, tried to shift the folds of Mercy’s overcoat, the wolf growled at her. She did not want her belly exposed. Preeta glanced at Augur, who waved his hand, telling her to let it go.

  Mercy caught Augur’s attention and nodded toward the mountains, letting out a little whine. All of it together meant, How long will we be gone?

  Augur twirled his index finger three times to indicate the orbit of the moon. Three days. A lifetime. If anyone in the camp had figured out her secret, they would have plenty of time to plot against her.

  By snapping her fingers, Preeta signaled to Augur that the backpack was secure. Her partner, a man named Friar, crossed his arms over his chest. Mercy assumed that it meant the same thing, more or less. With that, Augur motioned to the wolves who guarded the gate. As they opened it, the sunlight poured into the courtyard. Everyone squinted. Mercy scanned the crowd for Urna and found her hiding behind a larger dog. When Mercy called her over with a quick bark, Urna nearly knocked one of the hungover wolves to the ground as she zipped across the courtyard.

  Urna skidded to a halt, pawed the earth, and growled meekly. Take me with you?

  No, Mercy barked.

  Urna sniffed at Mercy’s belly. Mercy gently batted her away.

  You stay, Urna whined. Pups coming soon. Stay, rest.

  Mercy wagged her tail and gave a quick bark. Wait here. Urna did not like it. In a show of dominance, Mercy stood close to Urna and flopped her chin on the back of her sister’s neck.

  “I will howl when I’m close,” Mercy whispered in the human language. “If I give Dregger’s call, you run.”

  Dregger once taught them a special howl that started with a loud whooping sound and died out in a long hiss. Urna still remembered it. “I run,” she said, trembling. “Then we run? Together?”

  Mercy barked yes. She pulled away quickly. Along with the three humans, she set foot on the trail leading into the woods. The gate closed behind her. A few of the guards let out a cry. It meant safe journey. Before long, the entire camp hummed with the sound. Amid the noise, she could not make out Urna’s voice.

  They headed southwest, close to the border with the Sloat clan. Like the Mudfoot, the Sloat settled the area after the humans retreated inland. Dregger once settled a dispute with them by stringing the Sloat’s leader to a pike, crucified but still breathing. It was a fate worse than death since no wolf could last long as leader after enduring that kind of humiliation. After that, the Sloat respected the border between their territories. They dared not cross it, even after the flood. The cruel fate of it always bothered Mercy. If the rivulets had curved one way instead of the other, the Damnable would have wiped out the Sloat, and the Mudfoot would have become more powerful than ever. All this talk of lopsided peace treaties and abandoning the old ways would never have started.

  On a crumbling highway, the humans formed a triangle around Mercy, with two on the side and one guarding the rear. Putting Mercy at the front allowed her to notice the hint of salt in the air before the others. She had never seen the ocean before. Dregger once told her stories of fine sand, stiff grass, wind, rhythmic waves. And the best part, he said, was the endless expanse of blue wrapping around the entire world, leading to new lands that she could see only in her dreams.

  Silently, the humans took note of the few lingering markers of the former world: downed light poles, faded highway signs, billboards with chipped paint. Friar held out his fist, a signal to stop. He knelt and rubbed his hand over a series of indentations in the ground, like tire tracks, only much larger and deeper. Augur extended both arms to indicate an object of massive size. Then he extended his fist and opened his hand, making a puffing sound with his mouth. A tank, he said—Mercy had picked up enough of their sign language to translate. As Augur went on, Preeta backed away to take in the width of the tracks. In a panic, she asked if there was a tank nearby. Augur replied by digging out a clump of dirt from the tracks to show her that they were years old, maybe a decade. To illustrate the point, he crumbled the dirt and let the dust drift away in the breeze.

  They plodded on as the road narrowed and the grass grew high on each side, and a sound like hissing wind grew louder. Above, the moon made an early appearance, forming half a snowball amid the clouds. As they approached a hill, the hissing came with a gentle crash each time, much like the way Dregger had described it. He even mimicked the noise for her: puch-shhhhhhh. She almost expected him to appear on the hill to tell her she’d passed some test, that she’d proved herself worthy, that all of this had happened for a reason.

  The wind rippled her fur as she reached the top, and the entire world opened before her: a bluish-gray landscape blooming with foam, the sand a blinding white. Patches of brown grass stubbornly poked through the dunes. Far in the distance, a pair of seagulls tilted in the sky, occasionally dropping toward the water before ascending once more. Mercy stepped off the road and dug her paws into the cold sand. The tiny pebbles filtered through the gaps in her toes.

  Augur motioned to the others, drawing an imaginary square around the spot where they stood. Friar dropped his rucksack and pulled out a plastic tarp while Preeta got to work hammering spikes in the sand. Mercy unstrapped her bag and opened it. The smell of smoked meat drifted out. The cooks insisted that she take an extra share—one for her, one for her litter. She could not refuse.

  Augur sipped water from a leather bladder, most likely extracted from a cow, or maybe a bison. As he did when she first met him, the human wore a serene expression. One of the Cadejo dogs said he resembled a sleeping human baby, even while awake. The rest referred to him as some kind of angel. And why not? Everything he predicted had come to pass, and thus he had no reason to show fear or anger. The outposts had fallen, the territory had expanded. More canines joined the cause.

  “We lit the fires,” he told her after they had subdued the bats. He even let some of them escape. He wanted Hosanna to know what was coming. He wanted them to hear it from desperate, panicked refugees. Let the rumor spread, like the Damnable. Let the elders point fingers. Let them drive away more canines from Hosanna and into the wilderness where they belonged.

  Augur noticed Mercy panting and offered her some water. He tilted the bladder into her mouth as she drank.

  “What now?” she said.

  “We wait.” He pointed to a spot on the beach where two waves merged and then gently crashed, the water hissing as it receded. “Right there,” he said. “There, he arrives.”

  “You have seen this?”

  “I was there.”

  “When?” Mercy asked.

  “Tomorrow.”

  Friar and Preeta finished with the tent. A simple lean-to, it jutted from the sand dune and fluttered in the wind.

  “Let’s get warm,” Augur said. He signaled to Friar. Mercy made out a few of the words, something about a “big house.” Friar signed in response: big house for a queen. Mercy got it now: Augur referred to their meager tent as a castle. She had little experience with humor, and no patience with this talk of her as a monarch. But Friar and Preeta both put their hands out, palm down, as if resting them on the arms of a chair.

  “Throne,” Augur translated. Then he placed the fingers of one hand against his mouth, blew outward, and sp
read the fingers outward. “Warm,” he said.

  No matter her misgivings, this tent provided the only refuge in this desolate place. She hurried inside, carrying her bag of jerky with her mouth. The humans shuffled in beside her, sitting shoulder to shoulder to conserve the heat. She had seen them do this before. Unlike the wolves, the humans draped themselves over one another with no regard to rank and without posturing. As Augur closed the flaps of the entrance, Mercy lay on her side so that the humans could lean against her fur like her own pups used to do on the coldest days. She allowed herself a few moments to draw some pleasure from it. The consequences of her decisions would wait.

  The otherwise silent humans did a strange thing when packed tightly like this. Eyes closed, Preeta and Friar leaned close together and hummed in unison, a song with no words that vibrated through their ribcages. Suddenly, their features softened, and Mercy saw them for the children they were, barely old enough to mate. Though a lifetime of hiding from predators taught them the value of silence, they could not resist this ritual, any more than the wolves could do without their nightly songs. It was like Augur said. They were keepers of the forest, doomed and blessed at the same time.

  Augur busied himself with stitching a seam on his pants. While he worked, he swayed to their voices, occasionally bobbing his head when the song synched with the waves crashing. At one point, he raised his two fingers and pulled the flap open slightly, allowing a razor-sharp slice of wind into the tent. The sky had turned black and the sand white, and the moon glowed at half full.

  It did not feel right to be relaxing here with these humans. Far away, the Damnable continued to spread, and to compensate, the Mudfoot triggered a war they could not win, recruiting mouths they could not feed. Still, Mercy’s eyelids grew too heavy to lift.

  She opened them wide again when, sometime later, the thick scent of a deer mingled with the salty smell of the ocean. The animal must have relieved itself nearby. As Dregger used to say, the deer was so close you could count the ticks. Mercy’s ears pointed; her blood pumped. A primal urge to peel flesh from bone overtook her. She felt so alive, and yet ready to die.

  “Deer,” Augur said.

  “You smell it?” Mercy asked.

  “No. But I knew it would be here.”

  Augur nudged his companions. Their eyes flickered open, and the song died out.

  He gestured to them. They nodded. “It’s time for you to see what we see,” he said.

  Preeta and Friar stared at her, their pupils enormous and black in the dark. Augur tucked his hand into his coat and pulled out a silver canteen, barely larger than his palm. As he unscrewed the top, Mercy could not help herself. She leaned closer and sniffed. Her ears curiously pointed up. What is it?

  “The future,” he said, holding it closer. With the cap off, the canister released a greasy smell, like fish. She inhaled, recalling the first time she bit into a fish, having found it flopping beside a river. Her fangs sunk into the soft gills, and the blood ran thick and cold into her mouth, oily and metallic. She could taste it again, here in this stuffy tent. And then she felt herself whisked forward several years from that moment, running along a trail in the forest with Herc and Rove chasing her, yipping and giggling, the branches and twigs snapping as she tore through them. A weightlessness lifted her. She saw her younger self and she saw through her younger eyes, both at the same time.

  Time moved forward yet again to the days after Wex took command of the pack, when a murder of crows perched on Dregger’s decapitated body and devoured it over the course of two days. Like a single, gangly monster, their black wings flapped while their beaks poked and pulled at the flesh, their shiny black eyes never focusing on anything in particular as they ate. She hated them even more than she hated Wex in that moment, and it churned inside of her, hardening her mind, sealing off her heart, and the taste of the fish entered her mouth again, choking her until she couldn’t breathe—

  She opened her eyes to find her head resting in the sand, outside of the tent.

  Beside her, Augur pressed his temples with his palms. A vein inflated on his forehead. She placed a paw on his lap to show that that she sensed his pain.

  “I’m all right,” he said. “It’s just . . . when I share this gift of sight with someone, it interferes with what I see. It creates new paths. New possibilities. My mind needs to readjust.”

  “We stop, then,” she said.

  “No,” he said. “I need you to see this.”

  She rested her chin in the sand and crossed her paws over her snout. Above, the stars spun slowly, leaving white streaks through the blackness. Slowly, with each crash of the waves, the feeling of being pushed and pulled subsided, leaving her light and free, like a pup waking from a bad dream.

  “We call it the rahvek,” Augur said. “This is the last of it until we can get more. I give some to you so you can see through our eyes. Watch.”

  He tilted the canister until a tiny drop of greenish gel emerged at the spout. “Not too much. A single drop is all it takes.” He dabbed the sticky drop onto his finger and plugged the finger in his mouth. As soon as it touched his tongue, his eyes floated shut. He lingered like that for a moment before taking a deep breath through his nostrils. He slowly pulled his finger out.

  “What it do?” Mercy asked, wincing at her terrible grammar. “What does it do?”

  “It makes our minds work the way they’re supposed to,” he said. “Before the human ways polluted us. Made us weak.”

  He offered it to her. Another viscous drop appeared at the end of the spout, like milk hanging from a nipple. She hesitated.

  “A gift from the Queen,” he said. “If you’re willing to take it.”

  He knew how to speak to a wolf. Challenging her bravery felt like a claw raking her back. And besides, she saw what this substance could do. She saw Augur heal within hours from a horrible slash to the face. She saw him predict troop advances and retreats. He spoke of the future as if it had already happened. She wanted to go there with him.

  Mercy stuck out her tongue and licked the spout. The drop hung heavy and cold, numbing her mouth. The fishy taste again. And then a ringing in her ears. A floating sensation that lifted her from the sand, into the bitter wind. The sky flickered as the sun and moon raced across it, first forward, then backward, then forward again. Somewhere far off in the water, a voice skittered across the surface.

  “Stay this time,” Augur said. “Focus. Focus.”

  She blinked, and Augur stood a full foot shorter. His hair became shinier, his face even smoother than before. A young boy, already a hunter, his muscles wiry and taut, his arms too long for his body, ready to pack on new muscle with each passing winter that he survived.

  “What do you see?” the boy asked.

  She could not answer.

  “The past, or the future?” he said.

  “Past.”

  The boy’s face dropped. “You are not ready.”

  “No. I ready. Show me.”

  “Think of what you must do for your people to survive. Then you might have a chance.”

  She bit down so hard that her teeth felt like they could break. How dare he ask this of her? Had she not been thinking of this very thing every waking hour, as well as in her dreams? As the anger smoldered inside of her, a brief flash of a trail blinked in her mind. It happened again, this time more distinct: a row of tall, brittle grass on either side. She reached for the trail, trying to hold it still.

  “You see it?” Augur said.

  “I smell it,” she said.

  “Good.”

  And though she had never been to this place, she knew the way. She knew the way because she walked it before—no, she was going to walk it. She existed in two places at once now: here on the beach, and there, farther inland, where the grass grew tall enough to hide a deer.

  “You see it,” Augur said.

>   Mercy responded by bounding across the beach. The sand made a whispering sound each time her feet hit the earth. Augur trailed behind her, his footsteps getting softer as she put more distance between them.

  She saw the moment that would take place in seconds: a deer, huddled against a rusted chain-link fence, limping on an injured leg. Mercy ran across the road, through the overgrown lawns of a row of abandoned houses, their roofs having collapsed long ago, the windows smashed in, the weeds creeping along the bricks. This deer thought he could hide among these ruins. He thought that he could somehow see the future and control it, bend it. Like the stag who taunted Mercy on the day her former life ended. No more hunt. And no more Muddy Feet. She thought she was free that day. But this was true freedom, this gift from hell.

  She made it to the fence first. Here, the links had been cut so that a deer could squeeze through at the first sign of trouble. With her belly brushing the dry grass, Mercy lay flat against the bottom of the fence, a mere shadow. She felt the uneven juddering of the earth as the deer approached. A male, favoring his right front leg. No visible brands, no war paint, no sharpened horns. That made him most likely a scout from the Osken herd, separated from his partner—they always traveled in pairs. His eyes glowed with the scant light, and his nostrils flared when he picked up the scent of a predator. Unaware of her presence, he walked straight toward Mercy. When he got within striking distance, she held still.

  The stag’s ears twitched. The head turned, and along with it the enormous antlers. Mercy could hear clumsy human footsteps. In a panic, the deer ran toward the hole, only to find Mercy crouching, blocking the way. The deer froze. He wore the blank stare that marked his people when death found them. Eyes like dewdrops, mouth slightly open. A species meant to serve as food.