Malefactor

by Robert Repino

  After a brief ascent through the forest, Nikaya and Gaunt came to an opening in the trees, leading to a steep drop into another ravine spiked with sharp granite. Though a stream may have trickled through during the warmer months, it had since run dry, leaving behind bare stone. Far in the distance, the real mountains awaited.

  Gaunt pointed to his ears. He could hear something. After a few seconds, Nikaya could hear the noise as well, like a tiny room full of people. An uneven series of honks, shouted in every direction.

  “Oh, don’t tell me,” Nikaya said. She walked out to the edge of the promontory. Gaunt asked her what she saw. He could hear it, but only she could see it.

  Alongside a frozen pond about a mile away gathered a colony of geese, forming a great circle. Hundreds of them chipped away at the ice with their beaks to get to the water. Despite the distance, Nikaya could tell that they were famished, dehydrated, leaner from their long trip from the south. Even worse, they were at least six weeks earlier than usual, which meant that something had driven them north before they wanted to go.

  Gaunt asked what was wrong.

  “I was hoping we could find someone to help,” Nikaya said. “But it’s no use with these people.”

  Gaunt asked why the birds had stopped at the pond.

  “They’re waiting for the winds to pick up,” she said. “I’ve seen this before. They’re too tired to go over the mountains today. So they’ll regroup, count their dead, then use the air current to carry them over the top.”

  Gaunt motioned in the direction of the birds. It meant, Let’s go!

  “No,” Nikaya said. “They hate us. We have to find another way.”

  The geese would never help. They sat out the war, refusing to serve as scouts as most of the other birds had done. After the war, they refused to trade with anyone. During migration season, they acted as if they owned the skies and left their green shit everywhere. With no real leader, and still living as they had before the Change, they felt little need to interact with their neighbors. For all she knew, they’d made their peace with the wolves months ago.

  Nikaya started to walk away. Gaunt wrapped the tip of his wing around her arm and put his hideous fangs in her face. A stream of Chiropteran curse words flowed out, carried on the bat’s putrid breath. She could make out only a few lines. You will do, he kept saying. You will do!

  “I can’t do,” Nikaya said.

  Speak to them, the bat pleaded.

  “Listen, ratwing. Our best bet is to wait for them to leave. Then we climb.”

  No! the bat squeaked. Then he said the word for wolves. And ants. Wolves and ants, wolves and ants, on their way here.

  “I know,” Nikaya said.

  Birds, only chance, Gaunt said. Or we die here.

  Nikaya almost said yes, they would die here, as a matter of fact.

  You good at words, the bat said. You will do!

  The bat had never complimented her before. Not that she ever gave him a reason.

  You talk good, Gaunt said. Birds listen. Everyone listens.

  She watched him. She waited for his eyes to wander, his tongue to flick out of his mouth. Anything to give away what he was really planning.

  “Oh, I get it,” she said. “You think you can hand me over.”

  Gaunt covered his face with his wings and screamed.

  “That’s why you’re in such a hurry, isn’t it?” Nikaya said.

  Gaunt pounded his chest with his wings. He said the same thing again and again. My fault. My fault.

  “What are you talking about? What’s your fault?”

  Wolves angry, he said in Chiropteran. Because me. Because me! Gaunt gestured to the mountains again and started shouting. Nikaya could not translate all of it, but she didn’t have to. Gaunt blamed himself for the attack on the garrison. She remembered it well enough. The other bats did not want him to scout the wolves. He did it anyway, and it got them all killed. And now he needed to warn the others. As quickly as possible, no matter the cost. Dying in the process would probably be a blessing.

  Gaunt stomped toward her. He poked her shoulder, hard enough to knock her off balance. Thought you would understand, he sneered.

  Well played, she thought. He’d found her weakness. Probed it. Rubbed in the salt. He would make a good politician someday if he lived through this.

  “The birds might be hungry enough to eat us, you know,” she said.

  No, he squeaked. They listen. You see.

  Nikaya went to the lookout once more. From here, the geese seemed friendly. They groomed one another and brought food to the weak ones. A few of them floated in the pond, perhaps knowing that this could be their last chance to do so. When the time came to fly over the mountain, many of their number would fall. Even after the Change, a long winter would humble anyone. This made the birds dangerous. It also made them vulnerable.

  “All right,” Nikaya said. “We will try.”

  The bat flapped his wings. He said something about water. She asked him to repeat it.

  Water moves, he said in his language.

  She laughed. “The water flows, you mean.”

  Water moves, he repeated. We are water.

  “Sure,” she said. “We are water.”

  Chapter 10

  Gonney

  (unofficial) Logbook of the SUS al-Rihla

  Date unknown

  (My new companions from the Opa pack do not keep track of days and months.) Quay says one and a half full moons before the weather breaks.

  Walked about eight miles today. Quay says she can smell the pack.

  At night, made a new scabbard for the sword out of some canvas material.

  Personal health: injury is healing well. Puncture wound is sore, but scabbed over.

  Date unknown.

  Arrived at Mudfoot camp late in the day. Thousands of canines here. More on the way. All dogs and wolves and those in between.

  Most sleep out in the open. The leaders stay in a cave.

  The new people who arrive are given space at the edge of camp. They are expected to keep watch.

  Fires burn at night. The stronger wolves pass food around. Enough for everyone. All meat. “A generous wolf is a strong wolf,” they say.

  Word spreads that we are waiting here while the wolf matriarch rests. She is tired from giving birth, they say.

  The wolves howl all night. I am told they have howled nonstop since the wolf matriarch announced that she had a son.

  Personal health: stomach is growling. Have not eaten mammal meat before. Nipples leaking. Several people have noticed, even when I cover. Smell is too strong.

  February 3

  (A refugee from Hosanna told me the date.)

  At daybreak, the wolf matriarch came out of her cave and showed everyone her son. The humans stood at her side. On all fours. The entire thing lasted maybe three minutes.

  Everyone is still howling in celebration.

  Someone has streaked my son’s fur with charcoal, so he looks more like a wolf. I can tell he does not like it. He tries to lick it away from his paws. I can hear him grumbling about it in my mind.

  I slipped away to watch the dogs play zagga for hours. One of the dogs shattered his leg so badly the bone broke through the skin. I laughed when I saw it.

  On her third day at the camp, D’Arc passed the time by offering to dig a latrine ditch. Quay insisted on helping. Everyone agreed that if the growing pack planned to stay here, they needed a bathroom. No amount of swagger about living in the wild could change that simple fact.

  Most of the wolves were still asleep when the work began. They snorted and shifted at the sound of the shovels piercing the frozen dirt. Their bodies created a furry landscape throughout the clearing in the forest, with more of them nestled among the trees. Only the vapor flowing from their nostrils distinguished t
hem from rocks or fallen logs. While the wolves’ coats blended with the environment, the occasional dog would stick out, having more brightly colored fur, bred to please their human masters. A few patches of burnt orange indicated the foxes who had rejected the peace talks and joined the rebellion.

  During her breaks from shoveling, D’Arc would lean on the handle and watch these people. By now, she could spot the various packs that banded together at night. The Opa, who brought her here, wore a light gray fur. Beside them, the Hachi, had darker coats meant for sneaking through the granite mountain passes. Beyond that were the brownish white coats of the rival Junpaw and Pabka clans—once related, now competing for a river delta far to the south.

  D’Arc recalled her brief time at the academy, where her bunkmate, Razz—a pug who made moonshine—showed her a map of wolf country, color-coded by clan. “This map’ll be out of date by next month,” the pug said, slurring her words while she sipped her liquor. “Borders’re always moving. Wolves’re always cutting each other’s tails off.”

  Whatever violent history they all shared, here the canines rested together, as docile as the pets who camped with them, in a community that Hosanna promised but had never delivered. And yet D’Arc had never felt so alone. Staring at the cave where her child was held captive, she wondered if anyone here could help her get him back.

  “You need to rest?” Quay said beside her. The wolf wedged her shovel under a rock and pried it loose from the earth.

  “I’m fine,” D’Arc said, fighting the urge to cover the wounds on her ribs. The scabs had hardened into rough, purplish blotches that grew itchier each day.

  D’Arc stuck the spade into the earth and jammed it deeper with her foot. She considered telling Quay everything and asking for her help to find her son. But it couldn’t work like that. D’Arc could not even reveal her name to these wolves, choosing instead to call herself Madre, the name she’d used in her interactions with the beavers, back when the ranch was her entire universe. Quay believed in the cause, as far as she understood it. She said that the wolves, at long last, had a true leader who could fight the humans—not some tribal warlord hoping to bestow territory on his sons. Whenever D’Arc asked her what specifically the humans had done to the wolves, Quay would tell her of the many calamities that befell her family, from illness to natural disaster to famine. Sometimes, she blamed the humans directly, mainly for their interference in the natural order of things. Other times, she faulted them for not helping more. That her newfound leader allied herself with humans did not strike Quay or the others as a contradiction. If anything, it only reinforced their belief that Mercy the Great was special, rising from the ashes of the War with No Name. She would lead them to Hosanna, where she would separate the traitors from the people who saw the light.

  Again and again, the canines gave D’Arc a variation of Quay’s story. To hear them tell it, they suffered and toiled for years while the humans plotted against them. Oddly, the dogs from Hosanna often sounded angrier about the occupation than the wolves, who themselves never knew the softness of a bed, or the warmth of a stove in wintertime. During the endless zagga games, many of the chants from the crowd mocked the losers by comparing them with pets. They called the defeated ones gonneys. Fake wolves. The dirtiest word in the camp. And when one of the dogs drew a penalty—D’Arc could not figure out which arbitrary rule had been broken—they chanted the word “choker” as the disqualified player limped off the playing field, humiliated. D’Arc remembered the word from the stories Mort(e) told her about the early days of the war.

  “Who cut your balls off?” someone screamed.

  The ejected player silenced the hecklers by grabbing his crotch and shouting, “Pray you grow a pair this big some day!”

  Quay was no gonney. She knew how to survive out here, what to eat, where to find good water. She knew as well that they needed to slope the latrine so that the spill directed away from the camp. Though D’Arc knew the basics, she let Quay take the lead. No need to give away her past. Better to let everyone think that she left Hosanna like so many other dogs, searching for adventure, convinced she would never get ahead in a human city.

  Over the last few days, Quay often asked her about how bad things had become in Hosanna. The Opa wolves heard only the worst rumors, and D’Arc quickly realized that she would have to toss them some red meat. So she embellished stories of the terrible food at the academy mess hall. She described the squalor of some of the canine neighborhoods—disparagingly called the Kennels—though she borrowed many of the details from the flood, which had destroyed most of the districts, canine or otherwise. And she never mentioned that some of the dog communities insisted on having their own sections of the city. It was all too complicated to explain. D’Arc lied through omission, and by conjuring tales until it felt like someone else was speaking in her voice. The Opa believed all of it because they wanted to.

  When they finished digging, Quay and D’Arc lined the pit with rocks. By then, the camp was awake. Hunting parties formed at the perimeter, hoping to catch some deer who had strayed too close to the pack. More people joined in the small construction project, enough to form a line to pass the stones from hand to hand. The workers bantered. One of them asked if they would build a hotel next. Someone demanded maid service, another a hot tub. Someone else asked if anyone had heard about when the pack would move again. Quay laughed. “Now that we dig this pit, I bet we leave today.”

  “We can take it with us, right?” someone asked.

  Their laughter quieted when they noticed one of the humans making his way through the crowd with one of the Mudfoot wolves at his side. Both walked on all fours. The human wore a wolf pelt over his shoulders, the color of smoke, and his movements came so close to mimicking an animal that only his missing tail gave him away.

  Whenever the humans emerged from their cave, the wolves watched with a mixture of awe and dismay. Many had simply never seen one before. The canines stepped aside as the pair headed for a Junpaw wolf resting on her back, nursing her two cubs.

  D’Arc watched the exchange while handing over the rocks. The human and the wolf had done the same exact thing the day before, at the same time and with the same mother wolf. This human often stood beside the leader, Augur, while the Mudfoot wolf was part of Mercy’s inner circle. D’Arc wished she could record all their names and routines in her logbook, but she worried that someone who could actually read would find it. For now, she kept it all in her mind.

  After a few minutes, the human nodded toward the cave. The Junpaw rose to her feet while her young ones tried to hang on to her. Her stomach was still bloated from carrying the litter, which gave her a wobbly gait. She followed the human and the Mudfoot to the cave. As she disappeared inside, a wave of intense jealousy spread outward from D’Arc’s chest.

  “I told you,” Quay whispered to her. “The females are important. They need breeders.”

  She went on about the Junpaw clan, how they survived a terrible winter in recent years. “Good blood,” Quay said. “Strong hunters.”

  “Good milk,” D’Arc blurted out. She almost dropped the stone she held when she realized what she had said. The thoughts came rushing into her head, the entire scenario unfolding. She knew how she could get close to her son again. These wolves needed her. They had no choice but to trust her. And from there, it would only be a matter of time before she could find a way to pry him loose.

  It was like the Old Man said in all those years of training: know the terrain, know the enemy, know how to get in and out. She could do this. She imagined every single wolf in the camp chasing her as she carried away her son. As she carried away their future. It did not make her afraid. Instead, she felt so giddy she almost laughed out loud.

  “You’re holding us up,” Quay said. D’Arc gave her the next stone.

  February 4

  WEATHER: Bright, sunny weather.

  All work came to a stop today
for a funeral. The Toqwa child Sherin died in the night. They burned the body on the hill overlooking the camp, while the humans let out their sad howls.

  Quay tells me that Augur was the child’s father. He pulled her from the mother’s corpse and bit off the umbilical cord.

  While the fires burned, Mercy sat beside the human, leaning into him. He buried his face in the wolf’s HIDE and wept. He kept howling, and the sound got more ragged each time.

  “Now they have both lost children,” Quay says.

  The stories of what Mercy has endured have been going around the camp for days. No one can complain without someone else reminding them about what Mercy went through.

  I am going to bed now. The fires have burned out. The human and the wolf are still holding their embrace.

  February 5

  WEATHER: Bright and sunny again. Two days in a row. Can’t remember the last time that happened.

  Completed the latrine with Quay. Already someone wants us to help build another one. Tomorrow, I tell them.

  At night, Quay asks if I can teach her to read. I try my best. She quits in frustration after 20 minutes.

  Word spreads that the pack will move soon. Some say we are running away from the other wolves. But Quay thinks we are going to the wolves. They have a winter summit this time every year. They call it a ken-ra. Mercy wants to go. Not sure if she is invited.