House of Midas

by Chloe Garner

  Palk nodded.

  “Do you need anything from me?”

  “No, just going to throw bodies at it, for now. You have another meet with the Dandys set?”

  “They’re coming here to meet with Tiedmont next week,” Palk said.

  “Just get those plinth,” Galp said. “I’m sick of the critters getting more meat than the markets.”

  It was exaggeration, certainly, to a huge degree, but Palk respected how devoted Galp was to his work. The man never looked up, never questioned whether the people he worked for were good or bad, treating him well or otherwise. He just hunted down the things that made livestock disappear, and he made it stop.

  “Cracker won’t stop a plinth,” Galp warned him now. “You gotta put a slug in him, stop his heart.”

  “How many guns do we have?” Palk asked.

  “We don’t trust most of the boys with them,” Galp told him. “You’ll be the only one to get one, and that’s only cause Gamm says you’ve got a handle on it. I don’t believe him, and neither does anyone else.”

  Palk sat back in his chair.

  “How, exactly, do you expect your boys to kill a plinth if you don’t arm them?”

  “Normally, I’m the one doing the killing,” Galp said. “But Gamm says you’ve got it, so you get to do it.”

  Palk shook his head. It was foolish, sending a bunch of men with their kalt in to face a clawed animal that could kill a kalt - he’d seen the evidence a few weeks back - without arming but maybe one of them with the tools to kill it, but he wasn’t going to argue. He suspected the availability and cost of the gun might have been a part of it.

  “We’ll take care of it,” he said, instead, crossing his legs. “I’ve got Rosie putting together provisions to leave day after tomorrow, at dawn.”

  “Good,” Galp said. “You can send men back to get more grub, but I expect you to stay out there until the job’s done.”

  “I understand,” Palk said. Starn wasn’t going to like it much, nor was he, but he was expecting the trip to take as much as two or three weeks, as they tried to track the wily animals across the vast sections of the Tiedmont ranch where the bodies of livestock had turned up.

  Plinth didn’t nest, they didn’t burrow, they didn’t cave, they didn’t roost. As had been explained to Palk, by a man who was more afraid of them than anything else, they wandered the range in twos and threes, sleeping where they chose and hunting when they wanted, and generally nothing stood in their way.

  Palk had a hard time imagining they were as bad as the man suggested, but he was trying to go into the project with his eyes open. Starn had been more serious about it.

  “You’ve seen how they treat kalt,” she said. “We both know there’s more to them than the boys give them credit for.”

  “What?” Palk asked. Starn had seemed genuinely surprised.

  “You don’t see it?” she asked.

  “I’m just not sure what you’re talking about,” he said.

  “You look into Biscuit’s eyes and you don’t feel anything,” she said.

  “That’s creepy,” Palk said. She smacked him.

  “Don’t play around. This is serious.”

  “He’s smart,” Palk said. “Some animals are.”

  “And some animals aren’t animals,” Starn said. “Some of them are people.”

  He frowned. That had triggered something, something about categorizing things and making decisions, familiar and at the same time very much a memory.

  “You think that the kalt are people?” he asked.

  “I’m just saying,” she said. “The boys treat them like they’re the same as stilth, and they aren’t. Maybe plinth are the same way.”

  “People,” Palk said. He didn’t mean to be mocking, but he could hear it, even as he said the word. She put her hand on his chest.

  “Go out there and assume that you’re outnumbered, outgunned, and outsmarted. If you’re wrong, you just look overprepared. If you’re right…”

  “I can do that,” he said. “But they kill these things all the time, Starn. It’s not that big a deal.”

  “You don’t see the payments,” she said.

  “What?”

  She pressed her lips.

  “When one of the boys dies while he’s working, the Tiedmonts send his family a small payment every month for about a year. There are a lot of them. It’s dangerous work.”

  “It is dangerous,” Palk said.

  “And what, exactly, do you think is killing them?” Starn asked. “Kalt falling off of cliffs by mistake? Getting trampled by stilth?”

  He’d actually heard of that happening, but he conceded her point.

  “I’ll ask Tannish,” he said. She nodded.

  “This is one of the secrets no one tells, but Tannish will know. Just be careful.”

  He kissed her.

  “I will.”

  *********

  “Yeah, man, they’re bad dudes,” Tannish said at dinner that night. “Bad dudes.”

  “They kill people?” Palk asked, still not sure that he was getting the right story. He should have heard of this, by now, if it was the truth. Tannish nodded.

  “Four this year, two last year.”

  “And what are we doing about it?” Palk asked. Tannish shrugged.

  “What should we do, man? They’re out there. The boys know it. They take some animals, Galp gets after ‘em, but that’s all we can do.”

  “We can wipe them out,” Palk said.

  Tannish blinked at him.

  “Big world, man. Always more plinth out there looking for herds like ours.”

  “So we kill them, too. Make them teach their children to be afraid of us. How can we send out all of the handlers without any weapons at all?”

  “Guns are expensive man,” Tannish said, draining his beer. “I need to go meet with Gamm. You leaving in the morning?”

  “Yeah,” Palk said.

  “Come back in one piece, man.”

  Palk glowered after his friend.

  “Thanks.”

  *********

  They had a man with them who had a talent for tracking. He looked at marks in the dirt and could tell you how many animals had been through and how long ago.

  “Family group of stilth,” he said. “Buck and six does with their four fawns. Healthy.”

  “Do plinth have a preference, what they’re hunting?” Palk asked.

  “Mostly they leave the taims alone, unless they’ve got real reason to go after them,” the man told him, looking up at the hillside the way Starn read a book. “And a fight between a kalt and a plinth is pretty even. Neither side wins. So they stick with the stilth and the bobnots. If I was them, I’d just do bobnots. They’re easy pickings. Fat, good meat, and too dumb to find cover or get away. You just take them out, one after the next.”

  “But they don’t?” Palk asked. The tracker shook his head.

  “Nope. They wander too much for that. Take a kill, eat what they can at one or two days of meals, then move on. Might not hunt again for a week or so, and then they track down something new. I think the hunt is part of the fun.”

  Fun.

  The word chilled him a bit, driving home the real possibility that Starn was right. He put a hand on Biscuit’s neck and the kalt turned his head to look up at him with an annoyed but not malicious eye.

  “Yeah, I know,” Palk muttered. “I’m not into the sentimental stuff, either.”

  “I don’t see any signs they’ve been here,” the tracker finally said. “We should backtrack and find the last tracks again.”

  They were at least a week behind the plinth, and every time they had to double back like this, they lost more ground. The predators were fast-moving, on a normal day, covering miles every day that they didn’t take a kill. Palk didn’t like being this far behind and this poorly-informed.

  “So tell me more about how they live,” he said to the tracker as they rode. The tracker glanced at him, his expression too fl
at to tell Palk anything. The man was old, wiry, and skeptical. He didn’t seem bothered by people, but he also didn’t have any specific interest in them.

  “You’re a wanderer,” the man said.

  “Yeah,” Palk said. “Going back about six weeks, now.”

  “They say your wife is a fizbidget.”

  “I don’t know that word,” Palk said. The tracker laughed.

  “Means she’ll change the world. Can do anything she wants to.”

  “Pretty much,” Palk said.

  “Scares folk like us,” the tracker said. “We kind of like the world the way it is.”

  “I can see that,” Palk said.

  “You can’t control her, can you?” the tracker asked.

  “You know many husbands who can control their wives, really?” Palk asked. The tracker laughed again.

  “Fair enough. Maybe that’s why I never got married.”

  Palk nodded easily enough. The tracker shifted.

  “The kalt will tell you when we’re close,” he said. “Pay attention to him. Kalt and plinth are old enemies. Older than we are, you know. Plinth have been taking kalt younguns for as long as either of them can remember, and kalt have been crushing any little plinth they come across for just as long. Only thing around here that kills a plinth is a kalt and only thing that kills a kalt is a plinth.”

  “Except other kalt,” Palk said, thinking of Grindoth’s freakish kalt. The tracker guffawed softly.

  “They’s both complicated. Plinth’ll kill each other for stuff you can’t even see happen.”

  “You’ve watched them?” Palk asked. The tracker shifted in his saddle again in a motion that might have been ambivalent agreement.

  “I seen ‘em. More than most, I ‘spect.”

  Palk tried to imagine what that would be like, being able to actually see an animal that was that powerful and that capable of killing him, and then to just sit and watch.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I’d just shoot them.”

  The old man laughed until he coughed.

  “You get your shot, you take it, boy, but you know that the moment you fire that gun, there’s another one coming straight at you from behind, yes?”

  The drawback of the design of the gun. It only fired once, and then it took several minutes to reload.

  “They know?” Palk asked. The man nodded slowly.

  “Boy, they like as not know your name and your shoe size, by the time you lay eyes on ‘em.”

  “Then why do we ever get close?”

  “Dunno,” the man said. “I been close enough to smell ‘em, just sat, me and them, for hours while they sunbathed. They like warm rocks and lazy days as much as any man. Know other guys like me, like watching ‘em, who just never came back. You can’t know what they’re going to do, and to ask why is foolishness. You can’t ever tell, with the truly smart or the truly dumb.”

  Palk took the leap.

  “You think they’re people?”

  “What kind of dumbheaded question is that?” the man asked. Palk shrugged.

  “Something Starn said. She thinks that kalt and plinth might be as smart as we are.”

  “Smarter’n most,” the man said. “There’s more to being a man than that, though.”

  “What’s that?” Palk asked.

  “You being an idiot, or is that a real question?”

  Palk shrugged again. The man shook his head.

  “Look at that animal, you’re on, right there. He knows who he is, same as you, and he knows that if he takes a step sideways at just the right time, he’s going to dump you on the ground, no food, no water, no supplies, and he’s a hellova lot faster than you. I seen kalt string riders along mile after mile, staying just ahead of em.”

  “Sounds like him,” Palk said.

  “He’s got mischief in him, surer than sunset, and I’d wager a month’s pay that he’s got a sweetheart back home.”

  It hadn’t occurred to Palk, but it didn’t seem unreasonable, either.

  “Bobnot’ll breed anything with the right set of legs on,” the tracker said. “Stilth change families every time they get confused. Taims are more loyal, but if a ram gets killed, the ewes move on. Kalt, though, they have lovers. They have favorites and they fight over it.”

  “Okay,” Palk said. “Those all sound like people things.”

  The man nodded.

  “Your wife makes a good observation, one most people’ll miss their whole lives. But what she’s missing is a sense of being tied to the world,” he said. Palk shook his head.

  “I don’t follow.”

  “There’s kalt who are more people than a lot of the boys, sure enough, but what makes people people is that they know that life is life and death is death, and that they play a role in that. Soul, boy. They got no soul.”

  “You religious?” Palk asked.

  “No more religious than a life on the range makes you,” the man said. “But I know what I know.”

  “And plinth?” Palk asked. “They don’t have soul, either.”

  The man laughed.

  “Never been close enough to look one in the eyes,” the man said, “but if they got one, it’s black.”

  “You think they’re evil?”

  “Not sure I’d be out here helping you hunt them down, if I didn’t.”

  Palk nodded.

  “The tracks were just up there, right?”

  “Just up there,” the man echoed, his mind stretching out ahead of them again. Their conversation ended there.

  *********

  They were catching up. Day by day, they got closer to the trio of plinth that the old tracker was after. They found the body of a stilth that he said had only been eaten for a day before they abandoned it.

  “Is that a good sign?” Palk asked. The man shrugged.

  “It’s a sign. No more, no less than that.”

  Palk didn’t like it, and neither did the men with him. They sent people back for extra provisions, but it took those men several days to get back to the ranch, at this point, and then extra days on top of that to find them again. They were running short on all kinds of things, and men was one of them, because Palk kept having to send new men to get things that they were out of that the previous provision-runner hadn’t had on his list of things to get.

  They had enough beer. There was meat. But the kalt were getting short-tempered for a lack of grain, they needed medical supplies to replace the ones they’d used from the various accidents that just happened when this many men were out on the range, they needed fuel, and one of the boys had managed to lose a boot.

  No kidding.

  “Wait here,” the tracker said. “Don’t lose those.”

  Palk looked down at the vague swishes in the dirt and shook his head.

  “Wouldn’t dare.”

  The tracker wandered off to the side, going a ways back behind them and out of sight, and Palk waited, trying to keep Biscuit from wandering. The rest of the men guided their kalt away, seeking the shade of sparse trees nearby. Minutes went by, and Palk considered sending someone after the tracker, when the man reappeared.

  “They doubled back,” he called, pushing his kalt to faster speed. “They know we’re here.”

  “What?” Palk asked.

  “One of the three turned back, here. Don’t know how far back it goes, but by the line he’s on, he was avoiding their trail. They know we’re here.”

  “They’re that clever?” Palk asked. The tracker nodded.

  “No one should wander off by themselves, from here on,” the man said. “We have to assume that they doubled back again and would pick us off, if they got the opportunity.”

  Palk felt the weight of the gun at his waist, the only weapon the entire group had that was truly effective at defending them or killing a plinth.

  “You hear that?” he called back over his shoulder. “Stay in tight. No one off on their own.”

  “What about the boys who went back for provisions?” someone asked
. Palk shook his head.

  “We keep going, but we’ll only send people back in pairs, from here.”

  “There ain’t enough of us,” someone else said. Palk nodded.

  “I know. We’ll have to cut the number of supply runs. We may run out of some things in the meantime.”

  “I still need a boot.”

  Palk didn’t think it was prudent to answer that one, so he didn’t.

  He looked at the tracker, who was watching him without comment.

  “We keep going,” he said. The man nodded and, scouring the dirt again, set off again.

  *********

  One of the resupply runs made it back.

  The other two didn’t.

  One of the kalt belonging to a missing man did show up, after a few days, his side showing clawmarks. That was the moment that it got grim. The men stopped acting like it was just another trip out, the stories at the fire at night stopped, the mood darkened. Palk set men at watch, but he felt sorry for them. Their job was basically just to scream before they died. They moved in a tighter group, and he only sent one pair of men to go for meat and beer, ignoring some of the other needs that were beginning to emerge.

  “We need a plan, boy,” the tracker said one day.

  “What do you see?” Palk asked.

  “They’re slowing down,” the man told him. “We’ve been wandering for a while, but at this point, they know that we’re behind them, and they’re waiting for us to catch up.”

  Palk nodded.

  “I want to be the one who attacks them, not the other way around,” he said. The tracker gave him a grim look.

  “You think you get to choose that?”

  “These are men who practically live out on this range, same as the plinth,” Palk said. “They have a physical edge on us, but we aren’t just wandering around in their space. We belong here, too.

  “Mmm hmm,” the tracker said skeptically.

  “Where would they go?” Palk asked. The tracker shrugged.

  “They like sun in the mornings, shade in the afternoon, cover at night, like most critters.”

  “What kind of cover?” Palk asked.

  “Tall grass is plenty,” the tracker said.