House of Midas

by Chloe Garner

  Palk nodded. It wasn’t much to go on. He shook his head, trying to pull himself up and out of what was going on, immediately, and what needed to happen next.

  “We need to get eyes on it,” he said. The tracker frowned.

  “Don’t follow.”

  “Up high,” Palk said. “Are there any good places to get a good look around from here?”

  The tracker scratched the back of his head.

  “Sure. It’s a little off that way, but it’s a good piece of rock.”

  “That’s where we should go. I want to see where we are.”

  The tracker shrugged.

  “It’s an odd strategy for a hunter,” he said, “expecting your prey to come to you.”

  Palk glanced at him, not willing to admit that he felt more hunted than hunter right now, but gave the tracker a firm little motion.

  “Let’s go.”

  *********

  The rocky outcrop that the tracker brought them to went up a hundred feet or more above the rolling plain around it, like the weather had excavated the bones of the earth at that spot. Palk climbed it with several other men while the others found a spot to camp for the night. They would have good cover, for one night. The foot of the rise was covered in huge pieces of rock that had fallen off of the main outcrop to form a maze of space, hard to get through, easy to defend.

  The climb up wasn’t easy; the kalt never would have made it, but they finally reached the top. From there, they could see the small family groups of animals that scattered the plain around them, animals that tended to stay on the horizon as they went through the range. There was a flock of birds off to the north.

  “That’s a body,” the tracker said. Palk nodded.

  “Birds mean new or old?”

  “Birds mean meat,” the tracker said. “That they’re there means the plinth aren’t.”

  “They’ve abandoned it?”

  “No. They just aren’t there.”

  Palk tried not to sigh.

  “Okay. So show me where we’ve been.”

  The tracker pointed.

  “That’s where we left the trail,” he said. Palk drew the line he would have followed to get from the last point on the plinth trail to the animal corpse, somehow hoping he’d see some great beast stalking along it. It was too far away, his eyes weren’t that strong, and he doubted he’d have been able to pick them out, if they had been there. They’d been described as ghosts, at one point, because of how close their fur matched the red rock of the range.

  “Where’s the water?” Palk asked. The tracker nodded.

  “There’s a pool that way,” he said pointing, “just out of sight. There’s a little stream that goes across there, you can see the trees, that might still have some water running in it, this time of year.”

  Pal nodded.

  “So if they’re just wandering, how many places do they have to pick from for water?”

  “Those two, plus a third south of here a few hours,” the tracker said.

  “How often do they have to drink?”

  “Mostly like us, I figure,” the tracker said. Palk nodded. At least once a day. They had huge stomachs that would process meat for days, but in this heat and dry, everything needed water frequently.

  “Okay. We camp here tonight,” Palk said. “Then we head for water in the morning.”

  The tracker raised an eyebrow at him, then shrugged.

  “Up to you.”

  Palk nodded.

  “If they just leave, we’ll come after them again, but if they’re going to wait for us here, we’re going to be ready for them when they find us.”

  *********

  The men found a space with only one good path in and out where they could fit all of the men and their kalt. They built a small fire, and Palk set up a watch rotation for the night, laying down and trying to sleep.

  It was a strange puzzle.

  No one had told him that it was going to be this difficult. Even the men he was with had seemed casual and unconcerned about being sent out on a hunt. It wasn’t supposed to be this hard or this dangerous. But the tracker was unsurprised at the way the plinth were acting, the particular aggressiveness they were showing seemed in character according to him.

  How had they ever managed to kill these creatures in the past?

  He needed someone who could tell him, but no one who was out with him had ever been on a hunt before.

  Which, on its own, was strange.

  How had they managed to keep the population of plinth down when no one who Galp assigned to go after them had done it before? Wouldn’t this be normal? Grindoth had seemed to think that it was a routine knocking-back sort of idea.

  He was staring up at the sky, trying to work it out, when something above him moved.

  He held still.

  All around him, the sounds of men sleeping drifted out from the camp, like a bait.

  The firelight caught a red coat, soft over hard muscle, and then a face looked down at him from a rock.

  It was primordial. He’d never seen anything so terrifying in his life, save maybe Starn angry. It had a wide, flat face with a muzzle shaped for pulling meat out from inside of bones, with a pair of long, sharp teeth at the top and bottom of the muzzle that just protruded from its lips. Killing teeth, those were. It watched him intently, then jumped across the gap in the rocks with a noise like a soft breeze and turned to look, again.

  Palk was ready.

  One shot.

  He hit it in the chest as it turned on the rock, and the entire great body slipped and then fell into the space with a thud.

  He was on it as it landed with his knife, slitting as deep as he could across its throat, to be sure it was dead, then springing away, just in case.

  When his mind finally caught up with what was going on again, he was standing, by himself, in a pool of orange firelight, covered in blood with a knife in his hand and shaky knees.

  The men were awake, standing, staring.

  It hadn’t been a dream, or a breaking in his mind from the weeks on the trail.

  Nor had he imagined the beast.

  It was nearly twice his height, stretched paws to paws, and it must have weighed six-hundred pounds, at least, most of that in muscle. Just landing on him, it would have crushed and killed Palk, but it had moved without any noise at all.

  He put the knife down on the ground. He didn’t know why, he just did.

  “Focus, man,” the tracker said. “If he’s here, the other two aren’t far away. And they know what a gun is.”

  “How do they feel about fire?” Palk asked, numb. His hands were wet, becoming sticky.

  “Like anything wild, they avoid it. It won’t keep them away,” the tracker said. Palk nodded.

  “Fire. Get a fire going outside. Keep the kalt between us and the entrance. Keep your heads up. Everything open above your head is a threat.”

  The men shuffled, confused, sleepy, afraid, undirected.

  “Now,” Palk said sharply, the first to recover. “Now. Take the wood we’ve got and ration it for the rest of the night, then go burn it. Move the kalt. Four men outside. No one sleeps until dawn.”

  This had the desired effect, and the men finally started toward doing what Palk had asked. Palk shook his head, trying to get a grip, then picked up his knife and went to go clean it in the fire. He wanted the blood off of his hands, too, but that was going to have to wait, for now.

  “What do you want us to do with it?” someone asked him, motioning at the body of the plinth.

  “Bury it,” Palk said. “Just where it is. Dig out enough dirt to cover it back and be done with it.”

  There were nods, and a few of the men went to take care of it.

  He had twelve. It should have been sixteen, but things had happened and there were some who were gone.

  Four at a time outside for an hour at a time. He’d take a shift. The only one who wouldn’t was the tracker.

  “You should reload that gun, son,”
the old man said to him quietly. Palk nodded.

  “One coming from the other side,” he said. The man nodded, then went to sit in the back corner of the little cave, picking at his fingers with a knife.

  *********

  There was no sign of the plinth, the rest of the night. The men put the giant carcass underground, and at dawn, Palk sent out six of them to gather more firewood. He could feel that he’d started a war. It had been a game, up until now, for both of them, really. High stakes, sure, in that men had already died, but no one had believed that the plinth had any real chance of winning it. It was just a matter of time until the men tracked them down and killed them.

  He had ammunition in enough quantities that he wasn’t worried about running out of it, but Palk was very aware that reloading took him several minutes. With shaky hands that were slick with blood, it might take longer, yet, he couldn’t be sure.

  He’d killed things before. His hands told him that he had. They knew the motions. Knew where the important pieces were, knew the feel of a knife through flesh. He’d done it without thinking, and he was reasonably sure that anything he could do without thinking was something he’d learned to do without thinking, before.

  He wondered what kind of man he was, before, that his instincts taught him to leap onto an enemy and sever the connection between shoulders and chin.

  Maybe it was for the best, that he’d forgotten it.

  They built up piles of brush and great hunks of fallen trees on either side of the entrance to the cave, then Palk had men climb up on top and start building a roof over the space. It wasn’t thick and it wasn’t robust, but it would be enough to warn them before one of the great beasts could come sliding in among them on noiseless feet.

  As the evening came on, someone whistled, and Palk came to stand outside with the tracker.

  There were kalt coming.

  Three of them.

  Three.

  He frowned at this. He’d only sent two for supplies.

  As he watched, a plinth slid out from a stand of rocks and charged at them, but the kalt moved as if they’d known he was there, scattering at a sprint and striking out at it with more malice than panic. The center kalt stayed on line, but the other two took a while longer to come back around. Palk looked over his shoulder to be sure there was a line of smoke coming up from the fire - they’d maintained it all day specifically for this - then took another step forward, checking his gun.

  The plinth gave chase after one of the riders for a little way, then melted just as quickly as he’d emerged.

  “Ambush,” he said.

  “If they can get it,” the tracker agreed.

  He was too busy watching the third rider to notice the center one as the kalt got close.

  He was checking back on the first rider, making sure he’d gotten control of his kalt and was headed in the right direction again, when something in his subconscious told him he’d glanced past something important.

  He put his hand on the gun again, scanning for the plinth.

  “Ain’t that your girl?” the tracker asked.

  He actually took a step back, jerking his head to find the middle rider.

  Her hair was up, and she had her determined face on.

  “What?” Palk asked.

  “I think I’m going to go watch wood burn,” the tracker said, disappearing. The rest of the men seemed to also find other things to do, leaving Palk alone in front of the cave as Starn rode up and threw herself off the kalt.

  “How bad is it?” she asked.

  “I’ve lost two men,” he said. “And I made the plinth angry. What are you doing here?”

  “I’m the one who survives,” she said. “It’s what I do. Don’t know why, don’t know how, and don’t know how I know. Don’t ask. But I do. And if I survive, you’re going to, because you aren’t leaving me here with these barbaric men and nothing to do but watch women quilt for the rest of my life. You got it?”

  “Yes,” he said. It was something he was compelled to say, whether or not he actually understood all of the words in the question. Starn was angry.

  Angry.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  The other two men arrived, and Palk pointed them back into the cave for them to offload their supplies.

  “You got my boot?” someone called from inside.

  “What’s going on?” Palk asked again.

  “There are no trophies,” she said. “Anywhere. I looked.”

  “I don’t follow,” Palk said.

  “They’re men, right?” she said. “There are stilth heads on the wall in the main lodge, and everything is made out of taims’ wool, and they make their clothes out of bobnot hide. Tiedmont even has a set of kalt ears that someone dipped in molten something-or-other sitting on his desk. There is nothing on the entire ranch that comes from a plinth. Sure, they don’t kill a lot of them, but what kind of man doesn’t ever take a trophy from his enemy, just to prove that he won?”

  “One who doesn’t want to look at it every day,” Palk said, thinking about those teeth, just visible above and below the plinth’s lips. He didn’t want that memory. Starn touched his face.

  “You don’t belong with them,” she said. “But every other man here would cut something off of the body of a plinth, if they had a chance.”

  “Really?” Palk asked. She nodded firmly. He tipped his head, almost eager at the idea of being right where she was wrong. He turned and went back into the increasingly-enclosed space.

  “Who here has a trophy off of the plinth from last night?” he asked. The men stopped working.

  “You killed one?” Starn asked, sounding stunned.

  “Told you I made them mad,” Palk said. “Let’s see them. Who took one?”

  One by one, the men turned to face him, rooting in pockets and taking out bits of pelt, a tooth. Palk felt his moment of victory slipping away.

  “We saved the best ones for you,” someone offered, digging in his pocket to produce a small leather pouch. He poured out the four eye teeth and a handful of claws.

  “We figure someone can string ‘em for you, or put em into a vest,” someone else said.

  Starn looked like she was at least trying a little bit to not look smug.

  “All right, fine,” he said, escorting her back outside. “So every one of them did it.”

  “You actually killed one,” she said.

  “Part luck,” he said. “It was watching me, and I shot it.”

  “Palk, I don’t believe anyone has ever killed a plinth before.”

  “They have,” Palk said. “Everyone knows.”

  “Everyone knows they hunt them from time to time. If Galp had a chance to put a head on his wall, don’t you think he would?”

  “They have to keep the populations down,” Palk said. She tipped her head to the side, conceding the point.

  “It depends. If they reproduce like livestock do, then, yeah, eventually we’d be crawling with them, and we’d see them in territory disputes and killing each other or starving to death. That’s how it works.”

  He felt the if out there like a train coming that he couldn’t yet see.

  “And if they don’t?”

  “If they reproduce very slowly,” she said, “more like men, for example, then you could have the same families of them on the range for dozens of years, and never have anything change.”

  “You think they just put on a show of hunting them?”

  She pressed her lips.

  “I don’t know enough yet,” she said. “But… I suspect that something very much like that is going on.”

  “You’re different, son,” someone said. Palk turned to find the tracker leaning against a large stone, smoking something.

  “What does that mean?” Palk asked.

  “I been on these things,” the man said. “Been out with all kinds of boys over the years, all of ‘em eager as dawn to kill themselves a plinth. No one so much as smells one. They keep away like it’
s easy. Kalt can keep up, sure, if you know which way you’re going and can go at pace. But we don’t. We track ‘em, and they get further and further ahead, and then we give up and we go home. Ran ‘em off again, we did.”

  “Okay,” Palk said, not wanting to hear the next part, but knowing it was coming anyway.

  “You’re different. I know it, they know it, and you know it. You’re here to bring war to them. It’s about time, if you ask me, but there it is.”

  Palk looked at Starn, shaking his head.

  “I didn’t know,” he said.

  “I know that,” she told him. “And that’s why they sent you. If you want someone to do something impossible, find someone who doesn’t know it’s impossible and tell them to do it.”

  One shot at a time. Two plinth.

  “That’s why they don’t need guns,” he said. He looked back at the tracker. “How do they even know that you need a gun to kill one?”

  The man shrugged, stubbing out the burning weed with his toe.

  “Part legend, part experience. There have been a few times that people have seen plinth do their killing, and lived. I seen a friend die. You get a feel for it. But looking at that animal in there, tell me that you know already that the whip on your belt isn’t going to do you any good.”

  Palk nodded.

  He needed a gun, for that creature.

  A spear might work, if he was incredibly lucky, bury the… and then the details of what a spear was got away from him, and then he lost the word entirely.

  He needed a gun.

  “How attached are they, to each other?” he asked. “Will they just move on, after a while?”

  The tracker looked at Starn.

  “Would you?” she asked gently.

  “If they were rivals,” Palk said. “Or if they just hunt together for convenience?”

  “They’re siblings,” the tracker said. “Best theory going, but I’m pretty certain. They come in litters of two or three, and when they leave their mammy, they set out together and never split up.”

  “Damn,” Palk said. The old man nodded.

  “You finish what you started, or they’ll finish all of us.”

  “I’m not different,” Palk said to Starn. She nodded.