by Chloe Garner
“You are, and so am I. We’re wanderers, but we’re light-skinned and we think differently. You can see that?”
He turned to scan the plain again.
This wasn’t helping anything.
He knew what he needed to know. The fight was coming. It was coming to him, and he needed to be ready.
“We need to lay out plans,” he said, turning to go back into the cave.
*********
The men slept in four-hour shifts, two shifts awake, one shift asleep. It kept everyone alert and active, and kept people moving rather than sitting around and trying to find sleep.
Because that part wasn’t easy.
Palk found his first four hour shift of sleep, the one just before dusk that night, to be interminable, mostly just trying to find a place where his body was comfortable enough to let his mind go, at which point his mind would find a new piece of the interaction with the plinth to focus on, jolting him back awake again.
The fur as it framed its face was long, growing back along its neck and onto its back in a straight cover that would make biting its neck difficult. Palk wasn’t certain how he’d gotten the knife to flesh the way that he had, and he replayed it over and over again, trying to find the series of motions he’d made that had moved that protective layer of hair out of the way.
He had to have jerked its head back. He knew that. The line had been too easy. Had that been enough?
And then he was awake again, struggling to turn off the thoughts, roll over, relax the muscles down his back, and struggle for sleep again.
Starn wouldn’t go down.
She sat at the top of the peak for a long time with the tracker, who also considered himself to be outside of Palk’s authority, and they just talked. Or didn’t. Each time Palk went up to check on them, they were just silent.
He didn’t understand, but neither one of them particularly wanted him there, so he moved on again after making sure they hadn’t seen anything and that they didn’t need anything.
They had food and beer for a week. Five days, and then he’d have to send someone out again.
“Can we drink from the pond over there?” he asked the tracker as the sun reached the far side of the horizon and the sky rolled back its color to reveal the stars and the pale moon.
“Wouldn’t advise it, if you want to be up for a fight,” the tracker said.
“Could boil it,” Starn said. The tracker frowned at her.
“What good would that do?”
As soon as she said it, Palk knew it was the right thing, but he couldn’t remember why.
“Kills all the bugs in it,” Starn said.
“You think bugs are what make everyone sick?” the tracker asked, shaking his head. “No, I could pull every bug out of that water and eat it, and I wouldn’t get sick. The water’s no good.”
“Then how do the animals drink?” Starn challenged. He shook his head again.
“Here to change everything,” he muttered. Palk looked at Starn.
“It would work, wouldn’t it? Boiling it?”
She gave him a quiet, confident nod, trying to keep a deferential posture toward the tracker.
“If you put it through coals first, that would help more,” she said. “Then boil it and skim it.”
He nodded.
“I’ll send someone tomorrow,” he said, then shook his head. “No. I’ll go myself.”
“They’re out there, boy,” the tracker said. “Just waiting.”
“I know,” Palk answered. “But we need a source of water, and going back is asking people to risk their lives.”
“They’re risking their lives every second, now,” the tracker said.
Palk didn’t have an answer.
“It’s getting dark. We should get everyone inside and the fires lit.”
“It’s not a sure thing,” the tracker said. “None of it is. They want in, they’ll get in.”
“I know,” Palk said. “But this is the right first step.”
“First you build a fortification,” Starn said. He frowned at her. He hadn’t thought of it like that. She shrugged.
“What? Tomorrow you want to reinforce the roof, don’t you?”
That was exactly what he wanted to do. Set large rocks across the ends of the wood, to make it harder to move out of the way, and then cover the wood latticing with anything they could find that would make it so you couldn’t see through it.
He knew that the plinth could hear and smell well enough that it wasn’t going to be a strong solution, but it helped. As much as anything, it was psychological.
“So?” he asked. She shrugged.
“You’re predictable. First you build a fortification and you source water. Second you source food and weapons. After that, you’re dug in and you’re ready for battle.”
The tracker looked at her.
“I don’t intend to stay dug in, lady,” he said. She shook her head, looking out over the deepening gray plain.
“It won’t last that long,” she said. “They’re out there, and they know what they want.”
“I made ‘em angry,” Palk said. She nodded.
“And you’re a threat. First real one they’ve seen.” She tipped her head back to look up at him. “What would you do, if you’d just come across your first real threat?”
He could feel the answer she wanted, feel how right she was, predicting his reaction. He was a stubborn person.
“I’d study it,” he said. She nodded slowly.
“You’d study it, and if it continued to be a threat, you’d kill it.”
The tracker was watching him.
“Same as with everyone else here, though a lot of ‘em shoot first, as it were.”
“He’s a good man,” Starn said to the tracker. “It would have to be a credible threat to a target that was unable to defend itself. And even then, he wouldn’t be thrilled about it.” She shook her head and looked up at Palk again. “The only time he would really pull out a gun and shoot something without feeling anything is if he thought it was really on the verge of killing him or someone else.”
Like the plinth up on the rock watching him. He frowned at her, wishing she’d shut up. He didn’t know himself that well, and here she was reading things from inside of him he hadn’t known were there.
“If he’d known, a week ago, that no one had ever killed a plinth,” she said, pressing on, her eyes turning hard as she watched him, “he might have called off the whole thing.”
“They kill men, girl, like they kill anything else. For fun, without hesitation, and very well,” the tracker said. “They deserve huntin’ and they deserve death.”
She nodded.
“I’ve accepted that. I might have argued that they were innocent in all of this, until I saw the kalt that came home without a rider.”
She was still watching him, testing him. Palk wanted to turn away, to go find something productive and efficient and capable to do, but it was mesmerizing, the way she looked at him.
“They toyed with that animal,” she said. “It was a pretty kalt, just as cantankerous as any of the other ones, but nothing mean about him. And they left him in enough pieces to make it back to the ranch and die. That’s when I started packing to come out here. Started asking the right questions.”
She looked away.
“Questions I should have thought to ask long before we got to this stage. I should have left with you at the outset.”
“They never would have let you,” Palk said.
“Shouldn’t have, when they did,” the tracker said. “Not like those men, put a girl in danger like this.”
Starn laughed.
“They had very little choice, believe me.”
“Oh, I have very little doubt of that,” the man said. “The boy is right. We should take shelter while we can.”
She shrugged and stood, taking Palk’s hand as she got close. He almost pulled it away.
“You’re a good man,” she murmured. “But you nee
d to know yourself, and you need to know why they’re interested in you. It’s the only way I see you surviving this.”
“They’re just animals,” he said. “And they kill men and they kill livestock. It’s business and it’s about keeping people safe.”
She nodded slowly.
“But why are they still here?” she asked. “If they could just run off and be safe?”
“You really think it’s because I’m here?” he asked, still unable to believe it. She nodded.
“And now me. They might disappear for a while; I can’t say whether they take a step back to evaluate what happened, or if they attack tonight, at their first good opportunity. If it were me, I’d attack tonight, before you get dug in too well, but there’s no telling for sure.” She looked up at the weak moon. “But I don’t think we last a week here. One side wins or the other one. That’s just all that happens.”
“Come on,” he said. “It isn’t easy getting down from here in daylight. We need to be in before full dark.”
The fires below them were beginning to grow, putting up two columns of orange under longer, darker columns of smoke in the deep dark of the evening. No one could miss them, nothing for miles around would fail to know where they were.
That was okay.
Two plinth were down there, somewhere, and they already knew where he was. If they were going to try to kill him, they were going to have to come get him to do it.
*********
The creatures purred.
Palk wouldn’t have known what the word meant, until he heard it. All night long, they walked a path around the open roof, just out of sight, occasionally knocking a piece of wood to make it shake, and purring.
The men didn’t sleep.
Palk sat by the smallest of the fires with the gun across his lap, eyes up on the stars overhead waiting for one of them to wink at him. He didn’t need a big window.
The problem was what happened next.
If he shot one of them, he had no idea how to take out the other one, before it was on him.
But the hours rolled by and the plinth walked their slow circles.
Purring.
*********
He tried to sleep in the morning. He was exhausted, physically, but there was too much going on in his head to rest, so he finally got up and went to stand with Starn overlooking the plain.
“Did you sleep at all?” he asked. She shook her head, her mind far away.
“They’re watching,” she said. He nodded. The fires had burnt their way to ash, and he was going to have to send men out to gather more. He was worried how long the wood would hold out, in this environment.
“We should go,” he said. She nodded quietly. He left her to go get the kalt, paying attention to Biscuit as he tacked the kalt up and got Starn’s kalt ready. He lead them both back outside. Starn was friendly with her kalt, Babe, and they mounted up. He checked his gun and his supply of ammunition as they started down the hillside.
“They were playing with us,” she said.
“I know,” he answered.
“I don’t know that I understand that,” she said. “I can understand so many things, but not that. Why would they come just to torment us, when you killed their brother just yesterday?”
“It’s part of winning,” he said.
“They could have taken us,” Starn said. “I think the only real hope we had, last night, was that the kalt would kill them before they killed everyone.”
Palk had thought of that.
“It’s more fun if we’re afraid,” he said. Starn shook her head again.
“That might be what I don’t understand. Is it revenge? The fear? Or is it just tactics?”
“It’s both,” Palk said. She glanced at him, and he shrugged. “I kind of get it. We, I, made them angry, now they’re going to make it bad for us.”
“They aren’t going to win,” she said.
“I know.”
“But they don’t. They think it’s inevitable that they win. That they kill us.”
He was watching the grass around them, the rocks, the trees. A plinth had chased Starn across the open space in broad daylight yesterday. There was nothing to say it wasn’t going to happen again.
And Biscuit and Babe were on edge. Clearly the signs of plinth were all around them, as they walked. Babe was more resigned, more determined. Biscuit was alert to the point of near mania, dancing sideways, hopping at shadows, throwing his head every time Palk tried to remind him to move forward again.
“I didn’t think they’d make you afraid,” he said to the big kalt. Starn gave him a funny look.
“He isn’t afraid,” she said. “Can’t you read him better than that?”
Palk raised his eyebrows and she shook her head.
“He’s angry. If I had to guess, he’d go off hunting them on his own.”
“You think they’d do it?” Palk asked. “The kalt?”
“Not a chance. They have a better sense of self-preservation than that. Just that one,” she said, jerking her head at Biscuit. “He doesn’t like being pushed around. Got too much pride to take it and just run away.”
“You and me both, buddy,” Palk said, picking his eyes up again. The water was still a good thirty minutes’ ride away, and they were exposed the whole way.
“If they’re going to attack us,” Palk said, “and they think like me, they should wait until we’re loaded with water on our way back, with most of the way to go.”
“Or loading up the water. Scare off the kalt and have us on foot,” Starn said. Palk nodded. There was no safe way to do this. That was why he and Starn were the ones going.
His hands were tight.
He wasn’t shaky, which actually surprised him. After yesterday and the way he’d reacted to killing the plinth, he’d expected the stress to take a bigger toll on him, but he was firm. He just needed to remember to loosen up periodically to keep his joints limber, and to breathe evenly.
Tension was not going to help anything, but he was on task and unafraid.
Why wasn’t he afraid?
Was it Starn?
Or was it him?
“You carrying that knife you took off the pickpocket?” Starn asked. Palk nodded, still scanning.
“Give it to me,” she said.
“I’ve got a better one,” he said. The highly-functional knife that Galp had given him, one that was multiple inches longer with a thicker, better blade. That knife plus his boot worked as a hatchet, in a pinch.
“Exactly,” she said. “Give me the one you took on the way here.”
He pulled it out of his boot and handed it across the gap between the kalt.
“I don’t like you being undefended,” he said. “You should take the cracker, too.”
“I don’t have the practice with it that you do,” she said. “You can keep it.”
The gun was heavy on his side, awkward in length and in bulk, but effective enough.
Two of them.
He had to take on two of them.
The plain around them was quiet, and Biscuit suddenly settled. No more churning, soft feet on the dusty earth, no more queasy head, no more flicking attention everywhere.
Babe was similar, though her change was more subtle.
They were watching a space ahead of them with the focus of someone who is already in the trap.
“They’re early,” Palk said.
“You don’t want to be on that animal when they attack,” Starn said.
“Why not?” he asked.
“He’s going to throw you on the ground and do what he needs to do,” Starn said. “I might have been able to get myself and Babe out of here, but Biscuit is going to go after them, and you’re not going to be able to do anything about it. You should be on your feet when it happens.”
“What about you?” he asked.
“I’m going to let Babe do what she needs to do, but I’m staying with you,” she said, hopping to the ground. With a surreal sense of things goin
g on way outside of his control, Palk followed her lead, finding the ground under his boots and letting go of Biscuit. Babe and Biscuit had a moment. It wasn’t outright communication in some kind of specialized language, but it meant what it meant, and then Babe turned and bolted.
“She’ll be fine,” Starn said, her voice even. It pulled Palk back from the edge of distraction and into his zone. He nodded.
“Better she does it now,” he said. Starn gave him a reinforcing nod, and they continued forward.
Biscuit veered slightly to the right and away from them, his head outstretched and forward, his feet moving in a way that actually made Palk think of the plinth. It wasn’t silent and secretive, but it was a stalking motion, nonetheless.
“Here,” Starn said. Palk had already stopped. Biscuit went on. Palk hoped the kalt didn’t get himself killed.
They weren’t going to go into the kill zone, not into the heart of the ambush. If the plinth wanted them, they were going to have to take them here.
Two of them.
Palk found the second round for the gun and put it in his mouth, the only place he could think of to put it where he’d be able to get at it quickly without impairing his spare hand. The way he’d slit the plinth’s throat two nights ago still resonated with him, knowledge without memories, things he could do without knowing how.
He wished Starn wasn’t there.
“Stay behind me if you can,” he said.
“That’s where I plan on being,” she answered, but it sounded different than how he’d meant it. He thought of what the tracker had said.
If he did manage to kill one, he needed to watch his back, because that’s where the other one would be coming from.
He wished harder that Starn wasn’t here.
He’d go down fighting, he knew that much. The odds were almost completely against them, but he’d go down fighting and he’d make them remember him.
The silence grew more poignant, and there was a rumble of a purr of to his right. Biscuit had stopped moving.
“Steady,” Starn whispered. He had the gun out, and he found his knife in the other hand.
Trust that.
He waited.
There was another purr. It might have been the same animal, it might have been the second one, he couldn’t tell. Their movement was soundless and invisible except for what he could read off of Biscuit.