House of Midas

by Chloe Garner

  “That kalt is insane,” Starn whispered, and Palk nodded. He’d never been more proud.

  And then, as if a timer had gone off, Biscuit charged into the bushes. There was a yowl, more of an angry scream that was mostly surprise, and then the kalt’s responding, coughing growl. The bushes heaved violently, and the kalt and the plinth came into view.

  The plinth had the kalt outweighed by maybe a hundred pounds, maybe a little more. This plinth was larger than the one Palk had killed by quite a lot, and it was angry, swiping at the kalt, its entire body lashing with the effort.

  Biscuit was fast, too, and maybe angrier. The clawed limbs met with fast legs, and Biscuit managed to step on one of the plinth’s paws with a crunch. As he tried to kick with another leg, though, the plinth swung at him and caught his shoulder, tearing through the thick muscle there. Palk strode forward, gun at the level, and fired.

  The plinth turned its head to look at him with a glare, and swung both front paws at the kalt again.

  Biscuit pulled out of the way, but not before one or two of the claws made contact with his neck.

  The gun was gone, replaced in his dominant hand by the knife, and Palk found himself face to face with the plinth. For just that one moment, the kalt was no longer relevant, it was eye to eye, intent versus intent, and each of them planned on killing the other.

  Biscuit was having none of this, and he charged across the plinth like a train, rolling the animal. The plinth roared, lashing at the kalt again, and Palk was on it. The knife went through the bottom of the animal’s vicious jaw, crunching bone, and the creature went still, the violence of its last motion throwing it onto its side.

  Palk spun, looking for the gun.

  What had he done with it?

  He spotted it, yards back toward the center of the space, and he dove, eyes up, looking for the other plinth.

  Why hadn’t it attacked him yet?

  And then he saw Starn.

  Her arms were in tattered purple shreds and she was pouring blood from a gash in her side. He couldn’t see her skin anywhere but for the blood.

  “Starn,” he cried, forgetting everything. She was standing over the body of the second plinth. She looked over at him as he came to hold her.

  “Starn,” he said again, the earth crumbling, everything in the universe fading as he tried to help her ease to the ground. The wounds were fatal. He could have patched the gash in her side, with enough supplies, but he couldn’t stop that much bleeding from her arms at the same time. These were things he simply knew.

  Knew.

  “Don’t tell them I did it,” she said, looking at the plinth.

  Her legs didn’t give.

  He was holding an upright woman.

  “What?” he asked, confused, bewildered, certain this was denial.

  “Don’t tell them I was the one who killed the second one,” she said. “It’s much more useful if you did it.”

  She was in shock. She didn’t even know, yet.

  “Starn,” he whispered. She looked down.

  “Oh.”

  Her eyes widened and she looked up at him. If it were possible, the bottom would have fallen out of his world again.

  “Starn.”

  “Honey,” she said. “I’m fine.”

  He held her, trying again to get her to sit, to just be comfortable for a moment, and she shook her head.

  “Palk. I’m fine. Really.”

  She shook her hands out and ran them down her arms, like shuddering against the cold, then put both of them to her sides and pressed.

  “Okay, so that does hurt a bit, but… Palk. It’s okay. Just… breathe, okay. It’s okay.”

  And then it was just blood.

  There were no marks on her arms where the wounds had been, the tear in her clothing was over bloody skin. He brushed away the blood, looking for the wound, but it was gone.

  “What?” he asked. She looked across the clearing.

  “Go make sure he’s okay,” she said. “Then we’ll talk.”

  He turned his head to look at Biscuit, the kalt standing over the body of the plinth like he was still thinking about stomping on it some more, then back at Starn. She nodded, her eyebrows still the shape of patronizing concern.

  “If anyone needs help, it’s him,” she said. “Go.”

  *********

  The kalt truly was made out of solid muscle. While Palk could see where the joint and the lines of bone went in his shoulder, in proof he discovered that those lines were buried much deeper in flesh than he would have guessed. Biscuit was bleeding heavily, but there was nothing to Palk’s gentle fingers but muscle open to the air on his shoulder. Palk took off his shirt and leaned hard against it on the wound, pushing until it seemed to stop bleeding, then holding it there as he looked at the slice across Biscuit’s throat.

  He would have thought that to be the more serious one, but though the single slash was sucking air in and out as the kalt breathed, it didn’t appear to be bothering him much at all. As he went over the rest of the animal’s body for injury, the only sign the kalt gave him that something might actually be wrong was that he actually stood for it.

  Palk used the cracker to tie his shirt to the kalt’s shoulder, hoping that would hold well enough until he got back to the encampment, then looked at Starn again.

  “Not bad,” she said.

  “No,” he said. “You don’t get to do that. Now you tell me what’s going on.”

  She sighed, coming over and sitting in the dirt a few feet from the plinth. Palk didn’t like her there, but he didn’t say anything.

  “I don’t know any better than you do,” she said. “That’s the truth. Well, I know a few things, but it’s stuff that I know, not stuff that I remember, the same as you.”

  “Okay,” he said, checking Biscuit’s posture again. The kalt was still defiantly inspecting the plinth. Good enough.

  “I’m hard to kill,” she said. “I’ve known that from the beginning, but I’ve been finding that I know it with more and more… extreme confidence, as time goes by.”

  “You just healed major wounds,” Palk said. “Like they were nothing.”

  She shrugged.

  “And I knew how to do it. I didn’t know that I would be able to. I just knew the plinth couldn’t kill me. That something with claws and teeth and nothing else was going to find it incredibly difficult to cause me enough injury to kill me before I killed it.”

  “You could have told me that,” he said. “I’d have sent you out here on your own.”

  Okay, so that was just bitterness talking, but he let it go, feeling betrayed and worn down and exhausted and sort of a nauseated giddiness that made him need to sit down, himself. He wasn’t willing to, so he continued to stand with Biscuit.

  “You would not,” she answered.

  “Am I invincible?” he asked. “And I just don’t know it?”

  She shook her head, and he frowned.

  “How do you know?”

  “I know,” she said.

  “No, you don’t,” he said, drawing his knife. “I want to know.”

  “Stop,” she said. “Don’t do that.”

  “You can’t know,” he said, putting the blade to the skin on his arm.

  “Stop,” she said again. “Here.”

  She drew a pin from out of her hair - he hadn’t even known it was there - and put it to her fingertip.

  “It’s an experiment,” she said. “If I heal and you don’t, you don’t talk about slashing yourself open again.”

  She raised her eyebrows and he shrugged. He hadn’t been about to do anything stupid.

  She pierced her fingertip and then took his finger in between hers and did the same, holding up her hand. He watched.

  Nothing happened.

  She brushed away the blood with her thumb, and the hole was gone.

  He looked down to discover that he was still bleeding.

  “Okay?” she asked. “Don’t hurt yourself just to prove tha
t you aren’t me.”

  “What are you?” he asked. She shook her head.

  “I don’t know.” There was a moment, like a cloud going across the sun, and she looked at him again. “There’s a monster in my head,” she said. “I don’t know what it is or why it’s there. Maybe that’s why I’m… different from you. But I have to be so careful not to touch it, or else I might let it out. Everything I do, I have to be so careful. All the things I know…”

  She trailed off again, and then shook her head.

  “We should go let everyone know. We’ll head back to the ranch today, I expect. Yes?”

  “Not camping here again,” Palk agreed, still watching blood make a slow path down his finger. Finally he pushed his thumb against his forefinger to get the blood to stop.

  She was invincible.

  He attracted vicious, dark carnivores who wanted to kill him out of curiosity.

  What were they?

  “Don’t tell them I killed one of them,” she said. “Just tell them that they ambushed us and you took care of it.”

  “Still not clear on why,” he said, putting his hand against Biscuit’s shoulder and encouraging the kalt to follow him back toward the camp. Biscuit came willingly enough.

  “Because, it’s good for us if you’re the plinth-killer,” she said. “It’s the specialized skill that gets you recognized.”

  “But they just about killed us,” he said.

  “You don’t have to do it again,” she said. “Just be the guy who can.”

  “I don’t follow,” he said. “Even if all I do is negotiate a raise and stay here, they’re still eventually going to want me to come back out here and do it again. What’s the point of having a plinth killer if he doesn’t go out and kill plinth?”

  “No thinking about it,” she said. “What would you want to have, in order to kill the next family of plinth that shows up on the range?”

  “More guns,” he said. “Better ones. Men who are trained with them.”

  “How better?” she asked.

  “A lot,” he said. She laughed.

  “No. Better in what way?”

  “Oh. Lighter, for one. More accurate. I shot that plinth at three yards and I missed his heart by a foot. It was luck that I hit the one at the camp with a shot that actually killed him.”

  “You said that your hands were covered in blood?” she asked. He shrugged.

  “Yeah.”

  She shook her head.

  “You didn’t kill him with the gun. His heart was still beating when you cut his throat, if you got that much blood on you.”

  Ew.

  He knew that she was right, but somehow he’d managed to avoid thinking about it. Killing something with a gun was one thing. Killing it with his hands and a blade was…

  Exactly what he’d just done again. He hadn’t severed the plinth’s throat this time, so his hands were still mostly clean, but he’d still used a knife to kill the great beast. A knife and his own hands.

  “Definitely need a gun that hits what I point it at,” he said. She eyed him, but didn’t say anything.

  “Well, whether you actually kill more of them or not is kind of up to you. If you don’t, they will continue to hunt people for sport. That just is what it is. If you don’t want to come out here again, we can make that happen.”

  “How?” he asked. She shrugged.

  “Status,” she said. “We make you into a legend that the ranches will pay just to have around. You bully off any poachers and agree to train their enforcers, and you wear the plinth stuff wherever you go. We save up enough to buy some land somewhere where there won’t ever be plinth, and then we leave.”

  “You make it sound simple.”

  She frowned.

  “It is, in my head.”

  “I don’t want to wear plinth teeth,” Palk said. She laughed.

  “Oh, that’s not negotiable,” she said. “I’m going to get a hat made with all of the claws in it. And you’re going to wear it everywhere.”

  “I’m going to look like an idiot.”

  “Only in the mirror,” she said. “To everyone else, with the way they whisper about plinth, you’ll be a hero.”

  “I don’t want to be a hero.”

  “That ship sailed the day we found ourselves here,” she said. “Wanderers have pretty bleak lives, if you really dig into what happens to them, normally. They have no skills, no talents, and no contacts. They scratch out a living somewhere and they hope nothing bad happens. When something bad happens, they’re some of the first to starve.” The set of her jaw was something he couldn’t have described to anyone. “I’m not going to let that happen to us.”

  He checked Biscuit’s shoulder. It was bleeding again, but not as bad. He had a kit for stitching up wounds in his things at the camp, but the idea of trying to bring a needle anywhere near the kalt was almost laughably impossible.

  Two thirds of the way back to camp, Babe found them. She sniffed Biscuit and then Palk, then went to walk next to Starn like it was the most ordinary thing in the world.

  “I just want to go back to the ranch,” he finally said as they got to the final hill before the rocky peak. “I don’t want to be a hero or a legend or have status.”

  “You need to send them down to deal with the bodies,” Starn said. “They need to see them.”

  He sighed and waved the two sentries forward, giving them directions on how to find the plinth, and then orders to take another four men and bury the bodies.

  “Bring back the claws and the teeth,” Starn said as they started away. “I will count them.”

  The men touched their hats and scrambled away. Palk sighed.

  “I don’t know how I’m getting back,” he said. “I’m not riding him until he’s at least put back together.”

  “They said you were running low on supplies,” Starn said. “But I wouldn’t have believed you actually ran out of thread.”

  He raised his eyebrows at her.

  “You think you can make him stand for you to sew him closed?”

  “No,” she said, “but he will for you.”

  He looked at the kalt again and he saw it.

  The animal was calm. He wasn’t beaten, he wasn’t weary, he wasn’t bled out. He was simply calm, standing there next to Palk.

  “He will, won’t he?” Palk asked. She nodded.

  “Go get your stuff. We’ll do it out here where you have good light.”

  He nodded and retrieved the small tin where the needle and thread were. Most of the kalt had wandered out of the cave as the men left and were investigating Biscuit and Babe. Palk made his way through them and stood next to the heavy beast that had saved his life and whose life he had saved.

  “Just tell him,” Starn said.

  “They understand…” Palk started, then realized he had no idea what language he was speaking. “They can understand us?”

  Starn raised an eyebrow at him and Palk shook his head.

  “Lay down, buddy,” he said. Biscuit shot him a look and Palk shook his head. “Yes, we have to do this. Unless you want me to burn them closed.”

  The kalt shuddered and knelt, then dropped to his side with a shooting cloud of dust. The rest of the kalt milled around, watching. Palk untied the cracker and pulled off the wadded cloth as the tracker appeared next to him.

  “Gentled or not, you’re gonna want hands on him,” the old man said, putting his wide gray hands on the kalt’s leg, then sitting astride his barreled chest. The man motioned to Starn.

  “All your weight on his head.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” Palk said, not liking the treatment, on Biscuit’s behalf.

  “Palk,” Starn said, as she knelt on either side of the kalt’s muzzle and leaned her elbows down onto his neck. “Someone’s about to jab you with a needle and it’s going to hurt a lot. You want someone holding you still, or you want to be still all on your own?”

  The kalt didn’t shift.

  “Sorry,
buddy,” Palk said, patting his neck before he threaded the curved needle. The wounds were bleeding fresh again, but not with a soaking flow as he began the process of slowly closing each of the four long, deep gashes.

  “He limp his way in?” the tracker asked.

  “Don’t think so,” Palk answered.

  “No,” Starn said with more confidence.

  “Then he’ll heal up fine,” the tracker said. “What happened down there? The boys say you killed them.”

  “Both of them are dead,” Palk said, trying to focus.

  “They was right to be afraid of you,” the tracker said. “You’re somethin’ new, round these parts. You and your lady, there.”

  “Definitely new,” Palk said, not looking up at Starn, but hoping she knew that he was directing that at her.

  “Yes, he’ll heal fine,” the tracker said, as Biscuit shifted. Palk pulled the edges of the first slice together with his fingers, blood squeezing out like from a sponge, but then stopping.

  “He’ll have a scar,” Palk said.

  “Girls like scars,” the tracker answered. Palk glanced at him.

  “Thought you didn’t like girls.”

  The tracker grinned.

  “Said I’d never been married, not that I’d never felt the heat in my blood.”

  Palk shook his head and started the next cut. Biscuit shifted again.

  “Good hands,” the tracker observed. “Soft, still, but good hands.”

  Palk took that for what it was and continued his work. Biscuit put up with it, even as Palk closed up his throat, and then shook Starn and the tracker off like they hadn’t been there.

  “Get him some grain,” Palk said, not to anyone in particular.

  “You want beer in it?” the tracker asked. Palk glanced at him.

  “Yeah. Do that.”

  The other man nodded and disappeared. Biscuit shoved Palk with his nose, not particularly friendly, but not malevolent, either, and then wandered away.

  “Good work,” Starn said, coming to stand next to Palk. He was tired.

  Tired to his bones.

  And he had a long ride ahead of him, today.

  “I just want a bed and three days of sleep,” he said. She laughed and leaned against him.