by J. S. Morin
“Auzuma.”
An ear twitched, but he showed no other reaction.
“Auzuma,” Mriy repeated, leaning closer but not daring any louder voice. He stirred, and she spoke his name once more.
An eye opened, the wide pupil narrowing to a slit in the firelight. “What is it?” he asked in a whisper that matched her own.
“The hunt is over. I have failed. We’re going to release the humans and get out of here.”
Auzuma twisted his head until both his eyes could look into hers. He held her gaze for just a moment, then gave a solemn nod. Mriy swallowed back a lump in her throat, knowing that she hadn’t admitted until then—even to herself—that she would not prevail over Hrykii.
Auzuma followed her without another word. When the old chaplain reached for his knapsack, Mriy put a restraining hand on his shoulder. She shook her head when he turned a questioning look in her direction. The gear was not worth the risk of the noise it might make in the taking.
The night air was calm, but cold enough to cut through fur. By the moonlight, the live-prey cages were easy to spot, some fifty meters from the nearest building, where the smells and sounds of the animals would be less distracting. Out in the open air, there was less need for quiet.
“You find the snow-rollers,” Mriy said. “However many they have, we take them all or disable any we have to leave behind. I’ll release Tanny and Esper.”
“Kubu too!” Kubu shouted, his deep voice echoing in the mountain air. Mriy had forgotten how keen Kubu’s ears were. He had overheard her hushed voice from forty meters away.
“Yes, you too,” she hissed. “Be silent.”
She hurried through the snow as Auzuma disappeared around the side of the rebels’ main domicile in search of snow-rollers. There were a dozen cages, each a mesh of composite steel bars with gaps barely large enough to fit a finger through. The animals occupying the rest of the cages stirred as Mriy approached the cage with Tanny and Esper bound on the cold ground within.
“Mriy, praise the Lord,” Esper whispered. “Get us out of here.”
“What did you think I was out here for?” Mriy muttered as she examined the lock. It was a simple padlock with a DNA reader. Such trivial security seemed negligent, but the cages were mainly used for livestock. Mriy pressed a finger to the pad of the reader, and the locked opened.
Dragging Tanny and Esper out into the open to get better access to their bindings, Mriy drew a hunting knife and sawed through the cords. Esper gasped in relief when the pressure came off her wrists, twisting and stretching and flinching when she rubbed at the raw, bleeding wounds that were left. She stood clumsily, shaking feeling back into numb feet. Tanny was more stoic and less patient. She grabbed a spare knife from Mriy as soon as her hands were free and quickly snapped the cord tying her own ankles together.
“This one won’t open,” Esper whispered loudly. She was crouched at Kubu’s cage, pressing her own finger to the lock as Mriy had done earlier.
“Azrin DNA,” Mriy said. She crossed over and pressed her finger to the reader. The lock popped. “Anyone here can unlock it except you two—three.” She added the last after Kubu opened his mouth to object.
The canine had not been bound. Given his quadrupedal anatomy and the fact that his dewclaws barely functioned as thumbs, there was little need to bind him. He sprang from his cage with his tail wagging, but remained obediently silent.
A knife blade caught the moonlight, flashing a signal that caught Mriy’s eye. Auzuma waved to her, summoning the group to his location around the side of the compound. But Mriy’s keen eyes caught something else as well, approaching from the woods. An azrin form was watching them from behind a tree. It seemed that Hraim might have been cautious enough to post a guard, after all.
“Run for it,” Mriy whispered. “I’ll catch up.” She pointed toward Auzuma and hurried Esper along with a shove in that direction.
“We won’t leave without you,” Esper insisted, catching her balance and stopping dead in her tracks in the snow.
“You’re not fit to stay and help,” Mriy replied. “You have no boots. You’ll freeze if you don’t get to the snow-rollers and get out of here.”
“Just hurry,” Tanny said, grabbing Esper by the arm.
“Don’t worry. Leave without me if you must. They won’t kill one of their own kind,” Mriy said. She dropped into a crouch and headed for the tree line.
It was then that the sentry must have realized he had been spotted. “Turn to stone, traitor!” he shouted. When he came up from his crouch, the sentry was aiming a blaster rifle at her.
Mriy did as ordered, stopping in her tracks. He was too far to rush, too close to miss his shot. Only seconds earlier she had claimed that these rebels—these sons and daughters of Meyang—would not kill her. She still believed that to be true. But what she couldn’t admit in front of Esper was that, short of killing, there was no limit to the harm they might do a traitor. Mriy’s best ally was the sentry’s own reluctance to fire what was undeniably a deadly weapon at her.
“I tried to stop them,” Mriy said, carefully keeping her hands out wide and in plain sight. “The holy one used some spell on me. She’s only just now far enough that I could break free of it.”
The sentry stepped out from behind the cover of his tree and into better light. She struggled to recall his name—Rrumlau, the quiet one with the shoulders like an ox. He kept his rifle aimed at Mriy’s midsection, but remained silent.
The growl of a snow-roller’s engine echoed in the night. It was joined by another a second later. Those engines revved and hummed, then quieted.
Mriy turned her head in the direction of the noise. “They’re getting away!” she shouted. “They won’t come past us. They’ll go the long way around. Hurry if you want to get a shot off before they’re gone.”
Rrumlau looked from Mriy to the distant sound of the snow-rollers and back again. He snarled. “Try nothing foolish.” With that, he rushed off in the direction of the fading engine noise.
Mriy drew a hunting knife, took aim, and threw. The blade flipped end over end, catching Rrumlau a glancing blow on the back of his shoulder, but it drew blood. Mriy was already in full run by the time the knife hit. Rrumlau yelped and lost his grip on his rifle with his trigger hand. He dropped it to the snow when Mriy barreled into him as he tried to turn.
Rrumlau was a classic brute. He had twenty kilos on Mriy at the least, and was younger by a full hand of years—his fighting prime. But Mriy had stolen the initiative, first blood, and the upper position in the brawl. Soora had been built like Rrumlau. As he tried to buck and shove at her shoulders and hips, she realized that he fought much like her brother as well. Mriy let him push and struggle beneath her, shifting her weight and leverage so that he could not rise from the snow. With gravity aiding her, she landed heavy swipes to the sides of Rrumlau’s head, narrowly avoiding the bites he attempted in defense.
They grappled in the snow for minutes, until Mriy managed to kick off her boots and get her hind claws into Rrumlau’s flanks. That rendered his legs flailing and useless and started to compress his abdomen, robbing him of breath. The larger azrin tired quickly from that point, struggling for breath and clawing effectually at Mriy’s arms and face. With her toe claws dug in, the battle of arms only needed a stalemate from her end. As Rrumlau fought for air, his struggles turned entirely defensive. Mriy picked her way through his guard and pounded him until he was dazed and limp.
Rolling off the heavier fighter, Mriy fumbled in the snow until she found the dropped blaster rifle. It was cheap and lightweight, nothing like the ordinance Tanny procured for the Mobius. She crawled over to Rrumlau, who was now helpless on his back, trying to regain lost breath and staunch the bleeding in his sides. She aimed the rifle down, right where she judged his heart to be.
Mriy listened. For the first time since the blood rush of combat began, she noticed her surroundings. The hum of snow-roller engines had faded into the distance and was gone.
If she was lucky, she could follow the trail. They might double back for her, or stop and wait if they thought pursuit was lost.
Rrumlau spat up at her. Given his struggles to fill his lungs, she gave him the barest credit for managing to spit into her face. But it was a mistake. Mriy hissed and tightened her finger on the trigger. But it didn’t fire. The last little bit, the final squeeze that would send a burst of plasma to incinerate Rrumlau’s heart, would not come.
Light poured from the door of the domicile, spilling across the snow. Azrin voices shouted demands and threats. Mriy tried once again to pull the trigger, but couldn’t bring herself to do it. She had counted on the rebels’ beliefs to protect her—that they would not kill one of their own kind. How could she show clear proof that she was less noble?
Mriy flipped the rifle around and brought the butt end down on Rrumlau’s upper jaw. The crack that sounded was payback for his spitting on her. A glance at the rebels pouring from the domicile told her that there was no escaping. She might kill a few, but they wouldn’t hesitate to kill her in self-defense at that point. Letting the rifle slip from her grasp, Mriy collapsed onto her back in the snow.
Footsteps crunched through the snow toward her. “By your place in God’s heaven, what came over you?” Hraim asked as he loomed over Mriy.
“They were my pack,” Mriy mumbled, too exhausted in mind and body to lie. “They were all my pack. Even the damned dog.”
# # #
“We have to go back for her,” Esper insisted. Her stomach lurched as the snow-roller took a turn, while she was twisted around watching behind them.
“We can’t,” Auzuma replied. It was just the two of them; Tanny drove the rebels’ only other snow-roller and had Kubu with her.
“They’ll kill her,” Esper said. “She betrayed them.”
“Those rebels are true believers,” Auzuma replied. “They know their Book. ‘You shall not kill kin.’ Most of my people take it to mean not to kill within the clan. But those rebels, they hold to the old interpretation. We are all God’s children, so they won’t kill another azrin.”
“My species has that one, too,” Esper replied. “It’s worded a little less ambiguously, and they still break it all the time.”
“I’ve met few pious humans,” Auzuma said. He swerved the snow-roller around a fallen tree, causing Esper’s gorge to rise. She gave up on watching the second snow-roller and the path behind them. “We heard the word of the same God, but we followed it better. We have had no flood, no great plagues—yes, I’ve read your Bible. Our commandments numbered just six, and we followed them better than your kind ever did.”
“But what if they’re not as pious as you think?”
“Then Mriy will die.”
“Right! So we have to go—”
“No,” Auzuma said. His easy banter was gone. His pronouncement carried the weight of finality. “If Mriy needs saving, it will be the Yrris Clan who goes back for her—with a ship. Not us.”
# # #
Mriy didn’t remember being dragged indoors, but she recognized the scent of the rebels’ hearth fire before she opened her eyes. The sap from the green pine wood gave off a distinctive aroma. She would have liked to take a good sniff of the room, but feared that she might alert her captors that she was awake; instead she let the smells around the room waft to her. Hraim was here, along with Rrumlau and four other rebels.
She lay facedown on the dirt floor, arms pinned behind her. Ropes at her wrists and elbows kept her forearms pressed together and her shoulders straining in their sockets. Her legs were splayed, pulled in opposite directions—probably tied to stakes. It would have been a comical parody of some of the worst locally produced holovids if it weren’t so painful. The only solace she could take was that they left her arms—and claws—facing upward; it meant they didn’t intend to violate her before she died.
A bare toe prodded her ribs, and Mriy realized she was unclad. “She’s awake.”
Hraim knelt beside her. “Well, well. Looks like our friend is faking.” A thin-clawed slap left trails of fire across Mriy’s face.
She opened her eyes. “You are sad relics, living in dead days.”
“And you’re a traitor to your kind.” Rrumlau spoke with his jaw clenched. Mriy took grim satisfaction knowing that she’d broken it.
“What do we do with the human-lover?”
“She’s as good as human. Just kill her.”
“Make her pay, first.”
Hraim pressed her head to the floor and stared into Mriy’s eyes. “No. She’s still azrin. We don’t kill kin. But I think, if she wants to be part of a human pack, we oughtta help her.”
Rrumlau strutted into view. He bent low and held out a hunter’s tool, a pair of iron pliers that looked old enough to have been in his family for generations. They were used for taking trophies from a kill. Speak to any hunter who wore a necklace of teeth or claws, and he could pull such a tool from his pocket to show you. Mriy owned a little-used pair that she kept on board the Mobius.
Hraim held out a short piece of a tree branch that hadn’t been stripped of bark. It was thick as her forearm. “Open up. This is the last favor we do you.”
Mriy felt an instinctive urge to resist, to thwart any effort her captors made. But she knew the truth of it, and realized why her hands were tied behind her, where her captors had easy access. It was accept their offer, or suffer through the pain with nothing to bite on while they declawed her.
With a growl, she snapped her jaws down on the wood, giving a resentful glare as she did. But Rrumlau just laughed, and Hraim tied a cord around one end of the wood and looped it behind her head before trying the other. He wasn’t securing it so Mriy didn’t spit it out; he was forcing her jaws wide until she could barely bite down at all. Her protests came as inarticulate grunts.
Rrumlau turned and swiveled an ear toward her. “What’s that? I don’t understand human.”
Her captors pressed Mriy firmly to the floor. Try as she might, with no leverage she couldn’t stop them from unclenching her fists and forcing her claws out, one by one. In gentler fashion, it was the same trick a mother used to file a child’s claws. But one by one, those pliers clamped down and pulled. Mriy screamed into the wooden bit between her teeth as searing pain blazed at each finger, each adding to the misery of the last. One by one, bloody claws were pitched into the hearthfire as Mriy watched through eyes swimming with tears.
Ten fingers. Eight toes. She could barely whimper by the time they finished.
Rrumlau patted her on the cheek. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?” He opened and closed the pliers with a rusty grating noise. The wet tips gleamed in the firelight.
Mriy grunted. Her jaw ached, and she was dribbling spittle onto the dirt. She wanted to goad them into hearing what she had to say, just so they would take the bit away.
Rrumlau cocked his head. “What’s that? You say humans don’t have fangs? Why… I think you may be right about that.”
Mriy’s eyes went wide. She’d had enough. Hadn’t they done enough?
With frantic urgency, she struggled against her bonds. A knee came down hard on her back, across her already-strained shoulders. Hands gripped either side of the wooden bit and pulled her head back. Mriy might have been stronger than any one of them, maybe even Rrumlau. But tied up, beaten, and exhausted, she offered only feeble resistance.
Her breath quickened as she saw the pliers coming. Rrumlau took his time. She felt the wiggle in her jaw, the tug, the pain. The pulling brought her head forward despite the rebel holding her back. Then her head bobbed back and she tasted hot blood in her mouth. Spots swam before her eyes. Rrumlau waved the tooth with its bloody roots in front of her eyes before tossing it into the fire.
Three more times, and each time Mriy wished she was weakling enough to pass out from the pain.
When they finally untied the bit from her mouth, it slid out easily; no canine fangs impeded its exit. When they cut her bonds, she lay limp; no strength
remained in her muscles.
“Kill... me.”
Hraim hooked a foot under her side and rolled Mriy onto her back. “You’re going to die, but we won’t kill you. You’re going to die like a human. Alone in the wilderness. Unable to hunt. I’d have shaved you bare like a human, but freezing’s an easy way to go. You’ll find water, if you don’t lie there and give up. You’re going to starve—starve in a forest filled with game you’re too weak and harmless to kill.”
Rrumlau dragged her outdoors by the wrists. The cold felt wonderful, the snow numbing her wounds. She made a point of hiding that revelation, lest they bring her back inside. But it appeared that they had other plans for their shelter. Mriy watched the smoke as it burned.
Hraim was the last to address her before the rebels left. “Mriy Yrris, in your last moments, I hope you repent. Think about what you’ve done, and the mistakes that brought you to this end.”
Mriy knew already. Hraim, Rrumlau, and all the rest had shown her with perfect clarity. She should never have come back.
# # #
Carl stood at the back of the viewing room in the Yinnak, killing time along with a host of Mriy’s relatives and his own goddamn wizard. The box he flipped idly and caught, again and again, was worth 25,000 terras to whoever was slumming around astral space at the edge of the system. Mort could trust the azrins for a few hours—tops—and be back to watch the end of the contest. Instead, Mort sat there stuffing local sushi in his face, explaining the nuances of Napoleonic warfare as the holovid showed the Battle of Waterloo.
The only thing that kept Carl from losing his cool and screaming Mort’s bloody head off was the fact that the other 25,000 had been paid up front. It took a lot to upset the captain of a ship who’d just put 25,000 terras in his pocket, but a thin thread dangling the other half toward a black hole was enough to do it. Just then he wished Mort actually worked for him, so he could threaten to fire him.