by T E Olivant
By the time the light began to leach forward into the building from the torch I had lost most of my fear. If there had been some terrible monster lurking in here it would have attacked by now. The first thing I noticed was a pile of blankets in a corner and I crawled over on my aching muscles to cover myself in them. I still felt cold, like I might never feel warm again, but as I cowered down into the strange fabric some of the feeling began to return to my legs. I covered myself so that just my eyes and nose peeked out of the scratchy covers and poked the torch out and examined the rest of the building. The walls were roughly carved rock. Along the walls there were uneven shelves, but they were bare, and I shook my head at the futility of it all. Without water at least I had probably only bought myself a few more hours. Then I noticed something strange in the corner.
There was a pipe that led from the ceiling down to some sort of mechanical box. It was made out of a strange material that felt almost warm to the touch. There was a tap at the bottom. Without thinking I turned it and precious liquid spilled out onto the floor. I closed the valve as quickly as I could and could feel my heart racing. Water! I looked around and sure enough there was a round bowl on the floor. I filled it carefully from the tap, and downed it in one. I felt the chill liquid move down my throat, and hit my empty stomach and almost felt giddy. I poured a second cup but forced myself to drink it more slowly. I looked again at the connection to the ceiling: the machine had to be some sort of snow filter. I wasn’t sure how, but it meant that what came out the bottom was pure clean water, icy cold but better than anything I had ever tasted.
I wonder who made it, I thought, just as weariness finally overtook me and I lay down and slept on the floor.
Chapter 10: Kyrk
I heard the wolf pack when I was too far away to do anything. The howl of the White wolf is the one sound that can terrify even a Hunter – it means that they have found their prey. There were no deer out here, so the only thing they could have found was man. It was too late, but I ran anyway, as it was the only thing left to do and I had to do something. As I ran I drew my father’s knife from its sheath on my chest. It felt cool and smooth in my hand and I tried to be comforted by its familiar weight, even as I wished for a bigger weapon. Or an army. It was unwise to take on a single wolf alone. To try to fight a pack would be suicide.
The snow and ice flew past as I ran. My mind exhilarated in the speed even as my body complained. Before long I started to catch the wolf scent on the air, dense and musky and it was all I could do not to let out a roar. It was not until I could see tiny specks on the horizon that I slowed my pace and began to stalk around, looking for an approach.
I had to circle the pack to the East so that I was not upwind. Each step cost me valuable time. I was a mile away when I started to worry about stealth. I dropped to the snow, hidden behind a small drift. I edged my head over the snow and looked around. I silently thanked my ancestors for my Hunters eyes. I could see the pack as clearly as if they were standing right before me. I could even make out the beads of sweat on each snarling muzzle.
I crept forward, hoping that a plan would occur to me before I got to the pack. I had never had to fight a wolf pack before. Hunters avoid wolves in the main: unless they were a threat. I tried to remember what my father had told about wolves.
“Never run from wolves. Find high ground if you can. And you can’t fight the pack, so try to get somewhere where they can only attack one on one. You must find the leader, and you must kill him. You fight to the death. If you ever have to fight a wolf then know that one of you will die. Because a wolf chief won’t stop fighting until he’s dead.”
I pictured my father, stern and wise and tried to imagine that I was as strong or as clever as him. But he had been killed on the White, and somehow I had to do better.
It didn’t take long for me to spot my target. The leader of the wolves was huge. Bigger than I had ever seen, even among the large packs of the Eastern White. He held his head low, with massive grey shoulders arched up behind it. He could have stood level with even a giant elk and had no fear of being overpowered. He was a monster.
And then I saw something incredible. I wasn’t too late: there was someone alive in the middle of the pack. The sun was behind him so I couldn’t see what clan he was from. He was slight though, possibly a Doctor or even a small Seeker.
The man was lucky. He had found one of the large dark rocks that jutted from the White like a jagged black tooth. He stood on the very tip, and this had probably saved his life so far. The pack could only attack one by one, not in a group as they would like. But he was failing. With every step closer I could see more of his body language and it didn’t look good. His shoulders drooped and his legs scrambled to keep hold on the rock. He pointed something at the grey wolves, it must have been a knife, but it only seemed to keep them just out of reach. All they had to do was to bide their time.
I stalked out of the snow, low and deadly. My knife was in my right hand and I made a fist with my left. I knew wolves, knew enough to fear them. The leader must be killed, then the rest might flee. But to do that I had to get to the leader first.
I moved forward, slowly but smoothly. As I hunched low I mimicked the wolves themselves, crawling forward on all fours. I crept on until I was mere feet behind the pack and they still hadn’t seen me. It was time to break cover, but I hesitated. I felt fear, colder than the snow I stood on, wrap itself round my chest until I could barely breathe. I closed my eyes for a moment. Focus, I told myself. Use the fear, don’t let it use you.
When I opened my eyes my mind was clearer, and I leapt forward. I landed on the back of a female, and her scent hit me like a punch to the throat. She howled as she felt me on her back, but as quick as she snapped her head round to bite I had leapt off again, onto the haunch of the next wolf. The pack started to bark now, sensing a threat but not realising where it came from. I only had seconds to act. The next leap took me to a mound of snow and I rolled forward back onto my feet. I was directly behind the leader now, but I had been a fraction too slow. I had hoped to grab him from behind but he had turned to face me. I couldn’t even see the man the pack had cornered, so large was this wolf-chief that he blocked out the rest of my vision.
The wolf curled his lips up and I saw saliva dripping from his huge ragged teeth. His growl was so loud and low it seemed to vibrate through every bone in my body. Just as I thought I might fail, I felt the fear ebb out of me and instinct take control. My muscles tensed under my fur and I almost smiled. This was what I was born for.
I feinted left and lunged right, stabbing the knife into the wolf’s neck. He howled but more in anger than in pain and flicked a giant paw towards me. I felt the claws scratch my back but the pain was strangely absent, as if happening to another man, another body. I tucked myself into a ball and rolled underneath the wolf, slashing wildly as I passed at his belly. This brought me a howl of pain and I roared back in satisfaction, even as I tucked myself out of the way of his snarling muzzle. He turned to face me and I stood tall in front of him. I waited for him to move, and I must have wounded him because he was just a fraction of a second too slow. His jaws snapped shut on nothing but icy air as I sprang onto his neck. Before he had time to react I plunged the knife into his eye and it was all over. The giant body underneath me shivered once, then fell onto the ice. I screamed in pain and anger and triumph. The other wolves howled and ran, their pack broken in an instant. I slipped from the body and lay down on the ice next to it, utterly exhausted.
After a few moments rest my Hunter’s instinct kicked in and I pulled my weary bones from the ice. I had almost forgotten about the human cries I had heard before I descended on the pack. I walked slowly over to the jagged peak.
“Hello?” I called out, and a figure appeared above me silhouetted against the sun. He jumped down and landed in front of me. As he landed he gave a yelp and fell backwards. It was all I could do not to do the same.
The creature before me was not human. It was
small, barely up to my chest with thin arms and legs. Its face was heart shaped with large brown eyes and a small pouted mouth. Its eyes watched me, and it looked surprisingly intelligent. Then I noticed that what I had taken for pale fur was some kind of shimmering clothing. It was pulled tight from his toes right over his head and a transparent window in the front showed his face.
“What are you?” I hissed.
“I am human. What are you?”
I awoke flat on my back on the snow and at first the only thing I was aware of was a tearing ache that started at my feet and ended at my head, along with everything in between. As I moved to rub my aching limbs the events of the day before came flooding back. The long trek across the White, the battle with the wolves, and finding the stranger. Which meant that…
The creature was curled in on himself as he slept under a spare fur from my pack. The strange clothing that stuck to his skin covered him all over, and the only part I could see clearly was his face, which was behind a transparent panel of some kind. I had wondered if maybe I had imagined his strangeness, if he could just be a runt of some obscure clan I didn’t know. But it only took one look to see that this creature was not of my world.
“Hello, my name is Angel Sam.”
If I hadn’t already been on the ground I would have fallen down in shock. The creature had opened its eyes and spoken. I grabbed my knife and rose slowly from the floor. He stared back at me. Then my brain processed what he had said: he spoke my language! This strange pale alien actually spoke the same words I did, although his voice was higher and some of the vowel sounds were a little off. I would have been less surprised if he had sung like a bird, or growled like a beast of the White. What was he?
“Do you understand me? I’m Sam, what’s your name?”
He held his hand out towards me and I backed away. He was no threat, I could have crushed his skull in an instant with my bare claws. But he was just too strange, I didn’t want to be near him. I would have rather have confronted an angry mother elk than this creature. But he hadn’t been trying to touch me. Instead he reached for the pack by his side.
“Here, it’s food, do you want some?” He took a small wrapped block from his bag and began to mime eating it. He then held it out to me as if I was some wild creature he was trying to tame.
“I am no animal,” I said finally. “My name is Kyrk, and I do not need your food.”
The boy looked just as frightened as I had to hear me speak. He put down his pack and stared.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you.”
I sighed and dropped my knife to my side. Whatever this thing might be, he was clearly not a threat, at least not at this moment.
“I’m going to ask you some questions,” I said slowly, “and I need you to answer them before I decide what to do with you.”
The boy looked pale, but I had to make it clear who was in charge.
“All right,” he said.
“How old are you?”
“Eighteen.”
A year older than me. But he looked like a child!
“Where did you come from?”
“The City.”
“The City? Not possible.” I stared at him angrily. How dare he lie to me. “You would have been spotted as you passed the Peak. Besides, you couldn’t have trekked that far south with no supplies.”
“I didn’t come south,” he interrupted, “I came north.”
“But you can’t have come north from the city.”
The boy looked at me for a second with his big light eyes. “I think you and I are talking about different cities.”
“But there’s only one city!”
“I used to think that too.” The boy gave an awkward smile that only lifted one side of his mouth. I scooted back onto my haunches and stared at him. I couldn’t help feeling that this had to be a trap. He couldn’t be as vulnerable as he seemed, he had managed to keep the wolves at bay after all. I didn’t trust him one bit.
Another city! More than anything else this stranger told me the news that there was a second city shocked me. I thought I knew the White and all the creatures that lived on it. But as this boy told me about his home under the snow I realised that I had never really known it at all.
The pale faced alien talked non-stop. Unlike me he seemed excited by the notion that there was another civilisation that he had never heard of. He asked me question after question about my people, but I kept my answers brief. For all I knew he was some kind of spy, sent to find out our weaknesses. I squirmed as I saw those sharp eyes take in every snippet of information I gave him.
I looked up at the sun and was surprised to see that it was nearly down at the horizon. We had been talking for hours and there was no point in setting off for the Peak before nightfall. Just one look at the stranger told me that he would not manage to trek in the dark, so I began to set up camp.
The boy who called himself Angel Sam watched me stretch the deer skin until I had made a shelter that would just about cover us both. Thank goodness he was so puny – a larger man would never have been able to share the tent.
“We could share my food?” He said, holding out the strange package he had shown me earlier. I sniffed it once then turned my head in disgust. It smelt unnatural, like metal.
He shrugged and replaced it in the pack and I saw something strange inside.
“What is that?” I pointed at the smooth grey object.
“It’s a weapon.”
Now I remembered – this was what the boy had pointed at the wolves to stop them from attacking him.
“May I see it?” He hesitated for a moment then handed it over.
“Be careful not to touch the button on top, that’s how it fires.”
“How does it work?” I asked, feeling its deceptive weight in my hand.
“It fires a pulse of electricity towards the enemy.”
“What’s electricity?”
The strange man blinked twice.
“You don’t know? I assumed you must have it... I don’t really know how to explain. It’s a power that we harvest from the sun and then store in machines. It can do… well anything really. I can show you.”
He grabbed for the object and pointed it at one of the nearby flints. Some sort of light shot out from the metal and the rock jumped in the air. It came down in pieces. Stunned, I walked over and picked them up. They felt hot to the touch.
“The only problem is it needs time to charge, I was almost out of power when you arrived.” I pretended to listen but all I could do was to stare at the weapon. It made our knives look like children’s toys. This boy may not realise it, but I knew at that moment that this alien object would change everything.
“Time to sleep,” I grunted. I needed space to think.
When I woke the next morning the tent was empty. It took me a moment to realise what was missing but seconds later I had leapt from the floor and ran out into the White. I stopped and sniffed the air. I had almost convinced myself that my encounter with the man from underground was just a dream when I caught his scent on the wind. I ran towards him but stopped when I saw him hunched over the snow. I slowed my pace and walked over to join him, trying to keep a lid on the anger that threatened to burst from my chest.
“You shouldn’t just run out into the White like that.”
“Sorry. I just wanted to see it again.” I stepped past him and looked down at the wolf carcass. It was half frozen but the beast was almost as terrifying dead as alive. It was twice as big as a man and it stank. As I stood beside him I saw tears slide down the inside of his mask.
I felt like I should say something to comfort him, but I was overcome by a sudden irritation at his weakness. What could I do with this stranger from underground who was no better equipped to deal with the White than the tiniest child? I only had one option. I had to bring him to the Seekers, bring him to Swift.
The walk back across the ice would take days. Although he had somehow managed to survive on the ice for a day before
I arrived, the stranger was still in terrible danger from the freeze. His thin suit seemed to offer some protection against the cold, but I knew it would be useless if it received even a tiny tear. I wondered what it was made from; clearly no animal had ever worn it. It shimmered in the light and was the colour of worked flint. I thought again about the electric weapon in his bag. I needed to get him back to my people, and fast.
When I told him that I wanted him to walk across the ice to an unknown place, I was prepared to have to fight him to get him to come. He stared into space for a moment.
“How far is it?”
“Four days walk for me. More for you.”
He gave a grim smile.
“Then we better start soon. I don’t have much of my supplies left.”
I was impressed by his bravery. I told myself not to underestimate this man. His body made him seem like a child, but he was clever. I wasn’t sure if that was a good or a bad thing.
“Don’t worry about supplies.” I gestured to the furry mound at our feet. “Our grey friend here will provide.”
The man looked down at the corpse of the wolf in surprise. I laughed: he had so much to learn.
I skinned the carcass, working quickly with my sharp knife. At first the stranger watched with interest, but working with wolf flesh is a stinking job, and I was not surprised that he had to turn away eventually. I diplomatically ignored the sound of him throwing up behind the tent. It took me half an hour to skin the beast, longer than usual but I was still tired from the fight. It was the largest wolf I had ever seen, and I felt proud to have killed it. It also concerned me: the wolves were not supposed to grow this large. It made for a worrying trend, and I filed it at the back of my mind to report to the other Hunters later. Then I remembered that I wasn’t a Hunter anymore.