D'Arc

by Robert Repino

  Then he heard the blade slide from its scabbard. Shhhhinnng.

  Sheba’s eyes, deadened until now, opened so wide that they seemed to take up her entire face. She sniffed the air, her nostrils puffing outward and gulping in the scent. For a second—a very long second—Mort(e) thought that she planned to use the sword on him. But her head swiveled like a mounted machine gun, stopping and then darting in a new direction.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  She sprinted toward the forest, vaulting the concrete divider.

  “No,” Mort(e) said. “No, no, no, no, no.”

  He went after her. The pine trees masked whatever scent she was tracking. Mort(e) could see Sheba only in flashes among the foliage, many paces ahead. He released the safety on the machine gun strapped to his shoulder.

  Then he smelled it, and his heart sank. An Alpha soldier had passed through, flattening the grass, leaving tracks in the mud, deep gashes in the bark. There was no telling what these giants were capable of doing now that the Queen was dead. They received no instructions, an army disbanded but prepared to kill.

  At a clearing in the forest, the beast had trampled the weeds flat. The tracks ended at a pond. Sheba stood beside the water, gripping the sword in both hands. Mort(e) wanted to tell her to leave it alone. But he also wanted to see what she would do.

  Before he could decide, the surface of the pond exploded. The Alpha leapt to her hind legs, four claws extended, her jaw split open. Sheba sidestepped as the creature landed in the dirt. As the Alpha lifted her head, Sheba swung the sword and connected, severing an antenna. Mort(e) charged, trying to aim, but Sheba stood in the way.

  The earth shook. Mort(e) turned to see dozens of Alphas stampeding through the clearing like a herd of buffalo. Their claws hit the ground in irregular hoofbeats, each foot ripping out a mound of dirt. They did not seem to notice him. Their antennae pointed to some far-off destination. Mort(e) considered firing, but was too panicked to even swing his gun in their direction. Instead, he ran and tackled Sheba as she prepared to strike again. They splashed into the pond as the horde of ants stormed through the forest. Under the water, she held still while an Alpha dove in and swam past them, scraping Mort(e)’s leg.

  Mort(e) and Sheba surfaced. The stampede had passed, all dust and bobbing abdomens. Sheba waded to the edge of the pond and broke into a run.

  “Oh, come on,” Mort(e) said.

  She caught one of the slower ants, the one with the missing antenna. A quick swing of Sheba’s blade lopped off one of the ant’s legs, causing the beast to topple to her side, dragging herself along. Sprinting, Sheba jumped onto the abdomen and plunged the blade into the flesh, down to the hilt. The Alpha skidded to a halt. When the ant tried to twist her body around to snap at Sheba, the dog pulled the sword out and stabbed the Alpha at the base of her neck. The ant shuddered.

  Another Alpha approached, its antennae probing. Mort(e) aimed his gun. But he did not need to shoot. Sheba kept her eye on the other ant while she twisted the blade, silencing her prey. The curious Alpha scurried away.

  Sheba yanked the sword out, taking with it a stream of black gore. She slashed at the dead ant. Another leg fell to the ground. Then a chunk of armor. Then, with one big swing, Sheba took off the head. It thunked onto the dirt. She stood on the thorax panting while blood emptied from the wound.

  “Do you feel better?” Mort(e) asked.

  “Yes.”

  The rumbling of the herd died out. Sheba wiped the blade on the carcass and slid the sword into its scabbard.

  They spent the rest of the day dismantling the Alpha. Mort(e) learned how to do it years earlier, when an Alpha fell in combat and needed to be euthanized. Tiberius, the company medic, showed Mort(e) how to dress the animal for cooking, how to store the meat. The trick was getting to the body quickly enough. Waiting too long meant that the meat would stick to the exoskeleton instead of sloughing right off. If the Alpha had a stinger, the bulb needed to be removed intact with a sharp knife—otherwise, all the good parts below the thorax could be ruined. Culdesac, the commanding officer, preferred to roast the legs over a fire and then suck out the soft insides. Land lobster, he called it.

  Mort(e) taught Sheba the entire process, as much as he could remember. She couldn’t help sniffing the guts and muscles. She had been their prisoner for so long, tricked into believing that her quiet life as a pet had never ended. Now Mort(e) could give her the gift of tearing apart one of these creatures with the very hands that they gave to her. Passing along Tiberius’s knowledge, and seeing Sheba laugh for the first time, pleased Mort(e) in a way that he would have to keep to himself. He didn’t want to let on that he viewed these past few days as some kind of audition.

  Over a campfire, they ate roasted land lobster one leg at a time. The severed claws rested in the coals until they were piping hot. Sheba enjoyed the food so much she hummed while she chewed. Neither of them had eaten this much meat in years. They held a competition to see who could extract the largest piece of flesh without breaking it off. Mort(e) won the first time. He let Sheba win the second. “But really we’re both winners,” he said. He waved at her with the claw. She giggled. Then she doubled over with laughter when he used it as a backscratcher. Apparently, the act of killing brought out her sense of humor.

  “You know,” Mort(e) said, “I’ve been wondering what we would do for food. I’m not much of a farmer.”

  He dropped the hollow leg into the fire.

  “Those ants are wandering around with no orders,” he continued. “Alphas are usually covered in smaller ants, but these ones got separated somehow. They don’t know what to do. If we could track the herd, round ’em up, we could start a little ant farm.”

  “No,” Sheba said. “A big ant farm. Big ants.”

  Mort(e) laughed and reached for another leg. Sweet steam rose from the broken joint.

  “Not sure how long they live,” Mort(e) said. “But Tiberius taught me how to smoke the meat. This one alone could get us through the next couple of weeks. Just have to find a space large enough to hold the rest of them.”

  They would find the biggest house, he told her. Deep in the woods. A decadent human dwelling with a fireplace and a rug with a patch of sunlight on it.

  “They won’t find us for a while,” he said. “The warmongers and the prophecy peddlers.” And if they did, Mort(e) and Sheba could continue west and hope they would find more trees and water instead of decay and death. They couldn’t trust anyone, even those who fought in the war. The forest would be their home, he told her, as it had been for their ancestors, long before the humans ruined everything.

  The time had come for him to say what he wanted to say for days now. For years.

  “I didn’t go looking for you so you could be my pet,” he said.

  Sheba stopped fiddling with a leg and placed it in the fire.

  “You’re free now,” he said. “I can’t be your mate. I won’t be your master. I’m your friend. I don’t know how many lives I have left, but they’re yours, if you need them.”

  He told her the saying that Culdesac taught him: You are the master over someone who has told you his story. But the old bobcat applied it only to enemies, not friends. Mort(e) and Sheba knew each other’s stories, and they needed to be gentle with that knowledge. They could use it only for the good of the other.

  When she did not respond, Mort(e) took her hand. “There is a whole world out there, but I’m going deeper into the forest tomorrow. Do you want to go with me?”

  Sheba gazed beyond the flames, out to the mountains rising like black monoliths.

  She let go of his hand. “Tell me what happened to my children,” she said.

  It was her longest sentence so far. But Mort(e) felt relieved. He knew what she meant. She would go with him if he told her everything, even if it made her sad. It broke his heart to think of how many moments they had sha
red as animals, unable to speak. In these woods, he would learn about her all over again. A war destroyed everything, and yet they survived. They would take what this world left them. They were alive and together—they had that right.

  Mort(e) walked over to the pile of firewood. He dug out the largest piece, a trunk thicker than his waist. The embers danced as he heaved the log into the fire.

  Sheba waited for him to begin.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Story of Falkirk

  Falkirk arrived at the refugee camp late in the afternoon. Another winter had ended, though the forests held on to the chill, with fog tumbling over the melting snow. The muddy ground, soaked with drainage from the mountains, squished under his feet. He didn’t wear shoes like some of the other agents, and the humans he worked with would often tease him for it. When they asked him why he still went barefoot, he’d respond, “Because we won the war.”

  The camp consisted of a few dozen lodges, hastily constructed from sticks, tarps, and mud. As far as he could tell, everyone in the camp was a beaver, probably all related. Falkirk could smell them on the way in, thanks to the fetid scent mounds built out of mud and cemented with urine—an odd territorial habit left over from before the Change. At least the beavers had the good sense to put their latrine somewhere else—otherwise, Falkirk would have been tempted to tell his superiors in Hosanna that he hadn’t been able to find these people.

  An altar stood in an open square, with a stone top and legs made of tree trunks. A priestess with a white stole held aloft a jar of burning incense. Two underlings stood behind her, their leathery hands folded. While she sang a prayer, they hummed the background tune. Beavers always sang like this. It mimicked the sound of the water flowing, a vibration that drove them to build their elaborate dams. The priestess sneaked in a few lyrics praising the three goddesses that represented the water, the earth, and the forest. Under normal circumstances, Falkirk would have reported this blasphemy to the elders in Hosanna. This time, it would have to wait. Besides, this community sat at the edge of Sanctuary Union territory, surrounded by the wolf clans. They had enough problems without Falkirk tattling on them.

  Like some medieval outpost, two beavers guarded the entrance to the camp, both holding spears. Falkirk expected them to cross the weapons like an X if he tried to pass. As he got closer, the sentries mumbled to each other, no doubt wondering what a dog was doing here. Falkirk pulled out the Sanctuary Union ID badge from his satchel. He did not expect them to understand the lingo about his rank and status. He only wanted them to see the eyeball symbol in the upper right corner, announcing him as a bona fide agent of the Department of Tranquility, Special Operations.

  “Come with us,” one of the guards said. “We’ll take you to Castor.”

  “No,” Falkirk said. “Go get him. Bring him here. We have work to do.”

  As the guard went into the camp, Falkirk could hear the refugees debating over where he came from. Minutes later, he saw the guard approaching with Castor, a beaver who wore goggles perched on his forehead. His species tended to have terrible eyesight, and the lucky ones constructed lenses that helped them to see. Near the entrance of a lodge, an elderly beaver stopped Castor as he walked by. Falkirk knew from the reports that this was Nikaya, Castor’s mother, the founder of Lodge City. Castor had taken over as leader now that she had gone nearly blind, possibly senile. She said a few words to him. Castor nodded and kept walking.

  A young kit trotted behind him, perhaps only a few years old. A tuft of orange hair stuck out from the top of his head, like a permanent flame. The child held a toy zeppelin carved from wood, with the word Vesuvius stenciled into the side. All the children in the Union loved the Vesuvius. While Castor introduced himself, Falkirk thought of his own son, who once owned a similar model salvaged from an abandoned toy store.

  “Thank you for coming,” Castor said. “Do you need anything before we go?”

  “No.”

  “Are you a wolf?” the kit asked.

  “Booker!” Castor said. One of the guards snorted. Castor apologized to Falkirk, who waved it off.

  “I’m a husky,” Falkirk said. He saw a mixture of relief and disappointment in the kit’s face.

  “Forgive my son,” Castor said. “He’s very curious.”

  Falkirk nodded. He told Castor to lead the way.

  They arrived at a freshly carved path, where the beavers had felled several trees. Covered in teeth marks, the stumps had been whittled into cones. Falkirk placed his hand on them to gauge their smoothness.

  Castor asked many questions. Falkirk answered the ones he could, and deflected the ones that trespassed into classified information. Special Operations existed for a variety of reasons. Chief among them was tracking anomalies related to the Change. As expected, the beaver inquired about the kinds of rumors that only people living in the sticks would take seriously. Falkirk patiently explained that there had been no confirmed cases of wolves cannibalizing their own out west, or of trees uprooting themselves and walking around, or of the Queen’s hormone causing long-term illnesses or birth defects. Castor also asked about the reports of murders in the capital. Some of the traveling merchants claimed that it was a serial killer, like something out of an old human horror movie. Hosanna was a big city with many different species, Falkirk told him. It was impossible to keep an eye on everyone.

  Eventually, Castor moved on to the stories involving mutated fish. The fish-heads, they were calling them. Here, Falkirk had no trouble saying that the SO had investigated the rumors, which thus far yielded nothing. “If these fish-heads don’t want to be found, that’s probably a good thing.”

  The steep hill they climbed left Castor too out of breath to ask more questions.

  “Have you ever been in a zeppelin?” Booker asked.

  “I have,” Falkirk said.

  “I’ve seen them flying over Lodge City.”

  “When?”

  “Last spring.”

  “Did it hover over the city for a while?”

  “Yes.”

  “And then turn southwest, to Hosanna, after the sun went down?”

  “Yes! It turned on the spotlight and lit up the city! How did you know?”

  “That was me.”

  “What do you mean that was you?” Castor said, panting.

  “I used to be the commander of a ship.”

  “The Vesuvius?” Booker asked. His father laughed.

  “Yes.”

  Castor stopped laughing. “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “What happened? What are you doing out here?”

  “Things change. Isn’t that what all of us are doing out here?”

  As they crested one final hill, with the sun going down, they crawled on their bellies so they could peer over the ridge without being seen. Booker followed, though he stopped short of the top. Castor pulled the goggles over his beady eyes.

  From the hillside, Lodge City sprawled out before them in the failing light. Several buildings from the human era survived, all built from stone—a post office, a high school, a fire station. Around these decaying structures stood massive mounds of earth and tree branches, the lodges that the beavers preferred. A waterwheel stood frozen in the river. Downstream, a partial dam channeled water through sunken canals, perfect for ferrying objects or for swimming. A new church made from logs rose in the center of the town. The beavers had a saying: the water flows. It meant that they always had work to do, always a river to bend, always more lodges to construct. For them, this triumph of animal architecture proved how enlightened their species had become. A sort of middle finger extended from their newly formed hands.

  From his perch on the hillside, the town seemed out of focus to Falkirk, as if some gel had been smeared over his eyes. He pulled the binoculars from his satchel. Through the magnified lenses, he stared at the town for a long time before
he could accept what he saw. “Why didn’t you come to us sooner?” he asked.

  “Why did Tranquility send only one agent?” Castor replied. “We need an army.”

  Unable to answer, Falkirk looked again, panning more slowly this time. He could make out the contours of it: a spiderweb, consisting of millions of strands, draped over the town like a snowfall suspended in midair. The streetlamps, along with a few lights still burning in the houses, made the veneer glow like melted gold. Coiled ropes of silk stretched from the rooftops, pillars, and telephone poles, creating a network of pathways above the entire town. The white fibers reached from the base of the watermill across the river, forming a bridge to the other side.

  “Have you seen an arachnid before?” Castor asked.

  “Only in a vat of formaldehyde. They caught it down south somewhere.”

  “Over by the soccer stadium,” Castor said. “North end of town. You’ll see her. We call her Gulaga.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Mistress of the Gulag, I guess. My mother came up with it.”

  Before the war, the stadium must have been a nice place to watch a game on a crisp fall evening. But now, the web was pulled taut across the field, from one set of bleachers to the other, forming a giant hammock. Something stirred on the fringes of the web. Falkirk blinked a few times, and everything became still again. Cylindrical objects, wrapped in the silky filament, clung to the edges.

  Movement again. He focused in on it. One of the cylinders had burst open. Something squirmed from the inside. An appendage. An arm. The cylinder held one of the citizens of Lodge City. A beaver, trying to claw his way free. He could move only one limb. The other arm had been injured, apparently.

  No. No, the other arm was bitten off at the shoulder. That’s what these arachnids did. They amputated the pieces they wanted, numbed and cauterized the wound, saved the rest for later.

  “No,” Falkirk whispered. “No, stay still. Stay still.”