The Good, the Bad, and the Merc: Even More Stories from the Four Horsemen Universe (The Revelations Cycle Book 8)

by Chris Kennedy

  She figured out how to use her teeth to pull small chunks of flesh out, and nearly died when she choked on a piece that was too big to swallow. She gasped and coughed, and when it came loose, she decided teeth were for more than just tearing the food away from its home. Chewing was also an essential part of the business.

  As she ate, that tearing, piercing pain in her middle finally eased. A strange lassitude began to take its place, washing over her from the tips of her ears to her feet and tail, making her motions sloppy and slow. She wavered in place, her belly distended, and then took the steps required to move off of the bloody gash and curl up in the curve of the animal’s rear limbs. The wiry, cooling fur was not the soft comfort she wanted, but it wasn’t nothing, either, and before she could think more about it, her eyelids closed and she slept.

  * * *

  Something slammed into her, knocking the breath once more from her body. She struggled to swim up to full consciousness as immovable bands of pain wrapped once, twice around her body, pinning her forelimbs to her sides. She fell, tangled in that suffocating twist as she tumbled down off the body of the animal carcass.

  Some instinct reminded her that her tail and back feet were free. That horrible badness of fear flashed through her, burning away the rest of her fatigue, spurring her to action. She used her small tail to tangle with the whipping end of whatever had grabbed her. She wanted to keep it from wrapping her up further, and her instinct whispered that the stinging end should be avoided.

  With a gasp of defiance, she lifted her back feet up, claws extended, and raked against the lower band that held her. She scrabbled at it, fighting it as she fought to breathe. Two of the claws on her right foot pierced some kind of thick hide and stuck. She let out a strangled, meeping yell and yanked, and the thing holding her howled in pain.

  It also dropped her.

  Instinct had her twisting in the air so that she landed on her feet. She looked up at her attacker with a snarl she didn’t know she could make.

  “Little hunterrrr,” the thing said. It rose above the bulk of the carcass and peered down at her. It was thin, like the thing she’d stepped on earlier. But she recognized its eyes and face, and the words it spoke made sense to her. As it spoke, two wings flared out from the long tube of its body.

  “You hurt me,” she said. And in that moment, she learned that she, too, could speak.

  “Hunting. Why here? Too young. Wherrrre yourrrr Dama?”

  Dama. The word resonated within her, bringing to mind the memory of soft fur, warm milk…

  No. This thing had hurt her. She could not be sad. She took the outrage and anger she felt and wrapped it around her for protection.

  “I don’t have a Dama,” she said, and in that moment, she knew it was true. If she’d had a Dama, that being would have found her by now. Would have protected her. Would have given her softness and milk, and never let her be cold and hungry and hurt by this…thing. “What are you?”

  “Basrrrreen,” it said, with a strange, high pitched cheeping noise. “Must have Dama. Will die, else. Tough Hunterrrr, but too small.”

  “I don’t have a Dama,” she said again. But she liked the other word the Basreen used. Hunter. It, too, resonated within, setting her instincts alight.

  “Then will die. Must have Dama to teach.”

  “Teach?”

  “Too small. Must learn hunting.”

  “You teach me, then.”

  The Basreen spread its wings and reared back. Surprise, the young hunter realized. She had surprised it.

  “Basreen not Hunter. Not Dama.”

  “But you were hunting; you said so. I need someone to teach me how to hunt. And I have no Dama. And I will. Not. Die. So.”

  The Basreen looked at her for a long moment. Then it began to move, using its long, tubular body to make its way down along the rear legs toward the ground. She could get a better look at the creature as it moved. Its green-grey skin was smooth, and the wings disappeared when pulled in tight. The Basreen’s body ended in a triple ring, and a sharp point. The young hunter felt a surge of gratitude for the instinct that had led her to keep that deadly-looking point away from her body.

  “Had young,” the Basreen said quietly. “Died.”

  “I will not die,” the little hunter said again, her voice steady and cool. The Basreen’s eyes flicked back and forth across her face. Overhead, some creature made a long, fading cry.

  “Not die?” the Basreen said.

  “Not die.”

  “Will teach.”

  * * *

  The Basreen was female, and she had a name. Her name was a word the young hunter didn’t recognize, but came to understand that it meant the sensation of diving through the trees upon unsuspecting prey. The young hunter settled for calling her Teacher.

  Teacher gave her a name, too.

  “Name important. Powerful. Must have name. Name me Teacher. Is good. I teach. You? You must kill. Need killing name.”

  “All right,” the young hunter said, shivering as the night breeze picked up. “Give me a killing name.”

  “Wind,” Teacher said, her tone firm and satisfied. “Wind kills, unpredictable. Killing Dark Wind. Good name for hunter.”

  “Killing Dark Wind,” the hunter said, tasting the words on her tongue. And then, as her instinct for language intervened, “Deadly Night Wind. Reow. Yes.”

  “Is good name?”

  “Is good name, Teacher. Thank you.”

  “Good. Now. You kill. Follow.”

  Teacher turned and slithered back up onto the animal carcass where they’d met. She coiled her body into a tight knot, and then flung herself up and out, until she contacted the nearby looming giant that Reow’s mind whispered was called a tree. Then Teacher proceeded to slither her way up until she looped her body around one of the branches overhead. She looked down at Reow on the ground below.

  “Follow,” she said again.

  “I can’t do that,” Reow said. “My body is different…”

  “No can’t. Can’t means die. Must follow.”

  “But I—”

  “No can’t. Find way.”

  Frustration rolled through her, making her fur stand up on end. She glared up at the branch—so impossibly high! But she had said she would not die, and if she was to live, Teacher said she had to get up on that branch. So. Find way.

  Reow stepped forward and picked her way back up the limbs of the animal carcass to the top. The red deliciousness she had gorged on earlier had turned darker with time, and the scent carried a new, sickly sweet tang to it. She huffed out her nose to push the unpleasantness away and looked at the tree.

  She could see it had a rough surface, perhaps something she could catch with her claws. Drawing heavily on her instincts, she crouched low, gathering all the power her small legs could generate. One more deep breath and she leapt, all four limbs stretched wide, claws and tail extended as she reached for the uneven surface of the tree—

  SLAM!

  Lights flashed in her vision. A high, ringing noise echoed in her head. She felt herself falling. She tried to twist to right herself as she’d done before, but the pain in her head and the ringing noise confused her, and she landed hard. Her left shoulder slammed into the body of the carcass, which collapsed and sent out a cloud of noxious gas that threatened to turn her stomach inside out. The rest of her crumpled around her shoulder, and she couldn’t help but let out a cry of distress.

  High above, Teacher did nothing. Simply watched her and waited.

  Reow felt a stab of resentment. But then, Teacher was not a Dama. Not a source of softness and milk. She had no Dama. It was up to her to be her own strength.

  So be it.

  Reow gathered herself together and pushed to her feet. Her shoulder throbbed, but she pushed that pain away. She didn’t have time for that. She had to ‘find way.’

  She tilted her head up, and then, somewhat to her surprise, she pushed herself up on her back legs and stood. She wavered a
little, but her stance was solid, and she realized she could move this way as well as down on four legs. Well then. That was something, perhaps.

  From this vantage point, she tilted her head back and looked up. Teacher still waited, her body wound round the thickness of the branch that remained out of reach. However, something else caught Reow’s eyes that she hadn’t seen before.

  Another branch. Thinner, previously broken…but lower. Almost within reach.

  She dropped back down to her haunches and gathered her body again. This time, when she made the leap, she reached her forelegs out toward that thin, short remnant of a branch. She felt her body stretch to its limit, but her claws grazed the top of the branch. Enough for her to close her paws about its rough, splintery surface. Enough to keep her from plunging down in renewed defeat.

  Without thinking about it, she whipped her little body around the branch, feeling the splinters tear at the fabric of her fingerpads. Like the throb in her shoulder, though, it didn’t matter. What mattered was getting to Teacher. So when her back feet pointed at the green-dappled sky, Reow let go.

  The momentum of her swing flung her high into the air. Again, she let her instincts take over and managed to corkscrew her body over and around, until her claws caught at the underside of Teacher’s branch. For one gut-clenching moment, her claws slipped, and she thought she would fall to the ground, but she managed to fling her legs and tail up around the branch just in time.

  And there she clung, panting, for just a moment while her heartbeat slowed, and she remembered how to breathe. Then she awkwardly pulled herself up onto the branch.

  Teacher said nothing for a long moment. Then she began to slither farther out onto the branch, toward the thin part where the green leaves started to appear. The branch bent under her weight, until the Basreen leapt from it onto a crossing branch from another tree.

  “First lesson. Find way,” Reow heard, as her instructor continued to move through the trees ahead.

  * * *

  The second lesson was harder.

  Teacher led her through the trees to a place where more branches had been pulled and interwoven to create a kind of shelter. Reow followed the Basreen inside, where she found a space barely big enough to stand.

  “Rest now,” Teacher said. “Sleep. Tomorrow, more teaching.”

  And indeed, after the way she’d awakened to a fight, and then the demands of learning Teacher’s first lesson, Reow could feel exhaustion dragging at her young body. She surprised herself with a big yawn and crumpled to the pile of leaves and woven twigs that made up the floor of this small den. After a moment, she slept so deeply she never felt Teacher curling her long, cool body around her.

  Reow awoke when the hunger returned. Fortunately, she remembered where she was, and what had happened. She was Reow, and she had no Dama. She had only Teacher, who sat watching her as Reow opened her eyes.

  “Second lesson. You kill.”

  “I must eat,” Reow said, her voice ragged from sleep and hunger. It felt even worse than it had before, if such a thing were possible. She wasn’t entirely sure she could stand.

  “Kill, eat. No kill. No eat. Is bad. Make sick. Die.”

  Reow felt her face scrunch up as she processed this information. If she understood Teacher correctly, they would not be going back to the carcass of the animal she’d found yesterday. She felt a brief stab of regret, but it was nearly lost in the overwhelming pain of a belly that needed food. And apparently the only way to get food was to kill it.

  Well. If that was the only way…

  She pushed herself to her feet and followed Teacher out of the shelter. As before, the Basreen led her along the interlocking branches and trunks of the trees. Reow had to force herself to move quickly in order to keep up, and more than once her claws skidded where the branches were leaf-wet and slick. But eventually, she started to move with more confidence, and the going got easier after.

  She expected Teacher would take her to a place where she could jump down to the ground, but that was not the case. Instead, Teacher led her to a tree much larger than any she’d yet seen. The trunk itself was so large, Reow couldn’t see around it once she got up close.

  What she could see, though, was movement in and among the broken-up roughness of the tree’s skin. She blinked, and peered at it, sniffed.

  “Is food,” Teacher said. “Watch.”

  It didn’t look like food. It looked like a multitude of small, faintly luminous blobs of slime that wriggled their way through the cracks in the treeskin. Made the cracks in the treeskin, Reow corrected herself a moment later. For it was obvious that this was so. The small blobs would push through an existing crack, widening it until the crack split further down the skin. It was enough to make her wonder if the roughened treeskin all around was due to these gross little… things.

  Spurred on by her hunger, she swiped at the colony. To her annoyance, the things scattered, dipping under the treeskin, and hiding from sight. And as far as she could tell, they gave off no scent… or nothing that differentiated them from the tree itself, at least.

  Teacher let out a chittering sound.

  “Not easy. Must watch grubs. Find way.”

  “There isn’t anything to watch,” Reow complained, as her stomach rumbled. “They’re just digging under the treeskin and making cracks…”

  Oh. Watch. Find way.

  An idea occurred to her with a maddening slowness. By that alone, Reow knew that it was her own idea, and not the result of her survival instinct. If the little things (which didn’t look at all like food, but the hunger was enough to make her a believer) liked cracks in the treeskin, she would give them cracks in the treeskin.

  Very, very carefully, she extended the claws on her right paw, and reached out to puncture one of the small pieces of unmarred treeskin. It made a cracking sound, which bothered her. Everything had run when she’d made that noise by stepping on a stick before. But the grubs had already run. She didn’t know what else to do… and she was really hungry.

  Reow wiggled her claw back and forth, causing the treeskin to split. Immediately, she felt something squishy next to her claw. First one, and then more and more grubs began to pour through the crack she’d made, until her paw was covered in the slimy things.

  Her stomach howled at her, so despite their unappetizing nature, Reow brought her paw to her mouth and ate one.

  Flavor exploded over her tongue. Like the dead animal, but oh, so much better! It tasted like light and heat itself in her mouth. She gasped, and then reached out to take more. Many more.

  “Good Lesson,” Teacher said, slithering down from the branch above, where she’d perched to watch Reow figure this out. “Watch. Find way. Kill. Eat. That is all. No morrre to learrrrn.”

  * * *

  Of course, there was plenty more for Reow to learn. She was still, when all was said and done, an infant. But each lesson, each situation Teacher brought her to, boiled down to the same basic concepts: Watch. Find Way. Kill. Eat.

  That was all. Though she learned how to stalk through treetops and underbrush, how to track prey by scent and sight, and that other sense she couldn’t name, though she spent season after season hunting larger and larger animals under Teacher’s watchful eyes, in the end, it all came down to the lessons. Watch. Find Way. Kill. Eat. There really was no more.

  Then came the night Reow brought down a fully-grown male Cheelin by herself.

  It was a hard-fought battle. She had tracked her prey through the jungle for four nights, watching to observe the big animal’s patterns. She managed to trap it in a narrow cut in the terrain, where it couldn’t use its six legs to best effect. She stalked it through the trees and when the moment was right, she leapt down on it from above, her claws extended.

  Her prey was a big male, but he was old. Past his prime. Teacher had pointed out the signs. His legs were thickened with age, his movements a fraction slower than the others of the herd. Reow had been able to lure him away from the protection o
f his fellows by placing obstacles in his path and strategically herding him to the terrain cut she’d found. The killing box.

  So when she leapt, she was confident of a quick kill. She would hit him just behind where the head connected to his torso, and take out his eyes with one swipe. Then a dive underneath, avoiding the big, heavy stomping legs. Thrust upward with claws and rip open the soft flesh between the first pair of legs, grab the prime nerve cluster there and pull. Then roll out of the way before the beast collapsed on her. Easy.

  Or so the plan had seemed. She learned two lessons that day. The first: no plan survives first contact with the prey. The second: never underestimate the cunning of a beast who has survived to grow old.

  She totally failed to take out his eyes. The Cheelin dodged her initial dive, and she dealt him a glancing blow on his armored shoulder before tumbling to the jungle floor. She tucked, and rolled as she hit. The Cheelin reared up, trumpeting his anger, and hammered his forelegs into loam next to her head. Reow sucked in a breath, rolled again, and flung herself up off the ground. She reached out, grabbing for a tree, a stump, a rock… anything to get her up out of the vulnerable position she was in.

  The only thing she found was the Cheelin’s middle leg.

  Well, fine, she thought as she dug her front claws in. Let’s see how this goes.

  The Cheelin howled again as her ten needle claws penetrated the ultra-thick hide of his skin. A puncture wound like that wouldn’t harm him, but Reow supposed it was at least annoying. She brought her back feet up and began to climb up toward the beast’s belly. He thrashed around, knocking one paw loose. But she hung on, pressed her body close to the rough, armored skin, and kept climbing.

  Eventually, she reached the leg joint, and found a seam in the armor. It wasn’t large enough to be a true vulnerability, and it was only exposed when the beast moved a certain way, but it was what Reow had to work with.