25 For 25

by Various

  Drusher retrieved his papers, gathered up his bags and equipment cases, and walked down into the boarding yard to find himself a seat on the interprovince coach.

  It wasn’t hard. The vehicle, a converted military gref-carrier from the Peninsula, was all but empty. An old woman in a purple shawl sat alone, fingering rosary beads as she read from a dog-eared devotional chapbook. A young mother, hard-faced and tired, occupied another bench seat, her two small children gathered up in her skirts. A rough-faced agri-worker in leather overalls nodded, half-asleep, one arm protectively around the baskets of live, clucking poultry he shared his seat with. His hound, lean and grinning, prowled the aisle. Two young men, identical twins, sat side by side, motionlessly intent. Drusher set himself down near the front of the cabin, far away from anyone else. He shooed the dog away when it came sniffing at his bags.

  A hooter sounded, waking the agri-worker briefly. The coach’s big, caged props began to turn and beat, and the patched rubber skirts of the bulky ground-effect vehicle began to swell out. Drusher felt them drunkenly rise up. One of the little children laughed out in glee at the bobbing motion as the vehicle picked up speed.

  Then they were out of the city terminal and roaring up to the state highway, fuming spray into the gloomy dawn.

  Outer Udar, the most western and – many said – the most heathen of Gershom’s provinces, lay far beyond the Tartred Mountains, forty hours away.

  For the first hour or two, he worked on his notes, refining technical descriptions on his data-slate. Such polish was simply cosmetic. He’d been over it a hundred times and the taxonomy would have been published as complete by now. Complete but for the curiosity.

  He put his slate aside and took the crumpled voxgram from his pocket, hoping yet again that it was a mistake.

  Seven years! Seven damn years of rigorous work. To miss a sub-form of tick-fly, a variant weevil, even a divergent rodentae, well that would just be the way of things. Even, he considered, some class of grazer, if it was localised and sufficiently shy in its habits.

  But an apex predator? Surely, surely not. Any systematic taxonomy identified all apex predators in the initial phase of preparation by dint of the fact they were the most obvious of any world’s creatures.

  No, it was a mistake. The curiosity in Outer Udar was an error. He’d stake his reputation on that.

  The rolling motion of the gref-coach began to lull him. He fell asleep, dreaming of the characterising mouthparts of filter snakes, the distinguishing feather-palps of lowland locustae, and the bold, striated beaks of peninsula huskpeckers.

  He woke to the sound of infant laughter. The coach was stationary, and sleet was dashing against the grey windows. Blinking, he sat up, and repositioned his dislodged spectacles on his nose. At his feet, the two children had his sketchbooks laid open and were giggling as they surveyed the hand-painted images of beasts and fowls.

  ‘Please,’ he said, ‘please be careful with those.’

  The children looked up at him.

  ‘Zoo books,’ said one.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied, taking the sketchbooks away from their grubby hands and closing them.

  ‘Why have you got zoo books?’

  ‘I make zoo books,’ he said.

  They thought about this. Their simple grasp of professional careers did not reach so far. One nudged the other. ‘Are you going to put the beast in your zoo books?’ the nudged one asked.

  ‘The beast?’ he asked. ‘Which beast?’

  ‘The hill beast. It has teeth.’

  ‘Great large teeth.’

  ‘It eats men up.’

  ‘And swine.’

  ‘And swine. With its great large teeth. It has no eyes.’

  ‘Come away!’ their mother called, and the two children scurried back to her down the aisle.

  Drusher looked around the cabin. It was just as he had last seen it. The agri-worker continued to snooze; the old woman was still reading. The only change was the twins, who now sat facing one another, like a mirror.

  The cabin door thumped open and flakes of sleet billowed in around several newcomers. A black-robed demograph servitor, its face a cluster of slack tubes beneath augmetic compound eyes. A short-haired woman in a leather body-glove and fur coat, carrying a brown paper parcel. Another agri-worker, his face chilblained, fighting to keep his long-haired terrier from snapping at the roaming hound. A matronly progenium school teacher in a long grey dress. The short-haired woman helped the matron with her luggage.

  ‘Leofrik! This is Leofrik!’ the servitor called as he walked the cabin. ‘Present your papers!’

  Each voyager offered up his or her documents for the servitor to scan. Gershom was very particular about its indigents, the side effect of being so close to a war zone. The Departmento demographicae maintained a vigilant watch on the planet’s human traffic.

  The servitor, waste spittle drooling from its mouth tubes, took a long time studying Drusher’s papers.

  ‘Magos biologis?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Reason for travel?’

  ‘I went through all this at the terminal this morning.’

  ‘Reason for travel?’

  Drusher sighed. ‘Seven years ago, I was commissioned by the Lord Governor of Gershom to draw up a comprehensive taxonomy of the planet’s fauna. It is all but complete. However, a curiosity has appeared in Outer Udar and I am travelling there to examine it.’

  Drusher wanted to go on. To talk about the extended deadlines he had been forced to request, the increasingly reluctant project funding that had obliged him to take the overland coach instead of a chartered flier, the preposterous idea that he might have missed an apex predator.

  But the demograph servitor wasn’t interested. It handed the papers back to Drusher and stalked away.

  In the meantime, the short-haired woman had taken the seat opposite him. She smiled at Drusher. Her face was lean and sturdy, with a tiny scar zagging up from the left hand corner of her lip. Her eyes were dazzling amber, like photoluminescent cells.

  Drusher looked away.

  ‘Magos biologis?’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I couldn’t help overhearing.’

  ‘Apparently.’

  The servitor had dismounted. With a lurch like sea-swell, the gref-carrier rose and got underway again.

  ‘I was told you were coming,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  The woman reached into her fur coat – highland fox, if he wasn’t mistaken – and produced a wallet which she flipped open to reveal the golden badge inside.

  ‘Germaine Macks, province arbites.’

  ‘You were expecting me, officer?’

  ‘A squirt from the governor’s office. An expert on his way. I’m thrilled, of course. It’s about time. So, what’s the plan?’

  ‘Plan?’

  ‘Your m.o.?’

  Drusher shrugged. ‘I suppose I’ll examine habitat, look for spores, collate cases and get a decent pict or two if I can.’ His voice trailed off. In seven years, no official had ever taken such interest in his work.

  ‘And how do you plan to kill it?’ she asked.

  ‘Kill it?’ he echoed.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, chuckling, as if party to some joke. ‘That being the point.’

  ‘I don’t intend to kill it. I don’t take samples. Just descriptive records, for the taxonomy.’ He patted his sketchbooks.

  ‘But you have to kill it,’ she said, earnestly. ‘I mean, if you don’t, who the hell will?’

  By the firelight of the great hearth, Baron Karne went on expansively for several minutes.

  ‘The Lord Governor is a personal friend, a childhood friend, and when he makes it known that a scholar such as yourself is coming to my part of the world, I take pains to make that scholar welcome. Ask, and it will be given, magos. Any service, any requirement. I am happy to provide.’

  ‘Th–thank you, baron,’ Drusher said uneasily. He looked about the room. Trophy he
ads, crested with vast antlers and grimacing their fangs, haunted the shadowy walls. A winter storm battered at the leaded windows. Outer Udar was colder than he had dared imagine.

  ‘I wonder if there might have been a mistake,’ Drusher ventured.

  ‘How is that?’

  ‘Sir, I am a taxonomist. A scholar. My expertise is in the cataloguing of fauna-forms. The Lord Governor – your childhood friend, as you say – commissioned me to compile a concordance of Gershom’s animal life. I’ve come here because... well, there seems to be a curiosity out here I may have missed. A predator. I’m here to identify it for the taxonomy. Not kill it. I’m no hunter.’

  ‘You’re not?’

  ‘Not at all, sir. I sketch and examine and catalogue.’

  The baron bowed his head. ‘Dear me... really?’

  ‘I’m truly sorry, sir.’

  He looked over at the door into the dining room. It was ajar and light slanted through.

  ‘What will I tell them?’ the baron said.

  Drusher felt desperately out of his depth. ‘If you have guests – I mean, to save face – I could play along, I suppose.’

  Around the long candlelit table were nineteen local lairds and their ladies, the rotund Bishop of Udar and his secretary, and a square-jawed man with sandy-white hair and piercing eyes. His name was Skoh. Drusher wasn’t entirely sure who Skoh was. In fact, he wasn’t entirely sure of anything any more. The baron introduced him as ‘that expert from the city I’ve been promising’.

  ‘You are a famous hunter, then?’ the bishop asked Drusher.

  ‘Not famous, your holiness. I have some expertise in the line of animals.’

  ‘Good, good. So claims Skoh here, but in three months, what?’

  ‘It is a difficult beast, your honour,’ Skoh said softly. ‘I’d welcome some expert advice. What weapon do you favour, magos? Hollowpoint or shot? Do you bait? Do you use blinds?’

  ‘I… um… favour multiple means, sir. Whatever suits.’

  ‘Aren’t you terribly afraid?’ asked one of the ladies.

  ‘One must never underestimate the quarry, lady,’ Drusher said, hoping it conveyed an appropriate sense of duty and caution.

  ‘They say it has no eyes. How does it find its prey?’ asked the bishop.

  ‘By scent,’ Drusher replied emphatically.

  ‘Not so,’ snapped Skoh. ‘My hunters have been using sealed body sleeves. Not one sniff of pheromone escapes those suits. And still it finds them.’

  ‘It is,’ said Drusher, ‘a difficult beast. When was it last seen?’

  ‘The thirteenth,’ said the baron, ‘Up in the ridgeway, having taken a parlour maid from the yard at Laird Connok’s manse. My men scoured the woods for it, to no avail. Before that, the swineherd killed at Karla. The waterman at Sont’s Crossroads. The two boys out late by Laer’s Mere.’

  ‘You forget,’ said one of the lairds, ‘my potman, just before the killings at the Mere.’

  The baron nodded. ‘My apologies.’

  ‘The beast is a blight on our land,’ said the bishop. ‘I say to you all, a speck of Chaos. We must rally round the holy aquila and renounce the dark. This thing has come to test our faith.’

  Assenting murmurs grumbled around the table.

  ‘Are you a religious man, magos?’ the bishop asked.

  ‘Most certainly, your holiness.’

  ‘You must come to worship at my temple tomorrow. I would like to bless you before you begin your bloody work.’

  ‘Thank you, your holiness,’ Drusher said.

  The outer door burst open, scudding all the candle flames, and a servant hurried in to whisper in the baron’s ear. Baron Karne nodded, and the servant hurried out again. A moment later, Arbites Officer Macks was standing in the doorway, dripping wet, a riot-gun over one arm. Her badge was now pinned to the lapel of her leather body suit.

  She looked around the room, pausing as she met Drusher’s eyes.

  ‘Deputy,’ said the baron, rising from his seat. ‘To what do we owe this interruption?’

  ‘Another death, lord,’ she said. ‘Out by the stoops.’

  The acreage to the north of Baron Karne’s draughty keep was a low swathe of marshy ground given over to poultry farming. Through the sleeting rain, thanks to the light of the bobbing lamps, Drusher could make out row upon row of stoop-sheds constructed from maritime ply and wire. There was a strong smell of mud and bird lime.

  Drusher followed the baron and Officer Macks down boarded paths fringed by gorse hedges. With them came three of the baron’s huscarls, lanterns swinging from the tines of their billhooks. The weather was dreadful. Icy rain stung Drusher’s cheeks numb and, as he pulled his old weathercoat tighter around him, he longed for a hat and a warm fox-fur jacket like the one Macks wore.

  There was an odd wobbling noise just audible over the drumming of the rain. Drusher realised it was the agitated clucking of thousands of poultry birds.

  They reached the stoops, and trudged up a metal-mesh walkway between the first two shed rows. The bird-dung stink was stronger now, musty and stale despite the rain. Teased clumps of white feathers clogged the cage wire. Macks said something to the baron and pointed. A flashlight beam moved around up ahead. It was one of Macks’s junior arbites, a young man by the name of Lussin, according to his quilted jacket’s nametag. He looked agitated, and extremely glad to see company at last.

  The frame door to one of the stoop sheds was open; Macks shone her light inside. Drusher caught a glimpse of feathers and some kind of metal cylinder lying on the floor.

  He followed Macks and the baron into the stoop.

  Drusher had never seen a dead body before, except for that of his Uncle Rudiger, who had died when Drusher was a boy. The family had visited his body in the chapel of rest to pay their respects and Uncle Rudiger had looked normal. Asleep. Drusher, with a child’s naiveté, had quite expected his uncle to jump up and laugh in their faces. Uncle Rudiger had been a great one for practical jokes.

  The body in the poultry stoop wasn’t about to jump up or do anything. It was face down, thankfully, its limbs draped in a contorted, awkward way that wasn’t a practical joke. This was one of the baron’s farm staff, apparently, a yeoman called Kalken. He’d been doing the night feed, and the metal cylinder Drusher had seen was Kalken’s grain-hopper, lying where he’d dropped it in a pile of spilt maize.

  Macks knelt down by the body. She looked up at Drusher and made a little jerk with her head that indicated he might want to go outside again. Drusher stuck his hands in his coat pockets resolutely and stayed put. With a shrug, Macks turned the body over.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Macks said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  Drusher opened his eyes. He couldn’t remember leaving the stoop, but he was outside in the rain again, leaning against the barn opposite, his hands clenched in the wire mesh so tight he’d drawn blood.

  ‘Magos?’

  ‘Y-yes,’ he stammered. ‘I’m fine.’ He thought it likely that he’d never forget what he’d just seen. The awful flop of the rolling body. The way a good deal of it had remained behind on the muddy floor.

  ‘Take a few deep breaths,’ she said.

  ‘I really am fine.’

  ‘You look pale.’

  ‘I’m always pale.’

  She shrugged. ‘You might as well stay here,’ she added, though Drusher felt she’d said it less out of concern for his nerves and more because she knew he wasn’t particularly useful. ‘I’m going to make some notes in situ.’

  ‘There were bites,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ Macks replied. ‘At least, I think so.’

  ‘Measure them. And examine the bite radius for foreign matter. Tooth fragments that might have lodged in the bone. That sort of thing.’

  ‘Right,’ she said and turned away.

  ‘Where did it get in?’ he called after her.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Where did it get in
? Was the cage door open?’

  ‘No. He’d fastened it behind him when we found him.’

  ‘Can I borrow a flashlight?’

  Macks got a lamp-pack from Lussin and gave it to Drusher. Then she went back into the stoop with the baron to begin her grisly inspection properly.

  Drusher began to walk away down the length of the stoop run, shining his torch in through the cages on either side.

  ‘Don’t roam too far, sir!’ one of the huscarls called out after him.

  Drusher didn’t answer. He wanted to roam as far as he could. The thought of being anywhere near that bloody, dismembered mess made him shiver. He was sweating despite the winter gale.

  Ten metres down, near the end of the row, he found the wire cage roof of one of the stoops had been torn wide open. Drusher played the torch around. He was near the end fence of the poultry compound, a three-metre timber pale topped with a barbed and electrified string of wires. He could see no hole in the fence or damage to the deterrent wires. Had the beast cleared the wall itself? Quite a leap. There was no sign of spore in the thick mud at his feet. The rain was washing it into soup.

  He let himself into the ruptured stoop and examined the torn wire roof. With the rain splashing off his face, he reached up and yanked part of it down, studying the broken ends with his lamp closely.

  It wasn’t torn. It was cut, cleanly, the tough wire strands simply severed. What could do that? Certainly not teeth, not even teeth that could take the front off a man’s face and body. A power blade, perhaps, but that would leave signs of oxidation and heat-fatigue.

  As far as he knew – and there was no man on Gershom better qualified – there wasn’t an animal on the planet that could leap a three-metre security fence and slice open reinforced agricultural mesh.

  Drusher took out the compact digital picter he always carried and took a few snaps of the wire for reference. It came through this cage roof, he thought. Probably landed on it, in point of fact, coming over the fence, cut its way in... and then what?

  He looked around. The covered timber coop-end of the shed was dark and unforthcoming.

  It suddenly occurred to him that whatever it was might still be there.

  He felt terror and stupidity in roughly equal measures. He’d been so anxious to get away from that terrible corpse and prove he was good for something, the blindingly obvious had passed him by.