by E. E. Knight
Valentine wondered how many refused the offer. How many men wanted to be killers? He had expected physical or mental tests, not a moral one. He thought of his father but could not make the connection between the Wizard’s animalistic killers and the quiet man who was shot to death in his own backyard.
“Why don’t the Lifeweavers fight? I would think that with your technology, magic I’ve heard it called, you’d be able to beat the Kurians.”
The Wizard seemed a little surprised. “Usually I ask the questions, but I will do my best to answer yours: We are not any good at it. It would be like you defecating in your pants. You could do it if you put your mind to it, but you would not enjoy the experience, and until you had a chance to clean yourself, you would probably be preoccupied. We toilet-trained ourselves far too long ago, we are not numerous, and my ability to change into a wolf does not mean I could bite like one.
“You Homo sapiens, on the other hand, are almost perfect killing machines. You are flexible, aggressive, intelligent, and inventive. We examined life-forms on twelve worlds, and you half-savages revert to your terrible earlier selves with greater alacrity than any other. So we help you fight your battles, and in doing so you fight our war for us. Or am I speaking in riddles again?”
“No, I understand. It’s your method I question. Instead of arming us with some kind of advanced technology, you turn us feral. That seems a strange way to help us win a war.”
The Wizard abruptly disappeared, only to emerge from the dome-shaped cave’s other exit, carrying what looked like a small mirror on a stand. “I am sorry,” he said to the startled young man. “I had to get this, and I didn’t want to interrupt, so I left you talking to an image. You said you understood, David. It is clear that you do not. I’m giving you the most powerful weapon on the planet: yourself at your full potential.”
“I thought I was supposed to make up my mind.”
“You did, David, you did,” he said, sitting again opposite the young man. “The moment you thought of your father, and his death, and wondered if he was the kind of man I want you to become. You may not have felt it, but to me your fury was white hot. You can hide your rage from yourself, but not from me. It is so big, I wonder where you put it so you can sleep at night.”
The item the Wizard placed between them looked like a plate-sized round mirror. It hovered at face level between them, held up by the same mysterious force that kept the light globe near the ceiling. Valentine saw in it only his own reflection, but fuzzy and out of focus, conforming to his general outline.
“What is this?” he asked.
Amu’s face appeared in the mirror. The Lifeweaver’s visage melted and shifted as though his skin were made of clouds boiling in the wind. “You could say it’s the surgeon’s scalpel, David. I will use it to operate on you. There is a cup in front of you. Drink up.”
Valentine looked at the woven rug. A wooden cup, round like a hollowed-out coconut, sat before him. Had it been sitting there all the time? Valentine sniffed at it suspiciously.
“Just a little something to facilitate the ceremony. It is tasteless.”
Valentine drank. Just before consciousness faded, he looked into the mirror-thing. First he saw his face, then the Wizard’s, then a wolf’s. The images flickered together: Wizard-Wolf-Self-Wizard-Wolf-Self-Wizard-Wolf-Self. Only the eyes were all the same. But they were not his. Not Amu’s. The Wolf’s. Valentine found himself fixing on the eyes of the three faces as they morphed from one manifestation to the next, all sharing the same ice-blue stare.
The young Wolf awoke to an overwhelming farrago of sounds and smells. The pine needles, musty rugs, dried lichen on the walls, and living wolves all vied to overthrow his brain. He could hear their heartbeats as with a stethoscope. Their breathing sounded like a gale. Too much! Too much! his brain shrieked at him. He leaped up and hurled himself away from the sleeping pack as if flung by a catapult, bruising himself with the force of the impact against the wall.
David, stay calm. Your senses are just sharpened up a little, that is all, Amu’s voice in his head whispered in a soothing monotone. I will help you through your first days; then you will learn on your own. You must learn to switch your senses between two levels, “hard” and “soft.” You have to learn how to hear with soft ears and smell with soft nose first. You will use the hard ears and hard nose later, to sense over distance.
“Where are you?” Valentine asked, hearing the echo of his voice in the outer cavern where he had waited before being called.
I have linked us. I cannot understand you very well. I am not as gifted as some in this type of communication with human thought-shapes. I just get impressions about your emotions. You need to take a deep breath, fill your lungs with air, and relax. Draw everything back into your center. Soften your eyes, let them go out of focus; soften your ears, let them relax and listen to the sound of the empty air in front of you; soften your nose and smell the heat of the light cube. -
Valentine tried to relax, but the smell and sound of the slumbering wolves kept beating down the barriers. He felt dazed.
You are doing very well. I think you are a natural. Try to walk out of the cave the way you came in.
The musty old tapestry at the door reeked abominably, and he hurried past it. His legs were suddenly working too fast and he crashed into the cavern wall like a mechanized toy bouncing off an obstacle in its path. He steadied himself, but the flickering candles sounded like whip cracks in his ears.
Center! Center! the voice implored. No, you still don’t have it. Let me help you.
Valentine felt himself steady, the cacophony of sensations fading into the background. He made it to the other curtain, but as he pushed through it, the acidic vomit smell overthrew him. His gorge rose and joined the slick mess on the floor.
“Serves you right,” one of the Wolves thundered. Valentine leaped forward in alarm, but could not keep control of his spastic body and missed the exit. He ricocheted off the unforgiving stone and came away bleeding at the forehead. The coppery-smelling fluid infiltrated his nostrils, took over his sense of smell.
Breathe, breathe, bring it back to your center. Try crawling outside. You are fine.
The young Wolf did not feel fine.
“Hell, I think Father Wolf turned him all the way up,” he heard one man whisper behind cupped palm.
On hands and knees, Valentine crawled through the cave, toward the light outside. He could smell the blood trail behind.
“The Wizard thought that Marquez was something special, too. Sent him right off the cliff,” the other muttered back.
Valentine, remembering what had happened yesterday, brought himself back down with a determined effort. The world seemed almost normal. He climbed to his feet.
Good, good. Outdoors can be a little much; just keep breathing into your center and drawing everything back to that place inside you. You will learn in time. A good bloodhound controls his nose without even realizing it, the way you focus your eyes. You will be able to do the same soon.
Valentine made it into the daylight. Clear blue filled the sky overhead, a rarity on Kurian Earth. The snow seemed to gleam, and even across the valley, Valentine’s visual acuity was such mat he literally could not see the forest for the individual bees. It smelled as if he were standing in the center of the world’s largest goat farm, despite the fact that the three goats stood a hundred yards away. Downwind.
He centered on his own. David, try to find some goat droppings. The voice in his head still made him uncomfortable. Although his nose told him he was in a sea of goat shit, he localized it with an effort and walked toward the still-warm source, pausing less and less frequently as he drew nearer. He found he could play with his ears as easily as his eyes. He located a creaking branch, and listened to one of the goats pull up fodder from beneath the snow.
There you are, he thought at the end of his pungent treasure hunt, standing over the rounded mass.
Now, David, you are doing excellently. Follow t
he trail the goats left. Not by using the tracks in the snow, but with your nose. Shut your eyes as much as possible. Hear and smell your way down the mountainside.
It occurred to him that none of the other Wolves had explored the field in this way. He would have known, since most of them had left within the last few hours and there were only a few irregular, staggering footprints in the field. He took a deep bream, closed his eyes, and began to smell for the bail left by the odiferous goats.
And fell flat on his face. A tree root hidden in the snow snagged his foot. Usually he was agile enough to catch himself if bipped, but his usual reflexes had gone AWOL. He had the disquieting sensation of being in a different body. The only memory he could compare it to was his rare all-day fishing expeditions in Minnesota: taking a small boat into a lake and then feeling a little unsteady on his feet when he returned to dry land.
He got up, closed his eyes again with an effort, and began walking with an unsteady tread like a drunk doing a Frankenstein’s monster imitation. He found he could hear the location of trees by the sound of wind in the pine needles. He sensed a branch ahead and leaned back to avoid it, and fell flat on his back.
The goats showed a penchant for investigating clumps of thorny bramble. After a painful rake across his lips, he cursed and opened his eyes.
No peeking , Amu admonished.
Valentine sucked the blood from his punctured lip, took a deep breath, and tried again. He leaned forward and found the going easier with his hands placed ahead and his nose closer to the trail. Even when he bashed his head straight into a tree trunk, coming away with sticky pine bark tangled in his hair, he managed to keep his eyes closed. He found himself able to concentrate on the trail, letting the other senses fade into the background, like a reader absorbed in a book using just her eyes and her brain.
The odor became stronger, and he let out a yip like a foxhound. He began to lope, ignoring the bruises and scrapes as he bounced down the slope. He heard a panicked bleat from something ripe and warm, and he leaped. The goat collapsed under him, kicking.
The animal’s struggles brought him out of his trance. He found himself with a mouthful of goat hair, feeling as if he had just woken from a vivid dream. He released the unfortunate herbivore.
“Sorry, Billy. I got carried away.”
Terrible! the Wizard shouted into his brain. Had you been following someone with a gun, they would have shot you like a frothing dog. You mustn’t go feral. Do it again, but this time see if you can find one of your fellow Wolves as they disperse. Just follow him, don’t let him see you. Open your eyes now and then if you must, but try to work with your former semi-dormant senses as much as possible. Practice, because when it’s for real, there are no second chances, David.
David Valentine, Wolf of the Southern Command, got his new, awkward, battered body to its feet, closed his eyes, and stalked on.
Chapter Five
The Yazoo Delta, summer of the forty-first year of the Kurian Order: The wet crescent between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers is one of the most uncomfortable pockets of the globe. The swamp-and-canebrake Delta, returned to its original waterlogged existence by the breaking of man’s levees on the Father of Waters, is virtually empty of human habitation. The Yazoo’s flow moves imperceptibly through the bayous, making it impossible to tell if a current exists at all among the soggy sloughs. The water is so choked by vegetation, it seems like earth, and the earth among the tangled roots of cypress, willow, and water oak is spongy and hard to separate from the water. From water beetle to cougar, the teeming wildlife lives an amphibian existence among the Spanish moss and cattail thickets. It is a patch of humid desolation, taking its name from an Indian word for “death.”
This empty land is a fine training area for the young Wolves of the Ozark Free Territory. From the Yazoo Delta, they can keep an eye on Mississippi River traffic and explore outside its football-shape, 188-mile length into the burned-out shells of Memphis in the north and Jackson in the south. It is the most impenetrable and least guarded of all the empty borders of Southern Command, and the handful of Wolves in the Delta keep on the move, often going an entire season without supply or communication from the Territory.
David Valentine traveled here as a newly invoked Wolf and learned the Hunter’s Arts under two unremitting teachers: Nature and a longtime Cat named Eveready. In nature, Valentine learned to apply the lessons of his winter on how to find food, water, shelter, and fire, what might be called the four primary elements of human existence. From Eveready, a man who accepted no rank in Southern Command because it would mean an end to his one-man war against the Kurians as well as his jealously guarded independence, he learned how to unify his judgment, senses, skills, and tools into a single weapon. The young Wolves under Eveready’s tutelage practiced their art, improvising weapons to hunt everything from submerged alligators to treed raccoons. They took not only nourishment from their kills, but also hide, bone, and sinew for use in making clothing and tools. A few of the more atavistic-minded fashioned lucky charms from their trophies. Eveready, owner of perhaps the longest necklace of Reaper fangs in the Old South, encouraged the practice.
What Eveready taught even better was the art of concealing lifesign. His apprentices spent more time learning mental discipline than they did physical, mastering a form of self-hypnosis that cloaked their auras against the inhuman searching powers of the Reapers. Their skill at this determined whether they would hunt the enemy or be hunted like the game they brought home to camp.
The camp used a pair of ancient water oaks as its roof. The stumpier of the two oaks suffered a curious deformity; the main trunk ended twelve feet up and branched into six limbs that curved out of the trunk first sideways and then upward, resembling a cupped palm with too many fingers. The Wolves had rigged a patchwork of tents into these branches, making an area beneath that stayed dry as long as the wind kept down.
Wind would have been welcome in the humid air of the swamp, where runoff came to die. There was an air of death, decay, and corruption to the flooded Yazoo Delta that no graveyard could match. Mists and fogs haunted the neophyte Wolves, and mysterious wildlife voices croaked and hooted and gibbered from the bulrushes. Even their camp resembled an abattoir, with their packs and water bottles hung from the low branches like trophies on a gamekeeper’s gibbet.
Valentine sweltered in his cocoon of mosquito netting in a shallow sleep brought on by heat exhaustion. His usually pleasant hammock had been transformed into a torture chamber by the temperature and humidity. Naturally he preferred to keep himself, like his clothing and his pack, off the ground and out of reach of the various multilegged crawlies and snakes that might be attracted to a warm, motionless body on the damp earth. Only the earliest hours of the morning brought a lessening of the heat. He would give anything he owned for a swim in one of Minnesota’s clear cool lakes in this Delta summer. But even if he had been physically comfortable, he would still have passed a fitful night. The old dream about his family home had come back.
Eveready’s predawn return cut off his old nightmare. The Cat had walked off into the east within an hour of picking the spot for their camp days ago, leaving orders to wait and not to use guns while hunting. Eveready declined to explain whether this was because of nearby danger or just the parsimony brought on by visiting a supply station twice a year.
“Everybody up,” Eveready announced, laboring into camp with a heavy sack across his shoulder. His ancient M-l carbine was slung across his chest, stock glowing with its usual loving polish of well-oiled wood. Burton, who had the third watch, started to pour water into the coffeepot. “Forget that for now, Burt,” the Cat rasped. “You boys aren’t going to want breakfast when you see what I’ve brung home. Hand me that water, boy.”
Valentine tried to rub the gum from his eyes as he watched Eveready drink. Though the black-skinned man was a Cat, one of the caste whose members operated alone deep in Kurian-conquered territory, there was nothing catlike about him. Eveready wa
s a grizzled old warthog: all tough-minded determination on a thick body beneath a thicker hide. Barefoot, with ragged black trousers that ended at calves as wide as horse hooves, the rest of his body resembled a barrel with arms added as an afterthought. Chest muscles strained from an equally ragged vest cut from the heavy ablative cloth that the Reapers wore, and his neck was festooned with dangling teeth pulled from the Hoods he’d exterminated. The Wolves had never seen him eat anything but oversalted game stews and apples—Valentine believed Eveready knew the location of every single apple tree and grove within a three-hundred-mile arc of the Yazoo Delta—and this eccentric diet had left him with ageless vitality and shining white teeth. He was bald as the man in the moon but hid the fact with a battered baseball cap with a Saints logo. Eveready could climb like an ape, float like an alligator, and leap like a deer, all without making enough noise to cause a mouse to startle.
Easing himself out of the hammock, Valentine shook his head and took a pull from the water bottle he bedded down with to save a trip out of the mosquito netting. He pulled on his moccasins after eyeing the insides. Though they had hung from his hammock, the ingenuity of the Yazoo wildlife at curling up for a nap where least expected had been brought home to Valentine by a painful centipede bite earlier in the summer.
“What did you bring us, Santa?” Alistar, one of the Wolves, asked.
The Wolves gathered, and Eveready dumped the stained sack in the center of the campground. At first Valentine thought it was a trick of the rapidly growing light, but the sack seemed to writhe as it hit ground.
“Valentine, get your chopper,” Eveready ordered. Valentine retrieved his parang, a fourteen-inch broad hunting knife swelled at the center like a pregnant machete. It had a heavy wood handle with the tang capped at the end, combining the sharpness of a skinning knife with the utility of a hatchet.