The Wild Lands: Legend of the Wild Man (39 page)

We sit here, awaiting what Nature brings us. There
is nowhere to run, nothing to do but pray. Feel the bed of grass
beneath your feet, thank Nature for a small gift. Soon enough, we
will all be one with her.

Tunnel after tunnel Kao runs through. The
little monkeys are fast. He tries to keep up. They know this place,
he thinks. They hoot and yip excitedly. Freedom is a dangerous
drug. Passage after passage. All the same. No plants. No animals.
None of the pale hairless gods, the Hidden. A cave long abandoned.
Lifeless. Inorganic. It smells of nothing but the power in the air
that makes his prongs tingle and his hair stand on edge. The power
comes and goes with gentle tremors. It never leaves entirely, just
lessens.

On and on they run. The monkeys turn back and
check the hunter now and then.
Keep up Kao
. They are far
ahead. He cannot tell if they wait at corners or rush to them.
Do they want me lost?
Again the monkeys come to a corner and
take it, they vanish. His heart pounds. He speeds up, the wind
whistling past his ears, through his fur, and rounds the
corner.

He reels, dizzies, falls back to the ground
unable to stand. Nothing is in front of him. Nothing but sky. He is
high up, very, very high up. Through wisps of clouds he can see the
ordered garden below him, the river snaking around it, the mountain
he scaled and fell from. He can see on and on.

He looks up and his eyes adjust. The
shimmering blue wall is in front of him. He can hear its persistent
hum. The prongs in his arm tingle. Another dull thud this time with
a blue flash from the earth below and he feels the ground below
him, yet above the earth, rattle. The wall dims. Maybe he can break
it now. If he was brasher he might have, a caged hunter would, but
Kao does not want to, not yet. Another flash, another rumble, he
leans forward.

Prongelk. They pound the Totem. Each one
weighs a boulder. They challenge the Totem. They learned it holds
lightning like their prongs.
I taught them that
. They will
not back down and Kao is thankful for them. Another flash, another
rumble. He can see and feel the strike before he can hear it. This
makes his stomach retch. Everything about this place is wrong.

Seeing the prongelk down below pulls his mind
back in time, down the Spire, through the Garden, to the animals he
killed, the people he lost. He thinks of all he learned and has
become, those who sacrificed their lives for people who knew
nothing of them. The Spire owes him blood. It owes him each step he
took from his homeland and each tear shed over family gone but not
forgotten. He understands now that that debt may never be paid. It
will be enough to save his sister from the life they planned for.
He would like to teach her all that he has learned, share his
story, his symbols, be a hermit himself, but he treats the thoughts
as little more than childish fantasies.

His blooming mind is still not smart enough,
may never be smart enough, to see he could never think like this as
a child, that his hopes and dreams were little more than a warm
fire and a fresh meal and now, thanks to pressure, heartache,
strife and death, his dreams have evolved to sharing a story with
those he loved, to pass down all he's learned to anyone who will
listen.

A hoot yanks his attention and he jerks his
head to the left see the two monkeys hopping impatiently. One beats
its chest and the other takes off. The first waits just a moment
longer, then follows the other. The monkeys are not the loud
territorial things he knows. They are smart, cunning, wise to the
Hidden, wiser than him. He follows them, wishing another
once-unthinkable wish: to solve their mystery.

They lead him down tunnel after tunnel. They
run fast but now seem cautious. The Hidden must be about. They turn
a corner and see one of the pudgy pale people standing near an open
doorway. The first monkey howls its disorienting scream and the
man’s knees weaken. Kao is hurt just from the echo. It works its
way through his ears to his stomach. He thinks he will vomit but
does not. He can cope better. The man does not fall either, but the
second monkey leaps and lands upon his back. It is almost as big as
the man, its head to his shoulder. Neither of the two come past the
hunter’s waist. The monkey hoots and tears at the man but he fights
back more courageously than Kao thought the little people capable
of. The man slams the monkey against a wall and its grip loosens.
The Hunter runs forward and knocks the man unconscious in an easy
whack. They are no more a match for him than children. They are
pathetic creatures in a pathetic place, but not for much
longer.

The monkeys yip excitedly. One tries to
clamber up his back but he shoos it off. They are allies, not
friends.

They squeal and dance at the door the man
guarded. It is masked in the blue shimmer. Impenetrable to the
monkeys. They will not touch it. They do not have what he has. They
do not have weapons and wounds. The hunter does, and he knows how
to use them.

The Hidden's power works something like a
mountain stream. It flows and flows no matter what is put in its
path. Sometimes it can be diverted or slowed, but still it flows.
Just like a mountain stream, it can be dammed, and just like a
mountain stream, it grows stronger when confronted, not weaker.

Gingerly, Kao grabs the second prong jutting
from his arm. He fingers it slowly, feeling for fissures in its
hard surface. He feels one, and pulls the embedded antler towards
his chest. With a grunt of pain and a dribble of blood, it snaps.
Most of it still dwells within his arm, but he has what he
needs.

He draws the knife back and jams it into the
edge of the shimmering blue wall, where it meets stone. It is
engulfed in the field, swimming in its energy. Its dark glistening
blackness first crackles with blue lightning, then goes red, then
white hot. The hunter steps back as the lights dim. The blade
throws up showers of sparks. Finally he hears a hum, then a pop.
The blade explodes in a blue white blast of powder and little else.
The shimmering blue wall is gone.

The hunter steps through the doorway. The air
is different in here, more charged than anywhere else he has been.
The monkeys seem very cautious. They are silent, and stick to him
like children. He walks in slowly, looking around. Its a long
hallway, with a floor that is green and fuzzy. It makes odd squeaks
beneath his feet. He has never felt anything like it before. The
hall is long, he can feel the energy emanating from the end.

Slowly, he and the monkeys make their way
down the long hall. It is lined in little rooms.
Cages?
The
gods can't be so sick, to imprison everyone in one of these. Some
of the rooms have the shimmering blue door, others do not. He peaks
in one of the
m
.

It is filled with bones. Most are arranged
into skeletons, but some are in messy piles. There is a line of
kingcrow skeletons fully assembled. The ones nearest the back of
the room are smaller than he is. They are yellow, like bones get
when cared for and cherished. As the skeletons near the door they
get larger and darker. The one nearest him is almost the size of
the bird he half-blinded. Its bones are black as the last prong
jutting from his arm. He reaches out and grabs one. Just as he
thought, cold, black, and hard. He does not need to walk the length
of the room to know the white bones would snap much more
easily.

This is their secret. The bones
.
They've changed the animals bones for their power
. He looks
to his arm.
I
learned their secret, and I am
free
.

On the far side is the same skeletal display
but with monkeys. The white bones slowly change to black as the
monkeys morph. Kao shudders. His bones must be black as any of
these animals. The hermit long cautioned against food from beyond
the jungle. Kao understands why, though without it, he never could
have survived the Garden.

Kao turns to leave, and then he sees it.
Right near the entrance to the room, like it was left there in a
hurry, sits his helmet and leathers. He lifts the skull and
attached rack of antlers. There are still many left, unlike the
prongs once guarding his arm. He dons the skull. The bile-tanned
leather shrouds him and he feels safe. The monkeys hoot and scream,
their savior gone, until he turns to them and growls. They realize
who it is, though he can sense their fear. With weapons and armor,
he leaves.

The next room is empty, the one after that
filled with prongelk skeletons. The massive animals were huge to
begin with, though their bones were white. The hunter is amazed to
see their antlers extend and their prongs multiply as the
generations pass and their bones turn black. Before him, plain as
day, is the Hidden's secret. Their power only works on these bones,
this blackness that fuels all of the most terrifying beasts from
the stories he knew as a boy. They fed their Garden the innocuous
black moss and seized their minds too late to see the danger. This
brings closure to Kao in a way he never anticipated. To understand
the Hidden feels good as revenge. Their power is no magic, just old
knowledge:
Everyone is made of what they eat food
. Kao's
mother must have told him and his sister that more than a hundred
times as she prepared fresh meals from their jungled home. The
elders repeated the mantra as they shunned food from the plains. It
even explained the hermit's brilliant madness, he had as much
knowledge and secrets as the noxious brew that he fed Kao so long
ago.