The Wild Lands: Legend of the Wild Man (42 page)

The stone she used to guide the monkey that
led him to her.

He squeezes her once more, as tight as he can
until she squeaks again and he loosens his grip. He puts her down
then looks to the Hidden around him. He bares his teeth. She is
safe, but corrupted, they will pay. But his sister grabs one of
their hands.

“It's OK,” she says in his own tongue. He is
not in the least bit surprised. Symbols and words are all he knows.
He expects the same of all around him.

“This is Phoebe,” she says, he knows the
first two words but the third is strange, like Urea's name, a
different tongue. “She's my friend.”

Kao forces a smile to hide his tears, and
touches the little one on her shoulder. She barely comes to his
waist.

“Phoebe,” he says, then in his own language,
“thank you.”

High sick laughter echoes from the back of
the room.

“A family reunited! How wonderful.”

Kao spins to see Baucis hidden behind one of
the shimmering walls.

One of Kao's arms shoots out from his cloak
fast as lightning and grabs one of the little warriors by the
throat. He lifts him high in the air, and tightens his grasp. The
person's face turns red, then blue, then purple.

“Release him,” Kao the hunter says.

Baucis only laughs, then grins at Kao as
every person in the room clutches their heads and fall to the
floor. Only Urea and Skup in their isolated chambers don't feel the
pain. Even Kao's sister grabs her head. She's tough though, and
still manages to translate.

Kao roars then rushes the wall. He bangs on
it with his fist, already feeling energy pump through his body, but
Baucis only chuckles, and runs in place.

Then Kao's sister screams. He whips around to
see the hermit scoop her up with a cackle, bolt from the room and
run upstairs, to the last level of their terrible Spire.

Behold, the Wild Man and his daughter, mankind's
salvation! Lead us Wild Man, lead us to salvation!

Kao bursts from the door but stops, his feet
tread on soft grass. He has felt nothing like it in the Spire. He
tastes the air; there is life up here in abundance.

He opens his eyes and his senses are
assaulted. There are so many people. As many as he saw in all of
the Spire, more than he has a word for. All watch him from their
knees with awe. There is a path between them, some still face the
front, bowed in submission.
Baucis took the hermit's body and my
sister that way.

Once Kao accepts their presence he can focus
on the landscape around him. The top level of the Spire, the home
of the Hidden--carved of their bizarre stone that contaminates
every apple, lung, muscle or bone that it comes into contact with
it--is different than the rest. The hunter, with his knowledge of
nature, its rhythms and cycles and little else thinks of it as the
canopy of their tree home, and indeed there is accuracy to that. It
is the greenest level of their stone tree. Trees heavy with fruit
grow up here, a plethora of grasses sprout up between groupings of
meaty fruiting bodies and tender vegetables. The hunter sees no
insects though, nor can he hear them over the gentle din of the
people.

The canopy of the Hidden's Totem is both
alien and familiar. It is the most like his own home, there are
trees to climb and grass to sleep upon, but that also makes it the
most intimidating, the trickiest, like a dream that feels too much
like life to know the difference. Just past the shimmering blue
wall a scant few clouds swirl in twisters and cyclones as lightning
cracks silently, closer than he would have thought possible one
moon ago. He can see far from up here, the entire Garden, the
wreckage of the dome he battled in, the arena. His heart quickens
as he sees trickles of lava flowing from the ring of mountains that
round the Spire. Another of the hermit's stories proven true.
Mountains bleed.

He feels none of the rumbles from below. So
the elk have stopped their assault. He doesn't know to thank Urea
or damn her.

“Impressed?” the hermit says, his voice tinny
and unfamiliar but also thick with anger, revulsion, contempt. He
stands across the stratospheric garden, silhouetted by the constant
charges of lightning that cracks down from the heavens. He stands
tall and sneers arrogance. Kao can hear the strain in his voice.
Baucis intends to kill the Hermit, they all know it.

There, on the edge, near the maddening blue
energy, stands the hermit. He has the same mad grin as the demon
chief in his safe room, but he holds Kao's sister in his arms.

Kao leaps forward, towards his sister and the
possessed old man, but the possessed hermit wags a finger and
clicks his tongue.

“Long way down,” he looks over the edge and
whistles like a bird, shrill at first, then gradually drops in
pitch. The message is clear.

“Sister,” he growls.

“She's as healthy as she was when I found
her. She's just unconscious...”

Kao doesn't respond.

“Knocked out? Doped up? Drugged?”

Kao nods.

“Good, you get that one. I've practiced too.
I can understand you now, sort of. I think it’s like interpreting a
painting, sort of instinctual.”

“Give her.”

“Of course my engineers disagree. They say
its all waves stacked upon waves, feedback loops that let me into
his brain, but not him into mine. This body is like a second skin,
hhis mind a filter for my own. But I guess you don't understand any
of this,
Wild Man
.” He sneers the last two words, but Kao
understands neither sarcasm nor irony. He bares his teeth in a
hungry smile, it is a title he accepts.

Kao growls. He understands: its their magic,
their tools, their energy that give them this power, nothing inside
of them besides the stones. Tools can be broken, magic understood,
power stolen. He moves his weight forward imperceptibly. He's
hunted bigger game than this, though nothing as dangerous. The
illusion of distance is important. The trick is to make them think
they are safe.

“You know you're more p-popular than me? It's
true. The Spire loves you, or most of it does anyways. Ntelo's
convinced them this is all your fault, that you're here to end all
of us. Still, some of them are into doom and gloom. Maybe they're
jealous some of us ruined the end of times. Maybe we weren't
supposed to survive at all. Is that why you're here?”

“I'm here for family.” He inches closer. He
can see the fury in the hermit's eyes now. He is still in there,
powerless.

“Oh no no, these sharp eyes can tell you're
getting closer,” he spins and dangles the girl towards the edge.
Kao steps back with a snarl. “I don't actually know if she'd fall
all the way or just get torched in the field. Your species is the
first animal we've encountered not inundated with conductives. It'd
be interesting to see if she just passes through with minimum
burns, or gets stuck. I don't even know if we could have contained
you without those...” he points at Kao's prongs, hidden beneath the
folds of leather. The girl half slips out of his arm. “Don't worry
I got her!” he giggles, “I guess The Scourge doesn't run up into
the mountains?”

Kao only growls.

“Its a clever place to live, or lucky
really,” the hermit chuckles, a foreign and ugly sound the hunter
never heard the old man make, “That's how you managed to survive
the Scourge?”

“Scourge?” Kao feels out the word in his
tongue.

“The organism we created that wrecked
everything, it got loose in the flood.”

Kao's mind hurts.
The flood? All this
didn't grow up in a moon.

“Who sent the storm?”

“No, no, silly monkey.
That
storm was
just a little hiccup, a mistake. I never wanted that. I'm speaking
about the Deluge. The big one. We couldn't have done something like
that. This one remembers, listen...”

The hermit's body shakes then trembles, his
arms jerk and legs fidget then he cries in a version of of his own
voice, more ragged and tired than Kao remembers, “don't listen to
him! He tells lies! He wants us as slaves, the girl is already-”
but he speaks no more.

Dead. He was going to say dead. But Kao can
smell her. She is warm. He can smell her clammy sweat and her
palpable fear. After a moment the hermit's body loosens and the
metallic whiny voice comes back.

“The storm?”

“Oh that, I didn't do a thing. I wanted all
of your people to join us here, to lord over our garden. Our
children destroyed you. You know them. One's the cat that brought
you up here, the other's the bird that brought me your sister.”

Kao shakes his head, “No. you lie.”

“They feared you. They ended your people, not
me.”

“You taught them to fear us.”

“I thought we were the only humans to
survive...” he pauses for a moment, looks at his own body. Though
Kao knows not if he's looking at the hermit's long hairy arms or
his own stubby fingers. “I guess we were, you're definitely not
human.”

“I am not like you.”

“Mmm... . No, you're not. You're so robust! A
part of the earth and its crazy rhythms of hunger. Your form
doesn't beg the questions of weakness like ours does. You're hairy
and strong, its clear you're supposed to be down there in the mud
fighting with the panthers.

“I am of the mud...” Kao growls.

“Poor choice of words. You don't believe in
divine intervention? You weren't put here by a god to take what you
wish from this lump of resources?”

“I was sent to the end the gods.”

“To rid your Natural world of us interlopers?
I suppose that's what the old religions taught, the gods are blamed
and killed, we did the same thing to our goddess, 'Mother Earth' in
the end times, before the Scourge. The citizens believe you were
sent here by her to destroy us.”

“I came for family.”

“In the skin of my creation? You insult me!
You came to end us. All you've done is cause chaos. The old one
stirred rebellion in our
howluchin
s, you sowed insurrection
in our
vultus
flock, and taught the
biselk
to destroy
the Spire. Come on, you're here to kill us. It's in your blood.
You're the antithesis of our very existence.”

“I want her.”

“I want you to be together. I don't believe
Nature is trying to end us, I think Nature's trying to save us.
That's why she brought us you two. It's a spiritual mandate. I must
use your kind, fly in the face of the old gods so new ones can be
born. Don't you want to be the father of the next stage of
humanity?”

“I don't want to be like you.”

“You could live up here, there's trees and
grass, we could even bring up animals for you to hunt, nothing like
the
biselk
of course. We can't have something like this
happen again.”

“She's my sister.”

This causes the possessed hermit to pause.
“Hmmm... that's not good,” a slow, vile smile spreads across his
face, “then I'll guess I'll have to be the father.”

Kao can take no more. He screams at the
hermit and charges forward, lowers his head, he sees no other way
out of this. His people will end, but he cannot allow this demon to
infest his sister.

“Now!” the hermit yells, and lightning cracks
from the sky. It goes for the tallest, most metallic object, the
anarchic set of antlers atop the hunter's head. Two million volts
blast through his skull, down his arm and straight into his
shoulder. He keeps running though, he must. Then another lightning
bolt strikes, and another. Each one makes his brain run a thousand
times faster, then sputter out to nothingness. Finally he
collapses, his body ceases to function. His muscles contract and
extend of their own accord. He urinates on himself. He cannot
breath. He opens his eyes and looks through the charred eye holes
of the skull. A column of smoke rises from the roots of the prongs
still in his arm, it smells like burning meat. He is being cooked
from the inside. Still he cannot move.

“Stupid Ape. I wouldn't have brought you up
here without a plan. We could have done it the fun way, but we can
easily freeze a billion of your seed and use them as we wish.”

It is harder to understand the words, the
symbols he learned at the beginning of this quest. His body pumps
with adrenaline, his weapon, his force, but it is too late, his
reserves are empty. His brain slows down, synapses are fried solid,
others burnt to nothing. His whole body burns, he manages to look
down and see patches of his shroud are slowly melting away into
nothing while chunks of fur spiral smokey columns. He's dying, or
close to it. He has no more fight. The pain is too much.

Synapses try to fire, something about
lightning melting the leather he wears despite prongelk down below
being unaffected by it. Only one substance melts prongelk leather,
bile of the kingcrow.

“You are a magnificent specimen, you will be
the crown jewel of my symphony, the centerpiece, all will bow to
you, to
us
, this body is too old for my taste.” The hermit
leans over the hunter's body. He can just see him out of the corner
of his eye. He tries to focus on his sister, the limp form cradled
in his arms, but cannot.

His brain screams:
How is his leather
melting? How could bile get in here?
He understands nothing of
Baucis's words. His brain keeps jamming that question at him. He
looks up, but its hard to focus his eyes. There is a light in the
sky, a big round bright light. It calms him. He imagines this is
how prongelk feel as he steals their lives away with his knives. He
feels washed in its round light. The light calls him home.

No.
His heart pumps stronger.
The
moon!

The moon! The moon!
I worship the
moon!
It makes him feel stronger and smarter, but not
tonight... tonight something obscures it. A blue shimmer that hurts
and hurts if you get close to it. A blue shimmer that runs through
the bones of prongelk and the wings of kingcrows. He can't feel the
moon because of that.