The Wild Lands: Legend of the Wild Man (5 page)

The prong flies fast and true. It catches the
bird's elbow joint as it raises its wing to launch another volley
at his decoy. The monster screeches in agony as the razor sharp
prong passes through the tendons and emerges on the other side with
a squirt of blood that glows in the afternoon sun. The hunter drops
back into the hole as the kingcrow reels around and hops towards
him, its huge unwieldy talons ripping pebbles loose from the
boulder.

He dives out of a ray of sunlight as his
opponent shadows it. The bird's muscular neck allows its bald head
deeper into the shaft than the hunter anticipated. He falls to the
ground to avoid injury but badly jars the prongs embedded in his
arm. They send jolts of pain up his arm and he knows he won't be
able to fight or even stay conscious much longer.

Hoping the kingcrow will fall for the same
trick twice, he grabs what is left of the prongbuck and places it
into another sunny patch. He barely clears the ring of light before
it goes dark. He scurries away from a the bird's retching as messy
globs of white bile drip down from above. A drop lands on the back
of his hand and he grits his teeth in pain as he rubs it in dirt.
The globs hiss and evaporate into acrid mist as they ooze down the
boulders, dissolving any lichens or moss that had grown on the
boulders over the decades. His nostrils burn from the clouds of
noxious gas that leisurely fill the tunnels between the
boulders.

Vomit rains down again, this time spattering
the prongbuck's pelt. The young hunter holds his breath and lunges
for his trophy. It is worth far too much to be lost to something so
revolting. He furiously rubs it in the dirt, diluting the corrosive
slime and salvaging the hide. The acid only had time to burn a few
tiny holes in the leather pelt, but had almost completely eroded
the remaining fleshy bits and organ chunks that hung from the skin
and skeleton.

Realizing the hide offers more protection
than his own skin, the hunter digs his hand into the skull cavity
and scoops out the only organ unaffected by the bird's stomach
juices, its brain. He tosses the brain in a shadowy corner. It
lands with a loud CRACK as well as the expected squelch. He had
forgotten about the curious stone inside.

He marks its spot, he will need it to cure
the hide if he manages to survive this battle. He dons the skull
over his own, wipes the eye sockets clean and wraps the mangled
skin around him, shrouding his form. He calms himself and releases
pheromones--ancient organic odors older than aromas--that fill
animals with fear. They work on prongelk at least. He still does
not know if kingcrows feel fear, but everything can be surprised,
and that might be enough. He scurries up one of the shafts and
emerges on the top boulder without a sound.

The hunter charges the bird. His feet, still
wet with blood, squelch with each step. He howls and the bird spins
around with a startled squawk. The kingcrow attempts to raise its
head higher than the approaching wall of deadly prongs but it is
too slow, much too slow.

Heightened senses slow down the action to the
hunter. His energy converts to momentum as it flows up from each
footstep and off the boulder, then through each calve, then each
thigh. All of his muscles tighten, contract, then extend as he
leaps into the air. The bird lets out another screech that
adrenaline pitches down an octave in his ears. His right hand snaps
a prong off one of the antlers atop his own head. He hears the
chink of crystal as it pops free into his hand.

Then he is above the crow. He lowers the
antlers and hammers the kingcrow's skull with the prongbuck's. The
bird’s tongue lolls out from the force of the blow. The anarchic
antlers that extend past the birds' head pierce its neck in two
places though not fatally. Its long neck keeps its body safe.

His attack successful, the hunter traps the
deadly beak beneath the cage of prongs and swings the prongblade in
his hand into the bird's eye. It punctures the fleshy sphere with a
satisfying pop, and blinds the kingcrow's left side. The wounded
animal screeches murder to the wind.

The young hunter lifts the antlers, rushes
forward, and shoves the bird with all of his strength. It stumbles
backwards, then slips down the round boulder, flapping its ungainly
wings and screeching in pain. It tumbles to a feathered heap at the
base of the pile of rock.

He roars to terrify his enemy into retreat
but prepares to leap down if he must kill.

The kingcrow rights itself and refolds it
wings. It starts to hop away, gains speed for flight but falters
after a few paces with a loud squawk. It hops in place, turning in
half circles, testing its injured wing and screeching loudly.

The hunter knows it wants to flee. It is
injured and half blind, yet something compels it to fight. He
remembers the prongbuck's strange behavior and knows: the Hidden
are at work here.

With a mighty shout, he snaps off another
prong and hurls it at the kingcrow, sure to aim for its right side.
It flies past the bird's good eye and punches a hole in its wing
tip.

The kingcrow shrieks, then hops away from the
fearsome silhouette of the horned figure, its demons put to rest.
The enormous bird, taller than the hunter, beats its huge wings
clumsily and takes to the air, favoring its injuries. It gains
height slowly, leaving a trail of feathers in its wake. More vomit,
this time large chunks of meat and the bird is lighter, it rises
quicker.

It screeches once more, either a vow of
revenge or a warning to anything foolish enough to attack the
fearsome horned enemy.

The hunter, still young but a boy no more,
stands until the kingcrow vanishes over the horizon. His bloody
shroud whips in the wind, obscuring his form. He looks half bloody
man, half mangled elk, a chimera of blood.

When the kingcrow is finally gone he howls to
the sleeping moon, then collapses atop the boulder and falls
unconscious, too tired to hide beneath anything save the second
skin he wears.

The Hidden were masters of tools. Not like ours, to
them, carved bones and strong ropes are toys. Their tools scrape
the sky and stab the earth. Even the animals bow to them, some say
one day we all will...

Worry not children, they are few and have slept West
of Father Mountain for generations... what could draw them from
their nest?

Beyond frustrated with Skup's failed
acquisition of what could be the greatest instrument in his
symphony of life, Baucis showed uncharacteristic restraint and
withheld punishment from the gifted
vultus
pilot. He would
still fly; he had to. No one else could manage the flock, but his
privileges ended there. No mess hall, no terrestrial food, no
visitors. There was too much at stake. Baucis couldn't afford to be
soft on the boy.

The Garden had benefited from terrestrial
predators, but introducing them had been no easy task. It did not
help his Evanimal program to have failures, especially when a
success would easily end all debate on the subject. With
that
animal, he could do anything.

Baucis couldn't stop thinking about the
bipedal beast. It was taller than a human (how much taller he could
only guess, but if it stood eye level to a
biselk…
), much
more robust, and had long graceful fingers and prehensile thumbs.
It was enough to make him want to roll the dice with his own VRC
and synchronize with the animal, almost. He had never been great at
controlling the Evanimals themselves. He likened himself more to a
maestro of old than a musician. That suited him though. The
maestros received the lion’s share of the credit. Besides, there
was the animal’s probable resemblance to Ntelo’s fabled
Wild
Man
to consider. He knew she could sway public opinion easily
enough. She’d done it enough times before. A gift from Nature,
she’d call it. That would surely suffice. But one never could count
all
the cards, if public opinion did shift against the
Wild Man
(if that’s what the beast would be called), better
to blame the musician than the ensemble.

Skup would undoubtedly have been a gifted
musician, had he been able to choose the medium. As it was, the boy
was one of Baucis's best Evanimal pilots. He could handle
biselk
,
howluchin
s, and was the first to pilot a
vultus
with any grace, hence his punishment, or lack
thereof. Any other pilot (save his twin sister) would have been
stranded in the Spire for a week. Skup had won hundreds of battles
against
biselk
, an animal easily three times the size of the
two legged knife thrower. He should have been able to handle the
beast, he was almost a man.

At the end of the duel, Skup had claimed that
he lost control of the bird, that like the
biselk
, fear and
the animal’s sense of self preservation overran the VRC and he lost
control. Baucis expected this sort of puerile excuse from Jacob,
but not from Skup, he was supposed to be better than that. Not that
the Master ecologist didn’t believe Skup. Baucis hoped that one day
he would fully understand and control the chemical symphony that
surged through his carefully sculpted Evanimals. He had imagined
that a
vultus
wouldn't have been susceptible to fear; they
were the top of the food chain, kings of the sky. Their brain was
distinctly different than a mammal's, with less matter devoted to
those troublesome chemical drug dealers: emotions. Nothing had ever
hunted Baucis's most dangerous (and most controversial) Evanimal,
he didn't think it knew fear at all. If it caused the malfunction,
the fault
must
lie in Skup. Even if it didn't, he couldn't
punish the bird, but if he punished the boy maybe he'd figure out
to fix it.

The boy's failure wasn't all that troubled
Baucis. As he strode towards the Council’s chamber he attempted to
compose himself. He was perspiring, an easy tell, especially with
the harsh artificial lights reflecting off his bald head. His
typical pallid complexion was flushed, and the perceptive Council
would surely notice his elevated heart rate as his veins pulsed
beneath his translucent skin. He took a deep breath through and
slowed his step, a counter point to his racing mind.

This animal, this beast, was proving to be
quite formidable. Baucis was trying to determine exactly what the
beast was. He knew that it was intelligent and adaptable because it
had parried Skup's aberrant attacks quickly, using its environment
and even its own food as weapons against the attacker. He knew that
it was strong and swift from its final assault on both the
vultus
and the
biselk
. The beast had shown
unbelievable fluidity and control of its shrouded body. Baucis knew
the thing understood the interplay of fear and its effects on the
mind better than he did. It probably used pheromones either
consciously or unconsciously. The VRCs did not have any control
over the powerful chemicals, they remained infuriatingly
intangible.

There were too many unknowns for Baucis's
taste. He didn't know what the beast looked like, or why it had
bothered with the
biselk
skin. Hypotheses darted through his
mind. It could have been trying to protect itself from the
vultus
's corrosive stomach acids. Perhaps it donned the
leather as a ruse to drive fear into the bird's brain. The most
troubling hypothesis was that it wore the skull and skin as a
disguise- a deliberate effort to hide its own identity. All he had
seen behind the remains of his most improved
biselk
was a
hand that used parts of its world as tools, as weapons. The hand
and what it implied sent a few scant molecular compounds of fear
from Baucis's own drug dealing brain to his body. His pulse did not
slow. His delicate hands felt clammy. Despite his immediate
discomfort, he was exhilarated. Baucis was unaccustomed to fear. It
represented a challenge.

The beast may prove to be one of the most
important things ever discovered.
It may be the link between
Spire City and the surface.

The Scourge had bottled up Spire City. The
surface was still rife with the stuff. Even if they could manage to
get down, only disease and decay awaited them. Most citizens
assumed other parts of the world survived, but there was no way to
know. Even on the surface, they could never leave the
electromagnetic field of the Spire. Electricity was a kind
mistress, but she carried a short yoke.

Baucis’s first theory (totally untestable)
was that the beast was somehow related to the apes that lived on
the other continents. Across the oceans there had been large apes
that used fairly primitive tools. The apes had been the closest
cousins of humans and one type, the chimpanzee, shared 98 percent
of their genetic code with humans. But the Master ecologist’s lab
would never test this biped against those. Speculation ruled this
theory. If the beast was one of the known apes, its species must
have mutated drastically to become the two legged creature. As far
as Baucis knew, those apes had traveled on their hind legs but
relied on their knuckles heavily. The knife-throwing beast most
surely did not. Still, it was a possibility. Extreme mutations were
necessary to survive in a world that produced little beyond
stillborn offspring or spectacularly adapted individuals. Baucis
had estimated the time needed to evolve such an intelligent
predator from the apes, and didn't think the century after the
Scourge would give enough time, but it remained a possibility. The
biselk
had changed much more in last century than the one
before and the
howluchin
s hadn't even existed a century ago!
Yet his continent was home to none of the great apes and the
ecologist had other ideas.

There was the possibility that the thing was
human. Some
could
have survived the Scourge, but Baucis
didn't think so. There was too much chaos after its coming, too
much death. No one had ever tried to signal the citizenry of Spire
City. No radio messages, no lights, no smoke, nothing from the
surface to indicate a human population. If the beast was human, it
understood the savagery of the hunt more than civilization. Baucis
couldn’t dismiss the possibility, but if the beast didn't speak,
they would never know if it was their species' brother, or a
distant cousin.