Path of the Crushed Heart: Book Four of the Serpent Catch Series (5 page)

Phylomon cut the dead prisoners down. He picked up the bloody cooking pot. There were marks in the blood around the rim, the impressions of lips.

“Someone drank their blood?” Fava wondered aloud.

Phylomon loosened his sword in its sheath. “Follow me, and stay close,” he said. He carried the pot back to the six. The sun was falling behind the mountains.

Darrissea and Fava each carried a gun, followed behind Phylomon, legs shaking in fear.

“What are you?” Phylomon asked the six as they drew near. None would look at him. “Why did the Creators send you?”

The beautiful blonde Allon leapt at him from a sitting position twenty feet away, seeming almost to fly through the air.

Phylomon ducked aside and slashed above him with his sword, and great gouts of blood splattered from her stomach as if from a sack. She fell in two pieces.

The other five bounded away, leaping astonishingly high, then began running.

It all happened so quickly that neither Darrissea nor Fava had time to fire, but Phylomon howled in parody of a Hukm, and within moments the Hukm rose from camp, racing over the ground, and began clubbing the the strangers.

The strangers bounded away, sometimes jumping five feet over the head of a charging Hukm, gyrating and twisting in the air to avoid the deadly clubs.

One of the strange men landed on the shoulders of a giant Hukm woman nearly ten feet tall. He slapped her temple, tore open a bloody swath and snapped her neck.

The nearest Hukm roared in anger and charged.

Suddenly, among the snow-covered hills, thousands of Hukm roared in answer and converged on the area, loping over the snow between the twisted limbs of scrub oak and juniper.

The Hukm caught two strangers quickly and pummeled their broken bodies with great war clubs. Two others seemed far more interested in escaping than fighting. But Darrissea watched the Hukm converge.

The outsiders didn’t stand a chance.

Phylomon caught one woman, a nubile young brunette, and pinned her to the ground, but the muscles in her arms twisted like steel cables, breaking his grasp.

Darrissea watched the Starfarer’s symbiote release a blinding bolt of electricity, like lightning, and the girl’s muscles spasmed.

She jerked forward and lay facedown in the snow. Hukm circled the two.

The big white females with their pendulous breasts raised their clubs, threatened and growled. Their brown eyes were wide, fierce, excited.

Darrissea feared that they might leap in and smash Phylomon in their blood lust, but the most shocking thing was not the sound of their roaring that echoed over the hills, or their eyes glazing in their fury.

The most fascinating thing to Darrissea was their smiles. The Hukm were smiling as they snarled and stifled the urge to attack.

Phylomon leapt on the downed woman, pinning her tightly.

“Answer me!” Phylomon shouted. “What are you?”

She only growled at him in anger, like a trapped wolf.

He flipped the girl over, and Darrissea saw that her face no longer looked human. Instead, her features had become distorted.

The flesh had caved in over her skull. She was still spasming from the shock. She reached up with her nails and slashed Phylomon’s back, a blow that shredded his thick leather jerkin.

Darrissea felt sure that her claws would have ripped the kidney from a normal human. The girl’s face puffed out again, the hollows on her cheeks and forehead expanding like balloons, and Phylomon pulled his sword, rammed it through her neck, and staggered back, gasping.

Darrissea watched the girl’s features deflate, even her breasts beneath her jacket.

She slumped down and died in the snow, a strangely formless creature.

Darrissea peered around. The battle was over. Phylomon stood, panting over the fallen strangers.

“We’ll remain camped here for the night,” Phylomon said.

The Hukm brought over the bodies of the other false humans, and hundreds of the Hukm circled them.

Phylomon looked up at Darrissea and Fava. “I’m going to dissect them, find out what we’re fighting,” he said. “It won’t be pretty. You may want to avert your eyes.”

Darrissea nodded and walked over the uneven ground back to camp, which was hidden in a shallow depression surrounded by willows.

The snow was deep and windblown in the depression, and the air seemed somehow cleaner here away from the heavy scent of fur.

The Hukm quieted. In the distance, miles away, Darrissea could hear the Hukm’s questioning roars, almost like the calls of some odd, feral night birds preparing to sleep.

Stavan lay in the snow in the setting sun, curled in his bedroll. Darrissea looked down at him, at his burnished hair, the sleek angles of his face. He breathed erratically, shallowly. She knew that he was awake.

“Stavan?” she asked, recalling those lips, sweeter than any man’s lips had a right to be, the way his muscles had felt like iron cords, the way he had set a naked knife beside their bed earlier in the morning. “Stavan?”

He looked up, smiled at her as if just waking.

He stretched his arms wide, displaying his sleek musculature. He was nude within the bedroll. Darrissea’s voice sounded far away even to herself as she asked, “Are you still hungry for me?”

Stavan gazed into the barrel of her gun, and his beautiful gray eyes flew open wide. “I’m not like the others,” he breathed, “I love you! I really love you! I wouldn’t have hurt you—I was just …”

“Hungry?” For a long time she stared into his eyes, and the setting sun was so bright that it highlighted each hair on his brow, the golden skin of his face.

He swallowed hard. “I’ll go away, leave you and your friends. Tell me the name of a city, someplace where your enemies live, and point the way for me. I can hunt elsewhere.”

“Denai,” she said, jerking her chin west toward the mountains.

Stavan nodded. He cautiously climbed to his feet began packing his bedroll.

Night was falling, and he’d be weeks marching through the snow. She’d seen the hunger in his eyes earlier, knew he couldn’t make it without feeding.

But he was strong, dangerous still. Darrissea knew she couldn’t let him get close. He moved slowly, pulling his bedroll tight, as if pondering.

When he turned and leapt at her, Darrissea fired into his throat, blowing him backward, where he sprawled on the ground.

There he lay, unnaturally still, not breathing, not moving in the slightest. Darrissea found herself panting, wanting to scream or run, but she forced herself to stay. She stood for an eternity watching the skin on his face deflate.

***

Chapter 7: The Autopsy

Phylomon lit torches and set them in the snow around him, then took his knife to dissect the creature that had called herself Allon Tech.

He started at the top, skinning its head, simply because he needed a place to start.

He found that the fat around her cheeks was only a thin layer, that where the sinus membranes should have been in the cheeks and temple, instead the creature had narrow tubes and air sacs.

Tiny gray pheromone glands were hidden next to the saliva ducts. He discovered the glands only when he touched some of the fluid they exuded and found his heart pounding with lust.

The creature’s brain was smaller than either a human’s or a Neanderthal’s.

After nearly an hour, Phylomon noticed something odd—in the torchlight the brunette’s hair changed to a soft red, and the skin faded to a dead white.

Phylomon took his torch around to the other corpses, found that they too had all reverted to a similar hue. With the air sacs and color-changing ability, he realized that the creatures were quite adaptable.

They could look male or female, possibly even look human or Neanderthal. He considered: they might even be able to doppelganger their victims, take their places.

He went back to Allon’s corpse and cut some more.

At the top of the pharynx he found a small passage that he imagined would lead to more air sacs, but instead it went down the throat to a second stomach, which was filled with blood.

He found the liver to be overlarge, the spleen almost nonexistent. He cracked a femur and found it to be hollow, lacking marrow, like the bones of a bird.

He quit dissecting at that point, for he had spent several hours with the creature, and it had grown dark, and he felt uncomfortable slicing it up alone in the night.

Phylomon washed his hands again and again, and could not feel clean.

He went and lay in the snow, looking up at the sky, at the thin layer of clouds hiding the Milky Way. One of the red drones beat its path across the sky.

Until that moment, Phylomon had believed the Creators intended to destroy mankind, wipe them out and start anew. Now he wasn’t sure. The Creators were introducing new breeds of predators, new horrors to thin the human population.

But it seemed to him that if the Creators meant to destroy mankind, a plague would have worked more thoroughly.

That was the problem. The Creators, with their crystalline brains, did not think the way that a human did. Their plans sometimes seemed overly simplistic, other times unfathomable and ingenious.

Phylomon lay for an hour, replaying memories of his youth from the days when he was still taking seritactates.

Phylomon had helped program the predator/prey equations that told the Creators when to introduce new predators into the ecosystems, or when populations of herbivores had overextended enough to endanger the local flora and fauna. The crystalline brains of the Creators could only hold so much information, and those brains were crammed with genetic codes, sophisticated equations dealing with the allowable flora and fauna populations, and recommendations for possible solutions to various problems.

Beyond this type of information, the Creators were actually quite simple-minded. Phylomon wondered if the Creators were refraining from wiping out mankind with a plague simply because they didn’t recognize that it was the best alternative, or if they had been programmed against it.

After great consideration, Phylomon surmised that they had been programmed to avoid it. He personally had entered many of the equations into their brains that offered how to control the populations of higher mammals such as dire wolves and Mastodon Men, but he had only given the Creators the options of using either parasites or other predators to control the populations.

Using biological warfare against large populations, he had felt, would have been impractical in such a vast and complex ecosystem.

Phylomon found it grimly humorous that the only reason that the Creators hadn’t destroyed mankind already was because they weren’t designed well enough.

Ah, with a bit more work,
he thought,
what might they accomplish yet!

Phylomon considered the blood eaters. They were well-designed. Mankind could flee other predators—might find ways to burrow underground or climb trees to escape, but these blood eaters could hunt men in their warrens, in their most desolate and well-protected shelters.

As a Dicton, Phylomon had been born with a genetically created dictionary of the ancient language of the Starfarers—English. He knew all of the words in the language, but he did not use them when speaking with ordinary humans.

His descendants, whose blood had mingled with that of the Neanderthals over the centuries, had forgotten so many of the words that some had faded from the group consciousness.

Only a few rare throwbacks who had been born with an internal dictionary could communicate with Phylomon on his own level. Certainly, even if he told Fava, Darrissea, and the Hukm what he had found, they would not have understood—a creature that cannot create its own blood and therefore must prey on others.

He calculated in his head, knowing that the walls of the red blood cells from their prey would erode after only four to six weeks of pounding through the blood-eaters’ veins. The creatures would have to feed at least once every three weeks, he suspected.

He imagined how they must be spreading, searching out every city in Craal, trying to infiltrate the communities.

With their pheromone glands, they would find it easy to infiltrate. Now all that they had to do was to wait until the time was right to attack the cities from within.

Phylomon mouthed the word for what the Creators had formed:
vampire.

***

Chapter 8: The Dream House

In his dark cell beneath the earth, Tull was free to remember and dream.

The hay on the cold stone floor smelled of dung and urine and mice, reminding him of barns he had cleaned back home. The chittering of mice in the night reminded him of his own childhood, of how Jenks had chained him in his room when Tull threatened to run away, and at times late at night Tull could hear the rodents squeaking and scurrying through the kitchen.

The food for prisoners here was cold—stiff bread, boiled potatoes left in their own water until it turned almost white as milk, and he remembered milking cows for Hendemon Strong when he was young, the warm milk squirting into a wooden bucket.

Weeks ago, when the ship had reached Bashevgo, the Blade Kin had brought Tull from the depths of the ship into the stunning sunlight, marched him a short distance over the frozen ice with the others, shivering for lack of a blanket or coat.

Beneath the layer of ice, Tull had heard the groan of the sea serpent, eager to free him, but Tull had warned it, “not yet.”

A few yards ahead, he’d seen some people from town marching—Theron Scandal the innkeeper, and Zhopila, his mother-in-law.

There were far too many friends nearby. If the serpent dared break the ice, innocent Pwi would have died.

Yet the serpent knew it was his last chance. Tull could feel the monster brooding, and he could barely restrain it.

Far too quickly, Tull walked the short distance over the ice, and under the archway that led to Bashevgo.

Everywhere, curious Thralls had lined the streets to watch the last free men of the Rough hauled in.

The Thralls seemed confused by the spectacle. Some old Neanderthal women were crying to watch the end of an era. Other Thralls cheered the Blade Kin guard that marched along.

At last the Pwi from Smilodon Bay turned up a street, heading uphill toward the Capitol, but three Blade Kin escorted Tull in another direction.

He had hoped to be put in a cell with some family or friends—but they had all marched away to other buildings, and Tull alone was taken to a cell deep beneath the arena.

And now, here, he dreamed, thinking of his last conversation with Mahkawn.
What do you want in life?

After six weeks, he dreamed of Fava’s lips, of sleeping with her under the bear skins in his cabin, of the way that they moved together when cooking a meal or sweeping a floor, as if in dance.

He had wanted a bigger house, and since he was free to dream, he now imagined a house larger than the mayor’s.

He dreamed that he would get free, and someday teach Wayan to read, and that they would be respected, like human shipping magnates or gentleman farmers. He dreamed of food—lemons and oranges shipped north from South Bay in winter, grapes fresh off the vine in fall, wheat bread with leatherwood honey and butter, new clothes.

What do you want in life?
Sometimes Tull would look at his thumbs, his clumsy Neanderthal thumbs that would not let him handle small objects with the precision of a human, and he imagined that if he learned enough about human hands, perhaps he could find a doctor who would break the knuckles in Tull’s heavy paws and then somehow twist the thumbs and reset them so that they would work like a human’s.

Days passed in such dreamy pursuits.

Next to Tull was a cell with a strong young Thrall named Khur. He’d been a willing sex slave for a human master, and when she took another human lover, Khur had tossed a spear at his rival, ramming it through the man’s leg.

“It felt good,” Khur had said, “just to watch him bleed. I did not want to kill him, only to hurt him.”

“I don’t see what you accomplished,” Tull said one night as the days passed. “You will probably get killed, and your master will still have her human lover.”

“It makes no difference,” Khur insisted. “Now, she will always know that I loved her, that I was willing to die for her. Every time she tries to make love to another man, she will think of me. I will always be remembered,” Khur boasted, thumping his chest and pacing back and forth across his cell.

Tull puzzled. “I don’t understand. You will die for someone who doesn’t love you? You will make her feel guilty for what she has done to you? It seems a great waste, when you could have found another lover. Tell me, what have you gained?”

“Honor,” Khur said, pounding his chest, pulling his shoulders back. He stood behind his bars and grinned. “People will honor and remember me—a mere slave! And I will have revenge. My master will never enjoy sex more than what she had with me!”

Tull looked into Khur’s big, friendly eyes, his generous smile, and realized that he did not understand Thralls.

To Khur, who had nothing, a little bit of honor and respect seemed worth his own life. Tull turned away, thought of things he had lost.

So it was that Atherkula found him dreaming.

The sorcerer came without his robes of office, wearing instead a simple green tunic and red trousers, with a leather long coat thrown over it all. He had come quietly to the cell door, and found Tull smiling.

“You are a madman,” Atherkula said, “to be smiling down here. As a lunatic you will be worth nothing—fit only for culling.”

Tull looked up quizzically, and for some reason could not place Atherkula.

Atherkula demanded, “Why are you smiling?”

“Have you ever tasted Frog Hollow cheese?” Tull asked. “The land is cool and foggy down there in the winter—almost a swamp—and many of the trees there have rotted at the core, though they still stand. The folks take those old hollow trees and put bladders of goats’ milk in them to age for the winter. The cheese is yellow and creamy, very pungent. You should try it, really.”

Atherkula stared at him, and the old man’s eyes were filled with curiosity. “You are dreaming of freedom, aren’t you? You know, I am the man who took it from you, and I could give it back. Mahkawn wants your ear and would make you a Blade Kin if I permitted it. What would you give me for your freedom?”

Tull looked up, held the old man’s eyes.

“I tell you what I want for your freedom,” Atherkula said. “Among the Blade Kin, we have an old custom. We pick children who may become Blade Kin, and we give them a pet, and give them time to learn to love that pet. Then we order them to kill it. If they can kill the thing they love, we know they are worthy to become one of us. We know they can be trusted to follow our orders. I tell you this: I will trust you when I see you kill the thing you love most. But who would that be? It seems you do not care for your mother or father. So, I will make it Fava. We caught her at Muskrat Creek, you know. I slept with her last night. She gives a bumpy ride. If you killed her in the arena, I would consider you worthy to be Blade Kin.”

Tull closed his eyes, fought back his wrath.

“You’re not going to speak to me?” Atherkula asked. “You’re not going to say anything at all?”

Tull kept his eyes closed, realizing that if he hoped to make his dreams come true, he’d have to kill. In Bashevgo and in the Rough, he had killed without compunction, but never like this.

He imagined his dream house, a great stone house in the woods—cream marble with cedar panels on the interior—and it would sit next to a deep pond where trout would swim and mallards would land at night in autumn. He decided to build it in his mind, design and construct it, and imagined piling stone upon stone upon stone.

***