“Mother,” Leshe said.
“Hush.” Therazine rapped her fingers on the forearm of her rifle to keep them from falling asleep. The perpendicular clip of the rifle sat right in front of her face, looking almost like a harmonica extending from the side of the gun. She pulled her head back an inch and then cracked her neck, before resettling her eye on the telescopic sight. Through it she saw rocks climbing up the other side of the canyon. She traced along a natural trail until she found the cave she had been looking at before.
They had been been sitting on these rocks for hours. She had taken Leshe and left the homestead just after sunrise. They rode out to the range and within minutes found a fresh kill. Its guts had been scooped out like all the others. She fired her rifle in the air once as they approached and the scavenging jackals fled. They made for the mountains immediately after. Around noon they found scat. From there Therazine was able to trace the trail of the murderous creatures to the canyon they sat perched above presently. The cave on the other side was the most likely place that a family of glaive cats would make a den. She watched it constantly, while Leshe kept a lookout over the rest of the canyon with a brass monocular.
Leshe wasn’t happy with this stakeout, she knew. But this was what it took. You find where your prey lives, and you wait outside of its home. When it returns or when it emerges, you kill it from a distance, never to be seen by it. Patience is the mark of an effective hunter. She knew it. The glaive cats knew it. She would teach it to Leshe.
“Mother,” Leshe said.
She looked over at him. He lowered the monocular.
“I don’t think they’re there,” he said.
She sighed and looked back through the telescopic sight. “Neither you or I know that, Leshe. The only way for us to find out will be to wait.”
“For how long?”
“For as long as it takes. You be vigilant and patient, they’ll come to you. Lenfoul are impatient. Prairie dogs are impatient. Do you know what happens to them?”
“They get eaten,” Leshe said.
“That’s right. But the dust worms wait. The glaive cats wait. They eat those that see a need to run. Do you want to be a prairie dog, or a glaive cat, Leshe?”
“I don’t want to be either. I like being a boy.”
She glanced over at him again, and then back to the cave. “Boy’s need to eat. They need walls and land to survive. These animals would see that taken from us. So, as a boy, you need to fight them back. Take from them before they from you.”
“Then why don’t we just go down there?” Leshe said. “Why don’t we just go into that cave and shoot them all?”
Therazine remembered her days within the Society, and all the initiates who were killed on their first job because they were restless.
“Because that cave is their home,” she said. “If we go in there, we’re on their turf. You’ve seen pictures of glaive cats in your books, right? I’m sure they’ve taught you about them.”
“Yes.”
“Well, would you want to tangle with one of them?”
Leshe frowned. “Not especially.”
Therazine nodded. “So then we keep our distance. It’s an advantage of ours. Always hold on to every advantage you have, no matter how minor it may seem or how much easier it might be to abandon it. You never know what the Aether’s going to throw at you.”
“The rectors say we shouldn’t use that word casually,” Leshe said.
She turned fully from the rifle and met Leshe’s eyes. “Excuse me?”
Leshe fiddled with the monocular. “At the abbey. Rector Egan says that every time we use the A-word lightly it lets a ray of the Pale Light into our souls.”
“Aether? Is that the A-word?”
Leshe nodded.
She touched a hand to his leg. “Aether’s just a word, son. Words don’t mean anything, other than to the people hearing them. You say whatever words you want to say. Except shit. Don’t say shit.”
“Rector Egan tells us that the Aether listens to all our words.”
“That’s bullshit,” she said. “And you just said Aether right there.”
Leshe blinked. “But I wasn’t saying it lightly. I was… I just used it to…” He trailed off.
“So your rector would have you believe that the Aether not only listens to what words you say, but will also judge you on how you use them?”
“It’s not… I don’t know,” Leshe said. “He said it better than I did. It made sense when he said it.”
“Leshe, dear, look around us.” Therazine motioned to the rocky canyon around them. Clouds had rolled in from the previous night, covering the tips of the mountains in grey fog. Trees of all varieties grew far apart and stuck out from jagged rocks like hairs on a mole. Far below a stream ran through the canyon, hinting at a lake farther up, and snow past that.
“This is the Real. The Aether isn’t here. It’s kept away from us by very smart, very powerful men and women. If it were capable of listening to us, don’t you think the Prevalists would try and stop that? Would they really let it just listen in on everyone, everywhere?”
Leshe shrugged. “I guess not.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry I said a prayer for us last night. There’s just so much I don’t know about… things. I know you and father are having a hard time with the MonDozers. I thought that, you know, maybe a prayer would help us. Or, I don’t know, at least not hurt us.”
Therazine was quiet for a moment. “Your father told you about the MonDozers?”
“No,” Leshe said. “But our walls aren’t too thick. Bren and I hear a lot from our room.”
“You do?”
Leshe nodded.
Therazine bit her lip and turned back to her rifle. That was information she’d have to file away.
She looked back at the cave, and saw movement.
“Leshe,” she said sharply. “Look up.”
There was something moving at the mouth of the cave, partially obscured by a boulder. The foliage along the trail provided her with a scale for its size.
“It’s huge,” Leshe said. “I didn’t know they were that big.”
“That’s just a cub.” Therazine steadied her aim on the creature, waiting for it to move out from behind the rock so she could get a clear view. “Her parents will be big as horses.”
“Oh…” Leshe said. Therazine grinned slightly.
The creature stumbled into view. Through her telescopic sight, Therazine could see the creature’s long, lithe body, taught with muscle and nearly hairless. Underneath its short head, protruding from a lantern jaw, was a stubby horn-like structure, unmistakably identifying the animal as a young glaive cat. The validation made Therazine want to shout.
The cub wobbled over its big paws, kicking pebbles around the flat area outside the cave.
“Do we shoot it?” Leshe whispered.
“No.”
“Why?”
“If we shoot it, we’ll only scare its parents. They’ll flee and not show themselves again, and then this day will be wasted. The baby will draw them out.”
The cub continued to wander about. They waited a few minutes, but no other animal showed itself. The cub laid down and slept.
“Mother.”
“Hush.”
“But mother, what if the parents aren’t there? What if the baby goes back into the cave? Wouldn’t we—Shooting this one is better than shooting none of them, right?”
Therazine sighed. “Leshe, take a stone and throw it. As far down into the canyon as you can.”
Leshe did as she said, and a fist-sized stone tumbled down towards the stream before disappearing amongst the rocks below.
The cub looked up from it nap.
“Again,” Therazine said.
At the second stone the cub stood. It stalked curiously to look over the edge.
“Again.”
A third stone clattered down the rocks and stopped just short of the stream, releasing a dozen other stones which fell into the water with a soft sploosh.
The cub barked and twitched its naked tail. As if in response, a deeper, rumbling growl came from the cave. The cub started to hop, and kept bark. A roar came forth, and then a huge creature emerged into the canyon. The thin fur across its body was faintly striped, but otherwise was a near mirror of the cub. The most glaring difference between them—aside from overall size—was the mandibular growth on its jaw. Whereas the cub had a blunt, club-like growth, the adult sported a heavy blade that jutted forward to twice the length of its head. This blade was jagged from decades of cutting through bone and wood, the ravages of time clearly evident. Therazine’s first thought was admiration at how white and nearly gleaming the jaw blade was. Clearly this creature—a male, from what she could ascertain—took great pride in its weapon.
The adult glaive cat lumbered up to the cub and let loose another harrowing roar. It was easily four times the size of its child.
“Oh, shit,” Leshe said.
“Tongue.” Therazine settled the scope on the cub. If another cub hadn’t emerged at this point, then there wasn’t another. This cub was jumping around its father’s heels eagerly, clearly expecting a hunt of some kind. She waited until the cub stopped to crouch, ready for a pounce. Then she stopped her breath, focused on the rhythm of her own heartbeat, and drew the crosshairs a single degree above the cub’s back.
The rifle cracked. The cub dropped. She ran her thumb on the rifle’s wheel, and the harmonica clip moved a half-inch to the right, lining up a new bullet.
The adult glaive cat barked in alarm. Therazine fired, not wasting a second before cycling the rifle and firing again. The first bullet hit the animal in the lungs, the second in the neck. It howled and fell, gnashing at the air with its massive jaw blade.
Leshe’s hands were covering his ears. “Is that it?”
Therazine remained quiet and kept her eye level with her rifle. Grey smoke wafter from the three spent cases in the harmonica clip. There was no movement in the cave. The adult glaive cat stopped squirming and lay still. There were two bullets left in her gun.
Therazine remained prone and silent. After a minute she saw Leshe starting to stand up in the corner of her eye. Before she could command him to sit back down, the mother appeared at the cave.
She was large, but not as large as the male. But whereas the male had spent its final moment barking in confusion, the female jumped out into the light of day with her teeth bared and took off down the canyon in a run. She bounded to the stream below with startling quickness for a creature her size, and then began up the canyon on Therazine and Leshe’s side.
Leshe shrieked and fell backward onto rocks. Therazine jumped to her own feet to get a better angle on the beast. The glaive cat had seen the chaos and waited, just like Therazine had, and now it made a beeline right for her. Therazine took a half second to admire the creature’s cunning, and then sent a bullet spinning down the side of the canyon and through the female’s head. She tumbled to the bottom.
Therazine flicked the thumbwheel once more and chambered the last round in her gun. She breathed a sigh and then looked over at Leshe.
Her son was pale and breathing hard.
“You showed her where you were,” Therazine said.
“I’m… I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry,” Therazine said. “Just learn from it. You gave up the advantage of concealment because you thought that the fight was over and you wanted to go see your kill. You should have waited.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I said don’t be.”
She reached out and helped her son up. He looked up at her.
“What now?”
“We go and get the male’s head,” Therazine said.
#
The weight of the glaive cat’s head hanging from the saddle made Therazine’s horse tilt to one side as it trotted along. The jaw of the decapitated beast gaped wide, and its blade dug a trench in the ground behind them.
Leshe rode beside her. “Why not give it to the abbey?” he said.
“Because the abbey wouldn’t pay us for it,” Therazine said.
“But the abbey will display it in one of the classrooms. Or the grand hall. They’ll use it for education. Giving it to the Minister just seems… I don’t know, won’t he just mount it on his wall?”
“Maybe. Does it matter what he does with it?
“If he hangs it on his wall, people will think he killed it.”
Therazine looked over at him. “And you don’t want people to think that?”
“Well,” said Leshe, “he didn’t kill it. We did.”
“So?”
“So shouldn’t people know that we did?”
Therazine frowned. “That’s important to you, is it? That people know of your accomplishments?”
“Well, yeah,” Leshe said, his voice wavering. “Isn’t it?”
“Not as often as you think. Sometimes its much better to keep your victories to yourself. The less people know about what it is you do, the better you can do it. Public attention complicates things.”
They trotted on for a moment in silence, and then Leshe asked, “What is it that you used to do, mother? Before you met dad?”
“What do you mean?” Therazine said. “I was a nurse. You know that.”
“Yeah, I mean, I do… but also I don’t. You sometimes talk about things with dad and it sounds like you used to do something else. I don’t know. Where’d you learn to kill like that?”
Time slowed down for Therazine as Leshe talked. For a heartbeat she seriously considered stopping both their horses, dismounting, and having a straight, honest discussion with him about everything. She’d tell him how she used to belong to an organization known as the Bloodletter Society. She’d tell him about all the high-profile people she had killed in her twenties, and about the thousands of ways she knew to end a life. She’d recount it all for him in excruciating detail, late into the night. Every single gruesome, horrifying aspect of her former life would come to light. And she’d end it by explaining to him how much it haunted her, how much she regretted it all. She was rotten in side, the deaths of dozens of other thinking, feeling people staining her soul.
But she didn’t. She’d never even explained it to Kohl in that much detail. He knew what she was, of course. He’d met her when she was at her prime as a killer of men. But they never talked about it. It was in the past, and that was where it belonged.
“You learn a lot about how bodies work as a nurse,” she said.
Leshe frowned and looked out ahead. Therazine doubted that the subject was put to rest. Leshe had turned ten this summer. His questions were going to keep coming, and the answers she was giving wouldn’t suffice. She’d have to talk to Kohl.
They rounded a large boulder and stepped into the savannah. The mountains rose behind them. Ahead of them, far to the distance in the west, a column of black smoke rose into the air.
Therazine’s heart sank into her stomach.
“Mom?” Leshe said, his eyes widening.
A thick, gelatinous fear started crawling through Therazine’s veins.
“Mother, is that—”
“No,” Therazine said quietly. She spurred her horse and stormed across the plains. She kept repeating that word over and over again. The column of smoke grew as the miles passed underneath her. She kept hoping, begging that the column would shift a few degrees to the left or right, to above another homestead down the road. But as she approached, her horse gasping for breath, she came upon her orchard. The smoke rose from a point in the middle of the skeletal trees.
She rushed through the trees, and stopped next to an empty box meant for storing fruit. She couldn’t breath as she beheld the sight ahead of her through the trees.
Her home was gone. There were no flames—the damage was already done. It was a corpse of blackened wood and sheets of ash, belching black smoke high into the cloudy afternoon sky. She didn’t call for Kohl or Bren, because she already saw them. Kohl knelt on the burnt lawn in front of the house, Bren clutched tight in his arms. Above them stood a tall man with a gun to Kohl’s head. There were three other men standing around them, all watching the fire. Their chinless faces and fiery red hair showed that they were all from the same stock.
MonDozer’s boys.
Her mind raced with reasons why this shouldn’t be, exclamations of why the presence of the MonDozer’s on her farm was unjust and unfair. Panic at the loss of her house quickly gave way to fury at the sight of the pistol hovering so close to Bren’s head.
“They haven’t seen us,” Leshe whispered. She jerked her head over him. She hadn’t even realized he was near. Leshe was peering through the trees. “You could get him.”
“What?” she said.
“You got all the glaive cats from more than 300 yards. You can do this. You’ve got five shots. There’s only four of them.”
Leshe’s coolness surprised Therazine, and also terrified her.
“No,” she said. “No. They’re not glaive cats. They’re people.”
“What?” Leshe said. “They’ve got dad. And Bren. We’ve the advantage when we’re hidden like this. You need to, mother.”
“You don’t shoot people, Leshe. You never shoot people.” The anger was growing. “Do you hear me? You never kill people.”
Leshe looked at her like she was completely mad. “But you can’t just—What do we do, then?”
Therazine looked back at the smoking house. The MonDozer with the biggest hat—Wallace, if she recalled—turned back to the one that was holding a gun to her family and said something. The MonDozer with the gun nodded.
Therazine pushed her horse forward and left the cover of the trees. The four men turned to her. She stopped just beyond the orchard, leaving a dozen yards between her and the MonDozer with the gun.
“Mrs. Morlo,” Wallace MonDozer called to her. He was the eldest of the brothers. The right hand of his father.
“MonDozer,” Therazine returned. Her voice was quivering. She fought to control it, but that sludge-like fear had squirmed into ever blood vessel. Kohl looked up at her, tears streaming down the ash that stained his cheeks. She swallowed, and delivered her words with the power and hatred that spawned them. “Get the fuck off my property, you sons of bitches.”
“Our property, Mrs. Morlo,” Wallace said.
“You have no right to be here, MonDozer,” Therazine shouted. “We had until the end of the season to pay you, dammit. What do you think you’re doing?”
“Thera,” Kohl said in a voice that sounded hoarse from screaming.
“We keep an eye on your account, Mrs. Morlo,” Wallace said. Even if you’d turned a miraculous profit on this sad, dying farm, there’s no way by the Aether you’d be able to make enough money to pay my father.”
“We have the money,” Therazine shouted. She was shaking now. “It’s there.”
“It’s not,” Wallace said with a frown. “Your account’s dry as the land you till.”
What? That wasn’t possible. Her and Kohl had made certain that they had enough. They always had enough. It was there.
“It’s there,” Therazine demanded.
Wallace MonDozer shook his head sadly. “My father wants his land back, Mrs. Morlo.”
“Thera,” Kohl whispered again, and for the first time since she’d arrived Therazine looked at him fully. His eyes were wide and hollow. Bren’s face was held to his chest. Bren, who hadn’t even turned to see his mother yet. Bren, who wasn’t holding his father back.
Bren wasn’t breathing.
Everything inside of Therazine screamed.
“If you want this land back,” Wallace said, “the MonDozers are always open to feudal contracts. I’m sure you could work something out with my father.”
Bren wasn’t breathing. Kohl was holding his motionless body because if he didn’t, Bren would slump to the dirt and ash below.
“Your cattle will, of course, be absorbed by my father’s estate, to pay for the damages to this property. These horses you have, as well. We’ll be needing to—”
Therazine shrieked and yanked the rifle from its scabbard. In an instant she’d flicked the thumbwheel and pulled the trigger. Wallace MonDozer’s neck burst like a balloon full of meat.
The other three MonDozers had their guns on her immediately. Her horse took a bullet to the eye and went down, throwing off her second shot. She pulled away from the falling horse just in time to avoid having her leg pinned and rolled off of it. Then she stood, leveling her gun on the MonDozer brother near Kohl and Bren. Her third bullet struck him in the chest.
The remaining two MonDozers kept firing at her. She thumbed the wheel of the rifle and settled the sights on the head of the MonDozer farthest from her. She only looked through the scope for a split-second—just long enough to see a scraggly red beard and a face of tanned leather—and then she fired. Blood flared up in her scope.
She turned, spun the wheel, and placed the final MonDozer in her sights. He wasn’t five yards from her. One of his bullets cut by her face and tore a long painful streak across her ear. She jerked, her finger pulling the trigger, and her last bullet burrowed into the dirt.
Empty gun.
The MonDozer fired again, barely missing her. Therazine grabbed her rifle by the barrel and hurled it at him. He raised his hands to block it, and in that moment she closed the gap between them and snagged his hand that held the pistol. Before he could react she drove a fist into his gut, doubling him over. Still holding his wrist, she struck the back of his elbow with her other hand. There was a loud crack as his arm bent the wrong way. He screamed and the gun fell from his grip.
Therazine flung the gun up with her foot, snatched it out of the air, and shot him in the face.
The farm instantly became silent, other than the sound of the burning building. The whole altercation had taken eleven seconds. Somewhere behind her she heard Leshe shouting ‘mother.’ She dropped the pistol and ran.
Kohl was still clutching Bren. Leshe was beside him, bawling. Therazine dropped to her knees and took Bren’s head in her hands. His eyes were shut. His skin was cold to the touch.
The house burned and winter settled in.
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