He hunches away from his partners and shuffles along the shadowed alleyway. At the ass end, he leans his spear into the corner so he can use both hands to unwrap his breechclout, and he squats.
Ogrilloi and humans aren’t that different. They’re pack hunters, we’re opportunistic scavengers, but the behaviors overlap enough that our evolutionary adaptations have a lot in common. Like, say, we both prefer a little privacy when we crap.
Has to do with diets heavy in protein and aromatic fats. We evolved using the undeniably fierce smell of our feces to mark off territory. And being top predators-or, in our case, smart enough to be dangerous to top predators-we don’t worry about fresh fecal reek attracting the wrong kind of attention.
Our shit says
Loudly.
And it’s a hell of a lot louder to a scent-hunter like an ogrillo than it is to us poor nose-challenged humans.
Steam from one hard turd rises faintly into the slanting moonlight. Which is why that squatting buck over there has no idea I’m slipping over the lip of this ruined wall. He leans on the shaft of his grounded spear, grunting low in his throat, waggling his hips, trying to work the next turd out. Poor bastard’s crapping diamonds. Too much rich food.
But, y’know, I’m about to help him with that.
I slide through the moonshadow along the crumbled wall, bare feet feeling each step before I shift weight forward.
There are two contrasting styles of garrotte. The more popular is the cheese-cutter style: a single strand of thin flexible wire between a pair of handles. It’s pretty damned foolproof. Slices the external jugulars, crushes the trachea, and with the right kind of takedown there’s not much struggle either. The downside is that it takes a long damned time; a determined man can keep fighting quite a while with no fresh oxygen to his brain, and if you get a little careless on his back he can still kill you before he bleeds out. And if the wire’s too thin it can cut the trachea instead of crushing it, and then you’ve got a
I favor the strangler’s noose.
Squatting, he’s put his head just at my chest height; the doubled loop of the dagger’s hilt wire slips down past his eyes, his snout, his tusks-the loop’s extra-wide; if it snags I’m a dead man-and in the nightshadow he can’t see it. The first he even knows it’s there is when my two-handed yank on the dagger snaps the noose tight under his chin. He jerks up standing, and I ride his rise, doubling my knees to put my weight into his shoulder blades.
One one thousand.
My weight captures his balance; we go staggering backward. He drops his spear to claw at his throat, and his cry of alarm doesn’t even make a hiss past the two strands of hilt wire that clamp shut his trachea.
Two one thousand.
His backward stumble takes us to the ruined wall. He hits it just above his knees and we topple over it. His weight crushes me into the rubble and flares splash the inside of my head and I don’t care.
Three one thousand.
He kicks and flails and rolls and tries to reach back over his shoulders to get at me with his fighting claws, but his own massive musculature betrays him; his arms won’t bend that way.
Four one thousand.
And now he finally remembers the spear he left on the ground over by his steaming turd, and he struggles to his knees and pulls himself over the wall again.
Five one thousand.
And he takes one step, and my weight drives him to his knees. He keeps trying-the bastard’s no quitter-but this is the thing about the strangler’s noose: properly applied, it doesn’t cut the jugular veins, it only squeezes them shut-and it doesn’t close the carotid arteries. Which is to say: it doesn’t stop blood from going to your brain. It stops blood from coming
The whole thing takes only a little more than twice as long as it takes to say
He makes it to the spear at seven seconds, but his hand will no longer close upon it. At eight seconds, his will can no longer drive his collapsing body, and he crumples, twitching.
He keeps twitching for a while. Even after he’s basically dead. His sphincter never does let go. Poor bastard.
I take the wire off his neck before I skin him. I leave the flesh on his head, except for the musk glands under his jaw, which I have use for.
Last, before I go: I take from behind my belt one of the nails that had fixed me to my cross. I use the pommel of the dagger to pound it into his forehead.
Because they’re scent hunters. Because I want them to know.
Caine is here.
Caine is coming for them.
I AM THE SMOKE HUNT
I woke with the taste of raw human flesh still fresh and bloody on my tongue.
I rolled over and scrubbed at my face with one hand while my other groped for the pitcher on its stand beside the bed. I rinsed my mouth with stale water, then made a face and spat it on the floor. Fucking water tasted worse than the blood.
I hacked goo up the back of my throat and muttered, “Now, that was a
I poured water into a shallow terra-cotta bowl and splashed it on my face, softening the sleep gunk at the corners of my eyes before scraping it away with my fingernails. Dawn had paled the stars above the room’s slanted skylight. I sighed and shook myself till my ears rang. It’d probably be an hour before I could get breakfast. Or even coffee. After a soggy minute or two, I remembered ordering the Pratts out of town.
My head got too heavy to hold up. It sank into my hands. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”
I pulled the chamber pot from under the bed and opened the lid, reflecting that somebody on this planet really ought to invent twenty-four-hour room service. As I settled my bare ass onto the night-chilled steel, I decided I could live without the room service. What Home really needed was a couple million union plumbers.
And plastic goddamn toilet seats. With heaters.
I spent a while staring at my hands. Soft and pink and small. Far too small: flimsy fingernails barely thick enough to crack a flea. Forearms smooth and bare where I still vaguely sensed that fighting claws should be. And clean. Too clean. No crust of drying blood, no shreds of ripped manskin-It could have been just a dream.
Sure it could. Really. It was possible.
I finished with the chamber pot, flipped the lid shut and shoved it over by the door. The day porter’d take it from there. If there still was a day porter. I sat on the bed and laced up my breeches. Left in its holster patch overnight, the Automag jabbed into the small of my back. I was about to yank it out and toss it on the bed, but I stopped with my hand on its butt.
A dream-echo of the drumming pounded inside my head.
This hadn’t been like the vision of being Orbek. That had been real as waking life. This was the gradual leakback of memory after a bad drunk.
But maybe just as real. I hadn’t been that drunk.
Some kind of ritual. I couldn’t quite tease it up to the surface of my sleep-fogged mind. Flames in a cave. Leaping and stomping and whirling. Chanting. A house-size bonfire and the savory tang of burning rith. A stone chalice, filled with blood.
Kaleidoscopic. Hallucinatory. The three D’s: drums, drugs, and dance-
Dad, wearing his anthropologist hat, would have called it
