Mornings in the mountains are given to the rodents and the insects, seeking seeds and leaves and each other. Midday is the sole realm of the sun itself, driven to burn out whatever life it can reach. Evenings are for the snakes and the eagles; the former twisting into deep burrows, and the latter snatching up whatever the serpents drive forth. And all times, all prey, belong to the Guernikan.
*
All through the long heat of the day, as the sun sucked the resin from the cracking bark of the stunted pines, the Guernikan felt a growing sensation of deathness. It perceived the state-change as a tingle rising from the pit of the its guts to become an effervescence in its brain. It hissed and preened; it would suck marrow from long bones before nightfall. It hunkered down under its feathered cloak and waited. The sun peaked, westered and cooled, and the deathness strengthened.
It was only a matter of time.
*
Tomas the Rabid Dwarf and Yelm the Iron Giant steadily worked their way up the long slope of the Pass. The former was merely a very short man – not truly dwarfish – with bad teeth and an impressive mustache, so called for his temper and predilection for explosions and unprovoked violence. And the latter: single-armed and Cyclopean after the final engagements of the War, and so named because he stood eight feet tall and consistently survived what broke other men. Together, they ranged the European lands once ravaged by the armies and the creations of the New Scientists and the Madboy Kings, hunting down the Haunts which had survived the Second Thirty Years War. Those peasants and burghers who had likewise survived the conflicts, and who now found themselves piecing back together the old nations in spite of the vestigial aristocracies, paid well for proof that yet another of the monsters and machines created by the Madboys had been destroyed, and so Tomas and Yelm stitched together a living in the midst of the ruins and the fear.
“Is this really the right road, amigo?” Tomas brushed greasy black hair from his eyes. “These mountains all look the same to me.” He’d grown up the son of a heavily taxed villain a long day’s march from the Pass, but he’d been almost two decades away. “What are we doing up here, anyway?” Heat made him petulant.
Yelm lopsidedly shrugged away the Dwarf’s questions. It was the right road. He had his own concerns. He shifted his ten-foot long steel-hafted glaive under the stump of his left arm and reached into the large pouch on his belt. He mangled the loaf of stale bread therein and pulled a lump free. He hesitated, then offered it to his companion.
The Dwarf declined without thinking – it was too hot to eat. “With what you eat, maybe we should just try farming after all.”
Yelm chewed and waited for the Dwarf’s goat-cart to catch up to them. He looked down at his companion and considered the proposal. He wrinkled his nose.
“Por supuesto, you are right.” Tomas sighed. “Farming isn’t for old men like us.”
Neither man was actually old, although they’d spent the better part of the last decade living rough, and had lived hard through the Wars before that.
“Wouldn’t remember how any more,” Tomas said, and he grinned, seemingly satisfied to have lost the skill in favor of bounty hunting.
After a few minutes of mastication, the bread took on a kind of sweetness; the local grain was good. Yelm looked at the mountains rising above them. The road to the Pass paralleled a streambed, dry in the heat of summer. A one-armed man might have a garden, he decided, but working a farm would never do. Especially not in this kind of landscape. Now, a vineyard…. But no. Vineyards were very expensive, or so he’d heard, and his brief time as a quarryman and long career as a soldier hadn’t prepared him for nurturing.
Tomas said, “No, I suppose there’s no such thing as an easy life.” He tugged on the nearest goat’s beard, trying to speed the cart’s progress in spite of the slope and the heat. He looked up at his companion. “Still. If you can die happy, doing what you love, what’s old age to that, eh?”
Yelm wondered about his friend. Then he wondered about himself, did he really know what happiness was? He’d never given the idea much thought before. Even on long marches, there had never seemed enough time. Still, it seemed to him that he didn’t love fighting, and so he would prefer not to die that way.
“You know what I’d love right now?” Tomas said.
Yelm shook his head. He assumed it was to not die yet, either.
“A full belly, a warm bed, and a paid-up whore.” The Dwarf’s laugh bordered on a cackle. “No way to die, perhaps, but a hell of a way to live. No?”
Yelm’s belly rumbled, but he ignored it. He wanted to growl a denial. Supplies were always short for a man his size, as were the beds. And ladies of negotiable affection always charged extra for ‘wear and tear.’ The Giant thought his friend awfully simple. But then he reckoned the Dwarf lived in a different world. And even if Tomas’ vision had some merit, it was still beyond their grasp.
“Of course,” the Dwarf said, “Our job is a kind of fun. A man could die happy hunting down a bounty. You’d feel you’d done something, eh?” He looked up at the Giant.
Yelm couldn’t quite agree. It was a job: that was all. The Dwarf was merely thinking out loud, and his thoughts never seemed to solidify. And it was too hot to think this much, Yelm thought, especially for someone as unused to the exercise as Tomas. He nodded, and increased the pace ever so subtly.
*
The sun at last began to move behind the crazed peak of Nallikan Mountain. It would soon be hidden entirely and the air would grow cooler. On the mountainside high above the Pass, the Guernikan stirred in its shadowed perch in the roots of an ancient and grossly gnarled pine. It sensed ever more strongly the approach of a group of life forces, and its hunger stirred. It was surfeited of a steady diet of small lives, of marmot and mouse, vole and squirrel. It ruffled its black-feathered cloak and vented a tinny croak from beneath its stiffly jutting hood and thought about flesh.
The approaching lifeness felt strong, and the shadows of departed memories sleeted through the Guernikan’s brain. It remembered nothing, but it felt expectations, sourceless and unsettling. It shook out its feathered cloak and croaked again. But hunger always overrode uncertainty, and the Guernikan crept in perfect silence against the rising backdrop of the locust’s song. It slunk around and through the cracked and shattered boulders on the side of the mountain, under the stunted limbs of the pines like a patch of living shadow. It paused for a long while behind a screen of old, parched bamboo and savored the sensation of the approaching meatness. The feeling of deathness grew alongside a shadowy uncertainty in its brain. But its hunger grew also.
It hopped from foot to foot as its brain crackled and its body mirrored its mind.
The shadows of its memory screamed silently at the Guernikan, but it couldn’t understand their intimations. It did understand meatness, the approaching lifeness sweetly intermingled with deathness. That sensation was certainty enough for the hunter in it, and electric excitement coursed through its brain. Still screened from the Pass by boulders and bamboo, the Guernikan uttered a series of harsh croaks that rose in volume until they echoed from the mountain walls.
As those echoes were answered, the Guernikan hopped up and down on both feet and flapped its arms under its feathered cloak. On both sides of the Pass, its call was taken up by a multitude of coarse corvine tongues. The crows emerged from their shadowed nooks between tumbled rocks and at the roots of twisted trees. They too hopped from foot to foot and shook out their wings to clear the dust and pollen from the vanes. Those nearest the Guernikan took wing first and the air above the Pass was soon full of the cacophonous boiling chaos of the most immense murder of crows.
*
Yelm and Tomas both jerked their gazes skyward as a gigantic murder of crows erupted seemingly from nowhere. Yelm’s gaze roamed as he sought a trigger for their flight. Crows were scavengers, familiar to any warrior who survived a battlefield. A murder this large suggested much to the Giant. Most importantly, it suggested that something other than their approach had roused the birds. But he saw nothing obvious.
“Mierda. I guess it was the right road after all.” Tomas said.
Yelm had never doubted. The Pass had once been an important trade route, one of few in the area, and had been occupied by several contesting armies during the War. Now the local lugarenos spoke of it being occupied by something else. Something unwholesome and unseen. And they told the bounty hunters that the Magistrate of some nearby city wanted the Pass reopened to trade. It was the right road.
Yelm nodded. Tomas engaged the lock on the wheel of the cart as he moved to its rear end. He opened the doors there and began charging his arsenal while the Giant kept watch. For his part, Yelm was gladdened that his partner was finally demonstrating a more businesslike approach to the hunt.
*
The Guernikan felt the lifeness, still out of sight, cease moving. Anticipation sizzled in its brain, urgency pushed its hand. Now the fear that the tantalizing meatness might escape compelled it further. A rapid ticking noise issued from beneath its cloak. It felt deathness growing stronger in the Pass. The tenor of its calls changed only slightly, but the effect on the swirling crows was immediate and powerful.
*
Yelm grunted as the murder overhead changed shape.
“All right, I’m hurrying,” Tomas said.
They had not quite entered the Pass proper. Yelm could see where the roadbuilders had carved away a portion of the ridge between the two peaks. Some of the material had apparently been used to create a wall with a gate and a guardhouse, the foundations of which stood just visible to the Giant. They did not appear to him a useful hiding place in which an observer might find concealment. His puzzlement and concern at the behavior of the crows overhead grew.
The murder split into two groups. One remained as it was, circling noisily overhead. The other dropped from the sky and formed what was effectively a flanking force on the road below the companions. It looked like the tactic a general would adopt to force a battlefield of his choosing.
Yelm shifted his grip on his great weapon. His helmet sat atop the cart, and he wondered if he would be given the chance to wear it. His armor, a motley collection of pieces beaten to fit his massive frame by a score of smiths over the years, would be more than sufficient to ward off any number of crows – provided, of course, that he could actually put all of it on. He didn’t want any more scars on his face than he already had.
Tomas shoved a brace of pistols, each as long as his arm, into a pair of holsters across his back and jammed his own helmet onto his head.
“Right,” the Dwarf said, and picked up a short-barreled blunderbuss. “Ready!” He laughed and capered in the dust. A second blunderbuss lay across the top of the cart.
Yelm took two long strides, jammed the butt of his glaive into the earth, and pushed his helmet over his dusty hair. Tomas removed the chock from the wheel and they started forward again.
*
The meatness moved closer again, even as the sensation of deathness grew. Fluids wept from the Guernikan’s mouth and the clicking was replaced by a hiss. Shadows out of the past congealed once again in its brain. It shook them away, pressed them down. The past was gone – meatness was now. And it was close. The Guernikan’s calls changed again and the half of the murder still in flight began to drop into the Pass.
*
“Here they come,” Tomas said. He once more locked the wheel of the cart. The crows already on the ground behind them hopped closer, hemming them in, while those above started landing all around. Yelm grunted and strode forward, gauging the likeliest direction of an attack if the crows were simply a diversion. He left that space clear for Tomas’ shot. Birds landed atop the cart and carpeted the ground all around the companions. Once out of the air, they remained eerily silent. Yelm stopped walking, started whirling his great glaive in huge, lazy circles over his head.
One crow, a little larger than the rest, hopped out from the edge of the murder nearest the Giant. It eyed him quizzically, extended its neck, and cawed loudly. Yelm shivered.
The crow had teeth.
Yelm took one titanic stride forward and swept the glaive down. It took the crow cleanly across its grossly bloated body, flinging it among its fellows. Those nearest the bisected bird set up a raucous chorus as they began tearing into their erstwhile compatriot.
Yelm shivered again. He hoped these unnatural birds were not the direct manifestation of the Haunt indicated by the bounty. It would prove much more difficult to collect if that were the case.
“Hey! Hey!” Tomas shouted. “They’re biting my goats!” He drew a knife and ran back to his cart.
Yelm heard the draft animals bleating in panic. But other crows were hopping toward him, teeth exposed as they cried out. He left the Dwarf to defend his animals.
*
The sensation of deathness grew in the Guernikan’s brain as it watched its crows fall upon the remains of the victims of the traveler’s blades. New imperatives ratcheted through its brain, incomprehensible commandments levering it to unknowable actions. The clicking renewed, sped up, became a whir. It shook bodily, screamed hoarsely, wordlessly. Reaction was called for, but the Guernikan was paralyzed by the conflict between its sensations and its ancient, damaged dictates.
*
Tomas gave up stabbing at the birds bloodying his goats as something nearby screamed hideously. He pulled a short tube from his belt and applied the projecting wick to the smoldering rope jammed into the top of his boot. The wick caught and Tomas threw it trailing a spiral of smoke deep into the massed crows behind their position. An explosion rocked the Pass moments later. Feathers and pebbles and bits of bird fountained into the air, and the entire murder took to the sky in a panicked clatter of wings and caws. Tomas didn’t aim. He fired his blunderbuss straight up and was rewarded with a shower of feathers and scorched carcasses. Triumph rang in his laughter. The birds further panicked. The Dwarf dropped the first gun, grabbed the second and fired again with similar results. Then, for maximum effect, he hurled a second charge of dynamite as high into the air as he could, giggling through the ringing in his ears.
*
The Guernikan felt the explosions in its chest cavities, felt deathness ripping through its crows. It screeched, sounding more like an eagle than a crow. Its brain crackled and hissed, filled with old routines, long forgotten, incompletely recalled. It kept shaking its head, as if trying to to force the faulty mandates to settle, to give a hint at an appropriate response. Its crows were not warrior stock, not like hawks; they fled the noise and the flying death of the Dwarf’s arsenal. The Guernikan finally abandoned its hiding place. Lifeness must be converted to deathness; that was the only certain imperative that remained to it, stronger now even than hunger and meatness.
*
Yelm shouted wordlessly as he saw a hunched figure spring from a desiccated clump of bamboo near the middle of the Pass. Here at last was the Haunt of Guernikan Pass. He was glad it wasn’t the crows. They’d survived every individual thing the Madboys and the New Scientists had ever thrown at them, but he felt unsure about their preparedness in the face of a swarm. He hadn’t realized just how uncertain and uncomfortable he’d been feeling until he saw Haunt.
Tomas was already running to the back of his cart, the two empty blunderbusses abandoned in the dust. By the time he withdrew the long-barreled wheellock rifle from its drawer, the Haunt had already covered half the distance from its cover to the two bounty hunters. Tomas barely aimed. He’d double-charged the rifle, and was nearly knocked over by the percussion. He didn’t wait to assess his shot, but snatched a second brace of pistols from the already-opened drawer and stepped sideways to get clear of the smoke.
Yelm saw the figure of the Haunt jerk as Tomas’ bullet struck home, but the creature’s advance was not slowed. Yelm’s glaive still whirled around his head, but he let it slip out to its maximum reach. Still the Haunt came on, its feathered cloak flapping and shimmering in the dying light. It leapt into the air and cleared the final fifteen feet in a single flight, its cloak flying open for an elastic moment as it stretched its limbs toward the Giant. Yelm saw in that instant a bizarre conglomeration of shapes: the wasted arms and legs of an old man juxtaposed with a lumpen, swollen body. Metal blades on its hands and feet glinted in the fading light. Then the Giant’s glaive caught the Haunt hard against the side of its head, and the creature screamed as it spun through the air. Tomas’ pistols hurled more violence against the Haunt as it hit the ground.
It lay chirping on the ground even as the second round of bullets struck it. Its glossy, feathered cloak fell away from the lower half of its body, affording Yelm a clearer view of their foe. The legs truly were those of an old man: shriveled, liver-spotted, sparsely and patchily haired, with great, inflamed knobs for knees. But the feet were those of an immense bird: yellow, scaly, callused, many-jointed, three-toed, with great metallic talons. The line where the bird’s feet met the old man’s legs was inflamed, red and flaking and irritated. The lower half of its torso, just visible at the hip, appeared to be covered by some sort of smooth, matte, black material, stretched and vividly straining to contain the lumpen form beneath. It bulged in places no man should, unless something other than flesh had been stuffed between the material and the skin. But that was as much time as Yelm had to assess this Haunt; at that moment, the creature righted itself.
*
The warriors facing the Guernikan were strong in lifeness. But deathness hovered about them as well, intertwined. The Haunt was confused; it could not locate the source of the deathness, could not determine its orientation. The combination felt like a dangerous, aberrant re-emergence of lost patterns into the Guernikan’s world. The ancient, faulty mandates again sought to reassert control over its brain. It shook and screeched. Then it tore a handful of feathers from its cloak and hurled them at the Giant.
*
What appeared at first to be merely feathers proved to be steel darts upon contact with the Iron Giant’s armor. Most skipped harmlessly from its surface. One feather-like weapon painted a line of blood across Yelm’s cheek as the vane cut close to his face. And another struck squarely enough to pierce his armored abdomen just below his ribs. Neither wound was deep, but they were a solid reminder of the danger inherent in facing a Haunt. He took a single step toward his opponent and feinted a deep thrust at it. It recoiled and threw a second handful of darts at the Giant. Yelm was prepared for the response, however, and none of the missiles struck home.
Tomas fired his second set of pistols, then rushed back to his cart to retrieve a pair of hatchets. Firearms were not sufficient to stop this Haunt. It would be down to the brute strength of the Iron Giant to finish it.
*
The Guernikan jerked as more bullets tore through its body. It had not been damaged like this in a score of years, beyond its limited capacity for recall. It hissed deep within its stiff, black hood as its brain clicked. Shadows of memories slipped through its mind, incomplete, spider-silken, gone. Frustration flooded its sensorium with red-tinged rage. It wanted to sink its strong raptor’s talons into its foe’s bowels and feel the lifeness leave his eyes as it curled its toes in his entrails. It felt deathness looming hugely above itself and its foes. It screamed and hurled itself once more through the air.
*
Yelm crouched and set his broad-headed glaive to receive the Haunt’s charge. The creature crashed heavily onto the blade, and Yelm used its own momentum to carry the thrashing talons over his head. He then bore down on his blade and pinned the Haunt to the ground. Tomas ran forward and hacked at the Haunt’s neck with his hatchets, shouting “Hai!” with every strike. Finger-blades grated across the Dwarf’s leg armor.
*
The Guernikan felt the sensation of deathness grow immense, and knew it had failed. But it could no longer conceive of what that failure might be. The deathness seemed almost a welcoming presence after the red-misted screaming crowding its brain. Its body spasmed as the blades thudded into its neck, and its claws furrowed the dusty, densely packed earth of the Pass. The whirring in its torso slowed to a series of clicks. Then deathness took it, and silence.
*
Tomas stood panting over the body of the Haunt. Luminous blue gore dripped from the heads of his hatchets. He sat down abruptly in the dust.
“Am I getting too old for this?” he wheezed, his voice loud in the suddenly empty Pass.
Yelm ignored the Dwarf’s question as another meaningless noise meant to fill the silence. He grunted and pulled his blade free of the Haunt’s torso. A metal fin unfolded silently from the incision. Pale, phosphorescent fluids welled out around it. The Haunt’s liver-spotted head rolled free of the stiff cowl, and the great black beak pulled its face toward the dust, hiding the death-filmed eyes. The Giant had seen so many Haunts over the years that he didn’t even wonder at it.
Tomas spat into the dust. “Ugly old thing.”
Yelm nodded. He leaned his glaive against the cart and headed toward the edge of the slope. Tomas unbuckled one of his grieves and examined a shallow cut. One of the Haunt’s blades had slipped through a joint in the Dwarf’s armor. He shivered.
“What are we doing?” he said. His voice made him sound lost.
Yelm stopped and looked closely at his friend; he wasn’t accustomed to hearing the Dwarf sound so…vulnerable.
“Remember the La Sangra Haunt? Back in Figaro?” Tomas said, glancing at the remains of the Haunt of Guernikan Pass. “That was, what. Five years ago? No, seven. So long.” He looked up at Yelm. “Remember how we killed it, and then it split apart, and we had to kill each of those three smaller Haunts? And the Mayor would only pay us for the one, because that is all the bounty specified.”
Yelm remembered two clockwork soldiers and a chimerical-biological type tending them. They’d built a scaffolding like a Madboy’s War Walker that let them move together. It had been a fascinating fight. The Haunts almost seemed to be evolving. He nodded. He remembered, all right, and wondered where his normally unthoughtful partner was taking the recollection.
“That was….” Tomas paused, as if unsure how he felt about something so far in the past. “That was a huge surprise,” he said eventually. He looked back down to the still, shadowed form of the Guernikan Haunt. “It is just no fun any more.”
Yelm rubbed his cheek where the Haunt’s dart had cut him. The slash burned and he hoped it hadn’t been poisoned. He looked at Tomas and nodded. He wondered just how deeply his friend felt this seemingly new conviction. Hunting Haunts for their bounty had indeed lost its savor somewhere along the way. But what else could they do? They knew no other trades. And while the odds were stacked against the Haunts in the long run, he and the Dwarf were just as much relics of the Mad Days as the bio-mechanical creations; time and age stalked them all and he knew that they wouldn’t always remain so lucky against their targets.
Tomas looked at Yelm, his eyes moist. “I do not think I want to die this way.” There was a note of wonder in his voice.
Yelm nodded, recognizing and encouraging the transformation he hoped he was witnessing. He knew that all he’d ever wanted was a nice, quiet life. Maybe the Dwarf was actually coming to the same realization.
But then he shook his enormous head. Even ten years after the end of the War, the idea of a calm, quiet, normal life still seemed as distant as ever. Always approaching, but never coming near. He realized that he was more wearied by the rehearsal of these arguments, even just in his own head, than by their brief battle. The Dwarf would never change, and he couldn’t afford to try. His stomach rumbled and he grimaced. “Food,” he said, as much to forestall further conversation as thought.
Tomas blinked, his gaze flicking between his companion and the Haunt’s corpse. “What, that?”
Yelm shook his head and pointed at the cart. Tomas saw both his goats lying dead.
“Damn it! Those things were expensive!” Tomas rolled to his feet and kicked the Haunt.
Yelm ignored the Dwarf’s pique. And when Tomas spoke again, his once more uncharacteristic tone again arrested the Giant’s notice.
“We should retire,” Tomas said quietly, stalking from the corpse of the Haunt to the carcasses of his goats. “Spend our days fishing in some Peloponnesian village somewhere while we still have time to enjoy it.”
Yelm wanted to agree, but thought blackly that they couldn’t afford to stop working for a week, let alone the rest of their lives. Their financial situation always seemed to approach the edge of desperation. Besides which, he couldn’t remember exactly how he felt about the taste of fish. He continued to gather sticks and twigs and dry grass, clamping them under his stump.
The Dwarf glared at the Haunt as he began salvaging the harness from his goats. “I hope there’s enough from this bounty to last us a couple weeks,” he growled. “Otherwise, what’s the point?”
Yelm snorted. What was the point indeed? Of the past decade? Their whole lives during the War? Their bounty money’s endurance as ever depended largely on the quality of the next town’s brothels, given the Dwarf’s appetites. His stomach growled at him, reminding him of his own requirements, and he felt a little shame at his unspoken treatment of his friend.
Larger perspective meant little when one’s belly was empty, he thought. But he knew that there had to be more to life than the next meal. The fact that he was still alive and thinking seemed to demand that there be more. Anger, at himself and his circumstances, fumed in his mind. He wanted to hit something, but that would mean dropping his carefully selected firewood. He took a deep breath and slowly released it, feeling his pulse slow and his mind go quiet.
A thought welled up into the stillness. They had just made this part of the world a little safer.
They hadn’t repaired the ravages of thirty years of warfare and rampant Science, hadn’t materially advanced the course of human existence, hadn’t even solved their own financial straits. But they had re-opened the Pass to travelers, until the next round of bandits and toll-gatherers showed up. They had made this small part of the world a little better, for a little while.
The thought might not exactly make Yelm happy, as the Dwarf defined it, it did make his past and his choices feel…worthy. He had something to feel good about. So that even if their goals were not approaching rapidly, even if the Mad Days of their youth and primacy were long behind them, he could feel that their situation was perhaps not yet hopeless. They would eat the goat meat tonight, and some bread. And receive their bounty money soon enough. And they could continue the hunt, or not. But for now, at least, he felt that they had bought themselves a little more time.
***
