by Rich Handley
He took aim. He had the female’s head lined up in his iron sights, and adjusted slightly for the drop as he had learned to do. His nausea grew worse. He had killed before. He had killed Pardel. But that had been a mercy. This was murder.
And the humans… unfired as he was, with no inmost self, wasn’t he more like the First Race than the Second now? These were his own, more kin to him than Calio, Kotte, and Arnia.
Taul steadied. He reminded himself that murder was the defining trait of the First Race. Killing was their mortal flaw. Their capacity to murder had made the world the way it was now. Their gleeful relish in killing had shaped the planet, and had caused the Second Race to be. It had made God, and God was beautiful because God was the First Race’s capacity for murder on an absolute scale, yet held in check. Ultimate potential, yet gloriously and eternally restrained as a demonstration of strength and love.
The relic was the greatest proof of that doctrine. It was holy scripture.
The sickness subsided. Taul felt righteous anger. The First Race had loosed murder on the world. They deserved to have murder visited upon them for that sacrilege.
His finger tightened on the trigger.
A shot rang out, incredibly loud in the wooded basin of the pool. One of the human males jerked like a cracked whipcord. The side of his head vanished in a red drizzle. He crashed over into the water.
Eyes wide, Taul lowered his rifle. He had not fired.
Three riders burst into the clearing. Their horses were at full gallop as they rode into the pool, sheeting up water from their hooves.
They were soldiers of the Third Race.
They were apes.
The soldiers were massive, dark brutes, their hair as black as the polished leather hauberks they wore. They were draped in heavy bandoliers, and one carried a rifle, the butt resting on his thigh. He howled orders through a snarling mouth that revealed fangs like daggers. His outriders brandished long riot sticks.
The humans broke and ran. One of the males tried to flee across the pool, but an outrider ran him down and felled him with a vicious smash of his baton. His head split open, the male cartwheeled in a spray of water.
The female had fled with the satchel.
“Stay here!” Taul told the others.
“You can’t—” Arnia began.
“Stay the hell here!” Taul snapped. He turned to move, but froze. The ape with the rifle had turned his horse, and was walking it back along the shallows in their direction. Its hooves sloshed the water. The ape was staring at the thickets where they were hiding, as if he had heard their voices. The ape’s eyes narrowed, and his brow creased.
He was huge. The power in him, the bulk of his arms and shoulders. The blunt aggression of his brow. Taul had never seen an ape before, not in the flesh. The Third Race was very rare in the bleak wastes of the west. Their kind were the last-comers, those that had arisen last of all, the least of the three races and the closest to animals, yet the most powerful.
Peering through the leaves, Taul found himself fascinated by the threat of the rider. The purple uniform. The well-made leather war gear. The gauntlets and the munition webbing. The bridle and the saddle. The beads of water glittering like sequins in the horse’s mane and the ape’s hair.
The rifle in the ape’s fist. The rifle most of all.
It was almost identical to the one Taul carried. When they gave Taul his rifle, the elders told him they had recovered the weapon and the ammunition from a corpse found in the wasteland. How else? How else could you take a rifle from a monster that powerful unless it was already dead?
Apparently satisfied, the ape thrashed his mount’s neck with his reins, back and forth, and swung the animal around. He galloped off across the pool after the others, kicking up a wake of spray.
Taul got up and began to move through the trees, keeping low, running. He could hear the whoop and crash of the hunt close by, the thunder of hooves, the barking call-and-response of the riders. He heard a shot crack out. The Third Race hunted the First. The elders had told him that. They hunted the wild humans to keep them as slaves or kill them as vermin. Vermin most of all.
The Third Race hunted everything.
Taul realized Kotte was with him. “Go back!” he snapped.
“No,” Kotte said. “You’ll never find the female without me.”
“I—”
“In this?” Kotte asked, gesturing to the dense woodland.
Taul knew he was right. Without the gift of fire, he could hardly locate the bright, feral mind of the human female.
“This way!” Kotte cried.
Taul grabbed him and pulled him down into cover. An ape galloped past in full chase. Kotte was forgetting himself. The Third Race had no fire. Their minds were dark, all but invisible to the inmost selves of the Second Race. Kotte could not spot them or warn of them as easily. They had to listen for movement, the thrashing of hooves.
They ran on again. Kotte led the way, focusing his mind.
“She went in this direction!”
They heard hooves, and apes shouting nearby. There were more than three hunters. A whole pack of them. Taul and Kotte reached another clearing, and huddled down again. Two soldier apes rode past, one trailing a heavy rope net. They heard screams. Animal screams. Kotte winced, sharing a wave of pain and terror.
“She’s too far away,” he gasped. “She’s on the far side of—”
He pointed ahead.
“Does she still have it? The satchel?”
Kotte shrugged. He was struggling.
“I’ll bring her to us,” he said.
“What?”
“It’s the only way.”
Kotte tensed. Taul felt pressure in his temples. Kotte had let out his fire. He had projected it. God alone knew what rapture he had cast.
Taul heard a wail. It rang through the woodland. The female was coming back in their direction, running in abject terror, driven by whatever image Kotte had painted in her simple mind.
She ran into view, screaming. The satchel was still wrapped to her, the strap twisted and tangled. Kotte stopped her dead with another spearing thought, and she fell down in a stupor. The desperate force of his fire had probably made her weak brain stroke out. Kotte ran to her and began to untangle the satchel.
“Help me!” he yelled.
Taul hurried to join him. An ape with a rifle ploughed out of the thickets, horse at full leap, showering twigs and torn leaves behind him. He roared at the sight of them.
Taul did not flinch. He stood his ground and raised the rifle to his shoulder. According to scripture, apes were not animals, so the prohibition against killing extended to them, too.
Taul was unfired. He was no longer bound by scripture.
The charging ape reined up hard, his horse rearing. A human? A human in clothes with a gun? Taul, with the beauty of his true face unmasked, wasn’t sure what kind of human the ape thought he was, but the shock of him had checked the brute’s charge.
The shock was fleeting. With another savage growl, the ape raised his rifle.
Taul fired.
Center-mass, as he had been taught. The shot punched through the ape’s torso and snapped him back in the saddle, but didn’t unhorse him. Swaying drunkenly, the ape gazed down at the blood squirting out of the hole in his chest.
Taul fired again.
Head-shot. The ape rocked sideways off his horse, the sudden swing of balance bringing the beast down with him. The horse rolled, squealing, kicking at the air, then got up and fled. It dragged the slack, heavy mass of the ape’s corpse for a few meters until the stirrup snapped.
Taul ran to the ape and looked down at his kill. The ape lay on his back, staring at the sky, eyes dull but expressing surprise, one pupil blown.
Taul bent down and began to wrench off the ape’s bandolier. The ape was so damn heavy.
“Taul!”
He turned. Kotte had risen from the mind-burned female, satchel in hand, but two more riders had entered the
clearing. Kotte was out in the open between them and Taul. The apes were charging, batons raised.
Afterward, Taul suspected that Kotte had tried to use his fire against them. Even animals responded to rapture. Taul wasn’t sure what kind of deterrent Kotte had employed because his unfired mind was blind to it. Sonic or visual, one or the other, used in haste. Traumatic deterrent was futile, for the minds of the Third Race were impervious to such techniques.
But the charging horses baulked hard and reared in terror. Both apes howled, and one was thrown.
Taul ran forward, shooting from the chest. The thrown ape was getting up, and a bullet knocked him flat again. The other ape was regaining control of his spooked horse, and yanking it around to attack. Taul fired again, and the shot tore through the horse’s neck. It fell hard, its legs just giving out, and the ape spilled violently out of the saddle.
Taul felt sorry for the horse. He had been aiming at the rider. But an animal was just an animal. As scripture taught, “IN THE EVENT OF AN EMERGENCY, DO NOT STOP TO SAVE ANIMALS OR PETS.”
The ape got up. Furiously, he wrenched his rifle from the saddle-scabbard of his shuddering, dying mount. Taul didn’t wait for the soldier to pull the weapon free. He put two rounds through the ape’s broad body, and a third through his face as he toppled backward.
Something hit Taul hard and knocked him down. Pain lanced through his ribcage and right arm. He lost his grip on the rifle. He had only winged the first of the two apes. The soldier had got up, baton in hand, and struck him down. The ape struck again, savage, trying to mash Taul’s head into the ground. Blood from the bullet wound in the ape’s shoulder soaked his sleeve and gauntlet, flecking off his fist with every blow. Taul rolled to evade, but the baton smashed across his warding forearms and he cried in pain.
“Leave him!”
The ape turned sharply and found Kotte facing him. Kotte was clutching the satchel against his chest with both arms.
“Leave him be, beast!” Kotte cried.
“You… speak…?” the ape growled.
“I speak with the voice of God,” Kotte replied, “and you are—”
The ape brought the baton down on Kotte’s head, double-handed, like a woodsman splitting logs.
Taul watched Kotte collapse. He hurled himself at the ape. Winded, the ape staggered. They grappled. Taul was strong. His strength and fury surprised the ape. His fist cracked the ape’s jaw sideways and tore his lower lip.
But the strength of the Third Race was of another order entirely. The sheer mass and density of the ape’s muscle and bone was terrifying. He was so solid, so powerful. He smacked Taul away from him with the heel of one palm and Taul fell on his back.
The ape took a step forward, hefting his baton.
Then the ape paused and looked down at the handle of Taul’s dagger. It was jutting out of his chest. Taul had been obliged to get in tight to ram it home.
The ape dropped the baton. He thumped to his knees. He groped at the dagger’s handle, but he could not pull it free. His hands came away bloody. He glared at Taul and exposed his fangs in a grimace. Taul saw murder in the ape’s expression. The primal urge to kill.
The ape lunged. Taul rolled aside hard. The ape lay still on the forest floor, face down, one massive arm draped across Taul’s back. Taul heard the ape’s last breaths rasp out of him. A gurgle. Silence.
Taul hauled himself out from under the weight of the dead ape’s arm. He rose.
He could hear the hunt, moving away. The clearing was quiet and littered with dead. Three apes, the horse. The other two mounts had run off, riderless.
Taul was wheezing. The sound of his own breathing seemed to fill the air. His arms and ribs throbbed with pain.
The human female was alive, but her mind was gone. She lay shivering on the ground, sprawled just as she had fallen. Taul doubted she would ever get up again.
Kotte was dead. The ape’s baton had crushed the top of his skull. Blood was leaking out of the eyes and mouth of his misaligned mask.
In pain, Taul bent down and picked up the satchel.
He made his way back to the pool. It took a while. Obedient, Arnia and Calio were exactly where he had left them. They emerged from the thickets to help him as he limped up.
“You’re hurt!” Arnia cried.
Taul nodded.
“Where’s Kotte?” Calio asked as he took the satchel.
Taul didn’t answer.
* * *
Avoiding patrols, they hid in the fringe of the forest for another week until Taul was well enough to move again. Even then, the progress was slow. Taul had broken ribs, and his breathing was impaired. Regular rest stops were needed.
Calio said very little. He knew that Kotte’s fate and Taul’s wounds were ultimately his fault. Arnia, always optimistic, tried to cheer up Taul by reminding him that the trials and hardships of the track were all part of the progress a pilgrim made as he drew closer to God.
Taul reminded her that he wasn’t a pilgrim. He was unfired, so deliverance to the grace of God was not a reward reserved for him. God was not waiting for him at the end of the track.
After that, Arnia said little either.
* * *
Another week, and the woods of the valley gave way to open grassland, where they dared travel only at dawn and dusk for fear of being seen. From time to time, they saw packs of riders crossing the flats in the distance.
After another week, the grasslands petered out, and the landscape became arid again. This jumbled, rocky waste, they knew, was the last stage—a zone shunned by all but the Second Race.
In a place of ravines and deep crags, where the wasteland winds whined and moaned, they found the entrance and went beneath. The place, and its approach, was marked by stacks of stones that only the initiated might distinguish from natural rubble. They had been taught these coded signs by the elders in the west.
To be beneath again felt like a blessing. The tunnels and galleries, old places dug by the First Race, were dank and gloomy. Ground water dripped from the cavernous ceilings. Echoes mocked their footsteps. It reminded all three of them of home, of the sect fastness they had left behind. They took off their tinted goggles, and their eyes, accustomed since birth to the poor light of subground life, quickly and comfortably adjusted. They would not have to suffer the fierce light of the surface again.
They passed through vaults where the ruins and detritus of the Old Life lay scattered, pale ghosts of the world as it had once been. There were inscriptions on the walls that spoke of times and destinations that had passed into God. The words meant little to them, except that they reminded them of the grace which had brought their race from the fire, and bestowed on them their beauty, and taught them to survive.
When at last they passed through the gates and entered the buried city of God, the elders of the Children living there came out to meet them in the silent streets.
The elders were robed and silent. Their masks were impassive. They looked on Taul with what seemed disdain and turned their attention to Calio and Arnia. Taul felt his head swim and pulse.
“Speak aloud,” he said. “I have come a long way. I have brought these pilgrims here. I would at least hear what is said now.”
“You are pilgrims?” one of the elders asked, turning to look at Taul.
“Yes,” Taul said.
“From the west,” Calio added.
“Pilgrims have not come for many generations,” another of the elders said. “Once many came, but not in our lifetimes.”
“The way has become too treacherous,” Calio said. “Even for the devoted and the determined.”
“Yet you have come,” the first elder said.
Calio held out the satchel. “Because of this,” he said. “It is scripture. The word of God. And it belongs here.”
* * *
They were taken into a hall and allowed to sit at a long table of polished wood. Crystal chandeliers hung from the painted ceiling above. The air smelled of candle smoke a
nd incense. Elders gathered to sit with them, perhaps fifteen of them in all, and robed servants brought food and water. The servants washed the hands and feet of Arnia and Calio and, with veils raised for dignity, took off their masks and anointed their hands and true faces with balm and holy oils.
No one went near Taul. He sat at the end of the table, caked with the dust and blood of his track. His rifle lay on the tabletop beside a pitcher of water and a dish of food.
Arnia and Calio replaced their masks, and the servants lowered the veils and stepped away. Calio took out the relic and passed it to the leader of the Children. The leader opened the cover with reverence and started to turn the pages.
Calio nodded.
“You’re talking again,” Taul said. “Do it out loud.”
The leader looked down the table at him.
“Taul is our friend,” Arnia said. “Our guardian. He sacrificed the greatest of all things so that he could fulfill that duty. We would not be here alive except for him. So please, Mendez. Let him share in this.”
The leader stared at Taul. He nodded.
“I am Mendez XXI,” he said.
“Taul,” Taul said.
“You come to us unmasked, Taul,” Mendez said, “your true face revealed.”
“The beauty of your inmost self is very great, Taul,” another of the elders said.
“I have no inmost self,” Taul said. “I have no true face. This is just… my face.”
Mendez frowned slightly.
“You have no inmost fire, Taul,” he said. “I reach, but I do not find. My mind touches nothing. And you hear only words when they are spoken.”
“This is so,” Taul said.
“Were you born this way?” another of the elders asked. It was a woman.
“No,” Taul said.
The elders glanced at each other. Taul saw wrinkles of dismay.
