Twig

by wildbow

  Red had seen so many of the methodologies.

  “It’s treason,” Red said. “I’m a representative of the Crown, performing a vital service for the Crown.”

  Of all the statements she couldn’t have ever imagined she’d say with such conviction.

  “It’s only treason if I get caught.”

  “Raise your muzzle, blackest of wolves,” Red said. It was like a prayer. “Howl, and we shall howl with you. Hunt, and we shall hunt with you. Bloody those claws, and fill that belly, and we shall draw blood and feast alongside you.”

  “You consider yourself one of us?” Jovial asked. “You think you can hunt with me?”

  “All but the one with the bow bear the pelts of wolves. He… he bears the pelt of a traitor to the Crown.”

  She hoped it could hear, if it was even out there. It was finding its own independence.

  The Jovial Mercy nocked his arrow. His expression was more firm now.

  He didn’t get his chance to shoot her. The Wolfdog, as Lillian had termed it, was already sweeping out from the darkness below the rocky bit of hill. The Jovial Mercy turned, arrow drawn back, and found himself faced with a wolf as big as any carriage, with no weak points in plain view. The beast’s eyes were covered with lenses, its muzzle a mess of machinery and breathing apparatuses.

  Jovial fired the arrow as he tried to leap aside. The arrow did nothing of consequence, and the Wolfdog did something of final consequence. It pounced on the Mercy and by size and momentum, it destroyed him.

  The others remained stock still.

  “Lay your head down to rest, black harbinger,” she said. “Stay clear of me. Begone.”

  She watched it lope away. Where her breathing apparatus was silent, it hissed and wheezed. The saddlebags, tent, and the packages that were the ten other dead bodies she’d collected hung off of its sides.

  Her guardian, her nemesis. Her Wolf, with another project’s best qualities. Her feelings toward it were complicated. It was supposed to be her partner, as she worked well with it, but the memories she associated with it were so grim. Lillian had urged her to give it a try.

  She felt guilty, in a way. It wasn’t dumb, and it had some of the instincts that domesticated dogs did. It wanted to please, and it was keenly aware of her and her mood.

  It knew she hated it, so it lurked in a place where it was out of her sight, out of her thoughts, its wheezy breaths out of her earshot, yet where she was still in its earshot.

  She was coming to terms with that. Like so many other things, it seemed like a loss.

  She stepped forward, walking without nearly so much fear, now. She had to pick her way past the bloody smear that had once been a Mercy, and she had to walk between two of the Mercies to get there. They didn’t approach or comment.

  The Small Mercy was sitting by her bag, gathering the components and pieces back into the bag. No longer sorted, sadly. She’d have to rely on memory.

  “As an emissary of the Crown, I’ll ask you to lead me and my partner to Bathaven.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the Small Mercy said, extending a hand, the mask held out.

  It was an image of various animals all blended together, softened, made warm. A deer, a rabbit, and other prey animals, combined into a single pretty face.

  It was hard to articulate why she’d asked for a mask with that face.

  Whatever face she had or mask she wore, it wouldn’t be hers. Not anymore. She wanted to make peace, to conquer that demon. She didn’t want to wear anything else, because then she might not have been able to take it off and reveal this face again.

  “I’m sorry about him,” one of the other Mercies said, possibly reading her expression as something else.

  “Good,” Red said.

  She pulled the hood up, and clicked the small antlers into the waiting places at the top of the mask, as part of the arrangement to get everything sealed.

  “You’ll keep me company,” she said. The Wolfdog had been doing much the same. “Take me to your home. I’ll take record of how things are doing, check on the people you’re supposed to be watching over, and I’ll be gone, leaving you with only my urgings that nobody is to hunt.”

  “Nobody?”

  “We’re trying something experimental, and we can’t trust there won’t be other mistakes like this one.”

  She saw their expressions change.

  “For now, at the very least” she said.

  That got her some nods.

  “If I may?” the Small Mercy asked.

  “Yes?”

  “There’s something you might find of more importance than the report. Can I show you?”

  “What is it?”

  “A plant. It’s not too far out of our way.”

  She frowned at that, behind her mask, but she nodded.

  They were faster than she might have thought. Once they all had their gear on and masks in place, they set out as a group. Where she was strong in a way necessary to let her be agile, they were nimble as a side effect of their strength.

  She was faster, but she didn’t have to slow herself to a crawl to let them catch up. She could get ahead, peer back over her shoulder, and see the direction.

  She liked having people, she was realizing. She liked company, and it helped with the dark thoughts, the feeling of pressure on all sides, in this bleak place.

  Not so much that she felt like she could or would keep her Wolfdog company on the long way back, but she would work on that, as she worked on so many things.

  If she was to take Sylvester’s offer, she would need the Wolfdog’s assistance to be properly useful. She’d memorized the commands. It was hers. Bonded to her. She was it’s.

  She simply wished this wouldn’t be so hard, bleak, and uncertain.

  “There,” the Small Mercy said.

  There.

  She blinked, convinced her eyes had fooled her.

  It wasn’t massive. It wasn’t even pretty, or useful, or anything of the sort.

  But, amid black trees and black ground, black branches and black clouds of dust that drifted close to the ground, there was a slice of green, like clover. It encircled the trunk on the side closest to the sun, and it peeked through where the dust wasn’t piled too high on the ground.

  This. This was why. Why she fought, why she’d tried. It was hope. Acknowledgment on some greater level.

  “What was it your friend said? Life adapts. We adapt.”

  “He wasn’t a friend,” the Small Mercy said. “Not really.”

  Red was quiet. She reached out to touch the green leaves, that were somehow surviving despite so much.

  Previous Next

  Forest for the Trees—e.2

  The snow was starting to fall, and both students and kids were involved in the extensive relay, handing crates back, each packed and covered with a cloth. On the other side of the road, another team was sending crates out.

  There were shouts as a carriage rolled by, piled high with greenery, moving too close to the people on one side.

  “Can I have a few minutes of your time?” a Doctor asked. He was young, with dark hair that curled around his ears. He wore an indoor lab coat under one worn by those who worked outdoors, and the shirt beneath that coat had been badly wrinkled.

  “You may,” Shirley responded.

  “We have a problem,” he said. He paused for effect, which annoyed her. He’d turned up a minute ago, and had paused to take in the scene, hands jammed into his pockets. Despite the pause he’d taken to observe and let the words sink in, he said, “We’ll need to act sooner than later.”

  Further down the line, one of the smaller children in cold-weather jackets called out, “I’m getting tired!”

  Nobody seemed to be ready or willing to pick up the slack. Shirley looked back at the Doctor, “Come and talk to me.”

  She touched shoulders, and the little boy backed off, the older child to her right shuffling to one side to make room. She began passing the crates down. Each was light, onl
y five or so pounds, more a basket of wood strips than a proper crate, whatever its construction might have looked like. The contents weren’t densely packed, either.

  Peevish, perhaps, to busy herself and refuse to be swept up into the man’s tempo, but she would have done this if he hadn’t turned up, and she could leave at any moment.

  The Doctor explained, “In any disaster, or when we use a serious weapon, we can expect that as much as ninety-nine point nine nine percent of the target population or area will be killed. The number varies, but bear with me. It applies to bacteria, to plant matter, to animal, and human populations. For much of what we’re dealing with when it comes to the Black Wood and the long-term effects of the plague, it’s most of the above.”

  “Cats and cockroaches,” Shirley said.

  “Oh, it seems you know something about it then.”

  “I’ve picked up some things,” she said.

  “Well, good for you, miss. Good for you.”

  Shirley met the eyes of the girl to her left. Ten years old, if she had to guess. “You said you had a problem? Semi-urgent.”

  “Urgent, very urgent,” he said, giving no evidence to that urgency in how he comported himself. She’d met people like this, for whom everything was an emergency and a priority, to the point that the label meant nothing, even to them. “We’ve got cockroaches.”

  “Actual cockroaches? Or the—”

  “The same cockroaches made famous by the ‘cats and cockroaches’ term.”

  “Alright. Do you distinguish between the cats and cockroaches when using the term?”

  “Yes, sometimes we do. The use of the term can vary from place to place, institution to institution, often after the little disasters and clean-ups that demand a shift in perspective. Oftentimes it’s the cats that are wanted, the cockroaches that aren’t. That’s how I’m using it now. This might be good in the long-run, but it’s a bad thing in the here and now.”

  “What is it?”

  “Rats. There are a lot of them. Think of the parcels of land we’ve carved out as islands, surrounded by water.”

  “There’s the actual water too,” Shirley said. “We’re on the ocean, here.”

  The Doctor made a face, looking very unimpressed with her contribution.

  “Go on,” she said. Even with gloves on, her hands were cold, handling the snow-dusted boxes.

  “If we have a small population of these rats here that seem able to survive the Black Wood, then there’s a strong possibility they’re more numerous, spreading with no predator population to control them.”

  “They need food, don’t they? That’s in short supply out there.”

  “We think they might be burrowing, digging deep enough to get to the soil beneath the detritus. To find worms and deep-buried roots or tubers. There’s more to it, but it’s easier to show than to tell.”

  “Why approach me about this? I’m not in charge.”

  “Anyone in charge stays only a short time, then becomes preoccupied. They leave to travel, organize, abdicate their positions, or get so caught up in running things that they lose sight of the day to day issues. Our current ‘mayor’ is locked in his office, trying to work out rationing and the bartering budget so we can get through the winter.”

  “I heard about that.”

  “Indeed! No surprise, as you, little miss, struck us as the person who knows everyone, with a thumb on the pulse of things.”

  “Perhaps. I’ve been something of a liaison, and I catch the rumors and gossip at the shop.”

  “Someone told me to talk to you, and I knew exactly who you were, thinking back. There’s a concern that with the weather getting colder, the rats might seek refuge here on this island of ours. They’re already getting at the food, I think I said. The mayor is claiming he’s trying to prevent the food crisis, but he’s ignoring this.”

  The ten year old girl next to Shirley cast a worried look her way.

  “We’ll figure something out,” Shirley said.

  “The mayor seems to share that quaint notion, but he and you would be ignoring the experts in thinking anything like that,” the Doctor said. “We were short on resources already. I’m not sure how we’ll rally this.”

  “We came this far, through plague, war, and black wood. Don’t discount humanity,” Shirley said.

  “Humanity might be the source of this problem. Residual Academy work, as it happens.”

  Shirley, between the handing off of boxes, raised a hand, to get the attention of a group of older adolescents by the gate to the city. It was one of the boys who stood and hurried over, pausing only to let one wagon by.

  “I know you had a shift earlier, but can you take over? I have something I need to do,” she said.

  “Sure thing, Miss Shirley,” he said.

  She briefly put a hand on the boy’s shoulder before leaving the line. She didn’t miss how he stood a little taller at the contact.

  The Doctor, however, had noticed something else.

  “Miss Shirley,” the Doctor said, once they were out of earshot.

  “Hm?”

  “The way they look at you, and the way they address you, it struck me as odd.”

  “A boy who wears his heart on his sleeve, that’s all.”

  “It’s not an isolated incident. I’ve seen you interacting with others before.”

  “It’s simply the way things have panned out, Doctor.”

  “It’s disconcerting.”

  “Disconcerting?” she asked, a little surprised.

  “I don’t mean any disrespect, but that tone, it’s a degree of veneration normally reserved for Nobles, aristocrats and Doctors.”

  “‘Miss’ is ?”

  “The tone, dear. The tone.”

  “As you say, I know a great many people. I’ve been through warzones, I played a part in getting the orphans to safety.”

  “Yes, of course. Many of us were tested during the conflicts. But things have settled, Shirley. The rebels are quashed, at some cost, the Infante is reportedly back overseas, and we’re picking up the pieces. This new landscape is a fantastic challenge to work with.”

  “A more daunting one for us civilians. Can I ask you not to go on at such length about how dire things are, when children are in earshot? We don’t want panic.”

  “Better to panic now than to panic too late. We have to act in times of crisis, you know.”

  “As I said, I’ve waded through warzones. I’ve killed people. I know about action in times of crisis.”

  “You don’t strike me as an ex-soldier,” he remarked.

  “I wasn’t.”

  “I see,” he said. “Right through here, by the by.”

  She was glad for the lessons Sylvester had given her in poise, so she could keep her expression still, her body language confident. She was less glad about the situation. She didn’t know this Doctor, and she didn’t like him.

  She didn’t recognize or like the ominous stone building he was asking her to enter, either. It was a tower, squat and defensively-focused, with what might have been an armory adjacent to it. The door was five paces beyond the arch and short recess that preceded it.

  She turned her head, looking around. She felt a measure of relief when she saw that Pierre stood a distance away, leaning against the wall. His ears moved as she looked directly his way.

  Her hand moved. The ears moved in response. Not a signal, beyond acknowledgement of her message.

  She stepped through the archway, approaching the door. The Doctor was a step behind her, where she couldn’t easily see him.

  The feeling she felt at this whole situation reminded her of a time years ago, when she’d been younger, more or less the age the oldest Lambs seemed to be. She had meant to go out with a partner. Not quite a friend, but someone she knew enough to work with. The partner had backed out, Shirley had needed the money, so she had gone out alone.

  She had taken up with a customer, and she had felt then much like she felt now. That situation ha
d ended with her being hurt terribly. The hurt of the beating had been dwarfed by the hurt to her spirit.

  “I’ll get the door,” he said.

  She reached forward and hauled it open herself. She didn’t wait for him before passing through. The interior was stone walls with wood threaded through it, and it was dark, with only the midday light streaming in through the windows to illuminate the interior. Even the light snowfall made the light noticeably brighter and more diffuse.

  “Turn left,” he said. “There’s a basement area.”

  She did. She could smell the vegetation before she saw it. The air was humid.

  “Our line of thinking was that you might be able to appeal to the Mayor.”

  “You can’t?”

  “We feel he’s striving to maintain a divide between the Academy and the local government. It wouldn’t be the first time someone has wanted to protect his position by doing so. Most government positions are purely ornamental, you understand. Secretaries with better titles who balance the books and provide the information so Professors and those of Noble bearing can make the decisions.”

  “You want me to be your mouthpiece?”

  “We’d like you to be a lot of things, Miss Shirley,” the Doctor said.

  He hadn’t said ‘Miss Shirley’ in a way that implied deference or respect.

  She felt a sick feeling in her gut at that.

  There were more Doctors waiting in the room at the bottom of the stairs. One Professor, it seemed. Three of the five Doctors were hanging back, two with arms folded, the other with hands in his pockets.

  It could have been read as defensive. It wasn’t. They’d been expecting her, by the way they reacted to her. They’d been prepared with their guard up. They were ready for a fight, if they had to make one.

  “My friends. This is the young lady you spoke of?”

  Shirley knew he knew she was.

  “She is,” one of the Doctors said. “Shirley, was it?”

  “I am. Pleased to meet you. I don’t believe I have your names?”

  “I’m Nester,” the Professor said. “Professor Nester.”