by Joseph Lallo
Slowly, the creature raised his head, seeming to notice for the first time that the handlers had never stopped lashing him. Rocking with their blows, he climbed to his feet and turned slowly to the nearest of his tormentors. His gaze was cold and empty, eyes gleaming with an ancient purpose—something in that look was enough to cause the handlers to slow their strikes, then to stop entirely. The wisest among them chose to back away.
“You! You there! Why have you stopped! What's going on?” Bartner cried as he stalked toward the circle of suddenly apprehensive handlers, leaving the motionless old man behind.
The ring of handlers opened to allow their leader in. He stomped up to the creature, his furious gaze locking onto the eyes of a beast that seemed unnervingly calm. In his rage, Bartner had blinded himself to something that man as a species had forgotten on all but the most fundamental level.
When a man envisions a vicious creature, a creature that means to kill him, he imagines a snarling demon of a thing: teeth bared, claws pawing at the ground, ears turned back. In truth, such a beast does not mean to kill you. Flashed teeth and bellowing roars are meant to frighten, to threaten. A creature acting in such a way may fight you, it may even kill you, but what it is most dedicated to is fending you off, proving its strength, and saving itself. It is a cowering reaction to a larger foe, or an intimidating display to a would-be opponent. When a beast truly intends to kill you, it behaves very differently. It watches, intensity in its gaze. Its motions are slow, subdued. It trains it senses, waits until the right moment. In short, it behaves precisely as this beast was. Whether Bartner realized it or not, his relationship with the creature had changed. No longer slave and slave-driver, now they were predator and prey.
“Do you want me to do to you what I did to him?” Bartner raged, brandishing his strap.
The beast did not flinch and did not look away.
“Oh . . . so you aren’t afraid of the strap anymore?” the handler growled darkly. “Fine. We shall try something new. You, with the nine tails. Give it here.”
Bartner's obedient underling tossed him the instrument of torture. It was a bit larger than arm’s length, constructed of braided black leather that had taken on a brown tinge with age and use. At one end was a loop through which Bartner placed his hand to keep the tool in place. The opposite side was a tangle of nine loose and dangling strands, each knotted along their length. A few experimental swings whistled through the air. The beast watched, eyes following the motion.
“This has been a long time coming,” he said with a grin.
The malthrope turned to face him, expression blank and eyes steady. Bartner raised the weapon high and brought it down. At the same instant his victim raised his arm. Each strand wrapped tightly around the presented limb. When Bartner tried to withdraw, the beast shifted his weight, drawing his arm swiftly back and heaving with his work-hardened legs. With his fist still secured in the loop, Bartner could not drop the tool and was pulled off balance, stumbling toward the beast. Another weight shift and the malthrope was darting toward the overbalanced handler. His jaws snapped open . . .
In less than the time it took the others to react, it was over, a long overdue justice done. Bartner collapsed with a few final twitches. The malthrope spat something to the ground and turned his cold gaze to the next handler. What followed was chaos. Cries of anger rang out and every available slave-driver dove upon the malthrope. Somehow, the beast managed to shred the straps holding him to the plow, and slashing claws and gnashing teeth found their mark again and again. Slave-drivers scattered, but the beast pursued. Muscles worked to near collapse were roused to life again as ancient instincts of the hunt clicked into place.
#
No one truly knows all of what happened that day. It is said that at one point the surviving slave-drivers managed to manhandle the beast into his shack and brace the door, only to learn too late that the tool shack makes a poor choice of prison. A slash of a blade made short work of the door and the unfortunate man bracing it, and out streaked the malthrope, scythe in hand. There were screams that could be heard for miles. There were calls to arms as the personal servants and personal guards of the plantation owner rushed to the fields. There was blood.
For the beast, there was naught but the flames of hate blotting out the thinking part of his mind. For the people of the plantation, there was naught but a nightmare. That day they saw everything they feared a malthrope might be come to life before their eyes.
When the burning fury finally dimmed, the first thing to cut through to the malthrope’s mind was a piercing squeal of fear. He shook himself and looked around. He was indoors. Elegant furniture, expensive rugs, and fine tapestries were around him, broken to splinters and torn to shreds. He was inside Marret’s manor, and whatever he had done, it had destroyed the once-opulent sitting room. Again the squeal rang out.
He looked to its source, a young boy not more than five. The boy was huddled in the corner screaming his head off, his eyes locked in terror on the creature before him.
With his wits returned to him, the malthrope looked himself over. One of his black-furred hands was drenched, thick drops of crimson pattering steadily to the polished wood of the floor. The other held a scythe, its blade streaked with a muddy red. There was an acrid, metallic taste clinging to his tongue, and from the end of a whisker rolled a solitary drop of blood. He let the scythe clatter to the floor, looking down at his stained fingers and glistening claws. Realization and understanding crept into his thoughts, bringing with it a cold dread that seized the back of his mind and fluttered madly in his chest.
Not knowing what else to do, the creature ran. Through the house he sprinted, past scenes of unspeakable devastation. Through the fields he ran, finding them empty and lifeless in the light of the setting sun. Through the wide open gates, across the road beyond, long into the night he ran. Away from his home. Away from his prison. Away from what he had done.
Chapter 13
The terror of his acts was enough to keep the beast moving for far longer than his tortured muscles should have permitted, but exhaustion can only be pushed aside for so long. As the moon slid below the horizon, he managed a few final steps on shaky legs, stumbling into the tall grass beside a stream.
Sleep took him before he even managed to lie down, leaving him a crumpled heap among the weeds at the mercy of his dreams. They were horrible. The white-hot rage had robbed him of any real memory of what he'd done, but his mind was only too eager to fill the gaps with imagined horrors and half-recalled atrocities. The images came in flashes, vivid and searing. They flickered through his mind in tight cycles, always ending the same way: the squeal of terror and the look of utter horror in the eyes of that little boy.
An eternity of such torture seemed to pass, but finally his eyes opened and his mind tried to make sense of things. It was bright, brighter that it should have been. It had been years since he'd awoken with the sky over his head. His muscles were sore, which was nothing new, but it was worse than normal. He hadn't been so sore since he'd raced Menri to complete his row. On top of it was a horrid, pulsing pain across the whole of his back, where he could feel the breeze fluttering at holes in his tunic. Stiffly, he sat up, swatting away a cloud of gnats.
The back of his mind nagged him with the little tasks he was accustomed to doing each morning. Check outside the door for tools left for repair. Fill the water pail and bring it in for Ben . . . Ben.
He held his throbbing head in his hands as the truth settled in. Ben was gone. Everything was gone. The place he'd called home, his purpose, his mentor, all gone forever. He carefully stood, stopping just when his eyes were clear of the tall grass. There was nothing. No huts, no walls. Nothing between him and the horizon but open fields, dirt roads, and scattered cottages.
At the sight of the sprawling, unfettered landscape, the malthrope froze. Strange as it might seem, he had never truly longed for freedom. His youngest days, the only ones spent beyond the reaches of the plantation's fenc
es, were little more than vague memories. In his youth, all that had mattered to him was finding new ways to make Ben proud. In the years that followed, his every waking moment was spent working the land, performing odd jobs, and otherwise proving his worth to himself, to Ben, and to the others. The plantation had been his world, and the walls were where his world ended. To find himself beyond them gave him a dizzying, plummeting feeling, like he was dangling from the edge of a cliff.
Overwhelmed, he ducked down again, his mind abandoning the terrifying prospect of freedom in favor of smaller, more immediate problems. The long run and the events that came before it had taken far more out of the beast than sleep alone could restore. His mouth felt as though it had been filled with sand, tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth, eyes red and dry. He crawled to the edge of the stream and dunked his head, once to shock a bit of focus into his mind, and again to slake a bone-deep thirst.
Once his thirst was tended to, he hoisted his head out of the water and allowed his eyes to linger on the sight below. His hands, resting on the pebbles on the stream bed, were trailing billowing clouds of red, the dried remains of the crimes of the prior day mixing with the clean water. Madly he scrubbed at his fingers, his arms, his face, and back again, not stopping until long after the last trace of red drifted away. He likely would have continued until his hands were rubbed raw, but a motion in the water shook his mind free and reminded him of the other pressing need he had been neglecting. It had been too long since his meager breakfast the day before, and there had been too much work done since. His stomach was empty, not to the point of hunger but far beyond it.
Flitting in a long and cautious arc around the disturbance of his fingers in the water was a silvery form. The sight of it, the first fish he'd ever seen outside of a stew pot, brought a growl to his stomach and a gleam to his eye. Answering to instincts that had once again taken matters into their own hands, he dove for the morsel.
A clumsy grab sent the scaly meal darting away, and thus sent the starving malthrope splashing after it. After too much time, he finally managed to swat the wriggling form out of the water and onto the shore, where he pounced upon it. Two satisfying crunches sent the catch, bones and all, to an eagerly waiting stomach. Without so much as a pause to catch his breath, he launched himself back toward the deepest part of the stream. There, two more fish were caught with no more skill but much more enthusiasm. They were larger, and combined represented the largest meal he'd eaten in months. Now almost painfully full, he waded back to the safety of the tall grass, his mind able to turn to other things.
He sat back, panting, and tried to work out what had happened and what was going to happen now. Perhaps it was shameful, but his thoughts did not settle upon the lives he had taken. Not at first. His memories of what he had done were too fractured. They were like the nightmares he'd just awoken from: bright flashes and vivid instants, with wide gaps between. He simply didn't know all of what he'd done, and perhaps he never would. Instead, his mind turned to Ben. The old man had been the one constant in his life for so many years. He had always been there, always knew what to do.
For the second time in his life, he felt a hole form, an empty spot in his soul. First his mother, now Ben. When he thought of the blind man on the ground, Bartner over him with strap in hand, he felt the flames of anger again, but as quickly as they came, they were snuffed away by words from his past that had not spoken loudly enough to be heard yesterday, but now rang clear and true.
“If you let that part take over . . . you'll be what they always expected you to be,” he murmured quietly.
There was no denying it. What he had done was easily the match of anything they'd told tales about around the fire. He'd done terrible things. Things that could never be justified. Things only a monster could do. And what burned him now wasn't that he had done them—for now, his crimes were too large for his mind to swallow. What truly shriveled his soul was knowing the shame, the disappointment Ben would have felt. It seemed so small in comparison, a sprinkle of rain in the wake of the torrent of atrocity, but it was all he could think about. The old man was the only one who had ever seen any potential in the creature—not as a worker or a trophy or a ransom, but as an individual. Ben had had hope for what the beast could become. And now all of that was wiped away, wasted. In the space of a few minutes, he had lost his mentor and everything the old man had dared to believe.
His eyes stared unseeing toward the sky, the weight of his deeds pressing down on him. He could have lain there forever, tears of sorrow and regret trickling down his cheeks, but in time his keen ears twitched. There were voices, angry ones, in the distance. The words carried on the wind filtered through to his tortured mind. They were after him. It sounded like three people, two on horses and one leading a hound. Almost mechanically, he climbed to his feet and peered out from the grass. Sure enough, a team of men were in the distance, and there was little doubt that the hound had caught his trail.
If he'd thought about his actions, he might have allowed the men to find him and administer the justice he knew he deserved, but there was already far too much fighting for attention in his mind. Staying out of sight was the first and most thoroughly learned lesson he'd learned in his time on the plantation. Sore muscles and weary senses simply took their own initiative. He pulled himself into the stream and guided himself in the direction of the flow, moving quickly but quietly, no destination in mind other than away.
For nearly three days, he continued in that way, threading south, then west, always with search parties close on his tail. Word must have spread of what he'd done, because no sooner had he lost one batch of would-be captors than another drew near. There was no time to find food, and sleep came in stolen moments. Each change in direction was dictated by a short, careful scan of his surroundings with nose, ears, and eyes, selecting whatever path led to the fewest people.
He awakened one day, after passing out from hunger and exhaustion, to the sounds of heavy footsteps along the rocky ground. His panicked flight had taken him to the foothills of a series of low mountains. In his daze the night before, he'd managed to find himself a jagged cluster of boulders to sleep behind. The steps that he heard came to a stop on the other side of the stones. There, the men responsible settled down and began digging through their packs. As they did, they spoke.
“You sure they came this way?” asked the first voice, a man with the slow irritation of one who had followed another for a few miles longer than he'd wanted.
“Yes, Latak. I am sure it came this way,” said the other voice. “How many times do I have to tell you that we're only after one of the things.”
“But that whole plantation got wiped out. You telling me that one mally could do that, Dihsaad?”
“I'm telling you that I took the job to hunt down one escaped slave, in this case a mally. I don't care how big the bounty is and how many of the things I find, I'm only bringing back one. Besides, you saw the prints. There was only one of them.”
“They could have been traveling one after the other.”
“In perfect lockstep? Latak, how could you be at this game for nearly twenty years and learn nothing? And here I thought the worst part about having you as a partner was how much you slow me down . . .”
The two continued to bicker. From his hiding spot, the malthrope tried to keep silent as he looked over the landscape, hoping to find a path that could take him safely away from the trackers. All around was little more than rolling hills and stubby grass. He was resigned to the prospect of having to outrun the hunters when his empty stomach and sensitive nose joined forces to remind him that if he didn't find something to eat soon, he wouldn't be running for much longer. Sniffing the air, he detected the tantalizing smell of smoked and salted meats. The men were well supplied, a veritable banquet waiting in their packs. There was something about the men themselves, too. Something that stirred an old fear. Despite this, hunger began to outweigh logic, and before he knew it, he was slinking closer to the edge of th
e boulders to see where the bag was and whether or not he might be able to grab it. Aside from a few tantalizing moments when they were both looking away from their supplies, there seemed to be little chance of him liberating so much as a mouthful from them.
To his great surprise, his trackers managed to get through a heavy meal without noticing him, and were now discussing bedding down for the night.
“I don't think we'll make much more progress tonight,” Dihsaad said. “We'll start fresh tomorrow.”
“If we're sleeping here, I have something I need to take care of,” Latak announced.
“Fine, but do it on the other side of those rocks there. It is bad enough I'm going to have to smell it all night, I don't want to have to see it.”
Latak stood and began to pace toward the malthrope's hiding place. The smart thing to do would be to run now, hard and fast. With a meal in their stomachs and sleep on their minds, they wouldn't follow him for very long. But hungry as he was, he wouldn't be running very long either. Finally he made his decision. He burst from his hiding place and grasped the larger of the two packs. Dihsaad was startled, but only for an instant, managing to grasp the creature's wrist.
“Latak! Latak, you idiot, get over here!” Dihsaad cried, scrambling for his blade with his free hand. “It is here! We've got it! We've got—”
In his desperation, the malthrope acted swiftly, swiping his own free hand through the air and raking his claws viciously across the man's face. The tracker cried out, releasing the beast and clutching his bloody injury. It was a cry of savage agony, the scream of a man fearful that the wound might be his last. The beast seized the pack and sprinted for freedom, leaving the pair to deal with the aftermath of his attack. It wasn't until he reached a stream, much higher in the mountains, that the malthrope finally stopped. There he caught his breath and strained his eyes and ears, but there was no sign that the pair had followed. He tried not to think about why they might not have followed, and engaged in the increasingly familiar act of washing blood from his hands.
