by D. J. Bodden
Gaius smiled. He leaned in and said, “We’re here to pull people together and show outsiders we’re not weak. Try not to talk too much. And watch your back.”
“Yes, General,” I said, in my pristine white cloak that may as well have had a target painted on it. The people on the Komodos looked our way with feigned disinterest. The younger nobles stared with open resentment. I was getting Dick Cheneyed for sure.
He slapped me on the shoulder and headed for his mount.
ROBERT WOKE UP, SHEETS thrown aside, skin sweaty. The fan was still. Had he forgotten to turn it on?
Light streamed through the window. His smartwatch said it was minutes until his alarm would have gone off. He deactivated it, got out of bed, and walked into the living room.
No lights. No coffee. Power surge. They happened sometimes, though usually in the heat of high summer, not the edge of fall. He made his way to the electrical panel. The main breaker was thrown. He reset it. The microwave clock blinked.
Why do I feel like something’s wrong? He felt tired and unsettled, like he’d found the front door open or had a nightmare he couldn’t remember. He wasn’t the superstitious sort; hard work and preparation were his answer to life’s opportunities. He put it down to dehydration and the disruption in his morning routine, which was upsetting in its own way. He didn’t like to think of himself as that fragile.
He walked over to the coffee machine and hit “brew,” then he got a glass from the cupboard, filled it and drained it twice. The best way to get a handle on a problem was to solve the easy bits, tune out the noise, and then take a look at what was left. He switched his computer on and stepped out onto the balcony while it booted up.
There was no wind outside. No breeze. He leaned against the railing and stared at the almost flat ocean. It looked metallic in the early light, like a someone filled in the Pacific with brushed steel under an overcast sky. The whole setup was enough to ruin a man’s mood.
It had to be Viridian. He’d killed projects before, but this one had been close to his heart. He could admit that much to himself. Part of him had thought this might be it—that one project that made his legacy, a singularity in how he and other people led their lives. Rob had busted his ass to make things better for himself and the world, to remove the barriers his upbringing had placed in front of him. But even for Robert Osmark, billionaire CEO of Os-Tech, the world was still full of barriers and impossibilities. Viridian had been his answer.
He needed to break pattern, to get away, to start something new. He should travel. Maybe some time in the Singapore offices would do him good.
He went back inside and filled his mug with hot Jamaica Blue Mountain. He didn’t find the beans particularly special, but sometimes you needed the best cup of diner coffee money could buy. Then he sat at his computer and pulled up his emails.
He’d expected some kind of report or explanation from Sandra, but there was nothing. He Alt + tabbed over to his security panel and saw that Sandra, Alan, and Jeff Berkowitz had all swiped their cards into Alpha Testing and hadn’t left since yesterday, except for a four-hour window during which Sandra went to her office, next to his.
The hairs of his neck stood on end. He’d survived the last thirty years of running a multinational tech company by nurturing a healthy sense of paranoia. The people out to get him numbered in the tens of thousands, and included heads of state.
He trusted his team, especially Sandra.
But not that much.
He logged out, grabbed his keys, and left his coffee cooling on the desk. He dialed security on the way to the car.
A SMOOTH PEBBLE LAUNCHED from a sling cracked a hare in the skull and it flopped over, hind legs kicking. I was getting a little bit of XP for each of the party’s kills, but it felt empty. One of the servants in our group ran forward to collect it.
We were the beaters. The fifty of us advanced in a line with about five feet of space between us, making noise and poking bushes with our spears. The forest was mainly spruce, fir, and pines, spaced ten to twenty feet apart, with an uninterrupted but thin light green canopy.
The warden and his dogged assistants—pun intended—helped steer the line. When an animal broke from cover, one of the Komodo riders would try to take it down with their weapon of choice.
A pair of deer startled and ran across our front. The first was felled almost immediately by a lucky javelin throw. The second made it halfway across our front before a merchant rose in her seat and shot it from thirty yards away. The arrow hit behind its foreleg and the deer fell, skidding to a stop. A few of the nobles whooped in acknowledgment, and the merchant beamed.
“So they’re just going to kill anything we come across until they get bored?” I asked.
Provus ignored me, focusing on the task at hand.
I sighed. I like animals.
“None of it will go to waste, Citizen,” the warden said, suddenly right behind me. “Stay focused on the hunt.” He moved on down the line.
I looked at Provus.
He shrugged. “The meat will go to the Legion, the pelts, horns, and hooves will go to crafters, bones to the glue factories, and the proceeds will pay for the grain allowance to the poor.”
I smirked. “I’m guessing some of it will get lost along the way.”
“Get off it, already,” the woman to my right said. “The Empire was built on self-interest bent to the common good. Everyone benefits, Citizen.”
And I get that. I do. I’ve argued passionately, under the influence of alcohol, that acting outside of self-interest is downright evil. But deep inside I’m still the kid who cried when he watched Bambi.
Anyway, the general didn’t ask me to come for my views on animal rights. I was symbolic. “I’m Alan,” I told her.
“We’re not peers, Alan. Not even for a day.”
“You could just answer to be polite,” I said, using a Suggestion without thinking.
“And you could go suck-start a public fountain,” she fired back, not even looking at me.
Apparently there were divides even Charm and Suggestion couldn’t bridge.
The Accipiter prince and the Risi attaché walked behind the line, talking. Well, the prince did most of the talking. He wore a leather vest with several knife sheathes—all empty—and loose white pants. His wings were brown, black, and gold, like a golden eagle’s. The Risi was one of the biggest I’d seen, with olive green skin and muscles stacked on muscles. He wore a padded black vest over a white shirt, and black fatigue pants. He looked annoyed at everyone and everything, and stared me down until I looked away.
A trio of wild boars ran across the path ahead. Gaius shot the big male; the other two were going to get away, but the warden suddenly pulled his bow to full draw and clipped the lead sow in the foreleg, making her stumble. One of the senators finished her off with a thrown javelin and grinned in triumph.
I looked at the warden as he bent to retrieve the arrow. It was blunt—he’d set the aristocrat up for the shot.
“I just don’t see how this is a challenge,” I told Provus. “He all but tied the boar down to be shot.”
“They know that,” Provus said.
“It’s traditional,” the woman to my right said. “We come back with our white clothes stained red, ties of blood renewed by blood, and the citizens of New Viridia feel secure that the Empire is still strong, that our way of life will endure for another six hundred years.”
Provus snorted. “Yes, they sleep soundly because we faced down the god of the woods. We’d be better off educating them.”
The woman clenched her jaw.
“Can someone explain?” I asked. “I’m not from around here.”
“Cernunnos is Cernunnos wherever you go, Traveler,” the Accipiter said, walking up to join us. “You give yourself away.”
He had a friendly, lilting voice, like someone from the Middle East.
“He’s not a Traveler,” Provus said. “There’s no such thing.”
“Oh hoh!
” the prince said. “It seems the Empire is not as well informed as we might hope.”
“I never said I wasn’t one,” I said.
Provus looked at me like I was crazy.
“Well,” the prince continued, “if you won’t inform our guest from another realm, I will. The gods despise unfairness, Alan, but none so much as Cernunnos. The Viridians hope to prove their courage and unity by daring the Overmind of Beasts and Monsters to strike them.”
“Cernunnos is a fable, Your Grace, and Alan is just ignorant.”
The Accipiter waved his hand over his shoulder. “No titles, please, Imperial Tribune Provus Considia. I am Fatin. You Imperials can’t make wind without announcing your rank, station, and political affiliation.”
I snickered. “I didn’t think farting was possible in this world.”
The prince cocked his head. He flapped his wings once, buffeting my hair and clothes. “What did you think I meant?”
I giggled in delight.
The prince hesitated, as if unsure whether he should laugh with me or take offense.
“I’m sorry, Fatin, I meant no disrespect. I have no wings. Your turn of phrase made me happy because it made me think in a way I never had before.”
Fatin smiled. “And what does it mean in your world?”
I chuckled at the enormity of explaining flatulence to a prince. “It’s a bodily function that’s considered rude in public. It makes noise and it smells bad.”
“Like belching?”
“Yes, Fatin, like belching in almost every way.”
Fatin turned back to the Risi behind us with a childlike smile on his face. “Did you hear that, Tozhug? The honorary citizen says Viridians can’t fart without announcing their rank, station, and political affiliation to the world. What do you think?”
He spoke loud enough that the whole party heard him. Gaius glared at me from his mount. I’d made a small, tactical error.
“I think you both talk too much,” the Risi said, but he looked a little less annoyed than before.
Provus mimed falling on his sword, which I took as the local equivalent of putting a finger gun to my head and pulling the trigger. Well crap.
Just then, a large herd of deer—over twenty of them—came running and leaping toward us. The Komodo riders fired as quickly as they could, releasing arrows, lobbing javelins, and slinging stones, dropping the first dozen animals. One of the beaters fell, clutching the side of his face as an arrow grazed him. The deer bleated in terror, but they kept coming, reaching the line of beaters. Spears were thrust, taking down another half dozen animals. The warden fired two arrows in quick succession, cleanly claiming another two. I was so stunned by the violence of it all—the blood and the huff and cries of dying deer—that one ran straight past me. The nearest Komodo lunged forward, spilling its rider, and bit down on the doe’s back, snapping her spine. She never stood a chance.
“Nice work, Alan,” the woman to my right said, wiping blood from her spear with her cloak.
I was beyond words. I’d leveled up, but it didn’t feel like a win. There was no glory in this—no fair struggle or moral lesson to be learned. It was a process that made less of both hunter and prey.
And then it hit me. “What were they running from?”
A WOODEN MASK SAT PROPPED against a pile of stones like an altar in the Southern Woods. It was plain and roughly carved, two eyeholes and a mouth, neither smiling nor frowning. Through it, the being known as Cernunnos watched the herd of deer run from the bear, and that was good. The bear was hungry. The deer were fast.
Then the deer met the humans, and the humans culled them. The humans were not hungry. They took without effort or care.
Vines extended through the mask from the Monstrous Dimension. They wrapped themselves around the rough stones and rose in a humanoid shape eight feet tall, a green, brown, and gray shambler. A massive and razor-sharp 16-point set of deer antlers grew, split, and unfurled from behind the mask, like a pair of upraised talons. Cernunnos stood.
He pulled one of the stones from his chest and squeezed it, vines coiling and shifting, until it cracked. The sound was heard over a mile away.
And from over a mile away, monsters and beasts converged on the call.
JEFF WALKED UP BESIDE her. “Hey, Sandra. Coffee?”
“Oh, yes, please. Where did you get this?”
“That security guard out front brought some in for his team. He offered me some.”
Sandra nodded, wrapping her hands around the warm paper cup. It was still late summer outside, but Alpha Testing was kept freezing cold, like a hospital.
“How’s our boy doing?”
“Good,” she said. “He’s on a hunting expedition. It’s almost like an NPC-led raid.”
“A raid?”
She raised an eyebrow at him. “Seriously, dude?”
“I’m hardware. My daughter’s the gamer in the family.”
“It’s a group fight. High risk, high reward. I think we might finally see him kill something.”
“Is it really that high risk? All I see are a bunch of dead birds and rabbits.”
Sandra tapped the Overmind activity graphs. “Look at Cernunnos.”
“Ouch. You going to tell Alan?”
“Why ruin the surprise? We’re recording this, right?”
“Yeah.”
THERE WAS A LOUD crack, like a gunshot.
“What did you say, friend?” Fatin asked.
“I said, ‘What were they running from?’”
The servants from our group hurried forward, putting the surviving deer out of their misery and butchering the carcasses on the spot. The giant Komodos hissed and snapped. Two of them fought over the body of the deer I’d let through, tearing at it with their claws and teeth while their riders tried to get them back under control, yanking on their collars and smacking them on the top of the head with clubs.
It started with starlings. A starling is a migratory bird as big as an adult’s hand, with quarter-inch talons and a short, sharp beak. They range in color from matte brown and speckled to rainbow-metallic. They don’t so much sing as screech, and they swarm in the thousands.
The murmuration of starlings flowed through the trees like a biblical plague, darkening as the birds overlapped and moved closer together. We all craned our necks to watch them. The sound was unreal, between the thrum of their wings and the thousands of cheeps and screeches blending together to sound like a dozen cars doing donuts on bare, sparking rims. Then the swarm exploded and three thousand starlings attacked us all at once.
“Look out!” I shouted.
THE DOOR TO ALPHA TESTING was shoved open so hard it crashed against the stop and two security guards came in, Tasers drawn.
Sandra pulled her headset off and turned in her seat. “What the—”
“Stand up! Both of you! Step away from the computer!”
“Do it now!”
Jeff shot out of his chair and almost clotheslined himself with his headset cord.
Sandra stood up more slowly with her hands raised. “We’re complying. There’s no need for this.”
“Him too. Get him up!” the first guard said, nodding toward Alan.
Sandra didn’t know him, but the second guard was Frank Mitchell. “Talk to me, Frank.”
“We’ve been ordered to get the three of you out of here, Ms. Bullard.”
“By whom?”
“Hey!” the first guard said to Alan. “I said get up and get out of the room!” He reached for Alan’s leg.
Jeff, his eyes wide, moved to stop him. “You can’t—”
And then both Tasers were pointed at Jeff.
Sandra grabbed the mall cop’s wrist, put her knee on his chest, and kicked her left leg over, rolling into a flying armbar that brought the security guard to the ground and, in the same movement, ended with her pointing the Taser at Frank, finger on the trigger. “How’s your heart, Frank?” she said.
“Not getting paid enough for this shit, ma�
��am,” he answered, but he didn’t take the Taser off her. He moved to put distance between himself and Berkowitz, just like she would have.
“We need to talk, Frank.”
“Let’s do that.”
“Alan needs to stay plugged in. Who gave the order? Was it Wagner?”
“Don’t know Wagner, ma’am. My orders came from Mr. Osmark. Why don’t we just put the Tasers away? You have my partner’s arm, there. I won’t come any closer.”
“Cut the shit, jarhead. Second I take this Taser off you, you’ll rush me.”
“And you told me you drove trucks for the Army. Where did you learn...” Frank trailed off and raised an eyebrow.
I’m burned, Sandra thought.
But instead of blurting everything in front of Jeff and his partner, Frank asked, “You still working?”
A patriot. I can work with that. “I’m not here for the fun of it, that’s for sure.” She glanced at Jeff, who was smart enough to realize the grown-ups were talking over his head without having a clue of what S-P-Y meant.
Frank lowered his weapon slowly, and Sandra mirrored him. The other guard tried to pull his arm back, but Sandra tightened her knees. “Not you, asshole. We’re just going to sit here, nice and polite, until Robert arrives. Right, Frank?”
“Right, ma’am. Just hope I’m not going to regret this.”
TWENTY-TWO
“I AM SO REGRETTING this!” I shouted as forty feathered rodents pecked and scratched me, and beat me with their filthy feathers. The air thrummed with the churn of their wings. And they screeched, thousands of them, peep peep peep! My Health bar flashed but didn’t go down. I was still furious. I swatted the little bastards with the flat of my spear blade, choking up on the weapon and swinging it like a bat. I got one measly XP for each one I clunked, but screw them, and screw Bambi, too. They were in my fucking hair.
The whole hunting party had been swarmed. I couldn’t see much further than Provus or the nameless woman to my right. I could hear men and women shouting and the hiss and burble of the Komodos. I think I saw one rear on its hindlegs, snapping left and right. The lizards were probably loving it.
