The Human Experience

Quarter P, day 18, 3409.

Kaed turned ten today. He was supposed to spend the day as he always does – doing Helm training. Orcadis was in a conference with the Star-King, and I had the day to myself. So I took Kaed out of class to practise archery in the parks of level two. Then I stole some sweet bread for him to share with Varali. I think I even saw the kid smile once or twice.

At the end of the day, he thanked me for the outing, then seriously informed me that despite everything he still hates me and I shouldn’t get any ideas about being his brother.

But I never needed his affection. I just needed to know that, when he’s a grown Iron Helm, that natural human weakness will prevent him from killing me for being daddy’s favourite. A life insurance policy of sorts.

They were to set out from the Inaulti Valley that next morning, after a self-proclaimed group leader had everyone gather in a circle to introduce themselves. Who they were, where they were from, how their Voice had infiltrated them – all the formalities. The group numbered forty by that point. They sat on logs over a roaring fire and shared a breakfast of gathered wildberries and grouse eggs from the farmer’s market. The sky blazed gold in the late dawn, but it was still dark enough that the wood was mottled with shadows.

Hector accepted a broad leaf filled with berries. He passed the skillet with the scrambled eggs farther down the circle. Finally the good-humoured chatter died down – what the hell they had to be good-humoured about, he couldn’t say – and the ringleader cleared his throat.

“Journeymen, it’s time. I take my leave.” He brushed crumbs from his front and slung his satchel over his shoulder with a satiated sigh. “Don’t forget to arm yourselves before you go. Corbin and Adrick are in charge of weapons distribution. There won’t be enough for everyone, but each group should have a few good blades. One electric gun is worth four knives, since we only have a couple of them.” He scanned the circle with worry-lidded eyes. “Good luck. I hope the Star-Gods see you all safely to Akkút.”

He left the clearing and disappeared into the trees. It seemed his Voice had instructed him to go alone, poor fellow. Soon others started leaving, in groups of three or four, never speaking about the route selected for them by their Voices, but just rising simultaneously from the circle and setting off. No two groups took the same path through the trees.

When only half of the travellers remained around the fire’s smouldering embers, Hector turned to Zorion. “Mr. Zorion, whom exactly am I supposed to follow?”

Zorion chewed the end of his pipe, smoke rippling from the corners of his mouth. “You have to ask?” he grunted around the endpiece. “Course I’ll take you. The missus says it’s alright.”

“When are we leaving?”

“I’ll let you know when she tells me.” He broke into a guttural laugh that turned into a cough through the smoke. “She says if I’m not good she’ll choose the same route as Adrick’s Voice, that little minx! Knows I can’t stand him for all the credits in the realm!”

Hector ignored the anger stabbing through him. It was Zorion’s choice if he wanted to relinquish affection to that piece of shit parasite. “And Kaed? You’ll take him too, won’t you?”

“Well, ’course I’ll take your boy, if his Voice agrees. But each chooses its own path.”

They both looked at Kaed now, but the boy didn’t care to lift his gaze from the leaf he was meticulously peeling away from its veins. Hector supposed he’d gotten tired of uselessly repeating that he wasn’t Infected.

It was another hour, the suns already pulsing with their full heat in the sky, before Zorion rose from the log. Hector followed, irked that the pick of the weapons had already been had. He plucked Kaed up by the elbow and grunted, “Come on.”

Two others dispatched from the circle and met them by the pile of rusted blades and blunted axes Corbin and Adrick guarded.

“Group of five?” one of the men asked.

Zorion glanced at Kaed before saying, “Uh, looks like it.”

The men sorted through the pile. They handed Zorion a hatchet and some knives blunter than what Hector had used to butter his bread with at the Iron Keep. Zorion dragged on his pipe, narrowing his eyes at Adrick, but extended his arms to accept the dowry.

Hector took a good look at his companions. The girl was Avalyn of Van-Tillis, as he’d learned during introductions. She refused to come out of her tent without makeup and squealed at the thought of eating over a campfire instead of at an inn. When Zorion had asked her to fetch more firewood she’d passed the duty onto Hector because ‘he’s a man and built for such roughage.’ On top of that, her overly-tweezed eyebrows plain pissed him off.

The other was Syfer of Inaultis. A handsome young man, maybe a few turns older than Kaed, and rather tall for an Inaulti. His good looks and the uncommon mildness of his bone disease probably made him quite the ladies’ man up on the mountain. Hector assumed that was why he looked down his nose at everyone. Still, he walked with crutches and his legs were emaciated compared to his well-built torso. He’d brought his own horse, equipped with a special saddle and stirrups with leg braces.

How pathetic: a cripple, a princess, a moody teen, an old man, and...Hector. No wonder the weapon distributors were wearing those stupid grins. Why waste good weapons on people who couldn’t use them?

But Hector could use them. And he intended to. “I want that quiver of arrows over there,” he said, nodding over their shoulders at the stash. “And the bow.”

“No can do,” Corbin said.

“Saving it for yourself, are you?”

“So what if I am? I’ve a better chance of making it than you lot.”

Kaed groaned quietly. “Please don’t, Lykus,” he muttered.

“Are you prepared to defend it, then?” Hector pushed.

The man chuckled. “Come and get it, you–” He got no further, because amid a chorus of screams from Avalyn and Zorion, Hector rammed his full weight into Corbin, making him stumble into Adrick. The latter was crushed with a harrowing crack into a tree. Adrick slid to the ground, and an elbow to the solar plexus sent Corbin following.

Before anyone could gather their wits, much less object to Hector’s behaviour, he took up the bow, strapped the quiver across his back, grabbed a machete and a cask of freeze-vapour for good measure, and beckoned his group forward.

Avalyn was first to rush to his side. She gripped his upper arm with a smile and crooned about his bravery.

“Are you crazy?” Zorion raged, taking long strides to catch up. “We have to see these people at the meeting point in Akkút, you big lout! What’s the matter with you?”

“Well, at least now we have a shot at making it to Akkút.”

“You go over there and give those back, you hear? We can’t afford to go making enemies of each other.”

Hector shook Avalyn off, glancing behind him to see if the weapon hoarders had followed. Kaed sulked by a tree some paces back (what else was new?) and Syfer was nowhere in sight. Zorion noticed, too.

“Oh, now you’ve done it! We’ve lost the Inaulti. They’re probably holding him hostage for the weapons back – hush now, honey, he’s a good lad. He was only trying to help.”

Kaed’s head perked up like he’d caught a scent. His mouth fell open, showcasing the bucked front teeth he was so self-conscious of. “Uh, guys?”

Zorion massaged his temples. “Quiet down, woman, I can’t hear a damned word these kids are saying!”

“I think you were great,” Avalyn said, batting her painted eyelashes at him.

“Guys? I really think we should–”

Hector held up a hand to quiet Kaed. “I hear something.” A rumble moved over the earth in the distance, sending vibrations under his feet.

“Stars above, they’re coming for us,” Zorion whispered.

Screams carried on the wind. Their echoes mingled with the shivers of branches.

When Hector turned around Kaed was gone. His right bicep burned from the death-grip Avalyn kept on his arm. She was whimpering now. Hector thrust the machete into Zorion’s arms, drew out one of the feather-fletched arrows and nocked it swiftly. He lifted the bow eye-level.

“Take the dagger at my belt,” Hector whispered to Avalyn, but she only recoiled behind him, trembling.

The ring of metal, shrieks of men and women, trampling and whinnying of horses – the sounds mixed in gruesome harmony. Avalyn broke down, weeping quietly.

“I’ll go look,” Hector whispered, hardly daring to breathe. He crept through the trees, bow held at the ready, toward where shadows danced against trunks in the valley.

As he approached he saw horsemen passing deftly through the trees, galloping round the valley. He caught a crimson glint staining the edge of one rider’s waving sword. They wore strange headgear, helmets of some type, he thought, but they moved so quickly he couldn’t be sure.

Hector halted behind a tree on the valley’s edge and looked out. His stomach heaved. Of the fifteen or so Infected left in the valley, eleven were slumped dead on the ground, their guts spilling out of opened bellies or chests. He sucked in a breath when he saw the one right by the tree line, by his feet, hand outstretched and eyes goggling with frozen hope like he thought he’d make it. The top of his skull lay a few paces away, a mush-filled basin, the rest of his brain dripping out of his head in tatters.

In the center of the valley, four figures crawled desperately away. The five horsemen rode tight circles around them, reaching out to jab at them with their swords and roaring their laughter at the induced shrieks.

Hector saw their helmets now: wolf-heads, the muzzles coming down over their noses. And as they cornered their victims they threw their heads to the heavens and howled.

Hector squinted down the shaft of his arrow, trying to keep the bow steady as he blinked sweat from his eyes. The mongrels encircled their four victims, and in each steel wolf-helmet Hector saw himself. He stood hidden in the foliage, a silent judge, distributor of death as always, only this time he was judging himself. How many times had he cut down crumpled, snivelling victims like a logger hacking down trees?

The Infected huddled together against a rock mound. The young Inaulti, Syfer, brandished his crutch like a sword at the riders. One of them laughed and leaned in his saddle to swipe at him. Syfer jabbed, his crutch punched into the man’s gut, and the man toppled from his horse with an oomph!

Hmm...the boy may be halfway competent after all.

“You’ll pay for that, cripple bastard!” another raged. Sunlight flashed off the naked steel of his blade as he raised it.

Hector took aim, the bowstring pulled taut.

“Wait!”

He fumbled with the nock and barely kept his numb fingers around it. The horseman paused mid-swing to look at the figure that had emerged from the wood.

Damn you, Kaed Durant, Amaris strike you down! They won’t take you home!

“Missed one, di’ we?” said a rider with a drawling Rathian accent. His sword scraped out of its scabbard with a clear ring and he broke his horse away to approach Kaed. The boy met him head on until he and the snorting beast were barely a foot apart.

He’s not going to reveal his identity to them, Hector’s Voice said.

What the fuck do you know?

His Voice told me. There’s too much anger toward his father. He doesn’t want to be sent back.

“I’ll tell you what you want to know,” Kaed said.

The Rathian leered. “’Oo says we want tuh know anything? Maybe we’s just want tuh kill yoose walkin’ parasites!”

“Alright, if you’re not interested in the radiation coming from the Inaulti Valley and the foreign composition of its rocks, you may try to kill me.”

“’Ow’d yoo know–?”

“Yes, I am,” Kaed said, at the exact moment the dismounted rider gasped,

“He’s a Helm, that one!”

After a short silence, a third rider tsked. “An Infected Helm? Disgraceful. Your own people spit on you. They expect you to have the decency to end yourself. Ah, ah, stay right there!” he warned one of the cornered men who tried to crawl toward the trees. He turned to Kaed once the offender had cringed back against the rock. “We do not harm Helms. It is out of loyalty to them that we took up arms. But listen here, lad, this is no life. Die honourably, end it. Do not let the parasite do it for you.”

Kaed squinted up at the wolf helmets. “Ah, I see. Assumed the Iron Wolf’s honourable mission after he disappeared, did you? Killing the innocent to protect mankind?”

The Rathian growled, but the more refined one held him in check with a steely look. “Yes,” he said. “We call ourselves the New Wolves. Now, you said you could answer some of our questions. Better you than these cowering swine.” He cast a glance at the foursome, all huddled behind Syfer’s wielded crutch. “We did away with the ones who didn’t speak Vangardian, but I doubt these worms can get two words out now.”

“Fuck. You,” Syfer enunciated, tilting his chin up like an affronted prince. “How’s that for two words?”

The one he’d dismounted with the crutch stalked over in a storm, but Kaed swept in front of him. When the rider reached at his hip for his pommel he found his hand groping air. Kaed held the sword safely out of his reach. “Please, just listen,” he said in that soft voice of his, too low for his girlish looks.

But the scorned rider lunged for the sword. He looked ridiculous snatching wildly, always missing, Kaed tossing the sword from hand to hand and swinging a hairsbreadth out of reach.

The men erupted in hearty laughter. You’d think they were at a damned festival, Hector thought. They’d forgotten about their prisoners, it seemed, until the refined one said, “That’s enough, Rorin. Stand down.”

Huffing and red-faced, Rorin staggered back, probably more out of exhaustion than respect for his orders. Hector’s own muscles burned and his shoulder joint ached from keeping the arrow trained on the leader, but he couldn’t stop his curiosity from letting this play out a little longer.

“You want to know where the radiation around here is coming from?” Kaed asked. He pressed a palm to the rock mound behind him. From where Hector stood he could see the silver flecks in the stone picking up light like embedded fireflies. “These rock formations are unique. They give off a radiation even the best scientists haven’t been able to identify – and trust me, the Helms have access to the best scientists. Wherever these rocks are found on the planet, that’s where the Voices gather. That’s where the Swarm ‘hot-zones’ are.”

Hector felt his muscles cording. Why hadn’t Orcadis told him about this? And why was Kaed volunteering the information when it would only postpone the foursome’s death? Or was he lying?

He’s not lying.

“We’ve noticed peculiarities in the rocks, to be sure,” said the leader. “For one, in the dark they give off a faint pulsing glow. Why do the Voices gather around them?”

Kaed stuck the point of Rorin’s sword into the ground and leaned his arms on the hilt. “The Voices feed off the radiation. They can’t survive long without it, so on their journey to Gods-know-where they lead the Infected through these high-radiation points. It gives the Infected temporary relief, too. The Voices can feed on the radiation instead of on thoughts.”

“Where are the other high-radiation points? The other places where rocks of this kind are found?”

“Haven’t the slightest,” Kaed said. “My Voice took me straight here once I got Infected.”

“’Ee’s lying, the rotten littl’ urchin!” the Rathian blared.

“That’s all I know. Now if you’ll be so good as to let my friends go–”

“That, I cannot do. We are sworn to defend mankind against the parasites.”

Kaed smiled, his full lips and flushed boyish cheeks making him look less threatening than ever. “The sad thing is you actually believe that. Let me enlighten you. When you kill an Infected person, you don’t necessarily kill their Voice. The Voice leaves them and moves to a new food source. Maybe you, Gerulf, maybe your brutish henchmen Rorin and Halmar. Personally, I’d go with one of them – easier minds to break, you know? And no, Halmar, I’m not a girl; you can stop wondering.”

The Rathian and the dismounted one shared stupefied looks.

Gerulf, the leader, smiled back. “You’re good, I’ll give you that. So surely you’ve sensed that my mind is quite made up.” His sword hissed free of its scabbard. “The Infected must be compromised.”

Hector loosed the arrow with a soft twang. He barely managed to correct the between-the-eyes aim he’d never before questioned. The first arrow sailed through the air, and Hector was pulling out another before it had even punctured Gerulf’s sword arm. Halmar got one in his side and collapsed from his saddle. Rorin went down with an arrow just above the liver, and the other two on horses charged off through the trees in a swirl of dust. Amateurs. Hector sent arrows whizzing after them just to scare them from turning back.

He stepped into the clearing with his bow still trained. Gerulf had dropped his sword but remained in his saddle, blood blooming through his tunic from his injured shoulder. He gave a twitch and Kaed snatched the fallen reins before he’d even made a move for them.

Somehow Syfer was on top of Halmar, beating him with one of his crutches. “I’ll show you – ” thump “ – to threaten Lord Syfer Hemmer – ” thump, thump “ – son of Grand Duchess Thyra Hemmer!”

“Someone bring him back to his wits,” Hector said. The three other Infected remained huddled against the rock, so he barked, “You!” at the balding man nearest Syfer. “Get the Inaulti off him!”

As the man scurried to obey, Hector turned his eyes to Gerulf on the horse, looking up the shaft of his arrow at him. “Off your horse, hands where I can see them. Kaed, let me know if he plans anything.”

“He’s thinking he’s seen you before. Thinks you look familiar. By the way, took you long enough to shoot.”

The man slid from his saddle and lifted one hand slowly, his injured arm limp and useless at his side. Hector squinted at him. “We haven’t met,” he snarled. I’m only your goddamned idol.

Kaed snorted but turned it into a cough.

“My friend,” Gerulf said softly, “he needs medical attention.” Hector looked at the bloody and moaning Rathian man called Halmar (the balding man had finally managed to pry Syfer away from him), but Gerulf’s eyes rested on Rorin. The big man was gurgling for breath as black blood frothed from his lips. The arrow was embedded higher than Hector had meant it. Damn it, he’d purposely avoided the liver and had gotten the lung instead. His killer’s instinct was too strong.

He motioned to the corpses scattered across the valley. “What about my friends?” And Hector pointed his bow down, sent an arrow whizzing through Gerulf’s left foot. The man howled in pain, making a flock of sparrows take flight from a nearby canopy.

“Leave them. Kaed, gather up the horses. We’re going.”

Your friends? You hadn’t sympathized with the Infected until you became one, his Voice chastised.

I used to think the Infected were weak, were letting the Voices in willingly. Now I know better. You’re mind rapists.

Is hunting murder if you need the hunted to survive?

Hector flung curse after curse at the parasite until it crawled back into the corner of his mind where it had accustomed to staying. He distributed the riders’ fallen swords to the three Infected. When they refused to do anything but cling to each other and weep, he and Kaed hauled them one by one onto the horses and sent them on their way.

Syfer had swung himself over to his horse on bloody crutches. He waited imperially by the beast until Kaed informed Hector that His Highness wished to be helped into his saddle.

“Need help?” Hector asked.

The young man made a show of looking down at the withered legs trailing behind him and back to Hector. “What do I have to do, beg? Of course I need a lift!”

Hector didn’t bother being gentle as he planted Syfer onto his horse and strapped his legs into the custom-made braces attached to his saddle.

Gerulf had sunken to one knee, taking rattling gasps. His attempts to dislodge the arrow’s broadhead from the ground without aggravating his foot had been in vain. “Just kill us,” he panted, his head lowered so that only the painted wolf’s eyes on the helmet glared up at Hector. “Leave us here and by sundown we’ll be Infected. We’re no hypocrites. The fate we bestowed upon the Infected we will readily accept in the same situation.”

Pity spread like an infection through Hector. And that tightening called guilt, because even these ruthless killers weren’t hypocrites, and he was.

“Kill the monsters,” Syfer drawled. “If you don’t my mother will see them executed, anyways. You, too, for her trouble.” He flourished the reins and trotted into the trees without another backward glance.

“Great, I officially hate every member of our company,” Kaed grumbled. Hector knew it wasn’t right of him to feel stung, but who could predict these stupid emotions?

“I’ll call the medics after we get enough of a head start to be safe from pursuit,” he told Gerulf icily. And as he took the reins of a horse from Kaed, he added: “And Gerulf? Give up this Wolf horseshit. The Iron Wolf was as much a slave as any Infected person is to his Voice.”