Chapter 8 The Place of the Skull
The Place of the Skull
i
All of them knew where he was bound.
For as far as Blacktail could see, his path was lined with beasts.
Overhead, the birds were as thick as leaves in the trees—vultures and robins, seagulls and doves, colorful birds with no name he knew of that had flown impossible distances to get here.
They waited alongside the squirrel and tree-snake and opossum.
Beneath the trees sat an ocean of faces—dogs, cockroaches, snakes, mice and deer, horses, a few cats, all manner of lizards, elk, and coyote.
Terror and appetite were not a part of this.
Tomorrow the hunt would continue as it always had, but here, now, it was forgotten.
A family of ducks sat between a coyote and a pit bull, and none seemed to notice the others.
As he watched, a little mouse scampered up the body of a lynx, hoping to see better perched atop her head.
No one spoke. They only watched him, their heads turning silently to track him as he passed.
Some brought offerings. As he watched, a Chihuahua shouldered his way between a Alsatian and a brown rabbit, stepped over a hamster, and gently deposited a mouthful of food on the tarmac. When he was done, he scurried back fearfully, shivering in his lime-green sweater.
“Hold,” Blacktail called out to him, and the Chihuahua froze, eyes wide, cowering under the shadow of Blacktail’s approach. Blacktail bent down and sniffed the offering. “For me?”
The Chihuahua, mute with awe, wagged his tail once.
Blacktail snapped up the tiny morsel. It could be considered meat only by the dimmest, most abstract stretch of the definition.
But when he looked in the little dog’s soul, he could see that this pathetic bit of food was the best that he could offer, the best that he could imagine to offer, and that he gave it with an open heart.
“A fine meal,” Blacktail said. “Very fine. Tell me, little one, how are you called?”
“I…I…am Nugget,” the little dog whispered.
“I am Blacktail.”
The dog wagged his tail by way of answer—the most he could manage—then lay on his side in the road and spread his legs wide, offering his scent. Blacktail bent his head and sniffed the creature’s belly.
The scent of him nearly broke Blacktail’s heart.
The dog’s bloodline was twisted in on itself like a knot of ancient roots.
In their subjugation, mothers had been bred to sons, fathers to daughters, brother to sister, for so many generations that there was more poison in his veins than blood.
Nugget’s mind was a blasted landscape of idiocy and terror, the memory of pride buried so deep that it surfaced only in his most secret fantasies.
Not that his bloodline mattered—Nugget’s genitals had been cut from him when he was still a puppy, the scar now white and faded beneath a fine mist of fur.
In the moonlight, Blacktail’s eyes flashed.
He bent again, deeper this time, burying his nose in Nugget’s belly, then deeper, first through his flesh, then his guts, finally into the clear blue flame of faith that had called him out to Blacktail’s path with an offering in his mouth.
Blacktail reached out his tongue and kissed the sad little dog, only once, in the very heart of him.
Something happened inside. Nugget called out, a soft, wondering sound that he had not made before, even in his deepest dreams.
When Blacktail drew back out of him, Nugget’s mind was clear for the first time in his life.
A moment later he opened his eyes and looked down at his genitals, which were now whole and healthy.
He tilted his head back and looked up at Blacktail, massive and silent under the moon.
The dog’s eyes were wide, yes, and confused, but not nearly so dull as they had been only a few breaths before.
“Your children will be hunters,” Blacktail said quietly. He pulled off the sweater and spat it to the side. When he saw that Nugget understood, he raised his head and scented the night air.
“Where is it?” he asked them.
“That way, lord,” answered a slave dog. “It is not far.”
ii
The animals would not come close to this place; it stank of death and of the piss you make only in the deepest terrors. He had passed the last of the pilgrims a shortrun ago. Now he walked alone and unwatched.
The end of his long path lay in sight, a wide and low place of men that sat atop a barren hill.
It was not House, where they went to sleep and be with their mate and puppies, but a day place.
They came here to wallow in reason, to learn the nature of infection and disease, to study the migration of blood and bile.
Here they infected the creatures of the Forest God in order to study them as they died.
It stood empty now, but when the sun was high, it would swarm with men.
It had no name that he could understand, but screams rose up out of it like the smoke from hell’s deepest pit.
He thought the screams named it as well as any word.
The place was surrounded on all sides by wooden posts.
Between the posts ran metal vines set here and there with thorns.
He tested one with his jaws and found it strong.
HelpmelordHelpmehelpmelordhelpme
He heard the prayers all the time now, not only when he slept. This one, he thought, is very close.
Blacktail closed his eyes and saw a ghost standing on the other side of the barrier.
He was a black dog of no particular breed, a prisoner of this place who had by great courage and good fortune somehow managed to escape this far, only to be stopped at the final barrier.
His mate had died long before him, drowned before his eyes in the choking gases, together with their litter.
His right eye had been burned away in some study of men, leaving an empty socket and a knot of twisted pink scar, but he was otherwise handsome.
He could see the forest before him, this ghost, smelled it on the wind, but his way was blocked by the metal trees and thorns.
The two-legs that hunted him were, now and forever, near on his trail.
They would capture him, they would cage him, and he would be damned, caught up in the cage and forced to watch his mate and puppies murdered before his eyes.
There was nothing he could do. He had died long ago but stood here still, bound forever in the moment when the last hope faded.
Blacktail stretched out, gripped the metal in his teeth, tore it away.
He walked in and spoke to the ghost, scented him, licked his blasted eye and made it well.
The dog knew him by sight; no words were exchanged.
Behind Blacktail the path stretched out to the Far Hill, where his puppies chewed one another and his mate bounded in the grass.
I slept too long, Blacktail thought as he watched the dog go.
But now sleeping was done. He went to the front gate of this terrible man-den, this cathedral of reason.
He stood before it a moment, sniffing about the edges, then took it in his jaws and cast it aside.
Once he had entered places of men by stealth, but those days were long ago.
Matters were different now. He was different now.
The noise brought two of them, blue-cloth hunters with the gunshot sticks in their hands and a cloud of fury all around them.
The sound of their footfalls carried well against the hard walls of the burrow.
He heard them long before he saw them, running hard to stand against the invader.
When they rounded the last corner and saw him, they skidded to a stop and stood slack-jawed, not only in terror but also awe.
Blacktail of the Far Hill stood before them in his full fury.
In all the long age of man’s dominion no one had ever seen such as him.
Perhaps they did not know him for what he was, not precisely, but they understood enough.
The nearer one died of stroke, the arteries of his mind letting go with a cascade of tiny pops as the image of Blacktail radiated outward from his optic nerve.
It killed him quickly enough that he did not feel his heart burst. The other simply ceased to live, his body unable to support the sight before him.
At the sound of their death cries, the prisoners of this hell woke. Some of them began to call out. Blacktail padded slowly down the hall, ripping the gates from the walls to free each place in its turn.
To his left lay a burrow of cats. Their fur had been shaved away, the flesh beneath it ravaged with burning bile. They hid their faces when he entered. They would not look at him, even as he tore away the walls of their cage and pointed the way to freedom outside.
To his right were the dogs, whose veins had been stuffed with poison until tumors sprouted like mushrooms in their guts.
They looked at him with wide, staring eyes.
He went through the place, crushing the cages in his jaws, freeing each of them in their turn.
As he opened their cages, they rolled over and showed their bellies in submission.
Unlike the cats, who bolted at the first chance, these dogs remained, silent and watchful—penitents to his pack.
Their eyes flashed in the dark as he passed.
One of them, a young boxer with broad shoulders and strong jaws, had the look of a hunter. Blacktail spoke to him for a moment through the metal before freeing him. “How are you called?” he asked softly.
“I am Craft,” said the dog.
“Were you slave or free?” Blacktail asked him.
“I ran free for a time, lord.”
“Then you know of stealth and hiding?”
“Yes.”
“And the hunt? Do you know the way of the hunt?”
“A little,” he said.
“Very well,” he said. “When the time is right, you will be the one to lead.”