Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
Vidar
Bergelmir “Cap” Touchstone runs the entire search operation out of the back of a vehicle at the rear gate.
He has a grid up immediately. Sectors, comms channels, a headcount that he’s taken twice. He orders two members of Molten Lava to stay on the community side of the wall to make certain no other being goes out.
He does not put Hannibal Hellstone in command of anything. Cap gives him a sector and a partner and tells him to work it, and Hannibal takes it without a word.
Then he turns to Margaret. “You were Bureau?”
“Seven years in charge of witness protection. Relocation authority. Thirty-one operations.”
He grunts. “You are with Coalstone on the wall line. You know his equipment better than my team does.”
And that is the entirety of it. Every objection I have raised since the diurnal she arrived about contamination, unaffiliated parties, the integrity of the record, simply ceases to exist when a boy’s life is on the line.
The first thing the team discovers is blood at the gate.
Not a great deal, but enough to cause worry. It is on the stone at the base of the post and there is a smear of it on the ground going outward through the opening.
Somebody records it and tests it immediately. “This is a wulver’s blood.”
We go through.
The first thing I notice when I return to the preserve is the lack of shadows.
The two moons overhead are at nearly the same point in the sky, which means the light arrives from one angle and fills everything, and nothing in this preserve has an edge.
The trunks have no dark side. The undergrowth reads as a flat surface.
A fallen limb across the path does not announce itself until I am nearly standing on it.
I cannot gauge distance because depth perception is a function of shadow and there is none.
My equipment functions perfectly but my eyes are useless.
The moonlight is silver, and under the silver is a dusty shade of pink, coming down through the canopy in shafts, across the leaves and the path and on the backs of my own claws.
It is the most beautiful thing I have ever stood inside of.
I shake my head.
There is a child missing.
Forty beings spread out through the preserve.
Molten Lava has the deep sectors. Community volunteers have the near ground with a team member on each of them. Margaret and I have the wall line, east, because that is where my equipment is and because I am the only being on this planet who can read it.
Voices go up at intervals. “Dagr. Dagr Hellstone.”
They carry an enormous distance because that is the other thing about tonight—the preserve has stopped making noise and it is eerily quiet.
It has been silent since before the search began. Nothing is calling or moving in the understory. The fire birds went quiet when the moons closed and have not started again. During a light event every creature with a nest is in it and those without one have gone to ground.
It feels like the whole of the preserve is holding still and listening, and we are the only things making noise.
“It is hard for me to see,” Margaret admits. “Reminder that I don’t have night vision like the rest of you.”
Human eyes are not made for a Hyrrokin night, and the light is playing tricks on me, which means it must be doing considerably worse to her. She can’t even flash flame to make her own light.
I hand my female a small, handheld illumination light that I’ve already sparked.
“Thank you,” she whispers.
At some point in the first hour, she put her hand on my forearm.
Not for comfort. For orientation, so that she knows where the ground is and where I am and which direction we are moving. She keeps it there while we walk and takes it off when we stop and puts it back when we go on again.
The motion sensors show nothing across the entire wall line.
The thermal ones show our own search parties and nothing else.
Every heat signature belongs to a being whose name I know.
The resonance meter sits in its housing on my back and produces the flat carrier tone it has produced every night for eight diurnals.
Finally, we find the wulver at the third hour.
Off the path and down in the undergrowth, in a direction that makes no sense until I understand that he dragged himself.
Skylo came off the path where it happened and went into the growth toward the deep preserve and he made it this far before he could not make any more, and he is lying in the leaves facing inward.
Facing the way the boy went.
“Skylo.” Margaret’s voice cracks. “Skylo…”
One head is down. It is not moving. The other two come up when we reach him. He tries to stand.
“Oh, thank gods,” Margaret exclaims.
He gets his front legs under him and shifts his weight and then he goes back down into the leaves, and all three heads keep watching the deep preserve.
Margaret goes down beside him and puts her hands on him.
“I’m finding the wound. It is above the shoulder, forward, angled downward.
The entry is small and clean. The surrounding skin is scorched in a pattern I recognize.
” She puts it over comms immediately. “This is Reyes. I have the wulver, south of position eleven. He is alive but needs immediate medical assistance.” She keeps her voice level.
“The wound is a projectile wound. Close range. Sidearm, not a rig.”
The channel is silent for one full nanco.
And then the entire operation changes character, all at once, everywhere in this preserve, because a missing offspring has just become an armed being with a kidnapped boy.
Hannibal arrives in moments.
He comes through the growth and then drops down into the leaves beside his wulver and puts both claws on him.
He says something low and private to his beast in ancient Hyrrokin.
Skylo’s tail moves. Twice. Slowly.
Hannibal puts his forehead against the animal’s main forehead and stays there.
“He’ll make it, Hellstone,” a deep voice says from behind us.
Bergelmir has come up on our position. “I have seen worse than that in the field and walked the beast out.” He crouches, examines the wound with the flat competence of a male who has done this before, and stands.
“He does not have all night, but he has hours, and there is a med lab eleven minutes from this gate.”
Then, he says over comms, “Strikestone. Extraction, forty south of eleven, animal casualty, get him to the community and then get him to the lab.”
He looks at Hannibal. “Your offspring is somewhere in this preserve with an armed being. You will go forward. Strikestone and Idun will get your wulver out.”
He is a hundred and fifty nanco of guardian animal and does not want to go. Two heads keep turning back toward the deep preserve the entire time they are lifting him.
Hannibal watches them go then he turns and walks deeper into the preserve without saying anything to any being.
“Dagr Hellstone did not walk out of this preserve on his own,” Margaret says. “There is no way Dagr leaves a wounded wulver lying in the undergrowth. He would have stayed with him until he died.”
“So he was taken by a being with a sidearm who used it on a guardian animal.”
“Agreed.”
“Whoever took him is not from this community. Every domicile behind that wall is accounted for and every resident is standing in the drive under the alignment or out here calling a name into the dark. We have worked this line east and west and there is nothing, no track, no disturbance or reading on any sensor. Whoever took Dagr went inward. Toward the center of the preserve, away from the community. And I do not know who he is, but I know why a being goes into the deep preserve on an alignment night with a child. This has everything to do with the Skyggjar…I think this is a poacher,” I say to Margaret as we walk through our search grid.
“Definitely,” she responds.
The search pattern expands. Forty beings go deeper into the quiet jungle.
And then my tablet flags something.
Audio. Low band.
Very low, near the floor of what the equipment bothers to record, at a frequency I have no reason to be interested in, because everything in the accounts describes something enormous and this reading is small.
It’s thin and weak. My claw is actually moving to discard it, and then something in the back of my skull refuses to let me, and I stop walking.
“Wait. There’s a sound coming through. At first I thought it was nothing, but this audio is familiar.
I think I know what it might be. Let me check. I have a reference sample.”
I run the match. “That sound is not the creature.”
“What is it?”
“That is Dagr Hellstone.”
She gasps. “What?”
“He is producing a sound, deliberately. At a cadence and pitch for which I hold the verified sample I took in the yard, and it is registering on three separate audio positions along this line, which means…” My mind works furiously.
“Which means I can triangulate. Two point four nanco inward. North-northeast of the second turn.” My claws will not stop moving.
“He is alive, Margaret and producing a sound with his own throat to let us know where he is.”
“Vidar, wait.” She is looking up at me with her face lit silver-pink and the last of the shadows gone from around her eyes.
“I don’t think that’s only for us. He’s not making that sound for our benefit.
He’s doing it to warn the Skyggjar to stay away.
He’s sending out an alert signal to try and save the Skyggjar. ”
I do not answer for a moment. “You’re right, that boy is inside a preserve with a poacher who is here to kill the Skyggjar and he has worked out that he is bait.”
“We just need to remember that when we go in, because we’ve already learned that an armed being has taken him and we don’t want anyone accidentally shooting at either the real Skyggjar or even a presumed Skyggjar. Dagr wants to save it, so we will too.”
I put it over comms. “Coalstone to Cap. I have a location on the offspring.”
“Say again?”
“I have an acoustic fix on Dagr Hellstone. Two point four nanco inward, north-northeast of the second turn, confidence high.” I am already moving. “He is producing a low-frequency vocalization I have a reference sample for. Bearing follows.”
Bergelmir does not ask me how. He does not ask me whether I am certain. “All units,” he orders. “New tasking.”
Margaret is beside me with her hand on my forearm and I have the tablet in my other claw. I look up one last time before the canopy closes over us and note the moons touching during alignment.