The whole thing takes only a little more than twice as long as it takes to say massive cerebral hemorrhage.
He makes it to the spear at seven seconds, but his hand will no longer close upon it. At eight seconds, his will can no longer drive his collapsing body, and he crumples, twitching.
He keeps twitching for a while. Even after he’s basically dead. His sphincter never does let go. Poor bastard.
I take the wire off his neck before I skin him. I leave the flesh on his head, except for the musk glands under his jaw, which I have use for.
Last, before I go: I take from behind my belt one of the nails that had fixed me to my cross. I use the pommel of the dagger to pound it into his forehead.
Because they’re scent hunters. Because I want them to know.
Caine is here.
Caine is coming for them.
I AM THE SMOKE HUNT
I woke with the taste of raw human flesh still fresh and bloody on my tongue.
I rolled over and scrubbed at my face with one hand while my other groped for the pitcher on its stand beside the bed. I rinsed my mouth with stale water, then made a face and spat it on the floor. Fucking water tasted worse than the blood.
I hacked goo up the back of my throat and muttered, “Now, that was a party. .”
I poured water into a shallow terra-cotta bowl and splashed it on my face, softening the sleep gunk at the corners of my eyes before scraping it away with my fingernails. Dawn had paled the stars above the room’s slanted skylight. I sighed and shook myself till my ears rang. It’d probably be an hour before I could get breakfast. Or even coffee. After a soggy minute or two, I remembered ordering the Pratts out of town.
My head got too heavy to hold up. It sank into my hands. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”
I pulled the chamber pot from under the bed and opened the lid, reflecting that somebody on this planet really ought to invent twenty-four-hour room service. As I settled my bare ass onto the night-chilled steel, I decided I could live without the room service. What Home really needed was a couple million union plumbers.
And plastic goddamn toilet seats. With heaters.
I spent a while staring at my hands. Soft and pink and small. Far too smalclass="underline" flimsy fingernails barely thick enough to crack a flea. Forearms smooth and bare where I still vaguely sensed that fighting claws should be. And clean. Too clean. No crust of drying blood, no shreds of ripped manskin-It could have been just a dream.
Sure it could. Really. It was possible.
I finished with the chamber pot, flipped the lid shut and shoved it over by the door. The day porter’d take it from there. If there still was a day porter. I sat on the bed and laced up my breeches. Left in its holster patch overnight, the Automag jabbed into the small of my back. I was about to yank it out and toss it on the bed, but I stopped with my hand on its butt.
A dream-echo of the drumming pounded inside my head.
This hadn’t been like the vision of being Orbek. That had been real as waking life. This was the gradual leakback of memory after a bad drunk.
But maybe just as real. I hadn’t been that drunk.
Some kind of ritual. I couldn’t quite tease it up to the surface of my sleep-fogged mind. Flames in a cave. Leaping and stomping and whirling. Chanting. A house-size bonfire and the savory tang of burning rith. A stone chalice, filled with blood.
Kaleidoscopic. Hallucinatory. The three D’s: drums, drugs, and dance-
Dad, wearing his anthropologist hat, would have called it ritual frenzy: a deliberate, systematic breakdown of self, of the ego’s defenses of recursive inhibition, shredding self-awareness to open a religious communicant’s mind to the infinite. Unreserved, unconstrained, enthusiastic pursuit of transcendant union with-
What?
I had a sick feeling that I knew.
The textbook answer was a higher power. But this hadn’t felt like transcen-dance. Not like emptying myself into the infinite. Just the opposite.
It had felt like summoning.
I am the Smoke Hunt.
I still had that nagging presque vu. This should remind me of something. The Wild Hunt, maybe. I’ve always had warm shorts for the mythology of the Wild Hunt: a storm of chaos sweeping across the land, destroying all in its path. What’s not to like?
Reminds me of my Acting career.
But the Wild Hunt wasn’t it. At least not all of it. This was a different kind of hunt.
The dream or vision or whatever hadn’t stopped with the drumming and the dancing but had flowered into an effortless lope through moonlit streets filled with scents of piss and rainwater, spilled wine and human sweat-A sense of connection. . like the Meld the primals do, a sense of being more than one person. . or being one person spread through different bodies, all the bodies, so that in my pack I could look at myself through different eyes at the same time, and see myselves wreathed in flickering scarlet flames that cast no light, and the flame was the connection, and the connection throbbed thick and hot with shared werewolf lust.
Hitting a building. A door ripped from its hinges. Lamps shattering, flames licking wide: real flames here, crackling and scorching flesh. A casual punch splintering through a wall. Burying my jaws in soft screaming pink-fleshed humans tangled in bedsheets that leaked bright sweet blood into shredded mattress ticking.
More flames, and more terror, and more sweet copper blood.
Grey-fleshed fists crushing meat and bone with the same wet ripping crunch as the seven-bladed morningstars in the hands of men in chainmail that bore the sunburst of Khryl, the thunder of their long guns, the shirr of buckshot and the shree of rifle slugs, the clatter of steel-shod hooves on cobbled streets and no fear, no pain, just impact: blows given, blows received.
And draped over a crumple of ruined wall, shreds of corpse so battered it could have been ogrillo or human or pieces of both, freshly dead, sharp-slanting moonlight catching wisps of steam curling up from open gleaming meat-
Steam from the wounds. .
My dad, maybe forty years ago, had told me an anthropologist’s theory about the origin of the myth of the human souclass="underline" that water vapor rising from deep wounds might have been mistaken by ancient humans for the soul escaping from the body. Probably the origin of ghosts, too. The word spirit comes from a root meaning breath; in most traditions, ghosts resemble the curling fog you see from your own mouth on a chilly day. All the crap about the afterlife, about Heaven being in the sky. . all from nothing more than wisps of condensing vapor, coiling upward like smoke-
Like smoke.
I said, “Son of a bitch. Son of a bitch.”
Sure. That was it. Had to be. Had to be. Drummming. Dancing. Mind-altering substances. Ecstatic union with a higher power. . no fear, no pain-
Even bullets can’t hurt you. They can only kill you.
Take a pacifist Earth-human millennial religious movement, filter it through the consciousness of sentient pack-hunting carnivores, and what do you get?
The Smoke Hunt.
“They’re Ghost Dancers, for shit’s sake. Fucking ogrillo Ghost Dancers.
Crazy fuck my ass Horse and Jesus stinking bloody Christ on a stick.”
I ground my face harder into my hands. “Orbek-what the fuck have you gotten your stupid dog ass into?”