Al(tern)atives: Banquon exploits

The child had somehow managed to get himself turned into a wolf.

The night before had been a long one and, while Tern had insisted at the time that Murk needed the sleep, Tern had been the one curling up at the base of trees. Sometimes, when situations were frustrating, Murk could count how many ways the child could get himself killed if they were in Oppal. He stopped when it reached the mid-forties and started correcting Tern’s behavior.

But last night… walking while weary was often a bad move. Leading a child while weary was a fatal one, as the child, or your compromised leadership, could get you both killed. So, trees.

He smelled the Banquon ice wolves on the approach across the lake and chose not to move. Tern had done the same. Then, the scent had gone unbearably musky and Tern had stirred. A hand on his chest stopped him from getting up. If the wolf wanted to mark their tree as property, it hurt no one. Murk had taken the precaution of getting a vial of the stuff before they left Garamine, in case they needed to ward off their scents, but there was no way of telling whether this was the same pack.

At least they weren’t being considered prey.

The musk scent lingered and Murk heard the crunch of snow as the wolf circled from the left. Tern’s side. He didn’t move. The child’s breath was coming fast, nervous, though every couple of seconds it slowed and became rhythmic. Tern trying to remember not to hyperventilate, and then breathing fast again. A cycle.

This latest round came suddenly, shallow shallow breaths in quick succession.

Moving ever so slightly, Murk moved to get a visual on the wolf out of the corner of his eye. The creature was looking directly back at him, its eyes catching the moonlight, evaluating him. Equal predators. There was a decision made there that Murk didn’t quite catch, a dismissal. It glanced down at Tern, moved forward—

And licked his face, like any common dog.

Tern instinctively squirmed away, making a noise born more of ‘I’m going to get my face eaten off’ than ‘ew, licks,’ and the wolf stepped back several paces. Evaluated Murk again. Then it turned and left with its group of foragers, vanishing within seconds into the trees in pursuit of larger, elderly or sickened prey. Muttering derogatory comments about wolves, Tern wiped his face off. Surprisingly, the child didn’t lay up as he usually would after such an encounter, staring at the sky and twitching at noises the forest made. Now, the sleep made sense, if his body needed preparation for a change like this.

Murk had woken at the first hint of real movement in the area, which had been at daybreak when the birds began to stir. Listening for the sound of his charge breathing and hearing it, he promptly went back to sleep for another hour and a half. This time, he opened one eye to survey their surroundings.

Tern was gone.

In his place, lying very still on its stomach with its tail curled around its hind legs and looking up at him with worried golden eyes, was a grey wolf. There was no distinct color about it, its upper body was grey-russet, a black stripe leading down towards the tail, while its underbelly was closer to white. It was lying where Tern had been, though the position had shifted, and there was no sign of blood.

And they were in Banquo.

‘Tern,’ Murk signed. The tail beat a happy tattoo against the snow, though it still didn’t move. The logical assumption was that the wolf had done this last night as a way of… claiming them. But this was Banquo and there were no guarantees.

‘Sign something.’

The wolf got to a sitting position and demonstrated that it was certainly no ordinary wolf. Its fur bore none of the scoring a traditional wolf’s fur would and looked more like the idea of a wolf, of the best wolf anyone could imagine. A wolf with no hunting experience or skill. Tern whined.

‘Wolves don’t whine,’ Murk signed, but Tern had never had cause to learn that vocabulary, other than ‘don’t’. He probably knew an approximation of ‘whine’ but not in that animal-verb form. Balancing itself, the wolf got on its hind legs and tried to flex a single paw up and down – the sign for yes. Its whole leg flailed, naturally, but the intent was clear.

Murk was reasonably sure it was Tern now. The wolf didn’t know that. Sticking its nose in the snow, it began carving out a message, stopping every so often, until the word ‘TERN’ was written in big, paw-print surrounded letters in the snow. It sneezed vigorously, pawing at its damp nose.

‘Agreed,’ Murk signed, and the tail wagged again. ‘You won’t be much help getting out of that form, will you.’

The ears drooped. Murk leaned forward to wipe the letters out of existence and, finishing that, stood.

‘Stay with me.’

If Tern got himself inducted into a pack (or worse, already had been), it would be a nightmare trying to get him back. The wolf last night had done this as a message to Murk, he was fairly sure. Murk couldn’t travel fast and couldn’t pose a threat if he was dragging around a diminutive, skittish example of wolf-kind that bore the scent of the wolf’s pack. However, it also meant they wouldn’t be bothered by that pack.

Small favors.

Tern stayed at his side reasonably well, as the snow wasn’t deep. Banquo was a hushed country, there was something about the lay of the land that made Murk want to keep quiet, avoid drawing attention to himself or the wolf in company. But, there would never be a better opportunity to get the child to hunt.

‘Smell anything?’ he signed. One ear twitched, Tern puzzled by the question. He should know the word smell, they had used it before. ‘Smell,’ Murk signed, and tapped his nose. The child promptly buried his nose in the snow and tossed some of it up, making a little growling yap. Undignified, but Murk could read it: the child was smelling everything. If descriptions were accurate, he had a whole other sense of -seeing and existing in his nose. ‘Smell anything’ was like asking if there were any colors in a kaleidoscope.

‘Threats?’ Murk urged. The wolf shook its head, a low swaying motion that didn’t translate terribly well. How to change the child back? That was going to be the trick. Perhaps it would happen automatically when they exited the wolves’ territory. It wasn’t unheard of for wolves to patrol broad stretches of land and, if they were in Banquo, who was to say that they couldn’t enforce that territory with a spell? Banquo had different rules.

Tern looked out into the woods, ears pricked and alert. Probably hungry, which was good. The child didn’t solve discomfort with food, as most children did, and he would be often on the verge of collapse before Murk realized the issue was not exhaustion but hunger. Perhaps the wolf form was more direct.

The wolf tensed. A shiver ran down one of the back legs. The tail bristled. It was all the warning Murk got and the child bounded through the snow, off the path, and into the trees. Murk was fast, but the wolf quickly outdistanced him.

By the time he caught up, following the tracks, the wolf had brought down a snowshoe hare and had broken its neck.

The child wasn’t eating though, and if a wolf could look horrified, it would. Not that Tern hadn’t eaten wild game, and not that he hadn’t seen Murk kill them, but that he had done it automatically. There was no planned hunt about it. Point and hunt. Machine-like.

Tern let the hare flop over as Murk approached, the wolf rising awkwardly to its feet.

‘Nothing bigger?’ Murk signed. It was a joke and one he did not want to see the child try and implement. Tern didn’t make a big wolf, and wolves hunted in packs. An adult quadruped of even small size could throw him into a tree or trample him. The wolf’s ears flickered back, irritated. It was quiet with the child on mute, and Murk wasn’t sure he liked it.

Tern chattered, yes, but not about inane things. Half the time, he was thinking out loud; over the past several days, he had been planning how to tackle the situation with his cousin. Well, he was in a form that could rip her throat out now, if he chose to. He wouldn’t. Murk stepped forward and picked up the hare, after making sure it was actually dead.

Clean kill. No scoring on Tern’s legs or face either, which was good. Hares could rip open a leg or a muzzle if they weren’t hurriedly dispatched and Tern must have—the wolf must have bit clean through the neck upon catching it. Tern would lose that memory. Hopefully.

Murk didn’t approve of biting things to death. There were some in Oppal who did, and it was roundly recognized as a bad way of doing business. For Tern, it was the only option.

‘Eat,’ he signed, and held the hare out. Tern shook his head. Briefly, Murk considered wrestling the wolf to the ground and forcing the hare down his throat, but Tern would have to eat in his own time. Plus, instincts might take over on the wolf’s end and that would get too bloody to control.

‘Waste,’ Murk signed, but set down the hare, its still-pumping red blood staining the snow. Perhaps the wolf pack following them would think of it as tribute and not try to induct Tern. They walked on, the wolf nervously looking back every minute or two, as if the ghost of the hare would come haunting.

Quiet. It was like being alone, and the last time Murk had been alone, he had gotten into a brawl in a Garam pub. Granted, he had thought he failed his job and it would affect his candidacy for all future jobs at the time, but still. Brawling in a pub? He was supposed to have control. It was very important that he keep control over this situation, with Tern in this form, because the wolves would eat them both if they looked more like prey than predators and Murk was the only predator in the running. Despite Tern’s form.

Well, at least the child had killed something.

They travelled most of the day without leaving the woods or hitting the edge of the wolves’ territory (given the fact that Tern hadn’t changed back). The child seemed to switch into a background mode of walking without animation. The form, despite wolves’ reputation, was built for long periods of walking rather than running. When Murk put a hand on the wolf’s head to get Tern’s attention, the child jolted awake.

‘Food?’ he signed. The ears flickered and he got the feeling Tern would have shrugged and pushed away the question, if he had been verbally able. But the head had sunk lower and lower throughout the course of the day. Whatever the child might want to think, exhaustion and hunger would take him out soon enough.

‘Not food, sleep?,’ Murk signed. The child looked around wearily then ignored the suggestion and kept walking. Murk had explained, earlier in the day, that if they hit the edge of the territory, Tern might change back, but the phrases had been new and he wasn’t sure how much Tern had actually grasped. With one-way communication in a secondary language where Tern couldn’t even ask for (i.e. ‘demand’) clarification, their options were limited.

Murk kept pace with him as night fell. There were been distant howls, communications, as soon as the night dropped, but Tern paid little to no attention to them.  The child might have gone on the rest of the night if he hadn’t swayed over and bumped against Murk’s leg.

‘Sleep,’ Murk signed, more order than request this time. The ears went back and a low growl sprang up in the wolf’s throat.

Murk was well aware of the abilities of the form. If Tern wanted to truly injure him, it would be easier in this form. But Tern didn’t want to do that, even with this show of irritation. On the other hand, Murk knew how to kill guard dogs, because that was a required job skill for mercenarying, and he could kill a wolf. But he wasn’t going to do that either.

He put a hand on the back of the wolf’s neck, not all that far down to reach, and waited to see what Tern would do. The ears flickered indecisively for a moment, then Tern shook off the hand and urged the wolf body forward. There was a strain about it. Walking weary had become no better an idea than it was last night, yet Tern had stopped caring.

Then, the ears went back. The whole body tensed as growls became audible, closer and fiercer than they had been before. A second later, Tern took off through the snow. Too dark to keep his footing in the dark woodland conditions, Murk followed as fast as he could and it wasn’t long before he heard the yelps and snarls of a fight start.

He caught up just in time to see one broadside Tern, who had frozen, snarling. The two wolves, the attacker bigger than Tern, jawed at each other, angling for throats.

It had to be instinct kicking in. The child wouldn’t go for something’s throat if he was told his life depended on it. When Tern drew back, Murk could see the hesitation in the footsteps, the way the wolf danced around the issue. Then threw a hesitant Tern back into the fray.

Other wolves joined in, ignoring Murk in favor of tearing into this new wolf. Where had they all come from? They weren’t the pack that had marked them and transformed Tern – interlopers, probably scheduled to be taken down by the pack that patrolled this area. Murk had several throwing knives – it was good sense to have ranged weapons – but it was unlikely he could take down one of these thick-skinned snarling animals, much less the four now in the fight. Tern backed out of the fight, still snarling, and retreated until one of the wolves tensed to leap.

The child leapt first, sinking his teeth into the other’s neck until it yelped in pain. Tern held on, longer than necessary, until the other wolves started backing away. Tern didn’t lessen his grip, snarling deep in his throat, as the attacking wolf whimpered and rolled over on him, trying to get some kind of grip on him. It failed the first three lunges, until Tern moved too slow.

The victim suddenly became the attacker, snapping at the ever-moving body attached to the jaws at its throat, and caught the back of one haunch by twisting unexpectedly. Surprised, Tern let go to try and get away, struggling even as the attacking wolf released to try and get a better hold.

The child ran this time, knowing he couldn’t surprise them again. Murk chased them as the four fell into pace behind Tern, running with long strides that ate up the ground. He killed one that fell behind, on the run, but the other three outdistanced him.

“MURK!”

It took minutes to get to Tern and, in that time, the newly re-humaned child had grabbed a dead branch, far too big for easy weaponization, and was swinging it wildly at the three remaining wolves. Two, really: one looked as though it was ready to give up on this bit of troublesome prey. With satisfaction, Murk noted that it was the one Tern had been attacking, blood still dripping from its thick scruff.

Dispatch them. But how? Tern’s swinging could only take on a few of them and was no long term solution.

What was holding them back right now? Fear that this one-winged child-wolf monster could change into anything else. Even if they were in Banquo, they understood how the rules worked. Hm. There was the wolf essence to conceal their presence, but he hadn’t expected to use the vial as a psychological weapon. It might not even work in this context. Tern should be bleeding, and blood might overpower the scent of wolves.

Best to start now. Circling the battle, he approached Tern from a perpendicular angle in the darkness and saw now that the child favored his right thigh, breath coming quickly with panic. Panic didn’t stop him from yelling as he spotted Murk.

“Why are you just watching us fight?!! We are going to be torn apart by wolves and you—“

With the child already struggling to remain standing, it was simple to yank him down by his right arm, eliciting a yelp of pain. Then, to pour a vial of pungent wolf essence half over himself and half over Tern, and to stride forward, hurling throwing knives with pinpoint accuracy at the remaining two wolves who stood, stunned and confused at what their noses were telling them.

To their minds, the child had become a human wolf again, and then an adult man who smelled like a wolf and had shiny weapons and this was not worth it. The throwing knives were intended for humans; they barely penetrated thick wolf fur, but the pair fled for easier prey anyway. Murk waited until he was sure they were gone before turning. Tern would have shouted if he encountered trouble.

As it was, the child had pushed himself up on one arm, wincing as much from the smell as anything.

“Did you just drench us in wolf pee?”

‘Stand.’

“No,” Tern said, but pushed himself to an awkward standing position anyway. “…we are hungry.”