Chapter 74: Silent Attrition
Chapter 74: Silent Attrition
The first one took me four hours to kill and about eleven seconds to do it.
I spent the whole afternoon on the roadside unit before I ever laid the bait. It was a single-storey block that had been a tyre place — one steel door at the front, a roller shutter at the back that had come down and rusted solid, and a floor of cracked concrete with a pit in the middle of it that had once had a car over it.
I put four hours into making that room worse.
Everything moveable went against the walls to close the space down. I dragged a bench across the inside of the front door so it would only open about seventy centimetres — enough for a hound’s shoulders, not enough for a hound to turn round in a hurry. I laid a wire at ankle height eight paces inside, not to trip it but to check it, because a thing that stumbles puts its head down. And I hung a rag soaked in scavenger blood in the far corner beyond the pit, three metres past the wire, so that whatever came in had a reason to keep going.
Then I got up on the ledge above the door, in the dark, with the Veil on and the knife out, and waited.
At twenty past four, while I was wiring the door, Blind Call recovered. I left the charge untouched. A summon arrived with a timer, and spending that timer while thirteen hounds still occupied the compound would waste it on work I could do alone. I would thin the pack first, then call for help when help could finish the job.
It came at eighteen minutes past dusk, four minutes later than the previous two evenings.
Everything went the way I’d drawn it. It found the blood on the doorframe, put its head through the gap, and came in at a walk with its nose down. It found the wire with its foreleg and stumbled, and while its head was low and its weight was forward it kept going, because the rag was three metres beyond that and smelled better than anything it had had in a week.
I dropped on it from a metre and a half above.
There was nothing skilful about it. I fell with my whole weight and the knife in both hands. The point went in behind the skull where the spine entered it, and Feline Grace kept me from breaking my own ankle when I landed on a moving animal.
It did not make a sound. It did not turn round. And — this is the part I sat in the dark thinking about afterwards — it never looked at me.
That was the entire theory tested in one go.
I lay there in the dark for forty minutes after, not moving, with the Veil on and my hand on the knife, and nothing came. No howl. No patrol re-tasking. Four hundred and fifty metres away the alpha sat on its plinth between the water tanks and did nothing at all.
So pain doesn’t travel. Or it travels and it’s meaningless.
It has to recognise something. It has to know what it’s looking at. It never got that far.
I cleaned up properly, which took longer than the kill. I dragged the body into the inspection pit and pulled a sheet of ply over it, and I went out with a bucket and washed the blood off the concrete and the doorframe, and I put the bench back where a bench belongs, and I took my wire.
A missing hound is a question. A dead hound in a doorway is an answer.
The second one taught me that I’d been lucky.
That was two evenings later, in a different unit — a builders’ merchant with a stockroom off the back, one door in and a fire door I’d wedged from the inside. Same principle, better room. I’d got greedy about the timing and gone for one of the three-hound patrol group, waiting until the trailing animal fell forty metres behind the other two along the fence line.
It came in and stopped one pace inside the door.
Then it lifted its head.
Not at me — I was up on the racking with the Veil on and no reason for anything to look at me — but its nose came up and it turned it slowly through the room, and I understood in one horrible clean moment that the room smelled like a man.
I’d been in there four hours the previous afternoon, moving furniture in the heat.
The Veil suppresses what I emit. It does absolutely nothing about where I have already been.
I did not have eleven seconds. I had about two, and I took them badly — I came off the racking a full metre earlier than I’d planned, from a worse angle, and got the knife in through the side of the throat rather than the spine, and it thrashed, and I had to hold on to a hundred and ten kilos of dying animal in the dark with a cracked rib and my forearm across its muzzle to keep the noise inside the room.
It took a long time. I’d rather not go into it.
Afterwards I sat with my back against a pallet of tile adhesive and shook for a while and then got out my notebook.
The room has to be prepared at least a day ahead, and then aired, and then not entered. Or prepared and then over-scented.
I used the second option after that. Blood and offal from the kills, smeared thick on the doorframe and floor, made each room smell comprehensively of hound. It worked three more times over the next four days.
The next attempt taught me about the link from the other end, and it cost me a kill.
I’d set up in the third unit, out past the drainage channel, and I had a straggler committed — head down, six paces in, on the wire.
And then it stopped, and turned, and looked directly at the ledge I was lying on.
It didn’t smell me. There was nothing to smell; I’d done everything right. Something else had happened, and the only explanation I’ve been able to construct is that the alpha had already decided something was wrong with that stretch of ground and had pushed that decision down the link, and the animal had come in looking for a man.
I stayed absolutely still and the standoff lasted eleven seconds, and then it backed out through the door and went home.
I lay on that ledge for an hour before I moved.
The next morning everything had changed.
The patrols went out in fives. Nothing went out alone; I watched for six hours and not one animal broke off. The drainage-channel circuit was abandoned. The alpha added a new howl to the vocabulary I’d spent a week cataloguing: three short, evenly spaced, which recalled everything within earshot to the plinth.
It also started sending pairs out along the western fence line — toward my buildings.
It doesn’t know what I am. But it knows the west side eats things.
I sat behind the sill with the notebook and did the arithmetic honestly.
Thirteen hounds when I’d arrived, plus the alpha. Five dead, all of them subtracted from the ordinary ranks, none of them ever explained. Eight left: the two that never leave the plinth — bigger, heavier, and considerably more attentive than the rest — and six ordinary.
And a window closing at speed. Another three days of this and there’d be nothing to ambush. Another week and the alpha would either concentrate the whole pack inside the fence permanently, or abandon the compound and take my water tanks and my workshop somewhere else in its head, or — worst — come and find out what was living in the western buildings.
The charge had been ready for six days. I had delayed because preparation was mine to do and manifestation time was not mine to waste. Now the pack had adapted, the covert phase was over, and waiting longer would only make the assault worse.
[Blind Call Charges: 1/1]
[Preserved Signature: Liora Venn.]
[Repeat Selection Chance: 50% after an eligible D-grade roll.]
I sat on the floor of the burnt-out shop with my back to the wall and looked at it for a while.
Eight hounds and a Level 16. I need somebody who can hold ground.
I had told Liora I would make the Call again. I could not honestly promise what grade it would roll.
I activated Blind Call.
[Blind Call activated.]
[Eligible Grade: B.]
Something went out of me. I’d like to pretend otherwise and I’m not going to. Liora’s preserved signature only entered the selection at D grade; a B roll bypassed it completely.
Right. Fine. The Call doesn’t owe me the grade I wanted.