The animal in man: violent Mind, Chapter One:

The Shadow over Crosswall

Sunlight erupted from the day-star Yinna, striking the world from behind a passing cloud, and the fox tried to escape it. He winced at it—the corners of his wide mouth lifting involuntarily, exposing two rows of sharp fangs—and pulled the hood of his dark cloak over his orange-furred ears and as far down his muzzle as it could go. Maxan had been leaning against this wall for nearly an hour, watching as the square slowly filled with crowds of all kinds of species, mostly the mammalian citizens of Crosswall, capital city of the Leoran kingdom. He had been waiting for his latest mark to show himself among them.

Worst part of the job,” he mumbled in annoyance.

He scanned the endless lines of the supposedly afflicted animal folk that had been quarantined here in the western district as they shuffled closer to the central wall of the cross-shaped city. A mob doing its best to be civil. If any of them truly were going astray, it wouldn’t be long before snarling and raking claws tore the peace apart and the square filled with panic. Hardly a day went by that it didn’t.

Maxan reached into his pocket and sank the tips of his claws into the apple he had brought with him from the storeroom before setting out from the guardhouse barracks earlier that morning, well before Yinna’s first rays chased the night away. He savored the first, crisp bite, then wiped a dribble of juice from his chin with the back of a furry paw.

  Foxes were not the tallest of the Leoran species, so Maxan, being just a hair above five feet and in need of a better view, hopped just a little to his right where his hind paws planted themselves on a stack of empty crates. Better, he thought, sinking his fangs into the next chunk of his apple. Foxes were not renowned for their superior vision either, unlike a Corvidian eagle, so he had to narrow his mismatched eyes—the left forest green, the right a brilliant gold—to scan the throng gathered in the immense space before him.

 He was in the busiest part of the western district of Crosswall. This part here, right up against the high stone wall dividing it from the center of the city, was where the condemned animal folk—males and females, old and young, some alone, some with their entire family in tow—would gather every morning to receive their daily food rations.

The whole district had been cut off from the rest of the cross a year ago, when the plague called the Stray began to claim more and more of its citizens. Anyone who showed signs of “going astray”—from the early stages of stooping shoulders or claws that seemed harder to retract, to the later stage of losing one’s capacity for language and recognition of one’s own family—was herded and packed between the four great walls surrounding the western district. And every morning they lined up, and the endless lines terminated at the equally endless row of tables, across which the green-robed initiates of the Mind handed over baskets or sacks filled with ripened fruits, dried strips of game meat, handfuls of berries and shelled nuts, baked roots, and boiled greens. At other places along the tables, the Mind’s so-called designers, in white robes, provided the afflicted masses with basic sets of figurines and checkered game boards to play rounds of apotheosis, or apoth for short. Farther down, crowds of apoth players gathered to receive the latest list telling of the victories earned and defeats suffered by the city’s heroes in the famed cross-shaped arena far across the city in the eastern district, where the real games were played, where real blood was spilled. Here, the only kind of participation the isolated, neglected, and downtrodden animals of the western district could hope for was a kind of simulation.

An escape, Maxan surmised, biting a third chunk from his apple. Something to keep them busy. Occupied. Distracted.

Right. His thoughts turned against him, as they so often did, voicing some other cynical, sarcastic self within him. Look who’s getting distracted, Max.

Maxan shrugged, conceding the point, and swept his eyes back over the crowds nearer the middle of the square. Sometimes the extra voice in his head was helpful, an extra perspective to catch details he might have missed. Of course, most often, he found it simply repeating asinine observations he was already well aware of.

Still, he thought, it’s an improvement over talking to myself out loud.

Since the quarantine began nearly a year ago, the Mind had taken charge of the afflicted animals’ quality of life, ensuring as much as they could that these citizens were fed, cared for, and given a source of activity and entertainment.

They do what they can to ensure we don’t . . .

He turned the apple over in his paw, frowning, feeling a sudden loss of appetite.

Eat each other.

Throughout the city, rumors spread that the Mind had found a cure for the Stray, some mental trick or alchemical mixture that soothed the inner beast that raged in the afflicted Herbridian’s heart. Rumors were easier to hand out than game boards, and arguably did more to keep everyone hopeful.

Hopeful, Maxan’s cynical self thought. And docile. All of this goodwill is just a con. Look at it! To win the Mind ever more influence over our hearts and minds, ever more quickly than they already have.

It was likely that many of the very people who received these rations, the poor wretches whose lives were destroyed by showing symptoms of the Stray, had tended to the orchards, farms, and livestock pens just outside the city before being condemned to this district-sized cage. But this place was packed equally with a variety of species from arguably the most diverse kingdom in all of Herbridia, from the lowly wolves, weasels, raccoons, and rats, to high-born stags, panthers, and gorillas.

Hunger makes equals of us all.

Maxan glanced at the apple and turned it over in his right paw, which was covered in a black leather glove that extended from the tips of his claws to the top of his shoulder. He tossed the apple across to his left, covered only by his amber fur, and back again, juggling the single fruit, thinking about the injustice on full display before him. He had lost his appetite.

“Still no sign of them,” he muttered to no one.

So, you are talking to yourself again.

Maxan shook his head, but the critic in him droned on.

Nothing quite like a game to distract yourself from the terrible pangs of hunger. Or dying with the name of your favorite arena hero on your lips. Why not take in a puppet show to forget those fangs sinking into your throat? What a farce!

He couldn’t stop his eyes from wandering hundreds of yards beyond the crowd to the stage the Mind’s initiates had set up for such entertainment.

We are the puppet show.

Maxan broke away from these dark thoughts and refocused on the business that had brought him here. He had been waiting all morning to spot a band of murderous hyenas. An informant had seen the infamous pack of raiders entering the city two days ago, then spotted them again coming and going through the avenues of the western district. The rumor was they had recovered some treasure of great value from the river lands and come to Crosswall hoping to catch the scent of a buyer. It was unlikely the hyenas would pass up the chance to earn a free meal or two, delivered right to their paws courtesy of the Mind’s initiates, so waiting at this square for them to show up was the best lead Maxan had.

He already knew how they had entered the city. The Crosswall Guard did what it could to seal the gaps in the city’s crumbling outer walls, but in a place this enormous, filled with hundreds of thousands of Herbridians encompassing a hundred or more different species of mammals, reptiles, birds, and ocean dwellers, it was impossible to keep all the unwanted elements away. Maxan himself knew of several spots along the quarantine zone’s northern wall where smugglers brought in sacks and crates full of supplies from outside to feed the hungry. He thought it perhaps just as likely that the sacks and crates sent back out were packed with weapons to feed the growing rebellion in the Denland forests east of the city. He had done his duty—mostly—observing from the shadows and reporting all he had seen, but the overworked Crosswall Guard was often too late to arrive at the hidden entryways and seal the gaps before the hungry rebels were through with an operation. Whether the haul was food or weapons, it was only a matter of time before the smugglers found a new chink in the city’s armor and brought in more.

And so the cycle of uselessness starts anew.

At first, Maxan had felt ambivalent toward the rebel sympathizers and smugglers. After all, the folk they were supplying were poor, hungry, and desperate—animals quite literally backed into a corner. Many of them, although labeled as going astray, did not deserve to be here. From his vantage point atop the crumbling rooftops of this district, whenever he could confirm in the dead of night that the sacks they smuggled were full of food, he was most certainly not in any rush to report the affair. He was glad to think those who starved would eat a better fill the following day.

Weapons, however, called for immediate action. Anyone with a sharp object, Maxan reasoned, was likely to turn it on his fellow starving prisoner over a scrap of bread before the day came that the rebels called on him to raise it against the Leoran king. So Maxan would sprint back to his guardhouse station and tell his captain, the rhinoceros Chewgar, to rouse the soldiers and get moving, no matter the hour. Wherever there are weapons, Maxan thought, there will also be death. The bloody history of this world had already claimed the lives of enough Herbridians. Violence was the unspoken law of life.

The band of hyenas that Maxan searched for now ranked among the deadliest creatures that could possibly sneak into Crosswall. Hyenas were not so common outside of the Golden Grasses to the north, where their particularly vicious species originated. After Maxan told Chewgar what the informant had told him (but keeping the part about a treasure all to himself), the captain had enough time to put his guard contingent on full alert, ready for Maxan to spot his mark and report.

This should be easy, he had thought before.

Quite untrue at the moment, he thought now.

“Sir?” A thin voice broke Maxan’s vigil over the square. It belonged to a young weasel kit, no more than half the fox’s height. Maxan could see the boy’s ribs beneath the shoddy vest he wore. There were spots on his chest where patches of fur had shed. The weasel was starving, weak. He blinked his large black eyes at Maxan, then at the half-eaten apple in the fox’s paw.

“Did you wait for your rations today?” Maxan asked.

“They turned me away. Said they’d seen I had tried to come through already.”

“Had you?”

“It wasn’t true.”

He’s lying, Max.

 Oh, shut up.

 Maxan was no stranger to a con, having employed probably over a thousand of his own design during the decade he spent in his former career, years before joining the Crosswall Guard. Maybe he is lying. But this is no con. This is hunger.

 “Here,” he said, tossing the weasel boy his apple.

The weasel snatched it from the air and set to hungrily gnawing what was left.

“Where are your parents?”

“Just me and Mom left. My pop, he . . . turned. And he ran off.”

“Ran off . . .”

Maxan understood. The farther west one ventured in this district, the farther away from this square at the center, the more dangerous and wild the streets became, and the more likely it was one would meet with death at the claws and fangs of the Stray. The boy’s father, apparently, had answered the call of his inner beast and joined in.

Maxan thought it best not to dwell on the emotion he saw welling up in the emaciated weasel’s eyes. “Have you seen any hyenas?”

“Hyenas? What’s a hyena?”

“You’re from the Denlands,” Maxan reasoned. Weasels, foxes, wolves, bears, and other forest-dwelling creatures who had never set foot in the capital city would have little to no familiarity with their tribal neighbors to the far north of Leora, where clusters of jackals, hyenas, rhinos, lions, and other species prevailed.

The boy nodded as if it had been a question. He ripped a large bite from the apple. The fruit was too big for his mouth, but he forced his little jaws upon it all the same.

“Hyenas are grasslanders, from the north. They’re spotted, and their fur sticks out like spikes on their backs. They hunch, like this. See?”

“Oh! Do they smell bad?”

“Ah, I suppose.”

“They tramped by me and Mom last night. Farther in from the wall. Their stink woke me up. And they were laughing.”

That’s them. They’re here.

“They weren’t laughing,” said Maxan. “That’s just how hyenas breathe.”

The boy took another bite, at this point from nothing but the apple core, and he clambered up a second stack of crates beside Maxan’s, although much less gracefully than the fox had.

This kit would make a fine shadow someday. Maxan smiled as he watched the weasel boy scanning the crowd. He smiled, and followed his example.

Five more minutes. If they don’t show, ask the boy exactly where he saw them. Exactly where he and his mother sleep. Then ten minutes, another twenty to sweep the alleys and arteries, then—

“Listen, sir! I hear them. Somewhere.”

The weasel’s high-pitched excitement broke Maxan from his calculations. He pulled his hood back and fanned out his black-tipped ears.

“Hear that?”

Maxan’s ears twitched, changing their angles, scooping up waves of sound from different locations, scraps of conversations, arguments, the smacking of hungry tongues against teeth, rolls of the dice, consultations of lists, the scraping of apoth figures across the boards, accusations of cheating. Maxan heard everything. But he picked up a peculiar sound. “Huu-huu-huu-huukk. Huu-huu . . .”

There! Maxan saw five hyenas standing perhaps fifty yards away, near the middle of the bustling square. They stood near a dusty, decrepit fountain, their shoulders the highest parts of their gangly bodies, their scarred and spotted heads swiveling about to see who among the crowds they could menace. Maxan caught the glint of sunlight on the curved daggers they flashed at families’ ration baskets, paid as a kind of toll just to move past unharmed.

“Bastards,” Maxan muttered.

Their leader, clad in tattered leather plates bound by twisted metal rings and thick cord, sat on the fountain’s rim gnawing on a stick of cured meat with his grimy, crooked fangs—Yacub, the border raider, chief of this jolly, chuckling company of murderers and thieves.

Maxan rarely wore his official guard’s uniform anymore. Too many buckles, too much bright white, too much weight to effectively carry out his unique duty. But he always carried his badge, a strip of soft leather branded with a cross to resemble the sprawling city’s shape. He briefly considered how simple it would be to flash it at the guardsmen keeping watch near the Mind’s tables, to point a single claw tip at the fountain, to apprehend Yacub and his crew, to put an end to their abuse of the already too abused. But then he would lose the chance to see the real business that brought the hyenas to the city.

Raider groups like Yacub’s had sprung up in great numbers as the Extermination War drew to a close two decades ago and soldiers whose entire lives were based on armed conflict found it hard to put their weapons down, find mates, and live peaceful lives in the city among other species. So instead they wandered, and they pillaged and cheated and stole from villages and settlements all across Leora, and they did no one any good but themselves.

Yacub had been caught before, but he had evaded his long-overdue punishment. Maxan did not know for certain, but he suspected that Leoran coins had changed paws somehow, jail keys had fallen off their key rings, and jailers’ eyes had conveniently changed the direction of their watch.

“Not this time,” Maxan told himself. He hopped down from his crate, thanked the weasel boy once again—who seemed in finer spirits after the apple and the assist—and moved into the crowd, closing in on the hyena pack at the fountain, glimpsing them through the gaps in the throng that he wove through.

Yacub sucked down the rest of the meat and used the pointed stick to pick leftover gristle from his fangs. It didn’t work so well. He spat at the fountain, stood up, stretched, chuckled loudly, and said, “Sun’s up full, boys. We’re off.”

“We should all go with you, boss.”

“Not all you. Head back to the inn. We’re not there by night, we’re dead.”

A shrieking frenzy of laughter overcame Yacub, widening the space around the hyenas. “But don’t you worry,” he added, patting the naked blade of the scratched and serrated sword belted at his side. “I got my ripper.”

Maxan followed in the wake of wild chuckles as three of the hyenas joined their boss and moved toward the far western side of the square.

Maxan was a shadow, a special kind of city guard. While his uniformed counterparts carried a variety of instruments that could bludgeon offenders and criminals into submission, Maxan’s most effective weapons were his sharp eyes and sharper ears. And perhaps my legs. He observed, he listened, and he ran swiftly back to report on his findings. Shadowing required stealth and anonymity and speed, so the fox wore clothes of the common people, overlaid with a dark hood that concealed his eyes and the amber fur on his face.

He felt the edges of his cloak swish about his legs as he kept pace with the hyenas, who strutted casually several yards ahead through the busy walkways beyond the square.

The weasel kit was right, he realized, cupping a paw over his snout to block out the distinct odor left in Yacub’s wake. I could follow them with my eyes closed.

They meandered their way ever westward through thinning crowds of animals, until the hyenas and their unseen shadow were soon passing by only a vagrant or two. The afflicted huddled in doorways, shifting, twitching, reaching through the layers of rags to scratch at their furry necks and chests incessantly, perhaps trying to contain the feral urges that identified them as later-stage Stray.

As Maxan shadowed Yacub into the sprawling maze of abandoned and dilapidated structures, he knew that without crowds to conceal him from his mark, without the ferocity of the bigger species to defend himself if the Stray found him, his mission—Not to mention your life!—was at risk.

Time for some elevation, Max.

He sidled into a doorway and watched Yacub and his crew disappear around the next corner. He pulled back his hood, craned his neck skyward, and swept his eyes over the closest wall, noting its damaged pits and protruding bricks.

Ten seconds up, ten seconds over.

Maxan leapt, gaining twice his height in a split second, and grasped an exposed brick. He hauled himself up and caught another, counting the seconds—Five, six, seven—expending every muscle, buying himself speed. He pulled himself over the edge of the slate-shingled roof, then sprang into motion toward the point where he calculated Yacub would be, concluding his second count—Eight, nine, ten—as he ran.

At the edge of the roof, he grabbed the upward-jutting post of an unfinished balcony and scanned the avenue below. Sure enough, the hyenas continued their march onward.

Onward toward . . . well, I have no idea.

The rooftops of Crosswall suited a shadow’s work perfectly. Most of the high-steepled tops of the buildings, designed to carry rainwater away in channels along their edges, were crowned with long wooden beams that were at least two feet wide—ample space for a fox, even one at full sprint. There were arches and beams that linked the ancient wooden and brick structures to others across the street, and nearly all of the buildings in the western district had fallen into disrepair, exposing masonry and slanted railings everywhere Maxan needed them to be. Anyone else who might try hind-legging their way along the rooftops of Crosswall would be in great danger of breaking their neck. But Maxan had years of practice. In a life before this one, running away from the law, not bringing it in my pocket. One might think he would envy the Corvidian bird species’ natural gift of flight, but an elongated wingspan soaring low over the city would draw too much attention, rendering the whole point of his mission moot. Moving quickly while staying out of sight was what made Maxan one of Crosswall’s best shadows.

Maxan had been following his targets for what felt like hours. The cackle of hyenas wound its way farther west, enhancing its chances of encountering a pack of feral Stray with every step. But the streets were thankfully deserted. So far so good. I’d say it’s luck, but you know well enough.

Of all the animals of all the kingdoms in all the world of Herbridia, Maxan had observed the afflicted perhaps the longest and lived to report what he had seen: whole packs of animals that were no longer anything more than beasts. Their howling and wailing sent all the fur along his spine standing on end. He shook his head violently, defending against the horrific images that tried to slither into his mind.

Yacub’s cackle turned another corner. Maxan wheeled back onto the slope of the roof, then dashed forward and sprang across the ten-foot gap to the next one, landing atop the crumbling building on the other side of the street. Within a few swift strides, he was once again over Yacub’s position.

Maxan scanned the city’s skyline to the west. He knew this area well. Too well. Too many bad memories here. No more than half a mile farther on, near the outer wall of the cross, was the granary where Maxan had spent over a decade of his youth.

This better not be a homecoming.

Why? What are you afraid of?

Besides fire?

I know—seeing the old granary, seeing it happen all over again.

Maxan regarded the tight leather glove encasing his right arm and paw. He turned his arm over slowly, then balled his paw into a fist, extinguishing the memory before it could reignite in his mind.

The hyenas rounded a corner in the other direction, away from the granary. No more open avenues where that way leads. Dead end. Wherever we’re going, we’re here.

It had taken the hyena and the shadow the entire morning and part of the afternoon to reach this place. Yinna had already risen to her apex, and now began her descent.

Maxan slowed his sprint to a quickened creep, ducking from cover to cover, from crumbling chimney, to unfinished wall, to wide wooden plank, approaching what he knew would be Yacub’s final destination. The hyenas had passed through the only entrance to what was once an open-air corral, a former home for burden-beasts used to tend the fields years ago.

Maxan couldn’t help himself from scanning the jagged line that Crosswall cast across the horizons all around. This close to the wall, if he were a little higher, he would see those fields just to the north.

From the granary’s top we could—

Forget it!

He bit down hard, exposing his fangs in a pained grimace. Just forget it.

Just then, a darkness crept in from the east, plunging the whole city into shadow, an eerie event that drew Maxan’s attention now as it always did, day after night after day. It was the Aigaion. The colossal triangular leviathan that floated aimlessly miles above all the world of Herbridia drifted into view. No one living could tell by sight what the thing was made of. Metal? Stone? Wood? Not even the Corvidians, who flew above all others, had ever been able to agree on the details of its construction. No one had ever risen high enough to see its top. And no one dead had ever recorded where it came from, if it had even been built at all. The Aigaion was simply a part of this world, coming and going at random for hundreds of years or more.

Yet the Mind regarded the mystery of the shrouded wanderer with the greatest reverence, choosing to model its sigil after its triangular shape. The organization thought of itself as an institution of discovery and goodwill, charged with spreading knowledge to all Herbridians. But it believed the Aigaion represented the ultimate knowledge just out of reach, as though it held secrets animalkind was never meant to grasp.

The Aigaion’s size was literally overwhelming. No matter where a creature stood on this planet, if he kept his eyes skyward all day, he would glimpse the city-sized object overhead at least once. Whether one saw a black mass that slowly crawled across the horizon’s rim, or an overhead shadow that completely snuffed out the light of Yinna for an hour or more, depended on random chance. Just now, it seemed to Maxan that its shadow would be upon him, Yacub, and the entire population of Crosswall within ten minutes, bringing an early twilight to the city, shrouding them all in darkness.

Twenty feet below Maxan’s perch, Yacub and his cackle had finally worked their way through the inner pens and stalls of the old corral. The claws at the ends of their hind paws made distinct prints in the dirt floor as they moved to the center of the circular ruins.

Six figures emerged from doorways opposite where Yacub had entered. All of them were wrapped in layers of thick, drab robes that brushed the dirt floor of the beast pen. Four remained behind, pulling back their hoods to expose their species—a raccoon, a bearded ram, a long-horned ibex, a black-spotted leopard—and Maxan saw them shifting their arms beneath their hoods, perhaps readying concealed weapons.

Bodyguards, Maxan surmised.

The two others—one a Corvidian with great gray-feathered wings folded at its back, the other still disguised—met Yacub in the very center. The robed Corvidian made no move as the other threw back its hood, exposing the face of a male wolf. His fur was pure snow white speckled with gray, like meteoric ash raining within a blizzard. Most wolves wore their manes shaggy and wild, but this one’s had been slicked down to the nape of his neck. The white wolf clearly took pride in his grooming, but nothing could distract an onlooker from the hideous pink scar that began at the corner of the wolf’s mouth and ended at his left ear, permanently displaying his fangs and freezing his face in a constant, grotesque snarl.

“Did you bring it?” The wolf’s voice came from that maw with a rush of air escaping his open scar, a rasp that seemed hardly above a whisper, yet carried a power that resounded around the circular place like a sudden wind.

The hyenas’ arched backs began heaving upward and downward, letting a faint, collective chuckle escape from them. The matted, spiky hairs along Yacub’s spine quivered, perhaps with fear, maybe excitement. “Plan’s changed,” Yacub said. “Feyn, sir. Something happened.”

The white wolf, Feyn, said nothing, and merely glanced back at the unmoving hooded Corvidian. Feyn’s winged counterpart had no reaction either, and by their silence, the tough demeanor Yacub tried to put forth was broken in seconds.

“Something happened, I says,” Yacub pleaded. “I told my boys not to handle it. Just leave it be, like you sent word of. But curiosity killed the rat, they says, and some red light washes over us, and Ulbur lost his eye before any of us knowed what’s happened. And Baynay . . . he takes Ulbur’s blade in the shoulder, and he . . . And thanks be, I jumped in and grabbed it—the, the light, I grabbed it—and I dashed it against the floor.”

“You what?” Feyn snarled, his icy blue eyes narrowing.

“I mean I dropped it. And it’s fine. No scratches. Ulbur’s not so fine. Swears he’ll gut whoever stole his eye. Wasn’t me . . . I think. I can’t remember.”

“Nice story. But you have not answered me.” Feyn’s already low voice fell lower, becoming a rumbling growl. “Do so. Now.”

“It’s not here. I failed you, I know. Just we were sc—I mean, fright—I mean, I’m not scared of no one, you know. But I . . . We lost ourselves in that light, Feyn.” Yacub spun about to his cackle, who nodded their spiky, chuckling heads to corroborate their boss’s account. “And we thought it best to leave it where it lie. Well, no. Baynay grabbed for it—I don’t know how he could, with all the—and he held it . . . before he . . .” Yacub’s dry throat made a cracking sound as he tried to swallow. He let out a desperate, dry chuckle at the growing impatience in Feyn’s eyes. “We left it there. Tucked in his vest. We voted on it, then we left it. With him.”

Feyn kept his withering gaze fixed on the hyena, and within a few breaths the hyena withered sure enough. Tears welled in Yacub’s eyes and ran down his speckled fur. The spiky hairs on his back shivered with every guilty, sorrowful spasm. The sudden, hysterical sobbing mingled with the hyena’s chuckling gasps for breath was unlike any sound Maxan had ever heard. Yacub fell to his knees, and his cackle followed him to the dirt.

“I’m sorry. Please don’t shut us out.”

Peeking through a hole in a wooden railing, Maxan saw everything happening at the beast pen’s center. The white wolf’s claws hovered in the air shakily over the hyena’s exposed neck, as though he were about to rip the raider’s spine from his back. But Feyn kept control, closing his paw into a fist at his side. Although Feyn carried no weapons that Maxan could see, the way in which the wolf carried himself as he paced about the dirt floor of the pen carried an invisible danger. The gray-winged Corvidian might as well have been a statue. Feyn stepped around it and shook his head at the three others farther back, against the wall. The fox knew the only reason the hyenas weren’t dead was because they knew the location of whatever it was that Feyn wanted. Their ignorance, or their fear, is what saved their lives.

Red light. An inn. Maxan’s thoughts ran through all the places he knew in the western district. Not enough of a lead.

Some motion drew Maxan’s attention to the opposite side of the pen. A creeping silhouette flitted from cover to cover across the rooftops, inching closer to the walkway that ran around the place. “Another shadow?” Maxan whispered to himself, squinting, waiting for the figure to emerge from the last spot where he’d seen it.

No. Can’t be. Chewgar would’ve told me.

A shadow of a different sort then swallowed the entire world, and he lost track of this newcomer as the gigantic Aigaion loomed overhead. The absence of Yinna’s light crept westward over Crosswall.

Below, Feyn had halted in his tracks. He closed his eyes and sucked air deeply into his nostrils as the shadow enveloped him. He let out a great exhalation through his mouth, with a slight whistle where the scarred lips could not close over his fangs. “Aaaah,” he breathed. “My child. My poor, poor lost child. I know your pain. Your confusion. Tell me, Yacub, do you feel inadequate as you are?”

As gifted a speaker as this Feyn was, he could not swallow the distaste that saying this lowly hyena’s name left on his tongue. Maxan heard it. Yacub apparently did not. The hyena looked up sincerely and stifled a sudden burst of laughter as he spoke.

“Yes. I do.”

“Every Herbridian has a destiny. Even you. Yours was not death on the field, fighting against the insects. Neither was mine. Tell me, did you know many who the Thraxians claimed?”

“Yes, sir. My brothers. Sisters. My mates. My mother. Fa—”

“All right. Yes. Enough!” Feyn barked. Maxan heard the growing agitation, but the hyenas all seemed entranced by the snowy wolf’s gravelly voice. Yacub bowed his head again. “You survived,” Feyn went on, “as did I, for a greater reason. You lived this long because fate chose you to find the artifact you did. Fate placed it in your paws, Yacub. And told you to bring it here, to us.”

The wolf again glanced back to his Corvidian counterpart. At last, the robed figure moved. A slight nod of its hood was all Maxan could make out amid the darkness under the Aigaion.

Who are they? Maxan couldn’t help but feel that what was happening here was bigger than a simple transaction over treasure. He looked again across the expanse for the silhouette of whoever he’d thought had been following him, but the world itself was one thick shadow. If anything had been there, it was gone now. Are they Denlanders? Rebels? There’s a wolf, a ram, a raccoon, but also tribals from the north.

“Tell me,” Feyn said, turning back to Yacub. “Do you seek a greater purpose?” He rested his snow-white paw upon the hyena’s shoulder.

“Yes.”

“And acceptance?”

“Yes. More than anything.”

“Do you renounce your dependence on ignorance? Your lust for cruelty?”

“All we want is to be your soldiers.”

“We’ve no need of soldiers, wretch. We are students. We are scholars.”

“Yes. I’ll be one of those.” The sobbing had subsided a little, but the hyena’s feverish chuckling still rattled in his neck.

“Then tell me. Where is the artifact?”

Maxan tensed his muscles, ready to sprint, to run back to Chewgar and the Guard, to descend in great numbers upon whatever inn Yacub was about to reveal. After, of course, I’ve had a chance to see about this treasure.

The city skyline in the distance and the edge of every misty cloud glowed in the smoldering orange light, weak as it was far beneath the Aigaion’s belly. Maxan and the rest were gathered here under the giant’s dark center. The great thing in the sky seemed to lurch slower above them, as if grinding to a halt.

Yacub was hysterical, wildly sobbing, laughing, drawing deeper and deeper breaths that could not calm him.

“Tell me where it is, my son,” Feyn urged, grasping the hyena’s shoulder tighter, the patience in his voice straining to its breaking point. “Transcend from this loathsome animal inside, and you shall find your home among us.”

His words broke Yacub. The hyena chief sputtered another few words between fitful sobs and chuckles. Maxan drew back his hood, fanned out both his ears, gripped the railing, and leaned closer—anything to catch Yacub’s mumbling.

“What?” said Feyn.

“The Aurochs’ Haunch, Principal. It’s at the Aurochs’ Haunch.”

The inn! I know it!

Before Maxan could turn to bolt away, his world was frozen by a shrill scream that echoed from every wall and shook every grain of dirt on the beast pen’s floor.

A Corvidian knight in plates of polished armor plunged from the skies. Her legs and lower talons led her way, the tips of her brown-feathered hawk wings trailing high behind her. She gripped a long spear tightly, angled at the clustered hyenas. She fell like a meteor, inches from where Maxan crouched on the walkway, then flapped her wings outward at the last possible instant to break her fall. The blast of air sent Yacub, Feyn, and immense clouds of dirt rolling several yards away, but aside from the whipping of its drab cloak, the gray-winged figure beside them was unmoved, as if it had barely noticed the new arrival. The knight’s spear sank through a hyena’s back and plunged deep into the ground; an explosion of blood changed the dirt to mud.

At the same time, just as the four figures along the opposite side of the pen were scrambling to draw their weapons from beneath their cloaks, a streak of silver light cut across their necks from the shadows behind, catching the ram and leopard but sparing the shorter raccoon next in line. The two stricken creatures fell to their knees, their weapons forgotten, and their heads rolled easily off their shoulders.

A crossbow bolt whistled through the air just in front of Maxan’s nose, embedding itself in the plank railing. If he hadn’t been blown a few inches back by the hawk’s blast, the bolt would have speared his skull through his ear.

He snapped his head sideways, losing sight of the chaos below, and saw the thin silhouette toss the spent crossbow aside, then the flash of diminished orange daylight on the figure’s two blades, then its swift and silent charge straight at him.

The stranger glided so fast, a shadow flowing in shadow, as though its low paws never touched the woodwork.

Don’t panic!

Maxan was fast, but not that fast. He fumbled with the snap that kept his guard’s short sword secure.

What do I—

Before the thought was complete, his weapon was out of its scabbard, leaping up in his paw just in time to lock with both of the stranger’s descending blades, just an inch in front of his muzzle.

The force of the charge rocked Maxan back on his hind legs, and he nearly toppled over. He pushed hard against the stranger’s blades, broke free of the attack, and hopped back. The stranger swiped across the air where his belly had been only a second before. The idea of just how close he’d come to being gutted ran circles in his mind, tipping him off balance, and Maxan tripped and crashed to the walkway.

Without losing a beat, the stranger pounced directly onto Maxan’s chest, knocking the wind from his lungs. It straddled him, both blades pressed to his neck.

That’s it. He felt the other side of his mind let go. It’s done.

“Not like this,” Maxan answered himself. He let go of his short sword, unsure of what else to do with his paws.

From within the dark hood of the figure bearing down on him, Maxan could just make out two rows of fangs glinting in the sliver of artificial twilight. The fur of the silhouette’s mouth was rimmed with orange-and-white fur.

Oh, c’mon. Are you crying, Max? Is this how you want to go?

“It’s just . . .”

Maxan closed his eyes. All the clamor from below—the din of ringing steel and wild, chuckling laughter—was drowned by the rushing in his temples. He swallowed, feeling the razor-sharp blades’ edges scrape against the amber fur on both sides of his neck.

“I never . . . did anything.”

He waited.

Nothing happened.

“You’re a fox?” The voice above him was female, startled.

Maxan blinked through his tears but could not make out her face, only two large orbs of blue, clearer and calmer than the Peskoran seas.

“Yes?” was all he could muster.

The silhouette hovered, seemed about to speak again, but the piercing scream of a hawk overpowered everything, even the wailing laughter below.

“RINNIA!”

The blue eyes held Maxan’s gaze a second longer, and then she was off him at once, leaping over the walkway railing to the dirt floor below.

I’m alive? Must be a dream. A dream.

No time to dream, fool! Get up!

Maxan rolled over. He saw through a crack in the floorboards that the hawk knight was down on her knees, her left talon hand oozing bright red blood, as was Yacub’s vicious ripper, which had bitten deeply into her side, its teeth punching through her bright armor. Unsure of who their enemies were yet more than happy to tear anything living apart, the two other hyenas of Yacub’s cackle had drawn their similarly vicious swords and charged the white wolf and cloaked Corvidian at the center of the pen, where they were met by the two remaining bodyguards.

From the shadowed doorway at the far end of the corral, a slender figure in form-fitting dark red leather armor stepped delicately over the headless corpses of the ram and leopard and made its way slowly to the center, swishing its thin sword and spattering the dirt with flecks of blood. Even in the darkness beneath the Aigaion, Maxan could see its long green-scaled neck and knew it was a Drakoran snake.

The hawk held her spear up, trying to drive its point at Yacub’s snarling face, but the hyena held its shaft tightly in his left paw. They were locked. But it was clear that the hawk’s strength would give out far earlier than the hyena’s.

It seemed to Maxan there were too many sides—or no sides at all—in this battle. Yacub’s raiders had offset whatever balance there might have been, dashing in and reveling in the violence just for violence’s sake.

Feyn disengaged as his raccoon and ibex bodyguards met the hyenas’ charge, and stood calmly a few feet away, both his snow-white claws outstretched toward the knight, his knuckles rolling up and down. His brow was furrowed in concentration. He growled something, the rhythm of the sound matching the movement of his claws, and the hawk’s head jerked side to side involuntarily. She struggled to keep her focus on the hyena about to end her life.

The silhouette who had attacked Maxan appeared, landing in the dirt, and tumbled forward beyond the combatants, then lashed out at the wolf with both swords. But Feyn was fast. He dropped his claws and skirted backward in the dust. The two short blades caught the ends of his cloak, slicing two razor-perfect lines in the fabric.

Feyn’s attacker did not rest. She darted forward immediately to cover the distance and strike again, but the wolf’s claws came up. He lunged forward, then swung apart with all his strength as though tearing an invisible paper. The silhouettes’ short swords were torn from her paws and flung like arrows in opposite directions across the pen.

Maxan’s mouth hung agape.

How did . . . He didn’t even touch . . .

Get up! Go! Get the guard! Get Chewgar!

Maxan was up on his hind paws. In his mind, he was racing, leaping, sprinting, bounding over rooftops all the way back to the guardhouse. But his body lagged behind this vision of himself. Without thinking, he stooped and retrieved his short sword. While the vision of what a shadow ought to do leapt farther away across the city, he stood rooted to the spot, staring at the untarnished steel in his hand.

I’ve never used this . . .

Who cares?

Maxan found himself turning back to the walkway’s edge and leaning over.

Had the hyenas not been set loose, the battle might have made sense. Yacub was still locked in combat with the hawk, only now his sword’s serrated edge sawed through her armor rip by rip. The snake had been intercepted by the raccoon and ibex, though the latter was twisting his tall-horned head back and forth to deal with the wild, cackling hyena stabbing at his flank. The other hyena stooped low, nearly on all fours, circling the battle’s sole spectator, the hooded gray-winged Corvidian, who by contrast still stood with its arms calmly at its sides. The hyena flinched and wetted his lolling tongue, his muscles tensed for a pounce. But then he shook his head angrily and seemed to reconsider, as though forgetting his intention altogether.

Meanwhile, Feyn’s unexpected disarm of his attacker had caught her by surprise. She had tried to reverse herself midstep, but the momentum of her lunge had already carried her too far forward. Feyn’s snow-white paw shot forward and enclosed around her neck, squeezing tightly. Maxan saw her bushy tail swish in the air as she tried in vain to take them both over onto their side, while her thin arms beat uselessly against the wolf’s forearm. She was fast, but not strong. Not as strong as Feyn.

 “Monitor,” the wolf snarled at her. “You were so close. Witness now your own death.”

With his other paw, Feyn drew some shape in the air, and the silhouetted figure’s own dagger rose from the dirt several yards away, floated in midair, and shot impossibly fast once more, straight at the head of its owner.

But it never arrived.

The white wolf howled in agony as the edge of a short sword cut deeply into his forearm, with all the weight and gravity of a falling fox behind it. Feyn let go of his victim’s neck, and her sword flew by, sticking and wobbling in a wooden beam many feet behind her.

Blood splattered the wolf’s snow-white fur. It dripped upon the dirt floor.

Yacub was inexplicably shaken by the wolf’s howl. He ceased his laughter and the motion of his sword at the sight of Feyn’s blood, and the Corvidian knight seized the moment, her strength resurging. She stood at her full height, wrenched Yacub’s ripper sword free from her side, and from the hyena’s grasp, and tossed it aside. She clenched her spear in both hands and advanced a step into the hyena’s stance, bowling him over onto his back. A desperate, shuddering, pleading chuckle escaped from Yacub’s crooked mouth.

The ibex had fallen, the cruel edge of the hyena’s weapon having torn his throat open. But the mad, laughing creature reveled in his victory a little too long, allowing the snake’s thin blade to slice through his shoddy armor and open his guts. He clutched at the wet red mess, said “Boss?” to Yacub, then slumped over and did not move again. The raccoon, horrified, broke away from the snake and dashed through the shadowed doorway without looking back.

Feyn backed away from the combat in the center of the pen, leaving behind a trail of his blood. His howl of anguish shifted to a roar of anger.

Maxan clutched the short sword stained with the wolf’s blood. He pointed its tip at Feyn, then swept it shakily back and forth at everyone else. “Stay away!” He brandished the badge of the Crosswall Guard. His muzzle felt like it was stuffed with cotton, and he slurred his words, but he somehow made up for it with the volume of his voice. “All of you, stop this right now! You will know the city’s justice!”

Am I really doing this?!

He glanced over his shoulder. The hawk stared at him in some kind of awe, cocking her head, blinking her piercing yellow eyes at him. Even the hyena beneath her looked at the fox from where he lay sprawled on the ground, uncharacteristically silent.

The cloaked figure pulled back her hood, revealing the beautiful face within. A fox, like Maxan. She cast the gaze of her twin blue eyes at him.

“Who are you?” was all he could say. Struck dumb as he was by the commotion, by the serenity of those twin blue seas, he realized a moment later he’d emphasized the wrong syllable.

Who are you? Idiot. You mean who are you.

“Shut up. I mean, all of you, silence!”

“No one is talking,” said a calm voice from Maxan’s side. He whirled about, pointing his sword at the cloaked Corvidian, who pulled back her hood at last. The gray horned owl with impossibly huge, abyssal black eyes clasped her taloned fingers in front of her waist. Behind her, the corpse of a hyena lay sprawled in the dirt, his eyes rolled to the back of his head, his tongue lolling from his mouth, the teeth of his own weapon sunk deep into his own throat. “No one but you,” the owl finished, blinking once very deliberately.

“I mean, ah, I am Crosswall Guard. You will lay down your arms and come with me to—”

“Please,” the owl said suddenly, the sharpness of her voice cutting him to silence. She thrust her arm in Maxan’s direction, and as she stepped closer to him, there could no longer be any denying it: the Aigaion no longer moved in the sky overhead. It seemed the very center of the black triangle was directly over the abandoned beast pen. The hawk and hyena, the snake and the wolf, the two foxes—all were struck silent by the gray owl’s overpowering presence.

“Stop talking,” the owl finished. The tips of her talons rolled in similar motions to those Feyn had made at the hawk.

And nothing happened.

Maxan felt nothing.

The owl blinked again. She dropped her arm to her side. Her head swiveled about to Feyn, who still clutched his wounded arm. “There is no connection,” she told him.

“Then kill them,” Feyn answered.

The female fox had seen enough. She did not wait for their next tricks. She rushed for her short blade that had buried itself in the wooden beam.

“Wait!” Maxan called after her.

The green snake burst into action, flinging a small metallic sphere in the wolf’s direction. Feyn threw up a paw just as it struck the sand, cracked open, and burst into a spiral of flame that engulfed much of the facade ringing the pen. But the wall of destruction stopped flat against an invisible force just inches from Feyn’s paw.

“Enough!” shouted Feyn, sweeping his arm toward the wall, carrying the explosive energy with it. “Harmony, kill them all!”

As the snake’s thin sword led his charge on the wolf, as the wild hyena wrested the hawk’s spear free, as the fox took up her blades, as all of this happened, the gray owl raised her talons high, and a pulse of white light flashed on the Aigaion’s black underside. Then a blast of force struck the world like a hammer, throwing the very dust they stood upon into the air. Maxan felt his body bend against it, crunched, folded over. He experienced the pain in slow motion, then came the rumbling quake, catching up with the drift of time and sound that popped his eardrums, and then he was dragged aside, spinning in a vortex, swirling around the gray horned owl standing calmly at its center.

Everything—wood and stone, beam and brick, foxes and hawks, shadows and snakes and silhouettes—everything crumbled. Whatever glass remained in the broken windows shattered. The slate roofs of the structures surrounding the pen split and sank inward, bringing the buildings they covered down with them.

Everything was a raging, violent storm, and somewhere inside it Maxan’s head slammed hard against something. And although the Aigaion had already passed him that day, the whole world turned dark for Maxan once more.

PURCHASE The animal in man book