The scent always led from one building
to another, and in between would be a corpse. Sometimes there’d
be several, all stinking of death and fennel. They never could
find
his trail, and so they ascribed super-powers to him. He materialized
and vanished. He flew. They called him the Fennel Ninja, but
Resham himself knew he possessed only the most crucial superpower:
he
could shift his odor.
#
Inside the
now-deserted store, the fragrances were sandalwood, aniseed,
fennel and blood. Strong
enough to mask Resham’s odor while he changed, strong enough
to confuse hunters on his trail. He sniffed the air outside.
Under the scent of day-warmed stone, pine, grass, a mix of
wildflowers. He could match that easily.
A few seconds later, he was ready. He
slipped past the corpse lying still on the floor. It smelled
of stale blood, feces and urine from the dying victim, and
Resham’s old scent, the masking scent of fennel.
From the waning daywarmth outside, he
knew the day was half over; in a few hours, the nightcool would
return. He crossed the smooth stone flags of the square to
the chime-beacons marking the plaza wall, and climbed over.
They’d never find him now. By tomorrow’s warming, he’d have
moved on to another town, another job.
In the distance, he heard footsteps. Surprisingly, the wind carried the scent of a woman, hunting. Who did she pursue? Not him, anyway. His changed smell made him impossible to track. He hurried on. The stone paving changed to the more forgiving surface of the earthen path. With caution born of professionalism, he doubled back to see if she followed.
She didn’t. Instead, she cut straight
across his hairpin track, might have caught him except that
he sprinted ahead onto another path. Who was she chasing? The
field-fragrance grew stronger: wildflowers, grass, pine, matching
his new scent. Resham could smell her still, and headed downwind
for open meadow.
“It’s no good, Assassin,” she called. “Surrender now. Save your breath. You’re
dead.”
Resham ran, choosing the scent of a little-used path that dipped into an overgrown hollow. Birds whistled from the reeds near the stream, where an ordinary fugitive might wash away his smell. But confident of his perfect scent-camouflage, Resham continued on the lonely path that was weedy and tangled beneath his feet.
Yet each time he slowed, thinking he had
escaped, he could smell his pursuer on the breeze, hear the
rustle of her passing. The unhesitating footsteps still followed,
as though the woman knew—as she could not—that he was there.
He was winded, gasping. Something was
wrong, something had failed in his scent-transition from fennel
to pine meadow. Despairing, he flung himself deep among the
tall reeds and awaited capture. The rushes poked his skin,
the footsteps came closer, the hunter-smell grew stronger…
And then, as by magic, passed him by. “Damn! I can’t see him anywhere! Where the hell did the bastard go?” She
swore again, loudly, and ran on.
A cold chill ran through him. See. There
were rumors of this woman, this avenger of the dead, this ninja-bane.
The One with No Nose. She was scent-blind, but they said she
had super-powers. They said the warmth of the day revealed
things to her, distant things with no smell or sound. Philosophers
spoke of electromagnetic rays. The superstitious called it “seeing.”
Resham waited for the One’s scent and sounds to fade into the distance, then emerged. She’d
return to where she lost the trail, and he needed to be gone.
He prepared to double back to higher ground and the confounding
sea-wind.
Wait. If she could detect at a distance with electromagnetic rays, that might be exactly the wrong thing to do. Though the hours were passing, the day-warmth still fell on his skin. How far could she gauge objects? He needed to hide from the day.
There was a place: Underground, a hole
in a hillside, the roost of a million bats whose high squeaks
filled the air at night-fall as they flew out of it. Resham
ran through tall brush, where scent-hunters might easily have
trailed a normal man whose scent would cling to the bushes
as he passed. Resham’s scent clung, too, but it was only pine,
grass, wildflowers in bloom.
Again she was behind him. How far did her magical powers extend? Or was she relying on the rustle of disturbed grasses? She shouted in triumph.
“I see you, Hitman. You’re dead, dead,
dead.”
See. That word again, that superstitious
word. She was claiming her power, taunting him. He avoided
the temptation to zig-zag, to make her lose the trail. She
would “see” right across it. Instead, he took the shortest
path.
The cave’s distinctive smell wafted toward
him, droppings and urine of a hundred years of bats. Not far
now. His scent was slightly off for this place; he stopped,
caught his breath, adjusted it. The trail underfoot was uneven
with roots. Careful, now. In the distance, the sound of her
pursuit. Nearly there. The scent of urushiol from the poison
plants guarding its entrance, with the promise of a hot painful
rash on his skin. He would have to endure that.
But she was headed for him and closing,
the rustle of grass, the snapping of twigs, loud as she ran.
She wasn’t even on the path. She was bounding straight across
the meadow.
And then he heard the wondrous squeaks
and wings of a thousand bats, erupting from the cave. The day
was done, its warmth no longer supplying her magic. He ducked
into bushes off the trail, and froze, no rustle betraying his
place. He could hear her stumbling around, lost in the rapidly
cooling night, cursing. “No, no, no! I can’t lose him, not
now, at nightfall. Damn!”
He crawled silently through the small
nettle-guarded entrance she couldn’t smell, into the cold and
stench of the cave, thinking, In a different circumstance,
she would have made an excellent assassin.
