By day, Mattie and Juna loved their brother Benno. At night when Benno put on his mask and dropped to all fours, they shared in the fear of their neighbors. Brother and sister had wondered together if Leopard’s love was more dangerous than Leopard’s hate.
“Inspector will be here in a few weeks,” Juna stage-whispered to Mattie. A beautiful child of seven, with brown eyes and browner hair, she was just learning the power of rumor and hidden fact. She annoyed his twelve-year-old sense of importance.
“Shhh…” Mattie eased a large cluster of grape leaves aside with the flat of his knife. “Look…” His voiceless whisper dropped to almost nothing. “I think he’s after one of the sheep.” The animals huddled in their small night paddock on the far side of the grapes, kept in place by ovine pheromone markers and low-voltage wires.
Leopard bound out of a stand of thick bamboo off to their right and leapt the electric fence to bring down one of the sheep with a swift economy that terrified Mattie. The startled squeal of the prey raised a panicked bleating among the other sheep. Mattie set his shoulders, strengthening against the shiver of fear that his sister might notice.
Juna was too distracted, however. “That’s Agnes!” she shrieked as Leopard turned to savage a favorite lamb. She began to cry, not the quiet sniffling of a well-raised child, but a shrieking, bawling wail which put Mattie in mind of swift beatings and angry visitations from Priest.
“Shut up!” He slapped at Juna with his free hand. “Leopard will kill us both.” Behind them, Leopard’s growl rose above the bleating.
“Will not,” screeched Juna, louder, fear dropping away in favor of defiance. She jumped to her feet. “Benno would never hurt me!”
“When’s he’s Leopard, he’s not Benno!” Mattie yelled back, forgetting himself as he stood to pull Juna down again. He barely had time to turn into the rush of the clawed, hot weight of the big cat before it took him.
“Benno!” Juna screamed. At least she forgot her lamb, thought Mattie, drowning in the salty copper taste and the thunder in his ears.
* * * *
“Leopard,” intoned Priest. “Hear me, Leopard.”
Mattie’s ears felt thick, waxy. He could feel the heat of a fire nearby. The air stank of smoke, meat and machine oil.
He was in the Lodge with Priest.
Why? The question barely framed itself.
“Leopard. You have slain your brother.”
Brother? Mattie was confused. Leopard had killed him…
He thought.
Mattie tried to flex his arms. Unfamiliar muscles rippled beneath a heavy skin.
“Leopard.” Priest’s voice rumbled on. “Take up your work. You have made it your own.”
Mattie tried to talk but succeeded only producing in a frustrated cough. New smells spoke to his nose; olfactory languages unlearned bringing understanding unearned. Priest was old, his Lodge much older.
“You have asserted your responsibilities. Take them up.”
Was Priest trying to throw him out? What had happened to him? Mattie pulled himself to his feet.
All four of them. Clawed, furred feet.
He was Leopard.
Mattie opened aching eyes. Priest leaned on a staff hung with skulls, feathers and electronics. His Lodge spread around them both, cluttered metal walls glowing and rippling in the light of the fire burning in the central pit. The heads of dead beasts leered over ancient volumes bound with their hides. Equipment racks winked red, green and amber through their draped rags and beads.
Priest was wrapped in ragged, loosely stitched pelts and fabrics, embodying the chaos and complexity of his Lodge. He stared down at Mattie with a mixture of sorrow and frustration crinkling the tattoos of his face. Priest’s metal eyes appeared to weep, but Leopard smelled only machine oil, not salty tears.
“Inspector will be here soon,” Priest said. “We must have our Leopard. You have won the mask both by kin right and trial of combat.”
Mattie tried to talk, but again coughed instead. His voice trailed off into a growl.
“Remove the mask if you wish to speak to me.” Kindness tinged Priest’s voice.
Mattie began to protest that he had no fingers, that the mask was all around him, when it fell apart at his thought. He stood naked and warm in the firelight, clutching a worn leopard pelt in his hands. Its head hung from one end. A strap dangling from the jaw where the pelt could be pulled around Mattie’s face to hold it on. His own jaw ached, the memory of fangs disturbing his now-human teeth. The symphony of odors was gone, replaced only by a generalized reek of rot and age.
“Benno?” Mattie’s voice rasped.
“Dead.” Priest’s face drifted into an echo of a smile. The tattoos had a language of their own, if only Mattie had the wit to read it. “By your hand.”
“Juna?”
“Spared by both of you. Frightened beyond the borders of her wits but recovering.”
Mattie shook his head, gathering the leopard mask to his chest like an infant.
“Mattie…” Priest looked to shed another oiled tear. “You must do this thing. But you cannot become the mask. You are still Mattie, brother of Juna. Sister-son of mine.”
Mattie shook his head again. The mask—the skin—felt warm in his hands. “My brother killed me. I remember Leopard’s claws at my chest.” His nails began to slide out from their beds, sharpening and narrowing. “Mattie is dead. Leopard lives.”
Leopard bounded into the night, briefly pursued by the square of firelight from Priest’s door.
* * * *
Mother did not allow much standing water in Her worlds, preferring her people to use driplines for drinking and farming. No one ever washed in water. Still, there were usually a few bamboo-lined pools which sheltered fish and fat, fearless frogs. Waterhunting was forbidden to men and animals alike. Those few who rediscovered it in every generation felt the sting of Mother’s punishment most severely.
Mattie sat undisturbed in shade of the bamboo canebrake at the edge of one such pool, regarding his reflection in the calm water.
One fang had broken on the door of his family’s cabin. When he heard Juna screaming within, Leopard had fled the scene of his childhood. Her fear shrieked in his nostrils far louder than in his ears. Back in his own form Mattie hadn’t the heart since to look himself in his child’s face. Leopard came and sat within his head more and more often.
You are not me, said Leopard from the water below.
You should be Benno, Mattie answered himself. I never wanted to kill. Him or anyone.
I stalk the edges, haunt the night, give the people the gift of Fear. Fear, like Death, is one of Mother’s greatest servants. Disturbed by faint ripples, the reflection appeared to sigh. She does not grant such servants bodies of their own lest they contest Her power.
So stalk. Wind stirred. Mattie’s ears, now furred and tufted, brought him the sound of fan ducts high above beyond the daylit grid of Motherlights. Strange, he thought, that such magnificent ears should play servant to Leopard’s nose.
Fear serves best when transient, said Leopard. It should be unfamiliar. Have no face.
Fear had the face of Benno. Until I killed him.
Leopard was silent for a while, staring up from the water into the trees. Finally he shifted from