The green crystal glowed with power. He could feel its dark heat against his chest. He wiped the snow from his face and immediately saw the bird. The Garuda came hurtling in, flat and low this time, talons reaching out again, beak gaping to expose its bright pink maw. Mangku shouted the word of command, and lifted the staff toward the incoming creature, holding it out extended in both hands like a spear.
A bolt of green fire leaped from the iron tip and crashed into the bird’s right wing, the feathers immediately bursting into sickly green flames. The bird fell suddenly, right wing now a charred, useless wreck, its body thumping into the snow just yards from Mangku’s own body. It tried to rise, floundering with only one good wing, unbalanced, yet hopping on its talons toward the sorcerer, long beak carving furrows in the air. Mangku, still on his back and half-covered with snow, pointed the staff once more, aimed, uttered the word, and a sheet of green ichor engulfed the stricken animal, the red-gold wing feathers popping like fireworks. A blackened shape, strangely humanlike, flopped in the snow, twitched once and was still.
Mangku sat up. He felt sick and weak; his shoulder was sheer agony. But he forced himself to push the blade of his staff back into the mouth of the wound. The green jewel pulsed again. The staff in his hands felt heavy and hot. He slowly levered himself to his feet with it, letting the staff carry his weight. The Garuda were still there—three, no four enormous birds wheeling all around, shrieking like gigantic, furious seagulls.
Now one came swooping down, talons reaching out but Mangku was ready for it. He lifted the staff, holding it like a musket in both hands, said the words, and a bolt of sickly green energy speared out from its tip. The Garuda dipped a wing and slid sideways in the air, and the jet of magic missed it completely.
Mangku swore, aimed the staff again, but another creature was on him now, out of nowhere; its right talon arced out and sliced into his face, cutting a deep gash from the corner of his eye down to his jawline. He fell to his knees and yet another bird passed inches over his head. He forced himself back up onto his feet. A bird was screaming in his face: he swung and smashed at the Garuda with his staff, catching it on the side of its beak with the jewel end. The animal exploded in a ball of green ichor-fire and crashed to the ground a few paces away, sizzling and stinking in the snow.
Enough was enough. He was Mangku the Sorcerer. Master of Demons. He would not be conquered here. Not by a gaggle of oversized geese. He pressed the blade around the jewel at the end of his staff to his bleeding face, widening the cut, and felt the stone swell and grow, pulsing as it fed on his blood, renewing its power once more. He scratched a rough circle around him in the snow with the tip of his weapon. He wiped at the blood now streaming freely down his face, ignoring the pain in his shoulder as he moved his left arm, and scattered a few drops of blood all around him inside the circle from his dripping fingers. He uttered the ancient mantra—his voice growling with a harsh new puissance—and a wall of ichor sprang up all around, a shield of emerald flame. Now protected, he took careful aim with the staff at a passing bird, skimming along the crest of the ridge. He said the words, the staff discharged, the Garuda disintegrated in a cloud of blood, feathers and raw green magic.
He targeted another, blasting it with a jet of green and tumbling it away over the edge of the mountain. He aimed at a third, farther way—and the bolt of green power fell short.
And it was all over. The surviving birds flapped away, cawing their hatred and grief, leaving Mangku in a blackened circle, his face a bloody mask, his left shoulder ripped to the bone, wreathed in a virulent smoke, his staff as hot as a glowing poker in his shaking hands.
* * *
• • •
He made it down to the corpse of the Queen without being further molested by the Garuda males. He knelt trembling in the snow and used the blade on his staff to hack out the spray of golden feathers from her narrow head; he tucked the gory bundle into the pouch at his waist. Then he began to stumble, with a drunk’s lack of limb control, back down the mountain.
After a hundred yards, his vision was blurring, the pain of his shoulder made the whole of his left side a slab of raging fire, and his badly sliced face was swollen twice its size and throbbing like a Temple drum. He was weak from massive loss of blood but also from the expression of so much raw magic. He could not recall when he had last used so much power in so short a space of time. He was desperate for food, for fuel and for sleep, his exhaustion almost complete, his eyes closing as he lurched along, one foot clumping down in front of another, sinking deep into the snowdrifts. If he could just go a little farther, just a few more steps, if only he could make it to . . .
Three hours later, in the golden light of late afternoon, Mangku awoke. He was alive, plainly, and at some point he had crossed the snow line and made it down to the crumbling black rock, where he had collapsed and passed into unconsciousness. The Garuda were nowhere to be seen and he breathed a sigh of relief for he knew that he could summon no more magic—and would not be able to for some days. And he had no other weapon.
Somehow, he got back up to his feet, levering his body up with the staff, and continued the shambling descent. Stumbling, slipping on the friable volcanic path, falling painfully to his skinned knees from time to time. But on he marched, determined, on and on, down and down, sometimes in a sort of weird dreamland with phantom birds screaming in his ears, sometimes in the agony of absolute reality. Down he went, one hesitant, shaking step after another.
A little after nightfall, he found himself staggering along the main street of the Federation border outpost on the north bank of the River Pengut, using his staff as a crutch. There was a huge, dark, vaguely human shape looming in front of him, with two smaller shapes on either side. He lurched closer, very near to the end, and saw with some surprise that it was Kanto, one of his Ziran Atari crew, and two slight Han prostitutes, one on either of his heavy muscular arms.
“Kanto. Happy to see. You. Must . . . must take me to . . . Federation officer, immediately,” he said. Then his knees sagged and he slipped out of the world for a time.
Typically, Kanto did not obey him. He came to again in some slut’s boudoir, a fragile bamboo hut that smelled of rancid sex and cheap perfume, with a Han girl clumsily sewing up his torn shoulder, and Kanto trying to feed him some chicken broth laced with a good deal of sour marak.
“I must see the Federation official, Kanto,” he muttered. “Utmost importance.”
He felt himself falling back into the abyss, and forced himself to sit up. He pushed the Han girl away and tried to stand. His legs gave way and he fell back into blackness.
He was not all that much stronger in the morning. But for a silver ringgu, the Han girl allowed him to clean himself up in her washbasin and made him a portion of fried rice with eggs and a bowl of spicy fish soup. Next, he persuaded Kanto to take him to the Federation office. It was not long after sunrise and supporting himself between the huge, black-skinned sailor’s arm and his staff, he made his report to the very young captain in charge of this tiny military post, which marked the southern limit of the territory directly controlled by the Federation, a hundred miles as the messenger-pigeon flies southeast of Istana Kush.
The Dokra captain, looking like a child dressed up for a pageant in his scarlet coat with white cross belt and gold epaulets, was incredulous when Mangku told him that he had seen a large number of troops landing on the inhospitable western side of the Barat Cordillera. In fact, he refused to believe a single word that the tall, gaunt, terrifying man, clearly exhausted and badly wounded, had to say. But Mangku was most insistent.
“I climbed Mount Barat yesterday morning and near the summit I looked down on the western side and saw a force of Celestial Legionnaires, perhaps two or three hundred men, disembarking from three ships.”
“Is that so?” said the captain.
“It is. I presume they are an assault force and will be heading north,�
�� Mangku said.
“Indeed?” said the captain. This was obviously nonsense. No infantry force could march north on the western side of the Cordillera. The terrain was famously impassible.
“I would think the Federation might be interested in this intelligence. Legionnaires heading toward Istana with hostile intent. You might wish to report it to your superiors.”
“Well, thank you, Mister, uh, Mangku. I shall pass on your concerns. Is there anything else I can help you with today?”
Mangku looked at him with loathing. If any living creature deserved a blast from his staff, it was this idiotic puppy-in-uniform. But he knew he simply did not have the strength.
“No, nothing. I shall take my leave now. Good day to you.
“Take me back to the ship now, Kanto,” said Mangku, when they were outside the Federation office. Once more his body was betraying him; the world was blurring and twisting at the edges. His knee joints felt dangerously liquid, his feet heavy as boulders.
He put a hand on the leather pouch at his waist and took strength from one thought, one wonderful thought, as they staggered out into the blazing sunshine: the Third Key, the Key of Air, was his.
CHAPTER 31
Farhan felt curiously light as he stepped out of the gate of the bamboo fort and began to walk across the open ground toward the trees. True, he wore nothing but rope sandals, a pair of short, linen breeches and a loose, linen shirt—he had abandoned any thought of trying to armor himself against the poisoned darts—but it was more than that. It was as if all the great burdens of his life—his debts, his deceptions, his secrets, his failures, his appetites, his fears, his painful, unquenchable love for her—all the sad and wonderful things that made him the man he was, all of them were gone. Stripped away by this one grand gesture.
I’m going to my death, he thought. All my life has been leading up to this point. This is the best and the worst thing I have ever done. This is the apex of my existence—or is it? In a moment I shall know whether there is an afterlife and if all the threats and promises of the soul-merchants are true or, as I have always suspected, a pack of self-serving lies.
They had fired an unloaded cannon to command the attention of the savages, and hung a pair of crossed palm leaves, stripped from the roof of one of the shelters that Captain Ravi had built, over the side of the bamboo walls. After a long pause, more than an hour, a horrible period for Farhan who spent it writing letters in the tent and drinking most of a flask of marak, a white-caked man emerged from the trees, dumped a pair of crossed palm leaves in the dust and stalked back into the jungle.
Farhan remembered just in time to draw a large scythe on his forehead with a piece of charcoal from the kitchen fire pit, and then Captain Lodi was heartily shaking his hand with, astoundingly, the glint of tears in his eyes; Mamaji was enfolding him in a sweaty, motherly hug; Lila was looking solemnly at him—and was that a new respect in her big, dark eyes? The Dokra were saluting him, stamping and presenting arms with a violent precision that would not have disgraced the High Council parade ground in Dhilika, and he was stepping—light as air—across the clearing and heading for the trees and toward his certain doom.
He stopped at the edge of the clearing, his skin itching, at every moment expecting to feel the sting of the darts in his flesh. Then he stooped and picked up the crossed palm leaves. Shaking the dust from them and holding them across his body, like a fan or a shield, he walked slowly into the jungle. Farhan felt several dozen pairs of eyes on him but it took a moment for his own sight to adjust to the gloom. A tall, painted man walked toward him; he reached out and gently took the palm leaves from his hand. The man said, in a language not very far from the ancient Yawanese that Farhan had been forced to study at school, “You are now under the protection of the Great Harvester. You live at the pleasure of his mercy.”
Once Farhan’s brain had deciphered the meaning of his message, a surge of relief ran through his body from his crown to his toes and, unable to stop his face from beaming—and suppressing an urge to throw his arms around the man and hug him—he said, dredging his memory for the correct form, “All honor and praise to Vharkash. We live in his shadow.”
* * *
• • •
A pack of a dozen of them gathered around Farhan, either to guard him from others or make sure he did not escape, each man carrying a long pipe with a little pouch of darts at his belt and all slathered in the white clay decorated with gray and black stripes. Each man, Farhan noticed, had his own distinct pattern of stripes, with no man’s the same as another’s. They led him deeper into the jungle along paths that Farhan could see had been well trodden by human feet. After about a quarter of an hour—much farther away from the clearing, the fort and all his friends than Farhan liked—he found himself being led into a village, a settlement not very different from a dozen he had seen in Yawa on previous trips. To be honest, Farhan was astounded. An area of forest had been cleared; he could see the chopped-off stubs of bamboo and the stumps of bigger trees, too. Two dozen long and low mud-walled huts had been thrown up, thatched with broad, shiny bright green leaves as big as Farhan’s shirt, and there were women and children sitting about—all naked but for brief loincloths but none of them painted with the white clay of the warriors and, indeed, looking like perfectly ordinary Yawanese peasants. One woman, her heavy breasts swinging with every stroke of the ax, was chopping firewood by a stone-lined hearth outside one of the bigger huts. A slender young girl, with exquisite natural grace, was carrying a large pot of water on her head across the outskirts of the village. Older children cried out and came running to the knot of painted men, clamoring for a sight of the mysterious stranger with the pale skin in the outlandish linen breeches and shirt. Owlish babies, sucking on sweet roots or just their own thumbs, stared up at him from the dust. But every one of them from the smallest baby to the most decrepit graybeard had a scythe drawn or tattooed in the center of his forehead. And they all seemed very interested in Farhan, eyeing him curiously with what seemed to his scrambled, fevered mind very much like hunger.
Then he saw it. A gibbet—a simple bamboo pole with two A-shaped supports keeping it ten feet in the air. And hanging from it by the heels was a human form, his long black hair hanging down almost to the ground. Not a gibbet, Farhan thought, a gralloching frame. He had used similar structures for the deer carcasses when out hunting with his father. And like the stags of his boyhood, the naked body hanging from the frame had been eviscerated, the chest and stomach contents removed, and it flapped open obscenely. Most of the left leg between the knee and hip had also been taken away and Farhan, swallowing bile, determined not to show his revulsion, could see the thighbone, scraped almost clean of flesh. Black flies crawled all over the purple surface of the meat.
Then his mouth flooded with scalding vomit as he saw the upside-down face: it was the Dokra trooper he’d been playing dice with two days ago on the blanket by the river. Kishan had been his name. Sergeant Kishan. He swallowed down the acid and averted his gaze. Where were the rest of the bodies? In this heat, they would not last long. The answer to his question came in a drift of gray vapor. As they walked through the center of the village he saw a large building at the edge of the circle with smoke gently seeping through the shingle-leaves on the roof. A smokehouse.
His brain still whirling with horror, Farhan was led to the largest hut in the circle of dwellings in the village. A mat of woven palm leaves had been placed on the ground in front of the opening, which was covered by a screen of long, dried grass. There was a tiny stool beside the entrance, square, almost solid and made of some heavy, dark wood and beautifully carved with water buffalos and tigers, scythes and phallic shapes. It was indicated to Farhan that he should sit on the mat, and once he had done so, crossing his legs and trying to give the impression of perfect ease and confidence, he was given a cup of water to drink. It was surprisingly cool and sweet-tasting. His mouth was bone dry—fear, he sup
posed—and he drank it down in one draft.
One of his honor guard went over to the door of the hut, poked his head through the grass screen and reported his arrival. The rest of the painted men either settled down in the dust to wait, or wandered off. The tall warrior sat down just behind Farhan’s back on the same mat with a proprietorial air, as if to say this is my prisoner. To pass the time—but also to divert himself from his own terrible thoughts—Farhan tried to work out the strength of the enemy. By looking at the mud-walled huts and seeing more than one warrior entering and leaving—recognizable by the different patterns on their white-painted skins—he calculated that each hut held an extended family group, with fathers, husbands, brothers and sons taking their role as warriors. The village, he thought, might contain as many as three hundred people, and that meant that there were perhaps a hundred of these white-painted devils. Not as many as they had feared back in the safety of the fort, which was good news. However, the fact that they had gone to the trouble of building a village here, so close to the fort, and that they had brought their own wives and children with them, meant that they were not planning to leave anytime soon. Farhan’s own words about human livestock in a bamboo corral came back to him. These white-painted folk wanted to be near their food source. There must be very few people to hunt for food in the dense jungles of Yawa and the arrival of the Mongoose must seem to them like a great windfall—a wondrous gift from Vharkash, a reward for their devotion. What could he say to them to make them give up this holy gift from their God?
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