‘I am Talon!’ I shouted, suddenly regaining access to the waves.
My mind lurched with fear and the realisation I was losing myself. I suppressed compelling urges to regain my original form.
‘Lightmaker be with us,’ Tiaro called. Although she was physically in the waves at that moment, she was still with me spiritually, sensing everything I sensed. I was simply losing my sense of self.
‘Help me, Tiaro,’ I said. ‘I can’t hold on much longer.’
Her prayers in strange languages took on an echoing quality in my mind and faded into the background noises of the deep earth. Part of me realised that Tiaro was shoring up my spirit.
Like the sandbags one piled around their house to prevent the flood waters from reaching it, Tiaro surrounded my mind with light. She reminded me of things about myself that I hadn’t thought of for years, tender moments with my mother when I had been very young, sacrifices I’d made for my grief-stricken father after her death, quiet times alone in the mountains. There were flashes of Jaria’s Rada-kin, running to greet me and beg for scraps of their favourite foods. Then there was my own precious Rada-kin. Rekala! Thinking of her gave me an anchor to reality, and her voice found purchase in my thoughts.
‘Hurry dear one,’ she called, fighting her own battle of escape. ‘Dig!’
I sniffed around me. There was Sarlice-rabbit. The smell of blood was strong. I fussed over Sarlice’s injury, but she pushed me away weakly to encourage me to keep digging. The smell of the demon dogs increased and I dug with all my might.
My body trembled with fatigue. The tunnel shuddered and I heard scuffling in the distance. The dog smell became overpowering, so I drove my teeth into the dirt to help my splintered claws. A root barred my way. I scoured around it and chewed at it frantically. Sarlice did what she could to help, but her strength was fading fast. Panic engulfed me.
The tunnel echoed with roars. A beast scrabbled at the dirt behind me, larger than the tunnel I had dug. I bit down through the root until my jaw felt like it was breaking. The dog nipped at my tail. I drove powerful hind legs into its eyes. I drew blood, but the dog gave no reaction. I broke through the root in front and pushed Sarlice into the light ahead. The dog’s claws struck my back.
Sarlice fell before me as part of the wall we had just dug through collapsed into an enormous dimly-lit rabbit warren. The central area of the warren was ablaze with hundreds of eyes. Sarlice was nowhere to be seen and tunnels stretched away in every direction. The demon dog wrenched a tuft of hair from my tail as I dived into the rabbit haven.
I could sense the hostility and fear of the other rabbits. The bravest of the crowd sniffed at me warily and hissed in admonishment—I was a foreigner to the burrow and therefore not welcome. I found my body quite out of control, hair standing on end as I took on an offensive stance. Behind me the demon dog’s nose poked through the gap, causing the other rabbits to freeze in silent fright.
Then, as the mongrel scented its prey, it rapidly began widening the hole with its forefeet. The rabbits broke into hysteria, rushing into numerous tunnels. I was forgotten by all but the hound.
‘Fight back!’ This thought came from Rekala. ‘You are not prey!’
My body shifted and stretched into the form of a fox. I snapped at the monster’s paws and sunk razor-sharp teeth into its snout as it tried to squeeze through the collapsed part of the wall, but it seemed oblivious to pain. The mongrel had almost made enough room to squeeze its entire head through. Once its powerful shoulders were behind the loosened dirt it could easily push through.
I spun, scented something delectable and chose a tunnel. It came to an end almost straight away. Inside was a huddle of terrified young rabbits, at the mercy of my fangs.
I paused. My body screamed ‘Hunt, kill!’. My mind hesitated. A steady beat had started up again, distracting me from my purpose, which a small voice told me was to ‘Flee, escape!’. Animal hunger competed with blind fear. Something else was in the tunnels.
Unable to decide what to do I yapped and chased the young rabbits out into the main chamber. The demon dog drove through the wall, roared hungrily and lunged for the rabbits. It forgot about me temporarily in its lust for food. I slunk down through another tunnel using my powerful fox sense of smell to navigate towards open air.
The tunnels opened out quickly into a set of larger catacombs, pierced with light from the occasional rift above. I pressed my nose to the ground, picking up the smell of blood, the blood of a plump, juicy rabbit. The blood trail mingled with the tang of mongrel and human, leading me through tunnel after tunnel until I finally came to a large cave. I traced the human-blood smell down across the moist rocks of the cave floor. Hunger drove me. I am the predator.
Something smoky sweet like burning flesh filled my nostrils before I saw the demon dogs. They must have overtaken me while in the catacombs, intent on the blood smell like I was. They were closing on a fallen creature, the bearer of the blood trail.
‘My prey!’ I roared a challenge to the dogs. The creature they were haranguing looked up weakly.
‘Talon?’
I cocked my head. There was something about that sound.
The monsters turned simultaneously, red eyes boring into me. They licked their lips and showed their teeth. My instinct now screamed at me to ‘Fight, win!’
My red-gold fur stood on end and I braced myself for attack. The pair circled me, grimacing triumphantly. Something unnatural flickered in their eyes.
‘Defend!’ came a small voice. ‘Talon!’ It was Tiaro shouting through the waves, struggling to reach my clouded mind. ‘Come out of it. You’ve let instinct take control! Wake up!’
I stood for a moment, mouth agape. The hounds loomed before me. A woman threw a shower of rocks at them. A woman?
‘Talon!’ she shouted.
The repeated use of my name called to something deep within me. The fox form I had taken melted away, revealing my proper body crouched on the cave floor. With the demon dogs snarling and barking right before my eyes, I closed my lids.
‘Krii….’ I breathed out.
The spirit realm appeared around me. Demons surrounded me. Red, black, green. Horns of all sizes and shapes dripped with blood and gore. One demon seemed to be a sprout of nothing but tentacles, its oily black skin riddled with iridescent green veins. Another was covered with rows of orange spikes. I gasped in revulsion and lifted hands to my head. The demons closed in on me as flashes of horror erupted in my mind.
‘Sy-tré defend us!’ Tiaro summoned.
The demons pretended to be brave in the face of a mighty warrior. A wolf. By his claw a tiny man raised his arms to the sky. A channel of grace. A pipeline of power.
In the natural world I lunged into the slavering mass and gripped a leg here, a tail there. Teeth closed on my weak, human flesh, biting….
‘Lightmaker, hear me—release these creatures from the demons that control them,’ I prayed.
I sat up slowly, dizzy with fatigue, arms stinging from half a dozen bite wounds. The two dogs cowered nearby whining in confusion. They were both average sized mutts, fleabitten and scraggly. They bolted when I got to my feet.
Rekala and Kestric were suddenly free of their pursuers. The demons inside them must have been linked.
‘You did it, Rada,’ Rekala called down the waves. ‘I don’t know how, but you’ve banished them!’
‘Thank Sy-tré,’ I responded, ‘not me. I very nearly lost everything for us.’
Rekala relaxed into her icetiger form, pausing to catch her breath in the shelter of a tree with large, dark green leaves and purple flowers. The forest around her was dense and the air was moist and cloying. I realised they’d been running away from us all this time, drawing the demon dogs west towards the kiayr mountains.
Though they were already exhausted the two tigers soon started trotting, but now in opposite directions. Kestric came toward Sarlice and I. Rekala made for the last known location of Lira and the Zeikas to find o
ut what was befalling our noble friend.
The voice I had heard when I ran back to the pit echoed in my mind, recalling a time when I was only new to being a Rada and Rekala had been taken from me. I was too fatigued and distracted to put the puzzle together, but a sense of foreboding had settled inside me and Lira was at the heart of it.
‘How will I get to you?’ Kestric asked of both Sarlice and I. ‘If I follow my sense of you overland, I will end up above you, not inside the cave.’
‘I’m not sure if you can get to us in here. It may not be accessible from the open ground.’
‘I have to try,’ he replied. ‘Can you do something for Sarlice? It seems like she’s about to fade.’
Sarlice was sprawled against a tumble of rocks, barely holding her head up. Her clothes were torn and the bandage around her shoulder had stretched and ripped when she’d resumed human form. It lay to one side, covered in her human blood.
I crawled to her side. ‘Stay awake, Sarlice.’
She gasped for breath and shivered. I pulled a scrap of her shirt away to expose the damaged flesh. The arrow wound was on the top of her shoulder near her collarbone and drilled down into the muscle. I prayed it had not severed any tendons or Sarlice might never have full use of her arm again.
Fear gripped me.
If it had gone any deeper it might have struck her heart, but she would be dead by now if it had. If it had been on a slightly different angle, it might have burst her throat or lung. As if to emphasise that, she spluttered for a breath and grabbed onto me. I swallowed and held onto her, gripped by helplessness. We had nothing sufficient to treat the wound, out here.
Kestric’s panic came to me through the waves. ‘Do something, Talon, or she will die!’
Already shirtless my only option was to use Sarlice’s. I pulled it off and shook it. I packed the cleanest part against the wound, tore the rest into strips and bandaged her shoulder again. I needed something more. Her warbow was still tight against her back, so much so that it had dug into her flesh. I loosened the strap from the quiver of arrows and pulled it free. It just reached under one arm and over her opposite shoulder where I fastened the catch so it was tight against the swathe of material.
She howled in pain and fell back against the rocks, closing her eyes. I pressed one hand to her throat, fearing the absence of a pulse, but I felt a weak throbbing against my fingers. I listened to her mouth and nose for a moment, to be sure she was still breathing. Satisfied, I climbed to my feet to scout around for a water source.
It felt wrong to leave Sarlice behind, but I knew we would both need water to recover. My throat was parched and seemed coated in dirt. Her need for water would be even greater, I knew, because of the blood she had lost. Bessed had taught me that.
The need to clean her wound of the foulness from the pit was also in the back of my mind. I stumbled down the dark passageway, tripping over rocks and roots in my haste. There was enough light for me to make out the shapes on the ground, but I was exhausted and terrified of losing Sarlice. For her to die like this when our journey had only just begun would be too much to bear.
Don’t die, Sarlice.
There was a spring about a quarter mile away, which yielded fresh, cold water like I’d never tasted before. In my haste I hadn’t thought that there was no way I could get it back to Sarlice unless I was willing to give her water that had been in my boots. It was better than nothing, so I washed them both out thoroughly, filled them and carried them back to her.
By the time I got back a half hour had passed. She opened her eyes when I sat next to her.
‘Thank the Lightmaker you’re still with me. Here, drink this.’
She grimaced at the proffered boot and sipped. I checked that the dressing on her wound was secure, and was relieved to see that the shirt was not soaked in blood. A shaft of moonlight from a crack above us illuminated Sarlice’s bare skin, making it glow. Having removed her shirt, I was thankful, for her sake, that she was wearing a laced leather brassiere.
‘Where’s Li… Lira?’
‘I don’t know,’ I replied, ‘but there was another woman’s voice when I last checked on the tunnel entrance. She sounded highborn and like someone I heard a few month’s back, when Rekala was captured by the Zeikas.’
‘Another wo… woman?’ Sarlice asked in disbelief, unable to keep the shivers of exhaustion and pain from her voice.
‘I don’t know who,’ I added. ‘I can’t think straight right now. It’s been a harrowing day. Rekala is going back to help Lira escape.’
Sarlice slumped back against the rocks, saying, ‘They probably think I’m de… dead and you are going to go after them to rescue Lira.’
‘Clearly Bal Harar is still hunting you, Talon,’ Rekala said, listening in to the conversation via my thoughts.
‘Per… perhaps Lira was helping the Zeikas,’ Sarlice struggled to say.
‘No,’ I responded harshly. ‘That’s not possible. Lira wouldn’t betray us. And why would Zeikas enlist the help of a woman?’
‘You said you heard an… another woman’s voice. Couldn’t it have been her?’
‘No,’ I protested. ‘You’ve got it all wrong. You’re tired and you’re not thinking clearly. You never liked Lira much, and it’s clouding your judgement now. You should rest.’
‘There’s more to that girl than she let on,’ Sarlice argued feebly.
‘You don’t know her like I do.’
‘No, I don’t.’
I sensed there was a double-meaning to her words, but I put it down to their personal differences.
Sarlice let her head flop back against the rock. ‘Do what you feel you must.’
I stood up and paced around. I could run back and see Lira for myself, but even if she was a traitor the Zeikas would probably have her tied up just to fool me.
‘Why go to so much trouble just to catch me?’ I said through the waves to my kin.
‘The Zeikas have a saying,’ Tiaro began, ‘“Til eternity, we do have, to perfect the art of our power, to conquer that which is mighty and to enslave that which will bear us to greater heights”.’
‘Are we really that powerful, you and I? It doesn’t seem so to me.’
‘Perhaps,’ Tiaro replied.
‘The Zeikas must think so,’ Rekala said from afar. ‘They had you under surveillance even before you met the earring.’
‘Rekala, did you get a glimpse of the woman they called “Princess” back when we were captured?’
I had never thought to ask her that before—so much had been going on at the time and so much had happened since.
‘Yes, from a distance,’ Rekala replied, distracted by the need to seek cover. She had reached the area where the Zeikas had thrown us into the pit, but with the spirit circle still there, she couldn’t see anything but ordinary land. Without me to dispel the spirit circle there was nothing she could do, but risk creeping over the line. She couldn’t see what was inside, but the Zeikas could see out. What if they spotted her and struck her down?
Rekala broke through the shield, finding she had no clear view because she was behind a stand of bushes. She crept through the leaves, looking out over the camp.
Her impression of the princess the Zeikas had been talking to on the plains near Tez flashed into my mind and layered over it was her current vision of Lira standing in the middle of the Zeika camp, bound in ropes. Both women were willowy-thin, with smooth, pale skin, but one had long, silvery-white hair and the other’s was cut to shoulder length and black. Despite the differences, the fact that their bodies were the same shape and build set off a cascade of realisation in my mind.
I was bombarded with snippets from news scrolls and other people, snatches of memory and a sick feeling of dread and self-disgust. Back in Jaria, Ivon had described the Princess Denliyan as willowy and smooth-skinned. In the news scroll I had read about her involvement with the Zeikas. There was the tyrak I thought I had glimpsed bearing up through the sky in the desert near Tas
set where I’d ‘rescued’ Lira, the black stain on her shirt that I’d seen the night we were soaked by a storm and the convenient mulberry stains that meant she had to keep her face hidden when we were in Telby City.
‘But why? Why would she do this to me? Why go to all the trouble?’
Rekala’s next words caused shivers to go down my spine, ‘The Zeika Arak said, “He does look like Joram, doesn’t he?”.’
I recalled meeting my look-alike in Telby Palace, the Prince Joram, who I had seen being offered summerberry tarts by his aide. Prince Joram was Princess Denliyan’s husband and the only reason I could think of that she would need another man who looked like him was for him to father her children.
Whether Joram was impotent or Denliyan specifically wanted a child with Kriite powers, it suddenly hit me what might have happened in the forest yesterday. I had been drugged by Lira and used against my will… violated.
‘She said it was a Recknid,’ I cried, my voice echoing through the cavern, ‘but there was no bite mark. There was no bite….’
Sarlice glanced up at me, concerned.
‘What? What’s happened?’
‘She’s a traitor,’ Rekala sent through the waves to Tiaro and I, denying her impulse to attack the princess and the Zeikas. My rage filled her with wild fury.
‘I don’t believe it,’ I said, but what Rekala said was true.
‘We could still have it all wrong,’ I said aloud and through the waves.
The evidence of betrayal loomed before me, but I still wasn’t ready to accept it. My head ached with the day’s efforts, but it was nothing compared to the tearing in my heart. Could the woman I had started having feelings for really have been deceiving us? Would she really have crept out and met us in the desert, somehow forcing a camel stampede to entice our sympathy? All the time we had spent together—talking under the day star and at night, playing darts in the tavern in Sarm—was it all meaningless?
I doubled over, cursing myself for a fool, and let a small groan escape from my lips. The enormity of Lira’s efforts to deceive us was too much for me to comprehend.
Talon (The Astor Chronicles Book 1) Page 26
