by Ian Irvine
Rurr-shyve went sideways at the last second and Maelys drew her hand out. Her directions would only hinder it here. She let it fly on instinct, ducking as it wove along the winding cleft. Then they came around a corner and faced a solid wall of stone.
The pain in her head swelled enormously. Rurr-shyve let out a cry; Nish shrieked, and Maelys felt as though her arm was being bent backwards at the elbow.
She cried out. The feather-rotors spun the other way, then Rurr-shyve straightened up and arched suddenly until its tail almost touched the back of its head. Maelys watched in horror, sure the rotors would smash into it. But the flap-peter slowed suddenly, skimmed the lower part of the cleft, its leg pairs snapped straight against a boulder and they were catapulted vertically so hard that Maelys went dizzy.
Rurr-shyve shot up out of the cleft in a whirling cloud of feathers. Maelys clutched her stomach. Nish was white-faced. She directed the flappeter sharply to her right, her elbow throbbing, and they came hurtling up and over the top of the rock stack between the pinnacles as the other flappeters flashed past, below and to the right, one, two, three, flying nose to tail. She couldn’t look back – she just prayed that Nish could do enough with his one shot to give the enemy a fright.
The crossbow snapped. For a moment she thought he’d missed completely, and so did he, for he groaned, but the thin rider on the leading beast slumped sideways and his hand must have flicked up as it slipped from the loop, for his flappeter tried to stand on its tail in mid-air. It slowed so rapidly that the one behind was too close to avoid it.
As it slammed into the first, the feather-rotors of the two beasts locked, then sheared off. The leading rider was already falling when a whirling blade cut him in half. The other man was sent flying into a boulder, head-first. The two beasts, still locked together, thundered into the slope further on, tumbling over and over and causing a minor avalanche before coming to rest in clouds of dust a few hundred spans further down.
The third flappeter let out a screech and shot left, narrowly missing a pinnacle, with its rider wailing in sympathetic pain. Maelys could feel it too – she hurt all over and felt the most crippling sense of loss, though she had no idea what she’d lost. How much worse must it be for flappeters and riders who’d been linked for years?
Nish passed the bow forwards; she wound it absently and circled above the rock stack, watching the remaining flap-peter, which was wobbling in ragged spirals a few hundred spans away while its rider tried to regain control.
She pointed the crossbow at him, whereupon he weakly brandished a fist and turned away. Maelys headed down for the safety of the tall trees and, once they were a good half league into dense forest, brought Rurr-shyve to ground.
It stood there on shaky legs, its long neck drooping until it touched the ground. Its feather-rotors sagged. Their tips had been plucked bare and the injured blade was so swollen that the bamboo splint was embedded in it, but Jal-Nish had created flappeters to be nothing if not resilient.
Scrambling off before it collapsed, she helped Nish down. They were on a shallow slope broken by a series of steeper banks where the exposed soil was deep red. The forest was so tall and dense that no sunlight reached the ground. It was almost dark here and the misty air had a faint greenish tinge. Maelys caught hold of a low branch. Her knees felt weak.
‘Well done, lad,’ said Nish, shaking her hand. ‘I would not have thought it possible.’
Maelys lowered her head, thrilled at being praised by such a great man, but not knowing how to respond to it. She hadn’t been praised for anything since her father had fled. And she had done well, despite everything, perhaps because she hadn’t allowed herself to think. She’d just acted on the spur of the moment. Nish had done well too. ‘Thank you,’ she murmured, looking up at him shyly. ‘That was a brilliant shot.’
‘With a lot of luck behind it. I couldn’t do it again.’
She waited for him to take over, but he didn’t say anything else, so after a pause she said, ‘We’ve got to find a safe place to camp. Rurr-shyve can’t go any further. And we need water.’
‘There’ll be a river further down but I wouldn’t camp there. They could come on us from any direction. Go that way until we come upon a stream, boy, then follow it up.’
Maelys bit her lip. Being called ‘boy’ was galling; it undermined his praise. Yet Nish had been a hero of the war and a leader of men, and he thought she was just a kid, so she made allowances.
She called Rurr-shyve on, and after about ten minutes of creeping between the trees they came upon a rivulet at the bottom of a rocky gully, running down a steep slope. She followed it up to a point where the gully was impassably choked with scrub and small trees. They mounted again and Maelys directed Rurr-shyve to hover over the trees until she found what she was looking for – a secluded glade covered in ferns and moss, by a rocky pool.
The instant they settled, Rurr-shyve’s feather-rotors flopped down and it seemed to shrink in on itself. Its tail thudded into the ferns, its inverted knee joints quivered, folded suddenly, and it thumped into the ground.
Extending its neck, it took a long slurping drink from the pool, leaving the surface streaked with strands and clots of smelly yellow mucous. It tore up a barrelful of ferns by the roots and fed them through its grinding plates, dirt and all, before laying its long neck down, head tucked back under it. The compound eyes dulled, though its jaws continued to move and a bulging sac under its neck churned and squelched.
Every so often it gave a heave, regurgitating shovelfuls of ground-up fern into its maw, and chewed over them until brown strings of saliva surged out, accompanied by indescribable stenches.
‘Get it tied down, lad, or it’ll be off while we sleep,’ said Nish after watching it for a while. ‘Or worse.’
She should have thought of that, and it was a boy’s job to carry out the menial camp chores, but again Maelys felt diminished. She scurried to do the job, wishing he could appreciate her for who she really was. The ropes in the bottom of the saddlebag had metal collars attached. She fastened one around Rurr-shyve’s neck where the scaly carapace was scored, the other at the tail, and fixed the free ends to the trunks of two stout trees so it would have freedom to browse.
Then she slumped onto the ground, well out of reach, and tried to think what to do next. Nothing came to her; she was too exhausted. She knew in her heart that it was too late to head for Hulipont, but there was nowhere else to go.
She looked up to see Nish’s eyes on her. Maelys coloured and turned away. The great deeds she’d accomplished so far had been easier than dealing with him. She felt embarrassed about the little intimacies of before. How could she have treated the great war hero, the son of the God-Emperor, so familiarly? She couldn’t even look at him.
‘There’s food in the saddlebags,’ she said hoarsely, staring at the ground. Nish wasn’t over the brainstorm yet and she should have served him, but she couldn’t manage it.
He nodded formally, wobbled to the saddlebags, holding the loose leather pants up with one hand, and took out the food bag. Nish must have been ravenous but he ate delicately and in small portions. He held the food bag out but she shook her head, too embarrassed to approach him.
After drinking from the brook, well above the pool Rurr-shyve had befouled, she washed her face and hands. Taking the rider’s fur-lined cloak from the other saddlebag, she wrapped it around herself, lay on a moss-covered patch of ground a safe distance from the flappeter, and Nish, pillowed her head on her little pack and tried to sleep.
The sheath was digging into her hip. Maelys unbuckled the belt and laid it beside her, the knife close to hand. She closed her eyes again, but now became aware of how chafed her bound breasts were. She glanced at Nish, who was looking her way, and coloured. Sooner or later she would have to reveal that she was a girl, but not now. She gritted her teeth and tried to will herself to sleep.
That didn’t work either, for her mind began to replay the scene with Rider Hinneltyne aft
er the disruption had driven him mad. She kept seeing the knife hacking into his neck and the blood bursting out. So much of it, and all due to her.
Maelys tried to think about other things, though it was a long while before she could. She could smell the creature’s foetid breath from the other side of the clearing, sense its burning hatred of her and its longing to tear chunks from her flesh with its serrated maw, or beak.
What was the contract between flappeter and rider, anyway? It must be a bond developed by Jal-Nish to make sure the beast could be controlled, though how could she fulfil a contract she didn’t understand? Once Rurr-shyve recovered from the loss of its former rider, it would probably attack her for the interloper she was.
Even after she drifted off to sleep, its presence made dark shadows at the edges of her mind, and she dreamed that Jal-Nish was exerting all his energies to seize back control of it.
EIGHT
Nish dozed briefly, then snapped awake to see the green eyes of the flappeter on him. He didn’t think his father’s creature would be able to harm him, though how could he be sure? There was something wrong about it; something he couldn’t fathom, because it wasn’t like any other creature.
Its very existence made his father a hypocrite, for flesh-forming was an alien Art the lyrinx had used in the war, and for that reason Jal-Nish had regarded them as an abomination. He had done everything he could to wipe them from the face of the world, so why was he using their Arts now?
Nish sat up. He felt wide awake, fully rested, and having good food in his belly gave him the most marvellous feeling of well-being. He glanced across at the boy, who was sleeping soundly, wrapped in the rider’s cloak. Why had he done all this, and why had Fyllis been involved at all? Nish remembered her face clearly, and her quiet, confident manner, as if it were a game and she could come to no harm.
No, not a game; a serious responsibility she’d been entrusted with because she was the only one who could do it. That was the strangest thing, and for the first time in many years Nish felt a glimmer of hope. Fyllis had revealed a crack in the all-powerful façade his father had erected.
He tried to recreate the past night in his mind. Everything was clear up to the point where she had pulled him into that empty cell and put her hands over his ears to protect him. But from what?
After that his most prominent memory was pain; pain that sheared through his head and robbed him of his senses. He vaguely remembered throwing up, then being led somewhere, but he couldn’t see or hear for ages. He recalled his feet thudding against paving stones, and her warm hand in his, then nothing until he’d come to his senses staggering up the mountain with the boy.
There was something odd about the boy. He looked about twelve but acted like an adult, and he must also have a native talent. Nish had a vague memory of breathing underwater, surely a hallucination, then some intimacy that made him squirm, and the next he knew he was trapped in the flappeter’s legs and it was trying to carry him away.
Nish recalled the rider towering over the boy, knife in hand, followed by a dull red flash and more pain, worse than the first time. He had been blind, helpless, trapped; insects had been crawling all over him, sucking his blood, trying to get into his mouth and nose.
But the boy had risen to every challenge, escaped every attack and even taken control of a flappeter. Clearly two children, no matter how talented, could not have done all that by themselves. Could the lad be a wizard in disguise? Nish didn’t think so; the boy seemed too gentle; too kind. He was just a servant, but who was the master? Jal-Nish must have a powerful enemy who was now showing his hand.
The flappeter stirred, rotated its feather-rotors half a turn and raised its head. Nish’s skin prickled. He couldn’t read anything in its eyes, but he’d heard plenty about the nature of flappeters and their feeding habits. They could live on just about anything, including rotting wood and the stinking sludge at the bottom of duck ponds, but they had a particular liking for live flesh. What motivated this one – hunger, curiosity, pain? No, Rurr-shyve was no longer in his father’s thrall, for Maelys had cut off its speck-speaker. Nish shivered as he thought through the implications. Did it yearn for freedom? If it did, not even he was safe now.
Rurr-shyve began moving back and forth, testing the ropes. Nish eyed the knots, praying that Maelys had tied them securely. The ropes must be enchanted to prevent flappeters from biting through them.
Rurr-shyve tore up a clump of ferns as if they were lettuce and began to grind them to paste, slimy saliva dripping from the gapes of its maw. Ferns were poisonous to most creatures but it seemed unaffected.
Nish noticed that his hands were filthy, despite his time in the water. His nails were long and splintered, his matted hair hung down his back and his stench was as great a pollution of the sweet air of the glade as Rurr-shyve’s noisome belches. His odour was an unpleasant reminder of prison, and of a life controlled by his father; he could change that, at least. He rose, unsteadily, for his head felt slightly disconnected from his body, and stumbled across to the boy, who was sleeping soundly, head pillowed on his clasped hands.
Taking the belt, sheath and knife, Nish went upstream until he found a pool in the rocks. He hacked his hair off until it was just the length of a thumb joint, cut his beard even shorter, trimmed his nails and cleaned them with the point of the knife. Then he took off his clothes, sank into the cold water and scrubbed himself with handfuls of sand until his prison-pale skin was red and every speck of ingrained dirt was gone.
After washing Maelys’s pants and jacket he left them hanging on a branch to dry, but put the fur-lined leather pants back on. They swam on him and he needed the belt to hold them up. He left the coat behind, since the forest here was no colder than his cell in Mazurhize. Donning his socks and boots, he turned up the slope, revelling in his freedom to do the simplest things. Freedom! It was the most precious gift of all.
Above him, a rocky spur rose out of the forest. Nish began to climb it. He needed to see what lay beyond and reassure himself that, for all his father’s power, there were parts of the world over which he held no sway.
His legs hurt from last night’s climb, but that was good too. He was free; he could feel again. He took pleasure in every sensation, even his weakness and exhaustion, for these were under his control. He could get his strength back.
The top of the pinnacle was scarily steep but Nish forced himself to attempt it. Perhaps his father could not be beaten, but he didn’t control the whole world, or Nish. If Nish couldn’t fight Jal-Nish, he could go far away to a place where his father’s sway didn’t hold, and make himself a new life as an ordinary man. It was the only hope he could allow himself.
His racing heart was skipping beats from the unaccustomed exertion. Nish flopped onto a mossy ledge ten or fifteen spans below the top. He was nearly at the treetops here, and thus far he’d been concealed by overhanging branches, but once above them he’d be visible if anyone was watching from further up the mountain, or from the sky.
He climbed on, slowly now, for he was very tired. The pinnacle was taller than it looked and his earlier euphoria had begun to fade. He was even weaker than he’d thought; it would take months to regain his former strength.
Then, edging around a sharp horn of rock, Nish felt the sun on his face, the clear, scented air in his nostrils, and his eyes stung with tears. Sunshine; fresh air; freedom – they were such simple pleasures, but what else did a man really need? There was no need to go further, so he sat down, well clear of the edge with his back to the rock, gazing across the gigantic valley.
It had to be many leagues wide, for the forested slope on the far side was blue with distance, and the valley ran upstream and down even further, untouched by human hand. With a sigh, he lay back on the ledge and closed his eyes, allowing the tension to seep out of his legs, relaxing his whole body as he’d never been able to relax in prison, trying to think of nothing at all. That wasn’t easy. He’d always been the slave to an overactive mind.
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But now, with the cool rock beneath him, the warm sun on his face and a pleasant tiredness in his limbs, the world disappeared and for a brief while he could be an ordinary man again. There was not a cloud in the pale sky; no sign of life apart from a hunting bird wheeling in the distance.
Nish was dozing off when his sluggish mind realised that it couldn’t have been a bird, for it was too long and the wrong shape. It was a flappeter, searching the forest, and his dungeon-pale skin would stand out against the dark stone.
Cursing himself for a fool, Nish eased back out of sight. He didn’t think the beast could have seen him, but where there was one there would be others. Of course his father’s reach extended to this wilderness; it probably covered the entire world and he, Nish, would never be able to get away from him.
Despair bowing his back, he went down the pinnacle as quickly as his shaky legs would allow. By the time he reached the bottom he was starving again, so he hurried towards the camp site, collecting the remaining clothes on the way.
Before he got there an irrational dread crept over him, that he’d find the boy slain and a force of soldiers waiting for him, and it grew stronger with every step. He told himself that he had nothing to fear but his own terror, and that his father’s power was no greater than people allowed it to be, but Nish didn’t believe it. Jal-Nish held all the power in the world and no one could ever beat him.
Beset by feelings of approaching doom, Nish was almost to the camp site when he heard an odd, snorting rumble. His hackles rose; he eased the knife out, holding it low in front of him the way he’d been taught during the war, noting with faint surprise how his muscles remembered what his brain had forgotten. He began to creep down the steep slope, taking advantage of every tree and bush, scanning the ground in case he kicked a stone or cracked a stick underfoot.
The sound grew louder. Nish slid in behind a tree above the camp site and peered around it, then relaxed. The flap-peter was sleeping, head tucked under its long neck again, making the beastly equivalent of a snore.
