Kings of the Wyld

by Nicholas Eames

  “My wing feels better,” Larkspur mentioned. “Not great, but better. Can someone remind me why I was flying in a thunderstorm again?”

  “We should get moving,” said Gabriel, ignoring her question. “We’ve wasted enough time already. I still think we should have walked through the night. We’d be back in the sky by now.”

  Jeremy and Taino returned from their stroll. Besides the skull painted on his face, the cannibal’s whole body was riddled with scars and covered with a chalky green powder that served both as camouflage and to make his flesh taste terrible if he fell in battle with the enemy. He used his spear like a walking stick and carried a bundle of mudweed stalks in a sling on his back.

  Taino gave them each a gangly hug farewell. “Walk gud, y’ear?”

  “We hear,” said Matrick.

  Jeremy, who was staring at Larkspur with what Clay hoped was lustful (as opposed to literal) hunger, nearly jumped out of his skin when Moog began yelling in his face. “US GOING,” the wizard told him, accompanying the words with elaborate hand-motions. “BACK TO SHIP. NICE MEETING YOU. GOOD LUCK CURING CHIEF.”

  The Feral responded in his own incomprehensible language. “KI TOBARA. IK OOKIBAN DONO GARUK.”

  “He said he will come with us part of the way,” Moog translated—unnecessarily, since Jeremy had pointed at them and used his fingers to indicate walking.

  “IKKI DOOKA PUBARU. KOO PASSA PIKAPA.”

  “Also, we’re invited to the Boneface village for lunch.”

  “Lunch with cannibals?” scoffed Matrick. “Over my dead body.”

  Clay clapped him on the shoulder as they headed out. “I think that’s the general idea,” he said.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Hope in Flames

  They parted ways with Jeremy an hour later. If the cannibal was worried about being in the forest by himself, he showed no sign of it whatsoever and waved merrily as he set off southward.

  The five members of Saga, with Larkspur in tow, backtracked the way Gabriel and Moog had come yesterday, so that Clay was treated to a whole new host of the Heartwyld’s numberless horrors. The first of these was a maze of winding gullies spanned by webs inhabited by spiders the size of dogs.

  They ran into an ettercap at a fork in the path. The creature, which looked something like a scrawny old man with bulbous black eyes, snapping mandibles, a distended belly, and a forest of long, quivering spines on his bent back, had chased something into a hollowed log and was desperately trying to ferret it out one side or the other.

  It froze in a crouch at their approach, and appeared ready to attack or flee should the opportunity for either arise.

  “Do you understand me?” Gabriel asked it.

  The ettercap nodded, regarding him warily with those glossy black eyes. Its fingers and toes were unnaturally long, Clay noted, and very sharply pointed.

  “Which of these paths will take us west?”

  The creature tilted its head, then slowly raised one of its wiry arms and pointed to the way behind it.

  “Thanks,” said Gabriel, and took off at a stride in the opposite direction.

  Ettercaps had a reputation for lying, and a habit of hissing right before they attacked, which this one did as it lunged at Gabriel, grasping with those long, sharp, spindly fingers.

  Clay had been waiting for it; the fingers scrabbled harmlessly against Blackheart’s face, and Ganelon, who had also been expecting treachery, chopped the wretched thing in half with his axe.

  Once the ettercap stopped thrashing, its quarry scurried out of the log. It was white-furred and red-eyed, and it looked to Clay like a weasel with eight legs and heads on either end of its body. He’d seen one just like it in a cage in Moog’s tower, Clay remembered. Both its heads squealed angrily at them before the thing ran off at a lope.

  They pressed on, exiting the ravine-maze to find themselves in a forest of tall, leafless trees. A mist rolled in, curling around their ankles as though it were a living thing. Clay could have sworn he felt it snag his foot, and found himself taking slow, deliberate steps, like a man treading through murky water. After a while the mist seemed to grow restless and prowled off.

  At last the forest began to look familiar. They’d seen that fungus-decked tree before, they’d stepped over that acidic streamlet going the other way.

  The skyship’s just ahead, Clay thought, relieved. We’re almost there.

  A short while later they spotted a green-skinned, white-faced tribesman prowling through the forest alongside them. When they caught sight of another, this one carrying a crude shortbow, Matrick started to get nervous.

  “Do you think he sent them after us?” he asked.

  Moog frowned. “Who, Jeremy? Not at all. The Ferals are a very territorial people, you know. They’re probably just tracking us to make sure we stay well clear of the village.” He gestured to a painted warrior slipping between the trees nearby. “Consider this an escort. An honour guard, if you will.” Hardly a breath had passed when a stone-tipped arrow shattered the crystal orb on the top of his staff. The wizard’s face went pale. “Fuck me, they’re hunting us!”

  “Run!” yelled Gabriel, as if it hadn’t occurred to each of them already. He had Vellichor in hand—the vibrant majesty of an ancient forest visible in the broad face of the blade. Ganelon slipped Syrinx from his back with a sinister grin, as if he’d been hoping the cannibals would attack and was gratified they’d given him provocation to start killing them. Clay could hear the axe muttering quietly to itself, or to Ganelon, or perhaps to those whose blood it was about to drink.

  The southerner motioned for Clay to follow the others with a nod of his head. “Move it, Slowhand. I’ve got the rear.”

  The savages came at them from everywhere at once, yipping like jackals and hurling a volley of shoddy spears as they stormed in. Gabriel blocked one missile with the flat of his blade and cut another in half before it impaled Matrick. A stone tip struck Clay square in the chest and splintered against the red links of the Warskin.

  I like this armour, he thought, then shrugged his shield free as Ferals began dropping from the trees.

  The first to do so landed near Matrick and got a dagger through the eye. The next fell on top of Moog. The wizard went down with a yelp, and his assailant lost hold of his spear. As he reached for it Larkspur stomped on the shaft, snapping it in half with her heavy black boot. She hit the cannibal with the serrated flare on the back side of one gauntlet, and with the other hand took up the pointed end of the broken spear and rammed it through the throat of another rushing Feral.

  One hurled himself at Clay from the right and got batted aside by Blackheart. His head struck a tree and made a sound like a ceramic pot dropped on the floor. A second swung at Clay with a crude hammer. He met the weapon with his own and broke it apart, and another swing did the same to the poor man’s skull.

  Gabriel was too far ahead to see, and Ganelon was lagging, beset from all sides by shrieking cannibals. Ferals had a funny (if ill-advised) habit of attacking the strong before the weak, likely an attempt to exhibit their valour on the battlefield. In this case it was costing them dearly, as the southerner was killing them by the score. The path behind him was littered with limbless dead.

  Clay lingered until the warrior caught up, and together they waded through the Feral swarm. Ganelon’s axe, Syrinx, was a red mess, hacking off arms and slicing fatal gashes in guts, groins, necks—pretty much anywhere that bled a man out in a matter of seconds. Blackheart bore the bite of spear and arrow with the stoic fortitude of a seaward cliff. Occasionally Clay seized the opportunity to crack a skull or break a limb with his frigid hammer.

  All at once the cannibals ceased their attack. They didn’t flee, and they kept their spears trained on Clay and Ganelon, but they no longer flung themselves at the warrior with reckless abandon. One of them began to chant, “DOOK, DOOK, DOOK” and the rest took it up, stamping their feet and weaving like flute-charmed serpents. “DOOK, DOOK, DOOK! DOOK, DOOK, DO
OK!”

  The southerner muttered over his shoulder at Clay. “Are they saying duke?”

  Clay sure as hell hoped not. He searched the forest around them, half-expecting to see Lastleaf in his ravaged red longcoat striding through the trees like some smug, sylvan prince. Thankfully, what came crashing through the woods was not a druin at all—only the biggest, most fearsome-looking Feral Clay had ever seen.

  Dook, I presume.

  The new arrival wasn’t as broad shouldered as Clay, or as powerfully built as Ganelon, but what he gave up in bulk he made up for in height and reach. Each of his hands was the size of a small shield, and his loincloth, no doubt designed to fit a more modestly sized man, left little to the imagination. His bald head bobbed on a long neck and seemed altogether too small for his gargantuan body, which was curiously void of the green paint worn by others of his kind.

  A sign of prowess, Clay guessed, since the green was a precaution against being eaten, and Dook didn’t strike him as a man who planned on being eaten today.

  Weapon-wise, Dook was a simple man: He carried a very large bone, obviously taken from a very large monster, which the huge savage had probably killed with relative ease.

  “DOOK, DOOK, DOOK, DOOK!”

  The massive Feral paused to bask in the adoration of his peers, roaring and pummeling the earth with his ivory club.

  Ganelon hefted his axe. “You mind if I take this one?”

  Be my guest, Clay almost told him, except he’d been thinking since yesterday about what the warrior had said regarding the Quarry, and the resentment he’d fostered for everyone but Clay.

  What kind of monster must I be, Ganelon had asked himself, that even Clay Cooper gave up on me?

  What kind of monster …

  “It wasn’t you.”

  The warrior cocked an eyebrow at him. “Huh?”

  “When they came for you. When they turned you to stone. We should have been there, but we were selfish. I was selfish. I thought you deserved it,” he admitted, and saw Ganelon’s face spasm in what might have been hurt and must have been anger. Clay spoke quickly, afraid the warrior would cut him off. “But I was wrong. I was scared. Any one of us could have done what you did.”

  Ganelon sighed. “Slowhand …”

  “Never again,” Clay said. “Where you stand, I stand.” He wanted to say more, to say how sorry he was for every solitary second his friend had spent down there in the dark, but Dook, as it turned out, wasn’t one for sentimental moments, and he chose this one to raise his club and charge.

  Clay and Ganelon leapt in opposite directions as the bone came down like a felled tree between them. In keeping with cannibal tradition, Dook went after Ganelon first, using his absurd reach to snag the warrior’s ankle and then hurling him into a nearby trunk. Ganelon crashed into a heap at the bottom, dazed, and the Feral prepared another epic swing, tipping his grisly club behind his head so as to bring all his strength to bear.

  Before he could, however, Clay rushed in from behind and brought Wraith chopping sideways, cracking against the club and throwing Dook off balance. The cannibal turned his flailing momentum into a spinning swing, and Clay barely had time to register that he—and not Ganelon—was its target before the breath blew out of his chest and Dook began shrinking rapidly.

  Nope, he realized. I’m flying backward.

  He crashed into a cluster of cheering Ferals, and they all went down in a tangle of thrashing limbs.

  “DOOOOOOOK!” screamed the crowd of cannibals.

  That blow should have snapped him like a reed, Clay knew, and he once again offered silent praise for the durability of Jack the Reaver’s impenetrable armour. He tried getting to his feet, but his legs had other ideas. A glance told him that Ganelon was on his feet, pressing the attack, sweeping left and right with Syrinx while his adversary leapt back and sought an opening.

  The Ferals he’d crashed into were recovering as well, and they had no intention of letting him reenter the fray. One of them drove a spear into his stomach, and Clay returned the favour by smashing Wraith up into his groin.

  “Not even sorry,” he muttered, rolling sideways as another Feral aimed an arrow point-blank at his face. The shot missed and struck the ground just inches away—the arrow’s shaft broke and a shard of spinning wood opened a gash beneath his left eye. The man cast his bow aside and dived toward Clay, who managed to put a fair bit of strength into a backhanded swing with Wraith that did terrible things to the bones in the cannibal’s neck.

  The last of the three he’d landed on grabbed at Clay’s shield arm, and as they both finally rose, the straps binding Blackheart to his wrist tugged loose and the unthinkable happened.

  The Feral took his shield.

  Forgetting the fact that Ganelon and Dook were fighting nearby on his left, and doing his best to ignore how suddenly light his right arm felt, Clay locked eyes with the man holding Blackheart and said, as calmly as he could, “Give it back.”

  The Feral looked down at his prize and then back to Clay. He wavered. Clay could see him wavering.

  “Now.” The word seethed through Clay’s teeth, sizzled in the air between them.

  Slowly, slowly, the man lifted the shield and offered it to Clay, whose trembling hands reached for that slab of mottled wood like a mother for her newborn child. The moment Clay took hold of it, the Feral turned and bolted into the forest.

  “DOOOOOOOOOK!”

  Clay wheeled, wriggling his arm back into Blackheart’s straps and cinching them tight as he assessed how Ganelon was doing.

  The Feral champion had landed another blow, it seemed, and Ganelon was slumped against the same tree as before, which was now pitched to a dangerous angle. Dook was tiring, at least, and advanced on the warrior much slower than before.

  Clay took three running steps before his legs turned back to jelly and he staggered to a knee. Desperate to at least prove a distraction, he lobbed his hammer overhand. It sailed through the air and, miraculously, struck the lanky cannibal in the back of the skull. Unfortunately, Dook’s round little skull was exactly as hard as it looked, and any elation Clay felt at having landed his throw evaporated as Dook turned, took him in with those beady, close-set eyes, and laughed.

  Clay saw Ganelon rise. And Dook, though not especially bright, saw Clay see Ganelon rise, and so turned in time to see Ganelon swing his lethal, legendary axe—not at Dook, since he was too far away for that, but at the tree against which he’d been lying.

  Syrinx sheared right through the half-shattered trunk, and the tree came down like a ten-ton drunk, crushing Dook (and several other tribesman standing farther behind him) to pulp beneath it.

  “ … Dook, Dook …” a single Feral’s voice trailed into stunned silence, in which Clay picked out a low hum growing steadily louder, until it became a roar that rattled the trees and shook dead leaves from dying branches.

  The Dark Star cruised overhead, so low Clay could feel the mist of its tidal engines filtering through the canopy above. The tribesmen, fearful of the lumbering dreadnought, scattered like mice beneath a falcon’s shadow.

  The ground began to shudder, rocked by a succession of rumbling quakes, one after another. Clay and Ganelon shared an uneasy glance, and once Clay had retrieved his hammer the two of them shambled along in the direction the others had fled.

  “That was awesome, by the way,” Clay rasped as they went.

  Something like mirth tugged at the corner of Ganelon’s lips. “I know.”

  They emerged behind Gabriel and the others into the wide, rock-strewn ravine in which they’d landed their skyship the day before. The ground beneath their feet was scorched black, littered by small fires and shards of broken wood. Clay was wondering how that had happened when he saw half a dozen pitch-smeared barrels come spilling over the Dark Star’s rail.

  Oh, he thought. Oh, no.

  He watched with a rapidly sinking heart as they tumbled down onto The Carnal Court, bursting in a spray of liquid fire that ate the sa
ils like parchment and burned the hull to slag in a matter of minutes.

  Against the glare of alchemical flame Clay saw Gabriel stagger, using Vellichor like a crutch to keep despair from driving him to his knees. Matrick crouched to one side, stoop shouldered, while Moog removed his hat and bowed the bald crown of his head. Clay and Ganelon staggered to where Larkspur stood, neck craned, watching as the Dark Star vanished over the forest to the west.

  Clay stole a glimpse at her face, fearing to see the spark of recognition in her eyes. But there was only confusion, and a trace of sorrow in her voice when she spoke at last. “I assume that was my ship?” she asked, nodding toward the burning wreck of The Carnal Court.

  Clay sighed. Don’t think about it, he urged himself. Don’t think about the fact that your fastest way to Castia and back again is gone, burned, destroyed. Don’t think about how much longer it will be before you see your wife, or hear your daughter’s laughter, because then you’ll start crying and nobody wants to see that.

  “It was,” he said.

  The daeva’s dark eyes flitted back to the sky. “Who are they?”

  Besides being a bunch of fucking assholes? “They’re bounty hunters,” he said, deciding to risk some part of the truth.

  Larkspur’s arched brows furrowed. “Why are they after you? Are you criminals?”

  That depends on who you ask. “They’re after Matrick,” Clay told her. “His wife is the queen of Agria. He left her, so now she wants him dead.”

  “Dead? Why?”

  “Because she and Matrick had five kids and none of them are his. I think she’s afraid he’ll put the only legitimate heir of Agria into the belly of whichever woman takes pity on him first.”

  She snorted her amusement, and Gabriel wheeled at the sound.

  “Is something funny?” he asked. There was raw fury in his face, and it occurred to Clay that Gabe very probably blamed Larkspur for the destruction of The Carnal Court. And of course Larkspur was to blame, but the woman who’d emerged in the wake of her fall seemed a different person altogether.