Kings of the Wyld

by Nicholas Eames

  Dane giggled at that, but then raised a finger to his lips. “Gregor’s asleep,” he said. “I was singing him a lullaby, like our mother did when we were little. I don’t remember her, but Gregor says she was very pretty.”

  Clay had never seen a pretty ettin. He honestly doubted there were any. Even so, he decided to believe it anyway.

  Gregor had been born a monster in a monstrous world, and had managed to find beauty in it nonetheless. He’d squeezed sweet juice from a rotten orange. He’d painted an old house pink. And what was more: He had given all this to his brother, as a gift.

  “He’s dreaming,” Dane whispered.

  Clay spared a glance for Gregor’s gaping throat. They share dreams, he remembered. “You can see it?”

  Dane nodded. “It’s a pretty dream. A peaceful dream. I can see it in my head, like I’m there beside him.”

  You would have to be, thought Clay. Unless ettins weren’t ettins in their dreams. Dane closed his rheumy eyes, and was silent for so long Clay thought he might have succumbed to his wounds, but then he smiled, teeth like broken columns gleaming in the twilight. “It’s so beautiful, Clay. I wish you could see.”

  Clay was cold. He was tired and hungry and hurt. He’d been betrayed—they all had—by Larkspur, and Matrick was very probably doomed. She would take him east, and Gabriel would carry on to Castia; he was too close to turn back now. Ganelon would follow him. Moog would wring his hands and tug his beard, but he would go on as well, because what else could he do? The path behind would be swarming with rasks.

  The band was broken. What little hope they’d had was lost. Rose, by her own admission, was damned, and the dark days to come would claim them each, one by one. Except, perhaps, for me, thought Clay. He alone was trapped in limbo, stranded between life and death, standing at heaven’s door without a hand to knock.

  He knelt, settling himself on his haunches, and crossed his arms against the cold. “Will you tell me,” Clay asked, “about the dream?”

  When Clay awoke it was morning. He’d fallen asleep on his knees, chin nestled against the cold chain links of his armour. A light snow was coming down, settling soft as benediction upon his shoulders. The ettin was dead.

  Dane, he saw through bleary eyes, had died as he’d lived: with a great big ugly smile on his face.

  It took an effort to rise. His back groaned, his ribs whimpered, his knees howled in protest, but he managed to stand, and stay standing, as he looked left and right down the Defile. No giants. Nothing but stillness and snow falling. For a moment Clay wished he’d insisted they come this way instead of taking the Cold Road. But no, he had long since learned that harbouring regrets was akin to stashing embers in your pockets: it was pointless and bound to hurt. Probably Ginny had told him that.

  His gaze snagged on something to the east: a pall of smoke against the blue-white sky. A signal, he knew immediately.

  My men will find me, Larkspur had promised him on the bridge. I’ll make sure of that.

  Clay chewed his lip, looking east. How long before the Dark Star passed near enough to see the smoke? A day or so if I’m lucky, Clay figured. A few hours if I’m not.

  Hey, Cooper, another part of his mind chimed in, you just lost your hand, fell down a mountain, and watched a friend die in the cold. How lucky are you feeling right now?

  “Fair point,” he muttered, to no one at all.

  Whatever happened in Castia, Clay’s part in it was finished. The daeva had seen to that. He would never reach the city in time to help Gabriel. There was, however, a chance he could rescue Matrick before Larkspur’s thralls arrived, assuming he could do anything at all with cracked ribs and a missing hand against the deadly hunter and her fabulous new scythe.

  He started running anyway.

  Chapter Forty-six

  Deliverance

  Clay’s determined run had long since become a jog, which in turn degraded into a forward-leaning shamble barely faster (but somehow more exhausting) than a walk. When the rumbling stride of giants shook the ground Clay was grateful for the opportunity to collapse behind a boulder and catch his breath as they passed by.

  The drum-deep voice of one drifted down to him from above. “I don’t get it. So if I literally froze my balls off—”

  “Then it would mean that your balls had actually frozen and fallen off,” boomed a second voice. “What you really mean to say is that you figuratively froze your balls off.”

  “So I’ve been using it wrong all this time?” asked the first.

  “Literally!” his companion groaned, and both giants fell to laughter.

  Clay waited until their footsteps faded before moving on. Sometime after noon he emerged from the wide mouth of the Defile and began climbing the southern flank of Deliverance yet again. Sweat chilled on his skin, his ribs complained with every sucking breath, but still he compelled himself on, step by plodding step, desperate to reach the column of smoke before Larkspur’s skyship arrived.

  The Dark Star beat him there, but barely. Clay was near enough to see it descend. Lightning cracked from sail to sail, the engines slowing until only a single gyre whirled within each—enough to keep the dreadnought hovering just above the rocky ground. A ladder was thrown over the side and a handful of monks came clambering down. Their crimson robes whipped around them in the wind.

  Clay was laid out behind a nearby ridge, propped on his good elbow. He watched as Larkspur started down the slope, leaving her captive trussed and apparently unconscious beside the remains of her fire. If Clay could free Matrick, then maybe they could escape into the Defile, where the skyship couldn’t follow and Larkspur’s flight would make her an obvious target for giants.

  A bitter chuckle escaped him. It’s a terrible plan, Cooper, but it’s all you’ve got. Now get up …

  He made to push himself up, but his arm gave way beneath him. Clay’s jaw cracked against stone and his ribs muttered their displeasure. Breath fumed from his nose as he tried once again to rise. He failed. His legs were heavy as stone, and Clay could feel his heart shudder in panic at the thought of any more effort on its part. Don’t make me, it begged. You can’t make me!

  “Fuck you I can’t,” Clay hissed. He dragged a knee beneath him, used it to push himself up. He swayed there a moment before staggering to his feet. A step took him onto the ridge behind which he’d been hiding, another took him over, and then momentum carried him down the pebbled slope toward Matrick. He glanced right and saw the monks abasing themselves at Larkspur’s feet, their faces pressed to the ground. The setting sun threw his shadow almost to the daeva’s back.

  Clay stumbled to his knees between Matrick and the daeva’s signal fire, hoping the veil of smoke might obscure their escape. The king looked up, bleary-eyed. He’d lost some weight over the past few weeks, and it showed now more than ever. He looked drawn, grey-whiskered jowls hanging loose on gaunt cheeks. “Clay?”

  “The one and only.”

  “She said you were dead. She said you fell.”

  “I fell,” Clay confirmed. “Not dead, though. Not yet.” He tried on a grin that didn’t quite fit.

  Matrick scowled. “Where’s Gabriel? Is he with you? Where are the others?”

  “They’re gone,” Clay told him, and when Matrick’s face paled he quickly clarified: “They went on ahead, I mean. It’s just us now.”

  Matrick moaned. “You shouldn’t have come. She wants me alive, but she’ll kill you for sure.”

  “Thanks for the heads-up,” Clay murmured.

  “Gods, your hand!” Matrick pointed toward the stump as Clay went hunting for bindings beneath the dingy fox-fur cloak.

  “What about it?”

  “Where is it?”

  “I lost it.”

  “You lost your hand? What do you mean you lost it? How—”

  “Matty, I can’t … Are you even tied up?”

  “What? No.”

  Clay raked hair from his eyes, exasperated. “Where are your knives?”

&n
bsp; Matrick patted the sheaths on his backside. “Right here, why?”

  “Why?!” Clay forced the word though his teeth to keep from shouting. “Why are you still here? Why not run? Or fight?”

  “What’s the point?” Matrick shrugged helplessly. “We’re fucked, Clay. Literally fucked.”

  “Figuratively.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Never mind.”

  “We can’t outrun her,” Matrick sighed. He looked as tired as Clay felt, and near to tears. “We can’t outfight her. We obviously can’t outsmart her. I mean, all that Sabbatha stuff? She was faking the whole time! Best to just let her take me and have done with it.”

  Clay couldn’t believe his ears. He’d been pushing himself all day. He had reached the very limit of his endurance and then pressed on for several hours more. He’d risked his life to rescue Matrick, and now Matrick didn’t want to be rescued? It was too much. It really was. He closed his eyes, swallowed hard to keep the rage from rising in his throat, and said as calmly as he could, “Get up.”

  “Clay!”

  “Get up!” he repeated, realizing too late that Matrick had been trying to warn him. Clay spun in time to see a monk burst through the curtain of smoke, wisps curling away from an outstretched foot. The kick broke his nose all over again and split the raw wound on his face, spilling fresh blood in an arc as his head snapped around. Clay crashed in a heap, pain blaring in his skull like a bad song played too loudly with the wrong instruments. Someone grabbed his legs, dragged him over grating stone. His fingers scrabbled without purchase and his eyes swam, searching for focus.

  He glimpsed clouds dark as bruises against the orange sky, and the swirl of red robes—like blood in water—as the monks swarmed him.

  Clay could feel fists and feet pummeling him. The Warskin soaked up the brunt of it, but even still his ribs wept like a grieving mother. He was kicked in the shin, punched in the neck, and was trying to decide which was more painful (the neck—definitely the neck) when Matrick cried out.

  “Sabbatha! Tell them to stop! It’s me you want! He was only trying to help. Let him go! Let him go and I’ll come along nice and easy.”

  Silence from the daeva, and several more blows from her thralls. Clay curled in on himself, cradling his severed hand, good arm thrown up to try to protect his head.

  “Stop it!”

  A kick rolled him over and Clay saw Matrick leap to his feet.

  “Stop, now!” he barked, but might have been a chirping squirrel for the attention they paid him. Between one kick and the next Matrick’s expression went from helplessness to frustration, from frustration to livid anger. He reached beneath his cloak …

  Please, please the knives.

  … and withdrew a flask. He tore off the cap and threw it away, then tipped the flask to his lips. His throat pulsed as Matrick gulped down its contents, then he tossed it as well and shrugged the fox-skin cloak from his shoulders. He wiped his mouth with the back of one hand.

  “There goes nice and easy,” he growled, and finally, finally, out came the knives.

  Gabriel killed with flash and flourish, Ganelon with the instinct of a natural-born predator. When it came to fighting, Clay tried only to keep himself and his friends alive. And Moog? Well, the wizard was full of surprises, most of them more distracting than deadly.

  Matrick, on the other hand, was a cutthroat murderer. By the time Gabe finished toying with a foe or Ganelon wrenched his bloody axe from an enemy corpse, Matrick could punch holes in half a dozen men. He fought with a kind of meticulous fury, parsing out violence in short, frenetic bursts. Clay had once seen him go up against six men and come out on top. Of course he’d been much younger then, and a great deal faster, and not nearly as fat.

  He didn’t kill any of the monks when he leapt to Clay’s rescue, but he slashed all seven of them at least once. They scattered like wolves driven off by a burning brand, but like wolves they came circling back, hungry for blood.

  Matrick picked one from the pack and rushed him, ducking a chop aimed at his head and driving both knives into the man’s chest. He yanked the blades free, whirling as his assailants closed, and used one of his favourite tricks to help even the odds: he flicked a knife at the nearest man’s face. He didn’t throw it—it wasn’t an attack—but the blood on the blade spattered into the monk’s eyes, momentarily blinding him.

  A moment was all it took. Matrick opened the man’s throat and moved on, slicing three fingers from the next monk to reach for him and ramming the other knife up under his chin, cutting short a scream.

  Four, Clay counted, watching from the ground. One against four.

  A kick sent Matrick rolling sideways, and he kept rolling, evading a stomp from one monk and taking the legs out from another. He came up slashing, fending off a flurry of blows with sharp-edged blades. He glanced over the shoulder of one attacker and grinned.

  The man looked. Of course he looked, because nobody just grinned over your shoulder at nothing in the middle of a fight.

  Except sometimes they did.

  One against three, thought Clay as the monk hit the ground.

  Matrick was dancing, bouncing on the balls of his feet, weaving like a snake charmed from the basket. He was smiling in earnest now, obviously enjoying himself, and when the next monk drew close Matrick only snapped his teeth and the fellow jumped back in fear.

  “Ha.” Matrick straightened and gave his knives a spinning flourish, and dropped them both.

  Yep. Both.

  Clay didn’t see what happened next, since a woman’s harsh laugh demanded his attention. Larkspur was standing over him, Umbra slung across her shoulders. Something about her gaze—sidelong, appraising—was distinctly avian.

  “You’re a hard man to kill, Clay Cooper.”

  Despite the nagging pain in his legs, back, feet, neck, head, and arms, and notwithstanding the sense of overwhelming hopelessness that bloomed like a black flower in his gut, Clay found it surprisingly effortless to fashion a dispirited smile of his own. “But I’m easy to hurt,” he said.

  Her face slackened. Her eyes drifted to the bloodied stump of his left arm. She opened her mouth, but clamped it quickly shut, as though afraid an apology might escape unbidden. He could see the muscles in her jaw working, and could imagine her knuckles whitening beneath those sharpened steel talons. She looked, for half a heartbeat, like the woman with whom they had endured the trials of these past weeks, and Clay wondered which of the two—Sabbatha, inquisitive and empathetic, or Larkspur, the cruel and callous manhunter—was the greater affectation.

  Which are you, Ginny whispered in his head, the monster or the man?

  Looking up at the daeva, Clay could see her struggling with the same question, the same self-defining choice. He could have said something, he knew. He might have urged her to spare him, and in doing so, to preserve whatever vestige remained of the girl she’d once been. But he knew as well that a wrong word could simply goad her into deciding too quickly, or else concluding, rashly and wrongly, that she had no choice at all.

  One hand scraped down the length of her weapon’s haft, a noise like a raven’s claw scratching at a tombstone. The light went out of her eyes, and Clay suddenly wished he’d said something, anything, to forestall this moment.

  “I—” was as far as she got before the bolt slammed into her chest, launching her backward. She crashed in a heap several yards away, unmoving. Clay gaped at where Larkspur had been standing a moment before; there were only feathers now, spinning on the wind as another skyship dropped from the sky.

  The glare of gold sunlight forced Clay to shield his eyes. Squinting, he scanned behind him and saw Matrick wrestling with the last remaining monk. Their struggle lapsed as the shadow of the arriving ship enveloped them, but Matrick quickly seized the advantage. He wrested one of his knives from the other man’s grip and knocked him out with its pommel.

  “You boys need a ride?” someone shouted. The voice was gruff, familiar. And so, w
hen Clay could finally see well enough to make it out, was the face to whom it belonged.

  Barret was perched at the Old Glory’s rail. He was holding a crossbow, the source of the bolt that had nailed Larkspur seconds earlier.

  “That depends,” Clay called out. “You heading west?”

  Vanguard’s frontman looked despairingly at Ashe and Tiamax, both of whom loomed behind him. The arachnian waved four arms at once, and Clay raised his remaining hand in salute.

  “I’m afraid so,” Barret said.

  Chapter Forty-seven

  New Hands, Old Friends

  Clay was leaning out over the Glory’s rail, watching the skyship’s shadow ripple over snow and stone. The wind stung tears from his eyes, tussled his hair, and tugged fitfully at the fringe of his bearskin cloak. It was fiercely cold, and it made the wound on his face itch like the Summer Lord’s flea-ridden beard, but good gods it felt great.

  He was alive. Matrick was alive. They’d been improbably rescued by old and faithful friends and were now skyborne, speeding toward a reunion with their bandmates, who no doubt assumed they were dead.

  Oh, and he had a new hand.

  “I can fix that for you,” Tiamax had told him shortly after takeoff. They weren’t going far, since flying over mountains at night was about as safe as sharing a bathtub with an alligator, but they were in a hurry, and even a dying sun shed light by which to see.

  Clay had been fussing with his makeshift tourniquet, which had soaked through with blood and constricted as it dried. “You have bandages?” he asked.

  “Of course. But I meant your hand. You want a new one?”

  Clay frowned, trying to decide if the arachnian meant that as a joke, but it was difficult to glean anything like mirth in those insectile eyes. “You can make me a fake hand?”

  Chittering laughter. “I can grow you a perfectly new one.”

  Clay sat waiting for the punch-line, but Tiamax only watched him expectantly, so he decided to take the bait. “How?”