Sumac said, “Though I trust the Laurel Gap patrol will be embarrassed. In fact, Uncle Dag, I believe I will write that report. Just to make sure of it.”
Dag’s smile flickered, but faded again. “I shouldn’t think that malice would’ve run from a patrol. In the first place, it was so new-hatched it wouldn’t have known to, and in the second, malices regard us as meals on legs. It’d be like running away from your dinner. We try to make the sharing knives a surprise to them.”
Which gave Fawn a peculiar picture of her next meal leaping up off her plate, grabbing her knife, and attacking her. She shook it from her head. She didn’t want to try to imagine what malices thought; she was afraid she might succeed. Maybe she needed a nap. She glanced up at Dag, and her belly went cold. His face had gone absolutely expressionless, as if he’d just had an idea he really, really didn’t care for. “Not likely…” he breathed.
What isn’t likely, beloved?
The fire blight was at last giving way to patches of never-burned trees. A quarter mile up the road, Fawn could see a clear line where the woods closed back in. Had sudden rain saved it? Or a change of wind direction? The sun’s rim touched the western ridgetop, whose eastern slopes were already in shadow. She squinted at movement near the road at the tree line, doubly dusky.
“I’d vote for the first good stream past the trees for camp tonight,” said Finch, peering too. “Huh. What is that? Turkey vultures have got themselves a party, looks like.”
Half a dozen dark, flapping shapes surrounded a carcass. “A goat? ” said Fawn. “A dog? ”
“Maybe a fawn? ” said Finch, then snickered at her peeved expression.
Dag stood abruptly in his stirrups, staring hard. “That’s not a goat. It’s a mule.”
“Can’t be,” scoffed Finch. “That’d make those bird wings ten, twelve feet across.”
“Those aren’t birds. Sumac? Lend me your eyes. And your groundsense.”
Sumac kneed her horse forward, peering along with Dag. Her breath hissed in. “What the… Dag, what are those ugly things? ”
“Mud… men? ” His voice sounded remarkably unsure. “Mudbat… things. No feathers. Joints are wrong for birds. Bat wings.”
“Malices can make bat-men? ” said Finch blankly. “Why didn’t you say? ”
“I’ve never seen the like,” said Dag. “Wolf-men and dire wolves, yes. So why not bats? ”
Fawn could think of a dozen good reasons why not bats, right up there with why not alligators? No, ick, eew!
“Absent gods, they’re huge,” said Arkady, who’d ridden up to look.
His voice held a very un-Arkady-like quaver.
At the mule carcass, one shape was driven back by its feasting friends. It spread long, leathery wings, and vented a sharp snarl like a mill saw jamming.
“More leftovers? ” said Fawn. “Like the ones you said got away over the river? ” She hoped fervently that these were leftovers. Because the alternative…
What in the wide green world would a malice have to run from?
Nothing.
Except-a worse malice.
“Are those hands at the tops of those wing joints?” said Sumac.
“With… claws? ”
“Blight,” said Dag. “Fawn, Finch, ride back and stop the wagons. Sumac, round up the patrollers. I’m going for a closer look.”
“Not alone, you’re not!” said Sumac sharply. “Arkady, you alert the patrollers.”
Arkady gulped, nodded, and wheeled his horse. Reluctantly, Fawn followed, turning awkwardly in her saddle to watch over her shoulder.
As Dag and Sumac cantered up to the carcass, the bat-creatures scattered from it, making more jamming-saw noises. They were awkward, crawling on the ground with their wings trailing like half-folded tent awnings. Two clawed their way up nearby trees. Others made for a pile of rocks, scuttling up one after, or over, another to gain height. Another turned and screamed, rearing up and flapping its wide leathery wings like a crowing rooster; both Dag’s and Sumac’s horses spooked, pivoting and trying to bolt. Dag couldn’t force Copperhead close enough to slash with his knife, but did persuade his mount to spin and lash out with both hind legs. The shod hooves connected; Fawn could hear the bone-crack.
The bat-creature screamed again and flapped over the ground trailing its broken wing. Copperhead bounced wildly.
The bat-creatures who’d made it to the rock pile took off one after the other in great noisy wing flaps, barely clearing the ground before they started their climb into the air. They could fly, oh no! Roughly batshaped, with flat, oddly rectangular bodies like a flying squirrel’s, heads large, with backswept, pointed ears. Fawn couldn’t see the shapes of their mouths from here. Worse, they could fly well. Gaining height, the nightmare trio sped off over the woods.
Sumac gestured, mouth moving; Dag nodded. Both came galloping back to the wagons.
“Get everybody turned around!” Dag gasped.
“Not again!” wailed Grouse.
Fawn hesitated. “Dag-it’s open country for miles behind us. If those things can drop down out of the air on us”-and it sure looked like they could-“wouldn’t we be better off amongst the trees, where they’d tangle their wings? ”
He stared at her openmouthed, eyes dilated. “Ah,” he wheezed.
“Point.”
“At least,” called Sumac, whose horrified horse still fought her, “close up under the trees till we can scout and take stock. Knives are going to be no good on those things. We want spears and bows.”
“Axes, too,” suggested Fawn. The ones with the good long hafts.
Everyone who was mounted rode up and clustered around to listen;
Sage left their team’s reins to Calla and came running up to hear as well. Shrewdly, he bore his long-handled sledgehammer, though his hands shook as he clutched it.
The wagons lurched forward once more. Fawn stuck close to Calla’s.
All the patrollers except Rase, and half the farmer boys, rode forward to make another attempt at slaying the mud-bats. They closed rapidly on the fallen one; when they parted, the shape lay still, like a collapsed tent. The remaining two seemed to have snared themselves in their tree branches. A rider might reach one with a spear, but the horses wouldn’t go near; Whit had already dismounted. Fawn could hear the ratcheting of his crossbow, and see him exchanging gestures with Sumac about the angle of his shot.
So Fawn had a clear view when a black cloud of about fifty of the batthings burst over the eastern ridge and stooped upon them.
She’d never been much for shrieking, or making squeaky girly noises, but she screamed in earnest now. Magpie reacted to the vast flapping wings much like the other mounts, plunging under Fawn and almost unseating her, carrying her away from the wagons in an all-out attempt to bolt. If only the mare had run toward the trees, Fawn would have let her carry on. Fawn sawed the reins, trying to get Magpie’s head turned around in the hopes that her body would follow.
Water streamed from Fawn’s eyes and whipped away in the wind as she bounced in her saddle. She gasped in terror of falling hard and maybe losing the baby, till she realized that at this speed she was more like to break her neck; the thought was oddly liberating. She gripped with her legs, felt herself slipping with every hard stride, then abandoned her reins to grab her pommel.
Every animal in the party was bolting or trying to. The Basswood’s wagon was slowed because the two leader mules were tangled in their traces, and Sage and Calla’s wagon was jammed behind it. Grouse had evidently fallen off, but he leaped after his rig jabbing upwards at mudbats with his spear. Vio was braced on the box with one hand around the roof hoop and the other swinging an iron skillet. The wagon was covered with swarming bat-creatures, much as they’d mobbed the dead mule.
They used their wing hands to hold on, mostly, but tore strips out of the canvas roof with their clawed feet, reaching down as if feeling around inside. Vio banged her skillet down on the clutching claws like a hammer, which made
them jerk back, and whanged other mud-bats in the face or body as she could reach. She drove off some, but more came.
Vio’s screams shattered when a bat-creature beat its wings and began to rise, clutching her toddler in its two feet. Owlet’s mouth went square with terror and pain as he was lifted into the air, his shirttail flapping wildly around his churning knees. From the corner of Fawn’s eye she saw a patroller boy, she wasn’t sure which one, unseated and pulled struggling from his horse. Three mighty wing beats, and he fought free, only to fall with a cry cut off too sharp and a sickening bone-crack noise. Arm, leg, neck? Yanked around by Magpie, Fawn couldn’t see where he fell.
A stench and a hot wind buffeted Fawn in the back, and suddenly a clawed foot anchored itself in her shoulder. Her cry of pain came out a stretched wail, “Go away! Go away! Go away!” as she beat at the creature with her hands, only to have it grab her around her other arm and flap its vast wings again and again. Its claws were like iron, its thin muscles like cable. Without the grip on her pommel, she began to rise from her saddle, and frantically wrapped one foot into a stirrup strap. Galloping Magpie jerked them along as if the mud-bat was a kite and Fawn the kite string. If the creature let go and she fell she could be dragged by her ankle, but if she let go she could be carried off like Owlet…
Copperhead, half bolting, half bucking, appeared in the right of Fawn’s vision. Dag was somehow still aboard, gasping for air, gold eyes demented. There was no sign of his steel knife, but he swiped frantically with his hook and connected at least once, tearing a strip from a leathery wing beating against his face. The mud-bat yelped and drew its foot claws from Fawn’s right shoulder, which welled with blood.
At Dag’s next swipe the mud-bat caught his hook in its foot and held hard, releasing Fawn’s left arm, too. She grabbed at her saddle as she fell, ripping several fingernails half off, but yanked her ankle from her stirrup strap and came tumbling to the ground on her feet and not her head, rolling in the damp earth and weeds. She scrambled to her knees, rearing around dizzily and trying to spot Dag again.
Magpie shied away. Copperhead, made frantic by the flapping monster fixed overhead, got his head down and gave a mighty twisting buck that would have launched his rider into the air even without the aid of a mud-bat. A second mud-bat swooped near.
“Take leg!” screeched the first as Dag wrenched, kicked, punched, and struggled. The second mud-bat got a claw into one of his boots, then brought its other foot down for an iron grip on Dag’s ankle. Somehow, the two sorted themselves out so their beating wings didn’t knock into one another, and rose higher.
They talk! They have wits! They work with each other! Oh no, no… Fawn staggered along beneath the swooping shadow. She thought she was crying, but no sound seemed to be coming out of her bone-dry throat.
Higher overhead, Dag twisted, heaved, swore. Fawn remembered the falling patroller, and screamed upward, “Dag! Don’t fight them till you’re closer to the ground!”
He stared down wildly at her, seemed to realize how high he’d been dragged, and abruptly froze. He heard, he understood, oh thanks be! With his hand, still free, he clawed at his throat. Snapped the leather thong that held Crane’s knife.
“Spark, take the knife!”
She stared up openmouthed, bewildered. The sheathed knife fell, turning in air, into the weeds, where it bounced unbroken in soft soil.
She looked up to see Dag rising higher, higher…
In the distance, the howling toddler was being carried eastward; behind him, a madly flapping mud-bat seemed also to have Tavia, although it was struggling for altitude with her greater weight. Fawn didn’t think the evil things could weigh more than forty pounds, wings and all, but the biggest ones seemed to be able to lift upwards of a hundred. Fawn weighed less. She squirmed in the dirt and sought a well-anchored sapling to grip as more mud-bats swooped overhead, but they didn’t appear to be able to take prey right off the ground without fouling their wings. Once fallen and awkward, they could be outrun even by her, she thought.
She raised her head again. The wagons and the riders had reached the shelter of the trees, a litter of dead or injured mud-bats left in their wake.
The slaughter was no consolation. Tavia’s horse was down, making dreadful noises, gut-gouged and bleeding. Some mud-bats were attracted to its helplessness like the swarm around the dead mule, but most of the survivors took to the air and followed their comrades bearing the captives, screeching garbled abuse and clear calls to Come! at the hungry lingerers.
Along the woods’ edge to the east, Fawn thought she glimpsed Sumac spurring her horse in and out of the trees in a futile effort to follow.
Fawn crawled forward and gathered up the sharing knife, gripping it with trembling, bloodied fingers.
Whit galloped back out from under the trees toward Fawn, slid from his saddle, threw her up, and climbed after. She drew breath in stuttering gasps, unable to speak, but stuffed the knife in her shirt as they dashed for the woods once more. Beneath the screen of the branches at last, she slid down, then down to her knees, shaking too hard to stand. She wanted to faint, to escape this horrific moment, but she’d never mastered that trick.
She was going to have to get up and deal with whatever came next.
“He giv’ you his knife! Why’d he drop you that knife?” Whit wheezed. “Last thing!”
Neeta, scratched, bleeding, and wild, strode up. “I saw. Madness! Dag’s got as good a chance of using it as we do-better! Absent gods, it’s the only sharing knife we have left!”
Fawn stared fearfully up through the leaves at the luminous, empty sky, and thought, No. He’s got one other.
19
People had dreams about flying, Dag had heard. He might have nightmares about it in the future, if he lived. Just now that wasn’t looking…
… down. He shuddered for breath that would not come. The world wheeled wildly beneath him, like a map grown green and alive. The mud-bats’ flapping wings were as thunderous as a tent coming loose in a windstorm. Horses looked strange from this angle, legless ovoids with questing heads. Copperhead and Magpie were running off riderless and bucking. Had Fawn fallen? Where? There. Too still? No-she lunged up, scuttled, dove under a little tree that seemed much too scant a cover.
Alive. So far, so far.
On the next whirl he glimpsed Sumac, face raised, whipping her horse in and out of the fringe of the woods. She fell behind. The mudbats lurched and swooped at a terrific pace, unimpeded by any barrier.
No, wrong. The mud-bats were laboring hard to clear the eastern ridge.
Dag abandoned thought of the knife in his boot in favor of getting his hand around the other ankle of the mud-bat that gripped his hook.
It would not be able to drop him wholly at its convenience… the mudbat shook its back foot and made an angry screeching noise, but in this position was almost as helpless to fight as Dag. The feeling that his skull was exploding in his panic eased slightly with this doubtless-false sense of control.
Fawn had seen the problem at once, while his head had still been swinging around. If he fought free at this height-the blurring fall, the hot crunch of impact-even Arkady wouldn’t be able to put the pieces together again. Blight, I only look like I know what I’m doing because so much of it is the same doings of the past forty years. The truly new uncovered his weaknesses. Such as now, when he wanted down with a desperate desire, but not that fast…
He stiffened his neck and tried to look in some other direction. Most of the surviving mud-bats had winged ahead, but the burdened ones lagged. The screaming toddler-oh, I hear you and agree, little brother- was not far in front of him, if higher up. At least Owlet’s mud-bat seemed to have its back claws locked around the child’s thin arms, not cruelly piercing them the way the other had caught Fawn’s shoulder.
Tavia was ahead and lower, struggling. She, too, had hit on the notion of wrapping her hands around her captor’s back ankles; she twisted and kicked air, dragging her mud-bat closer
to the ridge, which seemed to rise below them. The gray rocks looked bony and lethal, the trees like pit-trap stakes. Could Dag force a similar descent without being dropped or falling? Once they wobbled across the high line, the ground would fall away again. Best chance.
If he could somehow get rid of the mud-bat holding up his right boot, the other would not be able to support his weight. He kicked, without effect but to elicit some nasty hissing and a tighter grip that hoisted his right leg higher at a more awkward angle.
How close was the malice? The mud-bats strung out ahead seemed to be aiming to clear the next ridge as well, a good four miles off. At least that far. Dag dared to ease open his groundsense, reaching upward into the mud-bat bodies as he would examine a distressed patient. Their thin-walled chests heaved, their big hearts pounded with their exertion.
Their grounds were a horror, but he ignored that. He focused on the second mud-bat, closer up and deeper in, deeper in… The ridge was coming up fast. There was no time for-there was no time.
He organized a projection, reached in, and ground-ripped a pinhole in the great artery exiting the mud-bat’s heart. Three straining flaps, three thumping heartbeats, and the vessel split asunder. The mud-bat’s mouth opened on a pained roar, its eyes rolled back, and it fell away, its clutching claws tearing loose from Dag’s boot. It tumbled into the trees. Dag’s remaining mud-bat lurched in surprise, redoubling its efforts.
Owlet’s mud-bat turned and swooped nearer, calling in confusion, “Come, come!”
It’s this or the poor tad is malice food. Dag had once been partly groundripped by a malice; as painful deaths went, there wasn’t much to choose between that and plummeting onto rocks. Dag reached again, at his fullest stretch. This time he went for the big vein entering the heart.
A touch slower to take effect, maybe…? He felt the pop, withdrew at once. Owlet’s mud-bat shrieked, choked, flapped more slowly… began spiraling down… crashed into whipping branches. Owlet’s screams stopped too suddenly.
Dag’s mud-bat was falling, too. It released its grip on his hook, tried to shake him off. But the release gave Dag back a weapon. He clawed upwards, catching and ripping skin from the creature’s short rear legs, tearing tatters in the lower edges of the leathery wings. Blood spun out like a shower of raindrops, bright red.
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