Taniwha's Tear

by David Hair

  But Riki had also drilled, and he had drilled solely in hand-to-hand combat against similarly armed men, not spent ninety per cent of his time shooting and the rest of the time stabbing a punch-bag with a blunted bayonet. He leapt the thrust as he charged, stamping downward with his left foot and pushing the gun into the turf, slashing left to right, catching the man on the temple with the taiaha blade, clubbing the man, stunning him. His right foot was already lifting, and he planted it into the man’s chest, shoving him over the cliff into the bowl.

  There was another man three steps further down, yet to fire. He turned as Riki’s man toppled, frantically trying to aim. There was no time to pause, but Riki realised instantly he was going to be too late. The soldier’s gun was swivelling too fast, and there was nowhere to go…but there was…

  He leapt sideways, and followed the soldier he had stunned off the cliff, as the second soldier fired. The muzzle of the musket flared, and a ball blasted past his head, the muzzle-flash almost searing the back of his neck as he fell. Then he was flailing to stay upright as the ground rose to meet him.

  When Damien saw Riki pelt towards the stairs, his legs took him after his friend without requesting permission from his brain. He roared incoherently and sprinted, saw Riki smash a full-grown man aside like a toy, then leap aside to avoid being shot by a second soldier lower down. The ball must have missed Riki by inches, then Riki was gone, falling down into the fray below. But the second soldier was still there, aligning his bayonet at Damien. He shouted and thrust, forcing the boy to check and parry desperately, years of fencing taking over as he deflected the razor-sharp blade, then counter-slashed with Jones’ sabre.

  But this man was no novice. Holding the rifle by butt and stock, he blocked two-handed, then jabbed with the butt, sending Damien reeling away to avoid the blow, following with a low jab of the bayonet that made the boy give ground to avoid being skewered through the thigh. Suddenly panicked, and facing the age-old problem that all swordsmen faced against staves—two points of attack—Damien had to fall back, slashing wildly as his feet sought purchase. The man came again, roaring up the stairs, thrusting and slashing in a frenzied assault. Damien lost track of the butt in the darkness, caught it on his hip and fell back on the rock. The soldier rose to his full height to stab…

  …and a brilliant orange light blazed into his eyes like fire. Dazzled, he froze for one instant…

  …and Damien’s desperate jab took him in the left thigh. His leg collapsed, and he pitched sideways into the dell.

  Damien looked back, where Cassandra stood above him, her laptop in one hand and the projector in the other, looking down at him. She whooped in frightened exhilaration.

  ‘We should marry!’ he gasped.

  ‘No way! Get up, you clown.’ Her voice hovered between laughter and fright. Her eyes were on some thing in the hollow below. He followed her stare. Sassman was lining up a point-blank shot at a stationary Mat. There was nothing they could do. Damien shouted desperately, calling the DJ’s name, but he never even heard.

  Suddenly the rocks trembled, and Damien looked down, at a crack opening in the stone on which he lay. There was not even time to twist, to try and grab something, before the whole stairs and most of the cliff fell into the hollow. He fell like debris.

  ‘Get me outta this, and you live,’ Sassman shouted, half-threat, half-plea.

  Mat looked down the gun barrel, and measured the resolve of the man’s eyes.

  They were at the edge of the lit area, beside the ring of bones that marked where Puarata’s enchantments had ended. Behind Sassman, there was uproar; shouting and shooting, men leaping from the rim of the bowl to close and fight. All was confusion, but he couldn’t make sense of it, as he couldn’t afford to look away from that gun.

  Was the musician really a killer? It was one thing to lead a man like Dwayne to a dangerous spot and leave him, but was Sassman someone who could kill face to face, in cold blood?

  ‘I’ll let you go,’ he offered back.

  Sassman’s face contorted. ‘You know I can’t shift outta this world. I need you or Bryce for that.’ He glanced back, to where Bryce was fighting for his life against one of the fierce pale newcomers. ‘An’ Bryce is busy.’ He placed the gun almost in Mat’s face, inches away. The black cavern of the muzzle seemed to fill the universe. Its very presence threatened to break Mat’s composure. He fought rising panic, thinking furiously.

  I’m stronger than him…I can shift worlds, and he can’t. I shifted a whole car and three people several times a day in September…I can beat him…

  But I don’t know how. He has all the training, all the knowledge…and a gun.

  His senses expanded fractionally, and he realised that flight to the real world was impossible here anyway. Opposite this place was a massive rockfall—in real-world terms, they were dozens of yards underground. To shift there would be to die instantly in the rock, if it were possible to shift at all.

  ‘Why not do this?’ Ngatoro whispered into his mind, showing him an image. Mat seized onto it with desperate hope.

  ‘Okay,’ he said to Sassman. He made a small change, no more than a flexing of fingers—all he was capable of under the circumstances. He felt his koru-knot pendant suddenly flare at his throat, and knew it had worked. He smiled grimly and raised his own gun, unsure if he had the nerve to use it, but damned if Sassman had to know that. He put all the confidence he could muster into his voice. ‘I refuse,’ he told the American. ‘But you may surrender, if you wish.’

  Okay, Sassman, are you really a killer?

  Sassman looked at him incredulously, and spat. ‘Damn you, boy. I never wanted to do this.’ He pulled the trigger. The hammer fell, striking a spark that ignited the fire-pan, exploding the gunpowder in the barrel.

  That answers the killer-or-no-killer question, was all Mat had time to think.

  The gun exploded in Sassman’s hand, breaking his wrist and blinding him, searing pieces of metal ripping at his face. He reeled backwards and sank to his knees, blinded and horribly confused.

  Yes!! Mat thought. It worked!

  Just a couple of seconds before the American had pulled the trigger, Mat had sealed Sassman’s gun barrel with a small stone from the real world, pulled from one world to another, and there was nowhere for the small explosion to go, except the path of least resistance—back out the firing pan.

  Mat rose and smashed the butt of his gun into the American’s temple, and Sassman toppled sideways. Then he looked up to the north face, as a body fell, and Riki followed it, shrieking Mat’s name and waving a taiaha. He struck the ground, and rolled, coming up in a graceful motion onto one knee like a ninja. A soldier turned on him with his bayonet, and they exchanged a flurry of blows, Riki holding his own, despite the size difference, through sheer speed and skill.

  Mat lifted his gun, seeking a target. Bizarrely, a dimly lit projection of a monster had appeared amidst the fog bank like a bad special effect, but then it winked out. Some instinct drew his eye up to the left, to where Donna Kyle stood amidst her warriors on the south rim. Like two ancient enemies drawn together, or two lovers across a bar room, their eyes met amidst the confusion.

  She snarled and raised her gun, an action he matched, when suddenly the wall to his right collapsed in a sudden tremor, and dust billowed across the bowl, choking and blinding him.

  Cassandra was at the head of the stairs clutching her laptop as the first tremor struck, Damien at her feet. The soldier Damien had wounded toppled into the hollow. She saw Mat under Sassman’s gun. She opened her mouth, a futile warning forming on her tongue, when the American’s gun exploded in his hand, and she punched the air as if at a sports game when Mat clubbed the DJ senseless and strode past him.

  Then another earthquake made the whole cliff wobble, and she staggered, almost falling into the bowl. She looked down at Damien, bent towards him with arm extended…and suddenly he was gone, in a roar of falling earth.

  For a second she teetered on the
edge of the rockfall, while the bowl filled with dust, and men bellowed in terror and pain below. Then a deafening CRACK filled the air, and splinters of stone flew like shrapnel. Her eyes caught a small fissure that opened along the top of the western wall, running through the stone until it was lost in the fog, out towards where the lake lay beyond. Where millions of tonnes of water waited, at a higher level than the bowl below.

  ‘Oh, crap!’ She backed, turned and ran, snatching up her pack, and sprang along the edge of the northern rim, above where the stairs had been, grasping at trees to keep herself from falling. She placed the laptop on the ground, wrenched open the pack and delved inside, spilling ropes and hammers and gadgets and all manner of essentials, until she found what she was looking for. She threw a harness on, trying to track everyone below, her practised hands blurring. She could see virtually nothing, just glimpses amidst the dust which had risen, hiding everything below, hiding the other side. There was nothing…

  She pushed down the night-goggles, and heat-shapes appeared. There! The boys were there! She prepared to jump, as some thing immense suddenly rose, a massive cold thing uncoiling from centuries beneath the earth. A black reptilian head as large as a car rose from the dust, with scaled skin and eyes of amber weirdly luminescent in her night-goggles. The left eye flickered, swivelled, and then fixed on her.

  Mat coughed out dust and brown spittle as some thing massive rose, black within the dirty dust of the rockfall, from the centre of the bowl. The sound of stone snapping as it rose was deafening, and a fleeing man suddenly threw up his hands then collapsed, shot in the back by flying shards of stone. Mat flinched and stood, and then staggered into the blindness, holding his shirt over his face.

  He groped at where he had last seen his friend, until a hand grabbed his, a brown arm, Riki’s arm, half-buried in the soil. He threw down his gun and pulled, shouting for help. No one came. All about him, men were fleeing the immense shape that rose from the earth, forgetting their foes in their terror. The massive shape roared—its very breath was enough to shred the dust-cloud, and let them see it.

  It was three storeys tall and still not entirely out of the earth. Part-reptile, like a massive tuatara, it also echoed the crocodile in its long head, and the snake with its serpentine neck. Its mottled hide was black and grey, ridged with amber, like its eyes. Its breath was wet and cold, dank as the deepest cave. It roared like a jet engine as it climbed from the earth, making the ground shake like jelly. It seemed enraged. Its head seemed to be caught in some kind of shimmering golden net.

  More rock fractured, and then with a hideous popping sound, a whole section of the western wall flew out, flying past the heads of the men in the dell. Water began to gush through the cracks in the wall, faster and faster, like fire-hoses.

  Mat turned back to the brown arm—Riki’s, it had to be—and pulled. Another shape slid down the pile of dirt and rubble, and sprawled beside him, someone he recognised. ‘Damien, help! It’s Riki!’

  Damien scrabbled to his feet, single-mindedly ignoring a terrified soldier clambering past him, stabbed his sword into the loose earth without a backwards look, and dug desperately with his hands. Mat pulled again, but lost his grip, sprawling onto his back into the remains of the pool.

  ‘You!’

  Bryce loomed above him, his pistol smoking, his other hand still impotently holding Lena’s braid. Mat stared at it, and gasped. It was not so impotent…

  The braid was glowing like gold, and the warlock had woven a cord of light that ran like reins to the skull of the taniwha. He flicked it, as if trying to master a horse, and the great beast roared, tossing its head.

  ‘Mine! It’s mine! There is still enough of that girl inside to hold it!’ Bryce roared aloud, then jabbed the emptied gun at Mat. ‘Lena-Hau! Kill the boy! Kill him!’

  The head of the beast turned to the left, then dipped and snaked about. And focused on Mat.

  Ponaturi swarmed out of the dell past Cassandra, as she finished putting her harness on. The mist was falling, and visibility was clearing. But the taniwha kept getting bigger, as it rose from beneath the earth. It hadn’t stopped looking at her. It was hard to think, caught in the spotlight of that gaze. Hard to move. But then she saw it toss its head, like a horse that someone had just bridled, and look down.

  She followed its gaze, and her heart hammered. Mat was there, and Damien, digging in the dirt. Above them, Bryce held some thing aloft, and unseen forces seemed to link that hand to the movements of the taniwha. She stared, baffled.

  Then the taniwha lunged at Mat, and without thought she screamed a warning, her hands going to her mouth.

  There was no time. The massive head lined him up and dropped, jaws opening.

  Bryce half-turned, to watch the result of his command.

  Some thing fell from the sky, a dog that became a hawk in a graceful spellbinding instant, and ripped at the man’s face, opening deep welts on his cheeks and forehead. The golden light flickered, and he flailed about, trying to guard his eyes.

  The taniwha paused. Mat didn’t. In one motion, he snatched up Damien’s borrowed sword and swung, as Bryce raised his arm to regain command of the taniwha. The blade arced, and Mat barely felt it cut, as it took off Bryce’s hand at the wrist. The hand, still gripping the glowing braid, fell wetly to the rock and twitched like a dying spider. The golden light went out, and the taniwha roared. Bryce gaped at the stump as blood fountained, his mouth wide with agony and fear. For an instant they were frozen like that, paralysed.

  The taniwha trumpeted its freedom to the gods. Behind it, the western wall exploded in a cascade of boulders and torrential water. The lake broke out of its centuries-old prison, and thundered into the hollow.

  22

  White water

  It was a matter of seconds. Damien reached into the hole he had dug about Riki’s torso, and heaved with every piece of his strength. Less than a foot below him, the first wave of water from the lake roared. Spray soaked him immediately. But he could feel Riki coming free, felt his arms move, and grip his shoulders in return. He turned his head to shout for aid, and saw the torrent sweep over Mat before the boy could flinch. A wall of water, and he was gone.

  Damien heaved as if all of life depended upon it. He felt his friend rise from the dirt, limp, barely functioning. Some thing huge struck the water behind him, and the wave knocked him flat. Then it too was gone, riding the mounting torrent.

  The water was to his waist in an instant. He drew his head up, holding the barely conscious Riki to him.

  Cassandra fell from out of the night, rigged in some kind of harness with a cord on her back that attached her to some thing above, her arms wide. He instinctively thrust Riki up to meet her.

  She smashed into them both, and he toppled backwards. The girl grabbed Riki’s arm and his belt with desperate fingers, wrapping her legs around him and then whatever she was attached to whipped her back into the sky.

  She’s a bungy-jumping freakin’ angel!

  Water swallowed the world, and sucked him to its belly.

  Cassandra held on to Riki—just—in a crumpled heap at the top of the rockfall on the north side. She didn’t have the strength to climb that last section again, and certainly not to get Riki up to the tree-line. It had been for nothing. But quite clever, she thought. Among her abseiling gear she had a high-elasticity rope—not quite a bungy cord, but of a similar principle. It was more of a thrill-seeking device than proper gear, but she’d brought it along anyway—it was handy in certain types of descents. What would Damien and Mat say about her cleverness? What would Lena say? She raised an exhausted hand, dazedly, as the water rose towards them. Dimly she was aware that the floods would sweep them both away in seconds, but exhaustion had numbed her mind. And I’m out of cool toys anyway…

  Wiry white arms locked about her, and pulled Riki from her hands. She almost fought them, the ghostly blue-lipped faces and their hideous strength, but then she realised what was happening. She was being rescued. T
hey hauled her back into the trees, and left her gasping like a beached whale amidst the under growth on the edge of the flood. Jones was suddenly there, somehow on the near-side of the dell again. He hauled at her harness, pulled it off her, then he was gone again, running towards the lake, shouting and gesticulating at Piriniha and his warriors. ‘The waka, the waka!’

  The warriors gibbered, and ran with him, but for one who stayed with her, holding Riki.

  She wiped her eyes, and crawled to her pack, deflated and almost empty amidst the debris of her gear. She reached into the final unopened pouch of her pack, and pulled out a bag of jellybeans. She waved it in front of the sea-fairy. It followed the packet as she rocked it side to side, as if trying to hypnotise itself.

  ‘This is all yours, if you keep us alive,’ she told it. ‘Not that you speak Engish, I guess…’

  Its eyes lit, and it reached out a long pale hand. It took the packet, opened its mouth wider than she imagined possible, and ate it, packaging and all. A look of sheer bliss stole over its face.

  Below her, the hollow was now a raging rapid, flowing eastward to the river valleys. She tried to puzzle how many litres per second might be rushing past her, but couldn’t focus. All she could manage was to stroke Riki’s shoulders, and not faint. The far rim was empty now. Donna Kyle and her allies were either dead or fled or washed away. None of Bryce’s men remained; the warlock himself had been swept away in the same initial torrent that had taken Mat.

  Mat…Damien…Lena too, whatever you are now…

  Cassandra didn’t really believe in God. And she didn’t believe that ‘no atheists in a foxhole’ saying—that was just panic. Clever people stayed reasoned and smart till the end, and made their own luck. But she did make a wish, because Jones had said that this was a land made of wishes.