Courage of falcons

by Holly Lisle

  From Third Point, they heard the sounding of a horn high and clear and mournful in the early morning air.

  Neither of them hesitated, though Har fought tear-blurred vision as he worked. The brothers sawed through the thin ropes that bound the heavy ropes which held the deadfall boards in place. The boards fell away, tearing at the painted canvas that hid them from the enemy and rocks and boulders, carefully piled behind those boards, burst free in a torrent and crashed down into the pass with an avalanche's roar. Har heard the same roar repeated farther up the pass.

  The screams started, and the neatly ordered column scattered like ants stirred with a stick the attackers ran madly, some fleeing out of the pass, some running deeper into trouble, some trampling their own and racing in circles in their desperate attempt to find safety. The rockfalls blocked the pass at Third Point and at Highbridge and at Long Fall, and at the mouth as well.

  Once they had the enemy trapped or as much of the enemy as they could hope to hold the defenders launched the bags of poison powder from their catapults. The bags had been carefully designed to burst upon impact the powder was light and billowed up in huge clouds when it struck. From within the white clouds, Har heard coughing. Then cries of agony, and screaming, and retching.

  "Run now," Namid shouted, and burst from their hiding place. Har followed him, keeping his eyes on the narrow, treacherous path that led along the uneven ledge to First Point. The enemy's flying scouts were nowhere to be seen, the first wave of the enemy's army, trapped in the pass, was dying, and Har began to hope that some of the gods might have heard his prayer and cared that he and his many brothers and the soldiers who fought with them might live to see another day.

  He tried to keep himself from hearing the anguished cries that reached him from below. He tried to keep himself from picturing the horrors that lay down there the bodies of men and women and children of the Thousand Peoples crushed beneath rocks, writhing from the poison, burning from the rain of flaming arrows. He was protecting his own people, and the evil he had done he did for them. For the men and women and children of the small villages in the mountains who went about their lives, blissfully unaware of the marching death that bore down on them.

  He tried, but he was no callous killer. He was a boy, far away from his home and the people he had loved all his life, and he had been forced to kill because he believed he had no choice. He still believed he had no choice.

  But he wanted to hide his face for shame that such slaughter should be the only solution to the danger his people faced.

  He and Namid reached First Point and dove beneath the sheltering camouflaged awnings and watched the archers shooting down at anything in the powder-coated mess below that still moved.

  "Time to retreat soon," one of the men said.

  "We're winning," Namid said. "Why would we retreat now?"

  "Because we're out of poison, almost out of arrows, and have no more deadfalls built. And they're already pulling down the first of the deadfalls. Didn't you see them?"

  The one thing they had not been able to see from their position was the area directly below their ledge which was the location of the first deadfall.

  "No," Namid said. "We didn't see them."

  "We aren't going to be able to hold this position for long. Ranan has already warned us to be ready to fall back to Third Point when the horn sounds again. We're to resupply from the caves there. Maybe we'll be able to clear a second wave before we're out of everything but that second wave won't just march up the pass like this one did. We're going to have to fight like demons."

  "And then what will we do?" Har asked.

  The veteran's mouth twisted into a weary smile. "Then we run like hell and hope they've braced themselves back behind us."

  * * *

  Ranan, from his aerie atop Highbridge, watched both the main pass and the small secondary pass and felt a moment of triumph. The failed second wave of attackers faltered and the few survivors fled backward. He counted his own casualties, dead from aerial attack and enemy catapult fire and the one bag of poison powder that burst in midair and rained back on a friendly position, and guessed that of the near-thousand men he'd led in the morning, some seven hundred survived in fighting condition. Bodies of the enemy filled both passes, in places three and four and five deep; he could only guess at the number of enemy dead, but his guess numbered ten thousand. If he went by the numbers, this Battle of Two Passes would make him one of the great generals of history.

  He would not take pride in his victory, however. Most of the enemy dead had fallen in the first wave, and a good half of those had been noncombatants. The bodies of mothers and babes, of children, of old men and old women, lay trampled with and tangled among those of the soldiers they'd followed. And it wasn't over. He had hoped that the enemy, twice slaughtered by a force it could not kill and could not intimidate, would turn back, and thus would not discover that he and his men had reached the end of their resources and would not be able to offer resistance to a third wave.

  He had dared hope that even if he had not won such a substantial victory as a full retreat, this Army of the Thousand Peoples might halt for a while, reconsider its plan of attack, and in so doing give him and his people time to regroup and resupply.

  The enemy, however, was setting up a third wave a force that would launch itself into both passes under cover of the coming darkness. From what he could see from Highbridge, this third force was as large as the first two combined and it would not include noncombatants.

  Ten thousand armed fighters against seven hundred men who had nothing left but their personal arms swords, daggers, cudgels, slings, and shields. Behind the forming third wave, enough of the Scarred remained to launch a fourth, and perhaps a fifth. He and his force had succeeded in slowing the enemy down nothing more. The army of the Scarred would have to clear away rockfalls and bodies before it could move its war machines through the passes, but when its path was cleared, it would come on. Inexorably, it would come on.

  Ranan turned to the young man beside him, the son of his favorite wife's best friend, and said, "Sound retreat."

  Chapter 42

  Danya, astride her giant lorrag, watched over the removal of the dead from the pass. They were bringing out some of the children of the Kargans: children she had once ferried across the Sokema River to pick berries; children who had taught her the subtleties of language and culture in her adopted home; children whom she had liked.

  Their backs arched; their mouths stretched open in silent screams; their eyes bulged wide and frightened, the corneas no longer clear and shiny, but clouded, dull, coated with dirt and powder.

  Children.

  She stared at Luercas, standing near the mouth of the pass, who was directing a group of Trakkath soldiers in disposal of the bodies. He remained untouched by the deaths; but then, why could she have thought he might be moved? He'd led her to destroy her own child, then stolen his body. What could the deaths of other innocents mean to him?

  He saw her looking at him, mounted his lorrag, and rode to her side. "Mother. Dear. If it's going to upset you so much, perhaps you ought to go hide with the rest of the helpless."

  She said, "I'm not upset."

  "I could feel your distress from clear over there." He nodded toward the growing pile of bodies. "You can't have a war without a few corpses."

  She lifted her chin and looked at him coldly. "Why those corpses? Why mothers and babies? Why grandfathers? Why little boys and little girls?"

  "If you want to ask those questions, then why anyone?" Luercas shrugged. "Why is the life of a little girl more worthy of tears than the life of a trained soldier? Why do you weep for the lost children but not for the lost men?"

  Danya, the daughter of Galweighs, born and raised with Family duty as the core of her existence, had no doubts on that score. "Those whose duty it is to serve must be prepared to offer as much as their lives."

  "But do they love life any less to go so unmourned, their sacrifices so un
questioned? Has the soldier in the flower of his manhood lost less or more than the ignorant child, or the all-but-unknowing babe?"

  Danya glared at him. "Now that we have come this far, would you convince me to leave off this war? To retreat to the Veral wastes again?"

  "Not at all." Luercas turned and studied the soldiers who were pulling out the last few bodies and adding them to the pyre. "I would only alert you to your own hypocrisy. You act as if ignorance and innocence add value to the worth of a life, and act as if you believe that those who have the most to gain have the least to lose. But the fact that those soldiers walked into that pass for you knowing that they might die does not make the price they paid less than the price paid by the children who died unaware of their danger. Rather, I would think they paid more, and hold them in higher esteem." He turned to study her face, and when he saw that she was giving his words serious consideration, he laughed. "I would value them if they were truly men, of course. These are just smart beasts but those they kill on your word in the coming days will be as human as you."

  He started to ride off, then turned back and grinned at her.

  "As human as you once were, anyway."

  She wanted to scream at him. She didn't that would give him too much satisfaction. She contented herself with imagining him groveling at her feet, begging for his life with the rest of those she would make pay for their sins against her those in her Family who had failed to ransom her, those in the Sabirs who had raped her, hurt her, twisted her with their magic, those among the Kargans who had turned their backs on her when she regained most of her human form, and the others since that time who had slighted her and looked sidelong at her as if questioning her right to call herself Ki Ika, the Summer Goddess. And now those soldiers who had poisoned the Kargan children who had cared about her, even when she was no longer Gathalorra, the Master of the Lorrags.

  She would call forth cries for mercy. Begging and pleading. Desperate offers of penitence. And then she would have the blood of those who had hurt her. The promise of vengeance against those who had destroyed her life was all that sustained her, all that kept her moving forward. But it was enough.

  Chapter 43

  The great airible Morning Star limped through the darkness on two engines, almost out of fuel, tugged by winds it grew less and less able to fight.

  "We're going to have to land," Aouel said.

  Kait looked down at the rough coastal terrain barely illuminated by moonlight. "Where are we?"

  "Not yet to Costan Selvira. I would have been happier to land us there. We could have gotten fuel from the Galweigh Embassy, perhaps repaired the engines on the landing field, and then we could have gone wherever you wanted. If we land below, we're going to have to cut the airible free."

  "Why?" Kait asked.

  "To preserve the secrets of the engines."

  Kait rested a hand on his shoulder. "The days of the Families are dead. My Family can no longer control the secrets of airible flight. No Family will be able to buy artisans and keep them in seclusion to rebuild from the Ancients' designs the people who controlled that power are dead, and the mechanisms that kept the power in their hands are dead, too. If we cut the airible loose and let the sea claim it, we will have consigned the work that went into making it to oblivion and there will be no more fine engines pouring from Galweigh workshops to replace those that we drown."

  Aouel frowned at her. "Don't think that. The Galweighs still hold land in the Territories. They still hold Waypoint and Pappas and Hillreach. And in South Novtierra, Galweigia. You can't call the Families dead yet."

  "Yes, I can. Money ran from Calimekka to the Territories, the daughter cities and the new colonies; trade goods came back. If our dependencies don't keep getting their ships full of gold and supplies, they will slip away from us like water spilling through open fingers. The true Family was in Calimekka. That's gone now."

  "Then what shall we do with the airible?"

  "Land it. Anchor it. Leave it. Most likely it will go to ruin before anyone can make use of it, but I'd rather someone figured out a way to fix the engines and perhaps even copy them than think that flight would be lost again for a hundred years, or a thousand, or maybe forever."

  Aouel said, "Who will know what to do with it? The fishermen who live along this shore? The farmers who work the ground inland?"

  "If we leave it behind, there's a chance," Kait insisted. "Not much of one, I know. But any chance is better than none." Kait ran her fingers over the controls and sighed. "It took my Family fifty years to decipher the secrets in the Ancients' diagrams and tables, and to learn to create the machines they could use to build such engines. It took them the gold of a nation to build the airibles, test them, keep their designs secret and only in the last ten years have we had any sort of reliable service in the air. I don't want all of that to be lost."

  "I know." Aouel looked at the ground, and Kait saw sorrow in his eyes. "When I step out of this airible, I will probably never touch the sky again. But I, too, hope that someone will."

  The men and women sworn to serve the Galweighs moved out of the cabin and onto the outer gangplank, ready to slide down the ropes and find anchorage for the airible on the rough terrain below. Kait didn't envy them their task they would drop, not onto a smooth and grassy field, but onto a rock-strewn stretch of land bordered on one side by cliffs and on the other side by forest, and they would have to make their landing in darkness. Behind the navigator's station Kait could hear Alcie soothing her children, promising them that everything would be fine, that they would be safe, and that she would protect them.

  Kait wished for just a moment that she had someone who depended on her, someone for whom she had to be brave and calm and reassuring.

  Aouel pulled the chain that blew the steam whistle, and the guards crouched, waiting for their second signal. He fought for response from his two remaining engines and slewed the airible around so that it fought against its own inertia with its engines, and even with the buffeting wind it hung still in the sky for a moment. As he came fully around, he pulled the chain again, and the guards leaped over the rail, sliding down the rope toward the ground. He'd taken them in as close to the trees as he dared, thinking that the trunks would make good anchors, but he couldn't get them in as close as he would have liked, for fear of dragging some of the guards into the trees and skewering them.

  Kait held her breath, and Aouel said, "They'll get us down. We've done this maneuver more times than I can count in the last few months, practicing with every conceivable obstacle. They haven't come this far to die here, and neither have we."

  She rested a hand on his shoulder and nodded. "Forgive me. It's been a long day following a difficult night."

  "Things are going to get better now." Aouel smiled, though he didn't look away from the instruments and controls on his console. "I promise you that."

  "I believe you," Kait said, and wished she weren't lying when she said it.

  * * *

  Dùghall had not thought an airible could make such a rough landing. The envelope snagged in some trees, the whole damnable contraption screeched like a pig in a slaughterhouse, and then without warning one end shot straight up while the other dropped down until the thing was standing on its nose.

  His feet skidded out from under him and he slid against the first bulkhead behind the pilot's cabin, which suddenly became a floor. He grabbed Lonar as the boy went skidding past, aimed for the doorway into the front cabin; Ulwe, graceful as a cat, landed on the bulkhead without mishap. Alcie, though, with a tight grip on the suddenly wakened Rethen, found herself suspended in the air on the couch, which, fixed firmly to what had once been the floor, now served as a precarious ledge. She howled louder than the squalling infant, but only once. From below him, Dùghall heard Aouel roaring commands out the open hatch, and Kait swearing steadily.

  The soft light of the glowlamps inside the airible prevented him from seeing anything that happened out in the darkness, but he could hear fra
ntic screams, and thumps along the side of the cabin and passenger area.

  "We've lost the aft gas chamber," Aouel was shouting. "Get out of the way so I can vent the forward hold!"

  That didn't sound promising.

  "How am I going to get down from here?" Alcie managed to ask Dùghall in an almost conversational tone; years of experience with hardship, a good Family upbringing, and the fact that she'd been terrifying her own children gave her the strength to sound brave even though she was suspended four times higher than his head on a perch that pitched forward crazily with every passing breeze, threatening to throw her and the baby to their deaths.

  "Mama!" Lonar wailed, and clung to Ulwe, who patted his head and pulled him close to her.

  Kait poked her head through the hole in the floor that had been the doorway to the cabin, and saw Alcie and the baby high above her, staring down.

  "Hang on," she said. "The forward gas chamber tore when we hit the trees, but Aouel will have the ship leveled soon. Don't try to get down on your own."