Courage of falcons

by Holly Lisle

  Ry read that quote in her thoughts, and their reaction echoed back to each other. We were chosen for this moment from the time of our birth. We were born to face this path and make this choice. Every struggle, every hurt we have ever faced, has made us stronger and pointed us toward this day.

  They pulled away from each other at last, and stood together facing Dùghall, and once again their hands sought each other out and clasped tightly.

  Ry looked down at Kait. "I doubted the hell of the philosophers," he said. "I was wrong to doubt. There is a hell, and this is it to know heaven, and to cast it away for yourself rather than see it destroyed for everyone."

  Kait smiled at him, though her lips trembled and her tears slid along the corners of her mouth so that she tasted salt. "You will not cast heaven away alone. I will be with you every moment that we have yet to breathe, I will breathe with you at my side."

  "You will do this, then?"

  Kait turned to face her uncle. "I am Galweigh," she said. "He is Sabir. We are born of Family. We know our duty to Family, to Calimekka, to Matrin. To the gods. At last I discover the meaning of the Galweigh motto: Kaithaeras tavan."

  "All before self," Ry said.

  "Let not the gods say that I cowered at the moment of their greatest need." Her voice began to shake so hard that she couldn't say anything else. She pressed her face against Ry's shoulder and fought to stop the tears.

  "We will do what we must do," Ry said to Dùghall. Then, softly and just for her to hear, he added, "Nevertheless, we have some time yet together before we reach Calimekka. If all of eternity is to be denied us, we'd best not waste this flicker that remains."

  She did not look at Dùghall again. Instead, she kept her face averted as she followed Ry back to the cabin they shared. "How do we make these few days last forever?" she asked him.

  He smiled and shook his head and kissed her. "We cannot make time stand still," he whispered. "But we can make it run."

  * * *

  Ian stood at the door of the brig. Rrru-eeth, shackled to the wall, glared up at him. He took a deep breath no one knew where he was at that moment, or if they knew, they did not suspect why he was there.

  "Come to tell me it's time for my hanging?" she snarled.

  "No." He looked at her. She was she had always been beautiful in her odd way. He had cared about her once, had trusted her with his life, had thought her a friend. And then she had betrayed him. But he was not her. "I've come to talk to you of our friendship."

  She snorted. "We aren't friends."

  "We were once."

  "Once. We could have been more once. I loved you."

  "I cared about you."

  "But you didn't love me. I thought it was because I was Scarred I could live with that. I was Scarred, and you were not, and that was the wall that stood between us."

  "It wasn't that."

  Rrru-eeth turned her face to the wall. "Of course it wasn't. Because then she came along, and she was Scarred, and you loved her anyway. So it wasn't that I was Scarred. It was just... that you didn't love me."

  "But we were friends," he reminded her. "We were good friends."

  She stared straight into his eyes with a fury that chilled him. "Not so good as you might have thought."

  He stared at his boots and sought the right words. "I'll let you go, Rrru-eeth. I don't want to hang you. I cannot pardon you mutiny cannot be pardoned. But I can let you escape... I can help you escape. We'll be sailing through the western edge of the Little Summer Chain soon. There are a dozen or so islands there they're livable, they get some ship trade from time to time. You could hide there until you could find passage elsewhere."

  "I don't want your help. I don't want anything from you."

  "If you stay aboard the ship, Rrru-eeth, I have to hang you. Shipboard discipline will not permit me any other alternative."

  "Then hang me. Have my blood on your hands and my soul on your conscience. And know that my ghost will haunt you through this life and every one that follows, cursing every step you take." She spat at him, but missed.

  He stepped back, shaking his head. "For the next three stations, if you change your mind, call the guard. He'll know how to get me if you request it. If you don't..." He turned away. "Then you will die, but your death will be on your own hands, because it is the path that you have chosen."

  Chapter 49

  In Costan Selvira, the last city that stood between the Army of the Thousand Peoples and Calimekka, the main gates clanged shut and the inhabitants, warned by Ranan of the oncoming horde, swarmed behind the walls, stacking explosives and torchbombs and poison powder for the catapults; twisting cloth into wicks for glass pineapple projectiles; restringing bows and refletching arrows; sharpening swords and pikes. Those few who remained outside the walls cleared the trenches and buried the rows of spikes in them, and spread out caltrops and pressure-mines to slow the advancing lines. No children would be able to play outside the walls of the city for a long time after the battle, Ranan thought if, indeed, any children returned to Costan Selvira.

  They were being sent away, along with their mothers and those too old or weak or sick to fight three ships would sail out to one of the tiny barrier isles just off the coast to wait for word of the battle. If the news was bad, or if there was no news, the captains of those three ships would assume the worst and sail north to Calimekka, or if the rumors of plague proved true, to someplace beyond.

  Ranan stood atop the wall, staring down the slope of the hill on which the town sat, studying the preparations his men and the Costan Selvirans were making. He also watched the road that ran south. If the Scarred followed their previous pattern of attack, the enemy scouts would approach from the sides, well away from the road, but the main army would march along it it was in fairly good repair and unless a sudden rain turned the dirt portions to mud, it would withstand the sudden traffic with only a little damage.

  He caught a flash of red at the edge of the clearing, and a man on horseback erupted from the jungle pursued by a pair of dozen-legged monsters that nonetheless ran upright like men.

  A pair of the Scarred scouts. Ranan shuddered and pointed two of the crossbowmen at them, and a pair of archers as well. A storm of arrows and bolts arced across the sky, sprouting in the oncoming enemy. The pursuers toppled and the human scout galloped on.

  Ranan hurried from the top of the wall to the gate to meet him. Within moments, the scout arrived. His horse trembled and frothed, its head hanging between its knees. The scout looked not much healthier. He bled from several wounds, and though none of them singly had been fatal, Ranan thought the man would be lucky indeed if the entire collection didn't kill him.

  "The jungle stopped their side columns, except for their winged attackers. The whole of the rest of their force now comes by the main road. If you split your ground forces to defend against a three-way attack, they'll overwhelm your main force in an instant and all will be lost. Keep... keep only the archers from the side positions to hold off their fliers."

  Ranan nodded. "What else?"

  "Their catapults and siege engines and battering rams are to the fore. The fliers took off in clouds and approach just above the tops of the trees, carrying something... but I know not what."

  "How long until they reach us?" Ranan asked.

  "They are almost upon us now."

  The army of the Scarred, then, would arrive with full daylight still to aid it though from what Ranan knew of the Scarred, that would make little difference; there would be those among them who had no need of daylight. Watching them moving into the pass and sniping at them from ambushes, he had seen creatures with no eyes; creatures with ears or noses so huge and complexly developed that he felt certain their eyes were only of secondary importance to them, rather as his nose was to him; creatures who wore a luminous bluish haze around them that he could only wonder at. When it came to a full battle, he did not know what the enemy could do. He and his men had run a guerrilla campaign, attacking from the sides
, wearing the enemy down as best they could, trying to get the people from the little towns that stood in the approaching army's way to flee to safer ground. This would be the first time they'd had enough men to dare a real stand.

  He turned to his signal captain and said, "Signal the ships with the noncombatants to leave harbor now."

  "They have not yet finished loading, sir."

  "I know that. But if they don't go now, they won't get out at all."

  "What of the ones who couldn't board?"

  "Send them home. And pray we win the day."

  * * *

  The Army of the Thousand Peoples pushed forward at its fastest pace, its wings flanking the main column from the air, the main column pounding inexorably forward three spears racing toward Costan Selvira.

  Danya, atop her lorrag, took her place with Luercas at the head of the ground forces. Almost home, she thought. Resistance up to this point had been almost nonexistent. The army that had caused them such losses going through the pass hadn't been able to press any truly devastating attacks since. They'd hit from the sides a few times, killing a dozen here and a hundred there, but they were poorly armed and vastly outnumbered they couldn't penetrate into the core of the column to threaten supplies or damage the great siege weapons. They couldn't touch the flying wings. They could only harry and harass and stalk and among the Scarred troops were those who were better harriers, better harassers, better stalkers. The enemy forces had lost many of their own in these last weeks.

  Now they appeared to intend to make a stand.

  Good. Danya was ready to finish it with them.

  The leading edge of the column moved out of the heavy cover of the jungle and into a huge clearing. Costan Selvira lay before the attackers like a treasure box unplundered, virginal, full of promise.

  To the Scarred, who had faced the disappointment of discovering both Brelst and Glaswherry Hala abandoned and stripped of most of their riches, that lovely white-walled city that sat before them with its gates up and soldiers along its parapets and ramparts was a long-delayed gift of the gods. They began to cheer.

  "Deploy the battering rams," Luercas shouted.

  The great wheeled rams separated themselves from the main column and began to move forward. Their crews, protected from arrow fire by metal roofs affixed to the central part of the rams, tucked in close to the rams, put their heads down, and began to run toward the city's gates.

  Danya paused. In Calimekka, she had people she hated. She had a reason to seek blood, destruction, and death. But here... ? These people in this city had done nothing to her. What business did she have with them, and how could she assuage her conscience at their spilled blood?

  She set her jaw and squinted at the parapets of the city wall, making out the shapes of strangers who stared back in her direction. This was the road to Calimekka if they did not take this city, kill these defenders, they would leave an armed enemy at their backs, and place themselves between the crushing jaws of a deadly vise. She raised an arm. "Deploy the ladder-men!"

  Behind the rams ran the thickets of ladder-men, who would attempt to breach the walls by flinging their ladders up against them and climbing into the city before they could be shot down or toppled over. With each team of ladder-men ran twenty archers who would give any of the enemy who dared poke a head over the wall to give a ladder a shove something else to think about.

  "Deploy the moles!"

  The Scarred diggers nicknamed the moles trudged forward, little eyes shielded from the light of day by circles of polished obsidian strapped over them. They trotted behind the ladder-men with their attending archers, and when they reached a point just beyond comfortable arrow shot, went nose-down to the dirt and began to dig. They would tunnel into the city from beneath, weakening the walls, creating paths that fighters could run through, and sniffing out armories so that they could be cleaned out from the inside, giving the Scarred more weapons and the defending humans fewer.

  Danya raised a gold and red flag and waved it high. That was the signal for the two flying wings to circle the city and clear any defensive positions from behind. The wings carried bags of poison dust that the Scarred had swept up from the pass and stored simple justice, Danya thought, to kill the enemy with their own weapons.

  She squinted, and saw the wings soaring out in two thin lines toward sailing ships that were racing away from the harbor. She could barely make out the dark shapes of the fliers, but she knew whoever hid aboard those ships would die within minutes.

  I hope they suffer, she thought. I hope they cry out for mercy. I hope they hurt the way I have hurt.

  Their suffering wouldn't be enough. It couldn't be enough, not ever, because no matter how much her enemies suffered, their pain would not take away her pain. But at least she knew that now, now, she did not suffer alone.

  * * *

  Smoke curled up from the remains of Costan Selvira, and fires from a hundred little battles lit the darkness like the eyes of hellish hunters. Ranan, bleeding and battered, gave word to Har, who had stayed at his side throughout the last stations of the fight. "Flee. Take word to Father in Calimekka that we have lost the day." His brother would run to Galweigh House if he could get out of Costan Selvira alive. He would let Dùghall know that now nothing stood between Calimekka and the Scarred.

  Har nodded. Ranan slipped a ring from his finger onto the boy's hand and said, "Give this to him to give to my mother, and tell him we did everything we could. Now run."

  Har fled down the stairs of the central tower from which Ranan had directed the last frantic stages of the fight, down into the darkness of the long tunnel that lay beneath the tower, silently as he could through the darkness, not even lighting his way with a candle for fear that he might betray his presence. He felt his way along the damp stone walls, wet and slick with moss; he hurried with fingers dragging the wall to keep himself from getting lost. He trotted, but he dared not run. Blind, he heard a thousand sounds that might have been Scarred monsters taking up pursuit; that might have been the breathing of some hideous talon-handed monster poised in the path before him, waiting to snatch his eyes out or bite open his skull; that might have been beasts hanging from the ceiling waiting for him to pass beneath so that they could drop on top of him and suck the life-juices from his flesh.

  He had seen such horrors from his place beside Ranan in the high tower. He had watched the monsters come, and he had watched humans fall to them and die in ways he could not have imagined in his worst nightmares. The monsters knew no mercy; they did not take prisoners, they did not spare any living thing.

  The children who had been sent away from the city were all dead, and with them their mothers and the sick and the elderly vengeance, he thought, for those moments in the pass. Some of their children. Some of ours. This evil thing we all do to each other.

  His terror nearly paralyzed him only the thought that the monsters were more likely to appear behind him than in front of him kept him moving at all.

  To Calimekka, he thought. To Calimekka, to Dùghall, with my news.

  To Calimekka. I'll be safe in Calimekka, if only I can reach it.

  To Calimekka.

  He would never be certain how much time he spent beneath the earth, or how far he ran before the tunnel finally sloped upward and disgorged him into the heart of a jungle. He wept, though, when fresh air brushed his wet cheeks and when he looked up and saw stars overhead, winking at him from breaks in the jungle canopy.

  He would never be able to enter such a closed space again, nor would he ever be able to stomach the slick feel of moss beneath his palm. And ever after, the sound of dripping water and of wind blowing through stone passages would send him racing for lighted places, for the warmth of a hearthfire and the presence of other people.

  He ran through the jungle, heading north, north, north, to the promised safety of Calimekka.

  * * *

  The whole of Costan Selvira belonged to her. Danya rode through the streets atop her lorrag, staring
at the human dead who lay in piles, and she waved her Scarred hand at their corpses and laughed. "You would have killed me," she shouted. "I could never have been one of yours, could I? But I'm alive and you're dead! Dead!"

  The dead watched her with unblinking eyes, with faces stretched by horror or grief or pain, and she found herself growing less happy the farther she rode into the heart of the city. She came upon a nest of girls certainly sisters dressed alike, their hair cut in the same silly fashion, who lay in the street in a neat line. Eight of them, the youngest no more than two or three, the oldest in her late teens. All dead, all on display, wearing their Family colors, their Family lace.

  They could have been Galweighs they could have been Danya and her three sisters. Dark hair, dark eyes, small stature she could have seen their likeness in her own mirror. Their young faces accused her silently, and she glared at them. "This is what I came for," she told herself as she rode forward. "I came to see my enemies brought low. I came to see those who abandoned me spread at my feet, to see them crushed. This is the first taste of my reward. This is my first moment of triumph."