Many of the Plainsfolk didn’t want to believe it. How could the enemy have come so close, so swiftly? Others – those who had already lost their lands and villages – broke in: they fly. No, not like birds. Not riding their beasts. They just fly. And the undercurrent of fear that came with the revelation: they are the Plague People. They can do anything.
Then the arguments started up again – the same as last night but whetted to a razor’s edge by the urgency. Some of the refugees were already packing what they had salvaged and preparing to head west, as though the Plague People would someday lose interest and cease to pursue them and consume the world. Others were taking up spears, axes and knives, donning armour of linen, hide and bronze. A band of ten Plague People was not so many.
Grass Shadow was the loudest voice of the war faction. His own chief was trying to speak for caution, but the old man had no arguments.
‘So what is your plan?’ one of the Boar demanded. ‘Kill these scouts of theirs, and what? What, when the rest come?’
‘Kill these scouts and the rest won’t know where to come!’ Grass Shadow insisted.
‘If they can be killed,’ another of the Black Eyes said, one of their hearth keepers. ‘They have no souls to part from their bodies.’
‘Then we’ll destroy their bodies, burn them until nothing’s left but ash and teeth,’ Grass Shadow swore.
‘And when they fly off, do you think the terror of Grass Shadow will keep them from coming back with ten times the numbers?’ the Boar pressed. ‘Or will you fly after them, dirt dog?’ This last some Plains insult Maniye wasn’t familiar with, which made Grass Shadow bristle.
‘My arrows will fly swifter than they can,’ he spat. ‘And when we have killed each one of them you can be sure we will remember who feared too much to stand beside us.’
Maniye felt a great urge to be elsewhere and started shuffling to the edge of the circle. This was not her land. Anything she said would be wrong. Then she saw a shadow at the edge of vision, and turned to see Tensho standing at the firelight’s furthest reach, dappled with the moving shadows of others. He nodded at her, just once, but his message came through clear.
So I will have to speak after all. She tried to gauge how the argument was going. Reshappa and some of the Lion were fierce for fighting, giving Grass Shadow more voices for him than against, but not by many. And of course many were not speaking at all, and most were more likely thinking about packing up their tents than taking up spears.
‘I will speak!’ Maniye called, but they were none of them listening to a skinny little Wolf girl. The Champion shifted impatiently within her. She did not want to abuse its shape, but it was plainly not used to being ignored.
She Stepped, readying herself to bellow at them and take the consequences, but the sheer size of the wolf-cat-bear-kin creature she became sent a wave of shocked quiet through them until everyone was looking at her. She felt a growl of challenge from a pair of big men, scar-chested and broad-shouldered, who must be Lion Champions. The other people here had none, and in some sense that made her their Champion. She was of no single people.
She walked to the fire, and they all made way for her. She could smell their hope and fear, and was only grateful that it was not she who would be their war leader. Stepping, her human feet were left surrounded by the great space she had occupied a moment before.
‘What would you say?’ Grass Shadow asked, plainly wanting her to support him.
‘Not me,’ she told them. ‘One comes who would speak with you. A voice you’ll want to hear.’ There were complex nets of etiquette about inviting a guest to someone else’s fire, and she did not know the Plains way of it. Thankfully Grass Shadow simply said, ‘Then let them come forward,’ and that dealt with that.
The figure who stalked in, through the broad channel Maniye had cut in the crowd, was tall and emaciated, wrapped in a loose white robe. Maniye could not decide whether it was male or female – or perhaps time had erased that distinction. Its face was high-browed, hollow-cheeked, its skin the yellow-brown of old bone. There was something of the Plains in it, but only a little, and nothing at all of any other people Maniye had ever seen. Tensho the Leopard skulked in its wake.
For a long time nobody there seemed to know who the visitor was, save that there was some uncomfortable power in every line of that lean frame. Then the whispers started up, and Maniye heard the name being passed back and forth, in awe and horror and incredulity. The Bat have woken at last. The Bat Society is with us. The Bat, the Owl and the Serpent were the three brothers who held off the Plague People before, so said the oldest tales. And while the Serpent had gone to build a kingdom and guide the River, and the Owl had become just one more tribe of the Eyrie, the Bat had vanished themselves away, seen only in the dreams and darkest rituals of the Plainsfolk.
The gaunt creature nodded, accepting as its due the whispering and protective gestures, the wary retreat from where it stood.
‘We were brought back,’ it told them in a low, dry voice, a woman’s voice. ‘If not to fight the Plague People then why? I will go with you. You will not hear my battle cry but it will strike fear into the enemy. We will drive them and their world away from here.’ The Bat’s voice was flat and impatient. We were brought back, she had said, and Maniye guessed she wanted nothing more than to return to wherever she had been conjured from.
‘And if we fight and fail, what then?’ one of the Boar challenged from the safety of the crowd. ‘What, when we have drawn their anger?’
‘Do not fear their anger,’ the Bat said, but not to reassure. ‘Do not fear their hate or rage. Fear them and what they are, for they are soulless and hungry. Do you think it will be better for you, if they are calm when they come to eat you and your ways and your gods? When you are no more than rooting pigs or voiceless dogs, will you feel relieved that they did not do that to you in anger? Know this truth: they do not care about you. They do not even believe in you. You are the shadows in their world. They come to set the fires that will unmake you.’ She spoke with a dreadful patient conviction. ‘So flee if you will, like the shadows flee the fire. One day the fire will be everywhere, and the shadows will have nowhere to go. Or fight. I intend to fight.’
‘And I!’ Grass Shadow cried, and Reshappa of the Lion was echoing him a moment later, and dozens of other voices besides. There were still those who would leave, Maniye knew, though they would not be arguing it here. The Bat’s intervention had brought round the majority at the fire, at least for now.
And then Grass Shadow was looking for her, pushing through the crowd to clap a hand to her shoulder. ‘Champion!’ he said. ‘Will you fight? Will you stand with us?’
Some small part of her wanted to claim that it was not her fight, but in truth she knew that this was everyone’s fight, and the mood about the fire had caught her up just as it had caught so many.
‘I will bring my warband!’ she shouted, as loud as she could. The Plague People had come too far without being shown that the world they were invading had teeth.
5
Hesprec remembered a Kasra’s son from a hundred years ago, the most beautiful man she had ever set eyes on. He had been his mother’s pride and joy, but he had not lived to be Kasra. A fever had taken him that all the lore of the Serpent had not been able to draw from his body. Hesprec had sat by his bedside at the end and watched the heat of his disease consume him, bright in his eyes and gleaming just beneath the surface of his skin. He had never stopped being beautiful, not even when the fever had hollowed him out.
That was what the Pale Shadow People reminded her of. They were beautiful – as statues could be beautiful when executed by a master. Their beauty hid a gnawing disease though. It was not their soullessness, or not just that, nor was it the legendary hunger of the Plague People. There was a sickness abroad in the Oldest Kingdom.
Galethea had led them through the overgrown streets of that ancient place, and every sight had only shown the Serpents that the world of their anc
ient enemies was collapsing in upon itself. The stories they had inherited had told of a city of gold, every wall a library of carven knowledge, every word set with gems. Hesprec had been more than prepared to find all that no more than hyperbole, and certainly the gold and the jewels were, unsurprisingly, absent. The carvings had been there, though, and she ground her teeth to think what knowledge had been lost. Everywhere she looked, the stone had crumbled or been worn smooth until what had been written there was lost to the eye. Vines and roots crept up from the ground and creepers fell from the boughs, all with the intent of smothering the stonework and thrusting into every crack to prise it all apart. In other places she saw a deliberate effacement: statues beheaded or their stone faces ground flat (so the eyes of the Serpent can no longer see here?). Elsewhere, the Pale Shadow had evidently tried to emulate their predecessors. Whole walls had been re-faced with new carvings in an alien fashion. She saw marks that were not writing, but aped it, set into orderly rows of meaningless repetition. She saw elaborate geometrical carvings, lines, circles and angles, interlocking and radiating, leading the eye in a spiralling inward dance. And yet many of these had been vandalized too, hacked at and struck from the stone.
‘Those who attacked us?’ she prompted Galethea.
‘Unhoused,’ came the reply, after some shared looks between their pale guides.
‘Meaning more than lacking a roof over their heads.’ Hesprec’s sidelong glance took in a dozen palaces that must have been abandoned for five generations, the jungle swallowing them stone by stone.
‘Renegades,’ Therumit said.
‘Are all the Jaguar renegade?’
‘No.’ Galethea’s answer came swiftly. ‘Those of our house serve us loyally. Those of other houses are happy with their lot. But some are of fallen houses, and others . . .’
‘Are less happy to serve,’ Hesprec finished for her.
‘Ungrateful,’ one of the other Pale Shadow women said.
They were approaching a walled compound where the greenery had at least been held back. White webs spanned the wall-tops and hung about the place like veils, a skittering motion wherever Hesprec looked. She wanted to make some comment to Therumit, about how neither of them would sleep well here. A little humour to puncture the tension had always been her way, old or young. Therumit’s face was so serious though. The words went unsaid. She must see the same sights I do. But if so, Therumit obviously gave them very different weight. Her face still had that hunger for lost times in it, and in that she was almost akin to the Pale Shadow.
Entering the compound of the silk-ragged palace, Hesprec almost thought she could reconstruct the entire history of the Oldest Kingdom from the moment the Serpent had been driven from it. They came as our guests, the stories said, and then they suborned our servants and betrayed our trust. They put themselves in our stead and drove us to new homes on the River. And we were never many, and those who survived the exodus were fewer still, and had so little hope of reclaiming their home that they made a new one along the River. Though some thread of that hope had survived, sufficient to bring Therumit here, and Hesprec in her shadow.
Then they rose and grew mighty. Most of the buildings around her must have post-dated the Serpent exodus. She looked up at the older carvings that sheathed the great tiered walls of the palaces and temples within the compound. She could not read the jagged almost-characters there, nor interpret the interlacing lines of their art. Where the Pale Shadow’s carvers had represented their masters, though, they were shown huge and grand and radiant. Women mostly, those early rulers: some cut in the old style of the Jaguar and the Serpent, stylized in stolen attitudes of benevolence and benediction. Others were cut to be startlingly naturalistic, and Hesprec could read the natures and vices of the originals in those stone masks. She looked on those long-dead queens and kings of the Pale Shadow and knew them to be cruel, proud and arbitrary, and that they must have seen such as virtues to so glorify them in their art.
But those were old, those exacting carved portraits. They had been cherished, but she saw the cracks and the wear of centuries on them. Their lips and eyes had been painted and repainted, and she could read the longer and longer intervals in which anyone had cared to take up the brush, for they were flaked and the colours faded. The silk hangings that graced the walls, which were shot through with gold and silver, were washed out, the images hard to descry. What she did see hinted at a history stretching back to the times before the Pale Shadow came to trouble the Serpent. There were great armies shown there, seen from a lordly distance so that the fighting knots of men might as well have been ants. There were unfamiliar ships pitching upon great waves, and terrifying beasts made of hooks and blades and too many legs which made the ubiquitous spiders seem tame and harmless in comparison. And yet she could see, too, that many of these tapestries were but copies of the past, copies of copies perhaps. Whoever had woven the image of that ship had never seen the ship itself. She could find the most ragged and light-bleached of the hangings and plot their descendants, generation to generation, each more stylized than the last until the image of ship and wave had become a mere abstract swirl of lines and colours.
Whatever the Pale Shadow had been, it was that no longer. And perhaps there had always been a core of rot, a lack of inspiration. Where the Pale Shadow had ordered their servants to raise palaces to their greater glory, the style was that of the halls the Serpents had left behind. The Jaguar masons had simply carried on their traditions, and the Pale Shadow had brought nothing new to their craft.
There was spider imagery more often than Hesprec was happy with, and she could not help noting that it was generally newer than the rest. Columns had chains of the creatures forming ascending helices up to the web-dusty ceilings. The brighter tapestries showed tessellated arachnids, mazes of interlocking legs, or else individual monsters rendered in a thousand attitudes of waiting and hunting, threat and display. The new art overlaid the old and its constant repetition of theme spoke of a strange desperation. Yes, the Patient Ones of the River revered Old Crocodile, but they did not practise such a mindless echoing of his image.
With that thought, Hesprec wondered if she had found the secret after all. She itched for a moment alone to take counsel with Therumit, but most likely their hosts would have ears everywhere. Ears and eyes and legs, far too many legs.
And then Galethea was breaking out into a grander chamber, and the two Serpents were abruptly standing before some three score of the Pale Shadow, and twice that many Jaguar. And did they lead us through all those little halls so they had time to assemble this host?
There was a throne at the far end of the chamber, and for a moment Hesprec thought that, too, was cut in the shape of a spider, its limbs arching upwards around its occupant like a cage. Then she blinked and saw it for a half-open flower, leaves and petals carved from a single piece of white stone. The workmanship was fine and old and she wondered whether this was something left over from her own ancestors’ craft, still used by the usurpers so long after.
A woman sat in the throne, haughty and pale as any of the old stone images they had passed. She might have been three decades old or six, her skin so pale as to be near translucent. She wore silks dyed blue and red, ornamented with gold and precious stones, fantastically elaborate in the interweaving of layers and colours. A high collar stretched behind her, spined and spread like a fish’s fin. Clusters of gems dotted her robe, and Hesprec saw they had been fixed to the shells of tethered insects that wandered on mindless, circular paths, so that the eye was constantly being drawn to their glittering burdens.
Such finery! And yet Hesprec had a keen eye. She saw where that fabulous garment had been darned, where a previous owner had trailed the hem too long on the ground. All around was the height of the Pale Shadow finery, gathered to overawe their visitors, and she could see the holes and the stains, the missing stones, the unravelling threads. Some instinct prompted her to glance up and she had to fight back a shudder. The lofty ceiling wa
s a dusty mass of ragged webs: just as the city was time-worn cast-off upon cast-off, so the spiders had recreated the same story with their own art, knotted with the corpses of desiccated flies.
And it is the same with their faces. With such a host of the Pale Shadow to examine she could pick out the common sickness afflicting them. Even that matriarch on the throne was gripped by the same fever, and many were worse. The hunger – the need – in their eyes as they stared at the two Serpents was palpable. It seemed to reach out towards them, then flinch away, fearful of what it might find. For her part, Therumit could match the Pale Shadow pride for pride, and she made her simple white robes seem more than the equal of all those jewels and faded colours.
‘You are made welcome to the House of the August Hand,’ the matriarch declared, the words comprehensible though given a stronger twist of accent than Galethea’s. There was such masterly arrogance in her voice that Hesprec wondered whether the speaker saw all the signs of decay, internal and external, or whether to her it was all gleaming and new. The Pale Shadow queen waved her slender hand, and dust motes glittered in the wan light like tiny jewels. ‘Long has it been since the Serpent was our guest.’
Hesprec waited for Therumit to make some caustic rejoinder, for the queen made it sound as though the Serpent had simply been poor friends, to leave the visit so long. Centuries, it has been centuries and yet she speaks as though we had just been away a year, and all been close as kin before then.
‘Yes, long,’ Therumit said dismissively. ‘Let us not talk of past hospitality.’ She waved her hand dismissively, and that, apparently, was that. No raking up of the old grievances, no accusations of the betrayed against the betrayer. ‘Much water has flowed since then. Much has flowed, even, since your emissaries came to me in the Estuary.’ And now she was waiting for the queen’s response, and Hesprec recalled that the early overtures of the Pale Shadow had not been well received. Galethea was not the first ambassador, but she was the first to return alive. ‘So long we have been away, and you did not think to invite us back,’ and here was what Hesprec had expected, that hard tone she well remembered from a dozen arguments with the woman. ‘But now you desire us to come and see your wonders.’
The Hyena and the Hawk (Echoes of the Fall Book 3) Page 5
