He shambled over and sat down himself, keeping a careful distance. Even seated on the ground, he towered. ‘If we could just do your part, and save the rest, I’d be happy.’
‘You do not want to fight? They call you Warbringer now, don’t they?’
The pain that came to his face surprised her. ‘Many died when we fought the Plague People. Died, or were lost. And we will have to do it again, and maybe many times, before they will let you talk to them. But I don’t want it. Not our deaths, not even killing them. I just want it done the quickest way.’
‘That is why you are war leader,’ Kailovela told him, ‘and not Yellow Claw.’
11
They had moved her from the tent of dead things. She awoke in another cage-within-a-cage, and with her wrists bound with metal, but still they had not collared her. Maniye felt her souls stir rebelliously, but at the same time she was weak, and there were Plague warriors staring at her.
She stared right back, feeling the Terror eroding away the Champion’s bulwark, trying to get her mind to flee deep inside her, her body to become a beast’s only. But she held out.
Their expressions, at least, were wary, but she had noticed that they had no great courage themselves – as befitted creatures that breathed fear, perhaps. They were miserly with their hollow little lives.
Some word must have been given out, because one of them came in that she recognized. It was the dark Plague Man, the one who had been so deft with his knives in the tent of corpses. Now his stained apron and his knives were not in evidence, and he had a fellow, a stout woman very similar to him, whose greying hair was drawn back severely from her round face. They both stared at her for a long time, but it was not a warrior’s stare. Rather, they reminded her of hunters examining a trail made by a beast they did not know.
She shifted uncomfortably. Rather the hostile glower of the guards than this calm scrutiny.
They talked to each other, or at least made gabbly sounds she guessed was speech, and then they went, and that was that.
Maniye understood her duty then. She heard the Champion’s voice in her heart: Step, and kill as many as you can. It would not be many, she knew. She was still weak, and their weapons were terrifying. She did not know why she was not already dead.
Or she did: it was written in the faces of the two who had come to stare at her. They were curious about her.
Why me? Why no other prisoners?
That night, she thought over it. They had fed her, in their way – some kind of stew with precious little meat in it, which sat leaden in her stomach and kept her up half the night with nausea. The answer came just before the moon went down: she had seen what had happened to their other captives, butchered and preserved in the tent of dead things. Only Maniye had lived, because she shared their shape. Only she had shown them a living human face.
And they’re curious. Perhaps they think there is some secret in me that can defeat all the peoples? Perhaps they will cut me open soon, to try and find it.
She thought of her pack, abruptly, Spear Catcher and the rest. All dead now, perhaps, or had they scattered and fled with the Plains people, to fall in some desperate last stand another day? Or had they come for her, and fallen to the invisible lances of the Plague People or run mad with the Terror, and here she was, oblivious of their futile sacrifice? Soon enough, the thought of them became a part of that constant, sapping ache within her, pain and grief and guilt all tangled up together.
The Champion made its demands again, but she fought them down. It had its honour, but when she reached for her own she found it had been wounded and broken by the darts of the Plague warriors. Every thought of resistance stirred the deep, feverish ache of her wound as it tunnelled into the heart of her. She did not want to die in a final flurry of teeth and blades. When I am a little stronger, she told the Champion, and a few days later, when she might have been a little stronger, When I am a little stronger still.
And in between her confrontations with her soul she fell into a strange routine. She was fed, and they gave her a metal bowl to void her bowels in. She marvelled that metal – iron! – was so plentiful to them that it was used even for such menial things. There were guards who watched her through all these tasks, and they took shifts in turn but their faces seemed interchangeable. And each day the two curious Plague People came to study her. She could not work out what they were for. Plainly they were not hunters, nor did she ever see them at any other useful task, but they did not have the air of priests. The woman drew pictures sometimes. The man had the guards bring Maniye out of the cell and measured various parts of her. She felt the Champion roar, deep in the recesses of her skull, but it seemed to be further away now. Perhaps it would abandon her for the coward she was, and one day the Plague People would find just a wolf or a tiger staring dumbly at them through their gauzy walls.
Then they tried to speak to her.
They made their sounds, at first as fast as a woodpecker’s drumming, then slowed down and given heavy emphasis, as though that made them any easier to comprehend. The Plague Man would hold up objects, some familiar, some mysterious, and repeat sounds to Maniye, who just stared sullenly back. The woman sketched out pictures of things. Most of these were baffling to Maniye, abstract lines and corners that meant nothing. One she recognized as a horse, though the perspective was strange, and tears welled in her eyes as she remembered Alladai, who she knew now she had loved, and who had been wiped from the world with most of his people. Once or twice, listening to their babble or staring dully at their scribbling, she felt herself on the brink of a great chasm of understanding, as though all their madness might suddenly fall into patterns of reason. She shied away from such revelation. It was a door through which her souls could not pass. She did not want to become the empty thing she would surely have to be, to make room for their meaning.
Day in, day out, they came. She felt them becoming frustrated. She felt no pressing need to respond to them.
One picture, though, she could not ignore. It was crude work, a poor likeness, but she saw the Champion there, as if a child had sketched it. The Plague Woman pointed at it, then at her, and made more of her babble.
‘Yes,’ Maniye told them. ‘I have a soul. You cannot understand that, can you? I am of the true people. You are just our echo.’
The Plague Woman seemed to find this a triumph, and scribbled away on the thin bark she used to draw on. Maniye craned to see, despite herself, but it was just lines of scratchings, no picture of anything she could recognize.
A few days later, they brought in one of the children.
He was a Plains child, and she guessed he had probably been born to the Horse about seven years before. The thought made her imagination push towards how it had been, when the Plague came to Where the Fords Meet. The Terror would have rolled down upon the people of the Horse, driving their minds away. The marshes around their home would have been mad with panicking horses sinking haunch-deep in the muddy ground as they careened off the paths, screaming as their legs broke. The defensible stronghold of the Horse Society must have become a deathtrap, and into it the Plague warriors would descend, their rods spitting death like invisible hornets.
But the children would have no Horse shapes to be forced into. They were yet to gain their souls. Maniye had barely thought of it, save to assume they must all be dead.
The boy did not want to speak to her at first, but the dark Plague Man was at his shoulder, pushing him, making sounds. And the Horse boy shook his head and said ‘Hkt! Hkt!’ That was how Maniye learned a word of Plague-speech despite herself. No, he was saying.
‘Speak to me,’ she said, as kindly as she could, but the boy was more and more agitated, caught between the soulless creatures that had claimed him and this reminder of his life before. Eventually, they took him out.
The boy would never get his soul, she knew. And what would that make him? When he was full grown, cut off from the gods and the cycle of birth and rebirth, what would he be? He wo
uld be a Plague Man, just another of the consuming host. Would he even remember that his parents had souls and were human?
When she was left alone again, save for the stony gaze of the guards, she could not keep from weeping. Helplessness, her injuries, the obliteration of the Horse, the end of everything she knew, it built and built within her until she was screaming, raging at the unseen sky. She Stepped then, howling her pain out, hissing at the world with wide cat-eyes and flattened ears, roaring into the faces of the warriors who had come running. She did not tear through the walls though. The fear was buried in her. She did not want more hurt, more weakness.
When she was done she was human again, standing there with her metal fetters at her feet, loosed the moment she Stepped. The two curious Plague People were back. They had watched her pain and anger, and made careful notes.
* * *
The armies of the Sun River Nation were slow to muster, but then the Nation had never needed all of them at once. Usually they were deployed against raiders – Plainsmen or the Dragon, and some small fraction would suffice, raised locally or an elite detachment sent downriver from Atahlan.
Tecumet was taking the Plague People seriously. She had sent her Kasrani Asman ahead with scouts, her brother was raising the many and diverse forces of the Estuary, and she had sent word to every village and clan chief, ordering them all to bring their spears. Here, on the north bank of the Tsotec some miles downriver from Atahlan, was the greatest gathering of Riverland soldiers that history would ever record.
She had four score scribes keeping track of the soldiers, the supplies, the gold and flint and leather, and a dozen priests overseeing them. It was a testament to the lessons of the Serpent over the generations that there was a corps of men and women who could count and calculate and set it all down in writing, so that of all those soldiers not one starved, not one was missing a helm or a blade.
And still there were matters that required her attention, or troubled the courts of the priests. There would always be clan rivalries, enmities passed down from parent to child from some mythical time when they offended us. Punishments for breaking discipline were severe, but human nature would find a way to express itself nonetheless. Add in the Plainsfolk and the problem doubled and then doubled again.
Most Riverlanders knew the Plainsmen as raiders. There had never been a great deal of love between the Nation and the many tribes of its northern neighbours. Now there were hundreds of Plainsfolk in Tecumet’s camp, and her people were being asked to welcome them.
Some were simply messengers, because intelligence from the north was at a premium right now. She had received Asman’s report at around the same time as the Plainsfolk themselves were telling her the same thing, that a force of their warriors had already been broken by the Plague People. Now the spears of the Plains were gathering west of that battlefield as they tried to prevent the Plague’s spread. The number of their warriors was dwarfed by the numbers of their refugees, however, and while most of them sought sanctuary further west, plenty were descending on the river, desperate for aid. Many of Tecumet’s advisers told her to turn them away, but the Serpent disagreed. Esumit Aras Talien and her fellows were making provision for any who fled the fighting to the north: finding them what shelter and food was to be had, though it strained their supplies to breaking point. Tecumet had followed the Serpent’s guidance. If nothing else, aiding the children and the hearth-keepers of the Plains warriors would make them more likely to fight under the direction of the River when the time came.
And yet there was friction. There were face-offs, fights, deaths even. The refugees were many, frightened and desperate. The Riverlanders were all too often hostile and grudging. And that was before taking into account the small number who had come just to cause trouble, it seemed. Some bands of Plainsfolk had no cares about the Plague People, but simply stole and raided and intimidated locals and refugees both. Tecumet had received plenty of reports about the Laughing Men in particular, who held all others’ laws in scorn. She could only hope that they would add their spears to the rest when the fight came, but until then they were a constant thorn in her side.
Tecumet was strong for her people. She walked in their sight, with the formal robes of her position and her savage war mask. She stood in their sight while Esumit made rousing speeches in her name. And then she retreated into her own palatial tent and shucked off all the burdens of state, and collapsed, feeling the shadow of the Plague People looming high over her.
At least I have Tecuman still. The thought of facing this crisis without him was terrifying. We came so close to killing each other.
Lying there after dark, in the only solitude the world afforded her, she fought for sleep. The murmurous sound of a thousand people reached her: talking, snoring, crying. Beyond that, she seemed to hear the soul of the world itself moaning in fear and hurt as the Plague ate into it, an infected wound whose rot only spread. Sleep would not come for her, and she was left with tortured imaginings: the last Kasra of the Sun River Nation presiding over the death of the entire world.
Then someone moved at the entrance to her sleeping chamber and she froze, picturing Plague People assassins; picturing, despite herself, Plainsfolk raiders, because she had grown up on the same tales as her people after all.
But it was Esumit of the Serpent, her right hand. Tecumet sat up hurriedly, because the priestess would not disturb her without good cause.
‘What is it?’ What has gone wrong now?
‘Kasra . . . Hesprec Essen Skese is in the camp.’
Abruptly Tecumet was wide awake.
Like so many petitioners before her, Hesprec met with Tecumet along with Esumit Aras Talien, currently the most influential of Atahlan’s priesthood, and therefore of all the Serpent. Unlike so many others, Hesprec would not be asking Esumit to intervene with the Kasra. In fact, she might be doing the precise opposite. Therumit had not let her great rival Esumit in on her plan to travel to the Oldest Kingdom, nor even that the Pale Shadow had begun making overtures. Now it would all come out.
In the Kasra’s tent, with the ruler stripped of masks and ceremony, Hesprec told them as much as she thought was wise. The ancient usurper and enemy had made contact with the Serpents of the Estuary. Therumit had begun a dialogue. The Plague People had been mentioned. She and Therumit had gone on a journey.
What she held back pertained to the Pale Shadow’s deepest desires: to cross that divide that separated the soulless from the ensouled; to fill the hollowness within them. That was a matter for the Serpent alone. Enough that Tecumet knew she had more allies than she had guessed, although of a most doubtful nature.
Esumit’s tightly controlled expression promised angry words in the near future, but before Tecumet she held her peace. If Hesprec had expected the Kasra to just swallow every bite without comment, though, she was to be disappointed. Most especially she wished to see the Pale Shadow ambassador.
Hesprec had walked Galethea through the press of the camp, and the experience had deeply disconcerted her. She had expected the woman to go hooded and veiled, to hide the emptiness within. Instead, the Pale Shadow woman had let the world see her face. There had been many stares – and more than a few admiring. Of course, most of the Riverlanders had never laid eyes on the Plague People themselves. They had no basis for comparison, that was what Hesprec had told herself. But then there had been the Plainsfolk, come fleeing that enemy, and many must have stolen a glimpse before the Terror drove them away. And yet nobody was drawing the obvious conclusion. Galethea was exotic and unfamiliar, but they did not see past her face to the nightmare depths.
Looking at her charge, Hesprec had seen why. As some wealthy River youth might use cosmetics to disguise a disfigurement, so Galethea had painted over her hollow core somehow. Hesprec could see it, if she reminded herself that it was there, but there was a magic the Pale woman had layered about herself that bewildered and enticed the eye.
This is how they fooled us when they first came, she thoug
ht, and it was a salutary lesson, reminding her how little she could trust these creatures. But let them help us now, and we can sit in judgement on them later if needs be.
And now Galethea stood before the Kasra of the Sun River Nation, practically radiating glamour and charm. Esumit stared at her, slit-eyed as though trying to glare at the sun, while Tecumet herself kept her face without expression, as though the mask was still there.
She asked what help the Pale Shadow could bring, and Hesprec heard Galethea trot out the same answers: insight and understanding of their enemy. At what cost? The familiar story of a common enemy, wrongs lost in the mists of time. The words fell flat before Esumit, whose suspicious glower had only grown as each one was uttered.
‘The timing of this is convenient,’ the priestess remarked coldly. ‘A perfect opportunity for the Plague People to place a spy amongst us.’
Hesprec found herself about to launch into a defence of her charge – already they divide us against each other! – but she was cut short when Galethea laughed.
It was no part of her act, that laugh. It came not from the mannered face of the beguiling diplomat, but from whatever passed for a heart within her. ‘Do you see them spying on you?’ she burst out. ‘Do they send many to infiltrate your camp and learn your plans? Have you had any sense that they even care what you plan or what you think?’
Esumit had an answer, but she too was stalled, this time by a gesture from Tecumet.
‘Speak,’ ordered the Kasra.
‘Great Lady,’ Galethea addressed her, ‘my people understand your people, because we have lived long amongst you and learned by rote your words and your expressions. And they must be learned, generation to generation; there remains a divide that separates us. That divide counts a thousand times for the Plague People, our distant kin. They have no concept of you, they may not even have noticed that you are at war with them. If they have, then probably they take it as you might take a pride of jaguars moving to hunt your herds, or an infestation of rats in your grain. They cannot imagine you, Great Lady. You are not real to them. It took us many generations before you were real to us.’
The Hyena and the Hawk (Echoes of the Fall Book 3) Page 12
