‘You have to go. I will die here. I have no strength left.’
‘Is the food poison?’
‘It is not hunger. I’m hurt, Hesprec. They hurt me, and it burns.’ Even the thought of escape brought back the pain and she shrank from it. Better to just lie here and just let go . . .
‘Show me.’ Hesprec was all business. When Maniye tried to ignore her she just demanded again and again, until surely the guard was within a whisker of hearing. If only to shut her up, Maniye turned and pulled up the thin white shift she had been given. She did not look, herself. She did not want to see how it must be consuming her, purpling and then blackening the flesh, eating deep into her innards. In her mind, the wound was a great abscess, enough to put a hand into, shining with the corruption of the Plague People.
She flinched as Hesprec shifted, even though the girl could not have touched her through the cell’s wall.
‘It is a severe wound,’ the Serpent admitted in her whisper-voice.
Maniye could only nod.
‘It must gnaw at you.’
Nod.
‘Escaping this place would put a great strain on it.’
The very thought made Maniye grit her teeth.
‘Maniye, I have some Serpent magic for you, a great secret of my people,’ Hesprec told her. ‘You must stay very still, and in your mind see the Serpent’s jewelled back that runs even beneath this dead place. The Serpent has been your friend before; you know him well. Call to him now, in your mind.’
Unbidden, behind closed lids, that rainbow path appeared in Maniye’s mind. The Serpent was not like the gods of her cold homeland, who tested all and punished those who failed. The Serpent brought gifts and guidance. She had walked his back before, when life had seemed impossibly hard.
‘The Serpent is within your wound, Maniye,’ Hesprec murmured. ‘He knows poison of all kinds. He draws the hurt from your flesh and takes it to himself. He drinks it, every drop. Where his body passes through you, he brings purification and life, like a river. You understand?’
Despite herself Maniye nodded, lulled by the soft whisper.
‘The wound is gone,’ Hesprec told her. ‘So sudden are the gifts of the Serpent.’
Maniye’s eyes flicked open and she reached within herself for that hurt; ready at any moment to flinch from a resumption of the ache. Yet . . . nothing. For the first time in days she permitted herself to lay a hand where the dart had gone in. There was puckering there, and the flesh was a little tender, but no pus, no oozing corruption, no deep wound.
She sat up suddenly, and still there was no stab of pain. At the entrance, the guard stirred, then lapsed back into his slumber.
‘The Serpent cannot do such things,’ she stated. ‘I know you, old Snake. If you could mend such wounds . . .’
‘Such wounds I can mend, and such wounds alone,’ Hesprec told her. ‘The wounds that are left, when other wounds have come and gone, these the Serpent has power over. For the rest, I have a few remedies the Milk Tear taught me, but the wound in your flesh had healed itself already. Champions have a robust constitution, in my experience. But the weapons of the Plague People are laced with despair like a poison. Small wonder it made a home within your flesh. Small wonder it grew the wound within your mind until you felt its teeth about your heart. And now you must be ready to leave.’
Maniye stared at her, still feeling within her for the great abyss of that wound, and knowing without a shadow of a doubt that Hesprec was right. Was it just the fear of pain, not pain itself? She felt ashamed for her cowardice that had preserved her. I should have let the Champion off its leash and torn them ragged. She felt just the faintest echo of the wound, then, and knew it for all the hurts she had seen done, the failure of the Plainsfolk attack, her own capture, the constant leaden pressure of the fear. How much easier a story it had been to say, I cannot act, I am too hurt, than to know all the chains that bound her.
And yet there were more chains. ‘They will not let me go,’ Maniye told Hesprec.
‘I do not propose asking their permission,’ Hesprec replied mildly. ‘I will find some way.’ And only those last words admitted a little uncertainty. Hesprec had come for her, but for once she had no more plan than this.
‘They will make you fear,’ Maniye whispered. ‘They will drive your soul into hiding until you are no more than a snake.’
‘Remember the three brothers who fought the Plague People in the story? Who held them back, back then? Owl, Bat and Serpent had that honour. I feel my ancestor in me, Maniye. Serpent shields me as the Champion shields you. For now, eat,’ the Serpent advised, and the hunger Maniye had been holding at bay for days took her by the throat and dragged her over to the meat they had left out for her. As a wolf she tore into it, startling the guard into falling from his seat. He came over and stalked about her cell, staring in at her with horrified fascination as she ripped and slobbered. He never saw the tiny serpent coiled beneath the strung floor of her prison.
Then, long into the night, screams erupted from the camp, and Maniye knew that, even if Hesprec had no plan, the Serpent had made a path for them anyway.
14
When the Plague People had taken Where the Fords Meet, if they had simply advanced, they could have swept the world before them. They could have poured across the Plains like a tide, swarmed on the banks of the Tsotec, darkened the skies with their insubstantial wings. But they had delayed, building their new home instead of destroying their enemies to the west and to the south.
Especially to the south, Orabin of the Milk Tear People told himself, because it helped to think of the Sun River Nation as a great hammer poised above the Plague People, ready to come down and smash them. It helped to fight his fear, which was jumping all through him as he hung in the water with only his bulbous toad eyes above it, waiting.
Then the Plaguefolk had gone west. Enough fugitives had come to Tsokawan who had witnessed that fight. The Plains warriors had been broken. First the Plague weapons had killed them, and then had come the Terror that stole minds. Plenty lions on the Plains now. Plenty lions without thumbs trying to remember what they used to be. Orabin felt his warty skin shiver at the thought.
But they had not come south, not even then. They had crouched and spun their webs about the place the Horse had once called home and they had brawled with the Plainsfolk, and all that while their real foe had only grown in strength. Surely they knew nothing of the world, to ignore the River Lords and their allies so.
Brave words. Orabin did not feel brave. The Milk Tear People did not count it amongst the virtues they valued. They had never brought a war to some other tribe’s village. Their god, into whose wide mouth they were born, did not exhort them to rule or fight, but only to live and learn and prosper.
But they were terrors when wronged, were the Milk Tear. Plenty of stories all around the Estuary about those who stole from them or disrespected their Mata, the wise women who ruled them. Enough stories that the other Estuary people treated them with care and seldom crossed them. Sometimes a reputation for vengeance was better than actually having to be vengeful; it was certainly less exerting. The Milk Tear did not like having to work up a sweat.
But the Plaguefolk don’t know those stories.
He blinked, eyes sliding half down into his broad skull then popping up above the waterline again, and he saw shadows in the north, past the edge of the water towards the dry horizon. Heart hammering, he tilted himself back and saw the great blue-grey wings of the Wryneck circling. The enemy were coming.
His nerve faltered, and for a moment he thought about just sinking down into the murky, comforting depths of the lake Chumatla was built on. He was just one young warrior after all. Who would notice if he did not fight? Who would know?
But there was a ready answer for that. Mata Heppa would know. Mata Isilwe would know. And Mata Embe would know most of all, for even the Toad came to her with respect and a downcast gaze. So Orabin would not follow his sinking heart and let himself
hide in the mud of the bottom. He would fight.
He shifted in the water, the slightest paddling with his broad feet to keep him steady, and let himself focus further and further, past where his eyes were happy, until he could see the enemy properly.
Many of them were walking, and he tried to focus on them because they seemed least fearful. Most were tall, strong-framed men, pale as fish bellies, wearing armour banded in black and yellow as though they were warning the world they were poisonous. Some were dark as Riverlanders, though no more familiar-looking for that. Some were slighter of build; a few seemed full grown but were small as children. None of that mattered. Orabin had heard the Plainsfolk talk about their souls, or the hole where their souls should be, but he had not believed them. When his eyes rested on the enemy, it seemed as though clouds covered the sun and the whole world darkened.
And they were many; more warriors than the Milk Tear had brought certainly. Perhaps more than the Milk Tear and the Salt Eaters together. Were there a full hundred of them?
From there, his gaze was drawn to the things that accompanied them. Again, the warnings of the Plainsfolk had not prepared him for the sight of insects large as men, loaded with burdens or trotting at the Plague warriors’ heels like dogs. But for all their size they were still things that Orabin recognized and could understand. His Toad-soul even managed a stab of hunger, for if a water bug or a crayfish was good on the tongue, then here were walking meals that could feed a whole tribe. Their masters were by far the more unnatural.
Then the movement above caught his eye, because of course these Plague creatures could fly. The Wryneck had given over the sky and now human shapes darted there, lifting up from the mass of them to circle overhead, then drop back down, keeping watch. Is it because they do not have the weight of a soul? Orabin wondered. That emptiness within them makes them light, perhaps? And he scrabbled to continue the line of thought, because he could feel the Terror reaching for him.
They know we’re here! But the Terror was not a spear in the hands of the Plague People, it was a cloak that swept all around them.
We will kill them, he told himself, trying to fortify himself against the fear creeping under his skin. This is our land and we will drive them from it. But the traitor thought seeped in: That is what the Plainsfolk said.
By the command of Prince Tecuman, all those who lived in Chumatla had fled for the shadow of Tsokawan. Now the village was just a collection of vacant huts and floating walkways, built out across the surface of the lake. The Plague People paused at the water’s edge, and a party of them set out around the lake’s periphery, but that was a long, long way – when the River Lords had deepened the water here generations ago they had done a good job, making the biggest fish trap the world had ever seen. The majority of the Plague warriors were already crossing, stepping carefully onto the shifting walkways, their gossamer wings seen and then not seen as they caught their balance. Their rod weapons were pointed like arrows at the nearest huts.
Orabin fought his heart, which wanted to speed and speed. He fought his mind, which was screaming to him of how close these unnatural monsters were coming. He fought his legs, which wanted only to kick away into the safe depths.
Without warning they were at the first hut, dropping from the sky to shove their weapons through the doorway, finding no enemies. He could see their mood in the way they moved: tense, frustrated, curious in turns. And stupid, or at least blind to the most obvious of things, things any child of the River would know.
Watch the water. But the Plague People watched the sky and the doorways of the huts, and now they had pushed far enough into abandoned Chumatla that their enemies were all around them. This sign of their fallibility gave Orabin the strength to stave off the Terror. For how long? Abruptly it did not matter, because the signal was rumbling through the water: the shuddering boom of a bull crocodile, more felt through the skin than heard. The Plague People did not react to it: to them it must be just one more alien sound in a world they had no place in.
Orabin found his courage and Stepped.
He had kicked out with his toad legs first, but he erupted from the water’s surface as a man with a bow in his hands, string already drawn back. All around him the first wave of Tsokawan’s forces was leaping up, some springing onto the walkways or the platforms that surrounded the huts, others keeping to the water to loose their shafts.
Many simply missed – there was a lot of panic tugging at the hands that released the bowstrings. Orabin saw his shaft wing past the hollow man he had been aiming at but gash the face of another beyond him. Just a scratch, and the Plague Man slapped at the line of blood irritably, but then he was down, trembling and kicking as the venom took hold. The Milk Tear were no great warriors but they had never needed to be.
In that first moment he thought the entire battle would be done within heartbeats. Milk Tear archers were sending their darts into the ranks of the Plague warriors, and though most just broke against their armour or hung uselessly in cloth, those that pricked even a little could be fatal. Others in the water were rocking the walkways, trying to tumble the invaders into the water where the River Lords cruised, long jaws hungry. Some of Old Crocodile’s children were in amongst the Plaguefolk, lashing at them with stone-toothed maccan swords. Above circled the Wryneck, Stepping for the heartbeat it took to loose an arrow and then catching themselves on their wings before they could fall.
Death to the Plague People! Orabin whooped and sent another shaft at them, almost expecting there to be no living enemy left by the time it landed.
But the Plague warriors’ armour was strong metal. The teeth of the maccan shattered against it; arrows could not pierce it. Instead of topple into the waiting jaws of the crocodiles, most of their warriors had wings that could right them. After that initial flurry, Orabin saw that, no, they were not all dead; they were not even mostly dead. Perhaps a dozen had fallen in the ambush but the others had drawn together and weathered the assault, letting the fury and the shock of it vanish into the holes they had for hearts. Their faces had no fear in them, just a bloody-minded determination.
Then they turned the killing back on their attackers. They stabbed at the River Lord soldiers with blades of silver metal that made no distinction between hide and armour, flesh and bone, but clove through them all equally. Death sped from the rods they carried, so that the Heron warriors above were plucked from the sky, the great graceful birds turned in an instant into sodden masses of dead feathers as they struck the water. Their darts, too fast to see, skipped over the water and pierced the soft bodies of the Milk Tear People. Orabin saw his uncle die, his cousin, then his oldest friend, and none of them even saw their death before it touched them.
The attack faltered, surprise lost. The Plague warriors kept killing, and now the Terror came rolling out that had been driven back while the warriors of Tsokawan thought they were winning. Orabin felt it grip him and pry into his mind. Flee! it said, but it did not mean the mud at the bottom of the lake, or to run to the far reaches of the river, or even to go to some far-distant land. There is no place you can go that will be safe from the Plague People, that fear told him. There is only one direction that will let you escape them. You must flee inside yourself, where they cannot find you. He felt the need screaming in his ears. He was floundering through the water then, trying to get away and yet knowing the urge was right: there was no escaping this on human feet. But he did not Step. He did not Step because he knew that if he took his toad shape now, his mind would burrow deep into that amphibian flesh and never come back. All around him he saw his kin, faces twisted in horror, and some of them were abruptly just large toads kicking off into the water, and in their bulbous, staring eyes there was no human connection, no empathy, no shared bonds of family. He was losing them. They were losing the fight. They were losing everything. The fear took him in its jaws and gaped wide to devour him.
And then the others arrived.
Lekat was one of twelve; the Hidden People w
ere never numerous nor much liked by the other Estuary tribes. Still, when Tsokawan called they had come to fight the great enemy of the old stories.
The Terror had frozen her even as she braced herself to strike at the enemy. She had thought that, unseen as she was, their power would likewise overlook her. It was a poisoning of the very air though.
She stood beside one of Chumatla’s huts within three steps of the enemy, invisible to them. Naked, her skin painted with the intricate, eye-watering patterns that were the secrets of the Hidden Ones’ priests, she blended perfectly with the wood and the cane. She kept one eye on the foe, another open for the signal.
The Milk Tear and the others were falling back, and a bitter despair rose in her throat as she saw them transform: human to beast, and not just Stepped but lost. Like so many others, she had not believed it. Everyone knew Plainsfolk were great liars. Except this, the most incredible of their tales, had been truth.
But then the drumming started – the Rain Watchers on the far bank sending the signal for the rest of the warriors to attack. Madness! Lekat thought, because this was a time for flight, not rushing into that hideous wall of fear. Brave men might charge in, but only beasts would exit that invisible barrier. Lekat could feel its claws in her, and only the knowledge that she was beyond their notice was keeping her from it.
But they came, the warriors of Tsokawan and the Estuary. The water was abruptly running with the ridged backs of crocodiles, the crested bodies of lizards and the hard shells of turtles. Toads leapt onto the walkways and became desperate, terrified men and women with bows and flint knives. Salt Eaters, dark men in sharkskin cloaks wielding clubs of whalebone, rushed forward with fear-widened eyes. And Lekat waited for that terror to consume them all, because it cared nothing for numbers and it already had its hooks in them.
The Hyena and the Hawk (Echoes of the Fall Book 3) Page 15
