The Hyena and the Hawk (Echoes of the Fall Book 3)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  A knife drove into her side and she turned on the wielder, crushing his brittle flesh in her jaws. A club broke across her back, sending a shock of pain through her. Her iron swallowed the teeth of the blow but the force still bruised her. She Stepped to the Champion again, but the slope of the ceiling cramped her, even as she scraped away a dozen little bodies against the stone. Some of the hands clinging to her were human, now, their weight dragging her down. Some of the teeth sunk into her were human too. She could no longer tell the difference.

  Another cultist waved a burning brand at her face. Snarling, she closed her jaws on him, the moment’s sear of the fire a cleaner pain by far than the teeth that were chewing at every inch of her, scrabbling to find the thinner skin where even her armoured hide could not keep them out.

  And then the Rat Speaker rose up before her, his front a slick horror of gore and struggling rodents, and drove his knife at her neck. He made a broad sweep of it, the razor edge driven through her with mad strength. If she had been the Champion when he struck he would have flooded the room with her blood. Her souls knew better than she did, in that moment. She dropped down into the wolf-shape and the worst of the blow missed her, but still he knocked her onto her side. Instantly they were on her, more hands than she could count, forcing her down, grappling with the bucking, snarling beast until they had her by the throat and she was a kicking, shrieking girl instead, Rat bodies swarmed over her, burrowing at the hems of her mail, their filthy teeth worrying at her.

  The Speaker raised his blade high. She could see he was dying; part of her whispered that he was already dead but such distinctions mattered nothing to the Rat. From the least of all gods to the greatest, feeding on the corpse of hope as the Plague People spread across the land. Perhaps Rat was right. Perhaps one day it would feast on Plague bones and drive them mad within their white-walled fortresses. Perhaps Rat would survive, the only remainder of all the ways and stories of the true people.

  Looked at that way, she was playing her part by dying here.

  The knife came down, but a lean grey wolf lunged past, jaws closing about the man’s bloody throat. A hyena and a serpent were fighting the people holding her, trying to break her from their grasp. Beyond them all, the fires were dying. The darkness was descending on them, that had dwelled in this place for a hundred years. Maniye looked up and saw a great tide of vermin, high as mountains, high as the stars. It fell on them all and she lost hope and dropped into the dark.

  24

  Loud Thunder was waiting for her when she returned, with a face like his name. She had never really seen him angry – and he seemed like a man who perhaps could never work himself up to real rage, but he was close then. When Kailovela Stepped to drop down where Mother lounged in her sled, his face was all knotted up with the feelings he was trying to stopper.

  ‘What have you done?’ he demanded, flapping a hand at the open sky above that she had stooped from.

  Kailovela took a long breath. ‘I have seen where the Plague People are and what they’re doing.’

  ‘Why?’ he barked out.

  She faced up to him, knowing from bitter experience that the first step backwards from any angry man would never be the last. So she stood and told him. ‘Because the Owl go only at night, and the warriors of the Hawk say many words but keep to their tents while the sun shines.’ She scowled. ‘It’s been days now since they attacked our camp; since we fled them. And we have been blind. And I wanted to see.’

  ‘Do you–?’ Thunder started. ‘What if–? They–!’ The words crammed his mouth and refused to order themselves, and now his anger turned itself inwards on himself, because he was Loud Thunder and everything was his fault.

  She thought of the Pale Shadow woman, the one the Southmen had brought who was somehow Plague and not-Plague all at once. Without letting herself think or doubt, she put a hand to Thunder’s bare arm, feeling the slab-like muscles there beneath their covering of fat and rough, hairy skin. He could snap her into pieces like kindling, but while her hand was on him he was powerless. And could I have done this with Yellow Claw? she wondered. She felt the power move in her. The Plague People power. The power I shouldn’t have.

  ‘You know the skies don’t belong to the Eyrie any more,’ he said harshly, but she could feel the anger drain from him, as though she had cut a hole in him with her touch.

  ‘I saw them flying,’ she told him. ‘But they do not fly as high as a hawk, and a hawk’s eyes can see from where the clouds sit.’

  Thunder looked past her at Mother. ‘Tell her,’ he almost begged. ‘Tell her she mustn’t.’

  Mother chuckled darkly. ‘Oh, idiot child, when you set her free of all chains, what did you think? That she would roost on your hand and eat sweetmeats from your mouth?’ Abruptly the huge woman pushed herself to her feet, the slow strength of the Bear moving in her, then fading again when she was standing, pretending to be just an old woman. ‘Anyway, it’s done now. She went; she came back. She saw things. Tonight the Owl and the Eyrie will come to my fire to tell me all that they saw. You, you with the long bird name, you’ll come too.’ She scowled at Kailovela for a moment as though she’d never seen the Eyriewoman before. ‘Perhaps we need a proper name for you. “Kailovela” is like chewing sticks.’

  ‘The Eyrie—’ Kailovela started.

  ‘They don’t; with their women, they don’t give names.’ Mother’s thick grey hair slapped about her face as she shook her head. ‘So I shouldn’t wait for them. I should do it.’

  She Stepped, ending the conversation beyond any argument, and shuffled off, her swag-belly rumbling hungrily.

  ‘Will you stand before the Eyrie and speak, then?’ Thunder asked her. For a moment she thought he was taunting her as Yellow Claw might have done, but his anger had washed away as it always would have done. There was only concern in him now.

  Abruptly she felt sick that she had found that ability in herself and used it on anyone, let alone poor confused Loud Thunder. It is wrong. It is a thing of the enemy. Why is it in me?

  ‘I’ll speak,’ she said. She would speak, but there were things she would not speak of. She had not just flown out to idly spy, after all. She had flown because she might have been needed to bear witness to a death.

  ‘What is it, now?’ he asked awkwardly, sensing the hurt but not knowing how to make it better. He stood very close, and yet he would not touch her. Perhaps he, too, was worried about breaking her.

  I have found that I do not break so easily, since you freed me.

  ‘I must go to my son,’ she said, trying to make the words sound like a mother’s. The thought only deepened the wound in her. Is this why I don’t feel for my boy like other mothers do? Because I am hollow somewhere inside?

  Thunder was mumbling a question about the child, who was with Quiet When Loud, the Coyote taking the opportunity to play mother before she must be one for real. Kailovela waved his words away. For a moment she was about to tell him the real reason she had flown out to watch the Plague People, but she bit back the words. Not while the anger was still cooling in him; not the best time to reveal one more little betrayal.

  Later, Mother found a big rock out in the grassland and made herself a nest of furs there – or at least she had Loud Thunder build one, and then deigned to sit in it. Those who had something to say could come to her there and speak, while Two Heads Talking and Quiet When Loud sat at her feet and murmured advice.

  Mother had called for those who had flown over the Plains to the east, but plenty more had come to hear what the scouts had to say. A restless gathering of the wise and the wary and the curious made a loose half-circle around Mother’s rock, representatives from every tribe and warband.

  They had lost many the night the Plague People attacked. The Swift Back hunters were almost all gone – some dead, but there were plenty of lost wolves at large on the Plains now. The Plague warriors had killed any other that the light of the Swift Back fire had touched, holding their weapons ready and taking any
target that came. After the Bat had routed them from their post, they had joined their fellows in bedevilling the Plainsfolk. A great despair had swept the Plains refugees the moment word of the Plague People had come to them. What had started as an orderly retreat had turned swiftly into a panicked stampede as those who could not fight had fled with whatever they could carry, or just fled, empty-handed, Stepped, ridden by the Terror. Nobody knew how many had died, but the Plague People themselves had slain few of them. Fear and the heedless feet of the runners had done far worse.

  Now here came an old hunter of the Many Mouths – not one of the scouts Mother wanted to hear, but he had sour news that must be told. His people cast down a score of wolf pelts before her rock. He and other Wolves had risked their souls to run east under the shadow of the Plague People, not to fight, but to hunt down their lost brethren of the Swift Backs. Each pelt was a former warrior lost to the Terror, soul now freed to be reborn in the north. No comment was made as the tally of those skins mounted. At least one hunting party had not returned.

  Mother sat solemnly through this, though Thunder knew it was not what she was interested in. The Bear seldom had time for the griefs of others, but she had all the wisdom her people generally lacked.

  There were others after, who wanted to speak – this Deer or this Tiger who had also braved the east – but abruptly Mother’s patience wore through and she just looked straight over at the little knot of Eyriemen, her silent expectation drowning out everything else.

  The Owl priestess, Seven Mending, spoke first, for those who had sailed the night skies. ‘They have come to where the Plainsfolk were camped,’ she said simply. ‘Like they have with villages, they are making the place their own. The white walls are already up – they make a large circle. Their beasts are spinning their tents within it.’

  ‘But what do they want, now?’ an old Plains Boar demanded. Haven’t they taken enough? was the echo behind the words, but Thunder shook his head. They were the Plague People. They were always hungry. There was no ‘enough’ in their world. Even as he thought it, Aritchaka of the Tiger was loudly saying just the same, full of scorn for a needless question, but the old Boar persisted.

  ‘It is different now!’ he told them, his harsh, cracking voice rising over the growing murmurs. ‘Before, it was as if we were their dream that they never quite believed in. Now they send a warband to our fires.’

  ‘It was the Rivermen!’ someone else insisted. ‘They fought them at Tsokawan and now they will come for every one of us!’

  Thunder’s heart sank, and he was braced when another voice called out, ‘It was the Northmen!’ for the same reasons, and it seemed the whole gathering would degenerate into finger-pointing. Then Mother stood, and that silenced everyone. She was not angry. Her expression was the usual one of sleepy boredom, but everyone’s words made way for her voice when she said, ‘Where is the Hawk woman?’

  The Eyrie delegation exchanged glances, for certainly there were no women of the Hawk amongst them, but then Kailovela was stepping forward, her child fussing and whimpering at her breast. The assembled gaze of all the tribes was hard upon her, so many covetous eyes.

  ‘You went by day over their places,’ Mother pointed out. ‘So, tell. What did you see?’

  Kailovela swallowed but she kept her head high. ‘This new place the Plague People are building, it is not just some camp of theirs. There are not so many warriors there.’

  ‘All Plague People are warriors,’ one of the Lion called, and Thunder cut him off.

  ‘They’re not. When we came to their place in the north, some fought and some fled.’ And apparently his voice was strong enough, too, to bring back the silence.

  ‘There are many kinds of Plague People. The Champion Many Tracks said as much, when she escaped from them,’ Kailovela told them all, and the name set another twinge of worry in Thunder’s gut, because Maniye had not been seen since the attack either. ‘This place of theirs is not a warband’s camp, it is a prison.’

  That stilled any errant muttering, set all ears waiting for her next words. Because the Owl could see by moonlight and tell what the Plague had built, but the Plague People themselves did not like the night much, and their business was done by day. Only Kailovela had seen them at it.

  ‘It is a prison for children,’ she told that horrified assembly. ‘For the Terror cannot touch those yet to gain a soul. So they find our children, where they have killed us, and they bring them to their places.’

  To convert them, to make them their own. A generation of Plains children who would forget their world and grow up soulless and hollow.

  There were other reports after that. The flying ship had been seen again. Loose beasts of the Plague People – beetles and spiders as big as dogs – had been found far from their masters, gorging themselves on whatever came their way. It was Kailovela’s words that stayed with them though.

  He approached her afterwards, leery of scaring her away. His earlier anger still sat within him, making him feel sick of himself, and he knew his words now would carry the echo of it, no matter how he phrased them. ‘You saw a lot, for one who flew so high.’

  She gave him a guarded look. ‘Hawk eyes.’ When that didn’t send him away, she sighed. ‘You cut my hair, Thunder. You freed me to fly. Must I just fly small circles about Mother’s sled? Or did you think I would live forever in your cabin and keep your hearth?’

  ‘I’m not trying to cage you. I just . . .’

  ‘You worry.’

  ‘Always I worry,’ he agreed, rubbing at his head to make the words come.

  ‘When the Plague warriors come, you’ll go fight them again?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And am I allowed to worry?’ she asked. ‘And if I do, does that mean I can tell you, “No fighting for you, Loud Thunder. My worry is more important”?’

  He made a deep noise in his throat, unsatisfied but unable to muster an argument. And perhaps if she had been a sliver more sincere he would have left it at that, but there was something in her tone, a slight hollowness that suggested things hidden.

  And then he had it, all of a sudden. For he had so seldom seen her alone since he called her to the war host, but here she was.

  ‘Where is the little monster?’ he asked her. ‘Where is Empty Skin?’

  * * *

  Empty Skin had kept the circling speck that was Kailovela in sight all the way across the grasslands towards the white walls. It was good to know that, if this went wrong, someone would know what had happened to her.

  She did not fear the Plague People the same way others did, because their greatest weapon was useless against her. She had stepped from child to adult within just such a set of white walls, after the Plague had come and destroyed the people she had been born to. The Seal had come to give her a soul and a shape to Step to, and the Plague People had barred their doors and kept him away, and now here she was: nothing more than Empty Skin.

  Because she looked like a Seal, still – not the horrible pallor of the Plague People – and because she looked enough like a child, still, the others of Thunder’s war host had not quite understood what she was. She was a grown woman without a soul. She was as hollow as the little monster currently by her side.

  She was a Plague Woman. She had the mind of a Seal – she knew the stories and the ways, how to fish, how to mend a boat, how to read the sea and the weather. And yet it was as though all that childhood knowledge had become a lie, a fading dream. She would never be the woman she had aspired to.

  None of the others understood just how much of a problem she represented. She was caught between two worlds; she needed to find her place. Having travelled so far with Thunder’s host, she knew her place was not amongst any people from the Plains or the River or the Crown of the World. In her mind that only left one option.

  When the Plague People had gathered in the Seal children, Empty Skin and her fellows had passed into the care of one of their womenfolk. And ‘care’ was the right word, fo
r all none of the others would believe her. When Thunder’s attack had come, that woman had even stood to defend her wards from their own people. Empty Skin had been in her care for a moon and more, hearing the sounds she made and trying to repeat them, trying to learn to be a Plague Person.

  And then Thunder had taken her back, and she had tried to be a real person instead, but without a soul it was an impossible challenge. And yes, she could go begging the hearths for some other god to fill the gap within her, but she felt she would not be her if that happened, and there was so little of herself left to her. Yet she knew soon enough that everyone around her would realize she was an enemy dressed in the skin of one of their own. And so she had gone to Kailovela and explained what she needed. Kailovela had flown over the new village of the Plague People and told her what was there, and then Kailovela had granted her other wish, the big one, the one Empty Skin had been sure would be refused. Kailovela had given her the little monster.

  Or she had freed the little monster, and it was returning to its people. Empty Skin couldn’t know, because they only had gestures and grunts and so very few words between them. What did the hollow creature think was happening, and what hold did the Hawk woman truly have over it?

  But she needed it. Without it, she was just one more lost child, and the Plague People would eventually imprison her with the rest, when they registered that she did not quite fit into the world they were spinning. But the little monster could talk to them and understand them. Empty Skin had even seen a couple of other diminutive creatures amongst the Plague People here, walking or flying through the air on unreal gossamer wings.

  She had waited for the little monster to abandon her – to flee and put away the nightmare that its last few years must have been, trapped in a world of souls it could not understand, but it had crouched in her shadow and stared at the Plague camp and its walls with almost the same alarm a real person would have shown. Perhaps the creature had forgotten the Plague People dream while it had been amongst the Eyriemen.