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

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  For now, the creature was at her side, and they were within the white walls even as they were being raised. Empty Skin had watched, fascinated, as spiders larger than she was had woven them, all that patient industry at the direction of slender, pale men and women who might have been doing something as mundane as carding wool. She could look into their faces and see no sign that they knew they were destroying the world. From their perspective, no doubt, they were creating it, one strand at a time.

  Empty Skin watched the children – far more here than there had been in the stolen Seal village where they had taken her. The Plague People were not sacrificing them to their gods, if they had gods. They were not torturing them or starving them. On the contrary, they sheltered them and they fed them, and if what they fed them was the meat of their own kin, well, that distinction probably meant nothing to the Plague.

  She walked among them. The warriors there – the hard-looking men in banded armour with the killing rods in their hands – they kept an eye on her, but she was not challenged. She was just one more child. Or perhaps they sensed she had crossed that boundary and already become one of them.

  I will stay, Empty Skin told herself, but at the same time, I must go, before they finish the walls. And perhaps they would not let her go. Perhaps they would hold her here, to protect her against the last fragments of the world they were destroying.

  She had brought the little monster as a talisman, and because she had envisaged feeling something definite in her heart, when she was amongst these, her true people. She had thought that the Plague-ness would hatch out of her like a butterfly, and she would know where she belonged at last. And then the little monster would go speak for her, and she would forget all the Seal stories and skills and just become one of the enemy. And it would not be good, but it would be something; it would be a place in the world, even if it was not the world she had been born into.

  Here she was still, one foot on either side, though, and she looked to the little monster for help and surprised a new expression on the creature’s face, one she could read as determination. All this time, she realized, the monster had been just as lost as she, unsure what its true destiny was. Now it had made a decision.

  It laid a small hand on Empty Skin’s arm, and then it was walking forward, out amongst these larger people who were just as hollow as it was. After two steps it was calling out to them, in those stuttering sounds that were its language. When they turned to stare, it was jabbing a little finger back at Empty Skin and all her choices had been taken from her.

  25

  Maniye stared up, and the stars of the Godsland stared down.

  They were closer than she remembered, those stars. They moved busily about the sky with a terrible eagerness. Perhaps they sensed that the time was nigh when they would be let into this place with their devouring hunger.

  She had been here before: to find a Champion’s soul, to watch over the boy-Kasra Tecuman, to become sister to iron.

  Only counting the visits did she realize that she had no idea why she was here now.

  I was . . . but clutching at memories only scattered them. She must herd them carefully lest she lose them altogether and forget even her own names.

  I am Maniye Many Tracks, the one I was born with, the other I earned.

  Like floating embers from a fire, her memories ghosted about her. She had the sense that, when they were all within her again and she remembered everything, there would be a great deal of pain, but she would be no child of either Tiger or Wolf if she let that dissuade her.

  She remembered the Plague People and their cages.

  She remembered the Plainsfolk.

  Hesprec.

  The Rat.

  There was no sudden awakening, no shock realization. She simply knew who she was and what had happened, now.

  The Godsland stretched out around her. In a way she couldn’t fathom, and yet which made perfect sense, she knew she was seeing the Plains and the Crown of the World both; that such distinctions did not make such a difference to the gods. And yet where were the gods? The hilltops, the great boulders, they were empty, and if she looked to the east (or was it east, here?) she saw that the dark of the night sky had already descended to touch the earth. The land there was . . . gone, taken beyond the reach of the gods because that was where the Plague People ruled, and they could not conceive of the gods of her people. In that bland lack of understanding, they unmade them, just as they unmade the minds of her people with their Terror.

  And this was the land she had come to, after fighting the Rat for Hesprec.

  ‘I thought I would be born again,’ she told the seething sky, and someone nearby chuckled darkly. Her blood ran cold, because she knew that laugh too well; it had been the scourge of her childhood. But she was a child no longer, so she turned to face its maker.

  Kalameshli Takes Iron sat on the hillside above her, as old and cantankerous as ever, wearing his robe of little bones and carrying his smith’s tools, face painted in the careful patterns of the Wolf’s priest.

  ‘You think you’re dead?’ he mocked her. ‘You’re not dead. You should be so lucky. No simple life as a mute sister for you; you have to go back and mend it all.’

  ‘Then why am I here?’

  ‘I didn’t say you were well, just not dead.’ He shrugged, waving an arm at everything there was to see. ‘This isn’t real, anyway. This isn’t the Godsland as the Wolf sees it.’ That familiar expression, both sneer and scowl. ‘Perhaps it’s enough for Plains or River gods, but the Wolf wouldn’t bother with this.’

  ‘Then where is the Wolf?’ she demanded.

  ‘Comes when you call, does he?’ Kalameshli levered himself up and rolled his shoulders; she heard his old joints crack. ‘The Wolf in the sky follows the herds from summer to winter; the Wolf in the forests does the same. If all those other gods, Deer and Boar and the others, have fled these lands, you wouldn’t expect Wolf to stay and starve, would you?’

  His assurance in the superiority of his god, despite all he had seen, was almost comical. What it was, was familiar; the same faith that would have given Hesprec to the fire, but it didn’t seem so terrible right now. At least he wasn’t beating or threatening or cursing her.

  The name echoed in her mind. ‘Hesprec!’

  Kalameshli sighed. ‘Don’t bring that Serpent nonsense here,’ he told her, mildly for him.

  ‘The Rats have Hesprec still. I’m fighting them—’

  ‘That’s all done,’ he told her.

  ‘Then . . . is she dead?’

  ‘You place too much value in the little Snake.’ Kalameshli spat, but without much rancour. ‘But you know what? All that stone-wisdom, all that “the Serpent is within the earth”, and yet the Wolf knows the secret of drawing iron from the blood rocks, hmm? Why doesn’t Serpent know, if he’s so wise? Don’t forget where you came from, with all these travels and foreign friends of yours. The time will come when you need the Wolf.’

  ‘Come at my call, will he?’ she shot back. She was still waiting for that rise of anger from him, and yet he seemed weirdly placid, almost smiling as he cocked an eye at her.

  ‘Are you not his Champion?’

  ‘Not just his.’

  ‘But his also. Child, you don’t like me and you hated Akrit Stone River. Both your fathers, and neither one you would have chosen, eh? But we are not the Wolf. Even I am not the Wolf. Listen to the little Snake if you must, but don’t forget the Wolf has wisdom too, and if you are strong, and if you walk through wounds and cold and agony and pass out the other side, that is the Wolf in you that made you so.’

  ‘Tell me what happened to Hesprec.’ For the conversation was becoming less and less real to her.

  Kalameshli fixed her with a sharp eye. ‘Oh, she lives. You won, you and the Laughing Girl. Probably you should go back to her now, trailing after the Serpent like you always did. I should have cut the throat of that old white priest before he had the chance to turn you from your people.’ And yet still
without venom, and then he shook his head and chuckled. ‘I tried to kill her, in that stone place on the river. And then she asked for my help. Me – and my jaws snapping for her scaly neck not ten heartbeats before! She asked me to help, in your name, as a friend of her friend. What do you think of that, eh?’

  Maniye stared at him. ‘And what did you do?’ But she already knew the answer to that, of course, because the next time she had met Hesprec and Takes Iron, they were standing shoulder to shoulder, the world’s most unlikely allies. ‘I’m glad,’ she told him. ‘Hesprec was like a grandfather to me, when she was old, and a he. I’m glad she taught you to be a father.’

  Kalameshli regarded her sternly, and she thought with relief that she had angered him at last, but then that smile slunk back, sniffing at the corners of his mouth. ‘Perhaps she did teach me some things,’ he allowed, and then took in a deep breath. ‘Now, now, enough of this talk. Another thing the Serpent is about, too much talk all at the wrong time.’

  Maniye opened her mouth to question him, but then the earth around them shook, and she saw cracks appear across the hills, raising great lines of dust. The ground heaved and groaned, and then something was pushing itself out into the night air of the Godsland. Not the Serpent, the god she would have wished to see born from the earth right then. Instead, another buried god was clawing its way into the open, fur matted with old blood, tangled with gnawed bones. It was the Rat, but it was far larger than the largest bear, or perhaps it was small but many, a rat made of countless vermin writhing over one another in constant turmoil.

  ‘Go,’ Kalameshli told her flatly, and she ran without question, pelting over the dry ground. Twenty steps and she turned to see him standing before the Rat still, an iron hatchet in one hand, a knife of the same metal in the other.

  ‘Takes Iron!’ she shouted, but he yelled, ‘Go, idiot girl!’ and she understood, fleeing the broken desolation of the Godsland for a land under a different shadow. When she looked over her shoulder she saw him as a tiny shape before the ever-growing bulk of the Rat, but he blazed with forge-fire, and when he opened his mouth the Wolf cried out of him, and she knew he would hold the way at her back, and let her return to the world.

  She was right: there was pain. Every part of her ached, and she felt bindings about her, her limbs most of all. Beneath she could feel all the separate hot fevers from a hundred little bites.

  She had been coming back to herself all this time while her mind soujorned in the gods’ empty places. Now she hung just below the surface of the world, knowing she could put the revelations off no longer. Her eyes were gummed shut and she had to fight with the muscles beneath the lids, but at last she forced open a crack onto the world and looked out.

  She saw the stars, and for a moment her eyes swam and they seemed to move, darting angrily about the barrier of night and looking for a way in. But then she made herself blink, the simple movement feeling like some colossal labour, and the stars fell back into their places, and the cold glare from the edge of her vision was not the lamps of the Plague People but just the moon.

  She closed her eyes again, because listening hurt less, and doing both at once seemed a complexity she could not manage. There was a fire nearby – its warmth lost in the feverish heat that gripped her – and someone moving closer: soft footsteps, familiar.

  ‘You breathe differently when you’re awake, did you know?’ The words had that old dry humour but they were gentle and fond, the voice of a little Riverlands girl who had turned up from nowhere after an old Riverlands man had gone to the earth.

  Maniye’s intent was to open her eyes and leap up and exclaim over Hesprec’s survival, but none of that happened; she managed a croak and a twitch at best. Moments later the cool edge of a bowl touched her lips and she was drinking as though she had crossed a desert.

  Soon after that she was sitting up, feeling each part of her raise new complaints as she changed position. She had so many little wounds in her – shallow scratches and punctures where the teeth of the Rat had got past the Champion’s thick hide and Maniye’s iron coat. It was not the teeth that had laid her low, nor even loss of blood. The Rat’s teeth were filthy from the middens and the graves where it fed. She could still feel the poison in her, the corruption it had driven into her with each tiny incision. But she was fighting it. She could feel her strength mustering like a warband ready to take back its home.

  ‘Where . . . ?’ She flicked her fingers at the fire, banked low and sheltered by rocks. Beyond, the grass ocean of the Plains waved silver in the moonlight.

  ‘We went east,’ Hesprec said. ‘Probably it was a mistake, but when we were clear of the Horn-Bearer fortress, there were more Rat Speakers between us and the camp, and you were hard to carry between us. We were hurt, too. So we went east, because the Plague People have worse eyes, and were not looking for us.’ She waved down Maniye’s next question. ‘Shyri is close. We have played hunter and hearth-keeper, she and I.’ And then Hesprec waited, watching her face closely. ‘Takes Iron is dead.’

  ‘I know,’ Maniye said simply.

  Hesprec nodded. ‘He taught the Rat to fear the Wolf before he went,’ she said, exactly the words Kalameshli would have wanted to hear. ‘We’re clear of the fortress because of him, and him only. He died on four feet, believe me.’

  ‘I know,’ Maniye echoed. She reached inside herself to find out how this made her feel, but there were so many pains there it was impossible to know. A father who had never seemed like one; a tormentor who thought it was for her own good. The man who had forced herself on her mother, when all Akrit’s efforts had borne no fruit. Kalameshli had not lived a life of kindness, even by the Wolf’s harsh standards. It was not Maniye’s place to forgive him for the worst of it, but what he had done to her, she found she forgave. With Akrit dead and taken from the Crown of the World and the Wolf’s Shadow, there had been another man in him, trying to reach the surface. She might have respected that man.

  ‘So what’s the plan?’ she rasped out.

  ‘The plan is that I wish not to have to rescue you and tend your wounds again, so you will have to be careful from now on, and not throw yourself away on small matters,’ Hesprec told her, hiding behind the Riverlander way, formality and understatement.

  ‘Like rescuing you,’ Maniye pointed out.

  ‘These things are known.’ Hesprec smiled at her, but it was a terribly wan thing. ‘But now you are awake, and if you can move, then we must walk. After the Plague attacked, everyone fled further into the Plains. What might be happening there now, I can’t think. Perhaps the Rat rules on a mound of corpses. Perhaps everyone is fighting everyone else. I would not be surprised.’

  ‘What about the Plague?’ Maniye pressed.

  ‘Well, bad news is like ants, they say; never going singly and everywhere you look,’ Hesprec said dourly. ‘Come, if you can.’

  Maniye tried her human feet, but the challenge defeated her. As a wolf, though, she could limp along well enough, tracking round the fire to the edge of the rocks.

  There was a great pale light out on the grasslands, beyond the stark shadow of the Horn-Bearer fort. It had not been just the moon, after all.

  ‘They are still building it,’ Hesprec told her. ‘Many have come from the east, warriors and the other sort, too. Our places fascinate them, I think.’

  Maniye Stepped back, thoughtfully. ‘I don’t think they quite know they are our places,’ she considered. ‘We are beasts to them.’ A dizzying thought took hold of her. ‘Everywhere they go they find buildings and children and beasts. How puzzling it must be for them.’

  ‘It was grown men and women they attacked four nights ago,’ Hesprec pointed out.

  ‘Four nights?’ Maniye exclaimed.

  ‘Four nights,’ came a new voice, ‘and you were quiet for all of them and did not call the Plague People down on us with shouting.’ Shyri dropped down beside her, dumping down a couple of creatures like tailless squirrels. ‘You look bad.’

  ‘I f
eel worse,’ Maniye said, honestly enough. ‘But I can travel.’

  ‘Good. Hunting is terrible here.’ Shyri would not meet her eyes. ‘Sorry.’

  Maniye wondered what for. For the Hyena and its alliance of convenience with the Rat? For striking the blow that brought the fight that killed Kalameshli? But how would things have gone otherwise? None of it was the fault of either Shyri or her people’s god. So instead she said, ‘Sorry, are you? You told the Rat Speaker there was one Champion you would keep. Did you mean Asman or me? I don’t know which you should be sorrier for.’

  Shyri stared at her, aghast, and Maniye managed a weak chuckle that quickly threatened to get out of hand and tear something. The Hyena woman wavered between anger and hurt until the joke jumped over to her and she was the Laughing Girl again.

  They set off before dawn, and would sleep out the hottest hours under whatever cover they could find and travel again when the sun was falling back towards the edge of the earth. It seemed a melancholy thing that each new day was born from the land the Plague People had already made their own, while each day died red over their fugitives and victims.

  They made a wide detour to avoid the white walls of the Plague People camp, keeping within sight of it and seeing new figures arriving from the east, some on foot and some on the wing. Even Hesprec breathed a sigh of relief when its pale radiance was at their back, but they were still far from safe. They travelled on through a land abandoned, ceded already to the enemy.

  The only human shapes they saw were skimming through the sky on shimmering wings, or penned behind the ever-growing white walls of the Plague People’s new town. They also saw a handful atop the Horn-Bearer fortress, and perhaps their blank-faced curiosity would even root out the Rat from its dark places. The Plague People would ask their meaningless questions of that grand collection of bones and glean no answers they could understand.

  Every so often Shyri would guide them to a village to pick over what remained there, taking food that had not spoiled, clothes, breaking up the pieces of lost lives for firewood. Often there were bodies, and many of them children who had been neither able to follow their transformed parents, nor gathered in by the Plague. Some had been killed and part-eaten by beasts, others starved. Some had fallen to knife or spear, and Maniye did not want to think about what had led to such a thing. There were adult corpses too – mostly the old but a few were warriors who had the marks of Plague People darts through their flesh. These the travellers avoided, because surely their ghosts would be clinging on within their ribs, waiting to blight the living who came near. Once they came across a village with dead fresh enough that vultures thronged the walls. The birds shuffled and shifted and fought, but they would not go down to feed because something worse was already in possession of the corpses. Maniye and the others watched a thing like a beetle, almost the size of a man, as it fumbled and chewed at the dead flesh, crushing and cutting with mouthparts like hammers and knives. Shyri was full of tales of similar sights. The Plague People were not good herdsmen; their monsters were getting loose into a land where nothing would threaten them.