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

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  And there was more. When they set a fire to watch out the night, hide it as they might, some beast would find them. A lion, perhaps, or a Plains dog, or even a wolf a long way from any place that wolves called home. They came and stared, those mute animals, and the firelight gleamed and danced in their eyes. Some part of them remembered, Maniye knew. It remembered other firesides, tales, family. She could look into those gleaming eyes and see a soul trapped within the beast, denied the freedom to take on its birth-shape. All she could do was wish them a rebirth, but the world of the spirit was unravelling, threads cut one by one as the Plague People spun their own world. In that world there were no souls and no rebirths.

  The next village they came to was another trove of bones, the last testament to those who had not fled swiftly enough. Who had killed them, Maniye could not say. There were knives scattered across the ground and she had an image of them, men, women, children, hacking at each other, maddened with fear and desperate to flee in the only direction left to them. But perhaps that was just her imagination trying to digest all the rich food she had given it these last few days.

  But the bones were all gnawed by hundreds of tiny teeth. Whether the Rat had brought death here, certainly it had followed soon after and taken what nourishment there was to be had. Every sack was chewed through, every pot upset and emptied, every shred of flesh stripped.

  He said it is his age, now. And even rats starve, but perhaps that is his victory, to be the last on the hill of bones. Perhaps in the end it will just be Rat and Hyena at each other’s throat. She stole a glance at Shyri and found the Laughing Girl looking back at her without expression.

  They left that village as swiftly as they could, pushing on through a landscape that had begun to seem endless, just grassland to the end of the world, studded with the empty sockets of dead villages, and not a single human being in sight from horizon to horizon. Maniye still needed much rest, slowing the other two down and knowing that any moment the Plague People might make a new push westwards and undo all their progress. And yet the enemy did not come, With her head swimming, and the fever still boiling her within her skin, Maniye padded on in wolf-shape, panting and shivering, and soon enough the world was swimming around her. The wind became voices of dead enemies and friends: Akrit, Kalameshli, Broken Axe. The tall grass rippled with the passage of tigers that were not there. After sunset, the stars came loose in the sky and wheeled about her. She felt the Godsland very near, just a sidestep away. At the same time she felt the heat of her wounds and knew that she could trust nothing of any of it, and must rely on Shyri and Hesprec to keep her walking straight.

  What happened next was more like a dream than anything, or a nightmare.

  They had camped in the shadow of a rock, choosing the west side so that it would shield them from the gaze of the Plague People, for all their new domain was not even a shadow to the east now. Shyri set a fire and they dropped down around it, more than ready to abandon the world to sleep.

  Maniye thought she had dozed a little – it made what followed even more dream-like, draped with the confusion of a sudden waking. She came back to the world with the knowledge that Hesprec was standing right beside her, rod-straight and tense as a drawn bow. Hesprec said, ‘We have a guest.’

  ‘What guest?’ Maniye fought not to just drop back into drowsing, pinching at her own arms.

  ‘Something of theirs,’ Hesprec murmured, and abruptly Maniye was wide awake, heart hammering away inside her. She Stepped, trusting to a tiger’s eyes. Out there beyond the ember-light of their fire she saw a huge hunched shape scuttling on too many legs. Not the Plague People themselves but one of their creatures, and bigger than any she’d seen.

  She took on the Champion’s shape in case the thing skittered closer, but doing so caught its notice. It stopped, so still she almost lost it in the dark until the twitch of its antennae told her where it was. She growled then, deep and angry, hoping to drive the monster off. Instead, it pattered half a dozen steps closer.

  Shyri was awake by then, knife in her hand, and the three of them just stared as the creature executed a curious little dance – a few steps closer, then one or two back, and then closer still – not attacking, not doing anything that they could make any sense of, but drifting slowly towards their fire nonetheless. Seen so clearly, it was awful in its clumsiness, legs flailing and dragging alternately, the curved shields of its wings half flaring out and then clacking back into place as though it didn’t know what they were for.

  Maniye found her human shape again, in case it was the Champion’s bulk that was exercising such a fearsome fascination for the thing. The focus of those glittering, bulbous eyes never changed.

  ‘It’s you,’ Shyri said. ‘Why is it staring at you?’

  Maniye shook her head, wanting to deny it, but that faceted regard was ignoring her companions utterly. Shyri could have gone up and driven her knife between the plates of the thing’s hide, and it might have utterly ignored her. Soon its shell was dancing red with the last of the firelight and they had retreated to the far side of the camp.

  ‘Is it diseased?’ Shyri asked, wondering. Maniye shrugged, conceding the possibility. The Plague People’s beasts had always seemed just that; yes, they were little soil-dwellers grown to monstrous size, but beasts still, with a beast’s desires, or else on the leashes of their masters. This monster, this great-backed beetle thing, acted like something else altogether.

  And yet we’ve seen this before. Maniye’s insides lurched as she realized what it reminded her of. Impossible . . .

  And then the creature had obviously gathered its courage, because it lunged forwards, almost running into the fire in its blundering advance, and then stopping, staring only at Maniye as though waiting for her to rebuke it.

  She opened her mouth – to say she knew not what, for what possible words could there be? Even as she tried to speak, the thing changed. Without transition the great hulking insect had become a man. He was a fat man, dark and naked, sprawled before the fire. He clutched at the dry ground there and made noises, horrible word-like noises. He stared at his hands as though they were new to him, and then he looked at Maniye with his human eyes, and she knew him.

  She had seen him day after day. He had come in with the woman, his constant companion, and he had tried to speak to her; he had tested and measured her. He had been curious. And hollow, for he was a Plague Man, but he was filled with something now. He was ridden by the soul of the beetle-thing he had become.

  He goggled at her, eyes wide and white in a slack face; he beat his flabby fists against the ground and hooted desperately. Then he was the beetle once again, spinning in a circle on the spot, limbs mad with trapped meaning, and a moment later those many legs had carried him away into the night. They waited until the moon had passed its zenith, but not another sound or sight of the thing came to trouble their fire.

  26

  Speaking to the Pale Shadow woman was disconcerting for Kailovela, not for the burning emptiness within her, but for the predatory attention she paid to her visitor.

  They were within a big tent set up by the Riverlanders; inside the cloth turned the daylight into near-dusk, for their prisoner-guest did not like the sun on her fishbelly-pale skin. Kailovela cradled her son, listening to him fuss and fidget, feeding him when he seemed to need it. In the gloom the pale woman stood out with ghost-like clarity.

  The leader of the Rivermen sat close by. Kailovela was more familiar than most with that aura of strength a Champion’s soul imparted, and this Asman had more of it than most, a man crammed with greatness so much that he sat in its shadow. He plainly did not relish being the Pale Shadow’s keeper, and the continuing absence of the girl Serpent was obviously chewing at his mind. For now, he just sat and listened.

  And Kailovela had come to gain just this from the white woman, but within a few words she was regretting her decision. The kinship between them horrified her, but for some reason Galethea of the Pale Shadow found it the most imp
ortant thing in the world.

  She was full of questions, all asked in that soft, strangely accented voice, occasionally pausing over a word as she translated the meaning from her own weird language. The thought of having two languages in one head was dizzying to Kailovela, as though languages were like a Champion’s souls. Except this creature had no soul at all, and so perhaps that made room for all manner of knowledge and magics. Like the ‘craft’ she spoke of that allowed her to touch the minds of others, and make them love her, even a little.

  ‘I have seen you do it,’ Galethea said. ‘It is a gift of our blood, the blood of the Families, and yet you have it. And you have a soul, a true human soul.’ Her eyes gleamed with avarice. ‘Where did you get it from?’

  Kailovela started. ‘My soul?’

  ‘The craft, the way you touch them. Was it from your gods? Was it a gift?’

  ‘It was just . . . born with me,’ Kailovela said haltingly. ‘It is no gift.’

  Galethea chuckled, full of unwanted sisterly affection. ‘Not to those around you, no, but to you? It makes you the centre of their world, does it not?’

  ‘That is no gift either.’

  The pale woman blinked, plainly unsure what she meant. ‘It came on when you ceased to be a child? That is the way amongst us. And amongst you, it is when your soul comes, yes? Always we have wondered if, when the craft arose in us, it might open the door a little wider, so a soul could creep in?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean. You have no gods. Souls come from the gods.’

  ‘But,’ Galethea interrupted urgently, ‘what gods? The gods of your parents, but you can sever souls and invite new ones in, we know this. Among the Jaguar, back in our Kingdom, we have . . .’ She faltered to silence abruptly, and so Kailovela’s imagination had to supply the word experimented.

  The pale woman pressed her lips together. ‘We took mates from the Jaguar, when at last we began to feel the lack in ourselves. We thought it would be so simple, that our children at least would borrow the souls of their fathers. But they are as empty as we. And our sons father only empty children on their Jaguar wives. But we never stopped believing that somehow we might find a god to favour us, to bridge the gap and bring us into your world. Because we like your world. Your world is so alive, and the world we left long ago is no longer ours.’

  ‘The Plague People are trying to bring that world here,’ Kailovela noted.

  ‘We are not the Plague People. We fled them too, long ago. Please.’ And Galethea reached out and touched her hand, where it rested on the baby’s head. ‘You have a foot in our world. A foot, half a foot, a toe. Please tell me how you did it. Tell me where the crossing is, so we may come to you.’

  Dread and revulsion ripped through Kailovela and she pushed away, breaking that cool touch before something malign could leap from it to her child. The boy convulsed in her arms as she did so and began wailing, immediately and utterly inconsolable. She looked into Galethea’s face then, expecting to see gleeful evil hidden in her eyes, but saw only utter misery. In that moment there was no craft, no magic, just a woman desperate for something she could not have.

  Who knew what she might have said, in that candid moment, but her name was being called from outside, in Loud Thunder’s booming tones. She stood awkwardly, eyes still on the beseeching figure. We have stories of monsters who wear human faces and prey on the unwary. But what if they lived amongst us for so long that they forgot they were monsters? Can we trust them, these pale things?

  She ducked out into the bright day, into Loud Thunder’s shadow. ‘Mother wants you,’ he told her awkwardly. ‘And she wants the – the thing, the Pale Shadow thing.’

  Kailovela frowned at him. ‘What for?’

  ‘Empty Skin and your monster, they’re back.’

  She should be happy they were still alive, given what they had been about, but the thought only brought Kailovela a shock of dismay. Now I am punished, she thought. Nobody had been pleased with her when they found out what treachery she had aided. Only Loud Thunder’s tacit support had staved off the repercussions. Now there would be a reckoning. Except . . .

  ‘But why the Pale Shadow?’

  A shrug. ‘Your monster has something to say.’

  There were plenty of angry people waiting to see what Empty Skin had to say for herself. The news of her recklessness had spread past the northerners’ camp so that the Plainsfolk had come to scowl and finger their knives at her. Kailovela had the impression that the soulless girl had become somehow to blame in many minds. They thought she would stir up a new attack by the Plague People, as though their implacable enemy needed a prompt for anything it did. Those who knew of the little monster and understood what it was spoke of losing some great weapon against the enemy, for all that it had only ever been a tiny thing of no great use.

  But they had gone, with Kailovela’s own blessing, and now they had come back unscathed and full of words that nobody could understand.

  Nobody except Galethea, but she had proved remarkably unwilling to act as translator. The sight of the little monster seemed far more abhorrent to her than it did to real people, until Kailovela guessed she was making it plain to everyone around her that the Pale Shadow and the Plague were utterly separate things. And there was a genuine fear there: she had not been lying when she said her people had fled the Plague, too.

  It took Mother to bring the pale woman to heel. When Asman brought her into the presence of the greatest of the Bear, all the fight went out of her. She stood in Mother’s shadow, face downcast and shoulders slumped, and agreed that she would hear the little monster’s words.

  ‘And you will speak them truly,’ Mother rumbled, and Kailovela imagined that ‘craft’, that hollow magic, reaching out to the Bear woman to try and alter her mind, and then scurrying back to hide behind its mistress’s skirts. Galethea could move Mother’s mind no more than she could carry a mountain across the Plains.

  So then it was down to the little monster talking excitedly in her rapid patter, broken by Galethea’s occasional interjections, and everyone else sitting around and waiting. Empty Skin sat at the monster’s side and faced down all the dark looks she was getting, unconcerned about anyone’s opinion.

  Kailovela watched and listened; she had lived with the little monster for years. She understood some of its words, but much more of the way it moved, its expressions and moods. A prisoner for most of that time, just as she had been, those moods had been in the main dejected. Now it was set on fire with purpose. She had never seen it so animated.

  It looked at her often, as though seeking her approval. In some small way it was still the two of them against the world, just as it had been back in the Eyrie. She was the tether that had brought the little monster back. She was the one it was trying to save.

  The thought made sense of what she was seeing. The little monster had a plan.

  And then its words were done, and it was gesturing impatiently for Galethea to relay everything to the assembled crowd.

  Their massed attention struck her like a blow, all that fear and suspicion and outright hate. Kailovela saw the exact moment that Galethea used her magic to blunt it, layering glamour over her hollowness until she could look like something other than her enemy. This is how her people first came to our lands.

  ‘She has gone to the Plague People and told them of us,’ Galethea announced, and if that ‘us’ rang false, then it was lost in the general uproar. Nobody liked the sound of what she was saying.

  Then Mother shifted slightly, and the movement was sufficient to quiet people. ‘Truly, pale one.’

  Galethea flinched. ‘It has told them of us,’ she insisted. ‘It says that in their minds we were a nothing, a dream people. She has made us a real people to them, even just a little.’

  ‘So they will kill us as people,’ one of the Wolves said, and for a moment Galethea was going to agree with him. Plainly whatever the little monster was suggesting was something she wanted no part of. Then she glanced gui
ltily at Mother and said, ‘She says they will talk to us as people. Now they know we are people, she says they will send speakers. She says she argued long and hard to win this for us.’

  ‘And then what?’ someone demanded. ‘Will they leave, when they have spoken to us?’

  ‘It’s enough if they will just agree to keep to the places where they are, and come no further!’ shouted a Plainsman, and others began to argue, perhaps because those places had been their places not so long before. This time Mother had to cough twice before quiet was restored.

  ‘She does not know what they will agree,’ Galethea said, with a venomous look at the little monster. ‘She does not know that they will agree anything. But she says they will talk, a few of them and a few of us. That is what she won from them, she says.’