‘Hold them off, all of them, alone?’
‘These things are known—’
‘Yes, yes,’ Shyri broke in. ‘These things are known, nonsense nonsense River talk. Just get on with it.’ She jumped to her feet and looked out at the figures drawing lines of motion through the grasses, all their sunken eyes on her. ‘They found new friends,’ she observed flatly.
Hesprec did have a knife, Maniye found. As gently as she could the Serpent took her arm and reopened one of the scabbed-over bite marks there before touching her tongue to the blood.
‘Let us go find the Rat,’ she said. ‘You are quite the familiar of the gods, now. It was only a matter of time before you met this one face to face.’
28
When Mother had called Loud Thunder to bring the Crown of the World tribes under one banner and be their war chief, he had baulked at it. Lone Mountain would be better at it, he knew. Anyone would have been better at it.
And yet he had done what Mother said, mostly because not doing so would have been harder. But he had never wanted to be Warbringer, only Loud Thunder, living in his cabin on his own.
Now he felt that being a man of peace was harder. He had fought this enemy. He knew their hollow flesh ran with the same taste of blood as that of real men and beasts. He knew they could be killed by copper and bronze, stone and iron. He knew how to make war on them. He did not know how to stare at their warriors and stay his hand. He did not know how he was supposed to stand within the shadow of their Terror, knowing it could stoop on him at any moment and rob him of his mind. And yet this, too, Mother had asked of him. First make war; now stand idle while others tried to make peace.
Or that was what the Pale Shadow woman was supposed to be doing, but he had no guarantee of it. The only assurances came from her tone, for the creature’s fear at facing her long-estranged kin was plain in every alien syllable. He could imagine that voice begging for its life, but not calculatedly betraying them. Her high, shaking tones rang out across the sky from the rock, and Loud Thunder could understand nothing more than the anxiety behind them. Only that was truly human.
He knew what she was supposed to say. Mother had sat the creature down and schooled her. Galethea was playing emissary for every human in the world. She was asking the Plague People what they would take to go away or halt their killing. Or just to kill us a little more slowly. Every breath becomes precious. And what treasure might they demand, Loud Thunder wondered glumly. What could be traded for something as precious as life? Would they take a tithe of children each year? And if that was what they asked for, would the Plainsfolk pay the price? Would his own people, or the River Lords? Or perhaps the Wolf would cull the children of the Deer and Boar and send them downriver to Where the Fords Meet or what had once borne that name. Or the Rivermen would take the children of their subject peoples, or the Plains tribes would have a new reason to raid each other’s villages.
Peace might destroy the world of the true people as certainly as war, but more slowly. For the Plague People’s forbearance would surely not be bought with anything as mundane as pearls or amber.
Galethea’s voice faltered again, and Thunder saw the little monster start forward from its stand between the two groups, obviously wanting to just step in and continue the words. One of the Plague warriors took her shoulder and held her back, though – not unkind, perhaps just seeking to protect her, but she seemed as much a prisoner in that moment as ever she had in Kailovela’s tent.
Loud Thunder took a step nearer, trying to wring out every drop of meaning from Galethea’s babble. As he did so, one of the Plague warriors did the same, like a crooked reflection. The creature was pale, clad in banded metal armour. Thunder had killed many like it, when he led his forces against the Plague nest on the Seal coast. He stared it in the eye, thinking, How small you are, how empty. Oh, perhaps a little taller than most Wolves, say, but everyone was smaller than a son of the Bear.
And yet the Plague warrior cradled that killing rod in the crook of his arm, directed at a slant towards the ground. He could point it at Loud Thunder more swiftly than Thunder could close the distance to him, yet there was a wildness in his eye, when he met the Bear’s gaze. He looked on Thunder as though his enemy was not just a vast hulk of a man, but a ghost, a monster. His hands gripped the rod tightly – the moon showed Thunder how his knuckles were knotted with tension.
And all the while the talk went on, and Thunder and the Plague warrior stared at each other. Galethea’s quavering tones rang out, and then, far softer, came the reply of the other.
And the other – the white-eyed priest – it wasn’t speaking vitriol; there was no fire in its words. If Loud Thunder had heard that voice in the camp he would have thought it some uncle giving advice to a wayward nephew, some mild remonstrance from one of the Wise to one of the Foolish. Mother’s own tones to Loud Thunder were harsher.
Except. Except that Thunder could hear Galethea’s stammering responses, and knew she was not a woman won over or reassured. Her fear was being wound tighter and tighter, her words breathless with it as Empty Skin pushed closer and closer, little fists balled. That tone was a liar, Thunder knew. It was a boat painted to seem a friend, but it came carrying spears and knives. And when he looked into that grey face with its white eyes, he thought he saw a moment when the mask fell, and the creature’s malevolence blazed brighter than the lamps.
He looked back at the Plague warrior and all the rest of them. Galethea’s voice reached a new pitch. Was she demanding, now? No, she was pleading. For herself, for her tribe, for all the world’s people? And the Plague priest just answered in his easy tones, but the tension was drawing about everyone there like a net. Thunder saw the Plague warrior’s hands tighten further, his jaw clench as he regarded the Bear. I have come closer, Thunder realized. Each little shuffle of his, each idle movement had drawn him towards his enemy. If I Stepped now, could I kill him before he killed me?
He looked across at his own people. Lone Mountain was close to the rock now, his maul no longer butt to the ground like a staff, but slanted over his shoulder, ready to swing. The Wolves he had brought were Stepped, eyes throwing back the lamplight like white sparks. Thunder saw the readiness in every line of them. Seven Mending’s hands were crooked like talons and Grey Herald had a hatchet in his hand, hidden mostly by his cloak but the bronze edge of it just peeked clear. The weapons were for when things went wrong, but they were for courage too. They were to hold on to when the Terror tore at them. Thunder could feel the air curdle with it, held back only by the fragile flame of their courage and hope. They stood right in the Terror’s mouth now, its teeth on either side of them. The thought made him shiver and for a moment it was closing its jaws on him. Hope, he reminded himself. Perhaps it will end here. He felt it would end here for him, however it went.
And the Plains were not quiet, either. Distantly he thought he heard shouting, hidden in the echoes of Galethea’s words. Somewhere across the grass someone else was fighting and dying. Surely that was a scream? He saw the Plague warrior twitch, hearing the same sound, perhaps suspecting treachery.
Now Galethea was almost shouting, her words washing over Thunder but hooking the attention of the Plague warrior across from him, drawing the creature’s eyes. They all understand, and we understand nothing, vied in Thunder’s mind with, Now, now, kill him now!
He fought back the impulse, hearing the fear in his own mind, which drove it. Even that little struggle brought him another inch, another inch towards his enemy.
Even Mother cannot bring some things about, he knew, with utter certainty. This was never going to work.
And then the scream came, tearing across the grasslands to strike everyone there at once. It was so shrill and inhuman that Thunder thought at first it must be some Plains bird unfamiliar to him, but then it dissolved into a jabber of agonized, incomprehensible words. Plague words.
* * *
So Hesprec had sat down beside Maniye and now they were about some
grand mystical business, which helped Shyri not at all. All she had was a knife and her teeth and her one body, and the Rat had who-knew-how-many Speakers and cultists, not to mention all those chittering little bodies.
My mistake was liking foreigners, she decided, balanced on the balls of her feet atop the rock as she watched the Rat’s creatures rush her. Asman had made her his servant and never acknowledged that she would have been so much more to him if he had only let her. Maniye was like a sister, but sisters shouldn’t get their sisters into this sort of trouble.
The Rat had no sense of strategy, or perhaps just didn’t see the need yet. The first two to reach the rock were scrabbling up to her without waiting for their fellows, and she kicked one in the face and then cut the other: once, twice, her bronze gouging a shoulder, then hacking down to sever enough fingers to send the climber tumbling away. There was a third on the far side, making heavy going of the handholds, and Shyri had more than enough time to Step, bound over, and take the cultist’s head in her mouth. No teeth were stronger than Hyena’s; she clenched and felt the man’s jaw pop from its socket, his skull crack where she sawed at it. Blood filled her mouth and made her want to haul the body away to feed, but she put Hyena’s urges in her shadow and shook the limp body off into the grass. Let the rats feast, and let the feast delay them.
The rest had not hauled themselves from the grass and so she looked down at them, one side and then the other, heckling as only a hyena can until she locked eyes with the Rat Speaker.
‘Oh, Laughing Child,’ he told her. ‘Your father and I, we are old friends. Will you not let us—’ but she had been ready for that old song again. Stepping, she let fly with a good-sized stone that struck him in the teeth and turned his words to bloody mush. A ripple of outrage went through the other cultists as their priest reeled backwards, spitting out red strings of spittle and white fragments. He tried to speak again, whatever tedious threat or imprecation the Rat had for her, but the words were mumbled through torn lips and ragged gums. She saw the real anger then – the Rat blazing through his vacant eyes, because of all things it longed to listen to its own words.
‘I don’t know why anyone ever stopped to listen to you,’ she taunted him, and saw the words strike a nerve; if people didn’t let the Rat’s words twist them, what was he? Vermin, just vermin.
Then they were coming in earnest, but clumsily, without discipline. They were half starved, these votaries; they were weak and diseased, driven by an energy their thin bodies could barely master. She cut at their faces, too fast for their hands to ward her off; she cut at their hands too swiftly for them to draw back. And there were not so many of them, but there seemed to be just enough to be too many for her to keep back.
And there was a swirling tide of grey-brown bodies roiling at the base of the rock, and she could easily imagine that tide rising to swamp her the moment the Rat put its mind to the task.
Then she had sliced up a Horse woman’s face – some fugitive from Where the Fords Meet who had gone from bad to worse – thinking, I am still fighting, and surely even Asman would have lost some blood by now, and understood in that moment it had been too easy. She knew him even as she turned, seeing the gore-mouthed Rat Speaker standing behind her, his own knife out and poised over Maniye and Hesprec.
She had committed to that last slash, her balance tipped the wrong way for a sudden reversal. She Stepped even so, digging in with four feet to turn her faster, teeth bared. But too slow! I can’t— and then the thunder came.
Not thunder. A sound from the sky that battered at them all just the same, but rhythmic, wordless, the night air being rent asunder by something impossible.
It fell on them from out of the night, wheeling like a mad thing, only the least thread of control left to it. It had its thorned legs outstretched in a doomed bid for balance. The thunder was its wings, three men’s lengths across beneath the curved cases of its shell. Shyri had never thought the monstrous beetle-creature could fly.
Just barely, enough to come barrelling out of the night to crash blindly into the Rat Speaker. She saw the shears of its jaws close convulsively on one of his legs and sever the limb, bone and all. Its weight had smashed the rest of him against the rock and now it waved its grisly trophy like a standard as though rallying an army.
But the only army was the Rat’s, and the loss of the Speaker did nothing to dispel them. Abruptly they were leaping up on all sides, and it was all Shyri could do to stand in the little space between Hesprec and Maniye and cut, cut, cut at every part of them that offered itself to her knife. At her back was the great domed bulk of the beetle, and right then she would take any ally she could. She only kept her skin whole because the Rat was far keener to kill it than her.
And she was thinking of the creature as something elemental, a monster from the stories. Was it not armoured on every side? Was it not armed with teeth like blades? She put her back to it and trusted in its indomitable nature while she got on with her own job of stamping on rats and carving slices from anything human-looking that tried to reach for her friends.
But the problem with the Plague People was that they deceived: they looked human but were not human; they looked like invulnerable monsters but . . .
She did not see what happened, but the behemoth behind her shrilled, some dreadful hissing noise no throat ever made. Some blunt part of it struck her across the shoulders and sent her to the ground, head ringing with the impact. There were Rat cultists clinging all over it, driving their knives through its shell, and she saw it rear like a horse, and then its wings flashed out, hurling thin bodies end over end on either side, broken shapes plunging into the tall grass.
And in the aftermath of that, the rock cleared of the Rat-followers for a handful of heartbeats, the beetle creature Stepped, becoming a naked man kneeling in a tangle of his own ravaged flesh and screaming in fear and pain.
Shyri half went to him, recoiling as his screech turned into a desperate babble of word-like sounds. She was willing him to Step back to his beetle shape, because everyone knew that if you died a human, then your soul . . . but what soul? Could such a hybrid thing have a soul?
He was not hollow. The emptiness in him had been filled, and now it was being emptied once again as his lifeblood left him.
Then she had no more time to speculate because the Rat had been driven away by the noise, but not far and not for more than a few heartbeats. She turned back to see its human votaries already surging back towards the rock, and around them the grass was thrashing madly with the passage of more bodies – not the scuttlings of the little rodents but something greater. She saw the whip of scaly tails and pictured rats the size of wolves slinking low-bellied towards her.
She readied her knife again, feeling bone-weary already, and hoped that Hesprec and Maniye were nearing the end of their journey, wherever that was. All the grasses were shivering with violent, low-slung movement. The human husks of the Rat gathered to swarm her, and a moment later the Plains erupted with jagged teeth.
* * *
Empty Skin saw it happen. The scream tore across the sky from somewhere to her right, far out across the grasslands. She heard the alien sounds in it and knew that one of the Plague People had met a grisly end. She did not know the words but the meaning of it spoke to her: Mother! Mother! like any dying thing.
She was ready for the sudden chaos as warriors of both sides reacted. She almost heard the peace break as though it was a stick. But that was not what she saw. Her eyes were still fixed on the Plague priest.
His mild expression broke, a man who no longer needed his mask. He hissed something at Galethea and then one grey hand was coming up with a knife, a lean blade of shining iron. The Pale Shadow woman was already throwing herself back, but the razor edge still cut a path across her body, and the expression of the priest showed he was only sorry it had not gone deeper, for all the wound looked like it might be mortal.
But that was not what she saw, not the final truth of it, for the Plague pr
iest stared at the blade of his dagger and then tore it viciously across his own arm, opening a long, ragged wound. He locked eyes with her as he did it, and his smile was pure spite.
Then he was backing away, kicking up from the rock and letting ephemeral wings carry him to the midst of his warriors. His bloody arm was up for them to see and she heard him calling them to arms with a cry that must have been Treachery! Treachery!
Then Empty Skin was scrabbling away, dropping back to where Galethea lay curled about her wound. She could hear the yells of both sides, words in two speeches competing against each other. The dying would start soon, and she could not be here for it. She got her shoulder under the arm of the pale woman and levered her to her feet, for all she screamed and thrashed. Of all the people in the world, with souls and without, only Galethea could say what had passed between her and the enemy. She must live; she must live long enough to spill those words out before someone who would understand them.
Kailovela came running to help her, flinching from each yell and roar. Empty Skin heard the howl of wolves and the bellow of bears and knew that everything had gone about as wrong as it possibly could. A pair of Plague warriors dropped down in front of her, landing in a shimmer of wings and then running somewhere. A glance around showed far too many of them – the enemy had kept forces nearby ready for just this moment. And yet they were not the only ones. Skin saw an Estuary warrior step from nowhere, bare skin shimmering and blurring as she rammed a knife into a Plague warrior’s neck, and the keening of hawks was in the air above. Then a greater screech went up as one of the Bat Society overflew the rock. Empty Skin dropped to her knees, arms wrapped around herself to contain the shuddering vibration of it, and Galethea sagged in Kailovela’s hands, eyes wide in horror as the sound swept through her. But the Plague warriors did not just fly away, but stayed on to make a fight of it, and now Skin was sure the Terror must be building around them, mounting to that point when it would begin locking away the souls of all those around them. All through the negotiations it had been waiting on like a bird of prey, kept at bay only by the hope of the true people that this talk might win them something. Now things had gone from talk to fight and in every mind a gate was opening, quicker or slower. Once the initial shock was over, they would find the Terror waiting to devour their souls.
The Hyena and the Hawk (Echoes of the Fall Book 3) Page 32
