Except me, for I have no soul to shackle, and nor does Galethea, for all she wants one. But Kailovela would be just a hawk then, and Skin had come to like her, so she forced herself up and dragged at both of them, the Eyriewoman and the Pale Shadow. A Plague warrior dropped down nearby, but whether he would have killed them or not she never knew, because a great owl was already stooping on him, claws fixing in his white face and beak ripping into his eyes. Even as he dropped, invisible darts were lancing into the bird, staggering it in the air. For a moment the priestess Seven Mending knelt there, vomiting out blood, pale eyes seeing nothing, but then the bird lay in her place, broken and bloodied.
Skin heard the voice of Kailovela’s little monster, crying out in rage. She saw the creature held by Plague warriors, being hauled away from the rock and the fight. Its wings flickered erratically as it tried to escape their grip but they were intent on protecting it; it was one of their own, after all.
The Bat passed overhead again unleashing its silent scream on the enemy, and their busy darts followed it in the air, skipping and singing as they tried to tear its wings and bring it down. Then Loud Thunder was with them, his face bloody and his axe bloodier, virtually picking them all up to bundle them away. She thought that was it, but he stopped still in sight of the rock and in reach of the enemy, calling out a name. Skin looked about, seeing at last Lone Mountain, Thunder’s cousin, as he charged down one of the Plague Men with a bear’s sudden access to speed. Thunder called his name once again and for a moment he was human, his maul dark and stained, looking back with a dreadful wildness in his face. Then the air was alive with darts. Skin saw a Wolf go down, and a Riverman. Somewhere nearby Asman’s Champion was screeching out a challenge, but there were more and more Plague Men coming, and they were incensed, fighting furiously and refusing to give ground even to the Bat. Because they think themselves betrayed, Skin knew, feeling sick. All our work wasted.
She saw the moment when Lone Mountain ceased to be Lone Mountain, the Terror ripping his human shape from him and leaving only the bear. The bear was fighting mad, though, and there was no such thing as just a bear. He tore into the enemies about him, bellowing and roaring. The Terror had robbed him of his humanity but it had taken away his fear of the enemy too. He was lost, but he was holding the way, drawing the enemy’s rage.
They fell back, all of them. Lone Mountain was not the only one gone. There were men of the Plains and the River and the Crown of the World left there as sprawled figures or huddled mounds of fur and flesh. They lay amongst the torn corpses of the Plague Men they had fought.
* * *
The Godsland here was eaten away, as though Rat’s hunger could not be sated on bones and grain alone, but had turned on the very earth itself. The grasses were patchy and dying as though the whole world was sick, and the rock whittled away to a crooked pillar of stone. Below, scattered across the earth as far as the eye could see, she saw bones. Some were human, most were animal. Some were huge enough to belong to gods. She remembered the buried chamber in the Horn-Bearer fortress with its intricate wall-coverings. This was just chaos, though. This was the desired end of the Rat, a world picked clean.
If she let herself drift, she could hear the clamour of a fight coming to her through her real ears. She was not firmly ensconced in the Godsland, straddling two worlds. Hesprec had done the best she could, but Maniye knew she had to block out any distraction or she would be lost back to the physical world. Part of her mind was constantly filling with images of Shyri falling, of the knives and teeth of the Rat’s mortal agents poised before her eyes, caressing her throat. She bailed away at the thoughts like a lost boatman desperately trying to keep the sea from overwhelming his little barque.
When she had come over, there had been rats clinging to her, teeth latched into her wounds, and she had torn them away one by one, hurling the twitching little bodies out over the cracked earth.
She had never seen Hesprec in the Godland before; perhaps what she saw now was just the product of her imagination, but every movement of the River child seemed to trail a cascade of ghosts: men, women, old, young, dark and secret and painted with rainbow scales, receding back in some direction Maniye had no name for. She caught a sight of that lean old face she had rescued from the Jaws of the Wolf and felt a sudden stab of loss, for all he had not been taken from her, only changed.
Hesprec put her hands on her hips and called out, ‘What a poor host you are, O Rat! Here are the guests you have so longed to meet and yet your hearth is empty. Have you no salt or drink for your visitors?’ Her tone was mocking and sharp but Maniye heard within it a tremble of fear.
There was nowhere for the Rat to come from, but it seemed to arise out of the earth itself, a great mounded form that grew and grew until it could stare at them on their pillar, eye to eye. It was almost shapeless in its gross bulk, its hide skewbald with patches of scabby hairless skin, with sores and maggoty boils. Maniye had seen days-dead corpses that looked more fit for life than the Rat. And yet she had no sense that it was in pain, that it suffered; the Rat revelled in the corruption and downfall of all things, even its own form.
Its eyes were pits of pure darkness; its filthy yellow teeth like slabs of bark peeling from dead trees.
‘So the Serpent has finally come to see his brother.’ The voice rose from its festering flesh like a chorus of whispers. ‘Do you come to welcome me in, O Serpent? Do you finally admit that I was there when the Plague People were cast back and the sea rushed in?’
Hesprec stood very straight, looking into the face of the god. ‘You were there, O Rat, but there is a reason you do not feature in the telling,’ she said flatly. ‘Serpent, Owl and Bat battled the Plague all night, awaiting the fire of the sun, but you lifted no spear against them. It was not their flesh you sharpened your teeth for. You are cut from the tale because you were there only for our bones should we fall. You could have taken your place with us and been our brother, but you chose to wager against us.’ A curious authority had come into her voice, as though she was gathering some mantle about her, coil upon coil. The children of the Serpent had always enjoyed a close and strange relationship with their god.
Rat bared its dagger-teeth and the hateful voice hissed out, ‘Then why come to me, O Serpent, if you only wish to dig up old corpses. You are in my place now. All the other gods are fled and the Plague People have long ago forgotten their own. I am sole master of this land.’
‘Not all other gods,’ Hesprec said quietly, and then she looked to Maniye and only the girl herself stared out of her eyes. ‘Bring your souls forward, Many Tracks, because we will need to fight.’
Even with the thought, Maniye felt the Champion close to her, padding massively across the ravaged land to stand beside the pillar. The Rat shrank back a little, seeming to diminish, until the Champion almost matched it, size for size.
‘We can’t fight a god, though, can we?’ Maniye asked.
‘This god we can fight,’ Hesprec told her. ‘This god we have fought all our lives, all of us, this god is starvation, deprivation, the loss of the self, the spiral of fallen tribes and kingdoms. The Rat is the enemy we always carry with us, just as the Plague is the enemy that we left behind. And now, with the world ending, the Rat has grown bolder, but bold for a rat is perhaps not so very bold.’
And indeed for a moment the Rat had seemed taken aback, cringing before the Champion’s appearance, but now it bullied forward, growing greater again, bulking out in folds of greasy, patchy flesh. The Champion braced, and then thundered forward, lumbering like a bear, leaping like a cat, latching on like a wolf and shaking. Its claws ripped into the Rat’s substance and tore it apart and it drove the squalling, squealing creature around the pillar, trying to gain purchase on its hide.
But the Rat was never still, and its bloated flesh seemed to flow and swirl about the Champion’s attacks. Every gash and rent in its hide was gone the moment it was dealt, while its teeth left bloody puncture wounds in the Champion’s body. M
aniye felt each one: it was her soul that fought, after all. She stood on the pillar and yet she was simultaneously down there ripping and tearing, hunting for a throat that was just more bulbous flesh parting before her bite and then reforming after.
Something was happening around them, too: some terrible deformation of the ground. Their pillar was now at the centre of a shallow bowl in the earth, and Maniye could feel everything around her sinking, the sides rising up to trap them. Time was running short, and she was losing to the Rat, carving into its substance without marking it for more than a heartbeat.
This is not how you fight a rat. But then there had never been a rat like this, not so vast and old and over-full of dead flesh. The thought caught in her mind like a fish-hook. There never was a rat like this. This is the Rat as it wishes to be, but what is it really, but vermin that survives by hiding and creeping? This is not the truth of the Rat.
With that thought, her other souls were with her. A wolf slunk to one side of the pillar, a tiger to the other. They were dwarfed by Champion and Rat both; they did not have that vast and ancient strength to them, but they were far better suited to the task of catching and killing rats.
She sent them forwards, committing every part of her, and they leapt upon the Rat’s body. They were not seeking throats or eyes or other vulnerable parts, for the Rat had none of them. All the Rat had was its multitudes, and tiger and wolf tore into them, attacking not the great form but all the tiny bodies it was made of.
She was horribly aware of the land sinking and twisting around them, the sides of the pit so high she could see only a gash of sky above. The Rat was screaming out its rage in many voices as she worried away at its components, all the little bodies it was formed of. But there were hundreds, there were thousands. There had been too much death in this land, too much sustenance for this god of failed things. All she could do was hold it and occupy its wrath.
In her ear, Hesprec said, ‘That is enough.’
Maniye could barely spare her any attention. ‘What now?’
‘Call back your souls. The fight is done.’
Looking at the high walls risen all around them, Maniye felt a terrible despair. She felt her souls return to her, their physical forms fading, until there was nothing between them and the Rat.
‘Kneel,’ came that hissing choir of voices. ‘Kneel and be my Speaker in the world, Serpent. Give me the blood of your friend and make yourself mine.’
Hesprec took a deep breath. ‘O Rat,’ she called to it, ‘your brother is here to greet you.’
For a moment Maniye felt that she and the Rat were both staring at Hesprec with equal bafflement, but then the earthen walls around them rippled and she realized she had not seen them properly when they formed. She could look up now and see the curved fangs that cut into the sole remaining slice of sky; she could see the ribs lining the interior of the hole as it descended into the earth, a slope the Rat was even now scrabbling at, hampered by its quivering bulk. The earth had not sunk into a pit, but something had arisen out of the earth to surround them. They were within the closing jaws of the Serpent. She and Hesprec stood upon its forked tongue.
Below them, the Rat cried and clawed, but the walls around it, the throat of the Serpent, gave a great undulating heave and it vanished, swallowed into the depths of the earth.
Hesprec took her hand, not jubilant but only solemn, a priestess who has seen the greatest mysteries of her god played out.
‘We have stayed too long here,’ she said, ‘and seen too much. Shyri will need us.’
Returning to the flesh was returning to weakness and pain, but Maniye remembered plucking the rats from her wounds and knew she would become stronger and that the pain would fade.
Around them were many bodies. Most were the starved followers of the Rat, but one was the still, dark form of the Plague Man whose captive she had been, who had been so curious about her Stepping from shape to shape. He had found his own final shape now, contorted in death, and she could only stare at him and wonder.
And Shyri was there, but not among the dead. Instead, she sat atop the rock trading stories with an old friend.
‘Venat?’ Maniye demanded. ‘How did you come here?’
The Dragon pirate grinned. ‘Oh, the Great Kasrani was about a piece of foolishness, as usual, but not so foolish that he didn’t want me and mine creeping about the place looking for surprises.’ His smile slipped. ‘It’s all gone to ashes, from my best guess, but by then I’d heard Laughing Girl fighting, and come over to get stuck in.’
There were a handful of his people with him, big men with weapons of greenstone and shark teeth.
‘They went to talk to the Plague People,’ Shyri explained.
‘Went about as well as you’d expect, I reckon,’ Venat added. ‘And we don’t want to be here come dawn or we’ll none of us see two feet again.’ The note of caution from him brought home to Maniye just how bad things must have become.
Hesprec was kneeling beside the dead Plague Man, hands out and almost touching his torn-up flesh. ‘He must have been so frightened at what was happening to him,’ she murmured softly. ‘And you were the only thing he knew that could make sense of it. I think he wanted you to help him.’
Maniye did not want to look at the creature – no, the man. A dead man, but a man nonetheless. ‘I couldn’t help him.’
‘He didn’t know that. What could he know? How strange it must have been for him.’
‘To Step?’
‘To have a soul.’ Hesprec touched the dead flesh tentatively, and Maniye wondered if there was a ghost left there, unable to depart – and if it could flee that prison, where could it possibly go, to be reborn? Would it find one of the Plague People’s pets, some hatchling monster to inhabit, or perhaps some tiny mote of an insect drifting on the wind?
Hesprec’s face was devoid of expression when she stood up; that meant she was thinking very deeply indeed.
‘Man of the Dragon, would you lead us to your Kasrani? You’re right, this is not a healthy place to stay.’
29
Galethea had been brought before Mother as soon as the healers had finished with her. It had been strange, the healers said. She had screamed and thrashed just like a real person; her blood had been as red, her flesh as vulnerable. And yet the hollowness had been there always, beneath their fingers; the soullessness.
But she had been tenacious of life and clung on while they dressed and bandaged the gash the grey priest had made. She had lived, though her paleness was now an ashen, bluish colour. Then they had taken her on a stretcher up before Mother and the rest of the Wise, and she had stammered through her report: there would be no peace with the Plague People. They would trade no more words with the real people. All was war now. Kailovela had stood by and listened, and felt ice sink into her at the words. In her head the words, It’s the end of the world, went round and round.
Mother had all but accused the Pale Shadow woman of bringing this about; everyone knew how reluctant she had been to play the peacemaker. Galethea had no strength left for her magic; her kinship with the enemy had been there for all to see. And yet she had wept and begged, desperate to be believed. She had done her best, but the enemy priest had no willingness to talk. He was poisoned from within by hatred for them all. In the end she had been believed.
Later, she had sat in Kailovela’s tent, with Empty Skin and Hesprec the Serpent priestess, and told the full story.
‘He said many things so the other Plague Men could hear,’ she explained in her thin, exhausted voice. ‘Peace words, as though he was there to treat with us. But in between those words he said other things with his craft, just for me. Because he needed to destroy us.’
‘He hated us, you said,’ Kailovela noted.
‘That is not it. Or it is more than that.’ Galethea’s face twisted. ‘I am trying to find your words for what he said. He said his family remembered, or his tribe, that is how you’d say it. He said the rest told each other you were animal
s who could trick them by taking man-shapes. He said that was best because then they would not feel guilt when they killed you, if all you were was animals. They do not have animals in their land, like you have here. Your wolves and bears and eagles are all monstrous to them. Killing you is easy, because they fear your claws and teeth.’
‘But his tribe, his family,’ Hesprec prompted.
‘He said they remembered,’ she repeated. ‘He said they forget nothing, that all the lore of the Plague People is theirs. They are keepers of secrets, he said.’ Her eyes fixed the Serpent girl. ‘They know.’
‘Know what?’ Empty Skin asked, but it was clear Hesprec understood. She and Galethea stared at each other for a long time, and the Serpent spoke first.
‘We have a legend; every tribe knows it, in one form or another. The legend of Where We Were, and how some of the people there made bargains with demons and became the Plague People. They spread throughout the land and devoured everything until the true people who were left had to flee. And, yes, the three brothers fought until the sun came and burned away the land, the sea rushed in, all of that. And I wonder about that last, and in truth I think perhaps the tale tellers made something grand out of something wretched. But we remember that the Plague People drove us out of our first home to these lands. And the Plague People do not remember, because it is easier to forget the one you scar, than the one that scars you. The Plague People do not know us as those they once wronged, back in the lost days. As she says, we are just animals to them, who have learned a strange trick, monsters who deceive them with our human faces. Except for this grey priest’s tribe.’
The Hyena and the Hawk (Echoes of the Fall Book 3) Page 33
