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

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  She stared into the face of her lost friend and wondered whether she dealt with human or god.

  ‘She cannot,’ the Coyote girl said, with another laugh. ‘I see the chains that bind her to her kin and the land beyond the seas. She makes her glamour from them, so she can paint her face and pretend to be real, but pretending is not being. You can never be if all you are is pretend.’

  Galaethea gave a groan of frustration. ‘This is meaningless,’ she choked. ‘What use are you?’

  ‘At least I’m real,’ Sathewe told her, stalking a little closer. ‘At least I can look into the waters and see eyes reflected back at me, and not just hollow hunger.’

  ‘I see eyes!’ Galethea protested desperately.

  ‘You see the eyes your craft paints onto your lids,’ Sathewe sneered. ‘How can you find your way with those?’

  ‘And you can do better?’ the Pale Shadow woman spat.

  ‘I know all the ways of this mountain,’ Sathewe boasted. ‘I wager I could find your song. Just tell me if it’s louder or quieter, each way you go?’ She jumped to her feet, instantly impatient to be gone. ‘We’ll play a game. We’ll call it Can You Tear Off Your False Face?’

  ‘A game,’ Galethea echoed faintly, but she forced herself to stand.

  33

  Even before she drew close, the Plague Ship seemed to grow until it could swallow the whole sky.

  Kailovela had only heard stories of the monster before, and mostly from those who had seen it just as a shape in the sky. It hung impossible in the air without wings, they had said – and here it was, doing just that. It made a sound like a creature in pain, they had said, and they were right; not loud but penetrating, a constant complaint that seemed to reverberate from horizon to horizon. It vomited fire, they had said. That would come soon. It was drifting serenely towards the great camp, those many hundreds all desperately trying to call back the gods. She thought of how close-pressed they were, all those chanting, dancing bodies; all those sun-dry tents, the sick and injured, the children. Her child.

  Ahead of her the great warband of the air seemed like a scatter of pebbles flung at the Plague Ship, Yellow Claw at their head. Already there were Plague warriors rising from below, and more issuing from the ship itself like angry bees. And perhaps the Eyriemen moved more swiftly and fiercely in the air, but how would killing those warriors stop the ship itself? No earthly thing was keeping it in the air, no wings moved it forwards. How could any of them halt or slow or turn aside such an unnatural beast.

  They spoke of it as a beast, everyone who had a story of When The Plague Ship Came. Its pained voice was that of a living thing, and it moved. What else could it be but some great monster the Plague People had bound to their service?

  Save that the thought did not sit well with her. She backed her wings, tilting sideways in the air and staring with a hawk’s keen eyes at the prodigy before her, even as the others were diving in to fight.

  The Eyriemen had few friends in the Crown of the World. They raided everywhere, secure in the knowledge that walls could not keep them out and they could come and go where they pleased. And yet they were not as many as most of the other tribes and so their depredations were in isolated places, against lambs and kids out at pasture, against children sometimes, whatever their talons could bear away. Most of the other tribes feared and despised them in equal measure. Many called them cowards for trusting to their wings rather than standing their ground to fight. And they were arrogant and kept apart from others. The Hawk were prideful and the Owl sinister, their only alliances those of convenience against common enemies. But this was their moment, their battle. Leading a ragged mob of Heron, Vulture and Shrike they surged towards the Plague Ship, armoured with the blood of Champions. Some broke off to fight the Plague warriors – some were already spinning away, pierced by their darts – while others soared against the immensity of the Plague Ship, keening their rage at it.

  Kailovela saw seven or eight of the Bat Society, perhaps all that were left, throwing the shadow of their vaned wings across the bloated bulk of the ship, their screeching sending the Plague warriors into fits, knocking them from the sky or scattering them across the deck of the Plague Ship, twitching and foaming at the mouth.

  The deck. The Plague Ship had a deck, where the Plague warriors stood to shoot. Kailovela had little knowledge of boats of any kind but a picture was coming to her of how the floating vessel was formed. There was an upper part, vast and bound like a full waterskin, and the Plague warriors were chasing their bird enemies across the face of it, determined to keep them from it. There was a lower part, smaller but inhabited by Plague warriors. They issued out onto its flat top from within, or they dropped out from openings in its belly. At its rear were great insubstantial discs that groaned and bellowed with the ship’s voice – she saw one of the Heron dart through one and simply explode into a shower of blood and feathers.

  The understanding came to her awkwardly, like an angular shape not meant to fit inside a human head. The ship was just a ship, not a monster. The front of that lower part was transparent, in front and below. She could see Plague Men within it, looking down. They would see the camp below them soon enough. They would know to drop their fire.

  She had been keeping her distance, circling back over the camp as the ship groaned closer through the air. She could feel the Terror just touching her wingtips. How many of those wings out there now just belonged to birds, panicked and uncomprehending. How many were still warriors fighting the Plague?

  Am I enough like them to be immune?

  She watched a flight of Hawk warriors stoop down at the deck, Stepping just long enough to loose arrows before speeding off again, the air about them spattered with darts. She looked for Yellow Claw – surely his great wingspan would make him no more than a convenient target for their weapons? And yet he lived and fought still, now attacking the great bulbous bulk above with his knives, now swooping down to tear at a Plague Man with his talons.

  I could watch like this until the fires come.

  With that thought, she cast herself forwards, waiting for the dart that would kill her, for the Terror that would snuff out her mind. Or perhaps she was so filled with ordinary fear that the supernatural grasp of the Plague could find no purchase in her.

  She beat her way through air filled with rage and death. On every side the warriors of the true people were dying, and killing too. The sky wheeled with Herons and Owls. Crooked men and women of the Vulture, black-clad with coppery heads shaved to the scalp, dropped down across the deck through a withering sleet of darts, but those that sprang up on human feet laid about them with knives and axes before taking wing again. Plague warriors in banded mail lifted their rods and sighted along them like arrows, trying to keep up with the manic, flapping throng around them.

  Within the Plague Ship, their cousins calmly stared down through their clear walls and floor, untroubled by the chaos without. She understand that all the fight the Plague Men were giving was purely to allow those others within the ship a calm span in which to burn away the mass of their enemy.

  Did they see the children below? Did they see the old women dancing, the antlers and the masks and the fires of devotion? Did they understand that those below were not warriors at all? She thought they lacked a hawk’s eyes, to see so much. She thought they would not stay their hand even if they knew. The world was a mirror to them in which they only recognized their own face.

  She flurried briefly against that clear wall, but it was hard and cold, like infinitely smooth stone. She slid off it without even scratching it with her claws. Briefly she thought of getting in through the holes the Plague warriors were issuing from, but that would be a death that would achieve nothing.

  She would need help. Up here, riding the air above the end of the world, there was only one she could ask.

  * * *

  At first it seemed that Galethea heard that soundless song clearly. ‘Yes!’ she said, and ‘Yes!’, chasing one way and another
as her image shimmered and waned and Sathewe watched her, head cocked to one side like a coyote. Maniye watched with mounting impatience as she seemed constantly on the brink of a revelation that never came. At her back she heard the great combined voice of the people falter, the unified rhythm of their invocation splintering as fear prowled between their fires. She felt Hesprec’s fear. Hesprec, who had been calm even old and alone in the Jaws of the Wolf. Maniye felt as though a great shadow was falling over everything she knew.

  She felt a fierce knot of frustration with this pale woman, who had come so far, sent by all the gods and spirits for this one task. Or would the gods send a soulless thing like this? Perhaps Galethea was just the Plague with pleasing words on its lips that still ruined everything it touched.

  Maniye could stand it no more. All that fear was standing at her shoulder, filling her with thoughts of death and burning and desolation afterwards. ‘Come on!’ she shouted at the spectre of Galethea. ‘Why can’t you find a way?’

  The pale woman’s look to her was desperate, teeth bared like the animal she would never be. ‘I don’t . . . the echoes . . .’ Her voice seemed to come from miles away, borne on a dying breeze.

  Maniye stormed over to her, wanting to rip that phantom substance apart, wanting to rage at the woman for her fallibility. ‘Where is the power you’re supposed to have?’ she demanded. ‘We don’t have time for you to fail! Where is that Pale Shadow power even the Serpent fears?’

  Galethea quailed before her. ‘Just a ghost,’ she whispered. ‘A ghost in their minds that we steered them with, and it is not here. I cannot bring it here, before your gods.’

  ‘Just a false face,’ Sathewe chimed in, giggling like she always did when things went wrong. ‘False eyes see nothing. No wonder you’re so lost! Plague Woman has nothing but a big hole in her where her soul should be!’

  ‘I’m not a Plague Woman!’ Galethea hissed at her. Maniye had the sense of her trying to find her magic.

  ‘Hollow body, empty mind. I can see through you, Plague Woman!’ Sathewe leapt up and Maniye barely saw the blur as a stone whizzed past Galethea’s ear. ‘No place in the world, no right to be here, no soul for you, Plague Woman!’

  ‘I’m not!’ The Pale Shadow creature sounded like a child on the point of tears. ‘We’re not them! We don’t want to be them! We want to be you!’ There was nothing good in her face, all those elegant lines crumpled by endless hunger and bitterness until she looked a hundred years old. ‘We’ve lived a thousand years trying to be you! It’s not fair!’

  Maniye felt that horror at her back – all those who could not fight, but who had stayed to pray and dance, to beg and cajole and command their gods. ‘We have no time,’ she said, voice flat in her own ears, but Sathewe just capered and threw more stones.

  ‘Hollow body, hollow mind! No soul for you, Plague Woman! Take your false face away, nothing-woman!’ she cried again.

  Galethea screeched, a sound that must have come from the vacant depths of her. Maniye saw her summon all her magic, all the craft of the Plague People. Her face shifted and writhed, layering beauty on beauty, glamour on glamour, paint over paint until what was left was hideous, features melted into one another, too many eyes staring out in taut rage. And Sathewe laughed and laughed.

  ‘Hollow woman paints her face! On and on she paints her face!’ the Coyote girl sang out. ‘So much paint and so much weight! Drags her face down to the ground! Painted eyes see only dust!’

  And this time Galethea went for her, a terrible blur of motion that had little of the woman to it. All the masks and guises seemed to spin and unravel in her wake, like fog, abandoned in her fury, her need to grind Sathewe between her hands, between her jaws. She went up the sheer rock like a spider, faster than Maniye would have believed possible, and her rage drew more substance to her so that she became a swarming grey shape, enough that she might have cast a shadow had there been a sun. The effect was horrible, profoundly inhuman, but Sathewe just squealed with mirth, always one step ahead.

  Maniye realized with a start she was being left behind. The Champion had borne her this far but it was no climber. Instead an ember-furred shadow pressed against her side, and she crooked her fingers into the tiger’s pelt and slung herself onto its back.

  She had some catching up to do, by then, but her tiger soul could claw up the rock as well as any Pale Shadow. She saw them ahead of her: the little dancing speck that was Sathewe; the half-ghost that was Galethea, whose voice came to her on the wind, cursing the Coyote child. Higher and higher the Coyote skipped, riding a stream of taunting insults. Galethea skittered after her, more and more here, riding the tide of ritual to draw more of herself into the Godsland. Perhaps she had not believed, before, but she was so angry now that there was no room left for anything else. Her entire being was fixed on the mocking figure of the Coyote. Her nebulous shape seemed to boil with flailing legs and unblinking eyes.

  Maniye lost them amidst the crags and the chasms – the whole landscape around her seemed broken, segmented, as though some great upheaval had riven it into splinters never to be made whole. The tiger leapt and scrabbled to keep up, and sometimes there was a wolf running alongside, a keener nose hunting out the scent of the two she followed.

  She crested a rise, and there was Galethea standing very still. For a moment Maniye thought she had caught her quarry, that the Coyote’s wrung body must be at her feet, but no, there was Sathewe sitting on a rock out of arm’s reach, grinning from ear to ear.

  ‘Galethea!’ Maniye snapped. The woman didn’t turn round, and so she slipped from the tiger’s back and circled until she could see her face.

  Her features were still recognizable, still that almost-human that passed for normal amongst the hollow people. Beneath translucent skin she seemed to seethe, and for a moment Maniye was afraid the Rat was here, somehow, come to spoil this last chance for victory. But whatever swarmed and ran within those hollow eyes was alien to this place as the Rat could never be.

  ‘I remember you,’ Sathewe said suddenly, but not to Maniye, to Galethea herself. ‘You hurt my hand. I was there with Takes Iron and Feeds on Dreams.’ Then her eyes shifted. ‘Many Tracks,’ she said, sounding surprised at her own knowledge.

  Galethea took in a harsh breath. ‘I hear it.’

  Maniye stared at her.

  ‘I understand it now. It is like the story you tell, three brothers. But there is an older story you do not tell. Two sisters; we will call them two sisters. Two different paths, but they were sisters once, even so, who shared a world with vast powers. One sister looked on some of these powers and walked towards them, so she became like them and took their shapes and had children who took more shapes until the land was filled with a thousand tribes each casting a different shadow. And the other sister saw other powers, and took from them their aspects and their strengths, and instead of giving herself to them, she took these things into herself and made them her magics. And the sisters were not friends, and the world was not even, and so they parted in blood and have been parted ever since. Yet paths can be retraced.’ The rage was leaching out of her, her grey substance shredding away like cobwebs. ‘Oh, Many Tracks, I understand, I understand it all, but there is no time.’

  ‘I know there is no time, so tell me,’ Maniye snapped. ‘Lead me!’

  ‘There is nowhere to lead you. There is nowhere left to go,’ Galethea breathed, and Maniye realized that the last rise she had crested was all the world there was. They were at the mountain’s top, a barren plateau of cracked rock with only the stars beyond. They were close, those stars; close and fierce and hungry to touch the earth.

  Galethea sagged to her knees as her borrowed strength ebbed away. ‘I understand,’ she said. ‘I know why Hesprec sent me here. I know we are not betrayed.’ She was weeping, silvery flecks like falling stars down her ghostly face. ‘But it’s too late. I have no time.’ She was stripped of everything that had made her beautiful, all that guise and poise and craft, but what was left b
eneath was beautiful in another way, even as it faded.

  ‘We have no time,’ Maniye insisted, but the spectre shook her head.

  ‘I,’ she corrected, just a whisper. ‘Too much, too much, and so little left of me. The grey priest’s knife has cut my threads, Many Tracks.’ She reached out to grip Maniye’s arm and there was no sensation to the touch at all.

  Galethea turned her face to the devouring stars and smiled. ‘But they’re beautiful, after all,’ she said, and then, ‘They have seen me!’ but with that, she was gone.

  * * *

  Kailovela found him sweeping across the deck of the Plague Ship. It seemed impossible that the broad sweep of his wings would fit through the tangle of beams and ropes that connected the two halves of the vessel, and yet there was none more born to the air than Yellow Claw. He turned and danced, pulling his wings in to thread needles through impossible gaps then throwing them wide to knock the Plague warriors from their feet or send them spinning away from him. Whenever they might have caught him, the shivering screams of the Bat were there to tear through Plague People minds like saws. Yellow Claw soared and tore through the fight like a man touched by the gods.

  She flurried past him, keening, trying to hook his notice. The shadow of his wingspan dwarfed her. The first time he might have missed her. The second, she saw his round orange eye light on her and know her, and he turned away, tilting on a wingtip to seek a fight on the far side of the ship.

  Desperately she flapped after him, screeching, catching him only because he stopped to fight. The air about them buzzed with darts – the Plague Men were defending their ship fiercely, and the deck was littered with the bedraggled, feathered mounds that were dead hawks and herons. Yellow Claw ignored them just as he ignored her, turning his back on her, then casting her to the deck with a single clap of his wings.