She Stepped. She had no option. She needed his help, for all it choked her.
‘We need to break inside!’ she cried at him, her words torn away by the wind. ‘We need to get at the men inside. Yellow Claw, this fight means nothing!’ She was waiting for the dart to find her human body and trap her ghost, to send her whirling from the ship until the ground caught her. ‘Yellow Claw, curse you! We need to break through their walls!’
For a moment he was human, plunging his knives into a hollow body, eyes meeting hers. His face twisted with loathing – she saw the humiliation of losing her, the pain of the beating Loud Thunder had given him, all the frustrations that should only fall to lesser men, not the Champion of the Eyrie.
‘Everyone will burn!’ she screamed at him.
He spat. He was Yellow Claw. Let them burn.
She felt her fingers crook like claws, about to rush at him and tear at his face for sheer frustration. All her life men like this had held her prisoner, and even now she was at their mercy, even at this last fight.
A hand took her shoulder and hauled her back from her lunge without effort. She whirled, striking out, and her wrist was caught by another. She faced the fear-mask of the Owl Society: Grey Herald.
‘Show me!’ he shouted at her.
She Stepped, trusting him to follow, fighting the wind to reach the front of the Plague Ship again. She swooped a ring about those clear walls, hoping he would understand. In the end, when he just soared back and forth in bewilderment, she Stepped again and crouched at the front of the ship like a figurehead, poised over those industrious Plague People, beating her fists against their walls with all her strength like a child.
In that moment she felt the Terror rise up all around them. Enough darts had found a home in human bodies that the battle for the air had turned. Her body thrummed to the shriek of the Bats as they tried to turn the fear back on the enemy, but the whole sky sang to the Terror. In moments their warriors would be losing their minds, one by one, no more than birds fleeing the shadow of the Plague Ship.
Plague warriors were abruptly flurrying about them. They know what we intend! She clung to herself within the hawk’s skull, seeing Grey Herald’s owl driven away from her. Fire from their hands singed her feathers and she crashed down onto human knees right above the transparent wall, clutching at the smooth, cold stuff for purchase. A warrior dropped down right beside her and tried to bring his killing rod to bear, close enough that the barrel of it struck her above the eye. She raked at his face with her nails, but all she achieved was to drive him far enough that he could shoot her with ease.
Something stooped on him, wings enough to swallow the world. For a mad moment she thought Yellow Claw had changed his heart and put aside his pride, but these wings were no bird’s, great vanes of leather that swept Plague Men aside with the force of them. Not one of the Bat, though, if any of them even still lived. For a moment the monster crouched here, some reptile thing with a long beak and a crested head, and then it was Asman of the River, hacking down with his stone-toothed sword to behead the Plague warrior, then Stepping again to his fighting shape. He ran precariously along the spine of the boat, leaping on another Plague Man and carving him up with brutal efficiency. In moments there were a half-dozen Heron fighting alongside him, the Estuary fliers drawn from across the sky to their Champion, and he led them up and down the deck in a storm of arrows and spears. He seemed frantic, and she knew he must have soldiers hard pressed on the ground, all his kin under the shadow of the Plague, but a call had gone out for anyone who could take to the air and he had answered.
Grey Herald Stepped down beside her, baring his teeth as he reversed the hatchet he carried and brought the back of it down hard against the clear wall. On the second blow she saw a maze of white lines spread from the point of impact. Then the third came down, with a great cry from the Owl priest, and the wall shattered into razor-edged shards of nothing.
What struck her was the surprise of the Plague Men inside. Their attention had been on their deadly work and, to them, the fight without was irrelevant, a problem for someone else. Now some of them cowered and others shouted, that staccato chittering of theirs that passed for language. Some drew out weapons.
Grey Herald landed in their midst, his skin drawn by a thousand little blades from the shattered wall. He yelled and put his axe into the skull of the nearest Plague Man, straight between the hollow creature’s aghast eyes. Then darts were lancing him, two, three, a half-dozen, knocking him back against all their clutter and the broken shards.
Kailovela dropped down, Stepping halfway to spread her wings and slow herself, then landing on human feet: a young woman in a doe-hide robe and cloak of feathers, unarmed, her dark hair cut short so it might never shackle her again.
The utterly unexpected sight held them for half a heartbeat and she reached for the magic in her, that force that had blighted her life. For a moment, now of all times, it was absent, and she was just a savage woman before these implacable conquerors. She waited for the Terror to take her, or their darts. Despair emptied her and the magic rushed in like a tide to fill the void.
She touched their minds. She had never felt herself do this before, though she had been drawing people close to take and own and control her since she was grown. The Terror had stripped away all her masks. She had a moment of utter self-knowledge, as she watched how this thing within her went about its work.
They had minds, these Plague Men, even without souls. They had desires and longings. She felt the echo of them within herself, even as she tried to grip at them. They were warriors, these men. They had come to fight an enemy. Their purpose was like an arrow in flight – no small matter to pluck it from the air. And all the while the Plague Ship cruised on, towards the vast camp below that was to be fed to the fire.
She tried to make the magic control them and do her will, but it did not work like that, or how easy would her life have been? It spoke to them at a level below their waking minds, deep in the stomach and the liver where emotions were born. Their emotions were all of war and bravado, though – just as Yellow Claw’s must be. She had no hold on them to turn them around.
And they had not killed her yet, nor had the Terror struck her, but the moment her magic parted ways with their minds, she would be dead. What do they have that I can touch? They cannot just be blood and metal all through! She dredged up all she knew about the enemy, and how pitiful that ‘all’ was! If only I had Empty Skin here with me!
The thought dropped into the centre of her like a rock thrown into a lake, and the ripples were understanding of the one thing the Plague People did know, the one thing of her world that they valued enough to repurpose.
Kailovela could feel the great strength of the ritual below her, all those minds, the fear, the desperation, the longing, the love. How many families crouched under the shadow of the Plague Ship? How many children? The Plague People had children, for they took in every stray of the real people to raise as their own. So Kailovela let her magic tell them of children. She filled their minds with thoughts of a mother’s love, a father’s pride, the burden of carrying a child to term, the pain of birth, the desperation of having such a dependent thing in so harsh a world. The gates were open then. She found herself channelling thoughts of lost homes left far behind, of loved ones gone too soon or too hard to their graves. A wellspring of feeling was funnelling through her and she could not stop it, but simply sped it on its way to the Plague Men before her, the world-burners in their invulnerable ship. And for everything she cast at them, she felt the echo: the homes they had left, the comrades and the kin they had lost to war or time, the sons they had watched grow, the daughters they hoped for. All the pathos in the world coursed back and forth through her, and she knew that these hollow men who had destroyed so much of her world without pity or regret were just men.
She channelled all of this, wielding this great emotional bludgeon, and she felt the wooden ground shift beneath her as the Plague Ship veered awa
y. She felt them fighting her, fighting their own hands, holding back from unleashing their fire. Triumph leapt in her, but it was born of bitterness, because all these noble sentiments that she wielded against them were not hers. She reported them second-hand. She had no home she longed for. She had a child she felt only duty towards. She twisted their minds with all the finer feelings she had never known, and now she must face the truth: the lack was not in her kinship to the Plague, it was in herself.
She shuddered, and the belly of the Plague Ship unseamed itself, the fire vomiting forth towards the ground. But they were away, their shadow only clipping the camp below. She had saved everyone a burning death for now, and the end of the world was pushed one arm’s length further away.
She opened her eyes and saw the grey man, the Plague priest, standing in the midst of the wreckage. He was staring at Grey Herald’s painted face – that fear-mask that was just a mockery of his own grey face and white eyes. For a moment even he was on the point of some great revelation.
Then he reached out with his own magic and severed hers, ripping her from the minds of his kin without effort. He barked sharp sounds that must be an order to sail their ship over the camp again. The Plague warriors around him were blinking, dazed, but more and more their angry eyes were turning on Kailovela. No warrior wishes to be forced to face the pain of the world he contributes to.
The Plague priest drove forwards with his knife, as he had against Galethea, but he had forgotten he was dealing with one of the enemy, not just a shadow of his own kind. His thrust met empty air as she battered at the ceiling in a storm of feathers. She had never hunted as a hawk, but her talons were right here and so was he, and she dropped on him, latching on to that grey skin, tearing at those white eyes with her beak, feeling the bitterness of his gall on her tongue.
The fire from their hands seared her, the darts lanced her – at least one tore through the priest as well. As she dropped to the tilted floor, as her blood stained her robe and her own clutching hands and the Hawk stooped for her soul, she felt the lumbering slowness of the Plague Ship as it began to turn once more.
34
Hesprec held on to Maniye’s hand as though she was drowning, gripping pale marks into the woman’s skin, eyes closed, shoulders hunched against what was happening around her.
The vanguard of the Plague People had been holding back, she knew now. They had been waiting for the fire of their ship to do its work, so they could swoop in and finish off whoever remained. But then the ponderous shadow had begun to slip away in the air, nosing off to the south as though it had lost interest in what was going on.
Any relief was short lived. Moments after the sky had shrugged off that huge shadow, dozens of smaller ones were taking its place. The Plague warriors were scudding over the camp like bad weather, loosing bolts of fire and their swift darts.
Hesprec’s plan had been absurdly ambitious. Even the long-lived Serpent had no memories of anything like it. So many priests, so many rituals; the tales, the chants, the drums and horns. Her fellows would have told her it could never work, and she would have believed them and not tried. That was why she had not shared her plans with anyone except Maniye.
But it had worked. The devotion of a score of different peoples had settled into the same rhythm and she had felt the gods turn back in their headlong flight. They had heard the music of their people and come to their aid one last time. Hesprec had felt them standing about the edge of the camp like tall shadows, now human, now in their true forms. Old Crocodile had been there, Wolf and Tiger, Bear and Boar and Plains Dog, Badger and Lion. All enemies, all of them, and yet they had been shoulder to shoulder passing their strength to their people, who passed it on to Hesprec. In that moment she had felt herself the fulcrum of the universe.
And she had passed it to Maniye and to the Pale Shadow creature, Galethea, because there was more to her plan than just this. But for a moment she had held the world in her hands and understood more about the nature of mankind and the gods than any priest before her.
Then the Plague had come, and her world had started to unravel. Hearth by hearth, song by song her great ritual was fraying. The Plague warriors dropped down, and the Terror stooped with them. She could feel the rituals ending like candles being snuffed, as the priests and votaries turned to flee or to fight. There were still warriors in the camp – more and more as Thunder’s fighters had been forced back by the Plague advance – but they could not match the enemy for speed.
Her ears were full of the fighting and the dying and her eyes were shut tight as she held Maniye’s hand and prayed that Serpent show the Champion her path. Galethea had already collapsed, lying on her side, curled about her reopened wound with the last few breaths of her life struggling to escape her.
Then the fighting was all around her and she could not close her eyes to it. The light let in a glimpse of banded armour, black and yellow, the flash of a blade. Hesprec held herself rigid, knowing that to even flinch would be to break her connection to Maniye and bring it all crashing down.
One of Maniye’s warband was between her and the enemy in the next moment, a big dark wolf frothing at the mouth as it knocked the Plague warrior down. Moon Eye. The angry spirit was on him for sure, but it liked the taste of hollow flesh better than that of his friends, or else he had finally learned to leash it. It tore at the Plague Man’s throat and then lifted its blood-stringed jaws to howl. Wolf bodies leapt and darted all around, Stepping into iron-armoured men and women who threw spears or loosed arrows at the circling enemy above. And dying. She saw old Spear Catcher struck down, blood bright at his chest and lips and a look of bafflement on his face. She saw three darts find Moon Eye, and then the Terror come for him – it drove out the man he had been but the angry spirit in him fed on it and kept on fighting, sinking its teeth into any piece of Plague flesh it could reach.
Someone’s knee impacted with the back of her head and she lurched forwards, clinging to Maniye. Someone was standing over them. Like a thorn in the corner of her eye, her peripheral vision caught the jut of a Plague warrior rod. She wanted to look at him. She wanted to meet his eyes and stare into the emptiness behind them, but she stared only at Maniye’s face and filled her mind with the intricate workings of the ritual.
A thin bronze blade flashed, drawing a line across the Plague Man’s throat, so that blood gouted hot across Hesprec’s face. Moments later, Shyri dropped down beside her, eyes wild, gripping Maniye’s shoulder as though trying to wrest some of the Champion’s strength from her.
‘Everyone’s fighting,’ she said, and to Hesprec’s ears that sounded an utterly unnecessary thing to say. Then Shyri’s meaning came to her: fighting was not losing. Fighting was not dying, even if it was not winning. All the warriors of the world were here to battle the Plague People, and by courage and numbers they were holding them at arm’s length.
But not forever. The Terror was already claiming its victims, and that was the true plague of the Plague People, the thing that leapt from mind to mind like contagion. We cannot last. Something must change.
‘Bring priests. Good ones.’ She got the words out through gritted teeth.
‘I reckon they’re a bit busy right now,’ Shyri pointed out.
‘Do. It.’
The Laughing Girl hissed through her teeth but Stepped and was off, and for a moment the space immediately about Hesprec was clear of living enemies.
The great ritual was disintegrating, eroded by the very closeness of the Plague People. Because they don’t understand it. Because they don’t believe in it. She felt the stifling presence of the enemy rolling over the camp, obliterating not just lives and minds but ways. It will be as if we never were. All our histories back to the first of us, unwritten. And perhaps some Plague priest will find our bones and our tools a thousand years from now and make up stories about who we were.
I’m sorry, she thought, the sentiment meant for all the people there had ever been, whom she was failing.
Then
she had more company, even as the sky grew darker with the flurry of Plague warriors. Two Heads Talking and Quiet When Loud dropped down beside her, the latter still holding Kailovela’s son, who was squalling fit to burst, little hands clawing at the shadows that flitted over him.
‘I need—’ Hesprec got out, but they knew, somehow. Coyote always was good at stealing the secrets of the other gods.
Others were coming now – those whose dance was done, whose song was cut short by the attack. Gnarl Hide of the Boar, Icefoot of the Wolf, Oreto of the Lion, Aritchaka of the Tiger with her knives steeped in blood. Crocodile, Snake Eater, and then a shadow that seemed as great as the Plague Ship itself as Mother came and sat beside them.
‘I need—’ Hesprec said again, feeling her heart strained to bursting by the effort of holding it all together.
Two Heads was explaining for her, though, not the long Coyote story but quick, concise words.
Hesprec closed her eyes.
* * *
Maniye stood before the stars. At her feet, Sathewe crouched, a thin Coyote girl or just a thin coyote, now one, now the other, but with head cocked waiting for her to do something.
When she had first come to the Godsland, the sky had frightened her with its busy malevolence. Trying to find a way in, she had thought, of all those swarming stars.
She had known nothing, back then. Now she stood on a mountaintop in the land of the gods, and the stars drew close to her, all of them. East and west, north and south, the sky was a featureless void of nothing, and all the stars were here, directly above her, clustered in a dreadful anticipation.
They’re almost here.
When she inhaled, the air smelled of smoke and blood and fear. The wind in her ears sounded like screaming and battle. Her senses were constantly tugged at by the human world and what was going on there.
The Hyena and the Hawk (Echoes of the Fall Book 3) Page 40
