Without a strong force to oppose them, the war host began to break up. Keeping so many fed in ravaged countryside was next to impossible anyway, and many of the Plainsfolk with them simply stopped when they found their old homes and hunting grounds. Old enemies amongst the tribes began to remember who they despised – there were fights between Boar and Lion, between Dragon and Estuary tribes, and of course between Tiger and Wolf. Warbands were constantly packing their tents and heading home, openly or stealthily as their nature took them.
At last, in greatly diminished numbers, the liberators came to Where the Fords Meet, and there they found the Plague People ready to resist them.
Alladai was at Maniye’s side to see his people’s home again, unrecognizable as it was. This had been the heart of the Plague Dream in the lands of the true people, and they had built a bizarre maze of their web walls and left nothing standing of the Horse huts and palisades. At its centre, they had begun new structures, building with stone like the Rivermen did, and Maniye felt a weird shift of perspective as she understood that all their strange architecture had been merely transition, as though some completely different civilization would have hatched from that cocoon had they let it.
The Plague People were still in the midst of abandoning the place, trains of them heading east across the high passes towards the coast. There were not so many that the war host, even reduced, could not have destroyed them in open battle. They were ready to fight, though. They had been given enough time to learn a little about their souls. Maniye saw Plague warriors with their killing rods, and great heavy Wasps thundering through the sky or hanging upside down on the white walls. She saw them shift, one to another. Some even took their armour and weapons with them when they Stepped.
There were hurried councils between the surviving leaders. Some were all for attack, but more remembered the killing power of the Plague People weapons. Hesprec spoke most. While before, her words would have been shrugged off in anger, the sobering thought of another battle with the Plague warriors opened all ears.
Hesprec spoke of being human. The Plague People had never been human before. Probably they did not like it, certainly it did not absolve them, but they had become something more than the monster of stories. The hunger of their hollowness had been extinguished. Who knew what they might be, now?
Maniye heard Venat remark to Shyri that the Serpent just wanted the Plague’s secrets for itself, which made as much sense as anything. What carried Hesprec’s argument was the weariness of everyone there. They had been marching and fighting for a very long time, and nobody wanted to die in the cause of a war already won.
The war host stayed its hand and just watched as the remaining Plague People abandoned Where the Fords Meet. A great warband left then, judging that they would not be needed. Alladai himself gathered the remainder of his people, those who had been away when the Plague descended on his home.
‘We will start to rebuild as best we can,’ he told Maniye. ‘I know you must see the end of this, but come back to me, when you have driven them into the sea at last.’ He grinned. ‘When I first met you, Hesprec – old man Hesprec – said you were a prophesied child he was fetching for the south. Was that a lie, then?’
‘It was.’ She remembered her bitter disappointment because, for a moment, she had believed it herself.
‘It became true,’ Alladai told her, and kissed her, and then it was time for the remaining warriors to move on.
They trailed the Plague Men all the way to the coast, watching them grow more and more used to their souls. The high passes were hard going, but they saw Plague People become beetles to haul loads, become spiders to weave rope, or flying insects to carry burdens. Maniye expected that to make them more fearsome, but instead the enemy just became more familiar now they were forced to live as real people lived, to solve problems as true humans had always solved them, with their souls and Stepped shapes.
And then, the sea.
Thunder remembered the sea from his own war host’s assault on the Plague People up on the Seal coast. Of all the true people, only a handful dared to live with the great yawning abyss that was the ocean. The Seal, the Dragon, the strange, taciturn Lizard-people of the Salt Islands. All the rest had turned their back on the great water, driven by a deep and atavistic fear of the enemy that had forced them over it the first time. Now that enemy had come after them; now that enemy was going away, by that same road.
There was a last bid by the Lion and some of the Wolf tribes to fall upon the remnants and destroy them, but Hesprec again took the contrary voice. This time she said, ‘There is a land out across the sea with a thousand thousand Plague People in it, without souls, without gods. These we see here are but a warband sent across a sea that we ourselves cannot cross. Would you rather these survivors fled back to their people to tell them of the horrors that await them, should they send more? Or would you rather they come with more weapons and flying ships, at some other time of their choosing, to find out what happened to their fellows?’
The argument went back and forth, and Thunder felt that neither option was a guarantee of future peace, but then Hesprec never said everything that was on her mind, after all. What clinched it was the little monster.
Thunder had almost forgotten Kailovela’s pet. It – she – had been taken by the Plague People after the failed peace talk, and he had assumed her dead or imprisoned, or just seamlessly become one of the enemy once again. Now she was here, springing from the jostling mob trying to get aboard the boat. She came to Thunder, and he saw her looking for another face, her former captor, her friend.
She read enough in his expression to understand Kailovela was not with them, and the sorrow he saw in her own was infinitely human, infinitely understandable. That was enough for him to add his voice to Hesprec’s and carry the day.
Loud Thunder remembered the Plague People’s metal beast. It had terrorized the Seal coast, and then he and his war host had watched it flee their spears, taking with it as many of the enemy as had been able to escape his attack up north. Now it was here, again the last sanctuary for the fleeing Plague Men. Except this time the sun shone on the thing and he saw it for what it was. A boat, that was all. A huge boat like a whole village, impossibly afloat even though it was armoured in metal plates like a Stone Man; a boat driven by the howls of tormented monsters within it. A boat, nonetheless.
The last of the fleeing Plague Men were just filing aboard under the sharp eyes of his war host. They carried only things of their making, nothing of the true people, who had come within a spear’s throw, gathered within sight of the sea to see them go.
Maniye’s Crow friend, Feeds on Dreams, had been out over the waves, watching the Plague People experiment using boats and their own wings. Go far enough from shore and there was a point when their gods finally let go of them and they were hollow again. The revelation was plainly a thing of delight to most of the Plague People, for once the news came back they redoubled their efforts to quit the land. Their souls horrified them and they wanted only to be empty once more. Thunder wondered if it was a revulsion at their changed state, or whether having a soul forced them to face up to all the things they had done.
And yet there were a few who felt differently, it seemed. A dozen only, but they had approached the war host with empty hands, and some of them Stepped into their six- or eight-legged forms, and then knelt or crouched, and waited. Hesprec had gone to them, and taken Empty Skin, the Seal girl, who could at least manage a few words of their speech.
These few wanted to stay, that much was plain. Whatever their lives had been like as Plague People, they had felt the absence within them that was now filled. They did not want to lose their souls and return to what they had been. Thunder came down to look at them, Maniye and Asman by his side. They seemed a cross-section of the Plague People, some warriors, some of the solid dark people Maniye recalled as trying to study her; one was slender and fair as Galethea had been. One was a woman with grey skin and white eyes, li
ke their priest, and this one Thunder wanted to kill out of hand, save that Hesprec stopped him.
‘The Serpent will take them,’ she said. ‘Who knows what they may become in time?’
‘You speak for the Serpent, do you?’ Maniye asked her, and Asman made a doubtful noise. Tecumet had returned to Atahlan by then, and he was plainly not at all sure his Kasra would appreciate Plague People as guests within the Sun River Nation.
‘I will talk my kinsfolk round,’ Hesprec said. ‘I always do. If these are willing to embrace their souls and live as we live, then perhaps the future can be a thing of hope and not just fear. I have had enough of fearing what is to come.’
‘You cannot even speak to them,’ Shyri pointed out.
‘I will send to the Pale Shadow to come interpret for their kin,’ Hesprec decided. ‘And if they will not come then the Plague People will just have to learn to speak to me.’
Then there was just one farewell for Thunder to make. He sat down for it, to bring himself more to her eye level. ‘Empty Skin,’ he said.
The girl stared at him mulishly. ‘I won’t go back. Not to the sea, not to the Seal.’
Thunder shrugged ponderously. ‘We have so many children back, now, left behind when the Plague Men fled. Some are too young for a soul, but there are others like you, whose time came and went. There are ways, the priests know. A soul can be invited again, or changed. Ask the Plains Dogs, who were Wolves once. You don’t have to be this way.’
Empty Skin scowled at him so furiously he thought she would bite. ‘This way is me, Cave Dweller. Do you think that this,’ and she jabbed two fingers towards herself, ‘is just the Seal child still? This, that walked amongst the Plague Men, that tried to save the world.’
‘And helped save it,’ he agreed. ‘But what, then? You complain about having no place, but now you can have a place, you don’t want one.’
‘Can have a place if I become a different person. What if I want no gods, no souls. What if I want one of their souls.’
Thunder shuddered. There had always been something terrible about Empty Skin, and now he wondered if it was this moment, shining back through the months to when he first met her.
‘They have wonders, you know,’ the hollow girl said to him. ‘I lived with them, a bit. I saw them. Their weapons are the least of it. What might their lands be like, where all such wonders are made? Don’t tell me you never asked the question.’ But she searched his big, honest face and had to nod resignedly. ‘You never asked. And you never will again. But I asked. I want to know. So I will go on their boat with the little monster. I will be the first of the people to see the lands where Terror lives, and where men build flying boats and the houses are made of iron and gold.’
‘And when they lose their souls and become monsters again, out over the sea?’
‘Like me, you mean?’
‘You’re not—’
‘Then why are they?’ Empty Skin’s face creased. ‘Anyway, perhaps I will come back. Perhaps they will come back.’
Thunder felt a chill go through him at the thought. ‘May they stay away for another thousand years.’
‘But if they come back, don’t you want them speaking our language, knowing our ways, understanding what we are?’
After she left, Loud Thunder watched the metal beast pull away from the shore, its innards roaring defiance at the land that had defeated its masters. There were ensouled Plague People travelling as a makeshift embassy to Atahlan. There was a child of the true people venturing across the sea to the land they had been driven from at the dawn of time. The world had ended after all, and something new was being born.
Acknowledgements
The usual suspects: Simon Kavanagh, my agent, whose sterling work in all aspects of the trade keeps me busy; Annie, my wife, who provides the spine to my otherwise invertebrate existence; Bella Pagan and her confederates at Pan Macmillan, who have brought this series and this volume into the world, with a special thanks for Neil Lang, who has designed the best covers I’ve ever been blessed with.
Also, thanks to the voters and judges of the British Fantasy Society who chose The Bear and the Serpent as the winner of the 2017 Robert Holdstock Award for Best Fantasy Novel.
Adrian Tchaikovsky was born in Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire, before heading off to Reading to study psychology and zoology. For reasons unclear even to himself, he subsequently ended up in law. He has worked as a legal executive in both Reading and Leeds, where he now lives. Married, he is a keen live role-player and occasional amateur actor. He has also trained in stage fighting, and keeps no exotic or dangerous pets of any kind – possibly excepting his son. He’s the author of the critically acclaimed Shadows of the Apt series and the Echoes of the Fall series, as well as Guns of the Dawn and Children of Time – which won the 30th Anniversary Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction Novel.
www.shadowsoftheapt.com
By Adrian Tchaikovsky
Shadows of the Apt
Empire in Black and Gold
Dragonfly Falling
Blood of the Mantis
Salute the Dark
The Scarab Path
The Sea Watch
Heirs of the Blade
The Air War
War Master’s Gate
Seal of the Worm
Echoes of the Fall
The Tiger and the Wolf
The Bear and the Serpent
The Hyena and the Hawk
Other novels
Guns of the Dawn
Children of Time
First published 2018 by Macmillan
This electronic edition published 2018 by Macmillan
an imprint of Pan Macmillan
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Associated companies throughout the world
www.panmacmillan.com
ISBN 978-1-5098-3028-2
Copyright © Adrian Czajkowski 2018
Design by Neil Lang
Cover Image © Shutterstock
The right of Adrian Czajkowski to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Pan Macmillan does not have any control over, or any responsibility for, any author or third-party websites referred to in or on this book.
You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Map artwork by Michael Czajkowski
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Table of Contents
Title page
Dedication page
Map
Contents
Prologue
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
Acknowledgements
About the Author
By Adrian T
chaikovsky
Copyright page
The Hyena and the Hawk (Echoes of the Fall Book 3) Page 43
