by Erron Adams
“Hey, get back here!” yelled the Talker.
“Get the bastard!” said the finger prodder and Bowman heard the clasp of a holster unlock, the slide of metal against leather.
But they needed no shot to arrest Bowman's flight. Before he’d gone twenty steps he stopped again, paralyzed before an ordinary blue-painted house door, his eyes locked on its lion-head knocker.
He couldn't make things out. What lay beyond that door? A neat hell peopled by demonic old couples, fussing, snipping, cleaning, eyeing the bedraggled newcomer, sizing him up for renovation? Or another labyrinth for him to wander lost in? Was anything real? Him? Caylen? Had they ever really been? As far back as he knew, life had been disquiet, and even if he'd wanted to there was no going back. Only the future was openable. He reached for the handle. As it turned the door swung open.
Bowman barely glimpsed what lay beyond it. His feet swung out from under him and his body swung round like a windsock as his hand scrabbled to retain its grip. The next thing he saw was the cops, frozen at the threshold, and in the foreground, his right arm, shaking all the way to where his fingers froze to the door by its familiar handle. The bones of his hand bulged and popped with the effort. Below him a cacophony of wind buffeted and tore at his clothes; his legs flailed in the throat of a vortex. He held on with all the strength he had, one glance below into the pit of a shrieking, black maelstrom firing his resolve.
Above his head the cops' stunned faces shone down on their errant creation. Slowly the Talker extended a hand towards Bowman. It hovered a few moments, almost connecting, then withdrew and grasped the lion-head knocker. The Talker’s arm curled towards his chest, drawing the door closed.
Bowman leapt forward with his free hand to clamp the Talker's wrist. The cop's eyes widened in horror, then burned with rage. He thrashed at Bowman's arm with his own free hand, clenched into a white-knuckled fist. When that didn't work, he made to prise the death grip away finger by finger. Bowman held fast.
Behind the grappling pair, the pistoleer observed the duel with growing impatience. Perceiving a stalemate, he acted. Grabbing his partner's shirt at the back for support, he kicked out at Bowman's left arm.
The first, glancing blow ripped the sleeve lengthways and drew a long tear in skin that twitched and reddened. The next kick was better aimed. It purpled flesh near the elbow and Bowman sensed a crunching as bone and sinew parted. As the boot descended a third time the shattered arm came loose and drifted, inches from the door knocker.
Pain fogged Bowman and just as quickly cleared in a gust of commotion. The kicker's boot had landed on his partner's hand, pinning it to the door knocker beneath. Both cops thrashed and cursed, but it was the Talker who broke free first. He scrambled backwards, kicking in blind panic, one kick landing on the other cop's thigh. A solid connect; it tipped its victim towards the abyss.
As the kicked cop's boot came free of the door knocker Bowman observed the man’s face. In the instant it takes to bark a command, the look of terror was replaced by the ruthless mask of the survivor: grim, feeling-less, will-hardened. As he flashed past Bowman, he gripped his captive's shattered arm with both hands. For a moment their eyes locked; the cop's narrowed.
Bowman saw in those eyes the flashing steel of a bloody ancestry, the enmity that crusades, that destroys what it can't enlist, that survives hate to encode hate's survival. Then he realized it was his own eyes he was looking into; he and the cop shared the black legacy they mirrored.
With this thought he hardened. Hunching shoulders, he shook left and right as violently as the constraints put on him by cop and door allowed. The cop growled and started to claw up Bowman's arm, hand over hand, clutching flesh and shirt indiscriminately as he came.
In this carelessness lay his downfall.
Coming to the shoulder, where the garment flared to accommodate the broad physique of Rory archers, both hands managed to purchase only baggy fabric around Bowman's more slender frame.
For a moment he hung there, trying to decipher the error. Then the maelstrom below him re-asserted its claim. His body, free of Bowman's, twisted and spun, tearing the fabric at the shoulder seam. Bowman's last sight of him was a man falling feet first into the black maw of a tornado spout, mouth a moue of wonderment, glazed eyes fixed on the piece of red rag his two fists clutched at the end of outstretched arms.
With the anchoring force of the cop gone, Bowman began to come adrift. He felt each minute disengagement as his fingers slipped along the door handle. With one arm gone and the other going, his mind began to shut down. Anaesthesia swept in; the agony of hope melted away in submission.
His head rolled on its dangling body till he looked into the vortex. It didn't look so bad, really. An eerie calmness accompanied his contemplation of the end of the future. Let go and be claimed, it told him. No more struggle, no more pain. Let go and let the soft night come down all around. No more anything really. Peace, at first, and then not even peace. Nothing. Let go.
Only the thought of Caylen brought him back, the possibility that somehow she really had tried to bail him and that the cops had power over her. Circuits in his brain re-connected, for a last time muscles stiffened with blood as he swung back to the doorway.
His lungs whooshed air as he came up head first. Resting his chest on the corridor's threshold, his chin jutted forward at the cop who remained there, kneeling, shaking, eyes still tracking the speck his partner had become in its endless fall. When Bowman's face emerged it was as though a demon leapt out of a mirror. The cop startled and fell back on his hands.
“Touch her and I'll come back for you, too!” Bowman looked over his shoulder, and back to the Talker. “Understand?”
It only took a moment for the bargain to be sealed with a jerky nod. Then Bowman released the last act of the love he'd lived through - a hate that kept him living - and fell.
***
His last thought seemed to come from outside him. The ring. Opening his eyes he saw it, and smiled faintly, that in all this blackness its black band shone, a long way from the land that birthed it, a long, long way for both of them, really. Like Michelangelo’s Creation he held it out before him and silently intoned the word Home, waiting for the touch of destination to kick in.
Entering the vortex he found the track that claimed him. It sucked his loosened limbs into a spiral line and he began the long barrel-roll home.
***
Part III
Wilderness
Chapter 6
Caylen
She edged into the clearing, sensing for danger. First one foot, then the next tentatively entered the zone. In times of war, in times of being hunted, it was so easy to walk into death. For her, this was a time of both.
No breeze distracted her. The air stretched tight across the whole scene and every sound, loud or low, sang sharp and clear. Her skin, too, had drawn drum-taut, feeling for the tiny vibrations carried in air. Her forearm hair bristled.
The sound was coming from the other end of the clearing. Laughter, occasional shouts. The voices of several men, relaxed enough to commit the folly of unnecessary noise. Tohubuho, she thought, and her mouth set harder as she pictured the mercenaries the Kasina employed this far from their coastal power base. Not deserters either, though these woods abounded with such. The nature of a deserter's business made them stealthy, silent. It had to be Tohubuho; Kasina Guards were too disciplined to make such a commotion.
A scouting party, then. A well-fed, and drunk, raiding party by the sounds of them, flushed with success from their latest action against the omnipresent enemies of the Kasina nation.
She had tracked well. She could see the marks of their passage leading from where she now stood, across the middle of the glade, down and curving to the right to where they celebrated in a corner of the forest. She could also see the source of the scent she'd honed in on: smoke rising from a campfire, its smudgy finger pinpointing location. Raw recruits, these, she thought. Noise, and betraying smoke; it was a wonder
they'd made it this far.
She'd followed them from the scene of their conquest. Like their present camp, that hadn't been hard to find. The burning farmhouse had been unable to hide its shame. She had spent a whole morning trekking toward its funerary plume. When, drawing near, she had found the farm swallowed in smoke, it had been enough to follow the stench and the moans.
She found the boy by the gate, lashed to it. He'd been beaten, cut and burned in the usual Tohubuho torture cycle. But worse was what she knew he'd been forced to witness, had been left alive - barely alive - to watch. And then been left for dead. A warning.
She looked down at his gaping visceral cavity. She took seeds from a pouch and pushed them into his bloody mouth - a limited mercy since the shattered jaw could no longer chew; release would take long minutes. She said nothing as he looked up in acknowledgment and nodded thanks.
Further in, she found the bodies of the mother and a younger woman, presumably a sister of the boy. Both had been stripped naked. Their torn clothing hung from them or lay close by in pools of their blood. Whatever had been done to them while they were still alive, there was no question as to the coup-de-grace. In both bodies, the rough-sharpened ends of makeshift lances extended from the side of the neck, pointing past the ear. The bark had been left on the lower parts of each lance, all the way to the end that still protruded from the victims' vaginas.
She closed her eyes and stepped quickly past.
Around the smouldering house she found the bodies of three men. Two were young, although it was hard to put a decade on their badly broken faces. The grey hair of the third indicated a patriarch. He still clutched a pathetic short sword in his hand as he lay face down in trampled grass. She felt for life signs in all three, finding none. The old man's throat had been cut.
This was the justice the Kasina meted out to enemies, a classification that included all those living within the ambit of Kasina power who'd somehow failed the test of obeisance.
Sometimes, no offence was necessary. In a terror campaign like the one underway, you only had to be the next defenceless peasant on the road.
She felt she should be getting used to it by now. This skirmish stage of war had gone several moons already. And true, she no longer vomited or cried herself to sleep. But the fury she felt on encountering each outrage was fresh as the first time.
It wasn't hard to see which way they'd left: the prints of horse were deep in the soil that had softened with spring rain.
Her Rory hunting boots followed.
***
There were six. In the background, two leant against opposite trees, talking. A little way beyond, they had tethered their mounts. Other horses wandered around the edges of the camp, feeding quietly where they found palatable grass.
Closest to her, two men were taking turns at a wine jar.
Between these pairs, a fifth Tohubuho bent over the fire, clumsily tending food. He'd evidently had his fill of the wine.
A few feet away to the cook’s right, the sixth Tohubuho lay sated against an ancient tree. Its massive roots obscured most of his body from her view. He was singing a long, drunken song, punctuated by maniacal laughter and belching. The Kasina flag fluttered from standard poles on either side of the small grove.
She scrutinized each figure in turn. All had carelessly laid aside their arms. Swords and lances leant against tree trunks, none close to hand. She could only see one crossbow, hanging from a saddle slung over a lower bough. It was unloaded.
Positioning herself behind a tree whose trunk diverged from the ground up, providing a perfect fork to shoot through, she leant back against the cool bark of one fork and stilled her breath.
She held the short hunting bow a little away from her body and drew a shaft out of the quiver slung at her side. This she transferred to her left hand, lifting the middle finger to clasp it to the weapon. The next shaft came straight to the shooting-shelf, just above her grip hand. Grasping the string where it met the arrow's nock, she was ready.
She pushed the bow away with her left hand, drawing the string to her jawline with the right. She relaxed, held for a few moments, then let down the draw. The bow uncurved as the pinched string straightened from its wide V-shape. She repeated the move several times, pumping blood into slack muscles, re-awakening the conditioned responses of nerves trained by countless repetition.
Careful with the broadheads, she reminded herself. She had coated them, and several inches of the shafts, with a paste made from the same angel seeds she'd given the dying boy earlier. Here, in the more volatile form of the dried paste, delivered directly into the bloodstream by the arrowheads, their effect would be much quicker. The irony of it struck her: that mercy could be so slow when evil could strike in less time than it took to draw breath. Less time than it took to draw a bow.
Even with the poison, it was usually the haemorrhaging that killed those struck by an arrow. The sudden, massive draining of blood from vital organs caused rapid loss of consciousness if the shaft struck critical organs like heart or liver or lungs. The animal, human or beast, would quickly succumb, head swimming with death swoon. A good shot meant a kill in seconds.
Such rumination was more than academic. Given there were six Tohubuho, her shots would need to be well placed. And there should be no escapes. None to go bellowing to masters in Kasina Nabir about the mad avenging woman in the woods around Twins Fall. Thus the poison. Any shaft that did not kill quickly, would do so in reasonable time, given the heightened metabolism of a fleeing, injured man.
There was another consideration. Her bow would easily take those nearest her. The Tohubuho in the rear of the glade, on the other hand, sober and close to waiting horses, were at extreme range for the weapon's accuracy. Yet they were the obvious place to start if she could get close enough. Eliminate those fit enough to flee first. Come back for the drunks.
She quickly scanned either side of the camp, looking for a way to pass by undetected. The horses wandering loose were the problem. The inebriates wouldn't notice her, but she couldn't risk the animals' wariness. Straight down the centre of the camp then, moving fast and hoping to reach the furthest Tohubuho in time; that was the only choice.
Once more she drew the bow, and this time stepped in a half circle to face the camp through the tree's branching trunks.
The heavy draw of the weapon allowed little time to pick targets. The recumbent singer to the left of the two drinkers entered her focus. Just as she saw him, he saw her, and rose, using scrambling hands to push up from the roots of the ancient oak that had enclosed him. He dropped the bottle he’d been drinking from, spluttered, and gesticulated at her. As he swallowed the last of the drink in his mouth he turned to the campfire to give the alarm. Before she was aware of any conscious choice, the fingers of her draw hand lightly brushed back over her cheek and the arrow flew.
It took him in mid-stride, hitting just behind the temple, and such was its force and the keenness of the broadhead's cutting edges that it passed straight through that relatively un-boned path and buried itself with a quick, quiet sound in the earth beyond. Its victim staggered dead towards the cooking fire, mouth opened in a long, quavering groan.
The cook saw him coming and, thinking the effects of alcoholic excess had made a sudden claim on his stomach, blurted out, “the food, not on the food” just before the blind figure tripped on a cooking pot and sprawled across the edge of the fire.
The two revellers closest to her stopped drinking and turned to watch the display. Their initial concern turned to amusement as they watched the cursing cook lift the dead man with the toe of one boot and heft him from the coals. They turned back to their drinking as the second shaft passed over their heads and buried itself in the cook's chest. He fell back, gasping under the force of the blow. He crouched and instinctively gripped the object that impaled him. Recognition set in as his eyes focused on the Rory fletching. He bellowed as pain and terror struck.
Now the revellers abandoned their jug. As they stumble
d to their feet, the facts of the situation crashed into wine-fogged consciousness. The one to the right of her vision ran a few steps towards the stricken cook and froze, his back to her, hands fanned out at his side, fingers bristling. The other showed more presence of mind. Gauging the direction of the arrow's flight, he swung around to face her.
“Attack, we're under atta…” was all he got out as the third arrow sliced through his gut and ricocheted off fire logs behind him. He doubled over in agony, then staggered towards the trees to his right and groped for the sword that lay on a high branch, still in its scabbard. She silently cursed a botched shot at such close quarters. Without the arrowhead’s deadly payload buried in him, there was a chance he might survive. Besides, she didn’t want him reaching the sword before his wound disabled him. She drew another shaft from her quiver. This time the shot found his heart and then struck fast on a rib in his chest, the stone broadhead shattering.
She watched him as she moved past, making sure of the kill. As blood fountained from its haywire pump into his chest cavity he slumped, his unfeeling fingers scratching down the rough bark of the tree. Satisfied, she looked back in front.
His companion had swivelled at the hip to observe this next catastrophe. He froze there a moment, until his eyes came further around to the figure of the woman advancing on him, bow already drawn, stone arrowhead pointing at his chest. His upper body swung back even as his right leg kicked off.
Focused as she was on his fleeing back, she tripped and almost fell on a small tree root nestled in the long grass. Her shot flew low, catching him in the upper thigh. He yelped and stumbled as the crippled limb gave way. He grasped the failing leg behind the knee and hopped on the other, making for his own, foolishly abandoned weapon. Three, four hobbling steps, then he went down, another arrow in his upper back. He lay there, screaming, one hand on either shaft, too agonized to try removing them, his crazed eyes on her as she calmly strode past.
