The Red-Stained Wings--The Lotus Kingdoms, Book Two

by Elizabeth Bear

  Around him, his riders were likewise wrestling whirling, shying horses. With meaty thumps, several of them staggered into one another. It was a piece of luck or the Mother’s blessing that none of the animals or their riders fell. Not even the Sahali nurse, who was carrying Prince Drupada on the saddle against her belly, held in place by a sling.

  It was all too much for the child, anyway, who straightaway began to scream as though he were being at that very instant murdered.

  You stole the kid, Himadra told himself. It’s your bloody job to look after him.

  He tugged the rein sharply. Velvet’s head came up in protest, her eyes white-rimmed and rolling, her ears pinned with fear. But Himadra got her to steady herself and face the charging bear-boars head-on. She shivered with the need to run, her neck bowed so sharply that her jawbone must have rested against her breastbone. Slaver blew from her mouth. She pawed, but stayed steady.

  Around Himadra, his men were sorting their disarray into ranks. He’d lost track of Ravana and couldn’t find him now. Maybe the sorcerer’s flashy mistreated horse had bolted. Maybe Ravana had just vanished silently and wordlessly, as he seemed wont to do.

  “Never a sorcerer around when you want one,” Himadra grumped.

  Well, he’d just have to solve this little problem himself, then.

  Rocks dislodged by the charging bear-boars bounced among the horses’ hooves. The very earth underfoot trembled with their thunder. Himadra took a wrap in the reins around his left hand. With his right, he pulled a pistol from the saddle holster and steadied his aim.

  Velvet knew what to do for shooting, and she stood like a stone statue of a horse beneath him. The pigs were less than fifty feet away. Himadra sighted between the eyes of the one in the lead and stroked the trigger.

  The pistol coughed and slammed the web of his thumb. A sharp reek of smoke stung his eyes and nostrils. The lead bear-boar staggered, shook its head so violently that Himadra could see blood fly, and dropped to one knee.

  The boar immediately behind the leader ran up the leader’s backside, knocked itself off its own feet, and fell down. The others, squealing, kept coming on.

  Himadra blew the smoke out of his nose and reached back to drop the spent pistol in an open saddlebag. He grabbed the second one. His hand was on the grip when the lead bear-boar shoved itself to its feet and shook its head again. A red gouge gleamed on its forehead below the fungoid ears, at its bottom revealing the pale shine of bone.

  “Oh, fuck me in an alley,” Himadra yelled. “It bounced off? It bounced off!”

  Beside him, Farkhad bent a double-curved bow fitted with a short, wicked arrow. The eyes would be a useless target, Himadra saw: too small, and nested in a ridged bulwark of bone. The chest was no better. It would be like shooting into a wagonload of steaks. The neck was thick and powerful—a cantilever of muscle and tendon that projected forward of the fulcrum of the front legs, almost equal to the mass of the proportionally ridiculous body and small rump extending behind.

  The tail was nothing but a tufted whip. The hind legs looked insufficient to do much except push and keep the rear end from dragging.

  Himadra was willing to bet that these things could turn a corner with supernatural agility.

  “Couch spears!” he bellowed. He might not be big, but he had practiced his projection until he had an authoritative voice of command.

  His men proved their discipline as well as their mettle. On his right, one arrow flew: the nocked one. Then Farkhad dropped the bow over the horn of his saddle and grabbed the spear carried upright in its holder by his cantle. All around Himadra, there came a rattle as spears were lowered, braced into their rests, and readied.

  “Get the kid away!” he yelled back over his shoulder. He didn’t have time to see if the nurse obeyed him.

  The earth itself trembled under the charging trotters of the bear-boars. Himadra could not level his spear; he did not carry one. The shock of an enemy striking the point would have broken his arm bones or shoulder.

  Instead, he leveled his second gun. “The big vein behind the ear!” he ordered. “Once you have them on a spear, try to get a blade in there!”

  “Just like a slaughterhouse!” boasted Farkhad.

  Then the charge was upon them, and there was no time for orders anymore.

  Velvet squealed in rage and fear as Himadra abruptly let her have her head again. She staggered forward because she had been leaning on the reins. Around him, his men spurred their horses. The horses, hemmed in by each other, had no place to go but directly at the pigs. Himadra let them leap past him. Velvet wanted to whirl. He widened the reins so she came backward, her head held steady and straight.

  The lead pig—the wounded one—opened its mouth in an answering squeal. The face opened like a crocodile’s, showing a cavernous pink-and-black mottled space, a wet tongue as long as a grown man’s arm, the ridged arch of its palate. Its own blood stained its slaver. Its many teeth were yellow-streaked, unevenly broken pillars.

  Himadra shot it through the uvula. Blood and matter exploded out of the back of its neck. He thought, for a wild instant, that it was going to keep running. That it was going to run over him, and Velvet, and just keep going on.

  It collapsed as limply and utterly as if it had fallen beneath the butcher’s hammer. It skidded forward in the rocky mud, turning half over itself before the back legs, too, quit thrashing and it fell back with a thud. Himadra’s heart leaped.

  The next pig behind the fallen one hurdled its body and came on, landing with a thump Himadra thought should snap its forelegs. Himadra had two more pistols, but he could not have reached them in time. The charging drift of bear-boars hit the spear thicket, each hog pushed up by the hog behind. Then two or three of the pigs were among the men, and Himadra lost track of everything except the immediate need to keep himself and Velvet from being disemboweled.

  The impaled boars were not dead. There had been four at the front of the pack, and each one now squealed and thrust its way up two or three spears, snapping at the hard wood, splintering shafts as they hurled their weight against them. Life was dear to these beasts, and they were churlish of releasing it.

  The horses backed and jerked, trying to escape the boars, trying to escape the spurs. The remaining boars were tangled in the hindquarters of the first rank, but soon extricated themselves and began to circle, as if they knew there was easier prey at the back.

  Farkhad dropped his spear and took his bow up again. Himadra saw the sense in it. And he himself might not be able to handle the shock of an enemy striking a couched spear, or withstand the draw of a heavy war bow, but that didn’t make him inept with a javelin and thrower.

  And those, he had.

  He couldn’t hurl the throwing spears as far or as hard as a man whose bones were not brittle. But he could hurl them, and that was better than nothing. Especially now that he and his men had found a few vulnerable points in the bear-boars’ armored bodies.

  He did not fumble. His hands did not shake, though the earth trembled under Velvet’s feet with the thunder of the bear-boars’ charge. Himadra fitted the butt of the first javelin into the cup on the thrower and laid the whole lever-arm assemblage along his arm. He wore bracers to protect his wrists from the recoil of his pistols; they also served to prevent him from overextending the joint when he released the javelin. He looked up in time to see a pig whirl, chasing Farkhad as Farkhad reined his horse around.

  Where is that useless sorcerer?

  A horse screamed. Himadra did not allow himself to look, or flinch. The pig turned, and dipped its head to disembowel Farkhad’s horse with its enormous tusks. Himadra sighted down the javelin and snapped his wrist over, the lever arm of the thrower propelling the javelin faster and more accurately than he ever could have hurled it.

  It sank into the hunting pig’s neck behind its fungoid ear, where the massive curve of muscled neck met the curve of the jaw and skull. A gush of blood followed, pulsing. Velvet shied as the arterial spra
y splashed across her face, ducking in her tracks. Himadra grunted in pain as he dropped—and stopped—with her.

  The bear-boar dropped also, a terrific collapsing crash as its forelegs failed and its enormous body’s momentum carried it over them in a gigantic somersault. Farkhad’s gelding leaped over the predator as it jerked convulsively. The horse staggered as it landed. Farkhad somehow stayed in the saddle.

  Himadra fumbled for another javelin as Velvet recovered herself. He fitted it to the thrower, but when he turned his head to seek another target there was nothing. Six boars were down, including the two he had killed personally. The rest were in flight, back the way they had come, some leaving splashes of blood in their wake. He turned Velvet, feeling her trembling beneath him, and turned her again.

  Of his own men, none seemed severely injured. He could see one horse limping, but not heavily. One more was down, never to rise again. A third horse was screaming, a terrible sound. One glance told Himadra that it was beyond saving.

  Himadra stretched in his stirrups a moment, feeling around his body for broken things. He seemed to have escaped unscathed, for which he thanked the Mother. Farkhad reined his blowing horse up beside Velvet and looked down at his lord.

  “Have someone put that poor beast out of its misery, would you?” Himadra snapped, irritated by the waste.

  Farkhad gestured for it to be done.

  Two men began slitting the throats of downed but still twitching pigs, and paunching the beasts to make sure the meat stayed fresh.

  Farkhad waved to the dead pigs. “That solves our little food problem, anyway.”

  “Temporarily. We can’t stop to smoke it.” Himadra wiped sweat from his brow with the back of his wrist, and realized only when he saw the pinkness on his sleeve that some of it was blood.

  “And we’ll be leaving some meat for the bear-boars.”

  The screaming stopped. Himadra forced himself to watch as the gray horse went to its knees, then crumpled. “At least much of it will be that of their comrades.”

  “Do you think they prey on riders here often?”

  “I don’t think they’ve met such heavily armed opposition in the past.”

  It had been a measure of Himadra’s distraction that he had walked into an ambush. If he did say so himself, that wasn’t like him.

  In his defense, the ambush had been set—he thought—by nothing human. And the tactical considerations of a bear-boar were doubtless somewhat different than those of a soldier. He glanced around, considering. They hadn’t come out too poorly, all things considered. A sense of tactics had saved them from a rout. And from being the dinner, rather than the diners-on.

  His stomach plummeted, as if Velvet had dropped out from under him again. “Where’s the nurse?” he asked.

  Farkhad craned his neck. “You told her to run.”

  “She seems to have run a little farther than I expected! We need to go after her. Especially as there are man-eating pigs around here.”

  “You’re lightest and on the best horse,” Farkhad said. “Junayd is the best tracker. Would you like my advice, Lord?”

  With a wave of his hand, Himadra granted permission.

  Farkhad said, “Take him and the fastest-mounted men and go after her. The rest can remain behind and butcher as much meat as they can. I can see the tracks from here: she rode back toward Ansh-Sahal.”

  “There is no Ansh-Sahal!” Himadra snarled in frustration.

  “One more reason to catch up with her fast. Before something bigger eats her.”

  “Or she rides into a cloud of sulfuric gas,” Himadra agreed. Exhaustion seemed to press his every limb. “All right. You pick the men. Let’s go.”

  7

  “Oh,” said Ata Akhimah, in a tone of bored exasperation. “I think we can handle this on our own.”

  She left Tsering clutching his own blood-soaked rag—if it had not been a rag before, it was one now—and made a sharp, rude gesture. It was obvious from the direction of her glare that she expected the faceless, gutless, liverless object of her ire to collapse immediately back upon the table.

  The corpse swung his legs around to the side. Unmentionable things oozed down them.

  “Hmm,” said Akhimah. She looked at Tsering as the obsidian knife dropped out of the corpse’s chest cavity and shattered on the floor.

  “Definitely sorcery.” The cool professionalism of Tsering’s tone was ruined by his hysterical giggle.

  “You don’t say.” The Dead Man groped for his sword. “Any advice on how to put down something that’s already missing most of its internal organs?”

  The Dead Man closed his eyes in denial for an instant as he heard a series of plops. And a thump. And a number of wet, sticky slithers. He forced them open, and turned to look. A basket lay upturned on the floor beside the worktable next to the slab. Several shiny lumps of meat slumped on the tiles. As he watched, another organ—large, slick, mahogany in color—humped itself over the edge of a ceramic bowl and thwapped against the floor. A liver, he decided. Definitely a liver.

  A glistening edge groped out from under the basket. A long streamer of intestine followed, leaving a trail of mucus behind. The Dead Man made an inarticulate noise as the various organs began to hump, crawl, and worm their way toward himself and the two Wizards.

  With a grinding noise, the autopsied corpse stood up, sliding greasily off the morgue table.

  The Dead Man sighed. “Why did I get out of bed this evening?”

  Ata Akhimah would have stepped up beside him, but he ushered her back. From his shoulder, she remarked, “Don’t you think one animate corpse in the palace is enough?”

  The Dead Man heard a rustle that was probably Tsering-la snapping a horrified glance at her. “Excuse me?”

  “It’s a long story.” The Dead Man’s saber was heavy and cool in his hand. It should have been comforting. “Do you think you can fight this thing?”

  “Fire,” said Akhimah.

  “Just the thing for the basement of a palace.”

  “I should be able to use the Samarkar effect to control it,” Tsering said dubiously.

  The corpse took an unsteady step forward. Around its feet, jellylike blobs of flesh quivered. With each movement, it sounded like something brittle within the cadaver cracked and shattered.

  “Right,” said the Dead Man. “I’ll hold it off. You get started.”

  He stepped forward, snakelike, leading with his blade. The corpse batted at him clumsily and he simply flicked the blade out of the way. Unbalanced, blind-eyed, it twisted sideways under the momentum of its own swipe. Somehow its feet stayed planted as its body craned illogically to the right, leaving its flank exposed.

  “Gift horse,” the Dead Man muttered. He didn’t usually talk to himself during a fight, but he didn’t usually fight people who had already been through an autopsy. His saber whisked back, the moon-curved edge sweeping through the corpse’s left arm with a meaty impact. The Dead Man followed through, swinging his shoulders and his hips into the blow, and let the momentum carry him around. He yelled without really meaning to—a wordless battle cry—and by the time he’d returned to guard position the cadaver’s severed limb had thumped to the floor in a nest of bowels.

  There was, unfortunately, a splash.

  The arm lay there for a moment as if stunned by the fall. Then the fingers uncurled and groped forward, dragging the mutilated object along the floor with painful scratching noises.

  A glitter along the edge of his saber caught the Dead Man’s attention. “Nicked my blade on the bone,” he said in irritation.

  “I’ll sharpen it for you,” said Ata Akhimah.

  The Dead Man took a forced step backward and resignedly lopped off the thing’s other arm. “You were saying something about fire?”

  He took another step back. With sucking sounds, the organs were closing in on him.

  “Working on it,” said Tsering, amid a rattle of chains. “In the meantime, my advice as a Wizard would be to get
the head.”

  “Noted,” said the Dead Man.

  Banging came from behind him, and a snapping sound. Then the welcome crackle of flames.

  The corpse came on, dragging the next slow, staggering foot through a squirming pile of its own offal.

  “Now, that’s disgusting.” With his free hand, the Dead Man made the sign of the pen. The Scholar-God would forgive him for using his left hand when his right one was engaged in so holy an activity as disassembling an abomination.

  He stepped back again, almost into Akhimah. Her steadying hand on his shoulder warned him. Also, she squeaked when he nearly stepped on her.

  Out of room to retreat, then.

  The smell of smoke filled his nostrils. The Dead Man’s stomach twisted. As if what was happening weren’t bad enough, everything seemed to writhe and pulse and glisten all the more, the scene being lit grotesquely by the flickering oil lanterns and the witchlamps spiraling as Tsering moved.

  “The head.”

  “It’s not so easy to just lop a man’s head off, Tsering!”

  The Wizard’s tone was sharp with tension. “I wouldn’t have said it was so easy to lop an arm off either, and you seem to be managing.”

  The Dead Man sighed. He’d need to close. Which meant stepping into the puddle of heaving organs.

  Well, he couldn’t retreat any farther, and they were going to be lapping at his boots anyway, soon. The Dead Man gritted his teeth behind his veil and squashed forward into the pool of bowels.

  They smelled like, well. Bowels. They were slick and squishy and they squirmed under his soles. And that was before the foul, cold things wrapped around his ankles and began hauling their way up his calves in loops and curls like snakes climbing a tree.