He cupped his hands around hers. Perhaps she should have taken offense, that he touched a rajni, but this was war and he seemed to be thinking nothing of it. And then the water in her hands began, softly, to glow.
“Spit in that,” he instructed, while Ata Akhimah leaned over his shoulder, using her greater height to indulge her curiosity.
Mrithuri spat into the water in her hands. She expected the saliva to float there, like a transparent worm in a puddle. But it touched the pale golden glow and the glow silvered, brightened, became opaque. The stuff in her hands became as if river water, except lit from within. “Make your wish,” Tsering-la said. “Then let the water fall.”
“I wish communication with the Mother’s sacred river dolphins,” Mrithuri said, then did as the Wizard instructed. She flung the cupped palmful out and away from the battlement. The river had fallen so much that there were mudflats and rocks below the stairs and the landing where the water gate should have debouched onto the water. The drops of water arced out and up and down, sparkling in the light of the Heavenly River, shining with their own light as they fell. They seemed to multiply, to increase in volume and number, as if Mrithuri had caused to be thrown a whole hogshead of water and not a scant hands’ grasp. They also flew farther than she thought her strength could have moved them, so that some, at least, reached the low river’s edge. The rest she leaned out to see, and watched as they braided themselves into rivulets and left a shining trail through the mud before running into the water.
Then the river itself began to glow, faintly, between the matted leaves and blooms of the lotus flowers. It occurred to Mrithuri that they were like an empire in their own right—each petal a kingdom, standing tall from and joined at the sturdy base.
She had no time for another thought, as she was swept from herself by a ferocious current. She fell out of her body like a stone through water. The last thing she knew of her own physical self was that it slumped over the battlements, and only the Dead Man and Hnarisha lunging to catch her saved her from slicing her breasts and belly open on the dragonglass studding the top of the wall.
She was down in the river in a world of bright blindness, where everything was white and she could see only the difference between white-that-glowed and the white-that-was-dark. Dark white? She thought, but there it was, beneath and behind her, and in shadowed patches denting the roof of the world. There was a weight on her back; her calf, carried above the water so it could breathe easily. The shadowed patches were in her way. They were the little islands the bad swimmers rode around on, and they were working very hard to cross the river against the current, despite the clogging lotus that she and her sisters and brothers slipped between.
She and her kin left the little islands alone, mostly, except for sometimes when they swam alongside them and begged for fish. But these islands were different. Someone—some knowledge—was telling her that these islands were a threat. Were linked in some way to the river becoming thicker, slimier. Harder to swim.
She clicked annoyance at the little islands, hearing her family click back. Turn the islands over. Dump them in the water!
She hung back, for her calf, along with the other nursemaids and new mothers. The young bulls and old cows charged forward, their tails lathering the water. The first of them reached the boats. There were thumps, and the sounds of the bad swimmers shouting into their hollow islands. What they could tell from the echoes in there was beyond the cow. She chased a young bull—a calf, really, of the age to think himself invulnerable and old enough to fight and to be wrong!—back away from the conflict, back among the babies. He scolded her in clicks; she spared a few choice comments for him.
An island overturned. Another. Bad swimmers kicked and thrashed, sending echoes crashing through the water. They made the dolphin cow’s ears hurt when they shouted.
Then one of her folk squealed, a high-pitched noise of pain and injury. The water tasted of blood.
The water was too low, she understood. Her people could not get under the floating islands without exposing themselves. The bad swimmers had spears and tridents, that they used to spear fish. (They were bad fishers, also.) And they were spearing her family. Her family!
And something that had been lying quiescent on the bed of the river squirmed, sending pulses of shapes through the water. It was great and ponderous, alive. She understood that it had come upstream and buried itself in the muck, and now it was awakening.
Get away, Mrithuri told the river dolphin. Take the calves. Take your family! Get away now!
The dolphin turned to flee, driving the calves before her. Mrithuri found herself back in her own fatigue-trembling body so abruptly that she reeled, and if it had not been—again—for the Dead Man and Hnarisha, she would have gone to her knees.
She needed food. She needed her snakes.
She stepped to the battlement and looked down at the river, at the patches of red pumping forth to stain swaths of it like blood poured into cream. At the center of the river, alongside the boats, something bulged. Rose like a pillar of ivory. Dripped blood and weeds and river water back into the Mother River’s troubled surface.
Her voice was a whisper. “I know what they were waiting for.”
* * *
It was as blind as the dolphins, the head that rose from the turgid water. There was a place for eyes in the massive skull. Even the ridge of a brow bone over each eye socket. But a white lid sealed the bulge beneath, protecting the organ from the silt of the broad, slow, rich Sarathai. It could probably see light and darkness, like the dolphins.
Like the dolphins, it came from the river, and like the dolphins it had no need to see more.
The head kept coming, rising on a long snake neck, scaled and white and webbed in waterweeds. The face quivered with barbels, and long spiral-twisted horns like an oryx’s swept back over the thing’s neck. Another single horn, like that of a rhinoceros, hooked between nostrils that unsealed themselves on a long, hissing breath that Mrithuri could hear all the way from the top of the wall.
“Great,” the Dead Man muttered behind his veil. “Another fucking dragon.”
“Sarathai naga,” Ata Akhimah breathed in Mrithuri’s ear. “The Mother Wyrm. I had no idea it was real.” She turned to the Dead Man. “Technically speaking, it’s not a dragon—”
He raised a hand to quell her. “I know. I know. Technically, they never are. How big does it get?”
“Not big enough to crawl over the battlements, I hope,” Tsering-la said, watching more loops of the thing slither themselves out of the water. It seemed to have very little regard for the men in the boats, who were now rowing away from it as fervidly as they had been rowing toward the river gate a minute before. “I guess that explains why they were doing something as stupid as rowing up to the city walls to attack us.”
Hnarisha squinted under his hand. “You don’t suppose that’s an illusion, too?”
Syama growled an answer. Hnarisha turned to Nizhvashiti.
The Godmade was already raising a hand.
A flick, and the chime in its eye socket rolled forth, heartening and crystalline: a sound that seemed to hold clarity of vision and clarity of thought in its very heart. The sound went forth from the tower in a sort of wave, as if one were looking at the bottom of a perfectly clear pool while a ripple passed through the water.
It washed over the monster in the river.
The monster in the river remained.
The Mother Wyrm squirmed closer, scaled curves propelling it. Its blunt, blind nose sought from side to side, sensory tendrils stretching and quivering. The heavy body made a sucking sound as it reached the river’s mud-thick verge. Its neck coiled back, ponderously, a series of heavy side-to-side curves like a questing snake. Mrithuri saw pink indentations lining the scales of its upper jaw margin, like the pits of a viper. She was unsurprised when a pallid, forked tongue flickered.
“The gates!” the Dead Man yelled suddenly, as if awakened from a trance. He whirled and le
aned over the inside wall of the battlements. “Man the gates. Brace the gates!”
Below, men surged forward, unquestioning. The gates were barred with heavy bars; padded tree trunks had been lowered into place in massive shoes two-thirds of the way up, their bottom ends buried in the earth and braced with boulders. Now their strength was reinforced with the backs and shoulders of men.
The Mother Wyrm struck as a snake strikes, and slammed into the gates with a force that sent Mrithuri to her knees. The wall shook, dust rising from the seamless stone. Fingers bruised Mrithuri’s arm, trying to steady her.
Below, men shouted. The bracing trees creaked ominously. Someone screamed in pain.
Sparks scraped from the copper sheathing on the doors. As the Wyrm’s head drew back, Mrithuri could see that the horn on its nose and the lip beneath it were sheathed in some cold-colored metal: iron, or steel.
Hnarisha tugged at Mrithuri. “We need to get off the wall, my rajni!”
“Of course,” she said. “But how?”
Another slam, and the gates rang like a great bronze bell. Mrithuri, clutching the interior battlement wall—the one not studded with dragonglass—saw the gates bulge for a moment, the slim gap between them. Hold, she prayed. Mother, hold.
Lady Golbahar was by her on the other side, pointing. “The birds are coming!”
Down on the river, the invading boats had withdrawn, and were waiting. Waiting for the Mother Wyrm to crush her way into the city, so they could follow. And above them—and from the landward side as well—the black, swarming cloud of carrion birds was swirling down on Sarathai-tia like a curved, clawing arm.
The wall shuddered and bucked under them again. Syama crouched, rocking with the blow. Under his breath, the Dead Man was praying. He had a pistol in his hand and with it tracked the motion of the Wyrm’s head as she drew back, coiled again.
“Too far away,” he said. “I’ll have to wait until it strikes again. Get down the stairs! I’ll be right behind you!”
Nizhvashiti stood statue-still, wind-ruffled, opaque of expression and gaze. Mrithuri wondered if it had gone away again. She turned away. The Godmade would take care of itself.
The stairs were stone, and built against the inside wall. A few steps away only, through a gap in the inner battlement. Hnarisha swung her around unceremoniously and hurried her along.
“Don’t yank at me,” she snapped. Her arm was bruises upon bruises.
Had she used to bruise so easily?
“Forgive me, my rajni.” He stepped back, extended a more ceremonious hand.
She took it and stepped onto the stair.
The stair, at the first touch of her weight, fell out from under her.
Mrithuri teetered, one foot on the wall, one foot wavering over nothing. Screams and shouts of pain rose from below as the stones tumbled down on the soldiers bracing the gate. Hnarisha clutched her wrist in both hands and threw himself backward, trying to drag her away from the precipice.
The Dead Man’s pistol spoke. The Wyrm struck again. The wall jumped so hard Mrithuri felt as if the sole of her shoe had been kicked. She was falling.
She barely started to shriek in surprise when the edge of the wall hit her across the midsection, knocking the wind out of her and ending her panicked cry in an ignominious gurgle. She lay across the stone, sliding slowly toward oblivion, without the strength to scrabble for a grip or kick herself upward. Hnarisha clutched at her. Syama, too, was there, teeth grating on metal as they gripped her arm, clawed feet scrabbling on the stone. Her muscles bulged; her hot breath washed Mrithuri’s face. Her jaw was locked; she would be dragged off the wall herself before she would let Mrithuri fall.
Someone else was there also, grabbing her hair, pulling on her chain coat. It was so heavy. The armor was dragging her off the wall, and the armor was also slipping off her as her friends tried to rescue her.
Then, suddenly, she was lighter. She shot upward, falling on Hnarisha and the Dead Man as they heaved at her. Syama, nimbler, dodged out of the way. Beyond their heads, she could see Tsering-la, his face a squint of concentration, his left hand outstretched and pulling back as if he hauled a fishing net.
He dropped his hand and sat down hard on the stone, gasping. Mrithuri pushed herself to her feet, trying not to plant a hand or a knee in the soft parts of the men who had rescued her. By the wall, Lady Golbahar shouted “Brace!” and the monster struck again.
This time, they heard wood snapping.
They had no way down from the wall. Nizhvashiti alone still stood, impassive, windswept in a place with no wind. The rest of them were toppled like the pieces on a chaturanga board when the table is jostled. Mrithuri could feel where Syama’s teeth had pressed the links of her chain mail into the padding she wore beneath, and into the flesh beyond.
Mrithuri grasped Yavashuri’s ankle. The old woman had fallen, and lay facedown on the stone. She picked her head up when Mrithuri tugged at her, blood streaming across her face from a plainly broken nose. “Not dead,” she announced. “Just feel like it.”
“One of the braces failed,” the Dead Man called. He’d rolled over and poked his head over the gap. “The men are still holding. The brace fell on some.”
“Mother,” Mrithuri sobbed. Her palms were scraped and bloody.
“They’re bringing up the elephant,” the Dead Man said.
“Hathi,” Mrithuri said. “Oh, Mother, no.”
She scrambled to the wall. There was her old friend, hastily outfitted in some scraps of the armor she had worn in her youth, when she carried a raja into battle, being led up to the gate through the courtyard behind. Hathi stepped gingerly among the injured and dying men while orderlies rushed to drag the ones who might live out of the way. She moved with a self-important dignity that Mrithuri recognized as humorous overacting, as if she thought herself once again the central figure in some pageantry.
She’s too old. Helpless rage stung Mrithuri’s eyes. She cannot do this, and she cannot fight the Wyrm. Just let me surrender. Let me surrender and save who I can—
Hathi placed her armored forehead against the city gates.
She leaned.
The birds were upon them. Pecking, clawing. Diving and fluttering, a beating of black wings. Mrithuri’s own bearded vultures were too few to drive them away. Mobbed, blinded by buffeting pinions, they fled back to their austringers. Mrithuri threw her hands over her head, shielding her face with her forearms. Claws raked her nape. A sharp sting of pain creased her ear.
The Wyrm struck again.
The gate rang again. But this time it rang differently. More muted. Below, Hathi grunted, and Mrithuri heard the scrape of her feet on stone, the incongruous cheery jangle of her ankle bells.
“I’d bring this arch down to seal the gate if it weren’t Wizard stone,” Ata Akhimah said, pushing herself to her knees.
“Seal the gate,” Tsering said. “Wait, it’s wood.”
“Under the metal.”
“Wood was alive,” he muttered.
He didn’t get up, or even crawl to the edge, but he spoke aloud in some tongue Mrithuri did not understand and a butter-colored light began to gather around him. The birds pecked and clawed while he shielded his eyes and face with his hands. As they all did, between waving and battling. Mrithuri groped for one of her daggers.
Then the Dead Man was on his feet, standing over all of them, his sword a whirl of silver. He spun it in overlapping spirals and whirls, and then—Ritu the acrobat was there beside him, with her son, and both of them had swords as well.
The swords, Mrithuri realized, that they used in the sword-dance.
They were not fighting. Just twisting the flashing blades in whirling patterns.
Whirling patterns that rained blood and severed bird parts down all over and around her. It was an improvement. Of a sorts. Syama fought too, lunging and snapping, dropping crushed birds, whipping blood-soaked slaver from her dewlaps as her jaws swung.
Another hammerblow struck the gat
e beneath them, and the three who were standing staggered and hopped, but kept their feet. Who knew there were so many uses for acrobats? Again, wood splintered. Hathi grunted in effort. Mrithuri heard the elephant’s feet slide. Heard the jingle of her bells as she stepped forward once again. She glanced over the edge slick with bird-bits and saw that the gates were buckling, the crossbars splintering. The elephant could only do so much.
One more blow. Perhaps two. Then Hathi would be gone under the force of the battering Wyrm.
In a moment of silence, a massive slithering warned Mrithuri that the Wyrm was coiling again. “Tsering, whatever you are doing, do it now!”
He groaned like a man suffering an arrow pushed through his body and slapped both hands against the stone. The butter-colored light ran out of him, into the rock … and was gone. He fell over on his back and would have rung his skull on the stones if Golbahar hadn’t been sitting there.
The Wyrm struck again, with a dull thud this time, as a dull axe thuds on a living tree it cannot bite into. The walls shook only a little. The gate held as firm as a mountainside.
“Mother,” Nizhvashiti said suddenly, in a voice like that of a small girl. “It is time to break your chains.”
* * *
Suddenly, Mrithuri felt the wind.
Not the hot draft of a mad crow’s passage, the whisk of black-feathered wings. The filth of the birds fouled everything—feces and blood and bits—and Mrithuri was too busy to gag. But this wind was fresh and sweet and held the scent of rain.
Nizhvashiti raised its hands.
The heaped thunderheads on the eastern horizon had seemed strangely flat in the distance, as if pressed against a wall of glass that stretched unimaginably high. Now those clouds were lit from within by a spark of lightning as huge as any that Mrithuri had seen. Though distant, it seemed to cover the entire horizon, orange-white and huge, flickering on for the space of many heartbeats as it cracked and cracked again, in utter silence except for the rising wind.
Whatever held the storm back collapsed utterly, and the clouds spilled across the sky with speed she could not have imagined. It was like watching water break a dam. In the next instant, it seemed, the storm was upon them—almost at the same moment that the distant thunder finally reached her ears.
The Red-Stained Wings--The Lotus Kingdoms, Book Two Page 32