Iron Jaw and Hummingbird

by Chris Roberson

  Huang turned back to see what assistance he might offer Zhao, just in time to see that contest, too, come to an end, though not in any way that Huang would have hoped.

  Just as Huang was taking a half step forward to close the distance between him and the two opposing leaders, the Bannerman slashed down with his saber, the blade biting deep into Zhao’s forearm and the hand that held the red-bladed saber. As Zhao’s saber clattered to the stone floor, the Bannerman pressed his advantage, lunging forward and burying his own sword halfway to the hilt in the bandit chief’s chest. Behind his grimy goggles Zhao’s eyes widened, and as the Bannerman yanked his sword free once more, the bandit chief fell forward, face-first onto the ground.

  Huang stood frozen for a long moment, watching the tableau before him, the Bannerman with the cross-shaped scar standing over the fallen body of the bandit chief, a man who in recent years had been as much as father to Huang as his own parent once had been, if not more. Then the Bannerman stepped over Zhao’s fallen body as though it were only so much refuse scattered on the floor, and turned his attention to another of the bandits, who was fighting a Bannerman a few paces away.

  Later, Huang would curse himself that he didn’t immediately race after the Bannerman and avenge Zhao then and there. In the moment, though, his only thought was to help Zhao. Dropping his own sword to the ground, he rushed to where the bandit chief lay. Gingerly, he turned the bandit chief up on his side, his front already sticky with the dark blood that pooled beneath him.

  “Zhao! Can you hear me?!”

  The bandit chief’s eyes rolled from one side to the other, half-lidded, and finally focused on Huang.

  “Ouch,” Zhao said absently, as though he’d just discovered a tiny splinter in his foot. “That hurt.”

  It wasn’t until the bandit chief started shaking with laughter that Huang realized that Zhao was joking. But he didn’t laugh long, since doing so forced him to cough, a pink-flecked foam gathering at the corners of his mouth just visible through the breather mask.

  “Hold on, Zhao, we’ll get you help!” Huang gripped the bandit chief’s shoulders, trying not to stare at the sucking wound in Zhao’s chest.

  “No,” Zhao said, and was once more racked with a fit of bloody coughing. “No help . . . Too late . . .”

  The bandit chief lifted his head, glacially slow, as though looking for something, and then pointed to where the red-bladed saber lay. His eyes flicked from the saber to Huang, lids dropping farther.

  “Sword . . .” Zhao said, his voice now barely a harsh whisper.

  Huang straightened and went to retrieve the saber, then came back and crouched beside the bandit chief once more. He could only imagine that Zhao wanted to end his life as he’d lived it, with a sword in hand, but when Huang tried to press the saber’s hilt into the dying man’s hand, Zhao pushed it away.

  “No . . . Hummingbird . . .” Zhao managed, but barely. “Yours . . . You lead . . . now.”

  Huang held the saber in both hands, shaking his head. “But Zhao, what . . .”

  “Lead ...” Zhao said, interrupting him. “... our brothers. Look after ... them ...”

  Another racking cough caught the bandit chief, and his eyes squeezed shut with pain.

  “Safety . . .” Zhao croaked, almost below the edge of hearing. “Lead them . . .”

  And then the light went out of the bandit chief’s eyes, and he was gone.

  Huang straightened and stood at the center of the hangar, the red-bladed saber in his hand, while all around him the bandits fought for their lives.

  Here and there on the hangar’s cold stone floor were fallen combatants, bandit and Bannerman alike. But while the bandits were clearly giving as good as they got, the Bannermen had the advantage of numerical superiority, and it was only a matter of time before the bandits found themselves completely overwhelmed.

  If any of them were to survive this encounter and escape death, capture, or worse, they would need to get out of the hangar and away from the Bannermen.

  Huang realized he was waiting for someone to tell him what to do. Even all the seasons he’d acted as strategist for the bandits, it had still been Zhao who had made the final decisions, and in the end Huang merely had to follow orders. He had been following orders his whole life, in one way or another. As much as he had liked to think himself the footloose free spirit when he was younger, carousing through the streets of Fanchuan, hadn’t he just been his parents’ dutiful son, even then? Oh, he might have preferred sport, wine, and women to his studies, but when his parents snapped their fingers and said it was time for him to go off and join the Green Standard Army, had he stood his ground or tucked tail between his legs and gotten himself fitted for a uniform? And in the brief time he was actually in the Army of the Green Standard, he was following orders then, as well. As the bandits’ pet he’d had no ability to exercise his own will, and when he had opted to join the bandits’ number he’d suborned his own will to that of the bandit chief, Zhao. But now, it seemed, there was no one left to tell him what to do.

  Of course, Zhao had told him what to do, at that. The dying chief’s last command, his last instruction to his prized lieutenant, had been for Huang to take his place as leader, and to lead the other bandits to safety. Huang was going to have to decide just how to accomplish that on his own. But now he found it difficult to remember the last time he’d made his own decision and followed it through.

  There was the moment he turned on the trio of soldiers who’d plundered the airship; he’d chosen the life of the bandit. And before that, when he’d attempted to escape from the Aerie, and gone through the hangar into the . . .

  Into the cave system!

  That was the solution. If there was any avenue of escape to be found in all of Mount Shennong, it would be in the winding tunnels carved in Fire Star’s ancient past by gases escaping through molten rock. Years ago Huang had tried to escape from the bandits and back to his life as a soldier by fleeing into those same tunnels; now he would try to lead the other bandits safely away from soldiers the very same way. Hopefully this time his breather mask would survive the journey and he wouldn’t asphyxiate in the process.

  There was no time to lose. Only a fraction of the bandits still remained standing, and if any of them were to escape, it would have to be now.

  “The tunnels, Jue!” Huang leaned close, speaking just loud enough to be heard. “We’ve got to reach the caves!”

  The two bandits stood shoulder to shoulder, fallen Bannermen at their feet but more still coming to take their place.

  “What about Zhao?” Jue followed Huang’s haunted glance back to where the bandit chief lay lifeless on the floor, and then glanced down to see the red-bladed saber in Huang’s fist. Then Jue nodded, his brows knit. “I’ll pass the word.”

  “Wait for my signal, then everyone form on me. Got it?”

  Behind his breather mask, Jue flashed the hint of a smile. “Seems simple enough. But you might want to include ‘not dying’ in the plans, as well.”

  With that, the scar-faced Bannerman turned and began slashing his way toward the nearest of the remaining bandits.

  In a matter of moments, the word had passed from bandit to bandit. There were maybe ten of them still standing now, the rest fallen before the Bannermen’s swords. There was no time to lose.

  “Now!” Huang shouted as loud as he was able, then took to his heels, pounding toward one of the largest of the fissures in the hangar wall. The nearest sniper Bannermen were a good two dozen paces away on either side, which was why Huang had chosen this cave over other, larger ones. He only hoped it remained as large as they descended.

  As Huang threw himself into the cave mouth, he heard a rifle shot spang off the wall just above his shoulder. The Bannermen were firing into the cave. Huang wasn’t sure if the Bannermen felt they’d already captured enough bandits alive, if injured, and were ready to dispatch the rest of their quarry with firearms, or if they were simply unwilling to allow the slim cha
nce the bandits might escape, and any hypothetical orders to take some of them alive be damned. Of course, for all Huang knew they’d never received any such orders, and had only closed with them in sword-to-sword combat because the Bannermen’s leader had wanted a bit of sport.

  It hardly mattered. Huang had reached the relative and temporary safety of the cave and now stood just within, helping the other bandits who followed do the same. One stumbled and fell, not from rifle shot but simply from exhaustion, just before the cave mouth, and Huang risked himself to rush back into the hangar and drag the bandit into the cave, while shots ricocheted off the walls and floor around them, kicking up fragments of stone that stung them like shrapnel. It wasn’t until Huang and the other were safe within the cave that he recognized who the stumbling bandit had been.

  “If we survive this,” the skeletal Ruan said with a grimace that seemed almost like a smile, “remind me to thank you.”

  Others of the bandits never made it to the cave, felled by the Bannermen’s rifles or cut down by sabers and knives as they ran past.

  In the end, only a half dozen of them huddled in the shadows a few paces within the cave mouth.

  “There’s no more coming,” Jue said, breathless, his hands on his knees.

  “He’s right,” Ruan put in. “This is it. We should move.”

  “But where?” another bandit said, eyes wild, blood flowing freely from a cut above his left ear.

  “The old mining shaft,” Huang answered, his tone level but firm. “It’s the only way out.”

  The other bandits exchanged glances, but Jue nodded. “He’s right.”

  “Here they come.” Ruan jerked a thumb back toward the hangar, where the lead Bannerman was now approaching, pistol in one hand and saber in other, toward the cave, his men following behind.

  Huang spared a moment to glare from the shadows at the Bannermen’s leader. He realized suddenly that he had lost any compunction against killing, and had no qualms against murder, so long as the person skewered at the end of his saber was the Bannerman with the cross-shaped scar above his right eye. But revenge would have to be satisfied some other time. Now he owed it to Zhao to get the few bandits who remained to freedom.

  “Come on,” Huang said, pushing past the others and continuing deeper into the cave. “There’s no time to waste.”

  It seemed an eternity later, but was nearer a handful of hours, when the six bandits managed to remove the last of the rubble blocking the mining shaft’s entrance, and looked out on a sight most of them had never thought to see again—the morning. The sun was just rising in the east and cast long shadows across the red sands. And from this vantage point, near the base of Mount Shennong, they could see what had been hidden from them the day before.

  A short distance off stood two military crawlers, camouflaged from above by large canopies dyed the same rust red as the surrounding sands. From the skies, they would have been all but invisible, which explained why the airship had failed to notice them. The bandits could only suppose that the Bannermen had tracked them back to the Aerie after some previous raid, then come here in secret and waited for the airship to leave on another foray. Then the Bannermen must have scaled the slopes of Shennong itself and descended on lines through the skylight. Overcoming the ground crew and the other bandits within the Aerie, they had then simply lain in wait for the bandits’ return.

  They would never know the details for sure, but that seemed the most likely explanation, and it satisfied the curiosity of all concerned.

  “So what now, Hummingbird?” Ruan rubbed his sharp chin, his cheeks seeming even more hollow than ever, his eyes sunken in dark rings.

  Huang unslung his breather mask and let it fall to one side, then tugged down his goggles and left them hanging around his neck. “I don’t have any desire to hang around here, do you?”

  The other bandits shook their heads.

  “So what do you suggest, Chief?” Jue asked. He’d already accepted Huang’s leadership, though it was clear some of the others still harbored doubts.

  There were only one or two Bannermen in evidence, maintaining a halfhearted picket around the crawlers, while the rest of their number were still in the Aerie above, tending to the prisoners and their own wounded, or in the cave system trying to track Huang and the others.

  “We’ll need a ride,” Huang said.

  He raised the red-bladed saber, given to him once long ago by Governor-General Ouyang, and again years later by a man who had sworn bloody vengeance against Ouyang’s name, and pointed toward the crawlers. Then he glanced to the others, his lips curled in a grim smile.

  “Why don’t we take theirs?”

  Gamine was officiating over the third funeral in as many days and wasn’t sure how many of them she could handle.

  The Society had reached the barren, hardscrabble highlands north of Forking Paths, where the northernmost mountains of the Three Sovereigns range could be seen squatting on the western horizon. On clear days, when the dust storms didn’t limit visibility to their hands before their faces, they could even see the misty outlines of Bao Shan towering farther off.

  Gamine knew that too many had died when she realized it wasn’t the death that bothered her so much as the funerals themselves. But could she help it if the dry, barren ground underfoot seemed no more to want the dead Society followers than the towns and villages to the east had wanted them alive? Unable to burn or bury the bodies, they’d been forced to cover them in sad mounds of sand, which began to blow away and reveal the lonesome corpses beneath even before Gamine had finished reciting the burial verses.

  If not for Mama Noh, who stood beside her always in recent days, supporting her both figuratively and literally, Gamine might well have left the dead to rot where they fell, without observance or ritual at all. But Mama Noh knew well how to perform, how to play a part, how to bend the face into the expected expression and go through the motions, even if within there was nothing but numb resignation.

  The journey west from Yinglong had been difficult and had taken its toll on the Society of Righteous Harmony, but there were times when Gamine almost felt that, if that was the price of meeting Mama Noh and the rest of the Red Crawler Opera Company, then it just might have been worth it.

  There wasn’t enough food to go around, and less with each passing day. Most of those who had died in the western trek, whatever the immediate cause, had ultimately been defeated by hunger. The Society followers were wasting away, little by little, and it seemed only a matter of time before there was nothing left of them at all.

  Yinglong had been only the first community to bar their gates to the Society and to force them away at the end of rifle barrels and blades. Word of the Society of Righteous Harmony preceded them, and in town after town, village after village, the authorities would greet them at threshold and order Gamine and her people to go back the way they had come.

  The Society purchased what little food it could afford—and stole or begged what food it couldn’t—from the farming communities it passed, but most of the operating farms were Combine plantations, and the foremen were always close at hand to drive the Society away. The Combine felt it had lost too many laborers to the siren call of Gamine’s homilies, it seemed, and would not suffer any more to follow.

  It had been as they were leaving the Great Yu Canyon behind altogether, heading out onto the highlands, that they first caught sight of the crawler.

  Temujin had been sure it was the authorities, tiring of pushing them out of village after village and preferring instead to hunt them down and eliminate the nuisance once and for all.

  Gamine had felt a serpent of dread coiling and uncoiling in her gut. She hadn’t wanted to believe that Temujin was right but found it hard to dismiss him outright.

  The Society was walking in an irregular column, some hundreds of them altogether, walking a few abreast, stretched out over nearly a mile. The crawler approached from the north, a black speck against the violet-tinged late-afternoon sky.<
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  Gamine had suggested that, if it was the authorities come to eliminate them, there would be little point in running. Temujin objected that there was still no compelling argument against trying, at least.

  Then the crawler slowed and stopped just ahead of the Society’s column, and it became immediately clear that whom-ever they were dealing with, it was not the authorities.

  The crawler was of antique design, and though time and the elements had worn down the paint on the hull, its former brilliance was still evident. The crawler was painted nose to tail an arrestingly bright shade of red, like the glow of the sun just before it dipped below the horizon. None of the Society followers could ever remember seeing a military crawler using anything like that sort of coloration. Most military crawlers were painted bland, yellowish green shades, not in such bright red hues.

  If the crawler was bright and arresting, though, it was nothing compared to the passengers it disgorged through its open hatches.

  They tumbled, they juggled, they danced, they sang. Their clothes were a riot of motley in all shades and colors, their hair twisted in strange spires atop their heads, rings glinting in their ears and on their noses. And at the vanguard, approaching Gamine and Temujin like an advancing storm front, was the largest and most arresting of them all: Mama Noh.

  She was a woman of prodigious size and uncertain ethnicity, with bangles around her wrists and ankles, hair piled in a towering hive rising from the top of her head, cheeks colored red and eyes lined with kohl. Her eyebrows and eyelashes had been completely plucked clean, with brows reapplied with paint high on her wide forehead, and the corners of her mouth were stained by the tobacco she always kept tucked between her cheek and gum, spitting out the tobacco-laced saliva into a dainty porcelain cup constantly through the day. The cup, which had once been something like white but which was now stained a deep golden brown, the color of a fresh-baked loaf, was emptied out onto the ground whenever it began to fill, and so Mama Noh left behind her a dotted trail of brownish expectoration in little pools wherever she went.