by Claire Luana
Rika drew her blade from her black sash. “Each of us sticks with a constellation. We kill the thralls; the constellations take care of the soul-eaters. Rendezvous at the queen,” Rika said.
The others nodded. Rika took aim and hurdled her blade with all her strength directly across the deck at the queen’s bulbous eyes. The blade winked in the moonlight, spinning directly towards its target…only to be deflected at the last moment by a wooden staff. Rika grunted and pulled the thread of the blade back to her. Worth a try. The blade sang as it spun back at her; she caught it in the air next to her head. Her gaze was fixed ahead at the soul-eater that had blocked her strike. The soul-eater holding a wooden staff carved with the leaves and palms of Nua. The soul-eater with three fingers.
“That’s the one that killed Father,” Rika said, her voice stiff. “With the staff.”
It was all Kai needed. She sprang into the crowd of men, her sword clearing a path, fire jetting from her outstretched free hand. Moonburning may not be able to kill the soul-eaters, but it could certainly damage their minions. “Mother!” Rika called, exasperated. “Stay with her,” she directed the phoenix, and the constellation launched into the air, soaring after her mother.
“She can’t have all the fun,” Emi said. With a whoop, she tore down the stairs after her, the great celestial bear in tow.
Daarco was busy removing pieces of the heavy armor, throwing them down at the men who made their way towards them. “What’s our move, princess?”
“Kill some leeches,” Rika said, wrapping the threads of the wasp around her fingers. She spun them out like throwing a spiderweb, and the constellation darted towards the queen in answer, stinger at the ready. The queen moved in a blur of black and green, narrowly avoiding the wasp’s glittering barbed stinger.
“She’s not just an ugly face,” Daarco said.
“No.” Rika frowned, searching frantically for the queen. There! Escorted by three leeches, including the three-fingered one. A handful of thralls hurried behind them, including one with golden hair. Anger flared in Rika. Master Tato. The traitorous librarian. She yanked a handful of threads, pulling starlight down in a fiery rain upon the retreating soul-eaters, taking special care to send one towards Tato. The world spun as the starlight flashed and shimmered.
“Are you all right?” Daarco put a steadying hand under her arm. “It won’t do us any good if you burn yourself out.”
“I’m not a burner,” Rika panted.
“Doesn’t mean you can’t burn yourself out,” Daarco commented. “Look out!” He bore her to the ground just in time to miss a quivering spear that impaled itself in the boards behind her.
Rika looked up in shock and saw one of the queen’s guard making his way towards her. And the three-fingered soul-eater. The shooting star had killed the third, but other soul-eaters had filled in around the queen, protecting her. Daarco snarled and leaped at the nearest one, who raised its armored arm to meet his powerful sword strike in a shower of sparks. “Help him.” Rika motioned to the giant fox, who sprang at the soul-eater who was wrapping one of its fists around Daarco’s throat.
The three-fingered soul-eater took an impossible leap from the deck of the ship and with a thunderous crash, landed before her, Vikal’s staff in hand. Rika reached and yanked desperately at the threads of the wasp, all the while throwing her blade at its face with all the force she could muster.
The soul-eater deflected her throw with the staff—metal ricocheting off wood—and her totem tumbled into the crowd of thralls below. Rika pulled its thread while dodging a lunge from the soul-eater. “That doesn’t belong to you,” she panted, coming into a crouch. The wasp was closing in…
“Its owner was unworthy,” the soul-eater said before ducking to the side at the last moment. The wasp overshot, missing him completely before spinning, buzzing in anger. “None of you are worthy. Of this world. Of living.”
“Funny,” Rika said, summoning the wasp again, gauging her attack. “I was thinking the same thing about you.” The wasp attacked the soul-eater again, and this time the leech wasn’t so fast. The constellation locked on to the creature’s torso, stinging him in quick succession. Rika darted into the creature’s reach and stabbed her totem through the neck joint in the creature’s armor. The soul-eater bellowed with pain, and with a blow of its iron gauntlet, tossed her into the air like a piece of chaff.
Pain exploded behind Rika’s eyes as she crashed to the deck in a tangle of limbs, tumbling to a stop. Her totem skidded over the rail, falling to the deck below. Her vision blurred as she tried to push herself to hands and knees—reeling from the strain and the trauma. She squinted and saw that the three-fingered soul-eater was grappling with the wasp constellation. It had the star in its four-handed grip—it was pulling, pulling, pulling, and with a sound like splintering armor, the wasp’s segmented body cracked. The constellation keened in anger and pain, scrambling away from the soul-eater, flopping onto the deck. The soul-eater had wounded a constellation. Rika hadn’t known that was possible.
“Rika!” Emi’s scream from the lower deck pulled her attention, and she saw that Kai and Emi were surrounded by half a dozen soul-eaters, black talons grasping, ready to suck their souls’ essence until they were no more.
In a panic, Rika yanked at threads of starlight, sending them to her mother and Emi’s aid like a deadly meteor show. The handful was too many, and while the devastating light rained down upon the soul-eaters, burning them through and causing others to scatter in fear, the power it required left her panting and weak. Pain snaked through her head and behind her eyes, and the threads blurred and swam. “Daarco!” she called, but she didn’t know where he was—couldn’t tell where her constellations were. She cried for them, but all around her the fighting was thick. The constellations and burners fought for their lives.
Black-booted feet swam into her vision, the wooden end of a staff thunking ominously on the deck. She had been an overeager fool running into this mess, thinking she could take on a thousand soul-eaters and thralls with only the heavens for backup.
The soul-eater knelt down and buried its fingers in her shirt, lifting her onto her feet, pressing her against the rail. The smell of sulfur overwhelmed her, and she spit the bile building in her mouth into the soul-eater’s face. It laughed. Laughed!
“I thought perhaps I had found a foe worthy of me. Of my queen. But I see now that you are deficient. Like all the rest. How disappointing.”
Rika’s third-eye vision flickered in and out, but she jerked at a nearby thread, summoning it to come to her. It whistled down towards the soul-eater, who dodged at the last moment. Rika used that distraction to pull her legs up and shove off the soul-eater’s armored chest with her feet, wrenching herself free of its grip. She scrambled across the deck towards the staircase at the far side of the balcony, her legs rebelling, her head swimming. Daarco and the fox constellation were on the lower deck, locked in brutal combat with a swarm of black. Rika was halfway down the stairs when another figure appeared at the bottom, blocking her exit. The queen.
Rika’s mouth went dry and she backtracked up the stairs—the queen matching her steps with alien grace. The creature was huge, even more monstrous up close. She wore no helmet to shadow her gruesome face; instead, her four green eyes burned above a maw filled with black teeth and flanked by two clicking mandibles. Long hair like black, slick ropes hung down her back. If this is what passes for beautiful in soul-eater territory, Rika thought, they have very different tastes indeed.
She found herself back on the upper balcony, the queen towering before her, the three-fingered soul-eater behind. This was her moment. Her chance to kill them both. To end this war, to save her people. And she was empty. Weak as a mewling lamb. She jerked on the thread of her totem and it spun up from below into her hand. That effort alone was enough to nearly undo her—it took all her effort to stay on her feet. Her vision flickered. She needed time to regain her strength.
“Where do you come from?�
�� Rika asked boldly, trying to stall. Her third eye was staying open, and she eyed a thread, a large and powerful star, fierce and unyielding.
“We come from the stars. Just as you do,” the queen hissed. “But we have been at this a thousand thousand years.”
“So have I,” Rika said, and with a twitch of her fingers, she summoned the star, willed it to send its fiery radiance into the soul-eater queen, to devour and consume her. The light streaked down above, strong and sure… And the queen sidestepped. One instant, the queen stood before Rika, the next, she was beside her, watching the light explode onto the deck in a maelstrom of sparks.
Pain exploded across Rika’s back as the three-fingered soul-eater struck her with Vikal’s totem. She sprawled forward onto the planks, hitting hard, her totem sliding across the deck. She tasted blood. The soul-eater’s booted foot connected with her ribs, sending a wave of agony through her torso. Through the railing, Rika could make out blurry forms of the constellations, snarling and clawing. There was no one to come to her aid. Emi and Daarco and her mother were fighting for their own lives, the constellations the only thing holding back the tide of thralls and soul-eaters. But if she died, the constellations would vanish. She needed them. She desperately grasped at the thread of the fox constellation, pulling it towards her. It slipped from her fingers as if she grasped at air. She wasn’t strong enough—couldn’t see it clearly.
The soul-eater queen knelt over her, filling Rika’s vision with green-eyed horror. “Your soul is a delicacy I won’t soon forget,” the queen rasped, her mandibles quivering, opening.
“Never,” Rika said, raising her hand to rake the queen’s eyes with her fingernails. She didn’t know what else to do.
The queen shied back, avoiding Rika’s labored effort. “So determined,” the queen said before pinning Rika ‘s shoulders to the deck, puncturing skin with her talons. A scream ripped from Rika’s throat, summoned by the pain, by the fear and hopelessness and sorrow. The scraping sound of the queen’s laughter filled Rika’s world as the nightmare curled over her like a lover, beginning to drink.
CHAPTER 35
IT HAD BEEN the strangest ride of Vikal’s life. Sandwiched between Ajij and Kemala, his eyes squeezed closed as they slipped through time and space. Somehow, Rika had known, and she had sent Cygna to them—the tiny sparrow now a massive creature with wings as broad as a temple roof. Cygna had climbed and climbed, past the point where the sky met the velvet stars, flying onto ethereal paths of light and energy that no human had tread before. Vikal felt Rika’s energy all around him, pure and clean and powerful. In this place of beauty, of light, Cygna cut through the universe, bearing them towards its mistress.
Vikal had expected the situation in Kitina to be dire, but when they descended down out of the heavens, his stomach dropped at the sight.
“That’s a lot of leeches,” Bahti said, his teeth clenched against the cold and the height.
A fight to the death played out across the yawning deck of a massive black galleon. The leeches appeared to be winning.
“Where’s Rika?” Vikal shouted, clutching Cygna’s feathers as the bird banked, soaring lower.
“God and goddess,” Kemala breathed. “At the stern. Vikal…”
His eyes desperately searched for where Kemala indicated, and when they locked on to Rika’s form, sanity left him. “Cygna, kill that leech!” he bellowed, and the night sparrow narrowed its wings, pulling into a dive. The sweet essence of Rika’s soul was vaporizing above her body, being sucked out by a horrific soul-eater. Were they too late?
“Hold on!” Vikal bellowed.
Cygna hit the feasting soul-eater and ripped it off Rika, grasping it with its talons. Or so Vikal imagined because when he looked back as Cygna flapped its immense wings, the leech was gone. Another leech stood over Rika’s body now, watching them with baleful eyes. It held a staff in its hand. His totem.
“Set us down!” Vikal cried. “By Rika!”
The great bird wheeled about, coming to a screeching stop on the upper deck of the ship, the power of its wings driving the soul-eater back. Vikal and the others leaped off the creature’s back, sandals hitting the deck. The strange soul-eater who had been feasting on Rika was writhing underneath the bird’s huge talons, pierced through.
“You have what is mine!” Vikal shouted at the soul-eater, who turned to face him. He wasn’t sure he only meant his totem. He wanted to run to Rika, to cradle her face in his arms, but he was intent upon the soul-eater. He had learned the hard way not to turn his back on these creatures.
“Our little thrall, back so soon? I am not surprised that you could not live without us. Free will is not for the weak.”
Vikal spit on the deck, unsheathing his swords. “I would rather die than be under your control again.”
“We can arrange that.” The soul-eater was upon Vikal in an instant, yielding his own staff like a weapon against him. Vikal ducked out of the way, ready for the leech’s blows, having seen them time and again as he had stood mutely by these creatures’ sides.
Kemala knelt over Rika’s prone form, and from the corner of his eye, Vikal saw Rika move. She was alive. “Help the others,” Kemala called.
Ajij and Bahti plunged into the battle below, forces of nature turned against the tide of thralls and leeches that were threatening to overwhelm the little knot of desperately fighting burners and constellations.
And then all his focus was pulled back to the task at hand, dodging and ducking, striking blows that glanced off the soul-eater uselessly. He needed the power of starlight to kill this creature. “Cygna!” he called, risking a glance over his shoulder. Horror welled within him. The huge, distorted soul-eater grappled with the constellation, raking Cygna with her armored claws, clambering over it with insect-like grace. Cygna thrashed and clacked its beak, trying to throw her off. Could a constellation be killed?
“Magnificent, isn’t she?” the soul-eater said. “A queen to be worshipped. Worthy of our devotion.”
“She has you in her thrall, just like I was in yours.” Vikal grunted, leaping over a swing of his staff. Gods, he wanted that staff back. “You are a slave, just as I was.”
The soul-eater bellowed, and this time, when it swung at him, Vikal dropped one of his swords and caught his totem, his arm flexing and straining to wrench it from the monster. Power flooded through him, filling him with knowledge of the threads of the green things of this world. He laughed with relief at the surge, redoubling his efforts to wrench his staff from the leech.
Cygna let out a scream of pain behind him, drawing Vikal’s attention for an instant. It was enough. The soul-eater punched him in the face with its other arm, its armored gauntlet connecting with a sickening crunch. Vikal crumpled to the ground, stars exploding in his vision.
The soul-eater hovered above him, the black eternity within its helmet mocking him with rasping laughter. “To come all this way only to die at my hand. The gods of your world surely are the sorriest lot I have ever encountered.”
Anger burned in Vikal, swimming through the pain. He tried to rise, but his body rebelled, still in shock from the power and pain of the blow. The soul-eater drew his sword, its attention locked on Vikal. So intent that it didn’t see. It didn’t see Rika coming onto unsteady feet, her face ghostly pale and grim as the grave. Rika pulling the thread of her totem, summoning it to her hand. And pulling the thread of a star, infusing it into the blade so it glowed with white-hot starlight.
As the soul-eater moved to make its killing blow, it hesitated, seeming to recognize the incongruity of Vikal’s teeth bared in a smile of triumph. But it was too late. Rika plunged her blade up under the leech’s helmet, into its spine and brainstem, if the soul-eaters in fact had such things. Starlight snaked into the recess of its helmet, cracking and expanding until the soul-eater exploded, the weight of its armor crashing at Rika’s feet. “It forgot about the goddesses,” Rika said, her breast heaving, her eyes glowing and wild.
Vikal laug
hed incredulously and heaved himself to his feet. He crashed into Rika, pulling her up into his arms, not able to stand another second of separateness. When his lips met hers, she tasted of blood and stardust and the rightness of coming home. The pain and adrenaline coursing through his veins vanished as she wrapped her arms around his neck, crushing her lips to his, she as desperate as he to make up for the foolishness of their parting. Why had he ever left her?
She pulled away with a gasp, doubling over in pain. “Cygna!” she said. “The queen!” The constellation and the queen of the soul-eaters were locked in deathly combat, and it seemed killing blows had been given on both sides. Sickly-green blood leaked from the queen as she snarled and leaped at the bird again with slashing claws; Cygna ducking and slashing with its talons. Starlight leaked from one ravaged eye, and its movements were labored.
The others were running up the stairs now—two silver-haired women and a man with golden hair followed the other gods. “Together,” Rika said. “She’s too fast for me to get her alone. Hold her, and I’ll strike.”
“With pleasure,” Bahti said, aiming a jet of fire at the soul-eater, sending her tumbling off the back of the constellation. They quickly moved around the queen, flanking her, surrounding her in a circle. Fire from Bahti and water from Ajij and lightning from the two silver-haired women pulverized the queen, pinning her to the deck even as she struggled to rise and flee. The bear and fox constellations flanked the queen, threatening her with gnashing teeth and rending claws. Rika moved in, her totem flashing, her three eyes glowing bright as stars. Vikal’s breath caught as Rika raised her blade for the killing blow, feeling as if all the world and past and future hung in the balance of this blow.