Monsters of Men

by Patrick Ness

  Mr O’Hare looks surprised. “But, sir–”

  “We need to know,” the Mayor says.

  Mr O’Hare stares at him for a second, then says, “Yes, sir,” before leaving, but you can tell he’s unhappy about it.

  “Maybe the Spackle don’t think the way you do,” I say. “Maybe their goal ain’t just war.”

  He laughs. “Forgive me, Todd, but you do not know our enemy.”

  “Maybe you don’t neither. Not as much as you think.”

  He stops laughing. “I beat them before,” he says. “I will beat them again, even if they’re better, even if they’re smarter.” He brushes some dust off his general’s trousers. “They will attack, mark my words, and when they do, I will beat them.”

  “And then we’ll make peace,” I say firmly.

  “Yes, Todd,” he says. “Whatever you say.”

  “Sir?” It’s Mr Tate this time.

  “What is it?” the Mayor says, turning to him.

  But Mr Tate ain’t looking at us. He’s looking past us, across the army, where the ROAR of the men is changing as they see it, too.

  The Mayor and I turn to look.

  And for a second, I truly don’t believe my eyes.

  {VIOLA}

  “I really think Mistress Coyle should have a look at this, Viola,” Mistress Lawson says, her worried hands rebandaging my arm.

  “You’re doing fine on your own,” I say.

  We’re back in the little makeshift healing room on the scout ship. As the morning went on, I really did start to feel unwell and sought out Mistress Lawson, who nearly fell over herself with concern when she saw me. Barely pausing to get permission from Simone, she dragged me aboard and set about reading the instructions for every new tool they landed with.

  “These are the strongest antibiotics I found,” she says, finishing the new bandage. It feels cool as the medicine sinks in, though the red streaks are now stretching in both directions from the band. “All we can do now is wait.”

  “Thank you,” I say, but she barely hears me as she goes back to inventorying the scout ship’s medical supplies. She was always the kindest of the mistresses, tiny and round and in charge of healing the children of Haven, always the one who wanted more than anything to stop other people suffering.

  I leave her to it and head back down the ramp from the bay doors onto the hilltop, where the Answer’s camp is already looking almost permanent with the hawklike shadow of the scout ship watching over them. There are rows of orderly tents and fires, supply areas and meeting places. In barely the space of a morning, it looks almost like the camp they had back at the mine when I first joined up with them. Some of them were happy to greet me when I walked through it, but some wouldn’t speak to me at all, unsure of my place in all this.

  I’m not too sure of my place in it either.

  I had Mistress Lawson treat me because I’m going back down to see Todd, though I’m so tired right now, I’m not sure I won’t fall asleep in the saddle. I’ve already talked to him twice this morning. His voice on the comm is tinny and distant, and his Noise is muffled, overwhelmed on the tiny comm speakers by the Noise of the army around him.

  But seeing his face helps.

  “Are these all friends of yours, then?” Bradley says, coming down the ramp behind me.

  “Hey!” I say, walking right into his hug. “How are you feeling?”

  Loud, his Noise says and he gives a little smile, but it actually is a bit calmer today, less panicky.

  “You will get used to it,” I say. “I promise.”

  “As much as I might not want to.”

  He brushes a strand of hair away from my eyes. So grown up, his Noise is saying. And looks so pale. And he shows a picture of me from last year, learning a math segment in the classes he taught. I look so small, so clean, that I have to laugh.

  “Simone’s been speaking with the convoy,” he says. “They agree with the peaceful approach. We try to meet with these Spackle and offer humanitarian help to the people here, but the last thing we want to do is get involved in a war that has nothing to do with us.” His hand squeezes my shoulder. “You were right to want to keep us out of it, Viola.”

  “I just wish I knew what to do now,” I say, turning away from his praise, remembering how close I came to choosing the other way. “I’ve been trying to get Mistress Coyle to talk to me about how the first truce worked but–

  I stop because we both see someone running across the hilltop, looking this way and that, searching each face, then seeing the ship, seeing me and running even faster–

  “Who’s that?” Bradley asks, but I’m already pulling away from him–

  Because it’s–

  “LEE!” I shout and start running towards him–

  Viola, his Noise is saying, Viola, Viola, Viola, and he reaches me and spins me around in a breath-squeezing embrace that makes my arm ache. “Thank God!”

  “Are you okay?” I’m saying as he lets me go. “Where’d you–?”

  “The river!” he says, his breath heaving. “What’s happening to the river?”

  He looks over to Bradley and back to me. His Noise gets louder, so does his voice. “Haven’t you seen the river?”

  [TODD]

  “But how?” I say, staring up at the falls–

  Staring as they get quieter and quieter–

  Staring as they start to disappear altogether–

  The Spackle are turning off the river.

  “Very clever,” the Mayor is saying to himself. “Very clever indeed.”

  “What is?” I nearly shout at him. “What are they doing?”

  Every man in the army is watching it now, ROARing loud about it like you wouldn’t believe, watching as the falls trickle back just exactly like someone turning down a tap, with the river below shrinking, too, metres of mud popping up where riverbank used to be.

  “No word from our spies, Captain O’Hare?” the Mayor says, in a voice that ain’t happy.

  “None, sir,” Mr O’Hare says. “If there’s a dam, it’s back quite a ways.”

  “Then we need to find out exactly, don’t we?”

  “Now, sir?”

  The Mayor turns to him, fury-eyed. Mr O’Hare just salutes and leaves quickly.

  “What’s going on?” I say.

  “They want a siege, Todd,” the Mayor says. “Instead of a battle, they take away our water and wait until we’re so weak they can walk right over us.” His voice sounds almost angry. “This isn’t what they were supposed to do, Todd. And we will not let them get away with it. Captain Tate!”

  “Yes, sir,” says Mr Tate, who’s been waiting and watching with us.

  “Get the men in battle formations.”

  Mr Tate looks surprised. “Sir?”

  “Is there a problem with your orders, Captain?”

  “The uphill battle, sir. You said yourself–”

  “That was before the enemy declined to play by the rules.” His words start filling the air, twirling around and slipping into the heads of the soldiers around the edge of our camp–

  “Every man will do his duty,” the Mayor says, “every man will fight until the battle is won. They won’t be expecting us to come at them so hard and surprise will win us the day. Is that clear?”

  Mr Tate says, “Yes, sir,” and heads off into the army, shouting orders, while the soldiers nearest us are already gearing up and making lines.

  “Prepare yourself, Todd,” the Mayor says, watching him go. “This is the day we settle it.”

  {VIOLA}

  “How?” Simone says. “How did they do it?”

  “Can you send the probe back upriver?” Mistress Coyle asks.

  “They’d just shoot it down again,” Bradley says, dialling some more on the probe’s remote panel. We’re gathered around the three-dimensional projection, Bradley aiming it under the shadow cast by the wing of the ship. Me, Simone, Bradley and Lee, with Mistress Coyle and more and more people from the Answer crowding i
n as word spreads.

  “There,” Bradley says, and the projection gets even bigger.

  There are gasps in the crowd. The river’s almost completely dry. There’s almost no waterfall at all. The picture rises a bit, but all we can see is the river drying up above the falls as well, the Spackle army a white- and clay-coloured mass on the road to the side.

  “Are there other sources of water?” Simone asks.

  “A few,” Mistress Coyle says, “streams and ponds here and there, but . . .”

  “We’re in trouble,” Simone says. “Aren’t we?”

  Lee turns to her, perplexed. “You think our trouble is just starting now?”

  “I told you not to underestimate them,” Mistress Coyle says to Bradley.

  “No,” Bradley replies, “you told us to bomb them into oblivion, without even trying for peace first.”

  “And you’re saying I was wrong?”

  Bradley dials on the remote screen again, and the probe rises higher in the sky, showing even more of the Spackle army stretching down the road in their thousands. There are further gasps behind us as the Answer sees how big the Spackle army is for the first time.

  “We couldn’t kill them all,” Bradley says. “We’d only be guaranteeing our own doom.”

  “What’s the Mayor doing?” I ask, my voice tight.

  Bradley changes the projection angle again, and we see the army sorting itself into lines.

  “No,” Mistress Coyle whispers. “He can’t be.”

  “Can’t what?” I say. “Can’t what?”

  “Attacking,” she answers. “It’d be suicide.”

  My comm beeps and I answer it immediately. “Todd?”

  “Viola?” he says, his worried face in my hand.

  “What’s going on?” I say. “Are you all right?”

  “The river, Viola, the river’s–”

  “We can see it. We’re watching it right–”

  “The falls!” he says. “They’re in the falls!”

  [TODD]

  There’s a line of lights in the shadows under the disappearing falls, stretching down the path Viola and I once took when we were running from Aaron, a watery, slippery stone path under the crashing wall of water that led to an abandoned church stretched across a ledge. The inside wall was marked with a white circle and two smaller circles orbiting it, this planet and its two moons, and you can see it glowing there, too, above the line of lights gathered across the rocky face of what’s now just a wet cliff.

  “Can you see ’em?” I say to Viola thru the comm.

  “Hold on,” she says.

  “Do you still have those binos, Todd?” the Mayor says.

  I’d forgotten I’d taken them back from him. I run over to where Angharrad’s still standing silently next to my stuff.

  “Don’t you worry,” I say to her, digging thru my bag. “I’ll keep you safe.”

  I find the binos and don’t even go back to the Mayor before I put ’em up to my eyes. I hit some buttons and zoom in–

  “We see them now, Todd,” Viola says from the comm in my other hand. “It’s a bunch of Spackle on that ledge we ran down–”

  “I know,” I say. “I see ’em, too.”

  “What do you see, Todd?” the Mayor says, coming over to me.

  “What are they holding?” Viola asks.

  “A kind of bow,” I say, “but those don’t look like–”

  “Todd!” she says and I look up above the binos–

  One speck of light is leaving the line from the falls, flying out from under the church symbol in a slow arc down the riverbed–

  “What is it?” says the Mayor. “It’s too big for an arrow.”

  I look back thru the binos, trying to find the light, coming closer by the second–

  There it is–

  It looks like it’s wavering, flickering in and out–

  We all turn as it flies down the river, as it takes a rounded path over the last trickles of water–

  “Todd?” Viola says.

  “What is it, Todd?” the Mayor growls at me.

  And I see thru the binos–

  As its path curves in the air–

  And starts heading back towards the army–

  Back towards us–

  That it ain’t flickering after all–

  It’s spinning–

  And that the light ain’t just light–

  It’s fire–

  “We need to get back,” I say, keeping the binos to my eyes. “We need to get back into the city.”

  “It’s heading right for you, Todd!” Viola’s screaming–

  The Mayor can’t help it no more and tries to yank the binos from my hand–

  “Hey!” I yell–

  And I punch him in the side of his face–

  He staggers back, more surprised than hurt–

  And it’s the screaming that makes us turn round–

  The spinning fire has reached the army–

  The crowd of soldiers is trying to part, trying to get away as it flies towards ’em–

  Flies towards us–

  Flies towards me–

  But there’s too many soldiers, too many people in the way–

  And the spinning fire comes blazing thru ’em–

  Right at head height–

  And the first soldiers it hits are blasted nearly in two–

  And it ain’t stopping–

  It ain’t effing stopping–

  The spinning don’t even drop speed–

  It rips thru the soldiers like matches being struck–

  Destroying the men directly in its way–

  And engulfing the men on either side in a sticky, white fire–

  And it’s still flying–

  Still as fast as it was–

  Coming right towards me–

  Right towards me and the Mayor–

  And there ain’t nowhere to run–

  “Viola!” I yell–

  {VIOLA}

  “Todd!” I yell into the comm as we watch the fire curve through the air and slam into a group of soldiers–

  Through a group of soldiers–

  Screams start rising in the air behind us from people seeing the projection–

  The fire slices through the army as easy as someone drawing a line with a pen, curving as it goes, tearing the soldiers to pieces, sending them flying, coating everything it even comes close to in fire–

  “Todd!” I shout into the comm. “Get out of there!”

  But I can’t see his face any more, just the fire cutting a path in the projection, killing everything in the way, and then–

  Then it rises–

  “What the hell?” Lee says next to me–

  It rises up above the army, out of the crowd, out of the men it was killing–

  “It’s still curving,” Bradley says.

  “What is it?” Simone asks Mistress Coyle.

  “I’ve never seen it before,” Mistress Coyle answers, her eyes not leaving the projection. “The Spackle obviously haven’t been idle.”

  “Todd?” I say into my comm.

  But he doesn’t answer.

  Bradley draws a square with his thumb on the remote and a box appears in the projection, surrounding the fiery thing and enlarging it out to one side of the main picture. He dials some more and the image slows down. The fire burns on a spinning bladed S, so bright and ferocious it’s hard to even look at it–

  “It’s going back to the falls!” Lee says, pointing back to the main projection, where the fiery thing has risen up out of the army, still curving, still flying viciously fast. We watch as it lifts higher in the air, completing one long circle, rising up the zigzag hill, heading towards the ledge under the now-dry falls, still spinning and burning. We can see the Spackle there now, dozens of them holding more burning blades at the end of their bows. They don’t flinch as the flying one heads right towards them, and we see a Spackle with an empty bow, the one who fired the first shot–
/>
  We watch as he flips his bow up, revealing a curved hook at the bottom end, and with perfect timing he snatches the flying S right out of the air, turning it with a practised motion, and immediately it’s reset, ready to fire again, tall as the body of the Spackle itself.

  In the reflected light of the fire, we see the Spackle’s hands, arms and body are covered in a thick, flexible clay, protecting him from the burning.

  “Todd?” I say, into the comm. “Are you there? You need to run, Todd! You need to run–”

  And in the larger view, we can see all the Spackle raising their bows–

  “Todd!” I yell. “Answer me!”

  And as one–

  They all fire–

  [TODD]

  “VIOLA!” I scream–

  But I don’t got the comm no more, the binos neither–

  They were knocked outta my hands by a wall of running soldiers, pushing and shoving and screaming–

  And burning–

  The spinning fire ripped a curve thru the men right in front of me, killing ’em so fast they barely knew what happened and setting ’em alight in two or three rows on either side–

  And just as it was about to take off my own head–

  It lifted–

  Up into the air–

  Curving round–

  And flying back to the ledge where it came from–

  I whirl round now to see where I can run–

  And then, over the shouting of the soldiers–

  I hear Angharrad screaming–

  And I’m pushing back and hitting out and shoving men aside to get to my horse–

  “Angharrad!” I yell. “ANGHARRAD!”

  And I can’t see her–

  But I hear her screaming in terror–

  I push forward even harder–

  And I feel a hand on my collar–