He turned from Dae Hyo’s incredulous expression to face the Chun leader. The man looked agonised, as if the contempt in Krish’s voice gave him physical pain. ‘But lord,’ he said, ‘it was you who ordered us to slaughter the woman-loving Dae. Chun Yong told us so.’
‘Chun Yong was wrong. I’d never have ordered that.’
The leader bowed his head. ‘I’m sorry, lord.’
‘You’ve failed me,’ Krish told him, ‘but you can make it right. You promised you’ll obey me. Will you do anything I say?’
New hope bloomed in the man’s face. ‘We will obey any order. Our lives are yours.’
‘Then I order you to let Dae Hyo take them. If that’s what you want, Dae Hyo. Do you want to kill them for what they did? Then kill them. Kill them, Dae Hyo. I command them to allow it.’
Olufemi made a strangled sound of protest, cut off when she saw Krish’s expression. His head was light with blood loss, but the feeling was almost like joy. He’d meant to use Dae Hyo. It felt so much better just to be his brother.
Dae Hyo didn’t seem to quite believe it. He approached the first of the warriors on light feet, his sword poised for a fight. His gaze flicked between the warrior and Krish, but Krish only nodded and the warrior lowered his eyes and held his hands away from his weapons. Dae Hyo hesitated a moment longer and then swung his sword in a savage slash across the warrior’s throat.
The man gargled as blood spurted on the silvery grass and across Dae Hyo’s face. Some of it caught on his companions’ black shirts. The blood soaked invisibly into the fabric and the men tensed and shifted, but none of them tried to run.
Dae Hyo took more time over the next man. He pulled out his knife and cut through the man’s right ear and then his left. Krish was appalled by the Chun warrior’s resolve. He struggled only a little before allowing Dae Hyo to gouge out his eye. After that, Dae Hyo tore through his stomach and his guts and then left him to sink to the ground, moaning. He’d be a long while dying.
‘Have we proved we obey?’ their leader asked Krish in a choked voice. ‘Is this enough?’
‘Is it enough?’ Krish asked Dae Hyo.
Dae Hyo didn’t answer. He just killed another, then another, more quickly now but with the same fierce joy, until only the leader was left standing.
‘Leave me alive, lord, to fetch my brothers,’ he begged. He was sweating now and shaking, but his hand still hadn’t moved to his weapon. Krish marvelled that he could believe in something more powerfully than his own instinct to survive. These men would form the most devoted army he could possibly have. They wouldn’t drink themselves into oblivion and leave him to be taken by Marvan and Nethmi. They’d protect him from his father. But they’d be an army of men just like his da.
‘Finish it,’ he said to Dae Hyo, and watched as his brother struck a knife straight through the other man’s heart.
Olufemi looked horrified. Krish only felt weary. But Dae Hyo was grinning as he wiped the blood from his face, and Krish was certain he’d done the right thing. He accepted the other man’s arm for support and offered his own to Olufemi as they walked past the sprawled corpses of the men who’d pledged to follow him, and away from the ruin of Smiler’s Fair.
Epilogue
Vordanna lay shivering in the wagon, growing weaker with every mile. Jinn sat in the saddle of the sway-backed horse, shaking the reins and leaning forward as if he could somehow urge the decrepit creature to go faster. His mother was sick, she was nearly dead, and the moon god hadn’t come to help them. Despite everything, though, a part of Jinn still kept expecting that he would.
His skin still itched from the grating the sandstorm had given it, and the wagon was now in ruins. Sometimes he thought about Nethmi and wondered if she’d survived. More often he thought about In Su, who’d told him there was a cure for his mother in the Spiral, if he could only get there in time.
The grasslands had turned to gentle hills this far north, scattered with trees. He knew that the trees were the outer groves of the great Moon Forest, and that should have given him hope, but nearly all his faith was gone. And then they eased through a valley between two slopes, and when they spilled out of the other end beside the river that divided it, the Spiral was in front of them.
There must have been a thousand wagons there. They’d been drawn up in the spiral pattern that gave the place its name, each wagon one wagon-length from its neighbour. Jinn knew that every day the pattern moved forward one length and the innermost wagon had to walk the spiral to the very outside and rejoin the formation there. More Wanderers would arrive as winter drew on, the days would pass and the Spiral would move, drawing them inexorably towards its centre.
There wasn’t much more speed to be coaxed from their horse, but Jinn did what he could. He forced it into a trot over the trampled grass that surrounded the Spiral until they’d reached its outer limit and he could leave the half-wrecked wagon as the last dot in the vast pattern. He barely waited for the horse to stop before he slid from its back. There was no need to hobble the idle animal. It dropped its head to crop the grass as he ran round the curve of the Spiral.
His chest was tight with tension as he hurried past a fat Ashane trader with a wagonload of silks from the Eternal Empire, a Wanderer’s heaps of brightly coloured spices, a cobbler, a smith, a jeweller. If In Su was wrong, if no Eom came here … Jinn passed a bird seller, a farrier and a fur merchant, and nearly missed it in his hurry. It was the bright figure of the trader herself who caught his eye and he skidded to a stop beside her stall.
The Eom woman had painted her face an extraordinary swirled mix of yellow and blue, while her hair was dyed violet and fell straight to her waist. Her wagon was just as gaudy, a patchwork of different shades of red with gold curlicues winding around them. The herbs and salts piled in front were lost in the riot of colour.
The trader looked up as Jinn approached. There was a pipe clenched between her teeth and the smoke that puffed out of it had a soporific smell. This didn’t seem like a person Jinn wanted to trust with his mother’s life, but according to In Su, the Eom knew the mixing of herbs better than anyone on the plains.
‘How may I aid you, young master?’ she asked.
‘Medicine,’ he said, and then paused awkwardly, not quite sure how to explain.
‘Do you have an ague, child, a rash? Are your energies unbalanced or your joints misaligned? Do you have pains, or do you wish pleasure? What is your need?’ Her expression was hard to fathom amidst the paint.
‘It’s – it’s bliss pills.’
There was a shifting movement in the blue and yellow that resolved into a frown. ‘Those are an evil thing, young master, a perversion of the plant’s will. I do not sell them.’
‘No. It’s for my mother. She was – she was put on bliss. And now she’s dying because she ain’t got any. I heard you’ve got some medicine can make her well again. I’ve got the coin.’
‘Ah.’ She tipped her head to the side as if weighing up his truthfulness. She must have decided in his favour, because she turned to a shelf behind her and pulled down a jar full of white pills, different from the pale purple of bliss itself. ‘Not cheap, young master. Very precious stuff, very rare. One glass feather for each tablet and your mother must take one every day. Every day, you understand? Or else her illness will be worse.’
It took half their remaining money to buy fifty, but he made the trade and hoped he’d find a way to earn more. As soon as the pills were in his hands he turned and sprinted back to their wagon.
It was almost too late; when he flung open the door and leapt inside it was to see his mother arched in agony, froth bubbling from her lips. His skin felt as if it had been coated in ice, but he made himself pry open her mouth and place one of the pills on the back of her tongue and then hold both her mouth and nose shut. He’d seen the Fierce Children do the same when they wanted to give medicine to one of the beasts in the menagerie.
Her back remained arched, her eyes shut. He wasn’t
even certain she’d swallowed it. He felt the last dregs of hope drain out of him – and then she let out a long sigh and fell back to the wagon’s floor as all her muscles suddenly softened. After that, the working of the pill was so fast, it was almost like the rune magic he no longer believed in. The feverish flush faded from her cheeks, her shivers ended and finally she opened her eyes.
‘Jinn?’ she said. ‘What happened?’
He smiled and held her hand, his chest too full of happiness for him to speak. They stayed that way as the sun set and the noises of the Spiral changed from trade to revelry. The smell of roasted pig drifted in and he almost laughed when his mother told him she was hungry. She’d barely eaten in weeks.
‘I’ll get you some, Mamma,’ he said.
It was full dark outside and hard to pick his way, but off to one side he saw a bonfire and guessed that the local tribe, the Maeng, were holding a feast. They were known to be a generous bunch and he thought they’d spare him some. The sound of drums drew him towards the blaze.
It was only when he’d crossed half the distance that he realised the deep vibration in his bones came from elsewhere. He stopped, hovering between feast and Spiral as he heard yells coming from both. And then one word became clear, repeated over and over: ‘stampede’. The sound was coming from the north, from the forest. He looked that way and gasped.
The moon was high and full. It made it easy to see the approaching animals – and to see that they were neither cattle nor horse. There were many shapes among them, many vast shapes. Jinn had spoken all his life about the monsters of the Moon Forest, Yron’s creations banished to the dark beneath the trees by his treacherous sister. He’d made them sound something pleasant. What an idiot he’d been.
The monsters were approaching with terrible speed and the Maeng warriors rode out to meet them. A succession of bangs and bright flashes followed and he realised that they’d brought their famous fire javelins. The noise didn’t seem to scare the beasts, though. Too late, Jinn thought of his mother, helpless in their wagon, and began to run back to her.
Before he could reach her, the beasts were upon him. They were all around. A winged horse twenty feet high nearly crushed him beneath its hooves, and when he flung himself aside it was into the path of a monster with ten eyes and a hundred jagged teeth. He heard screams and knew with dread that some had made it through to the Spiral. Wood snapped as they crushed the wagons beneath their huge feet. It was impossible to know what was happening. There were flashes of wing and claw and fang, and sometimes sword and axe as the Maeng warriors fought the beasts. There was blood as they died.
Then, clear and unexpected, he heard another noise: a hunting horn. And moments later another force joined the fight, riding in on beasts as monstrous as those they hunted. One galloped so close to him he could see its riders. They were monsters too, shaped like men but with heads like birds. But no, no – those were only masks. These were the hawks of the Hunter: the human servants of the goddess of the Moon Forest folk.
Their high-pitched hunting yelps joined the roars of the attackers. He saw a cluster of them bear one of the great beasts to the ground beneath their combined weight. Once it lay on its back their knives descended to hack its flesh apart. Another hawk was crushed beneath the claw foot of a thing half-mammoth, half-bird, but the death was avenged moments later as a spear the thickness of a man’s arm took the monstrosity through its slitted yellow eye.
He couldn’t quite believe when it was over. Blood streamed from a cut on his brow, and there was a deep ache in his flank from a wound he didn’t remember receiving.
The beasts were all dead, huge humped shapes in the darkness. Jinn forced his shaky legs to carry him back to the Spiral. The dread was so awful he almost turned round again. It seemed better not to know. Hundreds of wagons lay shattered, their owners killed, the beautiful pattern entirely broken. But a few stood untouched by the damage and as he drew nearer he realised that theirs was one of them. He saw a flash of white in the moonlight as his mother’s face peered out from the dark interior. They’d been saved. The Hunter had saved them.
Other survivors began to emerge. Some fled the carnage without a backward look, while others stopped to tend to the wounded. Jinn saw a figure striding through the darkness towards them. She held her own glow around her. Her hair was as bright as fire and she was taller than any of the hawks who formed up around her. They turned their masked faces towards her like flowers drinking in the sunlight.
She said nothing, but gradually others became aware of her presence until a crowd had gathered round her. Jinn found himself joining it.
The Hunter’s face wasn’t masked. Jinn had seen it before, painted on the sides of wagons, but she and her hawks hadn’t once left the forest in the 200 years since she made the pact with her Wanderers.
One of the Maeng warriors stepped forward to meet her.
‘First Hunter,’ she said in a clear, hard voice. ‘This is a dark night.’
‘Lighter for your help,’ the warrior replied. ‘Thank you. But these creatures – they never leave the forest. We were told they were banished from sun-touched land.’
The Hunter moved closer and Jinn saw that her face, though once as beautiful as the paintings showed it, was now viciously scarred. Four long scores ran from brow to lip. They pulled down the lid of her left eye and twisted her mouth.
‘The rules have changed,’ she said. ‘The moon has risen and his magic strengthens his creatures. There is a new force in the land, a dark one. We must fight it, or it will defeat us. The moon is rising, but there are powers greater than his. And if we unite, the people of the plains and the mountains and the farmlands of the east, then we can defeat him.’
Jinn looked around him at the dead beasts and the slaughtered people and the shattered wagons. She was talking about fighting the moon god, his god, who he’d been taught to worship all his life. But Yron had left his mother to die and then sent his beasts to kill them all. The Hunter had saved them. She was here.
Jinn stepped forward and bowed. ‘I’m with you, my lady,’ he said. ‘I’ll help you fight him. Just tell me what to do.’
Acknowledgements
Huge thanks to Matt Rowan, who gave me the idea for the book in the first place and then provided invaluable feedback on an early draft. Likewise to Matt Jones and Carrie O’Grady for helping me to pull the whole thing into shape. David Bryher, Peter Norgate and Naomi Alderman gave much-needed brainstorming assistance and my brilliant agent, James Wills, not only helped sell the book but also to make it much better. I’m grateful to you all. And finally a big thank you to my editor, Anne Perry, who knows what she’s talking about.
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Smiler's Fair: Book I of The Hollow Gods Page 42