Fight Like A Girl

by Juliet E. McKenna

  “What are you doing?” Ve shakes vir head, straining to turn vir face to vir Loaram. I push the blade a little deeper. “Tell me.”

  A thundering of trisk feet shakes the ground around me. “I told you we couldn’t trust them,” rasps Kodju, high above us. “Kill this vermin. Look to Azmai.”

  The priest stares into my eyes. I have no idea what ve’s thinking. Is ve mad, a zealot? Would ve rather die than co-operate? Azmai roars inside my skull, the anguish of a god in chains. I yank the priest to vir feet, my sword against vir side.

  More trisk shadows fall across us where we stand amongst the shattered rock of Azmai’s tomb. A hundred yards away, the Hostis delegation huddle. Some of them are gesticulating wildly. All are shouting.

  A small, clear voice says: “If you slay the priest, sword-dancer, we lose this chance at peace. The renewal of the Empire is at stake.” A sudden, fragile moment of calm holds us all still.

  Kodju gestures to the Whale, who helps him slide down from his trisk. He stands beside me and addresses the Empress.

  “Majesty, how can we make peace with these murderers and necromages? How could we trust them to let our trade caravans pass along their roads? They hate us and we hate them.”

  The Hostis priest lets out a stream of invective in vir own tongue, then says, “You murderers. You kill my people, and the spirits of our land. We will drive you from the mountains and follow you onto the plains and then—” ve lapses into Hostin again, hissing and spluttering.

  One of the Empress’ advisers leans across to her and whispers. With a flick of her wrist she sends her guards to accompany the adviser over to the Hostis delegation. Kodju continues pleading, but nobody’s listening. The calm has passed, and all eyes not fixed on the dragon-god are now on the Hostis.

  The Hostis and Amitsan guards have drawn swords and voices are raised in anger. One of the trisk rears up and wheels around, startled, and tramples a Hostin woman under its feet. The Whale leaps onto Kodju’s trisk and gallops over. The Empress and her entourage follow.

  My attention has strayed from the priest. Sloppy. Ve hurls virself from my blade, and crouches over the dead bird.

  “You’re not the only necromage here, Amitsa.”

  A tremor moves the mountain again, and, from the hard black ground, Hostis warriors rise. Dead Hostis warriors. They rise up. And walk. And wield spears in their fleshless hands.

  I had thought all my muscles were as tense and ready for battle as they could be, but I find a new level of tension, an acute sense of my own strength, position and potential. A skeleton closes with me, spear ready. I strike off its head. The skull falls and bounces beneath the feet of another skeleton, sending it stumbling to the ground.

  “Betrayed! Raise the Amitsan dead, or you will be overcome.” Osalma’s ghost wraps her hands around my head, making it hard to see the enemy. “You must come fully into Ap’da, you must release your power.”

  “What power?” I shout, striking away a bony finger reaching for my eye socket – why can’t everyone keep their hands off my face? – and smacking my fist into its owners rib cage. It falls back, but there are two more behind it.

  “The blood,” Osalma moans. “Reach into the blood . . .”

  Rivulets of blood run down my wrists where my gauntlets pierce my flesh, stinging wounds unhealed from the previous night. I feel the tug of the shade, drawing me deeper into Ap’da – I don’t want to go, but I don’t want to die here, either.

  “It’s not enough,” she sighs.

  “How much blood do you think I have in me? Should I slit my own throat? What then? What then?”

  “Oh, these dry dead things, already drained, already used . . .”

  Suddenly there is blood. I smell it, close beside me.

  “Go on,” urges Osalma.

  “I can’t—”

  “You can.”

  Shame burns me.

  He’s not dead, but gore covers his legs and the ground beneath. A sickening hunger flickers in me. His eyes meet mine. I lean down, put my hand to his chest. I’m no healer; I don’t know if he can be saved. He says nothing. His eyes roll back in his head.

  “Kodju . . .” I hadn’t even seen him fall.

  A glancing blow from behind knocks me off balance and I sprawl across him. Twisting, I find a dead warrior grinning down at me, spear poised above my breastbone. The dirty bones wear tattered cloth and an amulet bearing a likeness of the dragon-god. Behind it, the true Azmai flails against the Swords that pin vir down.

  I roll away from its thrust. The spear impales Kodju. His last breath sighs out inches from my ear. Pushing myself to my feet, my left hand sinks through torn flesh, into my lover’s squelching guts. I call the blood up. Strength flows into my limbs like a torrent of lava. I rise and snap the skeleton’s head from its neck, cast it down and stamp on it, cracking it in two.

  The priest has returned to Azmai. I close with vir, and am caught in a cloud of sparks blown from his fire. With a dizzying rush, I slip fully into Ap’da. Instantly, Osalma’s shade is before me, face so awfully like my own.

  The world reels. Shadowy weapons slash at me and I fight them off mechanically.

  The priest shrieks joy, and the dragon-god stretches one freed wing into the air, beating it hard, stirring up ash and dust. Osalma cries “There!” Two bright streaks jig across my retinas before resolving into the shapes of swords, above Azmai. “Take them.”

  “You do it.” I wasn’t meant to be here. I’m not really a blood-mage. I’m a dancer, just a dancer . . .

  She presses close. “I’m dead, child. Listen. The Swords are singing.” I hear – feel – the chord ringing my nerves. “Sing back. Not with your voice. Inside.”

  I think of the Whale’s mystic voice, how it emanates from inside vir. I find a silent note. The air pulsates with psychic dissonance.

  “Now, a target.”

  The Swords flash down to the priest, and jab at vir throat. Ve vaults the remains of the bone-cage, rolls under the protection of the dragon-god’s wing.

  The sounds of the battle are faint beneath the song of the Swords, but I hear my name called. I spin around, to see the Whale slapping a trisk’s great rump. The trisk gallops towards me. On its back, barely visible above its raised mane, is the child Empress. The Whale is surrounded by Hostis warriors; the living kind. The trisk tramples skeletons as it runs. I swore I wouldn’t fight for the Empire, but I can’t untwist my fate from hers now. I send the loose Swords into the skeletons. They resist; they want blood, not dry bones; but they obey.

  A powerful gust blows over me. I turn. Azmai has torn both wings free. Loosed, glowing feathers tumble in the draught of vir wingbeats. Ve rears up, talons thrusting against the ground, more than willing to tear vir tail feathers out to get into the air. Ve breathes fire. I leap back, clear of the flames, almost landing beneath the ponderous feet of the Empress’ trisk.

  Two more Swords dance in the air. I know I have to stop the priest from removing the last one. I bite my lip as four Swords lance towards the little Hostin, and, as one, pierce vir body and nail vir to the ground. Vir blood-stink reaches my nostrils. My power surges. I can taste victory, but the Empress calls out: “We’re losing, Skylla! Do something!”

  Me, do something? I am not Osalma. But why is it so important to me, not to be Osalma? Suddenly I don’t know. I have the talent. I have the skill. I have the taste of god-blood at the back of my throat. I drag the Swords back to the skeleton horde, force them through their undead ranks, hacking and slashing with something like grace and something like glee, until the tide of battle turns. Azmai’s roars grow deafening. The beat of wings grows stronger.

  “Bind vir,” says Osalma’s ghost.

  A god should not be caged. The thought reverberates. Azmai is a beautiful, terrible, powerful god; a Loaram fit to straddle the world and the world-beside.

  “Ve will destroy us.”

  My life is balanced on the edge of not one blade, but seven. I feel split into pieces
already: here, in my hands, and leaping through the fighters, biting bone after bone.

  “Quickly. You know what to do.”

  I do. I call the Swords back: they hurtle over. I call the Whale, and ve begins to wade through the battle towards us.

  The Swords accept their target.

  When they slice into my flesh, despite my exultation, I scream in terror and agony. I see my feet chopped out from under me and sent flying through the air, arterial blood pumping scarlet around them. When they take my hands, I become pure pain, and pure power. We whirl, the Swords of Light and the severed parts of a sword-dancer, around the dragon-god. I have enough spirit to recite the incantation, to command my bones to rise. When I am scattered in a ring around the dragon-god, my head on the ground next to the corpse of the priest, Osalma’s face swims before mine, my own face, an image of joy and sorrow.

  “Close the cage, Skylla,” says the Whale, weeping.

  Ve picks up my head and presses it against a newly grown bone-spike. I want to live. Let the god go free, let vir glory, and mine, stay in the world.

  A moment’s weakness. My spine extends from my neck, vertebra by vertebra, reaching for my head.

  Azmai’s wings flap. Vir feathers brush my face. With a wrench, ve breaks free and launches virself upwards between the spikes, up, into the glimmering dusk.

  Vir fury is beyond all mortal rage and promises fire and ruin. No human hand will touch Azmai again. No human foot will walk the high plateau, or the valleys beneath. The Empire will remain undone. No sacrifice can bring glory to Amitsa or Hostis.

  For the last time, the mountain shakes, and my dying eyes, clinging to Ap’da, witness the world turn vermilion, the volcano consuming the shape of Azmai, like a phoenix whose wingspan covers the earth. It dazzles white, then gold, then red. All falls into darkness, and drops away.

  ARCHER 57

  Lou Morgan

  You can learn a lot crawling through a tunnel. A lot about yourself, a lot about the world you live in, a lot about what collects at the bottom of a tunnel. And I’ve crawled through a lot of tunnels. You’d think more people would use them: once you know your way through them, you can get anywhere, and quickly. There are no checkpoints down here, no snipers or mines to dodge – just grenades. It takes a while to learn to navigate them, true – especially if you’re used to the grid system above ground. There are no maps for the underworld: Orpheus could have told you that, stumbling along in the evernight. The tunnels work in circles; they’re a coil of snakes swallowing their own tails, looping round and round under what’s left of the city.

  I know there are others like me, slipping through the shadows and the junk. I hear them sometimes; hear echoes and footsteps and what could be voices in the distance, or could just as easily be the wind over a vent. They call us rat-runners, up above. I’ve heard it through gratings, down ventilation shafts and from the other side of grilles. They laugh when they say it. Did I, when I was in their place? I don’t remember. I don’t remember thinking about who might be down here at all. Maybe nobody was, back then. Sometimes, they’ll throw a firecracker down a manhole. Sometimes they’ll throw a bomb. They don’t care if we’re on their side or the enemy’s: Loyal or Adverse, we remind them of what they could become. They don’t care what we are now – but they can’t look past what we were; where we came from and how we got here. Maybe that’s why they enjoy killing us.

  I don’t remember what the city looked like before the war. I’m not sure I ever really knew what it looked like before. We seem to have been at war forever. It’s always been said that the Steel Wars would be the wars to end all wars. They’ve ended a lot of things, I suppose, but not war. And in those early days as the fight raged on and the bombs fell and one by one, the men either volunteered or were conscripted, or were, finally, rounded up in cattle trucks and shipped to the front, the world Before crumbled. This is all that’s left. War and ruins and bones. Perhaps this will be the last war – because it will only end once we’re all dead.

  Once the men were gone, they came for the boys. Teenagers, at first. Then down to ten. Seven. Six. Five. They took my son on his fourth birthday, throwing open the door to our home and dragging him away. I could hear him screaming in my head for days. I still can, if I listen hard enough to the silence. For a while I couldn’t tell whether the screams I heard were his or mine: was I walking the streets in the dark, stepping between rubble mounds and screaming? And were my screams any different from the screams of every other mother, every other woman who had lost someone, had someone ripped away from her?

  When the screaming stopped – his, mine, ours – and my head cleared, I knew what I wanted. And within a month I was being walked to my new bunk in the barracks. With every new war a new weapon, a new way of fighting emerges – and this one is no different . . . except this time, we have not looked to the future. We looked to the past. Not to the drones or the rockets or the death from afar dealt by our forefathers, no. In this war, archers are the new-old weapons of mass destruction, and I was one of the best. I was one of the best because I had nothing to lose. Or at least I thought I didn’t.

  There is always something more to lose.

  To an archer, a fight is personal. We stand, we pick our target and we keep them. If we miss once, we aim again. We pick out a man, a woman we have never met, and we make them carry the burden of the whole war. We promise them, promise ourselves, that we will not stop until they are dead. And when they fall, we look for the soldier beside them.

  I ran sorties. I ambushed whole companies of Adverse. I ambushed them and I did not stop killing them until my hands and my face were red and I could barely remember my name. I lost myself in death, because I had already lost so much else. My arrows found their mark and I showed no mercy, seeing in each and every face not Adverse, but the Loyals who had taken my son, my husband, my life, my world. I killed without thought and without hesitation because I was killing my own.

  *

  I was expecting them to kill me when they captured me. They slaughtered the rest of my squad where they stood – kicking what was left of them, one by one, into a pit. Why they didn’t do the same to me, I don’t know. I was ready for it. Instead, they took the first two fingers of my right hand and they threw me to the wolves; the ones who had been handing me medals two days before. An archer who can’t shoot is no use to anyone, and a useless soldier is just another mouth to feed. The fall from archer to rat is a short one: it’s no greater than the width of two fingers under a blade.

  I don’t remember the pain. I don’t remember how I got back to barracks, only waking up in a sweat-soaked bunk surrounded by ghosts and empty beds. The dead walked from mess hall to shower block to training ground, and I was the only one of us wounded. Maybe they thought I was a spy. Maybe they thought I was a coward or a traitor, or both. Maybe they suspected what had driven me all along: that I hated them as much as I hated the enemy. More. Maybe it didn’t matter. I no longer had a purpose, with my shooting fingers gone. I had no purpose, and no place. And that could only mean one thing. The tunnels.

  The darkness is so thick here that you can touch it. You can wrap it around you like a blanket. It has a weight, a feel, a smell. You can taste it; mould and cordite and sewage and something a lot like fear. You measure time by the explosions overhead: the dull rhythm of a bombing raid means night, the sharp prang of a mine means day. To begin with, I drifted in and out of sleep to the sound of explosions or trucks rumbling overhead. The Adverse had stitched my hand to keep me from bleeding out before they handed me over. The Loyals, my own side, my own enemies, ripped the stitches out. I couldn’t stop the blood in the dark, so I tumbled through the tunnels until I found a boiler duct – clay now, not steel, but still hot. There are enough of them, if you know where to look. The world may be in tatters, but Loyal commanders still sleep in feather beds and take hot showers.

  I pressed my hand against the hot clay of the pipe and I bit my lip so I wouldn’t scream. When it was don
e, I spat out a mouthful of blood and it still didn’t hurt as much as the day they took Adam. There are wars that topple buildings, wars that topple empires and dictators . . . and there are the small, all-devouring, all-destroying wars that begin with something as simple as a door kicked in. Their war is not my war. It never was. The tunnels are full of life, even if you don’t see the humans. Cats, dogs, rats – they all came down here when life on the surface became too hard. The rats are the most dangerous: their teeth are sharp and their bites are deep and full of poison. Not long after I landed in the tunnels, I thought I saw one that glowed in the dark, but I was sure it couldn’t be real. It was a fever dream, a hallucination. A nightmare. I found a handful of broken arrows – useless to anyone and thrown away, like an archer with missing fingers – and I made them useful again, short enough to swing and stab within the curving walls of the tunnels. They’ve kept me alive. With them, I’ve been able to hunt and to defend myself from things with teeth in the dark. As my strength returned, I was able to venture further down the tunnels, looking for something I could use. I’m not looking for a way up, a way out: I could open any vent and climb out onto the street, but to what purpose? The Adverse would cut me down on sight, and the Loyal would take one look at my hand, one look at what’s left of my uniform, and know where I had been.

  If you need to get out of a sinking ship, you follow the rats – but what do you do if you want to sink one?

  You look for the rat that shines.

  It took me weeks to find it: the place that sings in the dark. I circled the tunnels, searching every branch, every dead end, until I found it. An old storage space, long abandoned. Once, there was steel here; thick sheets fixed to the walls of the tunnel, doors wider than my whole body. Long gone – taken by Loyal or Adverse or god knows who. But so few of the soldiers know their history, and the commanders are too busy sitting on their cushions feasting in front of open fires to care where their men find the last few scraps of steel. Some rooms should never be opened. Some doors are meant to stay shut.