‘We will go with her,’ he declared, to the obvious surprise of his fellows. Why? Maniye wondered. Just because of Hesprec? Does he owe me that much purely because Hesprec valued me?
‘Thank you.’ Broken Axe clapped his hand on Asmander’s shoulder, making the southerner shy away from him. ‘She will show you the way, and I will be with you, with help, as soon as I can bring it.’
‘But will they help?’ Maniye asked. ‘The Bear, will they even care?’ She felt far too fragile to have so much of the world concerned about her fate. The weight of it was crushing.
Broken Axe’s face showed that he had no such certainty, but a moment later he was back on four feet and dashing away, vanishing into the trees in a moment.
‘What’s she good for, anyway?’ Venater demanded. ‘Right now the only use for her that I can see is as lunch when our food runs out.’
‘Enough.’ Asmander kept his eyes on the girl ahead, because she didn’t seem at all as sure of where she was going as she had claimed. She hadn’t Stepped either, trusting neither of her souls. He guessed that mere human senses were inadequate to the task of navigation.
‘Enough?’ growled the old pirate behind him. ‘The First Son of Asman has a duty to his father, and yet here he is up in the cold north, helping orphans.’
‘She’s not—’
‘I don’t care. Her parentage is like those knots your Snake priests tie, that nobody can undo. So why’s it our problem?’ All of this certainly loud enough for Maniye to hear.
‘It’s your problem because the First Son of Asman told Broken Axe we would do this,’ Asmander snapped back at him. ‘I am your only problem, Venater.’
‘You’ve got one thing right, then.’ The man spat disgustedly. When his voice was stilled, Asmander found that he missed it. Snarling with Venater had at least kept his mind busy and not asking itself the same question. Why are you really doing this? Going near that question was like touching a raw wound.
Broken Axe will be back soon, he reassured himself. Then I will not have to make the choice of what to do.
They were making poor time, at the girl’s plodding pace. Unless she trusts herself to Step, a three-legged wolf could catch us.
Shyri was bored. She sauntered past Asmander on four feet, hackles high, and then Stepped right next to Maniye, making the girl start.
‘So,’ she said, chewing at a piece of gristle, ‘Broken Axe . . .’
‘What of him?’ Maniye mumbled.
‘You and he,’ the Laughing Man girl continued, ‘he’s your mate?’
‘No!’ Maniye told her.
‘No – or not yet?’ Abruptly Shyri was in front of her, walking backwards directly ahead of the girl, putting that grin in her face. ‘Maybe I’ll make him mine.’ She shot Asmander a look. ‘Strong man, doesn’t talk too much . . . I’ll bet he’d fight, too, but not too much. Men like that, they like being broken—’
‘Enough!’ Asmander got out.
She stared at him with exaggeratedly owlish eyes. ‘Have I shocked the Champion with my talk?’
‘Aim your barbs somewhere else.’
She smirked and slunk aside, letting Maniye stumble on. ‘You are Broken Axe’s Champion now, are you?’
‘And you are very brave to mock a man who isn’t here,’ he told her sharply, and caught a look of genuine hurt on her face for just a moment before she covered it. ‘Broken Axe is a man who says he will do a thing, and then does it. Not for gold or meat or favours, but because it must be done.’ He surprised himself with those words: before they came out, he had not realized how much the other man had impressed him. If the Wolf only had Champions . . .
Shyri’s face darkened, and no doubt she had a spectacular put-down ready on her tongue, but then Venater snarled, and a moment later he had coursed past them and into the trees, his low-slung shape glittering black with scales. Asmander Stepped to the Champion immediately, baring black stone teeth, and Shyri was a hyena. Only Maniye remained on human feet, clutching her bronze knife.
They heard the surprised yelp of something – Asmander didn’t know the animals of this land well enough to guess – but Venater came slouching back to them soon enough. When he Stepped back, his face was frustrated.
‘Just one,’ he reported. ‘One, and fled.’
‘One what?’ Asmander demanded. ‘The Wolf?’
‘Cat,’ Venater said. ‘Stripes. The other one.’
‘And gone to fetch his friends,’ Shyri pointed out, ‘since you let him get away.’
Venater gave her a sour look. ‘Maybe I wanted them to come and put an end to this stupid thing we’re doing.’
‘Girl, can you Step?’ Asmander demanded.
Maniye wouldn’t meet his eyes. For a moment he thought she would at least try, arms clutched about herself and teeth bared. Then she was shaking her head, and shaking all over.
‘Then we’d better keep going. We run, and hope Broken Axe is coming back for us.’
Then it was just the hard march onwards, their pursuers devouring the distance towards them as inexorably as the sun kept sinking towards the horizon. That morning she had said her last words to Hesprec. The evening would bring the Tiger.
Maniye tried to keep her gaze focused before her, but the corners of her eyes betrayed her. The woods seemed full of firestriped forms; the deepening dusk made tigers out of every shadow.
And she was slowing all of them.
I must trust to my souls.
If she fell now . . . but if not now, then a mile later. Unless she
Stepped.
She reached inside of herself. She felt as though she was looking into one of those pits her father’s people dug to keep prisoners in. At its base, the lean forms of her souls paced round and round, cramped by their captivity, snapping and snarling at each other and at her.
Obey me, or I die . But perhaps they wanted her dead – to part company with each other and fly free of her corpse.
Then, from how far away she could not say, she heard a wolf give voice, high and lonely, at the moon. The Winter Runners or just mute brothers? At the sound, the wolf within her leapt for freedom, and she Stepped, or tried to Step, only the tiger began fighting her, clawing at her insides. She stumbled and fell, briefly sleek and grey-furred, then bruising her human bones again.
She heard Venater curse her furiously, then Asmander had yanked her upright on her human feet.
‘Go,’ he said, but at the same time Shyri announced, ‘They’re here.’
A tiger leapt up before them, springing from the gathering dark to stand proud atop a rock. Another crouched on a tree trunk, while the spaces between the trees rustled with the passage of their bodies. How many? She could not know.
For a moment the Tigers were coming for them, but then Shyri had dropped to four feet, and Asmander was the Champion without warning, exploding into his terrible, alien shape right beside her so that she fell back from him – all the claws and scales and jagged teeth of him. Only Venater had retained his human form, a short-bladed club in one hand. He looked fearsome enough in any shape. Maniye saw the lead Tiger abruptly turn its aborted lunge into a casual pacing.The Shadow Eaters were clearly not so sure how the souls of these foreigners would taste.
And then Aritchaka was standing right before them, resplendent in her bronze mail and her feather-crested helm. Maniye caught her eyes for a heartbeat, and saw regret there, but not enough to stop her leading the hunt.
‘You have a thing of ours,’ she called out, and her warband padded all around them, never still, never clearly seen.
Asmander was human again, toothed sword slanted over one shoulder. ‘She says you mean to kill her,’ he observed.
‘She is claimed by the Tiger.’
‘Life too short to go over everyone who’s claimed her,’ Venater grunted. They all ignored him.
The Tiger priestess took a careful step forward. ‘Foreigner, do not make us paint our hands with your blood.’ She sounded genuinely solicitous. ‘We have no grievance with
your people.’
‘Fair point,’ Venater nodded.
Maniye felt the world beginning to tilt against her once more, to nobody’s surprise. In the handful of heartbeats when there was still talking, not fighting, she reached inside herself again, facing the tortured eyes of the two beasts trapped within her.
Wolf, carry me, or I will cut you away.With my last breath I shall go gladly to the Tiger’s mouth, as one of his own.
She sensed the snarl of canine teeth at that, the pain and the resentment.
Shyri had Stepped back now, if only because, if there was talking, she wanted her fair share. ‘Well, longmouth? Who speaks within you now? Your Champion? Your father? The Axe one? The Serpent?’ She was watching the shifting circle of the Tigers close in on them imperceptibly.
Tiger, let me ride the Wolf or I will cut you away. If Aritchaka catches me, it shall be a wolf soul the Tiger feasts on.Was that even a threat? But she heard the yowling in her ears, the hiss of displeasure.
‘We fight,’ Asmander declared flatly. He did not seem very happy about it. ‘We keep her from the Tiger.’
‘But why?’ Shyri asked, but then the ground shook, and something like a mountain cut loose from the ground had thundered out of the trees, bellowing its defiance; and dancing about its feet was a pale wolf with dark shoulders. Loud Thunder and Broken Axe had arrived.
The Tiger scattered, but in the next moment they were attacking, springing out from the darkness. One tried to leap on Loud Thunder’s haunches but he spun on the spot to face her, roaring, so that the Tiger almost fell over her own feet trying to get out of the way. Instead she met Venater, who did his level best to skin her alive with that short stone blade of his.
Then there was another, a man of the Tiger, leaping up on four feet to land before Maniye on two, a studded club cocked back to strike.
She skipped aside from the blow, knife angled ready for the Tiger dance, the fighting style of his priesthood. The sight of it gave him pause: the men did not learn that dance but they feared it. Then Shyri had jumped him from behind and torn a ragged mouthful from his shoulder.
The clearing was alive with leaping shadows. She heard the screech of Asmander’s Champion as it pounced into the midst of the Tiger, scattering them, chasing them here and there. Loud Thunder was holding two or three off, the Tigers’ claws and knives not even managing to penetrate his hide.
Broken Axe went rushing past her, pausing to snarl at her through bloodied fangs, and she knew it was time. She confronted the two beasts within her, reminded them of her dire threats, and Stepped.
For a moment they were rebellious, writhing stubbornly in her grip, but then she had forced her will on them, her blood hot with the violence of the moment. Stepping, she followed after Broken Axe, her nose telling her instantly that the sharp, alien scent of Asmander was on her other side as they dashed into the treeline. Behind her she heard the weird heckling cry of Shyri, that hunting call of a distant land cackling out of the darkness.
Almost immediately the reek of tiger was strong and close in her nose. She veered away, unseeing but hearing the sudden rush of it as it tried to ambush her. A moment later the dark shape bolted out behind her, raking at her flanks but falling short, hissing a challenge.
A thing from nightmare dropped onto the tiger, leaping so high that it seemed to fall out of the branches above. Asmander’s curved claws ripped in, but Maniye heard the splintering of ribs simply under the force of his landing.
Then the Tiger were on their trail in earnest. The woods seemed full of them: with brief ember-bright glimpses of their striped bodies, their moon-gleaming eyes. The fear that hammered within her was the Wolf’s generations-old terror of the Shadow Eaters who came to devour their souls.
Asmander was gone now. She had no sense of when, just that something had dragged him away. Then she was battling her way through denser trees, swerving and scrabbling, knowing that Broken Axe was off to her right and getting more distant. In a sudden panic, surrounded by that peopled darkness, she Stepped to her tiger shape to climb and leap, hoping to make better time through the tangle, trying to break out into the open where her wolf speed would count.
It was a mistake. In that moment of change her souls clashed inside her, ripping at one another, and she tumbled over, shocked onto two human feet, jarring hard off a tree trunk and landing on her knees.
When she looked up, she was not alone. The sight of the woman who had come so far to kill her hurt like a wound inside her, one that would not close.
Joalpey, Strength In Moonlight. ‘Mother.’
The Tiger Queen looked down on her. The curved blade was in her hand, but for just that moment she made no move to use it. Around them the woods seemed abruptly quiet, as though both of them had been abandoned by their allies.
‘I will not go with you,’ Maniye told her.
Joalpey nodded, and then one foot slid back and she was in her fighting stance, ready for the dance of tigers. Maniye felt herself fall into a mirroring pose, but there was a cold blade of fear in her, because to fight she needed her souls, and she could not say if either would answer her call right then.
Joalpey was moving as soon as she had made her stand, bronze edge flickering forwards in curved paths through the darkness, so that it was more an idea in Maniye’s mind than a sight in her eyes. She let the shape of her mother’s body tell her where the knife would go next, slipping aside into a crouching pose and bringing her own blade up in an arc that would have driven it into the other woman’s armpit if she had stayed still. Joalpey made the smallest shift to her footing, Maniye’s point missing her by an inch that might just as well have been an arm’s length, while Joalpey’s own blade drew a long red line down the girl’s arm.
And even as Maniye stepped back, stabbing at throat height with a hand slick with her own blood, her mother became a tiger, springing even as she Stepped. She launched herself under Maniye’s strike, knocking her smaller prey off her feet and slamming down on her.
The bruising pain of it seemed to knock Maniye’s mind askew even as the breath was driven from her. She was clawing and biting furiously at the big cat atop her, snapping with a wolf’s yellow teeth, digging in hooked tiger claws, digging in with the point of her blade, even as she fought to keep Joalpey’s own jaws away from her. She Stepped and Stepped, swift and and uncontrolled as a spring flood, her fluid form denying her enemy a target.
Then her mother was knocked away with a yowl of surprise, as another of her people bowled into her, his fur bloody. Venater’s reptile shape uncoiled from the dark after it, saw-tooth jaws tearing open the injured tiger’s entire flank. Then the pirate had bloated into his human shape, kneeling over the Tiger hunter with hand upraised before driving his razor-edged blade down, three hacking blows to butcher the beast with no mercy given. When he stood again, gory implement in hand, his eyes were on Joalpey. His grin looked like death.
Maniye fled, though right then she was not sure who she was fleeing from. She hit the ground on wolf paws, hoping that her mother would take up the southerner’s challenge.
She did not. Instead, she was pounding after her true target, and Venater, for all his fearsome skill, could not keep up with them.
But Maniye was faster: allow her twenty breaths of clear running and she must pull ahead of Joalpey. Ten breaths and no more conflict within her or even—
All of that was tangled in her mind when Joalpey leapt at her and caught her a raking blow down her haunches. The pain seared through Maniye and she stumbled, losing her speed, lurching desperately to get back onto her feet again. The tiger was off balance too, her lunge overextending her. One more time, Maniye fled.
Then there was a new shape coursing alongside her – Broken Axe keeping pace with effort, with blood in his teeth and down his sides.
Something passed between them, an understanding, and if she had the time to take human shape she would have told him not to do it. But he was already turning, Stepping into a man with his axe
drawn back. She heard the hissing scream of a woman as the iron blade bit, shocked out of her tiger form by the sheer pain. Not her mother, which meant that . . .
She had slowed without meaning to, waiting for Broken Axe, and that was when Joalpey caught up with her. Maniye saw only a flurry out from the dark, and then she had thrown herself aside, a leap the wolf was not capable of, so that she landed on her hands and knees, rolling and kicking to try and get up, her knife lost, even as her mother approached.
The hot breath of the tiger was on Maniye and she froze, reaching for any other form but the helpless, naked one she had been born to. The Tiger Queen was a shape of fire-splashed darkness, her eyes seeming to glow from within.
Then she was a woman once more, her knife levelled at Broken Axe as he returned.
‘Why?’ Joalpey asked him.
‘For the same reason I saved you from the Wolf. Because it is right. Will you not honour my judgement?’
There was a battle on Joalpey’s face just then, but she lost it when another pair of Tigers slunk out to stand beside her, one limping and the other with a torn ear.
‘For all I owe you, you were too late,’ she told Broken Axe. ‘You cannot heal the scars they left. And she is just one more scar.’
Something stayed her though. Her history with Broken Axe allowed Maniye two more breaths. The Tiger was fierce behind Joalpey’s eyes, but the eyes were human still, somehow penning it in. Not for Maniye; she would not defy her god for something as trivial as her daughter. She wanted Broken Axe to flee now though. She did not want his blood on her claws, his soul in her teeth.
Then Asmander stepped out, a shadow from the shadows, smudged darker with blood here and there, and his sword jagged with missing teeth.
‘We’re leaving now,’ he announced to the world, his voice ragged with weariness, but still trying to sound light and mocking. ‘Let the Tiger fill its belly somewhere else.’
Joalpey’s face twisted and she Stepped, snarling, but Asmander met her shape for shape. The ear-splitting screech of the Champion tore through the forest, sending the Tiger Queen skittering backwards.
The Tiger and the Wolf Page 45