by Angus Watson
They listened to Wulf’s report in sad silence, as the unmistakable scent of funeral pyres drifted up from the south.
That night Sofi lay awake in her tent trying to make some sense and draw some useful conclusions from the astonishing news.
Outside her tent, the creatures of the night went about their business, oblivious to the era-changing events. A hundred paces away an Empty Child’s bighorn sheep’s hooves scuffed on soft rock. Who were the bizarre little humans, she wondered? As far as she could work out, it was always the same group watching them, neither sleeping nor developing the agonising sores that should have crippled anybody sitting on something as bony as a bighorn sheep for so long.
Slowly, she became more and more certain that she could hear something else. It was a person, she was pretty sure, approaching with exquisite skill. He or she was blending into the night’s rhythms, using the sounds of the wind and the nocturnal beasts to mask their own almost imperceptible footfalls.
The only person Sofi had met or heard of who could move like that was Luby Zephyr, but Sofi had left her badly injured with Caliska Coyote over a moon before and a thousand miles away. It couldn’t be her.
Was it one of Beaver Man’s Owsla, alchemically enhanced with comparable stalking skills to Luby’s? If that was the case, he probably wasn’t creeping up with a surpise gift of just for the fun of it.
A chink of moonlight appeared as the tent flap opened a finger’s breadth. A shadow blocked the light and Sofi tensed.
“Sofi?” whispered a voice.
Sofi smiled. “Hello, Luby.”
Luby Zephyr slipped silkily through the gap in the flaps, silent as a shadow. Sofi sat, smiling genuinely for the first time in ages. She was pleased that her super-hearing was working well enough to detect Luby, and that Luby was still so stealthy that it took super-hearing to hear her. But much more than both of those, she was happy to see her friend. Despite all that had happened, she felt warmth blossom in her chest as her heart filled with joy.
The women hugged, fell back onto the bed and embraced for a long while.
Finally, Luby began to tell Sofi her tale, but Sofi put her finger on her lips and whispered that they should go further from the rest of the sleeping Owsla and Wootah to talk.
They stole to the back of the camp and sat in the moon shadow of the crescent of rock.
Holding Sofi’s hands, Luby told her how she’d had to kill Caliska Coyote, how Chippaminka had enchanted the empress to lead the Calnian army to its destruction, about the battle and the monsters, and how she’d killed Chippaminka and left the Empress Ayanna alive but not exactly well or safe. She told her how the monsters, the naked Owsla and the freakish cavalry hadn’t stopped with warriors. They’d swept through the baggage sleds, killing or capturing all the chefs and smiths and every other Calnian who’d crossed the Water Mother.
Sofi told Luby about the chase, about the Mushroom Men killing Sadzi Wolf at the Rock River and Talisa White-tail’s death on the Water Mother, why they were heading across the Ocean of Grass with the people they’d been sent to kill, how the Mushroom Men had become the Wootah, and the reason that she and the rest of the Owsla had been unable to join the battle.
“So what are you going to do?” Luby asked, nodding at the wooden box on her captain’s neck.
Sofi looked up at the stars. “Paloma survived bites from the spiders, so it’s possible the rest of us Owsla would, too, but we’d certainly be incapacitated for a good while. And the Wootah would be killed.”
“You’re set on saving the Wootah?”
“Yes. The boy Ottar the Moaner anyway and …” Sofi sighed, “… and the rest of them.”
“You believe the boy will save the world?”
“I believe that Yoki Choppa believes it and that’s good enough for me.”
“And why save the rest of them?”
“They are … interesting. They have become allies. Friends, even.”
“So what do we do?”
“We escape.”
“But so far …”
“We haven’t achieved much?”
“Well, yes.”
Sofi shook her head. “The spider traps are weird but they’re effective. We’re working on a plan, but I need your help. I’d like you to mix with their Low and find out as much about the Badlanders as you can, and about Beaver Man’s giant sledge, called the Plains Sprinter. I’d like you to find a route out of here westwards, towards the Black Mountains, that we could take if we stole the Plains Sprinter. And I’d like you to get some flesh from a lizard called a chuckwalla. The chuckwalla can be fresh, dried, alive; doesn’t matter.”
“Sure. Where do I find the lizard meat?”
That was one of the reasons Sofi liked Luby. No what do you want a lizard for?
“You should find some flesh in their warlocks’ stores.”
“That’ll be tricky.”
“Not for you.”
“Can’t I just find one in the wild?”
“Yes. On the far side of the Shining Mountains.”
“I see. Well, if it will free everyone …”
Sofi Tornado sighed. “My plan won’t free everyone. If it all goes perfectly, which it won’t, I reckon half of us, at most, will get away.”
“And the others?”
“They’ll die.”
“Doesn’t sound like your greatest scheme.”
“It’s all we’ve got, and we have to do something. Otherwise they’ll start killing us in the arena. It’s just luck that we haven’t lost anyone yet.”
“Rats’ cocks,” said Luby.
“Big rats’ cocks,” agreed Sofi.
“There’s one other thing we could do.” Luby tilted her head.
“Join the Badlanders?”
“Yes.”
“It’s been offered; for us, not the Wootah.”
“Tempted?”
“I don’t want to see any more Owsla die. I am tempted. But we’re not going to do it.”
“Better to live a day as a lion than a lifetime as a treacherous cowardly dickhead?”
“Something like that.”
Luby Zephyr returned the following evening with a whole desiccated chuckwalla, plus information on what was going on outside the camp, about the Plains Sprinter, and the route to the Black Mountains, as well as a detailed recent history of the Badlanders.
Sofi took the chuckwalla to Yoki Choppa to prepare for Sitsi Kestrel, then sat and listened to Luby on their rock in the moon shadow.
As the sky in the east lightened and a new set of animals started to bark and chirp, Sofi told Luby that she’d better go.
“Before I do, I bet you want to know what happened to Pakanda?”
The warlock Pakanda was the originator of the Owsla. He’d divined the alchemy and set it in place for Yoki Choppa to carry on his work. He’d been exiled from Calnia for letting Morningstar give him hand jobs in exchange for information, but Sofi knew that he’d had plenty of unwelcome interactions with girls younger, less exalted, more vulnerable and less willing than Morningstar. She also knew that his treatment of her and the other Owsla women when they’d been girls had been unnecessarily cruel and twisted. As soon as Yoki Choppa had taken over, the beatings and deprivations had stopped and their development into super-warriors had accelerated. Pakanda had beaten them, starved them and bullied them in all sorts of other ways, not because it was necessary as he’d claimed, but simply because he’d enjoyed it.
So she hated Pakanda because he was a sadistic child molester, but she also loathed him at a deeper, even existential level. With the rattlesnake removed from their diet, all sorts of realisations had surfaced, chief among which was that Sofi and her women were, undeniably, monsters, or at least had behaved as such. They’d killed innocents and enjoyed doing it.
Sofi loved who she was, revelled in her power, but she hated what she’d done with her ruthlessness. So while she loved her abilities, and those of her women, she also hated Pakanda for taking away her a
bility to care.
“Okay, tell me what happened to him,” she said. “But make it quick.”
“He was a Badlander originally and he returned after his exile. Beaver Man welcomed him in and used his skills to—”
“I said quick. Cut to what happened.”
“He resumed his interest in young girls. The first—”
A coyote howled. It would be only moments before Thyri Treelegs, always first up after Sofi, was out of her tent.
“Save the details for another time. Is he still alive? If not, what happened?”
“Beaver Man found out about the girls. Pakanda begged, said that Beaver Man needed him and he had more alchemical secrets to share. But Beaver Man killed him, horribly and slowly—private parts-related torture mostly—and gathered all the Badlanders to watch, telling them that this would be the fate of any adult who mistreated children. It went on for days. When he died, Beaver Man cooked him and ate his flesh. They don’t do that here—it’s banned—but Beaver Man made an exception for Pakanda.”
Sofi nodded. “You’d better go.”
“I’m out of here. One more thing, though. Most of the Badlanders disagree with Pakanda’s punishment. They wonder what marvels he might have created had he been allowed to live, and reckon Beaver Man should have given him all the girls he wanted to do whatever he wanted with, so long as he was creating beasts and alchemical warriors to fight for the Badlanders. It wasn’t, one of them told me, like he was hurting the girls. Some of them challenged Beaver Man about it and he beat them.”
“I see. Thanks. Work on that escape route today. Don’t get caught.”
“Caught? As if …” Luby Zephyr melted into the shadows.
“Thyri!” Sofi called a few moments later when Thyri Treelegs emerged from her tent.
The Wootah girl sauntered over, making quite a good job of looking aloof. “Yes?”
“Would you like to spar for a while before the others get up?”
Thyri stifled a smile. “Sure. If you like.”
Finnbogi the Boggy continued his training with Thyri Treelegs, which would have made him happy as a bee in spring had the slaughter of thousands of Calnians not cast a pall of depression over the camp.
The Calnians, of course, had slaughtered all the Wootah’s friends and family, so it should have been great that they’d all been killed. But it wasn’t, because the Wootah were friends with the Calnian Owsla now, and the Owsla were upset, so the Wootah should be, too. Even though the Owsla had been trying to kill the Wootah, and only hadn’t when they’d decided to disobey the orders of the Calnians …
It was far from simple.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend, Gunnhild explained to him.
“But what if that second enemy is already your enemy before you meet the first enemy? That would make the first enemy your friend in which case the second enemy has to be your enemy. So in that case, the enemy of my enemy is my enemy.” he’d said and walked away, very pleased with himself.
It wasn’t an entirely unhappy camp. There was no real evidence, no single incident, but Finnbogi reckoned that the massacre had brought Owsla and Wootah closer. The sombre air had somehow fostered a greater sense of solidarity between the groups. Maybe it was because they’d both suffered similar losses.
They couldn’t see what was happening in the rest of the Badlands due to the great fin of rock encircling the back of the camp and the generally lumpy topography, and they received no Badland visitors other than the mute Empty Children. However, on the evening of the day after the battle, Sofi Tornado gathered everyone by the cook fire and told them what was going on around them.
Finnbogi hadn’t a clue how she knew it all, and it wasn’t like she was going to tell him. The Calnians might be their friends now (apart from Morningstar) but they were still pretty weird, cagey friends.
She told them that while Owsla and Wootah ate, slept, trained and discussed how to break their spider traps, the Badlanders had burned the dead Calnians and hung the rest on the rock walls of the Badlands, draining their blood into the rock and feeding their next horrific project, whatever that was.
On the second evening, Sofi told them that Empress Ayanna and her baby son Calnian had survived, but were Beaver Man’s captives. Finnbogi could not have cared less about this.
On the third day after the battle, they still saw no Badlanders other than their Empty Children guard. Finnbogi guessed they were all busy. Slaughtering thousands must create a lot of work, he mused. He spent the morning training with Thyri. Nearby, Sitsi Kestrel was teaching bow skills to Sassa Lipchewer and, to Finnbogi’s surprise, Sofi was showing Gunnhild how to use her Scrayling Beater more effectively.
In the afternoon, Thyri told him that she’d be doing some advanced training with Sofi herself.
“Can I join in?” he asked.
“No,” she told him.
So he moped about, then told himself that he wasn’t sulking and set off to pace the perimeter of their confinement.
Just as he was beginning to cheer up, he heard a scuffling from behind a lump of rock. He craned his head and saw a bright blue bird pulling some hapless grub from the thin soil.
The bird saw him. Suddenly, as if a little door had opened in his mind, he knew that the bird was about to flee, leaving its meal.
Don’t be frightened, he tried to tell it.
It cocked its head at him, less scared but still about to fly off.
Let’s not be frightened together, he tried. There’s nothing to worry us here.
That did it. The bird went back to its grub, appeased. Finnbogi tried to reach out to it with his mind again, but there was nothing more.
He spent the rest of that day trying to communicate with the various animals that scurried and flew near the camp, but he had no luck and began to think that he’d imagined the interaction with the blue bird.
Chapa Wangwa walked into the camp four mornings after the destruction of the Calnian army with some warriors and a couple of Empty Children on bighorn sheep. He was grinning, but it was an exhausted grin and his swagger was all but gone.
“Morningstar and Keef the Berserker,” said Chapa Wangwa, “follow me.”
“At last!” Keef bounded towards the Badlander, decapitating a couple of imaginary foes with Arse Splitter on his way and looking happier than any of them had for days.
“Good luck,” said Wulf.
“Won’t need it!” chirped Keef.
Sofi put a hand on Morningstar’s arm and the two women nodded.
And before anyone could do anything else, before even Gunnhild could say something meaningful, they were on their way.
Morningstar walked ahead, proud and rangy as the lion that had walked past the camp a couple of days before. Finnbogi had heard from Sassa Lipchewer, who’d heard from Paloma Pronghorn, that Morningstar was the daughter of the previous emperor of Calnia, hence her aloofness. Sassa had reckoned this was no excuse since accident of birth gave you no right to be a twat. Finnbogi agreed. Paloma said that Morningstar would come round to the Wootah eventually and was actually a decent person, but, given the scowls she’d graced him with the several times he’d tried to talk to her, Finnbogi wasn’t sure whether either of those claims were true.
Finnbogi had been lucky against the rattlecondas, but he reckoned Keef and Morningstar would make short work of them, assuming that’s what they got. Whatever happened, they were lucky they didn’t have Freydis with them.
He hadn’t told anyone about the choice that Beaver Man had made him make in the arena. He’d pretty much sacrificed himself for Freydis, which was about as heroic as it got, and he was itching to tell everyone, but he knew he’d look like a tit if he blurted it out.
Most of all he ached to tell Thyri. He spent most waking hours training with her. It was near impossible not to but he knew he mustn’t. Of all of them, she’d be the least impressed by someone telling heroic tales about themselves, possibly because that’s all she’d heard growing up from Chnob the Wh
ite, her bellend of a brother, and Rangvald the Wise, her thundercunt of a dad. Finnbogi was better than that, he told himself.
It was frustrating, though. What was the point of doing heroic things if nobody knew?
Maybe when Chapa Wangwa came back with Keef and Morningstar he could get the Badlander to tell the tale. Although Chapa Wangwa probably didn’t know. He hadn’t been close enough to hear what Beaver Man had offered him, and the Badlander chief didn’t seem the type for gossiping with underlings. Then again, Finnbogi had no idea what type Beaver Man was. He was a murderer, a singer, a natural philosopher, a torturer, a charmer, a creator of monsters and slaughterer of armies. He didn’t really fit into a “type.”
“Stop fucking around. Walk next to me,” Morningstar commanded quietly. She didn’t like breaking her don’t talk to the Mushroom Men rule, but she had no choice. Well, she had. She could let this guy die and then beat whatever they sent at her. But … well, his weapon was formidable and he did swing it about as if it was an extension of his arms. He might be useful.
“Sure, what’s up?”
“In the arena, you do what I tell you. Got it?”
“Sure.”
She looked at him. He was a little taller than her, with a disproportionately small head covered with thin, spikey blond hair like a baby chicken’s. He still wore bandages over his eye and ear. His remaining little eye looked sincere.
“I’ll do exactly what you want,” he added. “One of us should be in charge. Should be you. You’re younger, but you have much more experience of fighting alongside excellent warriors.” He twirled his long axe. “Like me.”