The Dawnhounds

by Sascha Stronach

She had to get out: the longer she stayed, the worse it was going to get. Her hands still shook, and she felt a familiar panic rising in her. There was so much life around her, it was impossible to deal with: millions and millions of threads, all interlinked—she knew if she grabbed them, they’d blow her to pieces and she desperately didn’t want to die. She knew it was an option, but couldn’t face it. Even without Ajat’s warning, she wouldn’t have been able to do it. There is—in the human soul—a root of panic, which is the overpowering thought I do not want to die. It doesn’t matter if it is reasonable or sensible. It did not, in that moment, even matter that it would be temporary: it mattered only that she was going to die. It was the thing that had always made her lock up: tomorrow I might not be here, and I love this all so much—even when it hurts—that I just can’t leave it. Touching the world is like drinking protein concentrate, like grabbing ahold of a bundle of live wires—it burns, and the burn lets you know you’re still alive.

  She adjusted her grip on the cnida, and felt its tendrils reaching out through the limestone. It was keeping her safe, but also keeping her imprisoned, and she knew the longer she stayed, the worst things were going to get. She could pull the magic out of it, but it would have to go somewhere and she didn’t know if she could take it back into herself without breaking. She desperately scanned for other life, but it was hopeless: there was the cnida, and the ravening blanks but everything else had either fled or been killed. Even the limestone wasn’t giving anything up: the cnida had drank deep of whatever bits of tiny power it had once held. Each little crush of long-ago-powdered bone was totally empty and unable to be refilled.

  She couldn’t put it into a blank. It could break them open, but it could also make things much, much worse. Her mind went shrieking back to the art exhibit: blanks could survive things that normal humans couldn’t. She needed to take the energy into herself, without breaking. She thought back to Ajat: there’d been an intent and direction to the way she’d worked magic back on the ship. Focus, focus, focus. There was a glowing core of magic in everybody, and Yat’s had been sitting perched in her chest like a hot coal—all fire and potential. She took a deep breath, and felt it turning inside her, like it was alive and sniffing at something intangible on the air. She concentrated on it, and its warmth filled her. She unspooled it and reached down into the earth and grabbed at the central cluster of threads holding the giant cnidocyte together. The instant the threads touched, the heat in her chest went from warmth to a burn. The coal, the fist, the twisted ball of thread and fire. It exploded inside her, and it was all she could do not to cry out. She could see her hands and they looked very much like normal hands, which was at odds with how they felt: like they were burning down, like the skin was crackling and peeling away, like the fat was boiling and running.

  Focus.

  She pulled on the threads, spun them, fed them into the new furnace in her chest. The cnida writhed, and its tentacles retreated into the earth—slowly at first, but then in a wave moving out from her. Through the haze of pain, she saw chunks of shattered street and welt-covered purple bodies. The fire was the worst pain she’d ever felt, but it was exhilarating too. Her father had told her once that panic meant a moment of realising that you were alive, and how perfect and fragile it all was. Panic—for better or worse—meant you were touching the world. This was panic, pure panic: an energy that she could barely contain, a fire that would not go out—kissing madness and liking it.

  And then it was gone. The cnida had retreated entirely into the device in her hand, and she was alone, standing in the remains of the shattered city street. Just her, the limestone and the blanks.

  They turned towards her with milk-white eyes, and she ran. She couldn’t untangle herself from the city’s threads and as she ran, she felt the panic spread. There was no order to it: it jackknifed off at random, springing from soul to soul, street to street. She didn’t stop running until she didn’t recognise any of the buildings. There were no footsteps behind her: no sounds of slobbering animal hunger. It didn’t matter: she could feel the city coming apart. She ran until she got lost, and then she kept running a little more for good measure: until her veins burned, until her lungs seemed to push themselves flat against her ribs. She passed people: cleaners and stevedores and priests, and none of them seemed to want to bother the cop who had other places to be. They seemed like they had more pressing problems on their minds. She passed other officers: hands on their weapons, blowing whistles, running towards the hell she’d made. Some of them tried to stop her, but she was moving too fast and none of them gave chase; it seemed like they had more important things to do.

  She couldn’t get the image of Źu’s death out of her head. She’d hated him more than she knew it was possible to hate, but it was another thing entirely to see him die; to be connected to him while the life fled his body. To break a person open and watch the pieces come out. It had never been like that in her books: the hero cut off the drake’s head and it just … ended. It didn’t go down covered in welts, or fall, lopsided, with its skull torn open. Whether they succeed or fail, a hero is defined by death.

  As she ran, she could sense the birds in the air following behind her, peering down at her: dozens of birds, hundreds of them, darkening the sky. Yat ran, while the panic spread, and the city came to life around her.

  I want to show you this; you need to understand. I know it hurts, little bird, but you need to know what the stakes are. You need to know what happens when you fail.

  The most skilled botanist in Hainak lives in Kecak Alley, and darns socks for a living. Her name is Nelat-Kar. She was driven out of the academy for the sin of being a woman. They didn’t expel her, they just made all the little things a little bit harder, until she collapsed under their weight and left on her own. She does not love her work, but the world makes it easier for her. She lives with her husband, Janek. He is not the handsome prince she’d hoped for, but he is kind and he knows how to make her laugh.

  They were at home when the first spore burst went off. It shrouded their home in white powder, like flour. She is pregnant, but they don’t know that yet. She was scared, but she made a joke about it. Janek did not laugh.

  Nelat-Kar doesn’t know the specifics, but she’s clever and she knows spores when she sees them. She and Janek seal the doors and windows with wax, and take an accounting of all their food and clean water. There is not much: their work does not pay well enough for that.

  They are clever, and responsible, and so very brave. Even when the leering demons—these beasts of new flesh—appear out of the strange white mist, they continue to work; they do everything in their power to survive.

  They do not. By morning, their house will be empty. The door will be scattered pieces of timber on the ground. Their flesh will be remoulded and repurposed; they would not even recognise each other, if they were able. This is the story of one house, little bird; there are a million houses in Hainak, the greatest city in the southern sea.

  Night is coming, for you and I.

  It is not enough to be brave.

  It is not enough to be clever.

  it is not enough

  The constable couldn’t’ve been older than 18. A borer had got him in the side, not enough to kill straight away but enough to make sure he wasn’t getting out of it. He wouldn’t stop crying. Sen held him while the neurotoxin hit his brainstem, while the first wave of convulsions swept through him, while he began to foam at the mouth. Just some dumb kid who believed the stories, and wanted to be a hero. Sen felt the kid die. On a better day, he’d have brushed it aside, told himself he’d seen worse. Not today. Sen dragged the kid’s body out of the street, said a short prayer, shut his eyes and laid a half-yan on each of them.

  His skin was already blackening and peeling off when Sen left him. Stray round from one of the soldiers, junior officer in the wrong place at the wrong time. Nobody had even stopped to look after him: just
left him there and moved on. No point trying to chase down the shooter: he was half a league away, on a rooftop somewhere. There was a trick to it, that came when called: if you’d seen enough suffering, you learnt to turn yourself to stone for a while. You did that enough, you learnt to make the statue walk.

  There was something very wrong with the blanks. Sen had seen a man banging on a high window, shouting down at him. The blank had grabbed him, pushed against him and, and …

  Melted around him, merged with him, made his features run together, turned his face into a jumble of parts that all looked like something but it was impossible to tell what. Sen barely had time to register what he was looking at: it ducked back out of sight, and he moved on as quickly as he could.

  He found two officers in a restaurant, cowering behind the bar. Gave them directions to the hotel, told them where to set up fortifications. Told them to hold position until he came back. Moved on.

  A man with three arms, twitching in the street. A second face splitting off from the first, slightly higher. Two sets of teeth overlaid onto each other, melted together, forked like a snake’s tongue. Two irises in his left eye, whirling madly, running together like egg yolks. Sen’s hands shook, but everything had been shaking for days. When your whole world hurts, it takes more to shake you. Sen stepped around the man, and moved on.

  More cops, locked in a bank vault. They’d locked themselves in there, and the creatures had moved on. They’d received orders to fire on the bank staff and some had refused. The soldiers did it anyway: the place was a charnel house. The cops who hadn’t had any qualms had left with the soldiers, expecting their friends to die. Sen pointed them at the hotel, and moved on.

  Somewhere out near the shambles, a dog with a man’s face, crying out in pain. Its mouth remade into a snout like a dog’s, but puckered pink human flesh. It tried to bite him until he walloped it with the cane and sent it running off down into the rats-nest of alleyways, shrieking in the voice of a child. Sen moved on.

  Two dead soldiers in the shattered ruins of a florists’ shop. One had a strange mottling around his eyes, and an extra finger on each hand. Dozens of severed fingers lay on the ground around them. Must’ve been growing faster than he could cut them off. They’d shot each other at close range. Their bodies, leaning against each other, had begun to flow together. They weren’t up and moving, but Sen had a suspicion it wouldn’t take long. He moved on.

  At the docks ward, a mess of burnt bodies at the base of a hastily-assembled barricade. It was hard to tell how many of them had been infected. Medics pulling him inside, checking every inch of him, giving him a drink of something that burnt his throat, pointed him towards the station.

  New banners on the facade. Or, old banners brought back: revolutionary colours, Crane symbols. The bin chickens still considered themselves heroes of that one. They’d helped, after all. They’d helped the ruling powers for five centuries, then they’d helped the revolution when it looked like it might go a different way than expected. Sen sighed to himself. Hell had come to earth, and he’d come to the bloody office. The building was designed to scare the shit out of anybody who thought of disobeying the law; it scared the everloving shit out of Sen. The doors lay open. There was nothing else to do: Sen went to work.

  There was only one thing for it. Yat went home: fugitives always went home. She’d thought—in another life, so little time ago, so very far away—they were stupid, or sentimental, or weak. She understood it now; when the whole world has been shaken to pieces, you need something familiar—something rock-solid. She had a second home, somewhere at sea, but it was out of reach, and too new to really be home. When your world fell apart, you needed to know that something was the same as it had always been. She wanted to go to sleep in her own bed, and wake up realising it was all a dream. She wanted to have a cup of tea, and read her dad’s old book, and pat the damned cat that wouldn’t stop hanging around.

  She watched her house from a nearby alley. Nobody came and went, though the door had obviously been kicked down: it lay twisted off the hinges. She tried to look through, but it was still night-time and the lights were off. She couldn’t make anything out. After an hour or so, when the bleed of dawn was starting to make itself known over the horizon, she crept up to her front door, and went inside.

  They’d turned every inch of the place over. The cellulose mattress lay on the floor, with the sheets still half-wrapped around it. All the drawers on her bedside table hung open like yawning mouths, and their contents were all gone. She felt a pang for her dad’s book: probably somewhere in an evidence locker on the other side of town. They’d destroy it after everything got processed: old-world stories were illegal, after all. If that wasn’t evidence enough for the brass that she’d been a lost cause all along. Yes, it’s about a cat stealing a golden peanut from the gods. It’s got little notes in the margins: ‘squeaky voice here’ for the talking peanut—surely the sign of a deranged mind. They’d always been looking for defects with her: as if women were defective men; as if women who loved women were defective women who loved men; as if anybody who loved both wasn’t part of the equation and could be sorted into one or the other without their consultation. She could never be good enough, because she wasn’t the human they wanted her to be. The Kopek never asked her to be anything except herself.

  They’d taken her stash too. She hadn’t been thinking about her next hit, but seeing the empty drawer made her hands shake and her teeth ache. Her head hurt. She’d been shot, and hit, and she’d almost been knocked senseless by a ship’s mast, and they were ant-bites compared to the pain that was threatening to split her skull in half. It was as if every cell in her body had a fish-hook in it. She wanted to throw up, to fall down, to sleep forever.

  She made the bed. She didn’t know why, but there was something horrible about the way they’d just left it there, all over the place. She put the door back on its hinges, and let the connective tissue start to grow back. After that, she went into the kitchen and found her teapot. They’d taken the teabags—perhaps that’s where she’s hiding the rest of the drugs—but left the pot. It still had some loose leaves in the bottom, so she filled it with hot water and let it stew while she sat on the bed with her head in her hands and tried not to cry.

  When she’d grabbed Źu, the power had been so total that she couldn’t possibly begin to resist it. It had carved through her heart like a river carving through stone. She’d wanted to hurt him, but it had gone so much further than she’d expected. Every time she got close to somebody, she could feel the pull of their threads, as though their soul were saying take me away, take me with you. She couldn’t control it. She couldn’t jump, she couldn’t make things grow: she could only kill. She’d killed the blank, and the reinforcements, and probably Mr Źao. She’d killed the parrot and she’d killed Mr Źu and she’d killed herself. She was a wicked thing: a knife, a bomb, a bullet. She was the villain from an old book: a queer little witch who stole from the living to make herself strong. Somebody who was on the outside because they deserved it.

  She cried until her throat burned, like she was purging herself of the unearthly fire she’d devoured from inside of Źu’s chest. She sat on the bed, rocking back and forth, unable to stop the tears.

  The mattress depressed beside her, just a little, and she froze. For a moment she thought somebody had sat down next to her, but—even with her eyes shut—she could sense it was too small to be human. She reached out for its threads, and grabbed and—

  The cat yowled and tried to jump off the bed, but she was draining from it now and it could barely move. They were connected and she couldn’t break them apart: its energy was flowing into her and there was nothing she could do about it. The cat cried out in panic and confusion: she could feel its emotions burning hot like embers as it died. Nonono please she thought not this please anything but this.

  Nothing had been the same since that night at the docks, but th
is was a step too far. This was her home. She was not going to be made into a killer in her own home. A river of fire ran between them. She was not going to hurt a stupid beautiful animal whose company meant the world to her. She couldn’t stop the flow of magic, but she could change it. The river smashed into something hard—two words: no further.

  One hand on the cat, one hand on the mattress. Specially-treated cellulose, on a wooden frame, attached to fungal house. She let the energy from the cat run through her into the house, then—achingly, with gritted teeth—she turned the flow around. The cat wasn’t moving: its legs had been kicking but they’d stopped and curled up under it. She knew if it was dead, there would be no bringing it back. She searched for the light inside it, and found only a tiny ember. It was enough.

  The magic pushed back against her: it wanted to be part of her. There was so much of it: a million pieces of light flowing together against her, implacable. She forced herself against it, and pushed. She pushed for Kiada, who was lost; she pushed for her father, who never had enough time; she pushed for empty stomachs and broken locks and sleepless nights. She pushed for Hainak and the Kopek and the bar with the white door and the goddam motherfucking squeaky peanut. Something changed. Something tiny changed, something seismic; one tremor in the mantle, rolling out beneath the earth, breaking open veins of molten soul, ready to set off a tsunami.

  She couldn’t put too much energy into the cat: that would be just as bad as letting it empty out. There was too much energy in the house: she could barely take it into her own body, let alone the little body of the cat. It was moving back now, picking up speed. The cat’s rear legs twitched and its chest heaved in and out. Just a little more: just a little.

  She stood against the flow, and pushed, just a little, just a little. The cat’s eyes opened, and it yowled in pain. Crying out was good: crying out meant there was something to cry out.