“Because we’re always in a horror movie,” said Jude. She squirmed out of my grasp, grabbed Laurie, and shoved her in front of us. “Tell them to back off,” she ordered.
“Um,” said Laurie. She looked terrified. That showed more of a brain than was normal for her. Clearing her throat, she cupped her hands around her mouth and called, “Hey, monsters! Don’t eat us!”
The wendigo started laughing.
“I don’t think it worked,” said Laurie, dropping her hands. “Why didn’t it work?”
“Maybe because they’re mangy cannibalistic monsters, and not members of the Computer Club,” said Marti.
“It’s not cannibalism if they’re not human,” said Colleen.
“Should we really be standing here discussing this when we’re about to be eaten?” asked Jude, just before the wendigo we had left inside the shop—good old Chuck—slammed into her from behind and sent her sprawling into me. I slammed into Laurie, and all three of us went down in a heap, with the wendigo on top of us.
He didn’t stay there long. There was an enraged scream, and then he was fleeing from Marti, who was attempting to use his head as a kickball. Wendigo #1 fled to the dubious safety of wendigo #2 through #4, falling into place among his pack. He snarled. So did they. I picked myself up from the porch, grabbed Jude and Laurie this time, and fled back inside.
“Barricade the door!” I shouted.
“Way ahead of you,” said Marti, shouldering me out of the way as she hauled a shelf from its place in the middle of the room to prop against the door—which no longer latched, thanks to our earlier exit. “Okay, Colleen, you’re our genius. How the fuck do we get past these things?”
“I’ve never seen a wendigo before!” protested Colleen. “They’re supposed to be mythological!”
“Like zombies, mind-control, and attractive high-waisted jeans, and yet here we are,” said Marti. “Figure something out!”
Jude had picked herself up from the floor. Smoothing her hair with one hand, she asked, “What was that you said about the jerky before, Heather?”
“It’s human,” I said. My mouth flooded with spit. I swallowed it, trying to push back the memory of how delicious people had been, back when I was dead and they were my natural prey. “Teriyaki-flavored human, but still human.”
“Wendigo are cannibals,” said Marti again, shooting a glare at Colleen that dared her to argue the definition of “cannibalism.” Instead, Colleen just looked thoughtful.
“So the jerky is probably other people who stopped here for gas or to use the bathroom,” she said. “That gives me an idea.”
“We’ll try anything,” said Jude.
“Just remember you said that,” said Colleen.
* * * * *
Cheerleaders naturally come in two varieties: the ones who throw, and the ones who get thrown. We gussy our roles up with lots of extras, like “who stands on the bottom of the pyramid” and “who does the big tumbling passes,” but at the end of the day, some of us had our feet on the ground so that the rest of us could get our heads as high into the clouds as possible. Jude and Marti were both bases. Colleen and Laurie were fliers. I was a switch—I could fill either role, as needed, although most of the time, I was too busy doing cartwheels for my teammates to fling me around.
Using me as a stabilizer, Marti and Jude knelt down and allowed Colleen and Laurie, respectively, to climb onto their backs, where the two lighter girls locked their knees around the ribcages of their bases. That left Colleen and Laurie with free hands, and the leverage they would need if they had to launch themselves into the air. Jude handed me her car keys. I handed Jude and Marti each a jar of jerky, which they passed up to Colleen and Laurie.
“This is a terrible plan,” I said.
“Go, Pumpkins,” said Jude, and kicked the door open.
The wendigo were still outside—true to Colleen’s supposition, they had decided to wait us out rather than destroy their own shack. It was always nice to deal with responsibly minded monsters. Jude and Marti screamed as they ran. I dove for the space between them, hitting the ground on my hands and going into a tumbling pass that would have been illegal in competition; I was pushing myself high and hard, without pausing to breathe or give my spotters time to adjust for my position. It was the sort of stunt that breaks necks.
Like the neck of the wendigo I landed on halfway across the yard. There was a sickening crunch as he went down, and the smell of blood and piss filled the air. Hitting someone in the base of the skull with a hundred and forty pounds of fast-moving cheerleader will do that. Another of the wendigo howled, swiping at me and drawing four lines of burning pain down the back of my thigh. The smell of my blood—human enough to trigger that maddening hunger, even though it was my own—filled my mouth and nose, obscuring the stink of wendigo. The wendigo howled.
“Now!” shouted Jude.
On cue, Colleen and Laurie opened their jars of jerky and began pelting the wendigo. The wendigo howled and snapped, grabbing the jerky before it could hit the ground. Two wendigo went for the same piece of jerky. Then they went for each other. Colleen spiked her jerky jar, hard, off the remaining wendigo’s head—and then I was too far ahead of the action to see what was happening any more.
Jude hadn’t bothered to lock the car in her rush to get inside and buy things. Thank fuck for that. I wrenched the door open, jammed the keys into the ignition, and hit the gas, sending the car rocketing toward the fray. Jude dove out of the way, taking Colleen with her. Marti and Laurie were a few feet away, still throwing jerky to the wendigo.
“Get in get in get in!” I screeched. Jude threw Colleen onto the roof and dove in through the passenger side door. Marti didn’t bother letting Laurie go; she just shoved her through the open window to the backseat and slung her legs in after her, leaving her own torso hanging over the edge. Reaching up, she grabbed Colleen’s arm, stabilizing them both. I hit the gas again, and we were off, accelerating away from the shack and toward the freeway, with one cheerleader on the roof, one halfway out the window, and three wendigo in pursuit.
“I hate all of you!” I screamed.
Jude put on her seatbelt.
We hit the freeway at just under seventy miles per hour, weaving as I tried to keep the car under control without flinging anyone off into space. Colleen was whooping with glee. Marti was screaming incoherent curses, her meaning clear only from her tone. The wendigo were hot on our trail, which was somehow more terrifying than anything else about our situation. Shapeshifting cannibal monsters were one thing. Shapeshifting cannibal monsters that could run at seventy miles per hour were something entirely different.
A convoy of big rigs was making its lumbering way down the other side of the highway. I said a silent prayer to whatever god looks after cheerleaders and fools, and jerked the wheel hard to the side, sending us careening across three lanes and cutting off the lead truck in the convoy. Horns blared. Tires screeched. Colleen squealed.
Wendigo splashed. Everywhere. Three wendigo could generate a lot of splash. Colleen squealed again, but this time it was in disgust, not delight. “It’s in my hair, it’s in my hair!” she wailed.
“Shut up,” snarled Marti.
I kept pulling on the wheel, steering us onto the shoulder. I turned the hazard lights on, stopped the engine, and slumped backward in my seat, panting.
“Oh my God,” said Jude.
“That sucked,” said Marti, pulling herself in through the window and starting to pick bits of wendigo out of her hair. “Somebody get Colleen off the roof.”
I got out of the car and helped Colleen down as Jude slid into the driver’s seat. Colleen had been right in the path of the bursting wendigo: she was covered in gore, although she wasn’t injured. I was the only one who’d actually been hurt. Marti broke out the first aid kit, and we did some roadside medical care while Colleen toweled herself off. Then it was back into the car and back on the road for home.
* * * * *
An hour l
ater, Laurie piped up from the back seat: “I need to go.”
Everyone groaned.
Marti threw the rest of Laurie’s yogurt out the window.
The Hall of the Diamond Queen
Anthony Ryan
She loved to watch them run. Victory’s reward was the spectacle of fleeing men, the raging panic and fear a tangible delight as the Raptorile and Tormented broke their ranks and the blackwings streaked down from above, talons flashing and beaks gaping wide. This had been a harder battle than most, the foe an army some forty thousand strong led by a veteran warrior king of typically noble aspect. She could see him now, standing atop a small hill, two-handed longsword raised high as his most loyal retainers clustered around him for the final stand. She felt a faint tick of recognition as her unnaturally keen sight found his face, lined with age but still handsome beneath the beard, and the eyes a pale shade of blue reminding her of the sea.
There is only the Voice. The Voice brings great rewards and dark glory. Those deaf to the Voice are Abominate.
The mantra came unbidden, an automatic response to the surge of memory, banishing the images with a brutal ease that always stirred her gratitude. All memory is a lie, the Voice had taught her long ago. Beware its seduction, my Sharrow-met. She soon knew the recognition for what it was, watching the king reorder his ranks below. She couldn’t hear his words but didn’t need to; “Fight!” would be his exhortation. “Fight on or all is lost!” Another doomed hero. And there have been so many.
She laid her gauntleted hand on Keera’s neck, playing the steel fingers through the great bird’s ebony feathers, whispering a soft command. The blackwing tilted in response, banking hard to circle the hill where the noble king made his stand, now ringed by at least a thousand men. Ever more were rushing to join him, fear waning and shame surging at the sight of his example. Kilted clansmen from the northern vales with their double-bladed axes, strongbow-wielding plainsmen from the south, barely armed crofters from the western shore, all rushing to stand with the great king against the surging horde.
Such courage, she mused, guiding Keera lower. A shame, but one such as he will ever be deaf to the Voice.
She had Keera ignore the outer ranks and swoop low over the king’s house guards, steel-clad talons tearing through their armour like scythes through corn, blood rising in a sweet-tasting vapour that beaded her skin, hot and fresh. Keera rose from the hilltop with a warrior clutched in each claw, then cast them away, rent and torn, their blood like rain on the terrorised faces of their fellows. A few bows thrummed but the arrows flew wide as Keera’s wings fanned the air into a gale. The king stood alone now, she saw, his guards forced back by the bird’s fury.
She hissed a sigh of anticipation as Keera folded her wings, bird and rider plunging down in a black streak. She had intended to inflict a quick but spectacular death. Not, of course, out of mercy but as a demonstration to his men, the final blow to their teetering courage. The king, however, contrived to frustrate her, diving clear of Keera’s snapping beak and delivering a swift backhand stroke with his sword. The bird screamed as the blade found her eye, dark blood gouting as she reeled away, wings spreading in panic, then settling into unnatural stillness at a touch from her rider’s hand.
“The Voice is kind,” Sharrow-met told the king as she dismounted from Keera’s back. “And never shirks from offering friendship to a valiant foe.” The offer was perfunctory and she knew the king could hear the amusement in her tone as she strode towards him, her hand going to the long, black-bladed scimitar strapped across her back.
“The Voice offers only death to the valiant,” the king replied in a low voice, eyes grim with implacable resolve as he crouched in anticipation of combat. “And slavery to the cowardly . . . and the deluded.”
There was an additional weight to this last word that gave her pause, a sense of resigned sorrow. Once again she scrutinised his face, the recognition swelling anew, summoning an image of a man and a woman standing in a garden, his eyes an echo of the ocean beyond. Can’t you see the trap in his words? the man was saying, leaning close to the woman, a keen desperation evident in voice and manner. You think he promises life? The histories are clear. All the Voice ever brings is death . . .
There is only the Voice. The Voice brings great rewards and dark glory.
The vision shattered as the mantra took hold, calling forth her rage, the Dark Glory rising fast, singing in every muscle and nerve as she drew the scimitar. She attacked without preamble or restraint. On occasion she had let these encounters last, allowing her doomed opponent some measure of hope. It made the deathblow so much sweeter, the final realisation in their eyes a tasty treat to crown the moment as the scimitar’s blade bit deep. But there would be no sweet moment here, she knew that. This was a day for the all-consuming fire of the Dark Glory, the most cherished gift bestowed by the Voice.
The king was skilled, still swift and strong despite his age, moving with the fierce grace of a born warrior as he parried and whirled, his longsword a flicker of shining steel. A display worthy of a song, Sharrow-met mused as she hacked his sword arm off at the elbow then brought the scimitar up and ’round in a scything slash that took away his legs. She stood back to watch him die, the blood draining to leave his noble aspect bleached and empty, but still he clung to life, and his eyes . . .
“Sharrow-met!” She turned to see Harazil descending to earth on the back of his blackwing, a bloodied axe clutched in his fist and a brace of freshly harvested heads dangling from his bird’s harness. “Victory, Greatness.” The Shar-gur captain pointed his axe at the field and she raised her gaze to witness the disintegration of the noble king’s army. The Tormented had broken the ranks of those choosing to die with their king and now moved among the wounded, pale, silent figures going about their business with customary efficiency, killing the maimed and chaining those fit to join their ranks. Beyond them the Raptorile war-packs displayed no such restraint, surging through the fleeing mob, steel-barbed tails whipping like angry snakes as they leaped and bit and tore, pausing after every kill to voice their victory shrieks before bounding on.
Sharrow-met turned again to the king as he choked out a few words, too thick with blood and pain to be discerned but nevertheless spoken with a fierce conviction. She crouched at his side, leaning close with a raised eyebrow. The Dark Glory had faded now, leaving an odd sense of sorrow she had never quite accustomed herself to, and she found she had little appetite for the killing blow.
“I . . .” the king rasped, dimming eyes meeting her own. “I prayed . . . to the Twelve Gods . . . that I might never . . . see your face . . . again . . .”
Harazil’s axe came down in a blur, neatly severing the king’s neck as his lips moved to form a final, forever unknown word. “Abominate scum,” the Shar-gur grunted, snatching up the head and brandishing it at her, back straight and eyes averted in careful respect. “My gift to you, Greatness.”
Sharrow-met rose from her haunches, ignoring Harazil’s gift and turning away. Her eyes tracked across the sights of slaughter and beyond, over fields of green and gold to the pale, jagged outline on the horizon. Mara-vielle, City of a Thousand Spires. The greatest prize yet won by the Servants of the Voice and the last free city on this continent.
“I beg the honour of leading the Vanguard, my queen,” Harazil said, voice heavy with anticipation. Like all the Shar-gur his lust for her recognition was ingrained and insatiable. Should she command it he would slice open his own belly in a trice, an order she had been tempted to issue more than once. “I will secure the city’s treasures . . .”
“Be quiet,” she told him in a murmur, eyes still lingering on the distant spires. She could feel it again, the upsurge of recognition, though she fought to keep it muted. By rights she should surrender herself to the comforts of the mantra but the doomed king’s eyes were bright in her mind and there was something enticing about this new sensation, something that made her endure the pain of unwanted visions. He knew my face.
“Muster your Tormented,” she told Harazil, striding to Keera’s side. “Make due assessment of the chosen. Await my word before commencing the cull of the unworthy.”
She peered at the blackwing’s ruined eye, running a soothing hand over the bird’s neck as she took hold of the red-jewelled amulet about her neck. Holding it close to Keera’s eye she chanted a soft invocation, calling forth the jewel’s power, tendrils of red light snaking forth to lick at the wound, damaged flesh reforming and knitting together. Keera gave an appreciative squawk as the healing completed, the remade eye bright and new, possibly keener than it had ever been, though Sharrow-met knew it would always ache. The Voice’s gifts carried a price; her own body was as smooth and free of scars as a new born babe, but there were times, usually at night when she sat through the sleepless hours, when the pain of long-healed wounds was enough to make her cry out, though she never did.
“Send word to the Raptorile to advance upon the city.” She climbed onto Keera’s back, the bird’s wings thrumming as they caught the air and bore her queen aloft. “They will find me at the Hall of the Twelve Gods.”
* * * * *
Silence. No screams, no flocks of people casting terrorised glances at the sky, no weeping mothers cradling infants, no old and sick hobbling in the wake of the young as they all fled towards imagined refuge. Just silent spires overlooking empty parks and streets. There were some signs of disorder, upturned carts, doors left open in haste, various detritus littering the broad avenues. But no people, and the people were the true spoils of any victory, for what was the Voice without ears to hear it?
She spent an hour scouring the city, swooping low and high, her marvellous Voice-gifted eyes alive to the slightest movement, but finding nothing. Eventually she guided Keera towards the four tallest spires rising from the centre of the city. Each had been constructed from different coloured marble—red, gold, white and black—and were linked by a series of bridges. They were deceptively fragile in appearance, narrow with fluted buttresses, like a web spun between the spires, but strong enough to have stood for centuries. Each tower rose from the corner of a rectangular structure, itself more than a hundred feet in height, its walls decorated from end to end in marble reliefs. There were three great panels to each wall, one for each of the twelve gods, their legends rendered with a level of skill and detail as yet unseen in all the cities she had taken.
Unbound Page 28