by D. J. Butler
She skidded to a halt in a slime of blood, mud, snow, and rotting flesh. The city stank. She positioned herself in front of the opening.
It was large enough to drive a wagon through. Fortunately, since the Imperial troops were now trying to pass through, the guns had stopped firing on the spot.
Likely, they were being repositioned elsewhere.
The next ranks of undead shuffling into the breach had been men once.
Beyond them, Montse saw files of men in blue marching toward the walls.
“Fire!” she heard Jaleta Zorales call from above, but few of the cannons responded—most had exhausted their shot, as Montse’s had.
“Fire!” Bill yelled, and muskets answered. Through the gap, Montse saw soldiers in blue drop, dead and wounded. Their files struggled to march over and around them without losing integrity.
Living dead shambled toward her.
She waved to her crew. “Drop the gun!”
Two of the zaambi—a beastman and a man—had come fully through the gap and were out of reach when the cannon dropped off the wall. They didn’t even turn around as the iron tube and its wood and iron carriage fell with a loud thud, crushing three walking dead behind them into paste.
The beastman was terrifying. Covered in fur, it had the head of a horse, three legs, and only one arm. Montse stepped forward and hurled the burning coal and pitch into the creature’s face, spattering it with flaming asphalt.
The stink of burning, rotten flesh billowed immediately into Montse’s lungs, nearly choking her. She staggered back, but couldn’t seem to get out of the cloud. The beastman emitted a hissing sound. Montse saw the creature’s flesh blister, swell, and split open. When it cracked, black ichor belched out in waves like molasses glugging from the side of a toppled jug. The stench got infinitely worse.
It ran at her.
Its improbable geometry made it surprisingly fast. In a sudden sprint it leaped at Montse, one flaming arm raised to clutch her in a hellish embrace. She slashed and stepped aside, but it rolled around and lurched at her again. If she impaled it, it would trample her. But it was faster than she was.
She ducked once more, surely the last time she’d be able to evade it. The beastman spun and leaped at her—
and Gazelem Zomas stepped into its path.
He held a spear. High on the spear’s pole, just below the blade, the spear had a strong crossbar. Gazelem stepped on the butt of his spear, crouched, and rammed the spear tip into the zaambi beastman’s chest, just below its thick, horselike clavicle.
The monster shrieked, took another step forward, and collapsed. It flailed, trying to grab Montse or Gazelem with its one fiery arm, but Gazelem and his spear held it firmly in place while it twitched its last.
Bill staggered down the steps. He leaned on one crutch as he moved, and his steps were ragged. Behind him came Cahokian wardens with muskets, bayonets, and longbows. At the foot of the stairs he slipped, catching himself against the wall.
“The ambulance cart!” Bill shouted.
Montse had been distracted. She turned and saw the other zaambi who had got through. The man wore a tall black beaver hat, a red blanket over one shoulder and belted around his waist, and he had the shaved head and scalp lock of one of the Indians of the northeast. As Cathy Filmer shoved a torch into his side, he ignored her. Flesh sizzling, he hacked at a wounded soldier in a gray cape with a war ax.
With his first swing, he crushed the wounded man’s shoulder.
With his second, he lopped away a slice of the man’s skull.
The soldier screamed once, shrilly, sat up, and then died.
Miquel sprang at the zaambi, with nothing but a knife in his hand.
Montse raced for the dead man. “His eyes!” she shouted to Cathy Filmer. “Burn his eyes!”
As the zaambi raised his ax to strike at Miqui, Cathy shoved the torch into his eyes.
He missed his blow, the ax biting into the edge of the cart. Howling in rage, he swung at Cathy—
hitting her in the shoulder and knocking her down.
Miquel stabbed the dead man, to no effect.
“Cathy!” Bill’s voice came from too far away for him to do anything. “Fire!” he yelled next, and the sound of guns that resulted suggested that his men were shooting into the breach in the Treewall.
The zaambi raised his ax again—
Montse ran him through, pushing with all the strength in her legs and heaving herself against the dead man. She pushed until her sword bit into the wood of the cart and pinned him, off-balance and squirming.
With her other hand, she yanked the ax from his grip.
The zaambi groaned. With both hands he reached for a patient and missed. Then he groped in Cathy’s direction and got his fingers into her long hair—
Montse swung down with the borrowed ax with all her might. With her first blow, she chopped through his elbow, and with her second she severed his forearm. Cathy stumbled backward, kicking the two disembodied forearms away from her, fingers opening and shutting and still trying to grab.
Montse settled into a better stance and swung the ax at the dead man’s neck. She hit squarely where she aimed. His head toppled from his shoulders, rolled over three times in the muddy snow, and came to rest looking at Montse.
His face was confused and terrified.
She swung the ax one last time, shattering the skull into fragments.
“Perhaps from this very spot. Leaning out
one of the chevalier’s own windows, for instance.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Chigozie was hard pressed to keep up. A few short months earlier, he’d have been unable to, given Kort’s long, loping pace, but winter in the Missouri had hardened the muscles of his legs and given his stride ambition.
Naares Stoach seemed to struggle with the pace, too. That surprised Chigozie, given how comfortable the outrider seemed to be generally in this frontier land, but then he reflected that the Zoman was probably accustomed to traveling it horseback.
The second Zoman accompanying them might have been chosen for speed: she had long legs packed with lean muscle, and the face and torso of a racing greyhound. Her long brown hair blew wildly behind her as she ran, like a horse’s mane, but in fact she was a magician. Her name was Ya’alu. Chigozie didn’t know magic and didn’t trust it. It had always been his brother’s art, and even when it had seemed more innocuous than perverting their father’s funeral into a curse spell, Chigozie had never really liked it. This wizard was here to build on the Caddo boy’s testimony and find the prisoner they were to rescue.
Or, possibly, the servant they were to kidnap.
Kort and Ferpa traveled with long, quick paces. The other Merciful had no trouble, but they all seemed to have been assembled by a creator who wanted them to have fast legs. One had some kind of long tail, belly pouch, and powerful hindquarters that kicked her forward in ten-foot leaps and bounds. The second was the closest thing Chigozie had seen to a centaur: he had the body of a lizard that ran on all fours, though he could stand on his hind legs to elevate his man’s face when he wanted to look around. The third had the legs of a running bird and could easily pull ahead of all the others when it came to a contest.
The last member of the party that sneaked into the Great Green Wood was a Caddo boy named Ba’tshush. He was thin, with all the hair of his head shaved except for a narrow strip that ran down the center, front to back.
Whatever they were going into the Great Green Wood to retrieve, it was something the boy had seen.
Chigozie felt profoundly unsettled, but he also felt he had no choice. He had accepted the call of the Merciful to be their Shepherd. “The good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep,” and Chigozie was undertaking an insane risk in order to protect the Still Waters and its people from the soldiers of Zomas.
Chigozie, Ba’tshush, Ya’alu, and Naares all pretended to be the prisoners of Kort. To give veracity to the fraud, each ran with his hands loosely tied with the
same long cord, a string of prisoners behind the bison-headed giant.
The deception also required that Naares Stoach let Kort carry his weapons, concealed in a sack along with a few other items that might conceivably be plunder, including a box of colored chalks and a doll. Some of the paraphernalia belonged to the wizard, who would furtively consult a polished white stone by laying it over a leather map and peering into it when they took breaks from running, or cut the palm of Ba’tshush’s hand with a flake of obsidian and throw the liquid into the air when the wind was still, carefully observing which direction the drops flew. The wizard also anointed all their knees—or in the case of some of the beastkind, other joints that approximated the function of knees—at every stop with a thick reddish ointment taken from a stone jar.
“Will it make me faster?” Ferpa asked, the first time her knees received the unguent.
“You won’t tire,” the Zoman wizard said.
Ferpa grunted his acceptance.
It was a lie, though. Chigozie grew weary early on in their run. But somehow, despite a weariness that seemed to get simply worse and worse, beyond any fatigue Chigozie had ever endured, he had the strength to continue. He was exhausted, he knew it, but it didn’t matter to him.
They passed other travelers on the paths they trod, mostly beastkind. The children of Adam they saw were either prisoners—some looked Cahokian, some had the rough and ready look of Missourian Children of Eve, others still were Bantu or German—or people in flight. A Comanche band of two men and four women, with a handful of skinny children behind, rode past at nearly a gallop.
Between what the Caddo whispered and what the Zoman mage saw, the party reached a stone pyramid, rising above the snow-painted forest. They had traveled non-stop for three days, and Chigozie was unsure where they were. He’d faced into three sunrises and run generally downhill on a long, gradual decline, so they might be near the river, but he saw no sign of river birds and he didn’t smell the Mississippi.
Ya’alu again consulted her stone and map. “We go through the pyramid.”
Kort snorted and shifted from foot to foot.
“What do you mean, ‘through the pyramid’?” Naares asked. “Do you mean around it?”
“That’s not what the scrying stone tells me.” Ya’alu shrugged. “Through.”
“There is a place on the other side,” Kort said slowly. “It is on the river, but not the river as you know it.”
“Something like another world?” Ya’alu asked.
“There is no other world,” Kort said. “Not that I know. Though my Shepherd preaches a Heaven, and I want to believe. But I do know that this world is more complicated than it appears to the mortal eye. The Heron King lives beside the great river, in a place where no mortal foot can arrive unaided. This pyramid is the aid. It is a gate.”
“Do you feel uncomfortable going in there?” Chigozie asked the beastman.
“No,” Kort said. “I feel afraid.”
Ferpa lowed her mournful agreement.
The pyramid had openings in it like gaping mouths. Beastkind emerged from some and entered from others. Some of the beastkind moving into the pyramid had prisoners, either led on a string like Chigozie and his companions, carried over shoulders, or dragged along in carts.
None of the beastkind emerging from the pyramid had children of Adam with them.
Chigozie decided not to mention the fact.
Naares seemed to notice it, though. “Getting in seems easy enough. What about getting out?”
“We will have a hostage,” Ya’alu said. “If it comes to that.”
“I don’t like the idea of taking a hostage,” Chigozie said.
“Do you like the idea of being killed by an angry demigod?” Naares asked.
He didn’t, of course. Nor did he like the idea of kidnapping anyone in the first place. He liked nothing about what he was currently going through. “He’s not a demigod,” he protested weakly.
Naares snorted. “Say that to me again when he’s killed twenty thousand of your people, priest.”
Chigozie lowered his head, unwilling to either fight or concede.
“I have spells that will camouflage our flight,” Ya’alu said. “I have been preparing for this day.”
“You’re a specialist in kidnapping allies of the Heron King?” Chigozie asked.
“More or less,” she said.
“This is not the first Simon Sword my people have known,” Naares said. “Only we are not protected by the covenants of the Serpent Throne and the magics of the Heronblade. Onandagos’s other children stole those from us and left us naked in the woods to fend for ourselves as best we could.”
“Like Adam and Eve.” Ferpa looked at Chigozie as if confirming her understanding.
Chigozie nodded.
“No,” Naares Stoach said. “More like Ishmael, abandoned to die. Only an angel took care of that foundling. But over the centuries, we have learned to be our own angels, because we have had to. Someday, we’ll take back our birthright.”
“Not today?” Kort asked.
“No.” Naares pointed at the pyramid. “Today we’re going to take a hostage.”
They moved forward again, run now slowed to a march. Chigozie was full of questions for the Zoman outrider, but he was careful to ask them when they weren’t passing packs of beastkind.
“What are you going to do with this hostage?” he asked.
“A good strategist has more than one plan.”
“Will you tell Simon Sword that you’ll kill the hostage?”
“That’s a possibility. Another is that the mambo will…will empower us.”
“With her magic?” Chigozie asked. How much worse could this expedition get?
“Not exactly,” Naares said.
They followed a dark tunnel through the pyramid, and the space into which they emerged on the other side was free of snow and much warmer. The trees here still held their leaves; multiple avenues led off between the tree trunks in different directions. A flock of beasts that looked like alpacas—but three times the size, and with impossibly long necks—strode past, munching leaves well over Chigozie’s head.
And somewhere, to what should have been the east, Chigozie heard drums and chanting.
“I fear you will have us approach the drums,” he said. As he voiced the idea, he watched three beastmen with the heads of wolves drag a sledge full of children toward the rhythmic sounds.
Ya’alu consulted her map and stone. “No.” She pointed to the right, which felt to Chigozie like south. “This way.”
The land was flat and the soil moist and spongelike, as if it were built of millennia of river silt and rotting leaves. Just the touch of his heel in the soil made scents spring up that made Chigozie think of fertile farmland. Was this soil the reason the trees were so tall and strong, apparently bearing their leaves through the winter?
But no, that was obviously wrong. Whatever Kort said, this place was not the earth Chigozie knew.
To his right, moving silently through the forest in a line parallel to his own, Chigozie saw a tiger twice the size it should be, with teeth like scimitars. The beast noticed Chigozie’s gaze and slunk deeper into the woods, disappearing from view.
They followed the right-hand path for a mile or two. Chigozie saw beastkind such as he’d rarely seen before, dressed in elegant robes or wearing gold and silver jewelry, adorned with bits of amber and lapis lazuli. Some wore long feathers plaited into their hair or fur, or had their own feathers waxed or painted.
Most of the beastkind, and all of the children of Adam, were moving east. Chigozie’s breath came more thickly in his throat, the thicker the traffic became.
Ya’alu stopped their journey with a raised hand in a thick copse of trees. “It’s time to take a precaution.”
“The precaution I’d like to take is to bring along a cavalry squad,” Naares Stoach said. “Or more than one.”
“You have better than that.” Ya’alu winked at him. “You
have me.”
Naares snorted playfully.
“I will gladly see whatever precaution you have for us,” Chigozie said.
At Ya’alu’s direction, Kort opened his sack. She extracted five small skulls from the sack and handed one each to Naares, Chigozie, and the Caddo boy. She herself took the doll. Chigozie examined his skull: it was small, the skull of a gopher, or something similar. An iron staple had been pounded into its top, and a loop of twine passed through the staple.
“Each of you, touch your skull to one of our beastkind,” the wizard directed.
“They are not ours,” Chigozie said, “except in the sense that they are our friends and our companions. And they are not beastkind. They are the Merciful.”
“My name is Kort.”
The wizard sighed. “Please, now is not the time to complicate things.”
Chigozie turned to Kort. “May I?”
Kort smiled and laid a hand on the gopher skull.
The Zoman wizard chanted briefly, and then Kort laughed. “You have become like me,” he told Chigozie.
Chigozie wished he had a mirror, but he could see that each of the three other children of Adam in the group had become a perfect visual replica of one of the Merciful. Naares looked like Ferpa.
“We’ll attract less attention like this,” Ya’alu said.
Chigozie shrugged out of the lead cord, the others following his lead. Then they continued on their road.
After two slow curves in the road, they arrived at another stone pyramid. This one was considerably smaller than the immense tower through which they’d entered this queer realm, but also finer. Its stone had crisp corners and lines of gold tracing elaborate patterns on every surface. On some level, Chigozie expected hieroglyphs, wall-carvings or paintings, but the patterns resisted such easy analysis. Other than one obvious, recurring image: the pyramid was covered with images of skulls. Within whorls and square frames, precious stone panels sparkled, supplementing the shine of the gold. As greenish rays of light filtered down through the organic canopy above, they struck the stone and gave it the brilliant green hue of emerald, shading into the more somber greens of jade.