Path of the Crushed Heart: Book Four of the Serpent Catch Series

by David Farland

This was bigger even than the great horned dragons that rode the thermals out at sea, and Darrissea knew instinctively that it had been engineered by the Creators to hunt humans, that it was sniffing at the doors for them.

  A few moments later, after circling the deck, the dragon returned to the cabin door and sat, snuffling and licking at the door, tasting their scent on its tongue.

  None of them moved or spoke for nearly an hour, simply hoping the predator would leave, but Darrissea sweated a storm, and realized she was only making it worse, filling the cabin with the taste of her fear.

  Finally the dragon roared and leapt into the sky. She waited for several moments for it to return, and when it did not, Darrissea heaved a sigh of relief.

  “Adja. I fear we can’t stay here,” Fava whispered. “This place has evil kwea.”

  “I don’t think we can leave right now,” Tull replied. “I hear serpents patrolling the coast.”

  “I can’t hear them,” Darrissea said.

  “They talk very deep. You can almost feel the sound trembling through your bones rather than hear it with your ears.”

  Darrissea listened, shook her head. “I can’t hear anything.”

  “I hear it,” Fava answered after a few seconds.

  “You Pwi and your strong ears,” Darrissea said. “If they become silent, can we leave?”

  “If they become silent,” Tull said, “it means only that they’ve quit talking.”

  Darrissea asked, “Couldn’t we outrun them?”

  Tull considered. “They can call to one another for miles, and they hunt in packs, driving their prey. I’d rather try to sneak away.”

  The serpents that they had seen were juveniles, and Darrissea wondered if the metal hull could protect them against such small beasts if a serpent coiled around the boat.

  Fava stared through the small tear in the tarpaulin. “I see more dragons outside, floating on the wind.” She exhaled a deep breath. Above they heard the soft scrabbling of bird claws, the scrape of beaks as gray birds settled on the boat again.

  They crept down into a storage room below and locked themselves in.

  For hours they waited, and Fava pulled off the bandages from Tull’s chest to store them.

  The wound had finally stopped seeping, though the strange blue scar seemed to have grown wider. It was nearly two inches wide and a foot long, and she said, “The scar seems bigger than the wound was. How does it feel?”

  “It’s getting better,” he said.

  He put his tunic back on, furtively, almost as if he felt guilty, then he let Fava lay her head on his chest and softly sing. In the muted light, Darrissea could see little.

  For some reason that she couldn’t fathom, she could not help but feel jealous. Loneliness stings.

  Darrissea wished Phylomon were near so that she could lay her own head in his lap, feel safe in his arms. Darrissea could not help but think about how Phylomon had kissed her last night, when he thought she slept. “Find someone good to love.” They were not the words of someone who was dead to love.

  Yet she feared he was dead to the world.

  For the past several days, she’d been thinking about it. If the Creators’ symbiotes were so much stronger than Phylomon’s, he would need a powerful weapon to kill them.

  She suspected that his weapon would kill him, too.

  “You know, you once told me that you admired my courage, because I always speak the truth,” Darrissea said to Tull. “And I’ve admired yours, because you are not afraid to live.”

  Tull grunted in answer.

  Darrissea continued, “I feel like we are both cowards now. We came to fight the Creators, but we’re not fighting. We’re letting Phylomon do it. And in Bashevgo, what did we accomplish? Back in Smilodon Bay we promised to destroy the slavers, but we’ve run from them.”

  “The slaves don’t want to be freed,” Fava countered. “You saw how they turned against Phylomon and the Hukm.”

  Darrissea apologized in the Blade Kin’s behalf, “They were only afraid of the Hukm.”

  Tull said, “You’re right, we made a vow, but who do we kill? The Slave Lords? I saw them in Denai—beautiful people who were more interested in parties than in ruling slaves. Most of them don’t run anything. They’re just merchants, buying and selling goods to one another.

  “So shall we kill the Blade Kin? They’re apes, beating their chests to seek one another’s admiration. You should have seen Mahkawn’s eyes as he thrust the sword into me. He called me his ‘friend,’ and he was being as compassionate as he knew how.

  “So shall we kill the Thralls who continue to serve the Slave Lords and the Blade Kin? Shall we be reduced to eliminating the greatest victims of the state?” Tull asked. “In Smilodon Bay the answer seemed easy. Perhaps the Creators are right, and it is time to tear the whole thing down, destroy mankind and start over.”

  “You don’t believe that, do you?” Fava said.

  “I don’t know what to believe.”

  “In Bashevgo,” Fava said, “Wertha had begun to think that you are the Okansharai, that you could free Bashevgo. He was praying for you.”

  Tull laughed. “He shouldn’t have wasted his breath.”

  “We made a covenant,” Darrissea said. “You promised to help me.”

  “I’ll do what I can, everything that I can” Tull said. “Once I learn the art of Spirit Walking, we should be able to help some slaves escape from Craal and Bashevgo. But think of it: For every slave we free, a dozen more will be born. In time we could build a nation of free men, but we would never be a match for Craal.” Darrissea began to speak, but Tull stopped her with a motion of his hand. “Listen—”

  Darrissea heard moaning. She’d have thought it the creaking of timbers in the boat, but this metal ship made no such sounds.

  “The serpents are leaving,” Tull whispered. “They’re angry about something.”

  He gently moved Fava aside, got up, opened the door and ran up into the cabin, then stood hunched, looking out the slit in the tarpaulin. It was far darker than Darrissea had expected, and she realized that her time below had gone fast. Night had fallen.

  “I see a ship!” Tull said. “Tantos has come to battle the Creators. He is firing laser cannons.”

  Darrissea and Fava rushed up, looked out the slit. Several miles out to sea, a huge metal ship lit the night with cannon fire.

  A great battle was raging. The Creators’ dragons had besieged the ship from above, while the great serpents did the same from beneath, yet Tantos had brought the same armored behemoth he’d used to transport slaves from the Rough, and against that ship the Creators’ beasts appeared ineffectual.

  The conventional cannons began roaring from the decks, belching white plumes of smoke and spitting fire, while portable laser cannons sliced the air above. The gray birds didn’t join the attack, did not even seem aware of the roaring cannons in the distance.

  “They’re getting closer,” Darrissea said. “Could they spot us?”

  “Not if we leave now,” Fava answered.

  Before Darrissea had time to react, Fava opened the cabin door and stepped outside. For several minutes she made no noise, then the tarp over the front windows was pulled away.

  Darrissea went to the window. The shore was black with sleeping birds, as was the deck of the boat.

  She watched as Fava tied the tarp at the top, and then crept slowly to the bow of the ship, tiptoeing between the sleeping birds.

  Sometimes, birds would turn and slash her ankles with their beaks as they slept, and Fava bit her lip and tried not to cry out. She untied the rope that held the boat to shore, and stood up, wobbling.

  She staggered back to the door, heedless of birds nipping at her ankles. As she stepped in, she was panting, sweating, and she fell to the floor.

  Tull grabbed her and hugged her. “You shouldn’t have done that.”

  “Wash my feet!” Fava cried, near hysterics. “They are like ice. I can’t feel them!”

&n
bsp; Tull ran down to the galley, got some water, and Darrissea held Fava.

  “I … I’m sorry,” Fava said. “I think I’ve been poisoned. I had to do it. I had to unmoor the boat, before my courage failed.”

  Tull rushed back up to pour water over Fava’s wounds. “They’re bleeding well. Any poison should come out,” he said hopefully, and Darrissea studied the wounds. They were bleeding more than well. They were a mess, slashed half a dozen times each, and Darrissea felt amazed that the birds could have done so much damage so casually.

  Outside, the booming cannons drew nearer. Fava looked up at Tull, panting. “Get the boat out of here,” she told him. “There’s nothing more that you can do for me.”

  Her constricted breathing filled the silence of the cabin, and sweat gleamed on her forehead in the failing light. Darrissea took the stick to the ship, fired the engine, and tried to back the boat away from shore.

  It wouldn’t budge.

  “We’re too high on the sand,” she yelled at Tull. “We need to push off.” She looked down at Fava’s feet. The girl had not been wearing boots.

  Darrissea grabbed some cloth, tied it around her own boots, reinforcing the supple leather. The Blade Kin had taken her armor when they captured her, so she had no other protection.

  She threw on a heavy tunic, grabbed a long-bladed knife. Tull was still on the floor, washing Fava’s feet.

  “Good luck,” Darrissea said, and she rushed up to the cabin door, went out on deck.

  She walked slowly in the moonlight, and still the birds ripped at her feet when she tried to nudge them aside.

  She used the knife to parry, and made her way to the sand. She leapt down, pushed the boat off.

  It moved out into the water more easily than she had thought it would, and soon the boat was bobbing in the waves.

  Tull appeared at the window, and waved, urgently motioning for her to jump in the water, wade out to the boat.

  Instead, Darrissea waved goodbye, whispering, “Good luck.”

  She pulled her cloak tight, then slowly made her way up the beach toward the tangled woods, following Phylomon’s tracks in the sand.

  Tull waited several minutes, then fired the engines. Abruptly the boat turned and sped north.

  ***

  Chapter 26: The Guardians

  Six miles inland, Phylomon found that the birds were not so thick. The brushy hills were full of small rodents, something like pikas that feasted on tall, lush grass that somehow grew lush and green even in winter.

  The morning sun had just crested the hills, and with the creeping light of day, the island came to life.

  No snow covered the ground; no chunks of ice even clung to the hills, and so far north, Phylomon recognized this as virtually impossible until he placed his hand in the soil and felt its warmth, the depth of the humus.

  He picked up a bit. It radiated warmth.

  Bacteria, he realized, generating heat to warm the soil. Around him, the lush grass grew so fast that it seemed he could actually watch it grow if he stood long enough.

  The little pikas had run in herds of thousands, feeding and breeding all through the night.

  Now, with the dawn, the gray birds swarmed to feed on rodents. Phylomon hid from them in a small cave, and the gray birds ate their fill, but left after only two hours, and he crept into the open and continued on his hunt.

  In the course of a day Phylomon watched the surviving rodents bear large litters of twenty or more in the deep grass, saw young feed and reach adulthood by midnight, completing an entire life cycle within hours, so that the birds could feed again at dawn.

  Walking through the open, Phylomon became an easy target for dragons. Tyrant birds, small and ferocious, swooped upon him three times, dropping out of the night sky.

  Each time, ozone crackled around Phylomon, and lightning flew from his blue skin to kill the birds. It wasted terrible amounts of energy, weakening his defenses.

  In the late night, he climbed some foothills and looked down on a small seaport with orchards all about, a town of many thousands, and he grew wary, kept to the rocks. There were no towns this far north, no human or Pwi settlements at least, and Phylomon realized that these must all be blood eaters that the Creators planned to unleash.

  The town was not built of simple wood or stone; instead, the houses were octagon enclosures, resembling gray tortoise shells. Phylomon had not seen their like in ages. The domes were bioengineered so that each house was a living entity, like a coral formation.

  The blood eaters had no windows to their homes, no chimneys. Phylomon suspected that the beasts needed no heat; the warm soil beneath them sufficed.

  He hid in the shadow of a rock and watched.

  The blood eaters worked in the moonlight, planting and harvesting fields, building coracles in the bay.

  Phylomon could see no young among them. Apparently there would be no future generations.

  Still, if the blood eaters managed to invade the human settlements, they could feed for forty or sixty years. The sheer number of gray birds warned Phylomon that the Creators would try to wipe out mankind in one massive attack.

  Those who managed to escape would fall prey to the blood eaters; finally, when the last humans and Neanderthals had died, the blood eaters themselves would starve.

  If men were to save themselves, they would have to shun one another, become solitary animals, suspicious, violent.

  Few children would be born, and they would be teethed on paranoia, nurtured in barbarity, until the fabric of society unraveled.

  Technology would be forgotten.

  Any survivors would live a stone-age existence, stalked by the blood eaters.

  If I cannot kill the Creators, Phylomon thought, perhaps I can rescue some small portion of humanity. Hide them in Hotland, on the far side of the world, and return in a few hundred years. Perhaps the Creators are right, and it is time to tear it all down, start over.

  Yet Phylomon could not console himself with such a solution. Too many lives were at stake—lives that, too often, he detested.

  Phylomon became weary, closed his eyes, and let his mind drift.

  From his youth, hundreds of years ago, Phylomon replayed memories of things his father had taught him about the Creators.

  Though Phylomon had helped program them, he had never seen the finished product.

  He remembered his father, an old man who would no longer wear a symbiote, saying, “They’ve taken refuge in a system of caves to the north.”

  Phylomon tried to recall if he’d ever seen a map of the island that showed the entrance to the caves. If he had, it had not been in his youth when seritactates still enhanced his memory.

  Yet, he recalled the schematics of the Creators from a holo. Heat from their huge bodies generated power to drive their crystalline brains. Platinum neurosynaptic adapters fed commands from the brain to the biological portion of the giant worms.

  To facilitate birth through their omniwombs, the Starfarers had built the Creators without skeletons, giving them a strong, flexible pseudoskeleton of cartilage.

  Over that they had placed the symbiotes.

  It would not be well, Phylomon told himself, to underestimate them.

  The symbiotes, most likely, would protect themselves with beasts of their own design. Not for the first time, the Starfarer wondered at his own audacity. He could creep through some of the defenses the Creators had set up. The dragons and small birds posed no significant threat. One man could sneak past, while an army would merely attract their attention.

  But beyond those, what would the Creators have prepared? Perhaps it would not be possible for Phylomon to even get close to the Creators.

  Thinking such morbid thoughts, Phylomon drifted to sleep while light clouds blew in, blanketing the fields with snow.

  He woke shortly after dawn to a silver sky with feathered clouds that still smelled of water.

  The snow had melted so that the green blades of grass peeking from the stone around
him looked as if they were covered with dew.

  Below, in town, the blood eaters worked their fields and orchards. Many were walking a makeshift road beside a river that led through the trees into the hills.

  Phylomon watched a large gray bird with the head of a woman fly along the rocky ridge where he hid, up toward a craggy volcano several miles away. When it neared the base, it dove out of sight.

  That is where the Creators can be found, he realized.

  Phylomon set out immediately, skirting the road, climbing through rocks. Once, he stopped to look down on a small orchard where blood eaters had gathered around squat green trees to drink from dark-red fruits that hung like bladders.

  Even at this distance, Phylomon could discern the red dripping from their faces, like children slurping the juice from watermelons.

  Phylomon was grateful that the Creators had given the creatures a source of blood, for he had imagined herds of humans kept alive solely to fill the bellies of these monsters.

  A little farther up the road, Phylomon reached a line of trees that were bone-white, leafless, and smelled of carrion. In all his thousand years, he had never seen such trees, so he skirted them, keeping from under their limbs.

  Two miles beyond that he reached a second road that intersected the first.

  He stopped. Both roads ran through steep gullies and were deeply rutted—not by wheels, but by feet. At the juncture of the two canyons stood a gray tyrannosaur, watching as blood eaters disguised as humans and Neanderthals passed almost at belly height.

  Phylomon pondered the beast for a long time.

  It held almost perfectly still, in the way reptiles will, watching the road with one dark eye. Up ahead the mountains were too steep for Phylomon to climb. He could see no way to move forward without descending to the trail. But that meant passing the tyranosaur.

  He waited till the road was clear, then backtracked around a bend and climbed down into the deep, narrow chasm.

  Just as his feet hit sand, wings whistled above him as another of the Creators’ messengers flew overhead, another large bird with the face of a woman.

  Though her eyes stared at him as she flew over, Phylomon saw no gleam of recognition in them.