Calliope's Wings

by Guin Archer

  I pulled the spear from the slave and touched a hand to his back, relieved when I felt the life still in his aura. I forced my energies into him, healing the wound with brutal efficiency. It wasn’t a pain-free process for him, and I felt guilty for not being able to take my time, but this wasn’t an ideal situation. Not even close.

  The slave shouted in pain even as a shadow fell over me. I whirled, fisted spear and knife held awkwardly in my right hand, and saw the scythe swinging for me. My attacker’s face was partially shielded by a black mask, but his black eyes were wide and manic. He had size and surprise on his side and I knew no defense I could throw up would save my ass.

  Then, as if it’d been choreographed, the slave I had just healed hooked an arm backwards around my waist and flipped our positions so I was under him and his body was in the way of the scythe. At the same time, two Mahzri came at our attacker. One stole the weapon from him, the shaft snapping like kindling under his massive claws, while the other wrenched his head and neck in opposite direction from his arm and torso. The Tauren was dismembered in the time it would’ve taken me to get a proper breath in. When his mutilated body hit the packed, sandy ground, half his spine was torn from his back, his head was rolling off into the flames of a burning pillau, and his arm thudded against my feet.

  The Mahzri didn’t wait around. They chased after fleeing Tauren.

  “Innintani!”

  I blinked dazedly up at the slave hovering over me. His expression was a curious mixture of worshipful, terrified, and enraged. His hands clawed into the blackened ground on either side of my head. I gaped up at him stupidly.

  “You are unharmed?”

  “Aichi,” I agreed. My hand burned where I’d bum-rushed him with my energy and I felt the hit it took to my reserves. It was Granzee all over again.

  “Praise the One,” he uttered raggedly. He moved to take the spear from me. I didn’t release it. “I will protect You, uum Taytani.”

  No, he wouldn’t. I felt the pain of many injured auras radiating to me. I didn’t know if they were from members of the Horde or the invaders, but I knew I needed to help. I had to get up.

  “Move,” I snapped, shoving at his chest. Shock more than anything had the slave stumbling back off me. The smack from the long side of the spear helped, too. He hit his ass beside the severed arm, giving me plenty of room to come up to my feet.

  I started running blindly.

  Thank fucking God I had a veritable wall of Mahzri watching my back. They came from every direction, never keeping me out of sight. That was a good thing, too, because I was sure I’d have been made into mincemeat if it weren’t for them. They swept in like avenging angels, protecting me as one of their own before flocking off again.

  I wasn’t unduly surprised when my Zikta guard found me, taking up immediate defensive positions.

  “Taytani,” Forte snarled at me in an uncharacteristic show of aggression. Well, aggression aimed at me, anyway. “Stay put, you stubborn biis’a!”

  “Argh!” My forceful shout was for the male that slipped between Gaddi’s man, Daal, and Rohahn. He already had a battle-axe cleaving his side, but I snuck my blade up under his chin to his brain. Blood splashed down over my hands while his mouth spit more out into my face. When he hit the ground at my feet, the blade got stuck on his jaw.

  Fuck.

  Guess I was using my pilfered spear now.

  “Taytani, get down!” That was the only warning I had before a body was thrown over my head. I watched it go, knowing I was going to have nightmares once the shock wore off of his entrails spewing out of his slit stomach. A knotted mass of it even clipped my cheek, smearing ichor where it’d passed.

  “Who are they?” I stumbled up next to a Pasha who was crawling on her belly out of her burned pillau. Her copper skin was charred black in so many places, pustule blisters blown open everywhere. Her face was ravaged by agony and more blackened skin.

  Like with the impaled slave, I funneled my healing into her as quickly as possible. Even as she screamed from the quickfire mending, I was looking beyond her. I was looking for more injured. We were in the more condensed center of the Udonak now. There wasn’t room to escape so easily here and it was showing in the number of wounded stumbling around blindly.

  Fucking shit.

  “Ohmber,” Rohahn snarled, body-checking a male that was trying to flee. A female Mahzri picked him off, quite literally, and splattered his skull with a swift strike from her tail. Brain-matter rained out a good fifteen feet from the strike.

  “Thieves of the Sands,” Daal filled in as he slit the throat of another Ohmber. He peered off to the side and roared. He hefted the dead man’s spear and hurtled it into the chest of yet another Ohmber creeping between pillau. He’d been stalking a Pasha with familiar dark skin.

  Were we really that close to Gaddi’s pillau?

  “Gaddi! Ido!”

  My friend didn’t hesitate. She hurried to scramble herself into the protective circle of my guard. I could see that her arm was hanging oddly, like she’d dislocated her shoulder.

  “Come here,” I demanded. I split my healing between the burned Pasha and my friend. Gaddi’s injury was much easier once I had my hand on her.

  “Calliope,” she chided me even as she moaned. If we hadn’t been in the middle of a raid, I’d have been tickled pink at her using my name for the first time. “You should not waste Your power on…”

  “Silence.”

  She shut up quick when my energies lashed her. While my power was meant to serve and heal, the soothing heat could be ratcheted up to singe and sear. I could heal and punish at the same time.

  I wasn’t aware of that until today.

  “Forgive me,” I pressed out between gritted teeth. “Stay safe.”

  It felt like it took way too fucking long to work my way through the Horde. The Ohmber were culled quickly enough, but I had to wonder where they all came from. What could they be thinking to have attempted to raid the Udonak? Moreover, was it a coincidence that the Ohmber attacked when they did? With Kor and I-don’t-know-how-many Zikta were off on their own raids? Just after I’d exiled Uptip and Zek from the Udon?

  I believed in minor coincidences, yes, but not something major like this. Shit smelled so fishy you’d think we’d dropped into a fishmonger’s scraps bin.

  Bile kissed its way up my throat and into my mouth.

  While the Ohmber got the worst – by far – of the slaughterfest doled out to the Tauren, there were a fair number of Lubrei of the Horde hurt. I stretched my aura outwards, feeling for the most injured. It helped that the more able-bodied were carrying the felled to me for healing. My hands were raw from the power-surges I forced through them. Whatever stores of energy I had were dwindling away rapidly in the face of such severe wounds.

  “Fucking Christ,” I hissed as I tried to stand up and away from a Zikta who’d been sluiced through his eye by a needle-like blade. He caught me with a single hand under my chest while Gaddi ran to my side with a horn of nectar.

  “Uum Taytani, You should rest,” she husked out even as she rubbed my back supportively.

  “Where is Ruune? Where are my kut? Mari’et?”

  “I do not know, uum Taytani.”

  The Mahzri were filtering back into the Udonak from the fringes, most pulling down the remnants of the flaming pillau. Their hide was impervious to fire, I discovered. Interesting, but not enough for me to marvel at now.

  I slugged back the horn until it was empty. It barely improved my condition, my skin roasting and a headache throbbing in my skull.

  There were too many people still hurt. I didn’t have the reserves to help them all. I needed to find Mari’et and maybe, just maybe, we could work together to weed out who needed us and our powers most and who could survive with a few scars and subsist on natural remedies.

  “Uum Taytani!” Tan’s voice carrying over the din of the clamoring Horde was a welcome sound. My head jerked in the direction of where I’d heard her.
A relieved smile claimed my lips. She was being followed by Sekhmet, who was carrying Ruune and Mari’et on her back. Ruune was keeping my friend from toppling off. She looked about as drained as I felt.

  So much for tag-teaming with her.

  “Oh, Mari,” I lamented, helping my Xerbai to pass the healer down to me. She wobbled like she was drunk. I made myself grin into her tiredly blinking face. She summoned a shame-faced one in return. “You say I tire myself? There is a saying in my home; the pot calling the kettle black.”

  “Very wise, uum Taytani,” she murmured even as she slumped heavier into me. Tan took on Mari’s weight for me so I wasn’t crushed. The elder woman grimaced in shame.

  “I tried to stop her, uum Taytani, but she was forceful. She wished to help.” Her own eyes raked me up and down. Her grimace turned to a displeased frown. “You look…unwell.”

  “There is still healing to be done, Tan.” I palmed Mari’et’s cheek to make her look at me again. She was barely keeping her eyes open. Her aura was dimmed. She was exhausted and depleted. She might’ve been the one to teach me about how to use my powers, but I had more power than she did. Always had, even when I was Mathai’s slave in the port-city. Now that I was so well-kept, I could make an even greater difference.

  Still, I felt like total shit.

  “Lay her down,” I ordered Tan before scrubbing my hands over my face. Through my palms and fingers, I made my demands. “I need order. Bring the worst forward. I will tend to them first. If healing can be done without my chise now, those Lubrei must step aside. I need Sky-nectar. Now.”

  The sound of a horn blowing startled a scream out of me and I slapped a hand over my chest like that alone could keep my heart from catapulting from my ribcage.

  “The Tohtahk nears,” Ruune spoke up unnecessarily.

  “Too little, too fucking late,” I muttered to myself as I clambered up onto Sekhmet’s offered back. She still had my satchels tossed over her and I knew I had a flask of nectar lashed to the saddle.

  What happened next I probably should’ve expected.

  I mean, when did anything ever work out for me since waking on Intau? Karma was just itchin’ to get another bite out of me. I was accepting my place in this world and with my men, chickenshit Kor included, and thought I might actually want to stay. Of course something fucked up would happen.

  I had an instant of sharp pain ram through my neck from behind before everything went frighteningly numb. I saw blood spray and hit the faces of my nearest guard before my body was falling lifelessly forward. I wanted to lift my arms to brace myself, but they wouldn’t move. Nothing would.

  Rohahn caught me and I was a little nervous to see the stark spike of fear that passed over his face as I fell past his head. The male never emoted like that.

  The air around me filled with the loudest roars imaginable. Loud enough, I thought, to break the sound barrier. My eardrums popped from the cacophony and I tried to moan in pain. It was more of a gurgle than a groan. When I started to taste blood in my mouth and felt how hard it was getting to breathe, I knew something really fucking epically bad had just happened.

  One second the ground was facing me, the next I was being rolled to my back so I was looking up to the stars. It was a pretty night minus the stray wisps of smoke clouding the air.

  “Calliope. Uum Calliope,” Ruune’s sweet voice was tortured. I tried to reach out for him, to roll my head to find him with my eyes, but I couldn’t move. I felt liquid trickling in my airway and coughed mightily. More blood squirted over me with each ragged exhale. I blinked my eyes against the hot droplets when they landed back against my face.

  “Uum Taytani!”

  Oh, that was Kor. Where was he? He sounded close.

  No sooner did I think that thought than his face was there over me. He looked like hell. His silvered eyes were shot through with black and his thick plait of hair was in disarray over both sides of his scalp. His position ‘changed’ as my limp head and torso was lifted so I was more or less lying across Ruune’s lap. Then both their faces were staring intensely down at me.

  Hands petted my cheeks that I could barely feel.

  “Wake the other biis’a! Get the kut up!” Kor’s words were barked to someone else, but his gaze never left me. His blue-black aura was brimming with terror. Ruune’s too. Still, it felt inherently wrong for Kor to feel anything but powerful and surefooted. The male was unshakeable.

  Guess everyone has their breaking point.

  I tried to speak. I don’t know what I was going to say, but I still tried. It was for nothing. All I managed was to pop bubbles of blood on my lips.

  “Uum goran Zikta, You cannot leave me,” Kor rumbled despairingly. I saw him swallow thickly. “You must hold strong, Calliope. Do not close Your eyes.”

  Ruune’s body shuddered under me and I thought he’d be rocking me if I wasn’t as screwed up as I thought I was. My whole body was without feeling, but the encroaching black at the edges of my vision and my inability to breathe as I choked on my own blood was a sure sign of what was about to happen to me.

  I was dying.

  “Do not leave me,” Ruune wept freely, his equally silvered eyes brimming and overflowing with tears. His jaw was gritted as he tried to hold himself together. “I beg You, my love. Do not leave me.”

  Oh, baby, I wish I had a choice.

  “She is drowning from her lifeblood,” someone cried nearby. Sounds were getting duller now. I was getting close to breathing my last.

  “Wake Her kut! She can fix this!”

  “Innintani!”

  “The Ohmber die. Every last los’kah, biis’a, and shimi.” Kor’s voice boomed with lethal promise. His hands opened over either side of my face to hold it still so he could press our foreheads together. “Not a one will breathe the air. All of Intau will know Our wrath for what they have done to Our Innintani!”

  There were bloodthirsty bellows of agreement, but they were interspersed with sobs and a ceaseless racket of sound from the Mahzri. It was so loud, I would’ve closed my eyes to try and retreat from it if I didn’t know I was moments away from death.

  I needed to try and speak.

  “L-l-l-luh,” I coughed and choked. This time when I hacked up blood, Kor’s sheltering hands kept the droplets from blinding my eyes. The man looked at his blood-stained fingers with abject horror.

  “Io,” Ruune chanted my name like a prayer. A sad, mournful prayer. My heart wrenched for him.

  I tried again.

  “L-l-lo-love…yo-o-ou.” When I blinked, my eyelids wouldn’t lift again.

  “Io!”

  “Uumat!”

  “B-both,” I finished my struggled proclamation on a gurgling wheeze. This time, when I tried to get air back in, it didn’t work. I couldn’t breathe. It was like drowning all over again, only this time I was being suffocated by my own blood.

  Yeah, this shit was going to the top of my list of worst deaths.

  I know my men were talking to me when I finally succumbed. They were begging and cursing and making bestial, inhuman sounds of anguish. I know everyone was freaking out. I couldn’t blame them. Still, I wasn’t able to do anything to help them. I couldn’t make this easier for them to deal with because, really, I was the one stepping through death’s door. I was just wishing I could feel the rest of my body again so I could at least go with the sensation of Ruune’s strong, warm arms wrapped around me.

  When I died this time, it was more bittersweet than any other.

  I was finally surrounded by people I loved and loved me in return, but I couldn’t feel them. I couldn’t relish in their nearness

  I tossed spitting venom at Fate.

  Fuck you and your fucking sense of humor, you sadistic bitch.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  I wasn’t supposed to resurrect while drowning.

  I don’t know for how long I was ‘dead’, but it couldn’t have been more than several seconds of nothingness when an otherworldly blue light grew
so great around me that it actually penetrated through my eyelids. I screamed loudly – no longer gurgling on my own blood – as my body was tossed about in the buffering winds and slammed my palms up against my face for protection.

  In the next moment, I plummeted down not onto hard stone or sand, but water. The unmistakable taste of salt water blasted my tongue in my open mouth as I hit the sea face first. Swinging my arms and legs wildly, I looked not by sight but by feel for the surface. A wave crashed against my side and threw my equilibrium more askew when I was made to roll helplessly and further down. I felt awkward and heavy.

  Not good.

  I kicked frantically for what I hoped was an upward direction. The limited amount of air in my lungs burned in my panic. Dazzling lights flashed behind my closed eyelids. When my fingers flashed out and caught a cooler sensation, I propelled my body in that direction without thought. In reward, my face touched open air and I breathed in as deeply as I could.

  Another wave struck and again I was thrust under. I had an absurd feeling of remorse for harassing that poor mole in the arcade. Poor bastard didn’t deserve the battering he got.

  When next I emerged, I kept a frantic eye out for the next rolling wave that was bound to strike me. The water was so dark it could’ve been black ink. The sky was shadowed by ghastly, darkened storm clouds and rain beat down in stinging sheets against the water’s surface. The only light I could see by was from the multitude of lightning strikes arcing across the sky and a veritable rainbow of bioluminescent whorls stretching wide along my backside.

  The water was choppy. It brought images to mind of movies where fishermen are dragged down to the unholy depths of the sea, never to resurface. I could all but imagine Intau’s version of a kraken reaching up to strangle me with its mighty tentacles. Between the rain and the waves, I was fighting a losing battle for air and to stay surfaced.