by Sam Sykes
She found the blood not long after: spatters of red running down a dune, around a large rock. She followed them closely, eyes locked on the ground, ears full of sound.
And between the two of them, she didn’t even notice the claw lashing out.
Instinct—or luck—kept her feet aware, even if her senses weren’t. She leapt away, catching a glimpse of the blood-streaked talons as they narrowly missed catching her by the flank. She darted away, drawing an arrow and nocking it as a great head peered around the rock.
A long, black beak ran up to a pair of wide, unblinking eyes. Golden and perfectly round as coins, they looked at Kataria with a predatory intellect. The beast lowered its head and thrust a pair of pronged horns at her threateningly, making that low, guttural noise.
So, she thought, that’s what scraws look like close up.
Somehow, she’d imagined they’d be filthier.
She lowered her bow. The arrow was ready, but it wasn’t what was going to save her. That would be thanks to her slow movements, her averted gaze, and the wide berth she gave the beast as she circled around the rock. She knew the noise it made.
The creature made it again—a low, panicked rumble—as she came into its view, but it did not move toward her. She had surprised it earlier, come in too quick. Faced with her now, moving slowly and cautiously, it didn’t think her worth the effort.
Not with that arrow sticking out of it, anyway.
She took the creature in through stolen glimpses, unwilling to meet its eyes and set it off. She saw its long, powerful body—hooves on one end, bloodied talons on the other. That, she assumed, was how Kenki had met his end. A saddle was mounted on its back, behind its wings. Long reins dangled from its head, metal bits clinking as it growled. Its wings were folded tightly against its body, though the left one trembled with the effort, straining against the arrow lodged in its shoulder.
The beast watched her carefully, conserving its energy, gauging her movements. The cleverest beast she had ever met was a horse that could count to five; this was a little out of her depth.
Still, it was a beast, and there were certain laws that all beasts adhered to. No eye contact. No sudden movements. No loud noises.
And if humans can train them, they can’t be that smart.
She drew closer, keeping the beast’s talons in the corner of her eye; if it was going to move, those would move first. She kept herself at its middle, still within eyesight, but too far for it to use its claws easily. Or hooves. Or horns. Or beak.
Really, getting so close to a wounded animal with so many ways to kill her wasn’t the best idea. And she wasn’t sure what she would accomplish by doing it. Maybe it would fly away. Maybe it would kill her and then fly away. She didn’t know.
But there was a lot she didn’t know lately.
She reached out, holding her breath as she touched the beast’s flank. It shuddered and let out a low growl. But it didn’t move. And she wasn’t dead. She exhaled, let her hand linger there, let it become accustomed to her touch. Her hand slid toward the arrow in its shoulder. She brushed fingers against it. The scraw’s growl became a shrill rasp.
She closed her eyes. Absently, she wondered how quickly Kenki had died.
And then she wrapped her fingers around the arrow and pulled.
The rasping sound became a shriek. The beast leapt to all fours, hooves stomping the earth. Kataria backed away but kept her eyes shut. She waited for the feel of hooves cracking her skull or talons slicing open her belly or a beak pecking out her throat.
She felt only the shriek in her ears. The rush of hot air beneath massive wings.
Slowly, she opened her eyes. And met the beast’s.
The scraw’s head was lowered. Great golden eyes stared down a long beak at her. It let out a low chirruping sound, canting its head as though it expected her to give a reply. The feral panic was gone, replaced by a peculiar sort of intellect playing its in eyes.
But all beasts adhered to certain laws. And, as she slipped a hand into the pouch at her side, she knew it was still a beast.
She produced an egg—hard-baked from that morning before they had broken camp—and held it out in front of the creature. It regarded her with instant attention. She tossed it into the air, stepped back. Its beak snapped up and swallowed it down quickly.
“There,” she whispered. “I gave you food. I took an arrow out of you. The way I see it, you owe me.” She shot the beast a glare. “You can start by just staying there and not killing me.”
She turned her attentions from the scraw to the arrow in her hand. It looked like any other shictish arrow: a long shaft, a barbed head, black feathers. There was nothing particularly special about it.
And yet the sight of it chilled her.
They were here. Khoshicts. So many. So close to Cier’Djaal. They had been in enough of a hurry that they left one of their own behind, unheard-of in hunting parties.
But then, Shekune was not leading a hunt.
She looked to the scraw, idly cleaning away flecks of dried blood from its talons with its beak. This creature had seen them. As clever as shicts were, they couldn’t hide from something so high up. That was why they had shot it down. But they had failed to kill it. And if it could find them once …
“Holy fuck, get back!”
She looked up at the sound of his voice. Lenk came barreling down the dune, sword in hand. The scraw let out an angry rasp at his approach. She held up a hand to calm him.
“Put that away, moron,” she snarled. “Spook it and you’ll get me killed.”
“Keep away from it,” Lenk warned, lowering his sword but slowing his approach. “Those things are dangerous.”
“Oh, I’m sure once you look past the giant claws and beak, they’re quite cuddly.” Her ears flattened against her head. “I know they’re dangerous. That’s why I keep telling you to put your fucking sword away.” She let out a breath, looked back to the scraw. “This one’s fine. For now, at least.”
Lenk glanced from the beast to her. Slowly, he sheathed his blade. She nodded, waved him forward.
“Come here. Slowly.”
He eyed the creature warily. “You’re sure it’s safe?”
“If you keep acting stupid, I can’t guarantee you won’t die. But I can promise that it won’t be the one to kill you.” She sneered. “Yes, I’m sure he’s safe.”
“He?”
“Well, I’m not going to go under there and check.” She looked over at the scraw and patted its brow. “If he’s a she, I’ll apologize to him later. Her later. Whatever. I’ll take care of it after we get to Cier’Djaal.”
“Cier’Djaal?” He shot her an incredulous look. “You can’t mean to fly that thing.”
“Why not? That’s what they’re made to do.”
“By Sainites. Sainites who have years of training.”
She snorted, waving him off. “Sainites are just humans with fancy hats. And a human is just a monkey wearing clothes. And if a monkey in a fancy hat can ride this thing, I can, too.” She put her hands on her hips and looked the beast over. “I mean, I can ride a horse, can’t I?”
“This isn’t a horse.”
“Half of it is.” She glanced at its hindquarters, toward its cloven hooves. “I mean, it looks more like a goat, but you get what I’m saying. Besides …”
She approached the creature’s flank. It watched her attentively but did not move as she slid a foot into the stirrup and hoisted herself onto its back. It settled easily as she mounted it, held itself attentive as she took its reins in both hands. She shot a grin down at Lenk.
“I don’t see you with any good ideas.”
There was something in him when he looked up at her; that brittleness in his scars had seeped into the corners of his eyes like tears. She could still remember the last time he had looked at her like that. Right before they had left Cier’Djaal. Right before she had decided to tell him she couldn’t go with him. Right before she did, anyway.
Sh
e hadn’t expected to see that look again. And she hadn’t expected to feel what she did when she saw it again.
But ever since yesterday, when she had stood between him and Oerboros, firing arrows into a foe she couldn’t kill to protect him, it had been there.
And it wasn’t going away.
She reached down. He looked at her hand for a moment, thinking the same thing she was, and knowing the same thing she knew.
He took it. She pulled him up behind her. He drew in close. His hands slid around her waist. And while his eyes were cold and his scars were soft, his hands were warm on her skin and behind her, he felt like a stone. Solid. Immovable. Not going anywhere.
She remembered the last time she had felt this, too, the last time she had felt him. Out there, long before they had come to Cier’Djaal, long before all this, she had felt it every day. Out in the wilds, far from civilization and its problems, that was all she had felt. The feeling that, regardless of how many monsters were out there or how far from help they might have been, he would always be there.
Solid as a stone.
The days up to this moment all felt like fever dreams. The days of endless running, of fears and worries and failures, they were no less real. But only now did she realize how exhausted she was from them. Only now did she realize how much she had missed the feeling of someone else watching her back.
And, with a heavy heart, she realized she wasn’t ready to let that go. Not yet.
Shekune couldn’t attack an army the size of the tulwar and the humans. No matter how many she had. Whatever plot she was about to launch, it wouldn’t be soon.
Khoth-Kapira, though, was much closer, much bigger, and he didn’t care about numbers.
Save the world first. Save the shicts once they had a world to live in.
Simple.
She flicked the reins. The scraw chirruped, turned, and started off at a canter. Lenk’s hands tightened around her waist.
“Calm the fuck down,” she said. “See? It’s just like riding a horse.”
“We’re still on the ground,” he replied. “When we’re in the sky …”
“I’ll handle that, too.” She reached down, laid her hand on his. “Trust me.”
“Try to understand, madam.” Aturach attempted to wipe his frustration and sweat alike off his face. He forced his most pleasant smile for the third time. “We have every intention of holding the tulwar at bay. But on the chance that they do break through, we can only protect you if you come to the city.”
The woman on the stoop of the shack looked back at him with contempt from a face that had been weathered from years of toiling in rice fields. She spared a little more respect for the trio of Djaalic men behind him, with their makeshift spears and shields, but for a finely clothed, soft-fingered priest like him?
He might as well have been trying to convince a dog not to eat its own shit.
“It’s you that doesn’t understand,” the farmer grunted. “You had your fancy temple given to you. Your faithful pay for your food and your clothes. I had to work all my life.” She stomped the deck of her stoop. “And this is all I have for it. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to leave it because you said so.”
“But madam, the tulwar—”
“I saw the armies heading to Harmony Road,” she replied. “I saw those great scraws flying overhead. My grandpa used to tell me tales of them, how they beat back the Karnerians. I can’t imagine a force on this dark earth that could stand against them. So long as they’re still flying, I’ll be just fine.”
She settled back on her heels, a smug smile on her face. Aturach’s hands clenched into fists as he tried to conceive of a reply that wasn’t mostly curses.
Before he could even open his mouth, though, he heard the great flap of wings. In the distance, an avian shriek pealed through the sky. And in another breath, it was so close that his ears shook with the force of it.
The great beast came barreling through the sky overhead, jerking wildly through the air and letting out angry screams as it did. It flew so low that the Djaalics threw themselves to the ground. And though Aturach couldn’t see its two riders beyond their gold and silver hair, he could certainly hear them—or one of them—screaming as they flew by.
“… uckfuckfuckfuckFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKfuckfuckfuckfuckfu …”
When Aturach got to his feet again, the scraw was becoming a speck in the distance. The farmer stared at it disappearing, mouth open and eyes wide. After a very long moment, she looked back at Aturach, sighed, and turned to go inside her shack.
“Fine,” she grunted. “Let me just get a few things.”
THIRTY-FIVE
THE HERALDING STORM
Even so far away, he was still so big.
On the high ridge, far from battle, she could just barely see Gariath through the spyglass. Yet against the morning sun, he loomed like a scorch mark on the earth. Arms folded over his chest, wings spread, eyes on the battle below. He said nothing, he barely moved.
As he watched hundreds die.
“Rua Tong!”
Asper glanced down. Another wave of tulwar surged forward: steel flashing, roars flying, faces alive with color. Their war cry was just loud enough for her to hear this time as they hurled themselves at the wall of the phalanx, heedless of the barely cold corpses of their comrades to find the Karnerian spears.
That was the fourth one today.
They cared nothing for the crossbow bolts raining down upon them, nor for the wall of spears and shields that met them every time. They barely even seemed to notice the hundreds more that had died before them—and the tiny few humans they managed to kill—each time they ran at the impenetrable wall of Karnerians and Sainites.
There were still thousands of them, to be sure. But so many had died already, having killed so few.
And they just kept coming.
“Something’s changed.”
Haethen’s eyes were locked on the battle below. Sweat fogged her spectacles as she squinted through the morning sun. She nervously chewed at her thumbnail, having already gnawed through the others on that hand, as she watched the tulwar crash into the wall of shields.
“They’re charging too frequently,” the Foescribe muttered. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“Trying to wear us down,” Asper replied. “See how they keep coming, one after the other? Never letting us rest?”
“Oh, good. I was worried that my years of tactical experience and knowledge wouldn’t be enough to deduce a mind-bogglingly simple strategy.” Haethen turned an ugly sneer upon her. “Thank the gods I have a peasant inexplicably chosen by heaven to fucking point out the blatantly fucking obvious to me. I wonder what fucking deed I did to earn this fucking blessing from on high.”
Asper blinked. “You seem upset.”
Haethen shook her head, looked away. “Apologies, Prophet. It’s just …” She gestured out to the field. “The numbers they’re sending are too small to be an attempt to wear us down. There’s too long between each wave. They’re just being … sent out. It’s a desperation tactic.”
“That’s good, isn’t it? They should be worried about us.”
“A desperate animal is an animal that can’t be controlled,” Haethen said. “If they all decide to charge the road at once …”
“Then their losses would be catastrophic.”
“And so would ours,” Haethen said. “And, at last report, more clans were still trickling in to join the battle.”
Asper grimaced as she looked through the spyglass again. A small battalion of tulwar archers, their bows strung and arrows nocked, had ringed Gariath’s station. Likely to fend off scraw attacks—not that it mattered, with Blacksbarrow’s regiment still at the Lyre holding back the tulwar boats. But Haethen was correct; those archers hadn’t been there last night.
“He’d risk his entire army,” she said. “But the odds are in his favor.” With a suddenness that made Asper start, she slammed her fist on the railing. “Where the hell are th
e Venarium? Shinka said they would be here.”
Asper didn’t have the heart to answer that, nor the strength to dwell on it. They had sent runners to the tower all day and received no answer. And while that had been the case before today, at least yesterday those runners had come back.
“If we need to pull back …” she said.
“Careus is still in control down there. He’d let us know if he wasn’t.”
Above even the tulwar, the speaker’s booming cries thundered. He thrust his sword forward, directing the phalanx in a massive push to crush the tulwar horde once more. Asper tried to ignore the impression that he sounded a little hoarser this time.
“Still,” Haethen said, “if the dragonman is losing control, that presents a new scenario. One we must prepare for.”
Asper stared at him. From here, he was tiny: a puny thing that she could barely even see if she lowered her spyglass. Yet every time she did, her eye was still drawn to him. And even though he was far away, she knew he could see her, as well.
There had been times before when she would have believed Gariath was out of control. There had been names she had for him, then: berserker, lunatic, psychotic. But as time had gone on and he had left more bodies in his wake, she realized she only called him those names because they were more comforting than the truth.
Every bone he had broken, every throat he had ripped open, every corpse he had thrown to the cold earth …
He meant to do them. Each and every one of them. Never once had he lost control.
And he wouldn’t, this time, either.
She knew, surely as she knew he was staring at her, that he wouldn’t stop until she was dead.
There.
Right there, beyond the cliffs. Past the corpses and the blood and the spears and the shields, there she was. He could barely see her. And he might have simply been deluding himself by thinking he could smell her. But the smell of arrogance and hate was in his nostrils, all the same.