But as the dark, indistinct man-shape ahead came closer, she began to think that it was not nearly big enough, its footsteps not nearly heavy enough. And what then? What if this was one of the a’Krah? God damn it, why couldn’t anything ever be simple?
“Miss Shea?” The voice spoke in soft, smooth Marín.
She froze, momentarily amazed past breathing. “Hakai!” She bounded up to her feet to go after him, to throw herself at him. “You have a very devil’s nerve –” Then she was coughing again, an unbearable agonizing spasm that staggered her, left her on her knees and heaving in the shallows. By the Artisan’s broken blisters, that bullet was going to kill her –
– WOULD have killed her. But now Hakai was here. He would fix everything.
“I am sorry to hear you feeling so poorly, Miss Shea.” He was coming up to the water’s edge now, reaching down to fill the canteen with one hand and help her up with the other.
“You should be!” she replied, when she finally had the breath to say so. “You rat bastard, you broke your promise – and after everything I did for you!”
Hakai let her go on raging at him while he drank... and drank... and drank until the water was running down his chin, and even Shea had to stop and wonder how long he’d been waiting for that. “I’m sorry,” he said at last. “You know that I’m obliged to go where my master sends me. I would never have left you otherwise.”
“Well, nevermind,” she replied, because at this point, haranguing him about it was about as useful as sucking on a wet bar-rag. “You can make it up to me now.”
“Now?” he repeated, almost teasingly. He sorely needed a bath.
“Yes, dammit, now!” Shea grabbed his hand and put it to her side – quickly, quickly, before Jeté or any of the others could realize that she’d gone off-script and spoil it. “Please, do it now.”
“Of course,” he said as he tossed aside the canteen, and she was gratified to feel him press his warm, dry hand to the sore place under her arm, and put the other to her opposite shoulder, and walk her back until she was knee-deep in the water – until the river was deep enough to catch her. “I imagine this will be painful. Are you ready?”
“Get it out of me,” she begged.
And then Hakai – good, merciful Hakai, with his wonderful gift for earth-works – took a breath, steadied his feet, and rammed into her with a hard, full-body shove. “NOW!”
The bullet stayed where it was: three inches from the palm of his hand.
But Shea went tumbling backwards, her flesh ripping free of its evil influence – and Hakai’s sudden shout was answered by a gunshot.
For a brief, terrible moment, Shea felt it all over again: the pistol in Mother Opéra’s hands, the loud POP, the sudden kick in her ribs. But no, she hadn’t been shot. If anything, she’d just been un-shot.
Not that the Many would know that. All they could perceive was the crack of the rifle and her crashing back into the water, blood seeping from her new bullet-wound. But as Shea sank into the shallows, the deep rumble reverberating up from the river promised her that no, she did not need to worry one bit: the House of Losange would have Yashu-Diiwa for her in no time.
PORTÉ HAD NO idea what the wizard meant to do by pointing his gun up at the air like that. But at the blindfolded one’s shout, the gun made a horrendous BANG, so loud and shocking that Porté could not have broken camouflage if they had wanted to.
Fortunately, the others had no such difficulty. Within seconds, they came storming up out of the water, their joyous battle cries rousing Porté from stupor. With a great burst of heroism, they grabbed their net and surged forward to cast it over the wizard, their colors fearless and bright as they joined the fray.
“Pour Mère! Pour maison! Pour –”
A sharp jolt in Porté’s chest halted their momentum. Perplexed, they stared down at the unsightly wooden shaft. Nobody had said anything about arrows.
VUCHAK HAD NOT had time to discover how Hakai knew that fishman at the river – but he’d been right about it. As soon as Ylem fired his warning shot, half a dozen more of them came boiling up out of the water, brandishing spears and tridents and making a horrible shrill cry.
But Vuchak was a’Krah, with the gift of night-seeing... and after days of thirst and sickness and fire and evil too immense to name, he finally had an enemy that he could sight neatly down the shaft of a nocked arrow.
Two of them were coming from behind. Vuchak’s first arrow halted one in its tracks; the other hurled a net over Ylem.
“HEI!” He hadn’t had time to reload his gun, but that didn’t slow him down: with one forward lunge, the huge half-man threw a fist that knocked the fishman flat on its back.
Vuchak turned as he pulled a second arrow, hunting for its next target. Hakai had turned to run, but too slow, too late: a single leap from one of the reinforcements knocked him down with a gasp, and he was swarmed over in a second.
In five seconds, the fishmen had captured one slave and snared another, and Vuchak was the last man standing. He would not be taken likewise. He would not let his marka die thirty yards from water.
That was a promise he could keep. Although they outnumbered him twelve to one, the fishmen had no arrows of their own, no weapons of range at all – and they were almost comically slow. Their wide, webbed feet were no good for running on land, and though they could leap twenty feet in a single bound, they had to crouch down to do it. Those two seconds of squatting stillness were all Vuchak needed.
One flanking from the north lowered itself to spring – and Vuchak’s next arrow found its leg. Another from the shoreline did likewise – and black fletching blossomed from its throat. By the time the first cry of dismay went up, an arrow was already on its way to the crier. By the time they broke ranks to camouflage and run, Vuchak had emptied half his quiver. And by the time –
A terrific weight slammed into him from the left, knocking him to the ground. Vuchak scarcely had time to feel the bow snap under his weight before he was being sat on – and two big, wet hands were crushing his windpipe.
It was the biggest fishman he’d ever seen: as tall as Weisei, as strong as Vuchak himself, but with a murderous hate in its black eyes that neither of them could have matched.
And as its thumbs drove into the soft flesh of his jaw, and Vuchak got his first upside-down glimpse of the river beyond, he was amazed to discover that this was not even his biggest problem.
BY THE TIME Shea righted herself in the water, none of the Many were left in it. They had all charged gleefully ashore, their shouts so loud that she could hear them even submerged.
Then it went quiet.
Shea held still, straining to listen over the pain in her chest and the fear in her heart, expecting at every moment to hear another gunshot. But in the dark water of the All-Year River, everything was as calm as the eye of the storm.
Then someone fell backwards into the stream, so near that Shea didn’t need her eyes to sense the awkward tangle of limbs... or to smell the fresh blood in the water. What was going on up there?
She had to find out. With one hand pressed to the bleeding hole in her side, Shea surfaced into chaos.
“What happened? What was that?”
“Get down! Get out of the way!”
“Hurry up – the wizard is transforming!”
“Move, it’s going to –”
That thought ended with a soft, steel-pointed thump.
It had been almost twenty-five years since Shea had lived with the Ara-Naure, but she knew the sound well. Then she understood perfectly, albeit far too late: shrewd, earth-clever Hakai had sensed the ambush early, and let Yashu-Diiwa’s first shot flush them all out of hiding. And nobody had accounted for the archer.
Shea felt the rumbling in the water a scant five seconds before the wake hit her, submerging her again in an instant. That was all right, though: the cohort hadn’t accounted for the archer, but the archer almost certainly hadn’t accounted for Prince Jeté.
THE STILL-SENSIBLE PART of Vuchak’s mind understood two things: he was being strangled, and whatever was lumbering out of that river was not going to save him.
So he would have to save himself. The fishman sat astride Vuchak’s stomach, driving its thumbs into his throat. With one huge backwards-heave, Vuchak tucked his legs and slammed his knees up between the fishman’s shoulders, forcing it to splay its hands out on the ground to steady itself. That put its face lower, too – low enough for Vuchak to smash his forehead right into it.
“Aïe!”
Its shriek of pain made the perfect cover for Vuchak’s escape: he threw himself sharply to one side and struggled out from underneath, turning a crawl to a stagger to a run as quickly as his exhausted limbs could obey him.
But when they failed, it was not their fault. The ground shook, stealing Vuchak’s balance almost as quickly as he’d found it – and he did not need night-eyes to understand why.
The fishmen were smaller, weaker reflections of their kings. That was known. But Vuchak had never seen one with his own eyes – and this one made its minions look like infants by comparison. In the time it had taken Vuchak to free himself, the Grandfather of Frogs had crawled up from the river, as big as a bison and as muscular as a cougar. In two seconds, its first leap had eaten up half the distance, and sent it crashing back to earth as if it would smash a hole through to the World Below. Now it gathered its limbs and opened its mouth, and the sound that came from it vibrated the very air in Vuchak’s lungs.
FRRROOOAAAAK.
Its offspring abandoned their retreat, rallying to the call. Vuchak held still, paralyzed with fear. It was going to kill him. It would make one more leap and kill him, and he would be dead.
“Bútchak! Jelp!”
Was that his name? Dry-mouthed and lightheaded, Vuchak struggled to align his eyes with the source.
It was the half. And if there was a reason why that murder-eyed fishman had not resumed its efforts to throttle Vuchak, it was because it had been pressed into different service: even four of them together could not pin Ylem, and every lunge and shove and bone-bruising punch sent another one of his assailants sprawling backwards.
The king of the fishmen was tensing up again, the muscles under his bright blue-white flesh coiling for the next spring. Vuchak forced his own legs to heave him up off the ground, weathering their aching, burning complaints for the time it took to run on, zigging and zagging in a feeble attempt to make himself harder to hit.
The spear. Vuchak needed his spear. He’d use that monstrous creature’s own weight against him, run him through or make him impale himself somehow. He was a’Krah. He’d find a way.
The fish-king leapt, and this time landed barely two yards away. Vuchak was thrown off his feet again, but he didn’t dare let that stop him: he rolled away, one roll and two and three as the fish-king turned, and by the time it grabbed for him, Vuchak was out of its reach.
There was no part of his body that wasn’t screaming at him as Vuchak forced himself up for what would almost certainly be the last time. He ran – staggered – to their meager pile of belongings, snatched up his spear, and did not slow down until he was far enough from Weisei to be sure that neither blood nor bodies would disturb his dying prince.
The fish-king turned.
Vuchak planted his feet.
The fish-king tensed.
Vuchak hefted his weapon.
There were shouts from Ylem and the fishmen, and a disturbance in the river beyond, but Vuchak could not afford to notice them. Instead, he summoned the same pocket of serenity that had shown his arrow the way to the deer, aligning the ground bone head of his spear with the pulsing fleshy throat of the water-monster, and drew back for the throw.
By the time he heard the song, it was too late. The fish-queen had already risen from the water, her upper body swaying clumsily, but her mouth impeded not at all.
In ei’Krah, it was wo’Vat – the drowning song. Marín called it la maldicción de la sirena. But as Vuchak was just then discovering, there was no word in any language to express the sound of it. Sweet poison trickled into his ears, slackening his grip, numbing his senses, and smothering his reason.
The spear slipped from his grasp, and went crashing to earth. Vuchak followed it to his knees. In a dream, he could see the half-man tangled in the net – somehow larger than he had been before, somehow more muscular – and the fishmen piling on top of him. He still struggled, but now it was the feeble, fading effort of a throat-cut bison, and soon he was still.
It was up to Vuchak. It always had been. He cleverly avoided the fish-king’s inevitable leap by feinting – collapsing, technically – to lie crumpled on the stone-dry earth. It trembled at the sound of the next dire, angry croak.
Throw me my spear, marka, Vuchak called – though it emerged as nothing but a slack-jawed groan. Quickly, give it here.
Weisei didn’t answer, of course. He was fighting his own battle, one far removed from the waking world. He might have already lost. He might have already died. And in a few seconds more, it might not even matter.
THE SLEEP VOICE was not fatal, of course. It was merely the greater cousin of the sweet voice: a sound so compelling that the bodies of earth-persons and some kinds of animals forgot their owners’ intentions, and went quiet. Still, earth-persons themselves rarely made this distinction, and Shea didn’t blame them: when even a child like Princess Ondine could open her mouth and reduce a cohort of armed men to so many insensible warm-bodied heaps, some confusion was inevitable.
And there was certainly no short of confusion around here. Jeté unleashed an angry croak, furious with Ondine for endangering herself by surfacing. The Many plowed back into the water, some leading their wounded siblings, others dragging Yashu-Diiwa’s limp, tangled form. Ondine herself, not finished with helping yet, stopped singing and scooped him up to carry him across the river, where no more of his violent arrow-shooting friends could interfere. And Shea stayed away to one side, groping for the knife she’d dropped somewhere in the shallows.
“Be careful,” Entrechat admonished the princess. “Remember, he doesn’t have gills – you have to keep his head above the water.”
This was almost certainly a terrible idea: Ondine was as vulnerable to human weapons as any of them, and a much larger target. But Jeté was far up on shore, Fuseau was wounded, missing, or dead, and the rest of the cohort were all too eager to secure their dearly-bought prize.
Well, nevermind the knife. Shea abandoned her hunt and instead swam out to accompany the princess, just to make absolutely sure that Yashu-Diiwa got to the other side in one piece. Once he’d made it that far, she could surely find some sharp rock or something. It was his blood that would call U’ru back to life, not Shea’s surgical skills.
As if he had read her thoughts, Yashu-Diiwa began to stir. The sleep voice was wearing off, leaving him free to resume his panicked struggle.
“Cut that out,” Shea told him, “unless you fancy an accidental drowning. Just shut up and be still. Nobody’s going to kill you.”
He might have recognized her voice from one of their brief encounters in Island Town, or maybe he’d decided to trust anyone willing to make him promises in a language he could understand. He stopped thrashing, regardless.
But the silence did leave room in Shea’s mind for guilt, at the thought of how brutally the House of Losange had been made to pay for this little venture.
And for worry, because even though the Many were young and healthy, and unlikely to die from any wound that couldn’t finish them within the first hour or so, it would be a minor miracle if not even one of them had been killed in action.
And for rage, at the thought of her stolen puppy.
Shea stopped, perplexed by the thought.
Then she turned, and although she could barely see the shoreline even ten feet back, she had no difficulty at all in hearing that dire, unearthly howl – in perceiving that old, familiar mind.
So perhaps she wouldn’
t be needing the knife after all.
VUCHAK’S FIRST THOUGHT was that the marrouak had found them again.
He had no time for a second thought. No sooner had that howl raised hairs on his neck than its source came barreling down the slope: a terrifying great beast, brown, canine, with angry golden eyes and a shapeless dark thing on its back and such size and presence as could only belong to a living god.
And it had no business with him. It went bounding past in one heartbeat, was at the shoreline in another, and in a third, it had leapt open-mouthed and snarling at the fish-queen, who was even then carrying Ylem across the river. Then she and he and it all went plunging into the water together, and were lost to sight.
HRRRROOOOOOOOO!
The impact of that enormous body threw Shea nearly to the bottom of the river – but even at that depth, she could not have missed Jeté’s deafening, panicked cry.
Too late, Prince, she thought as the water churned and clouded with blood. The Dog Lady has her son!
DÍA HIT THE black water with a thousand-pound splash, her jaws closing around soft, wet flesh. She shook and tore at her prey, whipping it vengefully back and forth, its every jerk tasting of fresh blood.
Then a great fishy tail slammed into her, breaking her apart. She reached out, breathless and disoriented in the churning maelstrom, but her hands had lost her fur, and her lungs were screaming in time with her mind. Puppy. Help puppy.
One of her let go of her prey to mouth-grab the struggling, tangled puppy in the water. The other kicked and thrashed, desperate for air. One of her bounded up out of the river, her prize hanging from the heavy net in her mouth. The other grew weaker, fainter, and soon was lost in the current.
VUCHAK DID NOT know that strange, angry deity, so he could not praise it by name.
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