Then he leaped upward and the wind from the first, powerful beat of his wing blew the hair back from her forehead. In a brace of heartbeats, he was twice a man’s length above them all and starting to turn northward.
Sequa threw her own head back and howled into the cloven air. “Come to me! Come to me! Let this Run begin!” Despite the pain throbbing across her forehead, despite the ache in the arm and shoulder from where she had struck the stones, despite the blood rising in her throat, despite not knowing if the Shadow was well or ill or dying on the ground behind her, Sequa screamed out her call to arms with defiant exaltation.
After Measures and Measures of despair and failure and violation and death upon useless death, now she came to the balance point, to the blade of the knife, the hanging moment before the arrow leaves the bow, the sweet impact of stick on flesh.
Her plan had worked. Her relentless, hunting enemy had come to her and revealed himself at last. She had his scent and his face and his path clear in her mind. Now she would hunt him, and her hunting pack fell in around her.
Men and women both, recruited from Anem’s ranks in deathly secret, all well-formed, lithe and supple, with light steps and strong hands. All dressed in close-fitted clothing in grey and black and all of them eyed with an implacable arrogance.
Not Children of Home… now. They stood as their city’s last defenders, to take the fight to this monster that had terrorized her for so long. A monster in flesh as well as deed would mean nothing to them. He could bleed. His blood stained stones next to Sequa’s. He could bleed. He could die.
These weapons had come to Sequa’s hands and she threw them indiscriminately into the fray.
Sequa took off at a sprint not north but south, to the closest set of stairs leading to the Noble’s Path. A few of the swiftest of her little war band peeled off to the north, to follow him visually. The rest went with her. He took to the air; they would take to the Roofs.
The susurration of arrow flight floated on the wind from the roof of the temple. Sequa grinned fiercely into sky. Archers had lain in the shadows of the roof edge since the beginning of the Dance. Others waited on the highest buildings at the cardinal points around the Temple close and points on the city map. Spikes on a path. Not enough to stop him, but perhaps enough to drive him like a hunted animal to where they could reach him. To his lair that had to be on one of these roofs, unregarded.
She caught the sudden correction of great wings in flight from the corner of an eye—amazing what you could see barefaced. He veered east.
The staircase they aimed for was covered on the first two levels with wicker lattice. Some of the group took the door that gaped open for them.
Sequa and the others went straight up the sides, the rough strands of wood like a fragile ladder under thin-soled boots and bare fingers. The walls of the staircase cracked and shed as though being shaken apart from the inside but only two of them fell. One rolled to her feet and took the interior route; the other stayed down, clutching silently at an ankle.
First loss. Nineteen and counting.
Far to the east, the song of the arrows came again. Wings silhouetted against the rising Goddess flailed the sky, started to grow larger. The wing beats now looked labored, jerky. She had done some damage to them as they fell then bruising flesh and bone. He seemed to be skimming the rooflines, as though afraid he might fall. Good.
Once on the roof of some nondescript warehouse, Sequa and her hunters paused, panting. They made a ring, scanning the sky. Fist thumped on flesh to the east, once, twice. Without a word, the whole pack surged off and running in that direction.
Her multiple shadows fell in around her, sometimes in front, sometimes behind. The old hunting rhythm, the blood rhythm, learned on nights much darker than this one, in a dozen different cities and towns. Leads changed as they chose their routes, some longer, some shorter, some easier.
The second and third fell—again literally—as they leaped the space between buildings. All the fighters kept themselves in fine form, but the rigors of this kind of Run were quickly forgotten. A Child’s essential skills fled even more swiftly. They misjudged and both went down into the space between buildings. Down to seventeen.
No one stopped, no one paused, not even to see if they lived or died. If they survived they would be found soon.
Sequa cleared the space in a long, tumbling leap, shoulder rolling to her feet. Back up, she searched the sky, found wings nearly above them. This building came first in a long, unbroken block that stretched before her. Here, there a few, small structures jutted up. She ran for one and vaulted onto its roof, feeling as though she could nearly fly herself.
The winged man seemed to see the people nearly below him for the first time. Did he see motion best as the great hunting hawks did? They should have been nearly invisible against the mottled clay and dirt of the rooftops, with the Goddess only half risen. He checked in the sky, not hovering, but making some strange, half sweep. As though he could not quite work out what these people were doing.
Since she had begun to suspect what she was facing here in Ressen, this was the first time she had ever sensed hesitation or uncertainty in her adversary. Even his rushed and interrupted kill of the Noble man had been decisive. She snapped out a hand, made a sharp signal. Metal hissed through the air, but more subtly than the flight of arrows.
Distance weapons were not her gift. Sequa touched the hilts of her swords, ready to draw them when he fell to earth.
Nearly all of the flung spikes and knives missed. Bad.
One of them at least found its mark. Worse.
The horrible scream sounded again with a physical effect. Even as she flinched, Sequa saw the warriors below her cringe and jerk away from the noise. In that instant of general confusion, the winged man swooped downward hard, landed on the roof, and slashed the throat from one of her fighters with his claws.
Blood sprayed far enough that it reached Sequa on her higher perch, striking hot salt across her bare face. In the space of her blink, he had leaped off the roof edge, wings spread. North again. But across buildings now.
When Sequa charged in the same direction, her fighters followed, leaving their comrade convulsing in his death throes without hesitation.
Two roof edges passed, and the winged man barely cleared a tall, lattice wall that separated the third. Blood-melon vines, still young but strong in their promise of life, edged up the verticals. The pattern of the lattice, too tight to leap through, had lengths clearly made of light wood and makeshift bindings.
Breathing a prayer for forgiveness to the Goddess of the Harvest Moon and the Blood of the Earth Below, Sequa jumped toward the barrier, pushing off her back foot to spin in midair. If the wood framing was sturdier than it looked, this was about to be a painful and embarrassing failure.
She crashed into the lattice with her back, her spin continuing so that she landed facing in the right direction without pause, the shattered wood still spraying out around her. The rest of them poured through the hole she made like rainwater from a drainpipe.
Sequa felt herself smile just a little. That must have looked impressive.
Closer than she had expected, he struggled for height, his already labored wing beats faltering further. As she reoriented herself to him, he seemed to pause in midair and alight on the next roof over, just on the other side of a waist high (to him) wall. He looked unaware how closely his pursuers pressed, presenting his back.
Sequa redoubled her effort, sprinted hard for the wall and flung herself over it, in a flat lay out just barely clearing the top and just under the claws that flashed out to where her chest and head would have been if she had vaulted it properly.
She would have laid the same ambush, if it had been her leading this chase. Some part of her spirit crumpled and twisted at this further proof of how similar they were, the Runner and the monster.
The aspect change had cost her some agility—she struck the ground just over the other side of the barrier and rolled
like a log for an uncontrolled moment. If she had been lucky she would have scythed his legs out from under him.
Instead he took to the sky, snarling at her as his wings beat the air down at her again. Then the rest of the pack vaulted wall; he beat hard to gain height before one of them could use the wall as a springboard to knock him from the sky.
Blood tricked down her face to sting her eye from the re-opened cut on her forehead. Pushing up onto her hands, she tracked his flight over an open space then watched him veer sharply south again as another of her random archers popped out of hiding for a shot. The pack flowed across the rooftop after him.
Sequa rolled to her feet in one motion, and followed.
The rooftops flashed and blurred into a long train of scattered images, actions without thought, decisions without volition. The primacy of the hunt was all now, the winged creature and the silent pack like one entity of swirled intent and determination. Sequa sometimes followed, sometime led. They careened from the center of the city to the southern outskirts, which shocked her in the times when consciousness came of anything other than sweat-slick palms, bleeding fingers, and feet aching from impact after impact.
At the south wall, their prey gathered his strength and surged up and over the edge of the city where they could not follow. Converging from multiple levels and directions, the pack clotted against the artificial stopper of the high wall, their devolvement from furious action to impotent stagnation making it seem as though they suffered from some collective abrupt head injury.
Sequa checked back farther from the assemblage, the narcotic fugue of correct-exertion-of-self fading with great gasps and gulps of air.
Of those who had begun with her, only seven remained, Krif among them. To the last, Sequa had marked them from the beginning as either the nearest to their Child days or the most determined not to lose those hard-learned skills. She had not the slightest memory of where or when the others had fallen by the wayside, if they lived or died.
Their prey was missing as well.
Gone? Left the city? Not the outcome she had wished, nor one that would satisfy anyone, but perhaps enough that his murderous spree ended. Surely a convergent spark that would be missing now, robbed of the last and greatest prey on this meaningful date.
That would swing around again with the next Measure.
A dull ache in her chest from some strain of bone or muscle turned into a sudden stabbing pain when Sequa twisted to scan the sky to the east. Would he need sixteen more deaths? Or just this last one still, held in stasis till completion? Was this the anchor that would hold her to this benighted, beautiful place for all time? Watching and waiting for the slaughter to begin anew.
Gulping harder to fight the rise of bile sour in her mouth, Sequa backed away from the survivors of her desperate gamble. In her mind, a web of buildings and covered roads branched outward from here. If she reached there, ran to that space, maybe she could collect Cur and be out past the corpses of the gate guards to the north before they registered that she had fled…
But they turned to her now, needy eyes above veils and half-masks. Did we do right? Can we fix this?
Sequa opened her mouth and found no words there.
Not a creature of words, but of silences.
Failing these followers, as she had failed the Voice of the God.
This was why she did not lead.
A woman screamed, high and shrill, from the direction of the nearest gate. Without thought, the entire pack of them sprinted in that direction.
He had come back over the wall in a silent rush as they all stood staring at where he had been. One of the four guards on the gate was a woman by some foul luck and he had her face down in the horse trough, thrashing and kicking. His bright feathers, now dark with water, had been marred spattered with blood. He visibly favored his left arm. Bare-chested, wearing only dark breeches, cuts marring his skin. His blood, as well as others. No veils. No weapons other than his claws.
The bodies of the other guards lay thrown about like broken toys, a heap of limbs and the stench of death.
Sequa and her pack came off the roof of the closest building and into the open yard like a wave of black and grey smoke.
He looked up, his bland thin face a mask of hatred, exertion and—desperation? Somehow, the naked, raw emotion he displayed seemed almost a perversion, a violation of all correct and polite behavior.
A knife flew over Sequa’s shoulder, startling her. It startled him too—the thrower had used her as a vision block, to catch him unawares. He snapped a hand up with that uncanny speed, talons flashing in the Goddess light and batted it aside like a moth but he had to let go of the drowning woman. She surged upward in panic and terror, bringing a huge gout of filthy water with her. Her head slammed into his lower jaw, sending him reeling.
Sequa, at the head of the group, nearly ran over him. He had no time to spread his wings since she was instantly striking for him from within his arms length. He sprinted away into the dark alley to the north, Sequa close enough to hear the tick, tick of his talons on the cobblestones. Moving too fast to stop quickly, she vaulted the trough, the coughing, weeping woman, and one of the bodies to tap one foot into the wall and use that to spin herself around.
Her pack disappeared into the alley behind him.
The sputtering woman dragged herself to her feet, threw Sequa a horrified glance and fled into a nearby building.
Sequa stopped, called up Anem’s map of the city in her mind’s eye. If this gate, then that alley would empty out there. She ran for the next street over, wider and lined with coldlights until she located an exterior stair.
Up and onto the roofs again, Sequa ran three buildings north, and then stopped. She spread her hands upward in benediction to the Goddess and then dropped to her knees, grinding the tips of her fingers into the accumulated dirt of the city. Somewhere deep inside, past her panting breath and raging heart, Sequa found her dancer’s calm, her fighter’s calm, the moment on point before the foot turns to land, the instant the counter to a strike is launched without the mind attending it.
“I ate from your table in the Heart of the Empty. We spoke in earnest conference. Let the shadows conceal him no more this night.”
The wind kicked around her, swirling dust and filth into the air.
It breathed into her ear in a dead woman’s voice, bringing with it the scent of rotting flowers.
Sequa heard the beat of a heart, distant like thunder on the northern mountains, close as the pit pit of water dripping from a gutter. Her own heart snapped against her ribs in solemn counterpoint.
Her ring, Jesan’s ring. His heart beating in the night. The monster must be wearing her ring.
Sequa’s head snapped around to the northwest, as though she could see his path through the city outlined in bonfires. Even as she rose, it faded but she grasped and held the trailing edge of its holy magic. Headed north, toward the storehouses, the very place she had long thought he must be hiding. Where else would a man with wings go to be undisturbed?
She sprinted for the straightest line to intercept him, leaping obstacles, climbing walls, tumbling in the air like a leaf.
Twice, there she heard screams, once a man, once a woman. Down to five then, the last of her band.
She fetched up against a wide, dark alley, too far to jump. No lights, no windows, but she could almost see movement below. She checked, dithering, looking for a way down.
The wind kicked again, bringing no succor with it this time. She sucked in more dirt than air, her lungs and limbs growing heavy. Sequa staggered where she stood, mind reeling and unable to focus.
He had her at the length of his arm before she could react, arrowing up from the darkness of the alleyway in a rush of wind and feathers. His claws jammed into the sides of her neck, perilously close to the great vessels there. One of them pierced and re-opened the knife wound from the Measure before, when those she led now had tried to killed her. He landed with a thud, his free arm sweeping back
to set itself delicately as he lifted her off her feet into the air.
“Why?” He shook her like a rat, blood spray spotting his wing. “Why did you stop me? This was our power. I would have shared what I became with you! I had to share it! There would be no other I could take to mate!” He shrieked, high and thin, utterly unlike the breathy rich murmur of that night. In the uncertain light of the cloud-covered Goddess, he seemed made of twisting shadows and cold wind. His free hand drew her blades free of their harness and tossed them over the side of the building like so much trash.
Sequa’s ears finally closed over the words he spoke, and if she had had breath to draw she would have choked on vomit. Mate? She would slit her own belly first.
His eyes appeared like dark pits, his mouth contorted into a parody of a smile. The clawed hand squeezed, sending tendrils of blood down her throat, soaking the front of her shirt under the leather armor. His tongue lapped out obscenely and came back shining black in the light of the Goddess. He crooned like a mother to a child. The purity of his insanity broke whatever spell of lethargy and confusion he had thrown down against her.
That, and the gleam of golden hair on a finger of the hand clutching her throat.
Her hands came up in a sharp strike to the underside of his wrist, scrabbling at his talons and her feet planted against his stomach, pushed away. She strained against his grip, the talons slipping greasily free of her flesh as she pushed against him to the length of her body.
He threw her one handed into the far wall of the alley, four stories above the pavement with nothing to break her fall. Sequa’s head impacted the brick, sending a spasm down to her toes as the universe rang like a bell.
Her left hand stayed closed in a tight fist around the tiny beat of a heart. She almost laughed. She had Jesan’s ring back, stripped from him as he threw. Whole again.
Sequa started to fall to her death.
The sound of metal cutting the air and suddenly one of her swords quivered in the wall to her right. Her free hand slashed out, caught the hilt. Motion arrested for an instant, Sequa looked up in time to see the winged man aim a vicious blow at a tall, lean figure dressed in nondescript armor.
As A God Page 27