Lost to us forever, Hesprec recited the old mantra. She had lived many lives, youth to old age to shed her skin and find youth once again; she had journeyed to many strange places. This was a path she had never taken, though.
The Serpent had been dethroned by a people they called the Pale Shadow, who had come from across the sea in the old days. They had been fair and broken, begging to serve the Serpent. They had been empty, but the Serpent had been wise and mighty and terribly, terribly complacent, and assumed that teaching would fill that void. And the Pale Shadow People had carefully, slowly, taken everything the Serpent had built and stolen it away with lies and promises and the outer beauty that hid their poisoned hearts. They had claimed the palaces and the loyalty of the Jaguar who had helped the Serpent build their city. And at last, those of the Serpent who yet lived had fled north to scratch out a new home with the squabbling tribes of the Tsotec, driven across the dry places from their own home. And though no snake now living had ever seen those palaces, that city, still they remembered.
And then an emissary had come from the Pale Shadow to Therumit. Hesprec had met with her: a pale, beautiful and hollow creature, unnatural as the sun at night. She had come to beg the Serpent to return, so she said. She had come to pledge their aid against a common enemy. By then, Hesprec had known the Plague People were finally bringing their hunger across the sea, and though the Pale Shadow were some offshoot of the Plague, they did not relish the thought of their devouring kin finding them. Or so they said.
Hesprec had not wanted to accept their barbed invitation. But now word had come that the Plague People sat at Where the Fords Meet in the Plains, and had destroyed or driven out the Horse from their own home. And so it seemed that there were no unthinkable allies, no forbidden paths. The great threat from the oldest tales was here and now and very real.
Therumit believed they could take back their Oldest Kingdom. Hesprec herself just hoped that the Pale Shadow could be used, somehow, and that the Serpent had grown wise enough to grasp that weapon by the hilt and not the blade.
One morning, Hesprec woke to find herself alone at the fire. Therumit and her mount were gone, the tracks leading off south. They were close enough that Therumit’s yearning had hailed her from their fire to go look upon the land of the old stories.
Heartsick for a home she never knew. But Hesprec understood. It touched all the Serpent’s children. For all their teaching and their travelling, all they had built along the Tsotec and in the Stone Kingdoms, still they knew it was all second-best. The Oldest Kingdom dwelled only in the imagination; nothing real would ever compare to it.
She packed up the camp and scattered the ashes of the fire, knowing that there were hidden locals watching her, as their progress had been watched throughout these dry lands: the Curling Folk, the Tall Walkers, the People of the Hooked Claw. They kept their distance, hiding in the dust of this place so that even a Serpent would have a hard time rooting them out.
Hesprec loaded her horse and followed the hoofprints Therumit had left in the dirt, making no great speed and content to let her companion choose the moment of their meeting. If we do. If the Pale Shadow hasn’t closed about her like a trap.
The natives showed themselves to her mid-morning. She saw two of them standing by a growth of cactus, just within arrow-shot had she held a bow. They had dust-coloured skin and lean bodies with curved spines, draped in shapeless ponchos. When she met their gaze, their long-nailed hands described some ritual gesture. A warding or a reverence? She couldn’t know. Moments later they had Stepped and were scurrying away, armoured things with banded backs and claws tearing up the dry earth.
They must have been waiting to see if she was really going to that forbidden place, she decided later, for soon after that she found Therumit again. The old Serpent sat astride her own horse as it cropped at the dry grass. Her lined face was without expression.
Hesprec – no horsewoman – fought the reins a little and then let her mount amble to the side of its fellow. Beyond Therumit, she saw, the land fell away sharply. She had tried, all this way, to kill any germ of anticipation, but now the feeling leapt from her belly up into her throat. For beyond the dry lands are the valleys and the forests where . . .
‘You’ve looked, of course,’ she observed to Therumit. For a moment she could not tell whether the woman’s stillness was triumph or despair.
Then the older priestess jerked her head towards the decline. Hesprec’s mount followed when Therumit kicked hers into motion, and in mere heartbeats they were looking out over another world.
A skein of rivers had worn a great basin out of the earth, which stretched as far as they could see. The sun struck silver from their waters, or deep bronze from the greatest channel that came close to rivalling the mighty Tsotec itself.
A forest carpeted the basin, but Hesprec could see the patterns cut into it, where ancient husbandry had trained the trees into orchards, the ground into fields, so that all good things would grow in overlapping profusion without ever ceasing to be the forest. Here were the examplars of all the agriculture of the Sun River Nation, stolen from this lost place and taught to the people of the River and the Estuary.
And, rising from the trees, a single city of gold-warm stone; not a great concentration of life and architecture like Atahlan, but spread between the trees in mounds and temples and enclosures, each one placed precisely to please the eye, not to crowd its neighbours, to hold its own special beauty.
Hesprec glanced at Therumit and saw the glint of tears in the woman’s eyes, the tight-clenched jaw that locked in the feeling of Home, Home. The older priestess looked back and asked, ‘Do you not feel it?’
‘I do not,’ Hesprec said hoarsely. Yes, it was the Oldest Kingdom, but there was a reason the Serpent did not go here which had nothing to do with distance. The dry lands were not so impassable a barrier, after all. Raiders from the Jaguar came to the river, yes, and sometimes raiders from the Crocodile went to the forest, but they never returned. Hesprec looked out across the trees and the ancient, eroded buildings and saw only that the Pale Shadow had lain on this place a long time. But the Old Kingdom was where the Serpent had been wounded almost to death. It was where their old servants had been stolen from them, and if they took their new followers there, what else might they lose? Or perhaps it was simply that they would have to show any reconquering Riverman army just how they had fallen from grace, and nevermore be looked on with respect again.
At first it had seemed like mist to her eyes, but it did not move like mist, nor did it burn away in the sun. White sheets and strands shrouded the trees and blunted the edges of the buildings, so that the city and its surroundings were made into a maze of webs and tissue-thin walls. And within all of this there was precious little sign of life. Perhaps they saw some trace of people working the fields; perhaps bright birds soared over the canopy. But within the city itself, nothing. It was still as a tomb.
And Therumit smiled and seemed to see none of this, and then she was guiding her horse to find a path down the slope, and Hesprec’s mount was following on.
2
She could not move. Moving let the pain in, and then she would have to give it the run over her body, leaping from point to point about her limbs and back. The same happened when she choked on the sweet, smoky air and the coughing set her every nerve on fire with agony.
Maniye hung beneath a foreign roof in a foreign land: too hot, wrong-smelling, all unfamiliar sounds from beyond the sloped wooden walls. There were hooks in her flesh, pulling her skin taut. She had been given plenty of time to see the lines set in the ceiling, the exacting measurements to match her small frame. She had expected a collar about her throat to lock in her souls, but that was part of the torment, to have that escape hung before her, just as she was hung. To Step would be to fail.
She had been hanging for a day, a whole day. Sometimes the door of the hut opened, and then a clay bowl of water would be pressed to her lips, just enough to keep her alive. Exc
ept even that little water was acrid with some drug that gnawed at the point where her mind met her body. She faded in and out, snapping back to her body every time she twitched or coughed, and the hooks about her flesh bit with their fiery teeth.
She had asked for this.
The world was ending, or it might be. There had been a doom stalking the visions of the wise from all lands, these ten years gone. The oldest stories told of it: how Maniye’s distant ancestors had fled their ancestral homes, pursued by the insatiable hunger of the Plague People. But those stories told of how Owl and Bat and Serpent had held the enemy off until the sea came to stand between Our People and the Plague. The old tellers of the old tales had never thought that one day the sea might not be enough.
And so, after Maniye had seen the soulless creatures in human form, after she had felt the dreadful fear they emitted that drove true people mad and imprisoned them in their animal shapes, she had gone to her father, Wolf’s errant priest, and asked for his god’s final blessing.
The hooks that pulled at her skin were iron, forged in a fire of wolf-wood in the Crown of the World, and carried ever after by Kalameshli because he had always hoped this day would come.
No doubt he had seen it as his moment of triumph over his rebellious daughter, but they had both run a long trail since those days. She was not the bitter girl she had once been, nor he the angry tyrant.
In the dark of the hut she drifted again, the pain of the hooks receding from long familiarity. Her mind took the sensation and made it into the prick of teeth, as though the Wolf were carrying her in his mouth across the shadowed hills of the Godsland. And had she not walked there, to tame her souls and become the Champion of the Crown of the World? Had she not walked between Bear and Wolf and Tiger in the north, and stood between the jaws of Old Crocodile in the south? If any mortal could know the gods, who better than Maniye Many Tracks?
In the next moment the hubris of her thoughts struck fear through her. Just as she was physically helpless, so her mind was being laid open by the pain and the incense and the faintness of hunger. She had fasted two days before Kalameshli had lifted her up here, her stomach shrivelling like dried fruit. Now food seemed just a memory, one more tie to the world that was fraying to nothing and leaving her attached by no more than a dozen metal hooks. And if her skin tore, if the hooks ripped free, she felt she would fly away and never come again to the world she knew. And that would not be so very bad.
Behind closed lids she saw a great vast expanse of moon-coloured grassland, while overhead the stars swarmed and darted angrily. She knew those lights, now. Surely they were the myriad lanterns of the Plague People, that great hungry host still trapped in a land they must have stripped clean. How long had they starved there, husk-like and hollow, before finding their way to these lands? Our lands. Maniye had felt their hunger – the insatiable yearning of the soulless for those who had what they lacked.
In her mind’s eye, she sped across that vast grassland. Was she running or flying, or being carried? Was the Wolf truly bringing her home?
She jolted back to her body again, the bitter water at her lips once more, but her eyes no longer saw the inside of the hut. She felt them open, and yet she saw only the Godsland of the Plains. There were great shadows out there that made her tremble to see them. A maned cat stalked across her path, not deigning to acknowledge her existence; a high-shouldered shape heckled at her as she was rushed away, saying, I am within you as much as the Wolf that bears you, do not forget! You are my Champion too!
And there were others, further out – great lost forms that had no people to give them a human voice any more. She saw the solemn, endless tread of the Aurochs, its flanks vast enough to blot out the sky. She saw the great armoured shape of the Horn-Bearer mourning its vanished people, voiceless in the world of men. The Plains were littered with the ruins of dead gods and their lost children.
And then the silver grass was behind her and she was ascending into higher grounds, a land of hills and lakes and mountains that had been her home, while a home was still something she claimed or sought.
Her sudden access of speed brought her to the peak of a high hill where stones had once been raised by men, then torn down by time. She rested there, feeling her body sway, looking out across the night-lit landscape of the gods.
When she turned, the Wolf was there as she knew he would be. His hackles were high enough to eclipse the restless stars, his mouth could swallow the sun. He was winter and night, privation and an empty belly, long journeys in harsh weather and the last test that everyone fails. But he was her Wolf, and she was his.
She put a hand out to him, touching the fangs of his lower jaw that could have served her as swords. Her relationship with the god of her father had been troubled and difficult, but that was how the Wolf liked it. He liked you to run so he would have something to chase. And sometimes, if you ran well enough, he would only savage you a little when he brought you down. He had savaged her at times: through Akrit Stone River who had thought he was her father; and through Kalameshli Takes Iron who truly was; in the pursuit of Broken Axe, who had been her friend.
She waited to be given the secret: would the Wolf breathe iron into her or drive it into her body with his teeth? And yet the great beast did nothing – did not even look at her, but stared instead across the rocky landscape. There were other hills there, and Maniye knew they would host other gods – the wolf-like beasts closest, then further to those other lords of tooth and claw that had come together to make her their Champion.
Slowly, Maniye turned. She could not keep herself from turning to see what the Wolf found so fascinating.
She saw the moonlit landscape, cut across with the shadows of rocks and trees. With her poor human eyes, too many heartbeats passed before she saw the other shadows moving there.
Coyote was skulking from tree to tree, creeping with his tail between his legs. The Wild Dog of the Plains was there too, with his high, round ears and his spotted coat turned to night and silver by the moon. He trotted after Coyote, pausing to glance behind him. Maniye could read the way he stood and saw anxiety in every line of him.
Then her breath caught, for here came Tiger like fire and smoke, only ever glimpsed but she was his daughter too and she knew him. Here he stalked in full view of the Wolf his enemy, and yet neither had any thought of fighting the other. At his heels he cast a dozen shadows that were other cats, of the north, of other lands, of long gone times. Then he too was sliding away after the others. And there were more.
Bear shambled, grumbling to himself. She heard the shrill cackle of Hyena receding, the grunt of Boar and the cough of Badger.
‘What is it?’ she asked the Wolf at her back and he growled, low and terrifying – all the more so because she heard the unease there. The god of winter and endings had found something beyond the furthest end of his world.
And she looked east – she knew it was east for all there was no sun – and she saw fire bright and burning on the hillsides as though, behind her back, those stars had begun to fall to earth. She saw flames destroy whatever they touched, the very stuff of the Godslands burned through, and the fire-edged holes spreading and spreading. And within them: nothing. A nothing that knew neither gods nor souls nor people. And though the fires were bright and devoured all they touched, Maniye knew that they were cold, and that the nothing they brought was colder.
And then Wolf turned away from her and began to run, and she was trapped on her human feet, stumbling in his wake. She called for him to come back for her, to help her, but that had never been Wolf’s way. Wolf demanded that you run or you fall and die.
And she had run so very far to escape him; she had not realized at the time that she was running to him at the same time.
But I ran then and I can run now.
She took to her heels and, though she was just a human girl, she found her stride swiftly and danced across the hills of the Godsland, emptied of their masters. Behind her, she felt the ground shudde
r and twist in horror at what was to come. Freezing embers flecked the air about her.
The Wolf was far ahead already and she put on a new burst of speed, seeking to catch him and knowing she never would. There was a reddish tint to the dark air. Above her, the stars were beginning to fall, each bringing another spreading ring of oblivion to the world. So she ran as only one born to the Wolf and then cast away from him can run. She gulped down breath like a fish in water, fought past her raw lungs and burning muscles, lowered her head and ran. She was Maniye Many Tracks, Champion of all the beasts that tore at flesh. She could outrun the end of the world if she had to.
And yet the world was ending all about her. There were spreading stains of nothing ahead, now, so that she had to weave her way through them, and there was a cold at her heels that had teeth and wanted to unmake her. She could sense it: not a mind but a driving need to transform the world into somewhere that Maniye Many Tracks would have no place in, where all she was, and all she knew, was dust and bones.
She ran faster, but the devouring cold was gathering all the world to itself, dragging the hills and forests out from under her like a cloth. Her poor human legs were not equal to the task of escaping it. The gods had left her behind to die.
She looked back and the Nothing was at her shoulder, looming all the way up to the sky. It teetered high above her, Nothing piled on Nothing, with teeth of icy fire.
It fell. In a shock of panic she clawed within herself, desperate for more speed, fighting against the bonds that trapped her in this inadequate shape. Where are you, my souls, my kin? she cried out, and something broke inside her.
Moments later she was slamming into the walls of the hut, bellowing and roaring, battering at the flimsy wood with her claws until it seemed it must give way.
She came hurtling out into the open, the door flung wide before she broke it. The smoke-clogged air within gave way to the dust without, that Plains twilight when the heat that had beaten down was snatched away within a few breaths of the sun dipping past the horizon. The sky to the west was blood-tinged.
The Hyena and the Hawk (Echoes of the Fall Book 3) Page 2