The Hyena and the Hawk (Echoes of the Fall Book 3)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  She exchanged glances with the others, gathered around a square of darkness from which a cold, dead smell emanated. Not the reek of recent carrion, certainly, but something somehow worse. There was an edge of putrefaction, of excrement, of sour living bodies, but there was something that gathered all those scents to itself and smothered them, the patient odour of long-dead things and long-abandoned places.

  Maniye dared to hang her head into that hole, looking about at a space crossed with the faint moonbeams let in by the holes in the roof. Tiger eyes showed her more: a narrow space, crusted with fragments of wood, desiccated cloth, the occasional bone.

  ‘We’ll need light,’ she told them, when she was human again.

  ‘Again, the Wolf provides,’ Kalameshli said grandly, with a glower at Shyri. He swiftly had the makings of a torch, bundling cloth about an axe-handle he had brought and anointing it with a little precious oil – another of Wolf’s secrets. Steel and flint soon had it burning at a steady pace, leaving all three of them staring at the hatchway without eagerness.

  Shyri shrugged. ‘Oh, those Horn-Bearers,’ she murmured. ‘The silence and the shadow began to eat them, and they raised great doors and set them at their gates, so that those who came visiting could not even see inside, and they threw earth over their windows so that they had no more eyes on the world, and they sought the guidance of their god, opening their minds to the darkness. But it was another god who spoke to them.’ And then she was gone into the darkness, daring the others to follow her.

  Kalameshli went next, and Maniye spared the moon a final glance before she descended. In case I do not see you again.

  The jumping light of the torch revealed a low-ceilinged, cluttered space, but Shyri was already leading them away, finding a flight of steps that led downwards, and still reciting her litany. ‘In the minds of the Horn-Bearers, the unknown enemy had grown and grown, until no spears could defeat it, and no walls could keep it out, and all their strength would be water against it.’

  ‘Did they foresee the Plague People?’ Maniye asked.

  Broken from her story, Shyri glanced back at her, utterly without expression.

  ‘I thought that was why you were telling the story, because it was about the Plague,’ Maniye whispered to her.

  Shyri shook her head convulsively. ‘I tell it because it is the right story for this place. We tell the story of these ghosts and so we pass them.’ Her eyes were wide, the torchlight dancing erratically in them, and abruptly Maniye saw just how frightened the Laughing Girl was. This was a place of terrible deeds that had been a part of her world forever. The story of the Horn-Bearers let her master it, place it within her shadow.

  ‘Who knows what they saw?’ Shyri added. ‘Nobody can ask them now.’ She continued, creeping down the stairs with Kalameshli’s torch sending her shadow ahead of her. ‘Those Horn-Bearers, they set guards at every window, even though the windows had been stopped; they put spears at every door, even though they had closed the doors and sealed them. They filled their cellars with dried meat, grain and honey, and all good things, and said, “Let the enemy come. They will not see us. They will pass on, and all will die but we.” But the Rat came instead, who could creep into every little hole they had left in their walls. The Rat came, who could whisper into their minds even though they had closed them against the world. The Rat came, and dined well in their storehouses even as they stood guard against their own gates.’

  And they came out of the stairwell and saw the bones.

  This had been a gate indeed; from this side the outline was clear, though it had been sealed with the same hard stuff as the walls. And Shyri’s tale was instantly gone from a fireside story to hard truth, because here were those guards, here were those spears.

  Maniye could see that there was a passageway running around the outside of the fortress, curving away into darkness on either side beyond the reach of the torch. At their feet, it was strewn with skeletons, enough for five men perhaps, though they had been jumbled together so that it was hard to be sure, interlaced with great plates of verdigrised bronze that had once been part of monumental suits of armour, as heavy as the mail worn by the Stone Man Champion she had once fought.

  For a moment they were silent, even Shyri’s words stilled on her lips. Then Kalameshli hissed and pointed. There were footprints in the dust – which living, human feet had made. Whoever it was had not entered the fortress at the same point, but had passed along this covered passageway and disturbed the bones a little.

  ‘We follow,’ agreed Maniye, and they set off again. Soon enough the trail led to more steps, delving further into the fortress through a door that would have let a horse and rider through.

  ‘And who knows what the Rat whispered to the Horn-Bearers, as they trembled in the darkness?’ Shyri said, her voice the merest breath in Maniye’s ear. ‘We know, for we came after and picked over their bones. Who knows what madness possessed them, after they sealed up all their doors and then discovered their empty storehouses where only the tracks of the Rat had passed?’ And then her voice dried up entirely because the torchlight touched upon the bones of a monster. It lay before them at the foot of the stairs, long dead and yet still guarding this portal. It was as large as Maniye’s Champion shape – too large surely to have ever moved from the room it had died in. Its bones were huge, not long but massive, made to bear colossal weights. Its skull, like that of a giant’s horse, bore a long lance-like horn on its nose, and a short spike behind. Had it been alive and furious before them, it might have been the most terrifying thing Maniye had ever seen. But it was bones, bones and dust and withered slabs of hide that were too tough for even the Rat’s sharp little teeth. Maniye could have stood within its ribs.

  Only Takes Iron was untouched by the sad majesty of it. ‘The tracks, look,’ he told them, and they saw feet – more than one pair now – that had pattered past the great skeleton, heading down, forever down.

  ‘And in the end, even their own fortress seemed too exposed, and they gave up their souls to the Rat, gave up their shapes and their god, and crept into the small, dark places to die.’ And Maniye hoped that was the last of Shyri’s tale because her own imagination was doing fine work in telling her what might be ahead, and needed no assistance from Laughing Men legends right then.

  Then there was no more down, and they had come out into a low-ceilinged room that seemed to run off into the dark in every direction, supported by squat pillars cut with hard-angled geometric figures. The footprints ran everywhere here – mostly bare, large and small, as though a great many people had been scuttling back and forth in a chaotic host. Like rats.

  Maniye Stepped to her wolf shape and sniffed the air. The prevailing scent of the fortress was stronger here, the overwhelming musk of old death laying a heavy hand on her, but she thought she caught the scent of something fresher. She started forwards, trying to turn that suggestion into a definite trail, but Shyri’s hand caught in her pelt and pulled her back painfully. Maniye snarled, but then saw what the torchlight had touched: the edge of a shaft cut into the floor, round-sided, surely two men’s lengths across.

  Here in the chill, this was where the Horn-Bearers had stored their food, she guessed. As Kalameshli swept the light of the torch from left to right she saw more pits gaping blindly. Tugging the old priest’s arm to bring the light closer, Maniye peered into the nearest one and recoiled.

  Where had the Horn-Bearers gone? Down into the earth, down and down until only these pits remained to them. Bones large and small, she saw, but more small than large, and the torchlight lit mercilessly on the ragged edges, the dents and the cracks left by countless little gnawing teeth. And the rats had died down there too, their tiny bones piled in the gaps between the human remains, for the Rat cared nothing for the bodies it inhabited, of whatever kind.

  Kalameshli spat disgustedly. In the echo of that sound and the minute spatter of his disdain Maniye heard more. Abruptly the buried darkness was not silent, but there came a patt
ering and a rustling, a hurry of small sleek bodies. And, almost lost within the susurrus, a choked-off human cry.

  Maniye was moving even as her ears registered it. She raced ahead on tiger feet, Shyri loping as a hyena beside her and Kalameshli a step behind, the torch abandoned. She braced herself for the utter dark, but it never came. Even the Rat needed light to do dark deeds by. Ahead she saw the low glimmer of another fire and she made for it, letting its light warn her of the pits in the floor moments before her feet found them.

  Then she discovered there was further down to go after all – a sudden slope that she half skidded down, claws digging at the stone to slow herself, and then a circular chamber, buried deep within the earth and thronging with shadows. Her paws struck a rough surface, lumpy and uneven, and for a moment the handful of small fires banked up there blinded her. She Stepped back to human, letting her weaker eyes overcome the glare, Shyri and Takes Iron catching her up.

  The room was walled in bones. Bones were beneath her feet, but not scattered loose. Some madman’s hand had fitted them one to another to make a grisly mosaic, set each in place so neatly that she could not have put a finger between them. Bones scaled the curved walls and the dome of the ceiling, so that skulls leered down surrounded by radiant sprays of fingerbones, marching spirals of ribs, the studs of vertebrae. The Horn-Bearers’ last work . . . ?

  But they were not alone in the chamber. Time enough later to admire the artwork.

  She saw Hesprec instantly, held by a handful of scrawny, filthy creatures, a halter tight about her neck to keep her human. Standing beside her was a tall, gaunt Plainsman in an oversized robe, a garment that had been fine once, studded with gems and gold, but was now threadbare and holed, some grave goods of the Horn-Bearers perhaps. The firelight played tricks; Maniye saw him standing stock still and yet that robe undulated and crept about him as though countless busy bodies were rushing about beneath it.

  And he had at least a score of friends, she saw. Some held Hesprec, and others just crouched or crept about the chamber, the firelight wild in their eyes. They were cadaverous, streaked with dirt and excrement, their bodies covered with sores and welts, limbs like sticks, heads like skulls. They reminded Maniye of the Strangler cultists she had seen in the Estuary, and she knew the resemblance was more than skin-deep. People who had seen their world falling apart, who had no way to take their lives back and repair the damage: they despaired. These people had given over sovereignty of their minds and souls to a greater power because it relieved them of all burdens. The Stranglers, the Rat, these were known evils, better than the great collapse of the world that was going on outside.

  All eyes were on them, not lost in some dark ritual or focused on their prisoner. Each gaunt face was turned to the newcomers, and the Rat Speaker’s face was straining with an appalling smile.

  ‘Always,’ he said, ‘there are those who follow the false trail of the Serpent.’

  Maniye looked into the man’s eyes and found something squatting there, leering back at her, but not the eyes’ original owner. She had seen the hollowness of the Plague People; this was its opposite. The Speaker was stuffed with souls, hundreds of mean little rodent spirits crammed into his human shape until there was no room left for the man he had once been. Meeting his eyes was locking gazes with a god, albeit the most despised of all gods. The Rat Speaker was well named, no more than the Rat’s mouthpiece.

  ‘This will be a rare meal,’ the Speaker announced to his followers. ‘A Serpent of the River and curs of the north.’ Maniye tried to gather herself to spring at him, but his words kept jarring her. In his voice she heard multitudes, tittering and rustling. ‘But what’s this?’ He feigned exaggerated surprise. ‘Are you a new guest at our fire, sweet one? Are these dogs your guest-gift?’ His eyes were on Shyri. ‘Oh, Laughing Child,’ he sighed, ‘this is the stuff of memories. You and I have stood here before.’

  ‘We have not,’ Shyri said shakily. ‘I was in the stone ruins you left, above the Tsotec, but you were not there, only your memories.’

  The Rat Speaker laughed, and it was worse than the smile. ‘You mistake me, Laughing Child. Not this body, nor that you wear now, but I see Hyena in your shadow, and he and I are old friends. When we dragged down the last of the Horn-Bearers, all the peoples of the Plains made a great show of their despite, and yet some few crept in to share in our final feast. The Vulture was our guest then, and the Hyena too.’ Again that laugh, and its echoes were the scuttling of countless feet within the stone around them. ‘Do you think I would send Hyena away from my fire with an empty belly?’

  Maniye glanced at Shyri, waiting for the heated denial, but the girl stood quite still, knife in her hand but no will to use it.

  ‘Do you not tell of the time of corpses, when Hyena will pick over the bones of all the world? That is a Rat story, Laughing Child. That is the story we told you, long ago.’ Abruptly he had swooped down and hauled Hesprec up, holding her by the halter so that she clutched at his arm to stop herself being strangled. Around them, the score of starvelings began a rapid patter on the stone floor with their hands and the sound swiftly took on a life of its own. Maniye remembered the Tiger being called forth by smoke and embers in the Shining Halls. Now she felt the Rat respond to its own summons, seething close within the dark beyond the fires, a tide of gnawing, ever-hungry teeth.

  The Rat Speaker spread his arms wide, Hesprec still dangling from one hand. A flint knife was in the other. ‘Laughing Child, know that the time of the stories is nigh. The Plains are already half strewn with bones. The enemy has come that no spear can fight, and only the carrion-eaters will live, who can survive on bones and the lost larders of extinct tribes. A brief but bounteous age, Laughing Child! And all we must do is rid the world of those who preach the poisonous creed of hope!’

  Maniye felt the room was growing smaller and smaller, as though the walls seethed with an ever thicker layer of hairy bodies. She sought strength from the only well she had left; she let the Champion in and Stepped into that huge frame, brushing the stone of the domed ceiling with her back. And still the madness of the Rat stared undaunted at her from the Speaker’s eyes.

  ‘And there will be no more Champions,’ he said, right into her snarl. ‘No more old souls, no priests, no hope, no stories except those Rat tells Hyena over a picked carcass.’

  Shyri stepped forwards, and Maniye read just a dull acceptance in her posture. She growled, deep in her throat, but the sound did not echo back from the stone, lost in the endless scuffling of rodent feet.

  That ghastly smile stretched further, until the Speaker’s face began to tear.

  ‘No more Champions,’ Shyri echoed, casting a moment’s guilty look at Maniye, then stepping closer to the Speaker, virtually into his seething shadow.

  Maniye lunged forward, but shied away at the last moment, backing off. The thought of taking that tainted flesh in her jaws, of feeling the bustling ripples of his robe within her mouth sickened her stomach, whatever shape she was in. She stared desperately at Hesprec.

  The Serpent girl, still clinging gamely to the Speaker’s wrist, chose that moment to conquer her own revulsion and sink her human teeth into the man’s thumb.

  There was enough living man left in the Rat Speaker that he barked with pain and smacked at her with the butt of the knife, and Shyri spat, ‘There’s one Champion I would keep,’ and opened him up with her knife from navel to neck.

  Instantly there was chaos. The Rat Speaker votaries leapt forward as though a single hand had hauled on them – knives and rocks and filthy teeth and nails. At the same time the wound that Shyri had carved was vomiting more than blood. A great flood of vermin was pouring out of the gash. Shyri stood before it for a moment, as though accepting the price for her treachery, but then a grey wolf had knocked her aside in its haste to get its teeth into one of the Rat cultists, and Maniye started back to herself, and ceased to be an observer. The Champion thundered forwards, spilling human bodies out of its way as easily as
it crushed the fragile bones of the rats.

  At first it was like fighting dead leaves. Everywhere she turned something crunched underfoot. The human servants of the Rat were so starved by their master that she barely felt the blows they aimed at her hide. She roared and cuffed, spilling them everywhere, knowing that the power of the enemy had been broken so very simply.

  And yet they were not breaking, and there always seemed to be more of them. Coursing streams of matted little bodies were surging into the chamber from between the stones, from secret hidden ways. They surged like an unclean tide, seeking flesh to latch on to. Maniye had mad glances of a hyena shaking bodies in its teeth, their long tails flailing like whips; she saw Kalameshli’s wolf pounce and snarl, and then he was a man again long enough to bloody his iron in the bowels of a human votary. A serpent ran its length through the chamber like lightning across the sky, now tiny, ambushing individual rats from behind their brethren, now huge, its scales warding off their dagger-like teeth.

  Yet there were always more of them. Maniye’s pelt crawled with little hand-like feet, and her back and belly became a constellation of pain as teeth began to gnaw and burrow. They were focusing their numbers on her, the greatest threat. Maniye began to panic. She Stepped to a wolf and tried to outrun them; she became a tiger and writhed and rolled, flinging the vermin off her only to have them swarm back with her next breath. She snarled and cuffed, seeing a thousand little eyes throw back the firelight, backing away until the curved wall of the chamber was at her heels. She could not see the door; the Rat had closed the way somehow. She was buried deep within the earth and who would notice one more set of bones strewn in these dead halls?