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

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Besides, Lions might be lazy, but Lionesses were proverbially fierce in all things save standing up to their mates, and Reshappa’s mate was dead.

  Even so, this was not the moment for a doomed charge into the killing teeth of the enemy. Reshappa had a far better way to cause the Plague People grief.

  For a day and a night, her people had been hunting – not to kill, but to scare up a certain kind of game and make sure it was ready. They had not been alone, either. Once word of the plan spread, the best hunters of other people announced themselves proud to run with the Lion, and for once the Lion turned none of them away. There were some of the northmen, and the Plains Dogs, and even a handful of Hyena who seemed to realize that the best way to get their carrion was to contribute to the killing.

  Reshappa and her people had gone north until they found a herd of aurochs, the huge horned beasts whose tribe was long lost in the Plains’ bloody past. They had stalked about the edges of the herd, riling the beasts up with the scent of lion, forcing them across the grassland until they were between the Plague Men and the camp.

  Tchoche and a hundred Stone Men had joined them after that. Half his force were White Face warriors, loaded down with thick bronze armour, carrying great shields that covered them from neck to toe; the other half were Snake Eaters, lithe men and women who moved like they were dancing and fought with javelins and short curved blades. The Stone Kingdoms were safer than anywhere, right now. Up in the mountains across the Tsotec’s Back, who knew if the Plague People would ever come there? And yet the Serpent had called, who had once been their enemy but wormed his way into their friendship, and so here they were at the end of the world.

  Now the scouts were running back – Lion and Dog and Snake Eater, two legs and four, shouting that the Plague Men were coming. Their warnings were unnecessary; the sky behind them was already whirling with flying men, advancing like a storm-front over the land.

  Reshappa roared, and the sound was echoed back across the grassland. The aurochs had been cropping the grass, massed horns outwards against the predators they could still scent. Now the Lion hunters came at them, roaring and snarling, while behind them came more in human form, beating drums and clacking sticks together and waving bright torches. Tchoche imagined the herd stamping and bellowing, horns tossing in defiance, but they were beasts, not men. There would come a moment when the noise and confusion was too much for them.

  One of his people rapped on the side of his helm, and he craned past his shoulderguard to see a great curtain of dust thrown into the air as the aurochs began moving. The Lion and their helpers would be at their heels all the way, nipping and clawing, urging them on. In the rising dust, Tchoche seemed to see a shape, vastly muscled, head lowered as it charged over the backs of the animals. Perhaps Aurochs himself had heard the cries of the priests and come in memory of his vanished people. Perhaps this deed would bring them back to the world, who knew?

  He had thought the Plains people would scatter and run before the charge, but only some of them could fly, and the rest dropped back to protect them. Tchoche’s heart surged, because the aurochs were charging at full pelt now, an unstoppable force, and perhaps this was it. Perhaps the war would end here under the hooves of the bulls.

  The dust was spreading across the Plains now, layering his view of the enemy with drifting veils, and he waited for the sound of that clash, feeling the earth jump beneath his feet at the massed charge of the aurochs.

  The Plague People had formed lines, as though they could meet the aurochs as army met army in the south. Except nobody ever said the Plague Men just stood and fought with blade or spear, not when they had their killing rods.

  And they were shooting, he saw. Two or three rows of them, shoulder to shoulder, shooting and shooting into that great unstoppable wave of meat and horn, They are doomed! Tchoche thought, and his heart surged, hearing the cheering of his people all around.

  But the wave was cresting. His eyes couldn’t understand what they were seeing at first – it was as though the aurochs were breaking against a barrier he couldn’t see. As the jubilation of his fellows ebbed, he finally took hold of the sight and forced it to make sense. The Plague People were killing the aurochs with their darts. He had not believed that little slivers of metal could slay strong men the way he had been told, but now he saw the truth of all the stories. The charging herd met the massed wrath of the Plague People and died and died, huge beasts with thick hides pierced through and through until they dropped. Those behind were moving too fast in their panicked rout, stumbling over the bodies of those gone before, meeting the same fate even as they tried to regain their momentum. The Plague People just stood their ground, and Tchoche felt a worm of fear.

  Then there was no more charging herd, just odd animals running off in all directions, and even these the Plague Men cut down, one after another. And then they were advancing again, coming across the grassland like the wind.

  ‘What now?’ one of the Snake Eaters asked, her eyes wide. Tchoche was momentarily without ideas, but then a lion was in their midst that Stepped into the shape of Reshappa.

  ‘They barely slowed,’ Tchoche observed.

  ‘Then we will slow them,’ Reshappa told him flatly. ‘It will not be said that, at the end of the world, the Lion shied from the fight. Go back to your stone places, Stone Man.’

  Tchoche took a deep breath. ‘I will not.’

  ‘All your bronze will not save you,’ Reshappa told him. ‘It will only slow you, old man.’

  ‘It will not,’ he said, and Stepped, first to the badger that was his people’s totem, and then to his Champion form, the berserker wolverine that feared nothing and laughed at pain.

  They flowed swift and low through the grass, and there was enough dust in the air that the Plague scouts did not see them until they were almost within striking distance. Then they did what they could, engaging the Plague People and trying to hook them down before they could fly, fighting a ragged running battle back and forth across the Plains and trusting to surprise and Champion’s blood to stave off the Terror. For a few moments they were masters of the fight, and the Plague Men only reacting to them. Tchoche let his angry spirit off its chain, feeling the fury take him in hand and throw him at the enemy like a stone.

  He was the last one left, in the end. After his people had been killed, or the Terror had taken them, after Reshappa had been lanced with too many darts to fight on and all her hunters were dead or fled, still Tchoche remained, spitting and snarling and bleeding, surrounded by Plague Men regarding him with a horrified awe as they put shot after shot into him and he refused to die.

  They would not come near his claws and teeth, but just circled and circled, shooting and shooting, and even a Champion’s soul could not hold off the end forever. Death wins all battles, thought Tchoche, and the final bolt struck home in his skull and he died.

  32

  The rolling rhythm of the great ritual blurred in Maniye’s head, receding but never quite going away. Hesprec’s telling of the journey she was taking faded, becoming part of her mind at a level too deep to register.

  She opened her eyes to the sight her ears had been telling her of: that waxing, waning sound, coursing towards her and then ebbing away, what else could it be but this?

  She stared at the sea’s great, black expanse, creased with the ridges of waves forever clawing at the shore. She had never seen the sea before, not like this, not properly, but it was embedded in her mind from the stories. Like a puddle, like a bowl of water, like a dark lake but bigger, bigger until there was no end to it and it could swallow the world and everything in it, that was the sea.

  She wrenched her gaze from it to the barren shoreline, marked by a patchy line of driftwood and dead weed that the waves were creeping towards. Beyond, the land rose in jagged increments towards that unquiet sky she knew so well. But why am I here? I was in the heart of the Plains, as far from the sea as I could be! But in the mind of her people the sea meant the Plague People
. The sea was to be feared because if you followed its roads long enough, you would find that ancient enemy. In the Godsland the sea was here because the land beyond this point had been lost.

  The sea exhaled a chill that cut her to the bone, but that was not the breath she heard beside her. Galethea’s voice gasped, ‘What is this place?’

  The Pale Shadow woman was with her. Her form was spectral and shifting; Maniye could see right through her to the blasted rocks beyond, to the hungry depths of the sea. She was there, though, or something of her was. The fact surprised her as much as it did Maniye.

  ‘This is the Godsland,’ Maniye told her.

  ‘But how can I be here?’ Galethea whispered.

  ‘You knew this was Hesprec’s plan.’

  ‘But how?’ the apparition demanded. ‘Do I have a soul now? How else am I here?’

  Maniye shook her head. ‘You hollow people don’t understand. There are souls and there are minds. If it were only my souls here, they would not remember me. My souls move from body to body, life to life. That part of me that knows the name Maniye Many Tracks, she is my mind. You can have a mind without a soul – look at Empty Skin. Look at you. Your mind is here but it has no soul to anchor it. A strong wind could blow you away.’ She almost reached out to pass a hand through the ghostly figure, but the thought of what that might feel like stopped her.

  ‘I don’t want to blow away.’ Even Galethea’s voice sounded as though it came from far off. ‘What can I do here?’

  ‘You can stay close to me and hope my souls shield you,’ Maniye told her.

  ‘But where is Hesprec? I want Hesprec here. She knows what to do,’ Galethea said petulantly.

  ‘Can you not feel her at our backs?’ Maniye asked. ‘Can you not feel all of them, the priests, the dancers? Hesprec holds open the door that lets you stand here, that lets me stand here with you. So: it is up to us.’

  ‘To do what? If this is the Godsland where are your gods?’ Galethea asked her. ‘What is any of this for, if they haven’t come?’

  ‘We are here to find the gods, yes.’ And Maniye bit back the rest of it, because Hesprec had trusted the knowledge only to her, not to Galethea, not to Mother, not to any of the Wise.

  ‘Then where are they?’ The wind blowing off the sea caught Galethea’s words and ripped them away from her, barely heard.

  Maniye put the waves at her back, looking inland. There were mountains there, heights to scale. ‘Come with me,’ she ordered. A dozen paces up the slope she reached the first rocks and looked back. Galethea was still on the strand, the water touching her insubstantial heels.

  ‘What is it?’ Maniye asked her.

  ‘I can’t . . .’ said the Pale Shadow woman’s pale shadow. ‘I’m hurt.’

  ‘Your body is hurt, but that hurt does not come here, I know,’ Maniye told her, but if what she had here was the woman’s mind, it was a wispy, feeble thing without a soul behind it.

  The only solution to the problem did not sit well with Maniye or any of her souls, but she knew the creature could ride a horse like a real human. Perhaps it would not be so bad.

  She could not command, she could only ask, deep inside her. I need you. I know you would rather be fighting. This is no fit task for a great soul such as yours but I need you.

  No words, but she felt the shifting of thoughts like ancient bones gone over to stone. It was acquiescence, and a heartbeat later the Champion’s breath was on her neck and she stood in its shadow.

  She climbed onto that broad back and held a hand out for Galethea, bracing herself. What touched her hand was not like a hand-clasp itself, but the memory of one, the after-impression once the hand is gone. Nonetheless she pulled and drew the spectre up behind her, feeling arms about her midriff no more substantial than thistledown.

  ‘I’m scared,’ Galethea whispered in her ear. ‘I shouldn’t be in this place. It’s hungry. I could vanish into it and nobody would ever know.’

  ‘All the world is hungry, and your kind are hungriest of all. You’ve no right to complain.’ Her incessant whining was setting Maniye’s teeth on edge.

  ‘They’re not my kind,’ Galethea sighed. ‘Not any more.’ She sounded fainter than before, and when Maniye craned back, there was almost nothing of her left. She had to shout the pale woman’s name three times before the gossamer lines of her face sprang back like taut threads and she was present again.

  ‘Remember why you are here,’ Maniye snapped at her. ‘You want souls for your people? Then you must work with us. You must help us defeat your cousins.’

  ‘It’s hard,’ Galethea said. ‘I’m hurt.’

  ‘Just hold to me. Keep yourself real for me. You are the only one of your people ever to come here, Pale Shadow. This is the land all souls pass through, and here you are, laying eyes upon it. Let it be a lucky omen for your people and stay with me.’

  Then she had bent down to touch her forehead to the hairy scalp of the Champion, communicating her desires, and the next moment the great beast lunged forwards and scaled the rocks without a pause, raking its way up with four sets of claws, and then running across the dry ground it discovered, heading against the slope all the time, seeking the highest ground. Ahead the mountains looked like broken teeth, shrouded in dust or cloud and circled by the angry gyrations of the stars.

  The land around them was barren, but not featureless. The gods had been here. What they left behind was ruin. Maniye saw villages gone to fire or simply standing empty like skulls – the shadows of those places the Plague People had overtaken, perhaps the last monuments to where some small tribe and its god had made a final stand. There were bones, too, human interspersed with those of beasts large and small. In some places they formed a brittle carpet that the Champion picked its way over, the little ribs of rats and meerkats splintering beneath its pads. Elsewhere there were greater relics that dominated the scenery, the arching fingers, the boulder-sized skulls marking the fall of some ancient beast of deep time, or perhaps a god. Maniye didn’t know any more. She didn’t know what was real, what was her own mind dressing this dying place, what was built from Hesprec’s patient words.

  She had a dreadful sense of time flowing through her fingers like fine sand, the lives of Hesprec and the others before the advance of the Plague warriors that the war host could only delay? Or was it this place: was it the gods dying? She called out to them inside herself, for Tiger who dwelled in smoke and shadow, for Wolf who was fire and winter both. Was there a faint answer, her reluctant patrons howling back to her across the valleys? She could not say, but there was snow, then – and never in her life had she been so glad of it. Cold was her friend, a thing of her world sent by the Wolf to test his people. Her mood communicated itself to the Champion and it lunged ahead, loping swiftly across a ground patched with the first drifting scraps of white. Galethea’s arms tightened – or perhaps became more real – and Maniye glanced back to see exhilaration on her waning face. The fierce coursing of the Champion beneath her, Maniye’s own determination, something had crossed back into the world to haul her mind here, insubstantial as she still was, and commit her to this journey, to its reality.

  And then the Champion was slowing. At first Maniye thought it was because the land ahead was broken, creased into canyons and ridges as though the mountains had twisted all the land around them on the way up.

  It was not the land that had stopped the Champion, though. They were not alone. The starlight glinted silver in the eyes of something waiting for them in the darkness.

  The Rat . . . Could Serpent not hold on to the creature just a little longer? Or was Serpent dying too, and the Rat the world’s one true inheritor?

  Or not the only one . . . and these bones are cracked and split, not gnawed by many teeth. ‘Come forth,’ Maniye demanded, truly not knowing what was ahead, knowing only that she must go forwards – and up, always up.

  It stepped delicately out of its lair, claws rattling the bones of its feasting, a high-shouldered monster to p
ut the Champion to shame, its back bristling with a ridge of hair and its massive jaws exhaling a carrion stench. Its flanks were dappled and spotted, and it snickered at them, a little sound of cruelty and mirth.

  ‘Who is it still lives and breathes, here at the end of the world?’ asked Hyena, in the voice of a woman who has seen much to laugh about.

  ‘I am come to find the gods,’ Maniye told her, because in the stories, questing heroes misled the gods as often as they told the truth.

  ‘Your search is over,’ Hyena pointed out. ‘I am here.’ She padded closer and the Champion growled a little and backed up. ‘What other god did you expect to find at the world’s sunset, little wolfling, little tiger cub? Do you not know my people’s legends?’

  ‘I do, for I have travelled with one of your daughters,’ Maniye told those yellowed fangs. ‘And yet I think they draw the wrong lesson from them.’

  ‘Oho.’ Hyena ducked her head until one eye was staring at Maniye’s whole face, gleaming with captured starlight. ‘Tell me how my people are wrong about me, little wolf-cat.’

  ‘They say you will be the last god left on a pile of bones because you are last to the fight,’ Maniye said, fists tight in the Champion’s mane to keep her hands from shaking. ‘But I think you are here because you are last to flee. All the other gods cannot abide the coming of the Plague People, but you know your children will stay until the last, for the dead meat and the easy kills. You are not the last to fight, you are the last to run away.’

  Hyena was still for a long while, or at least half a dozen cavernous death-reeking breaths from those jaws seemed very long indeed. Then she cackled a little. ‘You would make me a grand protector, would you?’