Sol could still barely believe what he was hearing. Could it really be true, that living against their natural rhythm could kill a Nycht over time? "Why didn't she live as a nocturnal creature, then?" Sol struggled to understand. "I mean, if it was killing her—–"
"We didn't know it was killing her. We knew she was weak, but we didn't ascribe it to her lack of daytime sleep. She took a trip to Maticaw with Arth and Mareya one day. She'd never been, and had always wanted to go. Our mother was very protective of Nieve, never letting her leave Rodania. Arth had to make a delivery to someone in Maticaw who bought one of her items, and Nieve begged Arth to take her. Told her it was her dream to see the mainland. Arth agreed. They made the delivery during daytime hours, the way every other delivery is made. Nieve made it to Maticaw, but she collapsed on one of the docks. She was never one to complain. She had spent a lifetime hiding her suffering from us, keeping secret anything that would make us worry more or hold her back."
Toth was silent for a time.
"She never recovered," Toth continued. "They took her to a doctor, but he couldn't explain what was wrong with her. Arth sent for a Light Elf, but it was too late. The Elf arrived after Nieve had passed on. It was only then, using their magic, that they were able to discover the cause of her death. It was simply a life lived against what her biology needed to thrive, the forced continuation of insisting on the body when it’s begging for otherwise."
"I'm sorry." Sol finally cobbled together a response, and it fell like dust from his mouth, hollow and meaningless in the face of such a tragedy.
"If you're really sorry, then find a way to help me change things. Nieve is why Caje and I left Rodania. For all the good it did us."
"Are there others?"
"Nychts who died because they're forced to live the Arpak way? Of course there are. Not many, but there have always been some Nychts born with a compromised immune system or a weak heart. Their deaths are ascribed to the diagnosis given at birth, but in how many cases might living in accordance with their biological imperative strengthen them enough to live a full life? Nychts thrive in moonlight, and they are forced to live in the sun. Many of them do not even know themselves how damaging this can be over time."
Sol swallowed down his horror. "Why don't the Council know about them? These Nycht deaths?"
"They do," muttered Toth, all his bitterness finally emerging. "What are a few lowly Nycht deaths in the face of keeping Arpaks in control of Rodania?"
Sol found his gaze cast down between his booted feet, unable to look at Toth anymore. Shame burned through his insides in the same way the offensive alcohol had set his stomach and throat afire. "I never knew."
"Now you do," said Toth. "And you can't un-know it."
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
They approached the caves of Golpa in the black of night, since harpies were not nocturnal. In this way, they wouldn't alert any harpies that might be out hunting nearby, and they could utilize one of the Nychts’ more deadly assets––sonar.
The temperatures were now well below freezing. Every piece of cold-weather gear that had been brought along on the mission had been donned. Bags of food and supplies not needed for the attack itself were stashed among the rocks.
Scouts had reported in great detail the location, size, and surrounding terrain at the mouth of Golpa. They stammered through a description of a huge, yawning, toothy hole leading into the black belly of the mountain, and relayed the pungent odor of the harpy dung that littered the rocks and snow for a quarter mile leading up to it, in addition to the stench of death and decay, thick even on the frozen air.
When it was time for the party to see it for themselves, Blue and Red descended to join the Strix, landing on razor-sharp claws among the warriors, and blowing steam and smoke. A dim yellow glow emanated from the scales of Blue's belly where he'd stoked his inner fire. Red's scales glowed an angry scarlet, and were so hot that Strix who felt brave enough clustered around her for warmth.
The dragons crouched among the rocks, waiting with deadly patience for the Strix to move toward the cave entrance.
Toth made his way to Red's snout, approaching slowly and with his head down. She watched him through a calculating slash of a pupil, unblinking. The tips of her pearly white teeth could be seen even in the dark, giving her a chilly, predatory grin, and her jaws were so massive they could crush several harpies in one bite.
Toth stopped near her huge cheek, in the space between her and Blue, and rubbed his gloved hands together.
Blue swung his head toward the Nycht.
"This was your idea, bud. Are you ready?"
Blue snorted out a sharp, hot breath, which misted the side of Toth's face in mucous.
Toth wiped at his cheek and flicked the goop off his glove. "I'll take that as a yes."
Red's jaws opened, and Toth stepped back, observing the red glow that ran down her huge throat with watering eyes. Her jaws clicked shut and she shook her head, her leathery jowls swaying. She rose from where she lay and spread her wings, as Strix stumbled back from where they'd been basking in her heat. She took to the sky with slow, heavy beats of her wings, and Blue followed silently.
The Strix took to the air, staying behind the reptiles. They hovered at the huge black hole of Golpa and watched as Red floated into the darkness like a leviathan in the ocean. Her great form was swallowed up by the shadows, and Blue's disappeared shortly after. Only the beating of their wings could be heard, echoing up from the rocky cavern walls, growing softer by the second.
Toth held up a hand, signalling his Nychts to wait. Behind the cluster of hovering Nychts were the Arpaks, armed and waiting to do their job. The breath of the Strix punctured the air before every mouth. Two fat harvest moons had hoisted themselves into the frozen sky above them all, and the dome overtop Oriceran was a caul of stars. It was a beautiful sight.
When a blast of light and heat illuminated the mouth of Golpa, Toth signalled, and the Nychts moved forward.
The Arpaks watched the forms of their fellow warriors, silhouetted against the hellish glow, disappear one by one into the throat of the mountain. Shortly after, the screams and cries of outraged harpies echoed out to their ears.
Inside Golpa, the once frozen and dark-as-deep-space rock womb was now so lit with heat and light and blood, it seemed that the Nychts had found the location of hell itself. Staying far behind the dragons as they did their fiery work, the Nychts darted about the crags, stalagmites and stalactites, cutting down the panicked harpies that had been sleeping only moments before. Nests were discovered, eggs destroyed, young and old cut down without mercy. The smell of death and blood, smoke and scorched flesh filled the caves.
Golpa was not just one huge twisting hole winding itself deep under the mountain, but a stringy network of caves, mostly dead ends. Where harpies could go, Nychts could go with ease, but Red could only fit through the main artery; she wrought her deadly fire upon every hagbird she found there. The powerful sound of her fiery blasts emboldened the warriors, explosions of heat and light in hues of green, orange, and white lit up the mountain’s interior, urging them on.
Sending sound waves from their throats too high to be detected by Arpak ears, the Nychts echolocated in places where the light of the dragonfire did not reach. With sonar, the Nychts could read where the harpies were, how big they were, how fast and in what direction they were moving—–meanwhile, the harpies were blind and terrified. Between the dragons and the sonar, the scales of battle had tipped so steeply in the Nychts’ favor that it was absurd.
The harpies screamed, panicked and disorganized. For them, armageddon had come. Even their superconsciousness was too startled to register what was happening. Surprise shattered any hope they might have had to organize a counterattack; it was every harpy for itself.
In places where the light did not reach, their sonar gave the Nychts perfect visuals of the chaos. The cold effectiveness of their strategy surprised even Toth, as he cut through a flaming harpy that was straini
ng for the exit. He hovered for a moment to take in the scene around him: the Nychts were death on silent wings, and the caves were filled with the forms of darting, flapping, slashing warriors, and the tumbling, broken bodies of harpies. Far below his feet were the light orbs of abandoned nests, clustered with eggs. All of them would be destroyed before the morning sun lent its light to the frozen north.
The work Red and Blue were doing was too deep into the throat of the mountain to be seen. It was too hot and dangerous for any Nycht to venture close to them now, tempting though it was to watch the reptiles and their eye-watering, hair-singeing jets of flame. Judging by the state of the harpies that had survived the dragons’ attack long enough to make it this close to the exit, Blue and Red were being thorough to the point of surgical.
And thus the night wore on.
***
Smoke billowed from the yawning mouth of the cave where the Arpak warriors waited. The light of early dawn welcomed the soot-blackened Nychts as they retreated from the hot, smoky belly of the earth. There, they joined the Arpaks and waited, with drawn steel, for stragglers.
Harpies that came screaming from the exit in panic were cut down swiftly, their deaths upon them before they could register what was happening. At first, the harpies were many, exiting the rocky jaws with smoking feathers, some of them fully aflame. Then their numbers dwindled, and the screams that echoed from the throat of Golpa and into the crisp winter air abated.
Toth stepped back from the cluster of soldiers to wet his parched mouth with a drink of water.
A thick burst of black, resinous, and stinking smoke burst from the cave. A moment later, that same smoke was sucked back inside, only to be blown out again.
"Fall back!" Toth bellowed, the waterskin hovering in the air halfway to his lips. "Here they come!"
The Strix took to flight like a murder of startled crows, fleeing the entrance to Golpa like a spray of shrapnel. A triumphant, bestial roar shook the walls of the cave, and rocks loosed from their places in the overhang, falling to the rubble below with a clatter.
Blue burst from the mouth of Golpa first, his wings beating out a rapid, tight rhythm. He loosed an excited shriek that made the Strix soldiers cringe and cover their ears, but also grin with cold satisfaction. A blast of grimy smoke preceded Red, and all heads tilted back to watch the scarlet-scaled zeppelin emerge. She floated from the cave and darkened the sky as she passed overhead. Her wingbeats were slow and powerful as she caught up to Blue. The dragons climbed skyward, screaming their victory and trailing smoke.
The Strix lifted their weapons and cried out a collective reply, saluting the reptiles—–it was the dragons’ victory, not their own.
Toth bared his teeth in a satisfied grimace; the unpleasant mission was almost done. He knew there were harpies out in the wild world that had been missed. The next mission for his fierce Strix soldiers would be to break into smaller parties, hunt down the missing harpies, and exterminate them.
Toth's eyes shuttered closed for a moment, and he thought of Caje. "For you, brother," he murmured before taking several long draughts of the cooling water.
A shadow fell over him as Sol landed nearby, his face as black as the earth of the southern Conca. He was coated with soot, and his teeth were a white blaze in his face.
Toth handed him the waterskin, and Sol took it and drank. He handed it back, his shoulders and chest still rising and falling from the exertion and exhilaration of their success. Toth reached into a pocket and took out a hunk of leftover cheese. He held it out to Sol, who took it, broke off a piece, and handed the rest back. Toth pocketed it for later.
"That went well," Sol said, the cheese a bulge in his cheek.
"Not so well for the harpies."
"No, not so well for them."
They watched as a few remaining harpies were cut down at the exit. A cluster of Strix still stood or hovered in the air in a semi-circle around the entrance. When a harpy emerged, whoever darted forward first finished the beast off. It became a bloody game.
There was a feeling of relief that the plan had gone so well, but death was unpleasant work. The mood was somber, for these Strix were not ruthless mindless killers. They were civilized men and women from all kinds of educated backgrounds. They knew what they had done was genocide.
Toth watched his soldiers finish off whatever came out, until the emergence of a screaming smoking hagbird dwindled to less than one every ten minutes.
"Were we right to do it this way?" Sol asked quietly from Toth's right side. Sol had not expected to feel the sadness that was rising up in him as the full extent of the damage they had done sank in. His own feelings baffled him. They had been victorious; he should be screaming triumph to the sky. But the victory felt hollow and pricey.
Toth knew what Sol was asking. Had they the right to exterminate an entire species, gruesome and vile though that species was?
"They were an unnatural breed," answered Toth. "They should never have happened in the first place." Toth rinsed his mouth out again and spat off to the side, hooking his waterskin onto his belt. "Rodania is safe again. From harpies, anyway."
The soldiers had begun to prepare for a journey home, cleaning their weapons, drinking and washing the smoke and blood from themselves as well as they could. Someone was lighting a fire to melt the snow so they had something warm to wash with.
A small figure on a clifftop over Toth's shoulder made Sol squint his eyes. "We've got an audience," he jerked his chin toward the silhouette.
Toth looked over his shoulder to where Sol had directed, but the sun glinted off the snow and obscured his vision. He lifted a hand to shade his eyes, and the figure become more defined. Toth frowned. It’s a child. He or she was just standing there, still as a wax figurine, watching the smoke pouring from the mouth of Golpa and the Strix soldiers clustered around it.
"What's a child doing way out here?" Sol echoed Toth's own question. "There must be others nearby."
"Could be gypsies, though I thought they were allergic to cold weather. I'll find out."
Toth's wings opened, and Sol put out a hand and started to tell the Nycht that he would go, in case it was some kind of trap, but the words died on his lips. Toth was not that kind of captain. If he thought there was danger, he was more likely to lead the way or go by himself. Many of the Strix combatants thought this was foolhardy, but it was hardwired in Toth to behave this way. He'd been a solo mercenary for too long. So Sol only watched as he ascended from the barren valley floor toward the clifftop.
As Toth closed the gap between him and the child, the child sprang into action, turning and running across the rocks and snow like a deer.
It’s a girl, Toth realized, as he saw a long tangle of wild red hair the color of strawberries at the height of summer. He expected there to be a camp on the horizon, a nomadic village set up along the cliffside——though why any nomadic people would set up camp this close to Golpa was beyond him. But the child did not run to any camp. There was no tent in sight.
Toth flew overhead as the child ran, her fur-bound feet lightly springing between the sharp jutting rocks and ice without faltering. She headed for a copse of scrawny-trunked trees, where an arch of rock with a wide split in its face swallowed her up. Just outside the jagged crevasse were the ashes of a dead fire and a cobbled-together spit for cooking.
Toth landed just outside the copse of trees and made his way slowly through them toward the crack in the rock where the girl had disappeared.
"I won't hurt you," Toth called, and then repeated it in three more languages, hoping one of them would be hers. Toth knew most of the dialects of The Conca well enough to communicate, having defended it and made deals with its inhabitants for over a decade.
There was no reply.
"Are you alone?" Again, he asked this in multiple languages. He crouched at the remains of the fire and held a hand over the ash. It was warm. There were coals banked beneath the earth's surface. Toth's eyebrows shot up with surprise. Cleve
r girl. How long had she been out here, living like this? His eyes took in the girl's camp, the surrounding terrain. His ears perked for sounds that might suggest some kind of ambush, but there was nothing but the wind and the sound of dry snow spraying against cold rock.
"Do you need help?" Toth waited for a response, but when none came, he stood. Bemused, he posted his hands on his hips and chewed his cheek.
He wouldn't go in after her and drag her out; for all he knew, she was part of a tribe of hunters who would return with their kill and make a feast for her to eat. But Toth's gut told him this was not the case. Looking around, he saw only the tracks of a child in the snow, no others. There was an overturned metal pot full of dents—–probably what she used to boil snow for water.
"I'll leave you, then," said Toth, rattling it off in multiple tongues. He turned to leave, still hoping the child would show herself. He walked slowly.
Something small bounced off Toth's shoulder and landed in the snow. Toth looked down. She'd thrown a pebble. He smiled and stopped walking. His gut had been right. She didn't want him to leave. He turned to face the crevasse just as a loud sneeze emerged from the crack. A white face appeared in the wall, half-hidden and with a purple smudge under the visible eye.
"Are you hungry?" Toth opened his satchel and retrieved a hunk of cheese, unwrapping the cloth encasing it and holding it out. He took a few slow steps forward and crouched again, trying to make himself as friendly looking as possible. Armed to the teeth and with sharp dewclaws arched over his head, Toth did not cut a friendly figure. But the girl didn't run away again.
The girl took a step forward where Toth could see her better. She was wrapped up in rough clothing made from animal skins. A hat that might have once been white, but was now a dingy gray, encased her head, and square flaps came down over her ears. Her boots were tied on with leather thongs, and her pants were shaggy with tawny fur—–probably from one of the mountain goat species of the Northern Conca. Her jacket though, that was different. It had likely once been a bright blue-white, the color of an iceberg. Wooden toggles held it closed, and thick white fur sprouted from the cuffs and along the front, and lined the oversized hood, which hung against her shoulders. Mittens dangled from strings that hung from each sleeve. The mittens were leather and also lined with fur. Someone once cared very much about this girl, enough to outfit her in the warmest of handmade clothing.
Transcendent: The Revelations of Oriceran (The Kacy Chronicles Book 4) Page 15