Banshee (18 page)

Saavin unspooled her rope and began tying off to a large metal stake that protruded from a glimmering boulder. “Why not right?”

French paused working with his rope as the water sprayed around them, snapping his teeth together dramatically.

Saavin smiled grimly. “Good enough. Left it is.” Her shout was carried away in the cacophony of the waters.

As one, they approached the Chandeliers. Slickly knurled stones pulsed in and out of visibility as the rebellious waters refused to stay within any graven channel. The flowstone lip rolled away into the blackness, and their feet stepped into the frigid unknown. With a confident surety bred from years in the wilds, French led the fighter who plied her trade in the air. Steps led to sliding impacts against the irregular rocks, worn smooth by the water, but no less punishing for their less angular shape. Time and again, Saavin and French slipped, only to slam in teeth-jarring impacts that bruised them steadily during their tumultuous descent. Mercifully, after two long hours, French felt his feet touch the unyielding base of the final waterfall. Saavin collapsed next to him, safely away from the undisturbed waters of an eddy that was curiously still.

“Pull your feet back from the edge,” French said into her ear.

She jerked her black-clad legs back in a savage reaction, even as a minor ripple began to disturb the rare quiet of the pool that vanished from sight under a carved overhang. They both withdrew toward a spray-covered ridge of stone that wound along the left wall, elevating gradually into a distinct path. Saavin vomited water onto the stones as adrenaline shook her hands with a brute staccato.

“That’s the hard part,” French said, wiping blood from his ear. There wasn’t an inch of their bodies that hadn’t been pummeled by the journey. “Now, comes the dangerous part.”

Saavin’s eyes widened at that. “What could be more dangerous than
those
?” She jabbed a finger weakly in the general direction behind them.

French struggled to his feet, thankful that the water covered his groans of protest. Despite his excellent condition, he doubted that anything was going to be easy. With one hand, he pulled Saavin upright. Her wincing first step toward their path brought a weak chuckle from him, but he sobered swiftly when she looked expectantly at him for the answer to her question.

He shrugged in a wild understatement, given their surroundings. “This is as far as I’ve been. From here on, I don’t know
what
could kill us.”

Bedraggled and sodden, the pair of intruders clambered up a low slope that huddled against the soaring wall of rock. Gaining elevation with grudging steps, French tested his footholds with a delicacy beyond his size. Twice stone chips slid from beneath his question foot, clattering below into the diminishing roar of the waters. The path grew drier as quiet gathered around them, save their labored breathing.

“How . . . much further?” Saavin gasped. The bruising aftereffects of the Chandeliers caused spikes of pain that stole her breath. Illumination from lichens flared and stabilized as the tough life forms found better purchase on the moderate moisture of the curving walls. Shades of blue and green cast dim shadows along the widening path, until French turned to Saavin, sweat dripping freely form his face, and patted the air indicating they should stop. The ledge was broad, flat, and high enough above the Chandeliers that their noise had been shushed to a background of watery whispers.

“This is it.” French slid to the dry stone without ceremony. “That was a bit rougher than the first time.”

“Must be the rains, from somewhere?” Saavin said. She too collapsed with relief, and took a long look around their vantage point. “We’re close enough to the ceiling to pick out individual colonies of lichens.” She pointed weakly.

French didn’t respond. He busily pulled supplies from his pack in a virtual repeat of their earlier battle against the arachnids. In seconds, he’d lit a second small bundle of sticks for a cooking fire. It cast a remarkable bulwark of cheer against the alien oppression of the cave. “We need to eat, and rest. This is as safe as we’ll be . . . I think.” He appraised the shelf again, noting the lack of activity. “It looks like the path falls away toward that side passage. If you can call it that; it seems to be wider than the original opening.”

Saavin watched him with interest as he prepared the crayfish. Her stomach rumbled in protest, loud enough to earn a wry grin from French. “I never thought I’d miss the sun this much.” Her voice carried the unspoken fear of every human in history. Even with modest light, willfully leaving the sun behind was an abrogation of everything rhythmic that she’d known living in the merciless desert heat.

French stopped amid his task to look at her sharply. “If we don’t stop these things, the entire world will be dark. We’ll be reduced to living in holes and fighting for scraps, like vermin on a ship that we longer control.” An angry shake of his head flung water from his still-damp hair. “I can’t let that happen. None of us can afford to let it happen, but there are those who. . .” He stopped with a soft curse as the cooking meat singed his finger. “Not everyone is adamant about winning. There are rumors of coexistence,” he spat in anger.

“Watley means to—he thinks he can
negotiate
?” Saavin asked, aghast at the concept of treating with demons.

French nodded, handing her slices of lobster. The aroma made her eyes close in appreciation before she took the first bite. “He does, but he’s too cowardly to admit it. I know that he regards these creatures down here as foot soldiers. He’s always been curious about who or what is in command. He doesn’t think that hell is real. It’s a question of biology to him . . . and his followers. They’re deluded. That’s the problem with his kind of petty tyrant; they never see themselves as workers, only leaders. He’s blinded to the possibility that,
if
the spawn of hell are under some sort of command, that—”

Saavin broke in, saying, “Someone would be willing to share power.” She shook her head ruefully. “How incredibly vain, not to mention outright stupid. They’d open the gates of hell for a lie? I hadn’t realized it was that bad,” she mumbled around a bite of steaming lobster.

French spread his hands helplessly. “Harriet’s sick. I’m an outsider to some. Colvin Watley doesn’t care about the future, he wants control
now
, not later, or through some sort of democratic process that makes sense for the entire community. He’s sick with avarice, and it’s blossomed into a wide gulf, but we’re not the worst case I’ve seen. The settlement at Baton Rouge went under six months ago when their militia split the night before an attack. 8000 people dead and the breakaway fragment were chased down by water demons. Their boats were ripped apart like kindling. They were eaten alive, to the man.” He contemplated his bite of food with a fatalism rarely seen during a meal.

“The water is dangerous at any time, let alone when it’s rife with demons,” Saavin said with some conviction. At French’s inquisitive look, she explained, “My folks are sailors. Not the oceanic variety; they use flat-bottomed skiffs to fish and trade along the Alabama inland waters. I grew up with a healthy respect for the ocean, and the things within it.”

“Are they still alive? Your parents?”

“Oh, quite. Dad more or less founded the outpost at Theodore. It’s where he met mom.” Saavin grinned at the explanation of her origins.

“How did you get from there to the back of a dragon?” French asked. His question held a hint of reverence.

“Oh, that.” She pulled at her lip before reaching a decision. Her eyes glittered with remembrance and laughter. “I sort of fell into it.”

Dragons

“It isn’t like dragons stopped rising just because the war began. It was just that everyone was too busy running or dying where they stood to pay as much attention to them, like when the Firsters came up out of the cold ground to the fear and applause of an entire planet. The bigger cities didn’t fall because of demons; they collapsed out mass panic and uproar. I mean, caves aren’t exactly an urban feature, but there were subways, landfills, even abandoned cellars under factories . . . those were good enough to keep the light at bay, I guess. The demons used what was forgotten, and then, once the spark of terror was lit, the monsters became superfluous. My grandparents told me that we did all the heavy lifting for them. The first creatures that came howling out of the darkness put a taproot into the primal fears of every human being. Those attacks unleashed the very worst of humanity and, by the end of the second month, the veneer of humanity was scoured away. Blood ran in the streets, and it wasn’t from the teeth of monsters. We did it to ourselves.

“The dragons stepped in almost immediately, unleashing their killing potential like a weapon of light. I’d seen dragons before, but had never really been close to one. A pair of swift red dragons attacked and killed a series of sea monsters near the little port where my parents docked their boats. I’d never seen anything move that fast; they descended from the low clouds of a late summer rain just past daybreak, and I could hear the impact from a mile away as I stood on the beach pulling nets, with my pony grazing on the dunes nearby. I remember the sense of wonder at those two saviors; one minute, the night was a maelstrom of howls and screams, but then the dragons arrived with the sun and reduced the attackers to ribbons of silvery flesh. The dragons were laughing as they tore into the beasts, and I listened to the voices carried to me on the wind, trying to place the emotion that I heard in their deep, cheery words.

“It was joy. And purpose, fulfilled. Standing there with my scabbed knees and salt-toughened hands, I hoped and prayed that I would find a dragon, but I was wrong.

“A dragon found me.”

“I was sixteen. I’d been sent, with four other kids from the port, to cut bamboo from the massive stands that were choking the remnants of Lake Conroe. We would saw and bundle the deep blue-green timber bamboo that ran in endless groves around what had once been a wide open lake; we didn’t know how it got there, and cared little for the reason. Those forty-foot stands of bamboo were the frames for our houses, our drying racks, and the myriad of piers and davits that every port town used in the business of daily life on the water. We would cut it, roll the lengths together, and leave them for the adults with the operable trucks that made the trip inland to the lake once a month. By the time we would return, there would always be more bamboo than when we departed; it grew with such wild abandon that nothing short of a sweeping prairie fire could stop it, and even that fiery catastrophe only served to enrich the soil for the runners that would spring up through the freshly cooled ashes.

“Banshee rose from the last clear patch of water in the lake. It started with a rumbling boil and escalated to a geyser of water and muck; my friends ran screaming and, I wish I could say I was brave, but I wasn’t. I was frozen. His tail emerged first, and he flicked it like a whip to clear the duckweed from his skin. The noise . . . it was like a gunshot. The lake scum hit me across the face and chest with a sodden plop. I remember looking down at my chest, my legs, all covered with that muddy slop, and I got
pissed
.

“When his head broke the water, I’d already launched my first ball of weeds and silt at him, and it hit him hard on the end of his muzzle. He was a little smaller then, and he gave a squeak of outrage that didn’t really fit the big, badass dragon that hovered over me, gray mud and weeds hanging from the horn of his nose.

“And he started laughing.”

“After a minute, I joined in, and he lowered his head to me and swept that horn across my chest with the delicacy of a mother’s touch. Flipping the weeds from me, I took a good look at him. He was exquisite. So beautiful, and he was real. I touched his jaw and ran my hand over that gorgeous pebbled skin, feeling the tips of my fingers rise and fall in the story of his magnificent face.

“‘Banshee,’ he said, and I withdrew my hand as if burned, but he waggled that great head and reassured me that I could touch him, and that he was quite real. So I did, and I asked him to turn to and fro in the sun, just so I could marvel at him, like I was inspecting a stallion in all his muscular glory.

“‘Saavin.’ It seemed to be the right thing to say, because he cocked a foreleg and offered his neck to me, streaming with water and beginning to shine in the day’s heat. He was red, or I should say all colors of red, and gray, and his wings deepened to the black of the winter sky. He was, and still is, the most perfect thing I’ve ever seen, and I climbed onto his back like I was born to it. I was, you know?”

My friends stood in rapt silence, and I waved helplessly at the stacks of bamboo, telling the dragon—
my
dragon, my friend—that I could not leave them and the job at hand. Banshee laughed that curious bass titter that I know so well after three years together, and fixed me with the first of his signature stares.

“We have better things to do than gather sticks, my dear,” Banshee said, laughing. He leapt into the air for the first flight of our lives, and flew me directly to my parents, informing them that I had a calling to fulfill, and it would be done on the front lines of the war, astride him.

That was three years ago, and we’ve fought and killed every creature from the guts of hell. I watch people I know and love be torn into their most basic elements—flesh, bones, blood, and their last screams, their final reach toward home, oh, I see and hear it all, but I still wouldn’t ever go back to being the girl standing in a stagnant lake, sweating in the sun and wondering if some boy would kiss her at a bonfire.

Like Banshee said, there are more important things to be done.

Saavin Roark, Banshee’s Rider

—
Bulwark Archival Materials, Access Date 96 A.R.