Last First Snow (30 page)

She had not seen what she had seen. She could not have.

No. That was the reflex of a scared child's mind, to reject reality that did not fit preconception. She saw the knife in Temoc's hand. She heard him try to apologize, in that way he had of not apologizing. She saw him leave. She told him to leave.

And now he was gone, and she remained. Rocking on her feet. Her breath, and Caleb's, both loud in her ears.

Caleb. She turned back to the bed, to him, shaking, asleep, covered in seeping wounds, in blood.

So much blood. Gods. The body contained what, eight pints, a child's less, and how much spilled here? The sheets stained red. All the gods and devils watched.

She touched her son's chest, his face. Caleb groaned. Eyes opened but did not focus. A sweet, dank smell on his breath: some soporific drug, mixed with the wine. He kept that kind of stuff around, for rituals and dream-quests. Out of the boy's reach. Well hidden.

“Caleb. Caleb!” No response. “Caleb, can you hear me?”

No, again.

She wanted to cry. She was crying, big, racking sobs. Her eyes were wet. She wiped them with her hand, unthinking, and the blood stung. Qet and Isil. Damn them. Damn all the gods, and her husband, too.

She recognized the scars. She had written articles on their like, discussed their language and their relevance to modern Craft, had run her fingers over those very ridges on her lover's, her husband's skin. She had never seen them on her son's body before.

Too much, too much, tossed by rage and frozen by fear.

She could not afford to be this person now.

Her body understood before her brain did. Stopped shaking Caleb, stood. Searched the room, found nothing, staggered out into the hall, realized when she reached the bathroom that she was looking for a towel. A cloth robe. Something to cover him. Grabbed both, and returned. Don't drag the towel across the wounds. Whatever he had done—whatever Temoc and his gods had done—to heal the boy, his cuts were too fresh, scabs pink and raw where there were scabs at all. No longer bleeding openly. Not good, there was no good here, in this room, but good enough. Pressing with the towel, she mopped up blood. Some remained, smeared, dried onto his skin. A handprint. Hers, or Temoc's. No. She refused to think that name. It made her freeze, and she could not afford to freeze.

Where to go? Hospitals would be full of riot-wounded. Could drive north, risk meeting rebels or Wardens or those dogs. Don't worry about that, said the small part of her that was no one's wife, no one's mother, no one's daughter even. Don't worry. Get Caleb out of here. First, pull him off that bloody mattress. Scars on his back, too. Fuck. Sop the blood. Drape him in the bathrobe, white cotton with blue stripes and now red ones, too. Fine. Tie the knot at his stomach.

“Mom?” The voice soft, heartbreaking, weak as if through many layers of cotton.

“Caleb? Can you hear me?”

“Mom,” again, drifting off. Fine. Good, even. She lifted him, tested his weight. So heavy normally, grown big, but he felt like a feather now. All had gone out of him, everything but life. The life she'd keep, and strangle anyone who tried to take it from her. Drape his arms over her shoulders. Scabs ridged his skin beneath the thin robe. He moaned in sleep, from pain, from nightmares.

Alone. Alone with her boy in a city gone mad. She could walk the streets, try against hope to hail a taxi. Or she could fly. She closed her eyes, took inventory of her soul. She thought she had enough.

The King in Red would have forbidden optera from landing in Chakal Square, but the rioters' need was great—it would poison the air, confuse the bugs hovering above the Skittersill. But her need was greater, and there was no price she would not pay.

She ran with her son clutched to her, out into the courtyard, out into the street. Feet bare against cobblestones. Craft-warped insects that hover in the clouds, chitin angels, hear me. No one has ever needed you as I need now.

The sky spread opalescent overhead, stained orange in the west by fire. Blank walls crowded her in, skyline scalloped black by roof tile. Dew-damp cobblestones slippery underfoot. Hot breath on her neck, Caleb's breath, so rapid, his body rigid too, seizing up as she ran.

Shapes moved on the roof across the street. Humanoid forms, long-limbed. Copper plates glinted where their eyes should have been, like a cat's eyes seen at angle. They leaned forward, watching. Their silhouettes showed claws.

She would not scream. She ran.

I need you.

Bug-legs struck her from behind, and she flew.

 

49

Temoc ran from himself, and from his wife, and his son, and two decades of peace. He ran toward battle.

Dresediel Lex around him crouched in wait. Behind blank windows families hid, waiting for a signal to pretend once more to live their normal lives. Lit convenience stores stared empty-aisled out on vacant streets, waiting for customers who would not come. A shopping cart lay upended in a parking lot. An optician's ghostlight sign flickered and buzzed. He ran past all-hour groceries, diviners' shops bedecked with crystal balls and tarot cards, a small-time local Craftsman's office, low-roofed bars, a palm-fronted nightclub, a bookstore with barred windows, a row of tailors' shops. Most nights this strip throbbed with people. Now its emptiness throbbed in turn.

The wind shifted north, hot again, and he smelled smoke, dust, and sand. Senses dilated by panic, rage, and gods, he heard the battle in Chakal Square, an ocean of screams and tangled bodies. His world, now. He sank into it, and ran faster. Muscles stretched. Power coursed through him. He became a creature of darkness.

He felt the wingbeats before he heard them. Bass shock waves struck his chest like blows, echoed inside like a second heartbeat. He stumbled, thinking—heart attack? Had he lost everything only to die here? But he looked up, and saw. He might still die, but not from weakness of the heart.

A flying V of Couatl wedged toward Chakal Square. Twenty-meter wings beat in unison. Snaky tails thrashed the air. They flew so high, in such elegant array, that someone raised in another city might have mistaken them for swans.

Temoc did not mistake.

This was no patrol. They came to kill.

The gods were kind, indeed. Cruel and kind. The King in Red had held his attack for night, when after a brutal day's fighting the Chakal Square band would have no choice but to man their makeshift barricades and hope for the best. Then the Wardens' attack would fall in the center, brutal and unexpected.

The gods were kind, unless they had doomed him to see this assault without being able to stop it.

He could not fail now, not after all he'd done. He ran faster, through the scared city's sleeping streets.

*   *   *

“We are winning,” the Major told Chel in a voice that brooked no argument.

“Winning?” She swept an arm to compass the mess of Chakal Square. “You call this winning?”

They stood in the Square's heart: the clearing they'd made by the fountain for the wounded, of whom there were too many. Bodies lay on beds of folded cloth, moaning, bloody. Nurses moved among them, lacking any uniform but compassion. Few in the camp had medical training, most limited to half-remembered first-aid lessons from grade school camping trips. Now they tended the wounds of a war. In days, infection would claim most of the fallen, if the camp lasted so long.

Fires roared behind her. Out on the perimeter, the battle raged. Wardens charged again and again at the barricades.

“We have withstood a day's attack. If they thought we would be this hard to break, they would have struck us harder. We have exceeded the King in Red's expectation. We defied him.”

Sweat coated Chel. Pain dulled the sharp edges of her mind. Memories of Temoc's healing still sickened, that sensation of her body coming alive, ribs wriggling and blood vessels fusing as a boar rooted beneath her skin. “We're losing people. We can't last another day at this rate. And we won't, because they haven't really hit us yet. Which they will, if we don't give up these hostages.”

The Major laughed steel and springs. He'd straightened out the dimple in his helm, but a trace of the knuckles' dent remained. “You'd have us relinquish one of our few bargaining chips, just because you're afraid. Even if we released them, how do we know the Wardens would call off their attack?”

“There's nothing certain here. Best we can do is gamble.”

“And you've gambled so well today.”

She drew breath, and did not try to kill him. She'd clawed through broken glass to return to Chakal Square. Sprinted the last quarter-mile, or as near to a sprint as her wounded body could manage. Burst Mina's stitches running from those damn dogs. And her men, the ones she led out into the city to bring Temoc home—they weren't back yet. Hiding still in the city, she hoped. They had friends and bolt-holes. They weren't dead. Necessarily. Not all of them, not yet.

Flimsy argument, she knew. Gods.

“I made the right call,” she said. “If Temoc were here—”

“If Temoc were here he'd lead us down the same conciliatory road that got us into this mess. If Temoc were here, he wouldn't be able to turn this attack.”

“Listen.”

“I have listened. You want us to need Temoc, because then your sacrifice won't have been in vain. You want us to lose this battle, due to your misguided fascination with old gods and antique heroes. You refuse to—”

“Not to me, dammit. Listen!”

The Major stopped talking.

The camp around them had gone quiet. Even the convalescent ceased to moan.

A drum beat overhead.

Chel grabbed the Major's arm and pulled him to the ground. He squawked in shock, struggled to rise.

Then the tents exploded.

*   *   *

On any other night Mina would not have realized she was being followed until too late. Ordinarily the sky above Dresediel Lex swarmed with fliers and airbuses and Couatl and drakes, as reefs of mirror coral in the Fangs swarmed with multicolored fish. Even at night, the airspace should have been so crowded that a few more fliers would be all but impossible to notice.

Tonight, though, the Skittersill skies were empty. Couatl swarmed near Chakal Square to the west, but she flew north alone.

Alone, she'd thought at first.

The buzz of the opteran's wings rocked and reassured; its claws clasped beneath her arms, around her waist and thighs, strong as architecture. She was less sure of her own strength. Caleb was a light burden, his arms wrapped firmly around her neck, hers around his back, but even a light burden hurt if born long enough.

Caleb breathed. That was good. He breathed, and was not bleeding. Gods. She glanced back through the rainbows of the opteran's two-meter wings and around the tumescence of its body, its glittering eyes, the proboscis through which it tasted and drained her soul. So far gone in the adrenaline rush, she hadn't even noticed the creature's pull yet. Maybe she wouldn't. Maybe anger gave her spirit strength.

The Craft didn't work that way, but she could hope.

She looked back to their house, now vanished amid the maze of similar Skittersill houses, one more wrong turn in the labyrinth of light.

Shadows flitted through that light. Buzzing wings refracted streetlamps' glow.

Optera, two of them. Following her. Faster, too—gaining.

Any other night she would have called herself paranoid. Apophenia, wasn't that the word, seeing patterns where no patterns were? But this was not any other night. She was still Temoc's wife—gods, was she, even in her own mind?—and the boy his son, and he had gone to fight the King in Red in Chakal Square. Of course someone might have watched them. Of course, if Temoc left and they sought refuge elsewhere, they would be followed.

But these were not Wardens. Wardens did not use civilian fliers. They had their own mounts.

Caleb groaned against her chest.

The opteran sucked Mina's soul, she felt it now, a slight slowing of the mind, perceptions grayed and emotions dulled. But she could spare a second's delay to be safe.

She swerved left toward the coast. Needed to look as if she had a destination in mind. What was out this way? Monicola Pier, no fit place for a woman on the run. Offices. A few hotels.

She glanced back, and saw neither of the optera behind her. Lost them. Good.

But where had they gone?

She searched the city lights for the telltale rainbow of opteran wings. There—to the right, following her old trajectory, so fast. And, once she saw the first, she found the second faster: it had swept in a long arc to the left, almost even with her, moving to outflank.

Diving, she bore north once more, keeping the pursuer in sight. Down she fell, down, until she skimmed the tops of skyscrapers. The old monkey-fear of heights clawed at her—she was low enough now that the ground ceased to be preposterous and became real. A long, deadly drop. Faster, north along Jibreel, and there, her western pursuer passed in front of a white and red ghostlit billboard of a grotesque smiling face. She saw long limbs, too long, a pointed head, a glint of metal, and something in its hand, a blunt claw-shaped instrument with crystal tines that shimmered menacingly.

The light swept around and shrank to a point, pointed at her.

She climbed fast. Lightning cracked the sky beneath her, and the answering thunderclap ripped through her body. She veered right, spinning, her arms clutched so tight to her son she feared she might break his bones and rain his blood on the city. His robe flapped around them. Her feet were bare, and cold. She spun through two large circles to make a pattern, then jagged sharp to the left even as a second bolt tore through the sky where they would have been—this bolt from the right, the second attacker. No shot from the first. Their weapons must take time to charge, or else they didn't want to attract attention.

Both flew straight for her now, all pretense of innocence abandoned.