The Empire's Ruin, page 53
“You can’t fight them!”
He stared at her. “But the harpoons…”
“They’re just something to hold on to while you die!” she snarled. She was stumbling backward toward the cave, half dragging Rat in her wake. “Jonon’s right. We need to get under cover now.”
Overhead, the bird screamed.
Gwenna risked a glance up. It had swept down the valley, turned, and begun to wing back toward them. Her mind whimpered like a whipped dog.
“It’s time,” Jonon said, shifting his grip from Pattick’s shoulder to his elbow.
Pattick twisted free.
“No.” He reeked of terror, but his voice was steady. “I can distract it.” He raised his spear—a brave, sad, useless gesture. “I won’t leave them.”
The admiral’s face hardened. “So be it.”
Before Pattick could reply, he turned on his heel and strode toward the cave.
The young legionary turned to Gwenna, ugly face twisted with anguish, eyes pleading. She shook her head, took Rat by the waist, lifted her over her shoulder, and ran.
Pattick made the smartest stand that he was able.
Gwenna watched, trembling, from the mouth of the cave as he climbed atop a chest-high boulder, spread wide his arms, waved his spear at the sky.
“I’m here!” he bellowed. “I’m here, you miserable fucking buzzard! Look at me, I’m here!”
The bird responded. Whether it had spotted the men on the cliff, Gwenna couldn’t say, but at the sound of Pattick’s cries, it cocked its head, altered course, and stooped.
“So long, Pattick,” Chent said, offering up a mock salute.
Rat’s ragged fingernails dug into Gwenna’s arm.
The bird screamed, Pattick screamed in response, pointed his slender spear, and then, at the very last moment, stepped backward off the boulder.
The bird’s talons raked over the stone. It hovered for a moment, wings furiously scraping the air, then screamed again and rose into the blue.
“Kid’s quick,” Lurie observed.
“The kid is stupid,” Chent replied.
Gwenna just stared as Pattick emerged from behind the boulder, then climbed back atop it. Instead of following the bird, which had looped off to the east, he was staring up at the cliff, shouting, motioning furiously. “Get down! I’ll keep it busy, just get down!”
The wind shredded Cho Lu’s reply before it reached the cave, but Pattick nodded, turned to find the bird, and brandished his spear once more.
“Come on!” he bellowed. “I’m right here!”
“Bird kill Pattick,” Rat said quietly.
Gwenna glanced down to find the girl staring out of the cave with too-wide eyes.
“Yeah,” she replied. “The bird’s going to kill Pattick.”
Rat looked up at her. “Gwenna kill bird.”
“No, Rat. I can’t kill the bird.”
“Gwenna rashkta-bhura,” the girl insisted. “Or shava-bhura. Gwenna kill bird.”
“I’m not … whatever that is, Rat.”
Outside, the kettral was circling, studying the legionary with one black, inhuman eye. Kettral were smart, smarter than their smaller brethren. It understood now that the boulder would provide Pattick with cover and was searching for a way to get at him. The legionary pivoted with it. Slowly, the kettral tightened the gyre.
“Why?” Rat asked. “Why Gwenna Sharpe doesn’t fight?”
“Because Gwenna Sharpe is a coward.”
She could feel the truth of the word seared into her weak, trembling flesh.
“Coward?” Rat asked.
Without a shriek, the kettral twisted, flicked its tail, and tucked. Either it was faster, or closer, or Pattick was slower. Either way, as he threw himself from the boulder, the tip of a talon raked across his back, tearing open his tunic, slicing the flesh beneath. Gwenna could smell the blood.
“Not to be crass, sir,” Chent said, “but I earnestly hope you’re not going to ask us to carry his carcass back to the ship.”
Jonon stared from the cave’s shadow into the light, his hands clasped behind his back. “The bird is hunting him. When it is done, there will be no carcass left.”
“Coward?” Rat pressed. She hadn’t taken her eyes from Gwenna’s.
Gwenna held up a hand. It shook.
“Coward,” she said.
Rat watched the trembling fingers for a moment, then shifted her gaze back to Gwenna’s face, shook her head gravely.
“No coward.”
“Yes, Rat,” Gwenna said. “I am.”
“Why?”
Gwenna stared at her. “What do you mean, why?”
It was a question that, in all the days since the disaster at the Purple Baths, she had never quite asked herself. She’d wondered how it had happened, of course; she’d spent countless hours trying to retrace the path that led her from commanding the last Kettral Wing in the world to cowering in the darkness of Jonon’s brig, and what she’d concluded was that it wasn’t a path at all. A path unfolded slowly. If you followed a path too far in the wrong direction all you had to do was turn around, start walking back the other way. What had happened to her felt more like a breakage. The right force had been applied at the right time in the right way, and something inside her had snapped, something that could not be put back.
Those, though, were questions of the past. Rat was asking something else.
“Why?” the girl demanded again, huge eyes bright beneath the mop of her hair.
Gwenna gazed into those eyes.
Why was she broken? It was an unanswerable question. Like asking why water was wet, or pain hurt.
“There’s no why to it,” she said wearily. “You’re a little girl. Jonon’s an asshole. Gwenna Sharpe is…”
She shook her head.
Outside, Pattick had hauled himself back up onto the boulder. He was less steady now, his pale face ashen.
Gwenna closed her eyes. He could die if he wanted to; didn’t mean she had to watch.
“Gwenna Sharpe is rashkta-bhura.”
“I’m not whatever the fuck that is.”
“Yes,” the girl insisted. “Is the fuck. Not coward. Rashkta-bhura. Axochlin.”
“Maybe those are their warriors.” Gwenna turned to find the historian standing half a pace behind her. “Like the Kettral.”
“I’m not fucking Kettral!”
The words exploded out of her, half shout, half scream. Jonon and the others turned, but she didn’t give a shit about them. They, at least, understood the truth—that whatever she’d been she wasn’t anymore. It was Kiel, and fucking Pattick, and Rat who refused to see it, who, no matter how many times she fucked up, wouldn’t stop looking at her as though she were some kind of salvation, as though she was just waiting for the situation to get bad enough to step forward and take matters casually, easily, firmly in hand. Jonon’s disdain she could live with. The disgusting looks from Chent and Lurie and Vessik she could live with. It was the stubborn, stupid, idiotic fucking hope she kept finding in Rat’s eyes, and Cho Lu’s, that she couldn’t endure.
“What does it take,” she demanded, spreading her arms, “for you to understand?”
Rat nodded, as though this was what she’d expected all along, as though this was what she’d been waiting for. Kiel pursed his lips, but said nothing.
“You want to see what I am?” She snatched one of the harpoons from the wall of the cave. Raban had drilled a hole through the butt of it, looped through a long coil of rope, and made it fast. All at her direction, of course, all based on some horseshit plan she’d dreamed up years earlier half-drunk in a tavern. For all his disdain, even Jonon had believed her, believed her enough, anyway, to order the things made.
“You want to see the truth?” She lifted the spear. “This? This is useless. No one’s ever taken down a bird with a harpoon. But you idiots believed me because I used to be Kettral. Well, I’m not Kettral. I’m not your rasha basha. I’m not anything, you stupid pieces of shit. What do you need to see to believe that? I’m not anything.”
But she knew, of course, what they needed to see.
Back on the Islands, the trainers had a saying: Death is the last lesson.
Harpoon in one hand, coiled rope in the other, flames of rage and shame and desperation blazing in her heart, she stepped from the cave’s darkness into the sunlight.
Pattick turned, saw her. Hope unfolded in his gaze.
“No,” she growled. “No. No. No.”
“Commander—” he began. Still, after everything, with the commander.
“Get off the fucking rock,” she growled.
He hesitated.
“Get. Down. Now.”
The words might as well have been stones striking him in the chest, each one driving him back a half step until he offered up a half-assed salute and stumbled backward into the boulder’s shadow.
Somehow, Gwenna covered the intervening space.
The leaden heaviness had lifted from her legs. The pain and fear were gone, scoured away by the need—the coruscating molten need—to have them finally see.
She turned to face the bird. It had wheeled up and around, maybe twenty paces above, circling in a tight arc, watching her with one black, unblinking eye.
“Come on,” Gwenna whispered. She cocked back the spear in one hand, held the coiled rope loosely in the other. “I’m ready.”
There was a grisly game the cadets used to play back on the Islands called How Do You Die? The annals of the Kettral were filled with tales of last stands. Blue-Haired Su holding the door of the castle keep at Last Pine, fighting an entire garrison with a kitchen pot and a paring knife, buying time for the rest of her Wing. Georg the Butcher on the Antheran flagship, unlimbing men as the burning vessel sank beneath them. Rim Fair at the Rift, holding the slot canyon. Commander Selin on the bridge over the Leva, punched through with arrows but still crying her defiance as the last of the Annurian settlers retreated to the west. The names changed, and the weapons and settings, but one thing remained the same—the nobility of the sacrifice. Every man and woman in those stories went to their deaths proudly, for a purpose larger than themselves. That was how Gwenna had always imagined her own end—she’d be saving someone, defending something, giving her life for her Wingmates, for Annur, for something good and right and true.
Turned out, she’d imagined it wrong.
She hadn’t left the safety of the cave to save Pattick. A kettral could eat a full-grown cow in a single meal; after the bird was finished with her it would devour him, then the men on the cliffs, and that would be that.
She’d left the cave, finally, because she was tired. Tired of Pattick’s hopeful gaze, tired of Rat’s growing trust, tired of whatever inexplicable game Kiel was trying to play, tired of waking up frightened, and stumbling through the day frightened, of falling asleep frightened into nightmares of failure, of fucking up, of getting her soldiers killed, tired of picking through the detritus of her own decisions, of trying to find the precise point at which she’d gone wrong, tired of wondering what she could have done to change things, tired of the ache in her bones and in her brain, tired of the weakness that had settled in her limbs, tired, most of all, of the memories of that other Gwenna Sharpe, the one who had been able to face danger without shaking, to make decisions between one heartbeat and the next, the one who’d been able to save the people who needed saving and kill the ones who needed killing, tired of knowing in her bones that that was the woman she should have been, that she could never be her again, tired of knowing that whatever she became would only be a shadow of that other person, a whisper, a pitiful broken whimper.
She left the fucking cave because it was time to finally be done with it, because it was time to die.
After so many months hunched under the grim weight of herself, she felt suddenly light, painless, felt the rightness of her own approaching annihilation.
The icy wind shredded her hair across her face.
“Come on!” she screamed, opening her arms to the kettral. “Come on!”
And the bird came on.
Talons spread wide, beak split with a scream of its own, it dropped toward her.
“Yes,” Gwenna shouted as she hurled the spear, “yes,” as the line spooled out through her hand, “yes,” as the barbed point sank deep in the creature’s breast, just beneath the wing, “yes, yes, yes,” as she looped the spare rope around her forearm once, twice, three times, “yes,” as the bird, shocked by the stabbing pain, broke off, dragging her from the boulder up into the endless emptiness of the sky.
For a long time she was spinning, spinning wildly, the ice-capped peaks, bright sun, jagged cliff bands scribbled across her vision. She waited for the spear to tear free, to feel the rope go slack in her hands, her heart go light in her chest as she tumbled to her death. But the spear held, as did the rope, and gradually the spinning slowed. The pain was back, a vicious stabbing where her shoulder threatened to rip from its socket, but this pain, at least, was honest, clean. Unlike the vague malaise she’d struggled through for the past months, there was an explanation, a way to fight back. She tensed her arm to take the strain off the joint, reached up and caught the rope with her other hand, hauled herself up, and then, without really meaning to, she was climbing.
So was the bird.
With every wingbeat it circled higher, trying to fly free of the stabbing in its breast. The harpoon had hurt it, certainly—especially with Gwenna’s whole weight dangling off of the thing—but hurt wasn’t the same thing as injured, certainly not injured enough to stop it from flying, and when Gwenna glanced down she saw that the ground had fallen far, far below. At the base of the cliffs she caught a smear of color and motion—Pattick, probably, and Jonon, and maybe a few of the others, come out from the cave to watch her die.
“Good,” she growled, dragging herself another arm’s length up the rope.
The closer she drew to the bird, the tougher the climbing became. Each wingbeat threatened to strip her from the rope, and at every motion the rope itself jerked and twisted violently in her hands. Twice she nearly lost hold of it, found herself sliding down the braided length toward her own oblivion. Unlike the Eyrie-trained birds, the wild kettral flew with its legs tucked back up behind it, which meant there was nothing to latch onto, nothing to stabilize her wild, swinging spins until she’d climbed all the way up to where the spear was buried in the bird’s breast.
Her hands were wrecked. Blood oozed from her palms, slicking her grip on the spear’s wooden shaft. The muscles of her forearms throbbed. Something was wrong with her upper back—torn or spasming so violently she felt as though she were being stabbed over and over and over.
“What’d you expect, you dumb bitch?” she muttered to herself. “You came up here to die. It’s supposed to hurt.”
She could feel the heat baking off the bird as it beat its wings furiously, trying to free itself of the pain, the weight.
“We didn’t have to do this,” she said. “You could have left those kids alone, and I could have stayed in the fucking cave.”
But she realized as she hung there, face pressed into the feathers, body ready to give out, to give up, that she couldn’t have stayed in the cave. Sure, that cold hole in the mountain rock she might have endured indefinitely, but the other cave, the fathomless cavern in the belly of which she’d been lost since that night at the Purple Baths—that she could not abide for one more day. If the only way out was to die, then fine. Not just fine—good. It felt good to be flying again, good to be trying to do something, good to be alive, even if only for a few final moments.
Maybe Rat was right after all.
Need to fight.
Not against the bird, obviously. The kettral was just a great, savage beast following its own instincts. Gwenna bore it no more malice than she did the stones below on which she would splatter when she fell. The fight was against the woman who had spent all those days lying motionless in the brig, the one who had almost watched from the safety of the cave while the kettral tore Pattick in half, the woman who had taken her face, her body, her name, who for months had been moving through the world as though she was Gwenna Sharpe.
Whatever else happened, that bitch needed to die.
Holding the shaft of the spear with one hand, she twisted the rope high around her thigh—once, twice, five times, shoved a bight of it down through the last loop, then settled her weight into the makeshift harness. Wind buffeted her against the bird’s breast, battering her into the creature, then tearing her away, until finally she managed to snatch hold of one of the quills. The spine of the feather was thick as a small branch, and she used it to drag herself in tight against the straining muscle. Then, with her free hand, she slid the belt knife from her sheath and went grimly to work.
She’d been telling no more than the simple truth when she insisted to Jonon that no one could kill a kettral with a sword, let alone a ’Kent-kissing knife. On the other hand, she’d been imagining a situation in which the bird was free to attack with its beak and talons, free to fly, retreat, circle back. No one in the history of the Eyrie—no one in the history of the ’Kent-kissing world—had ever been mad enough to strap herself to a bird’s breast.
The knife’s blade was barely the length of Gwenna’s hand—far too short to reach any of the vital organs—but she didn’t need to get to the organs. The first slice slit the skin, the second parted a thick layer of yellow-white fat beneath it. The third cut reached the muscle. With long strokes she carved across the straining fibers, with each slash opening the wound deeper and still deeper, until she found herself drenched in blood, plunged to the elbow in the bird’s breast.
The kettral screamed at each stroke of the blade, strained with its beak to pry her free. It came close, so close she could see the hook of the beak rake the feathers off to her right, the huge black eye filled with fury, but she was in just the wrong place—a little too high, a little too far off to the side, and each time the bird’s attacks fell short. Then, gradually, almost imperceptibly at first, she felt the creature begin to weaken. Muscle was just cable, after all, cable twisted out of meat. Cut partway through, and it would weaken. Keep cutting, and it would snap. And when that happened, they would drop, both of them, onto the mountainside below.
