Hunting Gods, page 26
part #2 of Fate and the Wheel Series
‘Reveal yourselves!’ he cried out, waving his spare sword. ‘I know you’re there! Well, here we are, curse you! Why won’t you show yourselves?’
The edge of the trees was approaching, the entrance to the cave and the lower legs of the statue so close now that it would have taken a running man perhaps a minute to close the distance.
That was when Murrin knew they weren’t going to make it.
A frantic screeching reverberated somewhere ahead. Framed by the avenue, a familiar shape could be seen flapping back and forth against the cave entrance, harried by smaller shapes almost as dark. The back of Murrin’s neck felt as though it was burning.
Homollon rolled silently to a halt.
‘Up,’ said Coll, placing his bow and arrow very deliberately on Homollon’s back. He extended his empty hands slowly to the sides. ‘Make no sudden movements. Very carefully, look up.’
Heart pounding wildly, not moving a muscle more than necessary, Murrin tilted his head back until his straining senses were focused almost directly overhead. High above the road the avenue’s branches interlocked, forming an irregular green roof.
To begin with, he could make out nothing except dark and light-dappled leaves, and glimpses of sunlight and sky. Then he realised with a start that regarding them coolly from close to the spot he had been staring at, along the shaft of a wickedly slender, very steadily aimed arrow, was a pair of dark eyes.
The eyes were set in an inverted, but broadly human-looking face. Human but for one thing: a pelt of sleek fur, intricately striped in tan, rust-orange, and darkness. The stripes continued over a pair dangling breasts and on down (or rather, up) a body which was naked but for a garment not dissimilar to the one Keyenti wore. The body hung from a similarly patterned pair of out-splayed legs, whose feet … no, make that hands – were clasped about an arm-thick branch in the canopy above.
Against the canopy, her patterning had rendered her invisible. She looked quite capable of hanging upside down, with her bow drawn, all day if required.
As Murrin’s vision adjusted he saw that the canopy was thick with similar figures in both directions along the road. Some hung from their arms and were aiming arrows with their feet. Others used combinations of limbs. Shadowy shapes could be seen scurrying down trees or flitting and leaping between them.
They began emerging from the forest along the ground until Homollon was ringed by advancing arrow-tips.
Homollon snorted. He raised his front wheels and tossed his head.
‘Make another move,’ the figure he’d spotted first called down, in perfect but heavily-accented Eldari, ‘just one – and it will be the last any of you make. And before you act rashly – let me assure you the poison in our arrows will drop your impressive mount here as easily as it will drop you.’
PART THREE
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THE PATH OF THE GODS
CHAPTER 24
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Uprising
DARKNESS SPREAD BELOW, bottomless and cold. Shafts of dim light speared into the depths, flickering and shifting like fleeting thoughts.
The sea was silent.
There had been boats. The clumsy, awkward boats she remembered from before. For a while, the sea had seemed full of them. But she had kept her focus, refusing to panic, surfacing for breaths only when larger waves occluded her from their sight.
Eventually, after what might have been a couple of days, the boats had gone back to whatever grey ports had spawned them. Hopefully convinced that she was drowned.
Plankton drifted past.
She had been this way for a day now, head pointed down towards the murk, firing off weak locational clicks and messages at the most basic level of speech. There had been no reply. Even so, for now she was content just to hang this way, allowing each side of her dulled brain to slide into alternating periods of sleep. For a while she had even retreated, like a sea-snail inside its shell, into full-brain sleep – too bone-weary, shattered and numbed to care that any predator might take her. But then she had awoken, and things had been much the same, although moonbeams now raked the sea instead of the cloud-filtered light of the sun.
She had thought that Oliént’s death would change how she felt, but rage still ate her like something cancerous. And now, here she was, finally free – but also lost, hungry, and utterly alone, her vows of retribution exposed as the emptiest bluster. To make matters worse, she had found her sluggish thoughts turning once more to her disastrous mission, the Shi’iin, and her increasingly unreachable home.
What had happened there during her incarceration? Her world could be overrun now for all she knew. Her impotence was doubly agonising now that Murrin’s transcript from the temple seemed to promise all he had hoped. Provided that old Uilleir had been no more than he seemed: an unsuspecting instrument of the voseínte.
But, no. She had heard the crack in the old man’s voice as he described his family. The shame and indignation as he described what the crew of Qentas had inadvertently given the empire, through him. That she believed him only made her knowledge more unbearable. The information sought by her people – and Murrin’s – was now beyond reach, locked at the heart of an empire which remained more ruthless than anything she could have imagined before this accursed journey began. Everything which had meant anything to her might now be gone. And without Seeli …
Seeli! Gods, please Seeli … Why? I can’t do this without you. Why can’t you come back?
She curled into a semicircle, racked by very human sobbing. Her blowhole twitched, aching to let in the sea. Part of her welcomed the prospect. She felt scooped out. Hollow. As if all that Oliént and his monstrous empire had left of her was a shell of the person she had been – like one of the ghostly salps which drifted around with the current, pulsing with a simulacrum of life, but empty and transparent, powerless to control their direction.
She gave a start.
Gazing at her from no more than three mytors away was a face.
– Follow –
The voice was unquestionably male, its message clicked on the simplest level of the Shi’iin language spectrum. Its owner waited for a few moments, then clicked the same thing.
– Follow –
Without understanding why, what remained of Sheehan powered slowly off after him. Every so often, he would loop back out of the gloom and bob his head at her. He seemed impatient. She noticed with vague interest that they were headed south-west.
After a while she found that further sleek shapes were following. They were like slimmer, paler versions of Shi’iin – like the pod she had seen slaughtered by Teleísian fishermen near the end of her previous life. Occasionally, individuals – or, less frequently, pairs – would swim up and nuzzle along her flank, as though sensing her sorrow. She wondered if any of them had escaped the nets as she and her sister were dragged aboard the fishing boat. She and Seeli had done nothing but try to save their own skins.
Perhaps, she thought idly, they intended to punish her.
The pod was fond of porpoising, but she couldn’t summon the will, and followed slowly just beneath the surface. On all sides, streamlined forms would vanish from her realm into the one above, reappearing moments later with barely a splash.
At length, they left the cold upwellings along the coast for warmer, clearer waters.
A solitary fish swam past. Far taller than it was long, it had a curved proboscis like a dagger and bony fins tasselled with sea-lampreys and parasitic copepods. Three harmless remoras trailed in its slipstream, anchored to its leathery skin by the suckers on their heads. The bizarre creature looked ponderous, but she gave it a respectable berth. She couldn’t imagine how it fed.
They swam for days. She did not keep count. She found herself grateful for the quietly protective company of the almost-Shi’iin. They brought her fish, clicking overtones of support and friendship. She wondered what she’d done to deserve this.
Early one morning, she sensed the water change again. The plankton increased sharply. She began noticing fish, everywhere. Seabirds appeared, paddling their legs comically on the surface or drilling beneath it to chase after smaller species of fish or squid, or pelagic shrimp.
Then she sensed the seabed.
IT CURLED UP FROM A SLOPE well beyond the reach of light into a wall festooned with extravagant soft corals, sponges and sea-pens. Fish swarmed, in a variety and profusion she felt as though she’d never seen before. She recognised none of them.
– Sheehan – The pod was telling her, in a cacophony of voices. – Up. Sheehan. Up –
They know my name?
It seemed fairly obvious what they meant, though she couldn’t imagine a reason for it. She swam up the rock wall to within a couple of body-lengths of the surface. The seabed abruptly flattened, creating a basin that looked like a tidal lagoon. The almost-Shi’iin were all darting towards the shore and then impatiently circling back, all the time clicking – Up –
She swam slowly into the basin. Below her, unfamiliar creatures scuttled over tide-rippled sand. When she looked up again, she saw the wooden supports of what could only have been a jetty, driven into the seabed a couple of mytors below the low tide mark. Her guides were bobbing excitedly to the surface around it before sinking back down and clicking at her the same endless message.
– Up. Sheehan. Up –
Paralysis gripped her. What were they doing? Her heart pounded.
Not men again. I can’t.
Were they trying to trick her? To trap her here? Was this their revenge for her failure to help back in the Teleísians’ nets? The memory of the butchered male flooded back with such force it was like being there all over again.
Footsteps were clumping along the wooden boards of the jetty, their sound amplified by the water. A slender boat with an outrigger was moored to the jetty’s side. She floated in an agony of indecision.
Perhaps a look wouldn’t hurt.
She closed her eyes. Remembered the feel of balmy air on her skin.
She felt herself bob to the surface. A hand extended towards her. Before she could think what she was doing, she reached up and grasped it.
Then she saw the man who had extended it. He wore a lengthy black cloak. Her mind reeled.
While there was no strange hat, his outfit was otherwise a plainer version of the one worn by the holy man who had taken her and her sister to the palace.
‘GET AWAY FROM ME!’ she screamed, spasming away from him into the water. Instantly the man stood and backed off, hands raised in a pacifying gesture.
‘Whoa there!’ he said, in an unfamiliar accent of God’s Tongue. ‘I never meant to startle you.’
‘What do you want?’ she yelled at him, treading water with unnecessary force. His feet, she saw, were bare. For what seemed the first time in years, the sun was shining. A balmy wind rustled the tops of vividly green trees behind the beach. Amongst them, set well back from the sea, she could make out the palm-thatched roofs of what looked like low huts.
He sat down on the jetty and crossed his legs, as though hoping to appear less threatening that way. ‘Well, now,’ he said, propping lean forearms on his knees. ‘What I want is not what’s important here. The real question is, what do you want?’
She blinked. ‘Me?’
‘You escaped from the castle,’ he told her. Eyes glinting, he tilted his head into the strong sunlight, seeming to enjoy its feel on his coppery-skinned face. Despite a long beard he was a good-looking man, with a finely shaped nose, high cheekbones and irises not far from the colour of the sea she was floating in. ‘Few have managed that before. If anyone – officially, at least. Besides whatever else it may mean, this deserves some form of celebration, don’t you think?’
‘How do you know this?’ she demanded.
‘News travels quickly around here.’ He smiled in a way which was totally disarming. ‘Your friends told me.’
‘My … friends?’
‘The Squeakers. The Hai-ii.’ He gestured towards the sea. ‘The dolphin-people.’
As though summoned, the front halves of several “dolphin-people” rose from the turquoise water around the jetty, squeaking and sighing before vanishing once more beneath the surface. She could feel the pressure waves of them passing beneath her. Her frantic paddling began to ease.
‘I’m told you look a lot like them, when you’re beneath the water. But they cannot change, like you do – though they have legends which claim they could, long ago. I’d like to talk about this ability with you sometime, if you are willing. But that is for later. Come.’ He rose energetically to his feet. ‘We have much to discuss.’
‘But … you’re one of them,’ Sheehan said, tensing again, paddling herself backwards.
‘“Them”?’
The man looked thoughtful. Then he looked down at his clothing with an abashed smile, as though understanding for the first time what he wore.
‘Oh. You mean a religious maniac, is that it?’
‘I met the head of your order,’ she told him, fiercely. ‘Before he began brutalising me, he told me he had concocted the whole thing as a method of social control.’
She saw his shoulders slump.
‘For what it’s worth,’ he said, in a low voice, ‘I am truly sorry for what has happened to you, in the name of my order and otherwise. And I grieve for the loss of your sister. I wish I could have met her.’
He looked away.
‘Regarding my faith … That the head of our order is a monster is deeply hurtful. But it does not change what some of us feel to be a truth. What is now the “Templehood of the One God” was based on ideas in existence long before –’ his lips twisted contemptuously ‘– “God’s Right Hand” got his poisonous hands on them.’
‘Well,’ Sheehan said, ‘I doubt that you need to worry about that anymore.’
His smile returned, but it was regretful now. ‘Sheehan. Your effort was a valiant one. However, I am sorry to be the one to bear you this news … but you may not have achieved all that you think.’
For a moment, the world seemed to melt away.
‘He’s … He’s not …’ She swallowed: a great, wet gulping noise. ‘How …?’
‘We have no way to be sure yet. But at the very least, be comforted that you harmed him grievously. For a short while, the advantage still lies with us.’
Sheehan’s mind was still reeling. The thought that somehow Oliént might not be dead left her close to panic. ‘Us? Who is us?’
‘Those who oppose the empire.’ Though his mouth smiled, the man’s look had darkened. ‘Yes, they do exist. On which subject – time is short. So please.’ Rising to his feet, he held out a hand, beckoning. ‘If you will, come with me. Refreshment is waiting for you. We have much to talk about. And by the way, Sheehan hahe Seeheeli of the Twilight Pod of the Kingdom of the Seven Reefs – my name is Myckiel. And I am very pleased to meet you.’
A row of Shi’iin-like faces rose from the sea. He waved at them and uttered a thoroughly inhuman-sounding sequence of squeaks and moans. The Hai-ii squeaked back at him, then vanished.
When the tears came, Sheehan couldn’t stop them.
AT THE CENTRE OF THE VILLAGE a fire smouldered in a giant pit dug in the sand. Over it, skewered on stakes of wood and artfully wrapped in palm leaves, skinned torsos belonging to land-mammals she didn’t recognise were roasting slowly in the evening light. Despite the cooking, their smell was making Sheehan salivate.
Around her and Myckiel, in rough concentric rings stretching into the trees and the gaps between the village huts, were several hundred people. All were short and sturdy, with broad, smooth faces and skin the colour and lustre of a ship’s varnished timbers. According to Myckiel, among them were representatives from every one of the islands comprising what he called the Kingdom of Uurt – which was where they now were.
She had been relieved when, against expectations, he had not attempted to hurry her into the nearest available clothes. And now, though she sat here quite naked, she was receiving only looks of frank curiosity, along with the occasional goggle-eyed stare. Nothing like the ogling leers she had grown used to of late.
The heat of the fire-pit felt good on her land-skin. She numbly ate the slow-cooked meat which was offered. Not from duty: it tasted good, and she could already feel it replenishing depleted energy. Given the courtesy she had experienced from her hosts, she had been surprised to hear from Myckiel that, until missionaries of the One God had first reached the islands fifty years ago, ritual cannibalism had been common amongst the warring fiefdoms comprising what was now a single kingdom.
Apparently, the Teleísian empire had never seen much value in Uurt. Its visits to the islands had been mainly raids for slaves and harem stock. The Uurtians were fierce fighters, and centuries of inter-island feuds had left them adept at guerrilla warfare. A response, ironically, to the raids, the recent union of the islands had made the journey from Teleís, through unpredictable waters far from notable trading routes, not worth the risk posed by a co-ordinated defence. No fleets of ships had come for twelve years now.
Even so, there was scarcely a family not missing a father or a mother, a brother or sister, a daughter or a son. For some, entire generations had simply vanished, and the islanders harboured a smouldering hatred for all things Teleísian.
Except, paradoxically, their religion.
Aromatic fire-smoke coiled towards the stars. Around Sheehan, men and women conversed as they ate. Their joking and laughter seemed an alien sound.
Well, she thought, scratching her inner thigh, this is all very pleasant.
With the shock of Myckiel’s news about Oliént fading, she felt restlessness already building inside her. All afternoon, Myckiel had gently pushed her for information. How thick were the castle walls? Where were prisoners currently being kept, and where were they interrogated? Did she have any estimate for the number of the palace guard? Was there anyone at the castle she thought might present a particular threat?
