Quintessence Sky (41 page)

The two manticore armies collided with a
noise like the ocean thundering over the edge of the world. They
fought in two planes, able to pass through solid objects, but still
able to strike each other in that insubstantial second world. The
battle was only partly about the humans now. It was a battle for
dominance over Horizon.

THE WHINE of bullets filled the air. Matthew
whirled, trying to see where their attackers were. The forest
seemed to be full of invisible enemies. Colonists threw themselves
on the ground or took cover behind trees, though it was hard to
tell which direction the shots were coming from. For all they knew,
they were surrounded. With skink tears, they would have at least
been able to see them, but their stores of the blue liquid had all
been lost when the settlement burned.

Something was very wrong. The dead scout now
bleeding out onto the ground had quintessence in his veins, just
like the rest of them. Matthew had seen men heal from bullet
wounds, from burns, even from accidental amputation. But this man
hadn't healed
.

Blanca screamed and went down with a bullet
in her shoulder. Matthew knelt and pressed his hand against the
wound. It kept bleeding, showing no sign of the miraculous
quintessence healing they were all so used to expecting. The bullet
had punched a hole right through her shoulder and out the other
side, and Matthew saw what looked like a tiny half-circle of wood
on the ground behind her. He picked it up. The wood was cracked. On
the inside, there was a reservoir with a small amount of metallic
liquid that Matthew recognized immediately. Mercury.

The manticores were firing mercury bullets.
Mercury counteracted the effects of quintessence, dousing its power
just as salt inflamed it. With mercury in the wound, the
quintessence couldn't heal it as it usually would.

Blanca clutched his arm and gritted her teeth
against the pain. "I'm okay," she said. "You should fight!"

By this time, the colonists were rallying.
Even without skink tears, even surrounded and caught by surprise,
they were far from helpless, thanks to Ramos's salt. Skin
transformed into iron, and bullets ricocheted harmlessly away. The
colonists formed a rough circle around the wounded. As quintessence
light blazed from their skin, trees caught fire, and some of the
attacking manticores became visible as their fur ignited.

Somebody pressed something into Matthew's
hand. It was Stephen Parris. Matthew looked down to see a small
glass vial with a tiny amount of blue liquid in the bottom. Skink
tears.

"It's all I have," Parris said. "You'd better
take a look."

Matthew poured out the last dribble from the
vial and spread it into his eyes. He shut his eyes firmly through
the brief moment of burning pain, and when he opened them again, he
could see.

Thousands of manticores. They were
everywhere, all around them, as far as he could see, both on the
ground and in the trees. Dozens of manticores were dead or on fire,
but there were always more to take their place. A burning manticore
made it through the fire and threw itself onto a colonist, driving
a pincer edge through his unprotected eye. The man dropped, and
more manticores ran for the gap.

Matthew looked back down at Blanca, frozen
with indecision.

"I'll take care of her," Parris shouted.
"Go!"

Matthew hastily took the fallen man's place
and closed the gap before the manticores could break through the
circle.

Elizabeth touched his shoulder, standing
behind him and using his iron body as a shield. "What do you
see?"

Matthew told her, shouting over his
shoulder.

"Should we surrender? Will they take us
alive?"

Parris, doing his best to clean the mercury
out of Blanca's wound, was close enough to hear. "They are here to
slaughter us, your Grace. They will leave no one alive, white flag
or no."

"I'm sorry you came here," Matthew said. "We
meant to save your life, not take it."

"My life is in God's hands, not yours,"
Elizabeth said. "We will surrender, and pray that you are
wrong."

"Help is coming," Parris said. "Only a little
longer, your Grace."

"What help?" Matthew said.

"Tanalabrinu, of course. And Catherine."

The sounds of the battle changed, and Matthew
scanned the forest, trying to see what was happening. For a while,
it was all confusion, the smoke from the guns and the quintessence
fires obscuring his vision. Then he saw them, manticores fighting
other manticores, the newcomers dancing and weaving through the
trees to avoid the deadly guns.

Matthew kept blazing out from the circle,
using what quintessence power he had left to drive manticores back
from their position. He had no other weapon, and he would be no
match for a manticore fighting hand-to-hand. The only defense the
colonists had was this quintessence fire.

It was difficult to tell which manticores
were on their side. Only a small number of the attacking group had
matchlocks; the rest fought with claws and pincers, leaping on
their enemies and stabbing them through. But something was wrong.
As far as Matthew could tell, more of Tanalabrinu's manticores were
dying than Rinchirith's. In fact, many of Tanalabrinu's seemed to
be falling over for no apparent reason. It took Matthew a few
minutes to figure out what was happening.

It was the mercury-filled bullets. Depending
on how close the bullet came to striking the quintessence pearl at
the base of a manticore's skull, it damaged not just the manticore
it hit, but all those bonded to it. Just as whole schools of
ironfish could be killed by dropping a pearl from a single fish
into a vial of mercury, so whole memory families of manticores were
being killed with a single shot.

Matthew spotted Parris, now holding a
position on the other side of the circle. He was still standing,
for now. But Parris was bonded with Tanalabrinu. If the manticore
was shot and killed with a mercury bullet, Parris would die along
with him.

FROM Catherine's perspective, it looked like
a star blazing out from between the trees. It was only when she
drew closer that she could make out the circle of colonists, barely
keeping the manticores at bay. Unlike a year ago, when she had
driven back the grays from their attack on the colony, the
manticores knew what the humans were doing. They knew it wasn't
supernatural, and worse, they knew the humans couldn't keep it up
forever. Hundreds of manticores might burn, but at the end of it,
the humans would all be dead.

Though, not if she could help it. Catherine
glanced back over her shoulder at the other army of manticores that
had followed her here, united by the symbol of her rise from the
depths. There had been manticore battles of this magnitude before,
passed down in the memories of their families, but not within the
lifetimes of any now living. A decisive victory would mean great
power for the side that won. The enemy survivors would be forcibly
incorporated into memory families, their tribes erased. More
likely, though, at least if history was any judge, there would be
huge casualties and no clear victor, meaning a great amount of
blood would be spilled for no clear purpose.

Catherine couldn't worry about that. She
didn't want manticores to die, but when it came down to it, she was
loyal to her own family and her own species.

Despite her skills with quintessence,
Catherine was no warrior, any more than the rest of the colonists
were. The best she could do was blaze out with a light of her own.
The circle of fire kept the manticores back more than it made any
significant impact on the battle. But Catherine's goal wasn't to
kill. She just wanted to reach her family.

When she finally made it inside the human
circle, her breath was knocked away by the simultaneous embraces of
Matthew and both her parents. They hugged her and touched her face
and Matthew kissed her full on the lips, an act that back in
England would have meant scandal, engagement or no. At the moment,
though, not even Mother seemed to mind. Matthew didn't say
anything. He just looked at her, eyes shining.

She kissed him again, remembering that
afternoon on the sand by the bay, when they had played with the
principle of substitution and watched the tortoises. Happier
times.

Then she saw Blanca, lying on the ground, her
shoulder torn and bloody, and dropped immediately to her side.
"What happened?"

"Shot," Blanca said weakly.

"They're using mercury bullets," her father
said. "The wounds don't heal. I've got this one nearly cleaned out,
and it is healing, though slowly. She'll live. If any of us
do."

Blanca looked past her, just for a moment, at
Matthew, and Catherine saw an expression of loss register briefly
on her face. It was gone in a moment, making Catherine wonder if
she had imagined it.

"We could use some help!" bellowed another
colonist, and Catherine saw that the circle was failing, the power
of its light dimming. The human dead were everywhere. There was a
time to greet friends and family, but this was not it.

She rejoined the circle with Matthew and her
parents, adding their quintessence light to its strength. It was a
losing battle, though, Catherine could see at once. Rinchirith's
manticores were fully engaged in fighting Tanalabrinu's at the
moment, but even so, their light would only last so long, as would
the iron skin that kept the mercury bullets from killing them.

"We have to make a barrier!" Catherine
said.

Matthew knew what she meant at once. Just as
the settlement had been protected from manticore incursion by an
invisible barrier, they needed protection now. This was a
beetlewood forest. A rough wall could be made by snapping green
branches off of the trees, drawing out the quintessence threads,
and wrapping them around neighboring trees, thus creating a weave
of living quintessence threads. But all of the trees in their
vicinity were on fire, caught in the destructive blaze that was
keeping the manticore assault at bay. There was no way to climb
them or pull off the branches, if the trees were even still
alive.

They had no way to douse the fire, either. It
would burn until it had nothing left to burn.

"How?" Matthew said.

In answer, Catherine leaped as high as her
quintessence-fueled legs could carry her, aiming at a branch that
seemed relatively unaffected by the fire. She caught hold and made
her body heavy again, dragging it down. The branch broke, but
didn't entirely detach from the trunk, swinging her down toward the
deadly fire. She released her grip just in time and fell heavily to
the ground.

"That's not going to work," Matthew said.
"Even a little of that white fire on your skin . . ."

She knew he was right. There was no stopping
that fire from burning once it touched something. But if they did
nothing, they were all going to die anyway. Already, Tanalabrinu's
manticores were falling back from Rinchirith's, some of them
turning to run back the way they had come. Many of Rinchirith's
manticores were howling and racing off in pursuit, but others were
turning back toward the small knot of humans.

Catherine leaped again and yanked at the
branch. This time, it peeled away, and she fell back down with it
in her hands.

It was all she needed. She ran around the
next tree, stretching the quintessence thread and wrapping it
around, then heading to a third. She snapped it and threw one half
to Matthew, who did the same thing, in and out, weaving the threads
together to make a barrier. The quintessence firelight reflected
off the strand, making it visible to Catherine, even without skink
tears.

But it was taking too long. They would need
thousands of passes to make it thick enough to serve. By then their
salt would be exhausted, and the manticores would be upon them.