Wings of Wrath (38 page)

There was less screaming from the harbor now. Was that good or bad? She feared the worst. Finally a few women did join her, dragging terrified children along with them. Too few, too few! What was wrong with all the others? Couldn't they smell the danger in the air?

Then a bloodcurdling scream arose from within the town itself. A woman's voice this time, and not from very far away. Yosefa broke into a run, dragging her terrified children along with her. An older girl who was joining the exodus caught up her other boy in her arms and began to run by her side so they could all move faster. Yosefa had no breath to spare to thank her.

Out of the narrow streets they ran, into the open field near the trash pits. Yosefa could smell fire behind them now, and the acrid smell of burning meat. Tears ran down her eyes as she finally reached the far end of the field and started up the hillside that was beyond it. In better days she and her family might have come up here to relax, eating a meal in the open air as they watched the ships sail in and out of the harbor. Now, with the thickets of trees that crowned the hill, it seemed the safest place to go. To hide.

A few children stumbled and fell, trying to run up the slope. But no one cried out. Their mothers grabbed them by the arm and dragged them up the hill, but no one complained. White-faced with terror, they all seemed to understand the need for silence. Even Yosefa's two boys were quiet now, though they whimpered softly in their throats like frightened puppies.

Finally she and her family reached the top of the hill and with it the shelter of the thickset trees beyond. Not until the greenery had swallowed them up did Yosefa fall to her knees, trembling as she gasped for breath. Leaves weren't much of a barrier, but at least whatever nightmare was in the town would not be able to see them easily. And with the open field behind them, they'd be able to see anyone or anything that tried to take up their trail.

“Look,” one of the women whispered hoarsely. Yosefa saw her standing by the edge of the thicket, gazing back at the town.

She stood up to where she could see in that direction also, and looked.

The town was burning.

Thick black clouds billowed up from the streets they had just abandoned, and from the rest of the town as well. Here and there the smoke would part for a moment, allowing her to see that bodies lay strewn upon the ground. Silent and still—so very still—lying in pools of blood. Some of the bodies were whole, and might have seemed asleep save for the red puddles surrounding them. Some had limbs missing, or even heads. It was all so surreal she could hardly absorb it.

Then one of the women gasped, and pointed to the harbor.

There were three ships there, narrow and long and shallow of draught, with prows that were carved into the shape of great bestial heads. Scales along the hull seemed to transform the whole of each ship into a vast serpentine creature, ending in a high, curling tail at the stern. Yosefa had never seen such a thing before, but had once heard a street minstrel sing of snake-ships that had existed in an earlier time, in a faraway place. How was it that they were here now?

Men were returning to the ships now, and a few armored women as well; bloody weapons were thrust into their belts, bags of booty slung over their shoulders. Yosefa saw two burly men herding a group of terrified young girls onto one of the ships, roped together by their neck. The oldest could not have been more than ten.

Instinctively Yosefa reached out for her own children and gathered them close to her, as if to protect them. She could feel their hearts pounding against her own as she watched the bloody procession

“What is it, Mama?” Her daughter pressed herself close to her side. She, too, was trembling. “What are they doing?”

The town of Soladin had always been a peaceful place. Its harbor served all travelers equally, so all travelers respected it. Long ago it was said that princes had fought over who owned the surrounding territory, but Danton Aurelius had put a stop to all that.
The peace of the sword,
he had called it. He had made it clear to everyone in the region that disturbing Soladin would cost them dearly, and none had dared test him. The harbor and its surroundings had become a center of regional trade and had prospered accordingly. The yearly tithe that was required of Soladin seemed a small price to pay for the High King's protection.

Salvator Aurelius must be told about this, she thought feverishly. The new High King would surely step into his father's shoes and crush the ones who had done this. He would know what to do.

The monstrous ships were loaded now. Children huddled together in the center of the open decks as long oars were thrust out over the water on both sides, then dipped down into the waves in perfect unison. The ships began to move out of the harbor; slowly at first, then with increasing speed. As they reached the open sea their sails were unfurled, brilliant sheets of white canvas with some kind of crimson serpent painted upon them.

Sorran may still be alive.
Yosefa thought.
I need to go find him.
But nothing in the town was moving now except twisting columns of fire and smoke, roiled by a restless wind.

And then the horror of it all was simply too much for her, and she fell to her knees upon the damp, mossy earth and wept.

 

From his vantage point high above the plains, Nyuku could see the place where the world ended.

Shimmering in the air above the snowbound landscape was the hateful spell that divided his universe, a wall of eerie iridescence that was visible to his mind's eye but not to his human vision. To see it he had to close his eyes and let the ikati's senses pour into him, along with all the primitive emotions they inspired. He could taste the wind under his belly then, could feel the thin northern sunlight play along his broad wings, heating his blood (but never enough!). He could feel currents of air shift beneath him as he passed over an expanse of naked granite, then over snow once more, and somewhere in another world his human thighs tightened around the great beast as his powerful wings beat against the cold arctic air, striving to maintain his height. But most of all he could taste the ikati's rage, his bestial fury as he approached the sorcerous barrier that kept him from entering the warm lands to the south. An obscene creation that kept him from chasing the sun southward, as all of his animal instincts cried out for him to do.

The rage filled Nyuku as well, which is why he made no protest as the ikati suddenly canted in midair and headed directly for the barrier. Crouching down low against his consort's back, his legs pressing into natural hollows just behind the rear wings, he was one with the ikati and with his rage. When he howled in fury, Nyuku did so as well, as loudly as he could, until the whole of the sky seemed to shake from the force of their defiance.

But the mystical barrier remained unmoved. It stretched across the land as far as he could see, and extended upward into the sky, a glimmering supernatural curtain without visible end or flaw. Or hope.

Soon the sun would set beyond the world's edge for the last time that season and the Long Night would come once again. The air would grow cold and inhospitable and the ikati would be forced to crawl into narrow caverns, where the heat of the buried Sun Stone would keep them alive until spring. It went against every instinct that the great creatures had to be bound up in a confined space for so long, near enough to others of their kind that they could smell the scent of rivals seeping through cracks in the rock, maddening them with territorial fury. By the time the Sun returned every year the ikati were half mad from their confinement, and the first few flights of the season would often devolve into terrible duels as they vented all their pent-up frustration on one another. Sometimes their riders would channel that aggression into their own affairs and turn on one another on the ground, even as their mounts did the same overhead, until the snow-covered earth was soaked in scarlet and the weakest members of the colony, of both species, had gasped their last breaths.

After that the surviving men would gather up the bodies of the fallen ikati, stripping bone plates and skin to make into weapons and clothing. At first the creatures had reviled the practice, for the foreign smells that clung to the clothing of their human consorts made them feel as if others of their kind were mounting them—an intolerable offense!—but the humans were fragile creatures and needed the kind of protection that only the tough, supple hides could offer. So in time the ikati came to tolerate the practice, even derive a sense of triumph from it as the smells of the skins' original owners faded over time, replaced by their living and powerful musk: the weak giving way to the strong.

As for the orphaned riders, if they had not been driven mad already by the months of close confinement, losing their winged consorts in the spring frenzy completed the job. Some would stagger along the bloodstained slopes howling like wounded animals, a sound more empty and terrible than anything Nyuku would have imagined might come from a human throat. Others turned their gleaming iridescent knives upon themselves, preferring to die than live with only half a soul. A precious few—not wholly mad, but not wholly sane either—wandered off into the wasteland where others could not see them, and somehow managed to survive until the blooding of the next clutch. Then and only then they would return to the colony and try to win the favor of a newly blooded male. If they succeeded, then their spirits might be made whole again. If not, then they ended their life as food, the same as every other rejected creature in the barren landscape. The harsh northern climate allowed for no other options.

Once it had been otherwise.

Once (the eldest members of the colony told him) the ikati had ruled the skies of the southlands. The air was so warm there that they were able to fly freely even after the Sun set, not needing its rays upon their wings to heat their blood. And the Sun rose every morning, no matter what the season, to heat the earth anew. There was even a place where snow never fell at all (or so he was told), and herd beasts could graze in the fields whenever they liked! Born to a world of ice and snow, his entire existence circumscribed by the narrow margins of a Sun Stone's heat, Nyuku could not even imagine such a place. Indeed, when the eldest first told him it existed, he had thought it no more than a wild dream. How could such a place be real?

But then one day at the height of summer he had flown southward for many days, far enough to see the mysterious barrier that marked the end of the world, and to feel its power. The half of him that was ikati knew with certain animal instinct that his ancestors had indeed come from the far side of that cursed barrier and that he was destined to return there, to a world neither Nyuku nor the ikati had ever seen, but that both now hungered for with every fiber of their joint being.

It was their birthright.

Now. Now.
The ikati's need, fiery and terrible, pounded into him with each new wingstroke. They must follow the Sun. They must do it
now
. The drive was so powerful he could not resist it—he did not
want
to resist it—and he screamed out his defiance to the ancient witches who had erected the barrier, daring them to do their worst to him. Bloodless cowards all of them, who had enchanted this stretch of ground so that no living creature could cross it, then gone back to the warm and welcoming lands of the south to live in comfort! He cursed them with all his strength as his ikati picked up speed, energized by his hatred. Soon he would break through to the other side, then those mewling cowards of the south would pay the price for their handiwork!