Changer’s Moon

2

Julia crouched beside the crenel, the teletalk by her knee, the head of her target clear in the scope, trying to ignore the noise of the battle going on around her, the hordes of black-clad men swarming at the wall, dying by hordes from the shafts and spears of the defenders and most horribly under the floods of the boiling fat. She drew fingers over the wood of the stock, briefly amused at having discovered such an unlikely talent so late in life. Something about her mix of eye and hand coordination made her one of the best shots Georgia had. She resettled the rifle and listened for the signal from Dom Hern; she had three possibilities in her range of vision, figured she could take out all of them before they reacted to what was happening.

The teletalk crackled. “Ready. Now.”

Careful not to let the barrel broach the shield, she squeezed gently, rode the recoil, shot again, and again. Another idiot Nor rushing to see what was happening.

Four. Then she began firing calmly, methodically, cleaning off the section of slope visible to her.

Tuli lay hidden above the road where first she’d looked down on the Biserica valley, burrowed into a thick stand of dead brush, Ildas nestling against her side. Coperic and the others were scattered about the slope around her; she didn’t know exactly where, it didn’t matter, there wasn’t much they could do, the last days there’d never been much they could do. She watched the army flowing over the foothills, the disparate parts settling out of the mass like cream dotting into cheese, the norits lining up to glare at the wall and the answering shimmer of the Shawar shield.

And the demon chini trotted alertly along the ragged, shifting rear of the army, demon sicamars pacing silent and deadly in unnatural proximity to these their natural enemies, the red eyes of both sorts sweeping the slopes above them. Now and then, one of them, chini or sicamar, would dart upward, feet barely touching earth, dive behind scatters or rock or into clumps of brush. Sometimes there’d be a shriek, sometimes just a rattle of rock, sometimes shreds of movement more guessed at than seen, and the demon beast would go placidly back to his patrol.

Tuli watched grimly, knowing the next victim could be her or Coperic or anyone. Even Ildas was an uncertain ally. He was both repelled and terrified by them, would act against them only if she were under immediate and inescapable threat. She looked away from the demons. Smoke rose in lazy spirals from the fat-kettles dotted along the wall; she caught glimpses of figures through the embrasures, more dark spots moving about the distant Biserica; she could hear loud roaring sounds that bothered her with their strangeness, noted some things moving with a speed that startled her and convinced her she was watching phantoms, nothing real. She sighed and went back to looking for possible vulnerabilities in the army.

When the Minarks had waked after she’d painted the lordling, there was a mad flurry that almost spread to the units of the army camped nearest to them, when they woke to find sentries bypassed and sleepers among them with their throats slashed. Coperic and the others watched with deep satisfaction as the attendants standing watch were beaten to death with the spiked ball at the end of the lance the Minark lordling carried, the painted man howling and grimacing as he tore the flesh from their bones; when he was finished, he went into a frenzied dance that ended when he sliced open his own throat and went over backward under a fountain of blood. An hour later all the Minarks and their remaining attendants were packed and riding away from the army; the lordling’s body was rolled in cloth and tied onto his rambut; the bodies of the attendants were left lying where they fell. Tuli was appalled by the violence but at the same time delighted by the outcome. Her single act had removed almost a hundred fighters from the army; she’d expected some result but not so dramatic a success.

The next night there were too many norits about and traxim flying low in search patterns over the ground about the army; the band kept back, watched other groups of attackers fall to the Nor-fire and the arrows of aroused and angry soldiers. For two more days Coperic led them after the army; they circled it at night, looking for opportunity to inflict hurt without getting killed themselves, uselessly killed like so many of the others trying to nibble at the edges of the army. Coperic had some hope of the vigilance abating because of the ease with which the raiders were being slaughtered. Before that happened, the army came even with the Kotsila Pass and the force from Sankoy came down to join the larger force from Oras, bringing another swarm of norits, black lice to infest the Plain. Four of these were something more than the rest, clothed in arrogance and power so complete they seemed-and probably were-on the verge of leaping the chasm from norit to noris. They rode apart from the others, mounted on black, fire-eyed beasts, macain in shape but not in spirit. Clustered around them, pacing with a terrible sureness and an arrogance equal to their masters’, came a pack of demon chini and sicamars. Tuli counted fifteen of the black beasts. Interrupting her thoughts with silent whimpers, Ildas cowered against her, sliding into cloth and flesh until he was nestling within her body. She tried to comfort him, but her efforts lacked conviction. Those beasts terrified her quite as much as they did him.

The demons took over the night-guard and after that the army slept in peace, even though the pinpricks from the raiders continued. Coperic kept his distance. Even Bella and Biel were subdued. On the third night after the demons came they got close as they could, perched in trees of a small grove, watching the demon beasts pacing about the great blotch of sleeping men covering the slopes. From where she crouched high in the arms of a denuded brellim, Tuli saw three Stenda boys evade the demon guards, creep into a small herd of macain, saw them cut out a mount for each, slide up onto them and set them leaping for the shelter of the hills. They got about a dozen strides before a single black form came after them and was on them, red eyes burning, red mouth open, teeth like curved black daggers dripping fire. Though the boys tried to fight, metal wouldn’t cut the black flesh, blows wouldn’t bruise it. A swipe of a forepaw opened one boy from neck to crotch, a crunch of the dagger teeth and a second boy lost his head, a third was torn to bits and shaken into a dozen pieces that sprayed about as if the body had exploded; the macain fell to casual blows that seemed easy as caresses. The beast began playing with the bodies, shaking them, clawing them apart, mixing macai flesh and Stenda, even tearing up the grass and dirt, until he got bored with that and stood in the middle of the havoc he’d created, staring at the trees, his head moving from side to side, his nostrils flaring, his ears pricking forward, his eyes searching the darkness under the trees. Tuli fought the panic that was spurring her into hopeless flight and froze against the tree, knowing the others scattered about were flooded with the same overwhelming terror and priming themselves for the desperate and probably futile struggle to come. Ildas keened in her head and she almost lost control of herself. The demon sicamar took a step forward, stopped and listened, came on again.

Ildas gave a wild despairing cry and left Tuli, but before she would react to that, he was a great quivering sail of fire, gossamer thin, reaching from the ground to the treetops, interposed between Coperic’s band and the demon beast. She could see the black sicamar through the veil, saw him lose his alertness, saw him turn his head from side to side a last time, saw him shrug his shoulders, saw him go trotting off. The veil shifted with him, keeping itself between the demon and the band. Tuli felt the fireborn’s terror and revulsion, dug her fingers into the bark, somehow sucked strength up through the tree and fed it into him until he hummed with it, his confidence burning brighter and brighter as the demon sicamar trotted off. A moment more and he snapped back into himself. He sat on the branch beside her, preening his sides and oozing satisfaction.

After that, Coperic, Tuli and the others kept following the army, unwilling to give up the hope of inflicting more damage on it, no matter how minor, but they stayed well away from it when the demons were loose. They could only follow and wait for the battle to engage the attention of the norits and their beasts so they could again fight for the life they’d known and wanted back again.

Cold knots in her stomach, Tuli watched the Followers swarm at a section of the Wall, watched them falling from the arrows and crossbow bolts raining on them, watched them press on, those behind climbing over the dead, taking up the crude ladders the dead had carried and pressing on the wall, falling themselves under the scald of the boiling burning fat. Then, over the screams of the dying, the shouts of the attackers, she heard a rapid crackling that kept up for some minutes, a strange sound that resembled nothing she’d heard before unless it was the popping of posser belly meat frying in its own fat. The norits began falling; they were far beyond the reach of bow or crossbow, even beyond range of the catapults, but they fell; in seconds half of them were down, some screaming and flinging themselves about, some crumpled and silent. For several more seconds the norits milled about in utter confusion, more of them falling, dying, then they were running, diving into the reserves, diving behind rocks or clumps of brush, anything to get out of sight of the wall. She dug her fingers into the earth, hardly able to breathe, hope more painful than the despair that had haunted her the past days.

The crackling went on and on and the attack of the tie-conscripts faltered as the mysterious death scythed through them. A few moments later they too were retreating in disorder, flinging themselves in a panic after the panicking norits. Then all along the mountain slopes, as if that were the one key that unloosed them, Stenda and outcasts, tie-folk and tar-men, all those left after the slaughter on the Plain, they flung themselves on the backside of the army, fighting with scythes and pruning hooks, knives and staves and ancient pikes, anything they’d found that could inflict a wound.

For some minutes the confusion continued and the ill-armed, leaderless attackers gnawed deeper into the army, killing majilarni and tie-conscripts, Plaz guards and a few of the mercenaries, though these trained fighters quickly organized themselves into defensive knots and took out most of those that came at them. Sleykyn assassins slaughtered any who dared attack them. Then Nekaz Kole got busy, sending bands of mounted mercenaries rushing in both directions from the road, squads of three peeling off at each center of disturbance and fighting with a methodical deadliness that steadied whatever section of the army fought there, and turned the attack to rout. The near-noris Four horned their beasts into order and sent them against the attackers; though their numbers were few, not more than fifteen, their deadliness and the terror they breathed out sent everyone within a dozen body-lengths into desperate flight, flight that was seldom escape; they were too fast, those demon beasts, leaping along the mountainside fast as thought, with no sign of fatigue.

The attackers began to melt away, leaving a large percentage of their number dead on the slopes, pursued by the demon beasts that reveled in their slaughter, filling the mountains with chopped-off shrieks.

Tuli clung to her hiding place, hoping silence and stillness and ultimately Ildas would protect her better than flight. Now and then over the screams and rattles of the fleeing, she heard softer and far less shaped sounds, the others in Coperic’s band slipping away; she sent her blessings after them but stayed where she was, watching what was happening below.

The commotion began to settle. Nekaz Kole rode back and forth along the line, his guard flying behind him, quelling confusion and reorganizing the shattered army, sending a delegation under a white flag to arrange for the collection of the dead and wounded, got the cooks working, preparing meals back in the hills under guard of the norits; the raiders still alive were almost cleared away; the demon beasts were trotting back to their masters, most of them, one or two still nosing out knots of attackers gone to ground when they saw the result of the flight of the rest.

Tuli froze. Two shadows were moving through the brush below her. She saw a clawed hand reaching, twisted and brown like ancient tree roots, clumps of yellow-white hair escaping from under a dark kerchief tied about the man’s head, dark worn shirt baggy about a narrow body, slightly bowed legs in leather trousers, strong square feet in soft shapeless boots. A gnarled, tough old man moving with taut silence across the small cleared area, making no sound at all on the treacherous scree and bits of dead brush.

And behind him, one she knew almost as well as she knew herself, who for a while had been another self. Teras. Hars and Teras, both still alive. She wanted to call to them. She wanted desperately to call to them, but she didn’t. They were getting away clear, would soon enough be beyond the reach of the demon beasts, reined in as they were by the Four below. She watched Teras as long as she could see any bit of him, weak with the joy of finding him still alive, not one of the corpses abandoned by the side of the Highroad. She wanted to whoop and dance her joy but could not. It seemed intolerable that she had to lay still as the stone around her or betray both of them, but she managed it. All too soon, slow as he was moving, he was out of sight, creeping on up the mountain toward some rendezvous she knew nothing of, perhaps with more of the outcasts from Haven. She lay in an agony of stillness, her forehead on her crossed arms, breathing in the dry red dust of the mountain, grinning like a fool, weak as a new-hatched oadat.

Ildas nudged at her, nipped gently at her rib when he couldn’t get her attention; as she started to move, he yipped a warning. Slowly and carefully she raised her head, trying not to gasp in dismay. A demon chini stood in the clear space below, sniffing at the scree where Hars and Teras had passed. As if he sensed her watching, he lifted his head and stared toward her. Helplessly she lay where she was, watching him take two steps on the spoor of Hars and Teras, then lift his head again and look toward her as if he weighed whether to take her first or continue after the raiders. Ildas trembled, and wailed his terror, silent cries that tore along her spine and bounced about her head. The demon chini shook his black head as if his floppy ears hurt, then started up the slope toward her.

Not her, she realized suddenly. Two more chinin burst from the brush to her left and bounded down toward the demon, dark russet beasts with pointed black ears and black masks over blunt muzzles, amber eyes that shone like molten gold, a sturdy bitch and a slightly smaller male. Rushing to their death, Tuli thought. Again she had to change her mind. Shifting almost as fast as the demon, they dodged his first careless swipe, splitting to attack him on two sides, the male distracting him while the bitch threw her body solidly against him, knocking him off his feet. Then they switched roles. Dependent so long on his terrible strength, he didn’t seem to learn but repeated his mistakes over and over, while the other two handled him almost at will, keeping him confused and ruining his timing. But the chini pair were tiring; gallant as their attack was, they could not hurt the thing, their own teeth and claws won no purchase in the slick hide while the demon seemed to draw strength in with the air he breathed. Tuli dug her fingers into the dirt and tried to think. Strength alone wasn’t going to win this; the advantage belonged to the demon. Wits and knowledge-watching the chinin fight their impossible battle, she thought of Coperic and the band, all of them still alive in spite of the dangers they’d faced. Courage and strength wasn’t enough, guile was needed also and was more important than the other two. Guile-she frowned at the two chinin moving round and round the demon, avoiding his rushes, pinning him to the clearing with his lust to kill them; he could have brushed by them easily enough, gone on and left them behind, but the will to escape was not in him. And time was short. She could see the strain in the gait of the chinin, fatigue in the slowing of their escapes. She tore eyes from the contest and stared at the sky, trying to think-and saw the faint spirals of smoke rising from the fires on the wall. Fire. Traxim on fire and screeching with the pain, traxim on fire and plunging dead into the army, traxim fleeing this world to escape the fire. Another sort of demon, but still a demon. She watched the sturdy young male knock the demon rolling and dart away, bleeding from his rump where the demon’s claw had caught him. Ildas, she whispered, remember the traxim, the burning demons. He whined and wriggled, tried to deny he heard her, but quieted as she cupped a hand about his buttocks and held him close. Burn that beast, you can do it, remember the burning traxim. Next time the chinin knock him down, burn him, while he’s going down he won’t be able to defend himself, he’ll be depending on his iron skin and his iron strength, concentrating on getting his balance back. Burn him. Without waiting for an answer, she scooped him up and thrust herself recklessly through the brush too excited to notice the pain from the gouging of broken branches. When she emerged, the chinin took advantage of the distraction she provided to knock the demon off his feet again. As he fell, she flung the fireborn at him.

Ildas flattened and whipped around him, a skin of fire over the black body. The demon howled and went end over end in a torment greater than any he’d inflicted on his own victims, a torment that somehow split him into two parts, the skin and skeleton of an ordinary though rather large chini and a black cloud that held for a moment the chini shape then melted like smoke into the air. Then Ildas was tumbling away from him, away from skin and bones smoldering with a sullen stench, more smoke than fire. The fireborn sat on his haunches grinning at the mess, but after a moment he went over to it, lifted a leg and urinated a stream of his own fire into it. With a sudden whoosh, the skin and bones seared to ash. The two chinin limped over to Tuli and stood panting, beside her, giving small yips of pleasure while the demon died, a twinned howl of triumph at that last sudden flash of destruction. Ildas trotted back to Tuli, sleek with pride and complacency. When she opened her arms, he leaped into them and lay against her chest vibrating his triumph into her bones.

“Yes,” she crooned to him. “You’re a wonder and a warrior, my Didi.” Stroking him still she looked at the two chinin, saw them watching, knew they saw Ildas as clearly as she did-all she needed to recognize the bitch. “I know you,” she said. “One of you. Time we left here. Any ideas? Right.” Weary and filled with wonder, she started trudging up the slope, following the chini bitch, the young male following her.