The Fate of the Fallen (The Song of the Tears Book 1) (13 page)

She didn’t answer, knowing if she thought it through she
wouldn’t have the courage to attempt it. ‘As soon as we turn, be ready to
fire.’

He looked back. ‘They’re only a few seconds behind.’

‘Ready?’

‘I’m ready,’ he said hoarsely.

She squeezed the amulet hard and thrust her wrist through
the loop, down and to the left. Rurr-shyve went hard left and she felt a sharp
pain in her elbow at the stress on the rotor blade. She was gambling that the
other flappeters wouldn’t take the risk of following through the cleft; that
they’d turn at the last minute and go around. They’d better. She could feel Rurr-shyve’s
resistance. It didn’t like the look of the narrow passage, and nor did she. One
mistake and they would die.

There was no choice and risks were meaningless now, but she
could sense its fear. She tightened her will over Rurr-shyve, forcing it to
obey the contract. They raced down, just skimming the slope, swerving around
trees and over small outcrops. She flicked a glance over her shoulder. The
other flappeters were closer. She tilted Rurr-shyve a fraction, heading
directly for the cleft. She daren’t look back now.

‘What’s going on, Nish?’ she gasped.

He didn’t answer. Then finally he said, ‘They’re going the
other way.’

‘Yes!’ She curved Rurr-shyve down, fighting its impulse to
avoid any situation that could injure it. The cleft was narrower than she’d
thought; the feather-rotors were going to smash into the rock!

Rurr-shyve went sideways at the last second and Maelys drew
her hand out. Her directions would only hinder it here. She let it fly on
instinct, ducking as it wove along the winding cleft. Then they came around a
corner and faced a solid wall of stone.

The pain in her head swelled enormously. Rurr-shyve let out
a cry; Nish shrieked, and Maelys felt as though her arm was being bent
backwards at the elbow.

She cried out. The feather-rotors spun the other way, then
Rurr-shyve straightened up and arched suddenly until its tail almost touched
the back of its head. Maelys watched in horror, sure the rotors would smash
into it. But the flap-peter slowed suddenly, skimmed the lower part of the
cleft, its leg pairs snapped straight against a boulder and they were
catapulted vertically so hard that Maelys went dizzy.

Rurr-shyve shot up out of the cleft in a whirling cloud of
feathers. Maelys clutched her stomach. Nish was white-faced. She directed the
flappeter sharply to her right, her elbow throbbing, and they came hurtling up
and over the top of the rock stack between the pinnacles as the other
flappeters flashed past, below and to the right, one, two, three, flying nose
to tail. She couldn’t look back – she just prayed that Nish could do
enough with his one shot to give the enemy a fright.

The crossbow snapped. For a moment she thought he’d missed
completely, and so did he, for he groaned, but the thin rider on the leading
beast slumped sideways and his hand must have flicked up as it slipped from the
loop, for his flappeter tried to stand on its tail in mid-air. It slowed so
rapidly that the one behind was too close to avoid it.

As it slammed into the first, the feather-rotors of the two
beasts locked, then sheared off. The leading rider was already falling when a
whirling blade cut him in half. The other man was sent flying into a boulder,
head-first. The two beasts, still locked together, thundered into the slope
further on, tumbling over and over and causing a minor avalanche before coming
to rest in clouds of dust a few hundred spans further down.

The third flappeter let out a screech and shot left,
narrowly missing a pinnacle, with its rider wailing in sympathetic pain. Maelys
could feel it too – she hurt all over and felt the most crippling sense
of loss, though she had no idea
what
she’d lost. How much worse must it be for flappeters and riders who’d been
linked for years?

Nish passed the bow forwards; she wound it absently and
circled above the rock stack, watching the remaining flap-peter, which was
wobbling in ragged spirals a few hundred spans away while its rider tried to
regain control.

She pointed the crossbow at him, whereupon he weakly
brandished a fist and turned away. Maelys headed down for the safety of the
tall trees and, once they were a good half league into dense forest, brought
Rurr-shyve to ground.

It stood there on shaky legs, its long neck drooping until
it touched the ground. Its feather-rotors sagged. Their tips had been plucked
bare and the injured blade was so swollen that the bamboo splint was embedded
in it, but Jal-Nish had created flappeters to be nothing if not resilient.

Scrambling off before it collapsed, she helped Nish down.
They were on a shallow slope broken by a series of steeper banks where the
exposed soil was deep red. The forest was so tall and dense that no sunlight
reached the ground. It was almost dark here and the misty air had a faint
greenish tinge. Maelys caught hold of a low branch. Her knees felt weak.

‘Well done, lad,’ said Nish, shaking her hand. ‘I would not
have thought it possible.’

Maelys lowered her head, thrilled at being praised by such a
great man, but not knowing how to respond to it. She hadn’t been praised for
anything since her father had fled. And she had done well, despite everything,
perhaps because she hadn’t allowed herself to think. She’d just acted on the
spur of the moment. Nish had done well too. ‘Thank you,’ she murmured, looking
up at him shyly. ‘That was a brilliant shot.’

‘With a lot of luck behind it. I couldn’t do it again.’

She waited for him to take over, but he didn’t say anything
else, so after a pause she said, ‘We’ve got to find a safe place to camp.
Rurr-shyve can’t go any further. And we need water.’

‘There’ll be a river further down but I wouldn’t camp there.
They could come on us from any direction. Go that way until we come upon a
stream, boy, then follow it up.’

Maelys bit her lip. Being called ‘boy’ was galling; it
undermined his praise. Yet Nish had been a hero of the war and a leader of men,
and he thought she was just a kid, so she made allowances.

She called Rurr-shyve on, and after about ten minutes of
creeping between the trees they came upon a rivulet at the bottom of a rocky
gully, running down a steep slope. She followed it up to a point where the
gully was impassably choked with scrub and small trees. They mounted again and
Maelys directed Rurr-shyve to hover over the trees until she found what she was
looking for – a secluded glade covered in ferns and moss, by a rocky
pool.

The instant they settled, Rurr-shyve’s feather-rotors
flopped down and it seemed to shrink in on itself. Its tail thudded into the
ferns, its inverted knee joints quivered, folded suddenly, and it thumped into
the ground.

Extending its neck, it took a long slurping drink from the
pool, leaving the surface streaked with strands and clots of smelly yellow
mucous. It tore up a barrelful of ferns by the roots and fed them through its
grinding plates, dirt and all, before laying its long neck down, head tucked
back under it. The compound eyes dulled, though its jaws continued to move and
a bulging sac under its neck churned and squelched.

Every so often it gave a heave, regurgitating shovelfuls of
ground-up fern into its maw, and chewed over them until brown strings of saliva
surged out, accompanied by indescribable stenches.

‘Get it tied down, lad, or it’ll be off while we sleep,’
said Nish after watching it for a while. ‘Or worse.’

She should have thought of that, and it was a boy’s job to
carry out the menial camp chores, but again Maelys felt diminished. She
scurried to do the job, wishing he could appreciate her for who she really was.
The ropes in the bottom of the saddlebag had metal collars attached. She
fastened one around Rurr-shyve’s neck where the scaly carapace was scored, the
other at the tail, and fixed the free ends to the trunks of two stout trees so
it would have freedom to browse.

Then she slumped onto the ground, well out of reach, and
tried to think what to do next. Nothing came to her; she was too exhausted. She
knew in her heart that it was too late to head for Hulipont, but there was
nowhere else to go.

She looked up to see Nish’s eyes on her. Maelys coloured and
turned away. The great deeds she’d accomplished so far had been easier than
dealing with him. She felt embarrassed about the little intimacies of before.
How could she have treated the great war hero, the son of the God-Emperor, so
familiarly? She couldn’t even look at him.

‘There’s food in the saddlebags,’ she said hoarsely, staring
at the ground. Nish wasn’t over the brainstorm yet and she should have served
him, but she couldn’t manage it.

He nodded formally, wobbled to the saddlebags, holding the
loose leather pants up with one hand, and took out the food bag. Nish must have
been ravenous but he ate delicately and in small portions. He held the food bag
out but she shook her head, too embarrassed to approach him.

After drinking from the brook, well above the pool Rurr-shyve
had befouled, she washed her face and hands. Taking the rider’s fur-lined cloak
from the other saddlebag, she wrapped it around herself, lay on a moss-covered
patch of ground a safe distance from the flappeter, and Nish, pillowed her head
on her little pack and tried to sleep.

The sheath was digging into her hip. Maelys unbuckled the
belt and laid it beside her, the knife close to hand. She closed her eyes
again, but now became aware of how chafed her bound breasts were. She glanced
at Nish, who was looking her way, and coloured. Sooner or later she would have
to reveal that she was a girl, but not now. She gritted her teeth and tried to
will herself to sleep.

That didn’t work either, for her mind began to replay the
scene with Rider Hinneltyne after the disruption had driven him mad. She kept
seeing the knife hacking into his neck and the blood bursting out. So much of
it, and all due to her.

Maelys tried to think about other things, though it was a
long while before she could. She could smell the creature’s foetid breath from
the other side of the clearing, sense its burning hatred of her and its longing
to tear chunks from her flesh with its serrated maw, or beak.

What was the contract between flappeter and rider, anyway?
It must be a bond developed by Jal-Nish to make sure the beast could be
controlled, though how could she fulfil a contract she didn’t understand? Once
Rurr-shyve recovered from the loss of its former rider, it would probably
attack her for the interloper she was.

Even after she drifted off to sleep, its presence made dark
shadows at the edges of her mind, and she dreamed that Jal-Nish was exerting
all his energies to seize back control of it.

EIGHT

Nish dozed briefly, then snapped awake to see the green
eyes of the flappeter on him. He didn’t think his father’s creature would be
able to harm him, though how could he be sure? There was something wrong about
it; something he couldn’t fathom, because it wasn’t like any other creature.

Its very existence made his father a hypocrite, for
flesh-forming was an alien Art the lyrinx had used in the war, and for that
reason Jal-Nish had regarded them as an abomination. He had done everything he
could to wipe them from the face of the world, so why was he using their Arts
now?

Nish sat up. He felt wide awake, fully rested, and having
good food in his belly gave him the most marvellous feeling of well-being. He
glanced across at the boy, who was sleeping soundly, wrapped in the rider’s
cloak. Why had he done all this, and why had Fyllis been involved at all? Nish
remembered her face clearly, and her quiet, confident manner, as if it were a
game and she could come to no harm.

No, not a game; a serious responsibility she’d been
entrusted with because she was the only one who could do it. That was the
strangest thing, and for the first time in many years Nish felt a glimmer of
hope. Fyllis had revealed a crack in the all-powerful façade his father had
erected.

He tried to recreate the past night in his mind. Everything
was clear up to the point where she had pulled him into that empty cell and put
her hands over his ears to protect him. But from what?

After that his most prominent memory was pain; pain that
sheared through his head and robbed him of his senses. He vaguely remembered
throwing up, then being led somewhere, but he couldn’t see or hear for ages. He
recalled his feet thudding against paving stones, and her warm hand in his,
then nothing until he’d come to his senses staggering up the mountain with the
boy.

There was something odd about the boy. He looked about
twelve but acted like an adult, and he must also have a native talent. Nish had
a vague memory of breathing underwater, surely a hallucination, then some
intimacy that made him squirm, and the next he knew he was trapped in the
flappeter’s legs and it was trying to carry him away.

Nish recalled the rider towering over the boy, knife in
hand, followed by a dull red flash and more pain, worse than the first time. He
had been blind, helpless, trapped; insects had been crawling all over him, sucking
his blood, trying to get into his mouth and nose.

But the boy had risen to every challenge, escaped every
attack and even taken control of a flappeter. Clearly two children, no matter
how talented, could not have done all that by themselves. Could the lad be a
wizard in disguise? Nish didn’t think so; the boy seemed too gentle; too kind.
He was just a servant, but who was the master? Jal-Nish must have a powerful
enemy who was now showing his hand.

The flappeter stirred, rotated its feather-rotors half a
turn and raised its head. Nish’s skin prickled. He couldn’t read anything in
its eyes, but he’d heard plenty about the nature of flappeters and their
feeding habits. They could live on just about anything, including rotting wood
and the stinking sludge at the bottom of duck ponds, but they had a particular
liking for live flesh. What motivated this one – hunger, curiosity, pain?
No, Rurr-shyve was no longer in his father’s thrall, for Maelys had cut off its
speck-speaker. Nish shivered as he thought through the implications. Did it
yearn for freedom? If it did, not even he was safe now.