Angels and Exiles (19 page)

Then our aerostat had recovered its previous heading, and the sight had been taken away. It had been enough, those few seconds, to demoralize me. I huddled in the gloom, flinching when I heard the spell-cannons going off. Behind me, in a pool of greenish light, six men played dice, bleeding off dribbles of their combat-luck to influence the fall of the ivory cubes.

Out of an initial force of twelve, ten aerostats made it through the Pthal and reached the main engagement areas. We were intended to support the Melgrians, by raiding behind enemy lines. The aerostats were supposed to allow us to fly with impunity over the terrain and set down where we wanted.

Intelligence had not known about the aerial defences Carheil had put up. None of those clumsy, overpowered cannons that had thudded at us through the passes: these were flying units.

I never learned where they were bred, or from what stock. Certainly, these couldn’t have been demons created by a spell: they were too numerous by far. They were six-limbed, with both bat wings and arms. Their tails, whiplike coils of muscle, added a seventh.

We’d barely spotted them before they were swarming us. In a way they were far less dangerous than the cannons had been; it took whole minutes of concentrated attack on their part to even begin to tear at the aerostat’s envelope. The slight problem was that they could neither be avoided nor repelled. Our ship did try, blasting away with its heavy ordnance, bringing down mere handfuls of the assailants, while dozens more of them made it to the envelope and began worrying at the seams.

No one was dicing or joking anymore. We’d seen the gargoyles fly toward us, but now we could neither see nor hear them. We knew they were up above, steadily destroying us.

The aerostat dove brutally then. I thought this might be a bid to unseat the assailants, though it seems clear to me now that it was because the crew had panicked and were expecting to crash in short order. The drop siren began to warble and hatches were opened.

We were much too high for a drop; our slowfalls couldn’t be expected to support us long enough to reach the ground unharmed from this height. Yet a half-dozen of my section were thrown out of the drop hatches, falling to their deaths. Then the man in front of me—I was eighth in line, and if his brain hadn’t thawed, I probably would have obediently killed myself—took out his sidearm, held it under our lieutenant’s nose, and said that he’d rather be executed for disobeying orders than smash his skull open a thousand feet below.

Everyone froze; my skin crawled, a formication I knew and had felt before, triggered by a ward-spell activating at the imminence of violence. The lieutenant spoke in a quiet voice: “Put that away, Dremlin.”

“Fuck your shit-born mother,” Dremlin began, and then one of the gargoyles erupted through the drop-hatch, coiled its tail around his head, and tore away his face.

I was credited later with having killed that first gargoyle, though I’m pretty sure it was someone else’s shot that actually did it in—but that man died along with a third of us, so I did not bother trying to give him the credit. What does it matter anyway? Half a hundred more of the gargoyles came in through the hatches, bullets and blades flew through the air, spells discharged, men and beasts screamed; when it was over, thirty men lay dead or wounded on the floor of the gondola, several of them slain by their own side. The lieutenant—I cannot recall his name—was nowhere to be seen; he had fallen through the hatch. For some reason, I have never been able to stop wondering whether he was pulled out by an enemy, or tripped and fell in the turmoil of battle, or if someone actually pushed him in revenge. As if that, too, mattered at all.

The aerostat was listing severely to port by the time we’d repulsed the attack; it had dived swiftly through the thinning clouds and we were now barely in drop range. Through the open hatch, I could see pinpoints of light ahead of our path: it seemed we were about to reach our objective after all.

Throughout it all, the drop-siren had been sounding; now it cut off with a squawk as the frame trembled beneath our feet. We began losing altitude even faster. Two men were banging at the forward bulkhead, as if they hoped to break through into the crew compartment and regain control of the craft. One of the wounded was trying to scream through a throat full of blood.

For a few minutes, our officers tried to restore cohesion; some of us saw to the wounded, and two of the worst-off were quietly dispatched. Xavier, whom I’d grown to like and almost admire at War College, was curled up into a ball in a corner, whimpering and shaking; no amount of prodding could snap him out of it. We’d all, to a man, refused the bravery charms we’d been offered, knowing full well they tended to make men suicidally reckless; now I found myself wishing we had accepted.

An aerostat is not like a plane, always on the verge of plummeting to destruction; though we all soon realized our craft was going to crash, we had enough time to make an orderly exit. A good thing, too, as there were still quite a few gargoyles about, and they flew at the first of our men who dropped. We were prepared for this and provided covering spellfire; the gargoyles presently flew away, and the remainder of our unit dropped. I was among the last to go—I’d been working on Xavier, but fruitlessly.

“Haldan!” the centurion called. “Come on.”

“I can’t leave him here. He’ll die in the crash.”

The centurion came up to us, grabbed Xavier about the waist, and dragged him to the hatch, ignoring my protestations. Then he belted him across the mouth, hard enough to trigger Xavier’s ward-spells, and pushed him out of the hatch. I expected him to scream, to call out a name; but he remained mute, or if he cried out, the wind took away his voice: he fell in silence, and the night swallowed him.

“Your turn now, Haldan,” the centurion said. Perhaps because I felt all too strongly that Dremlin’s rebellion had saved my life, I had been about to rage at the centurion, to challenge him even—but in that instant I saw the callous wisdom of his actions; and after all, I had spent years training to obey. I clenched my fists—as always, the left one trembled—and I let myself fall through the hatch.

Come morning, I returned alone to that stretch of shore. The night before, Uncle Bernard had insisted we celebrate our accomplishment with “just a tot of rum.” He had heated up leftover coffee for me and added a drop or three from his flask; by the time we’d done celebrating, he’d drained the flask and was slumped on the table, drooling and twitching. He was still in the same position when I got up at dawn. I left him snoring and ran to the beach.

I might have had trouble finding the exact spot again, but the scavengers were still at work: some jet-black kelvaws and a pair of atthroes were quarrelling over what was left of the corpses. They took wing as I approached. The tiny mermaid still swam in the shallow tidal pool where I had carried her.

I knelt by the pool, forgetting in that moment the smell of death in my nostrils. The mermaid saw me, and her head broke the surface. She smiled, her mouth no wider than my thumb. I smiled back. She giggled—a silvery tinkling— and dove back under the surface. She swirled around the pool, her tail beating strongly, as if she were dancing. I thought she must be hungry. What could I bring her to eat? And then I realized how foolish I was being. Come high tide, she should be able to escape the pool. And if she somehow stayed put, how would I know how to keep her fed? Might as well try putting her in a bowl, bringing her home, and asking my mother if I could keep her.

I leaned over the pool. “Hey!” I called to the mermaid, waving my hand at her. Then I lightly slapped the surface; this brought her up immediately. Her torso rose completely into the air. I remember noticing, without any prurience, that she was not shaped like a child at all: her full breasts bore proportionately huge nipples.

“Listen,” I said. “I’m going to put you back into the sea, all right? I’ll just pick you up and carry you; it’s not far now, the tide has turned. Don’t be afraid, I won’t hurt you.” I reached out my hands; she looked at me, still smiling, and let herself be held.

I rose to my feet, marvelling at the feel of a living thing cradled in my grasp; the small amount of water that I had scooped up along with her sloshed in my cupped hands and seeped between my fingers. Then she twisted, jackknifed her body around my thumb, and drove the twin prongs at the base of her tail into the back of my hand.

It was pure reflex that threw her away from me; for a whole minute I was an animal, driven only by pain, though some small corner of my mind remained detached and observant, wondering at all that happened. I fell to the sand and rolled around, howling, my right hand clutching the left. Years later, I learned at War College that this is instinct commanding the wound be gripped shut so it will not leak precious blood; but it also serves well to prevent the spread of poison through the bloodstream. It is the only way I have ever approached religious awe, when I ponder that we hold in our very flesh knowledge of how to preserve it.

The initial wave of agony receded a bit; I grew more fully aware of my surroundings. Close by, a tiny voice was wailing. “Oh please, kind sir, spare me. Oh please, sir, get me back to the water. Let me live, oh let me live.”

Somehow I got to my feet; somehow I managed to run toward my uncle’s house. Those memories are lost to me now; though this was the defining moment of my life, I cannot recall it. There are only shreds left, and they might be the work of imagination. I remember the mineral taste of the village apothecary’s draught that sent me to sleep after he had seen to my envenomed hand; and after that I remember waking up, and the days that followed; but by that time I was no longer the same person.

I had heard of war and wars before; I may have been only ten, but I knew, dimly, what a war was. I believed I knew about weapons, but I thought only in terms of objects: clubs, swords, guns, and wands, as if death-dealing were a card game. There are living weapons, things less than men and more than beasts, or perhaps less even than beasts, for they lack free will, being as patterned as insects. Long ago, so long ago that their name is almost all that is left of their memory, the Doriands crafted the mermaids as a weapon in their unending war with the Cremonts, from whom everyone on this continent draws his ancestry. The ones my Uncle Bernard and I had found were juveniles, no more than a few weeks old. At that age, their poison glands are barely developed. Adults grow to seven or eight feet in length, and one scratch from their prongs will kill a man instantly. They are, or were, very rare—of late they have been sighted with increasing frequency. Though they are not truly intelligent, they are to some degree adaptable; and either they have found a way to overcome whatever deep-sea predators held them in check, or else this too is part of their patterning, this rise and fall in their numbers, so that their victims will have time to forget about their threat. Life is perverse enough that all too often the most twisted explanation is the right one.

My slowfall activated an instant after I’d left the aerostat. By then we were over the outskirts of Quinzach. I fell down from the sky as if flying, spinning slowly along my body’s axis to avoid being surprised by an attack from overhead—I still feared being attacked by a gargoyle. The lights of the city below me were a spangling of gold. Though I knew for a fact that it was nearly impossible to distinguish something so small as a man against the backdrop of the night sky, I felt exposed and wished I could have fallen into utter darkness instead of this glare. Half a minute later, I got my wish, as the lights throughout the city trembled and winked out. After long seconds a dull roar reverberated all around me, an echo of the destruction of a central part of the electrical network.