The Hyena and the Hawk (Echoes of the Fall Book 3) Read online

  For Darren Dale, greatly missed

  Contents

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  This is how they tell the story:

  That at the dawn of time the people of the world lived in the first lands and knew peace.

  That amongst the people there were those who formed alliances with monstrous creatures and became the Plague People, who set out to devour all the earth and sky.

  That the true people who were left were forced to flee, and that the three brothers, Owl, Bat and Serpent, called down a great fire to guard their flight, creating the ocean which forever protects against the Plague People, and serves as a dark reminder of them.

  And the true people multiplied in this new land and took many gods, each tribe taking its soul and its shape from the god it followed. In the north the Tiger and the Wolf were constantly at each other’s throat while the Bear slept and the Eyrie hovered overhead. In the south, the Serpent founded a great kingdom only to lose it to the Pale Shadow People, who we know to be the Plague People’s exiled cousins, who suborned their servants and cast them out. So the Serpent came to the River Tsotec and brought civilization to the tribes there, and created the Sun River Nation. And in the middle the Plains tribes devoured one another, save for the Horse who sought trade and travel instead of tooth and claw.

  And then, one day, today, the Plague People found them. They came with their wings and their hands of fire, and their rods that speak instant, invisible death; they came with their iron boat and their flying ship. Most of all they came with their terror, which robs the true people of their minds and their ability to change shape, and makes them only animals.

  Who will lead the true people against their ancient enemy? Maniye Many Tracks, daughter of Wolf and Tiger and Champion of the North, who discovered the Plague camp in the Plains where the Horse once dwelled; Loud Thunder of the Bear, who fought them on the northern coast and drove them into the sea; Asman of the Sun River Nation, consort of the Kasra and Champion of the River, who has only now seen his country unified; Hesprec Essen Skese, priest of the Serpent, who has seen human lifespans come and go, and is forced to seek allies in the worst of places, amongst the Pale Shadow; Venat, raider of the Dragon and Asman’s one-time slave; Shyri, daughter of the Hyena with her own apocalyptic prophecies; Kailovela of the Hawk, who has kept hearth with one of the Plague People, the ‘little monster’ that the Eyriemen captured long before the invasion. Warriors, champions, priests and tribes from the cold north to the parched south muster against the threat of the Plague People.

  This is how they told the story yesterday, today. Tomorrow is another matter, for the Plague People are the death of all stories.

  1

  The grand farewell had already happened before the palace at Atahlan. The Kasra Tecumet, robed and masked, had stepped down from the Daybreak Throne into the view of a thousand of her people, acknowledging their cries and benedictions with outstretched arms. Her message to them had been spoken by her chief priestess, Esumit of the Serpent, bland and reassuring. The news of what had happened out on the eastern Plains would not have reached many ears. The people of Atahlan had listened to the second-hand words of their leader with all confidence.

  That would change soon enough, the newly named Asman knew.

  Now he was at the docks and a war-barge was ready for him, a full complement of soldiers at his sole disposal. It was not the great army that the Sun River Nation could field, which was still being levied from every village along the river. Asman would lead the expeditionary force, to assess whether the world was just cracked, or broken in two.

  He had on his new armour, segmented leather sewn with stone plates, edged in gilt. His maccan blade was freshly set with new obsidian teeth. He cut a splendid figure, if he said so himself: Champion of the River and Kasrani of the Nation. He was the man who had brought the Iron Wolves from the far north; had earned the favour of strange gods and travelled with the Messengers of the Serpent. Even before becoming Tecumet’s mate he had become someone they told stories of.

  Probably people envied him, although the journey had not been a simple or easy one. He had earned a period of rest, quiet reflection, and a chance to enjoy his new station in life. Fate, it turned out, had decided he was not to have it.

  ‘Would it be presumptuous to feel all this was aimed at me?’ he asked his companion.

  Venat of the Dragon stared at him blankly for a moment and then rolled his eyes. ‘Of course. The oldest enemy of all the people of the world is here because it heard you might be happy. That is how the world works.’

  ‘It would lend a certain meaning to all that ridiculous business we went through,’ Asman observed wryly. ‘Thank you for coming back to me, by the way.’

  The old pirate scowled. ‘I thought it was to be rewarded, not for all this.’ Venat had just arrived with news of Asman’s father’s untimely demise, a matter which was also not general public knowledge; nor, for complex reasons, a source of particular grief, especially as Asman had given the order. It was the act of a villain of myth to have one’s own father assassinated, he well knew. His only defence was that those myth-makers had not known his father.

  ‘Is not my company reward enough?’ he declared, stepping onto the deck of the barge. The soldiers there clashed their spears against their shields, acknowledging their commander.

  Venat shambled after, turning the bile of his expression on all and sundry. ‘If you were a boil I’d stick a needle in you,’ he grumbled as he followed Asman below decks. Even on a war-barge the quarters were cramped, and surely nobody had made allowances for a surly Dragon pirate when they were allocating rooms. Asman had already resigned himself to sleeping in Venat’s armpit on the voyage upriver, and was about to say as much when the man stopped dead before the cabin door. Without thinking, Asman Stepped into his Champion’s shape, that lean sickle-clawed lizard that ran on two legs. He knew Venat, and in that instant the pirate had been a man about to do battle with a great enemy. A moment later, the Dragon shrugged and stretched theatrically.

  ‘I’ll be on deck,’ he said. ‘Never could abide these little boxes you live in.’

  Asman, bewildered, pushed open the door to his cabin and found in that small space the sole and supreme ruler of the Sun River Nation in all her glory. Not the robe, not the mask, which were all her subjects and petitioners saw, but the woman beneath them.

  He knelt immediately, and she put a hand to his head, fingers cool against the stubble where he had shaved the sides. He let himself look up at her face – a breach of propriety really, but who was here to complain? Still very much the girl he had grown up around, slight and dark and beautiful. He had loved her a long time, and if his love was divided, did that make the portion he reserved for her any less true?

  Tecumet hooked a knuckle under his chin and raised him up. ‘I wanted to say goodbye. Properly, not all the ceremony.’

&n
bsp; ‘How did you even get on board?’

  The Serpent priestess, Esumit, had arranged it of course. Probably the woman was delighted that Asman would be out from underfoot so soon, given that he and she had very much been on opposite sides of what had nearly been a civil war along the river. A little subterfuge for her Kasra was obviously a small price to pay.

  He held Tecumet for a while, listening to the sounds of the ship’s crew and the soldiers, and thinking of Venat somewhere on the boat. He had thought there would be some great reckoning between the Dragon and Tecumet, and only now did he realize he had been dreading it. And yet the man had just sloped off without a word, and taken with him all those missed chances for making Asman feel uncomfortable. A wedding present, perhaps.

  He knew that Tecumet had her own role to play in planning for war. Emissaries were already on their way north to those of the Plains tribes who would speak to Atahlan – few enough, but perhaps with the new enemy that number would grow. This was the great doom, after all, that every halfway visionary priest had caught some fragment of. Surely even the legendarily divided Plainsfolk would set old grievances aside in the face of it.

  Thinking on that, Asman had a sudden sense of being at the fulcrum of destiny, not a pleasant feeling at all. This was why the river had been torn in two after the old Kasra’s death, after all. The Serpent had been desperate to have the right backside sitting on the Daybreak Throne, as Venat would put it. Tecumet and her brother had been the standards that different cliques of priests had flocked to, until their urgent need to second-guess fate had almost destroyed everything. Only the wide-wandering Messenger, Hesprec Essen Skese, had set things right, talked Tecuman down and raised Tecumet up. And just in time.

  Tecumet would bring half an army. Tecuman was already sailing to raise the other half from the Estuary. But they would march where Asman directed. He was their vanguard.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Tecumet whispered. ‘You’re cold suddenly.’

  ‘I am trying to think of what the Plague People will be like. I can’t imagine them.’ He had only the babbled words of Maniye’s Crow, who had been half mad all on his own, no ancient monsters necessary. ‘How can they be so terrible? He said there weren’t even that many of them.’

  ‘Maniye sent him,’ Tecumet noted.

  ‘And I trust her judgement,’ he agreed. ‘But . . . in my mind they are giants or monsters. How can they be so terrible and look just like men?’

  ‘Perhaps we’ll be lucky, and they’ll not seem so terrible when faced with the warbands of the Plains and the armies of the Daybreak Throne,’ she whispered. ‘Perhaps they’ve grown less, or we’ve grown more, since the time of the old stories. Maybe this is no more than an echo, a ripple, after all.’

  Asman wanted nothing more than to agree with her, but the words stuck in his throat and instead he held her close. She had been his friend for a long time, his enemy for a brief span of days. Only parting from her did he realize how she was rooted deep in him. But then he often found the closest attachment with people who had tried to kill him at one time or another.

  There was a scuff outside the door, and then Venat was growling out, ‘He’s preparing. You just go play with your thumbs on deck till he’s ready,’ and Asman knew that the barge was ready to cast off, and that the Dragon was still being unnaturally considerate.

  Tecumet held him a moment longer and then released him.

  Soon after, he was on deck, waiting until he knew Tecumet had been safely smuggled away. Many of the soldiers and crew would know someone had visited him, but he hoped not a one guessed at the Kasra herself.

  He stood at the prow as they let the current draw them out into the Tsotec’s heart, Venat slouching at his shoulder. They would sail as far as the village of Umethret and then disembark on the north bank, marching for where Maniye had been. Nobody knew how swiftly the Plague People were advancing into the Plains, or if they even were. A similar lack of knowledge shrouded just about everything else. Asman and his warriors were going to be scouts as much as soldiers.

  That far into his thoughts, Venat’s pointed silence was like any other man shouting in his ear. ‘What?’

  The pirate snorted, then slumped forwards to lean on the rail beside him. He did everything as though he wanted to expend the minimum possible effort, right up to the moment he cut someone open. It was a Dragon thing, or possibly just a Venat thing.

  ‘All those prophecies,’ Venat told him. ‘Your snaky priests flapping like fish on the beach.’

  ‘You think it’s nothing? They say Where the Fords Meet is taken, all of it.’

  ‘I think most of the Plains tribes wanted to burn that place down. Horse Society, always acting like they know more than everyone else.’

  Asman shook his head. ‘You’re wrong because you’re right.’

  ‘What kind of sense is that?’

  ‘They would have taken the Horse if they could, raided them, stolen away the young and strong, set fire to the homes, emptied the storehouses?’

  ‘In a heartbeat.’

  ‘And yet none of them did. We saw that place. The Horse knew how to keep what was theirs. Walls and bows and good order. And now it’s all gone.’

  ‘If it’s true.’

  ‘I think the Dragon is scared to admit there’s something worse in the world than him.’ Asman was trying for levity but failing to find it.

  ‘The Dragon isn’t scared of anything.’ And while the words might have been a bluff from anyone else, Venat said them with conviction.

  ‘You’ll go to them, won’t you? Go back again?’

  But the pirate wouldn’t commit himself. He had been back once, since freeing himself of the River yoke. He hadn’t stayed long. Something had changed in him – added or taken away until he couldn’t quite see eye to eye with the rest of his kin; a man caught between two worlds.

  Not shoulders the fate of the world should rest on. But whose were? Asman had no illusions about his own failures and frailties. Or should the world put its faith in Maniye Many Tracks of the Crown of the World, who didn’t even know to what people she belonged? What about Shyri of the Laughing Men, whose people were no doubt sharpening their knives even now at the news of disaster, but only to feast after the fighting was done. Or Hesprec Essen Skese of the Serpent, who had travelled further than anyone alive, and was now on one more journey to a place nobody should ever have to go.

  Asman stared at the river that was the life’s blood of all his people and wondered how doomed the world must be, that such as they were its best hope.

  * * *

  Therumit’s body was old, but she set a punishing pace, and after several days of travel Hesprec began to wonder if the old woman’s withered frame was gnarled hardwood instead of flesh. They had borrowed mounts from the Horse Society to make the best time they could, and even so Hesprec was bruised from knee to waist after three days while Therumit just kept her narrow gaze on the horizon and pushed their beasts as far as she could every day.

  And how had she coaxed the Horse into giving up the animals, without any handler to see them safe? It was unheard of, and yet here they were, their beasts laden with water and supplies as they left the southern bank of the Tsotec far behind and crossed the dry lands.

  They were much like the Plains, these reaches, but sandier, and the grass was patchy. Here and there great pillars of earth stabbed at the sky like fingers, the castles of blind white ants that Hesprec harvested when they stopped at dusk, bursting their bodies between her teeth and spitting out the hard nuggets of their heads.

  The Serpent had placed its mark on these lands. The journey that Therumit and Hesprec were making had been forbidden, long ago. But forbiddance was a word the Serpent considered more lightly amongst their own than they did when dealing it to others. They never buried anything so very deeply that they could not remember where it was to dig it up.

  The priests of the Serpent had no leaders, but there were those amongst them who were oldest, those who were
wisest. They had a complex and precisely measured tangle of respect that connected them to each other – and after all there were not so very many of them, not any more. In the eyes of their peers, Therumit and Hesprec were both eccentric. Hesprec had always felt a need to travel and learn, far more than the others. Few had travelled so far from the safety of the River, fewer still had returned alive. The Serpent was not well liked, out where the world grew cold.

  And Therumit had withdrawn from her people, these last few lifetimes. She had made herself a hermit of the Estuary, husbanding her secrets and growing slowly apart from her kin. Now Hesprec knew why: she had never lost her yearning for the Oldest Kingdom, first bastion of civilization when the Serpent had been young and strong.

  Not even Therumit was old enough to remember, but the legends never went away, whispered from snake to snake in the dark places where they met. Once they had been greater than now they were. Once they had ruled a mighty city when all others had been savages living in caves and mud hovels. Once there had been a golden time, and then it had been taken away from them. And Therumit was not the only child of the Serpent who paused in the unceasing labour to shape the people of the Sun River Nation along the Tsotec to think If only we could have back what we have lost.

  These dry lands they travelled through were not uninhabited, though the denizens were sparse and shy. Hesprec only caught sight of them a handful of times. Men with great curved shields of hide, watching the two riders impassively; tall women with feathered head-dresses and spears, who became long-legged running birds and fled when the Serpents glanced their way. Just as well they were so skittish; their beaks had seemed like hatchet blades to Hesprec.

  None of these people had much contact with the Sun River Nation. It was not that they had nothing to offer, but that the Nation turned its back on them, and on anything to the south. Save for watchtowers and patrols, the River looked mostly to the River, and that was the way the Serpent had shaped it. For across the dry lands – close enough that sometimes raiding parties of Jaguar had crept to the very banks of the Tsotec and been repulsed – were the forested valleys of the Oldest Kingdom.