Chapter Twenty-Eight Double Thunder
Twenty-Eight
Double Thunder
In making their unprecedented alliance, both witches and gryphons had borne in mind their particular strengths.
For example, witches flew very fast. They weren’t part of an army, stratified in ranks and constrained by orders and hamstrung by a strategic plan concocted somewhere far from the battlefield.
Each of them was free to act on her own, and they fought fearlessly and without mercy.
And they had the strengths and the weaknesses of that freedom.
They could move like spies, alone and unseen in the darkness of the night, and they could range further and faster in the air than a horde of warriors on the ground; and when the power of an army was needed, they could gather like a swarm of hornets and terrify any enemy.
The idea of fighting strategically, however, was foreign to them; they threw everything they had into every battle, and never thought of withdrawing here to fight better there, or holding a force in reserve to take an enemy by surprise.
The gryphons were different in many ways: great predatory monsters, invincible in single combat in the air or on the earth.
They could glide on the invisible currents of the atmosphere, and with the twitch of a wing tip they could wheel and circle and then plunge into a dive, lion claws extended, and destroy any air creature or flying machine in a single devastating smash.
An entire army of gryphons, disciplined, trained, well-led, would have been a match for any army on the ground.
The gryphons didn’t shrink from war, but they didn’t provoke it either.
At the root of all their activities, all their desires, was gold—gold, and the compulsion to maintain the integrity of their two kingdoms, the outer one from the Black Sea to Kamchatka and from the Himmaleh to the Arctic, and the inner kingdom, the one that included the sun and the moon and the stars.
Prince Keshvād ordered his troops to range wide over the steppes before they reached the mountains of the Tien Shan, and to provision themselves from as many different herds as possible.
They were not humans, who robbed and murdered without thought, and cared nothing if they extinguished entire clans.
The gryphons needed food: of course they did.
Taking a little from many was better for everyone than taking everything from one or two.
The nomadic herdspeople regarded it as a form of tax, which they grumbled about but agreed to pay.
The alliance was something new to both sides, intriguing to all of them.
They portioned out the various tasks according to mutual agreement, the gryphons ranging high and wide by day, the witches exploring more closely at night.
And they all knew that great dangers lay ahead—not least those posed by the murder-birds, the oghab-gorgs of the Tien Shan.
With that in mind, one group of witches set about scouting the foothills of the Tien Shan, and agreed to let one witch fly ahead to see what she could discover about the troops of the Magisterium.
Her name was Sala Riikola. This was the sort of task she loved—exploring alone in a wilderness, dark and silent.
She was intent on discovery, not violence; that would come later.
At first she flew in the middle airs, watching the mountains and valleys below for movement on the ground.
As far as she knew, the only danger in the air would be from the birds, and there was little sign of them in this part of the range.
On the ground, she could see the cooking fires of scattered villages and the temporary settlements of nomadic shepherds and goatherds.
For many miles those were the only lights she could see, but there was a glow ahead, further up into the foothills, almost like the lights of a town or a city, and she flew towards it to investigate.
She came on it sooner than she expected.
It wasn’t a town: it was an immense body of soldiers and all their equipment, camping for the night.
Tents were ranged in ordered ranks, fires blazed under spitted oxen or camels, the aroma of which rose high into the sky.
The smell of roasting meat drifted a long way downwind.
At the edge of the widely spread camp, engineers were making fires too. Sala Riikola saw men using great machinery, repairing axles, hammering iron rims around cartwheels, welding metals for purposes she didn’t understand; altogether it signified detailed organization and great power.
Near the center of the camp (and she took a risk here by flying low) was a larger tent than the rest, with messengers coming and going, sentries on guard, a flag hanging in the still air from a flagpole above it.
She couldn’t see any symbol on the flag, but she didn’t need to.
The fact that it was there told her that this was the command center.
They had some kind of apparatus set up outside it, a series of metal posts linked by wire: all that occurred to her was the word anbaric.
It would mean something to the man Malcolm, no doubt, and the woman Lyra.
Sala flew up high and further towards the high mountains, because she could see a light or lights flickering in that direction.
As she got closer, the smell of the roasting meat from the camp faded, and another smell took its place—something rank and putrid; faint at first, but unmistakably the smell of death and corruption.
Could it be coming from the small group of men and horses moving steadily up into the mountains?
No. They smelled like what they were: men and horses.
This was a wilder smell. It could only be the oghab-gorgs.
Did they make nests? Did they roost on the bare rocks?
She didn’t know, but those were things she had to find out.
She flew higher, where a cold wind from the heights scattered the stench of decay and carried the freshness of snow instead.
She flew along following the men and watched them at work.
Why they were doing this at night, when they could surely see very little beyond their lamps, she had no idea; but she knew that people did things in the dark that they were ashamed to do in daylight, and she flew a little closer, and landed among the rocks outside a little ravine, and settled down to watch.
There were ten or a dozen men, in thick mountain uniform, wearing what looked like gas masks.
There was one other man too, in chains, who had no mask.
He seemed to be half asleep, or drugged, because he made little effort to struggle or get away.
He must have been cold, because he wore nothing but trousers of thin cotton and an open shirt, but perhaps he was near death anyway.
Sala saw the men tie him down to a boulder, under the instructions of an officer. And now he did try to fight back, but he had no strength, and they subdued him easily and made sure he was unable to move.
Then some of the men laid small boxes around the boulder, a couple of steps away from it, and began to join wires between them.
Something was stirring in the air far above.
Sala heard the sound of beating wings, and an occasional screech almost too high to be heard; but she was a witch, and she heard it.
Almost at the same time came the first full thick drift of the stench: rotting flesh, poisoned blood, gangrene—the oghab-gorgs, of course, it could be the smell of nothing else, as if the doors had opened on a feast in a charnel house.
The men had heard something too. Some of them looked up, to be snapped at by the officer and told to concentrate on their task. They bent over and moved more quickly, and he had to shout at them again and make them take care.
The birds had come much lower now, and their screeching had a note of excitement in it; if they were human, it would have sounded like hysteria.
Sala could see them whirling, diving, snatching, snapping—none close enough to threaten any of the men, but showing more and more interest in the prisoner.
The lamplight that played on him revealed a glimpse of a claw or a wing or a tail when one of them came low enough, and the officer was now running around to check each of the little boxes, and ordering the men to retreat away from the prisoner on the rock.
They needed telling only once. The stink of the birds was enough to make them want to withdraw, despite the gas masks, and Sala felt that she’d stayed too long already. She wanted to fly up and away as fast as she could, but she had come to spy, and—
One of the birds dared to swoop down and tear at the prisoner.
It slashed a deep gash in his exposed chest, and flew off at once, to be followed by another and another—and within seconds she could see the poor man no more: a mass of birds fought over him, tearing and rending and screeching, until he seemed to be merely a mass of blood and black feathers, a heaving pile of murder—
Without any warning all the boxes exploded.
First a silent bloom of red fire extending out and up from each box, growing immediately to join all the others until a canopy of scarlet cloud covered the rock, and the prisoner, and the feasting birds; and then came the tonnerre double—a rush of air in towards the center, with a crack so loud it might have been the mountain splitting, and a blaze of light that left a trace in Sala’s eyes for minutes afterwards.
She watched appalled as white and red and black roiled and tumbled into and beyond and through the space where the poor prisoner had been.
And all around the birds screamed and beat their wings, some hurled upwards, some dashed against the ground, some flung far out from the center of the explosion.