Chapter Thirty-Nine #2
He’d seen them as a boy only once or twice.
They were not common around the Huldu camps, a deformed and reclusive elite, and what the Huldu children whispered about them was vague, contradictory, the fuel for myth even among a mythic folk.
The ancient Huldu saw Neolithic hunters with bows, grudgingly took note of the upstart innovation, shape-shifted their way to a response.
But such extreme shape-shifting was no easy thing, even for the Fae.
The transformation needed for this was radical and, it was whispered, difficult to undo.
They just stay that way, Drasvinad said once, in hushed tones a million miles from her customary whimsical cruelty and laughter.
It hurts too much to make the change, or to change back. Only the strongest are chosen.
The archer stood seven feet tall, long limbed and heavily muscled like all his kind.
But he moved with less grace, made a more careful, lopsided figure when set against his comrades.
Where his left hand and wrist had once been, a gnarled, bifurcated growth sprouted from the brutally muscled forearm, curved upward a yard, downward a yard to match, gleaming like wet bone in the night, wrapped tightly about with what Duncan assumed was sinew.
It formed the undeniable outline of a long and powerful recurved bow, strung tightly from top to bottom with what had to be another single strand of yet more sinew.
Somewhere up on the creature’s hunched right shoulder, Duncan knew, would be a hole, wet and gory deep through the archer’s body, into which shafts of hazel or birch or pine were fed to marinate and steep in body fluid, to grow their dripping fletches and spines and bladed heads.
They soak them in their darkest hates, one Fae boy said airily one night around the fire.
Looking balefully at Duncan across the flames.
All the hate for the tree thieves, all the vengeance feelings and hurting for the Forest.
In the murky light and rain, as the party drew closer to their hiding place, Duncan thought he spotted a dozen protruding fletched shafts over the archer’s shoulder. But none were yet drawn or nocked in the bow.
Last fucking mistake you’ll ever make, sunshine.
He rolled out from the flat wagon, came up on one knee, slamfired into the approaching Fae.
Three shells, midsection height. The scouts went down, shredded and screaming, the archer staggered and howled and reached up and back for a shaft to load his bow.
Duncan popped to his feet, two steps in, fast, lifted the McCulloch to shoulder height, and put a shot through the Huldu’s head.
Blue-green flash and explosion, upward, outward splatter of blood.
The archer stood, skull like a cupped piece of crockery from some archaeological dig, still guttering faintly with flame, then tumbled ponderously into the brush.
“Duncan!”
The yell and the crack of the carbine hit at the same time.
Head yanked around—pale forms rising wet and muddy from the brush on the far side of the flat wagon, at least a dozen.
And two more archers. They must, he thought jaggedly, have crawled for hundreds of yards through the low growth.
Arthur was up on one knee, firing, ejecting, firing, ejecting, the mad-minute drill again, as fast as Duncan had ever seen it done.
Fanged heads jerked, figures spun and stumbled, some of them fell.
But they got back up, they got back up again.
Duncan raced back to the other man’s side.
Three shells left in the McCulloch—he chose the archers for targets, put two shots into the first, saw him go down in ruin, spent the last shell to stagger the other.
He threw down the emptied trench gun, grabbed up chain and sgian dubh from where he’d left them, leapt up onto the flat wagon with a howl.
Leapt down and ran right at the staggered archer, chain arcing through the rain over his head.
He got lucky, hit the Huldu in neck and shoulder. Iron links, sinking in, sparking smolder and green fire. The Fae archer shrilled and twisted. Duncan swung and lashed again, across the face this time, a blinding stroke. Then he closed with the sgian dubh, reverse grip in his left hand.
Into face and neck and chest. Screams and flailing, smolder and rain, the archer’s deformed bow arm battering awkwardly at him, the talons on the other hand slashing like razors.
He rode the blows, deflected the talon slashes most of the time, kept on hacking.
Behind him, the steady crack of Arthur’s carbine.
He saw an opening, stomp-kicked into the wounded Fae’s knee, felt it give and buckle.
The creature finally went down. He flogged viciously at it with the chain, opened smoking trenches across its chest and belly and throat…
The carbine fire, choked off.
He spun about, saw Arthur, up out of cover and wrestling against a Huldu scout, carbine rammed crossways at the Fae’s chest. Flash and smolder as the length of the barrel made contact.
The Huldu shrilled, but did not give ground.
Seasoned iron fighter, then—warrior caste.
Duncan came at the run. Maybe Arthur heard him, he turned his head, eyes wild, panic printed clear, even across those rain-soaked, fire-ravaged features.
Snapshot split second—the Huldu seized the moment, worked some rough-and-tumble wrestling trick, learned on the Forest floor with other young males, who knew how many centuries gone—the bracing barrel slipped and flipped, Arthur staggered sideways with the force of it.
The Huldu stood strong, chest still licked with tiny green flames and smolder into the night air, struck with one after another taloned hand…
Duncan roared, leapt back up onto the flat wagon, launched himself feet first. He hit Arthur’s attacker full force with both boots, knocked the Fae backward to the ground.
Landed, rolled. Came up in a muddy crouch, just as the Huldu scrabbled upright and lunged at him with its bloodied talons.
Duncan, desperate, fell back the way he’d rolled.
The Huldu’s slashing hand missed him, went too high.
He lashed out with the chain, got lucky again, caught the arm.
The links wrapped around, sank sizzling into Fae flesh.
He yanked savagely, pulled the Fae down on top of him, screamed into its face, put an eye out with the sgian dubh, then sawed the knife blade raggedly across its throat.
Blood exploded across the space between them, splattered on his face like fresh, hot rain, cardamom spiced.
He spat it out, shoved the hemorrhaging scout off him and away.
He scrabbled back to his feet and to Arthur.
Was just in time to see the sharpshooter die.
One or other of the Huldu’s talon slashes had ripped open his neck at the side, taken most of an ear with it, severed the carotid.
Arthur lay propped at a crazy angle against the flat wagon bogie, painted with his own blood.
He stared at Duncan oddly, as if they’d only just run into each other.
He held one hand pressed hard to the damage the Huldu had done, but seemed to have forgotten it.
“Now that,” he said, in a bubbling voice, “was a mad minute!”
“Oh Christ, Arthur…”
The sharpshooter frowned, took the hand away from his wound to study it, peering at his blood-buttered palm in puzzlement. “Oh…”
The hole in his neck filled up with blood, pulsed over the ragged edges of the wound, spilled all down him.
He tried to turn his face down and look at it, then hung his head in silence instead.
His arm and the bloodied hand he’d been wondering at went limp.
Rain dripped off the fingers. He did not move again.
You’re ill luck, Duncan. You know that.
Fresh, stealthy motion, off to the side.
Duncan swung around, blade and gore-dripping chain, crouched at bay as a ragged line of scouts moved to encircle the flat wagon with wary care.
He counted seven, no, eight, padding closer, some of them still with misshapen, damaged heads from Arthur’s fusillade.
The holes the sharpshooter had punched gave them an awkward, listing aspect, as if they were blinded—some looked as if they might actually be, eye sockets glutted or torn open—and now had to listen intently for their enemy before they moved.
There’d be more like this out there in the brush, downed, but they, too, would shortly heal and get up…
No time to get to the McCulloch, certainly no time to load it. They’d be on him the second he moved. You could see in the way they were poised, all they needed was to see him flinch or turn.
“Come on then!” he screamed at them in Skogurtal. “Who’s fucking next?”
Blank black stares, lips peeled from fangs. He nerved himself for their rush, he drew a deep, shuddering breath that seemed to set tiny fires burning along his veins, under his nails, in his teeth. He bared his own snarl…
“Enough!”
Her voice hit him a heartbeat before she did, the low, luxuriant tones warped into a cry that seemed to float on the night air somewhere between anguish and rage, and he knew instantly, despite all distortion, whose voice it was.
Mebhuranon!
She came like a stooping bird of prey, cloak wrapped, trailing long dark and silver hair, cannoned into him with shoulder and arm, knocked him flat to the ground, stood over him, fanged and taloned and staring blank as a black stone angel.
He had no idea where she’d come from, from what cover among the buildings or the trees, whether she’d simply dropped from the fucking sky…
“Stay down,” she snarled in English, and the sudden, stabbing shock of that alone was enough to hold him where he lay.
Then she rounded on her fellow Fae, made a cat’s hiss sound, and they bent their heads, abandoned feral crouch for obeisance in the scant second it took Duncan to prop himself up and see.
Her voice raged in Skogurtal, but it was an ornate, antique form he struggled to make sense of, fenced around with formulaic phrasing and allusion to things that, in his rattled state, made no sense, had no grounding in anything he knew.
The best sense he could make of it was that she had come just in time and that they, all of them, ought to be ashamed, and so should Svalenkari, their master…
He gave up trying to keep pace.
“Is this a [hunt? offering?] worthy of the One Who Watches?” She stormed on.
“Must Svalenkari [feed?] like a [???] with belly grown pendulous as a [???] who came before? What will your [fetches? guardians of?] in the Final Isles and End of Days say of your [???]? Where is [honor? name?], where is memory, where is [???] back to the Beginning?”
One of the uninjured Huldu bared fangs, started to say something—
Mebhuranon was on him before he got three syllables out.
She slammed him to the ground, crouched and cracked her jaws wide, made a sound like a buzzard’s cry, showed her fangs to him, let him scrabble backward away from her on his hands and arse.
Then she straightened, looked around at the rest of them, made a sound this time like the rushing of a hillside stream in spate. She gestured angrily toward the woods.
“Go, all of you! Now! Slope away, the way you came here, no better than creeping [???] or tree thieves, no more [worthy?] than [???] in the eyes of the One Who Watches and Her [brood? beloved?]. Go and [pray? desire?] only that the Final Isles shall not know this sorry, bitter tale!”
Someone dared speak up, spat out the name Svalenkari—
“Svalenkari,” she snarled back, “will have his [day? appointed hour?]. But he will have it as we have [lived? honored?] these hundred thousand [returns? losses?]. He may besmirch himself, but he will not besmirch the [name? realm?] of the Bright Folk, I will not permit it, not now, not while the moon is in the sky and the ocean in its bed, nor ever after! Now go!”
Slowly, then, very slowly, they dropped their stares, turned, and began to leave. The fully hale among them paused in the brush to help their head-shot comrades to stand and lean on them and limp away, too.
They left their dead where they lay.
They left Duncan and the Fae queen silent in the gloom by the flat wagon. They faded across the rainy open ground in ones and twos, and into the tree line once more.
Presently they were gone.
“They came for you,” said Mebhuranon finally.
Duncan got himself to his feet with an effort. “So I gather.”
“Svalenkari will not be denied.” She was, he realized, still speaking English to him. She stared down at Arthur’s body, out across the brush to where Hardy lay with his head shot through and the elf bolt shaft still in his chest. “Were these your friends?”
He thought about it. “This one, yes.”
“Then I am sorry for this loss.”
“So am I.”
Perhaps she heard something in his voice. She turned more fully to face him—she topped him by a good six inches—put one taloned hand on his chest. It was like being touched by something out of Milton’s vision of hell.
“A reckoning has come,” she said, still in English. “Svalenkari demands, and the clans will hear him. I cannot balance this. So tell me, Duncan, what will you give up, for the child to be saved, for Mimi and her mother to walk free? How far will you go?”
Rain hissed in the brush, like soft radio static.
Across the desolate industrial landscape of the shut-down munitions plant, through the eager woodland waiting at its fringes, a vast silence bent inward behind the sound of the rain, as if to hear what his best offer might be.
He stared into Mebhuranon’s pitiless black gaze.
“You already know,” he said.