Miriam coughed up blood.
She didn’t know if it came from her throat, which had been caught in the noose, or from her lungs.
Every breath brought pain.
She tried to sit up. She could not. Hands and feet bound behind her, she lay on her belly on the forest floor.
When would they release the spider?
Despite her agony, Miriam remembered the training. She turned her head, awkwardly bit a caminus leaf from the branches threaded through her hidey suit. She chewed. It hurt to swallow, but she did it anyway, then bit off another leaf.
Death was coming, but at least she would not become a demon.
How had the demon found them? Miriam had stayed so still, made no sound.
The forest around her had fallen into total silence. No cries of the vindeedee, no croaks from the humped gish, no snorfling sounds from a digging vootervert. Animals knew when to stay quiet, when to stay hidden.
Miriam wished she’d stayed hidden.
When the demons had returned, General Cooper set out to find them and destroy them. Wipe them out, no matter the cost.
That cost? Lives. Rowan’s life. Aaron’s life.
Miriam’s life.
The lightest of thumps, just ahead of her.
She craned her head to look, waited to see the gnarled black body, the backsticks, the toothtongue, but there was no demon.
Just the forest… and a patch of it that shimmered.
A patch in the shape of a tall man…
* * *
Black curls puffed from the top of the cart’s smokestack. Wind rattled the leaves of Ahiliyah Cooper’s hidey suit. She prayed to the gods as she held on for dear life.
Creen’s contraptions didn’t blow up often—not anymore, anyway—but at times, they still did.
She would have rather run, like the old days, but her foot had never healed correctly from wounds inflicted by the Demon Mother. Birthing four children hadn’t helped, either.
“Bump coming,” Creen said, shouting to be heard over this hiss of steam, turning of gears, and the rattle of iron-bound wooden wheels on hard-packed dirt.
Ahiliyah gripped the wooden handholds. The cart jarred hard enough to rattle her teeth.
Even if she’d been uninjured and in her prime, Creen’s invention was more than twice as fast as Ataegina’s fastest runners. And while the cart had to periodically be fed wood and water, it never got tired. He was working on a larger version, big enough to carry sixteen spearmyn, with shields, armor, and a week’s supplies. When Creen finished it, Ahiliyah would be able to outmaneuver the next Northern invasion with ease.
Soot from the cart’s boiler streaked Creen’s face, adding deeper lines to his horrific scars. Ahiliyah had known him so long that she often forgot about his scarred face, so bad were they that most people steered clear of him. Creen normally stayed in his labs in Lemeth Hold, but for this search, for these past two weeks, Liyah had needed his mind.
She’d asked. He’d accepted.
Another jaw-jarring bump.
“Riding in this thing is like getting kicked every ten seconds,” Ahiliyah said. “How much farther?”
Her hands were starting to hurt from holding on so tight.
“We’re close,” Creen said. “Or as close as this excuse for a road will get us.”
Thousands of people had spent years building this excuse of a road, leveling the land where the soil allowed, chipping out paths through the rock where it did not. Roads made it far easier to travel from hold to hold, and over the past decade had increased the efficiency of trade so thoroughly that shortages seemed a thing of the past.
A past that would soon return if she didn’t find the new Demon Mother.
The return of the demons had driven a dagger of fear through the collective heart of Ataegina. People were afraid to stay in the fields for the fall harvest. Without that harvest, the Western Holds would be reliant upon crops produced by the holds in the north and east. The hand-pulled carts transporting that food would also be a risk. They’d have to form large caravans, and Ahiliyah estimated a caravan would require at least five modules of spearmyn, enough to form the circular phalanx needed to defend against demon horde attacks.
Five modules meant two hundred and forty spearmyn, for each shipment.
More hands out of the fields and rivers, away from the forges and factories.
In the two decades since Brandun had killed the Demon Mother, Ataegina’s population had more than doubled. Ahiliyah was not about to let that growth slow.
She’d committed thousands of troops to this search. Creen and Ahiliyah had devised a method to search large chunks of land, then deploy modules along that area’s perimeter, slowly narrowing the area where the nest could be.
Eighty-two people had been lost so far, mostly from Pendaran, Hibernia, and Jantal. Everything north of the Pendaran peninsula had been eliminated. Somewhere on that peninsula, either in the small Pendaran mountains or out on the fertile plains, lay a nightmare—the enemy of Ataegina.
The longer it took her to find the lair, the more demons she would have to face when the showdown finally came. Ahiliyah was going to find the new Demon Mother, kill her offspring, and send her back to whatever hell she’d come from.
Today’s victims, the ones Ahiliyah and Creen were rushing to see, hadn’t been farmers, loggers, or fishermen—they’d been runners. A whole crew. Two missing, one dead, his body reportedly mutilated beyond recognition.
“Up ahead,” Creen said.
At the edge of the rutted road, a beacon of hope—a spearmyn module formed into a tight dome bristling with spears. Thanks to shields covered with netting that was stuffed thick with caminus branches, the dome almost looked like a crimson bush.
Creen pulled back a lever. The cart started to slow. He twisted a knob; a hissing jet of steam shot out from the big boiler.
Ahiliyah thought of the runner mantras, one in particular that had saved her more times than she could count: silence is strength. This rattling, whistling metal-and-wood cart was anything but silent. Such noise might draw demons, but she and Creen were behind the search line—fast communication between the divisions was worth the risk.
The cart stopped. In one smooth motion, Ahiliyah stepped out onto the road, unslung her bow, drew an arrow from her quiver, and nocked it. The arrowhead was already slimed with poison, the same poison that had delivered people decades ago.
A familiar voice, one near and dear to her heart, bellowed out from the shield formation. The spearmyn dome quickly flowed into four marching ranks—two columns of twelve, to the right and left, holding shields and long spears. Inside of them, two columns of twelve holding either bows or crossbows. A tall man led them, his shield held against his chest, the eye slit of his helmeted head peeking over the shield’s top.
Each spearmyn wore a hidey suit, just like the ones Ahiliyah and Creen wore. Hard armor beneath offered some defense against claws, tails, and toothtongues, but only the caminus leaves woven into the netting could protect against burning blood.
Creen fished a hand inside his hidey suit, pulled out the toothtongue he always wore, let it drop against the netting and caminus leaves. He wanted people to see it. He always did. His toothtongue was larger than the three Ahiliyah wore combined, larger than any other on Ataegina. One of a kind—or least it had been until the new demon rising.
“Hail, General Cooper. Hail, Uncle Creen,” the module leader said.
Even through the helmet’s narrow slits, she saw the boy’s eyes, eyes that looked so much like those of Tolio, her husband.
The boy. Only in her heart. Her son was weeks away from turning eighteen. Still growing. While nowhere near the size of his namesake, he cut an imposing figure.
“Hail, Brandun,” Ahiliyah said. “Let’s make good time, I want to be away from here before night falls.”
* * *
Brandun’s module formed a perimeter circle around the corpse.
Ahiliyah, Creen, and Susanna Albrecht, Lemeth Hold’s senior runner, stood in the center of the circle. At their feet, Rowan Winden—a ragged nightmare of blood, ripped meat, and broken bone. His leaf-strewn hidey suit had been cut from head to back. His spine had been ripped from his body.
No sign of the spine. Or the head that might still be attached to it.
Even in the worst of the demon fighting, Ahiliyah had never seen the like.
“He was one of my best,” Susannah said. “Not strong, but he could run for days, and he was so smart about staying quiet, staying hidden. I can’t imagine him making a mistake that would have let a demon find him. But here he is.”
The twigs and crimson leaves woven through the netting of Susannah’s hidey suit left only her face visible. The hollowness in her eyes—when those in your command die, it is always your fault.
Ahiliyah put her left fist against her hidey-suit-covered breastplate.
“He will be missed,” she said, because that was what one was supposed to say in times like these. “Any sign of his crewmates?”
“I found Aaron’s footprints,” Susannah said. “And blood. No one loses that much blood and survives. Another blood trail has to be from Miriam, but I couldn’t follow it”—she pointed up, into the forest’s sparse canopy—“because it went there.”
Creen’s scarred face wrinkled in doubt.
“The demons are using the trees? That’s new.”
Susannah pointed again, this time to a spearhead lying near Rowan’s body.
“Demons have burning blood,” she said. “Not that.”
On the tip of Rowan’s forearm-length spearhead, a smear of green. Glowing green. Ahiliyah had seen demon blood more times than she could count—it was yellow, and dissolved everything other than caminus leaves.
Spearmyn used the long spear, while runners used the short. The butt-spike, two halfstaffs, and the coupler were carried in a holster attached to the runner’s pack. The spearhead doubled as a short sword. Runners carried spearheads in a back scabbard, so they still had a weapon if they had to shed the pack for speed.
Creen moved to the spearhead, his huge toothtongue catching the sun filtering through the canopy.
“No acid scoring on the blade,” he said. “This blood isn’t from a demon.”
Memories flared—the ruined ship, Zachariah, the final battle against the Demon Mother.
“If a demon didn’t kill Rowan,” Ahiliyah said, “what did?”
Creen looked up, his scarred face smiling, eyes blazing with intensity.
“Something new,” he said.
He was excited. Two runners missing, one mangled beyond recognition, and Creen was excited.
Ahiliyah reached into her hidey suit and pulled out the battered, rolled-up map she and Creen had been using to mark the slowly constricting search pattern.
“If a demon didn’t do this,” she said, “then I need to know what did. Creen, you have fifteen minutes to get whatever you can from Rowan’s body. We need to get back to the cart and spread the word to the other divisions so they can pull their runners back until we know more.”
* * *
Yeh’kull paused.
It wasn’t possible.
She retracted her plasmacaster. She’d been moments from turning on her targeting laser and taking out the human that was clearly the leader, the one holding a nocked bow and standing by the game Yeh’kull had killed earlier.
Yeh’kull wasn’t supposed to take trophies at all, but her time on this planet was almost up. The elders would soon arrive, and signal her to bring her scout craft up to the mothership. That day, possibly, the next at the latest, and her time on this planet would be done forever.
She’d been sent to study this continent, to evaluate it as a potential hunting ground. An isolated planet, so primitive when compared to other human worlds. The people here seemed to have no beam weapons, no explosives, no firearms of any kind. They were even less advanced than those on their homeworld had been thousands of years ago, when Yeh’kull’s ancestors had been among the Yautja, had been worshiped as gods.
On this planet, humans were equipped only with spears, knives, shields, and armor, all made from a surprisingly decent variant of steel, along with hand-drawn bows and powerful crossbows.
She wasn’t supposed to hunt. Her brothers were dead. She was the last of her line. The clan elders constantly sheltered her, protected her. Yeh’kull hated it. She’d never asked for safety—in fact, she’d asked over and over to join real hunts, to risk her life in pursuit of honor just as her brothers had done. She longed to be blooded, an equal in her clan. The elders refused to grant her request, instead saying she had important work to do as an ecologist, sending her on soft missions to survey worlds looking for dangerous fauna that might be suitable for game.
Game she wasn’t supposed to hunt herself.
On this, her third such ecological survey, Yeh’kull had come to the conclusion that the elders already knew a significant amount about the planets they sent her to, already knew there wasn’t anything she couldn’t handle with ease. They knew they were sending her to planets that presented no real danger, no real challenge.
She did her duty, even though she hated it.
No, she wasn’t supposed to hunt, at all, but didn’t she deserve a souvenir? No one would begrudge her a few human trophies, taken just as her time here expired. With the surprising absence of large fauna here, humans were the biggest game animal she’d yet see.
She’d stalked the scouting party. One of them had fought well. Faster than Yeh’kull had expected, the male had cut her. She’d cached his spine and skull to take with her when the elders came. She’d killed a second scout, but took the third captive.
Part of Yeh’kull’s role as ecologist was to learn what she could of local dialects and add that information to the translator’s algorithm. The humans here had a previously unknown dialect, one that gave her translator program no end of trouble. That could happen when a human population grew in isolation for a long time, and as yet Yeh’kull had no idea how long these primitive people had been on this world. She had tried to learn what she could from the captive, but the captive had proven weak and useless. Crying, stammering, the captive had repeated one word over and over again—dee-mon.
In other human cultures, that was often a word for ghost, or monster. Considering how primitive this place was, it wasn’t surprising that the humans here embraced religious superstition. The scout had thought Yeh’kull was a monster? From the scout’s perspective, perhaps that was accurate.
The captive had bled out before Yeh’kull could make further progress, giving her three trophies to take from him. But they’d been so easy to collect. Despite the wound, she’d never been in real danger. She’d craved a bigger challenge, one that brought more honor—a challenge like killing a leader and then evading the ninety-six soldiers that had gathered to investigate Yeh’kull’s kill.
The female human leader wore the same thick camouflage suit the scouts wore, but there was no mistaking her bearing, nor the way the foot soldiers reacted to her.
Yeh’kull had been so close to shooting the leader, until sunlight had caught the trophy hanging from the little male’s neck. A trophy that Yeh’kull could only dream of—the pharyngeal jaw of a Kiande Amedha queen.
It wasn’t possible.
Dozens of three-human scout patrols in this area. Heavy infantry units backed them up, providing a line behind which the scouts could retreat and rest. Yeh’kull had known the scouts were looking for something specific. She’d assumed it was a rival tribe, or perhaps an invading force.
Dee-mon.
Now Yeh’kull knew what that word meant. It wasn’t about her, it was this culture’s word for the Kiande Amedha. Yeh’kull now understood why the scouts and the infantry were working together to cover such a large area—they were searching for a nest.
If the elders had known Kiande Amedha were here, they would never have sent Yeh’kull. They would have sent unblooded, to hunt, to become blooded.
A once-in-a-lifetime chance, a nest, and in it the ultimate prize—a queen. If Yeh’kull made a trophy of her, the elders could never again hold her back, never shelter her from the hunt, from true honor. Yeh’kull would be blooded. She would be an equal, able to choose her own destiny.
The female leader… was she marking a map? A map of the search area?
That would save time, and time wasn’t something Yeh’kull had.
* * *
A shifting wind washed the boiler smoke into Ahiliyah’s face. She hid her mouth and nose in the crook of her arm; her body smelled far worse than the smoke. She’d been managing the search firsthand, hadn’t bathed in days.
“Creen, make it go faster,” she said, coughing. “It’s getting dark.”
“No shit, genius.”
Creen squinted against the smoke, wiped an eye with the back of his hand. Soot lined the scars on his face.
They were well behind the search line, but both of them had lived through nights alone, out in the open, and neither of them wanted to experience that ever again, no matter how safe things might seem.
“Whatever killed Rowan isn’t from here,” Creen said, peering through the smoke made by his own invention. “You know that, right?”
Not from here—not from Ataegina.
Most Ataeginians didn’t believe Creen’s claim that the demons weren’t some mystical force of evil, but instead were creatures from another world, carried here by an ancient ship that could fly to the stars. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people had made the trek to Black Smoke Mountain to see the strange shipwreck, yet most of those people believed it wasn’t a ship at all, but rather an ancient temple built by followers of some dark religion, a religion hellbent on conjuring demons to destroy Ataegina. Creen’s arguments to the contrary fell on deaf ears. How could people believe in beings from another world when most of them didn’t even understand the concept of what a “world” was in the first place? Ahiliyah barely understood it herself.
“We have to be careful about this,” she said. “Relations with Biseth Hold are already strained, and—”
The cart rocked hard to the left. Ahiliyah grabbed at the wooden frame, trying to adjust, but when the cart rocked back to the right she felt a hard pull at her chest—she flew through the air.
She hit hard, tumbling across the hard-packed road.
Creen’s scream, high-pitched and raw.
Ahiliyah scrambled to her hands and knees. Everything spun. She stood, almost fell when her wobbly legs buckled. Her head howled in pain.
The cart had come to a stop. Creen was still inside. No… not inside… he was above it. Floating? He grabbed at his throat, hands digging at nothing. Something there, in the smoke, something see-through, like warped glass.
A sparkle, a wash of little flashes.
A huge, helmeted warrior standing in the cart, left arm raised high, hand wrapped around Creen’s throat. Clumps of black hair hung from beneath the strange, smooth helmet to rest on wide shoulders.
The warrior was big, bigger than any person Ahiliyah had ever seen, as tall as a demon but thicker, far more muscular. Dull armor on its arms and shoulders. It wore a hidey suit of sorts, but the rope was thin and clung tight to its body, more like a net to catch big fish than to hold foliage, and there was no foliage in it at all.
The sound of metal ringing out—two long, jagged, parallel blades extended from a harness on the warrior’s left forearm.
With the smooth motion that she’d practiced ten thousand times, Ahiliyah unslung her bow and reached back for an arrow.
Something popped up from the huge warrior’s shoulder, turned, pointed at Ahiliyah. The odd motion made her pause. Strange red lights came from the warrior’s helmet, lit up the road dust between it and her—something on her chest gleamed, scattering the light.
Ahiliyah looked down, saw a triangle of three red dots playing across her chest. The hidey suit had torn there, netting ripped when the invisible warrior had grabbed her, partially exposing the three toothtongues hanging from her neck. Where the dots of light hit the toothtongues, the clear, rigid demon trophies glowed blood-red.
She looked at the warrior. Eyes hidden behind the helmet, it seemed to stare at the trophies of the demons Ahiliyah had killed in battle.
The thing on the warrior’s shoulder twisted to the side. Ahiliyah jumped when a burst of bright light erupted from it—the burst hit a tree, blowing the trunk into a thousand splinters.
The thing on its shoulder pivoted, pointed straight at Ahiliyah.
The red lights moved from her chest to the bow in her hand.
Ahiliyah understood—she tossed the bow aside, shrugged off the quiver and dropped it as well.
The red beams blinked out.
The warrior lowered its arm, set Creen down on the road next to the steam cart.
* * *
These primitive game animals had trophies, trophies that Yeh’kull did not.
The humans were on their knees beneath a tree. Yeh’kull had taken them into the woods. She didn’t need a random platoon of heavy infantry coming down the road to complicate things.
She could have crushed these humans with little more than a backhand. Honor would not let her. The little male wore the pharyngeal jaws of a queen. The female leader wore three pharyngeal jaws taken from Kiande Amedha soldier-caste.
How had they done it?
They’d driven a steam-powered vehicle. Steam. Here, that had to be the pinnacle of technology. Small and weak, with no advanced weapons, these two had somehow killed Kiande Amedha. The humans would have more standing in Yeh’kull’s tribe than she did.
How was a question that could come later. The elders would soon arrive. If Yeh’kull was to seize this opportunity, there was one question she needed an answer to now.
“Dee-mon,” she said again, and again pointed to the trophies hanging from the humans’ necks, again swept her hand toward the plains to the southwest.
“His voice sounds like a talking fart,” the male said. “And he keeps repeating that. What the fuck does it want?”
Yeh’kull’s translator program could make out only a few of the male’s words. She wished she’d spent more time listening to the humans here, silently studying their dialect as she’d been ordered to do, but it was too late for that now. She paid close attention to his words, thought about them in context, trying to learn as she went.
While the male queen-killer trembled in terror, the female showed no fear.
“I have no idea,” it said. “If this warrior killed Aaron, Rowan, and Miriam, why are we still alive?”
“I don’t know,” the male said. “He must want something from us. Maybe he wanted something from Rowan, too, but Rowan couldn’t deliver. We better figure out what he wants, and fast.”
Yeh’kull grew frustrated. She’d broken the rules by revealing herself. She’d had to—if the elders came and she didn’t already have her Kiande Amedha prize, the hunt would go to unblooded males.
“His armor is so strange,” the female said. “Could he be a Northerner?”
The little male looked at the female with an expression that translated into all languages.
“It’s not a cocksucking Northerner, Liyah. It’s from another world.”
Yeh’kull’s frustration intensified. The humans had dozens of scouts in the field, supported by over a thousand heavy infantry. A definitive search pattern. They had tactical knowledge that Yeh’kull needed. They didn’t understand an obvious question, from one hunter to another?
Yeh’kull stepped closer. The male flinched, ducked. The female stared up, defiant, as Yeh’kull reached into the female’s camouflage suit, fished around until she felt the paper, pulled it free and dropped it on the ground.
“Dee-mon.” Yeh’kull again pointed to the pharyngeal jaws.
The female blinked. The defiant look faded.
Its hand went to its necklace of dried jaws. “Creen, I think he wants a toothtongue.”
Toothtongue. This dialect’s word for trophies?
“Toooth… tong,” Yeh’kull said, doing her best to imitate the sounds.
The little male stopped shaking. “Rowan didn’t have one. None of the runners do. Maybe the warrior asked Rowan for one, and when Rowan couldn’t deliver, that was it. If wants a toothtongue, Liyah, give him one.”
The female hooked a thumb under its necklace, started to lift it.
This game animal was going to give the trophy to Yeh’kull?
Humiliation compounded beyond measure.
Yeh’kull roared, roared far too loud, loud enough to draw other humans, but she didn’t care.
The little male started trembling again, then stopped. It looked at the map.
“The warrior wants a toothtongue, but it wants to do the killing itself,” it said. “The map, Liyah—he wants us to tell it where to hunt.”
* * *
It was getting dark.
Ahiliyah and Creen were on their knees, the huge warrior towering over them, looking down over their shoulders at the map rolled out at the side of the road. Small stones weighed down the corners.
Had this warrior taken Miriam, or had demons done that? Ahiliyah couldn’t be sure, not yet. Had the warrior killed Aaron? Had it killed Rowan, mangled his body? That seemed likely, but if so, what had it done with Rowan’s spine and head?
The warrior had killed her people, but the warrior’s weapons…
The warped glass camouflage, the parallel blades on its wrist, the strange shoulder bow that threw lightning… how many demons could the warrior kill? Enough to get to the Demon Mother? Could it kill the Demon Mother herself?
If so, if Ahiliyah could find a way to help make that happen, then the deaths of Rowan, Aaron, and Miriam wouldn’t be for naught. In a roundabout way, those three runners would be responsible for ending the demon uprising, just as Ahiliyah, Creen, and Brandun had been responsible for ending the last one, two decades ago.
Ahiliyah had led thousands into battle. Since taking over command of Ataegina’s unified forces, she’d fought four wars—one against the demons, three against the Northerners. She’d won them all, but in war, no victory came without losing soldiers.
She couldn’t bring Rowan and the others back. She could, hopefully, find a way to ensure their deaths mattered.
She studied the map. The quest to find the new demon lair had been the biggest spearmyn mobilization since the last Northerner invasion. Fifteen divisions, each with five modules, backing up over a hundred runners who were risking their lives every moment they searched the woods, plains, and mountains.
“We’ve cleared all of this,” Ahiliyah said, sweeping her hand in an arc that covered Black Smoke Mountain, the Nine River Delta, Hibernia, Jantal, and everything north and west of those places. “No demon. Here is where our divisions are placed to hem them in.”
Hundreds of scrawled Xs marked the previous positions of the divisions. Initially spread out, the Xs had drawn closer together as the search area tightened, and now lined the base of the Pendaran peninsula.
“She’s going to kill us,” Creen said. “Once she has what she wants, she’ll rip our spines out of our bodies.”
“She?” Ahiliyah glanced at the huge warrior. “What makes you think it’s a woman?”
Even under the threat of a horrible death, Creen found a way to sound annoyed that everyone in existence was dumber than he was, that their collective stupidity tried his patience.
“I take it you didn’t notice the odd, less-than-protective design of her chest plate,” he said. “She’s got boob armor, Liyah. No protection for her vital organs, but those boobies are safe and sound.”
Liyah saw it then, knew she couldn’t un-see it. Creen was right. Some of Ataegina’s women soldiers—the ones that needed it, anyway—wore armor that made room for breasts. Liyah’s own chest plate had been modified for that purpose. The odd thing, though, was the big warrior’s armor left her midriff completely exposed, protected only by the thin netting of her strange hidey suit.
Could that be some statement of bravery? Or possibly some religious dictate, in that she had to cover certain body parts, as did the women in Takanta, Biseth, and other holds?
“She’ll mutilate us, Liyah,” Creen said. “We’re dead meat.” Maybe the warrior would kill them. There was no way to know. And yet, that didn’t feel accurate. It didn’t feel right.
Ahiliyah thought of Rowan’s spearhead, lying on the forest floor, glowing green smearing the blade. She thought of the way the warrior’s red light had—without words—said drop the bow. Rowan had fought the warrior, and he was dead; Ahiliyah and Creen had not, and they lived.
“You’re wrong,” Ahiliyah said. “The way she keeps looking at our toothtongues… I think she respects us, maybe. Like we’ve done something she hasn’t. She’s got the map. The search pattern we drew isn’t that complicated. She doesn’t need us alive to figure it out where to look for the demons. All we can do for her is help her figure the map out faster and…”
Faster. The way the warrior seemed so agitated, so angry that Ahiliyah and Creen couldn’t understand what she wanted. Was she in a rush? It was getting dark… maybe the warrior didn’t want to be out here when night came and the demons started hunting.
“Besides, it doesn’t matter if she kills us,” Ahiliyah said. “You saw her lightning thrower. If she wants to kill demons, we help her kill demons.”
Creen drew in a ragged breath. He nodded.
“Fuck my face with a furgle,” he said, “you’re right.”
Ahiliyah knew Creen so well, could see his effort to calm down, to put his fear aside. It wasn’t the first time he’d had done that. He knew what the greater good was. He would do what needed to be done.
Creen reached out to the map, used the tip of his finger to circle the four marks that denoted the Pendaran mountains.
“I think the demon assholes are here,” he said. “Under these peaks. It’s a volcanic area. There are tunnels, and it’s hot. Demons like heat.”
The warrior stood straight. “Vol-can-ic.”
“I guess now she knows three words,” Creen said.
Ahiliyah heard a strange noise, like the chirping of insects, but different. Slowly, she turned her head, needing to see what came next. A rectangular piece of armor on the warrior’s left forearm had flipped up, like the lid of a box. She was tapping at the open area with her right pointer finger. Every time she tapped, that insect-not-insect sound.
The warrior flipped the armor back into place, stepped around in front of Ahiliyah and Creen. The warrior reached behind its back, grabbed something that looked like an engraved scepter, but with sharp, arrowhead-like points on each end.
The warrior pressed a button—the scepter expanded, quickly and violently, with the sound of ringing metal.
It was a double-pointed spear.
“This is it,” Creen said. “We’re dead. I really hate being right all the time.”
The warrior dropped the spear on the ground in front of Creen, then turned and walked toward a small clearing in the trees.
Ahiliyah heard something, something like the echoing sound of rolling thunder, growing louder by the second.
“She gave you a weapon,” Ahiliyah said. “Pick it up.”
Creen shook his head. “Rowan had a weapon. Look what happened to him. I’m not picking up a damn thing.”
The thunder drew louder, as loud as a dozen storms all coming together. Ahiliyah felt a slight shift in the air, a bit of wind. Dried leaves leapt and scattered. She shielded her eyes against blowing dirt and grit.
The sound of thunder dropped in half, then to nothing.
In the clearing, Ahiliyah saw something… lowering. Something big, like warped glass…
Whatever it was, the warrior walked toward it, then stopped, turned to face Ahiliyah and Creen.
The warrior barked out a guttural sound.
A crackle of white and purple light—just as the warrior had earlier, the warped glass mirage shimmered. In its place, a metal object as big as a sailing ship.
“Told you she wasn’t from here,” Creen said.
Ahiliyah realized that—for the second time in her life—she was looking at a ship that had come from another world.
A part of the ship object moved, angled down, came to rest against the road. Ahiliyah could see inside the object, saw flashing lights and some kind of mist lit up with a reddish glow.
The warrior made the guttural sound again, then curled its finger inward.
“Pick up that spear,” Ahiliyah said. “You’re right. It’s going hunting… and so are we.”
* * *
“This can’t be real,” Ahiliyah said. “The warrior charmed us. This is magic.”
A layer of fog oozed around her knees, her feet. Curved walls and ceiling, all glowing the shifting orange and black of a dying campfire. No corners here, this place was all curves.
In an alcove, two human skulls, spines still attached. Flesh stripped, the bone gleaming white. Rowan was one, was the other Aaron or Miriam?
An odd glowing image in the center of the warped room showed a view only gettum bugs and great bats could have, an image of the nighttime ground whipping past far below. It was like looking at the model of Ataegina in the Lemeth Hold council room, only this image was, somehow, made of ghost stuff—it was there, but it wasn’t.
Creen’s wide smile looked out of place on his scarred face. Ahiliyah was so used to seeing his scowl that when he showed genuine joy he was almost unrecognizable.
“It’s not magic,” he said. “We’re flying. I don’t understand it yet, but I will.”
Ahiliyah had faced down the warrior and felt no fear, for what fear can one feel after being raped by a spider, after vomiting up a worm, after being bit by the Demon Mother? But this, the flying, the image, the strange room that didn’t seem to have edges or corners… it was terrifying.
The warrior stood close by. Glowing symbols appeared in the air around her. The warrior grabbed these symbols, moved them, turned them.
The moving model in the center of the room shifted, became something recognizable: the outline of the Pendaran mountains. The image shifted again—getting closer, somehow. Yellow rings made of nothing but lights appeared out of nowhere.
The warrior moved a floating symbol.
The there-not-there mountains grew bigger again, as if Ahiliyah had been in the council room, leaning steadily closer to the model of Ataegina. The glowing rings on the moving map also grew larger.
The rings, three of them, each centered on something small, something… shifting. The rings moved in time with those small things, each ring leaving a red line in its wake, like the path a snake leaves in fresh mud.
Creen reached out a hand to touch the mountain—his hand passed right through it. He pointed to one of the yellow rings.
“Make that bigger,” he said.
The helmeted warrior looked at him for a moment.
“Make it bigger,” Creen said. “Show me that demon asshole.”
The warrior moved a glowing image. The yellow ring swelled, enlarged. In the center of the ring, so tiny Ahiliyah could barely make it out, a bit of black, reaching, crawling…
…a demon.
The three red snake-trails spread out, winding down the mountain, but they’d all originated from a single spot—the dark mouth of a tunnel entrance.
* * *
The lightning lashed again—a blinding flash, a demon bursting apart in a cloud of shiny-black and vomit-yellow. How many spearmyn would it have taken to kill that monster? How many would have died in the process?
So far, the warrior had destroyed at least twenty demons. Twenty. The warrior was a god. A god of destruction, of vengeance, sent to deliver the people of Ataegina from the ultimate evil.
Ahiliyah fought back her fear of this place. The darkness. The gnarled, dried black mud that coated the rock. The swelteringly hot air echoing with the hisses and screeches of the demons. It was Black Smoke Mountain all over again. So many Ataeginians had died there, died horribly.
Somewhere ahead, there were eggs. Spiders. Demons. A Demon Mother.
The Warrior God looked back up the tunnel, at Ahiliyah and Creen. Those lifeless black eyes in the helmet stared. It waved its hand inward.
“This is insane,” Creen said. “Liyah, let’s get the fuck out of here.”
He trembled so badly Ahiliyah wondered how he could keep hold of the big, double-pointed spear.
The Warrior God had given Ahiliyah a weapon as well: a bow made of some unknown metal. It was far lighter than it should have been, far more powerful than it should have been. Ahiliyah could draw the bowstring with almost no effort, yet the arrows flew so fast and so hard they shattered rock.
The Warrior God continued down the rough tunnel, dropping a small tube that glowed white. She’d done that several times since they’d entered. Without that white light, Ahiliyah and Creen wouldn’t have been able to see a thing.
“She gave us weapons,” Creen whispered. “Why? She’s killing all the demons. Why are we here? Let’s get to the surface. We saw demons leave—what happens when they return and they’re behind us? We need to run.”
The lightning thrower changed everything. Single-handedly, the Warrior God could end the threat to all Ataeginians. Ahiliyah needed to be there, to see that happen.
“The gods put us here for a reason,” Ahiliyah said. “Run if you want. I’m seeing this through to the end.”
She moved down the tunnel, the nocked bow in her hands.
There was an instant when she thought Creen might head for the surface, but in seconds she heard his footfalls coming down the tunnel behind her.
“Some things never change,” he said when he caught up to her. “You always were one intense bitch.”
Side by side, the two old friends carefully stepped past the still-twitching parts of the demon and the puddles of sizzling blood.
* * *
It happened fast, it happened all at once, and when it did, Ahiliyah Cooper knew the plan of the gods.
The farther they went under the mountain, the more the tunnels branched off, jagged forks winding away into the deepness. There was no way to clear the entire area, nor did the Warrior God appear to be all that interested in doing so. Higher up, she’d taken time to look into the various tunnel branches, to stare into the darkness, possibly looking for hidden demons. The farther down she went, the less time she spent checking the tunnels, the fissures, the cracks, and now she was running past them with barely a glance.
Had Ahiliyah been in command, she would have ordered the Warrior God to slow down, to check those side tunnels, to make sure no enemy was left behind. But Ahiliyah wasn’t in command.
The Warrior God’s careless tactics caught up with her. She rushed past a fissure, and a moment after she did, two huge demons slid out of the darkness, their shiny heads reflecting the white light of a glowing vial.
In a flash of memory, Ahiliyah recognized them as protectors, the big ones that protected a Demon Mother.
Before the Warrior God could turn and throw lightning, the protectors were on her.
“Creen,” Ahiliyah said as she drew the bowstring to her ear, felt the bow vibrating with mystical power, “move in.”
For reasons Ahiliyah would never know, Creen obeyed her order and moved forward, hunched over a spear that seemed almost as big as he was.
Ahiliyah felt suddenly calm, her fear gone. She’d killed demons before—this was no different. She sighted, waited for a clear shot. A demon rose up to strike; she loosed. The arrow sliced through the demon’s long head, taking a chunk of yellow flesh with it to splatter against the tunnel floor. The beast twitched… it was still alive. It turned to look toward Ahiliyah, and hissed—Creen rammed his spear straight through the open mouth.
Burning blood splattered across the tunnel, drops sizzling to gray powder when they hit the caminus leaves woven into Creen’s hidey suit.
The dead demon slipped back, sliding off the spearpoint.
The Warrior God stood. It wobbled. The other demon lay at its feet, chest gashed open by the Warrior’s parallel blade.
Glowing green blood spurted from the Warrior God’s thick shoulder. She clutched the wound, squeezed it, stemming the flow somewhat.
The helmeted head looked at Creen.
“Dee-mon-ass-hole,” it said.
Creen laughed, looked at Ahiliyah, a wide grin on his scarred face, a wild look in his eyes.
“Four words,” he said. “Well, maybe she doesn’t get the exact meaning, but her heart’s in the right place, and that heart is well protected by boob-armor.”
Battle madness. Ahiliyah had seen it before. She’d felt it before, in the phalanx against the Northerners, on her raids against the Southern pirates. She’d never seen it in Creen. If he lived, there would be a mental and emotional toll to pay, but better to live and pay a horrible price than die and pay nothing at all.
The Warrior God moved down the tunnel, stumbling more than walking. She didn’t need to drop a white light—Ahiliyah and Creen could see well enough by the trail of glowing green blood.
Little Creen, scarred Creen, the brilliant inventor that had moved humanity forward more in twenty years than in all the years that came before him, squared his shoulders, rolled out his neck, and trotted down the tunnel.
“Come on, Liyah. There’s a Demon Mother to kill.”
Ahiliyah nocked another arrow, then followed her friend.
* * *
The chamber was smaller than the one at Black Smoke Mountain.
So, too, was the Mother.
The beast was maybe half the size of the one Brandun had killed so many years ago. She was young, perhaps, but still big, much larger than her dead protectors, and that didn’t include her egg sac. The Warrior God had come at exactly the right time, to deliver Ataegina from evil before that evil grew large enough to spawn hordes that would slaughter thousands.
Ahiliyah, Creen, and the Warrior God stood at the chamber’s opening. The Warrior God had tossed in several white vials, illuminating the chamber, the dozens of huge eggs cemented to the stone floor and the Mother herself, along with the strange, long white tendons that stretched down from the cavern roof to support both the Mother and her bloated egg sac.
And, at the edges of the cavern, barely lit in the dim light, Ataeginians, encased in the wall, held in place by dried mud, looks of horror frozen on their dead faces, and gaping holes in their chests.
No other demons. The Mother’s defenders were dead. Had to be, or they would have been here to defend her.
The Demon Mother raised her huge, crested head. The black mouth opened, revealing long, clear teeth that gleamed in the white light.
“Shoot that bitch,” Creen said. “Shoot her right in her fucking stupid big head.”
The Warrior God did not.
The Demon Mother roared, a sound of hatred that shook Ahiliyah, made her bladder let go in a wash of heat and wet.
The bleeding Warrior God stood taller. She reached up to the lightning-thrower on her shoulder, gripped it, twisted it—it came free. She dropped it, let it clatter against the tunnel floor.
“Liyah, what the fuck is she doing?” Creen shrank back from the opening. “Why doesn’t she hit it with lightning and end this?”
Ahiliyah didn’t know how she knew the answer, she just knew.
“The Warrior God wants to fight her hand-to-hand,” she said. “For… for honor.”
“For honor?” Creen shook his head, shook it hard. “When she could kill it with lightning? That’s not honorable, that’s just fucking stupid.”
Maybe it was, but who was he to question a god?
The Warrior God reached to her helmet, pinched her fingers on some unseen ropes, ropes that hissed steam as they were pulled free. She hooked her thumbs under the helmet, pulled it free, tossed it aside.
Fangs. Tusks. Beady eyes beneath a heavy brow. The Warrior God, the killer of monsters, was a monster herself.
“And I thought I was ugly,” Creen said. “Her face looks like a hairy nut bag. With teeth.”
The Warrior God grabbed something hanging from her hip, a disk of some kind with holes in it. She slid the fingers of her left hand through the holes, lifted the disk free. She stretched out her right arm—the parallel blades extended with a sharp, metallic ring.
The Warrior God roared a guttural battle cry even louder than that of the Demon Mother.
The Mother’s long, thick back legs extended. She ripped free of egg sac and supporting tendons alike, the gristly tearing sound echoing off the small chamber’s gnarled, mud-caked walls. The Mother wobbled for moment, a newborn taking her first steps, then stood solid and firm. She let out a malevolent hiss, as if she was inviting the battle, as if she was saying, come and face me, if you dare.
The Warrior God stepped into the chamber.
Ahiliyah drew the bowstring. If the Warrior God failed, Ahiliyah would finish the mission.
“The eggs,” Ahiliyah said. “Creen, destroy them.”
Creen’s battle madness, if that’s what it was, broke, sharply and instantly.
“We’re doomed,” he said.
But despite his fear, he stepped to the nearest egg and jammed his spear through its side.
The Demon Mother howled at the death of her kind but, before she could come at Creen, the Warrior God threw the disk.
The disk sparked and glowed as it sliced the air. The Demon Mother tilted her massive head away and raised her black hands in an instant, automatic reaction—the disk sliced through a black finger, sending it spinning away in a gout of burning blood.
The Mother’s scream… half pain, half rage.
The Warrior God rushed toward her, each powerful step leaving a splatter of glowing green on the rough stone floor.
No one loses that much blood and survives…
The Demon Mother’s long tail slashed forward, black tailspike driving at the Warrior God’s chest. A flash of the double blades knocked the tail aside. The Warrior God drew her arm back, ready to drive those blades into the beast, but the Demon Mother’s undamaged hand swung in like a springing trap, sent the Warrior God crashing against the cavern wall with a thickening thud and another splatter of glowing green.
The Warrior God fell to the cavern floor.
The Demon Mother turned her head to look at Creen, who pulled his spear free from yet another ruined egg.
“Liyah,” he screamed, “kill it!”
Ahiliyah sighted down the shaft. With Creen’s poison on the arrowhead blade, she only needed one well-placed shot to end the threat forever.
The Demon Mother turned toward Ahiliyah and Creen.
Ahiliyah hesitated.
“Liyah, fucking shoot that thing!”
A huge target, not even fifty paces away. Even in the dim light, it was the kind of shot Ahiliyah could make in her sleep.
Still, she hesitated.
The Demon Mother took a step toward Creen. Then another.
The sparking disk whipped in, sank deep in the Demon Mother’s neck.
The black beast screamed again, louder than before, her crested head thrashing in agony.
The Warrior God sprinted and leapt, bladed arm reared back, graceful death arcing through the air. The Demon Mother saw her coming at the last second, tried to react but it was too late—the Warrior God landed on her big crest, her weight driving the Mother down, knocking her over and smashing her head against the rock floor.
The Warrior God jammed the blades through the top of the Demon Mother’s black head—it sounded like an axe head thudding into a tree trunk.
The Demon Mother’s mouth opened, toothtongue snapping out at nothing once, twice, a third time. Her huge legs kicked. Her clawed hands reached for the Warrior God but the monster’s strength was already fading away to nothing.
The Warrior God adjusted her footing and twisted her big shoulders, dragging the deep-sunk parallel blades through the length of the Mother’s skull.
Gleaming teeth opened one last time. The toothtongue reached out, slowly, opened, then clacked closed with the faintest click. The monster moved no more.
The Warrior God yanked the blades free, tipped her horrible head back, and screamed a victory cry.
* * *
Ahiliyah gripped her bow tight as she winced against the burning pain. Eyes closed, she thought of General Bishor, the Spider, of his body ravaged by burning blood, and wondered if he was in the heavens looking down at her at this very moment.
“You can look now, you big baby,” Creen said. “It’s like you’ve never been burned before or something.”
Ahiliyah opened her eyes. Creen was grinning at her. On his forehead, a still-smoldering mark burned into his skin, a mark made from two curved lines. Ahiliyah now bore that same mark.
She looked at the Warrior God, who held the severed demon finger she’d used to mark Creen, Ahiliyah—and herself. The Warrior God had made the same symbol on her black-eyed helmet. She tossed the finger aside, put her helmet back on.
Around her thick neck, on a necklace made from wire, the severed toothtongue of the Demon Mother she’d killed in hand-to-hand combat.
Creen saw Ahiliyah looking at it.
“Mine’s bigger,” he said.
She snorted. “Size matters, Creen?”
“Always, Liyah. Always.”
They were joking. She thought of Rowan, Aaron, and Miriam. Maybe it was a bad thing to joke when they’d been killed by the very warrior Ahiliyah and Creen were apparently bonding with, but when you survive a battle, it’s hard to not feel elation knowing you’ll see at least one more day.
The Warrior God gestured to her big flying machine.
“I think she’s leaving,” Ahiliyah said.
During the ascent out of the tunnels, the three demons they’d seen leave had attacked. The Warrior God’s lightning thrower made short work of them.
Once back out under the glow of the Three Sisters, the Warrior God had thrown some kind of magic weapon into the tunnel. Moments later, Ahiliyah and Creen had felt the mountain move, had seen the smoke billow out of the tunnel mouth.
“I hope she got them all,” Creen said. “If not, we’re fucked.”
Ahiliyah flexed her grip on the bow, glanced at the double-pointed spear in Creen’s hands—literal gifts from the gods.
“We survived before,” she said. “We’ll survive again.”
The Warrior God limped toward the flying machine, leaving a spotty trail of glowing green behind her.
“How about that,” Creen said. “I guess you can lose that much blood and survive.”
* * *
Yeh’kull had never felt such joy.
It felt odd knowing that she’d blooded two humans, while she had trophies of three others. Not all humans were made the same, it seemed.
The little male. He seemed so fragile, so weak, so small, and yet he had an inner strength that he probably wasn’t aware of. Every sentient being facing possible death feels fear, the elders said so, but it is the ones who face that fear, who face it and attack, that are the true hunters.
Creen—that’s what the female leader called him—knew the kiande liked the heat. Most of the search area had already been cleared. As soon as he’d said those mountains were volcanic, Yeh’kull had known where her prey would be.
The female leader. Lee-ha was her name. She, too, was a true hunter. Her decisive action and skill with the bow had saved Yeh’kull’s life. Yeh’kull wondered what kind of strategist Lee-Ha was. Had Lee-Ha fought battles? Won wars?
Lee-Ha wore her Kiande Amedha toothtongues proudly, as a hunter should.
Creen wore the toothtongue of a kiande queen.
And now, so, too, did Yeh’kull.
Her scout craft exited the atmosphere, leaving the planet behind. While she couldn’t see her clan’s mothership, the signal beacon told her it was there.
Soon, she would face her elders, her new trophy hanging from her neck in the style of the human hunting guides that had helped her.
Yeh’kull was now proven. She was blooded.
Never again would she be demeaned as a mere child-maker.