THE ORNCLAN WENT to war.
They took no joy in battle. They boasted and sang of it, and trained from the day they could first hold spears, but boasts and songs and the display of scars were just another sort of shield, tough hide pulled taut to guard weak flesh. The warriors of Orn used their boasts and dances and songs to shelter from the truth that they were no less mortal than anyone else. The fiercest might fall to a bullet if their songs failed, or sicken from a cut. All who gathered near the fireside to trade tales knew this without need to speak of it. They took no joy in battle, the warriors of Orn, but in survival, and victory.
The Ornchief led them. By rights her eldest daughter should have gone in her stead, but her eldest daughter had traipsed off a-voyaging beyond the stars, and around the fire they already whispered prophecies of her return. The prophecies were jokes so far; those who told them knew of few women less likely than Xiara Ornchiefsdaughter to return upon a crystal chariot, rainbow-crowned, to lead her people to glory in the stars. Had she a crystal chariot, they said in their cups, around the fire, Xiara Ornchiefsdaughter would use it to seek out another, shinier crystal chariot, and another after that. If she ever made it home, that one, it would be because she had chased some beauty around the universe and back again. And yet, though the elders spoke those prophecies and laughed, already their grandchildren repeated them for truth.
So the Ornchief led. Her next youngest son showed promise as a builder and planner, not a fighter; the son after that was eight. She led, trusting Djenn at the flank guard, and crept through thin trees, over fallen towers, toward the camp.
A high-pitched whine cut the air, and she bent low behind a vine-draped statue of some name-scoured ancestor; a black needle bobbed through the sky, an enemy wasp, searching. The Ornchief let out her breath and trusted the runes of her armor, and trusted, too, Djenn’s flank guard force to hold their fire. None of the warriors at her command would dare draw or strike before her whistle, but Djenn’s hotheads might slip his rein at any moment. Outnumbered, they could not afford discovery.
She could blame no one but herself for this war. She had raided for minds to feed the Graytooth; she let travelers fall into his maw. When they escaped, their families, rightly, sought vengeance. So would the Ornchief, in their place. And after the Pride came, after the battle that scorched heavens and Orn, after the huge burning chunks of metal Zanj scattered as she tore her enemies asunder wrecked the Ornclan’s decades-wrought defenses, neighboring clans who for years had quailed before the Ornclan’s might began to whisper that together they might do more than take revenge. Confederated, they might seize the manufactory and split its wealth between them. Many no doubt considered such a move and backed away out of respect for tradition or for the Ornchief herself, but the clans of Kronn Ornchief called Bloodarm, and Alyra Ornchief called Carver, rich and strong from recent victories and long covetous of the Ornchief’s valley and her manufactory, were brave or stupid or eager enough to try.
Such an alliance might seem ideal, but it would kill them both, even should they triumph. Any union that seized the manufactory would tear itself apart in the struggle for control that followed. There was, after all, only one manufactory. One small, fierce clan might guard it, trade its wealth with others, and so live, so long as it never became too rich or too complacent, and served its neighbors well—but two large clans such as the Bloodarms and the Carvers would come to grief over the wealth it offered, and scheme against one another. In prosperity, small resentments had ways of growing large. War would follow within a decade, and war between two clans would attract others.
Fires always spread.
This, too, was the Ornchief’s fault. She had failed the peace when she fell to the Graytooth—so duty fell upon her to set the balance right: a quick, decisive victory against Bloodarm and Carver to prove the clan’s strength, followed by mercy shown and penance paid.
Her daughter should be here to lead them. All the clan knew and loved Xiara, but the clan, too, overlooked her in their love. They saw a woman of beauty and eagerness and compassion, a young warrior who could chase her dreams past the galaxy’s edge, but they did not see what the Ornchief saw: a woman of strength and talent, a woman warriors would follow. This would have been such a stage for her, a war fierce as any the Ornclan had known in many seasons, the clan outnumbered and fighting for its life against enemies so hungry for victory they had opened ancient idols, called upon forgotten powers, raised daggerwasps and artifacts to fight for them. Xiara would have sprinted in the vanguard, spear raised, rifle hot, trailing glory.
No use to sigh now. The Ornchief hunkered low, as did her warriors, and the daggerwasp slipped by.
By dawn they reached the enemy’s position: a high amphitheater used for unknown purpose in ancient Orn, with a commanding view of the valley, the winding river and the fallen towers and the Ornclan’s grove and the spaceport. An impregnable post, or so the Carvers and the Bloodarms thought, its left flank and direct approach exposed to fire, its right overgrown with crooktooth—impregnable unless one’s grandmother had discovered an unguent expressed by spider rabbit glands that hid one’s scent from the crooktooth vines. This unguent, naturally, attracted spider rabbits, but they were not particularly poisonous—just unnerving. Some of the younger warriors grew fearful quiet as spider rabbits climbed them and tested their armor with their teeth, and the Ornchief allowed herself a smile. What did discomfort signify, when one might pass unharmed beneath the gaping mouths of crooktooth vines?
Their enemies had barricaded their flank and the slope, but trusted the vines to guard their right. So, when dawn came, and Djenn’s team began their shield rush up-mountain, their enemy clans would be distracted, their fiercest warriors mounting their walls to meet him with a rain of arrows and sling bullets, and even a rifleshot barrage in case the Ornclan’s battle chant weakened enough to let their fire strike home.
The Ornchief waited as the assault pressed uphill. Her warriors twitched, nervous and eager for battle. Djenn’s warriors gained step by careful step, chant high, shields raised, their song twisting daggerwasps back mid-strike. The volleys slowed them, but they did not stop. The Ornchief waited until the Bloodarm and Carver warriors raised spears and called upon the small gods with whom their ancestors had made bad deals, and, clad in spectral armor, jumped the barricade and charged down to scatter Djenn’s shield wall, tossing warriors aside as a bear might scatter coyote monkeys prowling after its meal.
Good.
The Ornchief whistled then, and her warriors slid from the vines into the enemy camp, trailing a wake of spider rabbits.
The defenders fell, rank by rank, taken by surprise. The Ornchief’s spear pierced shield walls; her blade forced her enemies to their knees, to pledge and beg surrender. Without fire and with little noise they moved through the camp, birdwhistling for aid or to announce triumph: pickets taken, food supplies secured. Young Agol suffered heavy wounds as he fought to the camp’s high altar, but with the last of his strength he seized the altar and bled upon its surface so the Ornclan’s blood could work its possessive magic on the daggerwasps and enemy gods. A young man in black silks, with knives for fingers and red wheels for eyes, stood against the Ornchief, and she stove in his ribs with a mighty kick, though his claws lay open her forearm.
In an hour that felt like a day and a heartbeat at once, she claimed the camp and pushed south to the barricade, cresting a wave of triumph. Only to meet, at the barricade, a line of troops and drones, with Kronn and Alyra in the vanguard—and Djenn, and his force, held at bladespoint.
The Ornchief calmed her rage, slowed the war spirits in her breast. Djenn looked ashamed, defiant, injured, but alive. The others of his force, likewise. The Ornchief raised her bloody hand to stop her warriors’ charge, and stop they did. For the first time, as she strode forward, she felt grateful for Xiara’s absence. If Xiara had stood in Djenn’s place, with a blade to her throat, the Ornchief would have found the calm she needed now more painful to sustain. And if the Ornchief had stood where Djenn stood now, while Xiara led the ambush team, there would have been much blood spilled. “We hold your camp and your altar,” she said as if there had never been such a thing as a hostage. “You have lost, Ornchiefs.”
Alyra tested her machete’s weight against her palm. “Not while we hold your people, Ornchief.”
“Release them. Turn back to your homes. And we will carry on as before.”
Great Kronn, graybearded and knotted as a vine-choked tree, shook his shaggy head. “You have held the manufactory too long, Ornchief, and failed us in its keeping.”
“I could not stop a demon from beyond the stars,” she said. “But I have stopped you. And I will stop any who dares trespass on our valley. We keep the peace. You are old, Kronn, and wise. You know better than I what wars you will face if you take the valley. Or do you think Alyra will settle for half measures of mastery?”
Alyra, by his side, half smiled. “Always you war with words, Ornchief. But mere words did not serve you against demons—and where one demon comes, others may follow. We must unite against the world beyond.”
“Your fear would start an avalanche to break the mountains of Orn.”
“War makes strength.”
“War,” the Ornchief said, “makes scars.” She raised her hand and blood fell between them. “If you will not surrender though I hold your altars in my hand, will you stand against me, arm to arm, blade to blade? We will see whose strength prevails.”
Alyra laughed, half-mad. “If you stand against one of us, you stand against both.”
Kronn hesitated first, but at last dipped his head in assent.
Two against one. The Ornchief felt the wound in her arm, and tested the strength of her spirits. She stood a chance of victory. Her warriors would prevail in open battle even without Djenn’s force—with their altar fallen, Kronn’s and Alyra’s drones were losing power, and the spirits that gave their warriors strength began to fail.
But they would kill Djenn first.
Djenn was strong. Look at him, defiant even now, prepared for his ascension to the Cloud, for his next life’s journey. Big dumb lug. The right choice, surely, for the Ornclan, for all Orn, was to press their advantage, rather than submit to a duel with two Ornchiefs bent against her.
But making the right choices, those brutal leader’s decisions for which her own mother had readied her when she was younger than Xiara, had led her to betray hospitality, to cast her daughter out into the stars, from which she never would return. The right choices led her, step by staggering step, to this field.
Why not try a different way?
“I will fight you,” the Ornchief said. “Free my warriors. Let the drums beat.”
Beat they did.
Alyra raised her machete, and the blade left Djenn’s neck, and the spearpoints shifted away from his followers. Alyra stepped forth in drum-time. So, too, did Kronn, raising his heavy iron club, in truth an arm wrenched in single combat from the shoulder of a metal-mad mountain hermit, spattered with the blood of five decades of his enemies since.
The drums beat faster.
The Ornchief raised her eyes to the stars beyond the sky, not seeking the advice or succor of any desperate lost god, but thinking about her daughter, out beyond the edge of time where their grandmothers once flew. Then she returned her gaze to Orn, stepped forward onto the dust, and lifted her spear, pondering the transformations of fate.
Before she could reach any grand conclusions, the sky split open.
New moons bloomed overhead, great curving ships’ hull swells and constellations of smaller stars burning bright beside the dawn. The largest of the ships cast the whole valley in shadow, save bright spots where its running lights shone. The Ornchief knew no scale to make sense of such a thing save monstrosity—but beneath her awe, beneath the rodent-rapid drumming of her heart, she heard the ship, all the ships above, speak to her blood as the Pride spoke, in womb-tongue.
Groundswell was that huge ship’s name, and her pilot …
The Ornchief dropped her spear. This might have caused her some embarrassment, were not the other Ornchiefs also frozen, staring up. The other Ornchiefs did not, however, begin to laugh.
No crystal chariot, perhaps. But once again she had underestimated her daughter.
Groundswell’s hull flickered, and displayed a mountainous image. There, flanked by Zanj the thief of stars, and Vivian Liao, and the gray demon who had caused all this trouble, stood her own girl, grown and sure and beaming, her eyes full of sacred wheels.
“Ornclans,” she said. “Brothers and sisters. I am Xiara Ornchiefsdaughter. I have traveled beyond the stars, and I come home to seek your help. We have sheltered in our ruins singing star songs and making small wars since the Empress cast us down. Now she plans to strike the stars themselves. I want to fight her, but my friends and I cannot fight alone. I have brought you ships, and you have the blood to fly them. The galaxy needs the people of Orn. Will you ride to their aid?”
The Ornchief looked down at Kronn, at Alyra, at the gathered squadrons, at Djenn, all rapt, unready. She could not blame them. Prophecies do not come true every day. But though none yet could speak, in their eyes, in their shoulders, in their hands upon the hafts of spears and clubs and the grips of swords, she saw so many echoes of her own ecstatic yes.
And so the Ornclans went to war.