Tigana by Guy Kay (novel24 txt) 📕

WHEN THE OTHERS FELL, scaly and grey, blind and crawling with maggots, there was never any blood. Elena understood why that was so, Donar had told her years ago: blood meant life, and their foes tonight were the enemies, the opposite, of any kind of life. When they fell to the corn swords nothing flowed from them, nothing seeped away into the earth.

There were so many of them. There always were, swirling in a grey mass like slugs, pouring down out of the hills and swarming into the stream where Donar and Mattio and Baerd had come to make their stand.

Elena prepared herself to fight, amid the loud, whirling, green-tinted chaos of the night. She was frightened, but she knew she could deal with that. She remembered how deathly afraid she’d been in her first Ember war, wondering how she—she who could scarcely have even lifted a sword in the daytime world—could possibly battle such hideous creatures as the nightmare ones she saw.

But Donar and Verzar had assuaged her fears: here in this green night of magic it was the soul and the spirit that mattered, here it was courage and desire that shaped and drove the bodies in which they found themselves. Elena felt so much stronger on the Ember Nights, so much more lithe and quick. That had frightened her, too, the first time and even afterwards: under this green moon she was someone who could kill. It was a realization she had to deal with, an adjustment to be made. They all did, to one degree or another. None of them were exactly what they were under the sun or the two moons of home. Donar’s body on this night of war reached backwards, further every year, towards a lost image of what he once had been.

Just as Baerd’s, very clearly, reached back as well, more than one might have guessed or expected. Fifteen, he had said. Not fourteen, or he would not have been allowed. She didn’t understand that, but she had no time to puzzle such things out. Not now. The Others were in the stream, and now they were trying to clamber out, clad in the hideous shapes her mind gave them.

She dodged a scything axe-blow from a creature dripping with water as it scrambled up the bank towards her, and as she did she gritted her teeth and slashed downward with an instinctive deadliness she never would have known was hers. She felt her blade, her living sword, crunch hard through scaly armour and bury itself in the maggot-infested body of her foe.

She pulled the weapon free with an effort, hating what she had done, but hating the Others more, infinitely more. She turned—barely in time to block another ascending blow and withdraw a step before two new, gape-jawed assailants on her right. She lifted her blade in a desperate attempt to ward.

Then suddenly only one of the Others was standing there. Then neither of them.

She lowered her sword and looked at Baerd. At her stranger on the road, her promise given by the night. He smiled grimly at her, tight-lipped, standing over the bodies of the Others he had just killed. He smiled, and he had saved her life, but he said nothing to her at all. He turned and went forward to the edge of the river. She watched him go, saw his boy’s body stride into the thickness of battle, and she wasn’t sure whether to give way to a rush of hope because of his deadly skill or to grieve for the look in his too-young eyes.

Again, no time for such thoughts. The river seethed and boiled now with the churning of the Others as they waded into it. Screams of pain, cries of rage and fury cut the green night like blades of sound. She saw Donar along the bank to the south swinging his sword two-handed in wheeling circles of denial. Saw Mattio beside him, slashing and stabbing, neat-footed among the fallen bodies, absolute in his courage. All about her the Night Walkers of Certando plunged into the cauldron of their war.

She saw a woman fall, then another, swarmed over and hacked down by the creatures from the west. She cried out herself then, in fury and revulsion, and she moved back up to the edge of the river, running to where Carenna was, her sword swinging forward, her blood— her blood which was life, and the promise of life—raging with the need to drive them back. Back now, tonight, and then again a year from now, and after that, and again and again on each of these Ember Nights, that the spring sowing might be fruitful, that the earth be allowed to bear its bounty in the fall. This year and the next year, and the next.

In the midst of that chaos of noise and motion, Elena glanced up. She checked the height of the still-climbing moon, and then—she could not stop herself—she looked to the nearest of the devastated hills beyond the stream, apprehension clutching at her heart. There was no one there. Not yet.

There would be, though. She was almost certain there would be. And then? She pulled herself back from that. What would happen would happen. Around her there was war, here and now, and more than enough terror in the Others massed before her, surging up out of the river on either side.

She tore her thoughts from the hill and struck downwards, hard, feeling her blade bite into a scabrous shoulder. She heard the Other make a wet, bubbly sound. She jerked her sword free and spun left barely in time to block a sideways blow, scrambling to keep her footing. Carenna’s free hand braced her from behind; she didn’t even have time to look but she knew who it was.

It was wild under the unknown stars, under the green light of that moon, it was frenzy and chaos; there was screaming and shouting everywhere now, and the riverbank was muddy, slippery