Chapter 3: Fire From Heaven
1603 Words
She heard the whistle first.
Not wind. Not the creature above them. The specific whistle of something moving through air with intent — narrow and fast and aimed — and Karath banked hard left before Elaine's mind had finished processing the sound.
The spear passed close enough to part her hair.
She pressed herself flat against the gryphon's neck and held on with everything she had — fingers buried in the warm bronze feathers, knees gripping, the necklace swinging hard against her sternum — and looked down.
Below them the desert was moving.
Not the sand. The things on it.
More of them. A dozen at least, spread across the ground in a formation that was not animal instinct but strategy — flanking, spacing, covering angles. And they had weapons. She had not seen that in the village. Had not seen them as anything beyond weight and destruction and gold. But these carried short bows and long spears and they fired upward with an accuracy that should not have been possible in the dark from moving targets at altitude.
Another arrow. Karath rolled right and it passed under her left wing.
Hold on, Damien said from behind her. Completely calm. As if they were not currently being shot at from below while something circled above them in the dark.
She had been holding on. She tightened her grip until her knuckles ached.
The thing from above made no sound.
That was the worst of it.
The pigs below announced themselves — their weight in the earth, their breath, their percussion. The aerial creature gave nothing. She only knew it was there because of what it did to the stars — the way sections of the sky simply stopped having stars in them as it moved, a darkness inside the darkness, enormous and purposeful and utterly silent.
Karath knew it was there.
She could feel it in the gryphon's body beneath her — a tension that had not been there before, a quality of alertness that raised every feather along her spine and changed the rhythm of her wingbeats from steady to reactive. Karath was not afraid. But she was paying full attention to two directions simultaneously and that was costing her something.
The aerial creature dove.
Elaine saw it for one second — truly saw it — as it came out of the dark above them into the edge of the valley's distant firelight. Vast. Black-feathered and scaled simultaneously, as if it could not decide what kind of thing it was. Eyes that were not amber like Karath's but red. The flat cold red of embers that have stopped giving warmth and retained only their ability to burn.
It hit Karath from above.
Not a collision — a strike. Deliberate and targeted, claws finding the base of the left wing, and Karath screamed — a sound that Elaine felt in her teeth — and the world tilted violently to the left as the wing lost its geometry.
She was nearly gone.
Her right hand lost the feathers and for one second she was held to the gryphon by her left hand only and the desert was below her and above her simultaneously and she heard Damien say something sharp in a language she did not know.
Then his hand found her wrist.
He pulled her back with one arm and she slammed against Karath's neck and grabbed on and did not let go and would not let go again.
"I have you", he said.
Three words. Flat and certain and she believed them completely.
Below them the spears came up.
Karath was descending now — not crashing, not yet, but the left wing was wrong and correcting and every correction cost them altitude. The creatures below adjusted their positions to track the descent, spreading wider, and Elaine watched them move with their horrible coordinated intelligence and understood they were being herded toward a landing point of the pigs' choosing.
"Temur", Damien said.
'I see it', the small one said from behind them. His voice had not changed register once since she had met him.
She heard the bow.
Not one release. Three in the space of two seconds — a sound like a word spoken very fast in a language made entirely of tension and release. Three of the creatures below went down in sequence, opening a gap in the formation to the north. Karath felt it before they saw it and angled toward the gap immediately.
The aerial creature came again.
Temur turned on Karath's back — she did not know how he kept his footing, would never understand how he kept his footing — and released once upward.
The red eyes disappeared from the sky.
Not dead. Gone. She heard it — a sound it had not made before, something between fury and pain — retreating into the dark above them.
"Thirty seconds, Temur said. Maybe less".
Karath hit the desert floor.
It was not a landing.
It was a controlled catastrophe — the gryphon rolling hard onto her right side, wing folding, body absorbing what her body could absorb, and Elaine went with the roll and came off and hit the ground and came up. She did not decide to come up. Her body simply refused the alternative.
She was standing in the desert with blood on her palms from the landing and the necklace swinging at her sternum and the burning valley visible on the horizon behind her.
She was standing.
Karath was up — favouring the left wing, feathers disrupted, but up. Temur was already on the ground with an arrow nocked. Damien —
Damien was standing six feet from her with an arrow through his left shoulder.
Not through. In. The shaft had broken in the landing and what remained was embedded and he was bleeding with a thoroughness that frightened her and he had both katanas drawn regardless and was looking at the ring of creatures surrounding them.
Because they were surrounded.
The gap Temur had opened had closed. They stood in the desert in a ring of gold-ornamented bodies forty feet across, spears levelled, bows drawn, every red-tinged eye on the three of them and the wounded gryphon.
Not advancing.
Waiting.
For what, she did not know.
Damien turned his head slowly, reading the ring. Calculating. She could see it — the same quality she had noticed in the market that morning in Pramila, who always knew what she wanted before she spoke. The reading of a situation by someone fluent in it.
Whatever he calculated, his expression did not offer her the result.
Temur.
"Fourteen, Temur said. 'Fifteen with the one on the ridge'.
The wing.
Two minutes. Maybe three".
They were talking about Karath. About whether she could fly. About two minutes being or not being enough time for something — she did not know what, could not follow the arithmetic of it, was too busy trying to understand why the creatures were not advancing when they had every advantage and no apparent reason to wait.
Then she felt it.
Heat. Against her sternum. Not warmth — heat. The necklace.
She looked down.
The disc was glowing.
Not faintly the way it had glowed before. Fully. Blue-white light pulsing from the dark metal with a rhythm that was steady and certain and was absolutely not her heartbeat because her heartbeat was considerably less composed than that.
The nearest creature made a sound.
Low. Almost like pain.
It stepped back.
The one beside it stepped back.
Then the next one.
Not fleeing. Not breaking formation. Simply — not advancing into the radius of the light. As if the glow described a boundary they recognised and could not cross, a frequency they were built to avoid, something in the blue-white pulse that spoke to whatever they were beneath the gold and the borrowed flesh.
The ring held but it did not close.
Damien saw it.
She watched him see it — watched his eyes track from the necklace to the creatures to her face and back to the necklace and something in his expression moved through several territories very quickly before landing somewhere she could not read.
He crossed to her in three steps. Stood in front of her. The broken arrow shaft in his shoulder was bleeding steadily down his arm and onto the desert floor and he did not appear to notice.
He looked at her face.
She looked at his.
Behind her Karath made that chest-sound — deep and resonant and felt rather than heard — and Damien's gaze dropped briefly to the gryphon and back.
Then he looked at the necklace.
Then at her.
"Who are you", he said.
Quiet. Precise. Not the question he had asked in the desert when he first saw the necklace — that had been about origin, about where. This was something else. Something that went further down.
The necklace pulsed between them.
The ring of creatures held its distance.
She had no answer.
She had never had less of an answer to anything in her life.
"I don't know", she said.
It was the most honest thing she had ever said.
He held her gaze for a moment that had weight in it — real weight, the kind that accumulates between two people who have just survived something together and are still processing what survival means.
Then he turned to Temur.
"Can she fly?"
Temur had two fingers on Karath's left wing, assessing. He looked up.
"Yes", he said. But not far.
Damien looked at the glowing necklace one more time.
"Far enough", he said.
- Writer
