Brack! and it lurched forwards so it could put a mouth-finger on the thing it had given me. Two other fingers reached past and touched my face. I froze. Its touch was slightly sticky. I remembered being told they ate no flesh and hoped that was true.
It ran a finger down where the Severance marked my face. Red, like the carving Erma’s Ma had used to call them; like the painting on many of the brackers I could see. I don’t know what it meant to them, but it was something.
Then there was a commotion from somewhere off in the trees, deeper into the bracker village or perhaps the other side of it. Abruptly the entire mass of them was in motion, ramming into each other, climbing over each other, some heading towards the noise, others away from it. For a brief moment we were an island in that grinding flow, constantly in danger of being crushed on all sides.
Then Melory just dropped, the ghostlight flashing bright as day from the pits of her face. I propped her up. Her one eye was wide, and her lips writhed.
“I hear ghosts!” she got out, clutching at me. “From far away. Ghosts. Ancestors!”
There was a shrill whining sound that bit into my head—I thought it was the wasps, but then one of the bigger brackers had shouldered into us, knocking Kalloi down. The thin sound issued from the vast bulk of its body.
“They hear,” Melory got out, before the creature seized her, rearing up so its middle legs could tear her from my grip and bundle her up. A moment later and it was loping off, out of the frenzied mass, out into the clear trees, Melory clutched to its underside.
VI
I HAD THOUGHT THEY’D be slow, looking at them. The bracker that had Melory was swift as a running man the moment it was out of the press of its fellows. Those huge forelegs pounded down and it swung its body between them, the short hindlimbs nothing but an anchor so it could swing the front pair forwards again. When I tried to pursue, another bracker was in my way, beating at the ground with its clubs and yet not quite wanting to touch me. I shouted at it furiously, waving my metal staff, even striking it across the nearest limb.
“Priest!” Kalloi yelled. I turned to see him trying to haul the hairless outcast with him. The dwarfish creature’s flesh deformed under his hands as though it were soft sand, blackening and splitting into runnels of blood. I went back automatically, but a fresh bracker rammed Kalloi aside before recoiling from him. It paused a moment over the hairless man, stamping like a child having a tantrum. I had the sense of conflicting desires within it, driving it into a frenzy.
One bludgeoning fist came down and smashed the hairless man’s body to pulp. I felt as though it could have been Kalloi as easily. The bracker was retreating, jostled by its fellows, shuddering as though the touch of the man’s flesh had been toxic. I grabbed Kalloi and hauled him upright. He was white with shock, bloody where the bracker’s serrated side had shunted him.
“They’re fighting each other!” Amorket shouted over the thunder and scrape. “Fighting, over there.” A finger pointed vaguely into the unseen spaces past the trees.
“No!” Erma insisted. “They don’t!”
“I don’t care,” I bellowed at both of them. “Let them slaughter each other. Where’s Melory?” I put my face, the Eyes of the Ancestors, right up in Erma’s. “Track them, hunter. They broke out of this mess. Follow them!”
But it was easier said than done because there were plenty of shoving, trampling brackers all around us and we couldn’t just push our way out. These were the larger ones that had remained behind, and many carrying their unformed young.
Right then I would have butchered the lot of them if I could, but while my nature seemed to be keeping us from being crushed, it wasn’t cutting a path through them.
Amorket did that. I will give her that much credit.
Without warning—and she was at my very elbow—she exploded with wasps. Her Furies swarmed us. I felt a searing fire in my arm where one just drove its sting straight into me. Kalloi cried out, too, wrapping himself in his cape to ward them off. I don’t think Amorket had any control over them; they just responded to how she felt, and right then she wanted to get out as much as any of us.
The wasps attacked the brackers around us. They dived about the creatures’ heads and bounced off their backs like stinging rain. More, they attacked the soft bundles of life the brackers were carrying, stinging the helpless little monsters wherever they could. The seething mass of beasts all around us was suddenly an expanding circle as the creatures tried to escape and protect their larvae.
Amorket moved, and the wasps moved with her, driving fiercely in whatever direction she faced. In such a way we got clear of the brackers; though, by the time we had, the wasps seemed as much of a threat as the animals. I retreated with my people and waited until the Furies had calmed and returned to their homes within the knots of her armour.
By then, Erma had a trail, and I could only hope it was the right bracker we were tracking and not some random beast that had lumbered off into the forest. With no other choice, we were after it, making the best time we could.
* * *
The bracker had taken Melory downhill, away from Tsuno. I asked Erma what was this way, but all she could say was that it was where the brackers lived, where their villages were, before they came here.
We stopped first when we came to a ploughed-up piece of forest. Trees had been torn up, and those that hadn’t bore scars and weeping wounds where something had carved into them on its way through. I reckoned they were all shuffling aside, in their slow way, as the memory of whatever had happened rippled through the forest.
“Portruno,” Kalloi said, and the rest of us nodded. Just like the way the earth had been churned up there, just like the path that had led between the wrecked village and the forest.
This doesn’t go to where the brackers are, though, I thought, but it didn’t mean anything. There were many bracker villages, Erma had said. Possibly they were expanding in all directions, great herds of them driving their paths between the trees. Except even when they had all been panicking and charging around, they hadn’t been causing that kind of devastation.
“Erma,” I said, after we’d set off again. “Those tracks . . . ?”
“Can’t say.” Her face was closed up, unreadable. “Too much gone past, can’t see any prints at all.”
“Are we gaining on Melory?”
“Can’t say.”
And then we ran out of forest.
We’d come to a dip in the ground, a fold between hills, and here we rejoined that devastation, except it was still being enacted. Even as we arrived there was the splintering snap of a tree being pushed over, and the whole dell had been ground clear, broken trunks and branches, spiralling sprays of leaves, all piled up on either side.
Things moved across the barren ground, grinding through the mud. They looked like rocks, save they were all roughly the same shape, like a great stone hood curving back on itself at the rear. They ploughed across the earth, raising a wake of mud and ravaged roots. Where they met resistance, they just braced themselves and shoved, and eventually the stone or tree just gave, undermined and turned aside.
Melory’s voice, high and clear over the grind and crack of the stone-things, was like a knife jammed in me. She was calling my name.