Crow Jane (7 page)

One of the Fallen rushed to get past the Swordbearer, crab-like lower body scuttling with all its power and humanoid arms raising a shield and spear defensively. The Swordbearer’s back-handed swing sliced through shield and spear alike, melted the crab carapace merely by passing close to it, and chopped entirely through the Fallen’s torso. The Fallen burst into flame and collapsed.

The Bearer of the Sword stepped over the smoking body and moved in Qayna’s direction, weapon raised.

Qayna ran. Around another corner, she found herself on the tiled edge of a canal. To one side, the collapsed rubble of several buildings blocked her way, so she yanked Jacob’s hand and rushed in the other direction, her eternal crow flapping at her shoulder.

Ahead of her, and on the other side of the canal, she saw Azazel walking forward, his back turned to her. She wondered what he was doing, and so did the boy.

“Papa,” he said, and pointed.

“Yes,” Qayna agreed, and dragged him faster.

Azazel stopped in a broad square, surrounded not by his Fallen compatriots now but by four of the Swordbearers. He stood upon the trampled bodied of dead men and women and Fallen alike, in a sea of blood, with his city burning around him. The Bearers raised their flaming swords.

“Stop!” Azazel thundered, and the Swordbearers hesitated. “Where is your leader?”

There was no answer from the blind swordsmen of Heaven, but they didn’t attack, either.

“Raphael!” Azazel yelled. “Where is the sniveling rat?”

“I’m here, traitor!” Raphael stepped into view among the smoking buildings, and his beauty took Qayna’s breath away. It had been years since she had seen one of the Messengers, Bearers of the Word, and she had forgotten how stunning they were. The Fallen retained majesty and some of their beauty, but the tinkering they had done with their own forms marred them.

Raphael flapped his six wings and drifted forward.

Though the Bearer was the more beautiful of the two gigantic figures facing off, Qayna preferred the leader of the Fallen. The mere sight of Raphael, even after so much time, made her skin burn. She felt she was being punched to the ground again to have her sins tattooed upon the scroll of her body.

She shuddered and looked away.

Ahead of her, the way was blocked by a mob of people. Not fleeing citizens of Ainok, but men with swords and spears, coming her direction. Perhaps, she thought, she could bluff her way past them. “I may pretend you are my prisoner, boy,” she whispered to Jacob. “Don’t be frightened.”

The boy nodded.

“Have you come to spout more defiance?” Raphael demanded.

Qayna tried not to be distracted and kept marching along the canal.

“What defiance?” Azazel raised his empty palms in a shrug. “I am defeated, and I have come for punishment. Only leave the others be. They harm no one. They only wish to be free.”

Qayna knew that the leader of the Fallen couldn’t possibly care very much about whether Semyaz or Bull Head or Snake Face were hurt by the champions of Heaven. He was more than willing to hurt them himself, brutally, in struggles for the leadership of Ainok and its people. What he must care about, she realized, was his son. He couldn’t entrust the boy to any of his rivals, so he had given him instead into Qayna’s care. He had given Qayna a place and people when her own had thrown her out, and now he counted on her to pay the debt.

Qayna gritted her teeth and ran faster.

She ignored the scene of the surrender across from her. One of the Swordbearers stood on the other side of the canal now, so there was no way she could cross it. To her left was a high wall with no entrance, other than the few unshattered mirrors that still hung on it, and they were no gate to Qayna. Her only way out was through a wall of armed and armored men, faces grim behind metal helmets.

She dragged Jacob towards them, yanking his arm to look fierce and pointing her dagger at him. Ainok had been her only place of refuge, and she owed it to Ainok’s founder to try to save his son, if she could.

“I’ve seized this boy prisoner,” she bluffed. “Where do I take him?”

Swords and spears bristled in her direction. The men’s armor was bronze and covered in swirling letters not too dissimilar to her own tattoos. Horsehair brushes rose from their helmets, and they wore white, hip-length capes. Qayna stopped, trying to keep the grim, confident look on her face.

The leader of the armed men only stared.

“Well?” Qayna demanded, shaking Jacob by the shoulder. “I think he’s someone important.”

“Do you think we don’t recognized the Marked Woman when we see her?” the leader asked. His voice sounded familiar and he poked his sword at her in a very unsubtle and threatening gesture. “Do you think all the sons and daughters of Adam don’t know to recognize the Marked Woman on sight?”

Qayna held her position, mind racing. “Do you mistake me for one of the Fallen?” she snarled.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Raphael and other Messengers wrapping enormous chains around Azazel, who knelt in the square alone with his head bowed. The Swordbearers stood motionless and alert around him.

The leader of the soldiers sheathed his sword and wormed the helmet off his face. “Do you think I would not recognize my own sister?” he asked.

It was Shet. Older, bearded, a man now, but unmistakably her brother. His face was cold and bitter.

“Shet …” she whispered.

“Take them both,” Shet muttered to his men, and stepped aside. “Kill the boy.”

Qayna dove into the water, dragging Jacob with her.

Immediately, she clamped her mouth over the boy’s and breathed the air from her lungs into his. She knew from experience that drowning wouldn’t kill her, any more than fire would, or falls, or bleeding.

She had tried them all.

Jacob kicked, but she wouldn’t let him go. She dropped the sword. The bottom of the canal was thick with weed and heavy garbage and she kept to it, kicking down with her legs and pulling herself along with her free hand.

Spears stabbed into the water, and arrows, but they missed. Twice, the flaming swords of the Bearers scorched through the canal about her, making the water bubble with heat and the sudden inrushing of air, but the Bearers missed her, too, and Qayna kept swimming. Jacob bit her hand, and still she wouldn’t let him go.

Qayna’s lungs burned, but she ignored them, knowing that she could not die. She was under the city wall, still kicking, when the weapons of her enemies disappeared and she finally felt she and the child had come to safety. Arms and legs exhausted, skin scratched and chilled, feet hammered from running across the stone, she dragged Jacob from the river outside Ainok’s burning walls. In a small grove of gnarled trees, she threw him into the grass and finally sucked air into her lungs, coughing out the water she had inhaled during the long submersion.

She slapped Jacob on the chest in camaraderie, sloshing water from both their bodies. “Well, boy,” she laughed. “We made it.”

He didn’t answer.

And then she realized that the child beside her in the trees was still and cold.

She was still pounding on his chest and trying to force air from her lungs into his when the first chunks of Ainok’s masonry, charred and burning, tore from the earth and rose into a heaven thick with smoke.

***

Chapter Seven

FHOOM!

Jane lit the rag-and-stone missile in her hand and it erupted into a fireball. She ignored the pain. In that instant, her wards of dissembling became inadequate, and all five rock and rollers saw her.

“
Carajo!
”

Jane whistled sharply. The Mare leaped away from the tractor in her direction, and she threw the stone.

Bullseye.

KABOOM!

The tractor exploded. The flames and force of the explosion engulfed the crow, but Jane didn’t bother hoping. The bird would emerge from the wreckage unscathed, as it always had.

She grabbed the rain-slick saddle with burned fingers and hurled herself onto the Mare’s back. The Mare whinnied and Jane drew the Calamity Horn.

The men on the ground rolled to their knees and tried to recover dropped weapons, but the fairy dropped at her from above, shrieking a falcon war cry.

Jane aimed high and fired,
bang! bang!
forcing the falcon to drop lower—

and then urged her mount forward with her knees—

the Thracian Mare bit at the fairy with sharp teeth, chomping wing and tail and scattering a bright spray of red blood.

Twitch hit the dirt hard, in female shape, shrieking and clutching her hip.

The Mare reared up, aiming to plunge down upon the fey drummer and shatter her with implacable hooves, but Jane pulled the animal’s reins and turned her back into the sorghum furrows, galloping fast. There was no particular reason to save the fairy, but neither was there any time to waste. In a wide circle around her, beyond the planted fields and the meat packing plants and the highway, she saw the burning white columns that could mean only one thing: the Bearers of the Sword had come to Dodge City.

And that was profoundly wrong.

Raphael was absent without leave. Heaven had sent her after the renegade. They had not sent their own minions, the Legate had said, because it was a case for discretion, which had made sense. If the Bearers of the Word were again disobeying orders and making decisions for themselves, Heaven would be seen as weak, as disunified. What believer could trust in a fragmented Heaven?

So why send the Swordbearers now? Had Jane failed?

Or had the Legate lied to her?

All of Jane’s instincts screamed at her to
run
, and she did. She spurred the Mare into the performance of its long and turbulent life, racing for the highway, where she planned to turn and head for Oklahoma, back the way the rock and roll band and come and the opposite direction from wherever it was they were going. She wanted, as they said in the old movies, to
get the hell out of Dodge
.

But as she raced for the strip of asphalt at the end of the field, the Bearers of the Sword raced for it, too. Ahead of her, two of the fiery giants emerged from charred and smoking sorghum stalks, swords raised and ready, masked faces unreadable.

They were after her.

A law enforcement vehicle of some sort—Jane couldn’t see the writing, but she saw the flashing lights on the rooftop and heard the siren—pulled to a screeching halt before the Swordbearers and two officers jumped out. As Jane veered to race back into the sorghum, she saw one of the Bearers slam his blade down like a drill, through the center of the police car’s roof. The flashing lights, the roof and the entire car disappeared in a column of bright, oily flame, and the two cops scattered left and right.

Then Jane’s back was turned and she lost sight of them. “Faster, girl!” she urged the Mare, and pointed her nose through the wind and the rain in the direction of the meat packing plant. This wasn’t a problem, she thought. She might lose the Mare, which was a shame, but she had an easy escape route and she wouldn’t look back.

Part of her wanted to turn and stand. Not fight, just stand still, in the hopes that the Swordbearers could accomplish with their titanic flaming weapons what she herself had been unable to achieve with blade, bullet, drowning, suffocation, fire, poison, curse, acid, falling, or any other of her uncounted attempts. Maybe the Bearers of the Sword could kill her.

But she didn’t trust Heaven to be that merciful. If they’d wanted her dead, the Legate could simply have given her the death letter in the Las Vegas hotel room. They could have revoked the curse, or never have cursed her in the first place. Her original punishment could have been merciful execution, instead of condemnation to an eternal pilgrimage with no destination and no reward for piety.

No, Heaven wanted something, and they weren’t going to ask nicely.

Racing across the furrows towards the plant, Jane tracked several things. She noticed the cordon of the Bearers of the Sword closing in. She saw the two policemen, puffing along the highway in the direction of the plant, one of them occasionally turning to fire at the flaming angels of punishment. She spotted a scarlet sedan chair approaching at a quick shuffle-step pace from the opposite direction. All of them converged on Fine Cuts, Inc.

Also closing in on the packing plant, juddering across the furrows like a spoon over a washboard, came something that almost made Jane smile: a rusted, dented, cracked, scratched and beat-to-hell brown Dodge van. Not that they were her friends; in fact, they were after her. But she admired scrappiness, and she felt akin to the down-at-the-heels, held-together-by-duct-tape-and-spit rock band. They were wanderers, outlaws and loners, just like she was. Just like she had always been.

Also, Jim was Azazel’s son.

Jane considered jumping off the Mare and escaping right in the middle of the field. She’d have done it, except that she wasn’t sure she had the strength. The burning fire of her ka was measured by art and intuition, and not by metric science. She knew she was recovering her strength, she thought she probably had the power to pull off now what she had planned, but she couldn’t be sure.

And failure would mean capture.

Jane leaped the Mare effortlessly over the rail fence just as the sedan chair from one end and the cops from the other stumbled up to the plant. One of the officers looked panicked and out of his mind; the other was surprisingly calm, holding his fire with his pistol in its holster. She couldn’t see the sedan chair’s occupant through the hanging red curtains, but it was such a silly and medieval affectation that it just had to belong to the Legate. It was carried, two in front and two behind, by men who were too large, muscular and blank-stared to be normal humans. Golems, she thought. Or professional wrestlers. Given the kilts they were wearing, most likely the former.

The Bearers of the Sword were further away. They swung their swords like harvesting sickles, burning the sorghum to the ground and incinerating trees, buildings, and anything else in their way.

Behind Jane, a
crash!
told her that the brown Dodge van had smashed through the rail fence.

The potholes were full of rainwater now, end even more treacherous. A lesser animal might have broken its ankle; the Thracian Mare charged over and through the hazards without complaint.

She urged the Mare up the concrete steps on the back side of the plant and ducked, holding on to her hat. The mighty beast rushed through the back door in a single kick of its hind legs, scattering papers, jackets and rubber gloves left and right as it breezed through the entry and into the cold room.

Jane pulled the reins and the Thracian Mare skidded to a slow stop, hooves clattering across concrete. Jane tumbled off the horse, grabbing her saddlebags and slinging them over her own shoulder. She made extra sure she had the hoof fragment, tucked into her duster pocket. She wanted out, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to go after the rogue Bearer of the Word anymore, not right now, but if others wanted the hoof, then it might become a valuable bargaining chip.

“Thanks, girl,” she patted the horse on the rump, and then whistled the command most welcome to her mount. “Give ’em hell.”

The Mare snorted jets of steam in the crisp cold of the plant, bared cat-like teeth and galloped for the back door.

“
Chingón!
”

Sudden gunfire filled the meat packing plant. The metal walls made the plant a natural reverb unit and the raucous explosions banged back and forth infinitely. The Mare took hits but didn’t slow her charge, and then the entry room collapsed into total chaos, a storm of kicking hooves, chomping teeth, and flying lead.

Jane considered the bathroom doors and almost went inside, but decided against it at the last moment. If she was wrong and her ka failed her, she didn’t want to be trapped in a dead end, not by the scruffy rock and rollers any more than she wanted to be trapped by the police or the Legate and his Swordbearers.

And where was Raphael in all this, after all?

Instead, she headed for the stairs, swallowing against the deafening racket of the gunfire.

As she kicked open the door she looked back and saw that she was followed. It was the singer, Jim. He ran with a bloody saber bared in his fist, crashing between the swinging beef carcasses like a freight train rushing along its cleared track through the trees of the forest, knuckles swinging and breath blasting in his nostrils.

She slammed the door in his face and raced up the stairs.

Oh, for more ka, she thought, or more time. But she’d rather be caught by the handsome singer than by the Legate—it was hard to imagine that he could do very much to her, other than cut her or inflict some transient physical pain. Heaven, on the other hand, could really hurt her. She knew that because it had.

His boots crashed into the stairwell behind her as she reached the door at the top.

She hesitated a moment, wondering if she would open the door to find a flaming sword thrust into her face. It probably wouldn’t kill her, but it would hurt.

She forced herself to throw open the door and charged out onto the rooftop.

It might as well have been noon, the sky was so bright. Directly overhead, in a tiny circle, she could still see stars. They twinkled like will o’ the wisps at the bottom of a deep, black well. A circle of white light blanched out the host of heaven around that bottomless well, and then streaked and blurred, in some places almost imperceptibly, into a ring of fire giants standing still and ready around the plant. There were seven of them, and they stood with swords help upright, fire dripping down to further scorch the ruined fields and mar the asphalt and gravel. The furnace blaze of their fire dried the air up, so that the wind gusting across the rooftop was arid and no rain fell.

Jane cursed, the Adamic imprecation blowing a small crater in the gravel at her feet.

She slammed the door shut behind her, wishing she could know exactly how much ka she had, so that she could throw a ward of sealing onto the exit. It didn’t matter, she was almost gone, anyway. She couldn’t see the sedan chair or the policemen from where she was, only the implacable giants, faces visored shut and angelic bodies still and ready to pounce.

She heard gunshots, though. Lots of gunshots, and the fierce, blood-drinking whinny of the Thracian Mare.

She raced to the circle she had left on the lightning-bolt-bearing box; it was intact. Jane dropped her saddlebags to the rooftop and clambered atop the metal casing. The circle was not exactly the one she would have preferred, either to regenerate the heat of her ka or to strengthen her gate-opening incantation. Its glyphs were written in Adamic, though, which gave it power and would reinforce her in anything she did; it would have to suffice.

Jane pulled a small round mirror from the saddlebag and set it on the metal at her feet without looking at it. She kept her eyes on the burning giants, ready to leap into action if they tried anything. She had the Calamity Horn, after all; one bullet per Swordbearer was terrible odds and a gamble, but at least she could make them think twice about trying to take her against her will.

She heard the rooftop door smash open, and she turned to face Jim, the singer. He came rushing across the gravel with his sword in hand, but he didn’t move like a fencer, cautious, one foot in front of the other. He sprinted, head down and glaring like a bull.

Jane incanted the words in Adamic and felt the fire of her ka flow from her. She waved good-bye at the charging rock and roller, smiled, and stepped onto the mirror—

nothing happened.

She looked down, and saw that the reflective glass had gone dull and gray. Jane cursed again, not meaning to, and the glass cracked.

Jim stabbed at her—

Jane stepped sideways, but a little too late. The burning in her side where his saber cut into her flesh jerked her back to full wakefulness and attention, and Jane dropped backwards off the generator box, drawing her knives.

Jim stabbed again, and a third time, but the box was in the way. He stepped forward and executed a neat shoulder roll across the top of the metal—

Jane stepped in slashing, but was forced back by the heavy heels of his boots before she could land a good blow, and then he pressed her again.

Something bowled into the small of Jane’s back, knocking her forward. Frantically, she crossed her long knife blades in front of her and caught Jim’s saber blade in them. She pushed, trying to shove the blade out of the way—

and instead, she impaled herself on it. The sword sank into her belly, up to the hilt.

Jane fell heavily, dragging Jim’s weapon with her. With confused vision, she saw a white horse flashing red, and for a moment she imagined that the Thracian Mare was coming to her rescue, but then she remembered that the Mare was black, and she realized that the horse she was seeing was the fairy Twitch; that the flashes of red were Twitch’s blood where Jane herself had caused injury.

Then Twitch the horse kicked Jane in her head, throwing her body sideways and slamming her to the roof again.

Jane tried to think as she dragged herself away. The band wanted Azazel’s hoof back. Did Heaven want the hoof as well, was that what this was about? The angel caretaker of Dudael had failed, and Jane had been sent to recover what had been stolen?

But then why not tell her as much?

“Stop,” she croaked. Twitch kicked her again, still in horse form, and smashed her flat to the gravel. “I’m not sure we’re enemies.” She dribbled the words from her lips with a thin stream of blood.