Walkers (58 page)

The Tartar’s rifles, instead of
firing a projectile,
sucked in
whatever
they were aimed at, over a distance of nearly a hundred metres. When they
missed, and aimed at the ground, a thin bullet of snow would be plucked up and
zapped backwards into the gun’s barrel. It took only a little imagination to
picture what would happen if they managed to aim straight at a human being.

With the sledge almost past them,
Tebulot rolled on to his back, and fired a single dazzling blast of
concentrated energy at the wooden tower. The energy-bolt screamed in through
one of the tower’s windows, and for a moment nothing happened. Then the tower
blew up, in a tumbling shower of shattered wood and scorched wolf carcasses,
and a ball of orange fire rose up over the sledge, then vanished. Two rear
runners collapsed, and the giant sledge ground to a halt in a spray of ice.
Immediately, the Tartar soldiers began to swarm down the sides of the sledge,
and drop into the snow, so that the Night Warriors would find them more difficult
to hit. One of the Tartars ran around and cut loose the bears, waving a bright
red flare at them to frighten them away. Samena watched this particular Tartar
for a while, and then unhooked a single arrowhead from her belt. She crossed
her arms, and fired the energy-arrow
zip!
along the side of the sledge. The arrowhead pierced the soldier’s hand so
that he dropped his flare. Immediately, two of the bears turned around, and
shuffled towards him, snarling and roaring. The Tartar cried out, and began to
run, but the bears could run much faster. They came up behind him like two
white locomotives, and knocked him down in a spray of blood. One of them went
for his head, and from two hundred feet away the Night Warriors could hear his
skull crunch.

The flare, meanwhile, had dropped
among the furs, and the front of the sledge began to burn. Within three or four
minutes, the whole sledge was thundering with fire from end to end. Kasyx kept
a lookout for Yaomauitl, but there was no sign of him. He said to Xaxxa, ‘How
about making a quick pass overhead? Do you think you can do that without
getting hit? I want to see where Yaomauitl’s hiding.’

Xaxxa said, ‘You got it,’ and lay
flat on his back in the snow. Then he covered his face with his mirror-like
mask, and double-somersaulted backwards right out of the pit in which they were
sheltering, streaking up into the snowy sky on a slide of shining gold.

For a moment, Xaxxa disappeared
completely, and they waited anxiously for his return. The wooden sledge
crackled and popped, and there was a thick nauseating smell of burning fur. The
Tartars kept their heads well down, especially since Tebulot was ready for them
with his machine fully cocked and ready to fire a multiple horizontal burst.

Samena said, ‘You don’t think he’s
lost, do you?’

But before Kasyx could reply, they
heard that familiar jet-plane whistle, and Xaxxa came flashing across the snow,
only two or three feet above ground-level, crouched on his shining slide like
the greatest surfer that ever was.

One of the Tartars lifted himself
out of the snow, and aimed at Xaxxa with his wide-barrelled rifle. But Xaxxa
weaved and ducked in mid-air, and kicked the Tartar straight in the jaw with a
perfect two-footed drop-kick that must have had an impact velocity of three hundred
miles an hour. The Tartar was flung bodily across the snow, and his rifle
dropped and fired straight at one of his comrades, who had been crouched next
to him. It was then that the Night Warriors saw what the weapons could do. A
six-inch plug of living flesh was snapped out of the soldier’s thigh, and
sucked bloodily into the rifle’s open barrel. The soldier screeched, and
dropped to the snow, clutching his leg.

Xaxxa made another fly-past, and
then circled around and rejoined the other three Night Warriors.

‘Terrific kick,’ Kasyx complimented
him. Then, ‘Any sign of Yaomauitl?’

‘I don’t think that creature we saw
was Yaomauitl himself,’ Xaxxa panted. ‘I saw his armour lying in the snow,
empty, and something lying next to it that looked like that Devil we burned at
the Scripps Institute, only smaller and redder. Whatever it was, it was dead
meat.’

‘One of Yaomauitl’s new offspring,’
Kasyx breathed. ‘While they dream, they can take on his grown-up appearance,
but when you destroy them, in their dream, they revert back to what they really
are. Embryos, undeveloped demons. What did Springer call them? Joeys.’

Samena said, ‘How about the rest of
the soldiers? Do you think we can manage to beat them?’

‘I’m not so sure,’ said Xaxxa.
‘They’ve dug themselves in pretty good. It’s going to take a lot of energy to
shift them.’

‘Energy is one thing I don’t want to
waste,’ said Kasyx. But then Tebulot lifted his hand and said brightly, ‘I’ve
got an idea. Listen! I read it in a cowboy book once. It was something the Cheyenne
Indians used to do, to distract their enemies.’

‘I hope you realise the Cheyenne
Indians got beaten, in the end,’ said Xaxxa.

‘Well, come on, it’s only an
adaptation
of what the Cheyennes did,’
Tebulot explained. ‘What we could do is this: pick up that Tartar soldier, the
one who’s been wounded in the leg, and fly him down the whole length of the
Tartar lines, spraying them in blood. Then we round up the rest of those bears,
and drive them back here.

As soon as they smell that blood –
well, they’re going to go crazy, aren’t they?’

‘When you say
we,
you mean
me,
if I
understand you right?’ Xaxxa asked him. ‘I mean, seeing as how I’m the only one
who can fly.’

Tebulot said, ‘We’ll be covering
you.’

Xaxxa looked at Kasyx. Kasyx said,
‘It’s a good idea, but you don’t have to do it if you don’t want to.’

‘No, I’ll do it,’ said Xaxxa. ‘I
just wanted to make sure that nobody here was taking me for granted.’

‘Are you kidding?’ smiled Samena.

Without any further delay, Xaxxa
flashed off through the falling snow, and vanished once more. This time, when
he came back, he was travelling so fast that they didn’t see himuntil he
reached down out of the blizzard and snatched up the wounded Tartar like a
buzzard picking up an injured gopher. The other Tartars lifted their weapons,
and fired a sharp shrieking salvo at him, but he managed to fly the whole
length of the Tartar lines with his victim hanging bleeding from his arms,
without being hit.

He dropped the hapless Tartar into a
deep snow-drift, and then climbed away into the sky to round up the Polar
bears.

Kasyx waited impatiently as minutes
passed by. The snow was still falling thickly, covering his crimson armour like
white wool. Samena sat beside him, her face calm, turning around now and again
to make sure that the Tartars hadn’t yet decided to attack them. Tebulot kept
his weapon ready and humming but he knew that there was nothing he could do,
not at the moment.

Samena said, ‘I hope Xaxxa isn’t
lost. He doesn’t have the same directional senses that I have. Not in this kind
of weather, anyway.’

‘He’ll be all right,’ said Kasyx,
although he wasn’t completely convinced of it. Xaxxa was a little too fast and
a little too flamboyant. If he had accidentally run into another of those
articulated snow-sledges, then he could have been killed without any of them
knowing about it.

Ten minutes passed. Then Samena
said, ‘They’re advancing, look.’

Kasyx raised his head, and changed
his sight to telescopic. Samena was right. The Tartars were rising up from the
snow, their winged helmets showing black against the blizzard, their masked
faces expressionless. A shot screeched past Kasyx’s head

- not a bullet, but a thin column of
air, sucked back into the rifle at twice the speed of sound. He dropped down,
and said, ‘There have to be thirty of them, at least. Do you think you two can
hit them all?’

‘We’ll try,’ said Tebulot. ‘We hit
ten times that number of corpses when we fought them on the plain.’

‘Sure you did,’ said Kasyx. ‘But
those corpses weren’t armed with suck-guns, the way that these jokers are.’
Samena said quietly, ‘We have to take the risk, Kasyx.

Xaxxa took the risk.’

‘Well, I know,’ Kasyx replied. ‘It’s
just that you’re -’ ‘Young?’ smiled Samena. ‘Yes, we are. But warriors have
always been young. That’s what makes their sacrifice so much greater.’

Tebulot lifted his head. The Tartar
soldiers had fanned out, and were now making their way across the snow towards
them in a wide pincer-movement, dark and sinister, their rifles held high.
Tebulot aimed his machine, and fired three bright energy-bolts that burst into
jagged ‘shrapnel’ – uncontrolled electrical charges that could tear their way
through armour-plate. With a crackling sound, six or seven Tartars dropped to
the ground. Smoke drifted through the falling snow.

Samena dropped two of them with
wire-flailing arrowheads, immaculate shots that killed them with scarcely any
waste of energy at all. But then the remaining Tartars began to fire at them
from three sides, and they had to drop back down into the snow.

‘Where the hell is Xaxxa?’ Tebulot
demanded, more to the snow in front of him than to anyone or anything else.

Tebulot needn’t have worried. For
suddenly, the shrieking of suck-guns died away; the three Night Warriors heard
confused shouting, and then screams. Cautiously, they looked up out of the
snow, and there was Xaxxa, floating towards them through the snow, twenty feet
up in the air, his arms outspread, his mirrored face inscrutable and
terrifying, even to them.

Ahead of him, roaring and rumbling,
jogged sixty or seventy full grown Polar bears, the remains of the ice-sledge’s
harness-team. At first, they had run this way because Xaxxa had frightened
them, looping from side to side in shining figures-of-eight. But now they could
smell the fresh blood that he had spattered all over the Tartar soldiers, and
their hunger drove their legs like superheated pistons.

Kasyx rose to his feet, and so did
Samena and Tebulot. The sight was extraordinary.

Each of the Polar bears must have
weighed close to a ton, yet they all shambled forward at nearly twenty miles an
hour, their teeth bared and their black lips curled back and their yellow eyes
staring with mindless hunger. The Tartars opened fire on them. Bloody strings of
flesh were snatched from the flanks of four of them, and three of them
collapsed on to the snow, but the rest began to canter forward even more
quickly, their breath smoking, their claws scratching on the ice-crust. The
Tartars wavered, and then dropped their rifles and began to run.

With a last unstoppable rush, the
bears brought down the soldiers in showers of bloody fury. The four Night
Warriors watched with a mixture of horror and relief as their enemies were
overtaken one by one and clawed down on to the snow, where their bodies were
ripped and their helmets were scattered and their entrails were dragged
blue-grey and steaming for yards across the snow. The bears circled and circled
their prey, their yellowish fur streaked with red, their snouts dark and
glistening, shreds of soldier meat hanging from their jaws.

A little way off, almost hidden by
the thickly falling snow, the ice-sledge had been burned down now to a trough
of ashes. A wind rose and began to blow away the sparks.

The Night Warriors cautiously
retreated from the scene of the battle, so that they wouldn’t disturb the
bears. Following Samena’s instincts, they trudged their way off through the
snowstorm again, and within minutes, when they looked back, all trace of the
sledge and the bears and the bodies of the Tartars had vanished.

For over an hour, they walked
blindly through the snow. Kasyx asked Samena several times if she was sure that
Yaomauitl was near, but each time she assured him that he was. ‘I feel it,
Kasyx, he’s here. He wants to fight us to the bitter end this time. He won’t
run away.’

‘I wouldn’t even mind if he ran to
meet us,’ Xaxxa complained. ‘He might save us a walk.’

Strangely, although it reduced
visibility to little more than a few feet, the snow was neither wet nor particularly
cold. It was more like thickly falling feathers – the way snow ought to be, in
dreams, rather than the way it actually is. Xaxxa’s and Samena’s costumes were
very brief, but neither of them felt affected by the blizzard.

Their body temperature, in fact, was
exactly the same as that of the dreamer himself, as he lay in his black satin
bed.

After a little while longer, the
Night Warriors found that they were descending into a wide valley, and that the
snow was beginning to clear. The sky, however, remained deep red, almost
maroon, and the clouds that moved through it, stately and slow, were tinged
with pink. As the snow dissipated altogether, they looked up and saw that
flamingos were flying around the clouds, their wings beating lazily on unseen air-currents,
and that on some of the clouds there were colonies of untidy nests.

The snow beneath their feet began to
clear away, too, and soon they found that they were walking through bracken,
interspersed with wild flowers, and that the sun was beginning to shine. Below
them, the valley spread out wide, with a silvery river looping its way through
sparkling meadows, and willows sadly washing their hair from grassy banks.