Whisper (18 page)

It was this friction that worked my knife out of its sheath, in the middle of the skirmish, and all at once there was a loose blade in the mix. Jay seemed to take note of the additional, intruding factor right at the same time I realized this new development was cause for very real alarm. All at once he left off, extracting himself, jerking back through the bars as if stung and taking two purposeful strides back. Some look of guarded horror flashed across his face like clouds over the sun, and my knife clattered through the bars to the ground. I was left bent backward through the bars as if using the bottom rung for support for sit-ups, my abs tightly clenched and panting.

“What...” Jay began, but didn't finish the thought.

My first thought, instinctively, was that he had been injured. Stabbed or sliced in the tussle. Equal horror flashed through me, but then he was just looking at me as if he didn't know me, and I realized he was merely surprised at the weapon. He had jerked back as soon as he realized, not wanting to hurt me.

I mastered my breathing, swallowing before speaking. “They wanted to equip me,” I said. “It's what we've been learning to use, in training.”

He looked no happier for the explanation, but at least he could see that neither of us had been injured. A little guiltily, I pulled myself free of the bars, standing on the outside. No need to rub it in his face and carry on with the goal that started the tussle when he was recovering from slight shock.

“You'd get one, too, if you bothered to join us,” I told him, as if that was what bothered him about the presence of the weapon on my person.

His jaw clenched, and he averted his eyes, looking everywhere but me as unknown thoughts swirled about his head.

Then my guilt was canceled out as I said something more cruel than I should have; “The people that belong here carry weapons, Jay. So I wouldn't talk, if I were you.”

Fifteen –

I
was in my tent when the signs I had been secretly dreading for the better part of a week began to make themselves known. A small tremor in the earth. A raised voice in the camp – followed closely by the first clamor that would start the hustle and bustle of preparing for battle.

They were coming.

I sat cross-legged on my bedding, my eyes rising to the tent flap as if I could see what was coming through that veil.
Dear God,
I thought.
It's happening.
I had been living in a state of denial every minute that I could following up to the second round of violence. Everyone had known it was coming, but I had not given it a chance to take root in my mind.

Numbly, I rose. Pushed my way out of my tent. The flap billowed in the breeze behind me. The cold draft blowing off the field was a sour mix of fresh dew and damp ash in the face, acrid and refreshing at once. It stung my eyes, cold and smoke-flavored, but I looked through it to the curve of the earth, where that evil line of black was manifesting. Fresh smoke rose from their ranks as they panted from the long march, the ghostly substance churning up and spreading into the air, turning the blue of the sky an ill color.

It was time for Jay to witness what I had witnessed. Bless his heart.

Bless all our hearts.

The men went into action, blurring and whirring around me. This time I did not take my eyes off the advancing army, but watched them come, a statue witness. I could not help but measure every step, thinking –
With every step, they're coming to butcher us.
With every step, they had the chance to change their minds, but with every step, it didn't happen. I willed it too. They had a thousand opportunities to change their mind, to leave off, to turn back before they reached us.

But such a clause was for an alternate universe. In this one, it never came to pass.

I thought:
It may just as soon be me dying today, as any of the ones that do.

I wondered where Jay was.

What he was thinking.

If I would lay eyes on him again before all hell broke loose. If I would lay eyes on him ever again.

The mounted formations scurried into proportion, and the fleets went out. The camp grew scarce, vacated, all of the manpower focused out on the field. I could hear the sound of empty tent canvas flapping in the wind, with no other sounds to override it.

As Gabriel's army drew nearer, the smoke they brought with them gathered into a more formidable barrier in the sky. It became like a cloud, blocking out the sun, and the wind grew colder and staler. Charred remnants of weeds scuttled into camp, kicked up and broken loose by a thousand marching hooves. A piece of it got caught beneath my tent, fluttering in the drafts, struggling to get loose.

Idly, I bent to free it, holding it in my grasp as I looked out toward what was in the making on the field. It was brittle, though, and soon I had crushed it in my grasp. Glancing down, I parted my fingers to consider the sooty pieces. The flakes fluttered in my palm, where small currents of air channeled through my fingers. For a time it held my attention, setting me on a progressive train of thought.

I was holding snuffed life in my fingers. This small thing had labored its whole life, striving and striving to reach new heights, beating the odds of the elements, weathering storms, making something out of nothing out here, day after endless day and year after taxing year – without ever an ounce of appreciation, and only to be vanquished without a second thought, in a hapless instant, along with the rest of its neighboring kin. And that, not even the beginning of the tragedy that befell the humans. All that meaning that existed, snuffed – and it didn't even hold a candle to what else happened on that field. Yet I found myself caring about that plant, appreciating all about it that no one else had ever bothered to appreciate. And it made me think: if I could stand there and find myself caring about a plant, I ought to put at least as much energy and care into the other beings out there – if not much, much more. A gross amount more.

And that's when that alternate perception of mine began to take over. The one that could see into the secret lives of plants, much as it could see the secrets of animals, and which could hatch all kinds of outlandish ideas.

There was a bang – a gun gone off in the ranks. I could not tell which army it issued from, but the result was the same: horses grew restless, on one side as much as the other. The formations began to fidget, nervous nickers and restive snorts beginning to ramp up toward the burst that would start it all.

My heart pumped louder in my chest. I didn't have to carry only snuffed life in my hands. I could carry real life in my hands.

The Lieutenant had checked in with me daily to measure Char's progress. He had not been ready or willing to have another human being on his back yet. But I could ride him.

I had always been able to ride him.

He could make a difference out there, if only he was out there.

Treachery flourished itself inside me, and my heart set itself to pounding into my head at what I was suddenly aspiring to do. But I was not in the real world anymore, where common sense and practicality – or an altogether healthy dose of fear – might bring me back down to earth and send me running like a sensible girl for the hills. I had stepped out of my grounded self, into that distant stranger who had come calling more and more as of late, and who, less and less, seemed to know when to leave. Away from reasonable, Equine Dr. Jekyll, into a confused and whimsical, champion Mrs. Hyde.

As the battle broke out in the field ahead, I bowed my head into my hand – and when I came out of it, soot was smeared across my face like war paint.

It was the least of what would be smeared across my person that day.

Sixteen –

T
he battle was underway by the time I threw Char's horn-studded bridle on and swept myself up onto his back. I did not need it, to ride him, but I hadn't been joking when I'd called it his 'helmet', and it never hurt to sport a figurehead blade out in front, when charging into battle. I had fashioned the bridle to go without a bit, because it would only serve to annoy Char and I required no such thing to direct him. As such, there was very little messing about getting the thing on his head, and then we were out of the pen like a shot. I did not give myself time to think. If I had, it might quickly have broken the spell.

Toby's torches and make-shift spears were leaned up against his tent at the ready. It was these that I took a detour for, only long enough to lean down off Char's cantering back to snatch one of the spears up, and then I was leaving the safety of the camp that only moments before I had been all too willing to be resigned to.

Char did not seem to share any of the disinclined sentiments that had held me back up until now, lengthening his stride to charge out into that field as if it was not swarming with deterrents. I brandished my weapon, making sure it was poised for the onslaught. Never once did practical fear rise up in me to demand what I thought I was doing. The world was awash with only the things that motivated a person: adrenaline, impulse, exhilaration, egoism, incentive, gratification... These things rushed around me as surely as if they were colors, vibrant and shining, streams of light breaking through the clouds. I was so immersed in those rays that I could see the dust matter floating in them, even amidst my thundering flight. Golden dust, sparks, and little swarms of pixies drifting between heaven and earth. They were thick in the air, an alternate-dimension sludge that made everything happen in slow motion. But the pixies had my back, and as everyone knows, pixies are fearsome creatures. In the real world – the one that was more real than the sludge plane – those whirring wings were what drove me, dancing beneath Char's hooves so he might as well have flown, propelling me from behind, flurrying up under my arm and lifting my spear for aim.

As I charged into the fray, the pixies flew forward with my weapon, channeling its path and driving it home into the first Demon Mount that reached with trap-like jaws to do me in. Char responded to my cues like a pro, maneuvering around so I could retrieve my spear. I yanked it free without so much as a cringe, spinning in search of my next victim or attacker. The blood running down my spear was like the prettiest color of paint. If I had not been in the middle of things, I may have been inclined to smear that over my face as well. I may have even
drank
it.

An interesting thing about the demon army was that some of the mounts had riders, but others directed themselves, unchecked and wild with their own ambitions. I did not know if there was any kind of method to the madness, but in the heat of things it mattered little. The enemy was the enemy, equine or human.

To my delight, Char's crown did not go to waste. More than once it punctured the flesh of a beast or man that crossed our charging path. And by 'delighted', I could not rightly say if it was over the fact that my ingenuity had been put to good use, or if in fact I was a little bit delighted by the carnage. I was not in my right mind. I was in a glorious, crazed state of mind. Euphoria flared through my nostrils at the smell of blood and fear and all that raged around me.

Char's muscles bulged and churned beneath me, a source of power and direction that centered me just enough to do my half in order to keep us both alive. I was inexperienced, but it didn't matter – I was great, the stuff of legends, a transcendent force to be reckoned with. All I had to do was perform my part. Char and the fairies would take care of the rest.

Char spun and lurched and surged, and I clubbed and jutted riders off of their horses and onto the trampling ground. I did not pay attention to whether or not my spear actually punctured human flesh. There was no time for that anyway. The onslaught was too much of a clanging, baying, furnace-sounding, smoke-and-blood-painted mayhem for small details such as a single tear in a man's flesh to be even remotely traceable. One would think, simply from the look of me, that
I
had been fatally injured half a dozen times over, and I had scarcely been grazed yet. Char was too busy making shish-kebabs out of those in front of us and pulping the ones behind us with his hooves. My spear seemed to serve for the other areas left open around us.

I'm sure it was chaos – a roiling mess of snarling, twisting, bashing, leaping and crumbling, but to me... To me it was a dance. Wild and savage, but all you had to do was dance away from the blows, the charging-bull-like creatures, and those around us crashing and burning. In a slow-motion world, it was not that hard. It was beautiful, seeing the pattern, being able to find the gaps, slip into them, swirl out of them.

Until Char slipped. My fantasy, my mind – it was able to create an atmosphere that I could work with, survive in. But I had failed to be aware that it didn't extend to Char. It was a bubble around me, and could do nothing to control, smooth, or enhance his actions, the signals that his own brain sent to his limbs. He was brave and wonderful – he was
magnificent –
but he was still prone to the same level of error that all of the rest of them were.