Firewalker (42 page)

They entered the swarm at a dead run. Sheer speed killed the first line of Workers on impact, but the Hive adjusted quickly and soon Lily felt the brush of furry bodies and the flutter of delicate wings against Tristan's cheek. She suddenly felt a sharp stab on one of her brave's throats. Pain and adrenaline shot through him. His heart pumped three times and stopped.

Lily felt his death and screamed. She sent a gust of searing-hot witch wind into the swarm—scalding her own warriors, but more importantly, singeing the edges of the Workers' wings. They looked just like normal bees and their delicate wings were just as vulnerable to fire. Workers dropped out of the air by the thousands. Behind the front line of falling Worker bees, Lily saw larger shapes alighting on the battlefield and moving toward her braves. They were too far away from her Tristan for Lily to see them clearly yet, but she could make out the way they moved. The Warrior Sisters ran up to the front lines with a hopping, gliding motion that reminded Lily vaguely of an ostrich.

The Hive regrouped quickly against Lily's scorching witch wind and sent the Workers out in thick clumps. The Workers on the outside of the tight balls of bee-bodies still fell from the air in droves, but the ones on the inside were able to land. The braves swatted at them, killing many, but in moments every inch of their skin was crawling with Workers. Lily sent energy coursing into her warriors. She thickened their skin to make them nearly impervious to the little stingers of the Workers. The Workers couldn't penetrate deep enough to inject their toxin into the braves' bloodstream. But sting after sting kept coming and finally the venom left on the surface of the skin started to eat its way in through the protection Lily supplied. Two more braves died as the Workers finally managed to sink their stingers in.

Lily needed to give her braves more strength—she needed to find a way to keep the Workers from stinging at all. She had to burn. She heard Breakfast's voice in her head.

But there's no stake. There will be nothing to hold you down in the fire.

I'll hold myself down, Breakfast.

Lily positioned herself over the raging brush fire and dove down into the flames. Her skin began to burn, and she shrieked angrily at her own pain. She dug her fingers into the charred earth, gripping the ground to keep herself anchored there despite what her reflexes were urging her to do, and sucked heat into her smoke-colored willstone.

A moment of silence halted all motion on the battlefield, and for a heartbeat everything was still. Then a boom resounded across the burning prairie as a beam of light shot out of Lily and into the wheel of hurricane clouds above. Power pulsed across the blazing grass and the Worker bees were swept back. Her braves paused for a moment in ecstasy, drawing in a deep draft of pure power, and launched themselves at the Warrior Sisters as they entered the fray.

Through her Tristan's eyes, Lily saw her first Warrior Sister head-on.

Her upper body was shaped like a woman's and she had unnervingly human hands, but her legs were too long and they tapered at the bottom into insect barbs instead of feet. She had thick thighs and her knees were on the back, like those of an ostrich or a grasshopper, explaining her strange gait and breathtaking speed. The Sister's skin was vaguely yellow and covered in plates of shiny black armor. As the Sister neared, Lily could see that the armor was a part of her, and it grew out of her skin in an exoskeleton.

Her head was the most disturbing part of her. She had a long stalk for a neck and her skull was ovoid, hairless, and topped with huge, multifaceted eyes. Her mouth was a jumble of tubes that was framed with a pair of shortened legs that brushed her face and constantly cleaned ash off her iridescent, alien eyes. Her head twitched and swiveled on her stalk-neck in blindingly fast and jerky motions. Lily got the sense that the Sister could see in a complete circle around her. She had no blind spot—not below or behind or above.

The Sister was over ten feet tall and she strode toward Lily's Tristan, her enormous black-veined wings vibrating irritably as she tucked them behind her. Those human hands of hers unwound something she had wrapped around her narrow waist. It was a whip that was tipped in barbs. She unfurled the whip in one hand as she neared and ran her other hand across the small of her back, which came back covered in vaguely golden ichor. She transferred the ichor to the barbs at the end of the whip.

She milked herself for venom, Lily.

I saw, Tristan. Everyone, listen—don't let the Sisters catch you with the ends of their whips! Cut them off if you can!

As Lily sent out her warning to all her braves the Sister spun her whip over her head and cracked it at Tristan. He dove to the side, narrowly escaping the stinging cat-o'-nine-tails she wielded. She reversed the direction of the whip and sent it back at him, but he wove his way inside the arc of her lash and stuck his blade between the plates of her exoskeleton.

The Sister twitched as she died. Three more Sisters dropped from the sky and a swarm of Workers zeroed in to attack Tristan in concert. Lily heard no spoken commands from the Sisters or the Workers, but they fought as one.

They are all connected. The Hive has one mind and it fights as an organism.

Lily didn't know if the thought was hers, one of the Tristans', Una's, or everyone's, but she sent it out to all her braves. If the Hive fought as one, so must they. She pulled her single consciousness out of her Tristan and instead imagined herself as plural, like a tapestry of many threads. Lily let go of her sense of
I
, of being one person, and became
They
.

They moved into a circle and focused first on becoming fire. They allowed the fire to engulf them, but fire would not kill them—it could only fuel them. The Workers died in droves, falling off their skin as husks of blackened carbon, and the Sisters cringed for a moment before diving back into the flames with Lily's They.

They cut through the Sisters—charred bodies falling around them and piling up, but more came. Always more. They lost one, two, then three threads. They howled and wept with every loss of Themselves. The whips cracked and the Workers flew into the fire to die without hesitation. Wave after wave. Sting after sting. The wildfire moved on, but They were pinned down by the bodies of Workers and Warrior Sisters everywhere—thousands of bodies.

They lost one more thread—an absence unlike any other—and Lily pulled herself out of the tapestry.

Tristan!

No answer.

“Tristan!” Lily screamed, but only a thin wail came out of her.

She heard a whip crack and felt the lash across her back. Hot and numb, the venom seeped into her blood. Lily could see Sisters swooping down to pick up her loved ones and fly off with them. She saw Juliet, Breakfast, Una, Caleb, and the other Tristan getting hauled up into the air.

Her Tristan, her best friend, was not among them.

She felt nothing—not hands holding her nor the temperature changing nor the wind rushing past—but she saw the ground get smaller and farther away as she was lifted off her stomach and flown upward. The black battlefield below still smoked. Everything went dark.

*   *   *

Carrick saw the smoke from miles away. Then he felt the thunder in the ground. A prairie fire was stampeding the buffalo.

Carrick didn't feel fear often, but he felt it now. There was no high ground to climb, no river to put between him and the tide of hooves and horns, and he'd lost his connection with Lillian when he followed Rowan over the mountains. Strength from his witch would not avail him, anyway. Neither would cleverness or high ground or any river but one of the great ones, for that matter. Surviving a stampede came down to luck. Either the buffalo came your way or they didn't.

Carrick could guess who had set the fire. Lily and her tribe must have needed to fight something. Something huge.

Rowan was ahead of him—out of direct sight—but not so far away that Carrick couldn't clearly distinguish his brother's track lying directly over Lily's. After maintaining a nearly inhuman pace, Rowan had caught up with her. He'd pushed himself over the mountains and across the plains with what seemed to Carrick to be a suicidal single-mindedness and now Rowan was only a few hours behind Lily and her tribe. Carrick was only a few hours behind Rowan and his endurance was at its limits.

Carrick stood in his stirrups, trying to see what enemy could be dire enough that Lily's tribe would risk a prairie fire to stop it. All he could see was smoke rimming the horizon, and the air rippling like water over the grass.

He saw a figure detach itself from the heat-haze. It wasn't the front line of the stampeding herd yet, although that was sure to be coming soon. It was Rowan, riding like hell, and heading straight for him. Carrick pulled up on the reins and wheeled his horse around. The horse was smart enough to not need any whipping, and reached a flat-out run in a matter of seconds.

Glancing over his shoulder wouldn't help, Carrick knew that, but he couldn't stop himself. Rowan was gaining him, but the stampede was gaining on Rowan. The ground shook as if to break. The pounding filled the air like a solid wall of noise—something felt as much as heard. Carrick's insides rattled against his bones, and his teeth clacked in his head as the horse under him galloped in panic. The pounding in the ground was joined by a strange buzzing in the air. Carrick glanced back again and nearly lost his seat. He eased back on the reins and tried to control his frenzied mount.

There were
things
in the air above Rowan. Flying things that Carrick had never seen before, but he could guess what they were from the stories his father had told him.

The Hive.

Rowan slashed at the air with one arm and clung to his horse's reins with the other, trying to fight off the Warrior Sisters who harried him from above. Carrick turned to face forward in his saddle and let the reins go with a terror that bordered on blindness.

First he felt the buzzing of the Workers' wings on the back of his neck, and then two pairs of impossibly strong hands grabbed his arms and tore him from his horse's back. Carrick didn't know if he screamed or not as the Sisters hauled him up into the air. The ground shrank away from him, his neck wrenching painfully as he was jerked into the sky. He tried to right himself, but the force of the Sisters' ascent was too much to fight.

Staring down as the ground rushed away from him, Carrick saw the green grass beneath him turn into a sea of ruddy brown bodies as the herd of buffalo swept across the plain. Dust rose up in great plumes bearing the smell of churned earth, blood, and musky hide. Smoke from the fire joined the dust to blot out the sun. The Sisters flew him west through the murky air. The thunder of the stampede was drowned out by the buzzing of the Hive all around him as they flew.

Out of the corner of Carrick's eye he saw Rowan's body dangling between two Sisters. Rowan's eyes were shut and his body was limp. Carrick couldn't tell if he was alive or dead.

*   *   *

The smell of flowers was all around her.

Lily opened her eyes and saw green stems and bright blossoms waving gently in the breeze. Her raw skin was smeared with ash and her clothes were singed tatters, clinging to the dried scabs on her body. She wondered how long she had been unconscious. She saw that her burns were already healing somewhat. Had it been a whole day? Two days?

Lily licked her lips and realized that someone must have poured water in her mouth because it was cleaned of ash and it felt damp. She concentrated on the last vestiges of venom in her veins and realized that it had not only knocked her out and kept her immobile, it had eased her pain and kept her injury from festering. A chemical cocktail that complicated had to have been engineered.

She heard groaning, and pushed herself up onto her elbows. Just next to her was Juliet. Lily sat up and found Una, already sitting upright with a blank and devastated look on her face. Caleb was just pulling himself up to standing and Tristan was beside him, still clutching a dagger. Lily looked frantically to her other side and found the source of the groaning. It was Breakfast. He flopped onto his back and grabbed his head.

“Lily,” the other Tristan said, coming toward her. He staggered to Lily and helped her sit all the way up.

“He's dead. My Tristan is dead,” she whispered, clutching at the other Tristan's hand.

He nodded and dropped his head. Lily looked around her in a daze, too numb to feel anything just yet. They were in the middle of a field of flowers. The sun was bright and the sky was as blue as a robin's egg. Lily could taste the ocean on the air. She lifted her face into the salty breeze. It was coming from the west. The ocean was to the
west
.

The other Tristan—now the only Tristan—and Lily helped each other stand, and then bent down to help Juliet up to her feet. Lily saw Caleb, Breakfast, and Una already standing and facing west.

The sun was just tipping down into a late afternoon and it hung over the walls of an immense city. Flowers were everywhere—pouring over the sides of the walls and carpeting the tops of every building that soared up behind the colossal wall.

“This is no city I've ever been to,” Caleb said.

“That's because you've never been this far west,” Una said.

“No one has ever been this far west,” Juliet said.

“Are you sure Lillian didn't know about this?” Tristan asked.

“Of course I'm sure!” Juliet looked scared.

“Lillian didn't know,” Lily said, holding up a hand before an argument could break out. “If she did, she would have sent an army out here to conquer it. She's not the kind of person who likes having anything beyond her control.”

Everyone heard the logic in what Lily said and dropped that possibility. The truth was, if either Lillian or Alaric knew that there was another city all the way across the continent, they would have tried to get here long ago.