Monsters of Men (15 page)

I’m not too sure of my place in it either.

I had Mistress Lawson treat me because I’m going back down to see Todd, though I’m so tired right now, I’m not sure I won’t fall asleep in the saddle. I’ve already talked to him twice this morning. His voice on the comm is tinny and distant, and his Noise is muffled, overwhelmed on the tiny comm speakers by the Noise of the army around him.

But seeing his face helps.

“Are these all friends of yours, then?” Bradley says, coming down the ramp behind me.

“Hey!” I say, walking right into his hug. “How are you feeling?”

Loud
, his Noise says and he gives a little smile, but it actually is a bit calmer today, less panicky.

“You
will
get used to it,” I say. “I promise.”

“As much as I might not want to.”

He brushes a strand of hair away from my eyes.
So grown up
, his Noise is saying.
And looks so pale
. And he shows a picture of me from last year, learning a math segment in the classes he taught. I look so small, so
clean,
that I have to laugh.

“Simone’s been speaking with the convoy,” he says. “They agree with the peaceful approach. We try to meet with these Spackle and offer humanitarian help to the people here, but the last thing we want to do is get involved in a war that has nothing to do with us.” His hand squeezes my shoulder. “You were right to want to keep us out of it, Viola.”

“I just wish I knew what to do now,” I say, turning away from his praise, remembering how close I came to choosing the other way. “I’ve been trying to get Mistress Coyle to talk to me about how the first truce worked but–

I stop because we both see someone running across the hilltop, looking this way and that, searching each face, then seeing the ship, seeing
me
and running even faster–

“Who’s that?” Bradley asks, but I’m already pulling away from him–

Because it’s–

“LEE!” I shout and start running towards him–

Viola
, his Noise is saying,
Viola, Viola, Viola
, and he reaches me and spins me around in a breath-squeezing embrace that makes my arm ache. “Thank God!”

“Are you okay?” I’m saying as he lets me go. “Where’d you–?”

“The river!” he says, his breath heaving. “What’s happening to the river?”

He looks over to Bradley and back to me. His Noise gets louder, so does his voice.
“Haven’t you seen the river?”

[T
ODD
]

“But
how
?” I say, staring up at the falls–

Staring as they get quieter and quieter–

Staring as they start to disappear altogether–

The Spackle are turning off the river.

“Very clever,” the Mayor is saying to himself. “Very clever indeed.”

“
What
is?” I nearly shout at him. “What are they
doing
?”

Every man in the army is watching it now,
ROAR
ing loud about it like you wouldn’t believe, watching as the falls trickle back just exactly like someone turning down a tap, with the river below shrinking, too, metres of mud popping up where riverbank used to be.

“No word from our spies, Captain O’Hare?” the Mayor says, in a voice that ain’t happy.

“None, sir,” Mr O’Hare says. “If there’s a dam, it’s back quite a ways.”

“Then we need to find out exactly,
don’t
we?”

“Now, sir?”

The Mayor turns to him, fury-eyed. Mr O’Hare just salutes and leaves quickly.

“What’s going
on
?” I say.

“They want a siege, Todd,” the Mayor says. “Instead of a battle, they take away our water and wait until we’re so weak they can walk right over us.” His voice sounds almost angry. “This isn’t what they were supposed to do, Todd. And we will
not
let them get away with it. Captain Tate!”

“Yes, sir,” says Mr Tate, who’s been waiting and watching with us.

“Get the men in battle formations.”

Mr Tate looks surprised. “Sir?”

“Is there a problem with your orders, Captain?”

“The uphill battle, sir. You said yourself–”

“That was before the enemy declined to play by the rules.” His words start filling the air, twirling around and slipping into the heads of the soldiers around the edge of our camp–

“Every man will do his duty,” the Mayor says, “every man will fight until the battle is won. They won’t be expecting us to come at them so hard and surprise will win us the day. Is that clear?”

Mr Tate says, “Yes, sir,” and heads off into the army, shouting orders, while the soldiers nearest us are already gearing up and making lines.

“Prepare yourself, Todd,” the Mayor says, watching him go. “This is the day we settle it.”

{VIOLA}

“How?”
Simone says. “How did they do it?”

“Can you send the probe back upriver?” Mistress Coyle asks.

“They’d just shoot it down again,” Bradley says, dialling some more on the probe’s remote panel. We’re gathered around the three-dimensional projection, Bradley aiming it under the shadow cast by the wing of the ship. Me, Simone, Bradley and Lee, with Mistress Coyle and more and more people from the Answer crowding in as word spreads.

“There,” Bradley says, and the projection gets even bigger.

There are gasps in the crowd. The river’s almost completely dry. There’s almost no waterfall at all. The picture rises a bit, but all we can see is the river drying up above the falls as well, the Spackle army a white- and clay-coloured mass on the road to the side.

“Are there other sources of water?” Simone asks.

“A few,” Mistress Coyle says, “streams and ponds here and there, but . . .”

“We’re in trouble,” Simone says. “Aren’t we?”

Lee turns to her, perplexed. “You think our trouble is just starting
now
?”

“I told you not to underestimate them,” Mistress Coyle says to Bradley.

“No,” Bradley replies, “
you
told us to bomb them into oblivion, without even trying for peace first.”

“And you’re saying I was wrong?”

Bradley dials on the remote screen again, and the probe rises higher in the sky, showing even more of the Spackle army stretching down the road in their thousands. There are further gasps behind us as the Answer sees how big the Spackle army is for the first time.

“We couldn’t kill them all,” Bradley says. “We’d only be guaranteeing our own doom.”

“What’s the Mayor doing?” I ask, my voice tight.

Bradley changes the projection angle again, and we see the army sorting itself into lines.

“No,” Mistress Coyle whispers. “He can’t be.”

“Can’t what?” I say. “Can’t
what
?”

“Attacking,” she answers. “It’d be suicide.”

My comm beeps and I answer it immediately. “Todd?”

“Viola?”
he says, his worried face in my hand.

“What’s going on?” I say. “Are you all right?”

“The river, Viola, the river’s–”

“We can see it. We’re watching it right–”

“The falls!”
he says.
“They’re in the falls!”

[T
ODD
]

There’s a line of lights in the shadows under the disappearing falls, stretching down the path Viola and I once took when we were running from Aaron, a watery, slippery stone path under the crashing wall of water that led to an abandoned church stretched across a ledge. The inside wall was marked with a white circle and two smaller circles orbiting it, this planet and its two moons, and you can see it glowing there, too, above the line of lights gathered across the rocky face of what’s now just a wet cliff.

“Can you see ’em?” I say to Viola thru the comm.

“Hold on,”
she says.

“Do you still have those binos, Todd?” the Mayor says.

I’d forgotten I’d taken them back from him. I run over to where Angharrad’s still standing silently next to my stuff.

“Don’t you worry,” I say to her, digging thru my bag. “I’ll keep you safe.”

I find the binos and don’t even go back to the Mayor before I put ’em up to my eyes. I hit some buttons and zoom in–

“We see them now, Todd,”
Viola says from the comm in my other hand.
“It’s a bunch of Spackle on that ledge we ran down–”

“I know,” I say. “I see ’em, too.”

“
What
do you see, Todd?” the Mayor says, coming over to me.

“What are they holding?”
Viola asks.

“A kind of bow,” I say, “but those don’t look like–”

“Todd!”
she says and I look up above the binos–

One speck of light is leaving the line from the falls, flying out from under the church symbol in a slow arc down the riverbed–

“What is it?” says the Mayor. “It’s too big for an arrow.”

I look back thru the binos, trying to find the light, coming closer by the second–

There it is–

It looks like it’s wavering, flickering in and out–

We all turn as it flies down the river, as it takes a rounded path over the last trickles of water–

“Todd?”
Viola says.

“What
is
it, Todd?” the Mayor growls at me.

And I see thru the binos–

As its path curves in the air–

And starts heading back towards the army–

Back towards us–

That it ain’t flickering after all–

It’s
spinning
–

And that the light ain’t just light–

It’s
fire
–

“We need to get back,” I say, keeping the binos to my eyes. “We need to get back into the city.”

“It’s heading right for you, Todd!”
Viola’s screaming–

The Mayor can’t help it no more and tries to yank the binos from my hand–

“Hey!” I yell–

And I punch him in the side of his face–

He staggers back, more surprised than hurt–

And it’s the screaming that makes us turn round–

The spinning fire has reached the army–

The crowd of soldiers is trying to part, trying to get away as it flies towards ’em–

Flies towards
us
–

Flies towards
me
–

But there’s too many soldiers, too many people in the way–

And the spinning fire comes blazing thru ’em–

Right at head height–

And the first soldiers it hits are blasted nearly in two–

And it ain’t
stopping
–

It ain’t
effing stopping
–

The spinning don’t even drop speed–

It rips thru the soldiers like matches being struck–

Destroying the men directly in its way–

And engulfing the men on either side in a sticky, white fire–

And it’s
still
flying–

Still
as fast as it was–

Coming right towards me–

Right towards me and the Mayor–

And there ain’t nowhere to run–

“Viola!”
I yell–

{VIOLA}

“Todd!” I yell into the comm as we watch the fire curve through the air and slam into a group of soldiers–

Through
a group of soldiers–

Screams start rising in the air behind us from people seeing the projection–

The fire slices through the army as easy as someone drawing a line with a pen, curving as it goes, tearing the soldiers to pieces, sending them flying, coating everything it even comes close to in fire–

“Todd!”
I shout into the comm.
“Get out of there!”

But I can’t see his face any more, just the fire cutting a path in the projection, killing everything in the way, and then–

Then it
rises
–

“What the hell?” Lee says next to me–

It rises up above the army, out of the crowd, out of the men it was killing–

“It’s still curving,” Bradley says.

“What
is
it?” Simone asks Mistress Coyle.

“I’ve never seen it before,” Mistress Coyle answers, her eyes not leaving the projection. “The Spackle obviously haven’t been idle.”

“Todd?”
I say into my comm.

But he doesn’t answer.

Bradley draws a square with his thumb on the remote and a box appears in the projection, surrounding the fiery thing and enlarging it out to one side of the main picture. He dials some more and the image slows down. The fire burns on a spinning bladed
S,
so bright and ferocious it’s hard to even look at it–

“It’s going back to the falls!” Lee says, pointing back to the main projection, where the fiery thing has risen up out of the army, still curving, still flying viciously fast. We watch as it lifts higher in the air, completing one long circle, rising up the zigzag hill, heading towards the ledge under the now-dry falls, still spinning and burning. We can see the Spackle there now, dozens of them holding more burning blades at the end of their bows. They don’t flinch as the flying one heads right towards them, and we see a Spackle with an empty bow, the one who fired the first shot–