The deadly little egg was balanced and streamlined to perfection, but still it was a tricky throw because the furious crowd of naked braves continued to dance around the captives and their executioner. There were only two or three paces between each of the cavorting, rushing men and Ria’s shot, taken on the run, had to pass through one of these fast-shifting gaps and strike down a moving target over a distance of a hundred paces.
The whirl of the dance obscured her view, but she heard a satisfying double clunk! – something like the sound of an axe biting into a tree trunk – as the missile bounced into the advancing brave’s naked ankles. Still five paces away from Hond, he tumbled and fell head over heels. In the process she was pleased to see he had impaled his left hand with the flint knife he held in his right.
He didn’t cry out, and an instant later, with an athletic bound, he was standing again – this time locking his gaze onto Ria with such force that she felt it like a blow to the face.
He was a fearsome giant of a man, bigger even than the biggest of the Uglies. Enormous knots of muscle stood out on his broad shoulders and narrow waist, and a huge penis and hairy testicles dangled between his thighs.
Ria wasn’t afraid.
As she hurtled across the sunlit clearing towards him – eighty paces, seventy, sixty – what she felt was rage and remorse.
Above all, remorse.
For she could not escape the conclusion that the terrible events unfolding around her were her fault. Her brothers must have come out in search of her when she’d failed to return the night before. They were superb trackers and had followed her trail as far as this forest.
What they couldn’t have known was that a band of ferocious killers, who’d just discovered the bodies of four of their scouts, awaited them there.
And now poor Rill was dead.
At fifty paces, as though responding to a silent signal, all the dancing warriors stopped in their tracks and turned in unison to glare at her.
Ria skidded to a halt too. She’d lost the advantage of surprise and would throw better from a standstill than on the run.
Her brother’s murderer raised his transfixed hand in her direction and withdrew the blade. There was a spurt of his own blood and the unmistakable rasp of flint grinding against wet bone. He straightened, showing no weakness, and intensified his weird stare at Ria. At this distance she could see his eyes. In stark contrast to his pale gore-smeared skin, they were a startling and disconcerting bright blue.
He shook his shaggy hair, tilted back his head and began to laugh. A moment later the other twenty members of his gang joined in, opening their mouths wide and baring their pointed teeth. They all had the same mad blue eyes and the sound they made was like a pack of cave hyenas squabbling over a rotting carcass.
Summoning up all her concentration and strength, Ria threw her second stone. She could see from the surprise on her adversary’s face that he hadn’t expected this – least of all from her left hand – and she watched the missile connect hard with the side of his skull just behind the temple. His raucous laughter was cut off, his eyes rolled up in their sockets, and he stumbled, dropped to his knees and slumped forward on his face in the grass.
That was when spears the size of small trees began flying through the air from all directions, thudding into the naked bodies of the Illimani. There was a great roar and the spears were followed by a throng of Uglies, the entire escort of fifty braves who had accompanied Ria from Secret Place, wielding their clunky stone axes and hulking wooden clubs.
Pandemonium broke out amidst the Illimani, suddenly outnumbered more than two to one. Men fell, were knocked aside, hacked down. None of them ran. They fought as a pack, like wolves, with stunning ferocity. But for a brief interval no one was paying any attention to Ria who was soon straddling the hairy body of the Illimani giant she had felled.
He was conscious but dazed.
Ria stooped, wrenched his flint knife from his grasp, rolled him onto his back, and scythed off his cock and balls. As he struggled to his feet, jetting blood and bellowing in horror, she slit open his stomach from crotch to breastbone and stuffed his severed genitals into his gaping mouth. ‘That’s for Rill,’ she screamed.
She darted forward and cut the ropes shackling Hond to the stout wooden stake.
The marks of torture were everywhere on his body. ‘Can you fight, brother?’ she asked.
Hond dodged a spear thrust from an Illimani brave who leapt out at them from the melee, snatched the weapon from its owner, reversed it and brought the man down with a jab through the eye. ‘I can fight,’ he said.
Ria tightened her grip on the long flint knife and stood back to back with Hond as three more warriors converged on them.
Chapter Thirty-One
The summit of the little hill was flattened into a platform about thirty feet across, and what was going on there was much more complicated than it had looked from the ground.
The most striking part of it was the naked young man standing with his hands outstretched as though to receive an offering from the massed ranks of armed men below. Up close he was beautiful – not just good-looking but beautiful – in a way that managed to be both strong and effeminate, mysterious and tempting, wistful and joyous, dangerous and intoxicating, all at the same time.
Leoni had been too busy with sex and drugs to bust her butt at art school, dropping out before the end of her first semester, but she knew what she liked and Botticelli’s famous painting The Birth of Venus was one of her all-time favourites. The guy on the platform looked enough like Venus to be the goddess’s brother. His body was lean and hard, covered with knots of finely-sculpted muscle, but he had the same red-gold hair, cascading below his waist, the same long, sensitive features, the same alabaster skin, the same Cupid’s-bow lips. His eyes were wide and luminous, but they were not gentle and introspective like those of the Venus, nor neon-blue like the eyes of the roaring army of men raising their voices in adoration from the foot of the hill. They were a strange mixture of green and amber, like the tawny eyes of an African lion, with smoky tendrils of a darker hue, perhaps purple, radiating out from pitch-black pupils.
His age was hard to guess. Was he twenty? Twenty-five? Maybe closer to thirty? He had about him an air of invincible confidence and experience that contrasted with his otherwise youthful appearance. This is how an immortal might look, she thought. Maybe even a god.
Indeed, the wild men massed at the foot of the hill were responding to him exactly as if they were venerating and praising a god. And, although their frenzied roars were meaningless to her, Leoni could hear two syllables repeated over and over with an ecstatic emphasis and realised they must be shouting his name:
‘SUL … PA!’
‘SUL … PA!’
‘SUL … PA!’
More faintly, she also heard something else – gut-wrenching sounds of sobbing and high-pitched screams – arising from the other side of the low wood-framed shelter that Sulpa was standing in front of. She took to the air and saw a group of children being marched at spearpoint across the hilltop behind the shelter. There were three boys and three girls, none of them older than twelve, some who she thought were as young as seven. They were dirty and bloody, covered in cuts and bruises, and as naked as their brutal captors who kicked and punched them as they stumbled along.
The wretched column halted at the base of the shelter. Then the guards lifted ladders from the ground and forced the children to climb about seven feet onto the flat grille of narrow wooden slats forming the roof. There, sobbing and shivering with fear, they were made to lie face down and, one by one, their wrists and ankles were tied tight to the slats. The last of the boys, a little bigger than the others, put up a fight, squirming, punching and biting as they attempted to tie him. A lucky kick from his heel struck one of the guards full in the face and knocked him tumbling off the roof but the others subdued the struggling boy with a rain of blows so harsh they must have broken his nose and his jaw.
Le
oni wanted to protect these damaged kids, with their bashed bleeding faces squashed down into the gaps between the roofing slats. She flew around them, searching for some way to set them free, but she could do nothing in her invisible aerial body.
There came another roar from the crowd at the foot of the hill and she saw Sulpa had picked up a sword and was holding it above his head. It was pure inky black from pommel to tip and had a narrow leaf-shaped blade that bore the dull glint of smoked glass.
Sulpa pivoted to look at the four guards who were standing just behind him, two on either side of the shelter, and his gaze rested on the one who had fallen from the roof. He said something to him in a guttural incomprehensible tongue and the guard stepped forward and knelt at his feet.
Sulpa’s manner was very gentle, even kind. He rested his hand on the guard’s head and ruffled his unkempt hair, ran a concerned finger down his cheek and helped him to stand again. But next, without any change of demeanour, he gripped the sword double-handed, swung it in a lightning-fast figure of eight, and lopped off both of the man’s arms at the shoulder joints. Blood splashed in all directions and the severed limbs thudded to the ground.
A roar of appreciation rose up from the crowd and Sulpa stepped back to inspect his handiwork and savour his victim’s shrieks of agony. Then, with a sly look stealing over his beautiful features, he swung the sword again and hacked off the man’s left leg at the hip, bringing him crashing down. As he writhed and squealed a final sword stroke amputated his right leg, also at the hip.
By now Sulpa’s lean, hard body was spattered with so much blood that he looked like a demon from hell as he stepped over the shuddering torso of the butchered man and advanced into the shelter, holding the dripping black sword.
Above him the six children tied face down on the roof slats screamed in abject terror.
The roof was low, just a foot above Sulpa’s head. Positioning himself beneath the sacrificial victims – for that was what Leoni now recognised the unfortunate children to be – he stabbed upward. His sword passed through a gap between two slats and into a girl’s chest, impaling her with such force that its point emerged between her scrawny shoulder blades and protruded a foot beyond. She gave a single pitiful wail of distress. Sulpa twisted the weapon half a turn, opening a huge wound, and withdrew it, releasing a bright torrent of blood.
‘SUL … PA!’ bayed the army of spectators, as though all their thousands of voices were funnelled through one gigantic throat:
‘SUL … PA!’
‘SUL … PA!’
‘SUL … PA!’
Invisible witness to these events, Leoni felt she had become trapped inside a nightmare where the horror just grew and grew. Sulpa was standing under the gushing faucet of human blood. It pumped out from the girl’s ruptured heart in a spurting stream, splashing onto his face and into his open mouth as he tilted his head back to receive it. In seconds his whole body was daubed crimson, his long hair was drenched, and his tawny eyes glared out from behind curtains of gore.
That was when he began to run back and forth inside the shelter, stabbing up through the roof and slicing the sword’s blade along the gaps between the slats, hacking the five other children to pieces. As their blood too began to pour down in sheets into the shelter Sulpa capered and bathed in it until he was entirely red.
Red from head to foot.
A being of blood.
At last he slumped down onto his haunches in a deep puddle of blood, his mouth gaped, and he seemed to fall asleep.
Leoni threw herself upwards into the sky and looked down on the hellish scene – the roaring army gathered around the foot of the little hill, the bloodstained shelter, the children’s slaughtered bodies …
‘SUL … PA!’
‘SUL … PA!’
‘SUL … PA!’
The Blue Angel had said she would show her Jack.
Could Sulpa be Jack?
As she began to consider this possibility, Leoni discovered she was no longer alone in her out-of-body state.
Rising from the butchered corpses on the roof below her she saw the aerial forms of the six children. Like her they were transparent and insubstantial but otherwise looked much as they had in life. Although they seemed confused and uncertain, they soon began experimental manoeuvres, like butterflies on their first flight, and she guessed they were experiencing the initial euphoria and liberation of being out of body.
The murdered guard too had made the transition from life to death and hovered above his own scattered and mutilated remains. He was attempting to gather up his amputated limbs – a task that was impossible in aerial form – and seemed oblivious to all other things.
Leoni’s only concern was the children. They had left their bodies, as she had done, but for them there could be no going back. Before she returned to her own body, which she knew must be soon, she wanted to help them. After all, she had experience of weird OBE worlds. At the very least she could pass some of that on.
So far the kids hadn’t seen her, but she was about to go and try to be a friend to them when something else happened.
Sulpa was out of his body too.
Chapter Thirty-Two
From the moment she castrated the giant, Ria felt the sharp flint knife come to life in her hand like a baleful supernatural being, as though it possessed its own insatiable will for blood. Gripping its handle of smooth mammoth ivory, aching for revenge, she stood back to back with Hond.
Two of the three men bearing down on them were armed with stabbing spears. They launched a wild assault on Hond, who blocked and deflected their first thrusts. As they wheeled and turned, manoeuvring for advantage, jabbing and parrying, Ria was engaged in combat by the third brave. He was a stocky, perspiring youth, fast despite his bulk, and slippery as an eel. He muttered strange words while lashing out at her with a heavy wooden mace that had spikes and razors of obsidian embedded in its bulbous head.
It was hard to get inside the reach of the larger, heavier weapon, but Ria weaved and dived, dodging his blows, goading her assailant with quick cuts and stabs. At last he grew so frenzied he lost control and rushed her with his teeth bared and a thick foam of spittle flying from his lips. He smashed the mace down but she was already diving forward between his legs, slashing the big artery in his inner thigh with the edge of her blade. As he stumbled, spraying bright blood, she rose up behind him and thrust the knifepoint deep into his back, bringing him crashing to the ground.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw that Hond, who she’d lost in the blur of the action, was being pressed hard by the two Illimani spearmen. Then – Clunk! Thwock! – Grondin appeared out of nowhere with a stone axe hafted to a long wooden handle and chopped them both down where they stood.
Hond at once squared up to fight Grondin, but Ria rushed to separate them. ‘Trust me,’ she yelled at her brother. ‘These guys are our friends. I’ll explain … if we live.’
The epicentre of the battle had shifted away from them and Ria had space to draw breath and take stock of what was happening.
The sheer numbers of the Uglies – fifty of them against just twenty Illimani – made their victory certain, and no more than eight of the foe were still standing. But they were ruthless and practised fighters while many of the Uglies were still weakened by their instinctive horror at the act of taking human life. Some, like Grondin, appeared to have mastered this inhibition, perhaps through recent experience of combat with Clan braves, but others could not do so and the price they paid was death.
One of the Illimani, a man with a face of wizened evil, was surrounded. But instead of spearing him on the spot the Uglies relented when he dropped to his knees in surrender. Ria was already reaching for a stone from her pouch as he scooped up a hatchet from the ground and cut his way through them, slaughtering three in the blink of an eye. ‘Not so fast!’ she yelled as he ploughed onwards towards the edge of the clearing where other survivors of the Illimani war party were regrouping. She was taking aim when Trenko an
d Krisko, the gentle-mannered buck-toothed twins, barred the fleeing brave’s way.
In a heartbeat Krisko was dead, his head half hacked from his shoulders by the Illimani’s tomahawk, Trenko staggered back spouting blood from a jagged wound in his chest, and Ria let fly with the third of the five throwing stones Merina had given her. The heavy little quartz egg tore soundlessly through the air and then – CLUNK! – it caved-in the back of the Illimani’s skull, bringing him down.
There was no time to worry about Trenko – he might live or die – just as there was no time to mourn poor murdered Rill. All that could come later. For now the only thing that mattered to Ria was that none of the Illimani must be allowed to leave the field alive.
With exceptional discipline and martial skill the last six had fought their way towards one another – the man she’d just felled would have been the seventh – and regrouped into a tight mass, bristling with spears and blades, formed in the shape of an arrowhead. At the tip of the formation, urging the others towards the shelter of the forest, was a huge bald brute swinging the largest axe Ria had ever seen. Two Uglies confronted him and he cut them down – WHACK! WHACK! Two more took their place – WHACK! WHACK!
‘Hey, Grondin!’ Ria sent out her thought-voice as she ran towards them. ‘Have your boys stand off a few paces and get some spears into those bastards right now!’ Then she drew back her arm and threw her fourth stone at the Illimani axeman. It hit him between the eyes, knocking him head over heels, and at the same instant Brindle limped forward and finished the man off with a rain of powerful blows.
‘That’s the way, Brindle!’ Ria shouted in out-loud speech. ‘No mercy! Kill them all.’
She had meant to encourage him – this new-found killer instinct was exactly what was needed – but Brindle only looked back at her with sad and haunted eyes. ‘Old world has come to an end,’ his thought-voice pulsed inside her head. ‘Uglies must be murderers now.’