The next moment, the creature was greeding at her stomach. She slammed her strength upwards, feeding it steel. Her swatching knife ripped into something soft.
She heaved at the weight above her and rolled the alien onto its back. It lay there, apparatus kicking. Yen Olass screamed, and hacked into it with her knife. She killed it, killed it, killed it, shouting, spitting, slashing, swearing.
A noise behind her.
Yen Olass wheeled to find one wounded alien dragging itself toward her. She sprang forward on the attack, jumped on its back and gashed its shell open. It started to gyrate and buck, trying to throw her off. Anchoring herself with her knife, Yen Olass hung on for dear life. Every time the creature paused for a moment, she whipped the knife out and slammed it into a new spot.
When it stopped moving once and for all, she gouged a deep channel in its shell until it was just about cut in half. Then she went to work on the others to make sure they were dead for real and forever. She counted the corpses. One, two, three, four, five. She counted them again, to make sure.
Her stomach was hurting. As if it was burning. Shedding her clothes, she found the alien which had crawled over her had ripped right through her weather jacket and a woollen singlet. There were half a dozen shallow scratches on her belly. Green gunk from the body of the dying monster had reached her wounds. That might be partly to blame for the pain.
Yen Olass shovelled away sand in the centre of one of the thin slicks of water still streaming off the flats – the water would still be draining away even when the tide returned. Water spilled into the hole she dug, and she washed her wounds, cleansing them vigorously. That hurt, but she thought it best to have them clean.
The wounds bled a little; she decided to leave them open, to bleed freely into the air. Blood would carry away the last contamination. Blood was clean, unlike that filthy green monster slime. She did not want to put on her contaminated clothing, but, even in its torn and tattered state, it was too valuable to throw away. Though her weather jacket was not going to be any good for anything other than patching. It had survived all the adventures of six years and more – and now it was ruined, just like that! How was she going to replace it? Still, it had saved her life – she could not complain too much.
Yen Olass looked out to sea. The Skowshan Rocks were uncovered by now. If she went out there, she could pick some sendigraz. Out there, too, were the dark mud sands concealing the remains of an ancient forest which had branched strong and tall many thousands of years in the past, when the sea was land. It was out there that she did her work, prospecting for amber, sometimes picking up the occasional lump uncovered by the sea, and otherwise testing the sand with her probing spike till she struck something which felt promising enough to dig for.
Her probing spike.
It was still under the corpse of one of her enemies. Yen Olass recovered it, and shouldered her pack. She was starting to cool down now; it was time to start moving. No work today, that was for certain. Back to Skyhaven. What she needed was a warm fire, a cup of mulled wine and then… then maybe straight to bed.
She counted the corpses one last time, then set off. When she had gone a dozen paces, she turned and looked back, in case any were moving. She saw a gull alight on one dead body; it stood there, its knees bent back at an impossible angle. Where one gull discovers carrion, soon there will be a hundred. But when Yen Olass looked back a little later, the one gull had flown away, and no new birds had arrived to replace it. The aliens had been tested, tasted and found wanting. That, to Yen Olass, was proof that she had just killed five creatures of the Swarms. Baby ones, no doubt. She was glad they were dead.
The weight of her pack comforted her as she hiked on. She paused to gather a couple more horse mussels and dig some more wedges; she felt it might be a good idea to spend the next day in bed. At the moment, she felt strong and victorious, but she could expect a wave of exhaustion and a backwash of fear to take her under sooner or later.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Arriving at Skyhaven, Yen Olass dumped her pack down by the door, which had been left ajar.
'Monogail!' said Olass. 'I'm home!’
She went inside. The briefest glance showed her everything was in order; her home was so much a part of herself that the slightest disturbance would have sounded an alarm note in her brain.
Automatically, she reached up and touched the gollock concealed above the door lintel. It was still there. Tonight she would be glad that her cottage had strong stone walls and a strong wooden door; she would be glad of the comfort of heavy steel honed to a razor edge.
'Monogail!’
Quelaquix was absent. There was nothing surprising about that. Yen Olass was back early; usually she did not return until the rising tide drove her in from the flats. The cat knew that, and timed his returns to coincide with the arrival of fresh food; that cat had all the angles figured out.
Yen Olass examined her wounds. They had stopped bleeding and were crusting over; in a few days there would be nothing left to show for them. She pulled on a fresh woollen singlet and a linen jacket. She still mourned for her weather jacket, ripped apart by some stinking arse-blind monster.
Finding some hot coals in the ashes, Yen Olass got a fire going; she was glad she did not have to sit down and work with tinder and flint, because she was a bit shaky. She emptied out her pack, and piled all the shellfish into her one and only bucket. With a layer of fresh water over them, they would stay fresh until evening and still be alive tomorrow; she had learnt long ago that shellfish die quickly, and are dangerous if eaten once they are dead. She went outside to draw water.
Removing one of the boards that covered the well, she thought that Monogail should really do this job. It was time for the child to start doing a bit more round the house. But she was probably down at the sward pond, hunting frogs or watching Quelaquix stalking birds. Let her have her childhood, then… she might have precious little else in life.
Without looking or thinking, Yen Olass dipped a hand into the water. She drank from her cupped hand, surprised to find she was thirsty. The water was cool, and tasted good.
Looking into the well, she saw…
Five golden discs, shimmering as the water settled…
For a moment, gripped by a shock of occult dread, Yen Olass thought that some witchery had translated the corpses of the five dead aliens and placed them, as discs of hostile energy, at the bottom of her well.
Then the water settled, and she saw the discs for what they were. Gold crowns, from Sung, adorned with the familiar profile of Skan Askander. Again she thought of the five alien corpses lying dead on the sand. Five gold pieces. One for each dead alien. Magic?
Then she remember her joke with Morgan Hearst:
– And Monogail?
– For five crowns you can have her. And her pet dragon.
She looked down into the water again. Counted the coins. Pulled them out, dripping wet. Their weight almost convinced her. She looked for the familiar denizens of the well; shaken by her encounter with the five monsters, she had forgotten about them till now. They were gone. The frog Alamanda and the fish Straff – both gone.
Yen Olass stood up.
She looked around. What about her chickens? Usually 355
they were scratching around within sight of the cottage; they never went far. Had they been shut up in the hen coop? She checked. No. Nothing. A chiz, then? Had a chiz been raiding? She checked her chiz trap, and found a twist of paper in the strangling noose she had rigged up with such skill and care.
Opening the paper, Yen Olass found words in Galish orthography, inscribed with a bold, clear hand:
'One chiz. Success at last. Yours, Vexbane.’
It had to be a message from Morgan Hearst. And he dared to joke! Yen Olass strode inside and seized her gollock. A world-destroying anger boiled inside her. Blood burned in her cheeks. The world rolled under her feet; her every movement was gifted with effortless power, as if she were riding a stallion. Buoyed up by her wrath, she was
