They used their wing hands to hold on, mostly, but tore strips out of the canvas roof with their clawed feet, reaching down as if feeling around inside. Vio banged her skillet down on the clutching claws like a hammer, which made them jerk back, and whanged other mud-bats in the face or body as she could reach. She drove off some, but more came.
Vio’s screams shattered when a bat-creature beat its wings and began to rise, clutching her toddler in its two feet. Owlet’s mouth went square with terror and pain as he was lifted into the air, his shirttail flapping wildly around his churning knees. From the corner of Fawn’s eye she saw a patroller boy, she wasn’t sure which one, unseated and pulled struggling from his horse. Three mighty wing beats, and he fought free, only to fall with a cry cut off too sharp and a sickening bone-crack noise. Arm, leg, neck? Yanked around by Magpie, Fawn couldn’t see where he fell.
A stench and a hot wind buffeted Fawn in the back, and suddenly a clawed foot anchored itself in her shoulder. Her cry of pain came out a stretched wail, “Go away! Go away! Go away!” as she beat at the creature with her hands, only to have it grab her around her other arm and flap its vast wings again and again. Its claws were like iron, its thin muscles like cable. Without the grip on her pommel, she began to rise from her saddle, and frantically wrapped one foot into a stirrup strap. Galloping Magpie jerked them along as if the mud-bat was a kite and Fawn the kite string. If the creature let go and she fell she could be dragged by her ankle, but if she let go she could be carried off like Owlet…
Copperhead, half bolting, half bucking, appeared in the right of Fawn’s vision. Dag was somehow still aboard, gasping for air, gold eyes demented. There was no sign of his steel knife, but he swiped frantically with his hook and connected at least once, tearing a strip from a leathery wing beating against his face. The mud-bat yelped and drew its foot claws from Fawn’s right shoulder, which welled with blood.
At Dag’s next swipe the mud-bat caught his hook in its foot and held hard, releasing Fawn’s left arm, too. She grabbed at her saddle as she fell, ripping several fingernails half off, but yanked her ankle from her stirrup strap and came tumbling to the ground on her feet and not her head, rolling in the damp earth and weeds. She scrambled to her knees, rearing around dizzily and trying to spot Dag again.
Magpie shied away. Copperhead, made frantic by the flapping monster fixed overhead, got his head down and gave a mighty twisting buck that would have launched his rider into the air even without the aid of a mud-bat. A second mud-bat swooped near.
“Take leg!” screeched the first as Dag wrenched, kicked, punched, and struggled. The second mud-bat got a claw into one of his boots, then brought its other foot down for an iron grip on Dag’s ankle. Somehow, the two sorted themselves out so their beating wings didn’t knock into one another, and rose higher.
They talk! They have wits! They work with each other! Oh no, no… Fawn staggered along beneath the swooping shadow. She thought she was crying, but no sound seemed to be coming out of her bone-dry throat.
Higher overhead, Dag twisted, heaved, swore. Fawn remembered the falling patroller, and screamed upward, “Dag! Don’t fight them till you’re closer to the ground!”
He stared down wildly at her, seemed to realize how high he’d been dragged, and abruptly froze. He heard, he understood, oh thanks be! With his hand, still free, he clawed at his throat. Snapped the leather thong that held Crane’s knife.
“Spark, take the knife!”
She stared up openmouthed, bewildered. The sheathed knife fell, turning in air, into the weeds, where it bounced unbroken in soft soil.
She looked up to see Dag rising higher, higher…
In the distance, the howling toddler was being carried eastward; behind him, a madly flapping mud-bat seemed also to have Tavia, although it was struggling for altitude with her greater weight. Fawn didn’t think the evil things could weigh more than forty pounds, wings and all, but the biggest ones seemed to be able to lift upwards of a hundred. Fawn weighed less. She squirmed in the dirt and sought a well-anchored sapling to grip as more mud-bats swooped overhead, but they didn’t appear to be able to take prey right off the ground without fouling their wings. Once fallen and awkward, they could be outrun even by her, she thought.
She raised her head again. The wagons and the riders had reached the shelter of the trees, a litter of dead or injured mud-bats left in their wake.
The slaughter was no consolation. Tavia’s horse was down, making dreadful noises, gut-gouged and bleeding. Some mud-bats were attracted to its helplessness like the swarm around the dead mule, but most of the survivors took to the air and followed their comrades bearing the captives, screeching garbled abuse and clear calls to Come! at the hungry lingerers.
Along the woods’ edge to the east, Fawn thought she glimpsed Sumac spurring her horse in and out of the trees in a futile effort to follow.
Fawn crawled forward and gathered up the sharing knife, gripping it with trembling, bloodied fingers.
Whit galloped back out from under the trees toward Fawn, slid from his saddle, threw her up, and climbed after. She drew breath in stuttering gasps, unable to speak, but stuffed the knife in her shirt as they dashed for the woods once more. Beneath the screen of the branches at last, she slid down, then down to her knees, shaking too hard to stand. She wanted to faint, to escape this horrific moment, but she’d never mastered that trick.
She was going to have to get up and deal with whatever came next.
“He giv’ you his knife! Why’d he drop you that knife?” Whit wheezed. “Last thing!”
Neeta, scratched, bleeding, and wild, strode up. “I saw. Madness! Dag’s got as good a chance of using it as we do-better! Absent gods, it’s the only sharing knife we have left!”
Fawn stared fearfully up through the leaves at the luminous, empty sky, and thought, No. He’s got one other.
19
People had dreams about flying, Dag had heard. He might have nightmares about it in the future, if he lived. Just now that wasn’t looking…
… down. He shuddered for breath that would not come. The world wheeled wildly beneath him, like a map grown green and alive. The mud-bats’ flapping wings were as thunderous as a tent coming loose in a windstorm. Horses looked strange from this angle, legless ovoids with questing heads. Copperhead and Magpie were running off riderless and bucking. Had Fawn fallen? Where? There. Too still? No-she lunged up, scuttled, dove under a little tree that seemed much too scant a cover.
Alive. So far, so far.
On the next whirl he glimpsed Sumac, face raised, whipping her horse in and out of the fringe of the woods. She fell behind. The mudbats lurched and swooped at a terrific pace, unimpeded by any barrier.
No, wrong. The mud-bats were laboring hard to clear the eastern ridge.
Dag abandoned thought of the knife in his boot in favor of getting his hand around the other ankle of the mud-bat that gripped his hook.
It would not be able to drop him wholly at its convenience… the mudbat shook its back foot and made an angry screeching noise, but in this position was almost as helpless to fight as Dag. The feeling that his skull was exploding in his panic eased slightly with this doubtless-false sense of control.
Fawn had seen the problem at once, while his head had still been swinging around. If he fought free at this height-the blurring fall, the hot crunch of impact-even Arkady wouldn’t be able to put the pieces together again. Blight, I only look like I know what I’m doing because so much of it is the same doings of the past forty years. The truly new uncovered his weaknesses. Such as now, when he wanted down with a desperate desire, but not that fast…
He stiffened his neck and tried to look in some other direction. Most of the surviving mud-bats had winged ahead, but the burdened ones lagged. The screaming toddler-oh, I hear you and agree, little brother- was not far in front of him, if higher up. At least Owlet’s mud-bat seemed to have its back claws locked around the child’s thin arms, not cruelly piercing them the way the other had caught Fawn’s shoulder.
Tavia was ahead and lower, struggling. She, too, had hit on the notion of wrapping her hands around her
