Thief of Destiny: The Collected Saga of the Panther Page 19

  His hands already wrapped, Manwe readied to go next.

  Cleon approached. "Now not too fast, Panther. I need to be able to see you to perform my enchantment, and if I can't, then you're on the hook."

  "A bad choice of words," Manwe mouthed silently, making a nervous smile.

  Cleon gave Manwe's hands an affectionate squeeze. "Don't go doing anything you'll regret. I can only save you so many times, Panther."

  Manwe eased himself off the bridge, his weight suddenly in his hands and feet as he tried to stop the immediate slide. Controlled, he allowed Folami decide the room she needed, letting her sink further into the space between the towers and the city. A few times he lost her, only the noise of her sandals scraping against the taut line to let him know she was there. Foot by foot, minute by minute, they went on, each strain taken in complete silence. The slight breeze in the cave, birthed from some unseen place, chilled bare flesh coated in nervous sweat.

  The apex of the city's tallest tower closed, a welcome relief when Manwe caught sight of it again.

  Black lights flared from the city, spiraling upward with fury as the bolts of magic tore through roofs and supports. They raced past the three companions on the rope, striking the Tower of Elegba’s bottom. The cavern complex shuddered at once. Boulders the size of rhinos dislodged from the ceiling.

  Manwe hugged the rope as the blast slithered down the line. Cleon fell from his place as the coarse fibers writhed like serpents. Panicked by his lover's fall, he thought to reach out when he noticed the sorcerer gliding toward the tower, his robes gathered in his hands. Shouting above the next volley of malefic magic cast from the city, Cleon flew towards the turret and crashed on the floor where he lay still.

  More black lights launched. Tremors forced Manwe and Folami into a swing, and swaying back and forth, Manwe tried to angle in the direction of the turret.

  Folami shrieked when the Koebeeng shot up from the darkness, its fanged mouth snapping at her legs. Manwe let one hand free and drew his knife, ready to sacrifice himself to buy her more time. The nightmare face dropped back into the abyss with a thud, crushing whatever it had landed on.

  "We have to reach the turret," Manwe cried above the next volley of black lights. "Swing!"

  Folami kicked her feet in the direction of the turret, which Manwe mimicked. Cave dust rained on their shoulders as they gathered momentum to carry her close to the tower's edge. Leaping at the end of the next swing, she let go, missing an ascending black light by mere feet. Smacking the edge of a parapet hard, her legs hung freely in the air as she clung to its side.

  Free of her weight, the rope wriggled as Manwe fought to recover his balance, turning in the void when he saw the Koebeeng hurtling toward him. Bringing his feet up in time to push off the beast's face, Manwe screamed in terror as the monster's flight knocked him wide of his desired course.

  The fiber of the cable dug painfully into his palms. Manwe cried out a second time as he let go.

  His fall ended short.

  Held aloft in the air, Manwe struggled in the unnatural hold of forces beyond his perception, flailing his arms and legs until a familiar voice called.

  Amplified beyond the chaos the subterranean battle between the resolute Tower of Elegba and the conquered city below, the booming words rose high above the explosions of Witch People's black lights. "Stay still, Panther," Cleon shouted, his hands curled into claws as bright yellow light pulsed from his fingers. The sorcerer, one foot on the turret’s fence, stood in defiance of the hell breaking out around him. Blood matching his robes trickled down the front of his face, leaving him masked in crimson as he held his bare hands up, fighting to maintain his spell.

  A black light whizzed up, its rude light showing that Folami knelt behind Cleon, crouched over a third person Manwe did not recognize. When it struck the ceiling, it dislodged a second large stone that traveled in a spill of dust. Manwe jostled without volition, his head inches away from its path. He felt a sudden jerk, and suddenly he was free again, flying through the air without the power of Cleon to guide him. He opened his eyes in time to see Cleon flying to meet him, arms out.

  The world disappeared in flares of red. Held in strong, thin arms, Manwe let his body go limp as he and sorcerer bombed the center of the turret with a bone-rattling impact.

  He awoke to a sapphire light, as deep as a berry but shining with an otherness. On his side, Manwe blinked at the strange rock stuck in the ground, troubled by its blue shine. His thigh and shoulder ached from the hard earth, but wiggling fingers and toes, he took it as a good sign everything at least worked how it should. Sitting up, he felt the fiber of a carpet beneath his hands, the warmth of oil lamps on his skin. Near the small door to the hut, Cleon nestled in a shadow, watching the haunted city outside the small window cut from the wattle wall. To Manwe's right, in another alcove like the one he sat in, Folami rested beside the sleeping form of a young girl, arms hugging her knees as she stared off into nothing. Blood dyed the bandages tied to the girl's exposed shoulder.

  "Where are we?" Manwe asked, breaking the quiet. The windows to the world beyond their walls revealed shacks built atop shacks, a maze of small alleys and lanes only one or two could fit through at a time.

  "We made it to the bottom of the spire," Cleon whispered. "You hit your head when you landed. I carried you until Folami found this place."

  "Who's she?" Manwe motioned at the sleeping teenager beside the Songbird. "I saw her before. Right before I blacked out."

  "One of Anansi's, apparently," said Folami. "There was a hatch on the floor of the turret. She came out of it to help us get away from the battle."

  "How did she get wounded?" Manwe asked.

  Folami grimaced at the question. "I mistook her for one of the Witch People. One of my darts is buried in her shoulder."

  "Is she the only one?"

  Folami gave a sullen nod.

  Manwe rubbed his eyes with his fingers, massaging away the last dregs of unconsciousness before he crawled toward Folami and the girl. Squatted beside the Songbird, he checked the girl's face first, peering through the darkness to discern her features. Satisfied by the normal slope of her forehead, the darkness of her skin beneath the chalk-like powder, he investigated the bandaged wound on her shoulder. Lengths of dirty wool wrapped around the shank of an iron dart, soaked to deep rust.

  "All right," he said to Folami, "moving her will do more harm until we can redress the wound with something cleaner. There had to be healers in this city before the Witch People came."

  "So, we're going outside," Folami concluded.

  "No, Manwe's going outside," Cleon said. "Wounded or not, we're not here to save her—we need to find one of these stones Anansi told us about and get it back to him before it’s too late up above. What happens on the surface of the world matters more than some little fool the voduni failed to rein in."

  The sorcerer's blunt answer drew a glare from Folami, but Manwe could not fault his lover's logic—the longer they stayed beneath the earth, the less likely they were to stop the disaster above it. Reaching behind him to discover by some miracle he had retained his knife, he crawled toward the door. "Anansi said the crystal caverns are at the bottom of the city. I just need to be pointed in the right direction."

  Manwe let Cleon’s weir-light lead as he wandered the catwalks of the abandoned city, the red point ruddy so it did not draw attention. The silence of the rickety buildings, wood and rope and nails, towered like the skeletons of forgotten behemoths. He could spy the towers above him through the mess of roofs and ladders, the two massive stalactites from where he had descended gigantic from this vantage point.

  The boards of the walkways creaked under every footfall, whether it was Manwe's or something else, the noises louder in the silence no matter how near or far they originated. The foreboding darkness seemed liquid to his eyes, having adjusted after...

  He did not know how long he had been underground. The disturbing fact failed to deter Manwe's pace, but t
he specter remained as he scaled down ladders to the deeper catacombs. Had Toba lost track of time? Had he even known where he was, suffering the tortures the Witch People put him through? Had there been anything else other than pain and the pitch of this underworld?

  The lower levels of the vodunis' city transformed from buildings made of wood to those of dark, solid stone carved by chisel and hammer. Smooth lanes led to blind alleys of abandoned homes ransacked in the recent invasion. Manwe passed these homes in silence, thankful at least for the quiet of where his feet now tread.

  Stairs were replaced by long, sloping ramps that led to the bottom of the vault, upon which had been built a great dome of bones. A weird light escaped between the gaps in the mortal slopes of the wall, lime and bright, which fluttered like a dying heart. Pieces of the barrier had been blasted away, leaving the blackened edges sharp. This was where the black lights had been launched, Manwe surmised. He reached up, hesitant, and closed a bare black hand around the red light Cleon had summoned for him. Slight warmth, an odd buzz, and the spell died with nary an effort.

  For the first time, he was glad for the shadows. Bent in a deep crouch, Manwe drew his knife and ran for the dome, his attention keen to any movement. A chorus reached his ears before too long, a droning chant he recognized as the dread song of the Witch People. An awful beat, bone rapped on bone in uneven percussion, almost halted his charge. Memory rose from his mind without warning, of blood and sorceries, wedge teeth gnawing on guts hung from the ceiling as cultists danced.

  Gritting his teeth, Manwe let his rage rise with the terror. These were the bastards of the earth who had taken his Toba, the bastards that had given power to the malignancy that was Voduni Calla, a Dead Man—and the bastards that had destroyed his revolution. He leapt upon the wall, crawling hand and foot for the apex. The songs hummed in the bones until his hands hurt. He stopped midway up, near one of the holes where the black lights had blown through the ancient skeletons.

  Packed into a shallow pit, dozens of Witch People danced in broken circles, their bare feet leaking as they tramped on a field made of bright green crystals. Smeared red by the cuts they had made, the sharp formations throbbed with the beat the drummers created, bashing the tops of human skulls with crusted femurs they had stripped of flesh but left raw and gross.

  The scene, far too reminiscent of one Manwe witnessed above on the savannah, played out in its macabre manner, surrounding a pair of figures at the center of the chaos. Seated on a pile of dingy furs, a man sat with his legs crossed, his eyes wide with madness as he took in the ritual around him. Mumbling through gore-stained lips, he turned his head right and left in small jerks. Hands stained with blood, he suddenly thrust out an arm, its length opened and oozing from a series of shallow slices.

  His aide, a young girl dressed in rags, shrieked in response. Manwe watched her closely as she ran into crowd of dancers, noticing how her features matched those of the Dead Man that had ordered her charge—perhaps his daughter? She dragged one of the dancers to the center and drew a sharpened piece of bone from the mottled hide tied around her waist. The chosen dancer stood in perfect stillness as the girl plunged her bone knife into his abdomen, ripping and gouging until he slumped to the glowing floor.

  Father and daughter set to work ripping open his rib cage to expose to the steaming organs, and from the horrid chasm, the Dead Man extracted his follower's still-beating heart. Holding it up, he shouted a series of unintelligible words, slurred and coarse. The life flowing out of the severed arteries dripped onto the crystalline ground, staining the green lights in runny spots of black.

  The entire cavern vault rumbled when the crystals flared, causing the ritual dancers beneath to fall to their gouged knees. Shaken by the quake, Manwe clung to the dome of bones as a scraping, drumming sound vibrated the air, so close and so powerful he almost lost his bowels when he looked down in time to see the smooth length of the Koebeeng slither through the natural spaces of the skeletal structure. Massive, terrifying, the dread cryptid moved like shadow changing the light, its hard flesh unharmed by the points jutting out of the floor. It came to a stop before the Dead Man and his daughter, its six blue eyes focused on the dark heart the former displayed.

  His mouth cut open by his fear, Manwe marveled at the sensation coursing his entire body, putting every nerve on end when he considered what he saw before him. The power, the evil, the sheer... he could not find the words to describe what he felt, too swept up in a terrified awe. He continued to the dome's peak, watching below as the Witch People prostrated, crying in celebration of their summoning. When he reached the top, Manwe found a hole in the crooked ceiling, large enough to slip into a drop that would land him directly behind the Dead Man.

  He paused. Manwe knew what would happen when he broke the Dead Man's connection to the Koebeeng. He knew he would not survive, set directly before the beast, unless he knew exactly where to move the moment the spell broke.

  With one last look to the Dead Man, his daughter, and the Koebeeng, Manwe freed his iron knife and leapt into the hole.

  *****

  Landing on the rocky floor beneath the dome, Manwe cut open the throat of the Dead Man's daughter. Blood dotted his face as the shaman turned to watch his child fall to the ground, her hands held to the hissing wound. The heart fell from the Dead Man's hands as he sunk to his knees and cradled her draining form, letting out a wail of sorrow that did not fit his inhuman appearance.

  Manwe turned for the nearest wall of the shallow pit, bending down while he went to wriggle loose crystals from the hard soil. A few of the Witch People not stunned by his sudden appearance made to converge on him when they were halted by a piercing roar.

  The Koebeeng awakened.

  The monster darted at the kneeling Dead Man, who wept bitter tears as he and his girl were swallowed whole. Turning upon the other adherents, it reared like an adder, fangs dripping gore. Manwe found a loose stone near the wall's edge, and stabbing his knife into the dirt, wrenched it free. Cutting his hand as he took it up, he jumped as high as he could, grabbing hold of the top ledge with his free hand. Nearly screaming, he hauled himself up as the Koebeeng writhed and devoured, claiming life in each passing moment.

  Manwe crawled into the gapes in the bones, weaving his way past the dome before the Koebeeng burst out the top of the structure, collapsing inward. Running headlong, he dodged the skeletal shards where they fell, refusing to look back at thing chasing him. He heard the rumble of the beast growing close again.

  A red flair shot from the higher levels of the city, a streak that halted the grinding noise of the Koebeeng. Another rose, then another, and before long, a line shaped itself in a clear path headed eastward. Recognizing Cleon's sorcery, Manwe went in the direction of the first shot, guessing at his lover's trick.

  For the first and last time, he looked over his shoulder.

  The Koebeeng had halted its chase, entranced by the streaming flares before it broke off its pursuit and headed east.

  *****

  Manwe sat upon the way connecting the Towers of Elegba and Lacroi, looking on the unlit city as he thumbed the hard edge of his iron knife. His mood matched the sullen dark of the wooden crown that formed the highest reaches of the metropolis, its points stabbing up at him as if to reclaim one that had escaped. Blood crusted the thin line of his weapon, the only remnant of a deed he struggled to banish from his mind.

  "I’d know that troubled brow anywhere."

  He glanced up to his left, unsurprised to see Folami standing over his shoulder. The front of her leather armor was scuffed and stained. Her eyes went down to the city as well, a slight frown on her full mocha lips.

  "It's been a time, Songbird," he said, wearily returning his focus. "A long time."

  Folami sat down beside him, her feet dangling over the edge. "I cannot image how you came down here the first place, especially if all you found were those... things..."

  "People," he replied, correcting her. "There were people down th
ere."

  "How can you say that?" she asked. "They were the ones that took Toba."

  "No, a lord took Toba." His cheeks tight, he closed his eyes. He could feel his dead love's weight in his arms, a weight that grew when the last breath left. "But I took a little girl today. Or yesterday." Manwe stroked the coarse beard on his cheeks. "Whenever it was, she was a daughter. She was lost, like the rest of them. And I murdered her."

  Folami said nothing. Side by side, the two thieves continued their vigil until she spoke again. "Why?" she asked. "Why did you kill her?"

  "Because I knew that if I wanted to break the Dead Man's concentration, I had to hurt him." Quick to the point, he shook his head. "I can't stop it, Folami. I can't stop myself when I know there is weakness. I saw that Dead Man pull the heart from the body of his fellow, hold it aloft like some trophy, and all I wanted was to hurt him the most."

  "Because of Toba?"

  "Because of Calla." Manwe swallowed his bitterness. "All I saw was him, taking away the thing I had fought so hard to make real."

  Folami hummed knowingly. "Your revolution."

  "Yes. That damned revolution." He scratched the dried blood on his iron with a thumbnail, clearing a small line in the burnt red. "I lost Toba, and the centaur, and Kosey. I can't let go of that anger."

  "The centaur?" she asked, confused.

  "It doesn't matter," he said.

  Folami bent slightly to make sure he looked back. "We lose people, Manwe. For whatever reason, we just do. Sometimes it is by an accident, other times by a mistake, but very rarely do we choose why things happen. You chose to kill that girl because it broke her father's spell on the monster. Tell me, would she have survived if you had killed her father instead?"

  "No."

  "The maybe what you did was a mercy. Maybe." Folami scooted back from the ledge and stood, dusting the back of her muscular thighs. "None of us will ever know the scope of what we do. The only thing we can hope is that whatever we do is good, and we will rise from it."