Book 2 The Gods of Light and Liars

Chapter Ninteen: Escape

She wheeled the Hare around at once and began riding towards the shrieks and screams and other sounds of distress. It sounded insane—felt insane, too, as she drove this rabbit-thing towards the most blood-curdling screams she'd ever heard—but it was another Alex-ism. When you're trying to get away, go with the crowd if you can. It'll be easier to get lost, and if you're caught you can say you were overpowered. The problem, she thought, as she dodged around a collapsed woman in green, is that there hadn't been many screams when she started moving. Now the shrieks were spreading like ripples in a pool, cries of No, and Run, and the Beast! It's here! Words spilling like blood into the darkness around them. Hawk glanced up to see what her guards were doing. They, too, were running towards the noise. Excellent.

She kept going in that direction until the expected wall of people stopped her. Green robes and Gold, women and men. The dancers were now varying shades of pale and green as they struggled to get past. The wind now carried the scent of blood. Not good, but at least it identified where and what the bad things were. She allowed the crowd to carry her backwards, back nearer the Archons, maneuvering all the while to get nearer to the procession's edge.

The struggle was fierce, as people moved from being a crowd of individuals to a flow like water. Some few individuals could spin off in little eddy-like drifts, but the majority of people were a singular, focused stream. The column of frightened worshippers parted before her like some sort of miracle, giving her time to prepare for each wave. Here they came again, after the briefest pause. They rushed to her and she had to dodge, pulling her Hare's face this way and that, trying to keep her animal clear as humanity tsunamied around her. It made sounds of distress, cries that she'd never heard before. The Hare cried out like a child in pain, sharp focused breaths and then a scream, AAAAA-ourAAAH, over and over, AAAAAAh-ourAAAAh, as it dodged and bobbed like detritus in humanity's flood.

Soon, the rush of green and gold began to be tinged with red.

Hawk decided she'd gone far enough, and simply let her somewhat stressed looking Fleet-Hare take over. And it didn't hesitate at all. It bolted with one singular jump over the heads of all before her, and then kept running, flat out, into the dark. And too late, she found herself remembering Alex's bookish advice, straight out of the Last Unicorn: Never run from anything immortal. It attracts their attention.

Too late. The Hare had its version of a bit in its version of teeth, and was going full tilt through a forest unseen save for the barest of shadow. Leaves smashed across Hawk's face, cutting her arms and cheeks and the exposed bits of her calves. She had to bend down and near to her Hare's neck to keep away from the worst of the branches, and it was all she could manage, clinging to its back like a limpet. Now she was alone in the dark, a night that would never break into day, and she had no extra lights, neither the good old battery powered kind or any of the cold-lights the Archon had made. She was going to be in the unyielding dark.

It was still better than what she left behind.

The Fleet-Hare slowed its pace down to quiet footfalls beneath her. Nothing as loud or as horrifying as a horse. There was only soft breathing, and the still-softer hush of furred feet in some form of soft grass. After a few more steps, the Fleet-Hare stopped entirely, and lowered its head down to graze.

It was quiet, out here. The first true quiet she'd heard since they left the Temple of Light. Funny. She had seen that place so briefly, lived there not even one full day (not counting time spent unconscious, of course) and yet now when she thought of safety, comfort, and security, she thought of the Temple. Even the horror of it holding the Prism that started all this paled in comparison to the sense of safe the Light-Archon brought to his domain. This was a different sort of quiet than that. She was not safe while in it. The only problem with returning to the procession was...well, she was pretty sure she was less safe there than she might be here, in the dark.

After all, natural predators can be sated. The human sort never seemed to bank their fires.

She let a lot of slack into the reigns and just let her frightened overgrown rabbit take lead. The sound of it munching contentedly to itself was the only sound for what felt like miles. She took a few shuddering breaths and just listened to it eat. The distant echoes of the frightened procession echoed in the darkness like water in a stream.

And then it wasn't the only sound.

A low, hunted, feted growling from behind, and another set of footfalls told Hawk she was not alone.

***

The Hare had noticed, probably before Hawk did. It lifted its head twice, chewing its mouthful of grass. Now it stiffened beneath her, as if readying for flight, and waited. The growl and footfalls came again, somewhat further to the left. It moved away, to the right. Hawk wanted to stop it from moving at all, but she didn't know what was hunting her, low growls and slinking movements and—the wind shifted—a stink like stagnant water. Ugh. She let the Hare move as it thought best. If nothing else, an animal would have better survival instincts than she would.

The Hare took a few steps forward, then dropped its head back towards the grass.

A growl out of the dark, nearer than Hawk wanted, had the Hare move a few more feet. Then it went back to grazing.

She was being hunted. And she had no idea what to do about it. Only that she could feel it coming nearer, a psychosomatic acid crawling down the back of her neck. She gave the Fleet-Hare its lead, hoping that it would have a better idea of what to do. But it just took a few more steps away from the growling presence and dropped its head back to graze.

Maybe she wasn't at risk, right now.

Growl.

Or maybe her Fleet-Hare was especially stupid.

God. She hadn't been thinking at all. Or else, she had, but like a modern day human, for whom the biggest problem is the glass ceiling, and not the possibility of wolves at the door. She was far too used to nature being a tamed thing, the way she was used to light being a permanence, as regular as clockwork. She'd been stupid to come out here. Stupid to run away from the crowd, where at least there was always someone else to shove in the direction of teeth and claw. And now she got to be ashamed of her own sarcasm and survival instinct. She'd go to her grave with guilt. Fantastic.

The beast in front of her growled again. And this time there was a different timbre to its growl. Something the Fleet-Hare heard in its bones, because now its head came up and it tensed beneath Hawk, and she knew with her best sense (her Alex-sense, the thing he'd tried to train into her) that this time it would run, and that would be a mistake. Her only choice after that was to hope there wasn't a second beast...and that she could out-run its ability to kill.

And then she saw hope in the distance: Lights.

That were not coming from the direction of the Earth Archon's Procession.

It didn't take three seconds for Hawk to start shouting. "Hello!" She said, "Hello the lights! Hello!"

And to her delight and horror, the lights answered back.

"Hello! Hello! Hawk!" It was Em's voice. "Hawk, is that you?"

And then it all went south. Someone off in the direction of the lights and Emile Yung's voice decided the best thing they could do was shoot off a flare. It soared high up into the air with the most brilliant of white lights, turning this shadow-shrouded landscape into daylight for the first time. Soot black trees with white and red leaves surrounded Hawk, the leaves almost iridescent in the flare's light.

And it exposed a being at least seven feet tall at the shoulder. It had the long and languid lines of a great cat. No purring happy rabbits here, it was surrounded by mobile tendrils with thick gill-slits in its jowels and glowing eyes with strange, oval pupils. Violets and golds decorated its scales, but it was mostly a turquoise so dark it should have been blood. Cephalopod eyes, empty of emotion and filled with hunger, watched Hawk with a languid assurance she did not like. It had a forked tongue, which it flicked at her, and very white teeth. And both of its eyes were fixed on her and the Hare.

And then, just as the icing on the cake, came a shout from behind the beast's left shoulder. "Hold on Hawk!" Em's voice. "Hold on.

"We're on our way!"