The General lay dead on the lawn, mouth agape, splintered ribs open to a cloudless sky. Sunlight polished his eyes as the hole in his chest wept, pooling blood under his shoulder, then elbow, the tips of his twitching fingers. Anathi dropped down onto the lawn. When her heels connecting with the soil, she felt the panic of ants drowning under the General's blood, the greed of the earth drinking him in, the worms in the topsoil burrowing deeper as they sensed moisture.
The Hundred Hillers on the lawn were silent. Their eyes were closed and they stood stiller than the corpse twitching in the middle of their circle. If it weren't for the hundreds of heartbeats pulsing through their heels and into the earth, Anathi would have thought them dead, but they were closer to sleeping -- the Queen's final command.
She had been merciful enough (was this mercy?) to command their eyes close and their minds lock. To take control of another body... Anathi's clay chilled. It took a spirit of divine corruption to even attempt it, but to take over five hundred at once? To rob each person here of will? She would have been angered by it, if the alternative had not been the sight of their Queen kneeling at the General's shoulder as blood pulsed out of him. She reached a hand between his ribs, and when she squeezed there was a squelching sound. The pulse died and the stream ebbed.
When the Sunspear rose (and it was the Sunspear, the Queen's spirit was barely a seed in a barren field now) its eyes settled on Anathi. There was a charge as their consciousnesses intersected, but then its eyes went over her shoulder. Asanda. Her scream was a silent cry coming out in hitched breaths.
Anathi turned to face her, drawing the Princess' attention.
Go, she signed. I will draw her to the milkwater.
Ndoda, at least, understood and dragged his sister through the crowd of Inner Plainers who were only now closing their eyes.
Anathi faced the Sunspear again. Its irregular heartbeat was a counter-rhythm to the hundreds thrumming through the earth, a gong in a sea of drums. Anathi pushed a glass claw through her index finger and pointed it between the Sunspear's eyes, though her focus was on the base of its skull.
It tilted its head, right hand red and sticky, cheek dripping a thin stream of blood into the corner of its mouth.
Sleep or die, Anathi said.
And who are you?
The Sunspear's question was a tidal wave so swollen with power and condescension it rocked Anathi's spirit. She took a moment to centre herself, drawing her awareness near and making it compact, immovable. She could no longer see the Queen's children running down the corridor, but at least she could stand against the Sunspear's lashing spirit now.
I am she who protects the Queen, she said, pushing glass claws through all her fingertips.
The Queen sleeps now. When her enemies are vanquished, and all threats to her person killed, I will return her to you. Until then, stand aside, little girl.
Anathi pushed her fireglass armour to the surface, and the light around her cut itself to fractals. The Sunspear took a step back at the sight of it, twitching a snarl and making the air heavier with the force of its rising power.
Do not be a fool, said the Sunspear. Strike me and you will be bound to my vengeance.
Tiny iron thorns sprouted along the underside of Anathi's fingers, all hooked inwards. A plain citruswood mask covered her from brow to jaw, decorated only by a giant siphon rune.
Do not think that a mortal threat, child. My wrath will be so whole that I will know no sleep until all who have ever heard your name are ashes in the earth.
My name is Anathi, Bound of Third Hill. Glass horns pushed through her brow, tipped in iron. You know my name. Come here and know my purpose.
**
"Boys." Anket hurried down the garden ladder with three buckets in the crook of his arm. "We need to get enough milkwater into the basin to submerge your mother."
Ndoda took the bucket given to him, knelt by the milkwater pool sloshing in the middle of the dias, and starting hauling water into the copper basin next to him. There was a moment before Khaya tore his haunted look from the pool and accepted his bucket. He promised a smile that just didn't come.
"I don't know how you're so calm," he said, kneeling beside Ndoda.
Anket grimaced as he lowered his lanky frame. "Now what good would panic do?"
Ndoda scowled. The three of them worked in silence. In fact, the entire hill felt deserted, save for the slosh of milkwater and some distant impact that occasionally rattled the windows.
Asanda sat behind her desk, her fists cold and wet as she pressed her lips against them. She didn't know how long she had been staring at the golden cuffs piled on the desk, only that, at some point, she started thinking about the hands they would bind. Hands that had ripped a man's ribcage in two.
"There's no Wayfarer clay here for Anathi to drag your mother through," Anket said.
Hands that had reached into the cavity of his chest and crushed his heart.
"We'll have to drag the basin into the hallway. Ndoda, come help me lift this side."
Hands that had massaged lavender oil into her twisted locks at least once a moon since her fourteenth year. And the look her mother -- the Sunspear, Asanda, for your own sanity call it that -- had given her...
"What are you waiting for?" Ndoda said. "Get the cuffs, let's go."
Asanda looked up. He stood at the doorway, panting with white water splashed across his thighs. Khaya was behind him, panting over the basin in the hallway. When their eyes met hers, they recoiled.
"You can contemplate what you saw later," Ndoda said. "Drown the danger first."
Why do you think I built the pool twenty-feet deep? Ma's words still carried the warmth of the kitchen ovens, the scent of oil on bread dough.
"There's nothing to contemplate." Asanda stood and snatched the cuffs off the table. "We do what needs to be done, and that's it."
**
Anathi caught the fist aimed at her throat and squeezed. The Sunspear's knuckles groaned in her fingers before a second hand grabbed one of her glass horns and torqued her head sideways. Her neck bent further than a human spine would have allowed. There was no pain in it, but the fibres that bound her clay form began to tear where her neck met her shoulder.
Be still and it shall be quick. The Sunspear's face was placid, but sweat mixed with the stream of blood running down its cheek. For you and all you've come to love.
Dipping her head, Anathi dug the iron tip of her horn into the Sunspear's forearm. The fine tip dug into the flesh but didn't break the skin; all the same, the silence of the yard crackled under the sound of meat popping on a skillet. They disengaged together and took some steps backwards, Anathi massaging the fibres in her neck whole, the Sunspear flexing the fingers on its right hand as it sucked on its forearm.
How clever you are, said the Sunspear, wrought of iron and citrus--
A second consciousness brushed against Anathi's, this one smaller, a whirlpool forever swallowing and spitting itself out. Asanda.
We're ready.
Anathi had no need for breath, but that human seed within her told her shoulders to rise and fall. She pushed her spirit out slightly, and her glass armour fell to the grass in heavy thuds. She pulled the mask off and dropped it on her discarded breastplate before the horns fell from her brow. The grass sizzled against the iron tips.
You are not my quarrel, said the Sunspear. Move.
Anathi spread her arms wide. Move me, if you can.
The Sunspear relaxed, then charged. Its feet hit the ground with a hippo's power, and yet it was leopard quick in its rush, at once a woman standing and the next moment a black and white blur of pure force. It hurtled into Anathi shoulder first. Her clay chest went soft and the Sunspear's entire arm went through her, its hand coming out the small of her back. Then all at once she hardened again. The Sunspear yanked, but it may as well have tried to pull a root from a world tree.
Anathi grabbed the free hand that tried to claw her face. She needed both arms to pull it down until it was pressed against her neck. The clay there softened, and she pushed the Sunspear's hand through, wrist deep, then yanked until it was trapped to the elbow.
Her clay legs hummed with the strain of dragging the Sunspear up to the patio. All the while, Hundred Hillers and Inner Plainers alike stood silently and with eyes closed. When they were inside the library, Anathi hooked one of the Sunspear's legs and braced to leap up to the ceiling.
This ends now, she said.
Fighting the legendary spirit had not frightened her, but there was something in the way it relaxed in her grip, how its impassive face almost seemed to... smiling was too simple. Blood dripped onto the Queen's -- the Sunspear's, her -- lips, which neither twitched upward or downward.
It appears does. Sunlight rimmed its left eye. Let us go meet the end, child.
Anathi sessed where Asanda stood, and the large basin of milkwater under a patch of clay in the hallway. There was a direct pathway from the library to there, just barely wide enough to pull the Sunspear through. Anathi leapt up, and the Sunspear did not struggle.