109 - :target deenay degrading:

Kyrus couldn’t see anything, his head jammed into his bird’s neck feathers, blocking any hope of sight, his cheekbone smashing into the prickly, furnace hot skin and spine bones underneath as Pikro bounced frantically from tsingy tip to tsingy tip, screaming.

The screaming cut people’s yells into incomprehensible bits of sound. He tried to reach up to grab the chain under the beak but nearly fell, grabbed and slid to that side, boots slipping as he grabbed with his knees, in sudden agony as his groin was smashed into the bird’s bare-plucked backbone where the saddle had been. His face was full of veil and feathers as he gasped.

Stop. Stop this bird. It’s gone mad. :data stream: degrade target deenay.  What? What was that? No leather on this bird, all rotted and fallen away.  One more jump and I might slip for good. Sliced, smashed – concentrate. Concentrate. Bakons grunting out of the way, fliers, bugs and more bugs flung up by our passage.

Bees.  A wild hive.  Swarming up under da’s mandery.  HEEEEELLLLP.

“Wait for it!  Wait... he’ll be killed if we time this wrong!”

Blind the bird.  But not mid-jump.  Blinders. Get his head down. Blind him.

Ky couldn’t risk letting go a hand to whip his veil off and over the bird’s eyes. He couldn’t even let go one hand, couldn’t reach that thrashing head, couldn’t reach the eye on that side, to turn Pikro.  The bird whipped his head around, as it jumped and flailed as if to fling a predator off his crest, though nothing sat there.  He jumped, scrambled up a tsingy tip, smashed his head back against another spire of rock, flattening his crest but somehow not even slowing him down.  Ky ducked as that dangerous head snapped back and nearly smashed him off.

Bees rising, I can feel them.  Da’s bees.  Help Da.  Stop bird.  Pikro, stop.

Dust and sand began to coalesce around the bird’s head as Ky panicked but tried to think of every way of stopping his mount’s wild career.  “Hold on, boy!” that was Ilax, a flung spear shattered just in front of Pikro and Ky saw it vanish as the bird veered wildly off to the side, almost back toward the rest of the caravan.

“We’ll have it stopped, boy, hang on!” Zon Marya bellowed from above.

He could see the bees, all around him, shimmering on Pikro’s feathers, and his hands, waiting for a safe moment to stop the bird.  That’s when the rock itself failed.

Pikro’s claws caught as he scrambled up, Ky felt the abrupt downward lurch as the spire broke under his bird’s wild scrabbling. He felt himself rise as Pikro clung, his stomach heaving up as the stone began to fall. Then the bird leaped sideways.

Splinters of stone shrieked and spalled in all directions as tons of rock groaned and ground down. The spire shattered and as it shrieked to a stop, suspended in a chimney, one piece speared back and impaled Pikro through the chest, the bloody point emerging less than a handspan away from Ky’s abdomen. :target deenay degrading:

He froze, as best he could, the spire and Pikro’s corpse suspended a hundred feet up, between obsidian sharp, broken rock. The bird’s feet fell away from their grip as he died, sliding to the one side, his head wove low and lower still, then hung, bleeding from crown and beak, eyes staring down at the drop they hung suspended over, like a bee on an eating skewer. Blood began oozing out of its eyesockets falling in red droplets, like alien rain, pattering on the boulders far below.

In the sudden silence, the bees buzzed up and away from Ky, released, before settling on the bird’s blood dripping down into the chimney.  Other liquid scavengers appeared, drawn by the sound of water and possible nutrients.  The caravan had been silenced by the horrific noise of the spire breaking.

Ky took a breath, gagged as he was enveloped by the stench of blood and quano leaking and dripping out of the corpse under him. He was drenched in liquid, but didn’t shift more than his eyes to see if it were shit or blood.  He dared to start moving by unclenching one hand, froze again as Pikro's corpse slid.  It twitched, dead nerves firing and he thought for an instant it would tumble off the spike and pull him down into a jumbled mess of flesh, blood and bone jammed tight into the narrow bottom.

He caught his breath again as the slide stopped. Took another inbreath, slow and careful. “Da?  I’m all right.  But I can’t move.  I might knock us loose from here.” 

He was shaking all over, trying to be still, staring at the bloody point that could have just as easily impaled him. He was aware of Pikros’s head, hanging, blood pouring out of his beak and eyes, the creak as the beakbreak hinge disintegrated and metal pieces rained down past his boot-toe, ringing here and there on the way down. He could hear his own breath quiver harsh in his ears.

“Thank Light and Dark.” His Da’s voice was just above him, just behind. He must have climbed down that spire almost as fast as Ky had fallen down it. “That’s right, don’t move.  We’ll get you out of there.”

“I’ll get that line up...” Ilax said from further up. “And I’ll pass that rope down to you inamour.  We’ll have you up in a moment, Ky. Pirzifon... good, you’ve got it. Don’t start wiggling around prematurely, boy.”

Kyrus couldn't help the sarcastic thought.   No, really? I thought a jig would be appropriate.  But he didn't say that out loud.