161 - Chaotic knots of Light and Dark

Werfas managed to drag another pack bird to the milling circle of animate skeletons to bait them.  “They can’t see!”

Kyrus clung to his bird as it howled and hopped, flailing its head trying to shake its hood off.  He wrapped his arms around its neck and clutched the goad twisted under the hood, his teeth slamming together as Hara was flung off her bird which ran blind.  

“Here!  Climb up -- we’ll find this guy!”  He managed to make his bird stop hopping and start running, he reached down, she caught his arm and swung up behind him.  There was nowhere to cling to on the back of a bird, except the rider so she wrapped herself around him, choking tight.

Werfas charged beside them still mounted. They managed to get away from what had been the Lainz road crew as their animate bodies hacked at the pack birds with their shovels.

“Stop, stop, it will take some time,” Hara gasped in his ear.   

The bird was flagging from both their weights and when he panted the down command it nearly collapsed onto its hocks, beak gaping as wide as the breakbeak would let it, tongue lolling.  Werfas swung down and they turned to look at the seething mass of corpses.

“Shit, we need to stop it, before those dead birds get up,” Werfas gasped.

Hara sank down on her haunches, her back against Kyrus’s legs and he supported her.  He flung a hand out to Werfas.

“I’ll look for energy outflow,” Hara snapped, even as Wer said.  “I’ll look for the sinks of energy.”

Kyrus flung his support to his friends and they sank into code, keeping one part of his mind aware enough to keep an eye on the zombies. 

He was barely aware of Hara and Werfas finding a webwork of energy, from creature to creature, from somewhere inside the defile. The shimmering web of controls shifted and seethed, focussing more and more on trying to bring things to bear on da and stepda and the zon, fighting for their lives. He could see over the rock-fall, from above it seemed, as if he flew up with the bush-dragon, reducing all their lives to seething knots of light and all the dead things into knots of dark below.

It was so chaotic it was nearly impossible to unknot and he could feel Hara pulling on one side and Werfas pushing but they couldn’t sort things out.  They were running out of energy, and time.  The skeleton men had stopped beating on the dead birds, and were turning slowly, skulls ticking back and forth as if they could somehow smell or hear them.

The dead birds shifted, one managed to stagger up, head hanging by a thread, leaking from a dozen wounds, trailing coils of intestines behind it. The other’s legs were severed so all it did was drag itself forward with its beak hooked into the ground, inching over onto its belly.

*We can’t... we have to run again...*

*LAINZ ZARDUKAR ONLINE: Accept?*

The mental call was loud enough to rock Kyrus back, and Hara.  *Accept! Accept!*  Kyrus opened himself up to the flood of energy pouring from the city, more than a day away, bees and other insects suddenly everywhere.  He flung it to his father who gathered it up and with a single strike, slashed through the knots and bands of control code that withered instantly, all recoiling to one place on the canyon wall.

Every dead thing froze in place.  There was a howl from above.  “NOOOO!  YOU MUSTN’T!”

*THERE, DA! THERE PA! RIGHT THERE, ZON!* The three young warriors dug their identifiers into the puppetmaster even as he struggled to re-coil his energy, re-animate his creations, strike again.

Ilax manifested an atl dart and flung it, even as they targeted the man.  From waist deep seething dust struggling to bury him he threw up and over and pinned the man through the body. More darts, more arrows flew from the zon, some rattling ineffectually on the stone and evaporating.  Others bristled his body as he staggered and, finally, fell.

A moment of frozen silence, and every dead thing on the road, in the air, the bits and pieces, all fell apart, the scales from the bush dragon raining down like sheets of glass that pierced the sand instead of shattering.  The skeletal men dropped into pieces where they stood and the birds thudded to the ground a second time, splashing into their own blood and guano.