'Your men are dead, Zaelis!' she called, as every sense she had clamoured at her to get away from there. 'It is a trap! Ride!'
Perhaps it was the conviction in her voice, or the fact that they were all on edge, but they reacted instantly and without thought to question. It was what saved their lives.
They raced out of the clearing at the same moment as two of the shin-shin leaped from hiding, springing down upon where they had been waiting brief moments ago. The remaining pair of demons were already racing along the rim of the boulders, their blazing eyes fixed on their prey as their spindly stilt-limbs propelled them rapidly over the uneven terrain. Lightning stuttered purple light across them, silhouetting them against the clustered moons, and then darkness fell again, and there were only the twin lamps of their eyes as they came after the Heir-Empress.
'Scatter!' Cailin cried, the reins of her mount gathered in one fist, wrenching it around to avoid sliding on the wet mud and crashing into a looming hunk of rock. The broken stones here provided a thousand routes to follow, and a person might lose themselves forever in this maze; but Cailin was not concerned about that now. Escape was the only option for them. She could not protect them against four shin-shin without her Sisters to help her.
Zaelis wheeled his horse, spraying rainwater from its flanks, and hunching over Lucia he spurred it through a narrow passage between two enormous slabs of granite. Kaiku went that way too. Asara was too late to check her momentum and squeeze through; instead she aimed for a short, muddy slope downward. Yugi followed with Mishani. Cailin went another way.
The sky screamed as if in thwarted fury, and Kaiku hunched her shoulders against its rage as she fought to control her mount. Zaelis was riding at a reckless pace, dodging through the rocks and trees with inches to spare while the rain conspired to blind them with wet gusts. Twice he almost dashed Lucia's brains out against an unforgiving bulge of stone, for she lay clutched to his chest with her head lolling to the side. Kaiku focused only on Zaelis's back, taking her cues from his movements. She scarcely dared to breathe as she whipped through gaps that threatened to smash her kneecaps, and she could not afford a second to look back and see where the shin-shin were.
You'll not get me now, she thought to herself with surprising venom. / beat you once, and I will do it again.
They broke out into a short, flat stretch, a strip of sodden grass mottled with patches of stone. Thundering towards a line of trees ahead, Kaiku found a few moment's grace to glance over her shoulder.
There were three of them that she could see; one racing along the ground after them and two darting between the boulders and outcrops that formed the walls of the maze their prey rode through. They were like living shadows, skinny patches of darkness that the eye refused to focus on, lunging through the rain with insectile speed.
She heard Zaelis cry out ahead of her. The fourth shin-shin had appeared from the trees, blocking their path, rearing up on its stilt-legs with a screech. Zaelis's horse brayed and swerved aside to avoid the demon in its path. Its hooves found a patch of slick stone and skidded, and Kaiku watched in horror as it twisted and went down. Zaelis took the brunt of the fall, cushioning Lucia with his body; Kaiku heard the snap as Zaelis's leg went, crushed under the flank of the horse. He bellowed in pain, but Kaiku was already bearing down on him, leaning from her saddle.
'Give her to me!' she called desperately, slowing as much as she dared.
Zaelis, understanding dimly through the fog of agony, lifted the child up as far as he could; and Kaiku snatched her, the weight of the dying girl smacking into her arms and almost pulling her from her saddle. She reined around, righting herself, and came face to face with the shin-shin that had emerged from the trees. She took a single gasp- and then Asara's rifle cracked out across the night sky, and the shin-shin was blown aside by the force of the shot. It flailed on the ground, its black stilt-legs pawing spastically. Its three companions looked up at where the shot had come from, and one of them erupted into flame with a howl. Cailin was there, emerging from another gap in the rocks, her eyes blazing red.
'GoF Zaelis roared, his molten voice breaking under the pain as his horse thrashed itself upright and left him lying there.
Kaiku needed no second prompting. She spurred her mount savagely, and it leaped away towards the trees, chased by the sawing shriek of the storm as the moon-sisters watched her go.
She plunged into the dark, wet world of the undergrowth, where every shadow was a hard face of wood and every wrong move promised a sudden end. Her ears rilled with the sinister hiss of branches as they waved under the onslaught from the sky, slapping her shoulders as she passed. She was riding one-handed, the other arm crooked around Lucia, the Heir-Empress's head jogging against her chest.
The ground suddenly dropped before her and her horse reacted before she did, turning to take the slope at the best angle it could. Kaiku held on for her life as her mount slid and slipped through the trees and rocks, and it seemed their luck could not hold, that every near-miss and narrow dodge brought them closer to the moment when they would collide with a tree and she would be broken like a twig doll.
And yet somehow the slope gave up before her horse did, and they bolted out into a narrow gully, with a stream running along its bottom. They pounded through the shallow water, throwing splash and spray up behind them. Kaiku knew they were beyond help now. There was no way the others could have followed her down here, much less find her again. She could only hope that the other shin-shin had suffered the same fate as the one Cailin had burned; but she dared not wait around to see. Whether it was her or her burden the shin-shin sought, she fled.
The walls of the gully seemed to narrow, and when the storm shrieked again she shrieked with it, for the sound was amplified and deafening along this corridor of rock. Her eyes were narrowed against the pounding rain, yet she seemed to be able to see almost nothing, and had no idea whether she was heading toward level ground or a cliff that would send her to her death.
It was the latter. Some instinct warned her, some part of her subconscious that recognised the change in turbulence of the stream ahead, and she reined her mount in hard enough to bruise its mouth. The stallion whinnied in pain, scrabbling to a halt. Kaiku leaned back in her saddle and held Lucia tight to avoid being tipped over the horse's neck, down the fatal plunge to moon-washed treetops below. Hooves skidded on wet stones, and Kaiku felt a sickening lurch as she realised that they might not stop in time; but then her mount found its purchase, and they came to rest inches from the precipice. Kaiku gazed out over the dark landscape, so far down, and her stomach churned at the thought of toppling through that endless space, the jagged rocks of the cliff wall rushing by, rains dashing against her face, hurtling towards the ground below…
With a rough tug, she pulled the stallion away, looking over her shoulder as she did so. Two of the shadow demons dropped from the treetops into the gully behind, their lantern-eyes trained unwaveringly upon the child in her arms.
'You will not have her!' Kaiku spat into the howling wind. Then her horse tugged left, against the reins, and she saw that the gully had crumbled enough at the cliff edge to form a ragged, unstable slope that they could use to clamber out. The horse wanted to try it, motivated by the terror of the things behind; but Kaiku knew better. Its hooves were not equipped for such uneven terrain. But her feet were.
She swung down off the horse and slung Lucia over her shoulder like a sack. Her arms and legs were aching, and the child needed better care than this, but she had no time to be gentle.