Crow Jane - D. J. Butler Page 0,38

Hell.

The slope was muddy and she fell more than once on the way down, coating her doe-skin tunic in gray slime. Her nostrils rebelled against the stink of the crater and her eyes shied away from the multitude of dead and dying birds that lay floating in it. Her own crow circled above the hole in the ground, indifferent to whatever killed all the other fliers. The mud was not the result of the rain—it and the few scattered drops were the after-leavings, the remnants, the stirrings in the wake of the flood.

The Flood, Qayna knew that Shet’s descendants would forever after call it. The windows of heaven had opened and the fountains of the deep had ruptured and everything Qayna had ever known had been obliterated by choppy water.

Qayna had drowned.

Only it hadn’t killed her. And after several long days of painful torture, being dragged about by the currents of the deep and gnawed by one strange, eyeless monster after another, she had admitted to herself that, whatever the Flood might do to the Fallen and their children, it wasn’t going to end her existence.

She’d armed herself with weapons that wouldn’t weigh her down: knives. Then she’d swum to the top, flung herself upon the gnarled, beheaded floating trunk of a tree and begun coughing mud and brine from her lungs. She was still hacking up black ooze when Nuh’s boat had passed her by, old Nuh (white bearded and bent over, though he was hundreds of years younger than Qayna—Father and Shet and everyone she had known in her youth all long dead, other than the Fallen and Raphael) oblivious to her, standing on the deck of his bowed, air-tight ship and scratching the long neck of a giraffe.

Qayna hadn’t bothered to try to get his attention.

After the Flood had come the monsters. The storm and high water had wiped out the people—the many—who had loved the city of Ainok and embraced its rule, but they also guaranteed that anything that survived them, anything that didn’t come off Nuh’s weird floating wooden chest, would be preternaturally tough.

Things already living in the deep had survived the hammering of cold water and crawled out hungry and pissed. The ugliest, strongest, most misshapen experiments and progeny of the Fallen had also made it through forty days and nights of rain and the slow receding afterwards. Qayna had been glad to be armed—she had pricked more than one monster into leaving her alone, and used her knives to hack her way to freedom after learning that even the digestive juices of a scabrous, six-legged land whale weren’t enough to free her from Heaven’s curse.

Most of the Fallen had also survived. Other than Azazel, Raphael and Shet and their army hadn’t taken prisoners, and once they had razed Ainok to the ground they had lost interest in pursuing the fleeing survivors. After the Flood, Qayna had more than once hidden in a mud-strangled copse or under a shattered roof or in a festering pile of dead bodies to avoid attracting the attention of one of Ainok’s rebel lords.

Bull Head had nearly stepped on her.

Weeks later, the higher ground had begun to dry out—like Ararat, where Nuh and his people had settled—but most of the face of the land was still a mud flat, pocked with ruins and the few trees tenacious enough to have hung on through the devastation. And, on the trail of a rumor she found hard to believe, Qayna returned to Ainok.

To find it a gaping hole.

And at the bottom, with yellow light flickering from it, an opening.

Qayna scrambled to her feet in a thick, fetid pool at the bottom of the crater. This might be exactly the spot where the Grand Plaza of Ainok had once been, she thought, though it was hard to be sure with most of the local landmarks obliterated. As if to confirm her guess, she stubbed her toe on a block of white stone the size of her torso.

“Password?” The voice was slithery-huge, a serpent’s hiss, and Qayna recognized the snake-headed giant who had hemmed her and Jacob in when she had tried to escape the Plaza before. He wore a kilt and sandals and stood in front of a cavern entrance vast enough to hold a small town, smoke and light and movement enlivening the space behind him vaguely. She chuckled. It pleased her sense of irony that this same Fallen who had tried to keep her trapped would now try to keep