Chapter 69
The shape of it in the dark, like a bird, like a cat
muscle hunting in the black.
—The Beast Beneath the Barrow,
Pub: Errant, Glissworm hard men from Dryke, the outriders and hawk-holders of Vantage, the herders and drovers of Fallow, all moving with stolid rhythm.
Anyone able, anyone angry, anyone with something to fight for.
An army that isn’t really an army. An army that’s fisherman and cartwrights, cooks and potboys. Herbwitches and smoketalkers. Marshwalkers. Hunters, catchers of frog and fowl.
There’s a unity among them that wasn’t there before.
She’s stitched them together under her care, binding them with their fears and hopes of a new world.
They chat among themselves as they walk, sing sometimes, their arms around each other.
Laughing in the cold mornings, as they piss out campfires and cradle cups still warm from the embers.
He watches Crowkisser from high places. She talks to them, walks between them. She brushes hair, rubs ointment into calluses, draws the blood from blisters. She smiles as she works, hands deft, steady.
People touch their fingers to her lips in thanks, offer up dark bread smoked over fires, strips of fish dried and stored, pungent and herbal.
She speaks in the mornings, on the brow of hills, her fingers light on the horizon. When her nails rest on the silhouette of the Stump, her voice rises, her body tenses. The people cheer.
Afterwards, miles fall away under their feet as they march across a wide and emptying landscape, past the ruins of other wars.
As they drum steadily through the skeleton of the Midlands its inhabitants close their doors.
The Midlands people know how to survive strife, going to ground and touching their hands to the lintels in hope of a swift passing.
All that’s left for Crowkisser’s army are the ruins of those villages which were not so lucky, those that fell to the Empire.
Or the bladedrinkers. Or the riders of Twicefallow.
The whole countryside silted thick with old conflicts.
They make the best of it, though. Sometimes they gather around old wells to see if they draw clear, or if they pull only muck and bones.
The younger children swarm the wrecks of these old villages, cock-crowing from high towers, scavenging among sherds for old blades, finding corroded clasps that are used to string blankets into ragged banners and heroes’ capes.
Their parents gather them up. Show them how to fit straps, where to balance the blade. The old stones hear steel again, run with shrieks and laughter.
The mountain grows closer day on day. The last ghost-acres of the Midlands give way to the rolling mounds of the Barrowlands, with their stands of black pine and sudden outcrops of rock long ago discarded by glaciers.
Slickwalker watches Thell from these high, lonely places, sighting along the barrel of the gun, letting its muzzle trace the battlements that lean out over the sleeping earth like a widow’s veil.
When the land flattens out from rock down to barrows, he climbs the flag poles of cairns, feels them shudder under his touch.
The army’s been left a mile or two behind him.
He’s alone in the wide nights of the north, and he revels in it.
The barrows take the evening like liquid, shadows falling from a heavy sun to pool amid the humps and hollows of this land of graves.
Some nights, he walks new hewn paths into the bellies of burial chambers, lays his head on slabs slanted from time and listens, heart hammering.
His fingers find traces of other explorers. New ones, at first; a discarded adze, a scrap of chew. The dust moved by wary feet, splashes that might be blood, might not.
Beyond these vestiges of the living, the dead lie in hollows, their legs drawn up to their throats, bound at wrist and knee. He smells the magic on them, tastes it sticky on his lips. He runs his fingers over their old teeth, loosens some, keeps them as charms, as gifts for her.
Once, curious, he lets a blade press against the bindings, and feels his arm throb with a strange deep hunger. Something calling out to his blood. He bites down on it, moves on.
Through mildewed chambers, into long passages which connect one mound to another, fallen far from light into blackness.
He draws his own shadow to him, pressing forwards.
A joy kindling in his heart, finally the adventurer he’d always dreamt of being – shielded by sorcery, forging into the darkest tombs to find out their secrets.
As he pushes deeper into the last barrow, he realises a battle was fought here.
Spear hafts snapped, a point lodged deep within the ribs of a skeleton, the tattered shreds of its bindings still loose on its wrists, tall shields sundered.
Another body. Old, dry, its legs torn from the torso, its chest and arms marked with heavy geometric patterns, black and red and black again.
Thell. Even here beneath the earth, Thell.
Beyond even this, another shield split top to toe.
Ragged brutal marks across its surface, a withered hand still in the grip.
Its owner further up the passage, lips peeled back in death.
After these bodies, another low chamber, strung with roots, its alcoves empty save for a few offerings of long-dried flowers, and scattered coins.
Not quite the treasures of legend, but at the far entrance he finds a ring of skeletons, fallen one against the other in a jagged circle.
Much more interesting.
The air thick with the burnt-sugar stink of magic.
He feels it tugging at him, wraps the shadow tighter against his shoulders in response, unhitching the gun and letting it uncoil.
Better than a knightly sword, by far. His feet take him around the chamber’s periphery, past deep gouges, a shattered plinth, echoes of some terrible confrontation.
In the centre, beneath the apex of the barrow, stands a small cairn, its top sheared off, the edges melted near to glass.
Curiosity overcomes common sense. He lets his feet cross the space, feels the stones squat in front of him.
The plinth is bare, save for a few shards of what might be scorched bone and a little powder that glimmers in the light.
Something hypnotic in the debris, like staring into a wasp hive and watching the slow, black dance.
Like hearing a song behind a closed door. Like listening to rock shift in the dead of night.
Something not calling, but pulling.
Gingerly, Slickwalker lays a gloved hand on the smooth edges of the cut shrine. His breath hangs tight under his ribs.
Nothing.
He lets out a laugh that sounds ridiculous down here. Another one follows as he realises that he’s almost disappointed not to be struck down, or dumb or blind.
So much for ancient magics. His brow blossoms with cold sweat, all that adrenaline with nowhere to go. A waste of time.
As he turns to leave, his eye hangs on the circle of bones, on those dead men.
Something has settled within the hollow of their fallen limbs – scraps, shreds of fabric, red, yellow, red again.
Without thinking, he bends low, takes one and braids it around his wrist, tying it off as he winds his way out from the throat of the barrow, his mind dancing with wizards and warriors, the rat-drum of his heart slowing, steadying.
Eventually the tunnels open up beneath the moon. He shivers at the cold, pulls the shadow to him, and flows back across the hills to the staggered glow of the army’s campfires. He slips in next to Crowkisser, takes off gloves and gun, runs a hand over her jaw.
‘I missed you,’ she says. And he sleeps. Twined with nothing more than a wisp of yellow and red, and a fading memory of the crawling dark.
When the mornings come, they come cold. Crowkisser stretches next to him, grumbling quietly. He kisses her neck, her forehead, smooths tangles from her hair.
‘Nearly there,’ she says, and smiles. He watches that smile. No longer new, fresh out of Astic, there’s something more in it now; a confidence, a certainty he hasn’t seen before. It warms his heart. He helps make breakfast, helps make plans.
She speaks again that morning, her eyes bright. Her army listen diligently, shush fractious chatter and nod among themselves. They return to their tents and emerge with blades sharpened, straps tightened. Their pace increases with each passing day.
Each morning Slickwalker takes himself higher, flowing ahead of their tired grey bodies to take the lay of the land.
Each morning, he lets the gun unfurl and feed, sees the sky through his own scoured bone, and pulls himself back together with shadow.
He returns to the column on tired feet and directs them to water, to game.
Later, he sits with Crowkisser by a clear lake as she asks questions.
The answers come hard and cold – he watches her eyes kiss the back of her skull as she finds paths further ahead than he can ever hope to look.
Stones and sticks falling into clear water, joined now by barrow teeth – a little local twist to the prophecies she tosses in the mud.
They are only a week away now, and they need to know how the mountain prepares.
He watches Thell from high places, traces the scars of old ice over its gates. There are plenty of vantage points here, ledges thick with old nests that were home to eagles once. Scavengers now, burrowing amid shell and twig.
It’s a bright day, and their soldiers are lined up against the edges of the morning, Kinghammer amid them.
Slickwalker lets the gun lick his outline for a while, wondering if it’s worth the shot.
He’s distracted before the temptation to pull the trigger gets too much.
Below his perch, a familiar pair move across the open ground like invalids.
Shipwright and Shroudweaver, one leaning against the other.
He’s surprised they’ve made it, saddened.
It would have been better for everyone if they’d died on the road.
He lets the gun feel them, mark their muscles.
It shivers under his fingers, hungry and impatient.
He shifts his grip, watches carefully as Thell’s old emissary comes to meet them, stooped under a cloak of ragged ribbon. Skinpainter. Red and yellow and red again. Slickwalker glances down at the barrow-scraps on his wrist and smiles. Interesting. That mystery makes a little more sense now.
The trio below meet with the sun still high in the sky and embrace. Some cheap theatre goes on. A lot of vague, empty gestures. The people of Thell eat it up, their cheers falling down the side of the mountain.
He watches a little longer, picks at some lichen. Eventually, they retreat inside the gates. The soldiers filter off the battlements. The bear of Thell relaxes, briefly, and sheathes its claws.
Slickwalker follows them in, flowing down the mountainside, where the runs of natural shadow caused by the rock are deep and cool, pulling him smoothly over the sheer surface of the Stump.
The barest sensation of limbs as he moves.
This is nothing like the descents he used to undertake as a child in the high, broad trees of the south, all burning limbs and thundering heart.
To move with the shadow is to fall like thick rain, to drift like blown sleet.
Only the briefest of adjustments is needed to swing his form towards his target.
Those old ice cracks, the deep cuts of glaciers positioned so conveniently either side of the Stump’s main gate.
Slickwalker takes a minute to catch his breath.
The movement may be different, but the exhilaration is the same, the elation of high places and the adrenaline taste of the ground hundreds of feet below.
He tries to focus, forcing himself to breathe slowly, precisely, in and out.
He lets the shadow slide off him just enough that he can feel his body, the rasp of air in his lungs, the soft burn in his muscles.
Once he’s calm, he turns to study those deep grooves.
They are almost perfect for his purpose, but perhaps a little sheer to take the shivers securely.
Glancing to make sure the battlements are bare, he presses the gun squat against the rock on the left side.
It uncoils just barely, pulsing like a lizard’s stomach.
The report is muffled, the cat’s yowl of the gun driven down into the stone, but the stench of it is the same – acrid, rotten lemon. The rock beneath its muzzle hollowed out and scoured. The gun squirms fitfully. It misses the taste of flesh.
‘Too bad,’ he mutters, half to himself, before swinging over to the other side of the gate.
He lets his arms take some of the strain, enjoying the exertion, riding the shadow like the cusp of a wave. The same procedure on the right-hand side; a quick press of the trigger and a disgruntled yowl as the gun bores its way into the rock.
Another quick check confirms that the battlements are still clear. Bless Shroudweaver and his magnetic personality.
Slickwalker works quickly. Taking the first shiver gingerly out of his pack, and settling it in the etched niche, before packing the hollow as full as he can, six or seven deep. Enough to level a sailing ship, and then the same again on the other side.
He covers them with a cloth to keep them still until they’re secure. His fingers linger a little on their rough shells. ‘Don’t let me down,’ he mutters.
The clink of metal from above ends that one-sided conversation.
Quick as a shudder, he flows away from the gate, back to his perch, to the empty nests and discarded bones. The guards on the battlements are none the wiser, chatting companionably. Slickwalker smiles. Enjoy it while you can.
He lets the gun have one last look at his handiwork before the shadow pulls him back towards Crowkisser. It’s enough to make a mountain burn. Enough to open Thell to her armies.
He sighs happily. A week to end this, no more. And if a worry lingers, the shadow claims it, and him, as he flows away from the mountain, and back to her arms.