Chapter 72 #4
He hauls himself back up to his vantage, shadows slowly pulling the hole in his shoulder closed, his mouth filling with curses at the lost time.
He has to catch his breath once he’s back on the ridge.
The picture unfolding below him almost takes it away again.
The battle joined in earnest.
Both sides moving in. His people are almost through the Barrowland proper, pushing in ragged groups towards the side of the mountain in a slow pincer movement, drawing in to meet the square block of Thell’s troops guarding the edge of the Barrowlands.
Maybe two hundred of them, crouched low, shields up, spears out. It’s odd they’re not advancing.
Slickwalker wonders if they’ve seen the troops to the west and east pulling in to hit their flanks.
Dogrunners and Whiteteeth from Dryke and Fallow.
Hopefully not – they’re fast lads, but lightly armoured.
He mouths a little southern prayer to guard their backs.
Feels it turn to oil and ash in his mouth. Of course.
Time to get into position.
He flows along the spine of the mountain until he reaches one of the westmost battlements.
The long men there turn to regard him as he reforms from the shadow. One is cleaning his blade on the edge of a ragged cloth. The other moves his knife over the throat of the last soldier. Slickwalker recognises her, the smoker.
She struggles a little, as the long man clamps his gloved fingers over her face, and sketches a wet red line across her neck. No more smokes for her.
Slickwalker looks around. ‘Lose many?’
The long man nearest him points to two grey-robed bodies, slumped one against the other, their chests a mess of holes.
Slickwalker shakes his head. ‘Get inside. We’re close.’
The long man nods, steps closer to Slickwalker. His eyes are pale under the brim of his hat. A seabird skull swings loosely around his neck, beak long and thin as a dagger.
‘Deep Fishers be with you, Slickwalker.’ A hand on his shoulder, then the pair turn and slip inside the mountain.
As they move from sight, the sky darkens, clouds rolling in, down off the mountains, followed by sudden deep thunder, and the crack of lightning.
Slickwalker tastes the burnt sugar of magic on his tongue, and breaks into a run.
Far below, the people of Astic have gained the last stretch of Barrowland, moving in harrowed grey clots. The spears fall still, as those clots fill the defiles between the barrows with their blood, turn the grass black and weeping.
The wind picks up, the clouds ravelling down off the hills, a gale building against them. The people of Astic push and are pushed like the sea.
Sandsinger flinches as the thunder rolls. Fucking rain on top of it all. Here she is, dying in the mud, and now it’s fucking raining. She doesn’t like the look of those clouds. Ship-sinkers, black as a widow’s skirt. They don’t belong up here.
She claws her wet hair clear of her face. ‘Onward, lovers. Just a little more and we get some payback.’
They’re all exhausted, reeling forwards behind the bodies of their friends.
Almost under those big battlements now, almost clear of the rain of spears. She glances up, counting steps in her head, her lungs rasping the squall in and out.
Above her, someone odd stands on the edge of the mountain. Stocky, robed. A ragged thing, like an old scarecrow, ribbons of red and yellow streaming off their arms as they raise them high.
She staggers as she’s pushed from behind and steps aside absently.
Something’s fixing her gaze on that figure as they raise up their arms. The hairs on her neck squall a hurricane alarm as she watches their arms reach up and reel the clouds in, their gestures seeming to pull the storm down across the Barrowlands.
There’s a taste on her lips like burnt sugar, and a pressure building like the summer sky before a squall, lightning coming down the line.
She turns to her boys and girls and screams. ‘Cover! Run!’
The figure on the battlements reaches for the thunderheads and she watches those yellow and red ribbons rise from their arms, snaking towards the clouds high above.
Mountain magic.
Sandsinger traces the ghosts of those ribbons as they flicker against the sky, swelling into impossibly huge bands of light amid the storm, red and yellow, ragged and wide as rivers.
In response, the clouds pulse, veined with black and red and black again, their angles sharpening to mirror the tattoos on the warriors of Thell.
The ship-sinkers move in strange rhythms, against the wind, gathering over her people below.
The falling rain hardens into sheets, striking with the force of a breaker’s hammer, punishing the land, the people, the dead.
She feels her skull bow under the weight of it.
Another rumble of thunder, and Sandsinger tastes its electric edge almost too late. She throws herself low to the ground, dragging her boys and girls down with her.
The lightning arcs red as blood and catches those still raised too high.
Across the plain it strikes, six, seven, eight times.
She counts under her breath as people explode, as the fire of their screams runs back into the ash sky.
She counts to keep herself sane even as the rain develops a thickness, gritty with burnt bone.
Through the cut light of the storm, Sandsinger sees Crowkisser powering forwards, lifted no longer, the weight of the rain pushing her down. She sees the lightning come for her, a twisting red snake, guided through the air by those upthrust hands.
She stretches out her own hands hopelessly, gasping at the last moment as a long man bulls into Crowkisser, knocking her to the ground, his arms still reaching for her even as the lightning sunders his skull, boiling out the tips of his fingers, roiling red in his eyes.
His corpse sways, smokes, falls.
Sandsinger watches Crowkisser stagger to her feet, stare at the body for a moment, then turn and sprint onward.
They don’t all have her fortitude, her faith. The sky’s against them, the clouds threaded with spears, torn by that red lightning that strikes the earth over and over.
Sandsinger watches hopelessly as the Astic line falters, the right flank breaking entirely, driven apart into swirling eddies.
Hundreds lost in a stroke, fleeing the field as fast as their legs will carry them.
It’s not the end of things though. The rest of her boys and girls aren’t done yet, and there’s hundreds more at their back.
She sees them, all down the line. Pushing onwards with everything they have left, fathers driving the bodies of their children forwards.
Brave lads and lasses who have lost limbs are carried, hoisted aloft, urging the others along.
All screaming teeth and tongue at the lightning.
One last act of faith and defiance before they’re all rendered down to ash outside this bloody rock.
If Crowkisser has a plan to save them, Sandsinger would sure like to see it about now. She distantly glimpses their young witch, racing the storm to the mountain, a few steps ahead of the lightning. She doesn’t look back at them, doesn’t watch her people die.
Sandsinger spits. ‘Come on, girl. Be better.’
As if it feels the bitterness in her chest the wind harshens, howling with black fury, picking at the pennants, snapping them in two. The barrow-markers list, tearing the earth beneath. Astic’s army staggers towards the mountain. The spears fall through the wet and reddening sky.
Sandsinger grits her teeth, ignores the ache in her knee, her hip, the cuts peppering her forearms. The only way to go is forwards.
The shout that tears out of her lungs is something less than words, but her lads all know it. The swell call. That wild yawp as home comes into view.
They surge into the last of the barrows. That big phalanx of bastards sees them coming. Shit, there’s a lot of them.
As Sandsinger’s ragged little crew forms up, a group peels off, angling towards them, locking shields with a shout. She feels her guts turn to water.
And of course, as she’s shitting herself about the spears, she forgets to watch the storm.
She’s sent tumbling as the air tears next to her, another bolt of lightning shearing the arm from the lad on her left. He turns and stares in horror as his flesh catches light. She swings her club upside his head, tears in her eyes. The only mercy she can offer.
Above her, a second clash of thunder as magic roils through the clouds, burning the air, splitting the sound from her ears in punishing thunderclaps.
Sandsinger distantly hopes their crow-witch is up to the task.
She isn’t sure what crows can do against a storm like that, but there’s no time to wonder about that now.
She tears her eyes from the shuddering sky as another spear buzzes past her ear, haft fishtailing madly.
Adrenaline shoots up through her guts and she tries not to piss herself.
That tattooed mob from Thell are impatient, a steel bloc of shield and spear creeping towards her, out from under the shadow of the mountain.
Sandsinger hefts her club as they advance.
There’s maybe some sixteen or twenty rolling in, their shields locked like fish scales.
Crowkisser might have mentioned this. Or Slickwalker.
Some scout he was. There’s spears poking out everywhere like tits on a hedgehog.
Some kind of ungodly hum comes from behind the shields, as if they’re all chanting in unison. Fucking cannibals.
She’s not alone though. Glancing left and right along the flattening line of the barrows, she sees others have made it through.
Not just her own folk, but all those brave buggers from the Rim.
Dark skin, wiry beards and hard eyes. The sight gives her a bit of hope, though they’ve been cut thin by the approach, only a few dozen left all told. An army of strips.