Chapter 73 #2
Quickfish falls hard onto the stone, feels the air rush out of his lungs.
Distantly, he watches Steelfinder drive a wedge of soldiers forwards, her fingers hard on the haft of her spear, punching in slow, economical movements, drifting in the spaces opened by the Deadsingers’ songs.
Quickfish wriggles desperately, pushing upwards with his knees.
Another body throws itself atop the first, hot breath that smells of beer and butcher’s blocks.
Too fucking heavy. He kicks hopelessly, twisting his head to avoid teeth which snap at his throat, his heart a lurching lump of terror.
Steelfinder’s soldiers are making space.
He can see their feet picking their way through the chaos.
Not fast enough for him. The woman’s teeth come down again, skittering off his raised forearm.
A spike of hot pain flares in his right hand and his palm itches so much he screams. He has a brief memory of a fountain, of sharp little teeth.
Part of him wonders if these are the things that a dying person feels. A bigger part of him misses his dad.
Quickfish feels nails dig into his stomach, teeth snapping at his fingers.
He lashes out again, watches the frenzied woman catch his wrist in scabbed fingers and raise his veins to her chattering mouth.
Something flares in his hand again, hot and furious, a blaze of gold, and a flicker of honey on his tongue.
The woman drops his arm with a yelp. Her pupils widen as something shakes loose, beneath the fever.
Quickfish pushes away, his eyes locked onto hers.
The beer-breathed man scrabbles back to join her.
They watch him in unison, mouths open. Slowly, they stretch their arms out towards him. Palms up. Open, hopeful.
The haft of an axe cracks the woman’s skull and she drops like a stone, even as a spear swims through the air and pins the wide-eyed man through the shoulder.
For a second, Quickfish is furious. Then the noise and the murder floods back in.
Roofkeeper leaps forwards and grabs Quickfish’s arm, as Steelfinder takes the other.
They drag him backwards towards the line of warriors, the screaming civilians huddling behind.
He doesn’t protest. Just marks the two slumped bodies, and feels his hand burn like a brand.
The infected fall back briefly, the Deadsingers’ song sweeping the field like evening shadow.
Steelfinder and the remaining few soldiers fan out, forming a thin line of metal against the dark.
The chastened, bloody mob skirt their lowered spear-tips, wary of drawing nearer, for now.
Shipwright watches them hollow-eyed, massaging her buzzing wrist. In the space, the Deadsingers ghost forwards, falling on the injured, striking them with open palms. They sing to them in thick harmonies that blend and build.
Quickfish watches them in confusion, glancing at Roofkeeper who shakes his head wearily, unknowing.
The remainder of Thell’s soldiers hang back, fearful.
Steelfinder scans them with tired, lidded eyes, taking stock.
As he’s lowered gently to the ground, Quickfish sees something rise from the bodies the Deadsingers are attending.
A drifting haze of red; glimpses of teeth, tongues, eyes.
The twins raise the pitch of their song, put it to a glass edge and string it with blades.
The red clouds shudder, burst, disappear.
The mob behind the shields bays in response.
The Deadsingers ignore them. Under their hands some of the injured rise, slow and weeping. Cautious comrades help steady them, wiping the worst of the gore from their hair, shepherd them into secluded crevices at the back of the hall.
They don’t all get up.
Some curse the Deadsingers in voices that aren’t their own, flailing weakly like beached fish. For those, Steelfinder and Shipwright do what needs done.
It takes Quickfish a while to notice Roof stroking his hair. He buries his face against his chest and weeps.
‘Easy, Fish,’ Roofkeeper murmurs, kissing the top of his head. ‘We’re not out the woods yet.’
As he pulls Quickfish closer, Steelfinder approaches them slowly, limping.
She offers up a weak smile. ‘I don’t think they’ll hold off for too long.
Just waiting for more of their own.’ Her voice hitches.
‘And if this is what I think it is, there’s going to be a lot more.
Skinpainter wasn’t kidding,’ she murmurs, half to herself, before focusing back on Quickfish.
She squats down to his level, arms loose on her knees.
‘I’m not leaving here without Ice, but this isn’t your fight.
’ She gestures to the back wall as she talks, the dark mass of frightened people.
‘There’s passages there that’ll take you out.
The Singers know the way. You could get to freedom, take some people with you. ’
Quickfish flicks his eyes to the crevice and back. ‘And what about the rest of you?’
Steelfinder smiles. A thin grey line. ‘If we don’t follow you within the hour, seal us in. This thing travels.’ She shakes her head ruefully, ‘I’ve got a friend who lives on the north road. If you see him, tell him Steel hopes he enjoyed the tea. Be nice to his dog.’
Roofkeeper pats her arm. ‘Thank you. I’m so sorry.’
He motions to Quickfish, who looks from one expectant face to the other, then at that thin, wavering line of warriors.
His stomach lurches. ‘No.’
Roofkeeper opens his mouth to interject and Quickfish hurries on.
‘No. We all leave. Together.’ He holds Steel’s gaze. ‘I don’t think you’d leave me, if the tables were turned. And I won’t leave you.’
Roofkeeper’s hand tightens briefly on Quickfish’s shoulder, then he laughs. ‘Ugh. You’re your father’s son.’
Quickfish smiles up at him. ‘Brave and committed?’
Roofkeeper kisses his cheek. ‘Arsey and pig-headed.’
The Deadsingers’ song saws up to a fever pitch and Shipwright’s voice cuts in from the front lines. ‘Steel, they’re coming.’
Steelfinder frowns.
Quickfish grabs her wrist. ‘Tell me what you need us to do.’
Steelfinder looks to Shipwright, the Deadsingers, then back to Quickfish. He realises how young she is. Not much older than him, really.
‘We can’t stay here,’ she says, finally, shooting a glance at the Deadsingers. ‘Can you hold this rock until we return?’
They look at each other, nod. ‘For a time.’
Steelfinder straightens her shoulders. Breathes out. ‘OK, OK. Then we make our way downwards to the sleeping halls.’ She points her spear at the things skulking beyond the shield-wall. ‘Before they do.’
As if on cue, the darkness screams, yammers, curses.
Quickfish shudders. ‘Why the sleeping halls?’
Her voice is tight with tension. ‘Because that’s where we sent the children.’
Quickfish loses track of time after that, as the mountain spits out friends turned to killers.
Steelfinder and a small cadre of sane soldiers leading them down into the depths of the Stump.
Shipwright is by her side, of course, and Roofkeeper too, which means Quickfish follows after, even if he’s a hairsbreadth from shitting himself with terror.
Whatever Crowkisser has unleashed is tearing through the mountain with ferocious speed; something that slides in through broken skin, spilt blood.
The soldiers either side of him more wild-eyed with each step.
He can’t catch much of their hushed speech, but over and over, one word surfaces like a black fish: ‘Emperor.’ Always said with a wary glance, a flickering hand over the heart.
Quickfish has no idea what Crowkisser’s done, but the people around him around are terrified, and it seeps into his bones with every passing second.
His feet move faster, fleet with panic, following the others, until they’re all hurling through the corridors on a wave of fear.
Down and down and down, through the Stump’s twisting halls, his exhausted heart hammering like a struck drum, sweat on his lips.
The others aren’t doing much better, the pace is killing them.
They’re a half-step ahead of the dead, at first, but losing ground with every slip and stumble.
The things behind them are faster, loping forwards, shifting with feral speed.
They lose people one by one, dragged screaming backwards by unseen hands.
A few of Steelfinder’s small crew plant themselves shoulder to spine.
Buying bare moments to keep them ahead. A few brave, terrified faces set against the broken-nailed dark.
Quickfish sees those same brave faces lurching after them minutes later, mouths slick with tearing, their catcalls doubled and strung with weeping, their mouths stuffed with each other’s meat.
He screams, over and over, until his voice is a husk.
The only thing that keeps him moving is Roofkeeper’s iron grip around his waist, and beyond that the imagined voice of his father somewhere in the darkness ahead, calling out to him.
Fallon’s big moon face as incongruous in his mind’s eye as anything he could imagine, drifting away as his palm itches like an ant nest around the ghost of golden bitemarks.
He retches and spits. Thick, sweet gobbets of honey and spice on his tongue. Somehow, he keeps moving.
He survives because he’s kept safe. Steelfinder and Shipwright at the head and heel of their charge, his own tired feet in the middle, and always at his side, Roofkeeper’s steady gait. Somehow, he sucks in the burning, blood-thick air and keeps running.