Chapter 73 #4
For a few blessed minutes, there’s a kind of peace.
Injured bodies slowly filling with injured minds.
The dead struck down by that brief, furious burst of magic not slain, but stunned.
Skinpainter, hung like dark cloth between Steelfinder and Roofkeeper’s strong arms, moves from person to person, fingers dancing over slick brows and pushing on bruised flesh.
As they make contact, angular tattoos on their arms wriggle to life, ink flowing forth, crossing from body to body.
At its touch, skin darkens and bone straightens.
The angles tighten and the broken mends.
Fallen men and women push their way back into their bodies with weary effort. The soldiers they killed are not so lucky. All of Steelfinder’s cadre down. The gate guards not even in pieces large enough to call a corpse.
In the quiet, Quickfish could swear he hears the slow drip of blood.
He might just be going mad. He takes Nigh’s small fingers as they pick their way through the dazed and the dying.
Whatever Shroudweaver and Skinpainter did here, it cleansed the room like a purging flame.
Not even the memory of the dead lingers.
Quickfish feels like a banished ghost himself.
Lingering light and empty on the edges of things.
Nigh tugs sharply on his hand. He’s been squeezing too tightly again.
He loosens his grip, crouches next to her. ‘I’m sorry.’
She rubs her fingers resentfully. Shies a little closer.
Something burns in his chest. A little ache of loss. He runs fingers gently through her mussed hair, tries to remember what his mother would say. ‘Hang in, little one. Rough seas, is all.’
Nigh holds tightly, says nothing.
Quickfish wants the mountain to stay quiet, but the battle is far from over.
Distant screams still swilling down through the darkness.
He wants them to be safe, but there’s miles of rock above them, and all of it writhing with things that want them dead.
And as if all that wasn’t enough, his palm itches furiously.
He rubs at it, stretches the thumb out. Nothing helps.
A burning like an ant bite, and the choking taste of honey every time he draws breath.
To distract himself, Quickfish watches Skinpainter work, tries to get lost in the steady movement of their craft.
The returned dead rest, heads in hands, crying softly.
Quickfish can’t comfort them. He doesn’t belong here, a ghost on the edge of the things.
Doesn’t understand a single scrap of the murder happening inside this mountain.
And ghost that he is, it takes him a while to notice the sound in his ears.
When it begins, it builds slowly, something barely felt.
A whine on the edge of his teeth, a weight behind his eyes.
Tiredness, he thought. Exhaustion, or something worse.
A hangover from so much death and blood.
But nothing quiets the sound. It blossoms into a bone-deep hum.
Sharpness oscillating up the octaves, until his head rings like cracked glass, growing louder and louder until he feels it in every inch of his body.
He looks around wildly. No one else seems to hear it.
No one seems to care. Panic builds in his throat, but even that’s drowned out by the sound.
He’s about to call for help when the nerves in his hand light with feverish fire.
His fingers dance of their own accord. The pain spreads up his arm in waves.
Two bright lances of fire radiate from where the fountain creature’s fangs sank in.
He screams out loud. In shock, Nigh echoes him.
From the depths of the mountain, something answers.
Deep-throated, its voice layered and spun with sufferings, echoing back on itself. Furious. Thick with barrows-dust and blood, like a clarion call. A dark beast awakened.
Shroudweaver and Skinpainter’s heads snap towards the sound.
Quickfish sees Roofkeeper run towards him, but his vision is slipping, doubling, he can barely see. He’s not quite here. There’s a city. A square. A cracked fountain. His palm burns.
From far away, he watches Shipwright call to Steelfinder.
Hurried, rapid, staccato. Something about the children.
Safe. Keeping the children safe. When the words leave Shipwright’s lips, they fall edged with gold.
Steelfinder nods curtly in response. At her back, Shroudweaver, Skinpainter and Shipwright leave at speed.
In sulphur, in red, in shadow. Quickfish watches them go, his head swimming loose in the pool of their departing voices.
He realises he’s on the ground, and that’s bad.
He’s pulled backwards into a circle of rising blades, Steelfinder and Roofkeeper. A few of the clearer-headed warriors. He should help. The danger’s not over. He staggers to his feet, swaying. He tries to take Nigh’s hand again, but misses and falls, his fingers grinding against stone.
The stone of a cracked fountain. Low in its belly, something golden and broken. Watchers around the rim.
Crowkisser’s to his left. Almost familiar now, pale as ever.
Thin black hair spidered across her face.
The air shudders and suddenly she’s Shroudweaver.
He raises a red-ribboned hand in salute.
To his right, stands something else. Huge and hungry.
The thing in the mountain depths. The Emperor.
Quickfish doesn’t recognise it, but the creature that bit his hand does.
The fountain god remembers the Emperor. And now Quickfish does too.
He can feel it growing beneath his feet.
Stretching up into the mountain, like blood in the vein.
As if it can sense his thoughts, the Emperor turns towards him, its body liquid and changing.
Many heads sway on its shoulders. Eyes flick in and out, like lit wicks.
Quickfish scrabbles backwards against the stone, bumping against Steelfinder. She mouths something and he tries to follow the lines of her lips, her furrowed brow. Almost manages it, until another wave of fire from his hand sets his arm alight with pain. He reels against Roofkeeper.
Against Shroudweaver, by the fountain. A red right hand on his neck, steadying him.
Fingertips that feel like crow’s claws. To his right, the Emperor howls, and Quickfish hears it in his head and in the mountain.
He wants to focus, wants to help, but everything burns.
His head swims, and for a moment, he glimpses someone else, a fourth, a stranger standing dark, and quiet.
They are robed and hooded, but he glimpses the briefest flash of a neat, grey beard.
They hold something out towards him, glinting, across the cracked basin. A box.
Their fingers move around it, shining like blades.
The god in the fountain cries out in rage and fear.
And its voice is Steelfinder’s, dragging him back to reality. To the mountain under stone.
And into the chamber comes Icecaller.
Child of the Kinghammer.
Beloved daughter of Thell.
Her lips red with gore.
And all the mountain’s bloodied, screaming hordes at her back.