Chapter 74 #3
Because they sound quiet up here, when all else she can hear is the shuffle and drag of her former friends readying to kill her.
The slow scrape of blades. The stumbling weight of broken feet.
The quiet drip of clotted blood. And under that, something speaking, moving.
Rats in the muscles. Scurrying, burrowing lumps that pulse under stomachs, throats, eyes.
Brief shapes in the smoke. Chattering on the edges of her hearing.
Forming in breathless, snarling gasps before her face.
She taps a hand against her father’s hip.
‘It’s them, isn’t it, Dad? The Empire’s dead. ’
He spits. ‘What’s left of them. Left of him.’
She twists the spear, slaps it down on grasping forearms, shatters ribs. ‘The Emperor? I thought you all … dealt with him.’
He puts a hand back to guide her over sprawled bodies. The Deadsingers’ voices swell from somewhere below, and they sprint forwards into a brief gap.
‘The oldest cunts are the hardest to kill,’ her father mutters.
He swings the hammer. ‘You can cut.’ Bone breaks.
‘You can burn.’ Blood pools. ‘You can crush.’ Soft wet growling.
A raised boot. ‘You can dig it up by the root. But,’ he pauses, his breath heavy.
‘There’s always, always some fucker planting. ’
He rolls his shoulders wearily, the haft of the hammer sliding slowly over the bone. ‘Look, let’s talk about this once we’re clear. We’re almost there.’
Icecaller believes him. Better, she feels it in her gut. In his calm voice. In the sound of her friends singing below. If she doesn’t notice the dead growing closer, who can blame her? If it takes a moment to mark the straightening of their backs, and the sharpening of their teeth, who could judge?
The loss, like all losses, happens in a moment.
One breath to the next. The ridden dead are hard to spot in the shadows.
Only the light on their broken skin. So Icecaller watches their eyes, their mouths.
They snarl before they leap. The gums peel back, their whole fucking mouth like a box of blades.
Terrifying, but it gives the briefest clue of what’s coming.
Three come for her at once. Icecaller dodges the first, kicks out at the ankles.
It tumbles, and she’s moving to slide around the blade of the second, her spear down into the calves of the fallen one, using the momentum to vault forwards.
Feet into the chest of the third, a sharp blow to its temple with her shield.
She can’t bring herself to kill them. Not yet. Not when they might still be saved.
Four more go for her father. His hammer arcs out to meet the first two, a crushing pendulum.
The other pair latch on to his arms, pulling him down.
His knees buckle. She turns to help him.
Loses count of the bastards. And before she knows it, there’s a flicker, and a weight on her, something hot and stinking inches from her face.
A tongue against her cheekbones. Teeth scrabbling for purchase.
Thighs on her back pinning her down. Fingers in her hair.
Blades skittering off her armour and something, something laughing in her head. Her tattoos flare hot.
She can’t lift her spear, there are knees on her elbows, grinding her against the stone.
She snaps her head back, yells triumphantly at the crunch of cartilage.
She can’t move. She arches her hips, scrabbles futilely with her left hand.
She can’t get loose from the shield-straps.
She can’t move. Nails start unbuckling her armour with quiet determination.
Something wet and heavy snickers above. More of them pile on.
She feels teeth skirt her neck and something howls in her own blood in response.
She almost wants to bare her throat, to shuck off the weight and let them in.
She screams, her voice hoarse as it skitters across the slick stone.
She thinks of Nigh. Pushes herself up hard into the foraging mouth, lets the cusp of her armour crunch their wet teeth.
Twists her shoulders till they scream, driving them backwards into wriggling ribs.
Spins herself around, somehow. Looks into the face of the thing on top of her.
Drives her knees up again and again, until it goes soft and wet and still. Pushes it away with shaking hands.
It pushes back.
It’s still not dead. Wrecked and ruined, but still moving.
Broken bones realign and scurry under its skin as it pulls itself onto her writhing body, pinning her down.
Its friends laugh like jackals. She screams again.
Not here. Please not here. Not with Nigh so far.
Not with her dad so close. It’s so strong. She arches her spine. She can’t move.
No. No. No.
She can’t move.
She sees hunger light in its eyes, watches its lips curve in triumph.
Two heavy footsteps. Its head vanishes in a spray of gore and bone.
The black steel of the Kinghammer. Another swing and the weight on her arm lifts.
Bloodied stumps still clinging, but the body long gone.
She recoils in horror and brushes lumps of someone from her.
And there he is, one hand outstretched. The other swings the hammer again.
The dead stagger back, yipping in fear. She takes his hand and grins. ‘Dad.’
The blade catches him at the throat. Just barely. He dodges so fast that for a second she thinks it’s missed. He drops her hand and presses fingers to his neck. A thin cut, the smallest flash of red.
He reaches for her again, and she feels the air shudder, as his tattoos glow with a bright fire.
The air around her father comes alive. In the drifting blood, before the jackal-jaws of their ridden friends, the dead flock to Kinghammer.
Their teeth, their fingers, so fast, so fast. Icecaller tries to pull him to her, but she’s too slow.
The air is thick with spirits. They swarm him like wasps.
She has a second to feel utterly, completely helpless.
He holds her eyes for all of it. And then firmly, suddenly, pushes her away.
The first of the dead hits him below the cut in his neck, in a sliver of bare skin.
Bites, worms in like a maggot. Rippling the flesh above as it moves.
Others follow, worrying at the hole like foxes.
Kinghammer falls to his knees. Another in from under the ribs, the geometrics flexed apart by a scream of pain.
His fingers arch and claw at the stone. His nails rip, bone breaks and blood flows.
More of the dead pile in through the ragged holes, punching through the wet ends of his fingers, forcing their way up through the muscles.
His back curves and he vomits. They scurry to his tongue and cheeks, ripping through the clean flesh on the inside of his mouth.
When her father screams again, he has so many voices.
More of the dead flock to the sound, tearing through his palms, his temples, his eyes.
The geometrics try to contain them. Icecaller watches them interlock and shift, red and black and red, red, red again.
The dead are too many. The tattoos pull tight in response, crushing arteries, airways.
Kinghammer writhes, one massive broken hand groping for his weapon.
Icecaller starts towards him, but the dead crowd around her.
She feels their grave-rot teeth against her eyelids, sees them picked out in the blood haze and melting ice, seeking an opening. Her tattoos itch like an old burn.
‘R-run,’ the words fall out of him in lumps, choking their way past rotten air and clotted blood. ‘Get your sister.’ His face twists, writhes. He says it again. ‘Gut your sister.’ Jaw hanging loose in a jackal laugh.
Icecaller hefts her spear.
Kinghammer watches her from his knees. Spreads his arms wide. ‘Yes,’ it says. ‘Tear more. Let the others in.’
The swirling mass of the dead roils in joy.
Distantly, she can see them punching into struggling bodies, burrowing like ferrets, needle-sharp and hungry.
Clumps of soldiers group together, fighting a desperate rearguard.
Thell’s finest, back-to-back. Alone at first, then opening their ranks to let in fleeing, grey-cloaked figures.
The sides of the battle are shifting, the living versus the dead.
No one’s coming to save her. There are acres of carnage between her and anything remotely like a friend.
People fall. Briefly listless hands reaffirm themselves to spears and turn on friends and lovers. The thing that was her father shambles closer. It watches her with feral, unfamiliar eyes, then presses against her tattoos, bares its teeth, and shrieks, flicking blood at her face from ragged hands.
Toying with her.
Icecaller casts around the room, desperately getting her bearings. Nigh can’t be too far from here, in the sleeping chambers. Which means she’s not too far from those solid oak doors.
She takes a breath, and punches outwards, breaking bone.
Buys herself about three seconds. Three seconds to turn from the howling face of her father, to duck below the sweep of his hammer, to raise her forearms in front of her face and barrel into the dead.
As she runs, she feels their teeth slide off her geometrics, driven back for a moment.
She mouths a quick thanks to Skinpainter’s work as the dead yowl, incensed.
Heart hammering, legs aching but staying a step ahead of the fear, she ducks a spear thrown by the woman who used to bring her breakfast. Somehow vaults a pile of weeping bodies busily devouring one another.
Turns, slips on shreds of flesh, falls. Avoids ramming her eyes onto a broken spear-point by a hairsbreadth. The hand holding it twitches.