Chapter 79
Conventional wisdom was that certain elements of the world could not be broken. In the event of the south, we realised that we were wrong. Light can be shattered. The sky can burn.
—Notes on the Destruction, Wicktwister
After that, they navigate by the sounds of dying, in a blur of violence and brief, desperate struggle.
Slickwalker’s gun unfurls, squalls, spits blackness into snarling, distorted faces.
Thell’s soldiers fall one by one, before rising again, sharp-toothed, yowling, mad.
The dead are bolder now, growing in number with every passing moment.
Crowkisser’s army is driven back into corners and culverts, hauled bodily into the mob, torn limb from limb.
Her long men do what they can, fighting the dead and the living, but still dwindling, retreating.
The dead of the Empire are an irresistible tide. Too many of them, too hungry and too fast, infesting the bodies of Thell’s injured and casting them back against the living.
Nothing should be able survive this. Nothing, and yet, here in the red belly of the mountain, Crowkisser sees the unity she’d hoped to forge. She sees her new people, Astic and Thell alike, rallying together against the dead, fighting for their lives.
There’s too much to take in. Too many souls struggling and snuffed out. Crowkisser thinks she has a handle on it, Slickwalker flowing in her wake like a half-born shadow, but she’s wrong. The battle fills the Stump. At every turn, the living clash with the dead, tooth and nail.
Three levels down, Sandsinger’s back-to-back with one of the Thell lads. The pair of them are hunkered down behind a broken table as the dead prowl beyond. He looks a little like her grandson who was lost at sea, and a lot like the only friendly face she’s seen in a stretch.
His hand finds her shoulder as she reties his shield, his voice low and soft. ‘If you get out of this will you tell my da that I tried my best?’
She cuffs him around the head. ‘You can bloody well tell him yourself.’ As she glowers at him, the howling of the dead swells. They share a glance, heft their weapons and charge.
A drop and a plunge, and deeper in the mountain, a long man faces down the horde.
He sketches a thin line with his blade, a weary circle facing the ridden bodies of his brothers as they prepare for a final strike.
Behind him, a line of shields and spears seals the passage.
Thell’s sent fresh troops from below. The long man watches helplessly, they’ve no idea what they’re walking into.
The dead go for them with the speed of wolves, and their line crumples.
He contemplates using the space to run, to put distance between himself and their teeth, but there’s a mountain girl in Thell’s front line that looks a little too close to his own daughter, and before he knows it his aching legs are carrying him back to their buckling shield-wall, blade raised against the screaming dead.
Minutes later, somehow, they’re all down, and he’s not the only one of the living left standing.
Thell’s soldiers lean on their shields, eyeing him warily.
He loops his knife into his belt with slick hands, tries not to think about the hair matted down the edge, and shoots them a wild smile.
There are too many lives in this mountain.
Even if Crowkisser can’t see them all, she can sense them, and sense their potential, all their conflicting loyalties smelted together by necessity.
Her beautiful new people. All she needs to do is make them hers.
And to do that, she needs to keep them alive.
She can’t just save them though, they need to see her as their saviour.
She smiles in the darkness. That traitor Emperor has handed her all the leverage she could ever need, but she has to move fast if she’s going to pull it off.
Her feet pick up speed from the shadow, their edges lit with half-formed feathers.
They’re still so high in the mountain, and every nerve in her body is screaming at her that the magic driving this is down in its guts.
If she wants to make a show of this, she needs to go where things are darkest. Nothing changes.
Two more breathless minutes fleeing through the black, down through tunnels swelling with the dead, glowing in the half-light from lamps, the mad look in her eyes bouncing back at her from crystal scars etched into the wet walls.
The whole body of this mountain has been marked by the cicatrice of old wars.
A few levels later, and they reach the shattered front gate, hasty barricades scattered in an arc around the smoking rock.
A resistance has built itself before they even arrived.
Atop a spire of crumbled stone, a helmetless red-haired woman shouts orders, her face twisted in pain, one hand clutched to a spreading wound on her side.
Her soldiers move with studied precision; her eyes narrow as they approach.
Crowkisser skids to a stop, then cautiously steps closer. The young woman watches her steadily.
‘You’re her.’
Crowkisser nods. ‘I am.’ She surveys the blades around her. ‘But I’m not your enemy today.’ She waves back towards the depths of the mountain, aided by a well-timed scream of agony. ‘Do you know what’s happening?’ Holds her breath, praying for ignorance.
The woman nods. ‘The dead.’
Crowkisser exhales, ‘I need to get everyone out of here.’
‘We’re working on it.’
Crowkisser steels herself. ‘Can I send them to you? Can you hold the gate?’
The redhead rolls her shoulders. ‘For a time.’ She frowns. ‘I think I’m supposed to kill you, though. Capture you at least.’
Crowkisser gestures at the blood on her hands. ‘Haven’t you had enough dying for today?’
A murmur of agreement.
Crowkisser smiles softly. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Lightmender.’
‘Well, Lightmender, let’s be allies for now. If we make it through this, you can kill me tomorrow.’
Lightmender watches her for a second, shifts her weight from her injured side.
‘OK, Crowkisser. Send anyone you find up here, I’ll get them out.’
Crowkisser nods, and steps back into the mountain before anyone thinks it through enough for things to go south. Back into the battle she goes, back and further down.
Slickwalker follows in her wake, gathering the remnants of both armies; telling them to flee back to the gates, to Lightmender, to the Barrowlands.
He stutters through shadow and around blades, collapsing tunnels to stave off the advancing dead, setting charges along rock already scarred to glass by battles long-gone.
The toll of the gun makes his hand ache, a feeling like starving as his flesh is swallowed by its magic, and poured back onto his bones by shadow.
He finds a man, leg struck, skin writhing with the dead, and listens as his words change, as his begging becomes imprecations, as the Emperor’s madness takes hold. Then he points the barrel of the gun, pulls the trigger.
By his side, Crowkisser takes apart the dead who come at her, turning herself into a devouring torrent of beaks and claws. She births crows in squalls, creating corridors, spaces for movement, pushing the dead back with wings and fury.
Slowly, they salvage what they can from the madness roiling in the mountain’s heart, this thing that her broken alliance has unleashed.
The Emperor, reasserting his hold. Each moment, no longer a battle, but rather a strange kind of triage, driving their people and Thell’s backwards and upwards, sometimes bodily.
There’s little time to explain, only the stark division of the dead on one side and the living on the other.
It takes a while for it to stick, the mountain’s defenders are reluctant to welcome the feathered witch and shadow-spitting hunter as friends.
It’s only when the people of Thell start losing the battle in earnest that Crowkisser can begin save them.
At every turn, Slickwalker sees shield-walls wavering, spears falling, young men and women stumbling backwards into the arms of friends who take them apart piece by piece, rib by rib.
He would have rejoiced at this a few days ago.
Now, he sees Crowkisser’s point. If they let this run its course, they’ll be victors over nothing but the dead and they’ll have a second war to fight against the Empire’s risen horde.
Every soul that dies in the mountain is a loss for their cause.
Still, it’s not easy to make a difference. His weapon’s not made for saving lives. It doesn’t help that this place is a warren of tunnels tight around a central well that kills his lines of fire. He’s no idea how deep they are now. He’s lost count in their haring descent through the Stump.
Four, maybe five levels later, they stagger into the remnants of a marketplace.
The gun keens wildly in his hands as it bucks and screeches, every shot scouring flesh and rock with abandon.
Everywhere, the injured and ridden dead.
Slickwalker tries to target the ones where the madness has set in deep, the most clearly gone, their snarling coruscating up the registers of pain as the gun eats their bones.
It’s brutal, but enough to get the attention of the survivors cowering beneath sacks and under tables.
Then Crowkisser takes her turn, calling crows from the dark places, between the blood-flecked lights and overturned stalls, past makeshift barricades, battering the mad and blood-crazed dead back into one other, creating, for a second, space.
Thell’s survivors seize their chance, and flee back towards the light.
Both armies merge into a column of refugees, wending shakily upwards. Thell and Astic, both bloodied to red. Slickwalker watches them go, wondering how many’ll make it up to Lightmender’s barricade alive. Enough to salve his conscience? Unlikely.