Chapter 79 #2
They struggle onwards, pulling bodies from the carnage.
In ones and twos at first, but foot by foot the form of the battle shifts.
Larger groups join them briefly as truces stitch themselves in panicked words.
All it takes is a single moment of empathy.
A raised shield blocking a falling spear.
A grey-clad fisherman hauling a ravening woman off a struggling warrior.
Hands join to reinforce shield-walls, or to pull the wounded loose.
And still, at the forefront, her fingers dancing like wings is Crowkisser, filling the tunnels with birds that move in pulses, clots, arrows.
Black feathers thick as breath, splitting the living from the dead. Wings. Wings beneath the mountain.
It costs her. God how it costs her, as she pulls meat and air from her lungs in lurching gasps.
She stops for the barest second, just to catch her breath, and something scrapes her mind like a struck match.
Her father, somewhere down in the darkness, alive somehow, weaving somehow.
She can feel his power building like a geyser beneath her feet, the cold touch of the between shivering into her bones.
And as quickly as it builds, it’s gone, fading like a struck bell. A release washing through the corridors of the Stump, cool and hollow. In its wake, the dead stumble, a lethargy on them, even if briefly, listless as bees in winter. Just slow enough for her to plunge onwards and downwards.
She shoots Slickwalker a look. ‘Now. Quickly. This won’t last.’
As they drive deeper Slickwalker sets the gun aside. It hisses resentfully in its holster as he falls back on older techniques, tricks he remembers from a childhood spent scuffling beneath wide branches.
He moves in the rhythm of the green forest, flows through the shadows; trips, stalls, chokes and tries, tries so very hard not to kill.
It helps that the dazed dead diminish as they delve further down.
Something pulls them still deeper into the mountain, their snarls and yips echoing up through the passages.
The Emperor is calling to them, Crowkisser says, with a certain grim satisfaction.
Slickwalker can barely believe it. An enemy like something out of a fable, some mad sorcerer he barely understands.
And him, here, miles underground, with no one but her at his back.
Panic flutters in his hammering heart. His brain pushes it down.
He focuses on keeping her safe, driving his bruised knuckles in rabbit punches at the kidneys of a howling man that comes for them, knocking him to the floor. He binds him with leather and moves on.
Crowkisser drives them ever deeper. His arms grow tired.
Mistakes begin to creep in. The darkness is hungry, writhing with grasping hands.
Crowkisser can’t save them all, and he can barely keep the stumbling dead off her back.
They are far too deep now to climb back to the light. The only way onwards is down.
He watches the realisation dawn on her in the stoop of her shoulders, the slowing of her words. Moving to her side, he puts an arm around her waist, steadies the gun on his hip, and keeps his finger light on the trigger.
Driving down and down and down.
Time stretching out into the dark.
Strange shudders of power and magic flowing unseen through the mountain, pressing against his temples like the promise of sudden storms.
The dead around them milling and confused, shoaling towards the frenzied voice from the depths one moment, and hunting them on unsteady feet in the next.
Somehow they push through, clawing their way past bodies and magic and blackness, throwing themselves down the throat of the Stump, running breathless for what feels like an age.
Until below them, at last, living voices. The first like bellows-brass, clear as a bell through the smoke and blood. He’d recognise Shipwright anywhere. She’s followed by another voice, softer, dry as paper.
Crowkisser stiffens. Turns to Slickwalker. The crows fall from the air.
Her mouth opens, struggles with the words.
He pulls her close, feels her shake and kisses her softly, on the forehead, the cheek, the back of her neck. ‘You can do this. I love you. Stay strong. Be careful.’
Crowkisser’s breath slides out of her like broken glass.
The room that opens out in front of them must have been a bunkhouse. Its alcoves filled with colourful blankets, cushions, long, low tables and soft light.
The whole space is now crammed with wailing children and bleeding bodies. And between the children and the teeth of the mountain’s dead, a ragged group.
He spies Shipwright first. Of course he does, but even she looks different down here, bruised, pent up, her fingers working at something brief and brass that mutters and clucks.
The gun struggles against its harnesses and he tenses reflexively.
There’s a young woman sprawled at her feet, shorn blonde hair, savagely undercut, matted with gore.
Her mouth is cannibal red, the tattoos on her body writhing like worms on a skillet, ink threaded thinly over sharp wounds.
She’s obviously infected, ridden with the dead.
Crouched over her is Skinpainter, their fingers moving lightly against her slumped body.
The air is thick with saltpetre smoke-stink.
Their red ribbons are scorched beyond reason, and a bruise purples their side beneath torn clothes.
Blood under the skin, Slickwalker suspects. Good.
There’s so many dead here. A dark-haired young woman with her throat torn out.
A tousle-headed young man sprawled immobile across her, his breath a thin rattling gasp.
A bearded warrior with the look of the plains people feverishly trying to clear his airways, struggling with an arm broken so fiercely the bone swings from the skin.
The dying boy might be Fallon’s son. Which would make this a whole new kind of nightmare.
Behind them, others, old and young – bloodstained warriors, children, one little girl who watches him with blackbird eyes, crying quietly with the silent shake of something small and alone.
He starts forwards, is stalled by Crowkisser’s hand on his wrist, her nails cutting into his skin. Her arm, her whole body is shaking.
It takes a second for Shroudweaver to see his daughter, and a second more for him to recognise her.
A smile flits across his face like a bird across an empty sky.
She doesn’t move at first, then edges a step or two closer, fingers clenching.
Magic flickers along the line of her wrists, flares, and gutters out.
Her shoulders cut in a tense slash, ribs held tight. No one moves. Slickwalker wills her to do it, to put an end to him. Opposite, Shroudweaver does nothing. Leaves his hands slack, threads unwound. He watches his daughter carefully, his eyes tired, softened with sorrow.
Slickwalker can’t even imagine what she’s feeling. How many years since her mother died? Not long enough for the scars to heal.
Crowkisser steps a little closer in another flicker of feathers, like a torc up her neck, then slithering down her spine. The room flinches. Shipwright holds herself like a greyhound in traces.
Her father opens his arms, and lets the threads fall to the floor; raises his chin a little, eyes wet.
A shudder leaves his daughter, a long tight breath that hangs in her throat like cupped water. Her hands mirror her father’s.
She takes a step closer, then another, until something breaks, and she picks up speed in a silent flurry of feet and stifled tears.
Slickwalker watches her father draw her close, press her forehead against his chest, twine his fingers in her hair, and look at her with a face filled with light and longing.
Slickwalker watches her father, and unclasps the gun.