The Volunteer (The Bone World Trilogy) (2 page)

The skittering sound came again,
this time from the direction in which his fellow hunters had fled. He
tiptoed towards it, although he only wanted run away. But that was
the point of being a Volunteer, wasn't it? To give yourself so that
your family might live, or, as the ancient saying had it, "That
the Tribe Might Make it Home"?

He heard a shout—a human
voice. No, voices! He reached the mouth of the alleyway to witness a
scene worse than any nightmare. A dozen Diggers occupied an open
space, their snouts round, their skins full of holes and seething
with subtle movement. They weaved around Whistlenose's fallen
companions. Leftear's right leg had bone poking through it from the
inside. Twistedtalley might have been unconscious, while Highstepper
crawled around in circles on hands and knees, shaking his head as
though he had thorns lodged in it, but no hands with which to pick
them out. "Mother!" he kept saying. "Mother!" It
made no sense. He crawled to within a few spearlengths of
Whistlenose's hiding place. One of the Diggers stopped him, its back
so close that Whistlenose could have reached out and touched it. It
became obvious now that the movement on its skin consisted of tiny
grubs crawling over the creature's body. Now, one of these dropped
from the Digger's hide to land on Highstepper's face. It was as wide
as a man's thumb, but somehow it forced its way up the hunter's nose.

Highstepper's eyes widened. He
screamed and gagged, rising up onto his knees, jaw working hard
enough to dislocate itself. Then he simply went back to his crawling.

Whistlenose looked up to find
Leftear's eyes fixed on his.

"Please," the man
shouted. "You've got to kill us! You've got to help!"

And all at once, the faces of
every Digger turned in the direction of Whistlenose's alleyway.

For the second time that night,
he found himself running for his life. He might have a chance—humans
on two legs seemed to run faster than the Diggers, above or below
ground, but the creatures were masters of ambush and three times
already they had appeared where the hunters had least expected.
Speedywink had been taken from below when he leapt an ancient drain;
Spearcatcher's legs had last been seen disappearing through a window.
It was all so...
playful
,
that was the word.

Whistlenose stumbled over a
brick, felt something scrape down his bad leg and imagined talons.
But it was only a piece of old metal jutting out of the masonry. He
righted himself against a moss-covered wall and ran on. Leftear's
cries had been silenced and the scrabbling claws seemed to be falling
farther and farther behind him. But he wasn't fooled, not any more.
I'm
just running where they want me to go.
It was as simple
as that.

He found himself back on a street
where he could see the remains of BloodWays burning and groaning in
the night. Dawn could not be more than a Tenth away now, and the
Diggers, for all their games, would want to bring him in before that.
They were rarely seen by day and seemed sluggish then and stupid.

He thought about running back
down the road in the direction of the human streets—ManWays, as
they were known. But no, no.
They're
expecting that. They've expected everything we've done.

Between him and BloodWays, there
lay a great open space—what the Ancestors had called a
"no-man's land." Trees grew there while mosses of a
thousand colours fought for the attention of poisonous insects. Even
by night with only the tracklights of the great Roof for
illumination, a hunter could be seen crossing this easily, unless he
knew the area well and had planned out a route for himself from tree
to bush to rock. Only a madman would go there otherwise, in full view
of every predator.

Whistlenose turned his face
towards the no-man's land and ran for all he was worth. One more
street and he would be there. Suddenly, the claws that had been so
silent were rattling on every surface. He could hear them behind him,
tens and tens of Diggers pouring into the road back in the direction
they had expected him to go. But others, too, were skittering along
in the streets parallel to his and one of these creatures, just one,
slid out to block his way forward. He was still running at full tilt.
Its triangular head turned towards him and its paws widened exposing
a rippling chest, an unmissable target.

So be it. His spear shivered when
it struck, biting deep, passing right through the creature's body
only to snap off against the roadway beyond. He didn't know where the
heart was, or if it possessed such an organ, but he expected it to
die, at least to die. Instead, a shudder ran over it and its two
widespread arms pulled him into an embrace.

They tumbled in the street
together, round and round while the Diggers down the road clattered
closer. Whistlenose felt his cheek pressed right up close against
warm wiry fur, that stung, somehow, on contact. Something was
crawling over his scalp, something finger-sized and warm. It tickled
his ear. He remembered the grub that had shoved its way up
Highstepper's nose and he screamed, shoving for all he was worth.

The arms fell away and he
staggered free on hands and knees, but the rest of the enemies had
arrived within spitting distance. He made it onto his feet and
launched himself away towards BloodWays, weeping, his skin stinging.

Under his feet, the ground oozed.
Rocks gave beneath his toes; moss pods opened to cause skids. They
came after him, a great wave of them, greedy for his flesh. Their
four legs would have the advantage here on the uneven surface, but
Whistlenose, running upright, could better see what lay ahead: a
Wetlane, what the ancient tales called a "Canal," with no
bridge anywhere in sight. So, he kept running, knowing he had one
slim chance of escape.

Whistlenose gritted his teeth
against the pain in his leg and pulled in his last reserves of
terror-fired energy.

Everyone knew there were
creatures living in the Wetlanes. Sometimes Chief Wallbreaker's
schemes tricked one of the monsters into the nets for the Tribe to
feed on. But once in that water, unable to swim, the hunter knew that
he would be the one providing dinner.

The reflections of the
tracklights shimmered on the surface as he sprinted forwards. He
didn't allow himself to think, to slow, to stop. Old Chief
Speareye—from before Wallbreaker's time—had a son called
Waterjumper, who had supposedly made it all the way across a Wetlane
without falling in. Supposedly. But if he had, he'd been a young man,
jumping in daylight, without a gammy leg.

Whistlenose remembered
Waterjumper's boasting by the fire, shortly before the Armourbacks
had killed him. "The trick is... and, remember, this is my idea!
Not Wallbreaker's, like he says. Mine! The trick is, you don't jump
forward. You go
up
.
High as you can and let your speed carry you to the other side all by
itself."

"I don't believe he really
did it," Whistlenose had said later to a comrade. "Who saw
him, anyway?"

Whistlenose reached the edge and
launched himself upwards. It seemed to take forever to cross the
water. He had time to count reflections in it; to think about his
miraculous son and his one remaining wife...

He hit the Wetlane in a shock of
cold that bubbled around him; that swallowed him down like a huge and
slavering beast.

He panicked, clawing all around
until his hands fixed on the lip of the wall. He pulled himself up,
although the water sucked at him, sapping at his strength. He got his
knees up onto the edge, hacking up water.

Behind him, the Wetlane churned.
The far bank held a dozen Diggers, but others had made it into the
water, their snouts peeping above the surface and writhing with
grubs. They could swim? But they lived
underground
!

He had lingered too long on the
bank already. One of the Diggers had caught up with him, but, hidden
by the lip of the wall, he didn't see it until its clawed hand came
up to fasten on his foot.

He would have died then, had not
the inhabitants of the Wetlane arrived in force. Water frothed around
the Digger. It released its hold on Whistlenose's leg, almost
politely, and disappeared beneath the surface. A few bubbles
remained, and then nothing. The other Diggers sank too, until only
those on the far bank remained to stare across at him.

A promise, he felt. They were
making him a promise.

He opened his mouth to shout
defiance back at them, but closed it again in the face of that
remorseless stare.

Whistlenose
ran hard for BloodWays, although he had no intention of entering
those dangerous, burning streets. He ducked behind the first rock big
enough to hide him and then began crawling on his belly, parallel to
the Wetlane he had crossed. Hopefully the Diggers wouldn't know which
way he had turned in order to circle around towards home again. He
was praying daylight would chase them off—and the Longtongues
too, whose territory he was now approaching.

His crawling brought him at last
to a small wood. He could stand here, but that didn't mean he could
start running again. Longtongues loved to set traps: invisible
threads they made inside their own bodies that a man would stick to
and could not escape. He collected a branch and pushed it ahead of
himself, wincing every time his feet crunched on dry leaves or
snapped a twig.

He wouldn't have to go much
farther. All he wanted was a place to hole up until daylight. He
would cover himself in vegetation and muck and then—

He heard a voice—a human
voice—a cry of anger. Whistlenose started forward and then
froze. "Don't be a fool, boy," he told himself, although he
was far from a boy now.

Nevertheless his feet, of their
own accord, turned him in the direction from which the cry had come.
More than once as he made his way through the trees, dizziness
overcame him. Had he really killed a Digger and jumped into a
Wetlane? Nobody would believe him back home. But
they
hadn't seen that thing crawling up Highstepper's nostril...

The cry came once more, sounding
more like frustration than outright terror. Whistlenose pushed the
stick ahead of himself and pressed on.

The Roof was starting to
brighten, thank the Ancestors! Whistlenose already fancied he could
feel the heat of it under the trees. He came into a clearing, just as
dawn broke, and stopped in surprise. One of the strangest creatures
he had ever seen floated between two trees. It had a face that might
have been a man's were it not for the hair that grew on its upper lip
and the darkness of the skin. The rest of its body—other than
the all-too-human hands—was made of a white flappy material.

Whistlenose stood there, frozen,
until the creature's eyes swivelled and widened at the sight of him.
He crouched, wondering how it would attack and knowing he was too
exhausted to flee.

But nothing happened except that
the tone of the floating creature's voice changed to what must have
been curses.

"You're not really floating,
are you?" said Whistlenose. Sure enough, as the daylight
brightened, he could see the threads of a Longtongue net glinting
around the tangled beast. For the first time, after that long night,
the hunter smiled.

"Thank you, Ancestors!"
Chances were, he'd make it back to ManWays alive now, and not only
that, he'd bring the flesh of this creature home for his family. His
belt-knife was made of that new material the Chief had
discovered—Armourback shell. It would cut through anything,
even the sticky threads of the Longtongue trap. He drew the weapon
and stepped forward with a grin.

"It'll all be over quick, my
hairy friend," he said to the creature, although he hesitated
when he saw its eyes widen in all-too-human fear. It began struggling
again as he approached. Spitting and shouting. It would attract the
attention of other beasts if he didn't hurry. But just as he raised
the blade the creature's struggles caused some of its flappy white
hide to fall away and Whistlenose realised with a shock that it
wasn't skin after all, but a form of clothing. The limbs beneath, for
all their puniness and dark colouring, were every bit as human as
that of anybody in the Tribe.

"I've seen skin like that
before," Whistlenose murmured. And he had, too—that
strange wife of the Chief's. The one his traitorous brother,
Stopmouth, had stolen away. Whistlenose remembered the day she'd
fallen from the sky and how she'd kicked some of the hunters in the
face when they'd tried to subdue her.

"Shhhh," he said to the
stranger. "Shhh." And the roofman seemed to understand that
Whistlenose had decided on rescue rather than butchery.

After that, only the Ancestors
knew how the pair of them made it back to ManWays alive, for the
stranger crashed his way through the woods and caught his ridiculous
clothing on every branch or stung himself on every patch of red moss.
He didn't understand the most basic of hand signals. He had to be
guided everywhere with tugs of his puny arms.

But Whistlenose had lost the
strength to feel any fear at all. He too, would have made easy prey
for any hungry creature that came along. He was limping by now and in
between pulses of pain from his bad leg, he kept thinking how unfair
it was that it was taking them so long to reach safety. The first
streets they encountered had been part of ManWays when he'd been
learning to hunt with his father and uncles. Once upon a time, human
guards had manned these walls, each with a shell to blow warning in
case of attack.