The Volunteer (The Bone World Trilogy) (21 page)

"Wallbreaker... Chief. I am
a father too. You're welcome. And... and if I may say so, the way you
used the Talker down there in the tunnels was amazing. The light
drove them right back! You gave us time to fight and..."
Whistlenose's words died in his throat. He was just remembering
something else that had happened in the tunnel, something truly
miraculous. Why had the Diggers, having covered the Talker and
brought down the Chief, let him escape again so quickly? And
afterwards, why had they seemed to ignore him even as he slaughtered
them?

The old hunter strained through
the dark, trying to see this man that the Ancestors loved so much.
They must have been involved in such a miraculous escape! There could
be no other explanation. And in that moment, the last of
Whistlenose's doubts about the Chief flew off like a cloud of
insects.

"I'll be honest,"
Wallbreaker said. "I never thought of using the Talker as a
weapon before. Even though it's obvious now... I just... it was dark.
Darkness is especially... I mean, I just wasn't sure I could go down
there, even for my own daughter. That's the truth of it. So...
hunter, ask a favour of me. Ask anything and—" But he
never finished the sentence. The grip on Whistlenose's shoulder
tightened suddenly. "There it is again! Look, the creature!"

Sure enough, another light shone
through the branches all around them, but with a bluish hue that
showed it was no campfire.

"It's on this side of the
Wetlane," Wallbreaker breathed. And then, although there was a
very real possibility of Diggers in the area, the Chief was off
running through the trees. Whistlenose followed, only to find that a
lot of slime had fallen here in the last tenth or so. He skidded
through puddles of the stuff, burning his feet. He found the Chief at
the edge of a clearing and slid to a halt beside him, breathless;
shocked at what he was seeing.

The usual, gentle sounds of a
forest night assured their ears that all was as it should be. There
were cracks and creaks; rustles and the fluttering of tiny wings; and
then, the
crunch
,
crunch
,
crunch
of pounding feet as the Chief's guards finally caught up. "By
the Ancestors!" said the first of them. Whistlenose didn't look
to see who it was. It didn't matter. His eyes couldn't leave the
bright figure in front of them. It was a woman, as they had seen
before. Except... except they could look right through her to the
other side. She glowed with a slightly blue colour, her body
shivering like a bowl of fat.

"It's slime," said
Wallbreaker. "She's made of the slime that fell from the Roof.
Remember the way it moved sometimes? Remember the way it seemed to
follow
me
?"
Whistlenose did. And now the strange substance had made a woman out
of itself with features that reminded him more of Aagam or Indrani
than any member of the tribe.

"Who... who are you?"
asked Wallbreaker. "
What
are you?" He had the Talker of course, and the creature may have
understood him, for she drew closer, her steps leaving tiny, moving
puddles behind her.

"It's an Ancestor,"
said one of the honour guard.

"Then why is she so sad?"
said another, and Whistlenose realised it was true: she looked like a
mother whose child had just been volunteered.

"I am," she said in a
voice like a bubbling stew. "I regret. I am...
regret
."
She said other things that made no sense at all, and the Chief in
frustration held out the Talker, as if bringing it closer to her
might make its magic stronger. Instead, the effect it had was quite
astonishing: the woman simply exploded, soaking all of them in drops
of slime.

"That's it?"
Wallbreaker shouted. "That's it? You came all this way for
that?"

But that wasn't it. The next day,
the Talker, their only weapon against the Diggers, their one way of
communicating with Aagam who was guiding them, started leaking slime.
It would never work again.

The
Warship ruin glittered in the light of the topmouth shaded his eyes
with one hand while bouncing his daughter with the other. She was
chewing the leather strap that held her firm against him, her drool
running down his shoulder.

"You like that, little one?"
Flamehair she was called, despite her dark colouring and the fact
that it was unnatural to name a child before she could walk more than
a few steps. Other children played near the wreckage and not all of
them were human. A Fourlegger pounced in amongst them and that too,
was wrong, or, as Indrani would have said, "new."

"Well, love?" His wife
had arrived. He felt an arm snake around him from the far side and he
smiled, couldn't help it. None of the strangeness mattered. He had
everything a man could want.

"It's the hole," he
said, nodding upwards. "The one you burned in the Roof."

"With the Warship's
lasers
.
Yes, love."

"It's bigger," he said.
"It's growing."

"That's just your
imagination, Stopmouth. It was huge to begin with. As large as a
city
.
But..." she sighed. "I keep thinking of all the people we
must have killed when we did that. We—"

They'd had this conversation
before. "Those people were dead already," he insisted. "You
know that. Or dying. Look at the rest of the Roof! Look!" He
pointed away from the sun-filled gap and out towards the hills
beyond. Here and there, a few tracklights still worked or blinked on
and off. But the rest of the world lay smothered under a thick
blanket of darkness. The Roof was gone for good, along with all those
who had remained in it.

But down on the surface, although
Diggers waited just beyond the hills, down here there was a chance to
survive. The
sun
dropped warmth and light through the massive gap Indrani had created.
And the crashed Warship had brought with it little kernels of magic
called "seeds" that could be tricked into making food. It
would take time, apparently, despite the fact that the seeds had been
altered in ways beyond his understanding to grow faster. There were
rations
too. Disgusting stuff, and not enough to feed everybody, but they
would help a lot until the harvests came along.

It better work, he thought. There
are too many of us now who don't know one end of a spear from
another.

Toiling in the glare of the sun,
hundreds of Newcomers, woken from the freezing boxes in which they
had thought to sleep for generations, were clearing rocks away and
pulling up plants. Another group, faces screwed up in disgust, raided
latrine pits for excrement, while still others, cursed and wrestled
with a thing called a
pump
that produced water out of nothing.

Indrani sniggered. "Oh,
they're paying the price now! Look at them!"

He wished she wasn't so open with
her distaste for these people, but he was finding it hard to care
right now. The warmth and the strange new light had a lovely relaxing
effect on him. Here, with Indrani by his side and a milky, squirming
child in his arms, Stopmouth couldn't have felt happier. Let every
day be like this, he prayed. This place and these people. Let it be
home for us all.

A tap on the shoulder banished
his peace.

Why did it have to be
Vishwakarma? A great sadness had descended on the man since the awful
attack that had happened when Stopmouth was in the Roof. But his
over-excited nature was never too far away. "Uh... Chief? Um.
Yeah, what you were expecting. The Fourleggers. Amazing!"

"They're here?"

"Just three of them."

"Of course. Thank the
Ancestors. All right, Vishwakarma. Get everybody up from the... the
fields and arm them all."

"But, Chief! Those people.
Farmers
.
They haven't a clue how to fight!"

"Don't worry about it. Just
get them together. Give them spears or sticks. Anything."

Stopmouth could no longer tell
the time without the ever-changing brightness of the Roof to guide
him, but perhaps a tenth of a day later, a crowd of up to a thousand
humans confronted a ragged band of Fourleggers.

Stopmouth had seen the lead
creature before, recognizing it by its smaller size and the slightly
darker shading of its rusty colouring. It bore new injuries: welts
and parallel lines of missing scales that could only have come from a
close encounter with Diggers. It limped forward to meet him.

"Hunger needs flesh,"
it said through the magic of the Talker.

"Hunger needs flesh,"
Stopmouth agreed.
But
not forever. We'll be eating plants soon, Ancestors help us!

"My sisters are few,"
the Fourlegger said. "Diggers have brought darkness to all the
world and have buried us deep in their nests. Only ninety trios
remain, many injured. Many failing."

It was the longest utterance
Stopmouth had ever heard from a Fourlegger, but even so, he felt it
had not yet finished speaking.

"The land needs our bones,"
it continued. "It will have them in thirty, or ninety days. No
more before our last trio fills Diggger bellies."

Here it comes, thought Stopmouth.

Humans and Fourleggers had made a
sort of alliance some time before. They had promised not to hunt each
other and to exchange food. He had been expecting a plea for aid.
It's what he would have done if his own people had been in such a
desperate position.

However, the leader of the
Fourleggers surprised him. "Hunger needs flesh," it said
again. "Your numbers are greatly increased. My sisters and I
prefer your bellies for a bed. We will sleep more quietly there."

Stopmouth looked uneasily at the
ex-priest Kubar who stood beside him. "Did it say what I think
it said?"

Kubar was grinning. "This is
marvellous! There must be nearly three hundred of them left and
they're offering to Volunteer? Why, we might not have to hunt before
our first crop! We wouldn't even have to eat that monster Dharam! I
suspect he'd only poison us anyway."

Stopmouth sighed, saddened by the
loss of such firm allies, but knowing he had no choice but to accept
their brave offer. He opened his mouth, wondering how to phrase it,
when he felt something brush past his leg.

It was the infant Fourlegger his
tribe had adopted. It bounded across the space between the two
leaders and swarmed up the body of the adult of its own species until
it came to a rest behind the triangular head, its forelimbs wrapped
firmly around the throat. The adult stooped a little under the
weight, but neither creature spoke.

"Is that..." said
Stopmouth aloud, "is that your child?"

"All children need me,"
it said. "This one's heart needs comfort."

"Of course..."

They stood on a street, soft moss
beneath their feet and the light of the sun streaming in through a
ragged tear in the Roof. Already it had moved most of the way across
the hole. Darkness would fall shortly after it reached the end of the
gap.

"Tell them we accept,"
whispered Kubar.

At that moment, the Fourlegger
leader lifted its snout high, an action mirrored by the younger one
on its back.

"The Diggers need darkness.
They are already near."

"See?" said Kubar. "Get
the Fourleggers inside the new perimeter, at least."

"How far away are they?"
asked Stopmouth. "The Diggers, I mean."

"Half an old day's travel,"
said the Fourlegger.

"Your hearing is that good?"

"Yours is not, human? The
earth suffers the bite of their claws even now."

Stopmouth felt the decision
settle on him with such certainty that he knew an Ancestor must have
been speaking to his heart.

"We will not eat you,"
he said.

"What?" said Kubar.

"Does your hunger have no
need?" asked the Fourlegger.

"What we really need, more
than your flesh," he said, "are your talents." "We
could do with those ears of yours, and your powerful claws. You will
join us inside our walls and tomorrow, when the... the sun comes back
into the sky, we will raid the Diggers' fields and find flesh enough
for all of us."

"This is madness!" said
Kubar. "We can't go back to hunting! Those new people from the
Roof have no skills, they—"

"Agreed," interrupted
the Fourlegger. "We will come inside your walls. Humans are now
my sisters."

Stopmouth found himself laughing
and a great many of the men and women around him cheered when he
moved forward to touch snouts with the beast. "Sisters!" he
said, still smiling and wondering, as Kubar had, if he was truly mad.

***

Not
everybody was delighted with the idea of an alliance. The Newcomers
had greater reasons to fear it than most.