The Volunteer (The Bone World Trilogy) (27 page)

But the sea, it seemed, had life
of its own. After a ten, or maybe fifteen days, people began
disappearing, pulled under before they could so much as cry out.

The Tribe moved on.

They reached a place where the
air hissed like burning fat and a fast-moving Wetlane—or
river
,
as Aagam seemed to call it—poured into the sea. Here it was
that they saw daylight again for the first time in nobody knew how
long.

It was some distance away from
them—in the very place where they had seen the Roof burning
when the earth had shaken enough to knock them over. It was burning
again now, but much more gently and with a kind yellow glow.
Whistlenose knew his jaw was hanging open. He hugged his family
tightly to him and everywhere men were doing the same. Nearby, Aagam
gibbered excitedly, speckling his speech with proper human words like
"good" and "tasty."

Daylight! Daylight! It seemed to
lie in exactly the direction Wallbreaker had promised to take them,
the one from which the
river
came. "It's not that far," Laughlong was saying to his own
surviving wife, Sweetfoot. "Four or five days for a hunter. More
with you to distract me!" Sweetfoot giggled like an unmarried
girl.

But to get there, they had to
leave the safety of the sea. So, they clung to the tops of the hills
along the river, while just beyond the circle of torchlight, the
Diggers seemed to be moving with them.

The enemy never attacked,
however. Even when the distant daylight disappeared night after
night.

People speculated why—everything
from the protection of the Ancestors, to something the Chief had come
up with, to the enormous losses the Diggers had suffered in the sea.
But as the tribe stumbled towards the daylight over slippery rocks,
with the rushing water of the river to one side and the whispering
darkness to the other, Whistlenose felt his own fear growing stronger
and stronger.

He kept remembering the day he
had seen Bloodskin burning, when he and five companions had been
chased among the houses of no man's land. His small group had not
been attacked immediately then either. "Playful" was what
he had thought at the time, as if the Diggers revelled in a cruel
sense of fun.

"They even move away when we
go scouting," Browncrack told him. "They stay just out of
the circle of our torchlight, but you can hear their claws and it's
louder than the hissing of the
river
."

"They must be afraid of us,"
said Whistlenose, hiding his real thoughts.

"Of you, maybe, with your
bad knees and worse breath," said Browncrack.

"Well, it can't be as bad as
the breath from that lower mouth of yours that gave you your name!"

"Ha, old man. I've wiped it
clean on hides that were fresher than you..."

They clapped each other on the
back as if they were home in ManWays after an easy hunt.

Three days travel later, sort
of—the new, far-off, daylight didn't seem to last as long as it
should—brought them to the remains of a great stone structure
that hung halfway over the river with a slope leading up to it and a
small stand of dying trees to provide them with firewood. Of course
the Tribe camped there, up high, with the rush of the river beneath
them. Of course they did.

Wallbreaker stood at the edge of
the stone structure, with the river hissing along directly below. He
beckoned Whistlenose to approach. "Give me your torch," he
said. The Chief flung the burning wood out as far as he could. It
smashed into something on the far side, exploding into a shower of
sparks. "Ha!" he cried. "I knew it! Did you see that?
It collapsed into the water, but this used to be a bridge."

"A what? Like a tree trunk?"

"Exactly! Like the tree
trunks we used to use to cross the Wetlanes back home. Or the metal
ones you find sometimes."

"But this is stone!"

"Sure, sure. What a shame it
collapsed. I wonder how they got it to stay up?"

In the distance, in the direction
of their future home, the sky turned pink and bright yet again and
the people cheered as was their new habit. But suddenly the sentries
were crying out in alarm. They had built fires down at the bottom of
the slope. Whistlenose and most of the other men ran down to join
them there in case of attack.

But there was no fighting. At the
very farthest edge of the firelight, the Diggers had finally shown
themselves. They waited in their hundreds. Thousands maybe. A great
mass of them, just standing there. "Use your slings!"
Wallbreaker shouted when he arrived. But nobody dared. The two sides
simply stared at each other.

"What are they waiting for?"
whispered the Chief. There were enough of the creatures that they
could have overrun ten times the numbers of humans that remained.
Nobody spoke for a while, but eventually, Laughlong, from over on the
right, provided the answer.

"The fire," he said.
"They knew we'd camp here with all this wood. Three days worth
to keep ourselves safe from them. But we've only trapped ourselves to
get it. There's no defences here and we've left the sea far behind.
There's no way out at all unless... Chief? A new plan? From the
Ancestors?"

Wallbreaker didn't answer. He
turned and stumbled back up the hill.

Three days, Whistlenose thought.
After that there could be no more fire. And the Diggers, in masses
never before seen, were waiting.

But they were not as patient as
they seemed.

Scouting,
that was the first thing. Stopmouth's new hybrid tribe would only
need to survive until Dharam's lies became apparent to his followers.
Until then, the young hunter wanted to know where the Diggers had got
to. Surely they should have tried to launch an attack by now? Their
cowardice made no sense to him. They needed to feed like everybody
else!

So, for the good of the Tribe,
for the future of his wife and daughter and all the other children
and friends he still had, Stopmouth needed to find out what was going
on beyond the hills.

After slipping from the warmth of
his moss bed with Indrani, he crouched next to the lump that
Vishwakarma had become.

"Get up," he said.

The hunter spoke no words of
human other than weapon words such as "spear" and "sling,"
but his eyes opened, glittering in the darkness.

"You can't stay dead
f-forever. I need you." Vishwakarma understood none of this, of
course. Nevertheless, he sighed and allowed himself to be helped up.
He accepted one of Rockface's new spears, as well as a sling and a
Slimer hide skin of water. He must have suspected then he would be
heading into danger and seemed glad of it.

"Don't be reckless. The
Ancestors w-will be angry if we w-w-waste our flesh this day."
All gibberish to Vishwakarma. That didn't stop him nodding and grimly
gripping the spear. "W-welcome back, hunter."

Stopmouth cut his finger and
flicked a drop of blood at the wall. Then, covering the tiny wound
with a bandage of moss, he led the other man outside. As he had
hoped, the short night seemed to be coming to an end. Already a
gentle breath of golden light was brightening one ragged edge of the
hole in the Roof.

The men passed by a motionless
trio of Fourleggers that stood guard on the building, before breaking
into an easy jog and heading for the hills. The light of the rising
sun followed them all the way, warming their backs and waking swarms
of
mossbeast
s
into glittering, rising spirals. Way back in time, when there had
been no Roof, and no hunters either, these insects and the sun must
have greeted each other like this every morning.

The run up the side of the hill
went so much faster with no Ship People to slow them down. They were
young men at the peak of their strength, and in Stopmouth's case,
even old wounds and scars had been scoured away after exposure to
Medicine during his time in the Roof. The slopes and the coloured
mosses, the sliding scree, were like meat to him after a long fast.

And then they were at the top,
looking down as the light sped across the fields below with their
lines of bodies stretching back and back farther, into the darkness
where the sun would never reach.

"S-something's not right."

The human raid had cut swathes in
the line and Stopmouth wasn't surprised to see that the gaps had been
refilled with fresh bodies. The familiar stench too, tickled his
nostrils, even from this distance. And yet...

"Let's g-get closer."

They jogged down the slope. They
were no more than halfway, when Vishwakarma, whose eyes must have
been better than Stopmouth's, hissed and fell back on his bottom,
smothering a cry of alarm before signalling frantically for
"retreat." It took the ex-Chief a few heartbeats to realise
what was wrong.

Diggers! Dozens of them. Rarely
seen by daylight and certainly not in such numbers! His heart caught
in his throat, but he calmed himself and signalled Vishwakarma to
"halt" and to be "silent." A human could outrun
Diggers most of the time, as far as he knew. So, as long as this
wasn't an ambush, they should be all right.

The creatures showed no interest
in the distant hunters. None at all.

"I think I know w-what's
happened." He signalled "forward" and was glad to see
Vishwakarma nod back at him, much calmer now. He too, must have
realised what was going on.

They proceeded more cautiously
down the slope until they were within slinging distance of their
listless enemies. Like the other creatures around them, these Diggers
had been planted, their lower legs buried in soil, their claw-tipped
upper arms limp at their sides. Either the enemy had run out of
creatures to hunt in the rest of the world, or they were fighting
amongst themselves now. Both cases implied a level of desperation.
Stopmouth knew better than to see this as a good sign.

The creatures eaten by the
Diggers' young tended to sink as they were consumed from below, until
only the head remained to be fought over by the remaining grubs. The
last grub, the victor, large enough by that point, would consume the
entire skull and bury itself deep in the ground, only to emerge later
as a full-grown adult. Stopmouth had seen this himself when the Roof
had sent him visions of it.

Now, he imagined something
different. His mind's eye saw how the fields in the heartlands of the
Diggers must be empty, depopulated of anything the creatures might
live on. This had forced them to expand and expand until no other
species remained alive anywhere in the world, so that they must turn
on each other.

"Oh Ancestors," he
said. "W-we're all they have l-left." He'd always known the
enemy would not long delay their attack over the hills, but any hopes
that the Diggers’ fear of being burned again by the ship's
engines would keep them permanently away, failed him now. The Diggers
simply had no choice but to keep going.

And yet, they
had
waited. But why?

The men moved down to the bottom
of the slope where the soil became too rocky for planting. He stepped
as close as he dared to the first of the creatures, while Vishwakarma
kept well back. These Diggers in front of him did not look well. Many
lacked claws or bore terrible wounds. "Knives and spears did
this," he said. "Not claws or teeth."

He walked carefully along the
lines and then stopped dead. A piece of wood still jutted from the
chest of one of the beasts, although the wound had long since ceased
to bleed. It was the handle of a dagger, much like the one a human
would have made back in ManWays, just the right size for a man's
hand. Could it be...? No, no. Of course not. But he was holding his
breath all the same.

Vishwakarma gasped as Stopmouth
darted within range of the Digger's claws. He ripped the wood free,
falling back again on his bottom in time to avoid the clumsy strikes
that could have disemboweled him. The other hunter grabbed him under
the arms to pull him further out of range, but Stopmouth shook him
off and crawled back to where the weapon lay. He felt his jaws
working, but no sound came out. He couldn't believe what he was
seeing, couldn't believe it. He held it up to where his companion
might see. But Vishwakarma didn't get it.

"Armourback," said
Stopmouth. "It's Armourback shell." He and Rockface had
both owned similar weapons, but nobody else outside of ManWays ever
did or could. Stopmouth's people had fought the Armourbacks to
extinction and this wonderfully strong material had been their
reward. Stopmouth himself had discovered how to shape it with fire
after his brother had first betrayed him. It seemed so long ago now.

He was breathing hard and his
eyes were blurring. His people had to be close by, surely, and yet,
none of them were planted here along with those they had been
fighting.

Stopmouth found himself on his
feet again and running with no idea of how that had happened, but
Vishwakarma was calling out his name, falling farther and farther
behind. With an effort he stopped himself to wait for the other man
to catch up. There was no point in exhausting himself without reason.