The Volunteer (The Bone World Trilogy) (30 page)

In that time, they had piled
enemy bodies up three high, while their own losses had all been taken
alive—dragged away before they could be rescued, or screaming
as grubs found a path into their heads.

And yet, this supposed final
assault had been beaten off and, at the top of the hill, fires burned
everywhere once more. Fires. "Where did the wood come from?"
he asked
Fearsflyers
again. Other hunters were staggering back to safety now, too.

The young man would not answer
him. He was weeping. Everybody was weeping. The Diggers' reluctance
to kill meant that maybe eight hundred people still survived, less
than a third of them hunters. None looked happy to be alive.

There was something strange about
the wood that had saved them, that burned so merrily. Whistlenose's
eyes couldn't quite make out what was wrong with it, but then, with a
spasm of pain that snapped through his whole body, he understood.
Tallies. Tally sticks.

"No!" he cried. "No!"
and he too was weeping. He found Ashsweeper and Nighttracker as soon
as he could. He hugged them hard enough to hurt.

"I'm glad you did not end up
in the fields, husband," Ashsweeper said. "We'll have one
last feast," she added. "Then... then the boy will sleep."

All around them, other parents
had the same idea. Digger and human flesh were both abundant.
Children would sleep when they were full and wouldn't feel a thing.
Whistlenose was glad of that, but inside him was nothing but
emptiness. The burning Tallies had done that to him.

He realised now, that nothing had
been real: not the voices of the Ancestors speaking to the Chief; nor
the Ancestors themselves. There was no future and no past. Even his
flesh would go to waste in the end, for the Diggers seemed to have no
use for corpses. And that didn't matter either. It had never
mattered.

Off to his right, the Chief sat
with what remained of his own family, while Aagam crouched by the
side, understanding little or nothing.

"You're a liar,"
Mossheart kept saying to the Chief. "We were better off where we
were. These people should throw you to the Diggers right now."
Their daughter sobbed, not understanding why they fought.

At the edge of the light, the
Diggers had gathered once more in a silent mass. These little fires
shouldn't have been able to hold them back, but they must have been
caught off guard when the cowardly Chief had given the order to burn
the Tribe's history. The creatures could wait another tenth or two,
and after that the humans would be no more.

Two days travel away, the Roof
glowed a strange orange colour as the morning there came into its
full strength. "You are so cruel," Whistlenose muttered to
his non-existent Ancestors. "To bring us this close..."

"Are we going to win?"

Nighttracker had come to sit by
him. His little body trembled, but he held a spear firmly in his
hands.

"Of course we are, hunter!
One more sleep, my fine boy, and we'll push the last of them away.
But it won't work, you understand me? It won't work if you don't
sleep."

"I don't understand,
dada..."

"It's what the Ancestors
want. Good children sleep when they're told. Especially the ones with
names! The ones who will be heroes some day." Whistlenose's
voice held steady; his eyes stayed mostly dry throughout. He could
lie now as well as anyone because nothing was real and all would be
quiet soon enough and forever.

Away from the Chief, another
group of hunters had stood up, gathering their spears and knives.
Fearsflyers
stood amongst them, making stabbing gestures down towards the
Diggers. "We need to go," he was saying, "while there
is still firelight to see by." That lot did not care, it seemed,
if they were planted in agony for tens of days before death found
them. They wanted to go down fighting rather than take their own
lives.

Whistlenose had had enough of
that, however, and of pain too. He hugged his child and gently,
gently moved his free hand up towards the boy's neck. How to do it
quickest so there would be the least pain?

He felt a hand on his shoulder.
Wallbreaker crouched down beside him. "I know how to do it,"
he said.

"What? What are you talking
about?" Why had the man interrupted? The man who had caused all
of this.

"Remember when we fell into
the tunnel with my daughter and Treeneck? And the Diggers covered up
the Talker with their bodies?"

"I remember. What does it
matter now?" Whistlenose just wanted to get on with killing his
son before the Diggers came back. At the same time, he grasped at any
excuse to delay this awful task.

"And remember how they
didn't attack me after a while? I was killing and killing them and it
was like they couldn't even see me? Well... I know now. I know how I
did it. We could defeat the Diggers!"

"Now? We could defeat them
now?" hope surged in Whistlenose's heart.

"Well... no... I don't
suppose we could do it
now
."

"Then why are you telling me
this?" Whistlenose could hear the sob in his own voice and could
feel his shoulders tense up to push the Chief away or to stab him or
to pluck out the man's hated eyes.

But just then, a searing blue
light exploded on the far side of the hill. It was brighter than
anything Whistlenose had ever seen. Brighter than the Roof itself! A
great boiling mass of Diggers was suddenly revealed. More of the
creatures than could ever have been imagined, pushing back against
each other, climbing one atop the other, desperate, desperate, to
escape.

They surged around the base of
the slope, trampling their comrades, even diving into the river to be
swept away, away from that awful blue light.

"It's a Talker!"
shouted Aagam in perfect human, "a Talker!"

Not all of the Diggers got away
fast enough. People were attacking them from behind.
Humans
!
Humans! And that was impossible, because Whistlenose didn't recognise
a single one of them!

"The Ancestors!"
somebody cried, although the attackers looked like Aagam, like
Indrani.

They slaughtered the enemy in
great numbers with the strangest hunting style Whistlenose had ever
seen. They swarmed about in little packs. Not all of them carried
spears. They had women amongst their numbers, often as slingers or
diving in close with knives. Each pack worked together, protecting
each other as some of the Diggers, trapped against a wall of their
own species, fought back.

"Let's go and meet them!"
shouted
Fearsflyers
.

Whistlenose surged to his feet.
"Go back to your mother, Nighttracker. I need you to protect her
with your spear!"

He and the other men ran
pell-mell down the slope to crash against the panicked enemy. He had
lost his fear of capture, of being buried. He brushed grubs from his
face and stabbed all around him.

The enemy wished only to flee,
but more than one hunter felt their claws in his belly or across his
throat. Several screamed and disappeared as tunnels opened at their
feet or the ancient streets collapsed beneath them.

Soon, however, only a thin line
of stubborn Diggers separated the Tribe from its rescuers. At the
head of the newcomers fought a pale-skinned hero. His speed with
spear and knife; his fierce, flashing eyes and sleek muscles, all
showed him to be an Ancestor reborn. There could be no other
explanation. Why he had been born to these foreigners and not the
Tribe from ManWays, made no sense to Whistlenose, but in that moment,
he did not care. Directly behind the great hunter, a woman, as
powerfully built as any man and wearing strange clothing, held the
Talker high above her head. A few heartbeats later and the hero faced
him over the body of the last Digger.

"You are Whistlenose?"

"You... you recognise me?"

"Of course! Don't you
recognize me?"

"I..." Was this John
Spearmaker? The Traveller?

"Never mind," the
stranger said. "We have to hurry. We have to get you all out of
here." The hero strode past, while the powerful woman with the
Talker tried to follow, but then gave up.

"I'm not walking on that,"
she said.

"On what?" asked
Whistlenose. Her face was perhaps the most beautiful he had ever
seen, but to his eyes, it sat strangely on such a large frame.

"On
them
!"
She indicated the Digger corpses that had piled up as far as her
knees. She shuddered, although she had been killing the creatures
herself until moments earlier. "I'll wait here until you all
come down again. But tell him to hurry up. We'll need to get back
while it's still light beyond the hills."

"All right," he said.
"I'll... I'll tell them."

All along the lines, people were
looking at each other, the light-skinned members of the Tribe and
their darker saviours.

"Can I see?"
Fearsflyers
said to another young man. "Can I see your spear? Why did you
make it that way?"

Whistlenose left them to it and
followed the hero back up the hill, racking his memory for where he
had seen the man before. He would never have forgotten such a skilled
hunter, surely. The Tribe would have songs about such a man and
fathers would have fought each other trying to marry their daughters
off to him. The blue light of the Talker stayed at the bottom of the
hill and the old man saw the newcomer pause at one of the fires, his
brave face in a frown.

"T-t-tallies? Are those
t-t-talley sticks?"

"By the Ancestors! You're
Stopmouth!"

The young man grinned. "Who
else would I be? We have R-rockface too, you know?"

"Rockface? That madman is
still alive?"

The grin widened. "He's
tried hard enough to get himself k-k-killed, but still has a way to
go."

"Of course, he does. He
would!"

Stopmouth's voice turned to a
whisper. "And my b-b-b... And m-m-m..."

"Your brother?"

A nod. Whistlenose should have
remembered that the young hunter had been condemned as a traitor. His
own tally stick had been snapped in two in Centre Square. Surely that
would all have to be forgiven now.

"The Chief is just up a bit
farther."

People had been wandering down
the hill to look in wonder at the newcomer, mostly children and women
who had not taken part in the last fight. Not one of them recognised
him any more than Whistlenose had. As if the Ancestors had slipped a
mask over his face.

"You're supposed to be
dead." There was no fooling Mossheart. She had come to the front
of the group.

The young hunter nodded, still
reluctant to speak, but he met her gaze in a way he would never have
done before he had left. He'd been so shy, Whistlenose remembered.
And then his handsome mouth set itself into a hard line. Somebody
else had pushed his way forward.

"Where is my wife?"
asked Wallbreaker.

The two brothers looked so alike
now and their faces seemed to ripple under the weight of powerful
emotions. Hatred, love, violence and fear. The crowd stepped back to
form a circle, as though they might be caught between falling
buildings.

"She was mine, Stopmouth.
And you stole her from me. And a Talker, the one you have below! You
stole that too when we might have saved ourselves with it. Instead,
you use what is ours, what belongs to the Tribe, to act the hero. We
lost... we lost
everything
because of that.

"Well, you can give it back
to us," he continued. "We don't need your rescue. Give it
back and we will drive the Diggers away all by ourselves."

It was true, Whistlenose
realised! Surely no strangers had been needed to save the Tribe if
only the extra Talker had not been stolen before! "Grab him,"
said Wallbreaker. "While his puny hunters are all down at the
bottom of the slope. We can ransom him for it. It belongs to all of
us."

Somebody bowled Whistlenose aside
and swept Stopmouth's feet from underneath him. A few other hunters
piled on top. The young man roared and threw them off again as though
they were dried twigs, but others piled in, pinning him to the
ground, his face against the dirt.

Stopmouth struggled to speak.
Finally, he managed: "W-w-we came for y-you. C-c-came f-f-for
T-t-tribe."

"Then you won't mind
returning the Tribe's property."

"W-w-wouldn't w-w-work.
Talker f-f-feeds on d-daylight. No d-d-days here. It's already
h-h-hungry."

People glanced nervously down the
hill. Sure enough, the blue light of the Talker did not seem as
strong as it had before. Whistlenose could feel everybody growing
more tense around him.

"You don't know what you're
talking about, brother," Wallbreaker said. "You barely knew
how to swallow soup until I showed you! Now. What about the other
thing? My wife? Where is my wife?"