The Volunteer (The Bone World Trilogy) (36 page)

It's cold, he thought. Like in
the Roof, in the parts that the virus had destroyed. He shivered,
remembering all the bodies that must still lie up there.

His plan now was to find the
Diggers before he could change his mind. Then, he would fight them as
hard as he could, forcing them to kill him before he could be
planted. Even so, he did not pick up the pace, nor did he stop
jumping at every imagined sound or turning to look back up towards
safety at the top of the hill.

Something cold and wet landed on
his face. He jumped and shouted without meaning to, even as it
slithered off him onto the ground, leaving a stinging track behind
it. Then came another and another: heavy lumps of slime falling from
the Roof to burn at his skin. In this complete blackness, the
globules seemed to glow slightly, so that soon, the faintest of faint
embers stirred everywhere on the hillside and all over the plain
below him. The victims in the Digger fields must have felt they were
under attack, for he heard them raise a great moan that thickly
filled the darkness, so that even his bones hummed in awful sympathy.

"Oh, Ancestors," he
whispered. "I don't want to die. I don't."

He had to swallow back his terror
before he was able to move again, and even after that, he felt it
waiting at the back of his throat, ready to spew forth.

The pools of slime, meanwhile,
seemed to be moving. That didn't bother him: he felt sure it was the
same stuff he had seen in the Roof. It used to move up there too and
he had even wondered if it might be intelligent.

But then, his heart stopped
altogether. The imagined scratchings had become real. Some
creature—several creatures—had begun moving out there in
the darkness, attracted, no doubt, by his earlier cry. It was almost
as though he could feel them surrounding him: the slide of claws over
moss; the scattering of sleeping insects. Why hadn't he brought his
weapons? How could he force them to kill him without a credible
threat?

Down on his hunkers, he picked up
a fair sized rock...

He never got to use it. A great
bruising blow struck him in the ribs, knocking the wind out of him.
All of a sudden he was tumbling down over stones, leaving skin and
blood on every one, only to land face down in a puddle of stinging
slime. Claws clattered towards him from every direction.

Stopmouth got his toes planted
beneath him and sprang straight downhill into the utter darkness, no
thought to it, only instinct. He crashed into the warm, wiry body of
a Digger, ripping its flesh with bare fingers as they went down
together. One less! He'd make one less for the Tribe to face!

It fought back, ignoring the pain
it must have felt, struggling to pin his right arm with all its
weight, while his left continued to tear at the holes in its skin.

Another weight landed over his
legs and now he screamed, enraged, horrified that in the end, it had
come to this, that his brother had wasted his flesh so uselessly.

But that had been the point,
hadn't it? To remove Stopmouth from the story of the Tribe and of the
world, with nobody to even know he had Volunteered.

And still more of the enemy
converged on him. Grubs crawled in his hair, catching there. He
fought to grab them until finally, claws transfixed his wrist to pin
him to the earth and there was no part of him that could move at all.

He had a vision then—just
like when he had lived in the Roof and the giant machine-goddess had
spoken to him and had shown him anything he cared to know.

He flew over shattered metal
caverns filled with burnt, or frozen or asphyxiated corpses. Places
where men and women had been crushed to a pulp, their flesh uneaten,
and great parks where the grass had been consumed by the starving
until the air had turned to poison and finished them off. Their
numbers were beyond counting. The achievements of the dead—and
there had been many—lay corrupted about them, as lifeless now
as they were themselves.

I'm sorry, Shtop-mou. I'm sorry.

Who was sorry? The Roof Goddess?
But the Roof is dead!

Stopmouth blinked. He knew
somehow that a great deal of time had passed: perhaps several tenths
of a day. And he saw before him a woman of light. No! Of
slime
,
of glowing slime with the slightest tint of blue. Like the one he had
thrown a dagger at that day with Vishwakarma. It stood before him, in
its barely human form, quivering all over in an effort to stay in one
piece. The Diggers, like all shadows, had been driven back, but not
very far. They waited patiently less than five paces from their
intended victim.

I'm
sorry. I will fix it.
Then, the slime creature
collapsed back into a puddle and the light disappeared once more.

The Diggers paused, perhaps
wondering if another slime woman might appear. He could hear their
breath all around him, shallower and faster and hissier than a
human's. When the sound stopped completely, he knew they were about
to spring. But this time, he made no effort to grab a rock to defend
himself with. He couldn't get his mind off the slime creature and
kept wondering if it had really spoken to him or if he had imagined
it. And what could it have wanted with
him
anyway? Addressing him by name!

Such strange last thoughts for
one who should have been thinking of his family and dedicating
himself to his Ancestors.

"Shtopmouth!"

A voice called out from up on the
hill.
Indrani
.
No! he thought. No! She would get herself killed with him. He surged
to his feet. "Get back!" he cried. "Get back!"

He expected the Diggers to take
him then, but they did not move. He couldn't possibly escape,
surrounded as he was, and he realised then, that they
wanted
him to call out to this would-be rescuer, that nothing would please
them more than for other humans to rush foolishly into their realm.
"Please," he shouted. "Go away! Go away!"

He heard a rumbling, but had no
idea what it was. Something massive flew past his face and warm
liquid sprayed over him. More objects crashed and bounced down the
hill all around. Finally, he realised what was happening and threw
himself flat. Boulders! Somebody was pushing boulders down the hill!

"Shtopmouth! Shtopmouth!"

"Go away!" he screamed.

Another crunch as rocks rolled
past him. But that wasn't the end of it.

Next came fire: rolling bales of
dried sticks and moss that turned end over end, with dozens of
Fourleggers charging along behind them. They were going to save him!
He couldn't believe it, but nor could he allow it. He
had
to die, that was the deal. He
had
to. Yet, he couldn't make himself run further downslope into the
darkness.

In spite of the rolling fires,
the shadows of Diggers in great numbers surged up the hill just as
the first of the Fourleggers reached him. Both sides fought silently
and better than humans would have, with senses superior for killing
without light.

"Shtopmouth!" a torch
appeared right in front of him. "Come on! Come on!"

"I can't, Indrani. Please,
leave me. I
agreed
."

"To him. To
him
!"

"He knows a w-way to save us
all, but I have to—"

She shrieked as a shadow appeared
suddenly between the two of them, but she overcame her surprise
quickly and smashed the flame down hard over its skull, scattering
sparks everywhere.

"Fourleggers die for you.
Come! Come!"

"But—"

"He tells not true all the
time, your brother! Now, you do the same."

"We need him, the T-tribe
needs him!"

"
I
need
you
.
So, we tell not truth too. We sleep you with Fourleggers until he
kills Diggers. Then, he not to needed again and I kill him!"

The Fourleggers were beginning to
pull back, as their balls of wood and moss began to burn out. And
Stopmouth found himself running too, rushing up the slope with his
wife. He didn't want to die, had never wanted it. He would hide out
with the Fourleggers as she asked, while Indrani would say he had
disappeared. And it would be true, wouldn't it? It's exactly what he
had agreed. To disappear. And no more than that.

Yet, as he ran after his wife, he
knew the Ancestors would see through such double thoughts and they
hated liars. Hated them.

Indrani tripped, her torch
falling away.

"Forget it," he said,
catching up to her and lifting her by the elbow. "Forget it!"

But the Diggers had not given up
on them yet. His legs were taken out from under him and Indrani
yelled in rage. Stopmouth had fallen flat on his face and couldn't
move at all. He heard his wife snarling over him and then screaming
enough to chill his blood, but then, the Digger rolled off him.

"Come," she said,
entirely out of breath. "Come! Oh Gods!"

They had nearly made it to the
top of the slope. The sun still managed to shine for them up there,
although when they finally saw it, it was only a few hundred
heartbeats away from sliding past the far side of the hole. They
would have to hurry if they were to make it to the Fourleggers'
warehouse. And what if somebody saw them creeping in? How would
Indrani persuade his brother of his disappearance then?

Sodasi was waiting anxiously for
them beyond the brow of the hill, along with the fourlegger child.
This then, was how the news of his attempted suicide had been spread.

"Indrani?" She had come
to a stop. He turned to look at her in the fading golden light. Sweat
covered her face from all of her efforts so that now she seemed to
sparkle.

"You must to live now,"
she said, the words spilling softly from between perfect lips.
"Flamehair... for her." And blood came too, then, from her
belly, where claws had ripped her open.

"Oh, no," he whispered.
"Ancestors..." they
hated
oath-breakers and always punished them. She collapsed, and he didn't
even manage to catch her in time, although she had stood but the
length of an arm away. He fell down beside her, pulling her beautiful
head up onto his lap, his mouth working uselessly.

"I never know..." she
said, "why you love me, Shtop-mou."

"What!" her words made
no sense.

"I did... very much bad
things... I am monster... but you..."

"No! No!" Indrani was
hard, yes, hard as metal and stone. But loving too. Just like the
Tribe, the way it needed to be to survive. She had once told him that
he was her heart. But if that was true, then she was his backbone. He
couldn't be brave without his Indrani; he couldn't be anything.

He didn't know how to say that to
her here and now. His idiot clumsy tongue and his panicking heart,
each tripped up the other so that the only sound they could make was
an awful, wordless moan.

And then, as suddenly as that,
she was gone. He trembled, his throat a swollen, aching lump. He
rocked her body, their skin sweat-stuck together, as the sun that she
had brought to the world disappeared at last.

The
time had come for the last battle that would decide the fate of the
world. Scouts had spotted huge groups of Diggers. They gathered in
the darkness beyond the hills where the light barely reached, even
though the hole in the Roof seemed to have grown slightly in the time
since the Tribe had arrived here.

"They're coming,"
people said. "For sure, this time."

And so a meeting had been called
for the Tribe—the
real
Tribe: men and women descended from John Spearmaker. He had taught
them to hunt; to feed and to clothe themselves. Sacrifice and bravery
had been handed down through so many generations of these people, you
could taste it in their marrow.

Heavy moss bandages covered the
Chief's shoulder, but Indrani's magic weapon had failed to kill him,
and he was finally back on his feet. He grinned, brimming with
confidence as in his younger days. His famous dimples were deeper
than ever and he seemed so much more certain of himself since his
brother had been lost on a scouting mission. He waved his hands to
silence the Tribe.

That was no easy task. Everybody
had crammed in together in a new Centre Square they had been made by
knocking over the shanties of the Ship People. Children cried.
Parents tried to shush them. Young hunters puffed up their chests,
hoping to win the eyes of the remaining unmarried girls, or holding
up fingers to show how many kills they would make.

"My people,"
Wallbreaker cried. "Many of you did not believe me when I said
the Ancestors had spoken to me, and yet, here we are, in the new home
that was promised to us. The Tribe lives and only one trial
remains... The final defeat of the Diggers."

"How do we know it will be
final?"