The Volunteer (The Bone World Trilogy) (39 page)

When the people finally came
outside under the stars, the women of the Tribe parted to let them
go. All except Ashsweeper. "I'm coming with you," she said.

"You are?"

"And not just me. Some will
stay behind with Mossheart to watch the children, but most of us are
with you. I told my husband it was a waste to leave us out of this
fight. We need to throw every spear at it. It's too important."

"Y-yes it is."

All around them, torches waved
through the air and terrified people tried to stay quiet. They knew
they were going into danger and Stopmouth had expected the Ship
People amongst them to hold back the way they had when he had forced
them to gather meat for the Fourleggers. But they did not. His rescue
of their friends the day they had used the mirrors had won him their
trust.

All the way to the edge of the
ruined human streets, the women of the Old Tribe had built great
bonfires of wood and bone that were tended by children too small to
hunt. It was something they had learned during their migration,
apparently, something that made the Diggers a little more reluctant
to attack.

At the rocky area, just where the
houses began to peter out, a last line of fires remained to usher the
reluctant humans into the terrifying darkness beyond, where the only
illumination was a mad scatter of stars.

Somewhere out there,
Wallbreaker's men had prepared a last ambush that the Chief believed
would break the back of the enemy forever. He had done so, ignoring
the talents and strengths of two thousand Ship People. Worse, he had
chosen to bait his trap with the best hunters remaining to the New
Tribe. Wasted. Horribly wasted and possibly dead or planted already
far out in the darkness.

In spite of his anger, Stopmouth
paused just before crossing the line of the last fires. There had
been low levels of talk around him between those who shared
languages. Prayers—even amongst the Seculars, along with the
exchange of kisses and good-byes.

He signalled all of them to
silence. The one thing he did not want to do was to ruin
Wallbreaker's plan by running in at the wrong time. No, he would
bring his people forward to a point where they could reach the
fighting at a charge as soon as the cries and shouting began.

He took a last look around him.
Rockface stood at his shoulder with Sodasi right behind. The children
they had trained were there, hopping with excitement and signalling
one to the other too fast to follow. Further back, Ekta, looking as
serene as a Roof Goddess; a terrified, very tall old man clutching a
sharpened stick; a young girl, totally unarmed; a bearded man, his
mouth moving in silent prayer; and a thousand more stretching back
through the streets.

He'd been a fool to ruin his
night vision by looking behind him. Never mind. He took a deep breath
and stepped into the darkness. Everybody followed—not in a
column as he had expected and might have preferred. Instead they
spread out until the whole crowd advanced like a palm sweeping bones
from a plate.

Nobody had brought torches for
fear of alerting the Diggers, so nothing could be seen. People to
either side of him linked elbows and he imagined the same thing was
happening right across the line.

It no longer moved in perfect
silence. Untrained hunters cursed beneath their breaths or cried out
when they stumbled. Behind them, the bonfires were still
frustratingly close and Stopmouth felt sure the fighting would be
over long before they could reach it. His friends might be dead
already. He was worried in particular about poor Tarini, who had
saved his life and his pride in the Roof.

He paused and unlinked from the
arms holding him on either side.

Something was very wrong: a
certain unpleasant smell on the air. An invisible pressure at the
front of his body, lighter than a flake of moss, but real enough.
Everybody else must have felt it too for the whole line came to a
halt and all those sounds of whispered curses over stubbed toes; all
those muttered prayers; all the sliding of rocks and the scattering
of pebbles, came to a stop.

"They're right in front of
us," said Rockface, his voice calm, but sounding like a shout in
the silence. "Look," he said. He must have brought an ember
with him in a leather bag, for all too quickly he was able to light a
torch, his face dancing in the flames. Nobody else spoke, not one of
them. Stopmouth could feel them holding their breaths, just as he
was. Rockface stepped forward out of the line, shrugging off Sodasi's
hand that tried to hold him back.

Twenty paces he walked into the
darkness, the light throwing up the crazy shadows of rocks and the
torn shreds of moss or the stumps of trees the humans had cut for
wood.

And then, the light found another
place to rest. A row of glittering eyes, the snouts, the wiry pelts
of Diggers, crawling with grubs that retreated from the torchlight.

Nobody of either species made a
sound. It was much too shocking.

All of a sudden, one of the
Diggers launched itself at Rockface, knocking the big man back and
sending the torch spinning through the air. Panic broke out,
everybody turned back, running for all they were worth towards the
bonfires and the safety of the human streets.

Stopmouth found himself alone
with Sodasi, standing over the fallen Rockface, expecting to be
rushed.

Instead, the Digger that had
attacked their friend hopped away from them, and the rest, the huge
mass of them, began to move forward, at a pace no faster than a walk.
The humans pulled their comrade to his feet and retrieved the torch.
All three found themselves stumbling backwards before the advancing
line of Diggers, while behind them, the Ship People ran for their
lives.

"Why aren't the Diggers
fighting?" asked Rockface. "Why aren't
we
?
A man should charge!"

But he kept moving all the same.

Rockface, the Diggers, all of
them, remained calm. It took Stopmouth a few moments to understand
why. This is the end, he realised. The end of the struggle. A great
moment, and both sides wanted to treat it with the reverence it
deserved. The first people of this world, the humans, were about to
leave it forever.

But Rockface had a different
interpretation of what was going on. "They have killed
Wallbreaker's lot. His foolishness has destroyed the Tribe and we are
all that is left. These Diggers... They're keeping their larder
stocked, hey? After us, whatever will they eat? They want us around a
bit longer now that they've picked the bones of the whole world
clean."

The humans were pushed all the
way back to the streets again and to the bonfires. The children who'd
been tending them were herded away by the enemy so that the wood
could be scattered and more places plunged into darkness.

"Are we going to take this?"
asked Rockface. "You are the leader now, Stopmouth. You have to
lead us in a last attack. Even the Ship People will fight, surely! I
don't want to see any of my children planted."

Stopmouth agreed. "We'll
fight, but not here. We'll do better from HeadQuarters with walls
around us. We'll kill more of them that way."

"So what?" the bigger
man muttered. He had fought Diggers from HeadQuarters before,
Stopmouth remembered. Only the Talker had saved the last of the New
Tribe then, but the Talker, like Wallbreaker's hunters, along with
those of the Religious, was lost to humanity.

More Diggers must have been
arriving in by the many side-streets, for the main road was now
packed with people. A thousand of them, maybe. Or fifteen-hundred.
The long line stumbled backwards towards HeadQuarters.

Flamehair would be waiting back
there for her father. Waiting for the Diggers, too. Stopmouth would
kill her first, not caring that her flesh would be wasted. He didn't
want her to suffer such pain as the grubs would bring.

And still the enemy followed,
gently pushing and pushing, breaking up the fires as they passed
them, never more than ten paces away from their intended victims.

Oh, Ancestors. I'm sorry I have
wasted our people like this.

The ground began to shake then
and he thought the Diggers were burrowing beneath the streets as they
had done in the past. Except... except that the confident enemy had
stopped in their tracks. Were they uncertain? Was that possible? A
cloud of dust was spreading through the air and Stopmouth looked up.
He knew exactly where he was now. He recognised the big building he
was standing beside and suddenly, a great urgency gripped him.

"Back!" he screamed.
"Everybody, get back! Back!" And the crowd, sensing the
desperation of his words, obeyed. They were close to panic anyway,
expecting pointy snouts to burst up between their feet at any moment.
But that wasn't it at all. No, the ground held firm. Instead, the
wall of one of the few remaining buildings in the area—the
giant warehouse that had been given over to the
Fourleggers—shattered, collapsing onto the street, burying
dozens of Diggers, but not the humans who had just passed it by.

A hundred Fourleggers, maybe two
hundred, of all ages, shot out of the building beyond, their claws
bared, flinging burning bundles of moss and twigs into the confused
ranks of Diggers. They crashed into the startled enemy, burning and
stabbing. Diggers lost their throats in gouts of blood, but worse by
far were the bodies of grubs, popping open at the slightest touch of
a flame—and the flame was everywhere.

Fourleggers killed Diggers by the
dozen, and the fallen, with few grubs to keep them alive, stayed
down. Stopmouth saw enemies scrambling backwards, clawing at each
other, panicking, desperate to get out of the packed, burning road.

Stopmouth wouldn't give them the
chance.

"Charge!" he cried and
sprang forward, Rockface at his side. He felt the wind of one of
Sodasi's uncannily accurate slingstones as it flew past his ear. He
heard chilling human screams—of rage. The women were here, the
women of his old Tribe, mourning their men with blood and spears and
rocks and flaming torches.

Stopmouth stabbed one enemy after
another. Sometimes their grubs kept them alive long enough to start
crawling away, but these were quickly finished off by Ship People who
brought concrete down on their skulls. Rockface was laughing and the
children, oh Ancestors, the children he had trained, were the fingers
of a single hand, swarming one victim after another, licking blood
from their weapons, signalling to each other, as the Diggers fled
before them.

Many of the Ship People fought
too. Clumsily, with tears on their faces and in constant terror. Ekta
led them and she dashed creatures against walls and snapped their
backs across her knees, while shouting orders at people who might or
might not have understood what she meant.

And yet, while dozens of Diggers
fell, the enemy resolve began to stiffen, to push back. People
screamed and fell, hamstrung rather than killed so that they might
still be planted later on. They lay there in terror beside fallen
Fourleggers as clawed feet used them for a road and pushed the humans
and their remaining allies back again, crowding them all together.
Ashsweeper fell into the press, her spear, ripped away from her by a
dying enemy. Three Diggers worked together to keep Stopmouth back
from her, trying to trap his spear in their bodies.

He saw her face, though, on the
ground, frightened, but brave enough to cry—"they've
bitten through my leg. Kill Nighttracker! Kill my son!"

Poor Fulki went down too,
snatched away from the other children with a screech. Rockface
burrowed down after her and came back alone, his spear red with her
blood, his face streaked with tears.

The Diggers disengaged again, but
only a little.

It had taken them a few hundred
heartbeats to reassert their mastery, to resume their gentle herding
of their future food-supply back towards HeadQuarters. The remains of
the U stood no more than a few hundred paces behind them, but the
people who had been hiding in it came pouring out of it now.

Stopmouth found Mossheart at his
side, her daughter in her arms. She had brought the Religious woman
with her, the one who had been looking after Flamehair.

"The Diggers are inside
those buildings," Mossheart told him. "They burst up from
the floor. We have nowhere left to go."

Stopmouth hung his head.

"It's not you who failed,
Stopmouth," she told him. She spoke calmly and seemed almost
relieved. "The Tribe failed when we let my husband lead us away
from what the Ancestors had taught us. And so, we are no longer
worthy of them. He was planning to eat the Roof People, you know? Not
just the weak. They would have grown food for themselves only to
become food for us. We were going to plant them, as if
we
were the Diggers."

"No..." he said, but he
knew she was telling the truth. "No..."

"If you kill my daughter,"
Mossheart said, "I will do the same for yours. Although... they
are both my husband's children aren't they? Aren't they? I worked it
out. There wasn't time for her to be yours..."

"Flamehair is
my
d-daughter," he said.