The Volunteer (The Bone World Trilogy) (28 page)

The two hunters slipped into a
more natural hunting jog. Vishwakarma asked a few questions and
Stopmouth guessed the man wanted to know where they were going, but
Stopmouth didn't know himself. He was following the line of planted
Diggers. It was all he had to go on. Eventually, however, as they
came to a place where the hills met the rushing river, they began to
leave the sunlight from the hole behind them. The line of wounded
Diggers stretched off into the darkness beyond, but the bodies along
the river bank lay too thickly together to pass safely.

What
do I do now, Ancestors?
No buildings stood nearby that
he might have climbed for a better view. But the hill would do just
as well, maybe better, for it would help prevent the Diggers from
getting underneath them. But what would he see from up there anyway?
Nothing could possibly survive out in the darkness other than his
enemies.

He sagged, exhausted from the
day; frustrated and afraid. The whole idea of scouting seemed absurd.
Other than a tiny patch of light under the hole Indrani had made, the
entire world belonged to the enemy. If some human band from his lost
home had tried to follow in his footsteps, then they must have
wounded a few dozen Diggers and been swallowed up. And even if they
still lived, the sheer mass of bodies between him and them, meant he
would never meet them.

He should have been glad of that.
They thought him a traitor, after all, and maybe he was.

Vishwakarma made a frantic
gesture. "Down! Alert!" The men dropped behind a boulder.
The ground shook. Soil sprayed from a small clearing amongst the
planted victims nearby and suddenly Diggers appeared. They had bodies
with them—more wounded Diggers to be planted here and there
while the hunters held their breaths. The men didn't have to wait
very long. In less than a tenth, the enemy had gone again, leaving
the tunnel exposed behind them and a trio of fresh plantees.

"They've been burned,"
Stopmouth whispered. "You see that? Somebody knows they d-don't
like fire." Vishwakarma neither understood nor cared. He grabbed
Stopmouth by the shoulder and pointed up the hill. The Chief nodded,
and the two climbed up above the river as quietly as they could,
keeping two spear-lengths between them so that one might escape any
ambush the other fell into.

About halfway up, a sharp blaring
cry echoed across the fields and over the rushing river beneath them.
A Clawfolk horn. There could be no doubt about it. The alarm sound
that had quickened his pulse so many times back home. The sound that
brought hunters stumbling out of their beds, weapons in hand.

When he turned now, a red glow
lit the horizon. A fire: several fires, more likely, hot and bright.

The river cut through a ravine
back there, he remembered, just as it did here. A ruined structure
stood right up over the river; easily defended on all sides with
plenty of rock for flinging at an enemy, and wood too, for the fires
he could see now.

His people! Oh, Ancestors, how he
missed them! The greatest hunters the world had ever seen! They were
no more than a day's run away. An impossible gap to bridge in the
Digger-controlled dark, even if he had every Ship Person on his side
to help him. Even if they knew how to fight. He felt his chest
tightening and his vision blurring.

Suddenly, he was on the ground
with Vishwakarma's arms clamped around him and the man babbling and
pleading in his ear. Had he tried to run back down the hill? Had he
really come so close to wasting his precious flesh?

"You think I'm s-stupid,
Vishwakarma? B-but imagine what they could do for us, those people
trapped down there! They can hunt like your spirits or
gods
,
or whatever you call them. It's only the dark that makes them weak
and the Diggers strong. We have to get them back to HeadQuarters to
f-fight along with us. We
have
to." And what he didn't say—not that the man could speak
human in any case—was that his brother might be there. Hated so
much, but loved too by a younger version of himself that still lived
in his heart; a version that hadn't yet learned to give up.

They headed back along the ridge
of the hill, Stopmouth's mind filling with memories of home. He had
been bullied and mocked as a child in ManWays. But none of that
seemed important now; not against the weight of his mother and other
beloved Ancestors; not against the Tribe, the
real
Tribe that was his marrow and guts and heart. Nothing mattered more.
He had learned as much from his first breath.

The light grew stronger as they
came under the hole in the Roof again, but it had a deep, orange
quality about it that Stopmouth was learning to associate with the
coming of night. He could see HeadQuarters from here and the ruins
that surrounded it. He could hear the river too, hissing like a
living thing, too wide to cross, although the far bank bore matching
ruins. He had never spotted any life over there. But he was glad to
have the river as a defence against the Diggers should they ever
appear from that direction.

Vishwakarma grabbed his arm and
signalled "alarm!"

Two hundred paces away in the
failing light, a woman-shaped, glistening beast rose up out of the
ground. It glowed with a faint blue colour that seemed familiar to
Stopmouth. And it was camouflaged too—he could see the colours
of the rocks and moss behind it.

He still had the Armourback shell
knife in his hand. Some other man had made it, but the Ancestors
guided Stopmouth's throw and the weapon flew true. It struck the
creature right in the chest. But rather than sticking, it passed
fully through to fall out the back in a spray of transparent liquid.

The hunters stared. A mouth
appeared in that female face. "Shtop-mou..." it seemed to
say. Almost as though... almost...

Vishwakarma grabbed him by the
shoulder and pulled hard. They could not kill this creature of pure
liquid! So they ran again, fearing an ambush that never came.

Whatever that was, it can wait.

They reached the first,
rubble-strewn streets, not stopping until they had returned to the
building of the Fourleggers, panting and exhausted after the day,
calves aching from the hills.

"Rockface!" Stopmouth
called. "Rockface, I need you! Indrani!"

His wife appeared first, shushing
him, until she saw the look on his face. Then, she had her arms
around him. She smelled of milk and baby and he remembered again, for
the thousandth time, that little Flamehair had been fathered by his
brother and not him. Rockface turned up a moment later with Sodasi at
his side, both of them smiling.

"Ha!" said the big man,
uncaring that Flamehair must be sleeping nearby. "You're not
going to believe it, but I've caught myself a new wife. At least I
think that's what's happened. We'll need to borrow that Talker to be
sure, hey?" And he laughed while Sodasi shyly took his huge hand
in hers.

"Aren't you happy for me,
boy? I should be meat, of course, I know it, hey? But you're to blame
as much as I am. I Volunteered, you may remember. I Volunteered! But
it'll be a while before—"

"R-rockface! Indrani!
Rockface... you h-h-have to listen to me."

"A man on his dowry day,
doesn't have to—"

"The T-tribe. Our Tribe.
F-f-from ManWays. They're still alive. Less than a d-d-day away."

"No!" Indrani and
Rockface both said the same word simultaneously in very different
tones of voice.

"T-they're trapped on that
big rock down by the r-river. W-w-we need them here. Those Ship
People are useless. They won't even learn to hunt, most of them."

He felt Indrani leave him. He saw
her run out of the room from the corner of his eye, but he couldn't
think of that right now. The Tribe, the Tribe! And Rockface felt the
same way, his big face writhing with emotions too powerful for words.
Meanwhile, Vishwakarma and Sodasi were talking rapidly in their own
tongue.

Finally, Rockface, with tears on
his cheeks, let out a roar and grabbed a spear from the wall. "No!
R-rockface! No! It's impossible. We need help on this one."

"The Ship People? Are you
crazy, hey? The Ship People?"

"No, no. There are a f-few
dozen of our hunters still around. The Religious. And we'll need a
p-plan."

Rockface threw the spear down
again. "Why would they help us? They're with Dharam now. They
don't want to eat flesh any more. He's meeting them all tonight to
tell more lies. They lap it up from him like soup."

"We can't d-do it without
them, Rockface." Stopmouth felt sick. But he felt alive too. He
hadn't even eaten the strips of dried flesh he had carried with him
all day, but he forced some down now and made his friends do the
same. Then he went to look for his wife, but she was asleep beside
the child and wouldn't wake even when he shook her.

"You're angry with m-me,"
he whispered. "He's probably not even alive anymore. This isn't
about him. You must know that, love. Or me or you. It's Tribe. It's
more than flesh." No response came until he bent down to kiss
Flamehair on the cheek.

But then, she murmured, "You
said before
we
are Tribe. Flamehair and me, your womans."

"Of course, you are! Of
course, you are, love!"

But she said nothing more after
that.

When
they were growing up, uncle Flimnose used to tell the children
stories of heroes from the Tribe's past. At the end, he'd always
point up at the grid of tracklights that dotted the Roof at night.
"And that's where they're living now," he'd say. "The
fires of our Ancestors, watching over us until the day we all go
Home."

But fires weren't like that, were
they? All laid out as neatly as the streets where hunters lived and
died. Wallbreaker was always the one to annoy their uncle by pointing
that out, but Stopmouth had wondered the same thing. Later, as an
adult, he had travelled into the Roof and had learned that the
tracklights were simply objects of dumb-metal and other materials
whose names he had since forgotten.

However, now that Indrani had
torn a hole in the Roof, something new had come into the world:
random speckles and clumps of light, sprawling across the night sky
like true fires, except that they were as numberless as the Ancestors
themselves. While the daytime sun could not be looked at, these
stars
always drew Stopmouth's eyes and filled him with new hope that the
tales of his childhood had been more than mere lies.

He dragged his gaze away from the
hole to look down at the ruins of the Warship. Dharam was to hold his
meeting here, and already the Tribe was gathering. Bedraggled Ship
People, no longer so confident of immortality, along with the
remaining Religious, all together in a defensive clump. The latter,
having spent time on the surface, knew the value of strong walls and
were probably wondering why this meeting had been called at night, so
far from HeadQuarters.

Stopmouth wanted to know the same
thing, but he had more urgent questions to answer. Where was Dharam
himself? Where was the Talker?

And then, he got all of his
answers at once. A light shone from the top of the ship, as bright,
or brighter than the sun, and Dharam appeared up there from a door
where he seemed to be floating.

"You see, my friends?"
he cried. "You were wrong to bet against me. We have already
uncovered some of the old technology of the Deserters. I know—only
I!—where in the Roof to find one of their ships. It will whisk
us away soon and we will leave this place to the Diggers and... and
our other enemies." He rambled on in this vein for some time,
using terms and ideas that made little sense.

"They don't b-b-believe
him," he said to Rockface.

"So, why are they listening,
hey? They even clapped for him when he spoke about the other ship."

"They
w-want
to believe him. Because they hate us, but if he's wrong they have to
become like us."

"Bah," said Rockface.
"I will have Sodasi hit him with that sling of hers. She's a
very lucky shot for a woman."

"She's a g-g-
good
shot," said Stopmouth. And she'd only improved since the death
of her sister. "But if we k-kill him, they will only hate us
forever... But y-yes. We'll be using Sodasi's skills very soon..."

They moved closer. There seemed
to be no guards of any kind. Were these people suicidal? Only the
Religious seemed to be worried about security, and they kept throwing
nervous glances towards the hills. Stopmouth's small group of
hunters—himself, Rockface, Sodasi and Vishwakarma—was
able to get within a dozen strides of the wreckage without being
seen. At that point, Sodasi, always quick to understand what
Stopmouth wanted her to do, stood up and let loose with a slingshot.

She was supposed to hit Dharam on
the wrist of the hand holding the Talker. Instead, the stone cracked
into the metal between his legs. She may have looked abashed, but
Stopmouth didn't notice because in his shock at the attack, Dharam
had dropped the Talker anyway and Stopmouth barrelled through the
crowd fast enough that he was able to leap upon it just as it hit the
mud and moss below.