The Volunteer (The Bone World Trilogy) (3 page)

War had put an end to that. The
Armourbacks had wiped out half the Tribe and the new Chief—as
Whistlenose still thought of Wallbreaker—had pulled everybody
back to a few small streets around Centre Square where they could
defend themselves better.

The loss still hurt, especially
amongst the proud older hunters.

The hairy-faced stranger stopped
suddenly to stare up at the Roof. Oh, there'd been a lot of activity
up there lately: metal Globes speeding through the air and spitting
fire at each other, while sometimes, distant patches of the great
Roof itself turned completely black. But there was little to be seen
there now, and Whistlenose nudged the man back into weary motion
until—thank the Ancestors!—the first of the rickety New
Walls came into view and a sudden waft of cookfire set his tummy to
grumbling. Even better, his wife was there, jumping to her feet.
Ashsweeper! He felt a lump in his throat. Too young to be with a man
who had so few days left in him.

The stranger saw her too. He all
but licked his lips at the sight of her long limbs. Rude, very rude.
Whistlenose glared at him, but the man, if man he was, kept on
looking at Ashsweeper even as she wrapped her husband in a warm
embrace. People came running from all directions. "What's that
on its face? Should we kill it? Is it a man?"

Ashsweeper ignored all of it.
"You took your time," she whispered. Whistlenose could
barely stand. He wanted to lose himself in her, but the stranger's
eyes were still there, like knives in the back of his skull.

In the Chief's house,
Whistlenose's left leg continued its trembling while his belly cried
out for food. Smoke from a single fire tickled his eyes and lingered
over trophies on the walls: the skins of mankind's enemies and prey.
Whistlenose kept such souvenirs in his own home, but here,
Wallbreaker had laid them out in ways that showed off the inner
workings of the creatures' limbs and muscles. He had even drawn
charcoal lines on the skins to show where the sinews used to be.

"Our Chief is mad," he
had told Ashsweeper once, as the boy tossed in sleep beside them.

"Well, he can be as mad as
he likes, husband. He's all that's keeping the Tribe alive."

"No, Ashsweeper. It's strong
hunters that keep us alive. And that... that
Chief
won't even lift a spear. As if that feud with his brother unmanned
him."

"Say what you want, love. We
eat better thanks to his strange ideas and lose fewer hunters now
than we ever did before. I think our population has even increased
since we ate the Armourbacks."

Whistlenose brought himself back
to the present to find the Chief studying him, as though he were one
of the strange creatures pinned to the wall. The magic ball known as
"the Talker" lit up the Chief's body with an eerie glow.
Its light picked out the skin of his belly, strangely soft, like a
woman's breast.

"Thank you, Whistlenose,"
Wallbreaker said. "You did well."

What he really meant, Whistlenose
knew, was that of the six hunters who'd gone out the day before, any
of the others would have been a more welcome sight than this old man
so close to the soup. "You'll get your share of the prisoner if
he is to be Volunteered."

"Thanks, Chief. But..."
his tummy rumbled again. "But what about now? Could I... for my
family...?"

Wallbreaker's eyes narrowed and
seemed to fly like slingstones towards Whistlenose's sore leg. "Are
you still limping, hunter? You told me that injury was better."

Upstairs, a child was crying and
one of the Chief's wives tried to soothe it. Whistlenose felt sweat
beading on his forehead. "I got away, didn't I? When nobody else
could? You don't have to worry about me, Chief. I'll Volunteer like a
proper man when my time comes, but it's not today."
Please,
Ancestors! Make him listen.
"I leaped over a whole
Wetlane on that leg. But my family still need something to eat."

"You brought nothing back."

"I brought the stranger.
That makes it either a successful hunt or a successful rescue,
depending on how you count it."

All of a sudden, the Chief
laughed out loud, making the hunter jump.

"Your mind hasn't blunted,
anyway," said Wallbreaker. "Very well. You can take four
days’ rations for your family. There are only three of you, am
I right?"

Whistlenose nodded.

"And a tattoo. You don't
have too many, I see, but if you really jumped over a Wetlane, then,
by the Ancestors, you've earned one. Now, sit down while I speak to
the creature you brought home. He might trust you, since you were the
one to rescue him. But," the Chief raised a finger. "This
is like the Flesh Council. No rumours leave my house. Sit. Go on.
Sit."

Whistlenose stifled a sigh and
hoped his bones didn't creak too loudly as he lowered himself onto a
cushion of stuffed Hopper skins. Shame they were extinct. Their hide
softened so well when properly chewed.

Hunters pushed the stranger into
the room. He shrugged off the helping hands behind him.

"Too proud for his own
good," Whistlenose muttered and the man's head swivelled towards
him. He had understood the words and it took Whistlenose a moment to
remember the power of the magical Talker.

The stranger's mouth moved. A
quiet, musical voice spoke words that should have made no sense, but
again, the Talker's power made them real: "This world is at an
end."

The Chief flinched. Ever since
the dreadful struggle with the Flyers and the Armourbacks, people had
been saying the same thing. "The world is ending." Barely
more than a thousand humans remained alive, squashed into a handful
of streets. Strange lights had been seen on the Roof, and a new,
numberless enemy, the Diggers, swept all before them so that even the
Longtongues teetered on the verge of extinction. Wallbreaker hated
such talk. He sent his Flesh Council bullies from hearth to hearth to
shut the pessimists up. But even the Chief was said to cry in his
sleep.

"He's worried he can't save
us," Ashsweeper used to say.

"Can't save himself, you
mean..."

And now this dark-skinned
stranger with hair growing on his face and perfect teeth, had arrived
in their midst like a messenger of doom from the Ancestors.

Wallbreaker cleared his throat
and licked his lips before speaking. "You mean the Diggers will
kill us?" He waved a hand at Whistlenose. "Just today your
rescuer told me the Bloodskins are no more. Their streets were
collapsed or burning."

"Yes," the man said. He
sat forward then and grabbed Whistlenose by the wrist in his strange
dark fingers. "So good of you to keep me from the Longtongues.
It's a bad way to go, getting your insides sucked out while you're
still alive." He released his hold, like discarding a toy. "But
the Diggers are the worst I've seen. Not even entertaining to
watch—they're far too... too efficient." He looked from
the Chief to the hunter and back again. "I know you think you're
going to eat me now, but you won't. Or were you planning to sell me
to the Clawfolk? You won't do that either."

"How do you know these
things?" asked Wallbreaker.

"Didn't your runaway wife
explain it to you, Chief?"

"My... how...?" The
Chief should have beaten the stranger bloody, but he only looked
confused.

The man grinned. It had a strange
and terrible effect, coming as it did from behind the hair on his
face. "We see everything in the Roof. Everything. We know what
you did to her. A few, like myself, found that funny. A stuck-up
Commissioner's daughter! Ha! Most of them up there have you down as a
villain. But don't you worry about your reputation, savage. They have
plenty to keep them occupied up there right now. Plenty."

"Why are you here?"

"Oh, it's not for the
cooking, I'll tell you that." The man grinned again, as if he
thought that was funny. "This little trip to the surface was way
down on my list of options. Let's just say I passed on information
that should have been kept quiet. The punishment for that sort of
thing has grown drastic all of a sudden and when I knew they were on
to me, I said to myself, Aagam, my friend, if they're going to send
you down to the surface anyway, why not pick your own spot? Go where
the professionals are. The ones who already know how to survive. Rule
over them!"

Whistlenose sputtered, "You...
you mean to rule over us? And how—"

"Oh, not by force! Don't you
worry! I, Aagam, the conqueror," he winked, "will run this
tribe through its current Chief. That's right, Wallbreaker. You will
do all the work. Deliver me my food and hope I learn to keep it down.
Give me a few of the prettier wives and a bodyguard and generally do
as I say."

Whistlenose looked from one man
to the other, amazed that the Chief allowed this stranger, Aagam the
Conqueror, to speak to him this way. It made no sense, but
Wallbreaker seemed to have overcome his earlier surprise. Now, he
cocked his head, the expression on his handsome face one of polite
interest.

"And in return for all this
free food and protection?"

"Information."

Wallbreaker nodded and suddenly,
Whistlenose couldn't take it any more. He leaned over and pulled the
man by his black, black hair into a strangle-hold until Aagam's eyes
seemed to pop in their sockets and his weak fists tore hopelessly at
the old hunter's rock-hard muscles.

The Chief watched, waiting until
it was almost too late. Aagam was kicking up the furs at his feet,
his face under the hair even darker.

"Enough, Whistlenose."
Wallbreaker waved him lazily away. "I think our guest has
learned his lesson. Haven't you,
guest
?"

It took Aagam a hundred
heartbeats of spitting and choking to recover. When he had finished,
his voice emerged as little more than a croak, although the Talker
continued to translate it perfectly.

"You will regret that,
savage," he said to Whistlenose. "Next time your tribe is
looking for Volunteers to be traded for flesh, I'll make sure your
Chief here puts your name at the top of the list."

For the first time, Whistlenose
began to fear the stranger. Aagam the Conqueror and the Chief looked
each other in the eye like kindred spirits, and Whistlenose couldn't
get his mind around it. A few dark utterances about "information"
and suddenly this beast could make threats? Whistlenose remembered
the Chief's stolen wife, Indrani. She had fallen from the Roof, and
she too had escaped the pot by means of the strange fascination she
had held for Wallbreaker, little more than a young hunter back then.

"What exactly are you
offering?" asked the Chief.

"Survival," said the
stranger.

"How?"

The man grinned, rubbing at his
neck. "Let's talk about your brother."

The Chief stiffened. Everybody
knew that Stopmouth had run away with the Chief's second wife a few
hundred days earlier. That Wallbreaker had survived the disgrace that
followed was testimony to how much the Tribe relied on his clever
schemes and his meticulous planning.

"Stopmouth must be dead by
now," said the Chief.

"Yes," replied Aagam.
Wallbreaker looked away and Whistlenose couldn't tell whether it was
from sorrow or relief. "But," Aagam continued, "this
is the best part. He only died about ten days ago, when these
creatures called Yellowmaws got him."

Wallbreaker leaned forward. "Only
ten days ago? Impossible! Unless... did you... did you
see
him die?"

"As good as. I watched him
fall right into the mouth of one of the monsters. He was surrounded,
and the nearest help lay three hard days’ travel away. He's
dead for sure."

"But only ten days ago..."

"I'm telling you this free
of charge," said Aagam. "I'll even tell you how he survived
so long. The answer is that he found more people. More humans. As
many as you have here. They have a Talker of their own and a few
streets like these, only, see, they're living now behind a set of
hills
..."
it took a few moments to explain what a
hill
was, but the important thing was this: the
hills
represented a rocky barrier that Diggers found hard to tunnel
through.

"They have a far more
defensible position than you have here. That's the first thing. The
second, is that this new tribe are weaklings compared to you. Fresh
down from the Roof with little experience of hunting. They need you,
and make no mistake, Chief, you need them too. You're surrounded by
men like this savage beside me—the one you will soon have
killed for me." He pointed at Whistlenose. "Yes, you."
He grinned horribly from behind the hair on his face. "Stopmouth's
tribe do not think as clearly as you do. They will not yet have
realised that their numbers have grown too small to survive into the
long term, even if the Diggers had never existed. At most, each group
has another generation or even two, shrinking all the while. You know
this, Wallbreaker, and I know you know it. You have a daughter of
your own already and two pretty wives who want to kill each other.
You may see grandchildren, but there'll be no great grandchildren.
And that's the
best
outcome. That's with no Diggers at all. But there are Diggers, aren't
there, Chief? The Bloodskins, you say, have fallen. Even the
Longtongues, for all their love of the dark, will be lucky to last a
hundred days more. And after that? Well... you
know
what happens after that."