The Volunteer (The Bone World Trilogy) (41 page)

There
were four of them left. Their children burrowed tunnels through their
flesh and they felt the pain of it as a glorious web of fire. Their
poor, unmated sisters would never know this joy; would never share
the pain of the universe: the cries of stars longing for the love of
their creator; the screaming, eternal dying of the comets. Only their
children allowed them to be part of all that. Only their grubs.

But agony should not be hoarded
selfishly. It must be shared.

And so they ran. Deeper and
deeper into the darkness. Nowhere could they find new hosts for the
grubs. Everywhere they went were fields planted with their own
sisters until even these petered out into desert. By the time their
energy had left them, they saw a place where light shone by day. A
glare that caused their grubs to shrink deep inside their mothers'
bodies. Perhaps some hosts might live there? But no, they had not the
strength left to do the right thing; to subdue even one lucky
creature.

They found a single planted human
there, high on the side of a hill so that he faced down to where the
light shone and from where the smell of smoke and wasted, cooked
flesh must have tickled his nose. A metal ball lay at his hip and a
broken spear.

They lapped gratefully at the
nutritious drool from his mouth.

"Mother..." he moaned.
He suffered an agony greater than any member of his species had ever
known. They felt particularly tender towards him in that moment and
they chose this spot to plant each other so that they might be near
him and share in his pain as they all sank into the soil together.

Each of their deaths would mean
the birth of a single child. There would be no more Diggers after
that, and this too, was beautiful.

[THE
END.]

I
won't write anything fancy here, but I want to say that everybody who
helped out on the first two books,
The Inferior
and
The
Deserter
, gets my love and thanks all over again. This includes
family and friends, work colleagues and neighbours. It includes
commenters and tricksters from the Brotherhood Without Banners. It
includes an elite band of booksellers from Dublin to St. Andrews, to
Liverpool and Lansing. It includes everybody at Conville & Walsh,
at Random House Children's Books and at that mighty forge of the
imagination known as David Fickling Books in Oxford.

Who else? Who else? Gabrielle
Harbowy swooped mercilessly on typos. Fiona Jayde provided a great
and bony cover...

But most of all—because
this is a book that should not exist—I want to thank all of
those people in every part of the world, who stormed their
piggy-banks to buy the first two volumes, and who pestered me for
years afterwards with questions such as, “What part of the word
trilogy
don't
you understand?”

It's all done now. Let's go back
to sleep.