The Volunteer (The Bone World Trilogy) (38 page)

Bulging eyes swivelled towards
the Chief.

"Mmmooootherrrr...."

"Oh, Ancestors..."

Drooplip made a grab for him. It
was clumsy enough that Wallbreaker should have had no trouble
stepping back out of the way. But he had forgotten the hole he'd been
standing in and he toppled over, the Talker spinning out of his
hands.

As he fell, somebody else caught
him in a clammy grip. He yanked himself free, then dived through a
thicket of waving arms to pull up the Talker again, before crashing
into the back of old Whistlenose.

"They're here!" shouted
one of the hostages. "Oh, Gods! The Diggers! The Diggers are
here!"

Wallbreaker could feel the truth
of it himself in the trembling of the earth. They were coming. The
Diggers! And all his hunters had trapped themselves because of him!
Oh, Ancestors! What if he freed them? They had only one grub each in
their mouths. But how many hunters could he get to before the Diggers
arrived? And what was the point? The plan had failed. The Diggers
would know now, they would know! But maybe... a fighting chance...

Another scream. The sounds of
claws rushing towards him, directly towards
him
!

"Bright!" he shouted.
"Brighter than the Roof!"

The sphere flared. Squinting,
Wallbreaker could see the enemy driven back, grubs falling dead from
their hides. But at the very edge of the light, beyond his hunters
and the Volunteers, great numbers of the enemy lay waiting for him.
Huge
numbers.

"I can burn you!" he
shouted. "I can burn all of you!"

A single creature stepped
forward. There was something different about it and it took
Wallbreaker a moment or two to figure out what it was. Smaller, he
decided, than the others. But that wasn't it. There was more. Its
hide was smooth, completely unblemished.

No young, he realised. An
unmated
Digger, without grubs to worry about. Wallbreaker was done for. He
was dead.

More claws rattled the stones
behind him. And that was enough, more than enough. The next thing he
knew, he was running for all he was worth, parting the horde of
Diggers in front of him with the light of his Talker. But behind him,
came the sounds of a smaller number of the creatures, those without
any reason to fear him at all.

Rocks gave way beneath him. He
skidded on patches of moss as shadows flickered and danced. He had no
idea where he was going. He just had to get away from them, desperate
for them to take the hostages, to take the hunters, anything and
anyone so long as they just left him alone. But even as he ran, he
realised his dilemma. The Talker. It was the last thing on this world
the Diggers feared and they had to be certain of its destruction.

He felt the earth rumble, and he
knew that it wasn't just a few younger, unmated creatures that
pursued him now, but the entire swarm! They could return for the
hostages any time, but he... he they meant to finish right away.

He wept and cursed and ran and
tired. He had no sense of direction—he had lost sight of home
in the glare he carried with him.

But slowly, ever so slowly, the
light of the Talker began to dim.

Flamehair
cried when Stopmouth gave her the rice. Something was missing. So,
one of the Religious women showed him how to mash the other stuff,
called
vegetables
,
until it looked for all the world like excrement. Then she made him
feed it to his daughter, who gobbled it down like it was liver. And
all might have been well, except that at the end, his girl said
"mama?"

The word was identical to the one
children of the tribe used and he didn't know how to console her when
no mama appeared.

Wallbreaker had ordered all of
the Roof People to pack into the remains of HeadQuarters, and such
were their numbers, that nobody had noticed when Stopmouth had been
smuggled in amongst them. Lost in despair, he had barely noticed
himself.

Now, he held his child tight to
his chest, growling and weeping angrily at any who dared come too
close. Eventually, he even drove off the gentle Religious woman.

"Ah, what's this now?"
said Rockface. Sodasi hovered behind him, weaponless for once.
Stopmouth didn't want to talk to them. He felt he was trying to vomit
up his own heart and only the child in his arms, pleading for her
mother, kept him present.

"You followed Indrani
before," Rockface was saying. "Into your brother's house.
All the way up to the Roof. But you can't follow her now, hey? Even
you couldn't do that, boy. You mustn't do it."

Behind the big man, Sodasi was
signing to one of the children. They could have used real words,
those two; they came from the same Religious community and spoke the
same language. Sodasi's hands were almost as fluent as the child's,
although sometimes she stopped him with a puzzled look on her face
and he laughed at her. What a strange world it had become where the
young taught the old and the old lived on and
o
n!

"Listen," said
Rockface. "We're going. Whether you come with us or not is up to
you, hey? But you wouldn't want to miss it! A glorious charge!"

Stopmouth blinked with slow heavy
eyes. What did Rockface mean by "glorious charge"? And what
did it matter, anyway?

"Wallbreaker took some of
our people, can you believe it? He took Religious to sacrifice to the
Diggers when he could have had all the cowardly
Secular
scum
he wanted!" Rockface spat the foreign words
that he must have picked up from Sodasi. "He got Kubar too, hey?
I'm fond of the old waster, though only the Ancestors know why. And
that little friend of yours, what's her name? Taroona?
Tar-something..."

"Tarini?" Stopmouth
felt his arms tremble. Tarini was brave enough she might even have
volunteered to be bait if she'd been asked, but he doubted
Wallbreaker had asked anybody. He was Chief now and would suit
himself. Stopmouth felt something stir within him.
Poor
Tarini
.

"We're going to get them
back," said Rockface.

Stopmouth found his voice. "What
about the plan?"

"What plan? He's always
making plans, your brother. Who cares about his plan? If he needs
bait, I should be there, an old man. The sick should be there. The
injured, hey? That's how it's done. But he can't seem to tell the
difference. He's taken some of our best hunters, for the love of the
Ancestors!"

It was true. The waste was
breathtaking enough to push through Stopmouth's pain. Wallbreaker's
contempt for even the best of the Roof people cast a dangerous light
on the future.

Stopmouth raised his chin and
forced his eyes to find those of the one friend who had stood by him
from the very beginning. "Rockface... let me g-go with you. Find
me that Religious woman who was looking after Flamehair. Let me
come."

A massive palm slapped him hard
enough across the back to jolt Flamehair and to set her wailing
again. "Of course you're coming! It will be like the old days
when we fought the Fliers, hey? I can't wait!"

But as the Religious woman
returned to snatch Flamehair away from him, Rockface brought up what
he called "a tiny problem." "We're blocked in here,"
he said.

"Blocked in? How?"

"The women of the Tribe—our
old Tribe, that is... well, you're not going to believe this, but
they've been doing a bit of... a bit of hunting during their journey.
Mad, isn't it? The
women
!"
Stopmouth, despite his loss, felt his mouth quirk up at these words.

"No, I'm serious! There are
women outside with... with
spears
,
blocking us in. It's not a joke!" Lucky for Rockface, Sodasi,
the best slinger in the Tribe, with a hundred days hunting behind
her, didn't understand a word he was saying. Stopmouth just shook his
head.

"Gather any hunters who are
left and everybody who looks like they might be able to carry a
weapon. There don't have to be enough of us to win a fight, just
enough to look threatening."

"Welcome back," said
Rockface nodding, and grimly, Stopmouth nodded back.

"I'm going outside,"
said Stopmouth.

On the way to the door, he
spotted Ekta, the Warden. He doubted anybody could have made
her
do anything, and yet, here she sat, alone and useless. Instinct made
him tap her on the shoulder. "Come with me, Warden," he
said. She must have understood his gestures, for she shrugged and
stood without bothering even to wipe the dust from her bottom.

The only remaining exit had
indeed been blocked off by rubble and mossy rocks, so the two of them
proceeded up to the roof to look down on a circle of armed women and
children.

"You're supposed to be dead,
Stopmouth!" one of them cried. "And yet, here you are, with
a new wife already."

"Mossheart," he said,
nodding. She was still very beautiful, he thought. She could never be
as perfect as some of the Ship Women, but that didn't matter. She'd
had such a hold over his younger self that when he spoke to her now,
he felt he was in two places—two times—at once. "We
n-need to leave," he said.

She smiled a hard smile. "I
remember when you weren't able to look me in the face like that and
talk at the same time. You're a man now, I see. A man who was
supposed to have Volunteered. You couldn't keep your word? Well,
never mind. You'll be staying where you are, Stopmouth. You can't
force your way out when you have no fighters left, can you?"

She smiled again when she saw the
shock register on his face. "He d-did this on purpose?"
said Stopmouth. "Wallbreaker took our best fighters to use as
volunteers on p-purpose?"

"Of course! He always could
think circles around you. There can't be two Tribes any more than
there can be two Chiefs."

Stopmouth felt dizzy. The
implications for the future of his people were even worse than he had
realised. Wallbreaker had no intentions of uniting the Tribes and
using their skills. The old Tribe would dominate and what would it do
then?

"Is that w-what you've
become?" he asked. "V-volunteer the
young
and the
useful
?"

Some of the other women around
Mossheart looked uncomfortable at the thought, but these people had
already sacrificed the last of their traditions with the burning of
the Tallies. Their own Ancestors wouldn't have recognised them now.

"Hey, Stopmouth," said
another woman. This was Ashsweeper, Whistlenose's wife, and she held
her spear easily. "What will you do if we let you out?"
Mossheart glared at her, but Ashsweeper paid no heed.

"We will h-help," he
said. "We'll provide them with some r-real volunteers and the
rest of us will join in the fighting. There are more D-diggers than
Wallbreaker thinks out there. We need him to succeed as much as you
do."

"Oh, he will certainly
succeed," said Mossheart. "But he can do without any of
your help." And Ashsweeper was nodding her head in agreement.

"There's nobody left in
there that can fight," said Ashsweeper. "Even Rockface is
too old. He can't even stand straight."

Ekta shifted next to Stopmouth,
bored and sad. He had to stop himself grinning.
Thank
you Ancestors
. "You d-don't understand," he
said now. "There are lots of people in here who can fight. They
haven't done so before now because they don't want to hurt you. But
if they don't get their friends back..."

All the women below snorted in
derision and made the grabbing "show us the flesh!" gesture
they would have given to any idle, boasting man. He turned to Ekta.
"I need your help," he whispered. He heaved a rock onto the
parapet of the roof and the women below moved back out of range in
case he planned to hit them with it.

"W-watch this!" he
cried. He mimed for Ekta what he wanted her to do.

The Warden's arm became a blur,
smashing down onto the rock and shattering it with a single blow. It
happened suddenly enough that the women below yelped and stepped back
even further, the pregnant ones holding their bellies.

"As I s-said. You have
children w-with you. We d-don't want to hurt them if we don't have
to. But we are leaving here to join the fighting when it starts. Do
you intend to stand in our way?"

***

It
took until nightfall to get everything organised. That meant they
were probably too late: that the poor Volunteers had already been
killed or captured or saved. Stopmouth's force would arrive when the
victory was already won.

Even so, he knew what he was
doing still mattered. He needed to make his surviving friends appear
dangerous enough that they could not be too easily dominated and
destroyed by his old Tribe.

Language was a huge problem. The
children helped, as always, half-bridging impossible gaps. Fulki led
the way with that funny sneer of hers that the others seemed to fear.
She ran off to try and recruit the Fourleggers, but returned
empty-handed. The creatures would not be taking part. And that was
probably for the best. Wallbreaker's hunters were nervous around them
and might attack them.