On the battlements, the remainder of Thell’s army set shields, their arms wrapped in bright metal, and beneath that, geometrics – red and black and red again. Slickwalker scans the line for targets, for someone worth more than another common soldier. Nothing yet. Crowkisser hasn’t tipped her hand, so neither will they. Instead, more of those damned spears rise and fall. Astic’s army are prepared this time. Their grey bodies peel off into huddles, shields upraised, keeping their hands on billhooks, flat-blades, boarding spikes, drawing closer to those phalanxes at the gate. They weather the rain from above with arms around shoulders and waists, those grips getting slicker and slicker as they are torn apart. At this rate, there won’t be enough of them to take the gate. Twenty companies had set out for the gate, two hundred men in each, little coveys forging forwards against the storm. Only a ragged stretch are still standing, and some of those just barely, winnowed down to half their number. The Barrowlands are hollow with the sound of chopped meat.
Their screams drift up to Slickwalker’s vantage. He grips the gun, sights, pulls the trigger, again and again and again, cursing with every shot. A body pinwheels over the battlements, spun by a slug to the shoulder. Another loses its throwing arm, the spear clattering to the ground. Still they come, flaying his people with steel, over and over again.
Despite the carnage they’re causing, Thell’s warriors are almost silent. They move metal with precision, adjusting shields andlobbing spears with quiet efficiency. The only sounds are breath, harness, sky, pierced with the occasional satisfying scream. It’s then that Slickwalker finds his target – Kinghammer, standing in the center of his troops, hands tight upon the battlements. Can’t get to him yet though. Too many bodies around him. When he goes down, it needs to be clean. Slickwalker wants everyone to see him die. The big bastard nods as metal rises and falls. He taps a rhythm on the haft of his hammer, raises a spear in his other hand, throws.
Down on the ground, Sandsinger watches a young girl take that spear in the eye. Her hands don’t even have time to flail at the socket before she’s driven back into the earth, carried down on six foot of wood and steel. Sandsinger’s sprats are in bad shape. So’s the rest of their army, from what she can tell. Their shields aren’t enough. They weren’t prepared for the sheer force of these things hammering through the air.
The only thing that saves them is the dying. She’s not sure who has the idea first, but suddenly, they’re moving forwards again, their shield-wall strung with the bodies of their friends.
She ducks as another rain of metal clatters off the cairns, wrenches the dead girl free of the spear and levers her to the front, listing wildly.
Their whole front line sprouts the dead, their bodies growing spears like a forest. Sandsinger flinches with every impact. She’s almost frozen with fear. Every step is a conscious effort. The boys and girls next to her are shaking something fierce. One of them’s saying the old prayers, but he can’t find the names, and he’s choking on the words. The girl to his left is slick with sweat and blood, her eyes white in a red mask. Every time she moves, she half-falls against Sandsinger, who holds her straight and steady, like a tired animal.
Their shield-wall heaves with one ragged breath, all of them straining together. As they shamble forwards again a spear-point splits the body in front of Sandsinger, and stops just shy of her chest.
Somewhere in that chest, Sandsinger starts singing. Snatches of songs she knows well, quiet shanties that grow and swell anddie, and grow again, old songs of the old sea. The survivors pick it up, ragged and thin as curlews on the moor, at first. Punctuated with screams and cries, but Sandsinger hears her voice growing stronger, and she hears other voices rising next to her. She leans into the sister on her left and the brother on her right and staggers onwards. Along their whole line, the ragged army of Astic lurches towards the mountain, shielded by their dead. The gate, somehow, grows nearer. Its guardians tip spears in response, the phalanxes of Thell’s vanguard barely a hundred feet away.
Near five hundred terrified boys and girls pulling through the Barrowland in ragged clots of ten and twenty, cowering beneath the rain of spears, then lurching forwards in the lulls. Above their heads Slickwalker’s gun rings out again and again, its scorched cat-scream crashing into the howls of the dead and the dying, the singing, the shouts of command. The noise of it all like a hammer beating wet on the inside of Sandsinger’s skull. Like the breath of a hunting dog on her shoulders.
She looks up, and prays to her new god, to that strange shadowed boy to keep watch over her.
High on the edge of the mountain, he’s doing his best. People run through the gun’s sights like water. Slickwalker’s fingers are burning, shadow eating at their tips as the rifle feeds and pulls. Still he fires. With every shot, another of Thell’s bastard brood goes down. Through the throat, so a mouth moves uselessly atop. Through the shield arm and the shield, spinning bodies in pirouettes of sizzling black. Through the guts, eating the whimpers, the flailing of desperate hands.
Slickwalker takes aim, fires again, his jaw clenching in satisfaction as another spear thrower staggers backwards, the gun devouring her skull straight from the socket. So many of them still, at least two hundred on the battlements, spears stacked and racked enough to kill them all five times over. They just can’t match Thell at range and he’s not enough to tip the balance.
As if his worries have found him out, the air tightens near his head, and he ducks to the side. Too slow. The spear takes him between scapula and neck, the force of it skidding him sidewaysacross the rock, his feet skittering in mouldering nests and rotten eggshell. For a moment, the ground looms below him, and he panics.
He trips as he tries to steady himself, hanging for a second on the edge of the precipice, then falls.
The armies below draw closer with frightening speed, as he twists in the air.
The pain in his arm is bad, but the weight of the spear is worse, pulling him off balance. He feels the gun buck in his hand as he nearly loses his grip. It’s hard to call out to the shadow through it all, his whole body unstable, hurled by the wind and gravity.
Of course, if he doesn’t get out of this, the gates stay closed. And they all die.
Slickwalker grits his teeth, grabs the haft of the spear, and tears it loose.
The agony almost makes him pass out. The spear spirals away below him, red with stolen blood. The ground is far too close now. Close enough that he can make out individual faces.
He closes his eyes, breathes through the agony, and leans into the shadow. It’s harder than usual. Gravity wants him, and he’s lost a lot of blood. It almost feels like his body is tearing apart. He screams with the effort, and dissolves into blackness, propelling himself into the pockets and hollows of the mountain which the sun never finds.
He hauls himself back up to his vantage, shadows slowly pulling the hole in his shoulder closed, his mouth filling with curses at the lost time.
He has to catch his breath once he’s back on the ridge.
The picture unfolding below him almost takes it away again.
The battle joined in earnest.
Both sides moving in. His people are almost through the Barrowland proper, pushing in ragged groups towards the side of the mountain in a slow pincer movement, drawing in to meet the square block of Thell’s troops guarding the edge of the Barrowlands. Maybe two hundred of them, crouched low, shields up, spears out. It’s odd they’re not advancing.
Slickwalker wonders if they’ve seen the troops to the west and east pulling in to hit their flanks. Dogrunners and Whiteteeth from Dryke and Fallow. Hopefully not – they’re fast lads, but lightly armoured. He mouths a little southern prayer to guard their backs. Feels it turn to oil and ash in his mouth. Of course.
Time to get into position.
He flows along the spine of the mountain until he reaches one of the westmost battlements.
The long men there turn to regard him as he reforms from the shadow. One is cleaning his blade on the edge of a ragged cloth. The other moves his knife over the throat of the last soldier. Slickwalker recognises her, the smoker.
