She struggles a little, as the long man clamps his gloved fingers over her face, and sketches a wet red line across her neck. No more smokes for her.
Slickwalker looks around. ‘Lose many?’
The long man nearest him points to two grey-robed bodies, slumped one against the other, their chests a mess of holes.
Slickwalker shakes his head. ‘Get inside. We’re close.’
The long man nods, steps closer to Slickwalker. His eyes are pale under the brim of his hat. A seabird skull swings loosely around his neck, beak long and thin as a dagger.
‘Deep Fishers be with you, Slickwalker.’ A hand on his shoulder, then the pair turn and slip inside the mountain.
As they move from sight, the sky darkens, clouds rolling in, down off the mountains, followed by sudden deep thunder, and the crack of lightning.
Slickwalker tastes the burnt sugar of magic on his tongue, and breaks into a run.
Far below, the people of Astic have gained the last stretch of Barrowland, moving in harrowed grey clots. The spears fall still, as those clots fill the defiles between the barrows with their blood, turn the grass black and weeping.
The wind picks up, the clouds ravelling down off the hills,a gale building against them. The people of Astic push and are pushed like the sea.
Sandsinger flinches as the thunder rolls. Fucking rain on top of it all. Here she is, dying in the mud, and now it’s fucking raining. She doesn’t like the look of those clouds. Ship-sinkers, black as a widow’s skirt. They don’t belong up here.
She claws her wet hair clear of her face. ‘Onward, lovers. Just a little more and we get some payback.’
They’re all exhausted, reeling forwards behind the bodies of their friends.
Almost under those big battlements now, almost clear of the rain of spears. She glances up, counting steps in her head, her lungs rasping the squall in and out.
Above her, someone odd stands on the edge of the mountain. Stocky, robed. A ragged thing, like an old scarecrow, ribbons of red and yellow streaming off their arms as they raise them high.
She staggers as she’s pushed from behind and steps aside absently. Something’s fixing her gaze on that figure as they raise up their arms. The hairs on her neck squall a hurricane alarm as she watches their arms reach up and reel the clouds in, their gestures seeming to pull the storm down across the Barrowlands. There’s a taste on her lips like burnt sugar, and a pressure building like the summer sky before a squall, lightning coming down the line.
She turns to her boys and girls and screams. ‘Cover! Run!’
The figure on the battlements reaches for the thunderheads and she watches those yellow and red ribbons rise from their arms, snaking towards the clouds high above.
Mountain magic.
Sandsinger traces the ghosts of those ribbons as they flicker against the sky, swelling into impossibly huge bands of light amid the storm, red and yellow, ragged and wide as rivers. In response, the clouds pulse, veined with black and red and black again, their angles sharpening to mirror the tattoos on the warriors of Thell. The ship-sinkers move in strange rhythms, against the wind, gathering over her people below. The falling rain hardens into sheets, striking with the force of a breaker’s hammer, punishingthe land, the people, the dead. She feels her skull bow under the weight of it.
Another rumble of thunder, and Sandsinger tastes its electric edge almost too late. She throws herself low to the ground, dragging her boys and girls down with her.
The lightning arcs red as blood and catches those still raised too high. Across the plain it strikes, six, seven, eight times. She counts under her breath as people explode, as the fire of their screams runs back into the ash sky. She counts to keep herself sane even as the rain develops a thickness, gritty with burnt bone.
Through the cut light of the storm, Sandsinger sees Crowkisser powering forwards, lifted no longer, the weight of the rain pushing her down. She sees the lightning come for her, a twisting red snake, guided through the air by those upthrust hands.
She stretches out her own hands hopelessly, gasping at the last moment as a long man bulls into Crowkisser, knocking her to the ground, his arms still reaching for her even as the lightning sunders his skull, boiling out the tips of his fingers, roiling red in his eyes.
His corpse sways, smokes, falls.
Sandsinger watches Crowkisser stagger to her feet, stare at the body for a moment, then turn and sprint onward.
They don’t all have her fortitude, her faith. The sky’s against them, the clouds threaded with spears, torn by that red lightning that strikes the earth over and over.
Sandsinger watches hopelessly as the Astic line falters, the right flank breaking entirely, driven apart into swirling eddies. Hundreds lost in a stroke, fleeing the field as fast as their legs will carry them. It’s not the end of things though. The rest of her boys and girls aren’t done yet, and there’s hundreds more at their back. She sees them, all down the line. Pushing onwards with everything they have left, fathers driving the bodies of their children forwards. Brave lads and lasses who have lost limbs are carried, hoisted aloft, urging the others along. All screaming teeth and tongue at the lightning. One last act of faith and defiance before they’re all rendered down to ash outside this bloody rock.
If Crowkisser has a plan to save them, Sandsinger would sure like to see it about now. She distantly glimpses their young witch, racing the storm to the mountain, a few steps ahead of the lightning. She doesn’t look back at them, doesn’t watch her people die.
Sandsinger spits. ‘Come on, girl. Be better.’
