The last two long men lifting her bodily, one at the shoulders, one at the legs, her view jostling as they pelt towards the mountain, always a step or two ahead of the widening ravine, scrambling up the side of a barrow, a heartbeat in front. Thewhole thing lists as the earth next to it sinks into the depths.
The long men set her down gently. The one nearest her sweeps his hair back from a sweat-stained forehead, smiles in relief, and mouths something that might be, ‘Safe.’ He offers her a hand.
The crack of the bell behind him rings like a splitting anvil. The tear rips across the land faster than anything she’s ever seen. A roar of sundered soil, and the side of the barrow explodes.
The long man’s fingers still in hers, the rest of him split by the force of the tolling. She glimpses an eye, drifting loose from the skull and the remnants of a smiling jaw. A brief mess of slithering, wet ropes as his guts arc over her head, then she’s in the air, spinning end over end. The earth opens, all those old graves, shuddering to one side, falling into the worm-flecked darkness, making room for her.
Something in her jerks, and she catches the gnarled remains of a root, hanging for a moment over the soft patter of bones and stone sifting into the depths.
The jolt is almost enough to wrench her arm from the socket. Pain flares down her side, fingers scrabbling for purchase. Not now. Not here. Her foot finds loose stone. Enough to kick upwards. The pain is blinding, white fire in front of her eyes. She grits her teeth, yells with the effort and starts hauling herself upwards, arm over arm. Fury on her lips. Not now. Not when she’s so close. Not when so many have died.
Hand over hand, Crowkisser climbs.
Above her the clouds chime. Bright, beautiful peals, as the iron bell tolls again and again. Belltoller spins in sharp, precise movements and with every cast of her arms, the peals intensify. For the first time in decades, a Belltoller has taken the field, and Crowkisser sees the horror in the folktales is true. Even alone, she is monstrous. Devastating. The landscape can’t withstand her. The grass is bludgeoned, the cairns pressed flat. As the pressure builds, the sound of tolling rolls like a beast across the Barrowlands. It tears the tops from hills and people, shearing barrows and slicing the earth into heaving sheets that pull whole units screaming into the depths.
Crowkisser has lost control of the storm, and Belltoller knows it. She flicks echoes up into the roiling clouds.
In response, the sky rings with purity. The thunderheads shudder and contract. The crows laced inside the tempest becoming less frantic, less urgent.
Belltoller swings the bell, marshals the storm like a wayward flock and draws it downwards. The oldest form of ’tolling. Back from before there was a Thell, or an Astic. The old art of swaying rain low over the fields. Of making the wind come to your beck and call with just clapper and arm. The clouds know it, and they sing in response, pushing the ground percussively, flattening what remains of Astic’s bedraggled army. The living are pushed down into the dead, into the rents in the earth and the slick mud between the barrows. Thell’s own frontline is too close to disengage now, fighting mechanically, desperately, spears rising and falling. Above it all, red lightning runs ragged along black wings as the cowed belly of the storm approaches Crowkisser’s army. And the bells, the great bells of the sky toll, and toll again.
Down on the earth Crowkisser hauls her body over the lip of the ravine, and spits, her fingers scrabbling in wet mud and blood. She’s furious. Exhausted. As the breath rasps from her lungs, she digs her hands deep into the earth, gets the stone under her nails and pulls. Beyond Belltoller’s cuts, deeper than she’s ever gone before. Finds the dark, broken and wounded. Wrenches it up through her body and into the light. The pain of it is incredible, but pain is just pain. The noise that leaves her lips is like a mother giving birth.
She takes the dark, and drops it like a cloak over her people.
It falls like soft feathers, like drifting ash, and beneath it Astic’s army rises, linking shattered arms, and singing, their mouths grey with the sea. In front of them, Crowkisser’s body contorts in spasms, and the outlines of her people blur, their brows kissed by feathers. Weapons are raised. They move forwards, picking up pace over the shattered ground. The great gates loom.
As Crowkisser works, the Barrowlands grow strong with shadow, thick on their charging bodies. Thell’s spears are metwith darkness mid-air, stutter through the sky, and are devoured. They reach the ground as nothing but splinters, hollowed metal. Freed from the killing rain, Crowkisser’s army is buoyed by blackness. The gates draw closer, Thell’s defensive lines wavering in the chaos.
Sandsinger feels magic swill around her legs, feels the kiss of strange winds on her brow. Finally. Finally, her crow-girl has come through. She thinks of Crabflick, and the southern fleets, and those golden bastards, and she raises a club half-snapped from swinging, screaming out a battle cry that’s lost to the storm.
That storm is foundering. Even with Belltoller’s guidance, it rolls like a wounded animal, seeping sound and light. She battles to keep it within her power, her lips a soft line, her words a secret that she whispers into her bones. The bell rises, falls. Her hands lift, tracing the pulse of the clouds. A rhythm builds. One final strike is all that’s needed. She glances at Kinghammer, and he nods.
The people of Thell match the storm’s thunder, drumming on their shields. Kinghammer roars and raises his hammer to catch the darkening air. When the haft falls, the sky rains steel. And the steel sings. Belltoller’s back arches in response, her fingers curving, catlike. The air reeks of burnt sugar, magic cascading off her in scorching waves. She reaches, casts outwards, and the steel follows her hands. Hundreds of spears twist through the sky like silverfish, hovering, schooling, and striking, piercing Crowkisser’s protective shadow to slip steady into bloody homes. The people of Astic are winnowed. The earth takes them. Hundreds fall to their knees, lungs and guts holed by this whirling gale of blades.
They’ve come too far to stop now. So they try. Still, they try. Shields are raised. Clubs bat aside spear-points in frantic desperation, but Belltoller moves like a windblown flower and kills with every breath. On the battlements, the arms of Thell’s warriors rise and fall relentlessly. The sound of the battle swells. The thundering sky, the falling steel of spears, the tolling of bells.
The shot rings through it all, a burnt cat’s yowl, that snake-eagle-death cry. It catches Belltoller full in the face. Bone andskull and teeth blown away. She staggers, raises an arm unsteadily and drops the bell. The steel rain wavers. The second shot tears her ribs out and eats her heart. The hissing blackness of Slickwalker’s gun pools in her body, devours the stone, her screams, her frantic hands. Shields surround her, raised and hopeless.
A third shot rips the air, catches the raised head of a hammer. Kinghammer staggers, his weapon smoking. A few moments of utter confusion. Here Shipwright’s strong hands, there Quickfish’s hurried work and Roofkeeper’s swift movements. Between them, Belltoller’s remains disappear into the depths of the Stump.
The air clears. The storm still squalls with crows and geometries, but it’s uncontained. Skinpainter is exhausted, Belltoller a burning husk of blackened skull. And below, the people of Astic pick up their shattered bodies and move forwards. The great gates loom, impenetrable.
Shroudweaver is barely visible high above. A ghost on the battlements, cut from a slip of ice and a scrap of windblown cloud. Unwatched. Unheeded. Unhampered, he begins to weave. Red for binding and silver for sending. The numberless dead of the Empire shift within his chest; pressing against bone and marrow, shaking his veins. Restless in the prison of his hammering heart for twenty years. Eating his spirit by slivers to stay alive.
Smokesister’s bindings have been enough to keep them from seeping into every twist of his muscle, every drop of his blood, but not for much longer. He’s held them for too long. He should never have taken them in the first place.
It’s time for them to come home, briefly. Time for them to become something more. If there’s a regret in his heart for what he’s about to do, it passes like breath on a mirror.
He squares his shoulders. This is real now. No stage show, no confidence trick. Just a blind stab at halting the inevitable, and righting a wrong held too long against his heart.
He carefully unpicks the first few strands of red thread from around his wrist. Feels a small shudder as the bindings loosen. Like stepping under cool water.
The dead stir under his ribs.
A squad of soldiers thunders past. He pivots and sways absently to avoid them, light on the heels of his feet.
A second red strand unravels. And now there’s a chill on the ground, a wave of cold flowing down the mountain. There is saltpetre on body and sulphur on bone.
