No. No. No.
She can’t move.
She sees hunger light in its eyes, watches its lips curve in triumph.
Two heavy footsteps. Its head vanishes in a spray of gore and bone. The black steel of the Kinghammer. Another swing and the weight on her arm lifts. Bloodied stumps still clinging, but the body long gone. She recoils in horror and brushes lumps of someone from her. And there he is, one hand outstretched. Theother swings the hammer again. The dead stagger back, yipping in fear. She takes his hand and grins. ‘Dad.’
The blade catches him at the throat. Just barely. He dodges so fast that for a second she thinks it’s missed. He drops her hand and presses fingers to his neck. A thin cut, the smallest flash of red.
He reaches for her again, and she feels the air shudder, as his tattoos glow with a bright fire. The air around her father comes alive. In the drifting blood, before the jackal-jaws of their ridden friends, the dead flock to Kinghammer. Their teeth, their fingers, so fast, so fast. Icecaller tries to pull him to her, but she’s too slow. The air is thick with spirits. They swarm him like wasps. She has a second to feel utterly, completely helpless. He holds her eyes for all of it. And then firmly, suddenly, pushes her away.
The first of the dead hits him below the cut in his neck, in a sliver of bare skin. Bites, worms in like a maggot. Rippling the flesh above as it moves. Others follow, worrying at the hole like foxes. Kinghammer falls to his knees. Another in from under the ribs, the geometrics flexed apart by a scream of pain. His fingers arch and claw at the stone. His nails rip, bone breaks and blood flows.
More of the dead pile in through the ragged holes, punching through the wet ends of his fingers, forcing their way up through the muscles. His back curves and he vomits. They scurry to his tongue and cheeks, ripping through the clean flesh on the inside of his mouth. When her father screams again, he has so many voices. More of the dead flock to the sound, tearing through his palms, his temples, his eyes. The geometrics try to contain them. Icecaller watches them interlock and shift, red and black and red, red, red again. The dead are too many. The tattoos pull tight in response, crushing arteries, airways. Kinghammer writhes, one massive broken hand groping for his weapon. Icecaller starts towards him, but the dead crowd around her. She feels their grave-rot teeth against her eyelids, sees them picked out in the blood haze and melting ice, seeking an opening. Her tattoos itch like an old burn.
‘R-run,’ the words fall out of him in lumps, choking their waypast rotten air and clotted blood. ‘Get your sister.’ His face twists, writhes. He says it again. ‘Gut your sister.’ Jaw hanging loose in a jackal laugh.
Icecaller hefts her spear.
Kinghammer watches her from his knees. Spreads his arms wide. ‘Yes,’ it says. ‘Tear more. Let the others in.’
The swirling mass of the dead roils in joy. Distantly, she can see them punching into struggling bodies, burrowing like ferrets, needle-sharp and hungry. Clumps of soldiers group together, fighting a desperate rearguard. Thell’s finest, back-to-back. Alone at first, then opening their ranks to let in fleeing, grey-cloaked figures. The sides of the battle are shifting, the living versus the dead.
No one’s coming to save her. There are acres of carnage between her and anything remotely like a friend.
People fall. Briefly listless hands reaffirm themselves to spears and turn on friends and lovers. The thing that was her father shambles closer. It watches her with feral, unfamiliar eyes, then presses against her tattoos, bares its teeth, and shrieks, flicking blood at her face from ragged hands.
Toying with her.
Icecaller casts around the room, desperately getting her bearings. Nigh can’t be too far from here, in the sleeping chambers. Which means she’s not too far from those solid oak doors.
She takes a breath, and punches outwards, breaking bone. Buys herself about three seconds. Three seconds to turn from the howling face of her father, to duck below the sweep of his hammer, to raise her forearms in front of her face and barrel into the dead. As she runs, she feels their teeth slide off her geometrics, driven back for a moment. She mouths a quick thanks to Skinpainter’s work as the dead yowl, incensed. Heart hammering, legs aching but staying a step ahead of the fear, she ducks a spear thrown by the woman who used to bring her breakfast. Somehow vaults a pile of weeping bodies busily devouring one another. Turns, slips on shreds of flesh, falls. Avoids ramming her eyes onto a broken spear-point by a hairsbreadth. The hand holding it twitches.
Icecaller flinches back into familiar arms. The wreck of her father jerks away from her as her tattoos flare, then closes in, purring, gurgling soft and hungry things. Behind her, a man dies screaming as his sister chews her way through his stomach. He’s filled from the roiling air and rises again to hunt his wife with a crazed, loose grin.
In front of Icecaller, the arm holding the shattered spear scrabbles, pulling a blood-slick body from under a mound of muttering corpses. It takes a moment for her to recognise Hawkspit. He opens his mouth to speak, but she can already see his geometrics glowing fiercely on his skin. Intact. She grabs, his wrist and screams. ‘Run. The sleeping halls!’
So they run. The loping meat of her father pursues them, sniffing at the edges of their protection, cursing them between smashed teeth. There’s a grief building inside her like a stopped river, but she’s choked it up with terror. No time to feel. No time to stop. No time for anything other than the mad, aching drum of her feet on stone. Down and down. The halls are in chaos. She glances about wildly for Skinpainter, Shipwright, Quickfish, but if they’re there, she can’t see them. Always in the front of her head like a pulse is her sister – Nigh, Nigh, Nigh. As they run, her feet draw her towards the sound of singing. The Deadsingers. She’ll have to pass the council chamber to get to the sleeping halls. Of course. Perhaps they can help her. Perhaps they can save her father. She sprints faster still, throwing herself towards the arch of the chamber with a yell of exertion, Hawkspit’s feet skidding bloodily. His hands pressed to his temples, his mouth a litany of terror and prayer. Her breath is a dagger in her side, the air slipping from her with every minute. As Icecaller collapses against the cool stone of the arch, she sees them. The Deadsingers, driven on to the high speaking stones, back-to-back. Beneath them, a sea of ridden people; herbwives, soldiers, bartenders, all clutching spears and knives and broken things, their bodies bloodied, darkened and torn with the stain of the dead.
The Deadsingers chant resolutely in low harmonised tones. A man leaps for them, and is struck open-handed by the rightmosttwin, her hair whipping behind her. He staggers, dazed. His broken tattoos flare and the Deadsingers drag him behind them. It’s only then that Icecaller sees the cleft in the rock at their back, and in it, the children. Another ridden woman leaps and the Deadsingers catch her mid-air, singing into her screaming, bloody mouth. She quiets, and they send her scrambling into the cleft to join the others.
Icecaller turns towards them, skirting the milling mass, pushing them back with the flat of her blade, keeping Hawkspit in front of her, between her arms. The closer she gets to the song of the Singers, the more the ridden dead shrink back. But not her father. His roar is close behind her, thundering across the flat circle of the council chamber, scattering bodies in his wake. The Deadsingers see her, see Kinghammer a hairsbreadth behind. Their lips set in a thin line.
‘Help him,’ she screams.
The leftmost Singer ducks a blade, slaps its wielder between the eyes as he barrels past, and shakes her head at Icecaller, horror cold on her face.
The thing that was Kinghammer laughs, his voice guttural and huge at her back. ‘There’s too many of us, dearest daughter.’
The rightmost Deadsinger leans back from a thrust chair leg, nods.
Icecaller scrambles up the steps towards them, kicking at grasping hands, hauling Hawkspit’s yelping, bruised body behind her. ‘Please!’
Something softens in their gaze and a lidded glance passing between them. The twins take Icecaller by her wrists and raise her onto the ledge. They’re surprisingly strong, their skin like soft wood, stark with muscle underneath.
She staggers gratefully behind them, Hawkspit flailing after. He shoots her a look and rubs at his shoulder.
The thing inside Kinghammer wastes no time, vaulting out from the mass of the dead, and landing on the ledge in front of them. Unsteady for the briefest moment, its new body and ruined legs conspiring against it. The Deadsingers move quickly,sliding either side of Kinghammer. It screams in rage, flailing the hammer in an arc. They dip like herons striking, as their song hits it from both sides like a vice. Their harmony and resonance shivers through the cavern. Icecaller can feel it against her eyes like a thumb against her veins. Hawkspit falls back screaming, hands over his ears. In the face of the song, the dead are driven back like leaves on a pond. Kinghammer falls to his knees. A jolt of hope strikes her heart, and before she thinks Icecaller runs to him.
