Lightmender watches her for a second, shifts her weight from her injured side.
‘OK, Crowkisser. Send anyone you find up here, I’ll get them out.’
Crowkisser nods, and steps back into the mountain before anyone thinks it through enough for things to go south. Back into the battle she goes, back and further down.
Slickwalker follows in her wake, gathering the remnants of both armies; telling them to flee back to the gates, to Lightmender, to the Barrowlands. He stutters through shadow and around blades, collapsing tunnels to stave off the advancing dead, setting charges along rock already scarred to glass by battles long-gone. The toll of the gun makes his hand ache, a feeling like starving as his flesh is swallowed by its magic, and poured back onto his bones by shadow.
He finds a man, leg struck, skin writhing with the dead, and listens as his words change, as his begging becomes imprecations, as the Emperor’s madness takes hold. Then he points the barrel of the gun, pulls the trigger.
By his side, Crowkisser takes apart the dead who come at her, turning herself into a devouring torrent of beaks and claws. She births crows in squalls, creating corridors, spaces for movement, pushing the dead back with wings and fury.
Slowly, they salvage what they can from the madness roiling in the mountain’s heart, this thing that her broken alliance has unleashed. The Emperor, reasserting his hold. Each moment, no longer a battle, but rather a strange kind of triage, driving their people and Thell’s backwards and upwards, sometimes bodily. There’s little time to explain, only the stark division of the dead on one side and the living on the other. It takes a while for it to stick, the mountain’s defenders are reluctant to welcome the feathered witch and shadow-spitting hunter as friends. It’s only when the people of Thell start losing the battle in earnest that Crowkisser can begin save them.
At every turn, Slickwalker sees shield-walls wavering, spears falling, young men and women stumbling backwards into the arms of friends who take them apart piece by piece, rib by rib. He would have rejoiced at this a few days ago. Now, he sees Crowkisser’s point. If they let this run its course, they’ll be victors over nothing but the dead and they’ll have a second war to fight against the Empire’s risen horde. Every soul that dies in the mountain is a loss for their cause.
Still, it’s not easy to make a difference. His weapon’s not made for saving lives. It doesn’t help that this place is a warren of tunnels tight around a central well that kills his lines of fire. He’s no idea how deep they are now. He’s lost count in their haring descent through the Stump.
Four, maybe five levels later, they stagger into the remnants of a marketplace. The gun keens wildly in his hands as it bucks and screeches, every shot scouring flesh and rock with abandon. Everywhere, the injured and ridden dead. Slickwalker tries to target the ones where the madness has set in deep, the most clearly gone, their snarling coruscating up the registers of pain as the gun eats their bones. It’s brutal, but enough to get the attention of the survivors cowering beneath sacks and under tables. Then Crowkisser takes her turn, calling crows from the dark places, between the blood-flecked lights and overturned stalls, past makeshift barricades, battering the mad and blood-crazed dead back into one other, creating, for a second, space. Thell’s survivors seize their chance, and flee back towards the light.
Both armies merge into a column of refugees, wending shakily upwards. Thell and Astic, both bloodied to red. Slickwalker watches them go, wondering how many’ll make it up to Lightmender’s barricade alive. Enough to salve his conscience? Unlikely.
They struggle onwards, pulling bodies from the carnage. In ones and twos at first, but foot by foot the form of the battle shifts. Larger groups join them briefly as truces stitch themselves in panicked words. All it takes is a single moment of empathy. A raised shield blocking a falling spear. A grey-clad fisherman hauling a ravening woman off a struggling warrior.
Hands join to reinforce shield-walls, or to pull the wounded loose. And still, at the forefront, her fingers dancing like wings is Crowkisser, filling the tunnels with birds that move in pulses, clots, arrows. Black feathers thick as breath, splitting the living from the dead. Wings. Wings beneath the mountain.
It costs her. God how it costs her, as she pulls meat and air from her lungs in lurching gasps. She stops for the barest second, just to catch her breath, and something scrapes her mind like a struck match. Her father, somewhere down in the darkness, alive somehow, weaving somehow. She can feel his power building like a geyser beneath her feet, the cold touch of the between shivering into her bones.
And as quickly as it builds, it’s gone, fading like a struck bell. A release washing through the corridors of the Stump, cool and hollow. In its wake, the dead stumble, a lethargy on them, even if briefly, listless as bees in winter. Just slow enough for her to plunge onwards and downwards.
She shoots Slickwalker a look. ‘Now. Quickly. This won’t last.’
As they drive deeper Slickwalker sets the gun aside. It hisses resentfully in its holster as he falls back on older techniques, tricks he remembers from a childhood spent scuffling beneath wide branches.
He moves in the rhythm of the green forest, flows through the shadows; trips, stalls, chokes and tries, tries so very hard not to kill. It helps that the dazed dead diminish as they delve further down. Something pulls them still deeper into the mountain, their snarls and yips echoing up through the passages. The Emperor is calling to them, Crowkisser says, with a certain grim satisfaction. Slickwalker can barely believe it. An enemy like something out of a fable, some mad sorcerer he barely understands. And him, here, miles underground, with no one but her at his back. Panic flutters in his hammering heart. His brain pushes it down. He focuses on keeping her safe, driving his bruised knuckles in rabbit punches at the kidneys of a howling man that comes for them, knocking him to the floor. He binds him with leather and moves on.
Crowkisser drives them ever deeper. His arms grow tired.Mistakes begin to creep in. The darkness is hungry, writhing with grasping hands. Crowkisser can’t save them all, and he can barely keep the stumbling dead off her back. They are far too deep now to climb back to the light. The only way onwards is down.
He watches the realisation dawn on her in the stoop of her shoulders, the slowing of her words. Moving to her side, he puts an arm around her waist, steadies the gun on his hip, and keeps his finger light on the trigger.
Driving down and down and down.
Time stretching out into the dark.
Strange shudders of power and magic flowing unseen through the mountain, pressing against his temples like the promise of sudden storms.
The dead around them milling and confused, shoaling towards the frenzied voice from the depths one moment, and hunting them on unsteady feet in the next.
Somehow they push through, clawing their way past bodies and magic and blackness, throwing themselves down the throat of the Stump, running breathless for what feels like an age.
Until below them, at last, living voices. The first like bellows-brass, clear as a bell through the smoke and blood. He’d recognise Shipwright anywhere. She’s followed by another voice, softer, dry as paper.
Crowkisser stiffens. Turns to Slickwalker. The crows fall from the air.
Her mouth opens, struggles with the words.
He pulls her close, feels her shake and kisses her softly, on the forehead, the cheek, the back of her neck. ‘You can do this. I love you. Stay strong. Be careful.’
Crowkisser’s breath slides out of her like broken glass.
