It’s not going to be enough. The tide of bodies is endless. The Emperor’s resurgent spirit threads the dead of Thell for miles, up and down through the mountain.
For a moment, Crowkisser loses Slickwalker beneath a swell of limbs and teeth. Briefly she glimpses tattered shadow and Skinpainter’s rags. At the final bark of the gun her heart lurches.
She sees Shipwright start toward the melee, sees the stupid, altruistic look on her face and screams. ‘No! We’re leaving.’
Then she calls the crows. On a scale she’s never tried before. From the edges of the dark, from scraps of meat and fragments of blackness, the black bodies of birds peeling off from the edges of her outstretched arms. Her own shape slowing, dissolving, unbecoming, flowing out to embrace them. She becomes one with the flock, her eyes shrunken, doubled, doubled again. The scene in front of her splinters into a nest of scavenged fragments.
The stuttering blur of Slickwalker trying to hold the line. The lemon-slick stench as he throws himself against the dead. Skinpainter falling at last, almost torn apart, then dragged out from under chattering teeth by Slickwalker’s gloved hand.
He’s bought her a few seconds. She can’t waste them, can’t waste his sacrifice.
They’re leaving.
She sends the first feathered coil of herself to the children and the injured, bringing them into the skirl of the flock, rendering them down piece by piece, stitching them into the hammering hearts of her crows, into the corners of their eyes, under the pinions of their feathers. She feels their tiny thoughts join her own, terrified and confused. No time to quiet them. No time for comfort. The strain of it all almost killing her. Her mind slidingin a thousand overlapping pieces like glass washed by the tide.
She has to focus. She calls the crows, deeper now, muscle flaking off her bones in thick black feathers. Another clot of clamouring birds wraps around Shipwright, Shroudweaver and the broken body of that painted girl. She sees Shipwright struggle at first, a brief flare of something brass and defiant, but Shroudweaver takes her hand and pulls her in. She hadn’t expected that. Her da’s full of surprises. Those two are a burden though. She senses something coming along with them, not just the touch of their minds, but a taste of their power, flashes of silver and gold exploding in her mind. The flock reels. She strains to bear it aloft. A thousand small wings beat furiously. It’s too much, too much, this weight like a ship’s keel, and scores of panicking voices. She’s never attempted anything like this. Too many minds to move, too many bodies bound to the bone of the flock. It’s too much.
Distantly, she sees Slickwalker almost subsumed by the dead. Barely stuttering out from beneath their teeth, hands trailing thick black shadow still clenched around Skinpainter’s unconscious body.
It’s too much. Then, somehow, she feels her father in the flock. A steady presence at her back, his hands on her arms, her wings. A lacing of soft silver light, a weaving from inside the flock, and she surges with energy. One last push. She calls the crows, deeper than ever before, beyond the bone and down into the marrow, down into the darkness below. The birds rip themselves loose from her flesh in bloody clumps, and she feels the last shreds of her mind disappear into the flock.
She is spread so thin, atomised. She belongs to the mountain, the air, the ice, the glacier; to feather and claw. So thin. Brief flares of herself emerge along the edge of a wing, the tip of a beak. Brief, brief, fluttering, gone. She is a thousand hammering hearts, and she is one. A body that is no body. No bone, no muscle, no marrow.
All of her stripped, fed to the flock. She has no idea if she can come back. Panic thrills her.
One last push, the silver of her father’s weaving in her wings,filling her hollow bones. The flock is so heavy with all these salvaged souls, with people weighting the chests of birds.
And still the dead come. Loping and broken and bloody and fast, so fast. Slickwalker is a blur of hands and wrists and fists between them, doomed and desperate. There’s a ragged cut on his temple and a gash under his ribs that’s writhing with shadows. Still, he fights, but there’s just so many of them.
A few stragglers linger outside Crowkisser’s reach, a breath ahead of the charging dead. Bloodied hands grasp for the bearded boy with the axe – he’s too damn slow. He staggers under Quickfish’s wheezing body, his shattered arm barely fit to shepherd a scared child, as she shrieks with terror. The dead reach for the trio, just moments ahead of the birds driving urgently towards them.
One last push, flensing the last scraps of herself to nothing. The flock screams with a single voice. A final tendril of feathers reaches for the struggling men and embraces them. The small girl wails in terror, slips a desperately grasping hand, and backpedals away from the swirling crows. The dead come for her in their hundreds, in a forest of legs and arms and teeth, swarming over her. The shadows close around her and she’s gone.
There’s no time for regret. No time for comfort. Crowkisser fills the space of the mountain. Her bodies batter its walls. Scores crushed by hungry hands and mouths as the dead tear into the flock. The pain is unbearable.
She has to go higher. One. Last. Push.
Gaps in the rock above her head, for light, for air. Too small for people, but not for birds. And she is nothing now, nothing but birds.
She leaves, she lifts. The mountain opens up above her, through a hundred howling passages. The flock moves over the battle’s embers at the speed of breath, cradled in blackness. The Stump’s tunnels writhe thickly with the dead, finishing their bloody work.
She has been betrayed completely. The Emperor has brought her nothing but a charnel house. He will pay for that but first, she needs to survive. And she needs to be a saviour. The flock spiralshigher still, up through the wide, tall galleries at the top of the mountain. Hollow halls still chill with the breath of the glacier, and finally beyond even those, an exodus, where the mountain cracks open to the sharp northern sky.
Crowkisser’s mind arrows upwards in a hundred black darts, into the cold sky, and the bright air and free, free, free.
The Stump explodes with crows. From every window and crevice, every gap and door. Out out out into a sky that takes them with shrieking calls. The last shreds of storm clouds strung across a blue morning that hums with the scent of fresh rain.
As the flock’s shadow paints itself over the wracked earth of the Barrowlands below, Crowkisser sees the mountain’s survivors, more than she could have hoped for. Her thousand hearts hammer. A column reels out from the shattered gate, and scattered through it, her people, her bold, grey people. Still others with them, Thell’s soldiers, dazed and reeling stumbling, side by side with her own army. Lightmender at their head, her lips split, a livid bruise welling across her throat, her shield sundered and something, something beneath her ribs that sings to the flock.
Curious; a puzzle for later. For now, they are leaving, leaving Thell.
The Barrowlands open before them, filling with people that spill out carrying their lives in their hands. Baskets, barrels and carts. Limping, reeling and weaving their way out into a desolation still hung with the drifting scraps of a shattered god. The refugees take slow footsteps among the dead, closing eyes, loosening bracelets and necklaces as they shift memories from one skin to another. After that, they make more pragmatic appropriations, weapons, armour, warm clothes. Eventually, they thread their way in clumps to the edge of the battlefield, huddled, shivering half from the cold of the frost-touched day, half from the shock setting in. Those that fall to their knees are lifted, grey cloaks are wrapped around tattooed shoulders and shattered spears become crutches for fishermen’s broken feet. Together, the refugees take unsteady steps forwards in the wet mud, until the first scraps of green appear beneath their boots.
Crowkisser should go to them, but she’s scattered, slung across a brightening sky that lifts her wings, her tired hearts. She can see the sky! No more dark walls, no more bodies pressed against bodies. She wants to spread herself as widely as possible, to lose herself in the refraction, the ice-light, the silent song of high places. Above her, frost-edged thermals call to her heart, but she can feel the weight of the last refugees within the milling crows, her charges; her insurance. The thought holds her back, barely. They don’t belong here. They are needed on the earth, where they can bear witness.
She begins to spiral the flock downwards, stringing herself in dark loops across the air. It’s then that she glimpses another huddle of survivors. Almost too distant, on the north side of the mountain, the Deadsingers, leading maybe twenty or thirty ragged souls. Her hearts leap, and she remembers an old pattern, slung in mud and rope and boathook gristle, scraped from the barnacled bottoms of boats by the long men and brought to her high on the temple hill above Astic scant weeks ago. The future’s balancing on a knife-edge here.
It’s such a small adjustment to nudge it to where it needs to be. With a shiver of effort, the flock splits, and a fragment heads north. Quickfish and his lover’s minds borne away on little black wings. Crowkisser feels their confusion as their consciousness peels off from the rest of her stolen souls; she whirls the flock in mad chaos to cover the shock of separation and lets the bird mind bleed in, drowning out the possibility of questions with thoughts of sky sky sky.
