The Inferior (27 page)

Stopmouth gasped. He’d told them not to attack! And now they were going to pay. He saw the other human group jumping up and running away, pursued by an equal number of Skeletons. The plan was in tatters. The enemy would hunt down Yama’s band and annihilate them. Worse, a dozen Skeletons who had yet to enter the alley were organizing themselves into a rearguard that Stopmouth’s group would be very lucky to overcome. Even if they did, all hope of a surprise attack was lost.

Stopmouth’s hunters covered their eyes and muttered what may have been prayers or curses. The Skeletons were now passing the tree trunk through the gap it had made in the barrier. Human and beast corpses moved back the other way, out of human control.

Stopmouth needed to concentrate. Where would Yama lead his gang of doomed boys? Where could he take them that they’d be safe?

Here! he thought. He’ll think I’ll know what to do. Or maybe he’s counting on the fact that our two groups together will outnumber the chasers. He’ll think that means we can beat them. Wrong. Very wrong. But Stopmouth had to try.

He led his group at a run back the way they’d come. They needed to get far enough away from the site of the siege so as not to be heard, but not so far that the two groups of human hunters would run into each other.

They’d reached a spot around the side of Headquarters when the first of the fleeing humans came into view. Stopmouth shoved his men into doorways on either side of a wide street and signalled ‘
Silence!’
Then he signalled ‘
Sling
’ and smiled grimly as they placed stones carefully into strips of Slimer hide. Only Kubar disobeyed. He grabbed the first fleeing hunter as he passed and hissed instructions that Stopmouth couldn’t understand. Though exhausted, the boy nodded and ran on. Stopmouth glared at Kubar. The priest should have made the man wait to fight with them.

More humans ran past, sweating heavily. Most had abandoned their spears. Kubar didn’t try to stop these, but Stopmouth guessed by now that the first man had been detailed to gather them up further along the way.

In the distance a great pounding noise started up. The second barrier, thought Stopmouth. At that moment he and his men were supposed to be closing the trap on the alleyway. Instead, they were here, too far away to intervene now. A chill settled on him.

A dozen more humans had passed before Stopmouth saw the first Skeletons. They jogged along together as a good hunting party should, heads high and pace even, driving terrified men before them. Yama was at the back, shouting at a plump-faced boy who looked ready to drop.

Come on! thought Stopmouth. Come on! He signalled frantically to those men who could see him that they should hold their fire. He hoped the signal was being passed down the line and that his hunters would have learned from the earlier disaster.

The last of the fleeing humans passed Stopmouth’s hiding place. Only Yama and his friend remained.

Come on!

The friend, a boaster and a favourite with the girls, tripped.

Yama looked behind him and, seeing that the nearest Skeleton was barely a spear’s length distant, cried out once and picked up speed. The other boy died screaming behind him.

The Skeletons increased their pace, their legs bent backwards, seeming to imbue every step with extra spring. Many had drool running down their chins, their narrow mouths working beneath a quartet of colourless eyes. Stopmouth waited until the main body had passed him. Then he screamed, ‘
Attack!
’ in the only language he knew and began launching slingstones into the packed mass of beasts. For a heartbeat he was alone, but then stones were flying in from all directions.

The Skeletons had barely a moment to absorb this shock before men poured out of doorways with spears and knives. Many of the beasts managed to bring their own weapons to bear, and they might have slaughtered their inexperienced attackers if Yama’s group hadn’t come charging back into the fray at just the right time. They screamed as they advanced and the enemy, packed in together and caught on all sides, could do little to defend themselves.

The victors cheered and licked their weapons.

Stopmouth smiled so as not to dishearten them. Many men lay dead or volunteered, their faces melted away. Maybe twenty since the day had begun. Too high a price. In the distance the tree trunk was still pounding against the second barrier. Yama indicated they should go back towards it. ‘There’s no point,’ said Stopmouth, knowing the boy couldn’t understand him. ‘They’re expecting us.’ He desperately needed time to think.

And then the pounding stopped.

His men, who were still celebrating their little victory, froze. They all realized what it meant. Stopmouth gripped the shaft of his spear like he meant to throttle it. He had nothing to say to them, nothing at all. The Skeletons would soon be inside the complex on their way to the women and children. He couldn’t save them now. But perhaps…perhaps there was a way to be with them at the end.

‘Let’s go!’ he shouted. ‘Come on! Move!’

He led the men back to where the Skeletons had been trying to climb onto the roof of Headquarters earlier in the night. Corpses surrounded the fallen tree trunks.

He indicated to his hunters that they should help him raise one of the beams against the wall. Many were arguing, pointing back in the direction of the barrier. So Stopmouth began heaving at the wood by himself until the others joined in. The Skeletons had carved handholds into the trunk, and while the spacing wasn’t right for human limbs, they were definitely helpful.

Stopmouth pointed at Yama and then the roof.

‘
Go!
’ he signalled.

For once the boy didn’t try to contradict him. He climbed as well as any Flim while other men kept the trunk steady. When Yama reached the top, he stared around for a few heartbeats and then turned back and shouted something. Suddenly everyone was grabbing at the handholds, all of them trying to climb at once. Stopmouth and Kubar made them raise the other trunk and fought them into a rough queue. Then Stopmouth flung his spear over the parapet and followed it up.

Yama heaved him over the edge into chaos.

The roof he’d climbed onto was the lowest of the three that made up Headquarters. The others lay perpendicular to it and looked down on it by less than the height of a child. Defences were concentrated around the long flat roofs of the two buildings which lay to either side of the U’s mouth. Defenders were streaming away from one of these now, while people on the other side jumped up and down in anxiety. Stopmouth could make out the figure of Indrani standing among the second group, urging them to stop staring, to keep throwing rocks. He could hear Rockface yelling in rage at the fools around him.

Stopmouth still couldn’t see any Skeletons. But he guessed that one of the ground-floor doors or windows had been breached and the enemy were now on their way up the stairs to the rooftop. And so the defenders were running away, seeking to preserve their lives a little longer when they could have sold them dearly at the skylight. Men and women pushed past Stopmouth and Yama at the base of the U. A few of the braver ones halted long enough to help hunters over the parapet. In this way Stopmouth had gathered most of his men together when the first Skeletons arrived through the skylight onto the recently abandoned building.

The beasts took their time. They had no need to rush now. They spread out to allow others of their kind to climb up unmolested.

Stopmouth brought his men over to join Indrani on the far side of the U from where the enemy had entered. Everybody here looked tired and afraid. Old women had bloody hands from pushing rocks and throwing stones. Men wept; some rolled into balls, their arms wrapped around their knees. The whole Tribe knew it was the end, that tonight the Skeletons would feast on their flesh.

Stopmouth looked at his woman. The tree-trunk ladders still leaned against the wall. If they ran now, the two of them could make another desperate try for the Roof. And yet not everyone had given up hope. Yama had gathered his boys together and he whispered to them fiercely. Kubar and others were picking up slingstones.

Meanwhile the handsome Varaha had finally lost his composure. He scanned the Roof, muttering to himself, fidgeting with his necklace. But he also held a spear in his white-knuckled hand and it was clear he intended to use it.

‘We’ll kill them all, hey?’ Rockface stood right at his ear, a grin on his face. His belt bristled with spare weapons. The dullness of before had completely disappeared. ‘They won’t be getting my flesh!’

‘I thought you w-wanted to v-v-volunteer.’

Rockface growled. ‘Do I look like a volunteer to you? You asked me to guard the children. And I am.’

Indrani was busy too, dragging women to their feet, hissing at tired old men till they armed themselves. Stopmouth knew then that even if it meant his death, he couldn’t abandon his people to this. They were Tribe and only the Tribe could give life its meaning.

‘Everybody listen to me!’ he shouted. As always, it amazed him the way they stopped and turned to him. ‘We can still beat them!’ he said. ‘They’re the ones who’ve suffered all the losses getting here! We’re far more numerous now!’ It wouldn’t matter, of course. Women, children and weaklings against real hunters. ‘But they’ll beat us if we cower back here. We need to meet them just before the base of the U, where we’ll have the advantage.’ The enemy would have to climb half the height of a man to reach the defenders.

They followed him there and he marshalled them into a line with spearmen at the front and everybody else gathering up handfuls of stones. He took a deep breath. The Skeletons would pay dearly for their genocide.

‘Hunters! Slings first.’ The enemy would be exposed for several heartbeats as they jumped down on the other side.

He felt somebody move into the line beside him. ‘Indrani?’ Sweat and grime covered her from head to foot. She was magnificent, beautiful, and seemed utterly unafraid. ‘Don’t worry, Stopmouth. They brought the spirit-lovers here for a reason. They won’t let me die. You’ll see.’

‘What do you mean? Who won’t let you die?’

She didn’t answer the question. She took his face in her hands and kissed him. ‘I’m glad I found you,’ she said. ‘Now, we must be ready. Look!’

She turned to face the enemy.

Fifty or sixty Skeletons had made it onto the roof. It had been an expensive night for them. They must have lost tens under rocks plus those that Stopmouth and his men had already killed outside. It was more than any Tribe could afford and Stopmouth knew they’d never have been willing to pay the cost had they known it in advance. Now they came forward at a jog, crossing from one roof to the next on their arm of the U.

The humans waited for them in a mass of bristling spears and stakes without points. Many of the people there couldn’t even hold a weapon the right way round. But the beasts didn’t know that and stopped in their tracks just out of sling range.

Everybody waited, spears weighing on tired muscles, while the Skeletons seemed to confer amongst themselves. The beasts were in no rush. Stopmouth could hear children crying and mothers hushing them. Otherwise the humans were silent as the enemy made plans to kill them.

‘We should attack them,’ said Yama. ‘They look confused.’

Nobody paid him any attention. Stopmouth sighed, his fear ebbing away. Maybe the enemy would call it a day now. It’s what he’d have done. If the Skeletons made an orderly retreat and took all their dead with them, the humans were finished. Thirty days of hunger and attrition would guarantee it.

Then people around him cried out in dismay. Ten more Skeletons had climbed up through the skylight. They must have come from the rearguard at the barrier. One of these was the tall creature with the decorated hides that Stopmouth had seen at the beginning of the night. It gestured once with its spear, and all the others fell in around it. Then it pointed its weapon across the U at the humans. The beasts surged forward, leaping down onto the lower roof that separated them from their quarry.

‘Stone them!’ shouted Stopmouth. He needn’t have bothered. Every human, from the smallest child capable of lifting a rock to the woman with the greyest hair, flung stones for all they were worth. Stopmouth’s hunters used their slings, a few of them getting in two shots before the Skeletons had crossed half the roof. Most of the stones were ineffectual–some didn’t even reach the enemy. But others struck home, and here and there a beast stumbled, fatally slowing the charge of its comrades and giving the defenders yet more chances to attack.

‘Got one!’ Rockface shouted. ‘Got one!’

Stopmouth himself slung like a madman, matched stone for stone by Sodasi and Kamala.

Then the Skeletons were flinging knives before them. Women and children screamed as they were struck. Hunters fell. They were dragged away and replaced as the first of the enemy came close enough to fight. Men stabbed into the glowing mass of beasts. Sometimes the target of their attacks would grab a thrusting spear in tentacle-like hands, pulling humans down amongst slashing knives.

Stopmouth felt like he was watching himself fight, watching a stranger. Fear had left his body entirely and his Armourback-shell weapon worked in a blur before him. He was aware of Indrani nearby, backing him up, making sure he never had more than two to deal with at a time.

Behind the line of hunters, women and older children lobbed a continual rain of fist-sized rocks over the men’s heads. Meanwhile the sisters, Sodasi and Kamala, were still managing to fire obliquely into the mass of the enemy. This close, they couldn’t miss.

It all worked as Stopmouth had dreamed. Every weak link of the human body moved as one until the whole was stronger than the sum of its parts. Yet it wasn’t enough. Yama screamed, his leg bubbling with beast spit. A pair of knives flashed through the air to take another man in the stomach. The defence began to buckle.

‘I’m jumping!’ shouted Indrani. ‘I’m jumping now!’

And she did. One moment Stopmouth felt her beside him, the next she was gone, in amongst the enemy.

‘Indrani!’ he screamed.