The Volunteer (The Bone World Trilogy) (15 page)

The two enemies rose up on
powerful tails. Whistlenose's fingers itched for a spear. They could
see him now, he knew that. They could see he was unarmed and
helpless.

Wallbreaker's schemes often cost
lives before he "got them working just right." Whistlenose
remembered in particular the Chief's use of nets to pull creatures
out of the Wetlanes. Sometimes, it was the hunters who were pulled in
instead.

Whistlenose tried not to think
about that as the two Jumper scouts hopped closer to the easy meat.
Were they hesitant in their movements? He hoped so. He would be, if
he were them. What they were now seeing, were dozens of living
humans—as well as a few of the larger men dressed in Hairbeast
furs—buried up to their waists or chests, their limbs listless.
A stench of bodily wastes hung heavy on the air.

The Jumpers paused. They lowered
their weapons: the wood they used for blocking, which Aagam had
called a
shield
;
and their long-tipped spears.

Wherever they came from, these
creatures had been fleeing Diggers. There was little else that could
drive such a strong people with so many hunters from their homes. And
now, they must be thinking, the Diggers had found them again. If
Wallbreaker's scheme worked, the Jumpers would run away as far and as
fast as they could, leaving the humans alone.

Unfortunately, these two scouts
did not flee. Something must have been blowing the warning shell in
their heads, telling them that all was not right here.

They hopped closer, coming all
the way out of the forest, until Whistlenose, in the front ranks,
could see them no more than a spears-length away from him. Sweat
rolled down his forehead.

Of course the assembled humans
could overpower these two enemies, even unarmed, even half-buried.
But if they gave themselves away now, the green creatures would drum
those tongues of theirs in an alarm that would quickly pass to a
relay of their friends nearby.

One of the creatures hopped to a
point just in reach of Whistlenose.
Ancestors
help me.
He reacted, grabbing for the beast clumsily,
just as a real victim of the Diggers might do. The Jumper swayed back
and he brushed its moss cloak with his fingertips.

It rattled its tongue and
Whistlenose moaned at it. Still, it didn't leave, although its
companion stayed well back. The sweat ran into Whistlenose's eyes. He
mustn't wipe it away! He couldn't react to the sting of it!

He wasn't the only one suffering.
His neighbour was the woman who had been whispering earlier. What was
her name? Stonedropper? He barely knew her, although they were close
in age. How could that be? She'd been pretty when they were younger,
he remembered that much. Hunters had offered ridiculous amounts of
flesh to her father in order to woo her.

He heard her moaning now and she
too grabbed at the Jumper—too enthusiastically, he thought.
No,
no! They're not like that!
But then, how would a woman
know? They had never been to the fields of the Diggers to see what a
hunter saw. They'd never had the chance. She moaned again, louder now
and Whistlenose imagined how afraid she must be, how she was trying
to scare the creature away. He felt clammy with fear.

He knew it was wrong, but
couldn't help turning his head slightly and in doing so, saw
something horrible. The Jumper still wasn't sure one way or the other
if these were genuine victims of the Diggers. It raised the arm with
its spear slowly into the air where Stonedropper could not help but
see it. The long, wicked tip of bone shone in the Rooflight and held
there for ten full heartbeats.

Then, it flashed down and drove
in through Stonedropper's belly and into the soil beyond. The pain!
The pain must have been incredible! Great hunters, strong men with
jaws of rock and chests black with tattoos had screamed their last
moments away with such wounds. Whistlenose had seen it. He had seen
them beg the Ancestors, their mothers, their Chiefs to save them; to
take the pain away; to make it all end.

But the Diggers' victims did not
react like that, would barely feel a thing.

Whisttlenose waited for the
inevitable scream that would ruin the plan and condemn all off them
to death. He would make sure to kill these scouts first, though. He
tensed his body to leap out of the hole and could sense the other
hunters around him preparing to do the same. They would start this
last stand with one small victory at least!

Incredibly, Stonedropper held her
silence, letting out no more than a quiet gasp when the cruel spear
withdrew. The creature turned around calmly, and hopped away.

Nobody could move to
Stonedropper's aid. Nobody. She bled to death in utter silence.

Later, just before the fall of
darkness, when the signal arrived that all were free to move again,
Whistlenose was first to get to her side. "Stonedropper,"
he whispered. Blood ran down her face from where she had bitten her
lip through to keep from screaming. She had saved them all. She had
saved the entire Tribe. It was the bravest thing he had ever
witnessed.

"Good," Wallbreaker was
saying from somewhere at the back. "I knew it. That was well
worth it."

In
the days after Stonedropper's sacrifice, the migration went more
smoothly again. The Jumpers had passed them by and although other
species were seen trying to escape through the woods, they were
nowhere near as numerous or as well organised as the green-skinned
tribe had been. These new creatures fell easily, almost gratefully to
human spears, and before long, enough confidence had returned to the
Tribe that the Chief was allowing fires to cook the flesh and to
smoke any extra for the long journey that still lay ahead.

In private, however, Whistlenose
wondered at the madness of running towards the source of so much
fear. He was sure that other members of the Tribe must be thinking
the same thing, but nobody could complain: the Chief had been right
so far and had saved many hundreds of lives with his clever schemes.
The younger hunters admired him more than ever now. He'd heard
Browncrack saying how the Ancestors—at the Chief's request—must
have silenced Stonedropper to make the plan work. That was all too
much for the older man.

"Listen," he hissed,
grabbing the lad by the neck. "You saved my life. You're a good
man and you'll serve the tribe well."

"Let... let go my neck.
Whistlenose! What—"

"But
you
didn't see... you didn't see her lip.
She
did that. Stonedropper. Not the Ancestors, not the Chief.
She
did it. She had a thousand days left in her. Ten thousand! And you
lessen them when you speak of her like that!"

"All right. I was just
saying!" The young man wrenched himself free. He was going to be
much stronger than Whistlenose soon, but he didn't realise it yet. He
had red marks on his neck from the older hunter's fingers. This
wasn't how a man should lead others and Whistlenose felt ashamed. And
yet, not even Ashsweeper had really understood when he'd told her. "I
was cursing Stonedropper before it happened," he said. "I
thought she was a fool! But there's no way I could have done what she
did. I couldn't."

"Of course you could,
husband. You're always putting yourself down. I saw how you
volunteered to feed the Clawfolk."

And so the days passed.

The Tribe was no more than a
short journey from the end of the forest when the Roof turned black
again. It was Whistlenose's third time to see such a thing and he
should have been ready for it, except it went on for so much longer
than before.

Utter silence reigned in the
darkness. Nothing moved. Even the
mossbeast
s
had frozen—he should have felt them whizzing past his ear!

Whistlenose was holding his
breath, waiting for normality to return, and then... then he saw a
glow in the distance. A faint blue light that flickered as a fire
would. Some creature, perhaps? But, before he could think of trying
to track it, the Rooflight came back on.

People had a name for these
periods of total darkness: the Blindness, they called it. This time,
no slime fell on the tribe, but another half a day's travel revealed
hundreds of crumbling trees caked in the white residue it left behind
when it dried out.

"It would have killed us
just as easily," Whistlenose told Ashsweeper. "There was so
much of it here!"

"But it didn't," his
wife replied. "The Ancestors wouldn't let that happen." She
was starting to talk like all the others now, as if she believed in
Wallbreaker's mystical pronouncements. Whistlenose wasn't sure how he
felt about that himself. There didn't seem to be any other
explanation for all the things that had happened. And yet, why would
the Ancestors have sent somebody as awful as Aagam to guide the
Tribe? And why would they speak through a coward?

Speareye had been a great Chief:
the man every man should be, but the Ancestors had allowed
him
to die in full view of the Tribe.

He dug into one of the trees with
a bone knife. Dry bark flaked away to reveal more solid wood beneath.
"This is where I saw that blue glow," he said. "During
the Blindness."

"Have you told the cChief?"

"He didn't seem very
interested."

Ashsweeper nodded, turning her
head to keep an eye on Nighttracker digging for
mossbeast
s
with a sharpened stick. Whistlenose raised his eyes to the great
Roof, something he'd been reluctant to do for the past few days.

In the distance, four great
squares the size of ManWays had turned black. One of these now
flickered back into dull life. The other three hung over the world
like a hole. Like the mouth of a Digger's tunnel.

Wallbreaker's
daughter looked more and more like Mossheart had when they were
growing up. She had her father's blond hair, however, and just the
slightest promise of dimples on those red cheeks of hers when he made
her laugh. Which he did as often as possible. But there was no
getting away from those full lips, or those eyebrows that each seemed
like separate living things in their own right.

As the child giggled on his lap,
Wallbreaker remembered the first kiss he had shared with her mother.
Those strange eyebrows had risen in surprise—her father had
barely turned his back, after all!—before settling gently
again. She had whispered, "He'll want a big bride-price."

"Will you talk him down?"

"No." She grinned,
keeping her lips close enough to his that an insect couldn't have
passed between them. "You will work hard to win me and you'll
work hard to keep me too."

He had leaned forward, but she
pulled away. "And that'll be the last kiss before you leap the
fire with me!"

It wasn't, of course. Tens of
sweet adventures had followed: embraces they had hidden from her
parents, from the Flesh Council and poor Stopmouth. But Mossheart had
been true to her word in one thing at least: Wallbreaker had handed
over a bride-price of five full creatures—the highest in living
memory. He had won love and a reputation, all in one go, and nothing
back then, nothing, could touch him. Oh, how quick he'd been! And
clever too. How strong!

"Enough of this
time-wasting," said a voice behind him. The child stiffened in
his arms. Like him, she had grown to hate Aagam.

"Go to your mother," he
said. "Or Treeneck. Your mother's digging today."

They were camped in a place where
the slime had killed a hundred trees. But farther on, the health of
the forest had suffered even greater indignities, where Digger
tunnels riddled the ground, and where fields fat with victims spewed
waste in every direction. Scouts were out there now, looking for a
way through while the Tribe consumed the last of its supplies.

"You told me we could pass
here," Wallbreaker said.

Aagam shrugged. "The way has
closed. Possibly only in the last few days. Remember the information
the scouts brought back to us?"

"Back to
me
.
I am the Chief."

Aagam grinned. He had lost quite
a bit of weight in the early days, but now he ate flesh with gusto
and claimed to enjoy it even more than the civilised food of his home
in the Roof. "I told you how the Diggers work. The creatures
planted out there are being eaten from below by the Diggers' young,
yes? So far, the victims have sunk very little into the soil, and
most of them are Jumpers or other creatures we have encountered
fleeing through these trees. So, they are newly arrived here. And
that means the great Eastern and Western Digger families have only
just now met in the middle. Their territory will be thin for a little
while yet. If we can bull through the centre, the hills lie only six
days to the north of us."

He had explained what hills were
already, although Wallbreaker had a hard time imagining mounds so
large that it could take a day for a fit young hunter to cross over
them.