The Deserter Read online

  He turned slowly.

  ‘Oh, you’re for it now, boy,’ said Rockface.

  Another trio of beasts waited behind. The creature to the fore looked smaller than any Stopmouth had ever seen before: barely the height of a tall man as it reared up on its hind legs.

  It said, ‘Fine soup needs human bones.’

  Stopmouth raised his pathetic club. The pair of Fourleggers guarding the speaker tensed for violence, but it ignored them and fixed its gaze on the human’s weapon.

  ‘A sheathed claw does not kill well.’

  ‘It’s just a club,’ said Stopmouth. ‘We wanted to capture one of you alive. To talk. We’ve tried talking to some of your hunting parties before, but they either chase us or run away.’

  It seemed to regard him carefully, but with beasts, who could tell for sure?

  ‘Magicians that can talk to all things …’ it said. ‘Perhaps the flesh of your snout might give me and my sisters such power?’

  It stepped closer to him. Stopmouth could see the slight sheen of its scales. By day they were red, and often the creatures made themselves easier to track by shedding them when they ran or scraped up against a wall.

  It was so close now that the hunter knew he could strike its skull. His heart beat fast, and faster still when two clawed hands swept out to clasp his shoulders while Rockface gasped and cried out, ‘Hit it! Why don’t you hit it?’

  The creature pressed its sticky, pungent snout up against his dry one. It said, or maybe whispered, ‘The little magician needs to talk well to save its bones from the soup.’

  Stopmouth took a deep, ragged breath. The up-close stench of the creature tickled the back of his throat and made him dizzy. He hoped it didn’t feel the same way about him.

  ‘We want an alliance,’ he said. ‘We will stop hunting you if you stop hunting us. However, we will exchange our dead for yours. Even better, we will co-operate with your people in hunts. We are not as strong as you, but we run faster. We build good traps. We will allow your kind to hide among us when they are being chased. We—’

  ‘Very well,’ it said. It stepped back. ‘The scaleless ones will be our sisters.’ As it spoke, its pointy snout waved from side to side. Stopmouth jumped when it touched him again, the claws scratching his shoulder.

  ‘New sisters make a gift of blood. Come.’ The Fourlegger wounded in Stopmouth’s ambush limped towards them.

  ‘Eat this one to make your sisters strong. Her bones carry power. Her seventh mother lived beyond the Roof in a nest all of metal.’ It waved a claw at the fallen Rockface. ‘Alliance needs an offering from your family now.’

  It waited. In the distance, Stopmouth could see the furthest panels of the Roof begin to darken. Right above his head, a Globe, the flying machines of Indrani’s people, hovered, watching everything he did. Are you in there? But Indrani would have been helping him if she were, Stopmouth knew that much.

  He felt a hand on his shoulder, a human hand. He smelled a new stench now – that of rotting human teeth.

  ‘It’s time for me to go, hey? Tell the children … Tell them—’

  Stopmouth shoved his friend’s hand away. ‘No!’ he said.

  ‘Don’t be a fool, boy. You know what has to happen, hey? I’ve gone beyond my time as it is.’

  ‘Alliance needs blood,’ agreed the beast leader. ‘Blood. Our sister for yours.’

  That’s the way it had always been when Stopmouth was growing up. The Tribe exchanged its old and its injured for food to keep the rest going, and it was a great honour – the greatest the Tribe had to offer – for somebody to give themselves up, limping but proud, to the needs of the future. The new tribe of poor hunters had yet to learn such vital habits.

  ‘My back has never been right since the Skeletons,’ said Rockface.

  Stopmouth looked back at the Fourlegger leader. ‘The alliance needs blood,’ he agreed. ‘But not human blood, and not the blood of Fourleggers.’

  ‘Don’t be a fool, boy, don’t—’

  Stopmouth turned in fury, ‘I am Chief here, Rockface. You will not contradict me in front of our allies.’ He stared at the bigger man, noting the stoop of his back and the many scars that puckered his tattooed skin. ‘And you will stop calling me “boy”.’

  He turned back to the Fourlegger. There were three of its fellows before him and three behind. ‘You may have any of our dead in exchange for yours. But this alliance will not be sealed with our blood, or the blood of your sisters. I will bring you three corpses of other creatures. I will bring them here in three days. If the flesh pleases you, you will bring three other beasts for us.’

  He waited, sweat beading on his body, Rockface silent beside him. And now, he thought, we die. Is Indrani watching this? Will she weep for me?

  The leader dropped onto all fours – they all did. Nothing had been said, or the Talker would have translated it. Together, with no signals that Stopmouth could see, the creatures ran off, each trio in a different direction.

  ‘So much for your alliance, boy.’ The hunter shook his head and left Stopmouth to go limping home with no weapons. He didn’t even bother to retrieve the club he’d left lying in the moss where he’d fallen.

  The young chief looked up. Only he and the watching Globe remained.

  People cheered at the sight of Stopmouth and Rockface’s safe return. The two men hadn’t exchanged a word since their meeting with the Fourleggers. The older hunter shook off hugs of congratulation and made his way into Headquarters alone.

  Kubar approached Stopmouth. If anything, the ex-priest was even older than Rockface, but it showed more in his gravelly voice than in his scars. ‘Did you catch one?’

  Stopmouth shook his head. ‘It was them who caught us. We … we spoke to them and … they let us go.’

  The man grinned, his teeth white and straight enough to belong to a child. ‘An alliance then? No? What’s wrong?’

  ‘I was too … I tried to be too clever. Like something Wallbreaker would have done. The beasts come in threes, you see? And they wanted to take Rockface …’

  Kubar made Stopmouth sit down and explain himself, always probing for more details. ‘So,’ he said at last, ‘they ran away.’

  ‘We lost them,’ said Stopmouth.

  ‘No,’ said Kubar. ‘They didn’t attack you and they didn’t say no to an alliance. We have to keep the pledge you made them and hope they don’t use it as a way of trapping us. But I think it’s good. I think you’ve done it.’

  ‘I’m tired,’ said Stopmouth, and stumbled away from the old priest. He pushed past other people who were babbling questions at him in their foreign language. He could understand more and more of it, but today, even though he had the Talker with him, nothing seemed to make sense.

  Cool air inside chilled the sweat on his skin. He followed the sound of children’s laughter, as he knew Rockface would have done. On the second floor of Headquarters, future hunters stalked each other between columns of stone and around piles of rusted metal junk that must have lain here for generations before the new tribe’s exile from the Roof. Among the humans an infant Fourlegger played. The children had adopted it against Stopmouth’s wishes. It could not learn the sounds of their speech and struggled to make itself understood by the adults. But it was for the sake of this small creature, and the fact that it had proven to be so compatible in its play, that Stopmouth had decided to try for an alliance with its people rather than the more human-looking Skeletons.

  He approached Rockface, who had stretched out his body against a wall to watch his pupils. The young chief expected his comrade to growl at him, but Rockface never held a grudge for long.

  ‘What you did was stupid, hey?’

  Stopmouth nodded.

  Rockface waved his hands towards the children. One of them held off three others with a tree branch while the infant Fourlegger circled on all fours to get behind him.

  ‘We can’t survive here without sacrifices, boy, and these people know nothing about such thi
ngs.’

  ‘Rockface, you’re all I’ve got left. I couldn’t let them have you.’

  The big man sighed and made a waving sound as if chasing insects out of his face. ‘It was my fight, boy. A man should charge, hey? At everything.’ He jerked a thumb at Stopmouth. ‘You, for example, you need to take another wife.’

  Stopmouth sat up. ‘What?’

  Rockface tried to rise with him, but grimaced and lay slowly down again. Then he sighed. ‘Without Indrani, you’re as much use as a burst skin. Moping about. Dropping slingstones at all the wrong times. Getting knocked over—’

  ‘She’ll be back, Rockface.’

  ‘Oh, she’s a fighter. I’ll give you that. I can see her up there now, kicking all those beardy freakmen in their faces, hey?’ He laughed. ‘A great one. But she’s home now. She has food in her bowl, and who knows what else? She’ll come back or she won’t. But you … These people need somebody whose eyes aren’t always slipping up to the Roof to look for her. They need you as yourself, not some boy peeping from behind his mammy’s legs.’

  ‘I stayed with the tribe, didn’t I? When Indrani left, I stayed.’

  Rockface jabbed a thumb at him. ‘Get another wife and Indrani’ll be back before you know it! Get some children. That’s what you need. A boy of your own and, I swear by the ancestors, you’ll sacrifice anyone – me, Indrani, anyone, to keep him fed.’

  Stopmouth tried to imagine another wife for himself. Or maybe more than one. There were women who embarrassed him by brushing up too close against him in a narrow alley, or who followed him when he went onto the roof of Headquarters to look out over the streets and to be alone. Why would they do such a thing when the girls back home in Man-Ways had all but laughed in his face?

  But it didn’t matter. Every time he tried to imagine life with one of them, he pictured Indrani’s return home. Sometimes he even laughed, imagining her chasing some unfortunate woman away with her frightening kicks.

  ‘It’s not just about me,’ he said. ‘Have you forgotten the Diggers?’ Stopmouth could never think of the beasts without a shudder.

  ‘Bah.’ The bigger man waved his hands in the direction of the hills. ‘Those monsters. We left them on the far side, hey? They couldn’t tunnel their way through all that rock.’

  But Stopmouth knew better, felt it in his bones. What if the beasts found a way to go around the hills? Or if they crawled over them by night? Less than ten days’ journey away, the land groaned under the weight of their victims. Indrani would have to come back. The magic weapons she might bring from the Roof were all that would allow these children to grow up.

  2. YELLOWMAWS

  A FLASH OF Rooflight from the metal skin of a Globe drew all eyes. But only for a moment. Other things needed the people’s attention more: the heavy shadows of ruined doorways; heaps of rubble where a hungry Slimer might rest for days without moving; the uneven patches of purple or red moss that hid sharp rocks and rusty metal spikes.

  The small human tribe had long since eaten through their stock of dried flesh from the time of the Skeleton siege. Although their hunting had improved, the surrounding beasts had learned to be wary of them too, especially when they ran in organized parties. So finding three bodies, each from a different species, only to give them over to the Fourleggers, was a luxury they could ill afford.

  Many went hungry, but none complained. These were the survivors now. They’d come through massacre and hopeless battle. They’d been banished from a paradise where the food never had to be hunted and never fought back. And still they lived. A little hunger was nothing to these people. In spite of all their clumsiness, their helplessness, their strange gods and customs, Stopmouth could not help but love them.

  His people found the necessary bodies: a Slimer, pierced through the belly; a Wallhanger, brought down by a lucky slingstone before it could swing away; and some unknown shelled creature that had badly wounded Krishnan with a charge.

  ‘New beasts should be studied first,’ said Stopmouth to the sorry group that had brought the last one back. But he didn’t have the heart to be too tough on them. Tonight they would have to eat poor Krishnan, sharing his flesh amongst those in need of it. Besides, it was now day three and he had a promise to keep.

  ‘What if it’s a trap?’ asked Yama. The boy limped along beside his leader, while behind them, others carried the three bodies over their shoulders on poles. Guards moved in the alleys that paralleled this one. They had to be wary of ambush with so much flesh at stake.

  ‘They could have had me and Rockface,’ said the chief, ‘with no risk to themselves. They let us go.’

  ‘But they might want to finish us off all at once.’

  Stopmouth smiled. ‘They won’t find us the easy prey we were when first they met us.’

  Yama grinned back and waved his spear in the air. Still a child, for all the carnage he’d seen. ‘We’d take them,’ he said. ‘We could take anyone.’

  Stopmouth said nothing.

  Nine Fourleggers waited to meet them. The little one which had spoken last time was not among them, and none of the others would respond to anything Stopmouth said.

  ‘They’re insulting us!’ whispered Yama. ‘We should fight them now – it’s what they want.’

  The beasts examined the corpses, licking them, scoring the skin with their claws and saying, ‘Hunger needs flesh.’

  Finally each trio took up a body and left through the far side of the plaza.

  ‘That’s it?’ asked Yama. ‘Shouldn’t we even send somebody to follow them?’ The humans had yet to find the exact home streets of the Fourleggers.

  ‘No,’ said Stopmouth. Then he called out to all the hunters around him. ‘We come back in three days. Hopefully we’ll get to eat then. Come on. In the meantime we still need to hunt.’

  The Fourlegger chief, if that was what she was, stood alone in the centre of the plaza before a small pile of corpses, laid neatly one on top of the other. Stopmouth was curious to see what they were, his mouth already filling with saliva as he imagined new flavours. The hunting hadn’t been good lately and he’d forgone his rightful share in the hope that today there’d be no need to fight.

  He wondered if he should lick the offered bodies and score them as the Fourleggers had done three days earlier; or if he should refuse to speak. He stepped closer, tummy rumbling with nerves and hunger.

  He recognized the first body: a Skeleton. They’d become rare since their disastrous siege of Headquarters. Delicious, he thought. Sweet, milky flesh that tasted so much better raw. His stomach rumbled again. He felt weak.

  ‘Hunger needs flesh,’ he said, pushing the body to one side. Oh, how he wanted to slice into it now!

  The second was a furry beast, its pelt wiry and probably very useful. Four pairs of limbs poked out on either side, and when he pressed fingers into them, he felt good strong muscle underneath. This would have been difficult prey for the Fourleggers and he smiled at the obvious respect they were showing to their new allies.

  ‘Hunger needs flesh,’ he repeated.

  It was no easy task to pull the heavy beast off the last body in the pile, especially in his weakened state. But when he did, when he saw the last one, the heat of the Roof seemed to intensify, to beat down on his head hard enough to knock him over. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. An eyeless triangular head; a dull pelt riddled with holes.

  He brought one shaking fist to his mouth. ‘Where … where did you find this one?’

  ‘Your hunger has no need?’

  ‘Where did you find it? Your sisters, I mean? Where did they get it?’

  The Fourlegger looked straight at him, and he had no idea, no idea at all, what it might be thinking. The Talker couldn’t translate its stance, its twitching snout, into anything he could understand. Finally it gestured towards the hills.

  ‘She came with her sisters. At night. Hunger needs them, as hunger needs all flesh. Have you no need?’

  Stopmouth stared down at the
Digger corpse, beads of cold sweat running over his face. Indrani – she had to come back. Or they were all dead.

  ‘Hunger needs flesh,’ he heard himself say. The humans would have to take all the friends they could get. And it still wouldn’t be enough.

  ‘Are you mad, hey?’ Rockface looked astonished, but there was a grin on his face too that grew the more he spoke. Blood covered him up to the elbows. His butchery class wasn’t going well today. The wiry fur of one of the Fourleggers’ gifts hid many tricky joints and sinews. Worse, Rockface’s little students had been too hungry to wait. They laughed and dodged behind his back or out of reach of his arms until every one of them had faces smeared with tasty gore.

  ‘You are mad, boy.’ He sounded proud, and that alone should have filled Stopmouth with worry.

  ‘She should have come back by now, Rockface. I mean, how long could it take to grab a few things from your house? It’s not as if their weapons are very large! I’ve seen one, remember? The green-light thing I took from Varaha. But the destruction … whole buildings …’

  ‘Ha! That little necklace toy does nothing now! I think you imagined it all.’ Rockface suddenly moved to pull a giggling child off the corpse. ‘Away from there, you scamp!’ He shook her until she dropped the eyeball she’d tried to steal. ‘Those bits are for hunters only, see?’ Then he turned back to his chief. ‘The weapon was even more useless than the man who fell out of Varaha’s Globe. Dead within days, but him we could eat, hey?’

  ‘I think she’s trapped up there,’ said Stopmouth. ‘She has enemies now, Kubar was saying. Lots of enemies. The holy ones didn’t like her before and the chiefs don’t like her now. At least, I think that’s what he meant. Life in the Roof sounds so confusing!’

  ‘They talk a lot of nonsense, boy,’ agreed Rockface. ‘Gabble gabble. Who can understand a word of it, hey? No, you’re right. She’s our Indrani and we need to go and bring her back. Provided she wants to come back, hey?’