Scar Night Page 0,142

back, gripping the port hatch, eyes frantic. Blood there too. It soaked the aeronaut commander’s white uniform utterly. No way for an officer to be seen. Whatever would Fogwill’s mother have said? And what was wrong with Hael’s belly? A metal barb jutted from the wet cloth there. A grapple? That shouldn’t be there, Fogwill thought with a kind of detached curiosity. He ought to say something to the commander, tell him about the grapple. He tried to speak, but the howling wind stole his words.

He examined his rings again; the seastones and rubies glinted under the blood. He rubbed at the gold. It would clean: soap and water would do the trick. The captain would have some handy inside. But the hatch was far up the sloping deck. He would have to crawl over all the blood to reach it.

“I can’t stop it. The port propeller’s gone.”

Fogwill wished the aeronauts would stop yelling. Their shouts and the rip of the wind and the buzzing of the propellers were giving him an awful headache.

Pinned by the grapple, Mark Hael was trying to see inside the hatch. Iron barbs protruded absurdly from his belly. “Cut the stern,” he rasped. “Pull the fucking tubes out.”

There weren’t any tubes. Just a grapple. Surely the commander could see that? But he wasn’t looking at his belly. He was still twisted round, peering inside the airship.

Sand stung Fogwill’s eyes and he blinked. He looked back beyond the rail. Dunes were rising towards them fast. Too fast. They ought to slow down.

“Slow down,” Fogwill whispered. Nobody heard him. Mark Hael’s attention was elsewhere. They were really going to have to slow down. He had to tell the captain that. He pushed at the rail digging into him, but it was useless. He was too tired. His shoulder throbbed. His hands felt badly swollen. He blinked again, trying to clear sand from his eyes. Stinging tears flowed over his cheeks. His slippers. Where were his slippers? He searched around frantically. The desert rushed closer. Sand and rock surged toward him. He couldn’t see his slippers anywhere.

* * * *

The dead crept from the darkness and surged up the mountain of bones. The lights that Dill had first taken to be souls were instead licks of flame curling around tapers clutched in bony fists. These were not ghosts; they were men and women. Some looked as thin as the skeletons beneath their feet; others were tumescent, their flesh shades of grey and blue. All wore rags. All looked hungry.

An army of them.

Dill dimmed his lantern.

“Too late,” Carnival hissed. “They’ve seen you.”

More were coming. They flooded out onto the bone mountain behind the others, and as Dill’s eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, he realized from where.

The city of Deep had been hacked out of the abyss wall, where torrents of dark sculpture rose to staggering heights, façades of writhing figures and tormented faces. The lower third of the city swarmed with distant lights. Flames moved behind carved muscle and sinew; they crossed arched spinal bridges, crept down stairs like spirals of black bone and out onto the slopes composed of human remains. Walls of skulls screamed silently from the rock-face. Tapers winked through eye sockets and tooth-framed doors as figures slipped behind. Fluted pillars supported great stone spheres cut into impossible orgies of flesh, wings, teeth, and bones, representations of countless angels feasting.

Deep shuddered to the pounding of metal.

Rachel was at Dill’s side. “There,” she pointed. “The sounds are coming from there.”

Flames glowed deep within the dark city. Silhouettes of figures working. Red-hot metal and flashes of steel.

“Forges,” she said. “They’re making weapons.”

A tide of torchlight poured out from the city and scaled the bone mountain. They moved lithely, disturbing little, shadowed eyes fixed on the three interlopers. Tongues darted between bloodless lips as if tasting the air. White, grey, and blue flesh slid beneath grease-stained rags. Knives and swords glinted.

In awful silence, the horde climbed closer.

“What are they?” Dill breathed.

“I think they’re dead,” Rachel said. “Or were.”

“We should leave.”

“Not yet.” She had a distant look about her. “Remember what we came for.”

Carnival picked up a skull, examined it, then tossed it away with a grunt of indifference. The skull bounced and tumbled down the slope, where it landed a few feet from the nearest of the advancing army. The line of men and women paused, then began to climb again, faces now twisting into snarls.

“Great,” Rachel said. “You’ve pissed them off.”

“So?”

“So, there’s an army of them, and