and sucked, then threw his arm aside. “Do you see what you’ve done”—she dropped to her knees—“you stupid, selfish…” She couldn’t find the words for her frustration.
Rachel was panting; her arms now hung heavy, empty. She turned at a commotion among the archons gathered outside the cell. They were retreating from the bars. Their master had arrived.
Blood streaked the god’s battered face. His massive chest rose and fell from exertion. He said, “You, my child, have seriously pissed me off.”
Rachel stared up at him, at the bulwarks of flesh, the breasts, the overlapping chins. His eyes glowed like burning coals. In one hand he gripped an enormous iron sword, scraped and serrated from long use. She felt like laughing.
There was a cough behind her. Rachel dragged her eyes away from the obscene god to Carnival, caught her startled expression, and turned to follow her stare.
Dill was sitting up.
31
On the Brink
Devon slammed the cell door open. “Get up,” he said.
Sypes flinched. The old priest had not moved since the Poisoner had last seen him. He was still lying naked and shivering among the fragments of his walking stick.
“Put this on.” Devon threw the Presbyter’s cassock towards him.
Sypes still did not move.
Devon dragged him upright, and thrust the cassock into the old man’s arms. “Wear it. You must be recognisable.”
Without his stick, Sypes had to lean against the wall for support. His thin arms and legs trembled as he pulled the cassock over his shoulders, and let the hem tumble to his feet.
“There,” Devon said. “Now you look almost human again.”
But that was a lie. There was nothing much human left in the old priest. He was all skin and sinew, mottled with purple and yellow bruises, more corpse than man. The cassock engulfed him, seemed to drag his stooped frame even closer to the ground. Grey eyelids drooped over misty eyes that did not lift to meet Devon’s.
The Poisoner had to help him from the cell. He all but carried the old man along the crew quarters companionway and into the innards of the Tooth. Sypes shivered and coughed and his knees buckled constantly, despite Devon’s assistance. The priest weighed almost nothing.
By the time they reached the corridor leading to the outer hatches, Sypes had started to drift in and out of consciousness. Devon had to shake him whenever he sensed him fade. “Just a few more steps, old man. We’re nearly there.” The Presbyter mumbled incoherently and batted his hands about as though dismissing invisible servants.
Heshette bowmen packed the hot, cramped corridor. They were loosing off arrows through rents in the hull left by the barrage of scorpion spines, whose serrated shafts had been knocked away and dragged aside to leave room. Piles of them now lay against the inside wall, their poisoned barbs covered in rugs and heavy blankets. Outside, war drums boomed a constant dirge over the clash of steel and the shouts and screams of the attacking army.
“Over here”—Devon dragged Sypes the last few feet—“by this hatch.”
The hatch door had been ripped away and pitch-smoke wafted through the gaping hole. Two bowmen crouched there, sheltered one at each side, alternately firing arrows along the length of the hull. Outside, burning wood keened and snapped and whistled. Arrows and bolts whizzed and whined and tore screams from their targets. Great wooden wheels grumbled, boots clumped, and hoofs thundered. Over it all, the war drums endlessly beat out the pace of battle. Bataba waited over to one side, half his tattooed features lit up by flames.
“Most of the ladders have been repelled,” the shaman explained. “But the siege-towers are moving into place and we have no more pitch. We cannot hold them back any longer, so this is your last chance, Poisoner.”
Devon peered outside, then jerked his head back as an arrow smashed to splinters against the wall behind him. Two more followed it in quick succession. He frowned, then grabbed Sypes’s cassock and pulled him over, exposing him to view at the open hatch. Firelight washed over the priest’s face for an instant, before Devon yanked him aside. Another arrow shot through the gap, and whistled past the old man’s ear. Sypes did not appear to notice it. Instead he muttered something about stonemasons.
“There’s always one,” Devon muttered. He waited a moment, and then thrust Sypes back to the opening, like a marionette. This time there were no arrows.
A chorus of shouts outside: “Hold your fire. Hold your fire.”
Bataba echoed the command to his own bowmen. The sounds