“Together.”
It spread like a ripple across mirror-still water, like a flame across the bone-dry leavings of a breathless summer. One hand grasped another, and another, and another, each man and woman latching hold of the one beside them. Up on the sky-ship decks, on the Earthcrusher, every hand finding another and squeezing tight, strength found in the press of another’s grip on their own. Silencing the whispers in the dark, black voices fading beneath the vow, the prayer, the hymn, repeated amidst fierce smiles and glowing faces. Over and over again.
“Together.”
“Together.”
Up on the Kurea, the Blackbird closed his eyes, burning the picture below in his memory—a portrait to be repainted in black ink on rice-paper scrolls, testament to a night that must surely live in people’s hearts and minds for a thousand years.
“Maker’s breath.” A wistful sigh. “And she says she’s not a hero…”
51
ENDSINGER
Dawn approached like a thief, nothing but a skulking glow to herald its arrival. The army marched through knee-high snow and ash, beset by swarms of accursed corpseflies. The ground trembled beneath the shreddermen legion, the Earthcrusher plodding behind, the true terror of what awaited them coalescing from the gloom before Yukiko’s horrified eyes.
Where once the Stain had lay, there was now only a bottomless hole, cracked at its edges like sores at a beggar’s mouth. Rolling mist clung to the rim for a few hundred feet, shrouding it in a pall reeking of dead flowers and burning hair. She found her eyes slipping away when she looked at the pit, headache flaring, chill gripping her bones. The air was a sea of frozen swords, so cold her tears froze on her lashes, her hair crackling whenever she turned her head.
An awful fear took root inside her, the warmth in her belly diminishing to a dull ebb. She pressed her hand there, feeling for them in the Kenning. The heat of the Lifesong beyond her wall was faded, a dull, sullen tempest rather than the inferno she’d grown accustomed to. She reached out, felt the dim pulses of the people around her; fireside sparks dying between winter’s teeth. The thunder tigers still burned strong enough to hold, and she caressed each mind with her own, willing them to be strong. But the soldiers were too muted and dim to cling to.
Whatever strength the lives inside her had brought was gone—negated by the awful chill emanating from that wound in the world.
And then of course, there were the things born from it.
A legion of horrors arrayed at the hellgate’s edge: malformed children clinging to a dead mother’s kimono. But gods above, what children. Nightmare forms, hundreds upon hundreds, dragged screaming from the depths of subconsciousness into strangled light. Blinking and stupefied, fixing glazed stares on the humans marching out of the wastes, gurgling hatred. The smallest were the oni she knew—blue-skinned, humanoid monstrosities. Some no bigger than human children, the skulls they wore still crusted with fresh meat and skin and hair, openmouthed and silently screaming. The larger ones stood twelve feet high, tree-trunk warclubs in their hands. Features pierced with iron rings, twisted, as if their Dark Mother had taken a fistful of each face and squeezed. But they were nothing compared to the horrors looming beside them.
Abominations in the blackest sense of the word. Parodies of life, of forms once gracing the living world. Great hawks made of bone and corpsemeat, rotten feathers and worm-ridden flesh stitched together by blackened tendons. They rose in a great swarm, circling the hellgate like flies over a fresh cadaver, clad in the reek of open graves.
Towering goliaths of dripping flesh, piles of corpses, mashed and pulped together into shambling monstrosities. Yukiko saw the skinless shapes of beasts long gone from the Isles—what might be pandas or monkeys or big cats, crushed together like putty around frames of tree-trunk bones, mouths like fanged furnaces, burning blue with awful cold.
Other horrors amidst the mob—pale, naked men with skins several sizes too big, sloughing and dripping as they shuffled, keening and eyeless. Bone-thin things with too many joints and too many fingers, eyeless faces with flat noses, snuffling at the air, long red tongues darting across needle-lined maws. Others still without static form—just writhing mountains of worm-ridden meat, trails of congealing blood left in their wake as they dragged their carcasses along frozen ground. When they roared, clouds of corpseflies spewed from their mouth amidst the wails of screaming children.
A brood born in utter darkness, suckled at a breast turned black with hatred.
The children of the Endsinger.
A song hung like mist in the air, growing louder with every passing moment. Echoing from the hell in which She’d been abandoned—the hymn heralding the end of the world.