He turned to X, his eyes wild with delight.
“My heavens!” he said. “It’s as if they don’t like you!”
The lord looked back to the wall.
“I believe I shall let you punish this man yourselves,” he shouted. “WOULD YOU ENJOY THAT?”
The cells erupted yet again.
Fear slipped its cold hands around X’s heart.
Dervish called to the guards patrolling the wall. He ordered them to release some prisoners from their cells.
“A hundred or so, shall we say?” he said. “Let them come down here and mete out whatever justice they see fit!”
X could not just hear the prisoners’ bloodlust now—he could smell its sour odor drifting down from the cells. Out of nowhere, he remembered Zoe telling Jonah that “pungent” meant “someone who likes puns.” He was warmed by the memory.
Dervish noticed.
“Look how he smiles!” he shouted. “THE BOUNTY HUNTER DOES NOT FEAR YOU!”
Cell doors clanged open. Prisoners thundered toward the steps. The wall was in a frenzy, chanting for X’s blood.
“I must take my leave,” the lord told him. “I do so abhor violence.”
The first wave of souls pounded toward him across the plain. The whole hive seemed to shudder under their feet.
The guards hastily fled.
“I don’t get paid enough for this shite, do I?” said the stout one with the red tie, as he ran.
“You get paid?” said another.
“It’s a figger o’ speech, innit?”
The first souls to reach X merely spit at him or dealt him a single blow. He looked each of them in the eyes. He refused to so much as bow his head.
The beatings soon grew fiercer. X forced his mind to drift. He remembered building the Lowlands out of snow and toys. He pictured Zoe, Jonah, and their mother crowded around him in a yard fringed by waving pines.
He was jolted out of his reverie by a voice he recognized.
“Dude, wake up! This shit is nuts.”
It was Banger, peering worriedly into his face. Ripper stood next to him. She was swaying in her filthy golden dress as if she were at a high-society ball in London.
“Why should I wake?” said X. “I wake only to a nightmare. Nothing can stop these men from doing what they will.”
“Shut up,” said Banger. “That’s just negative thinking.”
“Shut up, indeed,” said Ripper. She stopped midtwirl and fixed X with her eyes. “You are dousing what promises to be a quite thrilling rescue!”
X had always suspected that Ripper’s mania was largely a pretense. It was as if she still expected to be put on trial for murdering her servant with that boiling teakettle, and planned to use madness as a defense. Despite the flights of lunacy, X could see in Ripper the steely woman who had trained him. A dozen bounty hunters stood close by her now, their faces all wounded like X’s from the lords’ fingers. Ripper had mentored them all—and they had come when she called.
“I am grateful for your friendship,” said X. “But if you free me, you merely postpone my punishment till another day—and endanger yourselves. I will endure this now, and be done with it.”
“Don’t be so bloody noble,” Ripper said. “You’ll bore the arse off me.” She paused, her brain spinning in search of a plan. “If you won’t let us free you,” she said, at length, “then we can at least place our bodies between you and the threat. You are one of us, and we will not stand by while they make pulp of you.”
Ripper called to the bounty hunters.
“Form a ring, my daisies!” she shouted. “And do try to look at least a little fierce?”
The hunters made a human chain around the tree. Banger and Ripper paced in front of them, the first line of defense. X was surprised—and moved—that so many of his fellow bounty hunters had come to his aid.
Prisoners spilled forward in greater numbers. The chance to scrap with a bounty hunter or two was too tempting to pass up, and they all wanted to try their luck at getting through to X. The human chain may have been intended as a protective measure, but it took on the air of a challenge.
Banger alone trounced half a dozen men, but soon the prisoners attacked him two at a time. Ripper came to his aid repeatedly, jumping on their backs, gouging at their eyes, and trying to tear their fingers off with her teeth. (She actually succeeded once, tossing the finger at her dazed victim’s chest and exclaiming, “Oh, don’t weep, you infant! Your nanny can sew it back on!”) Soon, the prisoners grew bored of losing. They attacked the tree in one vicious mass, surging past Banger and Ripper and assaulting the chain of bounty hunters with rocks and branches.