The rail-car's meat had the same sour-bile taste as its blood, but felt more like real food. They ate it raw, cutting long strips off the machine's sagging flanks.
"Eat, eat," said the pale soldier, "be sick later." She pushed more into their hands.The pale soldier's name was Inka, and she wasn't actually Brairi. Just descended from them. Her father's parents and her mother had both been captured as children. Dally had known there were a few like that, but he hadn't thought it was this many. Now that he was looking closer almost half the thralls around him looked pale for Savosi.
When Dally and the others had reached the front of the rail-car, they finally saw what had killed it. Or at least they saw something. The car's head was lassoed in some kind of wet, red cable, like a a web of muscular intestines. The cord had yanked the head down, down, down into the rails, crunching into the dirt under its own wheels. It's monstrous, heavy body had kept going, though. The left over speed carried it right off the rails.
"That's the food vein?" Dally had said, after staring at the cord for a long time. "The vein strangled it."
Inka had waved her hand, and started cutting into the car's flank. "Captain gets what he wants."All the thralls in the cars had survived, it looked like, though there were plenty of cuts and broken bones. The humans mostly weren't so lucky. Dally and the others helped pull shattered bodies from the wreck, their clothes dripping with the greasy car blood. Dally had never seen a dead human before. Their dead eyes stared at the sky, exactly like Seth Greenlees had.When they were laid out in a row the Captain came back. He sucked on a cigarette, glancing at the bodies in heavy lidded boredom.
The thralls that had been trapped in the wreck were still crawling out, sliding covered in gore from holes that they'd cut in the sides of the car. As they retched and shivered Captain Bailla blew hard on a tin whistle. They turned to him.
"Thanks to that enemy trap, you'll have to stay here," said Bailla, standing in front them. "You're mine now, understand?"
The thralls shivered, squinting at him in the sudden daylight. "Yes boss."
By midnight they were all fed, and at least partly-clothed. No one had a spare jacket big enough for Ansel. He hunched near the fire with his arms crossed over his scarred chest.
"Did your Captain really wreck the car?" he asked the closest Front thrall, and got a vague grunt for an answer. The soldier turned away.
This had been going on all night - the quiet. Apart from Inka, the Front thralls didn't say much, good or bad, to any of the newcomers. They sang with each other — new songs — and played a version of serbat with about ten thousand different rhyme patterns. But, whenever someone tried talking to them, they gave one-word answers.
Meanwhile, Inka laughed loudly and constantly at Dally's fumbling Corps, but at least she talked. And she had a baby, which none of them had realised at first. As soon as they were out of sight of any humans she pulled him from the rubble; a chubby, flailing creature only a year old. He was beyond cute, and still doing couldn't sit still, or even stay in one shape for more than a couple seconds. As Dally watched he screeched, trying to reach a bug on the ground, then started started bawling when Inka wouldn't let him go.
"His father is not in this company," said Inka, whimsically stretching her arm to the sky. "One day, I will see him again."
There were a lot of kids in Provok. More than should have been possible. A tiny second army played in the shadows of the tents and hollow buildings. Sometimes there was a shatter and tinkle of broken crystal in the distance - one had found some slightly-intact windows, and now all of them were throwing rocks.
"I thought, uh..." Dally said, watching the baby. Then he rubbed his mouth to stop himself finishing.
"You thought what?" Inka asked.
Red must have been thinking the same thing. "How are there all these kids here?" she asked. "Don't they take them away?"
Inka laughed once, too sharply. For a second she looked like she wouldn't answer, and hugged her baby closer. Then she sniffed. "We hide them, until deps are gone." She turned to her esi friend. "Luin, tell about how you put Naia in ah - uh - tolnetzn?"
"Cook pot?" Nessie guessed.
"Yes pot! It was so funny."
"Yes, funny," said the one called Luin, and turned away. "Later, okay."
A few minutes later they picked up their pack, and slunk away through the dark.
There weren't enough tents, but anyone who'd been in the cars was happy to sleep outside. Dally left Red and Nessie in a warm nest under a tarp. He caught up to Inka while she tried to make her baby stay in the tent. He was crying in rage and clawing fistfuls of the fabric, gnawing with his few sharp teeth.
"Inka," Dally whispered.
"Dally," she whispered back, trying his accent, and laughed.
"I have to ask you something."
"Okay Dally."
"The others won't talk to us because we're weak, right?" he said. "Because they think we'll all be dead soon."
Her smile faded fast. "Ah, well!" she said, glancing away. "Ah."
"Is that it?"
She made a vague noise. "You must try and not die, okay? Good?"
Maybe he'd been hoping she would deny it. Dally swayed in place, imagining Nessie and Red trying to kill other thralls. Who was he kidding?
"Yeah," he mumbled. "Good."
The company marched the next day, into more grey fog.
At first Dally and the others didn't know where the hell to be, since the humans weren't actually giving orders. They just blew on tin whistles, and everyone changed shape, pulled up the tents, and started to move. By the time they were all on the road the column stretched what felt like a half mile. All four humans rode at the end of the column, on long-legged crawlers. Behind them the children ran in a loose pack, ducking in and out of hiding.
Dally's group drifted aimlessly, until they found Inka near the back. Without the jaw they might not have even known it was her: in major form she had weird plates covering her shoulders, a mottled gold color on her pale skin. She was walking where she could watch the kids; back there a ten year old was carrying her baby, tied in a sling on his back.
When she saw Red she whistled, and hitched up her massive harpoon-thrower on her shoulder."Look at you! I thought you all might look like big humans," she said, in slowed-down Corps. "But, no! Just thralls." She sighed in disappointment
No one had offered Dally or the other newcomers weapons, probably because there weren't enough. Most of the Front thralls had makeshift harpoons, made out of whittled chitin lashed to rebar. The luckier ones had aurum-infused harpoon heads, and about a third carried massive, glossy twitch-guns from the last Great Assault.
It was amazing those were still alive; they were probably thirty years old. Each was almost as long as a man was tall. The thralls carrying them sometimes pet the gun's gleaming barrels, or peeled back a plate to check the insides. Now Dally finally understood why the songs talked about 'gun hairs'; there were tiny fibers all along the barrel, tentacles waving like grass in a breeze. Their job was to snatch a bullet from the chamber, hurling it along the barrel. As each hair twitched the bullet got faster and faster, till it exploded out the muzzle.
Nobody seemed to actually have aurum bullets, though. Anyone carrying a gun stopped sometimes to pick up hefty rocks or chunks of scrap, stashing them in sacks made out of the rolled up tents.
"Stay with me," Inka said. "Today is a good day. There is no fighting, okay? We are far from operation."
"Where are we going?"
"We will attack old province capital, Nal Provok. But, we are too far."
They followed a road. Kinda. It was more like a weedy dirt trail strewn with rubble, crawling along the ridges of hills. There was a drop on both sides; loose shale slopes that echoed as rocks skittered down. They passed huge chunks of hollowed-out carapace; the bones of dead vehicles. Stunted trees and brush clung to the hills around them.
It would have been fine, if they could see. Sometimes a crumbling building loomed silently out of the fog, then disappeared behind them. The Front thralls didn't seem to want to check any of them, or even really look. They kept starting songs, and then falling silent again, watching.Dally hadn't been in a place so empty in his whole life. It wasn't just like the snow-capped woods on Lyle's estate. That had felt like humans were waiting around the edges. This was... nothingness.
In that quiet, the whip-crack sound of a shot rang for miles.
The front heard it first, and thralls skid into the rubble on either side of the track. Dally dragged Nessie with him to crouch in the shadow of a boulder. Together they stared, panting, into the grey nothing around them. In between the echos the only sound was the muffled howl of a soldier who'd been shot. He was sprawled out in a shallow ditch, trying to pull a railroad spike out of his thigh. Another one was quietly hissing with a hand pressed to their chest, and blood bubbling up from their lips.
The Brairi must have twitch-guns too.
A dark shape moved through the scrub, and another one. At Dally's side soldiers propped the muzzles of their guns up on the rubble, and fed their ammunition in through a gash in the side. As each piece of scrap moved through the machine it purred, louder and louder, until it burst from the muzzle like a lightning crack. One of the fog shapes somersaulted into the dust, and lay still.
"They're dead," Nessie whispered, staring up over the rubble, "they're—" they yelped, as something long and rust-dark seemed to sprout from their arm. A harpoon.A cable stretched from the harpoon back into the fog. It snapped tight, and Nessie staggered, while Dally grabbed with blood-slicked fingers at the shaft. The enemy thrall on the other end of the cable looked like Inka. He yanked until Nessie fell over, and started dragging them out of cover.
At least, right up until Red hit him from the side. Dally hadn't even seen her coming. She twisted around the Briari's flailing body, her teeth already closing on his throat.
Dally was halfway to helping her when a harpoon hissed past. The Brairi holding it cursed - somehow Dally knew it was a curse - before Dally leapt on him.
This wasn't like a cage match. The Briari's eyes were cold, and they fought in breathless silence. A scythe claw snagged against Dally's side, skittered down his ribs. Flesh parted in a long, agonising arc.
The harpoon cable had got snared around both of them, tangled, tripping, and then they fell, rolled and kept falling, down the loose shale drop at the side of the road. Rock sliced at them, jolting them together. Somehow when they stopped Dally's hands were on the other males throat, and he wrapped the cable around it, and pulled until skin creased. The Brairi clawed at his fingers, wide eyed. Bastard. Dally shook him and slammed his head back against the rock. Dally wasn't weak. He was a fucking champion.
The Briari's struggling slowed, and he didn't twist away from Dally's claw on his chest. Dally gut him, silently.
This wasn't like last time; he felt too awake, and the fog sucked up the sound of screaming like a stifling blanket. In terrible clarity Dally watched himself tear off a mouthful from the Brairi's shoulder, felt his teeth snick together through gristle.
Afterwards he staggered upright, confused, dripping hot blood. What was he doing?Red.
Faceless shapes rushed past him in the murk. By the time Dally had scrambled back up to the road Red was doubled over, with a pale, limp body pinned underneath her. Nessie was standing over her, trying to yank her away.
Red whipped around as she heard him coming, snarling through bloody teeth. The limp body was what was left of the Brairi soldier, the one who looked like Inka. He was now missing an arm and a chunk of flesh from his cheek.
At least Red herself looked okay, under the blood. A shallow gash stretched down from chest to navel, but it wasn't enough to stop her eating. She was still hunched over, pinned the dead body down. Nessie was staring at him with wide, desperate eyes. They were holding their arm weird, stiff, and Dally blinked to see the harpoon shaft still jutting out.
Another shot rang out, and they both flinched. They were standing in the open.
"Red."
If she heard, she didn't react.
"We need to go." He shook her, this time, and got a bloody hiss back.
Without thinking Dally snarled back, and yanked her as hard as he could. It worked, sort of. Red staggered as he dragged her, and twisted around to sink her teeth into his shoulder."Fuck-"
Somehow Dally managed to haul her, struggling, back to their piles of rubble. He flung her down into cover, then fell on her to keep her there. After what felt like a long time she stopped trying to throw him off, and stared up at him, panting. Blood was pouring down her face from a cut over her eye, staining half her face red.
The shots were slowing down, and the rapid whistles and commands moving up and down the column started to change.
"They're falling back," someone called out.
The call moved down the column, until finally someone repeated it in Savic for the humans.Bailla had ducked behind the carapace shielding on his crawler, and now he was slowly rising up again. He launched himself down, to stalk past his officers. "Sons of whores -- they should run. We must have stumbled on their camp."
Dally stared into the fog, trying to see anything that looked like a camp. There was nothing except the sounds of flesh tearing, and muffled cries as wounds were bound up.
Inka found them crouched together. Dally was gently probing around in the bloody mess of Nessie's arm, so he could try and ease the harpoon out. It wasn't working. The barbed head was buried all the way down in the muscle, maybe to the bone. Pulling on it made the barbs snag, tearing Nessie's flesh even worse. So far Nessie was barely whimpering, but the skin under Dally's hands was cold and clammy. They'd started to shiver.
When Inka saw the arm she tsked, bending to run a hand down Nessie's back. "Shh, shh. No problem." Her eyes narrowed as she examined the shaft. Out of some instinct Dally backed up, giving her room.
"No problem," Inka repeated, then stabbed the harpoon deeper.
Nessie howled, trying to wrench away. The motion slammed them into Dally's chest, and he caught the flailing body automatically, trying to hold them steady. In another second Inka had forced the harpoon all the way through the meat of Nessie's arm and out the other side. Wicked steel barbs followed the point, blood beading on cold metal. Once it was far enough through Inka snapped the shaft, so it could be dragged all the way through.
When it was finally done Inka frantically held the blade up to the light, then shushed, running a hand over Nessie's head. "You are lucky, okay? There is no aurum, just metal. Easy to heal." She pressed the bloody harpoon head into Nessie's good hand. "Now you have some weapon."Nessie sobbed, and Dally thought they might throw the thing out in the fog. They didn't, though. Just slowly sank to sit in the dirt, clasping the bloody gift to their chest.
Red had been watching the whole thing at a safe distance, standing silently with Ansel. Seeing him was more of a relief than Dally had been expecting; where had he been, in the fight? Did it matter? Ansel was blank faced, but coated with a thin layer of sweat, dust and blood. Both of them looked how Dally felt.
So this was a win. Maybe. Or not much of a battle in the first place? The bodies of those who hadn't found cover fast enough made low, dark mounds in the fog. If Dally and the others had been walking further forward, they would have been in that fire.Instead they'd been at the back, with the humans.
Bailla was moving his crawler up and down the line, muttering to another officer. When they stopped nearby Dally uneasily shuffled towards his little group, trying to herd them away. Red was distracted, though, wiping gravel out of a cut on Ansel's face. They didn't notice Dally's hissed warning until it was too late, and then Bailla was walking towards them.
By some Mercy of Nire they were still in major form - Red wasn't any prettier than anyone else. At first Dally thought the captain wanted to talk to Inka, but his gaze slipped lazily over her. Instead he pointed at Dally, who was closest. "You."
Dally froze. "Captain."
"The enemy is fleeing. Get two sections and follow them. Kill them all."
"Yes, boss.As soon as he was gone Dally turned to Inka, hopeless. "The hell is a section?"