Chapter 74: Naval Battle for Humanity (6)
Below us, they circled.
I could see them going past through the red water, shadows sliding under the surface and moving off again, and every so often one would come up just far enough to show its round eyes before dropping back down.
They were studying us.
They didn’t know what to make of this stone.
The stands weren’t waiting.
"CLIMB! CLIMB, YOU MAGGOTS!"
"THERE ARE SEVEN OF THEM! SEVEN! WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?"
"KILL THEM! KILL THEM! KILL THEM!"
It came down on us from every side at once, a rain of voices that never stopped, and some of them in the front rows were leaning out over the balustrade to shout from closer.
I gripped my trident and tried to breathe.
The shaft was still in my stomach. I hadn’t touched it since the water, the barbs were holding the flesh, and every breath dragged on it from the inside. I’d settled for taking air in small amounts, high in the chest, and the air wasn’t going deep enough to be any use. My fingers were cold to the wrist.
Under my feet the stone was wet, and some of what was wetting it was coming out of me.
Stay up.
That’s all you have to do. Stay up and watch the water.
Then the first one came out.
It broke the surface on my left, caught the edge of the rock with both hands, and the man beside me raised his trident to stick it before it had even pulled itself up.
"No—"
It came out with nothing behind it. He didn’t hear me.
I forced it.
"NO!"
The shout folded me in half. Something tore inside my stomach and I had to put a hand on the shaft.
He’d stopped and was looking at me.
"Not... in the water."
I spat. What came up was red and I spat it onto the stone.
"It sinks... if you kill it there..."
He didn’t understand. His mouth was open and his weapon was still up, and the creature was already swinging a leg over the edge.
I had no breath for a whole sentence.
"Let it... climb."
A beat.
"One foot. On the stone. Then."
He understood no better and he did it anyway.
The creature hauled itself up, brought one leg onto the rock, straightened.
And he killed it there.
He put his weapon into its throat at point-blank range and it collapsed onto the stone, across the edge, at the exact spot where it had come up.
It didn’t slide. It didn’t fall back into the water.
It stayed.
He looked down at the body. Then at the edge beside it, where there was nothing.
And I watched him understand.
"A WALL!" he screamed at the others. "A WALL OF DEAD ONES!"
Another man lifted his head.
"We have to let them up! Let them up and do them on the rock!"
"You hear that? On the stone! Not in the water!"
It went from man to man in a few seconds, without my having to add a word.
If we killed them in the water they sank and nothing was left. If we let them climb first, every corpse added itself to the edge of the stone, and the next one had to come over the top of it.
The rock would build its own rim.
Then they all came at once.
They stopped coming up one at a time to test us. They arrived from every side together, ten, twenty, hanging off the edge, and the rock was covered in them before I’d finished turning around.
And the killing started.
I took the first one that stood up in front of me. It still had a knee down when my trident went in under its jaw, and I pushed until it hit bone, and I pulled.
The shaft came. The barbs tore what they had to tear and came free.
I shoved the body off with my foot and it fell across the rim and stayed there.
One.
Again.
The second came in with its trident already up. I turned the point aside with my own shaft, stepped off to the side on my right leg — and my stomach gave out.
The pain came up all at once, white, and my vision closed in at the edges.
It caught me on the hip. Not deep, but enough to put me back a step.
The man behind me killed it over my shoulder.
"HOLD ON, KID!" he shouted.
I straightened, took my place back in the circle, and hit the next one.
It was the only choice I had.
I couldn’t pivot anymore. Every rotation went through me end to end and took my sight away for a moment, so I stopped pivoting. I held my sector, a third of a turn, no more, feet planted, and let everything outside it go.
They worked it out without my saying so.
The man on my left shifted to cover what I couldn’t see. The one on my right did the same on the other side.
And Blackbeard came and set himself against my back.
I felt his shoulder against my shoulder blade and he didn’t move from there through anything that followed.
They kept coming up.
They came out of everywhere. There were more of them than we’d seen on the deck, more than had hunted us in the water, as though the basin were still producing them.
And every time one put a foot on the stone, it died on it.
The rim started changing shape.
Scattered bodies first, then a broken line, then a ridge. They had to climb over their own dead to reach us, and while they climbed both hands were busy and their heads were open.
It gave us time.
Very little time, and it was all we needed.
"THEY’RE SLOWING DOWN!" somebody shouted. "LOOK, THEY’RE SLOWING DOWN!"
The one-armed man was fighting on my right.
Hercules. The one who’d seen the demon king drown a city with a gesture, the one nobody believed, the one who always sat against the darkest stretch of wall and never joined in with anything.
He had a trident wedged under the stump of his shoulder with the shaft braced against his ribs, and he struck one-handed, at close range, with an economy of movement I couldn’t work out.
He almost never missed.
One jumped at him and he took it on the point without giving up a step, planting the butt of the shaft against the stone, and the animal’s own weight did the rest.
He turned his head toward me for a second and showed me his teeth.
It was meant to be a smile.
"MUCH BETTER LIKE THIS, EH, KID?" he bellowed over the noise. "ON STONE! REAL FEET!"
He laughed and went back to work.
The stands were howling harder.
"KILL THEM! GET RID OF THEM FOR ME!"
"THIS ISN’T POSSIBLE, THERE ARE SEVEN OF THEM!"
"More! MORE!"
And over the top of all of it, at regular intervals, that amplified voice of the red demon calling every death and lifting the crowd another notch each time.
I wasn’t listening anymore. I wasn’t really hearing it at all.
There was only the sector in front of me, the edge of the stone, and the next head that was going to come up over the bodies.
I struck.
I struck throats, eyes, under the arms, everywhere the scales were thin, and I’d stopped counting and stopped thinking.
One caught me on the forearm.
Another opened my cheek.
A third came in while I was hauling my weapon out of a body and there was no time — Blackbeard pivoted at my back, put his trident through under my arm and took its throat without even looking at it.
He was against my back again immediately.
"Still with me, kid?"
I had nothing to put into an answer. I struck a mouth coming up in front of me and spat blood onto the stone, and that was all I could give him.
"Good," he said. "That’s good."
And on it went.
A man went down on my left, one knee folding forward onto the rock.
Two of us caught it at the same moment, me and the one beside him. We closed the gap in the circle before they could pour into it, and he got up, and he took his place again.
Another took a point in the side and kept striking with it in him.
Another lost his weapon, bent down, tore one out of the hands of a dead creature at his feet, and carried on with that.
Nobody gave ground.
That was the real difference, and I could finally see the whole of it.
They came one at a time. Each climbed on its own account, each toward the first prey it saw, and when one died the one beside it changed nothing about what it was doing.
We were seven and we were one thing.
Every time a man weakened, two others moved. Every time a sector opened, it closed. We were wounded, we were finished, we were all bleeding onto that stone, and we held because not one of us was fighting for himself.
The rim kept rising.
There was a bank of bodies all the way around us now. They slipped on it. Some couldn’t get over it at all and fell back into the water. Others got stuck halfway up and died there, and thickened the wall.
We had shut ourselves inside a rampart made of them.
And the water around the stone turned black.
Then, at some point, there weren’t any more.
One last one came out. A single one. It climbed the bank, reached the top, and looked at all seven of us.
It hesitated.
It was the first one all day to hesitate.
Hercules ran it through before it had made up its mind, and it rolled down the heap with the rest.
Then nothing.
We held position for a long while. Nobody lowered a weapon. We turned our heads toward the water, toward the rim, toward the bodies, waiting for the next one.
It didn’t come.
One of us let his trident drop onto the stone and the sound carried.
Then the legs started to go.
A man sat down. Another knelt with both hands on his stomach. Hercules let himself back against the bank of corpses and shut his eyes, his chest going fast.
Blackbeard turned toward me.
His hand landed on my shoulder and he looked me up and down, and his eyes stopped on the shaft still coming out of my stomach.
He didn’t say anything at all.
I didn’t sit down.
I don’t know why. I think I knew that if I folded anything I wouldn’t get back up, so I stayed standing in the middle of them with my trident planted in the stone to carry my weight.
And I looked.
The blood was running out of my stomach down my leg, steadily, around that wood I still hadn’t pulled out, and it went all the way to my foot and spread out under me. There was a pool of it. It widened while I watched it, and it was already running into the one belonging to the man beside me.
The whole stone was red.
Not stained. Red, from the rim to the middle, a thick tacky layer where you couldn’t tell anymore what had come out of us and what had come out of them. Our blood and theirs mixed on the same rock, and nobody left to say which was which.
Beyond it, the water.
It had lost all clarity. It was a sheet of dark red, motionless, from one side of the basin to the other, and it took a moment to understand you were looking at water.
Bodies floated on it.
Ours, face down, arms spread, drifting slowly. Theirs, on their sides, the scales gone dull. They were everywhere. Some had gathered where the current had pushed them, against the rocks, against what was left of the hulls.
Because there wasn’t much left of the ships.
Both lay on their sides half sunk, torn open from below, with gaping holes where they’d thrown themselves against them. Part of the rigging trailed in the water. A mast had snapped and was floating across the surface.
And wood. Wood everywhere. Planks, splinters, sections of rail, debris turning slowly on the surface between the dead.
That was what they’d been watching all day.
I raised my eyes to the stands.
They were on their feet. All of them. From the first row to the last, the whole height of it, tens of thousands of demons standing and screaming down at a red stone in the middle of red water.
"THEY HELD!"
"LOOK AT THEM! THEY’RE STILL STANDING!"
"SEVEN! THERE ARE SEVEN OF THEM!"
"MOOOOOORE!"
The red demon lifted himself above the crowd on those ridiculous little wings, and he flew a full circuit of the basin, and his voice covered everything.
"LADIES AND GENTLEMEN!"
The noise came down a notch.
"THE FIRST DAY OF THE COLOSSEUM IS OVER!"
And the colosseum went off.
"GLORY!"
"GLORY! GLORY! GLORY!"
They stamped, they beat the stone, they screamed that word until their voices went, and the sound came up from everywhere at once and filled the entire basin.
I stood in the middle of it, leaning on a trident, with a shaft in my stomach and a pool spreading under my foot, watching them cheer us.
And high above, in his box, a white figure was applauding gently, with the tips of his fingers, his black wings wide open and every one of those eyes turned on us.