—yes there and somehow inside, and worse, and better, she conquers, she is broken—
Shapes itself to your desire. Lets you act. Picks you—a hairpin
—hairpins, clips, pigtails, lips, lipstick, a gag—
scraping tumblers of a lock. Tumblrs. Christ.
—jesus—
It wants you to want. It needs you to need. Your hunger fuels your hunger. As you reach, it grasps you. So: think deeper. Watch yourself want. Learn your demons, your needs. See them arise. See them fall.
Breathe. Nothing you want can stay.
Air cools; skin withers, ages, rots, leaving bone. Viv herself passed on. She felt slickness beneath her palms, dug her fingers into claws, peeled back the skin. The lavender scent filled her, choked her.
She fell into the real.
Struck grass hard, and it hurt. That helped, that was a sign. Some kinds of pain at least were real—not the grand overmastering sort, but the shitty stubbed-my-toe aches no one could fetish over. She was soaked, sticky, covered in some sort of sap. It dried fast, flaked off as she turned and groaned amid ropy roots. Opened her eyes, saw the twilit sky, a spreading peach-pink tree. Somewhere nearby, that kid wailed. Overhead, dangling from branches, in translucent sacs, hung Zanj and Hong.
She forced herself to stand. Her muscles obeyed reluctantly; the kid fell silent—he had been wailing beneath Hong, but now he looked at her, awed. “It’s okay,” she said. “Give me a second.”
She broke off a branch, ignored the maple-cedar sweetness of its sap, and jabbed the sharp end into the sac that held Hong. On her third try it pierced and he spilled to the earth in a sick heap. “What?” His voice peaked and rough, for once uncomposed.
“It got us,” she said, and stabbed Zanj. This sac she got in a single blow—practice, plus she didn’t feel as worried about hurting Zanj. She had a tough hide, and she deserved it. “Now let’s get it back.”
Zanj was cursing already as she fell, half-awake, and landed on her feet, slick-furred, sharp-eyed, and furious. “Motherfucker’s gonna pay for that.”
“It’s okay. We’re out.”
“Okay? Do you have any idea how long we were in there? Hours!”
Hong, still shaking, gasping, accepted Viv’s hand up. “I don’t—I—”
“Fucking kama trap. Fuck!” Zanj punched the tree. The boom of her fist breaking the sound barrier overwhelmed the crack of the trunk snapping in two. The tree fell with a hammerthud. “Desire algorithm magic bullshit. Hate it. Hate everything. First the stupid crown, now this—nobody snags me in nonsense and gets away with it.” She knelt, wrapped her arms around the fallen trunk, and lifted it easily. Her eyes were murderous and wild. “Someone’s going to die.” The kid, slack-jawed with awe, ran to her, waving, follow me, but Zanj shook her head. “No way, kid. I am done sneaking around. I want this asshole to hear me coming.”
Viv ducked before she spun the tree, as did Hong—and a good thing, too, because the trunk shattered the surrounding grove. Trees dominoed into other trees; Zanj chose a direction, seemingly at random, marched forward, swinging the tree like a scythe. When the first trunk broke she chose another, and swung again.
“Zanj.”
Crash.
“Zanj!”
She halted her tree-swinging with a roar. “What?”
Viv pointed.
There, beyond the splintered forest, crouched the monster.
20
MANY-MOUTHED, GRAY AND bloated, sharp-toothed and ten-handed, the monster curled atop a platform of pearlescent metal marked with glowing circuitry. A fountain of light and heat gushed from the center of the dais into the large vertical mouth in the center of the monster’s chest. (Were those ribs or teeth that pierced the red flesh of his torso gums?) He swallowed in huge wet spasms and dregs of matter dribbled gray from the corner of that mouth, down the swell of his translucent belly. When his mouth gaped, Viv could see his heart beating far back in his throat. The smell alone turned Viv’s stomach: sour milk and spoiled meat and burnt sugar. Ten feet tall lying down, naked and rubbery, smeared with slime, with filth, he rolled, twitched, belched, gurgled, and fixed Zanj with six yellow eyes arranged in two ranks of three.
“Finally.” Zanj tossed aside her tree trunk as if it weighed no more than a broom, and marched into the clearing. Her head was raised, her shoulders broad, her movements fluid, lively, all anger and no scorn. Viv, watching, took note: this was Zanj faced with an opponent she respected. She wasn’t scared—just ready. “Are you Gray?”
The monster did not stop swallowing—but its highest mouth, the one just above its eyes, said, “I am hunger and peace: Worldgnasher, Form-Eater. In my gullet all finds place and—” Its voice was wet and heavy bass, and the monster interrupted itself with a burp. “Purpose.” Viv had to turn away at that, and managed not to throw up. Hong, beside her, wore an expression between terror and disgust; the kid watched with wide scared fascination, unable to turn away.
“My friend here has asked me not to kill people unnecessarily,” Zanj said. “So—even though you tried to catch me in a want-loop, even though you’ve grown fat on the fantasies of these poor groundling bastards, I’ll give you a chance. Surrender the manufactory and get the hell off this dirtball. I won’t hurt you. Much.”
The kid giggled, high, hysterical, the sound lost beneath the monster’s tree-shaking guffaw. The monster reared, twenty feet tall now, slithered forward, and spread six massive arms, each tipped with three thick-nailed fingers. All its mouths spoke at once, their voices ranging from a child’s treble pipe to a rumble on the lower edge of hearing: “Bold words for a tasty morsel! I have supped on the blood of worlds, and I will clean my teeth with your bones!”
“Your teeth,” Zanj admitted, “do need cleaning. If we’re trading riddle-stories, here’s mine. I have stolen suns, and burned inside them. I, Cloud-borne, a-wander through my mother’s body. I raised the armies of Ilion and watched them shatter. I am Queen uncrowned, now crowned. I fought first and last; I am whole and I am scarred. And you should have taken my first offer, because I never give a second.”
Steam hissed from the monster’s thick hide; its eyes widened, and one of its six arms smeared gray guck from the eyes on its chest to give it a clearer view. “Zanj?”
Wind whistled through the clearing, over the shattered trees. Viv heard the battery pop inside Zanj’s skull.
Her eyes burned white, and she moved.
With a single leap, Zanj struck the monster in the stomach. Her claws sank into his thick gray hide. She stuck in midair somehow, anchored, stained by the slime on his skin, then with a surge of back and waist lifted, twisted, tossed his great bulk down to the ground. His tail lashed toward her, but she let herself fall and it whipped harmless through empty space. Zanj sprang forward, skidded under the monster’s backhand, caught its arm, wrenched that arm sideways in a loud crack of bone, and landed, only to slip in monster-muck, recover, and leap to safety. Zanj was an insect against Gray’s bulk, and she fought like one—a wasp, stinging, slipping away, zipping in to sting again. She moved too fast for Viv to see. She traced her by the trails she tore in the earth, by the claw marks in the monster’s flesh, oozing oily blackish blood. By roars.
And the roars turned to laughs as the monster began to change. More hands unfolded from its body, grappling Zanj, but she slipped away, her fur muck-slick and matted; somersaulting through the air. Pustules swelled on that thick hide, burst, and the viscous stuff they wept hardened to armor as it met the air. The monster’s bulging mass warped; the tail split, each fork now tipped with a poison-weeping stinger.
And Zanj, too, transformed.
Quicksilver angles covered her—not splitting her skin, but rotating from an unseen dimension into place. She grew larger, supple, sprouted another pair of arms; there seemed to be many of her, or else she slipped through time, her smile growing, growing as she grew, and her eyes doubled. Many rows of teeth glistened in her mouth.
Viv had wondered
offhand, as Xiara and Hong told stories of Zanj’s prior exploits, how one woman no matter how strong or fast could have stolen suns and shattered fleets and stood against the Empress. She’d assumed there was some collective collapse at work: Zanj the leader emerging as a mythic figure when her exploits had in fact been team efforts, the way old Greek heroes stood, in stories, for the forces under their command, the way Viv herself stood for the work of the thousands of engineers and coders and salesfolk and marketers and support techs and factory workers she’d employed.
But Xiara and Hong had both spoken of the exploits of Zanj’s armies, and still said that she stole suns. Hard to believe of the woman Viv had rescued from High Carcereal, but easy to believe of this sharp-eyed glistening Being.
Was this silver shape a form Zanj could take on when she wanted? Or was the Zanj Viv knew the false shape—or, if not false, then partial as an anglerfish’s lure, the bright darting sprite over the immense eyes, over the mouth that gaped with teeth?
Zanj flickered blue, turned on invisible axes through the Cloud—and so too did the monster, tail stabbing through nothingness to emerge behind, above. Watching the fight, the part of Viv that never was where she was, the part that thought to save herself from feeling, recalled Modernist paintings, Duchamp, canvases that showed all angles and stages and frames of movement superimposed. Nude Wrestling a Monster, Number 2 in a series.
Viv followed the roots of that thought back to herself in the present: terrified, frozen, deer in headlights, toad staring at a snake. She stank with the tree’s slick goop, with her own fear—of the creature, of failure. But fear, also, of this beautiful terrifying battlecreature that was Zanj.
For the first time since Viv pulled her from that star, Zanj was having fun. She was not winning; or at least, not winning easily. Each time she seemed on the verge of tearing off a limb or crushing a windpipe, the monster wriggled away, reshaped itself, rejoined the battle. And Zanj laughed and changed herself in turn, became grander, stranger, less—well. She never had been human. But less recognizably herself.
When they struck the earth, great deep fissures opened, and earthquakes shook the ground. Viv kept her balance, barely.
This, for Zanj, was a kind of heaven: to fight, forever, against an enemy she never could quite kill, before whom she would never yield. Striving, always striving. And in that, more even than in her scars, Viv felt she understood her.
Hong’s voice cut through the chaos. “We have to help her!” His clubs out, he stared into the roil of claw and flesh and Cloud, over the cracked ground—brave, ready to die.
“Are you nuts?”
“The Gray’s drawing power from the manufactory.” The fountain of liquid light that rose from the platform had dwindled to a trickle of sparks. “Zanj’s batteries won’t last much longer. We have to stop the Gray’s power supply.”
“So we just run through … that?” The monster caught Zanj, threw her into the earth with bomb-blast force; dirt rained down upon them, and Viv shielded her eyes.
“We have no choice!”
And beside him the kid watched the battle, eyes wide and glassy, jaw slack, rigid with awe. His mouth twitched as the monster roared.
“Maybe we do,” Viv said, and hit the kid over the head with her stick.
Hong had a good set of lungs on him, or else the Mirrorfaith trained its initiates on vocal projection. For all the roaring and crunching and screams, his shouted “What!” came through just fine.
So, for that matter, did the thunk of the stick against the kid’s skull. As if the battle weren’t happening at all, or as if it were happening in a space removed from where they stood. The kid sprawled on the cracked ground, dazed. Viv jumped on his back, caught his neck in the crook of her arm, and ignored her own doubts. The kid bucked beneath her, stronger than he looked. She shouted to Hong: “Help me, you idiot!”
“What are you doing?” He managed to get the whole sentence out this time. Probably they’d drilled some rules into him back in the monastery about honorable combat, which didn’t include guidelines for dogpiling children. But—as muscles writhed under the kid’s skin, as his neck bulked beneath her arm, as he bucked again, broke her grip, sent her flying to land in a cloud of dirt—Hong got the picture. Not everything that looked like a child, was.
The kid hunched to his feet, breathing heavy, half his body still reed-thin, half plumped with muscle. A pale silver mix of blood and spit smeared his mouth. He wiped it with the back of his hand, and stared at it in peevish shock. “You hit me!”
Hong hit him next, with a club, in the side of his head.
“Ow!” The kid swirled around, unbalanced, metamorphosis incomplete, his thick arm clutching, but Hong had already rolled away. “What did you do that for?” He lurched toward Hong, step by heavy step. “I just wanted to make you happy.” That last word punctuated with a swing Hong ducked around and punished with a club strike that the kid, still growing, didn’t seem to notice.
“What are you?” Hong shouted.
If the situation had been a bit less life-threatening, Viv would have rolled her eyes. “He’s the Gray.”
“But that’s—” In the center of the clearing, Zanj, ten feet tall now, suplexed the monster to the soil, only to be knocked off-balance by a foot-claw, to spin through the air and land, all fierce grins and battle joy, and launch herself once more into the fight. Hong got it then. Finally. “Oh. I see. The battle is another trap.”
The kid spun from Viv to Hong and back, gaping. His musculature kept filling in, but his face was still a hungry child’s, gawping in disbelief. “A trap? I’m giving you what you want! I’m giving you all exactly what you want.”
“You fed on us,” Viv said.
“I didn’t feed on you!” The kid—Gray—grew larger now, swelling in scale, but his face was no less a child’s. “I don’t need any food from you. In here, with the matter siphon and the manufactory, I have whatever I want. Anything I could dream!”
Zanj kicked the monster in the head, twice; it tried to punch her in the mouth, but she tucked her chin and rammed her forehead into its knuckles. Bone, or something that served the same purpose, shattered.
“And you wore your dreams out,” Viv said. It was a guess. “You rubbed your fantasies raw, and went looking for others that weren’t yours.”
He made a wrinkled face as if he’d smelled something foul. “No! Gross. Do you think I like all your weird animal dreams, all those gasps and wriggling? I don’t want them, I don’t understand them. I just need them, that’s all.”
Anger filled her until her skin was taut and trembling. Maybe rage was not the best emotion for dealing with a nearly invincible immature god-thing—but Viv always made her best decisions on instinct. For a given definition of best that might not correspond to any in common use. “Those aren’t yours, kid! They don’t belong to you.”
“Look—I’m trying to make up for a mistake. When people come to me, I ask their souls what they want, and give it to them. I just collect the data. People were happy, and it was going fine until you came to wreck everything.” Zanj chucked the monster through the air and it landed on the platform—but she was slowing, even in her joy. “This is all going so wrong! Just let me put you back in the tree for a bit, okay? I’ll fix this. We’ll settle up later.”
Viv ran toward him, not knowing what she could do against something with his power; she had no plan other than distracting him from Hong, who’d worked around to flank him. But the kid caught her in his hands, sprouted other hands from his back, and caught Hong too. Viv growled, shook, kicked, but could not free herself. The ground bubbled up beneath her and caught her legs, climbed her, vine-supple and hard as concrete, locking her knees, her waist, reaching for her arms. Tendrils curled into her mouth, her throat. “Zanj!”
Not a command, even then, but a plea—one word against Zanj’s battle joy.
Zanj stopped in midair, over the recovering ruin of her foe. She revolved toward them.
Gr
ay’s face went slack, and his ashen skin paled; what he said sounded like static, but Viv’s translation gimmick rendered it “Oh, shit.”
Then Zanj hit him, and he splashed.
This battle lacked the brutal glory of Zanj’s fight with the monster: that had been a sort of fantasy in itself, Zanj’s need for an opponent fed into an optimizer powered by all the manufactory’s might. Zanj enjoyed this less: Gray a mess of formless sand pouring over Zanj’s body, taking form after form, thornbush and flame, horrible longheaded alien, writhing teeth, each assumed for the split second Zanj took to master it, then splashing back to sand again.
Zanj did not fight for pleasure now. She fought to win.
She flickered blue, into and out of the Cloud, caught some invisible thread in the whirl of Gray and twisted her hands in a circle; the grayness gathered, spun in, closed itself in a diamond shell, which she raised overhead and threw down so hard it shattered.
Viv and Hong’s stone chains snapped; the ground beneath them broke, healed, flattened. A cold wind tore through the grove. The few great umbrella trees still standing withered.
The gray sand gathered into a puddle, assumed a shape not unlike the kid’s, but softer: a round-faced coltish gray-skinned adolescent, eyes wide, mouth slack with fear. “I didn’t mean it! I didn’t, I swear, I’m sorry, I just—I shouldn’t have, I know. I messed this up, like I mess up everything—”
Zanj’s form returned to its usual number of dimensions, though her face held no less fury; mixed there, Viv saw recognition. “I know you.”
“Um.” Whatever Grayteeth had expected, that wasn’t it. “I really don’t think so?”
“You were with the Empress. Her page, her lackey, her servant, when she cast me down.”
His fear smelled of ozone and burnt insulation. “You’re really her. You’re really Zanj.”
“And you,” she said, “are about to die.” She raised her hand, claws sparkling, vicious.
“That wasn’t me! I swear. That wasn’t me, that was old Great-Great-Great-Aunt Gray, I only entered the service a hundred years ago, I don’t know you, I’ve never seen you before, I’ve just heard stories.” His wide eyes fixed on the tips of Zanj’s claws. “Um. Good ones?”
Empress of Forever Page 19
