In Veritas

by C. J. Lavigne

  Her thumbs were jammed into the eye sockets of an old man holding a spear. Her fingers were lined along the pressure points of his skull; his body was limp between the crush of her palms.

  Gasping, she dropped him and stepped back. She had a brief vision of his grandchildren—a boy and a girl, laughing, with a ball—and then turned to see those same children, a few years older now, lying blank and staring on a dry riverbank. The air was hot and wet. She was covered in mud and the rotted shreds of her stolen tunic. She was stricken with horror and the echoes of pain, but she couldn’t remember her name, so she stood with her hands at her side and didn’t move. The sun was low before Privya came to her, and the vision of a tower on the blasted plain.

  The young girl’s shift was made of some fine fabric that Privya didn’t recognize. It was also too small. Privya took the grandfather’s cloak instead, and walked away.

  She found a road, carved through the jungle by horses and carts and the two-toed print of some strange beast. A soft glow in the evening distance suggested a nearby town, so she ducked her head and marched determinedly the other way. When the ground began to slope, she followed it upward.

  She came eventually to a low cliff, and walked along its base until she found a crack that led to a cramped cave filled only with dust, dried droppings and gnawed animal bones. She rearranged the bones and the droppings at the cave’s mouth, reciting the sixteen uses for bestial defecation under her breath. She added strips of leaf from a vine she recognized nearby. Then, stooping for a sharp rock, she stepped inside the cave and opened the vein of her wrist. She added three neat symbols to the leaves and retreated to the back wall, waiting for the rumble and the burst of howling vibration that would bring the cave mouth collapsing inward.

  She choked on dust for a little while before she laid herself down in the dark and waited for the air to grow stale. “I only want to sleep,” she told the rat skull lying just under her hand, “that the monster in me sleeps too. I don’t want to hurt anyone anymore.”

  The skull was not sympathetic, though a trickle of blood from her wrist touched it and its teeth gnashed a few times in the dirt. She lay there tracing it with her fingertips, reciting bone-songs to herself and wishing for a peaceful death.

  It took somewhat longer than she’d hoped. Her fingertips were growing numb and a little cold, but she gripped the rock again and sawed long slashes into her flesh, spilling power on the ground. She willed the cave to stay closed and thick.

  The pain was throbbing, but it faded. Eventually, the air grew thin in her lungs and she felt herself gasping. She closed her eyes and smiled.

  She thought she would drift, but she dreamed of fire and blood. Her muscles withered to screaming rope. Her throat dried to leather and she had nothing to drink; she could not groan.

  When she gave in and would have scrambled toward the barest promise of light, raking her fingers at the rock wall, she was paralyzed. She dreamed only the rising tide of red.

  She woke tasting hot blood, with visions in her head she didn’t understand: light and glass and explosions of white powder. Her hands were clenched around the skull of a dead man wearing gold bars on his sleeves. She had seized him too harshly; his head had cracked open, his vacant eyes bulging. There were other bodies scattered around her: other men, young, with hair on their upper lips, and jackets to match the man in her hand. She was in the cave, with dust swirling in the air, illuminated by the beam of sunlight that entered through the wide crack in the rubble blocking the cavern mouth.

  She dropped the dead man and staggered outside. At first, she only wept for relief and the ability to move her fingers. Like before, she did not remember her name. When the moon rose, though, Privya came to her, and she wept anew.

  Her clothing—what had it been?—was rotting around her, but she no longer cared. There was a string of mules in the clearing, burdened with bags and now impatient and hungry. She took a hunting dagger from a fallen man’s belt and cut all but one animal loose, then dragged the bags to the ground and slung herself on the back of the lead beast. It turned its ears back at her, but the dead man’s language whispered through her mind; she uttered three words and commanded her mount back down through the jungle. Head down, it walked grudgingly.

  She let it stop and eat and sleep, though otherwise she rode it for three plodding days. She found a river, and wasn’t sure if it was the same river as before; if so, it was now too wide to cross, but she turned the mule and followed the water down to the coast.

  With her toes in the white sand, she took the guide rope off the mule and patted it once on the rump. She tied the rope around her waist and tucked the knife into it, feeling the hilt hard against her hips. She turned to look at the sea. She drew a breath and flexed her toes, then hesitated.

  She thought of red, and remembered timeless paralysis and the feel of her drying tendons snapping from her bones.

  She thought of dead children by the river, and a young girl’s curled hand.

  She gritted her teeth and raised her chin, then picked up a long branch from the forest edge and walked into the water. It was colder than she’d expected, and the salt spray went up her nose.

  She didn’t know how to swim, but the branch floated, so she clung to it and kicked her feet, splashing away from the shore. She wasn’t used to being wet, or chilled, and waves kept hitting her in the face and pushing her back toward the beach. But she had walked days through the desert; she kicked her feet again, and kept kicking, driving herself further into the water.

  When the tide changed, it took her with it, pulling her out into the vast water as the land shrank to a sliver behind her and then vanished from view. When the moon rose, it sparkled on the waves. Privya was very thirsty, but when she tried to drink from the cold sea, she only choked up the salt again. Her legs hurt.

  She took one hand off the floating branch so she could reach down for the knife tied to her waist. It stung her as she drew it free, but that didn’t matter. She sliced more deeply, scoring across bone before her stiff fingers fumbled the hilt and the sharp metal fell away from her, somewhere down into the depths. That didn’t matter either. All she needed was to bleed.

  There was power in it, but the ocean was too big; it swallowed her essence, diluting what she was. She let go of the branch and meant to sink peacefully after the knife, letting the water claim her. But drowning was harder than she’d expected. When the water closed over her head, she was stricken with an abrupt terror. She flailed upward, gasping in a lungful of air; she reached for the branch and her hand slapped only waves before she sank again.

  She wanted to focus, to remember staring eyes and the deaths she’d made. She wanted to remember a child’s life cut short, but the flashes wouldn’t come to her. Instead, she remembered the agony that had been her body rotting around her, and she struck out again, frantically, for the last bobbing hint of the branch.

  Her blood leaked hot into the water. A wave closed over her head, strangling her, before something hard and rough bumped against her hip. It slid past, gone before she could react. She twisted. When she would have screamed, there was only cold salt in her mouth.

  The hit came again, this time with teeth. Something ripped into her thigh and whipped away with a chunk of her. Her breath left her and the water rushed in. The bites continued: her back, her left arm, her right calf.

  She felt herself shredded. She choked and fought and was ripped to pieces; she lost her fingers, her nose, her ears, her eyes.

  When she couldn’t breathe and she couldn’t scream and her joints were pulled to strings of skin and vein, she knew that at least, finally, she would die.

  She didn’t. All the bits of her hurt and kept hurting, torn away from each other, drawing further and further away. She had no mouth to wail with, but she felt herself stretched impossibly thin. She was in pieces and she was drowned and she did not end.

  Privya was red agony. She no longer had a mind with which to despair.

  She lost he
r name again.

  When she came back to herself, her bare feet were planted on wet wooden flooring and she was clawing bloody-handed at an oak door that already bore the splintered marks of recent abuse. The door looked thick, but she thought she could hear a voice keening on the other side.

  She rocked back and almost fell. When she put a hand out to the side, she encountered a wall and leaned against it, vomiting blood, bile, a bit of bone, something grey, something that looked like human hair. All she could taste was salt.

  She screamed, and behind the door, the other voice screamed with her.

  She had limbs again; she had hands, and she used them to clutch at herself, checking arms and legs, curling around her belly. She was frantic for touch and the sensation of her bones moving.

  She was slimed with gore, but her skin was whole and bare beneath. Her nails were broken but grew as she watched. She scratched at her skin and the weals sealed in seconds.

  She was teeming with other lives—she saw an old woman’s swarthy face, a boy laughing with a wooden rattle, a man with a black eye smiling through bloody teeth. She stumbled back another step and shook her head. The voice was still shrieking through the door, but as she stayed silent, the stranger’s wailing dissipated to sobs, and then to silence.

  She was in a narrow hall of oak panelling, the battered door in front of her and stairs heading upward on her right side. Behind her was another door, this one shattered. Through it she saw shadows and a sprawled, lifeless hand.

  The floor was rocking perceptibly beneath her feet: up and down, side to side. Up the staircase, she saw open air and the heavily clouded skies of a daytime storm that was either oncoming or just past. She could smell the salt of the ocean, but she wasn’t certain if it was only the lingering impression of her nightmare.

  Leaving the voice behind the door to its anguish, she ascended the stairs and found herself on a broad deck in the middle of an endless sea. She had seen drawings of ships in her father’s books; she recognized the tall masts and taut sails. The air was quiet, but in the grim light of the distant storm, she saw the bodies scattered. They were mostly men, though some were barely adolescent, and she saw at least two women dressed in the same ragged shirts and trousers as anyone else. Their faces were wet. Some bodies were crushed; Privya stepped over a man with a missing jaw and had the vague memory of bone, cracking and brittle in her hands. When she paused to look down, she saw that his eyes were brown and vacant. His breath bubbled in his throat before he spewed out a mess of foaming blood. His stare didn’t change.

  “I’m sorry,” she told him. She heard her own voice, rusted and resigned. She set her bare heel on the man’s ravaged throat and crushed downward as she stepped over him.

  Some of the others were already dead. She took care of the staring ones as she passed. When she was finished, she stood at the ship’s rail and looked out at storm-tossed waves rising restless against the grey sky. She saw floating corpses—a wet mess of tasselled coats and sprawling arms mixed with pale, scaled bellies and bloated, finned creatures. She wondered if she’d done that, too. She was fairly certain she could guess.

  The sight of the water made her shiver. She was growing tired of looting corpses for clothing, though, so she went back down the stairs into the room with the broken door. Stepping around the moustached man sprawled on the oak planking, she saw a bunk, a table, a chest. Inside the chest, under a brass astrolabe and a book in a language she didn’t understand, she found trousers and a shirt. They were too big for her, and she mistrusted what might be living in their seams, but she put them on and rolled up the sleeves and legs.

  The man with the moustache was still breathing, though his face was empty and drool pooled at the corner of his mouth. There was a circle of blood spreading slowly beneath him. Privya sighed and crushed his skull with the astrolabe on her way out. Then, making her way past the stairs to the door that was damaged but still holding, she knocked politely.

  She thought that she heard rustling, and something suspiciously like a whimper.

  “I won’t hurt you,” she said. “Where are we?”

  This time, it was definitely a whimper.

  She waited a minute or two, then she went up the stairs again and occupied herself with dragging the bodies to the rail and heaving them over the side. She still couldn’t decide whether the storm overhead was oncoming; it seemed to have achieved a sort of stasis, looming clouds swirling restlessly over the tossing sea. The corpses she dropped floated up and down, bobbing into the side of the ship and away. She wished they would sink. She wondered how long it would take the sharks to eat them.

  The tossing of the ship was making her feel ill.

  When she had dragged even the moustached man to the railing and dropped him over—watching as he splashed in and then rose face down, limbs akimbo—she sighed at the gore on her stolen shirt and did her best to wash it out in a bucket of water. Then, dressing herself once more, she walked dripping back down the stairs and knocked at the door again. A voice (she thought it was male) screamed something she couldn’t understand, then started sobbing.

  “This isn’t very productive,” she said. She went back into the other room, looking for shoes, but found none. She supposed they wouldn’t have fit her anyway. She spread her clothing on top of the sea chest to dry it, then clambered into a hammock near the wall and closed her eyes. She found herself feeling pleasantly sated. She relished each pain-free breath she took. She wondered how long it would be before the person on the other side of the door grew hungry.

  When she woke, sunlight was streaming through the portal window and the ship’s rocking, while still constant, had subsided somewhat. She rolled from the hammock and set her bare feet on the plank flooring, then retrieved her now-dry shirt and pulled it on, adjusting the fit of the too-large sleeves.

  This time, when she knocked at the half-broken door, she heard a scuffling from inside. She waited. She took a moment to run her fingers through the salted tangles of her hair, which was a task more difficult than she had anticipated.

  The door opened a crack. She shoved her hands behind her back and clasped her fingers together, doing her best to look as non-threatening as possible.

  A darkly bloodshot eye peered out at her from a height significantly taller than her own. When it saw her, it flared wide, and the door slammed shut.

  “I won’t hurt you,” she said again, quietly. “I don’t mean to hurt anyone. I’m sorry. I can’t kill myself again. It doesn’t help, and whatever I become only makes things worse. But I’m me, now, and I’d just like you to help me sail this ship. We can’t stay out here forever.”

  The door cracked open once more. The eye peered out at Privya. She did her best to look small and innocuous.

  The door didn’t open any further, but the man behind it said something in a language she didn’t know. He spoke in a low bass gone raw with screaming.

  Privya tilted her head. “Do you know what I’m saying?”

  The man spoke again.

  “Oh.” Privya thought, feeling the weight of the stranger’s desperate gaze upon her. He hadn’t closed the door, but she could see the white ring around his iris.

  Slowly, she unclasped her hands from behind her back and raised her right palm to her chest. “Privya,” she offered, earnestly. “Privya.”

  Hesitantly, the man cracked the door a little wider. She saw that he was tall, raw-boned, and not much older than she. His brown hair was curling; his face was unshaven, sun-reddened skin pale with strain, and he had dried crimson splattered across the shoulder of his rough linen shirt.

  She was careful not to move, except to tap beneath her collarbone a second time. “Privya.”

  The man swallowed. Finally, he touched the bob of the lump in his skinny throat. “Ibrahim,” he said, or something like it. The name was foreign to her.

  Privya stepped back to give the man room. She tapped her fingertips against the wooden wall beside her. “Wall,” she said. Then again. She w
aited.

  He answered with a syllable that came to her like a memory, swimming from familiar depths. She repeated it. He nodded. His eyes were empty with terror.

  She walked up the short flight of stairs to the deck, beckoning him to follow. He shivered, shaking his head, but when she beckoned again, he apparently judged it best to obey. His attention darted around the broad deck, and she saw his shoulders relax slightly when the bodies of his shipmates were nowhere in view, though his gaze lit on a long smear of dried viscera and stayed there until she set her hand on a coil of rope. “Rope.”

  His head whipped around as he stared at her again. She repeated her request. They went around the deck—she asked about railings, sails, water. She had his language within her, awaking slowly. It was going to be a long process.

  She had time.

  Eventually, she would learn—she hoped before she was forced to turn on him. He seemed a nice man. She knew he would take her to land.

  where did this story come from

  Why? Is it not okay?

  it buzzes on my skin some of this is pure though, the sharks taste like cold vodka how do you know about privya

  She told Colin. I don’t know when. You know he met her before.

  okay

  Which parts are wrong?

  no

  Vee? What makes the buzzing? I can rewrite.

  no dont please dont ask me ill think about it and all the syllables will burrow into me, ill burn your stories like i burn mine i cant stop it hurts. all words are wrong

  Sorry. What about the sharks?

  less wrong

  keep leaving the pages on the desk

  im trying

  11

  Jacob is not a man of routine.

  He likes new things too much. He is too eager to play guitar or program a video game or weed a garden. He has tried managing a team of fifty; he has tried being their janitor. He likes to get up anywhere between five in the morning and four in the afternoon. Sometimes he adds Brussels sprouts to his sandwiches to see if maybe he’s changed his mind about them (he hasn’t, but he still tries).