“What’s that?” said Wodan, slowing as he jogged by.
“It’s a bow!” she shouted, smiling. “We have to use real animal guts!”
There was indeed a pile of dry, pinkish-black stuff before her. “Make me one, okay?”
“Okay!”
“And name it for me!”
She glanced at him sideways, then said, “Why would you name a bow?”
“Something tough. Like Heart-Piercer, or something like that. Okay?”
“Well, okay!”
Wodan waved goodbye, then he and the messenger crashed into the woods and followed a winding route through the darkness. They came upon two lines of hard-faced Reavers bearing a white body on their shoulders. One of them nodded to Wodan and they tossed the thing onto the ground before him.
Wodan had sent out other teams like this one: Reavers, a few fighters of Hargis, mercenaries from Pontius, and dogmen too wild to help in the deforestation. Wodan knew that they desperately needed information if they were going to survive, since the land they had claimed for themselves still belonged to others.
Wodan crouched over the body. It was bulky and humanoid in shape, and it reeked of death. Dead gray veins peeked through pale flesh, which was scabbed-over in many areas. The hands were broad, the skin rough and gray, the fingers crowned with thick, filthy claws. Most of the head had been blown off, and was already empty and dry, but what was left of the face was hideous: Eyeballs crammed in unevenly, cheekbones jutting outward, a mouth full of rotting black gums and cigarette-butt teeth crowding one another between large gaps.
“Sir,” said a Reaver. “Is this one of the ghouls you warned us about?”
“Yes. It’s big, though, bigger than any I ever saw. This must be one of their leaders.”
The Reaver looked at another, then one said, “Actually, we came up on a group of about five of ’em, and they were all this size.”
“This big?”
The Reavers nodded.
Wodan thought back to his exile, long ago. The creatures had tried to trap him and his friends when they were running to the mines in the north. There were hundreds, maybe even thousands of them - all tiny and howling and doing everything they could to stop them. Only a few, the leaders, were near this size. Wodan reasoned that if they had more of their kind this size, then surely they would have sent them against his small group.
“The ghouls must be growing,” said Wodan.
* * *
There was a theoretical land where there was a smooth, purple hill made of something like soft rubber. It was a nice place to sit, and if he looked around he saw other such purple hills on the horizon, though they came about only a moment after he thought to look, and he was almost sure that they erased themselves after he looked away. The sky was a white afterthought, but if he looked hard enough, it was tinged with yellow. More details would fill in if he thought to look long enough, but he did not bother because there was a tiny pool of water near his feet that drew his attention.
He saw curly red hair and a soft face staring back at him.
“I... am... Saul... Hargis...” he said to himself. “I... am... from... Haven...”
He practiced the thought. It held. “The year is... the year is... the year was, at some point...” but this thought would not hold. Either he had spent thousands and thousands of years in various torture chambers (cold steel, faceless men with sticks, scalpels, a greasy flickering light bulb swinging near the ceiling), or he and the entire world had been born only moments before.
“I am Saul Hargis. It is okay for me to think this. I won’t be hurt for remembering this.”
Saul felt a presence nearby. He slowly turned and saw a person, but its features were smudged, in constant lazy flux - except for the eyes, which were hollow and black. Saul realized that the being was blind, and so he held its hand, and it sighed with relief.
The being turned to him and said, “You are Saul Hargis. It is okay for you to think this. You won’t be hurt for remembering.”
“It’s not okay to think anything!”
“That’s just the nausea. It’ll pass. Try to remain calm.”
“Everything hurts!”
“Your old home, that place you came from. I... we... underestimated it,” said the blind thing. “My name is Zamael, and I’m going to make sure that the torture is over for you. In the land where I come from, you can’t get anything done without whips and screams. Identities can’t even be formed, much less controlled, without a torture chamber to live in and to hate.”
“Ah!” said Saul. “Torture!” The word meant far more to him than to most others. There was nothing hypothetical or abstract about it. He knew what the hours were like, strapped into those chairs, what it was like to see the sticks lifted high by mindless things, to see them hovering over him, and to feel the drawn-out dread before the impact. Time ticking by, dread, now, now, now, and dreading the next moment even more...
“It’s okay to rest,” said the blind thing with great black eyes. “It’s okay to know that you’re Saul Hargis and it’s okay and it’s safe to be close to me. My name is Zamael. All the pain is past. It’s past!”
“Why! Why! Why! Why! Why! Why! Why!”
“Because!” Zamael gripped his hand. “Because you grew up in a place that rewarded individual identity, and I see in you a unique chance to use your identity to keep mine solid, to keep it enduring. My name is Zamael! It is okay for me to think this! I won’t be hurt for remembering who I am from one moment to the next!”
A voice from a harder world broke through, and said, “In the land of those who see only illusion, the blind man is king.”
The flesh demon called Blindness, or Zamael, divided his awareness just enough so that Saul’s brain could enjoy lying on the purple hill, safe from torture, and concentrated the rest on what was going on around him. The succubus demon Bilatzailea stood nearby; it was she who had spoken, and he used her eyes to see his surroundings. They were in the lair of pink crystals, shining dull and red at dusk, neon arteries visible in the clotted ice. Blindness even saw one of his own black tentacles shifting about absentmindedly. Mercifully, the succubus turned her face to spare him the sight of himself.
Bilatzailea stared into a thick shard of living rock so that Blindness could see her reflection through her own eyes, as if looking at her conversationally. Her hair was lank and black, and her skin was very pale. She had a wide mouth with jagged, fat lips, and her naked breasts were peaked with scar tissue in imitation of nipples. Between the curve of her thighs and hips, below the navel, a mound of curling black hair covered the empty storage receptacle that kept seed warm and fed so that it could be transported to the world below the surface. Her form was a part of her function. Only a human male whose mind was deluded with sexual hormones could mistake her for a woman, or even for a female of any sort.
Bilatzailea was worn out from a recent journey into the mountains, to accept sacrifices and ensure that all was in order. She could see that Blindness was being pulled in multiple directions, so she closed several channels and spoke aloud. “You seem to have complete control over the ghouls now.”
Blindness sent several images. She saw his constant tweaking, survey, and manipulation of the minds of the ghouls, jumping from here to there to elsewhere. She saw the latest generation, thousands of them like slates wiped clean. Throughout the land, white heads with black eyes looked to Blindness, to Zamael, for direction. When there was no direction, most simply sat and waited, empty of want or care.
“But that presents another dilemma,” said Bilatzailea. “You define yourself through those you control. How can a host of empty automatons support your identity…?”
Another channel clicked open. You saw what I was doing just now, said Blindness.
Bilatzailea nodded at her own reflection. “The brain of that special boy. You’re going to allow it to sit and remember its own identity so that you can refer back to it and remember your own. You even introduced yourself to him by your old name: Zam
ael.”
Bilatzailea saw an image of Blindness startled, crouching as if in expectation of a blow. Just as the image was suppressed, she saw an old likeness of him: His body full of thousands of brains, each perfectly linked to one another. She saw the terrible civil war that had occurred long ago in the world below; claws and teeth rending in tight, dark tunnels, blood running between feet fighting for purchase as bodies locked against one another, pushing desperately, stabbing, howling. Mothers turned against mothers, children against cousins. Bilatzailea saw Zamael surrounded by others worshipping him, calling him a god. Then she saw Zamael beaten down by one far greater than himself. The great She Is cut him down, forced him to vomit out the thousand linked brains, then cut out his eyes and spared his life. Blindness was Bilatzailea’s nephew; he alone was not a child of the Grand Mother.
Blindness suppressed the memory with an embarrassing amount of effort, then added, If I was going to be punished for using that old name, the punishment would have already come.
“No matter.” Bilatzailea turned away from the mirror and walked among the crystal spires. She could feel Blindness moving away, not wanting to be seen. She drew near the thing she had caught glimpses of through the channels, but wanted to see in person.
“Wonderful!” she said, gazing upward. “So few can do this!”
Far above, in a strip of sky between several crystal spires, she saw several large boulders hanging in the sky, each spinning on an invisible axis.
She wondered how the thing was done, and instantly memories flooded into her through newly opened channels. She saw Blindness take in a human brain, years ago. It tasted strange, and he immediately spat it out. The organ was run through with tiny crystals. No such brains existed when Blindness was young and fat with brain matter. But as he studied the brain of Saul, ingested over a year ago, he learned that Saul’s people had a name for the condition: Neural Carbon Accretion. It was thought to be an incurable disease, a mutation that killed its victims after it drove them to madness.
But from scouts in Srila, Blindness learned that such crystal-growths in the brain were not a disease, but a rare gift. With exercise of the gift, the user could manipulate the subtle, powerful frequencies of the crystals and manipulate matter with thought alone – as if the rare crystal forms generated invisible fingers that could be controlled, and strengthened, through conscious thought. The invisible fingers were organs of raw, pure energy.
Madness and death only result from disuse of the gift, said Blindness. If it is not used, the host is killed.
Bilatzailea saw Blindness accepting a sacrifice in the mountains, saw him ingest a child’s brain that was run through with the crystals. Once he realized what he had, Blindness returned to the small, poor village and took the brains of the child’s entire family.
Now I have not just a dozen tentacles of flesh, said Blindness, but a thousand of any size and shape I choose. I can harden the very air! With such a shield, I am physically immortal. No weapon can harm me. No one can touch me!
“This will surely help against the invaders you’ve warned me about,” said Bilatzailea.
Blindness shrank away from her open channels. He still feared the invaders. Even with an army of ghouls, their numbers equaled his own.
“Don’t worry,” she said. She opened and sent the memory of how she had gone down into the earth so long ago with the seed of Serpens Rex, the great reptilian brute who was once a thorn in their side. Blindness saw the memory of her coming to a hot, humid cavern, how she gripped the wall and pushed, how little eaters crawled up to her and held her legs and probed at her space with open mouths and little flicking tongues.
“You see?” she said. “We will soon have reinforcements.”
* * *
A purple glimmer hung over the mountaintops when night fell. Everyone sat in darkness, exhausted but still able to explain the day’s events when the last of the stragglers came down from the mountain pass.
Khan Wodan came out of the forest and entered the massive clearing they had made. Physically he was fine, but his soul was worn out from speaking with and coordinating others all day long. He knew that they needed him. Even now, when most of the others were silent and still, Wodan could feel the eyes of the young warrior, Jago, watching him. Wodan tried to ignore the young pup to keep from embarrassing him, but it was almost as dark in the clearing as it was in the woods, so when he tripped over a small tree stump he smiled and winked at the young pup. Jago withdrew quickly.
Naarwulf smelled his Khan and barked out to him. Wodan plopped down on a nearby stump and slapped him on his thick shoulders. Wodan noted Jago stalking about on the periphery, watching him sideways as he pretended to mingle with laborers lying in the grass.
“Haven’t seen you all day,” said Wodan. “What’ve you been up to?”
“When we first came,” said Naarwulf, “I found a team of dogs lazing about. I ran among them with a stick and forced them out on patrol. I followed them for a while to make sure they obeyed, but then, wouldn’t you know it, I ran into another bunch of pups napping. I whipped them and made them do the same. But when I followed them...”
“You found another bunch sleeping...”
Naarwulf nodded in frustration, then said, “I’ve been whipping dogs all day just to get a little effort out of them.”
Wodan laughed loudly, then said, “That’s good. It shows they don’t fear this place!”
When he laughed, Wodan felt as if he was making several people uncomfortable. There were many who sat in huddled groups in the darkness, and he wondered just what was the matter. Then he heard tripping, the clattering of some pans, and saw that Nilem was trying to prepare a cold meal.
“You okay, Nil?” said Wodan.
She snorted, then ignored him.
“Come here for a minute, Nilem.”
Wodan felt her stillness in the dark, and knew that others were watching. She did not come immediately and Naarwulf bristled beside him. Wodan waved Naarwulf to quietness. He heard grass rustling, then Nilem came forward and knelt before her Khan.
Wodan knew that he had been neglecting her, and though he did not really like her very much, she had never done anything overtly disagreeable to him. He assumed that she still resented her enslavement. He had given her the chance to escape after the battle at Pontius, but she had not taken the chance, and so Wodan assumed that she must, in some way, want to be here. Wodan saw no use in stressing that point.
“How have you been, Nilem?”
“Fine,” she said.
“Had a long day? Tired?”
“Yes, tired.”
“I saw some men drinking tea from cups that belong to you. Did you make it for them?”
“Yes...” she said, trailing off, preparing for an accusation.
“Thanks. I’m sure everyone here is very tired and probably scared, too. I can’t possibly see to everyone. I’m glad that you could help.”
She leaned away from him. He was going to trick her, she knew, but was drawing it out, and so she prepared as if for a physical blow. She felt eyes burning into her.
“Nilem, I’ve been thinking. While technically you are my wife, you and I both know that we’re not a very good match. You are very withdrawn... well, people have accused me of the same. Can’t have two quiet types staring at each other all day long, can we? Do you think that we should find you a man, Nil?”
“I...” she stammered, then made an awkward sound. Her relationship with her Khan weighed on her fully, every day and every night, as an unspoken and unbroken chain of thoughts. The acid that churned in her heart was hers, and hers alone, and to have it drawn out in the open like this felt like a sort of rape. It was like having her soul dragged out of her body for everyone to see, for everyone to discuss and pass judgment on. She felt completely without control. It was agony, intolerable agony. She realized that she should not have put it past her Khan to do something like this to her. The former Khan’s rape was more tolerable than this! At least t
hat had been done in private, with only the bitch Freyja to see. Did the new Khan really enjoy this sort of spectacle?
“We won’t worry about it now,” said Wodan. “It’s just something to consider. Just remember, this land of ours is a land of freedom. We can do what we want here, within limits. We’ll come up with a solution, Nilem.”
Wodan turned away from her then and Nilem rose up slowly, awkwardly, feeling out the bruise on her soul. She was amazed that he actually believed he could toy with her like that. He believed he could make a spectacle of his strength whenever he wanted – he was in control. He could use her in front of others, then toss her aside when he was done. In a cold fury she turned to Jago, nodded, and stalked away.
Jago crept up to his Khan. He was terrified. He had not liked Nilem’s plan from the start. She had made him promise that he would follow through with any request, or else she would tell the Khan what it was that he did with her. He had thought she was going to tell him to kill Wodan, and he had bravely said that he would do so. But then, after he’d done what he wanted with her, the plan she had revealed to him had been terrible - because it involved actually speaking to the great Khan.
“Khan...” Jago whispered, his voice hoarse.
Wodan turned to him slowly, and seemed to look through him. Wodan felt sorry for him. The wiry-haired pup was obviously very shy. Wodan nodded. He knew that Naarwulf was annoyed that such a dog would approach the Khan.
“Khan... may we...” Jago cleared his throat loudly and many eyes fell on him. Nilem had told him to speak loudly. His heart blasted against his ribs. “Khan... may we make a fire?”
As soon as they had drawn away from Pontius and were in the wasteland, none had even dreamed of making a fire. The risk of attracting flesh demons was simply too great, no matter how cold it got at night. In the freezing mountain passes, a few people had built fires to warm up stew or cook meat – but only when they had sufficient cover, and they always put the fires out as soon as the food was cooked.
But here, in this strange green world, the night was far less cold than in the arid waste. Here, of all places, they could endure without a fire. It would be easy, and sensible, for the Khan to deny the request. The people could cower in the dark and eat cold bread while staring at the darkness…
Demonworld Book 5: Lords of the Black Valley (Demonworld series) Page 8
