The Worm in Every Heart

by Gemma Files

  CAROLA DE GUILDHADE.

  She crouched there in her shroud, atop the ex-captain, frozen by the sight of it.

  TAKEN TOO SOON.

  Abruptly, something blocked her throat, curdling as she tried to swallow. It took her a long moment to realize—

  No, not death. Never death. Never again.

  —it was a laugh.

  Because it was all coming back now. Like a jet of bile. Hot and scalding and virulent. And it was everywhere, burning her right down to the core. If she scrubbed for a thousand years it would still cling to the bone, marrow-deep, just out of reach. No shred of peace left to ease the passage, only the squall and the tearing. Christ Jesus yes, it was all coming back now, everything.

  And how could she have ever thought it worse to have forgotten?

  Whereupon she let herself arch back, feeling all her vertebrae wrench together at once, as the howl twisted up from her cold guts through her still, still heart, and further.

  Out in one rush, to scald the stars.

  * * *

  Most of the castle had fallen away with neglect and disuse over the years, until only the tower still remained stable, unhindered by any sense of its own mortality. From its peak, blue fire lit the walls of a five-walled room.

  At length, a hand drew the drapes aside, and thrust a dagger through the frame to keep them open.

  Then the room’s sole occupant gathered up his cards, and sat down next to it. To wait.

  * * *

  Carola de Guildhade, Lady of Raum.

  The land was hers, to rule and serve. And she was the land’s. So it had been for every eldest child to bear her family’s name, time and beyond—since Bastard William had first breached England’s coast, with iron and fire and God’s holy Word.

  A cold place, this inheritance of hers: Distant and small, but subject only to God and king. Raum stayed strong, always, as its lord was strong. To rule as child was one thing. It was necessity, made custom by constant threat. Threat of war, or quick successions. Of witchcraft, plague and poison.

  But to rule as woman—required a husband.

  “You are the land,” old Bede reminded her. The threshing fires cast a bloody shadow on his face, turning—for a flicker—his cataracts yellow.

  “I know what I am,” she said. Softly.

  “The land is yours, and you are the land’s. If it wither, you pine and die. This all men know.” He put one hand to his chest, rummaging in his robes, as if in search of his heart. “But if you be fruitful—”

  “Say then that I marry, priest,” she said. “Say I bear children. To who, their fathering?”

  So Bede brought out the letter of courtship, still warm from his skin, on clean parchment in a firm, red pen. From a knight of great name and little purse, with a hunger for speedy marriage. And three months later, mounted and jewelled, she had taken the flowery crown from Bede’s hands and turned it a long moment in her own, as if she’d never seen one so close.

  “Shrive me, priest,” she said. “I go now to battle.”

  “Only to woman’s true work, my daughter, as God deems both right and pleasant.”

  Behind her, a young castrato scuffed the earth nervously with the toe of his shoe. The clouds hung waiting, air sweet with bees.

  “Priest,” she said, at length. “I pray you, keep well.”

  And put on the crown.

  And rode away.

  Carola shook her head, sharply. The world fell back into place with a sigh.

  But the land is dead, she thought. My people fear me as damnation. And I—do not recall—my marriage night.

  To her right, from town, came a distant music. The moon was waning. Above the trees, the castle’s battlements stood suddenly plain against the lightening sky. But the tower room shone brighter and the road ran to an open gate, agape and lockless in the gloom.

  Carola, unaware of her own movements, took up her train.

  Someone keeps a lamp for me, she thought. Someone knows I am woken.

  And her smile unsheathed again, unbidden. Teeth white as salt.

  He shall not go unanswered.

  * * *

  It was almost dawn. A flush grew in the sky’s far corner. Purple, then plum. Then red.

  Far below, golden thread began to rim the ragged crenellations.

  * * *

  Footsteps in the great hall. Skirts in hand, Carola passed the cracked and silent fireplace, leaving a trail of dust. Tapestries flapped in the wind. Behind the great chair, two ravens perched on a slain knight’s skull still fought over his remaining eye. Owls rose, shrieking, from the rafters. Carola ignored them, setting foot instead to the tower steps.

  One, then another, and so on—up, higher and higher, into the coming dawn. Until the clouds were level with her knees. Until her chest rasped and burnt. Until—

  —a door sprang up before her.

  She paused for a moment, pressing her throat.

  No lock left to open with a touch. It merely hung, rust-slicked ring poised for pulling. Between jamb and wall lolled a strip of room, widening with each new breeze. And—inside that room—a light, pale as a lit tuber, flickering at the table’s head. Five grey candles, of uneven size, bases melted together?

  Behind her, a voice:

  “No. Look closer, Lady.”

  And the candles shrivelled, twisted. Grew nails. Became, at last, a grisly trophy shivering at the light’s core—a mummified hand, bleak with flame.

  The Hand of Glory.

  “It makes the living sleep,” said the voice, amused by its own expertise. Nearer now. “And, as I long suspected—the dead wake.”

  Almost within reach.

  But Carola stood still, thinking: Let him come to me, if he dares.

  “Oh, but I do.”

  And Carola spun—

  —to find him, smiling, at her elbow.

  * * *

  Down in the valley, dawn broke now in earnest, chasing crows from the frozen shreds of the wolves’ kill. Townspeople began, tentatively, to unbar their doors.

  * * *

  But Carola and her husband stood—still as only the dead can stand—at either end of the five-sided room, and watched each other closely. The room was hung with purple from roof to floor, windows lost under a weight of velvet soft enough to muffle the world’s scream to a dull hum, thick enough to shut out even the sun. Against this backdrop, Carola’s husband shone like leprosy, toying with his dagger. His eyes were green, like cut church glass; his teeth, porcelain.

  “Well met, truly, after so long an absence.” He said, bowing. “Will my Lady sit?”

  Carola did not reply.

  “It seems my Lady prefers to stand,” her husband told the walls. “And to stare.” A pause. “Am I so different, then?”

  “Not at all.”

  His brows raised. “She speaks! An honor surely worth a few years of anticipation.”

  Carola swayed, abruptly, and sat. The curtains stirred at her movement, dust spilling, to wake a handful of moths nesting near their base.

  “A—few—?”

  The moths hovered, caught, about the Hand. Its corona picked golden scales from their wings.

  “Fifty, to judge aright,” he replied. “Your pardon.”

  At his gesture, the moths veered too far in, crisped and fell together, twitching.

  “There was no need for that,” Carola said.

  Her husband merely smiled.

  “Hunger without need,” he said. “And power without conscience; yes. But a man must hold true to his own nature, must he not?” Softer: “Or a woman.”

  As he spoke, Carola found her teeth had begun to ache once more. She rubbed at the corner of her mouth, sensing a stain.

  “You cheated me,” she said, at length.

  “I? Never.
”

  Then, mildly:

  “My Lady, you do me wrong. And let me be your mirror in this—a fair bargain, since I promise you’ll have no other.” He rose, gracefully. “You see your fields fallow and your people craven, and blame me for it. But look you—’tis your castle shunned, your name taken in vain and prayed against in hope of God’s protection.”

  He gestured again, making the dead moths skitter in the Hand’s shadow.

  “I am entirely innocent in this matter. My only crime is to have kept your marriage bed warm while waiting, these many long years, on your late return.”

  Carola examined her hands, closely, in the wavering light. Saw—as if for the first time—the broken nails, black with grave-dirt and old flesh. Saw how the skin drowned in its own whiteness, eaten from within by immortality. She ran her tongue reflectively across her teeth, drawing blood.

  And raised her head at last, voice level—

  “You are noble.”

  “As you yourself.”

  “Had you—land of your own?”

  A flicker, at the corner of one eye. Just a flicker.

  “Once,” he said. “But that was long ago.”

  “And did no one ever teach you our duty? To serve those who serve us, or be unworthy of their love and our estate?” She stood now, flayed toes digging the stone like claws. “All that I have, I owe to them. This I promised.”

  Nose to nose with him, her voice rose to a thin shriek: “And you—you have made me break my word.”

  He held fast and met her, stare for stare.

  “You were born to this, Lady,” he said. “Dead or alive—hunter, to their prey. What matter whether they love or fear, so long as you rule?”

  “To rule, yes. And to protect. From beasts such as you.”

  A red light came into her husband’s smile.

  “Listen now, and be silent,” he said. “You are the merest shadow of what you were. You are dead. You are alone. Together, we might take this land and everything beyond—if we are quick, and discreet. We may even love each other, in the end. But leave me, knowing nothing, and fear will dog you forever. Your prey will turn on you, and hunt you back into the grave.”

  And he brought her face to his, coming even closer.

  “You are nothing,” he whispered. “You have nothing. Nothing but me.”

  Carola felt behind her, eyes on his, along the curtain and the wall beneath it. Felt until she found her hold—

  “Well, then,” she said. “Let us to our union—husband.”

  —and twisted aside, ripping the curtain open, flat to the wall as the sun came washing over him in a hot, gold wave. She held rigid, self-blinded, until his screams turned to gurgles.

  By sunset, there was nothing left but ash.

  * * *

  Dark crept in near supper-time, leeching the sky of every color but black. A cold wind blew in from the marshes. Flakes of snow lit and tumbled on its wake, like spindrift. Under the trees, assignations of long standing were kept and made again. Here a fire burned, and naked men and women danced back to back, as a goat in human clothes marked time. Here the Unkind Court rode in their finery, lances garnished with skulls, to hunt a mourning thing forever across the landscape of a thousand dreams. Here the wolves slunk anew from their lair, bound for yet another farm.

  And here the captain’s grieving woman, finding her husband dead by Carola’s uprooted grave, cut her throat with the rusted blade of his pike.

  Carola sat in state at the tower’s top, ashes blowing about her feet. Behind her, the Hand of Glory still burned. She had turned her chair to face the open window.

  And all this is mine, she thought. Everything.

  (And nothing.)

  The sky dimmed further. A lidless moon rose and stared, without pity, down upon Carola’s victory. Carola stared back . . .

  For whatever else befalls, I am still Raum.

  . . . as a tear of blood, unheeded, made its slow way down her cheek.

  Sent Down

  . . . that this, too, was one of the dark places of the earth.

  —Jack Conrad.

  DIVIUS ARCTURUS MARTIALIS’ bladder woke him, without dignity, well before dawn. Inside the tent an exported slice of Rome lay dozing, all shifting armor-clink and sour-stale sweat: Torc-burnt necks hidden beneath tarnished Medusa-head breastplates, Legionnaires’ badges muffled in sweat-stiff furs, hides, woolen cloaks. The ragged remains of a “cohort” cobbled together from Northumbrian numeri, Romano-Briton infantry recruits trained to fight their own in the service of an Empire too cheap to reinforce their own crude weaponry with more than a used gladius each—an Empire which once took their loyalty for granted, but now barely acknowledged their existence. Arcturus‘ cohort, for all that was worth; not much, nowadays, plainest of plain truth be told. Less, and less . . .

  . . . and less.

  Outside, meanwhile, Northumbria itself still waited: Slate-grey on black punctuated by intermittent salt-white flare of scraped-bare quartz turf-bed, chalk cliffs grey with fresh snow, darkness still pooled in their open cracks like oil on weather-waxed hide. Wet mist eddying in on every side, erasing the lightening sky.

  This godsless, gods-full place. This land where even shadows cast shadows.

  Arcturus barely had words enough to tell how he had come to hate it.

  Pausing by the foot of his standard, he shifted his kilt to empty himself, and watched a contemptuous curl of steam rise from the resultant puddle. His stomach reminded him just how far the village they had last taken booty from now lay behind them, even as he tried to shock it silent with a quick, reflexive curse, a half-attempted prayer—

  Mars Ultor, war’s Avenger, succor me. Look favorably on your faithful servitor. Ancestors, hold me up. Make me able to do what I must, for my men. For my own name’s sake.

  Call and response, automatic as breath: Roma Invicta, fraterni!

  (Roma Aeterna, magistere!)

  But this was no Roma, nor they Romans, for all their rapt devotion to their conquerors’ ideals. This was elsewhere, beyond Empire’s reach, beyond even the shadow of the Wall itself. Roadless ruin and darkness. Trackless waste.

  Arcturus felt the wet cold—ever-present, never-escapable—begin to seep up through his bones towards his heart, and shrugged his wolf-skins closer. He turned back for the fire-pit, veering to where the seer-girl lay tethered at its outermost edge: Pale and still, her fine-boned wrists and ankles strung with gut, under a smoky blanket of ash-blackened spindrift.

  She had refused to tell her tribe’s true name—or her own, for that matter. They had dragged her by her pale hair from a stone beehive in that last village, a skull-clogged dirt-trap full of blood-mess and hanging herbs that gave a heavy, fragrant smoke when Lucian—Arcturus’ numericus second, native-born himself, though better-tamed than most—fired them with his torch, almost as an afterthought.

  ‘Tis sacred, that’s what, he had said, his patois-inflected Latin even harder than usual to understand, as he rooted through the debris with the butt of his spear. A holy place for gods to speak through—through here, through . . .

  Pointing: . . . her.

  Our gods? Arcturus had asked. Only to see Lucian give an all-purpose shrug, his blue-tattooed cheeks glistening in the herbs’ light. And reply, without much (apparent) interest—

  . . . gods.

  The girl bore similar marks, as they all did—even Arcturus, for all that he kept his Legionnaire’s SPQR hidden beneath one shoulderplate: Light wounds rubbed with ash or woad, a charcoaled thread sewn beneath the skin and left to heal, uncleaned; permanent grey-blue lines bracketing the line of the girl’s nose, circling out over her nostrils to spiral beneath her eyes.

  Those pale, pale eyes.

  Arcturus reached down and shook her roughly, by one nude shoulder—cold white skin, dappled with dew. “Do you
live yet, barbarian?” he asked, slitting her hands apart. “Come back to me now, before I take mind to do your body some injury.”

  A long shiver took her, from heels to head. She bent back, bow-taut: Damp skin flushing like a caught eel’s, as her absent spirit poured back into her. Her “fetch,” Lucian had termed it.

  We’ve the corpse, but she goes out anyroad, coming to call. She’s sent for by those she serves, and ‘tis her fetch what answers.

  Her daimon, you mean? Her soul? A stolid, minimal shrug. Why call it ‘fetch’, if that’s all?

  Lucian laughed, shortly. Ask it tha’self, magistere. When it comes to FETCH thee.

  In Roma, as Arcturus remembered, the gods only spoke when spoken to. Oracular justification of policy. Reward for public service. Deities were twenty a sesterce, the Pantheon stuffed to bursting with them: Borrowed, stolen, made up fresh from scratch to suit every purpose under heaven.

  This one, though—she might look young in the body, this one, but she was sworn to old gods indeed. He had seen them look from her eyes, and laugh at him; felt their hands on him directly, now and always, more intimate than rape. Their invisible touch steering him here and there . . . softer, and more full of febrile activity, than a dead dog’s belly by any given paved, spear-straight, Roman-laid road’s side.

  It was no great mystery, to loose your soul and bid it do secret business. There were witches in Roma, too.

  Opening her eyes, now, as she rubbed—weakly—at her bruise-banded wrists: Faint rim of bloodshot cilia, fire-caught iris pale as dirty snow. Whispering—

  “She hears tha, Roman.”

  “Arcturus.”

  “A, Roman. Tha.”

  “Speak true Latin, slut,” he ordered her, yet again, freeing her feet likewise. Then: “Did you see our path?”

  “A, Roman. She sees.”

  “You’ll show us where it leads, then—and truly, understand? Or I’ll cut your cords.”

  “She shows tha, a. As She shows she.”

  “As . . . your goddess . . . shows you?”

  “A, Roman. ‘Tis lore-ful, this. She takes she out-body, into dream. Sends she down.”