by Scott Hale
“They tell us we have to kill Corrupted to keep the balance. That’s not biased?” R’lyeh bit her lip. “Is Aeson your boyfriend?”
Vrana cocked her head and chuckled. “Yeah, he is.” Had this been the first time she’d confirmed their relationship? Both to herself and to someone else?
“You sure about that?” R’lyeh bore her teeth as though ready to feast upon the details.
“Yeah, I am.” Vrana turned her head towards the sound of a snapping twig, but there was nothing in the darkness, save for darkness. “Yeah, he’s my boyfriend. I’ve just never said it aloud before. He’s more than that, really. But yeah, boyfriend.”
“My parents went to Eld to find out why there’s so few births every year,” R’lyeh said, abruptly changing the subject, which suggested to Vrana the girl once had a boyfriend of her own. “I bet that’s why they didn’t tell you. Caldera is where the warriors come from.”
“That’s what they say?”
“That’s what they say.” R’lyeh nodded. “I guess the elders have to be more careful now.”
“When we get back, I’ll help you find them,” Vrana offered.
R’lyeh shrugged and lay down, turning her back to the Raven.
The Black Hour came and went without incident. Vrana watched R’lyeh closely as she tossed and turned in her sleep, mumbling incoherent pleas to nonexistent threats. She was not entirely certain as to their whereabouts, but she was certain they’d at least crossed into the Elys. In the morning the fog would return and, with it, hours of endless wanderings through ghostly fields and untouched marshes. The sooner they found the cliff, the better; with the ocean at their side, it would give them a way by which to measure their progress. In regard to geography, the interiors of the Elys bore some similarities to the incomprehensible qualities of the Nameless Forest—paths appearing and disappearing, hills rising and falling, craters widening and consuming. Vrana and her companions had ridden through so quickly and confidently that she hadn’t even considered the issue, but now that R’lyeh was in her care, that confidence was compromised.
Vrana took a sip of water and turned her gaze to the heart of the fire, letting the warmth wash over her in tiring waves, and then slept.
When she awoke, she found that she was in the Elys and that she was alone. When she stirred, the rust-colored grass beneath her feet broke off into small pieces, stabbing the dirt that flowed like sand. Heavy, fat drops of rain fell down around her, thudding against her mask. Her hands itched, and when she went to rub them, she found upon each palm a black semicircle. Shivering, she placed her hands beside one another and completed the dark shape. A peal of bells thundered across the corroded sky. From her palms and the circle upon them, millions of tiny, blue figures writhed like maggots. Vrana screamed and shook her hands, but the figures clung to the cracks in her skin. She stood up and bent over as her stomach split open, and something came through.
“Everything all right?” R’lyeh asked.
Vrana opened her eyes and then closed them to keep the storm out. She nodded and put on her mask. The campfire had all but died, and what little was left of it hissed in annoyance at the downpour. She had been wrong: There would be no fog, only rain, which, in Vrana’s opinion, was much worse. Unsteadily, she wobbled to her feet and balanced herself with the ax. She felt like an old woman standing there: muscles sore and bones cold, body creaking like the floorboards of the Archive. If this was what it meant to be a watcher, then perhaps she would become a comedian after all.
“Take this,” Vrana said, bending over and rummaging through her pouch. “It’ll help.” She pulled out the cloak of faerie silk and handed it to R’lyeh, who struggled to keep it from slipping through her fingers. “Now you won’t have to steal it when I’m not looking.”
“Thank you,” R’lyeh said. She threw the cloak over her shoulders and pulled it shut. “I looked around while you were sleeping. Going south shouldn’t be hard, but it’s easy to get lost in these fields.”
“If we follow the coast, we should eventually reach Nora,” Vrana said, her words puffs of fog on the air.
“Easier said than done.” R’lyeh laughed. She centered the octopus over her head and fastened the Cruel Mother’s talons to her hips. “My dad and I were lost out here for a whole day once, and we weren’t that far from the village.”
“We can go to Alluvia, if that’s what you want,” Vrana said. “Blix will beat us to Caldera, anyways. Your mom and dad may be there, at Alluvia, waiting for you.”
The Octopus shook her head. “No, we don’t have time.” She took the satchel, which held the leftovers of their frog and squirrel. She dropped a large rock onto the campfire; a cloud of smoke enveloped her as she said, “I’m ready to go.”
The storm brought misery to the Elys, and pain. The rain lashed like a thousand whips at once, until their skin was swollen and numb. The wind hurried them along and then pushed them back, tugging them in every direction but the one in which they needed to go. It wasn’t long until Vrana’s work in the stream was undone and their clothes and armor were covered in layers of mud.
But despite these deplorable conditions, the Elys was more alive than it had ever been. Mudwallowers, rockjaws, waterdancers, and bloaters scurried, slithered, spiraled, and slinked through the spectral stretches of grass, each one eating the other or their leftovers.
“I hate these,” R’lyeh said with disgust as a waterdancer tried to scale the cloak with its twelve jittery legs. “We had a nest of them under our house. Every time it rained, they’d raid the kitchen for sweets.”
“We don’t have them in the South,” Vrana said, laughing. “Are they edible?”
R’lyeh shook her head. “Poisonous, but if we find some puddle spawn, we could eat those.”
Vrana stopped. “Puddle spawn?”
“Mm. They fall from the sky and live in pools and puddles, until the pools and puddles dry up. They look like grubs. They’re kind of like food for the earth?”
Vrana wrung the water from her hair and turned them further west. “Have you ever eaten one before, R’lyeh?”
The girl hesitated. “No, but I’ve heard good things!”
Vrana sighed. “There have to be horses in these fields.” She spied the outline of what appeared to be the weathered top of a cliff.
“To eat or to ride?” R’lyeh asked.
The Raven looked back and tilted her head.
“Y-yes,” the Octopus stammered. “But not this far out, I think.” Her voice tapered off. “What if,” she exclaimed, “what if we followed the Spine?”
The plains rumbled as thunder bludgeoned the heavens. “Getting there is the problem,” Vrana shouted as the rain started to fall harder. “Deimos rode through this place with no issue. No one said anything. In and out. Why do I feel I’m going the wrong way with every step I take?”
“It’s silly,” R’lyeh started.
Vrana reached the edge of the Elys and, leaning over it, found on the other side a steep drop and the churning sea. “What do you mean?”
“Some people think the Elys is cursed.”
The ground beneath Vrana’s feet crumbled and fell away. She stepped back, heart somewhere in the neighborhood of her throat. “Cursed? What do you mean?”
“I guess no one tells the story in the South. They say there is a woman who lives at the center of the Elys, which is why it is the way it is. She’s never satisfied, so she changes her surroundings all the time. People get lost in the Elys because of it; she finds the lost and draws them in, to her home. We’ve found bodies before. She bites off their faces, fingers, toes… down there.” R’lyeh paused and shook her head. “I don’t know how they know, but the story goes she makes whoever she finds part of her family. Men are husbands, women wives, kids… kids. More were missing than were ever found. I guess some must make her happy.”
Hiding her alarm, Vrana asked very calmly, “Do you believe the story?” and, more importantly, “What do you call her?”
&n
bsp; “Something’s killing people here.” And then R’lyeh laughed. “The Woman in White Satin. I know, right?”
Vrana squinted and looked beyond the girl at a small house, its windows wreathed in candles and smoke rising from the chimney, with a swarm of flies darkening the sky above it. She looked farther still, through the window and into the house, where shadows slinked across the wall, wailing like infants, laughing like madmen. And then she found herself not in the field but the house itself, by a crackling fire that gnawed on wood like a dog would bone; and again, she was looking through the windows but this time into the field, where a strange creature with the head of a raven spoke to an octopus with twelve limbs, each oblivious to Red Worm that loomed in the distance, a mountain of flesh defiling all that it touched.
“I think if we forget about it, we’ll be okay,” R’lyeh said, nudging the Raven from her thoughts. “They say the Woman does it because her heart was broken by a king a long, long time ago. She eats the hearts, too, of course.”
There’s no forgetting, Vrana said to herself. She’s taunting me. Woman in White Satin… Maiden of Pain. If R’lyeh wasn’t with me, I’d go straight to the center. But maybe it isn’t you, Witch. Is there another? A sister? A copycat?
By nightfall, Vrana and R’lyeh were so drenched that, if they were to wring out their belongings, they could’ve had a small lake all to themselves. By the time their jaws started chattering like gossipy skeletons around gravestones, Vrana knew it was time to make camp. She turned to the cliff for shelter, for the Elys had few trees, none of which could provide much of a reprieve from the storm. After an hour of searching, they found a small trail that ran along the side of the cliff, the path itself reinforced by planks of wood that appeared to have been placed there recently.
“Take your time,” Vrana said as they followed the trail to the place where it narrowed. Ahead, sneering out of the cliff side, a cave promised stony comforts. Vrana went first, her back to the cliff; she shimmied across slowly, for the weathered path was not wide enough to do otherwise.
R’lyeh squealed as the vicious wind buffeted their position. “Go faster,” she begged. White roots of lightning spread across the sky. Her knees began to shake as the wooden reinforcements moaned and shed shavings into the sea. “I’m going back. I can’t do this.”
“No, you’re not. Come here.” Vrana shimmied faster and then stepped onto the lip of the cave, where the trail widened, ended. She held out her hand and waited for R’lyeh to draw near enough to take it.
“Vrana, please!” R’lyeh shouted, one leg giving out, sliding out, so that she dipped down, cracking her right knee against the rugged path. She screamed and swore as her left leg dangled over the edge. Fat drops of rain smacked against the cliff side, against her, drenching her. “I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.”
“Get up!” Vrana yelled. “After all you’ve been through, this is what does you in? Get up, R’lyeh.”
The Octopus said, “You’re mean,” but then proceeded to stand up, her busted, blood-speckled knee giving her some trouble. She stopped, hunched over, and then crossed the rest of the path, falling into Vrana as she stepped off and into the cave.
“Sit,” Vrana commanded, and R’lyeh sat. The Raven scoured the cave, which didn’t take long, as it was only a little larger than her cramped room back home. Scuttle crabs snapped at her as she sliced through the shadows, but the crustaceans knew their place. “Trap the crabs with the cloak,” Vrana told the girl, and R’lyeh trapped the scurrying crabs with the cloak, holding a handful of them down beneath the slippery material. “Crack ‘em.” The Octopus took out her dagger and slammed the pommel into each one, until the cloak was stilled. “These, too,” Vrana said, pointing to another grouping of the creatures; she wanted to keep R’lyeh busy, until her mind was settled.
At the back of the cave, Vrana found scorched stone and a large pile of dry kindling and firewood. “Someone’s been here,” she told R’lyeh as the girl gathered up the crabs into a large pile of the dead. “But if they come back,” she looked toward the entrance and the trail they’d followed, “I think we’ll know.”
“No need to worry about that,” a scratchy voiced taunted, echoing throughout the cave. Pebbles showered down around Vrana as a face pushed through the shadows above, its eyes bloodshot and mouth bloodstained. “No need to worry about that at all. I’m already here.”
CHAPTER XXII
Vrana took the man by his neck and pulled him out of the crevice. He hit the ground headfirst, squealing with delight as blood poured down his face. A banshee wind ripped through the cave, flattening Vrana against the wall, where the name “Gemma” had been carved. The Corrupted jumped to his feet, but R’lyeh sent him to his knees, with a quick cut that sent a line of blood across the rocks.
“Argh,” he cried, squeezing his forearm where the girl had wounded him.
Vrana stood up and kicked the Corrupted in the stomach, so that he would be too winded to retaliate.
“Fitting it should be the Night Terrors who’ve come to claim my soul!” he sputtered, giggling as he spoke. “Here it is!” He curled into a ball. “Take it! I’ve no need for it. It’s brought me nothing but despair.” He wiped the blood from his forehead and made the icon of Penance on the cave’s floor. “Make me soulless, like you.”
R’lyeh’s fingers tapped against the hilts of the daggers. She looked to Vrana for approval to kill the man, but Vrana knew it was more than that; she didn’t need to see past the mask to know where the girl’s mind had gone. R’lyeh was asking for permission, irrevocable permission to murder not only this Corrupted but all Corrupted to come.
“No, not yet,” Vrana said, shaking her head. She eyed the Octopus until the daggers were lowered. “Who are you?” she asked the man, noticing his swollen ankles.
The man squinted and yelled, “You have a face—and a voice!” He uncurled and scurried back against a large boulder. “You’re no Night Terror.”
Vrana went to one knee and ground the ax head against his throat. She felt his eyes looking up and down her right arm, in search of hidden Corruption. “Your name.”
“J-Jakob,” he gasped. He grabbed for the ax to move it away, but Vrana pushed it in tighter, so that he was choked by it. “Trader, I’m … I’m a trader.”
Jakob? A trader? Vrana’s thoughts returned to that night she’d spent in the shadow-swarmed, seaside library. “Where are you from?”
“Nora,” he confessed. Vrana removed the ax from his neck. “Do you like to get to know your prey before you eat it?”
Vrana tensed. She had shown Corrupted mercy before: What would become of her if it developed into a habit? Thunder drummed the world, like two great fists pummeling the skin of the earth. The ocean crashed against the cliff in heavy, hateful waves, as though it meant to bring the whole thing down. She had shown Corrupted mercy before: What would R’lyeh think of her if she showed it now?
“You’re safe,” Vrana said in a decided tone. “Your mayor asked me to bring you home.”
Jakob’s eyes widened. He rubbed his reddening throat and pressed himself harder against the boulder, as though he’d meant to slip into another crevice to be away from his captors. “What do you mean?”
R’lyeh, throwing up her arms, said, “Vrana, what the hell?”
“Vrana…” Jakob repeated in a whisper.
“Where’s Richard? It’s Richard, right?” Vrana pointed to the dead scuttle crabs, and R’lyeh gave her a handful. “You went to Geharra. Share your story, and we’ll share our food.”
R’lyeh’s gaze lingered on Vrana for a moment. “He’s Corrupted.”
“I see that,” the Raven croaked. “Should I kill him for that reason alone?”
The Octopus shook her head and slipped into the shadows, where she could nurse her anger unseen. “I’m sorry,” she said, clinking the Cruel Mother’s talons against one another. “You know.”
“I know,” Vrana said; she gestured for the girl to eat, and the girl at
e. “Where’s Richard? Should we be expecting him?”
Jakob shook his head. His eyes grew large, and his words came out all wrong and covered in spit. “He didn’t make it.”
“Tell me what happened, or you won’t either.”
The Corrupted raised an eyebrow at the threat, as though it were a promise he could hold her to. “That wouldn’t be such a bad thing.”
“Jakob.” Vrana opened a satchel and tossed him a heel of stale bread. “On with it.”
“Night Terrors…” His cheek twitched, and then he bit down into the bread and moaned. “My final meal. You promise to kill me, even after I tell you everything?”
“We’ll see,” R’lyeh answered from the shadows, having caught onto the man’s madness.
“Mm,” he said, taking another bite and then another, until the bread was gone, and he was chewing on his dirty fingernails. He wiped the fresh and dried blood off his face, picked a piece of black meat out from in between his teeth and smeared it on his pant leg. “You been there. I know you have. Did you escape, too?” He shook his head so violently it was as though he were having a seizure. “No, no, no. You went but you weren’t there. Wouldn’t be asking questions if you had. What’s happened? When Richard and I gave Penance the slip, they were rounding them up, bringing them in. What were you doing there? Your people, I mean. How’d they find you?” He laughed and then cringed as he held his side where something was broken or strained. “Faces, voices, villages? I should like to see your face, but I’m afraid it’ll look like ours. I thought about killing myself, but I can’t seem to do it; not for lack of trying, mind you. I just can’t seem to die.” He pointed to his ankle, to his side; he showed his wrists, and there were deep cuts running horizontally from them. “That must make me god, and you my minions.” He laughed some more, and then he started to weep.
“How long have you been here? And how long were you in Geharra?”
“I don’t know, and two weeks.” Jakob leaned forward and closed his eyes.
