The Bones of the Earth- The Complete Collection

by Scott Hale

  Without an army or a god, the Lillians, for the first time in countless years, were quieted. They closed themselves off to the continent and kept to their frozen solitude, hoping that when they finally emerged once more, the Night Terrors would be gone, and their own transgressions forgotten.

  Edgar’s legs went out from under him as he bolted across Anathema’s roof. His palms hit the tiles hard. Scattered pebbles inched their way into the soft, red parts of his palm.

  He hurried to his feet, Father Silas’ blood licking at his heels, and for some reason, thought of Lotus; beautiful, immaculate Lotus—the woman who had shown him a softer side of sin. He thought of her hair sliding across her chest, her legs entwined with his. He thought of the sensations she had teased out of him, working each one loose with fingers, lips, and tongue. He thought of how short the night had seemed, and how long the next would be.

  He then thought of Father Silas, his torso mouth split open at the seams and stuffed with his innards, and told himself the priest wanted this. He wanted this, too, his death, in a way; to get home, but the priest had wanted it first.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. The torso gave a death spasm and spewed hunks of lung into the air. “I’m so very sorry.”

  He ran back to the staircase they had ascended to get here. Below, he heard the click of talons on cold stone, and words being murmured in the tongue of suspicion.

  “He wanted it, and it was the only way to get home,” he told himself.

  He was a monster. Edgar ran back across the roof, searching for another way down, other than the stairs. That’s why Crestfallen had me do it. That’s why he wanted to die.

  Edgar gripped one of the gargoyles, leaned out, and saw that the supply caravan was readying itself to go down the path that Father Silas said led to Chapel.

  I’m doing this to get home, he told himself, Lotus’ silhouette in his mind’s eye. I’m doing this because this is what I have to do to get home. He hadn’t killed the man, not really, and yet he still took full responsibility for his death.

  Edgar noticed a ladder beneath the gargoyle, one which was bolted to the side of the church and ran the entire length of it. Shaking, he swung his legs over the roof’s edge and planted his feet onto the creaking steps of the ladder.

  Sharp paint chips along the rungs bit his fingers as he descended. He heard cries coming through a hole in the large, stained glass window beside him. Leaning over, he saw the congregation shedding their robes for feathers, their hoods for beaks. They circled the inside of the church, crying out not in anger, but celebration.

  This did wonders for Edgar’s nagging conscience.

  Edgar’s stomach lurched as someone grabbed his ankles and ripped him off the ladder. He cracked against the ground. Two figures shuffled up beside him.

  “You killed him,” the man with the green hood said. He, like the man beside him, had yet to transform. “You killed Father Silas.”

  “We saw it,” the second man added, the one with the purple hood. “We heard it.”

  “Please,” Edgar pleaded, the sun shining harshly on him, whiting out the scene.

  “Come with us.” The purple hooded man extended his clawed hand.

  “You’re not safe here.” The green hooded man extended his human hand, which was thick with red Corruption.

  Edgar squinted out the light. He sat up and said, “I don’t understand.”

  The purple hooded man looked at Anathema as though he could see through its walls, to his brothers inside. “Father Silas was our leader. They will kill you for killing him.”

  The green hooded man looked at Edgar as though he could see through his skull to the confused brain within. “Father Silas was wanted dead by all. They will kill you just to pretend they didn’t.”

  Edgar took the green hooded man’s human hand and stood. “Why are you helping me, then?”

  “The Woman in White wills it.” The purple hooded man’s eyes went beady and black. His neck opened at the sides and back to let feathers pass through.

  Edgar jumped as he heard something snap in half inside the church. It sounded like they were tearing up the already torn-up pews. “If you wanted him dead, why didn’t you do it yourself?”

  “No blood runs that deep,” the purple hooded man said. “My name is Jed.”

  “No blood runs this deep,” the green hooded man corrected. “And my name is Jes.”

  Four more robed members of the congregation were stocking the caravan when Edgar snuck up beside it. Jed and Jes introduced him to the workers. They nodded at him with indifference.

  Crates of food atop Persist bedding were loaded onto the two horse-drawn wagons. Large, sturdy terracotta vases sat nestled in between them, the liquid inside the vases sloshing as they settled.

  When the workers were finished, they turned around and passed through an archway at the back of Anathema, which led down to the depths Father Silas had shown Edgar earlier.

  “Those four don’t know what you’ve done,” Jed said. He made himself comfortable in the driver’s seat of the first wagon.

  “They don’t, like we don’t, feel as the others inside feel,” Jes said. He settled into the driver’s seat of the second wagon. “We’re too young. We don’t remember like they do. It’s good you killed Father Silas, though. One day, they’ll thank you.”

  “Get in,” Jed said to Edgar; then he cracked the reins and the horses started forward. “We’ve all work to be done in Chapel.”

  The hooded men, over the clap of hooves and the horses’ breathy snorts, continued to speak as they traveled down what they called the Binding Road. Much like the highway, the Spine, which ran the continent from its frosted skull to heated sacrum, the Binding Road connected travelers to the constant places of the Nameless Forest. It ran from the kitchen, Anathema, to the workshop, Chapel, the loom, Atlach, and finally, the mill, Threadbare, with smaller trails here and there that led to the untamed tracts.

  Jed was eager to tell Edgar of a few of these untamed tracts. There was the Pit, a hole in the center of a dried basin from which a thousand tortured voices called out unendingly. Also, Agrat’s Heath—a fallow plain beneath a blood-red sky, where tens of succubae waited for the wandering unfaithful.

  Jes, sensing Edgar’s intrigue, then spoke of the Orphanage, a school in a swamp where children worshiped a massive, festering bat. He said it might even be located down the fifth path that ran from Anathema, the one Father Silas couldn’t remember the purpose of, but he couldn’t be sure.

  “There’s a small village, no more than a few homes in size really, near a river. It’s two days down this way here,” Jes said, pointing to a shaded path that peeled away from the Binding Road. “It’s said that if you go there, bring a white dress and a jar of graveyard dirt. It’s said if you sleep in an empty bed there, with the dress over the headboard and the jar over your heart, you will wake to find a crack in the bed frame. It’s said if you widen this crack, you’ll find a gray Void beyond. It’s said if you look through this crack, you’ll find a woman in rags who will take you out of the Nameless Forest.”

  “That’s a lot to say,” Edgar teased. He leaned over the edge of the wagon, holding on tightly as it bounced with the bumps in the road. “Take you where?”

  “Where you came from.”

  “Sounds like Crestfallen. I mean, the Woman in White.”

  Jed cleared his throat. “It’s not.”

  “Sorry, sorry.” Edgar didn’t want to upset his drivers. He was lucky enough they hadn’t butchered him back in the churchyard. “I didn’t… Jed watch out!”

  From both sides of the Binding Road, an ocean’s worth of water was crashing through the trees. Edgar’s jaw dropped as waves like sickles rose high into the sky, to reap the world below. Birds were swallowed by the churning flood; clouds were reduced to salt-laden smears.

  Edgar did as most do when they don’t know what to do: he cursed and shouted and placed blame where it didn’t belong.

  The waves brok
e, raining rivers down around them. As the waters reached the road, Edgar knew that the emptiness he felt inside him, the place where his soul had been and had already begun to flee, would soon be filled.

  And filled he was; not by the bitter taste of drowning death, but sour relief. As though they were encased in glass, the waters ran against and over the Binding Road. The caravan, its supplies, the passengers—everything that had stayed to the road was untouched.

  Like an animal pacing frantically behind its enclosure, Edgar moved about the wagon bed. He gripped the sides of it, a manic smile stretched across his face.

  “How is this possible?” The darkened sunlight reflected onto his skin through the waters above, and left his flesh looking scaled.

  “Your people would call it the Black Hour,” Jes said. He snapped the reins, hurrying the horses.

  Edgar watched a shark pass overhead, gear-like legs clicking along its underside. “But it’s midday, not midnight.” Holy Child. How long have I been in this place? The sun has been out for as long as I can remember.

  “The Dread Clock cares naught for the hour here.” Jed lowered his hood. The feathers poking out of his scalp retreated. “Time is as it wills.”

  “The Dread Clock?” As Edgar echoed Jed’s words, he felt that same emptiness inside him again. “Someone told me a story once about a clock in the Nameless Forest.” He closed his eyes. There was a memory in his hazy mind. Something that hadn’t been there before; a recollection that had freed itself from his subconscious.

  He remembered a room, a heavy cloud of smoke and incense meandering through it. There had been a voice, too, soothing and slow, like a storyteller’s.

  He fed me until I was full. He kept feeding me, even when I refused to eat. Who… who the hell was it?

  Edgar could see a face, but he didn’t recognize it. Looking past the face, he saw moonlight.

  It was night. It was the night I was taken. The person he couldn’t recognize had been telling him about the Nameless Forest.

  Was he warning me? Preparing me? Had the Forest really wanted him to forget these moments, or was something else suppressing these memories?

  There was something wrong with that person. They, no, he… he asked me to do something.

  At that moment, Edgar felt a disgusting weight fill the emptiness inside him.

  What terrible thing did he do to me?

  “My lord,” Jes said. “We’re here.”

  Edgar opened his eyes, and didn’t quite catch the fact that Jes had called him lord. In that brief moment of reflection, the ocean had receded. In its place, a massive, toppled skyscraper lay on its side in an overgrown field. He had seen these buildings before, in the books Amon had shared with him from the Old World. The pictures hadn’t begun to come close to conveying the skyscraper’s size. It was immense, almost too large to take in from just one angle, but there was one detail he didn’t understand; a strange, glowing, lattice of lines that covered the building. An architectural quirk of its times, maybe, or…

  Edgar’s heart stopped. The lines that covered the skyscraper weren’t for decoration. They were spider webs. Thick, bloody, quivering, mile-long spider webs.

  “Jed, we have to go back,” Jes shouted. “Atlach has broken the truce. They must have found out why he was here!”

  “What?” Edgar drew his sword. “What’s going on?”

  Jed, panicked, did everything he could to wheel the wagon around. Something crunched beneath the horses’ hooves, and Edgar saw that it was a sign that read “Chapel Industries.”

  In the distance, figures had begun to emerge from the broken windows and fissured walls that lined the skyscraper. They screamed for help, begged for mercy. Lightning and thunder flashed and boomed throughout Chapel.

  A man with a bloody stump for a leg emerged, holding a handgun. He waved to the caravan and fired the weapon into the air—a signal for them to get away as fast as they could.

  “That’s a pistol,” Edgar cried, recognizing the Old World weapon through the confusion. “No one has been able to create—”

  Jes wailed in agony. Edgar looked to the second wagon. In the driver’s seat, a headless body spewed tongues of steaming blood all over the backside of the horses. His body tensed, his sword tightened. He’d seen something. Something skittered in the second wagon’s bed, behind the crates and vases.

  “Jed, what is it?” His voice rattled in his throat. “Jed?”

  He looked over his shoulder and saw, crouched at the front of the wagon, over Jed’s mutilated body, an abomination. It looked like a man, but beneath its arms were another set of arms that had grown out of its side. Longer arms, seemingly boneless, hung down off its back, past its knees; they wept webs from the open veins, and looked like sex organs on their wrists. The abomination’s mouth was beset by two fangs that protruded from its gums. The mouth itself was a narrow chamber of swollen flesh that glistened with hissing fluids.

  “S-stay back,” Edgar warned. He inched forward, sword pointed directly at the beast.

  “You’re new,” the abomination spat. “You’re ours.”

  Edgar’s gaze moved past the creature. There were hundreds of the abominations, crawling on all eights out of the skyscrapers, dragging large web sacs that bulged with snared life behind them.

  “Wait, wait,” Edgar said. “We’ve the same purpose. I’ve come to kill the leader of Chapel.”

  “That’s good,” the abomination said. It held out one of its hands, put it to its mouth, and blew.

  Edgar stumbled backward. Tiny hairs from the creature’s hand clung to his eyes and burned away his vision.

  “Do struggle,” the abomination said.

  Edgar, blinded, was lifted off the ground. He tried to swing his sword, but his arm refused to move.

  “Struggle fiercely,” he heard the abomination say, as it flung Edgar over its shoulder. “You’ll taste better that way.”

  CHAPTER XII

  Thirty-Three Days Ago

  The first known time that Auster ever shed a tear was now, when Penance’s assassin dug his blade into the twin’s stretched neck.

  “Please. Please,” he begged.

  “Let him go, god damn it,” Edgar shouted. He looked at the assassin’s face, which was charming, almost innocent. He imagined ripping that face apart, piece by piece, until nothing was left but the chunks on his fingers.

  “What do you want? What is it? What… god, fuck! What do you want?” Audra’s voice trembled. She dropped the torch she had ripped from the hole into a pool of water along the tracks. “Please, anything. We’ll give you anything.” The subway darkened as the dirty water instantly extinguished the torch.

  “Oh, god,” Auster screamed. Blood bubbled from his mouth between each word. The assassin dug the blade in deeper.

  Edgar lunged forward, but Audra grabbed his arm and held him back. In what little light was left, he saw that there was something wrong with the shadows here. They started to thicken, glisten. They became heavy, tangible. They looked like paint splashed against a wall.

  Noticing this, all the charm and innocence eroded from the assassin’s face. The darkness beside him bubbled and cascaded, like black sand. He gritted his teeth, whispered a prayer. With the look of someone promised the riches of heaven, his arm tightened and started to cut Auster’s throat.

  Audra screamed. With her screams, the shadows surged forward. They stretched and thinned into spikes. They shot forward, stabbing the assassin through his eyes, mouth, wrists, and heart. Where the wounds should have bled, they decayed instead. It wasn’t long until it was the assassin who was screaming, begging for death, as his flesh fell in stinking sheets from his body.

  “A-Audra?” Edgar stammered. He stepped away from his sister, fearful of her. “Was that you?”

  She shook her head and said plainly, “Mean things live down here.”

  Edgar didn’t believe her. He had almost lost track of where he was, what had happened prior to the shadows, when Auster let out a
cough and grabbed his pant leg.

  “Auster!”

  Edgar dropped to the ground. It was difficult to see; they only had the torture chamber’s light to help them. He put his hands to his brother’s neck. Expecting to find a gaping wound, he found only an inch-deep gouge that tapered off into a long, superficial cut. Already, there was a dark scab forming across it, as though the shadows had somehow attempted to heal it.

  “We’ve got to get you out of here. Come here. Give me your arm.”

  “I can do it. I can clean him and stitch him,” Audra said.

  She crouched down, pulled the torch out of the puddle. Somehow, as though called forth, the flame returned to the torch. With her other hand, she grabbed the assassin’s skinless wrist and started to drag him back to her hideout.

  “I can do it. We can’t let anyone else know what happened or where it happened,” Audra said.

  “You’re right.” Edgar looked at Auster. He needed to be disinfected and stitched, but he would be okay. “Audra, what are you doing? Leave the body.”

  “No,” she said.

  Auster took up the assassin’s other wrist and started to help her haul it down the tracks.

  “I can use it.” She kicked the assassin’s side. “For the Crossbreed.”

  The hour was late, but Edgar needed to see Alexander Blodworth. He was being held under observation in a small, vacant building directly across the Archivist’s tower.

  Guards stood posted outside the only entrance at all times. As decreed by King Sovn and Queen Magdalena, they were to forbid passage to anyone who requested it.

  Edgar wasn’t sure how he intended on breaking into the building, but seeing as his brother had almost died a half an hour earlier, logic was not a luxury he currently possessed.

  “My lord,” the guard, Brinton, outside the building yelled. He tipped his torch forward to have a better look at Edgar. “My lord, you should not be out this late. Where are your escorts?”