The Bones of the Earth- The Complete Collection

by Scott Hale

  “Recite,” he screamed at Felix, who was cowering in the pile of blankets on the floor. He was in his underwear, too, and he had almost soiled himself.

  “Thou shalt not…”

  Samuel Turov clenched his teeth and grabbed Felix by his ankle. He dragged him out of the pile and whipped the switch against Felix’s bare thighs.

  “Stop me! Stop me!” Samuel Turov cried, eyes heavenward, as he branded the Holy Child with his cruelty.

  Felix squirmed free of the exemplar’s grip. He got up and went for the sword against the wall, but Samuel Turov wrapped his arm around his neck and flung him down to the ground. “Thou shalt not worship false idols!”

  Felix bit into the old man’s sunburnt arm, but it only made him choke him harder.

  “Stop me!” Samuel Turov screamed.

  Felix’s eyes rolled back in his skull.

  And as his consciousness faded, he woke, drenched in sweat, tangled in his blankets. He threw his legs over the side of the bed and bawled into his hands.

  “Don’t think about it, don’t think about it,” he repeated over and over, fingers sticky with snot and saliva. “She wouldn’t leave you with him. She wouldn’t do that to you.”

  Felix wiped his hands on the covers and rose shakily to his feet. He sighed, his breath hot and potion-soured, and went the window, to stand in the moonlight coming through it.

  “God give me strength,” he said. He put his elbows on the sill, his nose to the iced glass. “God give us all strength.”

  Felix took a deep breath and blew on the window. The glass fogged. As he put his finger to it, someone croaked behind him, “Help me.”

  Mackenzie? Felix looked over his shoulder, but it wasn’t Mackenzie he found there. It was the Night Terror who’d saved him, the woman with the raven’s head. She was in his room. He wasn’t dreaming.

  CHAPTER IV

  The Winged Horror ran forward and tackled Felix to the ground. The feathers that covered her pricked his skin, leaving numb bumps where they touched him. She wrapped her human-like claws around his face and tilted it back. The Night Terror leaned forward, into the shaft of moonlight coming through the window above. Her head was literally a massive raven’s skull. With it illuminated, Felix could see two sad, black eyes sunken deep inside it.

  “Help me.” Her voice was high, but hoarse. The words came out muffled from that scarred beak of hers.

  Felix shook his head. “I don’t… I don’t…”

  The Winged Horror squeezed his head in anger, and let go. She reared up, her mottled wings splayed outward. He had been wrong. She did have skin, but it looked bleached, and there wasn’t much of it. It had been a long time since he’d seen her, but she looked wrong, starved. Her arms, which were attached to the inside of the wings, were sinewy, stretched. But she clearly remembered him. And if he looked at her hard enough, he could see what he remembered of her.

  Felix scooted back, against the wall. “Who did this… to you? What can I…?”

  She lowered her wings and rose to her feet. The talons that had burst from her boots clicked on the ground. “The cult… the cult.”

  She gripped her head and bent over. The feathers on her back stood upright. Her spine pressed hard against her back.

  “They’re coming,” she said, clawing her skull. “Find them. Tell them.” She looked up at the ceiling. “Two men.” She glanced back at him, shivering with fear. “I am… V-Vrana. Tell them!”

  Felix cried, “I don’t know who you’re talking about.” He slid up the wall. “I want to help you, Vrana, but I don’t know—”

  Gray fog formed above her. From it, a long, pale arm fell down in front of Vrana and grabbed her by the beak. The Night Terror screamed, sunk her talons deep into the arm. A second arm, longer than the first, slipped through the fog and, with its boney hand, choked her throat.

  “Naughty, naughty,” a woman’s voice whispered. There were voices behind the voice, words within the words.

  “Vrana,” Felix whispered.

  Long, wet, black hair fell from the fog, draping across Vrana’s skull. Then, along with the arms, like a spider crawling down its web, a head and two shoulders appeared. It was a woman, the woman who had spoken.

  The Witch twisted her neck, the veins and muscles in it bulging, and said, “Go back to sleep, little boy. This is only a bad, bad dream.”

  Felix jerked awake. He was on the floor, curled up in a ball. The morning sun was coming through the window, slowly creeping towards him.

  Avery and Mackenzie opened the door. Their eyes went wide. They ran to him.

  “What happened? Are you okay?”

  Felix tried to get up, but he was so covered in sweat he kept slipping.

  Avery and Mackenzie went to his side and gently put him back in his bed.

  “Bad dream,” he said, now shivering. He grabbed his pillow and held it tightly.

  Mackenzie shoved Avery toward the door. “Get a doctor.”

  “Not necessary,” Justine said.

  The Mother Abbess was standing in the hall. As though nothing were wrong, she strolled in. Flicking her wrist, she sent the guards out of the room.

  When the door slammed shut behind her, Justine said, “We can’t miss morning prayer again.” Her morning gown, a pinkish white, pooled around her feet.

  Felix peeled himself from the pillow. “Where were you?”

  “A few months ago, we sent another party to Geharra, at Blodworth’s request. They made it back last night, with two survivors from Blodworth’s group.” Justine’s lip quivered. “You have to learn how to live without me sometimes.”

  Felix’s cheeks went red. He could tell he had let her down. Yeah, he was only eleven, but he was the Holy Child, god’s speaker, and one of the highest ranking members of the Holy Order of Penance. He couldn’t crumble every time she wasn’t there to support him.

  “I don’t know who the two survivors are. I’ve never met them before. They were too traumatized to talk. Maybe you can talk to them.” She fingered a chain around her neck, mumbled “Ouch,” when it moved. “Are you sick?”

  Felix shook his head. He was perfect. There was absolutely nothing wrong with him. He might have just seen his nightmares come to life, but how did that make him different from anybody else?

  Justine wrinkled her nose. Her pale eyes darted back and forth as she stared him down. She could tell he was lying this time. But apparently, she didn’t care, because she ignored it and said, “Did you speak to Audra?”

  “Yes.” He tossed the pillow onto his bed, got up, and started getting dressed. He had to keep busy, to keep the images of Vrana and the Witch off his mind. “She said—” he searched the ground for feathers, scratches—anything that would prove it had really happened, “—something about the Worms of the Earth?” He threw on a tunic, slipped into some pants. He touched the back of his head and felt a stinging cut. “And something about—” he still had a few of the numb bumps on his arm, “—Samuel Turov. But I know it’s not true.”

  Justine touched Felix’s shoulder, to slow him down. “I wouldn’t sleep well, either, with all that on my mind.”

  He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Her hand on his shoulder, its cold warmth comforting him. This was what he needed last night. She wasn’t his mother, but to him, she was. Without her, he only had god, and sometimes, god wasn’t enough.

  “Did she say that I let Samuel Turov take you on purpose?”

  He nodded.

  “That is a vicious lie that Isla Taggart and the Winnowers’ Chapter have been trying to pass off recently. If Isla wasn’t the Exemplar of Innocence’s niece, I’d cast her out to the tundra.”

  “I know.” He smiled, fought back a tear. “Doesn’t make sense, anyways.”

  “What doesn’t?”

  “Letting Samuel Turov steal me.”

  “Exactly.” She patted his head. “A lot of people lost a lot of trust in the church when that happened. And I… lost a lot of faith in myself.”r />
  She apologized a million times that day the soldiers brought him home from Cadence. He had never seen her look so scared in his entire life. She had never said she loved him before, but in that moment, he knew. Nothing made Justine cry. But that did.

  “Samuel Turov… Worms of the Earth. She’s already trying to turn you against me.” The smell of burnt wood rolled off Justine and made Felix’s nose curl.

  “What are they?”

  “Ancient, mythological creatures. But apparently, not that mythological.” She smiled, ran her fingers through his hair. “Eldrus’ Red Worm seems to be one of them. Get through the day, Felix, and I’ll give you the writings on the creatures tonight at dinner to read. I’m not worried, though. It’s nothing god can’t handle.”

  As she finally took her hands off him, he felt his stomach sink, the burden of his lie about the nightmare weighing it down. But that wasn’t the only thing making him sick. Samuel Turov. Something didn’t add up about him, about how he’d taken Felix. He acted like he believed her, only because he hoped to fall for the act himself. She loved him, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t hurt him.

  Felix shook the stupid idea out of his head.

  “After the usual morning business, I want you to go to Penance. Meet these survivors. The people of Penance need to see you, too.”

  “What about Audra?”

  Justine laughed, her face flashing all the colors of cruelty. “She can wait. She’s not going anywhere.”

  The road to Penance proper from Pyra was a short one—the monastery sat high on a hill at the edge of the city—but the weather had been poor the night before. Helminth’s Pass, the road on which Felix’s carriage traveled, was covered in a few feet of snow. The weather workers were out in full force, as they often were, maintaining the roadways. For some reason, though, they hadn’t made it to Pyra yet—a place that was supposed to be taken care of before anywhere else.

  Felix rode alone, but outside the carriage, he was at the center of everyone’s attention. Avery, Mackenzie, and several additional guards rode alongside him. But with all the armor and furs they wore, even he had a hard time recognizing them. They looked like a bunch of wild animals on horseback, pretending to be human. It made him smile, and made him think of Vrana.

  There was a ragged copy of Helminth’s Way on the seat beside him. He grabbed it and opened to a random page, to forget about the Night Terror. The sacred text of the Holy Order was everywhere in the city. There were definitely more of them out there than any other book. And he was pretty sure it was the only book most people ever read.

  “The Five Commandments of Helminth,” Felix started, focusing as hard as he could on the prophet’s words. “The First Commandment: There are no other gods but god. The Second Commandment: Lillian was the first mother of the Holy Order, and the first speaker of god; her words are divine truths. The Third Commandment: God’s followers are missionaries; it is their duty to save those who have strayed from god’s grace.”

  Felix bobbed in his seat as the carriage cleared a mountainous drift. The driver shouted something at the horses. With a snap of his reins, the carriage bucked again and landed, at last, onto cleared road.

  Felix lost his page, but quickly flipped back to it. Of course, he didn’t have to. He’d had the Five Commandments memorized long before he could speak them.

  “The Fourth Commandment: Do not do harm to god’s people, lest harm is done unto the people of god. The Fifth Commandment: The Holy Order is the embodiment of god and, therefore, infallible.”

  He hated to admit it, even in his head, but thinking about the Commandments, it made him realize how people like Isla Taggart and the Winnowers’ Chapter were right about the way they were written. Helminth was a Trauma survivor, a prophet who created the sacred text and many of the Holy Order’s rules, but why was his name on everything? Shouldn’t he have given god credit? The same went for Lillian, about whom even less was known.

  Justine had made him attend a Winnowers’ conference in secret once, to see how extreme some individuals’ views were when it came to their religion. They had claimed that people didn’t worship god anymore, but the Holy Order itself; the “institution” as they put it. It had made him so mad that he begged Justine to break up the Chapter, but she told him it wasn’t worth it.

  “There’s always someone who thinks they’re smarter than the rest,” Justine had said, ushering Felix’s red-faced self out of the meeting. “It’s not about worshiping, but being the one who is worshiped.”

  “Isn’t that blasphemy?” he had said, cursing them in his head.

  “Everything is a blasphemy. The Night Terrors are right, in a way.”

  Felix remembered he had stopped and looked at her like she was crazy.

  “It’s all about balance. But not an equal balance, as they know it. The scales must always favor evil. Otherwise, there will be no motivation to do good.”

  “No,” he had said, shaking his head. “I don’t think that’s true.”

  “Would you rather it be the opposite? Good outbalancing evil? That’s how we end up with groups like the Winnowers’ Chapter. Good is never good enough. Honestly, it’s not even about balance, Felix, but maintenance. Life is best enjoyed with the faint taste of rot in one’s mouth.”

  “God doesn’t think so,” Felix had boasted boldly.

  Justine had smiled at this and said quietly, “Is that what god said?”

  Outside the carriage, Avery shouted, “We’re almost there!”

  Felix closed the sacred text and tossed it across the compartment. Realizing what he’d done, he said, “Sorry, god,” and prayed a quick prayer of penitence.

  The carriage picked up the pace once Helminth’s Pass wrapped around and joined with Lillian Avenue. Penance’s main road, it ran from north to south across the snow-sieged city. When Penance had been known as Six Pillars, Lillian Avenue was the way in which the religions housed here could come out of their quarters and interact and build good relationships with one another. When Six Pillars became known as Penance, Lillian Avenue was the way in which the newly formed Holy Order had been able to take over the city and absorb the faiths that were too weak to fight them off.

  The two surviving soldiers of Geharra and the group who had found them were waiting for Felix at Saint Priscilla’s Hospital for Maladies. Saint Priscilla had been the second Mother Abbess, after Lillian; her namesake hospital was mostly used for quarantining patients. According to Justine, the survivors may have come into contact with a plant Eldrus had used to take Geharra over. They had since been tested and cleared, but to avoid a panic and mob, were yet to be released.

  Two knocks sounded on Felix’s door. Then Avery’s voice shouted through it: “There’s a few people here to see you. Do you want to address them?”

  You do, god said to him, so Felix nodded and said, “Yes.”

  Avery shouted something to the other guards. He heard them dismount. The horses all snorted in appreciation. Felix opened his door slightly. A few people? Even through the crack, he could tell the area was packed.

  Mackenzie pulled the door open all the way. A cold wind funneled through and blasted Felix with a face-full of ice.

  “Tell Avery his math skills suck,” he said, as Mackenzie wiped him down.

  “Your math skills suck,” Mackenzie shouted at Avery, who was securing a perimeter outside the hospital.

  Avery looked back angrily, and shrugged.

  Felix strained his ears to make sense of the crowd, but too many people were saying too many things all at once. “What are they saying?”

  “The usual. They know you’re here for the survivors.” Mackenzie pulled back, gave him the thumbs up. “Say something sassy about Eldrus. The Demagogue has been whipping them up all morning. They’ll love it.”

  “The Demagogue?”

  Felix dropped out of the carriage into two feet of snow. Despite his layers, the cold found him at once. The frozen needles of this forever winter stabbed at his feet
, worked their way up his legs, and prodded him for warmth to take.

  “He’s here?”

  “Unfortunately.”

  Felix wasn’t very tall, but the crowd stretched so far and was so loud, that he didn’t need to be to know there were more behind those bunched up outside Saint Priscilla’s Hospital for Maladies. They had to have been standing there for a while, all the men and women, and the children like glue that wriggled between them. Their faces were bright red, their whole bodies solid, stiff. An inch or so of snow sat on top of their shoulders. Altogether, they looked and moved like hunks of ice. But that didn’t stop them from crying out to him, reaching out to him, begging him for blessings and god’s guidance.

  With Avery and Mackenzie to his left and right, he trudged toward Saint Priscilla’s. The hospital had been a shell of itself after the Trauma. Mother Abbess Priscilla took that wreckage, gutted the Old World machines and objects, and rebuilt it. Now, it stood two stories high, pillars running up and down its length, with more stained glass windows than most of the churches nearby.

  The Demagogue was standing, arms crossed, at the foot of the steps that led up to the hospital. Dressed in a long, tapered, black robe, with a red clerical collar like a fetter around his neck, the man, with his craggy face and crooked nose, still looked like an absolute tool.

  “Your holiness,” the Demagogue said, kneeling. His greasy, shoulder length hair slid across his face like an oil spill.

  Cringing, Felix held out his hand; he yanked it back as soon as the Demagogue kissed it. This was a formality he kept trying to forget. But he did it today, because he knew the Demagogue wouldn’t forget. He didn’t forget anything.

  The Demagogue rose to his feet. “Are they supporters or traitors?”

  “Who?” He had to shout it, because the crowd around them was getting restless.

  “The survivors.” The Demagogue’s hand dipped into his pocket and took out a rosary. He started rubbing each of the wooden beads.