The Bones of the Earth- The Complete Collection

by Scott Hale

  “What the hell, Real’yuh?” he shouted, making room in the saddle for her.

  R’lyeh, you idiot. Damn kid never got her name right. The crowd shouted behind her. She looked back. A few were coming after her. Night Terrors weren’t all that terrible in the full light of day.

  R’lyeh pounded down the shore. A foot from the horse, she jumped onto it and screamed, “Go!” into Will’s ear.

  The Skeleton’s son snapped the reins. The horse took off. Chunks of mud from the ground flew up around them as its heavy hooves pounded the earth. R’lyeh straightened herself out in the saddle and held onto Will’s waist so that she wouldn’t fall.

  “What happened?” he asked, Bedlam blurring around them as they hoofed it toward the bridge on the outskirts of town.

  “I killed the priest. He saw me.”

  R’lyeh twisted around, ax out, ready to chop down anyone alongside them. But there was no one. Her pursuers had returned to the church to douse the flames that now engulfed it.

  Will faced her and said, “Real’yuh, Dad’s going to be pissed.”

  But R’lyeh wasn’t listening to him. As she turned to look at him, her heart seized in her chest. Ahead, on the bridge that spanned the river they rode along, she spotted a blonde woman standing there, watching them. She wore a large leather hat, and a long leather coat covered in belts and buckles and makeshift pockets. In the woman’s left hand, she held bandages, and in her right, a shepherd’s crook.

  She pointed to the shepherd and cried, “Will.”

  He spun around, sputtered out a string of nonsense. He cracked the reins and kicked the sides of the horse into a full gallop. They passed under the bridge, under the watchful eye of the shepherd. And when they came out on the other side, they both turned around and found that the shepherd was gone.

  “D-don’t tell him,” Will pleaded. “It wasn’t what you think.”

  R’lyeh looked over her shoulder, Bedlam proper shrinking with every passing second. Great plumes of smoke wound into the sky, the scent of heaven burning in the autumn air. She searched what she could of the streets for signs of the shepherd, but it had vanished. Vanished, just like the Skeleton had warned it would.

  “Hey.” Will grabbed her arm, bringing her attention back to him. “Don’t tell him. He won’t let me work for the Marrow Cabal anymore if he finds out.”

  R’lyeh took off her mask and secured it in her lap. “Are you kidding me?”

  Trees and bushes whipped past them as the horse plunged into the forest surrounding Bedlam.

  “That’s the dumbest fucking idea.” R’lyeh shook her head. “He told me.” She clenched her teeth. “Do you want to go back to the Membrane?”

  Will opened his mouth to argue, but instead, he turned around and took control of the horse.

  Don’t tell the Skeleton? It made her sick with anger that he would ask. I’m not losing anyone else. I don’t care if you hate me for it.

  She closed her eyes and held on tighter to Will. Tight enough to keep him from the shepherd should it show up again. If she lost Will, then she’d lose the Skeleton. And if she lost him, she’d lose Vrana for good.

  CHAPTER II

  Aeson had just started kindergarten when he found his parents hanging from a tree outside Caldera. From six years old to today’s sunrise, he had hated them for leaving him in the most selfish way anyone ever could. But now, as he stood below that tree, looking up at the branch Bjørn had cut his parents down from, he found himself empathizing with their suicide.

  Because Vrana, his best friend, his only love and lover, was gone. He didn’t know if she was dead or alive, but according to R’lyeh’s letter, the Witch had taken Vrana to the Void, which meant she was probably both.

  Killing himself made sense. In every piece of rope and sharpened blade, he saw sinister invitations to a place his feelings couldn’t follow. The loss of his parents had been one thing, but losing Vrana? It was as if all the bones had been broken in his body, and all the blood in his veins had been replaced with sand. His heart hurt, too. He had thought the sentiment was just poetry, but there was truth to it. It was as if his heart had been turned into a pincushion, and every day a new needle was jammed into one of its failing chambers.

  Aeson went beneath the bough that had helped snap his parents’ necks. The splintery culprit, unpunished all these years later, was now bent, and the bark chalky and soft. If he placed any weight upon that beckoning arm or the other branches around it, they would surely break. The tree had been good for two deaths, and two deaths alone. If he were going to die, it wouldn’t be here.

  He took off his skull mask and dropped to his knees. Falling back on his heels, he groaned and said, “I’m an idiot.”

  “Aye, but you’re our idiot, so that makes you special.”

  He looked over his shoulder. Bjørn stood behind him, his eyes winking in the dark maw of his bear mask. He was drenched in sweat. A few new fly friends buzzed around him, entranced by the big man’s stench.

  Aeson slid the Corrupted skull back on and jumped to his feet. “Uh, hey.”

  “Howdy partner.” Bjørn put his hands on his hips. “This is where your parents died.”

  A hot nail of rage bore itself into Aeson’s brain. Cheek quivering, he mumbled, “Oh? Oh, shit. It is, isn’t it?” He laughed, clapped his hands together. “I didn’t even realize!”

  “Yeah, that’s why I pointed out the fact.”

  Kistvaen shook behind them, shedding sheets of rock the same way a snake would skin. Whether or not the mountain’s recent rumblings had to do with the spellweavers who made it vanish or its history as a volcano, Aeson couldn’t say. But if lava were to burst from Kistvaen’s peak and smote this mother fucker off the face of the Earth, he would’ve been just fine with that.

  “Appreciate the sympathy,” Aeson said finally, his face several shades darker.

  “What?” Bjørn shook his head. “What do you want? To tell me how you’ve been sulking around Caldera for the last few months? Go on, tell me about how much you miss Vrana. Tell me about all the things you could’ve done differently. Or how about you tell me how you plan to kill yourself?”

  Air caught in Aeson’s throat. “What is—”

  “Here? Was this to be the place?” Bjørn covered the bear mask’s mouth, shocked. “Did I interrupt you? I know being an Archivist runs in the family, but I didn’t realize cowardice did, too.”

  Aeson’s knuckles were clenched so tightly that his nails dug into the heels of his palms. Where was this coming from? They were hardly friends. In the months following Vrana’s departure and disappearance, Aeson had actually grown closer to Adelyn, her mother, than Bjørn. This right here was just some insensitive, overgrown man-child mouthing off to someone who he thought wouldn’t say anything back.

  Stepping up to Bjørn to prove him wrong, Aeson said, “I don’t know what you think this is between us, but you don’t speak to—”

  “I’ll speak to you however I like. And you know why?”

  “Enlighten me.”

  “Because our Vrana is missing.” Bjørn paused. He shook, the same way Kistvaen shook, as if he were unburdening himself of the heavy things not even his huge frame could sustain. “She’s gone, but not for good. Can we agree on that?”

  “I… I don’t know.” He clamped his eyes shut until the tears retreated. “Yeah. Agreed.”

  Bjørn shoved his finger into Aeson’s chest. “You. Need. To. Get. Her. Back. No one wants to hear your tale of woe. No one is interested in that shit. We all know what’s coming, so let’s get to it.

  “You’re our Archivist and Vrana’s boyfriend. You owe it to damn near everyone to save her from that Witch bitch. That’s why I get to talk to you the way that I am. Same way I get to chew out a warrior for not fighting. And that’s why you’re going to listen, too. Because you know I’m right.

  “I don’t really believe you intend to kill yourself. Loner like yourself, down there, underground, in the Inner Sanctum, I w
ould have thought you would have done it already. But you haven’t. Like I said, no one cares about that shit. So what’s the problem?”

  Aeson cried, “What the hell do you expect me to do?”

  “The same thing she would have done had this happened to you!”

  Bjørn paced back and forth in front of the tree. Occasionally, he glanced toward Caldera where the harvesters’ sickles flashed metallic smiles in the sunlight. He was frantic, Aeson could see that now. This big outburst wasn’t some sporadic projection of his own unresolved bullshit. No, the Bear was desperate, just like him. But why? Had something happened back in the village?

  Aeson drew a deep breath. “You don’t think I don’t want to help her?”

  “Unless you’ve been formulating some master plan these last few months, then I don’t know, Aeson. I don’t know.”

  “I’m an Archivist.” He directed his attention to the house of the elders. “The only one we have in Caldera. I’m not one of your warriors. And they—” he pointed to Faolan and Nuctea, who had just emerged from the garden behind the house, “—won’t let me leave.”

  “How old are you?” Bjørn asked flatly.

  Nineteen, Aeson thought but didn’t say.

  “You don’t need to be a warrior.” Bjørn crossed his arms and headed back toward Caldera. “I’ll do all the killing. You just need to get us to where we need to go.”

  “What?” Aeson started after him.

  Bjørn stopped, looked over his shoulder. Sweat drooled from the bear mask’s discolored teeth. “I know you’ve been biding your time. I know you haven’t ever left the village, except through all those books you have down in the Sanctum. But I also know you love her. I understand the confusion. It’s easier to say you can’t, that they won’t let you. But you know what’s even easier?”

  Aeson didn’t know.

  “Me saying you will. You will get her back. They won’t let you leave? Well, I won’t let you stay. So figure it out, what needs to be done, because when we leave here, we’re leaving together.”

  Bjørn nodded, as if an agreement had already been made between two of them, and headed back into Caldera.

  His parents had committed suicide. That was a well-known fact amongst those who lived in Caldera. No one questioned it, especially not Aeson. Like his responsibility to continue the work they had started as Archivists, he accepted the cause of death and seldom entertained other possibilities. For a man whose entire purpose was to dissect the past, such willful myopia didn’t make any damn sense. And now it was happening again with Vrana, just like Bjørn had said.

  Aeson went to the tree and rested his head against the trunk. Digging his toes into the soil, he recalled R’lyeh’s letter. It had arrived one month after she and Vrana would have reached Lacuna. Aeson and the elders couldn’t figure out how she had managed to get it to Caldera, because the raven that delivered it wasn’t from any Night Terror villages. The parchment was strange, too. It was coarse, and the paper had a purplish hue to it. If Aeson stared at the words written there for more than a minute, his eyes would go out of focus and his head would start to hurt. Anguis suggested Mara may have spellweaved the letter, but both Faolan and Nuctea agreed she was nowhere near powerful enough to do so.

  “It sleeps again,” Aeson mumbled, reciting the letter. “And the Children have left. But Vrana is in the Void. The Witch used her, used us all. Belief powers her. Now I’m going to get Vrana back.”

  That was it. That was all the letter had said. They had succeeded in putting the Blue Worm to rest, which scouts near the Widening Gyre could confirm. When Aeson pressed the elders on what R’lyeh meant by “the Children,” they explained to him Lacuna’s fertility project, where Night Terrors and Corrupted, with the help of the Blue Worm, were bred together to repopulate the Night Terrors’ dwindling numbers.

  “How many flesh fiends did you end up with?” Aeson had asked Anguis that day. He was already well aware of what happened when Night Terrors and Corrupted mated.

  “Enough to feed the Blue Worm for years,” Anguis had said. “Those Night Terrors and Corrupted that did not turn into flesh fiends were shipped off to the mainland, it seems. We will have our people in Traesk, as well as the Heartland, reconnect with them.”

  If not for the circumstances, he would have been floored by the notion of having hundreds of Night Terrors with the potential to practice telepathy. At that moment, Aeson didn’t care about these mutant offspring the elders had consented to creating. All he had wanted to know was this: “How do I get into the Void? You told Vrana there may be a way in through Nachtla. And the Witch used her? What did R’lyeh mean?”

  And all Anguis could tell him was: “I don’t know, Aeson. Keep searching for us. Vrana is strong. If she’s alive, she—”

  Aeson smashed his second skull, his stolen skull, against the tree, bludgeoning the memory until it went away. It was bad enough that Anguis was clearly lying to him. But the fact Aeson had taken his word as gospel was ridiculous. After that, just like with his parents’ death, he accepted the hand he was dealt, and instead of doing anything about it, he went through the same pathetic motions he had gotten good at for the last thirteen years.

  There were stacks of books in his room about Old World folklore. If it had even the most tenuous connection to witches, he had plucked it from the Archive’s shelves and brought it down to the Sanctum. The most relevant works tended to come from Connor Prendergast and Herbert North, two old-school supernatural investigators who had recorded their cases in a series of books called Black Occult Macabre. In the two and a half volumes Aeson possessed, there were numerous references to a woman who had to be the Witch, or the Maiden of Pain, as well as another woman, a sister, called Joy, the Maiden of Joy. They often mentioned that the women had a kind of otherworldly hideout, a Void, but they had never been successful in locating it. At the end of the day, it seemed the Witch would only appear when she wanted to. When she did, she did so at the height of her power. And until then, she used others to carry out her bidding, which Aeson figured was exactly what she had done to Vrana, up until the moment she had snatched her from this world.

  In their writings, Connor and Herbert had made mention of ancient, occult weapons known as Red Death weapons. They were said to be created by Death Itself, and engraved with runes that could annihilate any creature, living or dead. Aeson had heard of such an object being held up in Eldrus, in Ghostgrave, that fitted the description, but with everything going on with the Disciples of the Deep, going there seemed out of the question. For a moment, he had considered asking Death to forge one anew, but that would mean taking the ferry to—

  Aeson punched the tree. He reared back, eyes following along the bough that had caused his parents to spill their bowels. What the hell was the point of knowing everything if he couldn’t do anything with it? If he had found a way into the Void from one of the books, what would he have done? Sent someone else to get his best friend back? Probably. And if he had one of those Red Death weapons? Assign someone else to carry out the mission? Definitely.

  And that’s where the myopia came in. When something had to be done that extended beyond his duties as Archivist, he suddenly became stupid. A doe-eyed dumbass who couldn’t do more than two things at once, because it was easier being what he was supposed to be, than being something else.

  He turned and headed towards Caldera, to the training yard, where children sparred with one another under Bjørn’s cruel tutelage. At the moment, the yard was empty because the children were at school, sparring with their teachers instead.

  Keeping out sight, to keep out of conversations with others, Aeson wheeled around the enclosure until he found where the gate sagged and hopped it. A muddy puddle broke his fall. He shook off the slough and skirted the gate to the shed where many Bjørn-forged training weapons waited.

  He already knew what he wanted and where it was. The ax sat at the back of the shed, somewhat forgotten, like the kid who gets picked last for games.
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br />   “Figures you would use an ax,” Aeson said, as if Vrana were there beside him. He took it in his hands and got a measure of its weight. “You blunt, brutal, beautiful love of mine.” He laughed, thought of her, and then left the yard.

  Aeson returned to the tree where his parents had died and swung the ax into its side. The blade was dull, but his will couldn’t have been any sharper. Two deaths, this tree had been good for two deaths. If he let it stay here any longer, its roots would spread and claim a third. And it wouldn’t be his ghost that hung from its boughs, but Vrana’s—the noose around her neck his terrified reluctance.

  He buried the ax deeper into the trunk. White shavings seeped out of the widening crack. He brought it back and swung in again. Crack. The tree braced itself against the impact. Old as it was, it wasn’t going down without a fight. For thirteen years, he had been cultivating the very thing he should have been killing.

  “Well, isn’t this symbolic?” Aeson said in Bjørn’s mocking drawl.

  After ten minutes or so, a crowd began to gather behind him. It wasn’t every day that they saw their Archivist engaging in manual labor, let alone severing the sore that had sickened his soul for more than half his life. He didn’t speak to them, and they were wise enough not to interrupt. Their presence only made him hack harder, until his arms were heavy and numb, and the sounds of the ax were finally louder than the blood in his ears.

  Two hours later, the tree’s trunk had been whittled down to a small, bare spine of wood. Aeson stopped, almost as drenched in sweat as Bjørn had been, and gave long-delayed inevitability a chance to catch up and close out this outstanding account. At first, the tree stood unyielding, but with a little help from the wind off Kistvaen, it started to shake. Then, its spine started to break. And with a ghastly howl, his parents’ makeshift gallows gave and snapped in half.

  Aeson took a deep breath. He wiped his brow, but didn’t drop the ax. For now, it was a part of him, just as much as Vrana’s ax had been a part of her. He turned, half-cocked, to see how much of an audience still remained. Much to his surprise, there was only one.