by Scott Hale
“Smells delicious, Liz,” Miranda said. “It might actually give us away, because the Divide is rank today.”
Elizabeth handed a bowl to Miranda as she passed behind her and R’lyeh. “What did you find?”
“Vermillion veins on the western bank.” She took off her sword, laid it on the ground, and then loosened her armor some. “The rebellion didn’t do a thing to stop Edgar from planting them everywhere.” She sat down beside R’lyeh, so that the Octopus was sandwiched between her and Elizabeth. “I didn’t see an army, but like we saw with Bone Daddy back at Carpenter Plantation, those things can be weapons themselves.”
R’lyeh, with a handful of eggs and mouthful of porridge, said, “Huh?”
“Some of the veins explode outward, impaling anything in their path.” Elizabeth took a drink out of her flask and then burped. “I guess you don’t need an army when you’ve got the whole edge of the Heartland booby trapped.”
Miranda nodded, chomped into her bread.
“In Bedlam, when I was with Will, I saw a priest put a ‘seed of Heaven’ in someone. It did that. Made the vermillion veins explode out of the person,” R’lyeh said.
Miranda said, “I guess if all else fails with the Disciples of the Deep, King Edgar can always turn his followers into suicide bombers.”
Bombs? R’lyeh remembered the piece of parchment she had seen on the Skeleton’s desk before she left Gallows. Aside from the drawings of Old World buildings on it, the word ‘bomb’ had been written. Was that what he had been getting at? The vermillion veins as weapons?
“Penance has a whole mess of people on the eastern bank, and ships, too,” Miranda said. “It might just be for intimidation. Most of the soldiers looked like regular citizens who had been conscripted on the way here.”
Elizabeth, two egg-covered fingers in her mouth, said, “They’ll still fight like hell, yeah?”
“Of course.” Miranda slurped up some porridge.
R’lyeh was the first to finish off her breakfast. She literally licked the bowl clean. As she sat there watching the other two women stuff their faces, she cleared her throat and said, “Do you think there’s really two gods out there?”
Miranda shook her head immediately; the answer to the question probably as obvious as the color of the sky.
But Elizabeth hesitated. Taking off her chest piece, so that she was down to her ratty, long-sleeved shirt, she said, “I don’t know, R’lyeh. What do you think?”
Shit, she thought. She liked it better when she got to ask questions rather than answer them. Fiddling with the Cruel Mother’s talons at her waist, she mumbled, “No. I think the Disciples and the Holy Order are both liars.”
“Just because it’s a god, doesn’t mean it deserves to be worshipped, yeah?” Elizabeth removed her bracers; her forearms had long-since stopped bleeding, but they were covered in slashes from the razor nettle. “Gods have to be held up to standards, too, you know?”
Miranda said, “That’s right,” and set her bowl down. “If King Edgar came up to you right now, R’lyeh, and punched you in the face, would you let it slide because he was king?”
“Hell no.”
“Then the same should go for any god. And if they don’t like it, then tough shit. They’re gods. If they can’t take a little criticism, then they aren’t worth our time.”
R’lyeh smiled as she nodded in agreement. She stretched out her legs and fell back on her palms. She could feel the fire in the balls of her feet, working its way into her bones. This is nice.
“Liz, I did see some very thick spider webs not far from here,” Miranda said.
“Arachne?” Elizabeth asked.
“Looks like it.”
“Rattle Bones did say something like that might happen.” Elizabeth turned to R’lyeh. “Ever been to the Nameless Forest?”
R’lyeh sat up. “I’ve seen it from a distance, I think. Have you?”
Miranda moved her paralyzed arm onto her lap and said, “We lived there.”
The hell? R’lyeh brought her knees to her chest. “Seriously?”
“Our Ladies of Sorrow academy,” Elizabeth answered. “Yup. It was an orphanage. We grew up there. Surprised, yeah?”
“Uh, yeah.” R’lyeh couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Did anyone else know about this? Was this something they were sharing with her in confidence? It had to be, right?
Elizabeth continued on. “Yup, lived there until we were fifteen, then we left about fifty years later, when we turned sixteen.”
R’lyeh started to laugh. Then, when she realized Elizabeth wasn’t joking, she said, “Wait, what?”
“Do you know what vampyres are?” Miranda asked.
No, they’re screwing with me. But instead of saying that, she said, “They’re bloodsuckers. Bite people’s necks to turn people into them. They do everything at night, because they can’t go out in the sun. Some of the kids back… home used to say the Frozen North was full of them, but… you’re not saying you’re vampyres are you?”
“Not anymore,” Miranda said.
“Not anymore,” Elizabeth repeated.
“Please, guys, don’t mess with—”
“We grew up in the Orphanage. We weren’t born there, but mothers in the Nameless Forest sometimes leave the children at the academy to keep the vampyres living there happy,” Miranda explained. “Mine and Liz’s mothers left us there. Nowadays, all vampyres are children.”
“Or teenagers,” Elizabeth added.
“Vampyres don’t bite necks. The mouths they use to bite are in their palms.” Miranda flexed her hands, and for the first time, R’lyeh noticed the faint vertical lines on her palms. “The sun weakens them, but it won’t kill them. They can’t spread the disease, either. They have to bring initiates to their master, Camazotz, for that.”
R’lyeh’s hair blew in front of her face. She quickly pawed it out of her eyes. “Camazotz?”
“The massive bat they have suspended in the academy. They have to feed on its blood to keep their immortality. If they stop feeding, they will eventually start to age again.”
“At fifteen, the headmistress, Gemma, said that me, Miranda, and our friends Jessie and Emily, were ready to become vampyres.”
Mouth hanging open, R’lyeh said in disbelief, “You really drank the bat’s blood?”
Elizabeth and Miranda nodded.
“Did you get mouths in your hands?”
Again, they nodded, and they both showed the scars on their palms.
“Holy shit. I had no… but you said after fifty years you started aging again?”
“We did. We stopped feeding. We didn’t agree with Gemma and the way she was handling things at the academy,” Miranda said.
“And then the Bad Woman came,” Elizabeth said.
R’lyeh raised an eyebrow.
“Her.” Elizabeth raised her shirt and showed the tattoo on her lower back. It was of a demon-faced nun who held Helminth’s Way in one hand, and a rosary made out of teeth and eyeballs in the other. There were four stones—red, white, pink, and purple—at the nun’s feet. “The Bad Woman.”
“No adults had been allowed into the academy ever since the Trauma,” Miranda said. “That’s what we had been told.”
“But that little shit, Gemma, let the Bad Woman in and she took over. She promised to rejuvenate Camazotz; said if she did that, the vampyres could escape the Nameless Forest. She lied.” Elizabeth lowered her shirt. “She tortured all of us, and made that rosary you saw her holding out of Emily’s teeth and eyeballs. Miranda, Jessie, and I knew we had to get out of there, so we ran away. After a few weeks, the hands in our mouths healed and the disease disappeared.”
“We stayed in Threadbare for a few years, another village in the Nameless Forest. This lady there, Lotus, took us in,” Miranda said. “Then we found a spellweaver and went back to Our Ladies of Sorrow academy.”
R’lyeh leaned forward and whispered, “Why?”
“Sweet revenge, of course,” E
lizabeth said. “We went back and beat the shit out the Bad Woman while Gemma was away. We dragged her ass back to Threadbare, and the spellweaver wove her into my skin.”
“W-wove her?” R’lyeh asked.
“Bitch was my first tattoo. She feels everything I do to her,” Elizabeth said, “and she’s not going anywhere.” She poked the spot where the tattoo was through her shirt. “She isn’t a part of me. She’s just hitching a ride. So when we caught you eating gloom caps, I understood, because you know what I do when I get anxious?”
R’lyeh shook her head.
Elizabeth took a knife out of her belt and pressed it to her lower back. “I always end up cutting too deep and go past her into myself. But it’s worth it, yeah?”
Miranda nodded, said, “Yeah.”
R’lyeh covered her mouth. She blinked her eyes hard and had a look around to remind herself they were still in the woods outside the Divide. The sun was high in the sky now, and wildlife was scurrying and flying all about them. It had to have been eight or nine in the morning, but after everything so far, R’lyeh was ready to go back to bed.
“We will wait until nightfall to cross,” Miranda said, standing up.
Elizabeth held out her hand, and Miranda took it to help her up. “East bank or west?”
“East,” Miranda said, offering her hand to R’lyeh, who took it, too, and came to her feet. “Penance isn’t so close to the Divide that we can’t sneak by. I’m not risking walking through a field of vermillion veins.”
Elizabeth and Miranda nodded and went their separate ways; Elizabeth to the tent, and Miranda to the woods to relieve herself.
R’lyeh, feeling left out again, then said, “What would you guys do if you saw Gemma again?”
Both women stopped what they were doing, but they didn’t answer. Their silence said it all.
At nightfall, they broke down their camp, loaded their belongings onto the horses, and rode the beasts to the Divide. To the east, the bank was aglow with torches from Penance’s encampment. There were voices coming from that area, but they were outnumbered and overwhelmed by the songs that were being sung from the makeshift masses that had cropped up around the base. There were a lot of people out tonight, R’lyeh thought, but if they had their heads in heaven for the next hour or so, then she, Elizabeth, and Miranda just might slip by.
Using the light of the moon as their guide, they followed along the edge of the Divide. Often, the horses would go off-course and start walking through the water. It wasn’t quite pitch-black, but it was close enough that they were practically riding blind through the night.
Halfway to Penance’s encampment, R’lyeh started to hear something move through the woods beside them. Using her ears, because her eyes were all but useless, she followed the noises. Whatever was out there, they were quick, agile, and were using the trees to get around, rather than the ground. The air smelled bad, too; like a mouth full of rotting teeth.
“What’s that?” R’lyeh whispered.
Someone, probably, hopefully, Miranda, shushed her.
R’lyeh focused on the darkness beside her, using the moonlight to solve its mysteries. The trees creaked and moaned, and a branch suddenly snapped and plummeted into the shadows. There was a groan, maybe a hiss; and then the noises were closer. Whatever it was, it was just out of sight, and it was going where they were going.
Once they were close enough to Penance’s encampment that the torchlight could give them away, Elizabeth, Miranda, and R’lyeh steered their horses into the shallows of the Divide and cantered very slowly down the river. The encampment was built on a steep embankment, and as long as they kept close to it, not even the sentry towers would see them.
R’lyeh tightened her grip on Vrana’s ax as they fully entered the encampment. Above them, only the tips of the nearest tents could be seen. Torches flared, and so did the sounds from the Masses. Shadows moved back and forth along the rim of the embankment.
They rode in silence until Miranda halted the procession and whispered, “Stop.”
A rush of anxiety wracked R’lyeh’s body so hard she thought she might curl up like a spider and fall off her horse. Stop? Stop for what? There were thousands of soldiers just over the embankment. All it would take was one of them to see them, to round them up, to march them through the encampment and make them—
“Ah, that’s what I’m talking about,” a man’s voice said ahead.
R’lyeh squinted. Two shapes were standing on the embankment a few feet ahead. They had their dicks out, and they were pissing into the wind.
“I was about to explode,” the second man added. He shook himself a bit, and then wiped his hands on his trousers.
The first man grunted in agreement. Still pissing, he said, “Ragtag group of soldiers they got here.”
“Yeah, but feels kind of like a big family get-together,” the second man said. He started away from the embankment, then turned, so that he was directly facing R’lyeh and the others.
Fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck, she thought. He’s going to see us. She pressed herself against her horse. Elizabeth and Miranda did the same.
“Everyone from everywhere. Seen a lot of faces I haven’t seen in forever,” the second man continued.
“Ah, you know why everyone’s here.” The first man finally put his dick away. “I mean, how often do you get a chance to actually see the Mother Abbess and the Holy Child?”
“Never. Once in a lifetime.” The second man clapped his hand on the first man’s shoulder. “Think they’ll be here soon?”
The first man said, “I hope so,” and walked with his companion back into camp.
But before they had gone completely, R’lyeh heard one of them say, “Can’t wait to see the Mother Abbess turn into an angel. Once she does that, all those Disciples will come crawling back. You’ll see.”
CHAPTER IX
One day into the Dires, and already Aeson wasn’t a fan. North of Caldera and east of Geharra, the Dires was all red rock and yellow earth; a flat, dusty territory that, without sand and scorching heat, seemed to be nothing more than a poor man’s desert. The place had a haunting quality to it. With it being so empty and vast, every brittle field and trembling wood suddenly became homes for horrors unseen. Aeson tried not to let his imagination get the better of him, but after hours riding beside Bjørn and not seeing another soul, it was hard not to. A place even as boring and inhospitable as the Dires couldn’t possibly be this empty; the only solution was that they were being watched, followed, and measured up for some forthcoming massacre.
Aeson told Bjørn his concerns, and Bjørn laughed at him and told him he was being paranoid.
“You’ve never been this far outside of Caldera,” the Bear went on, bobbing up and down in his horse’s saddle. “It’s alright to be scared.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Aeson said. “Damn, these horses are uncomfortable.”
The two horses they rode were conjurations the elders had created for them from what was left of Caldera’s fields. Made up of rock, wood, soil, and whatever unfortunate creatures had been in the field during the ritual, the horses were incredibly fast and impervious to exhaustion. Their time, however, was temporary. Aeson’s and Bjørn’s horses each had about three hours left before they would fall apart and return to the earth that had spawned them. After that, they’d have to find their own rides.
They rode for another two hours in silence, and then the Dires decided to do something different. The unending expanse of dead fields and dry thickets started to become healthier, fuller. Out of the unnaturally even earth, hills like fat, melted candles formed. Farther on, parts of the sky sat low to the ground, as if the clouds in it were weighing it down. The path they had been following once ran in every direction, but as the land sloped, it funneled them into a steep ravine.
“What do you think?” Bjørn asked, taking the vanguard.
“I feel like something bad is about to happen,” Aeson admitted.
The walls of the ravine shivere
d rocks around them, as if something were tracking their movements from above. Aeson’s eyes darted back and forth, searching for signs of a stalker.
Bjørn, undisturbed by this, corrected himself. “I mean being out of Caldera.”
Aeson’s horse let out a grunt. The spit it spat as it sneered wasn’t spit at all, but small seeds that whistled in the wind.
Bjørn shifted in his saddle. “You’re holding your own.”
“Oh, thanks.”
Aeson still couldn’t believe he was here, hundreds of miles away from home. It had all happened so quickly, so easily, that it made him wonder if it would have happened sooner if only he had asked for it. How much of his isolation had been self-inflicted? The elders had nurtured it, but he had been the one to impose it. Like the tree his parents had hanged themselves from, it was easier to let things be than to have them be anything else.
“It’s great,” Aeson said, catching up and riding beside Bjørn.
“What is?”
“Being out of Caldera.” Aeson smiled behind his mask. “We’ve been on the road for weeks now. A little late to ask, don’t you think?”
“Now we’re deep in it, that’s why. You can’t turn back,” Bjørn said. He stopped his horse as the ravine branched off into several different directions. “Which way, Skull Boy?”
“Northeast should take us to the Dismal Sticks,” Aeson said. Then, jokingly, he added, “Papa Bear.”
As if struck by lightning, Bjørn sat straight up in his saddle. Slowly, he turned his head and stared Aeson down.
“Do you mind if I call you that from now on?” Aeson asked, doing his best not to laugh.
“Do you mind riding the rest of the way with my boot in your ass?”
Aeson shrugged. “Can I get back to you on that one?”
“Take your time,” Bjørn said. He kicked his horse and took the ravine’s northeastern passage.
Words must have been a limited resource for Bjørn, Aeson thought, watching the big man brute-force his way through the ravine. He could get Bjørn to speak for a few minutes at best, and then he would go quiet. The strange thing about Bjørn was that he was the one who usually started the conversations, here and back in Caldera. It was like he wanted company and companionship, and then, when he got a hint of either, he hid.
