The Bones of the Earth- The Complete Collection

by Scott Hale

  The flesh fiend’s sagging gut bludgeoned the water with every step it took. It didn’t crawl on two hands, but one; and the same was true of the three flesh fiends that traveled with it. Each of them had one of their twisted, mutilated, white-crusted arms extended above and away from them. They were carrying something, sharing together the heavy weight of the unholy load stretched over them.

  Above the flesh fiends, held up in their grips, a sedan of charred vermillion veins was suspended. The warped, blackened chunk looked like a comet disgorged from some chaotic plane. The flesh fiends struggled to hold it, but they held it all the same; as if the speaker buried within the mass’ center was royalty.

  “Take m-me t-to… her,” the voice spoke again.

  The end of the procession passed Aeson. The four flesh fiends’ eyes never left Angheuawl. They had a job to do. Everything else was invisible to them.

  “She n-needs… my hurt.”

  The four flesh fiends and their vermillion cargo reached the hill and headed for town.

  The curse wolf nudged Aeson to move, but his body wouldn’t budge. He felt Death’s finger scratching at his chest again, but the threads of his mortality wouldn’t yield.

  Get up, he said, coming out of that dark and dead place. You have to get up.

  And that was true. It was now or never. And never really wasn’t an option, because it was the only one that anyone with any sense would choose. The long line of cultists coming into town was thinning. There were only stragglers now, from the north and south; Corrupted and Night Terrors, mostly—some wearing the white garments of Cathedra, others, the mossy armor of Traesk.

  Again, the curse wolf nudged him. He stared into the beast’s jet-black eyes and saw the luminescent sheen of Death’s wings in its pupils.

  I have to do it now.

  Three dead ravens floated past him.

  I have to do this now.

  The curse wolf took off through the woods, darting between the trees. Aeson followed as fast as he could, his legs numb from sitting in the icy water for so long. The closer they came to Angheuawl, the less cover they had with which to hide themselves.

  Aeson and the curse wolf reached the hill’s summit and quickly slid behind a work shed that stood in shambles on the outskirts. They waited until the very last of the cultists passed, and moved deeper into Angheuawl, one wrecked wall and bombed-out building at a time.

  So close to the center, to the end of this horrid quest, and yet Aeson couldn’t steal but a glimpse into the heart of the Witches’ operation. Angheuawl was a mining town, built by miners, on the edges of Southern Cradle, in a volcanic range. Not much thought went into its construction or aesthetic. It was an uneven, unpainted mess of homes and stores intersecting at odd angles; a plot of garish geometry, streamlined for work, and reluctant to allow for anything else. Squat homes, narrow roofs; woods worth of wood on every corner, along every street—splintered, buckled, and covered in the Cult’s graffiti.

  But like cattle answering the call, there was an order, despite the meandering. For at the farthest end of Angheuawl, there was the mine. Aeson couldn’t see it from where he was, but he saw the top portion of façade that had been built over it; a wooden steeple jutting high into the sky, and a name—Nicholas Harrington—painted boldly in black on a horizontal beam between the supports. That was where the blue smoke was coming from, and the singing, and the—

  Aeson dropped the sword and held the Red Death weapon against his chest. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t pretend to ignore it anymore. The Cult of the Worm was everywhere.

  Holy Child in hell there were hundreds of them. Clogging the streets, moving in and out of the business and homes. Adults, mostly, except for the childish flesh fiends that slinked along the rooftops, biting the heads off the ravens in their hands. Night Terror, Corrupted, Child of Lacuna, or Cultist—it didn’t matter. Other than the presence of Corruption, who these people were or what they believed was impossible to determine. The distinction between species and sub-species was so blurred it made Aeson cross-eyed trying to figure it out. The only way he could identify them was by the culture they clothed themselves in.

  There, Night Terrors from Rime and Traesk, and a few elderlies from Eld. Shit, was that the Wasp and Boar from Caldera?

  There, Corrupted from Nora, Nyxis, and, yes, hunters of the Blasted Woodland. And goddamn, soldiers from Eldrus and Penance, too?

  But that wasn’t all. There were more, many more, up ahead, shuffling towards the mine, damn near walking hand-in-hand with the flesh fiends at their sides. Flesh fiends. Subterranean sadists, subdued, almost docile. He’d hoped the creatures at the Dismal Sticks had been a fluke, but, no, it was true: The Witches had discovered a way to control them. And there were so many of them. More than the humans and humanoids with blue light dripping from their eyes. For every piece of flesh, there were five fiends. Like roaches on their best behavior, they seemed to be playing a part, biding their time, for the great feast to come.

  Shrill laughter swept through the town, from the mine upon which the Cult was converging. It was Pain’s voice he heard, and behind it, pathetically, there was a croaking. And beating wings. And scrabbling claws. And another woman, Joy, screaming at the yet unseen, still love of his life—the Winged Horror.

  The curse wolf started for the next building, an infirmary. Aeson cleared his thoughts and thought of nothing else but Vrana. She was his blessing, his boon; the backbone he’d been born without. He never would’ve come this far for anyone else. No one else could’ve brought him this far.

  They slipped into the infirmary through a backdoor. It smelled sour inside. Most of the beds were nothing more than frames. The supply cabinets had already been emptied and filled again; this time with cobwebs. Unless someone was seeking a radical cure for arachnophobia, no healing was going to happen here anytime soon.

  The curse wolf kept going. Aeson did, too. They hurried into an administrative office and back into the streets. The wolf stopped, barred his path. The tail end of the four flesh fiends and the vermillion sedan passed by. And then the coast was clear; they were off again.

  They snaked through the edge of Angheuawl, never daring the main road. From the infirmary, they went into a chapel and out its window and into a string of residences. They were getting closer to the meeting point—the Choir’s throaty hymns were absolutely deafening—but the dread inside Aeson told him they were never going to get close enough. The lack of guards was surprising, but when he thought about it, it really wasn’t. No one except for himself was going to be stupid enough to come into a town crawling with flesh fiends. And Pain and Joy had nothing to fear. So long as they had the Void, they had everything.

  The curse wolf crept out of the last house, paused, and huffed at Aeson to give chase. He hurried down the porch. Just then, a Night Terror and Corrupted, both women, naked and still covered in the sweat of their sex, came trudging down the street. They locked eyes with him, and he with them.

  “Have you come to open yourself?” the Corrupted asked.

  Aeson nodded.

  The Night Terror was holding her mask. It was a monkey. “There’s a void in us all. One to fill the other.” She smiled, slipped on her skull, and walked on with her lover.

  About to shit his pants, Aeson ran after the curse wolf into the saloon. The place was covered in the Cult’s two-headed stick figure symbols, as if a child had gone to work on the walls.

  “Fuck.” Aeson gasped and propped himself up against the bar. “Fuck, that was close.”

  “Goddamn it,” a woman rumbled behind him.

  Aeson’s stomach sank.

  The curse wolf’s lips peeled back into a terrifying snarl. Its teeth were Death’s nails.

  Aeson spun around. Behind the bar, there was Belia, the one-armed servant flesh fiend from House Gloom. She was still wearing the dress Ichor had given her, except she wasn’t really wearing it; rather, it was now a part of her. When the house had burned down, the heat must’ve fused
the corset and cage crinoline to her body. There was pus oozing down her chest; and her breasts looked like two deflated balloons covered in hair. When she caught Aeson gazing at her, she covered herself up, as if embarrassed.

  “Goddamn it!” she screamed, hurling herself at him.

  Aeson stumbled backwards. He dropped the Red Death weapon beside the curse wolf, not wanting to waste it.

  Belia hobbled across the saloon, spitting and swinging her claws. Her left leg, shorter than the right, slowed her down badly.

  “Goddamn it, goddamn it!” she said, over and over, the only phrase she was capable of. “Goddamn it!” Her voice was an alarm he couldn’t afford to have going off any longer.

  Belia sped up and flung herself at him. Aeson went sideways. Her grasping claws hooked onto his breastplate and yanked him onto the ground with her. Aeson broke his fall on her hip. She took the blow like a champ, oriented herself, and came after him, on her hands and feet.

  Aeson scooted backwards, the nails in the wooden floor catching on his ass. Feeling bad for Belia, he pulled the sword back, ready to bust her with the pommel. But as she vaulted towards him, she stopped being Belia, and started being her, it, the fiend that had fucked him.

  He felt an invisible weight on his groin. And heat from the fire that burned Gloom down. And the wet grass, soaking his back.

  “Goddamn it!” Belia lunged.

  Aeson’s sympathy was the finality of steel. At the last second, he twisted his hand and drove the sword through Belia’s mouth. It scraped against her teeth, made a mush of her gums. The flesh fiend’s momentum drove her down on the sword. The tip blew out the back of her skull. It wasn’t until her bleeding face hit the hilt that she stopped.

  “Goddamn it,” Aeson said, standing up. Belia slid off his sword like meat from a skewer. “Thanks for the help,” he said to the curse wolf, stepping over Belia and retrieving the Red Death weapon.

  Vrana. Vrana. Vrana. Aeson repeated the name over and over as he and the curse wolf ran out of the saloon before anyone might come investigate the noise. I’m coming. It’s almost over.

  Angheuawl’s streets had all but cleared. Aeson and the curse wolf skirted along the sides of a general store, waiting for two flesh fiend children to catch up with their brethren at the town’s center.

  The falling snow started to thicken. The flurries fattened and came in sideways. As if his eyes were failing him, the town was suddenly rendered in a gray tone, and visibility fell off after fifteen feet. Convenient. Maybe it was the work of whatever spells the Witches were weaving ahead, or maybe, just maybe, Mother Nature wanted these bitches dead as much as he did.

  Vrana, I’m so sorry I took so long.

  Aeson went low when the wolf seemed to tell him to get low. Like the beast he followed, he crawled along the ground, to the last turn in this maze of a mining town. After that, he’d be close enough to the center to see everything.

  I don’t care what you are now.

  The curse wolf glanced back, to make sure Aeson was still there.

  I know you won’t care what I’ve become.

  “Get up,” the curse wolf said with a yelp.

  We’ve both gone to pieces.

  Aeson got up and slinked over to the alley that let out from Angheuawl’s center.

  I’d rather be broken than broken-hearted.

  He moved down the alley, the snowflakes that pelted him melting around him, as if he gave off an aura of intense heat. He set his sword against the wall, within reach, and holding the Red Death weapon with both hands, peered out at the center of town.

  The Cult of the Worm was everywhere. On every roof, in every doorway. There was no ground to walk on, because the cultists blanketed it with their bodies. The Night Terrors, Corrupted, and flesh fiends were here by the hundreds, and all of them, every single one of them, were on their backs, their arms interlocked with their neighbors’, singing a single eldritch note no creature of this planet should’ve been able to create. There was no blood or gore; no senseless slaughter, no mass rape; just body after body, bound by their limbs, looking up into the sky, weeping diamonds of light, as blue smoke swept across the congregation and poured into their quivering mouths.

  Wicked laughter lifted Aeson’s attention from the demonstration. At the back of Angheuawl, where he had expected to find them, Pain and Joy stood. They were in front of the entrance to the drift mine, except the mine wasn’t a mine anymore; its doorway was now a gray, swirling portal that let out into the Void itself.

  And there was Vrana. There she was. It hurt to look at her, the same way it hurt to look at the sun, but despite the pain, he needed them all the same. Vrana was between Pain and Joy, her arms and wings crucified to the support beams that formed the opening of the mine. Her head was tipped back; the blue smoke that roamed Angheuawl was pouring out of her beak. Around Vrana’s neck, the Blue Worm’s silver necklace shone with an intense, throbbing light.

  Between here and the witches were hundreds of their minions, all willing at any moment to tear Aeson to pieces. He gripped the Red Death weapon until it felt as if his knuckles were going to tear, and retreated into the alley. The curse wolf was gone. He had to do this alone.

  “Bring out the babies,” Pain cried. “Let them see the world they’re going to inherit.”

  Joy stepped in front of Vrana. Her white satin dress swished around her legs. Black bloodstains ran up and down the front and the back of the fabric from all her miscarriages. She held up her arms and said, “Are you sure?”

  Pain grinned, spit on her sister, and laughed. Her wild eyes, black orbs pricked with red, rolled in their sockets. “Better late than never!”

  “We should finish what we’re doing first—”

  Pain walked over to Joy and slit her throat with her fingernail. Joy dropped to her knees, blood sputtering out of the wound in thick, almost comical geysers. It doused Vrana, but Vrana didn’t stir. At this point, Aeson couldn’t tell if she was alive or dead.

  Pain held out her pale, slimy hand, and Joy took it. By the time she was back on her feet, the wound had healed.

  “They’re coming!” Pain screamed giddily into Joy’s ear. “Give them a good show!”

  Joy nodded and held up her arms again. The Void portal contracted, and a tendril of it reached out and touched her between the legs. The black bloodstains dripped off the dress and slithered into the Void.

  “Not all of them,” Pain conceded, sounding annoyed.

  Joy’s body jerked. The black bloodstains whipped out of the Void, like chains, and hooked upon their ends were the most terrifying abominations Aeson had ever seen.

  From the Void, the bloodstains brought out huge cancerous masses that had been formed from the bodies of children. They were sick amalgamations of body parts, fitted together in such a way to allow for movement. Its lower half was a hard crust, like a massive callous, comprised of legs and arms, and some combination of the two that had been melted together into what amounted to tails and tentacles. The upper half was like a piece of severed fruit; a glistening bi-section of tiny bodies and heads constantly crying out in garbled, childish pleas. Like rotted seeds, babies and infants were lodged into the top of the Horror of the Womb. From their split bellies, ropes of intestines flailed in the air, flinging blood and shit across the nearby cultists.

  One after the other, Joy conjured these creatures from the Void, until there were four of them. Then, the last of black bloodstains wrenched a fifth Horror from the Void—their mother.

  The Mother Horror wasn’t Death, but a mockery of Her. The Horror came tumbling out of the Void, end over end, until it was checked by Joy’s trembling legs. Slowly, it rose off the ground—gallons of clear, steaming fluids pouring off it. The Mother Horror grew exponentially in size as it gathered itself. Beginning as a dripping grub, it soon sprouted sets of arms and legs, and then two moth-eaten, moth-like wings. It wasn’t beautiful in the way Death was beautiful; it was horrible to behold. Its body was oily; the furs that covere
d it matted and knotted. A head burst from the top of the grub, and it was a single black bulb, with no eyes or antennae; simply a sneering grin painted on with what appeared to be nail polish.

  Joy dropped her arms. Pain, rubbing her hands together like the villainess she was, shouldered past her sister and, flailing her arms, screamed at the Horrors, “Go! Go!”

  The white satin dress practically swallowed Joy as she dropped to her knees, spent. The black bloodstains returned to their place on the fabric. “They can’t fend for themselves.”

  “Neither could we,” Pain said, taking Joy by the chin. “Look at us now.”

  The Mother Horror, now a good twenty feet long, lifted off the ground. Gracelessly, it drifted like a kite over the Horrors of the Womb. One by one, with its arms and legs, it picked up the oversized ovaries and hauled them off, over Angheuawl and into the snowy distance.

  With the Horrors gone, Aeson let himself breathe again. I can’t do this, he said to himself. Crying, and shaking, he fell like Joy, crumpling on the floor of the alleyway. Out the corner of his eyes, he stared at Vrana, crucified; her feathered body struggling in a kind of epileptic shock. She was covered in every kind of fluid imaginable. There were fresh scars all over her body, and her legs looked gnarled. I shouldn’t do this. I can’t save you to kill you. Killing you is the only way to save you. I can’t—

  “What’s that?” Pain hollered.

  Her voice found him like an arrow and pierced him through. He looked back at the Witches.

  The Witches were looking back at him.

  “Is that…” Pain tilted her head; her ashen hair fell across her face. “It is! Joy, fetch him!”

  No, no, no. Aeson hurried to his feet.

  But Joy was faster. She rose out of her dress and glided over the still lying, still singing Cult of the Worm. She cleared the distance in a blur. One second, and she was there, in the alley with him.

  “Do I know you?” Joy asked, slowing her words to sound sultry. She was flirting with him.

  Aeson slipped the Red Death weapon behind his back.