The Bones of the Earth- The Complete Collection

by Scott Hale

  “Shut up.” R’lyeh screwed up her face. “No. The hell? No, I’m not. This—” she gathered her breath, “is just like when we first got here. It’s always b-bad, but then it gets better.”

  “Stand up, then.”

  R’lyeh fell forward, having almost fallen asleep, but she didn’t stand. She couldn’t. It took too much effort to even consider standing. Her neck constricted. Her heart began to beat faster. Sweat and snow melted from her scalp, ran down her face. Something was different. Something wasn’t right.

  “I’m sorry, R’lyeh.”

  R’lyeh tried to steady her breathing, but it was no use. Every breath she took hurt; every exhale made things move inside her, like the Green Worm’s clouds were growing over her innards, like mold.

  “Get me out of here.”

  The Skeleton didn’t stir.

  “Get me out of here!” She squeezed her eyes as tears fell from them. “Please.”

  The Skeleton shook his skull. “Green Worm’s in you.” He covered his mouth. “Can’t get it out.”

  R’lyeh, shaking her head and coughing, swiped at the Skeleton, but missed. “That’s b-bullshit.” She tried to push herself off the ground, but her arms gave out. “Help me, Atticus.”

  As soon as the Skeleton slid an arm under her armpit, an excruciating pain coursed through her body. R’lyeh screamed and jerked away. Her nerve endings were raw, flayed by disease. Like the old woman she sounded like, she wept there in a twisted knot of agony.

  “Use it.” R’lyeh quivered. “The heart.”

  “There’s no cure for what you got.” The Skeleton touched her hand with his gloved one.

  Shivering violently, she brought her knees to her chest. “T-then go back in t-time. Don’t let me come here.”

  “No good can come from that.” The Skeleton’s voice broke.

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “I didn’t even do it for Clementine and Will. There’s a lot of things I’d like to change—”

  R’lyeh stopped listening to him and started listening to herself. He wasn’t going to help her. He had already doomed her to Death. That’s what he knew. That’s all he knew. She wasn’t dying. She wasn’t doing good, and this was quickly becoming the worst thing that had ever happened to her, but she wasn’t dying. The Worms of the Earth were stronger than anything she had ever dealt with before, but she had dealt with the Red, endured the Blue, and seen through the Green. She was R’lyeh of Alluvia; the Octopus; a member of the Marrow Cabal; sole survivor of Geharra and the only person, besides the Skeleton, to have gone as deep as she had into the Dead City; and a Deadly Beauty. She wasn’t dying. She wasn’t—

  She held her legs tightly. She had so much spit in her mouth, it kept seeping out onto her thighs. The pain from the pressure of sitting and holding herself was getting worse. She tried to move, to find a better position, but everything hurt everywhere. Winter was helping, numbing her where it could. It wasn’t enough.

  “Please,” she said into her knees. “Please.”

  The Skeleton gently wrapped his arm around her and pressed his bony body against hers. His touch was like rough fingers stirring the pink meat of an open wound. She bared it for him. He bared it for her.

  “Cure… Go back in time… I’m…”

  He shushed her.

  “Are you m-mad at… me?”

  “No.”

  “Why won’t you do anything?” R’lyeh tipped her head back, and lost it. Her face was inflamed with agony. Every tear was a knife cutting into her, taking her apart, laying her bare. “The Virions c-changed… I could be changing.”

  The Skeleton whispered, “You don’t want that.”

  “No,” she whimpered. “I don’t want to die.” Burying her face back into her knees, she wailed, “I don’t want to die, Atticus.”

  “You had a good run.”

  “Fuck you,” she said, her face a smile and a scowl. “Are you kidding me? I’m not just… giving up.”

  “Not asking you to.” The Skeleton’s wild eyes met hers and he said, “Just give in.”

  She tried to shake her head, but her muscles were too taut. “No, no. I’m not done. I haven’t done… anything.” She coughed and growled out the pain it caused her. “Oh god,” she cried, blood dribbling down her chin. “Please. I need—”

  “You’ve done so much,” the Skeleton said.

  “No, no, stop. Listen to me. I can fight it. I can f-fight. I…” Her airway closed; suffocating, she gripped the fabric of her pants until she could breathe again. “Just… use the heart.”

  Snow blew across the peninsula in white waves, until the Dead City was gone, and the mainland was gone, and there was nothing else other than him and her and the sounds of the sea.

  “I think I can stand.”

  She couldn’t.

  R’lyeh was crying again. Muscles she didn’t even know she had were wracked with spasms. She had a migraine. There was snow in her eyes—the red kind, the bad kind; the kind that came when your body went. She fell sideways, into the Skeleton’s side. The fabric of his cloak blocked her skin from the taint of the Black Hour, but only barely. If he moved, it would consume her.

  “I didn’t do enough,” R’lyeh said. “I didn’t do anything.”

  The Skeleton draped his arm over her.

  I didn’t do anything, she thought. But she didn’t want to be alone right now, in her head. If she wasn’t an open book, she’d close for good.

  “I fucked up everything,” she said. “Every mission you g-gave me. My village. My… parents. Vrana…” Silently, she bawled; those deep, thudding sounds of despair. “Here… You. It’s not fair. It’s not… fair. I tried so… so hard. Please, you have to… I can’t. I can’t. I don’t want to be… alone again. I’m so—” She coughed and cleared her nose. “I’m afraid. I’m so weak. I’m really scared.”

  “You did plenty,” the Skeleton said, kind as he could probably manage. “You survived Penance attacking your village and Geharra. You went all the way across the continent. You survived Lacuna, too. And Gallows, when the Red Worm came. You scouted for me. You got out of Rime alive. You passed through Penance’s army… and Edgar’s spider soldiers. You went through a blood portal. You came here. That’s not bad. That’s not bad at all.”

  “But it didn’t mean… anything.”

  “It meant everything to me,” the Skeleton said. “You saved Audra, I reckon, and Elizabeth, too, in a way. You made my boy happy, even if you didn’t much care for him or speak to him.”

  R’lyeh smiled.

  “You didn’t have to save the world, but you did save a few souls. Mine’s damned for all I’ve done, but you kept me holding on.”

  “How?” she whispered.

  “Didn’t come here for weapons. Came here to get away. Knew no one could follow. But you did.”

  “But your w-wife… and son.”

  The Skeleton ground his teeth. “I knew Hex’s Cult might be gathering in Angheuawl. I sent them, anyways.”

  R’lyeh’s eyes were as wide as saucers. “Why?”

  “Don’t know. Don’t know why I do the things I do anymore. I think I find ways to keep saving them. If I settle, I’ll just be bones.

  “Every day my grave gets deeper, and darker. And when the light goes out, all my hours will be black. Dying isn’t so bad. It’s living you got to watch out for.”

  “Did I save you?” R’lyeh asked, like the child she was.

  The Skeleton shook his head. “Can’t save what’s lost. But you gave me a little light to see with.”

  “I didn’t know… you were so fucked up.” She managed to laugh, and then regretted it.

  “I don’t expect either of us know each other as well as we should.”

  “Would you… use the heart… if you did know me?”

  “By time I come out of it, you’ll be gone. I want to be here, to see you off.”

  R’lyeh covered her eyes. The tears were finally coming to an end. She didn’t have anyth
ing left to give, because she had given everything.

  “Can I see… it?”

  The Skeleton didn’t ask her what she meant; death was their bond now; and by its bond, they ran the same wavelength. With his free hand, he reached into his cloak, removed the Red Worm’s stone, and laid it on her chest.

  “Never again,” she said. “It’s mine.”

  “It is,” the Skeleton agreed.

  R’lyeh had another coughing fit; between each violent exhalation, there was blankness—the pages of her so-called open book… there wasn’t much written on the ones ahead.

  “My name is R’lyeh Akkoro. I’m from Alluvia. My m-mom’s name is Anoplo Akkoro and my d-dad’s name is Iso Akkoro. I… want to be a badass librarian… and have guys think I’m the b-best. I like horses. I like when it… rains.” She coughed and fought to stay awake. “I don’t like hurting people as much as I thought… I did. I liked… hurting myself… more.

  “My best friend was a woman named Vrana, and t-this man named Atticus… or Gravedigger… or Skeleton… or…” She laughed. “He has a lot of names. But he was good to me.”

  The Skeleton held her closer.

  “I’m thirteen years old, but… I think… because I’m so badass… I’ll be fourteen now.”

  “You’ve earned it,” the Skeleton said.

  Snow blew into R’lyeh’s eyes, and the world was rendered crystalline.

  “What… what do I do?” R’lyeh closed her eyes.

  “Let go,” the Skeleton said.

  “Will you come see me in the Membrane?”

  “Don’t fight and end up there. Go to the Abyss. Everyone’s waiting.”

  “Okay,” R’lyeh said.

  As she settled into his bones, R’lyeh heard the sound of beating wings. Thinking it was Vrana, she opened her eyes and saw that there was a giant bat flying above them, weeping its blood everywhere it went into the accumulating snow.

  “What’s Camazotz… doing here?” she asked.

  The Skeleton took out a large fang from his cloak and held it out in front of R’lyeh. “She’s our ride. Are you ready to go out in style?”

  “Always.”

  R’lyeh closed her eyes. She could feel the humungous bat drawing closer, the power of its wings parting the wintry air, dusting the snow from the ground. The Skeleton shifted R’lyeh’s deadening weight, and she could tell this by the pain he was inflicting on her as he was moving her to his arms.

  In her final moments, R’lyeh saw Geharra’s pit. It wasn’t filled with bodies, but stars. She didn’t recognize most of them, but there were a few that shone brighter than the others. Their light was a warm light, distant as it may have been. For the first time in a long time, R’lyeh stopped running. She went to the pit in her mind and met the past it harbored. She peered into its depths and let it have her. It was always hers, and she was always its. Of all the poisons she’d taken, the past was the only one that really mattered.

  Something thundered in R’lyeh’s ears. It sounded like the world was shattering in two. But she didn’t care. She kept focusing on the sound of Camazotz’s wings and telling herself they were Vrana’s. She couldn’t wait to see her again.

  CHAPTER XXVII

  Gisela had taken it upon herself to redecorate the spellweavers’ lair. Their disk-shaped home inside Kistvaen had once been a plate upon which the gaudy niceties of the Old World had been served. It was a place, the things and the people imprisoned within it, that had been entirely fabricated by the elders of Caldera. It must’ve bothered them to have the spellweavers call their home a lair, because clearly, the elders had meant to make for them a museum, instead. The couches and embroidered chairs; the intricately weaved rugs that covered the floor; the curtains that cordoned off sections of the lair with the ancient Roman, Greek, Japanese, and Indian images displayed across them; the desks and the dressers; the grandfather clocks and the newly installed chimes; the grand chandelier, hanging from the high ceiling, weeping candlewax like tears on the shackled below—all of it Aeson had assumed was a desperate attempt by the elders to misdirect themselves, the spellweavers, and others into thinking that what they were doing here was okay, comfortable.

  But Gisela had torn everything apart, piece by piece, and covered it in the skin and bone, blood and gore of Verat and Enaar. And in doing so, she had revealed the truth of the elders’ efforts: this museum wasn’t a museum but a mirage; an image of their empathy warped by the volcanic light. It had to have been hours, if not days, since Gisela had slaughtered the other spellweavers. Not only had Anguis, Faolan, and Nuctea left the remains where they remained, but they had been held up here this entire time, watching Gisela, studying her, giving her a full-run of, arguably, one of the most important and dangerous places on the continent, as if they were curious to see what she might do with it.

  Night Terrors weren’t human, so they couldn’t lay claim to such ideas as humanity, but they did have compassion, and even remorse or regret. Aeson had never known the elders to have any of these things, and watching them as they marched the soiled pentacle carved into the lair’s floor, he realized they’d never had them to begin with. They weren’t Corrupted, nor were they Night Terrors. They were something else entirely.

  Vrana had never been to this place before, but Aeson could tell it somehow must’ve confirmed her suspicions about the treatment of spellweavers. He should’ve told her; he should’ve told her a lot of things.

  Straight to the point, Vrana croaked, “What the hell is going on?”

  Nuctea hummed behind her owl skull. “Look at you.” She adjusted the headdress she wore; the heat inside the volcano was causing it to slip. “You are amazing.”

  Aeson’s eyes roamed the lair. The spherical alcoves in the outskirts had gone dark; the black fires that had once burned there burned no more.

  Faolan of the wolf was trotting through the filth that filled the pentacle’s ridges. She said, “Aeson is amazing, too. You, both, have gone so far, and have seen so much.” She shooed Gisela away as the blind, eighty-four-year-old crone came close to her. “You have what it takes to be elders.”

  Gisela scoffed and clapped her blood-caked hands together. She stripped off a piece of flesh from her shoulder and wiped her ass with it. Kistvaen rumbled, seemingly pleased with her depravity.

  “Answer her,” Aeson said, not to Faolan or Nuctea, but to Anguis, who was slithering around the center of the lair, where the spellweavers usually weaved.

  Anguis stopped. “That’s not your mask.”

  “It isn’t,” Aeson said.

  Vrana’s head tracked Gisela’s movements. Hands clawed, she was poised to strike.

  “She killed Verat and Enaar,” Anguis said.

  Gisela laughed and started fondling her breasts.

  “How?” Sweat stung Aeson’s eyes. “You keep her chained up. Did she break free?”

  Gisela shook her head.

  “We let her out,” Faolan said, shit up to her knees in the trench where the spellweavers relieved themselves.

  Vrana outstretched her wings; Pain’s encrusted blood flaked off her feathers.

  “What?” Aeson shouted. “What the hell? Why?”

  “Verat had a stroke,” Anguis said. “Without the third, keeping Kistvaen’s illusion maintained is too strenuous for the other spellweavers.”

  “Gisela has always used violence as a way to bolster her abilities,” Nuctea said. “We thought she could manage the illusion until replacements arrived if we let her have her way with Verat’s body, and Enaar’s.”

  Gisela started licking her fingers with loud, sloppy sounds.

  Vrana moved closer to Aeson, her body between his and the cannibalistic spellweaver’s.

  “It did not work,” Anguis said.

  “No fucking shit,” Vrana barked.

  “Wait… wait,” Aeson said, “but it’s not just the illusion they have to maintain. If you don’t get more spellweavers in here, the mountain is going to erupt.”

  Vran
a drew a sharp breath.

  “It will,” Anguis said.

  “It should have a very long time ago,” Nuctea added.

  Faolan tipped her wolf skull back and whispered, “We were wrong.”

  “No, wait.” Aeson took out The Blood of Before. “You can’t… What the hell’s the point?”

  The lair shook. Pieces of stone fell from the ceiling above. The grand chandelier shivered; one if its supports broke free from the stone and it went swinging sideways. It crashed into the rocks, into a million useless, pretty pieces.

  “Kistvaen’s magma has been building since the Trauma. When we found it, the crust was about to give way,” Anguis said. “We did not mean to, but with the Blue Worm’s weavings, we were able to contain the eruption. But the magma has continued to build. And now the restraints are free. What is the point, Aeson? To cover the land in lava, to blacken the skies in ash. To kill everyone and everything, and euthanize this existence for good.”

  Vrana made a clicking sound inside her beak.

  Gisela mimicked it, and laughed.

  Aeson couldn’t tell what was burning hotter, him or the volcano. “Why now?” he said. He imagined beating Anguis’ skull with The Blood of Before. “There’s no reason…”

  “There is,” Nuctea said.

  “There’s every reason,” Faolan continued. “How far did you get in that book?”

  He squeezed it and said, “To where it’s written in blood.”

  “That’s where we have all read up to,” Faolan said.

  “The rest is gibberish. Insane ramblings in a language that existed in a time without time,” Nuctea said. “To understand, you would have to go back, and be like Gisela.”

  Gisela nodded and collapsed. Her slick body made a smacking sound as she hit the stone floor. Eyes closing, she started to snore.

  “We have fought for years to maintain the balance between the natural and the supernatural, but it was the internal battle that was the more important of the two,” Anguis said. “The scales have shifted.”

  “Angheuawl…” Aeson caught his balance as the lair rumbled. “It’s Angheuawl.”

  “The Night Terrors were already something of an endangered species,” Nuctea said. “We tried with Lacuna, but how many Lacunans died in Angheuawl?”