by Scott Hale
What is she doing? Felix took a step back, and then he took a step forward, crouched, and honed in on the keyhole. Don’t be naked, don’t be naked, don’t be naked.
Justine was naked. Her dress was around her ankles, and she was leaning over the basin. She wasn’t laughing, though; not really. She was crying; the happy kind of crying; the kind that made your nose snotty and your face hot and wrinkled. And she was talking, too. Felix could hear her whispering something, but her mouth wasn’t moving. With the White Worm of the Earth being capable of inspiring righteous violence in thousands, this ventriloquist act wasn’t all that surprising. Except she wasn’t the one talking, because she wasn’t the ventriloquist.
Justine leaned forward, turned slightly. In the pale, veined skin of her right breast, a crude face had formed. It was only hollowed eyes and a crooked, hollowed mouth. There were no other features to it save for the flesh which it’d claimed; that patch was dusted, wrinkled, like it’d been there, or within, for a very long time.
“It’s done,” the face said.
Justine laugh-cried.
“You promised.”
She reared back. Squeezing her fists, the face sank back into her flesh, as if it had never been there.
Felix holy-shitted his way out of Justine’s quarters, into the hall, but not before swiping a keyring off a table. He closed the door, waited there for a moment for her to call after him. She didn’t, and he thanked god for that, though whether his thanks went to himself, her, or the beast squatting over the volcano, no one could say for sure.
He didn’t know what he had just seen, and he didn’t really want to. Ever since the battle on the Divide between Penance’s conscripted and Eldrus’ Arachne, he had been avoiding things, burying them so deep they’d only be fossils when they were finally dug back up. It only got worse when the Vermillion God woke. It reminded him of Samuel Turov; the douchebag rapist exemplar who had kidnapped him. It reminded him of how powerful he thought he was, and wasn’t at all.
Felix wandered down the hall. The stained-glass windows that lined it drenched the hall in a patchwork of colors that left him feeling more somber than spiritual. He hugged some warmth into himself under his robes. It was lonely here in Cenotaph Cathedral, in Cathedra; he saw no one, and no one came to see him. It wouldn’t be much longer, Justine had sworn to him, before Narcissus, Penance’s main army, was here, and they, the figureheads of the Holy Order, would be safe enough to emerge, greet the people, and march on Eldrus. But didn’t she see the God on their doorstep? Hundreds of miles away, yet It could pulverize them at any second. What about that? Wasn’t she afraid of that?
No, she wasn’t. She never shook, not even when God stood over the Earth, wreathed in smoke and fire, casting its writhing shadow across the world. But today? Today, she was crying, because something inside her, a part of her, had told her, “It’s done.”
What was done?
Was she going to leave him?
Whether it was with his old guards, Avery and Mackenzie, Audra, Justine, or even Commander Millicent, he was always safest, happiest when he was with someone he trusted… loved. But Avery and Mackenzie were dead, Audra was gone for good, and Commander Millicent, if she wasn’t dead, was knee-deep in the dead on some Heartland battlefield. That left Justine, and only Justine, because Justine had only allowed him to have her and her alone. And she was done? She promised to do something, and now it was over?
What did she say? They could be Speakers for the Vermillion God?
Felix glanced over his shoulder, to the White Worm of the Earth’s door. He liked her better when she wasn’t trying so hard to be human. There had been less secrets between them.
Getting angry, getting dumb with anger, Felix marched down the hall to where it let out to the private, Holy Children-manned staircase. The star-headed statues, forever posed in pain, tried to bar his path; but when he was close enough to touch them, they stood aside. There were Justine’s minions, but only to a point; no one was to ever touch the Holy Child without his consent ever again. That’d been her decree, when she’d discovered the scars on his thighs from where he’d cut himself over and over again with the contrition knife. He didn’t even have to tell her why he did it. They were Samuel Turov’s signatures; through Felix’s hand, he still signed his work.
Skipping every other step, Felix hurried down the staircase to the first floor. He was the Holy Child; the speaker for god and the most powerful and influential member of the Holy Order of Penance. He couldn’t keep burying things. He needed to control something. If Justine was going to keep secrets, then she was only going to keep so many of them. She didn’t want to tell him about the thing living inside her? Fine. She didn’t want to tell him the exact plan for what they were going to do next? Okay. But not telling him why she was keeping the Marrow Cabal not as prisoners, but guests in the dungeons beneath Cathedra? That wasn’t going to fly. Not anymore.
Beneath Cathedra was a series of tunnels that had somehow survived the Trauma. Once part of a mine shaft, and eventually taken over to smuggle escaped slaves from the nearby Carpenter Plantation, the tunnels formed a web beneath the town that let the Holy Order run its strands and spy on just about anyone, anywhere, at any time. The idea turned Felix’s stomach, but not as much as the room he had to go through to reach one of the tunnel’s entrances.
He stepped off the stairs, and entered it.
The Hall of Remembrance. He hated it. It was one long room lit solely by the light coming through the faerie silk-infused windows. On the left side, twenty marble statutes of every single Mother Abbess stood, from Priscilla to Justine. On the right side, thirty-seven identical marble statues of every single Holy Child knelt, from the unnamed first to the empty dais where Felix had once been and no longer was, because someone had smashed his to bits, leaving only his ankles and feet. He hated it because the Hall looked like a tomb with all its rough, gray stone, and it smelled like a tomb with all the cloying incense burning all around it, and felt like a tomb with the temperature far colder in here than it was outside. He hated it because, even though the Mother Abbesses all looked different and had different names, they had all been, in the end, Justine. He hated it because there were far more Holy Children than there were Abbesses, and none of them had names, though, unlike the Worm, they’d all been unique. Whatever they accomplished, none could remember, even though they were in here, in the Hall of Remembrance. He hated it, because the Children knelt, whereas the Abbesses stood. He hated it, because someone had destroyed his statue before they arrived, as if Cathedra’s sculptors had expected him to fall in line like the other children had. Is that what the world saw him as? Who commissioned the statue, anyway? And what was the new one going to look like?
Like a pouting child, Felix crossed his arms, digging his fists into pits, and crossed the room. Passing window after window, he felt Cathedra clawing at the corner of his eye. He hated Cathedra, too. Justine had said he was just moody these days because of hormones (“The terrible teenage years,” she’d said, as if she’d actually gone through it herself), but it wasn’t that. He knew what he was talking about. He spoke for their god. He knew what he was talking about.
Cathedra was a sham. Every building, and the streets, too, had been built with white stone, just like the buildings and streets in Penance. Felix had learned from the exemplars that Cathedra had almost became the seat of the Holy Order of Penance, before the Lillians were driven out of the Heartland. And, apparently, the freaks who lived here had never given up on the idea. The town was even laid out like Penance, but on a much smaller, much more condensed scale. Masses were mandatory here, and anyone that wasn’t a believer in the Holy Order was beheaded in the public square.
Cenotaph said it all, though. The cathedral in which they stayed had, on the outside, been modeled to look just like their home, Pyra. On the inside, it was completely different, and Felix figured the same could be said for all the buildings, and people, here. It was all fake, all of it; and the w
orst part of it? They got exactly what they wanted.
Cathedra was going to be the new seat of the Holy Order of Penance. Felix and Justine were going to make this superficial shell their new home.
Grumbling, Felix left the Hall of Remembrance and slipped down hallway after hallway, room after room, until he reached a metal door not unlike the one in the in the unfinished part of Pyra’s cloister. He took out the keyring he’d stolen from Justine, found the key he needed, and unlocked the door. Air, like a death rattle, wheezed from out behind the door as he pulled it open.
Darkness greeted him with the scent of sewage. He backpedaled, grabbed a candle from the nearest room (it was a cathedral; there were candles everywhere). Going back to the door, he held the candle outward. More stairs in a narrow staircase, surrounded by empty alcoves.
Felix did a double-take, but it didn’t matter. He was alone. He was always alone. There wasn’t anyone here to stop him doing something stupid. Justine should’ve thought his isolation through.
He descended the stairs slowly, turning with them as they wound through the earth. Half a minute later, his feet met smoothed dirt and grasping roots. He turned around, faced the way he’d come. There were shadows, and the earthen things casting those shadows, and that was it. No Vermillion God. For the first time since It awoke, Felix felt free from Its prying eyes.
The Deep’s below, isn’t it? He laughed to himself. The closer you are to Heaven, the farther away you are from It? He pressed on in the mining tunnel. Maybe we should just move to the Ossuary.
Felix tipped the candle, dribbling wax behind him, like breadcrumbs, just in case. Thinking he heard skittering, he stopped. His heart thundered in his chest. The skittering sounded like the Arachne did. But that couldn’t be. Sure, Justine had said there were more coming, but the Nameless Forest was hundreds of miles away.
The skittering stopped. Felix took a deep breath, held it, and exhaled. The cuts on his thighs itched. With his free hand, he reached into his cloak’s pocket and held the keyring as if it were a weapon.
“I shouldn’t be down here,” he said, his voice echoing off the walls, eerily.
A good sneaking sounded like the remedy he needed right about now, but he could only go against Justine so much before he felt sick. Again, he turned back the way he’d come. They’d gone to Gallows after the battle on the Divide, and that’s where they’d found the Marrow Cabal, having narrowly escaped Kistvaen’s eruption.
The giant mosquito—Felix couldn’t remember his name—gave the Cabal’s central members up without a fight.
Hex, Warren, James, Clementine… but no Skeleton.
“The country boy is a city boy, now,” the mosquito had said, before disappearing into the blood lake upon which Gallows had been built.
Felix didn’t know what that meant then, and he didn’t know what it meant now, but he knew how upset it made Justine to hear that. God, he had so many questions for her…
He spun back around. More noises up ahead. Stepping backwards, he pushed the candle forwards. Footsteps; bare feet on rock. There were probably guards down here watching the Marrow Cabal, but they wouldn’t be barefoot.
Something huffed in the dark. There was a wrenching sound, like a piece of raw meat being twisted apart. Then a chomp, and saliva being sucked back into a mouth. Smacking lips.
Felix went to flee when—
“Hey,” a girl called out.
—he stopped and stared into the dark beyond.
A girl, his age, emerged from the dark in a green dress with a red collar. She was pale; paler than Justine. She was holding a severed head. Not with her fingers, but with her palm. There were teeth coming out of her palm, stripping the skin and draining the blood from the skull.
“Hey, man,” she said. “Name’s Gemma.” She held out her other hand, where in the palm, another mouth gaped. “Put ‘er there, partner.”
CHAPTER IV
Audra shot up in bed, covered in sweat. Shadows exploded across the walls of her room, surprised by her sudden awakening. Calming, they moved in once more, their gaunt fingers reaching out to comfort her.
“Stop!” she hissed, leaning forward. She locked her head between her knees and squeezed them against it. Her head felt as if it were being pried open. This hadn’t been the first time, and it was worse than before.
Dark, residual images lifted from the folds of her mind. They’d be back again, she knew, like the Echoes they kept seeing from the hideaway on the outskirts of Nyxis.
“I’m okay,” she told the shadows. Their icy concern made her shiver. “I’m—”
She screamed. Searing black lights shone inside her skull. Eldritch commands left cracks in her cranium. Audra gripped the sheets of her bed and cried.
Her door swung open.
“Audra!”
Deimos ran to the side of the bed, threw his arm around her and brought her in close.
“It’s God,” she said through her teeth, agonized. “It’s trying to speak to me again.”
CHAPTER V
Elizabeth reached into her bag of needles and inks, took out a soft toy a teething child might chew on, and said, handing it to Aeson, “Bite down on this.”
He laid his bare right arm across the table he and Elizabeth sat at. “I’ve been through worse.”
Elizabeth glanced at Vrana, who was standing against the wall, as if to confirm.
Vrana only stared back with her black, raven eyes. Her state alone said enough for the both of them.
“Alright.” Elizabeth tossed the chew toy back in her bag. She took out a bottle of crimson ink. “You know, Night Terrors have been good for business these last few months.”
“How many have you tattooed?” Aeson asked.
“Handful or so, yeah?” Elizabeth took out a needle, rubbed it with Cloying Bark—a kind of disinfectant. “Kind of funny. You guys ran around for years with your masks, talking crap about ‘Corrupted.’ All obsessed with us, but didn’t want to admit it. And when shit gets bad, yeah? You’re the first in line to join the club.”
As Elizabeth removed the stopper from the ink, Aeson drew his arm back and said, “What’s in it? You come highly recommended—” he pointed to her hands, “—and what happened there?”
Elizabeth made fists. “Childhood accident.”
“They look like scars,” he pressed. “Scars from someone who was a vampyre.”
“As I said, yeah? Childhood accident.”
Vrana liked this Elizabeth, but she didn’t like how little she knew about her, or that she did look familiar, or how she had waltzed into their hut in the dead of night without even paying any attention to, let alone remarking on, Vrana’s appearance. It wasn’t that she wanted everything to be about her but, with the way she looked and the stories that followed her, she kind of couldn’t help it. Either Elizabeth was an idiot, a schemer, or, given the scars on her hands, she, like Vrana and Aeson, had seen some shit.
The world moves people together, like the plates beneath its crust, her mother had told her once. And when they meet, their lives are shaken, turned upside down, as in an earthquake. Her mother had told her this the first time she blubbered out she had a crush on Aeson. She had been ten, and it was the smartest-sounding thing she’d heard in her whole life. Still was.
“What were you doing before God woke up?” Vrana asked.
Elizabeth, coyly: “What?”
“Doubt you were doing tattoos.”
Now, Elizabeth did start to have a reaction to Vrana. She scratched the back of her head, and her cheeks turned red.
“You were a vampyre,” Aeson said. “I would know.”
Vrana nodded. “He would. He knows everything about everything.”
Aeson grinned; his cheeks went red, too.
“Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I was a vampyre. You caught me.”
Sensing she was trying to play this off, Vrana kept at it. “Most humans wouldn’t help Night Terrors. I don’t blame them, but let’s be honest with ourselves. Whe
re’d you come from?”
Elizabeth’s mouth tightened.
“Where did you come from?”
Elizabeth glanced back and forth between her and Aeson. Baring her teeth, she went to get up and then, zeroing in on Vrana’s talons, thought otherwise and sat. “Damn,” she said, and exhaled loudly. “Damn it. I’d say it was good while it lasted, but it wasn’t, yeah?”
“We’re not going to kill you,” Aeson said.
We’ll see, Vrana thought.
“You, uh, ever heard of the Marrow Cabal?” she asked.
There it was. The memory on tip of her mind, like a word on the tip of a tongue. The Marrow Cabal. That’s where she knew Elizabeth from. When Pain had forced Vrana to invade Hex’s mind, to make her kill R’lyeh. It was Elizabeth who had saved R’lyeh; with a wicked punch, she knocked Hex unconscious, severing the connection between her and Vrana, and the powers of the Blue Worm that’d brought them together.
“Of course,” Aeson said.
“That’s where I came from. I’m from the Nameless Forest. I was a vampyre. And up until a few months ago, I was taking orders from an immortal skeleton. So, yeah, you don’t scare me, Big Bird.”
“It’s Vrana,” she said.
Elizabeth furrowed her brow, like she had a memory on the tip of her mind, too. Had R’lyeh told the Marrow Cabal about her?
Intrigued, Aeson leaned in closer. “You knew the Skeleton?”
In a flash, the hut went dark. A heavy clump of snow had fallen into the fireplace, snuffing the flames. The logs hissed as the snow melted. When it was gone, the fires returned, but not nearly as strong or bright as they had been before.
“I thought I did. Then he lost his damn mind, yeah?”
“What was—”
Vrana went to the table, pulled up a seat, and sat. “You knew a girl, a Night Terror, named R’lyeh.”
