by Scott Hale
Felix turned, muttered to the dead guard some gibberish the fools on the floor would convince themselves was a prayer, and hurried out the door.
A point had been made, and Felix felt it in his side. He thought of Hex beating Ichor in the abandoned chapel, and imagined himself upon the altar, Gemma and Justine above it, each taking turns with the whip.
CHAPTER XXIV
The ashen walls of Eldrus ran red with God’s voracity. The disconnected slabs that split the city-state from each perimeter spire were infested with vermillion veins. They poured over the walls and into the districts, rich and poor alike—a flood of crystallized faith with a slow drip of sugary salvation to satisfy the masses. Ramshackle buildings bearing counterfeit signs, like the tentacle-wreathed eye of the Disciples of the Deep, were built against the densest growths, and people were mining the veins, selling God’s blood like the drug it was. The operations were quick—they went up and down in a matter of minutes—and those that weren’t quick enough to scatter were scattered by Eldrus’ soldiers, sometimes to pieces. It was clear the church wanted the people to partake in God’s bloody communion, but only by their rules and regulations. It was about control, and also, avoiding having a city slow to a crawl because its citizens, with their vacant expressions and vermillion-stained lips, were too hopped on the Holy to do anything but mill about, lost in an endless daze of hallucinations.
Worse yet, though, were the mutated people. The walking, talking vermillion vein-human hybrids; forced to live out the rest of their lives in agonizing adoration for their God below because somehow, someone had convinced them to suck on Its seed. There were so many of them in Eldrus; it was like another species was taking over.
You’re an idiot, Edgar, Audra thought to herself, seeing all of this as the carriage sped down Eldrus’ streets. And you thought I was being ridiculous when I showed you I’d made the Crossbreed. Hypocrite.
It was hard to be mad at her brother, though. He’d accomplished what they’d initially set out to do in the dark—him, her, and Auster. Back then, before Edgar had murdered their family, the idea had been simple: control the population with the Crossbreed to make the changes needed to improve everyone else’s lives. She hated to admit it, but she was itching to see the statistics.
Lotus had stopped speaking an hour back, and Ikto had run out of spit to spit at her sometime before sunrise. Now, the two of them were sitting there, staring at nothing in particular, content—the rocking of the carriage calming in a way that called to mind a mother carrying a child. It was too sweet a comparison than what this fly-infested, sweat-drenched, and feces- and piss-stained dung heap deserved, but that’s how these things went. The Balance, as the Night Terrors were so quick to preach. On one scale, beauty, and on the other, brutality; and the equilibrium, both present in the other.
People darted out of the carriage’s way. Others stood as close as they could, pointing, slack-jawed. They knew it, which meant Lotus had made this trip many times before. She carried a reputation Audra read on the gawking faces, and it read like a sordid thriller: mild intrigue, terrified repulsion. Audra wondered what the people would do if they knew she was in here, but truthfully, she already knew the answer. They’d turn the carriage over, drag her to the nearest alley, and kill her, rape her, or some combination of the two, until Death’s wings closed around her. Everyone knew the rumors about King Edgar killing his family, but that didn’t matter anymore. He’d brought God to the world. Anything that threatened their generous ruler, including a vengeful sister, wasn’t going to sit well with the rest of the populace. And vengeful she was. She admired what he’d accomplished in the same way she would’ve admired it had they accomplished it together, but they hadn’t accomplished it together. He’d killed everyone she loved and sold her to Blodworth as a bargaining chip to what he’d done. He was the pot in which she’d plant her finest creation.
It’d been a long time since she’d last heard Deimos scream. He wasn’t dead, that much she was certain of, but she didn’t know how much of him was left. She wasn’t a prisoner. She wasn’t even shackled. But they’d given him the works. Someone had to be punished, and like Lotus had said, she was too “precious” for something like that. Nevertheless, Audra hoped he was okay. The most she could hope for was that the torture had roughed up his smoothed edges. She needed the killing machine his people were known as being. The days for diplomacy were over.
The carriage’s wheel caught in a rut. The horses neighed. A whip cracked against their hides. Once, twice: finally, with a tug that sent its crew reeling, the wheel was yanked from the hole in the street. They passed another ashen wall, one of Edgar’s suffer centers; then, turning, the road widened to a boulevard and beyond: Home.
Ghostgrave. There it was. Audra thought she was prepared to see it, but she wasn’t. Its sight swept through her, stole everything inside. Hollowed, a nagging feeling of emptiness like a cavity in a tooth, happiness and sadness welled inside her, anxiety and anger the foam that collected on the crest. Home. She didn’t approve of the things that’d happened in it since she’d last been there, but all the same, it was still the same. Headstone gray shards held together by spit and sweat and eons-old Old World grit and grime. There, the balconies. There, the towers—even Archivist Amon’s, though she’d heard he’d died. There, the royal family’s quarters, blooming outward, an architectural marvel of sculpted stone—petals fallen from a stem left upon a forgotten plot.
God, she felt drunk seeing Ghostgrave. Poetic, even. It made her regret the thick hair growing on her legs, under her arms; the menstruation collected in her undergarments, like filtered pits from a fruit. She felt like she needed to be herself, and sitting here, she wasn’t herself. She wasn’t royal in the slightest. Superficial, sure, but at least—she sighed, wiped her eyes—she could admit it.
“Almost there,” Lotus said, droning. “He’s very excited to see you.”
Ikto, taking apart his bed of webbing, said, “I’ll be watching you. Don’t even think of laying a hand on Father.”
“Have you even met him?” Audra asked.
Ikto clicked his pincers.
“Temper your expectations,” she said. “Just when you think you’ve got Edgar figured out, he’ll turn into someone else.”
Lotus said, “That’s calling the kettle black, isn’t it, Audra?”
“What’re you getting at?”
“I see a lot of myself in you, in more ways than one.” Lotus winked.
Audra ground her canines.
“I see a woman who everyone underestimates, even up until the day you’re standing on their throats. You have power. I can sense that about you. Being from the Nameless Forest, I have an eye for that sort of thing. Edgar warned me about you; said you might be quiet, timid. He said you didn’t think highly of yourself when he knew you years back. He said you were a bit of a show-off, but not in a bragging way. In that sad kind of way, like the kid who sits in the middle of the classroom who everyone knows but doesn’t really see. He said to be on guard around you, because you might try something ridiculous, but if we weather it, then everything will be alright afterwards, because that’s when we’ll be dealing with the real Audra.”
Red in the face and seething, she stared a hole through Lotus. Her gaze burned like a solar flare; it shot through the carriage and the whole of Eldrus; straight into Ghostgrave, to the throne room where an empty chair sat, the ghost of her “oh so benevolent” brother cowering behind it.
“He doesn’t know shit about me,” Audra said.
“Keep it that way,” Lotus said. “From one woman to another, keep it that way. Once they know you, they think they can own you.”
Ikto splayed his limbs, shouted, “What the hell are you getting at?!”
“Chill out,” Lotus said, indifferently. “Audra is your aunt. She means a great deal to your father. You should want the best for her.”
Drooling, Ikto mumbled, “She means nothing to me.”
“You think you m
ean anything to him?” Lotus laughed. “If you knew half the things King Edgar did to take the throne, you’ll find birthright and bloodlines mean dick to him. All those limbs, and you couldn’t be bothered to have a brain. Shame.”
Audra tried her best not to let Lotus’ words get to her, but they got to her all the same. It pissed her off that her brother would say those things, especially to this freakish whore who probably wanted him dead just as much as she did. Nobody, Felix withstanding, knew a damn thing about her. No one was going to own her. She wasn’t in this carriage as a prisoner. She was here by choice. They only caught her because she wanted to be caught.
One night, someone close to her had come into her room with a knife, and only through a change of their heart did she wake the next day. She wasn’t about to be in that position again. These were things she kept telling herself, because they were the person she had to be.
The carriage creaked as it made its ascent towards Ghostgrave. Guards shouted orders to the driver, and then orders to the guards farther along by the gates. The squeal of metal told her they were closing things behind her, sealing her in. The only way to get out was to go in.
Audra’s thoughts cleared, like two roiling clouds parting, and, where there should’ve been light, there was only the Deep. A bracing swell of screams drove itself into her mind. Her senses shut down, as if God’s words were blowing out all the candles in her brain. Deaf and blind, and unable to speak, the infinite blackness of Heaven seeped into her skull and began filling it, like a mortician would to embalm an organ in a jar, to preserve it; to see it unspoiled. But as a shadowy encephalitis set in, Audra, in indescribable agony, realized that wasn’t the case at all. The Vermillion God had assaulted her mind, and it’d refused Its advances. To own her, It had to know her, and then, unmake her.
The carriage stopped. A hand closed around her wrist. Cool air filled the compartment. Wrenched from her seat, the Will of God was ousted, and there, before her, cloaked and powdered, alone as always, even in a crowd: Edgar.
“Audra,” he said, his lower lip trembling.
She widened her eyes as if to confirm what she was seeing.
Edgar went to one knee, bowed his head to her, and said, “Forgive me, Sister.”
CHAPTER XXV
If the Ossuary was the frontier between Vrana’s world and the Deep, then the lone village of Kres was humanity’s terminus to a long, amusing history of trying to storm the gates of Heaven. It was enlightenment of a geographical kind—the thin sliver of a passage that, like a splinter, protruded from one body to be caught on another. It was a gateway whose sole purpose was to bleed Heaven dry, drop by drop, until nothing remained but the hollow husk of something holy—vindicating, in a way, of all those hucksters who’d sold knockoff afterlives just as empty as the Deep might soon be.
But to call it a village seemed a stretch, or at least it did to Vrana. Kres was twelve buildings, all the same shape and sandy color, gathered around a large lake with the shade and consistency of moss. Crops were grown inside four of the buildings, but they weren’t of any species Vrana knew. In another four buildings, which were larger on the inside than the previous ones, were animals. These she did recognize. Pigs, cows, goats, sheep, chickens, horses—all the makings of a traditional farm. And they weren’t being kept inside these buildings. They were living within them. The buildings’ floors were carpeted in grass; the walls were vistas and skies, and the ceilings, clouds and the sun. It was like being on the other side of a window, looking in rather than looking out, and yet being behind the window all the same.
The remaining four buildings that comprised Kres were for the creatures who’d created and maintained the village: the mumiya. Like mummies, the mumiya were covered from head to toe in dusty, sun-bleached wraps, with no holes left for eyes to see out of or for mouths to breathe from. Averaging at about six feet tall, and all being equally frail, the only way to distinguish one mumiya from another were the markings burned into their bindings. Vrana had assumed that those with more markings were more distinguished than those with fewer, but Neksha, who’d been the first mumiya to greet them an hour ago when they came into the village, was now telling her it meant the opposite.
“Fewer markings, the better,” Neksha said. “Less to the Abyss.”
He led her, Aeson, Elizabeth, and the Skeleton to the lake and gestured for them to have a seat on its banks. With thirty other mumiya watching (maybe less, maybe more; their numbers fluctuated, and it was too hard to tell who was who and if they’d seen them before), the gesture didn’t seem optional. One by one, baking under the bright, sunless sky, they sat.
“The bindings are our bodies. Without them, we are not.”
Elizabeth, hunched over and panting, took off her shoes and slipped her feet into the lake. The green water congealed around her feet, and she let out a euphoric moan. The splotches of heat left her skin. The sweat retreated into her brow. Her lips healed. And her blisters each popped, one after the other, but the flesh underneath was healthy.
Neksha nodded, pleased. “The bindings are those of us who have died. Each one that dies leaves their mark on them. Then, Death.”
Aeson took off his shoes, too. He’d been quiet since they’d first arrived. The resolve Vrana had seen and he’d spoken of before didn’t seem as strong in his demeanor. As he stretched out his legs and the water reached out to take his toes, she noticed he shook. His eyes—there was something in his eyes. A thought, a fixation; she couldn’t see it, but she knew it was there, because the same, like a mote of light, was often in her eyes. He was regressing.
“They go to the Abyss, like all dead things. We take their bindings. A mumiya is its bindings. When a mumiya dies, a link is forged between the bindings and its previous owners’ souls in the cold Abyss. These bindings are the only way to survive the heat of the Ossuary.” Neksha walked slowly around them, leaving trails in the bone-white sand. “The dead make life possible.”
The Skeleton hiked up his cloak and slipped his bones into the lake. His crazed eyes lingered on his chest, where the Black Hour’s heart resided, as if it were speaking to him.
“Rest,” Neksha said, crossing his arms—the loose wrappings around his wrists catching in the wind. “Take your time. We are not going anywhere.”
While Neksha bowed and began to walk away, Vrana fell back on her hands and slid her legs into the lake. The surface parted, closed around her limbs. The gelatinous water moved with soft sentience across her scaly skin and feathers. In an instant, the heat left her body, and the ache was doused in her muscles. Her body temperature fell steadily, until she was no longer doing her best impression of a boiling thermometer. At first, she thought the lake was a luna lake, but it seemed more than that. It wasn’t a pool to increase fertility, but to rejuvenate. She wondered where it came from, then decided she didn’t care.
Relaxed, at ease, she closed her eyes and convinced herself she was back on the shore outside Nora, when she’d first touched the ocean. Those had been better times. Not for everyone, but for her. She didn’t have wings then. She hadn’t been covered in feathers. Aeson was still innocent. Mom was still alive. The Red Worm’s necklace was still nothing more than a trinket she’d found on some dead corpse by the side of the road. Beneath the cliff, her feet in the sand, Lucan yelling at her to hurry it up because Deimos was getting impatient, there had still been a chance to turn back. She wouldn’t have saved R’lyeh, but she wasn’t sure she had, anyway.
God, what a fucked up thing to consider.
Mumiya went about their business around the lake, not paying these new visitors much mind. The perpetual avalanche of sand that partially obscured Kres wavered behind them in a beautiful kind of way, like the skirts of Calderan dancers on initiation night. Where the avalanche came from, Vrana couldn’t tell; it poured from a pocket in the sky. She’d thought it might’ve been a protective barrier, but they’d crossed it easily enough. It was only now, looking upwards into the eye of the cone of ground bone, tha
t she realized that, for a place as alien and desolate as the Ossuary, this was the closest anyone could get to lighting a torch or building a landmark. The mumiya meant to draw people here. But why? For what reason? To kill them? To enslave them? Somehow, given the mumiya’s indifference, she doubted it. All of this—Vrana and the others arriving, Neksha giving them a tour and telling them about their bindings—felt so routine, so rehearsed. Kres was less a village and more so a precipice, a point of no return. The staging area for all wayward travelers on their way meet the thing that claimed to be their Maker.
Vrana stopped thinking. The lake’s cooling touch, in combination with her body’s belief that she should practically be on fire given the weather, caused her reason to short-circuit. She could hurl a thousand questions at the situation, but given how badly her mind was sweating, not a single one of them was going to stick. Always planning. Always considering. Always smashing the past into the present to get some semblance of the future.
For now, Vrana’d had enough of herself. She laid on her back, wiggled closer to the lake until the waters were up to her thighs, crossed her arms over her chest, and let whatever sorcery the water possessed go to work on her.
“Fuck it, yeah?” Elizabeth said, lying on her back beside her, eyes to the sand-spewing sky.
Aeson didn’t lay down, but he did inch nearer to Vrana. “The Night Terrors have been to Kres. I read that in The Blood of Before. The elders knew it had something to do with God. I think King Edgar’s been here, too. It doesn’t seem like a well-kept secret. Were we even looking for it? Or did the village find us?”
“Found us, I reckon,” the Skeleton said. “I guess it remains to be seen if we and them mummies share similar interests.”
“Missionaries and murderers… Hard to tell the difference between the two,” Elizabeth said.
Vrana rubbed the feathers on her breasts. They came away in a molted clump. “What’s the Heart say?”
