by Scott Hale
As Elizabeth pulled away, wiping her eyes, the Skeleton said, “I’ll help you find the witch.”
Vrana shook her head without giving his offer any consideration.
“Are you sure?” The Black Hour’s growth began to throb over his bones. “That’s what I’d do.”
That’s what I would’ve done, too, she thought to herself. The old her would already be halfway to the Void by now. But she couldn’t do that to Aeson. In the end, he’d given his life to free her from Pain and Joy. One day Vrana might die, and that day might be coming soon, but she couldn’t bring herself to be put in a situation where Joy might have the satisfaction of seeing it happen. That’s what Joy wanted, wasn’t it? That’s why she let her live. To see Vrana screaming across the Void, flying blindly on the fumes of revenge.
“I’m sure,” she said. “I am.”
Neksha moved in her periphery, as if he carried a great weight on his shoulders. He was going about the edges of the Sanies, collecting the wraps of the six mumiya Joy had murdered. By the time he’d picked up the fourth bundle, he stopped and dropped every one that he held to the ground. The mummy pushed his hand against his face and began to unravel, beginning with the binding around his toes. Except, when the wraps came loose, there was nothing underneath. He was limbless, formed only by the features the bindings gave him—the skin of his kin.
“Neksha,” Elizabeth said, wiping her nose on her forearm. “Don’t.” She hurried over to him, grabbed the bindings as they came free around where a knee would be. “Please.” She held the binding, and in doing so, he held on a little longer. “Please, don’t.”
“I should have known,” Neksha said, staring at Vrana. “I could sense the Void in you.” He stopped, took his binding from Elizabeth—“But this is not your fault.”—and began wrapping it around himself, until he was whole again. “There are so few of us left now. Never have I felt so alone.”
“We all are, yeah?” Elizabeth said, smiling pathetically. “Alone.”
Neksha hung his head.
Vrana focused on Aeson’s remains; the bits of flesh and shards of bone pinned down by shredded innards. She knelt, scooped her hands under the sand beneath the gore, and carefully lifted what was left of her love to her breast. She carried him to the Sanies and then, hip deep in the lake, let him go. When the pieces of Aeson touched the surface, the emerald green water closed around them and took them under. In a desert formed by eons of death, committing him to the Sanies seemed like the only way to give him some semblance of a burial.
She waited until she was sure he was gone; and waded back to the shore.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” the Skeleton said. He tipped his skull, as if the Black Hour were speaking to him, then: “It’s your call.”
“We do what we came here to do,” she said.
Elizabeth left Neksha’s side. “Take some time, yeah? You don’t have to rush—”
“I do,” Vrana said. She wandered over to the building they’d been staying in. “Got to die to start living, right, Atticus?”
“I reckon,” he said.
“Me too.”
Vrana didn’t make it further than the doorway. In it, she propped the Red Death ax across the threshold and sat. Leaning forward, elbows to her knees, she spread her wings and covered herself with them the best she could. For a long while, she stared at nothing in particular, and then, everything.
Vrana stared at the rising dunes and the disappearing valleys, and the sands pouring from that invisible slit in the sky. In each grain that graced this desert, a death was held; captured and collected by a god who should’ve had it all and still wanted more. For as long God existed, the Ossuary would keep growing, until Heaven and Earth were choked by it, made one by it.
Vrana stared at the sky, and the twelve moons waxing and waning and shining fully —distant clocks on a celestial shelf. In the fabric of space, she noticed stitching—orange and gold threads fraying amongst the stars—and figured it was Exuviae that’d sewn itself into the scene. If so, who there manned the moons? Who kept watch on the graveyard of graveyards? If the Ossuary was the hourglass of her dreams, then what was keeping time by its sands? Not God nor Man, who were so certain in their ways. Something else, she realized, catching a glimpse of the new moon lurking behind the others, waiting for its time to come out of the shadows.
Dozing off, Vrana caught herself before she fell forward. Blinking hard to stay awake, she stared at the Skeleton, Elizabeth, and Neksha. They were alone, the last of their kind, outrunning the echoes of extinction; trying to leave their mark, though no one would find it; unsung suicides trying to give purgatory the slip. They’d come here for their own reasons—the Skeleton, to no longer be immortal; Elizabeth, to understand the Bad Woman; Neksha, to fulfill his master’s purpose—and yet here they stood, on common ground. They would all have to die to start living again.
In her last moments before total mental shutdown, Vrana’s attention drifted to the Sanies. In its waters, she saw Aeson’s reflection. He was happy, and he was whole; the way he’d been a year ago, that night before she left for Geharra, when he came into her room. He’d been so sure of himself when he kissed her lips, and so considerate when he touched her. And when he laid her down on the bed, he’d taken his time undressing her, cherishing every part of her. She remembered how much they laughed at how awkwardly serious the whole thing was, and how they laughed even harder when it ended so quickly. In those days, when she stared into his eyes, it’d always been Aeson who stared back—not their hellish history.
A hand rocked Vrana’s shoulder.
She jerked backwards, away from Elizabeth. The hazy light of dawn, like something out of a nostalgic daydream, shimmered and wavered behind her. She was wearing mumiya bindings, and had the Red Death sword.
“If we’re going to meet up with the Maggot, Neksha said we’ll have to go now,” Elizabeth said.
Vrana nodded, ran her hand up and down and the length of her beak. Then, getting up, she paused midway.
It wasn’t just Neksha and the Skeleton who stood at the center of Kres, but the entire village of mumiya—all twenty-one of them.
“Are they… seeing us off?” Vrana asked.
Neksha stepped away from his brethren. “No,” he said. “We are coming with you. All of us.”
CHAPTER XXXIV
Isla nursed her wounds alone. After Audra and Deimos’ beating, King Edgar had helped her up off the floor and offered her his own personal doctor. Bruised, bleeding, and mind so dizzied it felt as if her skull was filled with oatmeal, she’d told him no. Now, standing in front of the mirror in her room, a spread of bandages, potions, and salves at her disposal, she wished she’d said yes. This broken nose wouldn’t heal right, otherwise.
It was too easy for her to pretend like she didn’t need anyone. It was a reflex; at this point, almost instinctual. Any helping hand just looked like her uncle’s, and his never took all that long before it was smacking her across the face, or holding her down, like so many others before him. Sure, she’d managed to get what she wanted from Joy, but it’d cost her more than she could ever repay. It couldn’t be the same for Edgar. If he let her in the way she wanted him to and gave her the chance and tools to chisel from this world its social imbalance, she’d have to get it right this time. She had to be smarter. She had to be better.
A bug fluttered past Isla’s face. Dabbing Null on the cuts across her lips, she watched the moth coast about the small room before finally landing on the headboard. It was the same moth from Rime, the one with the markings that looked like skulls and eyes. The one Joy had seen and panicked.
Isla hadn’t had the opportunity to get a look at the bug. With everything that’d been going on at the time, she’d forgotten Joy’s freak-out. But now she was alone with it, and enthralled by it, and when she looked at it, she was consumed by it. Head already swimming, it started to drown. Her stomach ached, turned cold; not from where Deimos had hit her, but deeper than that ache, than
that hurt, where a vortex lined in needles churned her innards inwards. She gasped for air. She stumbled. Her right foot slid forward, her left followed. She grabbed onto the side of the mirror to resist the undertow. The floor was stone, but suddenly, in its texture, she saw stars.
The moth adjusted itself on the headboard. Its antennae wavered, as if it were signaling to her. Then there were sounds. Not from the moth, but from everywhere. Sharp sounds. Slicing sounds. Penetrating sounds that packed Isla’s ears like cotton and pricked her brain like a pincushion. She smelled metal, and freshly cut flowers; and the stench of old breaths, ones she’d known for so very long, began to lift.
Isla let go of the mirror, let the undertow take her.
Three knocks on the door.
The moth took flight, and with it went its spell.
Isla gasped. She grabbed the footboard. Struggling to speak, she coughed out, “Come!” and fell forward, planting her hands on the bed.
The door opened.
“Isla?”
It was Joseph Cleon.
She stood up, spun around, and hurried to him. She saw him go stiff, scared of what she was about to do. He winced. She hugged him.
Joseph Cleon, the Demagogue. He’d once been Mother Abbess’ rabble-rouser; the church-sanctioned shit-starter who’d cruise the streets by carriage, from sunrise to sunset, spreading rumors about the mainland. His job had been to keep the faith by keeping the fear good and fresh in all the minds of those who lived in Penance. It kept the Holy Order and its followers staunch isolationists and bolstered tribalism in the city-state. Joseph had done his job so well and so frequently that he was seldom seen as being anything but the Demagogue. No one knew anything about who he was or where he’d come from, and because he possessed no wants or needs of his own, the people of Penance came to trust him. Others on the mainland, however, saw Joseph’s dedication as a sign of weakness, and those who’d never met him or would never meet him, came to loathe him. He was an easy target, and a perfect smokescreen behind which worse men, like Alexander Blodworth, could carry out their crimes.
Isla put her hand around the back of his neck. He twitched. She’d choked him several times before, usually during sex, and generally to the point where he had passed out. She’d put him through a lot of things over the last few years. He was the guinea pig upon which she experimented, with his body and her own. She often denied him pleasure, thinking that, because he was a man, he’d had enough of it in his life and could do without it on occasions. She’d bit him, burned him, beat him; tied him up, held him under water; she’d spat on him, berated him; cut him. She made him shave her and clean her sometimes, if only to see the extent to which he’d serve her without complaint. He was the object of her derision, and also, her only listener. It was with Joseph that’d she shared her beliefs and aspirations, and her inspirations found in the teachings of Lux. When she told him to ride with her and the Winnowers’ Chapter out of Penance, he did so without question. When they took Rime and she asked him to torture and attempt to gaslight the Night Terrors there, there wasn’t a murmur of complaint or resistance.
Joseph Cleon had left his mark in history as the Demagogue, given her everything she had ever wanted, and yet she knew absolutely nothing about him. Only a few weeks ago, Isla would’ve told herself that was the point, that was why she kept him around; that he was a blank canvas she could cover in her own shit and piss, and still, by the end of it, he’d make it seem as if it were art. Today, though, bloodied and beaten, her brain constantly replaying Joy’s slaying in the Ossuary, she didn’t want that for her and him at all.
“What’s… what’s wrong?” he asked.
He was scared, mistaking her kindness for cruelty. She could feel his body flexing, his veins throbbing. Her wills and whims had always been a puzzle for him which he probably assumed he’d never solve. Now that she was unlocked, he couldn’t handle it.
Isla thought about apologizing, but she worried if she took it too fast with Joseph, he might think she’d lost her mind, and she’d lose him for good. Instead, she said, “I’m glad you’re here.”
His long, black hair—greasy as always—mingled with her own equally dark and greasy hair. His clothes, black as well, were rough against her face. She pressed her nose to the fabric. She could still smell the north in them—pine trees and smoke from a fire. She didn’t miss Rime, but she did wish for the comfort it could’ve provided, before she rode in there and uprooted it with the seed of heaven.
“Isla—” he stepped away from her, “—what do you need me to do?”
She looked past him, through the doorway. She’d thought she’d heard something in the hall, but there was nothing. She said, “Nothing. I’m just glad you’re here.”
Joseph broke eye contact. He reminded her of a child, and thinking that, she wasn’t even sure how old he was. Twenties? Thirties? She’d aged him so badly through her own efforts that it was hard to say anymore. Whatever remained of Joseph Cleon was behind decades of scar tissue, from both her and the Holy Order. It was about the only thing he and Isla could say they actually had in common.
Coming to, Joseph scrutinized her face and cried, “Who did this to you?”
“Doesn’t matter. I deserved it.”
“No. You’ve suffered so much—”
Have I?
“—Tell me—”
Maybe I should suffer.
“—and it’s my fault I wasn’t—”
That moth came for me, like it did Joy.
Joseph was fuming. His face had gone red, and he was halfway out the door, ready to track and maim, like the good dog she’d made of him.
Before he could leave, Isla grabbed his wrist. “Did you just get here?”
He looked at her hand. That was the Isla he knew, wasn’t it?
She let go.
“Yes.”
“Through the Void?”
“I don’t know. We were blindfolded.”
“Did anyone else come through with you?”
Joseph raised an eyebrow. “No, it was just me, I think. I don’t know what Joy did with the rest of the Night Terrors and Winnowers.”
She kept them all for herself. That fucking bitch. She’s going to throw them to her stupid Cult of—
Another sound. She’d heard one before, she was sure of it now, because she was hearing it again. It was sharp and slicing, not like it’d been with the moth. Farther down the hall, she heard a commotion. And laughter. Joy’s laughing.
Out of nowhere, a flesh fiend bounded down the hall, directly for Isla’s room. The child horror was a red blur, slinging coats of blood all over the walls as it ran. In its mouth, it held a hunk of hair that was attached to a severed head that was missing an eye, a jaw, and both ears. The child fiend’s forehead had been branded with the double-headed stick figure symbol that represented the Cult of the Worm.
Joseph ran for the door. Right when he was about to close it, Joy entered the hall.
“Oh, my little angel,” she said. “Get back here.”
The child flesh fiend immediately skidded to a stop. The stolen flesh on its legs and feet sloughed off onto the floor. “S… S… orry.” It turned, panting hungrily at Isla and Joseph, and hurried to Joy.
“Boys will be boys, won’t they?” she said, holding out her arms.
The flesh fiend jumped into them, severed head and all, and clung onto her like a chimp.
“I told Edgar the Choir needed to stretch their legs.”
They’re here? She brought the whole Cult into Ghostgrave?
A bell dinned.
“Ah!” Joy exclaimed.
Valac, the Anointed One, strolled up to her side.
“Settle in, Sister,” Joy said. “I’ll come for you soon.” And with that, she walked with Valac off into the keep.
Isla’s eyes lingered on the still-dripping smears of blood the flesh fiend had thrown all across the hall. This wasn’t going to be any different than Rime. It never would be.
“Jo
seph,” she said, calling him over.
He went to her.
She grabbed his head, pressed it to hers, and said, “I need you to help me do one more thing. And I swear to God I’ll never ask you to do anything for me ever again.”
“I will always serve you—”
“No.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “No. This has to be it.”
“Okay,” he said, thoroughly unconvincing.
Isla opened her mouth. The moth from before fluttered past. It slipped through the doorway, out into the hall. When it reached the bloodstains, it exploded into dust, and from the cloud, a single flower, the Death’s Dilemma, fell to the ground, atop the pile of flesh.
“If we’re going to get anything done here, if we’re going to change the world like we said we would…” Isla steadied her breathing. “We have to kill her. We have to kill Joy.”
CHAPTER XXXV
Against the better judgment of his silent, stone Holy Children guards, Felix opened the window in his compartment of the carriage and reached out to the world. He smiled and waved at those they passed on the road. He cried prayers and sang hymns. He preached and channeled the Word of god, all the while reminding those who were watching and listening that he and the Mother Abbess were, in fact, aspects of god itself.
Finding it hard to draw people’s attention, Felix became more animated, more obnoxious. Going at it for hours like a traveling salesman, his voice was hoarse and the things he was saying started to make less and less sense. As time went on, fewer people stopped to listen, not because they were afraid of the army, Narcissus, marching through their hometowns, but because they didn’t want to hear it anymore. Red in the face, Felix’s stomach hurt, and his heart hurt, and his arms felt as if they were going to tear off, because he’d reached out, and no one and nothing had reached back.
The Holy Order of Penance wasn’t wanted or needed in the Heartland anymore, and so neither was he.
