by Scott Hale
Audra said, “Of course.”
He unfolded it, read: “Pain for Pain. I know what you are. Be useful. A new generation awaits.”
Audra stepped back into the shadows. She got as close as she dared to Deimos and asked, “What the hell’s that mean?”
“Pain for Pain.” He dropped the parchment; his fingers were dotted with blood from where he held it. “Aeson must have somehow… killed her sister, Pain. I don’t believe it.”
“He killed the witch?” Audra chewed on her nail. “How?”
“I’m not sure, but I think that is what this means.”
“Vrana got out, then?”
“It’s possible.” In a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment, Deimos cracked a smile. “That may be why the Cult activity died down. That might be why we haven’t seen Pain, only Joy.” He ran his fingers through Aeson’s hair. “You paid dearly, Aeson. And if Vrana is still alive… Oh, I know her anguish well.”
Johannes, Audra thought.
“A new generation awaits.” Deimos stared through Audra, lost in thought. “Caldera’s gone. Rime’s gone. Lacuna’s gone. Traesk and Eld have probably been raided by your brother’s Great Hunt.”
“Your people are going extinct.”
“Only what they’ve become is.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was a well-kept secret amongst the Night Terrors, but we are descendants of flesh fiends.”
Audra couldn’t but help laugh as she blurted out, “Fuck me, that makes so much sense.”
“It does, when you think about it. But the Night Terrors were very good at deceit and misdirection.”
“The new generation… Joy brought flesh fiends to Ghostgrave.”
“Yes, she did,” Deimos said, his voice shivering.
“This message was for you.”
“Yes, it was.”
“The Cult fell apart, probably because of what happened to Pain. She’s rebuilding it again.”
Audra crossed the room to her writing desk. Giddy in a sick kind of way, she swallowed her shame and ripped the rug out from underneath the desk. Beneath it were several loose, discolored stones. It was the whole reason she wanted to be back in her room tonight, and she couldn’t believe Edgar hadn’t sealed them back together. She pawed for the lantern on top of the desk and lit it.
“She thinks she can recreate the Night Terrors. A new generation of followers. An unlimited source of belief and power.” Deimos came to his feet, Aeson’s head still in his hands. “Audra, what are you doing?”
Removing stone by stone, she set them aside and piled them up, until, at last, the top of the tunnel that plummeted deep into the bowels of Ghostgrave was revealed.
“There’s a ladder here,” she said, lowering herself into the tunnel, grabbing the slickened rungs. “Down here, there’s Old World ruins. A subway. It’s where I grew the Crossbreed. It’s a good way to get around to the more hidden parts of the keep.”
Deimos searched Audra’s room until he found the large wooden box with a white lily painted on the side of it. He opened it, took the trinkets out she’d stored in there as a girl from her days of pilfering from the royals in Ghostgrave, and lowered Aeson’s head inside. Carefully, as if the box were now combustive, he laid it on Audra’s bed.
“It’s only temporary, Aeson,” he said. “I will be back.”
Audra climbed farther down the ladder, and when Deimos was on it, too, she called up to him, “I don’t know how my brother is connected to Joy, but he’s letting her stay. And there’s only one place in Ghostgrave where she’d be able to keep the flesh fiends. The dungeon.”
Returning to the Old World subway was, for Audra, like opening a long-forgotten favorite book and inhaling the past preserved in its pages. Coming off the ladder, she came into her own, and found herself leaving Deimos behind as she moved about the station, swinging her lantern this way and that, absorbing the oddities and eccentricities of what’d once been her most private and important place. God, she’d missed the old, mismatched tiles and the long stretches where the flooring had fallen away to metal supports and corroded wires; the half-standing walls checked by earthen slabs and the permanently out-of-service bathrooms; the tunnel, where the tracks were pulled apart or pulled back, stretched into abstract shapes, and the subway cars on their sides, once overgrown with Crossbreed, now simply overgrown. There was the office, too. A few more of the panes that overlooked the tunnel had been blown out. But all of her stuff was still there. The beakers and the pots and the books and the failed experiments now nothing more than powder on the tables and chairs, and the computer terminals in which she’d grown them.
Audra wandered over to the office. Her heart leapt when she noticed a few glowing bulbs still thriving in a corner covered in cobwebs. This was it. This was the place where everything had changed. This was where she, her twin, Auster, and Edgar had come together for probably the first time in their careers as one another’s siblings and decided they were going to change the world.
Her shoulders slumped when she realized the Crossbreed was truly gone. “I think I was hoping the Crossbreed would be still down here. That they’d figured out another way to make one.”
Deimos stepped up beside her. “Amon Ashcroft filled your head with stories about the mythological plants. He knew what he was doing. He took advantage of your abilities.”
“Yeah, but…” She sighed. “I went and made another one, anyway. And now the Bloodless is loose in Cathedra. More dead because I just can’t stop trying to prove myself. Thing is, I think I have. I’ve proved myself to be a heartless bitch.”
“No.”
Audra glanced at him.
“No,” he repeated, and that was all he said.
Audra wasn’t convinced, but she wasn’t going to make this about her. She gave him the lantern. She put her hands together, let her mind drift to the Deep, and called on the shadows. They poured into her mind, and when she could take no more, she pulled her hands apart and held them high. From the shadows cast by the lantern, a dark mass emerged midair. It warped itself into a disk. She touched it. It blinked twice. When the disk opened its eye for a third time, a hot, bone-white light filled the station.
“What’s that saying? Eyes are the windows into the soul?” Audra held the disk outward and led the way. “Shadows are souls. They let me see through their eyes.”
Deimos scrutinized the disk, trying to latch onto the imagery wavering inside the light. “If this is their eyes, what do they see?”
“The Ossuary,” Audra said. “Better than any torch, really. Dungeon’s this way.”
Surprisingly, the tunnel hadn’t changed, only the things that inhabited it. The piles of rubble and blankets of shattered glass were right where’d she left them, as well as the broken beer bottles, hypodermic needles, used condoms, and thousands of pieces of paper from which time had sapped all the ink. But there were more rats than she remembered; they were bigger, too. Snakes as well—coil asps by the look of them—and bats. And with the bats and the shit and piss they covered the tunnel in came the bugs. The beetles and the roaches and the centipedes, and all the other small, colorless skittering things Audra couldn’t begin to name but she hated all the same. The disk’s light sent them scurrying, but like waves, she could feel the insects reforming behind them, following them, waiting for them to fall.
Getting to the wall that checked the dungeon, Audra extinguished the disk and led Deimos by the hand to it. A few shafts of orange light cut through the gaps in the bricks. When neither of them heard screaming, wailing, or the rubbery sound of innards being wrung out like sponges, they put their eyes to the peepholes, and gasped.
On the other side of the wall, ten flesh fiends sat in a pool of their own collected filth, staring ahead at the eleventh flesh fiend standing before them. This flesh fiend was male. He was dressed in a suit which he’d bled through. He had a small chalkboard beside him, and in a shaky scrawl, he’d written the alphabet across it.
&nb
sp; “A,” he said, stabbing the chalk in his hand at the letter A.
The ten flesh fiends, in a chorus that called to mind the Cult’s choir, cried, “A.”
The teacher fiend dragged the chalk across the board. It screeched to a stop at B.
The ten flesh fiends grew anxious as they waited for him to tell them what this letter was called. They began to pick at the stolen skin sewn and stabbed with stones into their bodies. One shot up, all fists and chomping teeth, and—
“B,” one of the students mumbled through a wad of spit.
The raging fiend sat down. With the others, he said, “B.”
The teacher’s eyes rolled in the back of his head. He dragged the chalk across the board to C and—
The door swung open. Joy entered the dungeon, one hand on her heart, the other to her mouth. “Ezra.”
The teacher fiend turned towards her.
“How are they?”
“Good… They speak… They know.” Ezra pulled a piece of flesh up from underneath the collar of his shirt and chewed on it, like a bib. “They learn.”
“Excellent,” Joy said, beaming. “And our patron?”
Ezra and the others looked to where the room was split by a wall and the metal grate fixed into it. Audra could hear breathing and pacing coming from inside that dark place.
“Not happy,” Ezra said.
“He’s not as enlightened as you all.” Joy went to the students, bent over. She pinched a nose, knuckled a jaw. “Take care of him, though. He’s seen much, and in the right light and with the right education, he’ll look and sound just like his father.
“Finish your lessons, Ezra,” Joy said, wheeling around the dungeon before heading out the way she’d come. “This class will be graduating soon, and I have a new teacher lined up.”
Audra stared at Deimos.
Deimos stared at Audra.
“I know that you want to kill Edgar,” he whispered.
Do I?
“But if we kill him, she will be what’s left. I will not work for her. And if she does not murder you like she did Aeson for your meddling with the Void, then she is going to use you for everything you have; worse than anyone else ever has.”
“What’re you saying?” Audra said.
“We have to kill Joy.”
“How in the fuck are we going to do that?”
“Isla Taggart,” Deimos said. “Joy has her under her thumb. Isla does not strike me as a person who stays under any person’s thumb for long.”
“She’ll turn on her.”
“Yes.”
“But there’s only enough Shadow Bladder for one,” Audra said.
“One place,” Deimos corrected. “You can kill one, or you can kill many.”
Audra opened her mouth to speak, but a scream came ripping through instead. She stumbled away from the wall.
The class of flesh fiends heard her. She could hear them jumping to their feet, homing in on the wall.
“What is it?” Deimos cried.
Audra gripped her head.
Stop, stop, stop. The Vermillion God’s voice ate through her brain. It boomed and cracked like thunder and lightning.
Stop, stop, stop. It swept through her cerebrum—blowing out her vision, snuffing out her touch. Her legs buckled, and before she hit the ground, Deimos caught her.
Stop, stop. The words reached into her front lobe and scrambled it. She smashed herself into Deimos, cried, “Get the fuckth offz…” and collapsed on the tracks.
Stop. It’s message penetrated her temporal lobe, impaling her memories. Audra couldn’t remember where she was, what she was doing. She tried to get up, but she couldn’t figure out how to work her legs or move her arms; the sequences made no sense.
And then it was over.
Like a storm passing, God’s words went with the wind, into the rancid darkness of the subway. Audra grabbed Deimos’ pantleg, and he helped her up.
The flesh fiends behind the wall were hitting it so hard, bricks were beginning to fall out of it.
“Get out of here,” she said, drooling when she spoke.
“What happened?” he cried, hoofing it with her through the dark.
“I heard God. I didn’t mean to listen, but I actually heard It for once.”
“What did it say?”
Audra squeezed her head, as if God’s words were poison to be forced from a wound. “It said… It said ‘They are coming.’”
CHAPTER XXXVII
The cold souls of the dead were not enough to keep the desert’s heat at bay. Vrana, several pounds of feathers lighter, kept readjusting the mumiya wrappings, pulling them tighter, trying to make them stretch to the places on her backs and legs where the fabric couldn’t reach. The chill of the Abyss was in the markings, in each rune that represented the name of the mumiya who died wearing the bindings. Her bindings were nearly black from where the runes overlapped, and still it wasn’t enough. Under the Ossuary’s sunless sky, she felt as if she were drying out, losing color and form, like the trimmings cast to the corners in her mother’s garden. In this kingdom of bones, she was kidding herself if she believed she could make it out of here as anything but dust.
Grabbing the large canteen at her side, she unscrewed the lid and guzzled the Sanies water. It burned its way down her throat and set a fire in her belly. Her head throbbed, like a second heart had grown inside her skull, and now was trying to beat its way out. Her muscles were cramping so badly, she imagined them twisted up beneath her skin, like noodles around a fork. Sweat had stopped sliding off her; instead, it congealed, like a heavy afterbirth. Piss came out amber-colored; it stank and it stung, and in trying to rub out the pain with her legs, her thighs chaffed. When she smelled herself, she smelled like a newborn—hot and raw, and almost powdery. She was being undone.
If the Vermillion God was truly the Creator, then the Deep was the womb of all, which meant the Ossuary before it was the crematorium—the great oven that gave rise to life or burned it to a crisp depending upon which way you came in. The Ossuary looked the part, too. The sky had the color and consistency of hardened grease—the fatty smears of the incinerated immortalized in the atmosphere. Dunes, like shelves, shimmered on the infinite horizon; from them, bone fell like ash, constantly filling the constantly forming desert. Mirages wavered like gas streams; and in those intoxicating windows and whirlwinds, all kinds of heaven were held. In some, Vrana saw what she imagined the Deep to be—dark and expansive, a country of nightmare—and in others, the ocean. Sometimes, she saw Aeson, and other times, Death, Her bladed fingers dripping with tempting nectar.
Vrana was pretty sure she was dying. Aside from the Skeleton, who led this doomed procession across the sands, she was fairly certain the same could be said for the others, too.
There was no sign of Elizabeth beneath the mumiya wraps. She was covered from head to toe. There was a swagger in her walk, and a meanness in her breaths. Limp-wristed, she held the Red Death sword at her side, its tip drawing a line in the sand as she went. When she could spare the energy, she’d press her canteen to her mouth and let the sanies filter through the wraps that covered her lips. Neksha had warned consuming too much of it would bring on an eternal slumber, but Elizabeth was two canteens deep and still kicking. They couldn’t even drink their way out of the Ossuary.
Even the twenty-one mumiya that herded Vrana and her companions were struggling, and they’d never known anything else in their lives but this scorching purgatory. It was already hard enough for Vrana to distinguish one mumiya from the other, but now they were identical in their anguish, too. Fanned out around her, Elizabeth, and the Skeleton, the mumiya coasted across the sands in silence, black spears in hand, their gazes always fixed to the cardinal directions to which they’d been assigned by Neksha. They stared into the distance like her mother’s patients used to when going under the knife without anesthetics. Their minds were elsewhere, but Vrana couldn’t help but wonder what creatures like the mumiya distracted themselves with.
Did they think of Exuviae, the home none of them had truly known? Their friends and family that’d fallen over the ages? In their minds, were they answering the call of the Abyss, readying themselves for the cold nothingness to come? Or were they daydreaming of a world rid of God, and the corner they may have in it?
It was too easy to romanticize the mysterious and esoteric. Appearances aside, there was seldom a difference between monsters and men. The only difference was the depths of their wants and the reach of their needs.
They’re probably thinking about what they’re going to eat when this is all over. Probably wondering if Abraxas over there is checking out Makalani. She smiled; her thoughts drifted to Aeson. Probably trying to wiggle out the bindings riding up their ass. I hope they think about that stuff. Vrana’s smile wilted. Wonder what they think about us? Dumbass mainlanders trying to kill God, like everybody and their brother before them. Who’s helping who here? She squeezed her eyes shut to stem the tide of sweat pouring into them. Where the fuck is this fucking Maggot?
Thump.
Vrana dropped the Red Death ax. She’d forgotten she’d been carrying it. Turning around, bending over, she grabbed it. Standing back up was the hard part. It felt so good to stop, to let her muscles settle into the soupy dregs of adrenaline. Several feathers worked themselves free of her flesh and fled into the wind, back the way they’d come.
“You must eat, Birdy.”
Craning her neck, Vrana spotted Sekhet hurrying across the sands towards her, the large pouches on her shoulders bouncing back and forth against her sides. She was slightly smaller than most of the other mumiya, and had a single golden rune etched into the binding that ran along her forehead. According to Neksha, it marked Sekhet as a healer, but their definition of a healer varied from Vrana’s. A healer in mumiya culture was a caretaker of the body and mind, and their skills ranged from something as simple as small talk, to massages and full-on surgery. A mumiya healer was, literally, life support.
“You’re too good to me,” Vrana said. She stood and stretched her wings and yelped when her joints erupted with fiery pain. “I’m not hungry. We should save—”
