by Scott Hale
The Skeleton had his hands around a mumiya’s neck. Black moss flexing like tendons and muscles across his bones, he ripped the creature’s head off. A tuft of fur and a gout of black blood shot from the wound. Rather than fall to ribbons, the mumiya’s decapitated corpse hit the clay with a hearty thump.
“Get beside me,” the Skeleton said.
Vrana spun around as she hurried to him. Pockets of fighting clashed around her. In and out of the dark, with weapons that could’ve been the jawbone of some great abomination, mumiya struck—bedlam Bedouin showing no quarter to these tired interlopers. One at a time and alone, they came. They hacked at Neksha’s people, drove them to their knees. They took spears to the side, and sometimes took them with them back into the night, disarming through disfigurement.
Elizabeth, supported by Neksha’s shoulder, limped towards Vrana and the Skeleton. His people closed the gaps behind them.
“What the hell is going on?” Vrana shouted.
“It is the viracocha,” Neksha said.
Elizabeth freed herself of him and hobbled up to Vrana. She checked Elizbeth over, but she wasn’t wounded; just beyond winded; tornaoed; hurricaned.
“Viracocha? What’re you talking about?” She drew her ax as the mumiya drew closer. It was impossible to tell who their ally was anymore. “That’s your people!”
Offended, Neksha stopped and scoffed. “They are nothing like us!”
Vrana couldn’t believe what she was hearing. But she didn’t need to, because everyone else around her, the Skeleton and Elizabeth included, clearly did.
And then, when the circle of mumiya was closed, the others she’d seen doing hit-and-runs from the dark slinked back into the dark, and it was over.
Six more had died. Ten mumiya, Neksha withstanding, remained. Sopdu had been killed. Sobek perished to his wounds by sunrise. No one slept that night, but no one could recall what’d happened after the attack, either.
The third day could’ve been the fourth. Trained by Sopdu in what’d become his final hours, Vrana became the person to which Neksha looked to track the Maggot. The other mumiya were aware of the methods, but they’d become more resistant, insubordinate.
“Why… did you make them… leave Kres?” Vrana asked Neksha, struggling to breathe.
The nearer they came to the rock fortress where the Maggot was supposed to be, the thinner the air became and the more punishing gravity was on them.
“They don’t want… to be here.”
“When the Skeleton arrived, a voice spoke to us all from within,” Neksha said. “It told us we had to follow. We could not fight it. We had to follow.”
Vrana stumbled, said, “What does—”
—The fourth day blended seamlessly into the third. They hadn’t reached the rock fortress. Two more mumiya had been killed.
Vrana had stopped eating. They were running out of meat, and she wasn’t hungry anymore. All she could think about was the Maggot tracks.
“They look like you, the viracocha,” she told Neksha.
“They are nothing like us,” he said, stiffly. “They are our Corrupted.”
Vrana laughed. “Fuck, every species does it, don’t they?”
“What?”
“Find one flaw, and suddenly, you’re better than everything else.”
Neksha kicked sand at her and said—
Light, then dark. Morning, then night. More tracks, and sandstorms. When Vrana closed her eyes, the rock fortress was in front of her, and when she opened them, it was worlds away. There was—
Four more mumiya had been slain. Neksha hadn’t been fast enough to collect their bindings. Now, they went with the wind to distant lands.
The Skeleton and Elizabeth sat next to one another, and at this point, she didn’t look all that different from him. Her bones were coming in good and—
Was it the seventh day? The eleventh day? Vrana dusted for the Maggot’s fingerprints. Her back felt as if it were going to split open. She was losing feathers at too fast a rate for her cursed body to replace them. Her bare ass was showing.
“Giving everyone a free show?” Aeson said, his image wavering on the dunes.
“Heh—” she flipped him off, “—I’ll show you a—”
The Skeleton shook Vrana awake. A sandstorm was sweeping across the horizon. Lightning played out behind the gritty veil, jumping between the grains of bone.
“Drink this,” he said.
She did a shot of sanies, passed out until he woke her back up.
“We’re going to get through this.”
“You are,” she said, her voice like two stones rubbing together.
“They heard Mr. Haemo’s voice, the mumiya.”
“What’s a Mr. Haemo?” She closed her eyes and—
She was walking through the Ossuary. She’d always been walking through the Ossuary. She’d been born here, and she would die here. The rock fortress was close enough to touch, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Instead, she crawled up beside it and groveled before the monolithic structure. Its shadow consumed her.
“Hey…” Elizabeth crawled next to her.
Vrana glanced back. Only three mumiya, Neksha withstanding, remained. The Skeleton stood half a mile out, holding the Black Hour’s heart, trying to conjure from it things to see them through the night. This would be their last night here, she knew.
“Got farther than I thought we would,” Elizabeth, no Aeson, no Elizabeth, said.
Screaming.
Ripping and tearing.
Vrana didn’t even bother opening her eyes. She’d seen it all before, heard it all before. The three mumiya were dying now. They’d be dead soon. So would she and Elizabeth and, well, not the Skeleton. He’d be fine. Poor bastard.
Vrana couldn’t move. She couldn’t piss or shit. She could barely breathe. Gravity was pushing her into the ground, flattening her out; to make her soft and pliable for the fires to come. Soon, the flames would burst from the sands and engulf her. First, they’d burn the bindings, then the feathers; and then, they’d come for her flesh. Her cursed flesh; her cannibal’s skin. It’d eat through her, liquefy her; and when it finished with her bones, the Ossuary would spit them out as ash, and she’d be nothing more than nothing at all.
To protect something… you… have to… make it… unremarkable…
Vibrations in the sands teased the tips of her talons.
That’s where… I went… wrong. Thinking I could… be.
“Vrana!” the Skeleton cried.
She ignored him. She dug her beak into the ground. A small grave for a small pile of ash. It was the least she could do.
“Move, dumbass!” Elizabeth hollered.
She shook her head, breathed out in a cloud of bone, “No.”
Growling.
Hissing.
Spittle on her ankle.
Something inside Vrana awoke. She turned over, holding the Red Death ax against her chest. She still had a little bit of fight in her.
A virachoa was running towards her, bindings unraveled on its right arm, revealing the red chitinous plate beneath.
Vrana dropped the ax, lay back down. She’d had a little bit of fight in her, but it was gone now.
She waited for Death. She’d be here soon. The two had seen each other so often in passing. She couldn’t wait to tell Her how big of bitches Her daughters were. She’d probably like that.
But Death never came. And neither did viracocha. After what might’ve been an eternity, and what itself took an eternity, Vrana sat up.
The viracocha was gone.
All of the mumiya, except Neksha, were dead.
And there, behind the Skeleton and Elizabeth, catching the sunless light in its sickly yellow girth, it was. The Maggot. Massive, regal in its repulsiveness. The size of a carriage, as wide as two. An upside-down crucifix carved into its head.
“Better late than never,” Vrana said, wincing in pain from speaking.
The Maggot’s chevron-shaped eyes shi
fted and it said, in an accented female voice, “Likewise.”
CHAPTER XXXVIII
King Edgar had a habit.
Isla had only been in Ghostgrave for two weeks, but the signs were there: the sunken eyes, the sharp cheeks; the nervous fidgeting; the late arrivals and early excuses. His fingertips were stained vermillion, and though he tried to hide it—he had the bloody gums to show for his scrubbing—his teeth were stained vermillion, too. His hands were often in his pockets, twisting the root of his addiction.
Isla had seen this before, with the Night Terrors and her own Winnowers back in Rime; and she’d heard the Heartland had begun trafficking God’s blood. Hallucinations, disassociation, psychosis, and delusions of grandeur—these were the symptoms of repeated consumption of the vermillion veins. It was too soon to tell if the effects were permanent, but she had a suspicion they were. Like the seeds of heaven, which brutally transformed those who ingested them into vermillion vein-human hybrids, it seemed as if God didn’t like what humanity had become. Some had said God had created humans in Its own image. Isla disagreed. She thought maybe It hadn’t, and, after years of being forgotten, abandoned, and fought against, It’d started to realize It should have, and now, It just might.
That wasn’t good. The world needed a change. Isla still believed that. She needed to change, too. She was trying. Lux had suggested hacking away and flaying humanity to fix it, but that wasn’t the answer. God wasn’t, either. It would have humanity become a deformed conjoined twin; a slobbering mass fixed to Its side, eager to sing Its praises in exchange for but a morsel of Its intoxicating attention.
There had to be another way. Isla couldn’t tell how far gone Edgar was, but it was clear he was up to his eyes in the vermillion stuff. If he hadn’t already changed, he would soon, and if he did, any logic he had left that’d stopped him in the past from glorifying God in the worst ways possible would go, too. If he did that, he’d have no reason to listen to Isla or Joseph, or even Audra.
And if he did that, then Joy just might get exactly what she wanted.
Isla stood outside the torture chamber hidden deep within Ghostgrave, watching through the bars in the door as Deimos tried to communicate with the fifteen shackled flesh fiends. Not far from where this sad excuse for a class was being held, on the wall, the two-headed stick figure symbol of the Cult of the Worm had been painted with entrails. It was, as far as Isla knew, the only entrance to the Void in Ghostgrave.
At first, Isla was surprised Deimos had agreed to try and educate the flesh fiends, but after having lived so many years with Uncle Augustus and his close-minded ways, Isla had, if nothing else, an acute sense for bullshittery. Deimos was up to something, which meant Audra was, too. They were playing Joy by placating her, making her feel as if she were in control and still a woman to be feared. Was it because of what’d happened in Pyra? Were Audra and Deimos making themselves necessary to avoid the messy death Joy so often swore to Isla she’d give them? Or was it something else?
Isla leaned into the sweating bars. Some places live up to their designations. Edgar’s torture chamber did that, and then some. There wasn’t a floor anymore but layer after layer of caked-on blood and gore that had all the colors and turgid consistency of a drying palette. The walls had been stone once; now, they were something else; a cross between a burlap sack and roughly shaved skin; irritated, tinged, and oiled. Even the torchlight was dirty. A foul orange color, like the rotted inside of a pumpkin, passing yet through a killing jar. The various chains and manacles, and long tables with leather straps and protruding splinters, were nothing more than set dressing, and expected. All of it was, in a way. But what frightened Isla the most was the wall towards the back that sectioned off the last third of the room. There was something behind that wall, pacing back and forth, scratching and snarling at all hours. When Joy had asked Edgar what it was, he told her she was welcome to open the tiny door built into it and find out. She never did.
The flesh fiends were getting rowdy. Most of them were children. A few weeks old, they could’ve passed for humans age five to six. Their bodies made crunching sounds when they moved, on account of the filth that’d accumulated on them. They were speaking in full sentences and were probably smarter than Isla was at five or six. The flesh fiends were highly intelligent and adaptable. Up until this point, they’d never had a reason to be.
“How… does it… go?”
Joy’s shining of example of rehabilitation, Ezra, dragged himself beside Isla. Joy had been keeping him, with many other flesh fiends, in the Void while they’d occupied Rime. Ezra, though he’d never admit it, seemed happy to be let out.
“Fine.” She stepped back. Rehabilitated or not, Ezra still wore a crown of fingerbones on his head as if it were of daisies. “Almost done for the day.”
“Mother will be… pleased.”
“Why Deimos?”
“He is… a good ex—” Ezra choked on the phlegm in his throat, “—example.”
Isla squinted at him. “You’re not?”
“I am…” He jerked his head back; went to the door. “Mother believes… in us.”
Ezra pulled a keyring out of moth-eaten pocket and unlocked the torture chamber’s door.
Deimos glanced back, relief shining in his one good eye.
“That is all for… today.” Ezra corpse-shuffled into the chamber. “Hello… lovelies.”
The flesh fiends hopped to their feet and held out their pudgy hands, webs of blood stretching between their splayed fingers.
Deimos took the keyring from Ezra. “I will lock you in.”
“There is… no place… I’d rather be.”
Deimos hurried out of the torture chamber, locked the door behind him, and was halfway down the hall before he’d even realized Isla was standing there. That was okay, though. She was used to it.
“We want in on it,” she said.
“You want in on what? And what is it?”
Isla kept her mouth shut. It was something she’d been practicing lately.
“And who is we?”
“Me and Joseph.”
Deimos glanced back, surprised, she was sure, as anyone else would be, to hear Isla was working together with someone else. “I serve Audra of Eldrus, the King’s sister. That is all.”
“And now you serve Joy, too.”
“And you do not?”
Isla’s cheek twitched out a tell.
Deimos left her like that, as Ezra started to practice discordant hymns with the future members of Joy’s Choir.
Joseph Cleon came to Isla’s room later that night. They both took off their clothes. That was as far as they got. Things were different between them now. There was too much sadness, too little attraction. They lay in bed, in the dark, naked, Joseph’s head on her stomach, his fingers knitted between hers. Even after five years, there was a first time for everything.
“How old are you?” Isla asked.
“Thirty-one.”
“I’m twenty-three.”
Joseph rubbed her knuckle. “I didn’t realize that.”
“Where’d you come from?”
“Before Penance?”
“Yeah.”
“A little town about a day’s ride south of Penance. Midian. Not far from the sea. The wind was so cold that if you stopped moving, your blood would freeze. Everyone had a way to keep busy when they weren’t at home, thawing by the fires. My way was through god, or at least what I thought was god at the time. I used to put on plays for the church throughout the town, reenacting stories and teachings from Helminth’s Way.” He stopped, tipped his head back, as if to make sure she was still listening, if her interest had been sincere. “I never stopped moving. I never stopped talking. I never did anything else but what the church asked. It was my life, and my livelihood.”
“How’d you meet the Mother Abbess?”
“It was when she had been visiting places across the peninsula, getting everyone ready for the new Holy Child. Felix was two or three, th
en. She came to Midian, saw my show, and said she was impressed with how much I knew about the Holy Order. She said people listened to me. Back then, a lot of people didn’t like the idea of getting a new Holy Child. There were a lot of questions about what happened to the other one, Eli.”
Isla shifted. “His name was Eli?”
“The Mother Abbess let it slip once, but I think so. She told me if I could convince my town in one night to follow the new Holy Child, I could come back to Penance with her and that she’d have a job for me. I did. She did, too. Yet, here… I am.” Joseph cleared his throat; she felt his neck go clammy. “Where I want to be, of course.”
“You had a good thing going.” Isla took her hands from his. “Why me?”
“You were pretty—”
Fucking men, she thought, reflexively.
“—and loud, in a good way. You wanted to shake things up. That’s what I was doing. No one likes me.”
He paused, but she wasn’t going to tell him otherwise, because he was right.
“I’m not creative. My parents said I wasn’t smart enough to be anything. They said I was wrong in the head. That’s why they gave me to the church.”
I’ve opened the flood gates.
“I still saw them around town, every day. They pretended like they didn’t know me.” He took a deep breath. “I like when people tell me what to do. I don’t know what I’d do otherwise.”
“I’ve made you do a lot of awful things with me,” Isla said, her stomach knotting.
“All for a good reason,” he said, tipping his head back to look at her. “You’re going to change the world.”
“Does it… bother you we’ve killed people?”
Quickly, he said, “No,” and shifted onto his side. “Isla, can I ask you—”
She sat up. “You should go to sleep in your own room.”
Joseph Cleon, the Demagogue, hopped to his feet, got dressed, told her cheerily, “Goodnight,” and did as he was told.
Isla woke later that night to Joy standing at the foot of the bed, staring intensely at her.
“What’s…” Isla scooted farther up the bed, pulled the blankets hard against her. “What’s… wrong?”
Joy, not showing any sign of emotion, whispered, “Just watching you sleep. Close your eyes, Sister, and do just that.”
