by Scott Hale
She shook her head, smiling. “Atlach is mine. There are still thousands of Arachne. Your Great Hunt and this war wasn’t enough to wipe them out.”
Edgar said, “Shame.”
“But with their numbers lessened, they will be more manageable. I’ll think about how to make them useful again.”
Isla chimed in: “Isn’t there a problem with the people drinking too much of God’s blood?”
“Yes, there is,” Edgar said.
“I don’t mean this in the wrong way, but the Arachne kind of look like God, in a way.”
Everyone, Felix included, looked at Audra for how to respond. Pain mounting, the sounds getting louder inside her head, she cringed and said, “Tread carefully, Taggart.”
“I’m just saying that maybe they were… or they could be… protectors of God’s veins. They could wrap Its veins in their webbing. Anyone who tried to get at them after that, their skin would melt. I don’t know.” She crossed her arms, started getting angry. “Just an idea.”
“I like it,” Lotus said.
And because she liked it, Edgar said, “So do I. Alright, then—”
Audra closed her eyes. She pushed her hands against the seat of the chair, as if to get up. Nausea overtook her. There was a light. A shaft of red, moving like someone running with a torch down a pillared corridor. Her stomach lurched. Sudden tightness tented her shoulders, as if strings had been attached to them and they were now being pulled upwards. She heard hooves, too. Distant, at first, but drawing nearer by the second, growing louder, more intense.
“—it is time, Sister, for you to commune with God.”
She stared at Edgar. He pointed to his nose, and when she touched her own, her fingers came back bloody.
“We must keep the balance, as the Night Terrors would put it,” Edgar said. “One for us, one for It.”
“I…” Audra wiped the blood on her pants. “I will make contact.” She stood, took a deep breath. “Do not interrupt me,” she said, her voice quivering. “I can handle this.”
Lotus crossed her legs, palmed her knee.
Isla kept looking around the room.
Felix might as well have been covering his face.
And Edgar, he was all teeth. “This is so exciting. Finally… Finally! The world is united. When you get everyone in the same room… It was worth it.” His face darkened. “Everything I… It was worth it.” He sniffled his nose. “Go on, Speaker, go on and speak for—”
The hooves were so loud, they could’ve been behind her.
And then they were.
The throne room door flew open. The hooves hadn’t been hooves at all, but this Holy Order’s soldier’s feet, running towards them. In his arms, he held a frail old woman, hairless and wrinkled. Her skin was pale, the heels of her hands and feet black with dirt. Her head lolled over his shoulder. One eye was open, wide and clouded over with cataracts. And her mouth, thin enough to have been painted on, was curled back, caught on the sticky surface of her gums. She was laughing.
Felix shot out of his chair, knocking it to the ground.
Isla cried, “What’s wrong?” and grabbed his hand.
Lotus rushed the soldier, screaming in his face, “What is the meaning of this?”
The soldier, panting, addressed Edgar. “I’m… I’m sorry, my Lord, but…” He looked at Felix. “Your Holiness, the Mother Abbess is gone. And…” He readjusted the old woman in his arms like a baby. “We heard crying from outside her room. This woman was inside and… I didn’t know what to do.”
Felix stammered, “I… I… Get… Get rid…”
Audra stared at the old woman.
The old woman stared back at her. “He… chose… me!”
She threw her head back and began coughing violently. The soldier tried to turn her over, but she started thrashing against him so violently, he dropped her. The old woman’s head clipped the side of the table. With a skull as soft as infant’s, the hit left a gash on her brow. A gout of blood flooded it, like water coming through topsoil. By the time she hit the floor…
Audra had, too.
She’d dropped to her knees. The pain was back, worse than before. It was all-consuming. In her final moments of sight, she saw herself in the old woman’s dead eyes.
And then God had her.
It tore her mind in half and forced Its way into her consciousness. A vermillion light swelled inside her skull. From the soil of her mind, veins grew and took hold. They threaded through her lobes and punctured her bones, until they were deep in the marrow of her spinal cord. Thoughts were consumed. Feelings swallowed. Memories were cast like bloody scraps to the baying dark.
Then came the images, millions of them; fed into her brain—fetid regurgitations from God’s perverse whims. A forest of vermillion veins, hundreds of humans dangling from their boughs by their mouths, perpetually sucking poison from those bloody teats. Mountains of meat moving across the land, their shadows long beneath the four-moon sky. A great hole in a silted wasteland, with a tower built over it, stretching from the Deep to the stars in space. Hearts. Victorian haunts. A woman and two children hiding behind her dress.
Audra screamed, because inside her, God screamed. The images gave way to just one. A woman that looked like a raven, a skeleton, and a giant maggot. Through God’s eyes, she watched them go around It, towards the wound on Its back.
HE HAS IT.
The heart of the Black Hour. She knew it without God having to tell her, because now, at last, their minds were one.
Audra stumbled to her feet, bleeding from every orifice.
STOP THEM, STOP THEM, STOP THEM.
“We…”
“Audra?” Edgar stammered.
STOP THEM, STOP THEM, STOP THEM.
A massive rumbling rocked Ghostgrave. Audra turned to the window and saw in the South, God was moving.
STOP THEM!
Audra cried, “They’re killing God! They’re killing It!” She grabbed the soldier that’d brought in Lillian. “Do something!” She ran to the window, bashed her fist against it. “Send everyone! Everything!”
STOP THEM, STOP THEM, STOP THEM!
Edgar was saying something about how he didn’t know what was going on, or what he could do. Something about how Valac… But she stopped listening.
She was in charge. She was God’s Speaker. She was God’s protector. She would be the Will and the Way. It was up to her. It had always been up to her.
Hands clawed, Audra grabbed her head and let the Deep take her over. In bringing the Shadow Bladder to the Void, she’d killed millions, maybe even billions, of shadows, but there were still some left, in the glittering ruins of God’s gulf.
“Kill them!” She ordered them to the wound the apostates had snuck in through. “Kill them all!”
CHAPTER LIII
“Something’s wrong,” Vrana said to the Skeleton and the Maggot.
Still flying up the passageway the Red Death rot had carved through God’s innards, she stopped and landed on an encrusted foothold, popping several pustules underfoot. The Skeleton hurried past her, raining chunks of muscles down as he tore up the necrotic hollow. Most of Neksha’s wrappings were gone, and it was hard to say if he kept going because of the few he still had, or if he had simply gone insane. The Maggot, however, must’ve sensed danger, too. Hooked to the intestinal wall by the barbs on its underside, it stopped near Vrana and glanced back into the darkness out of which they’d sprung.
“It knows,” the Maggot said.
Vrana shook the numbness out of her wings. “Do you see…?” The darkness had begun to move, ripple. “Did you…?”
The Maggot squeezed out its acidic secretion. The hissing fluid fell heavily through the air, like snot. When it hit the darkness, it didn’t keep going, though. It stopped, splattering on it as if it were whole. And then, the darkness screamed.
“Go!” the Maggot bellowed.
Vrana sped up the passage like an arrow, overtaking even the Skeleton. A horrible la
ughter swept up around her from the shadows surging like a flood down below. Reaching the top of the passage, where the tissue was blackened and constantly weeping fleshy ash, Vrana finally landed and spun back around.
The Skeleton was seconds behind her, drenched in pus. His skull was the only part still covered by the bindings. “They know what I did to Momma!”
“Fuck you,” Vrana said, “I’m going to let that one slide.”
When he was close enough, she threw out her hand. He grabbed it—
Fat barkeeps playing chess on the backs of blue-collar whores
—and propelled himself upwards, off the wall of decay, and landed beside her.
She shook out the Black Hour like she would if her leg had fallen asleep—cussing and cringing in equal measures—and went back to the ledge. The Maggot wasn’t far. Its lumbering girth was burning a groove into the rot, it was moving so quickly.
“Hurry the fuck up!” Vrana shouted. Like an addict, she reached for a weapon to calm her nerves, but she had nothing to get that quick fix.
The shadows were gaining on the Maggot, slowed only by themselves and their surroundings. Unable to gain purchase in the rot, or even fly, they were piling on one another, building with themselves a stygian swell that choked the tunnel from its every infected corner. The mass, eerily similar to the black mass growing on the Skeleton’s bones, was too ensnared to count how many shadows there were. But Vrana knew this cavity couldn’t have been anything less than a mile long.
Holy Child, she thought, there’s got to be thousands of them.
“Take this,” the Skeleton said behind her.
She turned, grazing his face with her beak. In his left hand, he held his right arm. Where his wrist would’ve been, it had been broken off, the end filed down, likely by his teeth, into a wicked point. The Black Hour growth was gone from it, nestled, instead, in his shoulder socket, waiting as his limb regrew. Once it did, the mass spread down it and seeped into his bones.
“Something to fight with,” he said.
She took his arm and gave it a swing. Surprisingly, it had some weight to it. “Uh, thanks” she said, doubting it’d do much damage to the shadows.
He nodded, gave his new arm a wiggle, and said, crazed, “If I tear myself apart, the Hour loses its hold.”
The Maggot threw itself over the lip of the ledge. The top and tail-end of it were torn open and squirting out copious amounts of dissolving fluid. The upside-down crucifix at the front of its head had prolapsed, and deep within those yellowish folds, a single eye peered out.
The woman named Ruth Ashcroft inside it spoke clearly when she said, “What did Michael Indomitable’s mother say? Oh, yeah, Karma’s a bad bitch.” The crucifix sucked inwards, sealed shut. “We’ll hold them off as long as we can.”
The Skeleton saluted it. “Thanks, Mags.”
“I’d hug you,” Vrana said, “but, you know.”
“Don’t think fondly of me when this is over,” the Maggot said, turning away to face the nearing shadow storm. “You wouldn’t, if you’d known what I did to get us here.”
The shadowy bloat rose before them, an amorphous breaker of wanting limbs and countless teeth, and red eyes like hot coals. There was a voice amongst them, deep within. A woman’s voice, constant and rhythmic—ritualistic. It drove them like war drums, each syllable an addition to this out-of-balance equation, rapidly multiplying this eldritch arithmetic made manifest.
The words stopped. The problem resolved with a single command. A shoal of shadows stabbed out from the contorting bulk. The black beam of God’s damned drove straight into the Maggot. The larva split open, from its head to its tail, like a Venus flytrap. In that moment, Vrana saw what was inside the Maggot—a concrete basement, miniature but not, and a woman strapped to a gurney—and then it sealed up, trapping the shoal inside. The gargantuan hell-bloat continued to pump shadows into the beam, until the Maggot, doubled in size and bleeding from its stretch marks, was about to burst.
And then it did.
The pregnant Maggot exploded outwards, drenching the gathered shadows in acid. The effect was instantaneous. Huge swathes of heretics and blasphemers were broken down, melted in bubbling pools. The bloat collapsed upon itself as the acid, still spurting outwards as if the Maggot’s entire body were a single cut artery, worked its way through it. The top caved-in, the sides gave way. Seared to the shape of a withering mushroom, the bloat’s bottom finally gave out, and like a building, it toppled, splitting apart—shadowy bodies hurled across the passage—and fell downwards, deep into the dark.
Vrana and the Skeleton ran. They ran as fast as they could. And when she couldn’t keep up with him, she flew, but that wasn’t much better. It wouldn’t be long until what was left of the shadows reformed.
The path of decay twisted and turned and spiraled upwards into God’s breast. The necrotic tissue became softer as they went, until their feet were plodding through it like mud, and they were dredging up fresh blood with every step. The way became narrow. It began to breathe—this part of the Red Death infection having run near God’s lungs. The path opened up to a wide cavity filled with putrescent lakes, where pneumatic fluids gave off toxic vapors. Head spinning, Vrana held her breath as she cleared the cavity. The Skeleton followed on all fours, moving so quickly his hands and feet barely broke the surface of the waters.
“You alright?” she asked, as they made it to the shoreline.
Sleep paralysis rapists. Sunday morning sleep-ins.
Vrana drove the heel of her palm into her head. She dropped out of the air, landed next to the Skeleton. Instead of asking her what was wrong, if she was okay, he fisted the black mass on his chest and tore out some of his ribcage.
With a gasp, he said, “It’s getting worse.”
“What can I do?”
“Remind me…”
A pet store handing out crickets for Halloween.
As the Black Mass fed inside his ribcage, to cover the newly formed bones, he dug back in and tore more out. “Tell me why we’re doing this.”
Vrana took a step back, thinking that might help with the Black Hour waves. “We’re doing this for everyone.”
“The real reason.” The Skeleton braced himself against the contracting walls—God’s literal breaths flowing against his fingertips. “Give me it straight.”
Vrana looked back the way they’d come. No shadows. Not yet. But soon.
“We’re doing it because—”
A little boy with his face in his hands, as Mom and Dad carve sister up for dinner.
“—because we have to.” The Black Hour left her dizzied. “Sorry, fuck. It’s happening a lot now, Atticus. We’re doing this because we have to. Right or wrong, it’s what comes next.”
The Skeleton gnawed the fingers off his hand. “Alright. That’ll do.”
They headed upwards again. Always upwards, in some way. The passage grew darker, the dead material much older. Ahead, towering tendons blocked their path. They climbed around them. They shook when touched. When they shook, God’s entire body trembled. To Vrana, Death was supposed to be a state, not a sensation. She couldn’t begin to imagine how badly it hurt to be touched by Death and to live on regardless.
Going over exposed bone a mile wide in width, Vrana glanced back at the Bone Man himself. He was getting worse; and because he was getting worse, he was going at himself harder. Every step he took, he was picking at himself, tearing himself. There were points where he had multiple bones growing back at once. For a second, he was missing his left leg completely. Mutilation was the only way to keep back the madness, as mad as that sounded. And, ever the scrapper, the Skeleton kept what he’d cut, chipped, and cracked away close to his breast, where he’d tinker with it, secretive in a way, like the overachiever in class who always covers up their tests with their whole body. He was holding back the black mass from taking him over, true, but he was also building something.
Coming to a squelching junction, where the tender walls were
blanketed with what appeared to be billions of lice, Vrana stopped and said, “Hey, is that still working? Tearing yourself up like that?”
“It’s a time-honored coping skill,” he said, in a posh accent.
Vrana winced and let that go. The black mass was literally getting to his head. “Hey,” she started, taking them down a dark bend that’d gone septic. “That black stuff is the Black Hour, right?”
“Yeah,” he said, wrangling a hunk of his hip away from the aforementioned growth.
“It’s covered you before.”
“Yeah, but this time’s different.” The Skeleton fiddled with the pile of bones in his arms, locking things into place here, jamming things into position there. “Don’t know how. Just is.”
“You’re the new Dread Clock.”
“Seems that way.”
“What’s it like?”
The Skeleton stopped, his wild eyes peering out at her from the last of Neksha’s wrappings. “All consuming-like. I see why no one’s ever done what I’ve done before. It takes you over. Fills your head up with time and all it’s, uh, permutations. You can’t think. You can’t breathe. Can’t eat or sleep. I can feel the Black Hour in places inside me I can’t name. Maybe my soul. Maybe something more than that.” He took a fistful of black mass, ripped it away, only to have it grow right back. “It wants me bad. Used to be manageable but coming to the Deep’s done something to it, to me. It’s not scared, but it’s trying to survive.”
“By taking you over and making you walk out of here,” Vrana said.
The Skeleton hunched over, to work more things into place in his pile of self-harm. “Yeah.”
“You think Exuviae is worse than the Deep?”
“I think—” he grunted, “—there’s always something worse, and we’re just working our way down the line.”
Vrana nodded, said, “Yeah, I think you’re right. Wonder if we, those to come, will ever get to the end?”
“I expect we will, when the stars go out.” He reared up. Glistening with fresh black mass, said, “Ta-da!”
