by Anthony Huso
Maybe the head of the Cl’cr’Nok, hanging in the great hall, had drawn it. But would something so powerful and different from its physical cousin hold a grudge? Would it even care about murder?
Sena didn’t know. She had no answers as she stood, trapped, feeling its cold, unseen secretions envelop her like gelatin.
There was a potion in her belt. Hemofurtum, she thought dully and reached for it with exaggerated sluggishness. She had kept it close in anticipation of the formula that would help Caliph win. She had been planning to perform it . . . right now . . . or earlier. She couldn’t remember. Why hadn’t she done it earlier? Instead of wandering aimlessly through the castle halls?
She didn’t know.
She pried the potion’s cap off like a clumsy drunk and watched the crimson fluid purl upward in the air. That shouldn’t be happening, she thought dreamily.
A shadow, like a brushstroke, had appeared beside her. It hung just above the left side of the battlement in her peripheral sight, smoky and gaunt and curled. Black, with a vague wisp of white hair and within it, a hint of cimmerian eyes, burning through the cold, staring across the empty gulf between the tourelle and the thing that boiled on the wall.
“Nathan?” she asked. But the specter only watched. Sena felt like laughing, everything was so bizarre. She opened her mouth to speak, trying to gather holojoules from the weightless potion. Panic. She couldn’t breathe. The heavy invisible slime poured into her mouth. Into her nose and throat. She couldn’t speak. She struggled. She thought she heard an old man humming far away.
Sena twisted as her feet came loose from the stone. She flailed. Floating. Fighting for her life. She couldn’t hold her breath any longer, she began to choke. As the jellied air poured in, deep inside her throat, she felt something bite.
On the side of the castle, the godling-stain bubbled, a black honeycomb of flesh pouring from its hole, plasmoid, tentacular, hideously fast, a complex mollusk unfolding.
The black pseudopodia foamed toward her, silent as thrown ink, glistening with deep cribriform patterns. There was a burst of prurient pink, an outward thrust of bright color trimming those impossible lobes. The pseudopodia didn’t move in concert. They were not like the anemones from Desdae’s biology labs or any other creature with a cognizant grasp. The outpouring flesh, if it was flesh, moved like an abruption . . . like something that had exploded from a wound. Mentally, Sena screamed.
The blood potion floated in front of her like the glowing tube at Grouselich Hospital, the disgorged red contents hovered, roiled, and remained suspended. Her eyes glazed, her throat relaxed, the slime-thick air poured into her lungs. Something bit deeper, like serrated teeth, slicing into the soft tissue of her pharynx, biting, slicing, she could taste her own blood.
Those ebbing holojoules . . . waiting for her voice. She thought of Megan’s transumption hex, of the Devourer: Gr-ner Shie.
In the distance, the sound of thunder or zeppelin guns tortured the sky. Sena’s body convulsed from lack of oxygen . . . the black flesh was all around her. And she was floating, stuttering. Catapult. Zoetrope. Where was Caliph? The Thae’gn’s sweet mucus filled her sinuses with incomprehensible alien dreaming, scent-shadows of her own death. The curl of smoke that was shaped like an old man did nothing.
Snow fell. Odd. It seemed unaffected by the thick air. Her vision was blurring. Then suddenly, she was assaulted from every direction, both internally as well as all across her skin. Her jacket tore away in parallel strips. Her clothing disintegrated. She could suddenly breathe but the pain was exquisite. Black tendrils sliced gill-like slits into her skin. Those arms that looked so slippery, surprisingly powerful . . . and rough. Like coarse sandpaper grit. They snagged and tore at reality. She could see them shredding the fiber of space with every subtle movement that they made, reality turning to mist, threadbare wisps that dispersed slightly, revealing glimpses of someplace else . . . someplace hidden . . . hovering just behind. Space closed as the arms moved, re-weaving, healing, but vaguely warped . . . vaguely scarred.
She was breathing through her skin . . . or maybe she had stopped breathing altogether. Her body had been filleted, every part of her exposed, like a child’s snowflake cut from paper. She hung in tatters in the air, bones and organs twisting. A gory paper doll.
Black filaments of something like mist condensed, forming webs below her dangling guts. They braided, wound up, tugged gently at her tattered flesh. She felt the manipulation, not from without, but from within, at a cellular level, a molecular level.
Her smallest parts, the fibers of her tissue, the atoms themselves were grinding against each other, turning, realigning, tuning themselves to some new atomic pole. They snapped suddenly, locking together, fundamentally changed, perfectly attuned to this new orientation.
And Sena was back together, packed tight and sutured shut and the great black mass trimmed with vaginal pink was collapsing, withdrawing, once again becoming a void, an empty hole on the castle wall.
Sena dropped, no longer floating. The potion of blood now spun, falling as it should have done minutes ago. She had been struggling so hard to scream that now the sound ripped from her throat, filled with numbers.
“Not that one,” the curl of smoke whispered. It had not moved from its position during the entire ordeal, while the godling-stain had chined and sliced and then reinvented her anew. “Use the beacon.” It was a command not spoken in Hinter or Trade. Sena had no clear sense of individual words, only the collective meaning.
Without thinking or questioning, she obeyed. Words gushed from her mouth, a torrent of repellent sounds. Was she imagining it, or could she actually hear a ghostly stopwatch drumming through its tiny gears.
Faster!
The old thin voice sequenced like a horologe, just outside the hurricane of her concentration.
Her flesh prickled.
Faster!
Sena let the Inti’Drou glyphs sink their blackened compound forms into her eyes. She could see them even shut, behind her eyelids, played like picture lanterns across her brain. She was preparing to inject portions of their compressed multidimensional data into her argument.
Sena nearly choked on the glottal sounds that tumbled up her throat. Lightning rived the towers of Isca Castle. Snow fell. Thunder boomed as if the compression crack of the Pplarian guns had finally reached the parapets half an hour late.
She gathered the holojoules from the whirling blood before it splattered across the floor.
To focus Megan’s transumption hex, she called out, sending up a beacon from the tourelle, screaming at Gr-ner Shie to see her. Forgotten were her plans of helping Caliph. She was obeying the whisper in her head.
The beacon went up, a meaningless pillar of math that bent every dimension, useless except in pinpointing her location to the thing that had been roused for the sole purpose of devouring Stonehold.
“You will save the Duchy,” the trace of smoke assured her, sibilant and dry like a leaf-rattle in the wind.
Glassy shapes spread suddenly from the direction of the zeppelin war. Delitescent palpi puffed the sky from the other side of nothing, fungal forms swelling. The stratosphere burst like fluted glass gone wild. Sena saw jelly slipping through crystal pearls, glistening worms the color of empty air.
Colors played across her face. So beautiful! Incandescent pink. Flaming, cerulean blue.
There was no doubt that the thing that had eaten Fallow Down had found her! This time it was not a random abrogation of luck. It was cognizant as it groped its legion parts in the direction of her voice.
But then, while the heavens went berserk, something happened that she had not expected. The snow hovered, retreated, fell backward, the dawn eclipsed by unseen mass. Some continental shadow spread like an infection below the maggoty celebration in the sky.
No thunder.
No sound.
Just freezing silence across miles of air.
And then the distant zeppelins buckled like red gelatinous creatu
res caught in riptide. Not just Saergaeth’s airships, but the High King’s as well. She saw them fold in on themselves and vanish from the sky. The armies on the ground, every building west of the Hold, was unmade. Even the clouds, the great storm front moving west, evaporated like a clot of steam.
Sena felt the plurality of their deaths as an impact in her chest. So many people at once! But the madness in the sky was not done yet. Its glassy writhing mass surged toward her. It homed in on her position atop the battlements, spreading east. Sena steeled herself. She felt the temperature drop suddenly and then: the godling-stain exploded a second time, thrusting from its hole like something hidden in a shell. Its untamed limbs skewered the clouds, then curled, as if gripping prey before pulling back into the void.
Sena looked down to find herself lying on the roof amid shattered chunks of ice. Her naked flesh had gone mausoleum gray.
CHAPTER 41
There was nothing anymore. Nothing on the wall. Nothing covering her skin. The curl of smoke, the whisperer, had dissolved if it had ever been there at all.
Sena looked down at herself, albescent with an oyster-colored glow. Whorls of blue flickered under her fingernails, luminescing. Her body had been extraordinized under an obscene stylus. She looked at the patterns and laughed out loud. “I see! I see!”
Zeppelins hit the city from the east. They drifted in over Monk Worm, dropped chemical bombs in Daoud’s Bend. They were from Vale Briar, ignorant of the fact that Saergaeth and his entire armada had disappeared.
The city fumed and hissed. Two war engines, left to protect Isca, erupted in sudden fire. Gargoyles exploded as gun-stones passed between tower and sky. The glowing ornate face in Maruchine’s clock tower imploded. Coped gables were blown away. Crockets fell in a heavy rain of carven stone. They broke like ice against the street. Rent pipes spewed steam in ugly patterns on avenues suddenly alive with running people.
Sena heard the Klaxons from her prone position on the other side of Isca Castle. But time had fractured. Is this the past? Is this the present? The western skies were dark. The Pplarian guns had ceased to fire. She couldn’t see a trace of battle in the clouds.
She rolled her head to the left.
On the turret roof a sprinkling of hollow metallic granules rolled sorrowfully in the wind, inches from her cheek. A bitter fume wafted from them.
There were stones missing. Great blocks displaced like knocked-out teeth.
Something had coddled her in that brilliant terrible light. Something had stroked her like a tongue, beautiful and languorous and left her in this state of dread.
Sena tried to move but could only fumble. Her vision was skewed in new indefinite ways. She could see magnetic bands across the sky. The city’s architecture looked slippery and unreal.
Her head throbbed.
In the west, nothing stirred. She looked between the battlements, past a star, through a distant galaxy and into someplace lightless and deep.
The explosion tore her eyes back, up, or down . . . completely disoriented. An orange blossom. A pinwheel. A zeppelin on fire. She watched the Byun-Ghala tip into Isca Castle. Metal screamed against stone.
Sena spun. Her limbs were weak like molten candy. Her eyes refused to blink. She was looking at the accident. The airship crunching like an accordion against the castle cliffs. She was looking at the sun.
Time stutterd.
Snow or ash dwindled beyond the windows.
People stirred. Men in red coats. Cycles of light and dark. Sena’s eyelids fluttered open just in time to catch a dark shadow flicking over the room as a sheet of melting snow fell past the glass. She heard whispers.
“The High King is dead.”
The story came to her in pieces. His airship had left the battle, racing back to Isca in an effort save his life. The details were still foggy. A hawk had brought a note stating that Caliph had needed transfusions and surgery. Stat. The Byun-Ghala had escaped granulation, only to be hit by Saergaeth’s smaller front coming from the east. That offensive had stopped quickly when it was realized that Saergaeth himself had been vaporized with the rest of his fleet. But it was too late. By the time they surrendered, the Byun-Ghala had already been hit, crippled, crushed against the castle.
Sena sat up in Caliph’s bed. A doctor in a red coat looked at her from across the room with a terrified expression. She saw the Herald on a nearby stand, read the headlines in the largest, boldest typeface available to the press. Three words covered the entire page.
HIGH KING SLAIN! And below it: BRT VANISHED LIKE FALLOW DOWN! Perhaps people will start calling the town “Burnt” even though it doesn’t rhyme, like they call Fallow Down, “Fallen Down,” like Stonehavians have always used humor to deal with crippling loss.
What? How could she think about that! How could she be distracted from the headlines proclaiming Caliph’s death? There was a low ringing like tinnitus: musicians in the grand hall, she realized, playing subtle fugues. Why was the doctor staring at her so strangely?
Sena looked through the walls of the bedroom to where the High King’s body lay surrounded by several thousand candles that melted the grand hall into a dignified but ritualistic-looking cave. Around him, tapestries hung like chthonic draperies and flowstone.
Gadriel entered the bedroom. His eyes were red and frightened, devoid of their usual brightness. He nodded to her, almost shaking, and placed several embossed envelopes on a tortoiseshell table before stepping backward, shrinking, almost creeping away.
“Condolences are pouring in,” he whispered.
Am I . . . gods, what’s happening?
“Gadriel?”
His answer to her question was tense and fearful. “You are the queen. The Council, what is left of it, called a meeting . . . last night. With the exception of General Yrisl, all of our ranking officers are . . .” He stopped.
Obviously there were too many details to explain. Too much horror behind the reason. “You are queen of Stonehold, my . . . lady. According to the vote.”
Impossible! They would never . . .
Gadriel and the physician left the room, not waiting for her reply.
Sena got up. A whisper etched the air inside her left ear. Nothing intelligible. The gas lamps had been put out until shipments of metholinate could be resumed. There were candles all around. She took a bath, got dressed and sat down in front of her vanity. She stared into her eyes where the black islands of her pupils had been buried under a brilliant flood and then, slowly, took notice of her skin. There were markings, shimmering and pale, nearly invisible. Distinctly, from far away, she could hear an old man’s voice . . . humming.
“Ha! Clever Pun. And so like tattoos they now seem to me!” His voice sounded whimsical.
She echoed it. Whispered it to herself. “The Last Page.”
The memory was hard to grasp, sleek and slithery, the instant that the sky had gone wild, but pieces of what had happened were falling into place. The gill-like slits . . . her body opening like a flower . . .
These tattoos must be the scars! But they’re so . . . beautiful!
Head to toe, they covered her. Fully healed into elegant designs. What had the Thae’gn been trying to do? Strike that! What did it do . . . to me?
Something was wrong.
She had just realized that she wasn’t breathing. She was sitting at the mirror, thinking . . . not breathing. Frightened, she drew air in through her nose. She could feel it pull down into her throat, cool, crisp, she could feel it filling her lungs, a pleasant chilly expansion. Relieved, she noticed that she could smell. She could smell so acutely that it reminded her of when she had been a child. The faint dampness of the wood at the windowsill. The pleasant waft of her perfume bottles and lipstick tubes. And then she realized that she wasn’t breathing again.
She inhaled. Exhaled. Inhaled. Exhaled. Everything worked. She stopped. Seconds passed. No panic. She flipped open her watch. A minute passed. Nothing. Five minutes passed without a breath. She didn’t need to breath
e.
She remembered the terrified expression on the doctor’s face, the way Gadriel had seemed frightened of her. What’s happened to me?
She checked her pulse.
Nothing.
She felt under her chin, cupped her hand under her left breast. Nothing. She felt herself. She was warm, except for the tattoos. Fear rising, she took a hat pin from her vanity and stabbed her finger.
It didn’t bleed. It didn’t even hurt.
She rubbed her fingers together. They weren’t numb. She could feel the brush of one against the other. She found her kyru and sliced into her palm.
For a moment, the flesh parted, but she had the distinct impression that it had done so only because she had desired it to happen. There wasn’t any blood. Shocked, she sliced again, deeper. The skin parted without pain, showing perfect pink muscle tissue all the way to the bone. The skin fell back together without so much as a mark. Not a trace. Perfectly whole.
And she wasn’t breathing.
She examined her tattoo-scars in the mirror, the way they carved her up with screaming lovely poems. She recognized the designs from the Csrym T. Inti’Drou glyphs. The Thae’gn had written on her.
Slowly it began sinking in that the entity hadn’t actually attacked her. Even when her intestines had been dangling in the wind and her skin had been flayed open like a tattered kite, it had never attacked her. It had done something on its own, outside her small sphere of logic, like a lab technician re-engineering some small speck of life in order to study it. And then, They had used her.
It felt mysterious and sinister but mostly it felt invasive. What did They do to me?
But, in the same self-exploratory moment, Sena felt like she could already answer that question.
Caliph’s ships had held the brunt of Saergaeth’s armies at bay, gathering them, holding them in one place where Gr-ner Shie’s mindless gluttony could stop dead the entirety of the war. In that respect, Caliph’s plan had been a success. Precisely timed, the Abomination from outside reality had transmogrified her, even her vocal cords, giving her the ability to pronounce the glyphs.
