“That’s the place? The Neck of Arezura?” Ashtadukht lay prone on a knoll, peering through a tussock at a rather unremarkable hole in the ground. The most that could be said about it was that it was not a hole anyone would notice for farsangs out. And if they happened upon it, they’d probably circle it hands on hips, mutter an unimpressed “huh”, and be on their way.
She swatted at a blade of grass that’d been getting friendly with her cheek since crawling into the tussock. “That’s it?”
Waray had an egg pressed to her lips; its flaxen shell was blotched with greenish-black. She’d wrestled a quail for it earlier.
Ashtadukht turned to her. “Well?”
The half-viper parted her jaws leisurely, or perhaps measuredly. Her head shifted obliquely. She stared unblinkingly at Ashtadukht. She popped the egg in, and brought her jaws together with a crunch. She nodded. She produced another egg.
The display would have been unsettling to anyone else. Ashtadukht paid it no heed. “I thought there’d be guards posted. Shouldn’t there be a div who keeps watch?” She racked her brain. “What was the name? It’s on the tip of my—”
“Vizaresh.”
“That.” Ashtadukht knotted her brow. She rolled onto her back. The silhouette that loomed over her wouldn’t fit any human chassis. All manner of vermin swarmed over one another one moment, solidified the next, swarmed, solidified, and the cycle went on. The floating, formless div gave the vague impression of a beating heart.
Ashtadukht swallowed. “Vizaresh?”
“The Many and Only,” Vizaresh popped like splintering wood.
“Oh.”
“Where is the Litter’s Runt?”
“Uh?”
“The Colossal Failure. The One Least Slithered. We Saw Her. You Travel as One.”
Ashtadukht flicked her eyes sideways. Nothing but a patch of flattened tussock. “Those aren’t nice things to call a person,” she said. “Would you stick around after such treatment?”
“We Speak the Truth.”
“You? You speak the truth? The guardian of the gate of the Lie?”
This seemed to agitate the div; it swarmed especially vehemently. “You Stall. Where—”
Waray collided with the mass just as it shifted, issuing an unstable cackle that tap-danced on the unmusical scale. She barrelled through one end and out the other, trailing ants, frogs, snakes, and cats, and landing in a roll. She transitioned smoothly to a glissade on her rear then to her feet, where one leg swung out wide, spun her around, and came to rest gently on the hillock. Her shoddy axe—the conduit that demarcated rocky control from outright chaos—came down in time to hew a cat in half as it flew by.
Vizaresh turned on her, or it seemed to anyway; front and back were terms it had no need for. “The Litter’s Runt.”
The half-viper hissed, an even more crooked smile swept over her canted face, and she charged. Glorious abandon hot on her heels, only her white-knuckled grip on the haft kept it at bay.
When she neared, she crouched low as if prepping another leap. Vizaresh brought an arm of curiously cooperating cats and rats and fleas to bear in a pre-emptive parry. Waray did leap, but forward, propelling herself under the div and rising with a flurry of chops. Vizaresh wailed like a bagpipe.
Its bulk rushed Waray faster than she could shuffle out of harm’s way, engulfing her, then solidifying.
Ashtadukht realized it was up to her now. “Let her go,” she said with the steely conviction of a planet-reckoner. “Or so help me, I’ll call to everything in my power and there’ll be no more guardian at the gate.”
The half-viper’s head emerged from the swarm. “The Gate’s Šo-whippedBitch,” she hissed, sinking her fangs into a snake. “Floating PettingZoo!”
“You Will End The Litter’s Runt, Too.”
“Guardian ofaHolein the Ground!”
“Perhaps,” Ashtadukht replied evenly, getting to her feet. “Perhaps not.”
“The Planets Will Refuse. They Would Not Harm Me.”
“Really? Is that a risk you’re willing to take?”
The swarming quieted, and Vizaresh seemed to consider its options. Ashtadukht hoped that was the case at any rate, because it was short on facial expressions.
“Very Well,” Vizaresh said, and Waray dropped through the swarm and onto the hillock. “You May Pass.”
The half-viper grumbled and rubbed her rear. She scanned for the woodcutter’s axe, and found it just as Ashtadukht picked it up.
“Save your derring-do for later,” said the half-whore.
“Justice,” Waray complained. “Youtitteredof justice.”
“Choose your battles, Waray. Before we go any further, you must remember these divs aren’t the target of our justice, no matter how they’ve wronged you in the past.”
Ashtadukht straightened, grimacing at the prolonged complaint it drew from her back, and addressed Vizaresh. “You were ordered to let us through, weren’t you?”
Only the scrambling of vermin answered.
“Thought so.” She turned to Waray, who had crawled out of the div’s shadow and levelled a sneer on the axe, crossly flexing her fingers. “Going to be okay?”
Waray gave a hesitant, cocked nod. “Maybe.”
The half-whore inclined her head, producing an empathetic smile. “Self-control isn’t your strong suit. I know. But you’ll need it if we’re to exact justice. Take it from me; I’ve been at it for half my life.”
The half-viper tore her gaze from the axe and aimed concentrated malice at the hillock. Her eyes glazed over.
Ashtadukht expelled a sigh. She looked up to find Vizaresh had dispersed. “For the best,” she muttered, thinking the half-viper would have plenty more divs to tempt her on the following leg of the journey.
Waray stood with atypical poise. She fixed a foreign awareness on the axe. She extended her ultramarine-scaled hand and drew that acute scrutiny upward. Ashtadukht fought the urge to divert her gaze.
“Give me the šo-damned axe,” Waray barked. Ashtadukht handed it over, too taken aback to argue. The half-viper hefted it, testing its weight in her palm. She aimed an intelligent, decidedly smooth, and plaintive smile at its bit. “Justice to those responsible. Let them suffer as I have.”
Then the thousand-yard stare returned to quench that lucidity and make room for . . . something less. Ashtadukht furrowed her brow and futilely searched the half-viper’s eyes. It’d been brief, but Ashtadukht couldn’t shake the feeling that during that moment she’d glimpsed the person Waray had been centuries ago, the one extant relic of a past that could never be reclaimed.
Coming here appeared to weigh heavily on the half-viper. Her life must’ve been very different back then. Ashtadukht took a seat atop the squat hillock overlooking the Neck of Arezura, and patiently waited there for her friend’s faraway stare to subside. They’d enter together, she’d decided—rather than having Waray come to in the thick of it. That would be inconsiderate, to put it lightly.
She gnawed a bite of dried apricot and watched the gate. Ashtadukht wasn’t entirely sure what she hoped to accomplish by entering the den of the divs, but she figured she might find some refuge there—allies, even. Sure, she’d been tasked with hunting down and killing troublesome divs for all of her adult life, but her license for indiscriminate murder was only ever brought to bear when all other courses had been explored and exhausted. Plus, she had her newfound lineage.
“Šo-wily axe,” Waray grumbled, leering at it sideways. “Creepinginto my hand like that.”
Ashtadukht glanced up and offered a dried apricot. “Ready?”
Waray cocked her head away from the entrance, uneasily directing her eyes to its tenebrous cavity. Her leer hardened. “Maybe.”
“Yeah. Me either,” Ashtadukht admitted. She popped the apricot into her mouth and got to her feet, brushing the grass from her travel-worn trousers. “Let’s get on with it.”
They ambled over and hovered by the edge of the hole, which Ashtadukht peer
ed into. “I can’t see anything.”
“That’s šo-healthy. I think. Pedigreedhole breeding. Husbandry?”
“Huh?”
“Whenahole loves a hole . . .” Waray canted at the darkness, pursed her lips. “Maybe not love, but theymakeit work. For the little breach. Something about foaling. One eclipses theother—” She made a fist with one hand and grasped it with the other. “Andtheholes, you know, there’s a—” Waray wrinkled her brow because the term that swooped in did so surreptitiously and without her consent. “Singularity and the two holesbecomeone. Used to be holesall over.”
If Ashtadukht didn’t know better she would’ve mistaken Waray for a philosopher; they always had their heads in the clouds, devising pretentious and farfetched explanations where a simple answer fit perfectly well. They lived on rodomontade. “So,” she said, indicating the hole. “Do we just walk in?”
“Maybe. Neverwent in. Belched us out something fierce.”
“Right.”
Ashtadukht put one foot over the breach, sucked in a lungful of air, and took the plunge. She’d been anticipating a fall, having stepped into what looked like a chasm, but what ensued was decidedly less frightening. It was as if she stepped off a flat Earth, and its unique gravity swung her around the underbelly to deposit her on the ceiling of the ground she’d just vacated.
Her surroundings—if she had surroundings—were a piceous, slickened sort of black. The very same she’d seen draining from eggshells in the skies of the illusion Waray’s mind had inspired. Like a starling’s plumage left too long in the sun. That melted plumage did not bring to mind the stagnant deeps of subterranean tunnels or undisturbed tombs; instead, it flowed and murmured, brushed gelidly over her skin, excited goosebumps.
The div in her stirred. Sickness overcame her. The apricots came up in a hurry. The Whore’s influence swept through her; the essence of a slattern insinuated deeds both immoral and utterly disgusting. It was one thing to be told she was half div and to reason it was true; it was another entirely to feel her lineage unfold for the first time. The worst of it was where it originated. She could trace it, as if examining the heat signature of the universe, to a smear on her soul.
All this time. All this time, her illness had been incurable because she wasn’t ill at all. Gushnasp, Tirdad, her father: they’d all been supporting a woman weakened by her bloodline. What better way to infiltrate the abode of the Truth than with a seemingly harmless, fragile yet precocious little girl?
Ashtadukht wiped the bile from her mouth. She pored over her surroundings, weakly rubbing her forehead, where a dull but unremitting pain had taken root.
Her inner div having attuned to its homeland, she could now make out an unhealthy glow that dappled like spoiled yogurt over the fey, chaos-gripped terrain. There could be no doubt that this was the burrow of the Lie. Fetid formations bubbled, oozed, and transitioned between shapes that resembled objects, ideas, and emotions from the world above, but could never really get the hang of it. Ashtadukht recoiled from the penetrating glower of failed ambition as it lost form, and stepped away from the puddle that spread toward her boots.
Waray incarnated beside her, grim-faced and axe brandished. Her eyes darted from a storm that crashed into the horizon like an overturned cauldron, to a chattering venial misdeed, to an aborted amphitheatre. She bared her fangs. Ashtadukht witnessed the hand of Eshm take further hold. Waray looked bloodthirsty; she wore the unhinged, glinting expression that marked a degradation of humanity.
Ashtadukht risked placing a hand on her shoulder, and it occurred to her that she’d once been tethered much the same by her big brother. “Fight it,” she said.
Waray’s head angled abruptly. The axe swayed gently. “Easyforyou to say. Youjust want a šo-feathered duckbill.”
The half-whore’s lips sagged at the corners. She did feel uncomfortably aroused. The div in her pointed out that Waray was no doubt fierce in the sack. “I’m fighting—” She caught herself speaking silvery. “I’m fighting it.”
“Šo-tempting,” Waray hissed through gritted teeth. “Šo-tempting.”
It occurred to Ashtadukht that the half-viper’s inner div was probably describing how euphoric it’d be to wedge a cleft into her skull. That Waray would explain it as pomegranate-red. She swallowed and withdrew her hand. She then turned a circle. Farsangs of the chaotic terrain shifted alongside the oily black emptiness. It wasn’t a ceiling, or a sky, or an above; it just wasn’t. “What now?” she asked.
Waray shrugged. “I’monlya straw boss.”
Ashtadukht fingered her cuff. “Are there . . . cities?”
“No.”
“Hmm. Do divs not gather anywhere for . . .”
“Šo-implausible sexand šo-immoral dilly-dallying?”
Hardly checked desire flared in the half-whore. “Yes.”
“The city.”
Ashtadukht sighed exasperation. “You just said . . .”
“Just theone.”
“Oh. Where?”
Waray’s tilt deepened until her chin came to rest on her collar. “Aroundabouts. Maybe.”
“How about—”
Waray turned nearly compromised control her way, flourished the axe menacingly—likely without even thinking about it—and dragged her nails along her scalp. “Drugs,” she half whined, half hissed. “Needdrugs; need them now.”
“I really—” Self-preservation clamped Ashtadukht’s lips around the neck of a rejoinder. She extracted a packet from her tunic and handed it over summarily. She then watched with open envy as Waray sunk to the ground and hid her face between her knees, from which worry-free humming soon issued. Ashtadukht turned a calculating gaze on the axe. That would not do; best to refrain from crossing Waray here. Besides, disarming her would only make it more gruesome. A clean hew from an axe to tooth and nail any day. She reminded herself that she had to trust the half-viper, same as Waray had presumably trusted her not to take advantage of her while the drug ran its course. The urge certainly lingered.
At the groaning behest of her every fibre, Ashtadukht lowered herself to sit on what was, at the moment, a stump of polished vilification with a handle on one side. She pulled out the dagger with the rutting ram hilt, and played her touch over the gilded spiral of a horn, which, along with the rest of the finely-detailed head, composed the pommel. This dagger had struck down a manifestation of Ahriman. She gave it a haggard, barely perceptible smile that stopped far short of her eyes, and placed it on her lap. Next, she slipped the pack off her shoulders—tenderly, and wincing as she did—to fish out a handful of dried apricots. She figured she should probably be more circumspect with their provisions, but she was beginning to suspect neither she nor Waray actually needed them; that she only wanted food out of habit. Like a ghost going through the motions of its past life. She leaned on her knees, idly watching the squirming of what looked to be a distant cousin of the dugong emerging from the chaos, and bit into the leathery hide of an apricot.
• • • • •
Ashtadukht had no way of measuring how long she’d sat there, watching the runaway, utterly abortive generation and degeneration of her surroundings. Her stump had fallen apart before long, and she hadn’t bothered getting off her rear. Having no sense of time didn’t so much as ruffle her feathers; what really got under her skin was that she couldn’t tell time because there were no luminaries, only that starling-black abyss.
That curdled her blood. She felt powerless—she was powerless. Her only consolation was that she hadn’t yet attempted planet-reckoning. There remained a chance it would succeed, but she’d rather not hazard a blind lot until every alternative had been exhausted.
They set out an indeterminate time later, marching through the surreal, ever-changing landscape without so much as a single word exchanged. Waray led; Ashtadukht followed.
Each had her own travailing preoccupation. Ashtadukht had vomited another helping of apricots, which worsened her headache and dismal view of affairs. She actually e
njoyed apricots. There weren’t many comfort foods on the road.
She still waged an ongoing war with the whore within. When it came to elaborate and scurrilous depictions of venereal indulgence, she turned out to be very imaginative. Visions of mules, bloodletting, trees with resin oozing through creases in their bark, the wheel of a cart as it bounced down a packed-dirt thoroughfare: all of it twisted in the most ribald of ways. Ashtadukht had already decided she would only stick around long enough to search for allies. This place was no refuge. Refuges, she’d decided, did not doggedly hound you.
For her part, Waray weathered her bloodlust solidly and with the benefit of experience. Mostly solidly, anyway. Occasionally, she’d bring her axe down with a hiss like a boiling kettle to hew whatever happened to be on the side opposite Ashtadukht, and that would sate her for a time.
When the ever-changing landscape of Down Below, as Waray had fashioned it, crested the plain and wedged itself deeper and deeper into the abyss, Ashtadukht mistook it for a massif. The more they neared, the more it began to resemble an enormous termite mound, or a shoddily packed sandcastle half reclaimed by the sea. The irregular, pockmarked ridges that carved into its sallow flanks gave the impression that it’d survived many an offensive from the void, which had drafted both claw and missile in its sieges. Closer still, and Down Below revealed causeways that intersected and crawled over its bulk—indeed, many of its craters had been repurposed to that effect.
They reached the concave outcropping of its outer wall, which kept the unstable steppe at bay. There, further lending to the appearance of a termite mound, Ashtadukht discovered it was built with some sort of baked dirt.
“Huh,” she said, prodding at it with her dagger.
Waray’s axe ricocheted off the wall dangerously close to the half-whore’s ear. “Huh. Going to need šo-heavy munitions. Orsomesorry saps.”
“No,” Ashtadukht said. “I mean it’s all dirt.”
“Dirt,” Waray replied in what was chiefly the affirmative.
“And how do you go about baking it? That’s what’s got me.”
A Star-Reckoner's Lot (A Star-Reckoner's Legacy Book 1) Page 27
