by James Maxey
Brand squatted at the edge of the hole as he said, “Oh. That. I guess I did cross a line. I’m sorry. You shouldn’t take what I said too seriously. Fortune telling is mainly the art of maintaining a straight face while spouting bullshit.”
“I don’t accept your apology. Take the dragon bones and go. You came here looking for wealth. You’ve found it. You’ve no further reason to stay.”
“You came here looking for knowledge,” said Brand. “Have you learned what you needed to learn?”
Sorrow shook her head. “I believe I know less now than I did when I came here. But mapping the contours of my ignorance has its own value.”
“I’m not going to argue myself into more digging,” said Brand, standing up and stretching his back. “I’m sore as hell.” He looked around and said, “So, how do you want to divide up these bones? Are there any parts you—”
“Take them all,” she said.
“But—”
“Take them all and go!”
Brand furrowed his brow. Finally, he turned away. She could hear him moving around. Less than a minute later, he was back at the edge of the pit.
“Your kicking us out wouldn’t have something to do with our missing patient, would it?”
“Who?”
“What do you mean, who? The guy we dug up.”
“He’s missing?”
“There’s just an empty blanket where he was sleeping. You didn’t know this?”
“I haven’t left this chamber,” she said. “How could I know?”
“Climb out and let’s look for him,” said Brand. “He might be wandering around in delirium.”
“What do I care?”
“He saved your life!”
“And I saved his. He was free to leave anytime he wished. Just because we saved him doesn’t make him our property.”
Brand scratched his head. “Are you sure you’re okay? You just seem—”
“Leave!” Sorrow said, clenching her fists. “Stop wasting my time with your prattle!”
Brand grumbled something she couldn’t make out as he turned away. Time slowed to a crawl as she listened to Brand and Bigsby gathering bones around the grave. The sun grew ever higher in the sky, and she adjusted the slate tiles around her to better support the weight of her elbows as she leaned forward. She couldn’t believe how much time the two men were taking.
At last, Brand and Bigsby both returned to the edge of the pit.
“We’ve packed all we can carry,” said Brand. “Are you sure you don’t want us to stick around? It’s dangerous out here alone.”
“I believe I’ve shown myself capable of handling any threats,” said Sorrow.
“I bet she’s found a bigger treasure,” said Bigsby. “She doesn’t want to share, so she’s getting rid of us.”
“Or maybe I’m just sick of the company of a brain-damaged dwarf!” Sorrow snarled. “Get out of here, you little freak!”
Brand shook his head woefully as he and Bigsby turned away. “You weren’t exactly friendly before, but I didn’t think you were flat-out mean.”
“This just proves how bad you are at reading people,” she grumbled.
Brand and Bigsby left. She could hear their voices for a little while, growing ever more distant. She waited until they’d had time to move far beyond the graveyard. Then she waited another hour.
Sorrow knew she couldn’t sit in the hole forever. Despite her... handicap, she’d obviously had the power to make it to the top of the stairs. She just needed the courage to push on a little further and make it back to her tent. She placed her hands upon the edges of one of the stones, prepared to push it aside. She stared for a long time as her arms refused to move the slate.
Finally she set her jaw, took a deep breath, and pushed the rock away. She moved the other stones that concealed the lower half of her body one by one, studiously keeping her eyes fixed upon her hands, avoiding what lay beneath.
She stared up into the canopy, at the patches of blue she glimpsed beyond the trees. She wiped her brow, wet with sweat, perhaps from the effort of moving the stones, or perhaps due to the rising heat of the day. Or perhaps from the undertow of terror that had accelerated her heart since waking.
“I can do this,” she said, clenching her fists, gathering her courage. She swallowed hard, then looked down.
From the top ridge of her hipbones, the pants she’d worn had decayed into a fringe of tatters. Her boots had experienced a similar rapid degradation, devoured by mildew and mold until they’d fallen apart at the seams.
Some other time, the loss of control of her entropic magic would be quite worrisome. But now, she was focused on the all-but-vanished clothing because it provided a welcome distraction from a much larger and more deeply existential trouble.
The truth was, she didn’t need to worry about trousers or boots any more. She finally allowed her eyes to focus on the reason her heart was beating with a speed to rival the wings of a hummingbird.
Her legs were gone. From her hips down, she now possessed an enormous black serpent’s tail. She stared at her scales for only a moment before she had to turn her face away and stare at the walls of the pit.
“You’re already in a grave,” she said out loud. “Why waste the effort of crawling out?” She choked back tears. Never before had she contemplated suicide. She held nothing but contempt for those who threw their lives away. But did she even have a life as a human now? She was more snake than woman. If the changes continued, and she lost her arms... she shuddered at the thought.
Should the day come when she lost her arms, she’d curse herself for not ending her life when she’d had the chance. She cast about the broken ground with her hands until she found a shard of glass from the dragon’s coffin.
She placed the sharp edge against her wrist. She studied the blue veins beneath her pale skin and set her jaw.
After a moment, she threw the glass away. She wasn’t afraid of death, but she couldn’t bear the thought of her long war against the church coming to an end due to a moment of weakness. If her life had lost so much value that she found death an acceptable option, wasn’t this a liberation? She had nothing left to lose. She could throw herself into her quest to destroy the church without fearing for her own survival. Perhaps she’d been too concerned for herself, too cautious. Now this timidity no longer stood in her way.
“I’m a monster,” she whispered. She found that the words didn’t hurt. She said, in half a shout, “I’m a monster!”
The thought calmed her. She’d been a freak and an outcast since the day she’d shaved her head and driven in her first nail. Brand had perhaps been right after all. Her father was a moral monster. It had been only a matter of time before his blood pulsing through her veins drove her to the same inhuman extremes. Let the world see what she had become. If she was to be a monster, better it be in body than in soul.
“I hereby promise myself that I shall never surrender,” she said. “Let my enemies gaze upon me and know fear!” She raised her fists in defiance. She was certain she was more ready than ever to take the fight to her foes, if not for the non-trivial problem that she had no idea how to climb out of this hole. Her mind, trained in the art of placing one foot in front of the other, couldn’t quite make sense of the sensations coming from beneath her hips.
She could feel the length of her serpentine form spiraling down the stairs, and sensed the weight of her new body pressed against the edges of the stone. But how to move? She had no memory at all of crawling to the top of the stairs, but she’d obviously done so, with enough precision that only her human half had reached the surface. Her new body was obeying her will, at least on an unconscious level.
Perhaps the key was not to think of moving. Her body had responded to her fear of being seen by Brand. Now, what she wanted more than anything was something to drink. She’d not had even a sip of water since before they’d fought the bone-dragon. She imagined the canteen in her tent, fixing the image of it in her mind, hoping
her body would carry her there.
To her delight and horror, her serpent body began to undulate. Her torso was pushed into the air, until she had risen above the lip of the grave. She looked down. Her serpentine length was now fully exposed. Before, she’d stood five feet, five inches in her boots. Now, her legs had been replaced by a tree-trunk thick expanse of black coils almost twenty feet long. She was standing—if standing was the right word—on the lower ten feet of her serpent tail, which was looped into a rough circle. This left ten feet of her scaly trunk rising into the air, with her human torso balanced atop it. She was suddenly thirteen feet tall. It was oddly empowering to look upon the world from such a vantage point.
As she crawled from the grave, a large fragment of black glass caught her eye and she momentarily forgot about her thirst. She stretched out her hand toward a particularly large remnant and her body obeyed her unspoken will to lower her toward it. She picked up the glass, a good fifty-pound smoke-blackened chunk.
Glass was one of her favorite materials to manipulate. She had only to touch it and think and it would flow to whatever form she imagined, unlike iron or copper, which she had to physically sculpt. In moments, she’d coaxed the glass into a long flat plane, which she rested against a tree trunk.
She willed herself before it. The midday sun that pierced the leafy canopy was bright enough to turn the dark glass into a mirror. She stared at herself for a long time. The scales of her tail glistened as if they were wet, though when she touched them, they were dry, smooth as polished wood, slightly warm, and hard as bone. But despite the hardness, she could feel the pressure of her fingers in the muscles below. Sliding her hands around, she even found that she could feel a pulse. She wondered how her heart found the strength to push blood such a length. And where had she gained all of the new mass? While she could shape glass and wood and other materials, she couldn’t create these from thin air. Nothing new was added or subtracted from the total mass of the objects she sculpted. Why should this new nail giving her command of decay suddenly allow her to magically create matter?
She thought about Greatshadow’s words. She wasn’t creating mass. She was channeling it. Rott manifested himself as a giant black serpent. Her new body hadn’t come out of thin air. Somehow, she’d opened a gate. Her own body was now a door that the dragon was slipping through. Why? And, more urgently, would he continue to do so? Had the changes stopped?
Pressing her lips together, she untied her blouse. She shed it, and stood naked before the mirror. From her pubic mound up, she was still completely human, with no hint of scales. She turned and peered back over her shoulders. Her buttocks blended into the serpent body. The line of transformation seemed to mirror the shape of her pelvis.
Frowning, she pondered the gross yet practical matter of how she now went to the bathroom. The loss of her reproductive organs was tragic, yes, but it wasn’t as if she’d been using them. But even if she never planned on having children, she did still plan to eat and drink, and these actions had consequences.
With a sense of both revulsion and curiosity, she ran her fingers along her front. The scales of her back and side were the shape and size of the heads of garden spades, but her front scales were more like ringed bands. She explored the length of her body until, three feet from the tip of her tail, she found a gap between the bands that her fingers slipped into. She withdrew her fingers at once; the flesh within the gap was tender. She furrowed her brow. This was a very long way for food to travel. And there seemed to be only the one hole. When she returned to civilization, she would have to seek out a naturalist who could explain the intricacies of snake anatomy.
Ah, yes. Returning to civilization. That might prove to be a challenge. Even in as wild a port as Commonground, full of half-seeds and the most jaded of humanity, she couldn’t imagine she would get a warm reception. She bent down and picked up her blouse. She slithered once more toward her tent, paying little attention to her surroundings as she buttoned her clothes shut once more.
Twenty feet from the tent she stopped, looking up. She heard something.
She stared at the silk walls. Was there someone moving inside? Had Brand and Bigsby tricked her?
In answer, the tent flaps opened and two forest pygmies walked out, carrying a basket filled with dried meats and cheeses, provisions she’d packed for her expedition. The two forest pygmies had dark green skin the color of moss and were naked except for bright red gourds they wore over their penises. Their green hair was pulled back into braids. Each carried a short spear tipped with a stone point. They moved as quietly as cats, craning their necks around to make sure no one had seen them.
They both looked right at Sorrow as if she wasn’t even there. They turned their backs to her and began to walk away, then, in unison, froze and slowly looked back over their shoulders. Both of their mouths fell open at exactly the same time.
Sorrow felt like being tall and she became so, rising up on her tail until she loomed above them by several body lengths.
“Drop the basket and no one gets hurt,” she said.
They dropped the basket, though whether they understood her words was debatable. They began to shout in a language she didn’t recognize, their voices deep and booming despite their diminutive stature. Both reared back and threw their spears. Sorrow swayed out of the path of one missile, but the second spear struck her on one of the scaly bands where her knees had once been. She flinched, but the spear bounced off.
Sorrow ran her fingers along the impact point to make certain she was okay. She couldn’t even feel a scratch. In addition to being tall, she was also spear-proof. At least, parts of her were.
When she looked up, she found that the two pygmies were at least a hundred yards away, leaves and dirt flying as they fled headlong over the graves before finally vanishing in the underbrush.
Sorrow picked up the basket and removed a hunk of beef jerky. She chewed it slowly as she contemplated what would’ve happened if the spear had flown a yard higher. She suspected that, unless she could find a way to reverse the changes to her body, she would have to get used to people’s first reaction being to throw things at her.
After washing the jerky down with water from her canteen, she slithered back to the hilltop. Despite the massiveness of her new form, her motions were surprisingly silent. The whisper of her smooth scales sliding across one another was much quieter than her footsteps had been. She also took note of her speed. Though she didn’t feel like she was moving terribly fast, she made it back up the hill as swiftly as if she’d sprinted. She would have preferred not to be a hideous reptilian abomination, but she tried to take some comfort that her new body had its strong points.
Of course, while the new parts of her physical form were stronger and tougher, she was still greatly concerned about the safety of her old, non-spear-proof human parts. Fortunately, the dragon’s shattered coffin provided plentiful raw material to ameliorate her vulnerabilities. Glass had a reputation for brittleness, but during her years of working with the substance she’d learned it could be spun into long, thin, interweaving fibers that could be sealed inside a matrix of smoother glass. This woven glass was practically shatterproof, much lighter than iron, and quite tough.
She found a large piece of black glass and held it above her head. Her fingers sank into it as it liquefied, turning into slow moving black molasses that seeped down her arms and flowed over her shoulders. Inspired by the diamond pattern of her lower half, she willed the threads to form overlapping scales of black glass. In a few moments, she’d turned the glass into a suit of jet black scale armor that matched her bodily scales in gloss and shape. There was just barely enough material left to form a dark, gleaming helmet to conceal her face. Only her hands remained bare; her magical abilities required her to touch the substances she commanded.
She returned to the mirror she’d made earlier. It was almost impossible to tell where her armor ended and her scales began. With her face hidden, she looked even less human. For some rea
son, this was a relief. Before, she’d been a freak, a woman sewn onto a snake. Now, she looked like some ancient demi-god who’d crawled out of hell. Despite the underlying horror she felt, she was quietly pleased to look so formidable.
For the greatest part of her life, she’d been nearly invisible. There had been advantages of being a young woman of petite build. Concealing her shaved scalp beneath a cloak, she’d been able to walk down city streets unnoticed. Hiding in plain sight was no longer an option. Brand had laughed at her boldness; at last, she looked as dangerous as she felt.
She decided to increase her air of menace by crafting a pair of curved swords from the picks and shovels she’d brought to the site. She had no training in fighting with such blades, but she anticipated she might need to learn swiftly. In all her recent fights, she’d relied on Rott’s power to vanquish her foes. Wielding such might had almost become addictive. But it was plain that there was a connection between using this power and losing her legs. She wanted to hold onto what remained of her humanity. She dared not use Rott’s abilities again.
She packed the few belongings she thought she might need into a large satchel, which she slung over her shoulder. She decided she would travel lightly; she would create a case from the leftover glass and bury all but her current journal for later retrieval. She wished to make it back to Commonground as swiftly as possible. She felt certain that a complete translation of the letter she’d found would provide clues to finding Avaris, if she was still alive. Brand’s suggestion of finding a monk to translate was definitely not an option. But a more likely translator was nearby—the Black Swan. The unofficial empress of Commonground’s underworld, the Black Swan had a reputation for uncovering secrets. Sorrow felt it likely that the Black Swan could read the ancient script, or employ someone who might be able to.
She set off as the sun was low in the sky. Soon the forest was a maze of shadows. Her difficulty in seeing her path made the feel of her serpentine body slithering over roots and rocks and slimy leaves more unsettling. She wouldn’t have enjoyed walking through the jungle barefoot, and now she was effectively crawling through it on her belly. On the other hand, if she’d navigated this root-filled wilderness on foot in such poor light, she couldn’t have gone twenty feet without tripping. Her new body moved across the dark terrain with confidence.
