Gown of Shadow and Flame

by A. E. Marling

  Teeth, serrated white spearheads, gnashed in row after endless row. A red pit of living spikes gaped with dripping curtains of drool. The mouth could swallow her whole, roll her about its saw blades of fangs until the last of her flesh tore from her bones.

  Celaise's throat locked, and her unvoiced scream shredded her insides. Fright blinded her, and everything split apart.

  “A nibble for a nibble,” the Lord of the Feast said.

  The ground tilted, sliding her toward his jaws.

  Her body throbbed with half-remembered dream pain. The agony shifted as reds and browns over her vision then focused into points of light. Stars. It's still night.

  And I'm alive. She mouthed the words. For now.

  Rising from the ground in a spread of skirts woven of air, Celaise saw the scarred man with an obsidian knife balanced in his hand. He stooped over the pudgy boy.

  Her stomach lurched and twisted at the thought of the time spent with the Lord of the Feast. It had felt far too long, but she wondered how many moments had passed in the waking world.

  Celaise noticed the bestial thing sucking life from the boy's neck. The man above him hesitated to stab it, and she could not allow the young creature to grow into a Headless. She fought against prickles of fear and shuddering uncertainty to kneel beside the figures.

  The True Dress pooled out like a round doorway opening downwards from a cloud, a landscape of hills and green pastures impossibly far below. Brown lines like ant trails crisscrossed the fields, and rivers appeared as trickles of water. The man shuffled back from the brink, tugging at the boy's ankle.

  Their fear was ripe, but with one of the beast's young at hand, she decided she had to try. Anything to stay away from the Lord of the Feast. She grasped the wrinkly parasite with her hands—or rather with the five-fingered blue outlines she had for gloves. The bare-skin thing slid through her palms, tumbling downward through the sky.

  Celaise swatted at it with her magic, battering its senses with gales that froze its muscles and warped its senses. The membranes between its legs flared open. She shredded them with updrafts. It was helpless now. It would fall. And it would die.

  Only, the predator's young did not fear. It seemed not to believe it was airborne at all. Perhaps it could not understand how it could be, when it had been suckling on the boy's spine moments before.

  Celaise cursed the creature's lack of imagination. In desperation, she clawed at the vermin's brain. The puny organ was no bigger than her thumbnail, but her magic teased it into thinking it was not on a boy's back but on a rock. Its needle mouth had pierced into a chink of stone. It had many mouths, a beaked one at the end of each leg that sucked blood like leeches, but now they drew in only the coldness of coarse sand. The grit would clog its insides and cause it to die a slow death of indigestion.

  Celaise did not know if she had tricked the gummy critter into believing it actually fed off stone. At the least, she had disoriented it. The vermin retracted its narrow mouth and clambered off the boy. It sloshed a few steps away.

  The tribesman jabbed the thing, without even being told. Celaise was grateful. As long as the beasts died, her lord would not care who killed them.

  She glanced at the man. He had not recoiled from her, which he would have if he knew she was a Feaster. She felt safer knowing she could hide from him even after being seen.

  His scars branched outward from his eyes like rays from the sun. The white lines touched each other over the tip of his nose and on his cheeks, stark against his skin. Brutal cuts bristled upward from the angle of his jaw. The scars were too precise, too well patterned to believe an animal had savaged him. His own people must've done it to him.

  Cold fury whirled in a blizzard inside her, stinging, biting, freezing. If she had not been forbidden to, she would have devoured them all, every last one who had hurt their own son. Nothing angered her more than such a betrayal.

  Celaise lofted to her standing height and breezed past the tribesman. She heard fighting and choked-off yells from the village. Even if she had no real family anymore, she had her trial. She had her life. That was enough.

  Ooze had splattered from the Skin-Back over Jerani and his brother's limp body. The globs had not touched the goddess but had fallen through her dress and out of sight.

  Thankfulness for her swelled in Jerani. She had returned to remove that nasty thing from Wedan. Tall Tachamwa had said it could not be done, without killing him.

  Anxiety jolted through Jerani. Had she killed him?

  He slapped his brother's back. “Wedan! Wedan!”

  A sneeze jerked his brother's face up from the ground. “Achoo! ”

  It was the most beautiful sound Jerani had ever heard.

  “Jerani?” Wedan was blinking bleary eyes. He touched the back of his neck and made a sour face. “Did a tick bite me? Oh no!”

  The scent of piss was strong, and Jerani guessed that Wedan had realized he had wet himself.

  The boy clamped his plump hands together. “You mustn't tell the others. Promise you won't. Especially not Besara.”

  “I'll only tell how you defended Gorgeous' calf.”

  Jerani noticed how isolated the two of them were, below the village with no more cover than a lone acacia. A dark ridge of mountain loomed to their right, stars glaring to their left. The goddess was leaving them behind, and he heard thumping from the shadowed brush nearby. The sounds were too lumbering to be one of the tribe's light-footed cows.

  He asked, “Can you stand?”

  Wedan wobbled up to one knee then sagged into Jerani. They did not have time. Something snuffled in the brush, and starlight trickled grey over the ridges of a monster's back. Chills wormed through Jerani. He hefted his brother, whose knees swayed side to side as they walked toward the village.

  Younger brother leaning on elder, they padded between the huts. A calf tottered into view, confused and unprotected. Jerani recognized her as the calf his brother had saved earlier by the white diamond pattern on her brow. She was the daughter of Gorgeous, the herd leader who had gone berserk at the start of the night's madness.

  Bawling and rolling her head from side to side, the calf no doubt searched for her mother. Two Rock-Backs padded toward her, trailing drool, and she did no more than sniff at their sour musk.

  Jerani would expect better survival instincts from most cows of the Greatheart tribe, but this calf was less than twenty days old. Easing his brother to the ground, Jerani sped toward the monsters, war club raised. Stub tails jutted downward from their rumps.

  He walloped one of their knees. It had the same girth as a human waist. A back-kick blurred toward him. He had expected it but still could only dodge the four pinching claws by slapping the side of the leg with his left hand and pushing himself to the ground.

  He rolled upward to see the goddess. She glided in front of the calf. Several surprised Greatheart warriors trailed behind her with their spears. They squinted at her brightness.

  The Rock-Back with the stiff knee turned to get away at the same moment the other one pounced. She did not even flinch as the monster ran through her. Her arms lifted to spread a mantle of dress, and the Rock-Back plunged into the sky and vanished.

  Jerani held his breath for the two seconds it took for the brute to reappear behind her. With a thump it rolled onto its back, feet pumping as if trying to run on air. He guessed the goddess had tossed it through the clouds then slammed it back here.

  Tall Tachamwa rushed up beside her but skidded to a stop short of the clawed legs. “Quick, while it's down. Stick it through its greedy mouth!”

  Jerani batted aside one of the thick limbs to let another warrior jump onto its belly. He danced around gnashing teeth and stabbed his horned pole downward.

  Tachamwa shielded his eyes from the splatter of blood. “That's two down. Jerani, mind the Skin-Back!”

  With a fleshy slap, a pink webbed thing sprang out. It waddled up Jerani's leg. He had a moment of sickening panic before his war club connected
with a wet crunch. The Skin-Back dropped dead.

  The goddess drifted after the other Rock-Back, but it dug claws into the ground in its speed to get away.

  Wedan gripped Jerani on the arm not coated with Skin-Back goo. “Tell me I'm not the only one seeing her.”

  “She saved you,” Jerani said. “And me.”

  The eyes of his brother popped at her. “Then what am I seeing?”

  Jerani balanced the words “a goddess” on his tongue but hesitated. In all the stories the Holy Woman had told, the goddess had clothed herself in fire, not air. The Angry Mother had forged spears of lava and given those as blessings to her warriors, had crushed her foes in burning avalanches.

  This woman had not cast so much as a spark. A puff of cloud drifted beyond her fingers in some far off land. But if she's not the goddess, he thought, why does she help us?

  “Some outlander,” Tall Tachamwa answered for Jerani, “swimming in magic.”

  “Up to the neck,” another warrior said. Her dress covered everything but her face.

  “A cowless?” Wedan said it as if this was more surprising than any dress of magic.

  Jerani sucked breath through his teeth. If she was a goddess, Jerani was nervous they would offend her by saying she came not from the grassland but the towns, a person without cows. Outlanders tended to have skin tanned like loam, but never with white rippling hair.

  She gazed past them, at the flighty bands of cows moving around the village. Her face maintained a calm that he would expect from the enlightened, though her eyes held a breathtaking fierceness.

  “She's sure long in the leg.” The warrior Isafo clicked his tongue in appreciation. He stepped down from the Rock-Back's belly, wiping blood-coated braids from his eyes.

  His loud voice embarrassed Jerani. The woman clothed in sky must have heard. Even if she perhaps was not divine herself, a god must have sent her to the grassland. She wears the sky. Maybe she belongs to the Sky Bull.

  The warrior Isafo was right. She strode with such a tall grace that her feet did not even seem to touch the ground. Still, Jerani thought she was not the type to be tongue-clicked like any girl in the village.

  “More are prowling about.” Tall Tachamwa eyed the Rock-Backs tromping around the village looking for calves and children. “Spears up and out. And you, if you've magic in you to spare.”

  For the moment, none of the warriors stirred. All watched the woman. She had not turned, though Isafo's loud comment had left her frozen, except for her hair. Ghostly locks writhed, reflecting the starlight.

  Worries swarmed over Celaise like fleas on a beggar. Itching, crawling, violating her every inch, too many to confront, too maddening to ignore.

  She might starve herself back to the Void. The temptation to Feast on people might overcome her, even with the memory of her lord's teeth prickling her mind. The tribesmen might murder her yet. She could taste their expectation, that she should turn and answer them.

  First, though, she gazed down onto the savanna. The plains rippled in grey, speckled with lone trees, while above, the Sky Bridge constellation glittered in a pathway of light into the night's beautiful blackness. Celaise wanted to lock the vista in her personal trove of treasured sights from her last three years of travels, borrowed time she owed to her Black Wine.

  The tribesmen would kill her for that magic, her Feasting. She might fool them for a while longer if they did not see her terror. Magic paralyzed her face, hiding all expression.

  One man leered at her. Others shied away, perhaps already suspecting. Suspicion leads to hate. Hate leads to murder.

  A hundred paces away, several cows were surrounded by three Headless. The tall tribesman pushed the others forward to help them. “Aim for the legs! And remember, their bead eyes are only on one side.”

  The leader of the warriors and a few of the tribesmen held back, marking the approach of an old woman. Her left eyelid sagged, and wrinkles cracked her face like a dry creek. She gestured to the cows scattered around the village. “They're running like their tails are on fire.” A wailing of moos was cut off by the stamping of predators' feet. “Need Gorgeous to gather them.”

  “Gorgeous got her spine bit,” the tall warrior said. “She's lost.”

  “Then the loss is great,” the older woman said. “We must bring the packs together, back into a herd.”

  “But she....” The younger tribesman's eyes flickered up to Celaise then lowered again. She had heard him called Jerani. “She can pull off a Skin-Back. She saved Wedan.”

  Jerani pointed to the pastry-gobbler of a boy, who held his sheet clothes about his chest with one hand, his other wrapped over the calf and petting it. The calf leaned against him, shaking.

  The older woman's hair was tied at the ends with black and white pegs, and they clicked together as her good eye snapped to Celaise. “Then you must help us. The Greatheart tribe would owe you a debt.”

  Celaise thought, What better way to clear debts than to kill those you owe?

  “I want nothing from you.” Her voice raised brows. It always did.

  The lanky man with scarred ears had crouched down, tracing scuff marks in the dirt with his spear. “Gorgeous fell here. And the Skin-Back had her crawl that way.” His head swiveled at a lowing, the tone the same as a deep-voiced crone's who had stubbed her toe barefoot.

  The older woman gestured to Celaise to follow her. “Will you be helping?”

  She understood Gorgeous was a cow, and she supposed this cow would assist in regaining control of the herd somehow. Celaise could not allow the Headless to feed on these people and their cows. She needed the predators as hungry and weak as she.

  Without replying, Celaise moved after the old woman. The boy trudged behind her along with the calf, its knees knocking with every other step. Jerani had not left with the other tribesmen, and he also followed. Celaise suspected his cudgel could be useful.

  They found the cow in a ditch. It had scraped its legs on the black rocks of the embankment, and now it stared at the stones before it with frozen eyes. The Headless' young on its back had swollen to the size of a cat, its limbs pulsing as it redirected the animal's heart blood up one hairless limb and down another.

  The calf bawled and nestled itself against the cow. Celaise bet the cow was the mother, and she felt even more pity.

  The boy made a face at the sight of the leeching parasite. “Was one of those on me? Tell me it wasn't.”

  Folding her hands over the hairless thing, Celaise tricked it as she had the first, into waddling off its host. It burst under Jerani's cudgel.

  Brownish jelly splattered the younger boy's chubby face. He spat over and over. “I got it in my mouth!”

  The old woman stitched the cuts on the cow's back. The cow blinked her white lashes. Rusty patches speckled her neck and legs. Her horns curved upward as if reaching for each other.

  These cows had the thickest horns Celaise had seen on mortal animals. None of Celaise's brethren would ever craft a nightmare beast with horns so large, for fear it would be disbelieved. These pillars of bone looked like they would sunder the poor cow's head from their weight, though they were swung about as if they were no heavier than shovels.

  They'd look natural on nothing smaller than a dragon, Celaise thought. She even wondered if the dragon god, the Winged Sun, would enjoy these cows as sacrifices, but she shook her head. I am no longer of that land. Now she had no god. That was, if the Lord of the Feast was a man.

  The cow had begun licking her calf, and Celaise lost herself for a few moments, enjoying the sight of the forearm-length tongue caressing the white tuft of hair on the calf's brow. The baby creature nuzzled at its mother's flank, trying to find her udders, which were on her other side. Embarrassment flashed over Celaise when the cow began licking her calf's bottom.

  “Jerani,” the elderly woman said, “pick up Gem. See if Gorgeous will follow.”

  “She'll not walk,” the boy said, pointing to the splattered critter recently remove
d from the cow's back. “Trust me. It feels like you're set on your head and spun.”

  Jerani hefted the calf up, its slender legs splaying in all directions as he carried it out of the trench. Rocks crackled as Gorgeous pushed herself onto her feet. She trotted after Jerani with only a touch of unsteadiness in her stride.

  “No fair,” the boy called after them, “she has twice the legs I do.”

  The white-haired woman kept pace, jogging alongside with one hand on the cow's neck. The boy waddled and huffed beside Celaise.

  “Uh…Are you…Do all town'ers look like you?”

  She would have chuckled at the boy's goodhearted ignorance if not for a distracting weight on her wrist. Her dress covered her arm, but she wore a copper bracelet where no one could see it. She kept it as a memento of blood and betrayal. The bracelet reminded her that children pushed and shoved to be closest to public executions. Her younger brother had thrown the first stone at Celaise. The rock had missed and skidded off the cliff edge, but she shivered at the memory.

  A few dozen cattle trailed Gorgeous by the time Celaise reached the village. More flocked to the cow, greeting her with short, thankful moos. She returned a rousing call.

  Celaise could not see why the other cows let Gorgeous lead them. The cow did not look so different from the others. Older perhaps, her udders drooping. She certainly was not the biggest. An animal twice her bulk, a bull, strode among the cattle, holding its head high so its horns would not impale anyone.

  Tribesmen followed groups of cattle, touching Gorgeous' horns in reverence. Women and children dashed from the huts to stand beside Jerani and the calf. One girl clung to him, reaching up to stroke the furry belly of the calf he held. The girl wore only a wrap skirt. She asked, “Did you save her? Did you?”

  “Wedan did.”

  Jerani set the calf down, and it scampered off to hide below its mother's legs. Jerani glanced to Celaise, smiled as best he could through his scarred face, then he turned his chin away in embarrassment. He whispered to the girl and pointed to Celaise, and the girl's mouth made a circle of wonder at the sight of the True Dress.