Gown of Shadow and Flame

by A. E. Marling

  A mouth in the shadow opened, a maw of hundreds of crystal fangs lit red by a furnace throat screaming with flames.

  A river of rock carried by clawed feet crashed out from between the baobab trees.

  Jerani and the other Greathearts had been running in the direction of the Big Stump Trail when the second giant rock snake looped through the foliage to cut off their escape.

  “Burn it all!” A warrior cowered against Hero's heaving side. “We're trapped, like lions in quicksand.”

  “Me a lion?” Tachamwa said. “I'd be a fly on a hippo's rump if it meant living. Jerani, where's your steam woman now? We need her.”

  “She was a Feaster.” Jerani spat into his hands and regripped his spear.

  Her betrayal would get him killed, he realized that now. Celaise had said she could defeat the Rock-Backs. She had deceived him with her words and with her silences. She was no goddess.

  Worst of all, she had lied to his eyes. Jerani understood telling falsehoods, even if he did not like them. But she had used her magic to change herself, to fool him into seeing her as she was not. All those times he had thought he had been speaking to a majestic lady, he had been within reach of the cowless woman's claw hand. She had portrayed herself as perfection, but she was more scarred than Melelek.

  Jerani swatted a Skin-Back aside that had landed on his shoulder. He pushed his spear against any monster that tried to force into the ring of warriors, though he knew it was hopeless. As soon as one of the giant rock snakes wanted, it could smash its way through them again.

  Monsters pressed in on the warriors, and the bull broke from their ranks to hoof it away. His tail flicked behind him.

  “Hero!” A warrior cried out as the speckled bull abandoned them.

  Scowling down at a jellied lump of dead Skin-Back, Jerani knew it was true. Ugliness on the outside means ugliness within. Celaise was not beautiful. Her arms and legs must have been broken and healed poorly, and her misshapen limbs and busted teeth revealed the deformity insider her.

  Jerani shouted, “Gore all Feasters!”

  Beside him, the warrior Isafo whimpered as a giant rock snake reared into the air. It smashed down not far away in a blast of dust. Jerani had never seen Isafo so lost of poise, and his strong chin seemed to be doing him no good at all.

  “Isafo!” Tall Tachamwa pointed at his own head and made a thrusting motion. “If a Skin-Back gets me, I want you to give me the ol' Mother's mercy.”

  “I don't…I don't—”

  “No hawing,” Tachamwa said. “As long as I don't have to lug a spear in the next life, I'll be happy.”

  Jerani paid little attention to his fighting. What does it matter? Between jabs that only irritated a Rock-Back, he glanced at Tachamwa's frightened face. For warrior marks, only two small notches cut into his ears. If he had more courage and vigor, he would have requested the knife touch his face.

  Melelek had boasted more creases in his skin than a lizard's hide, making him the fiercest warrior in the grassland. But Jerani remembered even Melelek had shown nerves before the Rock-Backs. It had been Jerani who faced the colossus.

  Does that mean I'm a stronger warrior than Melelek was? Jerani did not see how he could be, with no more than eleven marks running over his face, and he remembered his shame from the scale-skinned man pushing him down.

  Jerani also remembered who had killed the colossus. Celaise, with the lies of her Feaster magic. She might be called the strongest warrior in the 'land, if she were a man.

  Now that he thought about it, though, Melelek's warrior marks had not stopped him from taking his tribe and fleeing. Neither had the bold colors of his bulls saved his tribe. Maybe it isn't the marks that make the warrior. Maybe it's not the coat that makes the cow.

  Claws slashed over his chest, the four yellow knives breezing a shrill coldness through his ribcage and out over his whole body. He cracked the monster's arm back with his spear shaft.

  Jerani dashed a hand under his torn warrior's robe, feeling for the wound on his chest. Sweat slicked his skin, but no blood. He had escaped death by a hairsbreadth. The relief pained him.

  Anza needs me to be a warrior. Wedan, too. He stole a glance up at Big Stump, and the outcrop shone pale, the top jagged like a broken horn. Jerani thought he could spot the rest of his tribe up there, if he looked long enough. He imagined his brother and sister staring down at him, breathless, waiting for the end.

  If the Greatheart warriors died, the herds of the nearby tribes would die. The cows atop the Big Stump would starve. No grass, nothing but Rock-Backs all around.

  His brother and sister would have to watch as the Rock-Backs devoured him. Jerani could not accept that.

  A giant rock snake still wove its way back and forth between them and the trail up Big Stump. No escape. In the other direction, Rock-Backs surged into the Light Hoof tribe. The distant shine of the Bright Palm attacked a round-backed brute, but others trundled past him. The second clawed snake hurtled its way into the Star Herders. The Bright Palm isn't strong enough to save them. Or us.

  Celaise had defeated the colossal hill-back, a beast that would have trounced a tribe by itself. Illusion or not, her magic had killed it. She wielded power, more than any warrior. Jerani thought back to Tall Tachamwa's campfire wish, that there were women warriors.

  “She is a warrior.”

  Jerani's words lost themselves in the crash and cry of battle, but in his mind, they boomed and echoed. Celaise had slain Rock-Backs but never harmed the cows or people of the tribes. Sometimes she appeared beautiful, sometimes scarred, but Jerani would still love Anza if she lost her eye. Celaise's battered skull and limbs meant only that she had survived a life of hardship.

  And she is our one chance.

  I was wrong to leave her, Jerani thought. He pushed between two warriors and used his spear to vault over claws and land on top of a Rock-Back. He could only hope he was not too late. The thought that she had died frightened him more than the lump-scaled monster bucking underneath him.

  “Jerani!” Tall Tachamwa called from behind the ring of horned spears. “Get back here!”

  “We need the Feaster.” Jerani jumped onto another living mound of rock then sprang off, toward where he had seen Celaise fall.

  The glittering jaws opened in a fiery well. A long, black rug of a tongue snapped out toward Celaise.

  Knowing that the Lord of the Feast meant to finish her off, Celaise shifted her gown to the swirling shiny storm of metal shards. She would make him regret putting her through this impossible trial.

  The black tongue ended in three prongs, and they wrapped around Celaise like boa constrictors. Instead of slipping into the fury of her gown, the tongue held her as if she wore nothing more than a dress of silver thread.

  She slumped in the fleshy grasp. How could I think to fight him? She yearned for her body to die quickly, hoping that would kill her in this dream as well.

  Celaise tried not to think how the tongue lifted her into the cavern of fangs, how the nearby flames heated the back of her neck. A lifting sensation made her wonder if she was being carried upward. The teeth stayed locked around her in a prison of crystal, binding her but holding her safe under a vaulted palate.

  The leathery bumps on the roof of his mouth changed, flattening out and lightening, crossed by three pink lines. Spaces opened between the teeth, and the fangs themselves shortened and blunted. Most vanished, and the five remaining were segmented into three parts.

  Celaise imagined that she grew as the maw shrank, until it was not a dragon that held her at all but a human hand. Then she saw it was really happening. Not a nightmare but a man lifted her. His arm pulled her the last way out of the chasm and onto flat land.

  “I trust you'll not tell anyone I broke my word and spared you.” The Lord of the Feast spoke with a single, soft voice. He wore a frilly coat embroidered with orange thread in vibrant patterns of people screaming. “You can always trust your secrets to the dying.”

  Sh
e did not know what to say. Celaise had never seen the Lord of the Feast as a person before, as he must look under the curse of the Sun Dragon. An ugly brand of a black triangle split his brow. His arms hung limp at his sides, his fingers crooked and with two nails missing.

  “You're letting me go?” she asked.

  “I'm no scavenger,” he said.

  Her terror diminished. Seems he'll let me die peaceful like. A deep emptiness opened within her, and she wished she could have seen more of the Lands of Loam.

  “Neither am I one to deny a dying lady her last meal,” he said. “You are free from your vows of abstinence. Drink this, wake, and Feast one last time.”

  The man in the lacy clothes lifted one hand, and a black chalice appeared. The onyx-studded cup floated up to her, waiting for her to grasp it.

  As Celaise understood him, the Lord of the Feast had unbound her from the promise to dine only on the Headless. He had given her permission for one final binge.

  She asked, “What good will that do me? I'm going to die anyway.”

  “But for a moment you may forget that,” he said. “That's the best offered by any pleasure.”

  Her gloved hand had already gripped the chalice, winds gusting in her fingertips. Hunger flexed within her guts, pulling her arm up and closer to her opening mouth.

  She glanced at the Lord of the Feast, feeling a kinship with him. His bent fingers looked as broken and useless as her left hand. Should I thank him? She decided she would not. He had hurled her into this death trap, after all.

  A single drop of Black Wine rolled across the chalice bowl, onto her tongue. The Lord of the Feast had distilled it himself, and the potency of the draft numbed her mouth. She could not taste it, but she had a sense of a beautiful stained-glass window shattering and gusting inside her in a multihued blast.

  As the Black Wine jerked her toward wakefulness, she wondered how many people she could consume before the last of her life's blood ran out.

  Jerani crept around three Rock-Backs fighting over a dead cow. Dark liquid had splattered over her pristine white coat, and the sight pained him, the ripping and slurping driving him to greater speeds. He crouched, spear balanced and level with the ground as he shuffled forward on aching legs.

  The living cows all depended on him. Me and Celaise.

  He spotted her. A Skin-Back nudged its spindly head at her bony arm. The vermin jiggled as it dipped into the seeping blood of her chest wound. Whether because the Skin-Back heard Jerani approach or it wanted fitter prey, it tried to scamper away.

  His spear pinned the pest to the ground.

  Jerani knelt beside Celaise, and she stared up at him without seeing. She still bleeds, she still lives. He shucked his torn warrior robes and began ripping them further into bandages. Wearing only a short wrap around his waist, he shivered in fear that a Rock-Back would notice him and charge, or, worse, that she would die, despite anything he did.

  Tucking an arm under her shoulder and holding the back of her head, he coaxed her up from the ground to begin tying strips of cloth around her torso. She seemed to weigh nothing. She murmured, and with her lips not too far from his ear, he thought he understood a few words.

  “…I…die anyway.”

  “No, no you won't.” Jerani rested her back down, tightening the bandages. “You've survived so much already. You'll live.”

  Darkness spread through the bandages. He pressed a hand on her chest, but still the sticky wetness pulsed out of the wound, though weaker with each beat.

  “You'll live,” he said as if words alone could bring her back to health. His hope and worry spun and sparked within him. “You are a warrior.”

  Her head rolled. Celaise's eyes flickered closed.

  She is dying, he thought. You can't save her, just like you couldn't save mother.

  He slumped, bowed over her as he ground his fingers into the damp soil. Has to be something more I can do.

  Jerani knew there was not. There was nothing more he could do for her, but he would not let it end like this.

  With all the care of picking up a newborn calf, Jerani lifted her and stood. She was wet against the skin of his chest and reeked of blood, but he held her close.

  She gasped. Her eyes bolted open, and her pupils burst with blackness, approaching the beautiful dark of a cow's eye.

  “Celaise?” Hope spiked through his chest in piercing rays of light. “Are you—”

  Her claw hand scraped down from his ear to his neck. He felt a coldness reach through his skin, into his skull, to grope his mind.

  Celaise found it. His deepest, purest fear.

  Before she had sensed it, but now she had it. She plucked the secret from his mind of the day he had scaled to the peak of the volcano. She held it as she might clutch a key to a treasure trove. Now she could unlock his terror and Feast him into a puddle of whimpering flesh. I've waited so long for this.

  But she hesitated. Celaise wondered what Jerani was doing, why he had her in his arms. Did he come back to help me? The crescent sickle of the moon reflected in his caring eyes.

  Hunger twisted and coiled inside her, and her back arched. The Black Wine scalded her veins, begging to be used.

  No, she thought, he came back to finish me. To make sure I was dead. He knew she was a Feaster now. He has to. She could only guess he planned to throw her to the ground to break her skull. Or perhaps he would shift his hand from the nape of her neck to her throat, to strangle her at eye level so he could watch her torment.

  He's betrayed me. As they all do.

  The Black Wine within her simmered into the delightful aroma of cooking wine as she pulled on a new gown. A dress made for Jerani.

  Her face changed first. Her sunken lips pushed outward into a full and lavish red mouth. Locks of hair spiraled over her cheeks and glossed orange. Relief raced through Jerani, chased close behind by staggering shock.

  Celaise's dress turned black and exploded with heat. Scorching shards billowed into Jerani, and he snatched his hands away and jerked backward by reflex.

  Got too close, he thought. Once I step away she'll attack the Rock-Backs. Thank the Mother she's—

  She snapped her arms around him. His foot landed on heat-rippling air, and he began to fall.

  Jerani had fallen only a few times in his life. As a child, a dead acacia branch had broken in his hand, and he had toppled from the tree. The drop to his rear must have lasted only two seconds, but he remembered hours of panic compressed into a few gasps as he squirmed in the air, worried what he would land on, where he would be hurt. He had wondered if his friends and father would ridicule him for his clumsiness, or scorn him as a cripple who had broken his own right arm out of stupidity.

  This fall doubled its terror with each ash-choked breath. He was scoured by the skin-melting stench of yellow rock, and as he flailed in gusts of stinging grit, he glimpsed Celaise gazing down at him, her face calm, and the horn moon glowed through the opening of her dress.

  He reached up and cried for help, spinning heels over head and losing sight of her. This was an accident. I was too close when her dress changed, but she saw me and'll save me.

  A belch of smoke and embers flipped him face down. Through the eye-smarting heat and swirling cinders, a redness spread beneath him. The glowering light grew as he plummeted, from the size of a campfire to a burning village. It was worse than even that, he knew. Part of him had known from the first whiff of the Angry Mother's steam, and the tearing sense of shrieking nothingness blasted through him full force.

  Celaise had dropped him over the most dangerous place he had ever seen, the most sacred and the most terrible.

  The lava lake.

  She prided herself in her creation. The stench of sulfur, the plume of rock fragments, the ever-increasing heat all had to be just right to hold Jerani locked in his own mind. The Black Wine from the Lord of the Feast added power to the magic, but Celaise liked to think she could have concocted it without his help, since she possessed Jerani's inn
ermost fear.

  His horror tasted as delightful as she had imagined. A stream of cacao washed over her, its dark richness swirling with spices of vanilla, and just when she thought she had reached the peak of flavor, another wave smashed her over with a rapture of taste.

  Celaise whispered sweet nothings into his ear. You will die. She netted and bound his own mortal fear with that of losing his siblings, of failing his tribe. Down he fell, toward a greater heat than she could have dreamed of, a pool of molten rock hotter than a dragon's fiery gullet. The nightmare she created for him was so perfect that she had to pause in drinking his fear to marvel at her work.

  Part of her regretted having to do it. Anza would miss her brother, and even if the one-eyed girl never found out how he had died on the battlefield, Celaise disliked thinking of Anza trapped atop the mesa, hungry and awake every night, listening to the Headless stomp.

  Wish it could've turned out different, Celaise thought. She would have preferred to have wiped out the Headless then maybe Feasted on another tribe. But just one tribe. And not the Greathearts.

  Now that she had begun to Feast, she could not stop. If she allowed Jerani to regain control of his thoughts for an instant, he would crack her head open for being the Feaster she was.

  True, she would die soon anyway. Remembering that added a drop of poison to Jerani's cacao draft. Its sweetness now stifled her, and its barrage of flavors confused her.

  She wanted to stop Feasting, but she did not for a moment believe that she would. Always finish my meals.

  Jerani knew that he would die. His bones would roast to ash.

  You will die. You will burn. You will die.

  The lava lake stretched below him, waiting and fuming. A crimson web of blinding god's blood crisscrossed between floating scabs. He was falling toward the open wound of the Angry Mother, the source of all life and death in the world. The Holy Woman had warned him against the sacrilege of attempting to throw anything into the lake, and he was certain she and the gods would frown upon him defiling the lava personally.