by Mur Lafferty
“I don’t know, I don’t know what’s not here. I only remember that stone was my name because I just touched it. I’m sure I will forget that soon enough.” She sighed and stared at her hands and the different colors of pebbles. “If I put them down, I’ll lose them again. I can’t just carry these around forever.”
“We’ll figure something out. Why don’t you rest? I can keep watch.” He still had a pained look on his face, and she wondered why he wasn’t happier for her.
She shook her head. “No, we need to find Kate and Daniel. I can help. What did Kate say? I’m an empty shell?” She grinned – it felt fierce, hard. She liked it. “I’m not empty now.”
“But you can’t use your hands without losing those memories, though,” Marcus said. “In a way you’re worse off than you were.”
“I’ll figure something out. We can argue while we walk. Let’s go,” she said. She checked the ground for more pebbles and, satisfied she had all she would ever get, walked into the woods.
After a moment, Marcus followed her.
• • •
The crow hated traveling like a human. But every time she tried to walk, the hot air buffeted her. The monster wasn’t very smart, thinking they would only attack from the air, she thought.
She reached a clearing, but it wasn’t a clearing made by anything natural or god—intended. All of the trees were flattened as if blown by a huge wind. In the middle of the blast, the monster stood, hands raised to the sky, wings stretched up. He looked — well, he looked beautiful. His skin had turned silver, his face beatific. His clawed feet had sunk so deeply into the moss of the forest floor that he looked as if he had connected with the land itself, and his arms reached higher, stretching him, as if he reached for heaven itself.
But this is heaven, she thought, confused. The ground shifted again and the land writhed in pain. She heard a soft chirp, another bird, a hawk in the branches above her. He flew down and landed beside her.
Come back with me. This is too dangerous. He looked at her with his one eye.
We have to stop him. He did this to me.
We can stop him together. All five of us. Come back with me.
The crow thought about the poor shell of the girl she once was. She didn’t want her fighting. No.
The hawk clacked his beak. Then what are you planning on doing?
The crow hopped again into the wind. I don’t know.
That’s just great.
They watched the beautiful monster as it grew toward the sky, its face scrawled with pain and exhilaration.
The hawk looked at the trees that still shielded them, then back at the monster. Oh no. I have to see something, come with me. Fly straight up.
They leapt into the air, but a hot gust caught the crow and she spiraled back, hitting a tree. Ignoring the pain, she desperately fought for altitude. When she cleared the tree line, she saw the hawk climbing high above the monster, intent on climbing, and not seeing the monster take notice of it. The monster smiled. A tendril, like a vine, sprouted from its torso and smacked the bird down just as it leveled out. The hawk fell, pulled down by the tendril. His wings bent in odd angles and downy feathers fell from him like snow.
The crow wheeled in the wind but battled against it. Now that there was enough light in the forest below them, she saw the deep green slowly fading in an ever—widening circle from the monster, who grew slowly in size, his light reaching into the gray nothing that was the sky.
This is what the hawk was looking for. The monster wasn’t reaching for heaven, she realized. He was turning this place into hell.
The hawk struggled under the tendril, but it pushed him into the moss until it was actually burying him. More tendrils came out, most to hold the hawk down as it struggled, but one came after the crow.
She wheeled and dove, away from the monster, flying as fast as she could. The wind finally at her back, she tumbled through the air and fought to gain control so she could ride the wild current behind her. She chanced a look back and it was getting closer. How far could he stretch?
It reached out for her claw, and she tucked it closer to her and dove again, hoping the trees would confuse the tendril.
It worked, the tendril found a branch, twined around it, and pulled the tree from the ground as if it were a blade of grass. The crow darted and dodged through the woods until she had lost the tendril. She came to rest on the ground — safer than a tree — and then saw she was next to the river.
She stared at it for a moment: the horrible liquid that had made her like this, a shattered girl—bird. She then took wing and followed the river south, looking for the clearing where they had stayed.
The humans, the girl and the boy, walked through the forest. The girl held her hands close to her stomach, protecting something.
“So, what do you remember?” the boy asked.
“I told you,” the girl said, sounding irritated. “I know I was a prophet. I’m from Meridian. I know Amadeus imprisoned me. We’re dead, and so is he now, but he’s still hounding me. I remember….” She subsided trailed off and looked at her hands.
The girl held pebbles in her hands. They were different colors, some blue, some green, and some golden. The crow wanted those pebbles. She flew down from the trees and landed on the boy’s shoulder. Both the boy and the girl jumped, and the girl dropped some of the pebbles. In an instant, the crow swooped down to the forest floor and grabbed one of them, the shiniest red one. She flew to a tree and landed, which was a good thing, as the memories that assailed her made her briefly dizzy.
“Oh no, that stupid bird!” cried the girl, gathering up the fallen pebbles.
“Which one was it?” the boy asked, watching the crow in the tree.
“The boy. Adam, I think. I don’t know anymore.” She sounded very sad. “That was the red one. Stupid bird!”
“I don’t think insults will work,” the boy said mildly. “And she’s partly you, isn’t she? Come on, crow. Julie needs that pebble. It’s very important to her.” He pulled something from his pocket and held it up for her. “I’ll trade you! This shiny green one for the red one. Come on, what do you say?”
“Wait a minute, what’s that one? You stole one of my memories?” the girl was outraged.
“I picked it up, wondering what it was. Then you were falling in, and I put it in my pocket and forgot about it,” he said. “I was going to tell you when things weren’t so chaotic.”
“What is that one?” she asked.
“Come on, is there any memory that is more important than the one of Adam?” He shook the pebble at the crow again. It gleamed a strange milky green.
“Who?”
“See, he was so important to you and now you can’t remember. That’s important to you, I promise. Probably your most important memory. This one isn’t so much.”
“They are both part of me,” she said. “I want them both.”
The crow wanted the green pebble. But she was very interested in the pebble in her mouth, though. When her tongue touched it, it tingled and she felt strange and warm, happy and safe. Nothing like she felt here in these monster woods. She wondered if the green one would be the same.
“Come on, little bird, trade with me?”
The crow looked at him, and then her tongue touched the pebble again. She flew down and landed on his arm.
“There’s a good girl,” he said. “Now take the green one and give me back the red.”
Curiosity got the better of her and she placed the red one in his palm. He quickly dropped it on the ground as if it were hot. The girl grabbed it and put it with the others, closing her eyes and remembering. The crow took the green one from the boy and flew into the trees with her prize.
• • •
“I can’t believe you traded my memories like you’re trading for food,” Julie said coldly. It was hard to stay angry because he had given her back the memories of Adam — the notes, the whispered affections, the promises to run away together, and the urge to
find him in the afterlife. But she had lost control of a memory and Marcus refused to tell her what it was.
He still watched the crow in the tree. The stupid bird held a part of her now. “I didn’t know what else to do.”
“What was the memory? You could see it, couldn’t you? When you held it?”
He didn’t look at her. “It’s gone now. I don’t remember.”
She bristled but hardly could argue, because she couldn’t either. It was one of the first ones she had pulled from the river, but that was all she could grasp. She sighed. “I can’t live like this, Marcus. I’m going to have to use my hands at some point.”
He helped her up, her fingers still tightly clutching the stones. “We’ll
figure something out. But we have to find Kate and Daniel now. The crow is here, not with them, so at least she’s safe.”
Julie glared at the crow, which had flown down again to land on Marcus’ shoulder, the memory still tight in her beak. “Fine, let’s go.”
“She came from upstream.” Marcus pointed. “Should we head that way?”
Julie looked into the woods, where the trees were visibly withering. “I think that’s the way to go, unfortunately.”
The bird cawed, a strangled sound as she still held the pebble in her beak, and took flight again, heading back the way Marcus and Julie had come.
“Hey, get back here!” shouted Julie.
“Let her go,” Marcus said. “She won’t be in danger, that way. Not as much danger, anyway.”
“She’ll probably swallow that rock and my memory will be gone forever,” Julie grumbled.
Marcus’ eyes grew wide. “That’s it. That’s how you keep them with you. Swallow them!”
Julie laughed. “Eat a bunch of rocks? Why would you think that would be a good idea? And even if they wouldn’t make me sick, wouldn’t I, uh, get rid of them later?” She looked down, embarrassed.
“But we’re in the afterlife. We don’t need to eat, or excrete. I’m betting you’d absorb them, and not have to worry about where to keep them! Try it, just one won’t hurt, will it?”
Julie frowned. It made sense, in a twisted way. She took a memory, a simple, small one. Her favorite food, roasted hen, a dish she had tasted three times in her life whenever she was able to steal a bird from Lathe. She could taste it, spiced and juicy, when she put the pebble in her mouth, and she dry-swallowed it, wincing as it went down. But once she swallowed, it didn’t feel like a lump in her throat, it was simply gone. And the memory of roasted hen stayed with her.
“You were right,” she said, wonder in her voice. She took another one and swallowed it, and remembered the names of her friends back in Meridian.
“Come on, you can eat as we go,” he said, and they headed for the desolation, Julie eating her memories along the way.
• • •
Despite her desire to stay with the humans and their wonderfully shiny colored rocks, the crow remembered her initial goal. She flew back to the clearing where the boy’s pack sat next to the embers of the fire. It was harder to use her beak, harder than the fingers she barely remembered having, but she placed the precious pebble in the moss and rummaged her head around the boy’s pack looking for something specific. And there it was. She grabbed the loop of the water skin, no longer needed, and pulled it, flapping and making frustrated noises, until it came free.
It was empty, but plugged tightly with a cork.
Cawing her frustration, the crow pecked at the cork, realizing that every moment she wasted was one more where the gods had to fight without her. She didn’t stop to wonder the ridiculousness at that thought, that two gods needed a little crow to help, but kept poking at the cork, shredding it piece by piece until she was able to pull it free. She upended the water skin just in case and a few drops spilled onto the moss.
The clear drops looked so strange next to the whiteness of the river Lethe, the only water she’d encountered so far in this world. The crow grabbed the strap in her claws and tried to take off, fluttering clumsily. It was hard to carry, she strained several feet, and then landed, discouraged. Then she remembered her pebble, and flew back, leaving the skin behind. She pecked at it, and the wonderful memory came back into her mind, and, reenergized, she returned to the water skin and picked it up, by the skin itself this time so it wouldn’t swing and throw off her balance in midair.
She flew upstream, as fast as she could, savoring the memory and emotions to keep herself going.
• • •
Julie and Marcus stopped arguing when they reached the edge of the trees where the silver monster, thirty feet tall and still growing, continued his destruction of the land. A crater lay next to it, an unmoving hawk in the middle.
“Oh no,” Julie said. “Where’s Kate?”
The hummingbird appeared beside her and blurred, forming the figure of the goddess. Kate’s face was anguished.
“What happened?” Marcus asked.
“He’s nearly killed Daniel,” she said, looking at her lover in the crater. “He’s still there, but he can’t change back.”
“What do we do now?” Marcus said. “Can’t you beat him?”
Kate pressed her lips together. “I can. But the energy needed to destroy him will also take you two and this world with it. I’ve played with huge amounts of power before. Very bad things happen when I do that. Remember the destruction of Meridian? Leviathan City? Yeah, killing a major god leaves a lot of…uh, collateral damage. And like it or not, this jackass is pretty much a god right now.”
Julie saw Marcus wince.
“So there’s nothing we can do? Can’t we even go in and rescue him?” Julie said. “I could try to turn into a crow again—”
“That part of you is already a crow. You can’t access that power anymore until we find a way to get you and the crow back together,” Kate said absently. “But Amadeus is destroying this land, we won’t be able to get out of the Reach if he finishes it.” Her voice was calm, but tears ran down her cheeks and dripped onto the moss, where flowers took bloom in the dead moss, and then wilted as the taint from the monster sapped the life from them.
“Where do we go if we die here?” Marcus asked.
“I don’t know. I could try to make a new land, but I doubt I’d manage. I’m not as powerful as I was. I gave up a lot: first to get to you two, then to travel here,” Kate said. “I thought I’d appreciate losing power, so I wouldn’t fuck up anymore. But it seems whatever I put into this land to create it, Amadeus is stealing. Now he’s much more powerful than me or Daniel.”
Julie frowned and looked at the pebbles in her hand, the ones she hadn’t eaten yet. She wished one of them had a memory of her being insanely clever and innovative.
Her hands closed on the pebbles convulsively, then opened and scattered the pebbles on the ground. “I have an idea. Watch Daniel to make sure Amadeus doesn’t do anything else.” She turned and ran.
Marcus called her name, but she kept running. The memories she had dropped faded from her mind, clearing her head even more, making the idea seem bigger. This was something Lethe couldn’t take from her, because she had learned this after waking up. No matter what she had been in her past, right now she needed the minimal experience she had gained recently.
She sprinted faster, part of her mind remembering that she used to love running, before running was death, before she lost her mind and soul. She dodged the trees and bushes, picking up speed when she saw the shimmer of Lethe ahead.
• • •
The crow damned her new body again and again, wishing she could do more. The land groaned under her claws, not shifting in anger now, but a
dying gasp. She had no time left.
The water skin floated on top of the viscous river. It would have drifted away, but she held it in place by the strap. She couldn’t get it angled so that the river ran into the skin, and she was too afraid of losing what remained of
herself if she tried to peck it to push it underwater.
panting and smiling, looking more alive than she ever had before. She filled it easily and stood, beckoning to the crow.
She flew to the girl’s arm and dropped the green pebble into her hand. Her face went slack for a moment, then she looked briefly irritated, and then smiled. “That figures,” she said softly, and then swallowed the pebble with a gulp. “Thank you. Let’s go.”
• • •
Julie ran again, hearing the trees crack around her. Limbs began to fall, and she had to dodge them, leaping back or to the side, and once putting on a burst of speed to duck under another one.
“You do realize this is a crazy notion,” she said to the bird. The bird cawed at her, then extended her wings. “All right, less talking, more running. I get it,” she said, and approached where Kate and Marcus were attempting to create a hook out of dead branches to snag Daniel and get him out of the crater.
They looked up as Julie skidded to a stop in front of them, panting. “I’ve got it.” The crow pecked at her ear, gently, but hard enough to remind her. “All right, we’ve got it. We have to get the river Lethe into him. He’ll lose everything.”
“Holy shit. You’re right,” Kate said, her hand flying to her head. She looked up at the monster that towered above them, still concentrating on stripping the land of its power, reaching high and still growing. “The trick is getting him to open his mouth.”
“The trick is getting the water skin that high. We can’t send the crow after what happened to Daniel,” Julie said. “I’m good at throwing, but not that good.”
“We have to distract him,” Marcus said. “Julie, you used to climb the ruins of Meridian, didn’t you?”
Julie nodded.
“Could you climb him if I could distract him?”
Julie looked at what used to be Amadeus. His feet had rooted into the earth like a large trunk, and only his robes remained, bedecked with bark and vines. She nodded.
