Bloodchild

by Anna Stephens

  THE BLESSED ONE

  The moment of awakening

  The Afterworld

  Lanta sat up. There was an instant of dislocation, the memory of exquisite agony commingled with unutterable glory as she stood in the very presence of both her gods, and then … she was here.

  The grass was grey and speckled with sticky red droplets. The sky was crimson, as red as the sun through closed eyelids. The permanent dying of the light. Everywhere Lanta looked she saw people. Souls. Those faithful children of Blood who had died in the hundreds of years before her and now thronged the Afterworld.

  Death was not to have been Lanta’s fate at this time, and yet here she was. The Lady’s will. She brushed herself down and stood, tossing back long blonde hair. When a Blessed One was called to the gods’ side, the Dark Lady Herself would greet her. Lanta would sit at the Dark Lady’s table with the other Blessed Ones and high priests, and she would bask in the presence of her Bloody Mother for eternity.

  But the Dark Lady wasn’t here. Nor was Holy Gosfath. Lanta herself had summoned and then trapped Them both in the temple in Rilporin. Lanta was alone until – if – They escaped. She’d scuffed the circle before her … death. Would that be enough? Unease crawled across her skin. There was no one left in the temple to complete the ritual. Had the Dark Lady claimed the infant? Was She even now returned to the living world, divinity clothed in mortal flesh? Lanta tried to will her sight back to the living world, to observe the moment of her goddess’s triumph – for how could it be other than triumphant – but nothing happened. She was here, and They were there, and there was a distance between them that she’d never before felt.

  The horde of souls had grown closer. Lanta could see the divisions, how there were tiny but significant spaces between one group and the next. Allegiances and alliances, in the Afterworld as in Gilgoras.

  ‘I am Blessed One Lanta Costinioff,’ she said loudly, raising her chin. ‘I am responsible for the resurrection of the Dark Lady Herself. Even now, beyond the veil, She is cloaking Her divine essence in human skin, to return to us, to guide us as She did before. I have—’

  ‘Shut up, bitch.’ The voice was loud and generated a spate of ugly laughter. ‘Resurrecting Her? Meaning She died on your watch, eh? Think we didn’t know that, didn’t feel Her loss here where always She has walked among us in glory?’

  ‘That’s not—’ Lanta began, but then a figure burst from the throng, covered the bloody grass in a few strides, and punched Lanta in the teeth. She went over backwards, too shocked to scream, and by the time she’d opened her eyes, the man was busy tearing at her gown and linens.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she screamed. ‘I am the Blessed One. I am Lanta Costinioff, Voice of the Gods!’

  ‘You’re a fresh cunt is what you are,’ the man grunted, ‘and in the Afterworld, we get all those things we were promised. To kill and run and fuck and die without dying. Forever.’

  ‘No,’ she shouted, thrashing. ‘No, you don’t understand. I’m the Blessed One, the Blessed One. You don’t get to touch me. Stop!’

  The man ignored her protestations and now others were approaching: men, women, hollow-eyed children who’d seen too much and done even more. For this was the Afterworld, and what they did, they did forever.

  Lanta screamed again as she felt teeth sink into her ankle, a clump of hair rip from her head, and the tearing as the man got her linens off. Funny, I still have linens in the Afterworld, she thought hysterically, until all thought was subsumed by pain. Inch by inch, limb by bloody limb, hour by hour, they tore her to pieces. And she felt it all.

  Lanta died.

  Lanta sat up. There was an instant of dislocation, the memory of exquisite agony commingled with unutterable glory as she stood in the very presence of both her gods, and then … she was here. She scrambled to her feet and backed away from the advancing mass of souls.

  ‘My name is Lanta Costinioff, Blessed One to the Dark Lady and Gosfath, God of Blood,’ she called, searching for a familiar, a sympathetic, face. To her right, another form sat up in the grass and began immediately to run. Away from her. Scores set out in pursuit and then she saw it, all across the endless, bloody fields. Death and rebirth into death. Chasing. Dying. Killing and rutting and eating dead flesh, cannibals and monsters and sadists, every one.

  ‘Listen, just listen to me. I am—’

  ‘Fresh meat,’ called a woman who had gobbets of flesh clinging beneath ragged, yellow fingernails. Her throat and chest were wet with gore. It might have been Lanta’s, from before.

  Turning her back to her sisters and brothers in Blood, Lanta picked up her skirts and began to run. In the distance, the hill of the Blessed Ones, where the priesthood lived. Ahead of her, a running battle between hundreds of children armed with sticks and bones, teeth and fingernails and fists.

  Lanta ran faster. A howl rose behind her, and the horde gave chase.

  Forever.

  CORVUS

  Tenth moon, first year of the reign of King Corvus

  Five miles from Deep Forest, Wheat Lands

  The moment had been everything he’d been praying for these last months – a return to the Dark Lady’s embrace – and yet nothing like he’d expected. It was early, for a start, far earlier than Corvus had anticipated, and if not for that bastard Koridam, he’d have been there to witness it, to see Rill give birth to a life that would become divine. But that he was not there was ordained, as were all the actions of a life dedicated to the gods. The Lady’s will.

  The sense of Her return had grown through the night, a looming glory that lifted the hearts and spirits of the faithful so that they barely slept behind the protective ditch and wall thrown up by the East Rank. And the enemy knew what was happening, too, for they didn’t attack that night as they had every other night, didn’t pick off sentries or sabotage the palisade, steal inside to kill.

  And then dawn, and triumph, the culmination of the Blessed One’s plans. The glory of their Bloody Mother filling every heart and soul with adoration, with awe and worship and completion.

  And then the fall. Rejection and panic, rage and possession, and behind them to the southeast, a storm gathering black and brooding and pregnant with madness.

  The Dark Lady’s presence, Her pure and guiding presence, was muted, blurred, mixed like paint with another, the jealous and fearful and angry – so angry! – essence of Holy Gosfath, until they couldn’t feel either god distinctly, just a roiling maelstrom of rage and vengeance and lust. They were neither uplifted in adulation nor strengthened with holy purpose. Instead, they were battered and bludgeoned with divine rage, divine pain.

  Under the clear sky of Rilpor, the army of the faithful knelt in concentric circles around a small knot of men at the centre: Corvus, Fost and Tett, the surviving or promoted war chiefs, General Baron of the East Rank and his most devoted officers, all of them anointed war priests, as Corvus himself was, all lending their faith and discipline to his as he strove to discover the cause of the gods’ fury, the gods’ … merging.

  He focused his breath and his mind on Them, seeking, trying to understand the confusion of impressions and emotions that battered at them, to see through it to the gods Themselves, here in Gilgoras. Here in Rilpor. It may just take time for Her to settle, to come to understand the limits and abilities of Her new form. A day or so, no more, with the Blessed One there to guide Her.

  An intruder ripped into his mind, enveloping him in a hot, sticky rush of confused emotion. Men cried out in consternation and disgust, in fear, as a slick and oily wetness curled into their heads as it did his, a dripping anger bound up with need and awash with lunacy sliding through their thoughts, searching, picking at them, picking them apart. Part of him knew who it belonged to, but he wouldn’t – couldn’t – accept the name his mind supplied. It wasn’t Her. This was not Her.

  Corvus clenched his fists as it touched him, as it rummaged in his head, a hunger to it that only made its touch the viler. It didn’t want him, it
didn’t care for him – it needed something from him, but neither he nor it knew what.

  Corvus groaned, pawing at the air to push away the web of madness that clung and stuck, that he inhaled with every breath.

  Cries of distress and disgust rang across the camp as the worm in Corvus’s head writhed faster, harder, bloated with his memories, with parts of him that it chewed away from the rest and swallowed. It was getting angry now as whatever it looked for inside them it failed to find, angry and more desperate, its rummaging careless, harmful. A man in the third ring out collapsed, a spontaneous nosebleed erupting, pouring crimson down his face as he coughed and choked.

  Corvus had the briefest glimpse of … something, something that couldn’t possibly be his beloved gods, couldn’t even be alive. Some amalgam of his memories, perhaps, but he didn’t believe his own lie. Multiple arms and screaming mouths, eyes misaligned and bulging mad, spine bent this way and that and … bunches of red and black tentacles whipping above its head from the weeping, broken flesh in its back.

  ‘You contacted a monster,’ someone shouted; he couldn’t see who. ‘What have you done? What have you done?’

  Corvus dropped forward on to his hands and vomited, trying to push the image from his head as all around him his army did the same, rejecting with frantic force the thing twisting through their thoughts. Malice and lust and vengeance and the urge to kill exploded inside him, so thick he could almost taste it, viscous as phlegm.

  It was not in Holy Gosfath’s nature to concern Himself with the goings-on of mortals: He feasted when blood and flesh were offered; as Lord of War he lent strength to His armies, but He did not often grace Gilgoras with His presence. But as the worm writhed faster, Corvus began to see Him in there, entwined around and through and within the Dark Lady. They were both there, both inside him at once. His gods. The only gods, joined as They never had been before.

  And They were angry.

  Corvus wiped a string of drool from his chin and raised his arms to the sky, knowing what had to be done, knowing that victory lay in embracing the madness, that to reject it was to know the void. She was back and he would worship Her. Nothing else mattered but to do Her will.

  ‘Dark Lady, beautiful goddess of death and fear, you are returned to us. I feel you in the wind and in me, and I rejoice, for we have missed the glory of your touch.’

  The part of him that stood separate in the back of his mind didn’t rejoice; it cowered, hands over its head, praying for the monster to go away. Corvus ignored it and Fost’s abject terror. If the gods were angry, Corvus would placate Them. That was the way of things. It didn’t matter what the gods looked like now: They were still his gods. He repeated that over and over, convincing himself, or trying to.

  ‘Holy Gosfath, God of Blood, of war and mutilation, you are reunited with your Sister-Lover, made whole by Her return. I feel you in the wind and in me, and I rejoice, for we have missed the power of your divine battle lust.’

  Against the odds, despite every obstacle, every moment of indecision or lack of faith, the Blessed One had done it. She’d brought the Dark Lady back to them. She’d reunited Her with Gosfath, together for eternity as one all-powerful being, unstoppable. Corvus vomited again, unable to stop himself. He spat to clear his mouth and made himself stand and face his army.

  ‘Together for eternity,’ he shouted. ‘The gods are returned, to Gilgoras, to each other, and to us. Holy Gosfath, Dark Lady, we are your children, we do your will, satisfy your desires. For you, we march to war. For you, we will destroy our enemies and offer their blood and meat for your rejoicing.’

  He gestured at the others and the chorus was ragged, unsure. But it was there. ‘Our feet are on the Path!’

  Corvus shook his fists at the sky. ‘Our feet are on the Path. The Path to war!’ he screamed and this time they stood and roared it back at him, the chant growing into thunder as they drank the horror like sweet poison.

  He didn’t wait for them, just headed for the gap in the palisade and the long, stubbled fields that led to Mace Koridam and his ragtag army. His gods were back and Their rage filled his head and heart. The madness of battle was a madness he could understand and he embraced it with something like relief.

  Bloodlust shook him, his own and the gods’, and it rose like a tide to consume every doubt, drown every image in his head. It flooded across them all, the need to kill for the gods, the need to wipe the stain of Light from the land, and his army didn’t hesitate, rippling over the ditch and wall, madness and rage speeding their feet to the final confrontation.

  The gods demanded blood, and gladly Corvus would give it to Them.

  TARA

  Tenth moon, first year of the reign of King Corvus

  Temple district, First Circle, Rilporin, Wheat Lands

  The doors shuddered under the impact again and Tara braced her feet and strained, the agony in her burnt and broken arm gnawing at her bright and hard like winter sunlight, and as cruel.

  She managed a glance over her shoulder and Rillirin, Salter and the rest had vanished. Relief washed through her chest and lasted only until the doors shuddered in their frames again. A questing black filament eased beneath the bottom edge and wrapped Tara’s ankle. She yelled as it tightened, crushing hard around her lower leg, and she stepped away from the door, kicking frantically. She hacked down with Valan’s knife, half severing the tough muscle. It puffed into smoke and sucked back beneath the door, then the wood exploded and more tentacles felt their way through, the rest of the … thing hidden in the temple’s gloom.

  Tara collapsed, scrabbling backwards out of the way. Her left hand found the sword Salter had left, but what good were a knife and a sword? There was a hissing sound, like bees or steam escaping though a thousand times louder than either, as gusts of foul wind blew from out of the temple, rippling the bloody water dribbling down the steps. Sulphur and rot. Her head began to pound.

  Thin screams, high and distant, as more buildings fell, Rilporin once more crumpling beneath the whim of a mad god. The screams of slaves, of Rilporians. Screams of her people. Tara used the knife to hack the skirt off above the knee, transferred it to her left hand, took up the sword and stood. No one else was dying on her watch, not if she could help it. If she was the only one to stand between them, then that’s what she’d do.

  ‘All right, soldier, buckle up,’ she said. ‘It’s time to kill a mad god.’

  Weapons in hand, she climbed over the shattered wood into the temple’s stinking gloom to confront the … thing. It was a baffling, sickening, awful being, part Gosfath, part Dark Lady, all nightmare. The God of Blood was no more, but neither was the Dark Lady resurrected. Where there had been two gods, two essences of red and black, now there was one. One thing, monstrous and deformed, one curling horn, three arms, two and a half legs.

  Two faces, welded next to each other on one huge misshapen skull, the God of Blood’s mouth perpetually open in a snarl or perhaps a scream, the Dark Lady’s smeared over it like paint, Her black eyes rimmed in red and rimed with madness.

  Whatever She had attempted had failed. If She’d hoped to use Gosfath’s essence, His form or very life, to build Herself a new body, all She’d succeeded in doing was melding Herself to Him.

  Like Crys. Two souls in one body. Except not the fuck like Crys at all, because Crys is pretty and that’s enough to make sure I never sleep again.

  And it was growing, its heads – head? – nearing the rafters as it bellowed-moaned-roared its hate and struggle. It didn’t see her coming, too absorbed in its battle with itself and she realised its attack on the doors probably hadn’t been intentional. Tara slid through the shadows and the puddles, the splash of her boots lost beneath the noises the thing was making.

  It still had tentacles of black protruding from its spine, whipping back and forth as though seeking support, and a red arm, one of Gosfath’s still intact, made a wild grab at itself, ripping at black stuff, gouging for the Dark Lady’s eye beside His own. Her arm
batted it away and the monstrosity spun, unbalanced and staggering.

  ‘Listen, Fox God, this was your idea, sort of, so if you could lend me a little strength, I’d appreciate it. Or just, you know’ – Tara tapped her fingertips to her heart – ‘watch over me, that’d be great.’

  Gods, she thought as it spotted her and bellowed, even by my standards this is stupid. Mace is going to kill me.

  I really, really hope he gets the chance.

  A manic laugh burst from her as she raised the sword and knife and summoned the last dregs of energy. The divine atrocity that defied nature and all known laws halted towards her, lurching and keening. ‘Fox God, you listening?’ Tara babbled. ‘A little help?’

  There was no response, so she rolled her wrist a few times to loosen it, tightened her grip on the weapons, and moved to meet it. It was distracted, the Gosfath half still intent on peeling the other from itself, and she used that to her advantage, skipping beneath a flailing arm and thrusting her sword up into its gut. It scraped off the solid, stone-hard red flesh and slipped sideways, shoving into the Dark Lady’s pale skin with little more effort than it would a mortal’s and opening up a wide red mouth that gouted black.

  Twin bleating calls, of triumph and of rage, and a tendril of ebony muscle as thick as Tara’s thigh crunched into her midriff and shattered what felt like the rest of her ribs. The floor rose up and slammed her in the back and Tara would’ve screamed if the pain in her chest hadn’t obliterated all thought and expelled what little air she had left. She concentrated on not passing out, fighting to breathe, fighting her body so she could fight the monster.

  ‘Where … where are you going?’ she croaked as the thing limped past her moments later. She swung her left hand and drove the knife into its ankle; it looked back as though at an insect, and the same foot came up and then slammed down with crushing force on her forearm. Tara heard multiple snaps and the burnt flesh sloughed free, trailing in ribbons across the stone as she rolled on to her side and curled up around the fresh pain.