Bloodchild

by Anna Stephens

  Together they picked at the hole in the front line, widening it man by man, the Southerners in the next rows back trying to climb over the bodies and dying. Corvus took a step forward only as the men to either side did, stamping down on the corpse, feeling around it for a solid footing, fencing away with the spear tip jabbing for him, knocking it up hard enough his man behind lunged in and stabbed into the exposed armpit with his own spear. Another one down.

  But the end of Corvus’s line was still twisting despite all his efforts, pushed slowly back downhill, breaking the line of shields, the strength of numbers and formation.

  ‘Hold the line,’ he screamed towards the left, but it continued its slow warp. Much more and the enemy would be able to flood past it and roll up the flank like a fucking carpet. And the baggage train and hospital tents were burning – he could taste the smoke on the wind – so where the fuck were the Easterners he’d sent to fire it? They were supposed to be advancing up the southern slope to take these bastards up the arse.

  ‘On me!’ screamed a major next to him without waiting for orders. ‘Three steps back, on my command. Step!’

  The South Rank roared its victory as the line shuffled down the hill, straining to pull the left flank back into contact with the rest. They pushed forward, clambering over their dead, harrying the line before it was settled on its new footing, and another bulge appeared as half a dozen of Corvus’s soldiers went down on a patch of ice or mud, were slaughtered where they lay, the South shoving into the breach, barging forward behind their shields. They had the momentum now, were threatening to cut Corvus’s line in two.

  The rest of the Easterners weren’t coming. When Corvus himself reached the Afterworld to take his place in glory at the gods’ side, years and conquests and the making of legend from now, he would ensure those who had failed him were daily torn apart for their incompetence.

  Corvus’s mouth stretched in a wide smile as he killed the next Ranker to dare face him. Tett fought on his left, still alive though missing an ear and part of his cheek, blood misting into the air with every rasping breath, but killing and dodging and saving Corvus’s life again and again.

  Part of him knew they were losing, but it was a distant knowledge, subsumed beneath something else, something greater and immediate and right there, filling him to the brim with bloodlust and fury and righteous, revelling madness – the gods had come.

  The gods had come and nothing the fighters did now would alter that momentous arrival. Corvus screamed his raging euphoria as all around him, as all over the hill, every faithful son of the Red Gods was lifted up and filled with reckless purpose.

  Kill. Kill them all.

  Kill everything.

  DOM

  Tenth moon, first year of the reign of King Corvus

  Edge of Deep Forest, Wheat Lands

  He wasn’t surprised when Crys came up beside him. Or not Crys. The Fox God. He’d shed His armour, His boots and even His shirt, seeming oblivious to the bitter wind and the hard, tiny crystals of hail that blasted like gravel into their faces. It’d snow soon, if Dom was any judge.

  ‘You ready for this?’ he asked the Fox God as the presence of the Blood Lady loomed closer and darker and ever more imposing. It felt as if She was going to push through the clouds any second and crush them flat. ‘The Red Gods’ most wanted, gathered together to defy Them.’

  The Fox God’s smile was feral, His teeth overly sharp. ‘We’re ready. Are you?’ He reached out without looking, put a hand on Dom’s arm, and lowered it from his mouth. Dom could taste his own blood and knew it was wrong; he leant on the Fox God’s strength to stop himself from biting again.

  ‘You’re the one She’s inside,’ He added. ‘You’re the one seeing what She wants you to see.’

  Dom stumbled away a pace, clutching his stump to his chest. How did He know that? Was this another vision, sent to distract him while the real Fox God faced the Blood Lady on His own? How would he be able to tell?

  The Fox God held His arms out wide. ‘I’d tell you to stab me, but we know that won’t prove anything,’ He said. He snapped His fingers and silver light arced from them to the bites in Dom’s stump. They sealed even as he watched. ‘All right then, Calestar, now that that’s cleared up, what’s your plan?’

  Dom blinked, brushed the cold flesh of his foreshortened arm against his stubbled cheek. It throbbed, a dull, persistent ache. Maybe the cold; maybe something else. Didn’t matter, he supposed. ‘What? I don’t have a plan. You’re the Fox God; what’s your plan?’

  The Trickster rubbed at the red and silver patterns on his chest and upper arms, appearing unconcerned. ‘I’m not allowed to know the specifics of my fate, remember, in case I run away screaming? I assumed you’d have a plan that saw me kill the Blood Lady and die in the act.’

  Because I tried to kill you before? Dom didn’t say it out loud, but from the knowing look on the Fox God’s face, He understood the path of his thoughts. ‘May as well kiss goodbye to a free Rilpor then,’ he said instead, ‘because I haven’t got a fucking clue.’

  ‘Really? Damn.’ The Fox God grinned. ‘Then I suppose we make it up as we go along, don’t we? Wouldn’t be the first time, and She’ll be here soon, anyway. Any. Minute. Now.’

  Unexpected nerves fluttered in Dom’s belly – unexpected because they were the nervous thrill of anticipation, the excited anxiety of meeting an old lover again. He did his best to still them.

  Remember what She looks like now, what She is. What She’s always been, and you too blind to see it.

  Remember Rillirin. Home.

  The wind was dropping, though the temperature continued to tumble as the sun moved across the sky, a distant orange glow behind thick snow clouds. Winter was early and savage, and a god rode its back. As the squall lessened and the hailstones became bigger, fluffier, the first flurries of snow, the rumbling clash of metal on wood, metal on metal, and metal on flesh rose from behind, the sound swirling and swooping as the carrion crows would soon enough. Dom shivered again.

  ‘Seeing anything unusual?’ the Fox God asked.

  Dom stared across the whitening field and around in a circle, studying the ground and the sky, looking for that intangible something which might be the Blood Lady’s approach. There. He squinted. ‘I … I think we’re on the wrong side of the hill.’

  The Fox God hummed low in His throat. ‘And yet you walked this way and I followed you. Trying to delay me, were you?’

  ‘Me? No, Lord. I came this way …’ He paused, thinking. ‘I don’t know why I came this way.’

  ‘Because She wanted you to. She wanted access to Her followers without our interference, I expect.’ He cocked His head and Dom heard the change in the sound of battle, higher-pitched and strident now. Fear and rage. The last desperate moments of thousands of warriors. ‘She’s already here. Come on.’

  The Fox God set off at a run directly for the small wood hugging the base and flank of the hill. Dom shambled after Him, fast as he could and not fast enough. But the Fox God needed him, there was no doubt about it, so he limped on, dragging his left foot, lurching on his right.

  The Fox God came back to his side. ‘This is undignified, I know, but I’m going to carry you,’ He said. Dom’s mouth turned down but he didn’t argue, and was hoisted up and over the Fox God’s shoulders like a sack of grain, the staff falling from his hand.

  ‘Fuck,’ he grunted as they began to run and his sternum bounced up and down on the Trickster’s shoulder, stealing a portion of his breath with each stride until the pain made him dizzy.

  They slowed through the trees, picking their way through roots, shrubs and the dead clogging their path, and then they were out on to the plain and he heard the Fox God mutter something and slow again, then pick up the pace. If there was such a thing as running reluctantly, He was doing it. Whatever was in front of them, it’d given Him pause. Cold sweat prickled and Dom didn’t look.

  The Fox God put him down with his back to whatever was there
and held his head in both hands to stop him turning. ‘Are you ready? Do you know what it is you have to do, even if you don’t know what I’m meant to do?’

  Dom licked his lips, wiped his palm against his trousers. ‘Yes, Lord. Well, I think so.’

  ‘Remember the Light,’ the Trickster said. ‘See Them for what They really are, not what She shows you. She won’t save you. She doesn’t love you.’

  ‘Neither does the Dancer,’ Dom said before he could stop himself.

  Sorrow darkened the Fox God’s dual-coloured eyes. ‘You know that’s not true,’ He said softly. ‘But whoever it is you’re fighting for, hold them close.’ He let go and took a pace to the side. Dom had to screw up his courage and hold it tight to his chest before he could shuffle around in his wet boots and look.

  The Dark Lady. The beautiful, perfect, tantalising Dark Lady. Her smile was hot as She beckoned to him, and his feet were already moving before the Fox God repeated his admonition to look, to remember. To see.

  But he couldn’t. It was Her, his love, his perfect goddess, the answer to his every prayer. Love and need rose in him as She stroked his mind and slipped into the godspace as silky smooth as Her tongue into his mouth.

  My calestar, how I have missed you. She laughed, the sound jarring and wrong. Mad. Dom blinked rapidly, scrubbing his hand over his face and then biting savagely on his thumb, not because She made him this time, but in order to focus on the pain. You have come back to me. Despite everything. You are mine again.

  Want.

  That wasn’t Her speaking; that last word was deeper, lower, a hungry child’s demand. Gosfath. Dom stumbled in the frozen mud, shaking his head like a dog. ‘What?’ he croaked, and then he saw Her. Saw Them. It.

  His mouth fell open as he took in the full horror. The Dark Lady was gone, subsumed into something far less than human, far more than divine. A mangled wreck of body parts jammed and smashed and minced together, crooked eyes and screaming mouths with too many teeth, too many limbs, too much sagging, swinging skin. Too much everything rearing as tall as Rilporin’s towers once had.

  Horror made flesh. Flesh made divine. And divinity made mad.

  This is what She’d have done to our daughter, he realised, and it was enough to break Her grip on him. She was still in the godspace, scritching around like a diseased rat, but he could see Her with his own eyes, not the illusion She’d placed over them. He wished he couldn’t.

  The Fox God was at his side, still bearing that look of sorrow. ‘Sister. Brother,’ He said, hands outstretched. ‘It is still not too late.’

  The Blood Lady raised a hand, mottled with red, three of its fingers tipped with black talons, and She pointed. ‘You. You have my essence, my spark. Give it back or I will kill everyone here. Kill the entire world.’

  ‘No, you won’t,’ the Fox God said, walking forward with all the nonchalance of a man meeting a friend in the street. ‘You can’t. You haven’t the power. It’s taking most of what you’ve got to cling on to your Brother, to meld your essence with His. One single lapse in concentration and He’ll oust you.’

  Dom followed Him, a few paces behind, his heart pounding squirrel-fast, mouth dry with fear, not lust. He held Rillirin’s face in his mind as a barrier between it and the Blood Lady. Wind-blown russet hair and grey eyes softening a face that rarely remembered to laugh but was lit from within when it did. She was alive still, their daughter too, and he wondered what she’d named her and which of them she most looked like.

  Thoughts to bring him peace. Thoughts to build a wall between him and Them.

  The Fox God was still advancing, his arms outspread to the Blood Lady as though to embrace Her horror. Dom knew, fear writhing in his gut, that he couldn’t let that happen. Not yet. They couldn’t touch yet because despite the madness and the halting, twisted flesh, She was still too strong for Him. Someone’s got to weaken Her. Oh, look, that’d be me.

  ‘My love,’ he called, and the Fox God’s head whipped around to stare at him, disbelief and suspicion warring across His features. ‘What has she done to you, my love? How did the Blessed One manage to fuck up so badly? She had the babe; she had everything she needed. What happened?’

  ‘Calestar,’ He warned, but Dom ignored Him, going closer. On the hill where men and women fought and died, the clash of arms seemed weaker, as if Dom were walking down a tunnel and leaving all the sound behind.

  The war had always been bigger than the men and women on each side could understand. It had been fought for a thousand years, not by Wolf and Mireces and West Ranker on the border, but in minds and in hearts, in faith and in blood, and in the spaces between the stars and beyond the veil. Now, finally, it had come to Gilgoras. And it was here, on Rilpor’s soil, that the fate of them all would be decided. By Dom, the half-Blood, half-Light calestar, the dying cripple who had betrayed them all, friends and enemies and gods alike.

  But not you, my love. The Blood Lady preened at his thought. Not you, Rillirin. Even though it must have felt like it, I never betrayed you.

  The monster brayed its fury and slammed harder into the godspace, trying to force him to recant, to beg forgiveness. Dom swayed like a tree in a storm but he would not stop. Could not stop. He might not be the heroic, self-sacrificing warrior Gilgoras needed, but apparently he was all the Dancer had, because She’d set him on this path years and leagues and deaths ago, stripping his choices one by one until every twist and turn in the road led him not away from, but towards, this moment.

  ‘And I don’t even have the energy to hate you any more,’ he mumbled to the Dancer and to himself. ‘Let’s just get it done.’

  He rubbed his chest over his stuttering, skipping heart, its rhythm erratic as the Blood Lady continued to scrabble inside him, looking for his truth. He just had to reach Her before She learnt it.

  Rillirin.

  ‘My love,’ he said, near enough now not to have to shout. Her stink enveloped him – sulphur and mould, sex and fear. ‘What can we do? How can I help you?’

  The blowing snow could no longer hide the extremes of Her hideousness now he was so close. She tried to sneer, but Her features were permanently warped into agonised fury and only one cheek twitched.

  ‘Help? I— We— do not need your help.’ She eyed the Fox God, predatory. ‘We have our plans.’ She laughed, the sound as mad as Dom’s must have been for all those months, a file across his nerve endings.

  A few more steps and he’d be able to touch … It. And the closer he got, the stronger the swirling madness became, emanating from Her like perfume, like rot. More pieces of him unravelled, tugged by the winds of Her lunacy, out and away and gone. He could feel them, strands of being, of identity, tearing away in the breeze.

  He laughed, a mad, high-pitched cackle that matched Hers, and he stepped forward into Her arms. ‘My love,’ he whispered over the hissing, belching screams and shouts that hooted around her from the Afterworld, ‘my sweet love, you have returned. To me and to all of us.’

  ‘I remember you,’ She said and what he’d thought was fondness in Her ravaged face twisted into fury. ‘I remember what you did. Because of you, I am this. Because of you, my Brother suffers. I suffer. Because of you’ – She leant down close so that one of Her eyes was level with his own – ‘the world will suffer. And you will watch.’

  There was something that Dom was supposed to do now, but it was almost calm here, almost tranquil, in the eye of a storm that lashed everyone around them with madness and fury and hard white snow. There was a patch of Her face that was still Hers, pale as moonlight, smooth as butter. He put his hand against it, stretched on to his toes to kiss that corner of Her mouth, where it was perfect, before it twisted into a mockery of Gosfath’s leer.

  Nothing mattered but that little corner of Her, the memory and vision of all he’d lost, all he could have back again. ‘I can make you whole,’ he breathed. ‘And then you can make me yours.’

  The Blood Lady reared back, squealing Her agony as Her twisted, melt
ed form protested. Those parts that were Gosfath writhed, straining, splitting great wet mouths in Their flesh as He tried to rip Himself free of Her. She squealed again, black and red light flashing around Them as She drove more of Herself into Her Brother-Lover, anchoring Her essence deep within but not before He was able to wrench His head away, ripping the elongated skull in half, tearing Their faces free of each other.

  ‘Stop, my love,’ Dom shouted over the screaming – high-pitched enough to make his ears bleed and deep inside him too – but the thing before him mangled itself even further, one part desperate for separation, the other for control. It shrank, losing much of its imposing height in favour of healing the tears in its flesh. It had three complete legs now, one bending backwards. The heads remoulded, eyes realigning and bones forming beneath knitting flesh and Dom struggled to get away but black, horn-tipped tentacles held him tight, feet off the ground.

  The Dark Lady, head and one arm and torso beautiful and perfect and compelling, examined him and the battlefield from atop a writhing monster. Gosfath kept pulling, and more black tentacles erupted from Her spine and pierced Him, dragged Him closer. Dom could see them pulsating as they drank His strength. The god squealed and battered at Her; She ignored Him.

  ‘I know what I’ve done, I know you have no reason to trust me, but I can fix this!’ Dom screamed. He heard the Fox God shout something behind him, ignored it. He stretched and just managed to put his hand on her chest. ‘It was here, wasn’t it, my love? It was here that I stabbed you.’ The Dark Lady’s mouth stretched wide, wide enough to bite his throat out and She dragged him close enough to do it. Dom grabbed Her perfect face with his hand, wrapped his stump around the back of Her head and kissed Her.

  The Fox God, shouting.

  Gosfath, fighting.

  Dom, dying.

  Ecstasy and surrender filled him and threatened to swamp his resolve. He moaned at the rightness of it all, the lust and pleasure coursing his limbs and then Rillirin’s face, grave and sad, crossed his inner vision and did what no god’s command ever could. It gave him back to himself.