“What did it look like?”
I exhaled, composed myself, and decided to change the subject. “Our headsets work for telepathy. We need to test them for abilities.”
Zira nodded. “Regeneration first.”
“No, don’t release your scythes yet—”
“I’m not stupid,” he hissed, kneeling over the brook. Peering into the water, he said, “But we need to make sure that we can self-sustain in case our trip extends longer than planned.” Zira grabbed a loose, scale-looking rock at the bank’s edge, smashing it into fragments with one, swift beat. The strength he’d just displayed seemed promising, at least. I was also a little disgruntled by the lack of fear he was presenting; he’d spoken fearfully of this place up until now.
Zira drug the sharp edge of a shard across his palm. The incision he made wasn’t deep enough to cause discomfort, only to create a dark red line on his skin. It didn’t even draw blood. He enclosed the same shard in his fist, counted to five in a whisper, and then opened it.
The red line was gone. The shard was gone, too.
“Looks like we’re in business,” said Zira, but the grin forming on his lips suddenly curled downward. He looked up at me then, pupils so dilated that they’d swallowed his irises.
“Zira?” I said, uncertain.
“We can’t…” he stopped, as if those two words alone had stolen all of his breath. “Toxic…”
Fuck.
He teetered, hitting the bank on his side. I knelt beside him, gripping his shoulder, not knowing what else to do. And then I remembered the osmium marbles in my pocket. I fumbled for them as Zira shook like he’d been submerged in ice water, teeth chattering so loudly that I thought they would crack. There was no guarantee that osmium would stop whatever poison the shard had afflicted him with—and if it didn’t, we’d have one less source of fuel for the journey ahead—but the risk was worth the cost. I sure as fuck wasn’t going through this nightmare alone.
I forced a marble into his hand and curled his fingers around it, holding them closed with my own. “Come on,” I encouraged. “Come on, suck that down.”
He watched me, shaking, chattering, and for the first time I saw real terror in his eyes. Save me, they said. Please, save me.
Just when I thought my plan hadn’t worked, it did.
Zira’s trembling started to ease, and I no longer heard his teeth. For a few minutes more he only laid there, breathing hard, staring ahead in a sickly daze. He closed his eyes, exhaled, and when he opened them the fiery orange of his irises had returned. They flicked toward me. He was well enough to frown.
“Well, it looks like scythes are a no-go,” I muttered, doing my best not to show any more concern for him. “We don’t have enough reserves to regenerate with.”
Zira sat up and shook his head, reclaiming his bearing. He, too, tried very hard not to acknowledge that I’d just probably saved his life. Neither of us were comfortable with addressing what had just happened, but there was now a common understanding.
There was a fraction of trust, albeit unspoken.
“I haven’t gotten anything back from the Court,” said Zira, rising to a stand. For the meantime he avoided eye contact, which was fine with me. “Have you?”
“No, but it says we’re connected to the stream. Maybe it’s output only.”
Zira sighed. “That does us no good.”
“At least they can watch. And know.”
“True.” He looked ahead, where the brook meandered and disappeared into the boundaries of a strange, crystalline forest. “So, there is some good that came out of nearly killing myself.”
I lifted a brow. “Oh?”
“I think I know the way now.”
“… The way to Leid?”
“I don’t know. There’s a thread of light that you can’t see. At least I assume you can’t see it because you haven’t mentioned anything.” He pointed down the brook. “It’s leading that way.”
He was right; I couldn’t see it. “A thread. You mean the same threads that Leid always talks about?”
“Not sure. It looks like smoke, but stays in one place. And it’s glowing.”
I followed his eyes, then looked back at him. “How do we know it doesn’t lead to our demise?”
Zira shrugged. “We don’t, but this is the only lead we’ve got.”
I hesitated with a response for a lengthy moment, instead looking between Zira and the forest. “Nothing about this feels right.”
“It won’t, not ever,” said Zira, hushed. The grim acceptance on his face made me realize he’d already gone through this process.
“Lead the way,” I said, sighing in resignation.
With that, he took off down the brook, sprinting so quickly that within a blink of an eye he’d gained a massive head start.
“Hey!” I called, chasing after him. My anger was somewhat diminished by relief in the discovery that our speed was more or less the same. If we got out of this alive, someone had better give me a fucking award for my headset upgrade.
Zira stopped at the tree line, waiting for me to catch up. “We need to hurry. I don’t know how long the shard will stay in my system, and I’m not eating another one.”
*
We were forced to stop only a while later, when the brook split two ways. One path led to a denser area of tightly-woven trees, the other continued ahead in the same meandering direction; except several paces down, there was a metal post jutting crookedly out of the ground. It stood as tall as us, displaying a sign that, for the first time since becoming a scholar, I couldn’t read.
That alone piqued my curiosity, though the sign itself seemed very out of place. The material out of which it was made, the way it unnaturally connected to the ground—;
And, most importantly, the way Zira reacted to it.
He didn’t even look at the other path, only stared at the sign in shock. After a moment, the shock receded and the light left his eyes, as if he was looking at the saddest thing he’d ever seen.
“What is it?” I asked, because it certainly appeared that he knew.
Zira’s response was delayed. “I don’t know.” Then, he turned toward the other path. “This way.”
I didn’t move, only followed him with my eyes, and he eventually stopped when he noticed I wasn’t with him.
“Are you coming?” he asked. The hint of urgency in his expression verified my suspicions.
“The thread isn’t leading that way,” I said.
He tried to hide his surprise. “And how would you know?”
“Because your poker face is garbage. Can you read the sign?”
Zira looked away.
“You can, can’t you?” I demanded, throwing up my hands. “What’s the problem, here? Why aren’t we following the thread anymore?”
“I don’t—”
“What does the fucking sign say, Zira?”
“Dortiva,” he said.
I waited for him to explain, but he didn’t and only stared at the ground.
“Uh, what—?”
“It’s the town where I was born,” he relented, and the mere act of imparting this information seemed to wound him deeply. “We can’t go that way.”
I squinted at Zira, and then at the sign, trying to make sense of what he’d just said. The scripture was illegible to me because Zira’s birth race, Firianis, had long since been extinct; that part I understood. “But the thread—”
“It’s a trick,” he deduced. “It won’t lead us to Leid, I realize that now.”
“A trick played by whom?”
Zira shook his head, revealing he hadn’t a clue. “We can’t go that way,” he repeated.
“Well, I’m not going that way,” I objected, pointing to the pitch-black death trap that was our only other option. “Not unless you have a specific reason, backed by evidence, why we shouldn’t keep following the thread.”
Zira snarled. “Qaira, for fuck’s sake—!”
Wow, he actually swore.
I was winning all kinds of awards today. “This isn’t about the fear for your privacy, this is about Leid. Don’t you think whatever planted this sign here also considered that you might pussy-out and choose the other way? Isn’t that what it’s counting on?”
Zira only stood there with a conflicted frown, opening and closing a fist. He knew I was right, and I needn’t a verbal declaration of that fact. I turned and headed past the sign, staying the course.
“We keep following the thread,” I said, my tone daring Zira to challenge this decision again.
I didn’t hear his footsteps behind me, and I thought for an instant that it was here where our brief alliance would die. But then he appeared at my side just as the forest broke into a clearing, and I struggled to hide my relief.
“Welcome back,” I said, half-mockingly.
“I eagerly anticipate your turn,” he replied, not meeting my gaze, casting his own tiredly ahead. “Let’s see how brave you are then.”
I had no idea what Zira was talking about, nor did I bother to humor him.
The clearing wasn’t huge, but it definitely seemed deliberate. I could hardly picture the trees naturally sprouting a near-perfect circular border in the middle of nowhere. It depicted a synthetic meadow, or growing-field, minus any crops. Or soil. Or basically anything essential for farming.
But there was something at the center of the clearing: a dilapidated shack made of rusted metal sheets unevenly fused together, and what appeared like cardboard strips for roofing. There were no windows, only a rectangular hole serving as an entrance, bereft of an actual door.
In front of the shack was a hearth, the flames fierce and blue-hot, curiously without any source of kindling. It was just a massive fire in the center of a circle of large, milky-white shards, none of which seemed flammable or even marred by the heat. There was a cast-iron pot laying on its side next to the fire, utensils such as cups strewn further away, like someone had knocked it from the rack-bar still mounted over the hearth. A gross, congealing brown liquid had spilled from the pot, staining the ground like old blood.
Zira was the first to slow, concern etched across his face. It was clear he recognized something about this, but before I could inquire, a creak made us both turn toward the rusty shack. A contraption rolled out from behind the side of the shack, moving into view.
It was a… wagon?
Muck-stained and small enough for only a child to fit in, it rolled several more feet along the uneven, scaly ground; the rickety, misaligned wheels creaking, until it made a full stop ten feet from the hearth. As far as I could tell, there was no one around to have pushed the wagon. This had just escalated to some Grade-A terrifying shit.
“What the fuck?” I whispered, feeling my pulse punch the inside of my throat.
Zira didn’t respond, and when I turned to look at him, his already-pale skin had turned even paler—as if someone had just dumped a bucket of chalk-dust all over him. His lips quivered, but whatever he was trying to say couldn’t leave his mouth. I called to him twice, but he never took his horrified gaze off the wagon.
“Zira!” I shouted on the third attempt, and he jumped, as if having woken from a trance.
“No,” he breathed, backing up. “No, she said this wouldn’t happen again. She said it’d never happen again.”
I watched him, utterly confused, his evident horror surging my own. My wrists ached, and I had to use everything inside of me to keep the scythes from unsheathing. I couldn’t afford the injury. We had nothing to defend ourselves with; nothing to regenerate with.
But what were we defending ourselves against? A fucking wagon? Why was Zira freaking out over a wagon? Sure, what had just happened was creepy, but—;
And then he fell to his knees, gritting his teeth in pain. He hugged his chest, as if trying to hide his arms, but was forced on all fours seconds later. I watched on, at a complete loss, flinching with each sickening pop and crack of bones and muscles torn from their joints. Most terrifying of all was watching Zira wheeze and sob as his limbs and digits curled with the most severe case of arthritic disfigurement I’d ever seen. And it’d all happened in less than a minute.
“You have to stop it!” he screamed, blood tears pouring down his face.
“S-Stop what?!” I screamed back, hands on my head, trying not to completely lose my shit. “What the fuck is happening to you?!”
“I’m regressing!”
Well, that’d been no help whatsoever.
“The Augur!” he was croaking now, having all but lost his voice. “Kill the Augur!”
Kill the Augur.
Okay, then.
I turned and headed for the shack, acting like I knew what Zira’d meant. In reality I couldn’t watch him suffer anymore; retreating into that rusty shithole felt better than helplessly standing by as my partner contorted into a pretzel.
Guilt clenched at my insides, twisting my stomach into fits of nausea. I shouldn’t have forced Zira on this path. He’d known what was waiting for him—how he’d known was another matter entirely; one I’d raise if he somehow survived this.
I stopped dead in my tracks on the threshold, half my form encased in cool darkness. Perforations in the walls made pin-pricks of light across the dingy room, revealing a body mere inches from my feet. It lay face down, a filthy, blood-soiled sack over its head. The rest was covered in a robe and a single sash, fastened at the waist. The form beneath the robe was frail enough for me to acknowledge they’d been for a while; long enough that I opted not to remove the sack.
Something moved from further within the room. I jumped, cursing under my breath at the amount of times I’d been spooked so far.
A figure twitched in the corner, having conveniently avoided any light rays, its shape caliginous and sinister. I could hear breathing, ragged and infirm, and a strange rattling that I couldn’t quite place. It either didn’t see me or didn’t care that I was there, and I cautiously inched closer, this entire event unfolding to the soundtrack of Zira’s strangled screams outside.
Just a few more steps, and I could see it clearly. Or I thought I could see it clearly, but what I actually saw in that tetanus-infested corner was so unreal that I couldn’t prevent a laugh of disbelief from escaping my throat.
It was some kind of disfigured creature, skin mottled and uneven, as if half-assedly sewn together from different bodies. Sharp contours of its skeletal frame jutted from soiled brown bandages that covered most of its form, even half of its face. Its hands and feet were wrapped in glittery rope, thread, wound tightly enough to cause lacerations that had cut deep grooves into its fetid flesh. Attached to its fingers was more string, each further attached to an athanasian shard, dancing along the floor in concert, producing the rattling noise I’d heard.
That was when I noticed the runes scorched into the ground in front of the creature. I didn’t know what they said, but it surely wasn’t anything good.
Was this the ‘Augur’?
Regardless, it was too ugly to live.
I’d given up on trying to rationalize any of this. Time to fall back on my natural talents.
I retreated out of the shack and snatched the pot beside the bonfire. Zira wasn’t screaming anymore, writhing and trembling in silence on the ground. He didn’t look any better, but didn’t look any worse. Without missing a beat I returned to the shack, cleared the room in only three steps, and swung the pot at the twitching abomination. Half a minute later it, too, lay face-down on the floor with its head caved in, myself and the pot covered in a black oily substance that had sprayed from its busted skull.
I resisted the urge to puke, breathing hard, watching to make sure it didn’t move again.
Instead, the corpse behind me sprung to life, its spine creating an inversed arch as it lifted its head to emit a death rattle. I just about hit the ceiling, then stomped on its head until the sack was flat and mushy.
Again I stood there and waited for something else, armed with a giant tea pot, covered in black blood, a s
ingle thought running on loop:
What the fuck what the fuck what the fuck—;
I emerged from the shack to find Zira seated in place with knees drawn to his chest, watching my approach in an exhausted, trauma-induced fugue. The streaks of dried blood on his face flaked away like paint chips. His hands were no longer gnarled, all his limbs now fixed in their proper arrangements, but he was evidently drained and still in pain, so there went another fucking osmium marble.
I chucked the pot aside and sat down beside Zira, handing him the marble, which he accepted with a trembling hand. As the color returned to his skin and his typical, brooding demeanor presented itself, I asked, “What’s up with the wagon?”
“Don’t worry about it,” he murmured. “Just a bad memory.”
He exhaled and rested his face against his knees. I wavered, knowing that kind of shame.
“I’m sorry,” I said, the confession nearly making me throw up in my mouth. “I shouldn’t have forced you to come here. I didn’t know.”
Zira seemed surprised by my apology. That made two of us. His gaze left me, settling on the shack. “I think this was a waystation.”
I tried to wipe the oil off my jacket, failing miserably. “A what?”
“There are places here that serve as… checkpoints, I guess, to voyagers. Laith is the wayfarer at the one I’ve been to.” Zira frowned and rose to his feet, dusting himself off.
“What’s an Augur?” I demanded, watching him venture toward the shack, the wagon having mysteriously vanished.
“I don’t know exactly what they are,” he said, “but they feed off our shadows.”
“Shadows?”
“Fears; the things we hate the most about ourselves.”
I thought of the sign and the wagon. “Bad memories.”
“Right. The wayfarer wards them off and guards the gates of entry into this realm.” He paused on the threshold, just as I had, studying the dead creature with the sack over its decimated head. “But, this wayfarer is dead. Its Augur went rogue.”
Oops.
Behind him, I winced.
To my credit, I’d had no idea who—or what—that thing was, and it’d scared the fuck out of me. Not to mention the wayfarer had been one foot across death’s door already, so I wasn’t entirely to blame.
Covenants: Anodize (Hymn of the Multiverse Book 9) Page 9