by Paula Guran
“Au beneath the waves,” she said. “Why? You have betrayed us!”
“It was the nature of the island itself,” said the god. “And it was never in my power to keep any human alive forever, nor did I ever promise such a thing.”
She saw the dishonesty of the god’s words, but could not find sufficient answer for it. “What of Etoje’s service to you?” she asked. “Had he not taken you for his god you would still be on the island, with no company but the cries of birds. Does this mean nothing to you?”
“Etoje’s service was pure self-interest,” said the dead priest. “He killed his own brother to satisfy his greed. Surely you know this, the tale has been told often enough. And it should not surprise you. It is the way people are. As it happens, it serves my purpose.”
She looked at the people around her. They would, she knew, cut her throat as easily as the Speaker had offered up the victims of Au. Did they know what they dealt with? Even if she had spoken their language, and could have warned them, would she have wished to?
But there was nothing she could do. And that being the case, she would not beg or scream. She took two stumbling steps to the Stone of Etoje, knelt heavily and then made her back as straight as her shivering allowed and waited for the knife.
Steq had known that the woman was no coward. He had, when he had thought of what was to come, been grateful that he would not have to steel himself to endure pitiful weeping or wailing.
She knelt shivering by the stone, her chin up as though inviting the knife. Her eyes were open, and she looked not at the grimy, dead priest but at Steq.
He had not expected to be undone by her bravery. “What did she say to you?” he asked the god.
“It does not matter.”
“I am curious.”
“You are delaying. I wonder why?”
“Why should it matter to you?” Steq asked.
“It does not matter.” Steq did not answer. “Very well. The woman begged me for help, invoking my agreement with the people of Au. I explained to her how matters stand. That is all.”
That was all. Steq took a breath, and then spoke. “Godless, I fear I have led you astray.”
“And I fear this ship needs a new captain,” said the dead priest.
“It will have one,” said Steq, “if the people do not like what I have to say.”
The corpse made as if to step forward, but a voice spoke from the watching crowd. “Touch him and you’ll be over the rail, stone and all.” Other voices murmured in assent.
“Put me overboard and you’ll speedily discover your mistake,” said the god, but it made no further move.
“If we feed this god what it desires,” said Steq, “it will almost certainly have the power to do much of what it has promised us. And the blood that it demands will be none of ours.” His gaze shifted momentarily to Ifanei, and then back to the priest. “But let me tell you why the god has abandoned its promise to the people of Au. The great mountain above Ilu was a volcano, and there were others. For a thousand years the god held the island safe, because of its promise to the people of Au, but after all that time it could control them no longer. A thousand years! Imagine the power thwarted, enough to destroy the whole island when it was finally let loose. And when this god realized that it could not hold back the fires forever, what did it do? Did it command the people of Au, who had served it faithfully all that time, to build boats, and escape under its protection? No, it allied with us behind their backs, and left them to their fate. It will do the same when its agreement with us becomes inconvenient.
“Many of you have lived all your lives under this god’s protection. The rest are too accustomed to living in opposition to all the gods and peoples of the world to fear what might happen if the god of Au has not the strength to do as it promises. Perhaps I have grown too soft with easy living, and sentimental. But the fate of the people of Au troubles me greatly, and if you would ally yourselves with this god you must choose another captain.”
“And if we would not?” cried a voice.
“Then we must cast stone and corpse overboard, and sail away from here as quickly as we may. It has some power yet, and we will be in some danger, but I do not think it will follow us far. The gods of surrounding waters will have no love for it, and even so, at the bottom of the sea there will be no one to feed it.”
“I will show you my power!” said the corpse.
“Show it!” came the voice of an old woman. “We all know your weakness, and Steq has never yet led us wrong!”
As though her words had been a signal, the boat lurched to starboard. Steq grabbed the rail, watched as three or four people tumbled into the water. Crew slid across the deck, and the stone began to roll but the priest caught it up, and then a thick, dead-white tentacle reached up and onto the boat, twisting and snaking until it found a rail, which it curled around and pulled.
The rail snapped and was thrown up into the air. Another tentacle joined the first, groping along the hull, and then another. Torches tumbled from their places and bounced across the deck and into the water. Still a wavering, flickering light lit the boat—the sail was aflame.
“You!” Steq grabbed a man by the arm. “Loose the port hull!” The man scrambled to obey him, speaking to others on his way, who followed him. Steq then let go of the rail, to slide down the deck up against a writhing tentacle. “Everyone to the port hull!” he shouted. What they could do against the monster in an overloaded single hull he did not know, but he did not think they could extinguish the fire and right the ship, and so it was the only chance for survival.
In the meantime he would attack the monster in any way he could. He reached into his coat for his knife, and his hand brushed up against his pouch. There was nothing in it to help him—a few needles, a coil of fishing line and some hooks, and . . .
He looked around for the woman of Au, and saw her scrambling up the deck, hands still bound. He followed, grabbed her ankle and pulled her to him. She lashed out, swinging her fists, and hit him, hard, just under his ear. “Stop!” he shouted, though he knew she would not understand him. But she did stop. “Look!” Out of the pouch he pulled the small piece of polished, golden glass he had brought from Au, and held it before her eyes.
She looked at it for only a moment, and then closed one hand around it and called out, and suddenly the writhing arms were motionless and the sound of snapping wood ceased. “Up,” he said, and pushed her along the sloping deck towards the port hull, which was nearly free, and climbed after her.
“Steq!” The voice of the dead priest, weird and gasping. “Steq! What is that?”
“It is the smallest part of the island of Au,” called Steq, without turning his head. He and the woman reached the edge of the deck and leapt into the port hull just as it was freed. The Godless were unlashing covers and pulling out oars.
“She is not of Au!” cried the dead man. “I am not bound!”
“Then move against her!” This was answered with an inarticulate cry. The last few flames of the burning mast went out as Righteous Vengeance slipped under the waves, and the only light was the torches of the other boats, for the rest of the fleet was still nearby, their own crews watching in horror.
“Row for the nearest ship!” Steq ordered then. “It cannot harm us so long as the woman is in the boat, and as for the others, it has not the strength to bring more monsters against them, or it would have done so already.”
The woman sat shivering in the bottom of the hull, both hands clutched around the small glass token. Steq went to her and cut her bonds. “There is a place in the south,” he said, though he knew she would not understand him. “A mountain so high they say you can touch the stars from its top.” She did not answer, he had not expected her to. “Do you hear that, god of Au?” But there was no answer.
The next morning the Fleet of the Godless, reduced to five boats, sailed southward. Behind them, far below the featureless sea and attended only by silent bones and cold, indifferent fish, lay
the Stone of Etoje, and the god of Au.
“FAINT VOICES,
INCREASINGLY DESPERATE”
ANYA JOHANNA DENIRO
The silk threads of grief and time snap and spin away from the black looms, but all Freia wants to do is go back to Vienna. Dozens of women work the looms in the magnanery. Hands fly as the threads spin out of the boiling cocoons. Freia doesn’t work on the looms though. She’s not patient enough. Instead she sets the strands of damp, slightly sticky silk from the cocoons, hooking them to the spindle to unravel them, as the objects inside the cocoons die from the scorching water.
She dips her hands in. She can barely feel a thing. She hates the magnanery. The combination of Romanesque columns with the overhead fluorescent lighting creates the worst possible world she can imagine, and she knows many.
One of the other women she works with dumps a basket of cocoons into the troughs of boiling water. Freia judges the quality of silk inside. The most coveted threads are black, followed by citrine, carnelian, and gingerline. Invisible threads are not valuable at all; they are rough like a cat’s tongue and are always getting tangled. She sorts accordingly.
Freia has never been able to make any correspondence between the type of cocoon and the thread. No one has ever explained it to her, and truthfully she doesn’t care. She keeps her cravings for knowledge in check. This is how she survives.
The cocoons bob in the water and look like they’re about to jump out when she hooks them to the spindle. That’s when she can hear the voices inside most clearly, anguished whispers of help me help me and what is happening what is—
Freia usually wears her headphones while she works.
None of the other women working in the magnanery have talked to her in a long time. They keep their heads down. They have given up their old names. Their eyes are like pieces of charcoal excavated by an archeologist.
There is only the work. And Woden. But Woden is too monstrous to be contemplated just yet.
Instead, consider the tall tree in the center of the magnanery. From the central dome of the building, there’s a round opening where the tree keeps stretching on and on; and an opening in the floor where it stretches on and on.
But here, Woden uses the tree as a managed resource, a revenue stream.
From the trunk grow the branches with the golden leaves that the silkworms feast from. The leaves are supple and soft, almost like skin. And the worms are ravenous. Freia has never liked the worms, but maybe that’s because she knows what happens to them. Once full, the white worms start spitting silk, and they cocoon themselves, and after three days, the women pluck them hanging from the tree like figs and collect them for Freia.
The worms are silent. It’s only when they boil that they speak, and then what’s inside dissipates altogether.
Vienna, though—Vienna persists for her, almost despite itself. That’s all she wants. The world with the Danube and its tortes named after composers, her adopted home. She longs for blood. But Woden has removed anything that could cut her since the last time she fled, twenty-five years ago. It’s gutting to realize that her entire life has been stripped of its sharp edges. Woden sees her as a stubborn girl who is desperate for his protection but doesn’t realize it, or is afraid to admit it. He keeps her falcon cloak, her two cats, her boar, and her jewelry in a safe in his office.
At last, though. At last.
Freia hauls one of the troughs to the holding tank in the nave of the magnanery. She edges around the tree. One of the other women walking in front of her drops a needle that she’d pinned into the folds of her dress hem. Freia stops briefly, frozen. No one watches her, as far as she can tell. The needle is barely visible. The woman doesn’t seem to notice it’s missing. Freia kneels on the path as if she has to adjust the fit of her shoe, and then slips the needle into her own pocket.
Freia doesn’t dare look at it until she’s at her work station. A bronze needle with a glass bead at the tip of the shank. She doesn’t hesitate. All it takes is a drop. She gets a lot more.
“Ow!” Freia says as the needle pricks her thumb. She holds her breath and waits for her skin to blossom.
Soon the blood gushes down like the Krimml Waterfalls. The blood keeps coming, pooling on the floor and rushing down the storm drain of the magnanery, keeping it from reaching and feeding the tree—even Freia would not want to see that—and through the pipework, where it bubbles over in a toilet in a luxury high-rise apartment in Vienna. The blood rises at midnight, making the apartment’s bathroom unusable and thus the apartment unlivable.
Freia is breathless as the blood spurts out of her. She used to be known for so many beautiful and awful things, but now there is just blood.
The looms stop. The other dozen or so other workers in the magnanery stare at Freia. Despite her need for escape, and her joy, Freia is still ashamed and she hates that she’s ashamed. She bites her lip, and finally she sucks at the red rivulet.
“I’m sorry, I’m really really awful at this,” she says to them, but they don’t respond. Woden—her supervisor and one of her exes, who founded the magnanery many centuries ago—comes in through the iron door by the loading dock. He’s wearing a bombardier jacket and has a sack over his shoulder. Something writhes in the sack, trying to escape.
They stare at each other. They both feel the pull. He knows that once she bleeds, there is nothing he can do until she goes.
He gives her a mocking wave.
He doesn’t even look at her as she is cast down, cast down into the Imperial City, the red city, and this is what she is most embarrassed by, that he doesn’t actually care much about her, that she’s an afterthought, but still keeps her locked in the magnanery anyway.
Of course she has been cast down many times before, left to fall like piss from an airplane, always into Wien. It’s been their adopted home for a thousand years. At the beginning, before the Habsburgs came, Woden willingly let her venture into the city. The magnanery hadn’t been built yet. There was just the shining tree in the field, which stretched forever, where the worms congregated, ate, cocooned, and then burst into moth-dom, and flew away. Woden wasn’t quite as cruel yet. She still had all of her shit—a nice house, her jewelry, cats, and falcons and boar and lots of hot dead men and women to fuck.
And come to think of it, as she wakes up in the spartanly furnished apartment overlooking the Danube (or at least a hazy shimmer of it), even when he did become cruel he still treated her, more or less, as an equal—and sometimes he even cast her down himself by surprise, and she enjoyed this. She enjoyed having her throat slit and waking underneath the shadow of the Dreifaltigkeitssäule, commemorating the temporary end to the plague, which Leopold I attributed to God. She hates that she once craved Woden’s fucked-up affection.
But a hundred years ago or so he started taking his monstrous völkisch bullshit seriously.
The apartment is spartan, but still luxurious. Or wanting to give the appearance of money but not flaunting it. More than anything, the apartment wants to exude security, a cross between a panic room and a boutique infosec consultancy. The bathroom—the master bathroom—is a disaster area with the blood splatter—her blood, she has to remind herself. She walks around the apartment. A bedroom, a guest bedroom, two bathrooms, a kitchen, a “common area” with a foosball table, and a study. On the nightstand of her bed is a magazine in English folded to an article with the title “15 Members of the Super-Rich Who Remained Grounded and Humble.” She snorts. Whoever lived here before was either a lich or a sociopath.
She touches her arms. Her body is fine. It’s not the body she would have picked if she had the choice, but it’s fine. She goes through the walk-in closet and puts on what’s there: gray cashmere cardigan, white button-down dress shirt, black pencil skirt, black ankle boots. Onyx earrings. Dark blue scarf. It all feels good to her.
She’s in 2018, in an Age of Blood like no other. No purges, sieges, plagues or occupations from the past compare with the Imperial City Undying as an i
nvestment opportunity, a city for princely oligarchs to park money from selling teenaged Moldovan girls and lost nuclear warheads from Kazakhstan, apartments bought with white rhino horns and cash. Vienna is both the center and the beachhead for awful things. She knows this. The apartment’s previous tenant moved out in a hurry the day before, and there is an eviction notice under the door. She knows that she’s a hair’s breadth away from being a tourist, or a squatter. The notice indicates that the property managers, a holding company in Frankfurt, is “renovating” the building, which means likely demolishment and the construction of something more expensive. She sighs.
But it’s perfectly fine. She’s here. A little blood never hurt anyone.
It’s time for her to go to work then. She figures she could ditch this body’s responsibilities, but she can’t think of any easier way to interact with a large group of people where she’s not a complete stranger. It’s so hard being an almost-expat. Outside it’s . . . March? This March freezing rain, der schneeregen. The words form on her lips awkwardly. Her high-rise is on a quiet side street in Simmering, two blocks away from the Zentralfriedhof, the central cemetery with three million souls buried inside of it. She goes out of her way to pick up the tram right in front of the cemetery gates. The cemetery reminds her of home, that she’s no longer written under the sigil of love but only the sigil of death.
Fuck you she can hear someone say from a distance, deep inside the grounds. Fuck you, fuck you soul-sorter. On second thought, she has no time for the dead. There’s a glint on the sidewalk in front of her and she bends down. Amongst the raindrops is her needle, the bronze needle with the glass tip. In the magnanery, the needle was the lockpick and she was the lock. Woden must have tossed it out and down like the trash. The whole of Wien, every district, would not be sure what to do with her appetites, were it aware of them. She puts the needle inside a little fold in her messenger bag. Now all she needs is a thimble, a pair of scissors, a bobbin, a lucet, her spindle, and a loom powered by the exsanguination of a thousand innocents, and she would be set, she could open a shop on Etsy and make hats or shrouds for her enemies.