Lock swiped at the elusive woman with both swords, but they passed harmlessly beneath her and he grudgingly realised he needed to put some distance between them if he was going to prevail. The tip of the boot-knife whispered past his unprotected arm and opened a shallow cut. Lock twisted and leapt back out of her reach.
‘All the Splintered Fang are dead. You next.’ He taunted her with a flash of his wicked smirk.
‘You first,’ she hissed, panting heavily as she turned once again to face him. Her eyes moved to the graze on his arm and, unnerved by the triumph he saw in her face, Lock followed the gaze.
The cut from her dagger had barely broken the skin, but already he could see the poison chewing into his flesh as black veins squirmed up his arm like filthy serpents. The area where she had cut him grew puffy, and as he clamped his other hand over the wound, he felt the heat radiating from it.
‘You first,’ repeated Ophidia and she stood straight, relaxing and tipping her head to the side in a mockery of the Cabal’s own way. ‘Enjoy your death, crow. The poison will not kill you right away, though you will come to wish that it had.’
Lock felt the truth of her words as a creeping chill gripped at his arm, before he felt it crawl like a living thing into the space of his shoulder. His hand curled into a useless, nerveless claw and he was suddenly short of breath. His vision began to swim as the inky, toxic veins pushed into his chest and lungs.
She watched his slow paralysis dispassionately and turned away, studying the area with a critical eye. ‘I must prepare the ritual to offer you as a sacrifice and to drive out the taint in this place.’ Ignoring Lock, she moved away.
He felt the snapping of his own bones as they began to re-form into impossible, new orientations. The pain was excruciating, but still he did not cry out. His gaze was locked on the priestess as she prepared to desecrate the Great Gatherer’s most sacred of places.
I will not stand before my God until I am a great hunter.
He felt as though his skin were boiling, burning, and with supreme effort, he turned his head to look at the back of his hands. They shone with new growth and he realised, with bile at the back of his throat, that they were covered in scales. He snapped his head back to Ophidia, who was standing at the base of the tree, looking up into its heights. Then she nodded and taking her knife, began to carve a symbol into the tree’s trunk.
Lock staggered as slivers of icy pain needled into his knees and ankles. He shot Ophidia a murderous look and, as though she sensed his eyes on her, she turned, treating him to a malicious smile. Behind her, Lock could fix his gaze on the Mother, the Gatherer’s perch, haloed as it was with infernal light. She had dared…
The hunt must end with a trophy.
‘Coiling Ones, come to me in this place of death. See what fragility exists outside of your embrace. Let me offer up this sacrifice…’
The words of her obscene ritual drove all the pain from him.
Great Gatherer… I offer this trophy up to you!
He knew that this would be his final hunt, that he would bring no more offerings for the Pick. But he had one last trophy to lay before the Great Gatherer. The finest he had ever made. He mustered the last of his failing strength and forced his defiant body to stand steady, even as his throat tightened.
Lock managed to croak a note of defiance around a mouthful of bloody foam.
He charged. Every movement was an exercise in torture, but still he charged. Surprised by the unexpected attack, Ophidia reacted with her blades, plunging both into Lock’s body as he wrapped her in a fatal embrace and drove her back towards the tree.
A brutally barbed thorn pierced the priestess’ back and erupted from her chest, and she gasped in shock and agony. Lock released her and flopped onto his back, dragging the impaling blades from her dying hands. The poison had worked its way through his system and had nearly completed its paralytic work. His tongue felt thick and heavy around the blood swilling in his mouth.
‘No. Fang,’ he choked. ‘Nothing. For. You.’ He gurgled and spat, determined to let the dying Ophidia know the depth of her folly. ‘Never. Any. Fang. All. Dead. For. Nothing.’
He watched her through the mounting agony so that he would know that she had heard and understood. Her expression as the life left her was reward enough.
Lock started to laugh but he no longer had control over his own throat. Instead of laughter, he choked and vomited. He squirmed for a few moments and arched his back as thin, serpentine bones curled out of his skeleton and burst through his skin. An iridescent scale burrowed out of the palm of his hand in a mist of blood and he flopped over on his side, staring at the great tree. It bulged and creaked, twisting the impaled body and lifting it high into its boughs. More thorns ripped into the priestess, pinning her corpse so that it hung with its arms outstretched as if in benediction. Such a grand, beautiful trophy.
He couldn’t even scream as the poison rushed to complete its horrific work, but he kept his eyes fixed on the sight of the tree. The priestess’ snakeskin cloak snapped in a soft breeze that lifted momentarily and travelled across the grove.
So very beautiful.
Bones and scales tore their way out of his face, robbing him of his vision, and his ears filled with the sound of rushing blood.
He drew one final breath and listened to the rasp as it left his lungs. Then, above that sound he heard one other.
The rush of wings.
In the seconds before he knew no more, he knew one final, vital truth.
The Gatherer comes.
EIGHT-TAILED NAGA
David Guymer
The snake moved across Marik’s cheek, hard muscle and horribly dry skin holding on to his flesh like the tender hand of a corpse. It was as hideous a way to be woken as anything that Marik could have imagined.
With a reflexive jerk of the wrist he flicked the reptile from his face and pushed himself upright. An angry hiss and a rattle sounded from the ground beside him. He pulled his hand away.
A knot of serpents lay tangled over the dark sand.
Black. White. Orange. Red. Writhing together like a flesh tapestry. Bronze mambas. Bush dragons. Splinterworms. Double-headed Neb-Ka, feuding lords of the Varanspire, bound to a single entity by the sorcery of the Nine in punishment for holding the enmity of their Gods over the writ of Archaon. The vision had the eerie quality of a nightmare. His limbs felt swollen and heavy, as though he would find himself unable to fight or flee even if he could understand why he needed to. His head was woolly, confused by dry reptilian scents, the squirm of colours and a throbbing serpent hsssss of almost-human voices.
‘Papayagapapayagapapayaga…’
What was he doing here?
Part on impulse, part on memory, he looked down.
His stomach was as thin and hard as old rope, sandy, dry and coarse with dark hair. He felt his attention pulled to the shallow cut across his navel. It was a vivid, blurry pink, but was no longer bleeding.
An attack.
The steading had been attacked in the night.
‘Papayagapapayagapapayaga…’
He looked up.
He was in a hole in the ground. The sky was red and smoky, and tasted of recent death. In spite of their offerings, the God of Blood and Brass had come down on the Deepsplinter this night. He tried to get his eyes to focus on the walls of the pit. Its depth seemed to vary depending on how long he spent looking at it. A shimmering reptile with dark skin and silvered scales bobbed and danced around the circumference of the pit, and from its hissing aggregate of nearly human voices came the chant.
‘Papayagapapayagapapayaga…’
Marik stared at the daemonic blur in open-mouthed horror.
‘Husband!’
Marik’s gaze swam to the left.
A bird-thin woman in an armoured bodice sewn together from cactus rinds slashed at a sna
ke with a knife. In temperament and appearance there was something of the vulture about her. Never more so than now, the edges sharpened, the world around her blurred. Jarissa. His wife. At the sight of her, Marik felt for the hidden pocket in the rind plate that should have concealed his own knife. The weapon was not there. Whoever had come for them in the night and thrown them in this pit must have found it and taken it away. Trust Jarissa to have somehow kept hold of hers.
He who speaks in blood had always been her first love.
‘Husband!’ Jarissa trod on the neck of a cannibal asp as it poised to strike, then caught the throat of a rattleneck as it flew at her face and stabbed it through the roof of its skull with her knife. ‘Wake up!’ A blindsnake with sapphire-blue colouration and a pattern of shifting, eye-like spots lifted its head to about a foot off the ground behind her.
Marik fumbled with his tongue.
‘Jarissa!’ he managed to shout.
Too late.
The blindsnake sank its fangs into the thin layer of meat that sheathed the bones of her leg.
Jarissa staggered, swayed.
‘Is that all you… is that… is that… is… ssss… ss…’
The snake’s lower jaw throbbed, pumping its venom into her calf.
‘Ss… sss… nnn.’
Already dead and changing below the knee, Jarissa folded to the ground with a whimper. Her transformed limb oozed like a poisoned eel. Marik had never heard her utter so pitiable a sound.
‘Papayagapapayagapapayaga…’
‘No!’
Death was no stranger to the peoples of the Deepsplinter. To those scattered clans who scraped a living from blood cacti and cannibalistic rites far from the black eye of Carngrad and the Varanspire, he was taker and giver. The even-handed. The handful of rugged steadings on the Deepsplinter were without doors, that Death might come and go unhindered, and come swiftly when the moment came.
He did not come swiftly for Jarissa.
Marik dropped to all fours with a howl.
His right hand fell across a large stone.
Whoever had dug out the pit must have left it there in the ground, too much effort to pull up. Marik could see that most of it was still buried. Wrapping it with both hands and digging his fingernails into the sand around it, he pulled. Its rough planes cut into his palms. His hands, bloodied, slid on the stone, but it refused to move. Blinded by grief and pain, thoughts jumbled in his head, he reset his grip on the stone to try again.
With a murmuring hsssss, a great white boa reared up from the writhing mass of serpents, like a daemon conjured from a pool of ichor. It stood half again his height, thicker about the trunk than he was. Its spade-like head swayed from side to side, eyes as huge as worlds, a forked tongue flickering in-out, in-out, tasting confusion and fear.
Marik met the milk-and-oil swirl of the giant serpent’s gaze. Leaving the stone where it lay buried, he clenched his torn hands into fists. A libation to the Bloodied One dribbled to the ground between his feet.
‘Blood for the Blood G–’
A hot, sharp pain grew from his foot. His voice became slurred. His tongue fattened. Numbness threaded his leg towards his waist, moving through his veins like a fire and yet leaving the muscle it passed through cold. He looked down. Unnoticed, a sandsnake no longer than his foot had sunk its fangs into the bone of his ankle. It stared glassily back at him. He kicked it off him, then fell, sprawled to the sand. It spun under him. He heard a dry rustle of movement and, though his arm was going to sleep, he clawed together a handful of sand and tossed it into the great boa’s face.
The sand rattled off the snake’s hard, translucent eyelids. Its tongue flickered. But for some reason his efforts at self-defence drove the many-voiced serpent beyond the walls of the pit to ecstasy.
‘PAPAYAGAPAPAYAGAPAPAYAGA…’
It became a white din in his ears. A single, rolling drumbeat. A sibilant hiss. A great uncoiling in his mind.
‘Watch for the coming of the eight-tailed naga,’ he slurred, tasting sand but unable to feel it on his lips. ‘Seek the trueblood child of Nagendra. Rejoice. And beware. Chosen of the Varanguard!’
The white boa struck.
And though the words continued to hiss through his mind, the world no longer heard them.
It was day. He had no way of knowing which day, nor how many he had slept through since that night in the pit.
It was day.
He was lying on a bed of mounded earth and dried snakeskins that crackled disgustingly as he breathed. The air was cold and tasted of ash in his mouth. Burned steadings. Burned meat. The harsh bleats of brass-horns carried on the dawn chill. That the attackers had taken the semi-feral livestock rather than simply slaughtering them as they had the clanspeople was oddly reassuring. It meant they were mortal creatures of flesh and blood, not daemons, with human concerns such as milk and hornwool to stand alongside such observances as were demanded by their Gods. Above him, an awning of woven grass stalks shielded him from the desert sun. The sky beyond it was a too-bright blue torn by a bronze aurora, a distended mouth filled with fizzing storm-teeth, as though the sky itself were a rubber-masked horror trying on a human smile.
Marik had a mental image of a giant snake, its mouth wide, and shuddered.
‘You are awake, Ma’asi. Good.’
The voice came from the side of his bed. Marik turned his head towards it, wincing as though the tiny movement had dislodged hot coals from the inside of his skull.
A young man sat cross-legged on the black dirt beside him. He was draped in silvery layers of serpent scales and strange fabrics, metals glistening with morning dew. His face was a reptilian mask of tattoos, his ears, cheeks, eyebrows, nose and lips pierced with thin needles of bone. His hair was a venomous green, stiffened with some kind of animal glue and swept up into a crest. His veins were prominent, dark green. His eyes were glazed, as though he were drugged, their distance making him appear older than his unblemished skin and slender set implied.
Holding up a small cloth-wrapped packet so that Marik could see it, he set it on the ground and slid it towards the bed.
Marik risked lifting his head a little more.
‘What is it?’
‘Food, Ma’asi.’ When Marik made no move towards the packet, he elaborated. ‘You put it into your mouth and chew. Like this.’ He demonstrated, jaws grinding like a brass-horn working on the hard grass. Marik felt his lips draw into a smile. The young tribesman must have mistaken the look for one of incomprehension, for he felt the need to explain further. ‘Perhaps you do not eat, Ma’asi? Strange peoples I have encountered on the Coiling Path. Strange things I have seen. Those who drink only the blood of their infants, or who bask in the lights of the Eight-Star and grow fat on it like blood fruits. Those who do not eat at all. Perhaps you drink fire from air, or take vigour from your god by smearing the hearts of your foes into your skin?’
With a grunt, Marik rolled onto his side to pick up the parcel. He unpeeled the cloth wrapping to reveal a flat, black biscuit. It was grainy and hard. He sniffed it. There was no odour. Rolling back, he felt a sting from his belly, and remembered the wound there.
‘How do I know it is not poisoned?’
The stranger grinned, lip, cheek and nose piercings clinking together as though assembling a skeleton. If it was a joke, Marik did not understand it. But he was hungry. He took a bite. It was bone dry, almost woody, hard to chew. After a few seconds, Marik’s jaw began to ache. The young tribesman nodded, as though witness to the completion of some important rite.
‘Good, Ma’asi. Good. Nagendra did not choose in error.’
‘What is that supposed to mean?’ said Marik, dry mouth full of biscuit.
‘It means the khaga is poisoned, Ma’asi.’
Marik spat it out. The tribesman laughed as Marik wiped his mouth with the snakeskin bedding.
‘What does Ma’asi mean?’
‘It is your name.’
‘My name is Marik.’
‘That was what your false people called you. Ma’asi is your truename. It is how the Coiling Ones will know you.’ He pressed a palm to his breast. ‘My name is Klitalash.’
‘You don’t sound like a man of the Deepsplinter.’
‘I faced Blan Loa once. I was just a child then and do not remember much of it, only that it was long ago, and far away from here. The Striking Death have travelled far from the jungles of Invidia.’
‘To go where?’
‘The great isle of the Varanspire. Eventually. The Coiling Ones would have us do honour to Nagendra, and prove our worth to Archaon.’
Marik shivered at the utterance of that name.
‘I don’t understand.’
‘It means you are Striking Death now, Ma’asi.’
Marik crunched his eyes tight. An image of Jarissa falling to the ground with a mutating limb filled the darkness inside his mind. There, it was still hot. There, he could still see the blood in his eyelids flowing.
‘And if I choose not to be?’
Klitalash bared the filed-down points of his teeth, dismissing the question. Then, as though remembering something, he reached into the folds of his cloak and drew a knife. It was Jarissa’s. Klitalash offered it to him, grip first, holding it by the blade.
‘Papa Yaga gave this to me, said you were trying to reach it even when he drew your still body from the grave pit.’
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