“You lied,” she said to the mirror, eyes widening in fear and understanding. “You have to save him.”
“Stop it,” said Bedeckt. “You’re a shite Mirrorist. Your visions of the future—”
“Shut up,” she said, without glancing in his direction. “I have to see.”
Nodding to whatever she saw in there, she placed the mirror atop a table, using a mug to prop it up. After once again searching the saddlebag, she drew forth a set of needles and twined thread.
“No no no,” said Bedeckt when she turned to face him.
“I can do this,” she said.
“No.”
“It’ll work.”
“Just like saving that boy—”
“Shut up.”
Zukunft bent at his side, her hair falling across his face and tickling his nose.
“You smell like a wet dog,” he said.
“Don’t distract me.”
“That’s the wrong kind of thread.”
“It’ll work.”
Something deep within was damaged. This wasn’t a simple surface wound. “I’ve sewn myself closed enough times to know—”
“Shut up.”
Biting her bottom lip, she pulled his hand away from his side, examining the wound. He felt exposed, open. Cold.
“Rings of your chain armour are driven into the wound,” she said. She set about digging them out with her fingers, dropping them, one at a time with a dull plunk, on the floor at Bedeckt’s side.
“Get them all,” he said through gritted teeth.
“Get better armour,” she said. “They’re rusted.” Then she splashed whatever was in the bottle she brought from the bar into the wound and he was on fire. It felt like she rammed a white hot poker into his guts.
“Sticking cunt bitch whore,” he said between clenched teeth and she shushed him again.
He whimpered as she sewed, cursed her family for a dozen generations each time she tugged rough thread through tender flesh. He swore she’d serve in the Afterdeath when she tied the thread tight, and screamed when she finished by emptying the rest of the bottle over the ragged wound.
It was the worse sewing job he’d ever seen.
“Remind me not to let you fix my pants,” he said, breathing in shallow gasps.
She ignored him, sat staring into her mirror. “Did it work?” she asked whatever she saw in its surface. Her face crumpled in misery. He didn’t need to ask.
I don’t want to die.
Zukunft returned her attention to Bedeckt. She laid one hand upon his chest as if she meant to stop him from rising. “You will never touch me, will you?”
He stared at her in confusion. She couldn’t possibly want that. Could she?
She leaned close, hovering over him, her hair falling about his face like a sodden curtain, blocking out the rest of the world. Reality was gone. Only Zukunft remained. There was nowhere else to look but into her desolate face. Her eyes, welling with tears, were filled with dread.
Bedeckt, head spinning, his own eyes watering from the agony searing his side, had no idea how to answer. He wanted to tell her she was a damned child and that he didn’t hurt children. No matter how much of a shite human he might be, there were a few things he would not do. But he knew himself and she was painfully beautiful.
Get a grip, old man. Still he hesitated.
What did she want to hear? Why the hells did he care?
“You can,” she said, blinking back tears. “Just reach up, right now.” A bead of water hung from the tip of her perfect nose and then fell to land on the crushed ruin of his.
“No.”
“Why not?”
Women. If Stehlen was impossible to understand, Zukunft was something else altogether.
“I’m stained,” he said. “Spoiled. Ruined. Broken. Shite, think of every word you can to describe an awful man and that’s me.”
“You have your list.”
“Stick the list.”
“Then touch me.”
“No.”
She gave him a smile of gut wrenching misery and tears fell. He tasted salt. She leaned in and kissed him, her mouth open, tongue touching his lips. She pulled away to look him in the eye when he refused to return the kiss.
“I’ll live?” he asked, having already seen the answer in her face but desperate for a distraction.
Zukunft cried harder, sorrow distorting her features, tears raining down upon Bedeckt’s upturned face.
“Find the innkeeper,” said Bedeckt. “Maybe—”
“Long enough,” she said.
Long enough? Long enough for what?
“We have to leave,” she said. “There’s a farmhouse.”
“A couple of days, and then we’ll…”
Zukunft shook her head, eyes pleading. “We have to leave now.”
“I can’t,” said Bedeckt. “I can’t ride. It’ll kill—”
“You have to.”
“Why?”
She stared down into his face, shaking her head enough to move her hair against his face. She doesn’t want to tell me and hates herself for what she’s asking.
“If we don’t leave now,” she said, “you’ll be dead before we reach the farmhouse.”
“If we leave now I’ll—”
“What you want—your means of stopping Morgen—it’s there.”
How badly did he want that? What did he want more, redemption, or a few more years of life?
You’ll be dead before we reach the farmhouse.
Dead. She stanched your wounds with filthy bar rags, sewed you shut with string from gods knows where, splashed strange alcohol in the wound; what the hells did you think would happen?
She was wrong. Her damned mirror and whoever she thought was in there was wrong. “If I rest here,” said Bedeckt. “A few days.”
Zukunft lay her face upon his chest and shook with sobbing anguish. “I’m sorry.”
I’m dying? No. Not again. Not so soon. “What’s at the farmhouse?”
“Your friends.”
“I don’t have—”
“And me.”
“Your mirror lied about the boy. We never could have saved him. It’s lying again.”
“She knew this would happen. All of it.”
“She?”
“My little sister,” Zukunft said into his chest. “This is why she wanted us to come here.”
“So I could die?”
“She wants to teach me a lesson.”
What the hells is my death going to teach Zukunft?
“I killed her,” said Zukunft. “We argued. I pushed her through a mirror. Shards of glass fell, one slipped between her ribs. She took hours to die and I sat with her, holding her hand.”
She shook, uncontrolled sobs racking her thin frame, pressing herself into Bedeckt’s chest as if he could somehow make everything better. He raised his half-hand, stopped short of touching her. He didn’t want to die. He knew the Afterdeath , understood the grim helplessness of what awaited. There was no redemption there. Not for him, not for anyone. Those souls earned their fate. They weren’t the kind of people who suddenly turned their lives around and became good. And what came after? Bloody battles were even more common in the Afterdeath, with none of the decent souls around to forestall the madness. Still, he hesitated to offer comfort. What are you afraid of, old man? You’re dying. You know you are.
Bedeckt held her tight, ignoring the agony in his guts.
His friends. “The farmhouse,” he said.
“We have to go,” Zukunft said, voice muffled. “Your friends will be there. Your answers.”
Answers. Morgen. “Something bad happens there,” said Bedeckt, not quite asking.
“My sister wants me to go.”
“But we don’t have to. We’ll go somewhere else.”
“She showed me the future.”
“Damn it, girl.” How could he make her understand? “You’re Geisteskranken. You’re delusional. Your sister is dead and gone, yo
u’re imagining all of this.”
“My imagining it makes it true.”
He couldn’t argue with that. “But if she means you harm, we have to ignore her. She can’t force us—”
“Your friends will die there if we don’t go.”
Abandoning friends isn’t on the list. To hells with them.
Bedeckt remembered the night he and Stehlen shared in that dark alley, the drunken rutting. He remembered her face, that moment in the Afterdeath of unexpected softness, when he returned to her that motley collection of scarves. He remembered how Morgen once said Wichtig looked to Bedeckt as a father, desperate for encouragement or a kind word. Bedeckt had laughed and mocked the boy god’s naivety.
“I don’t have friends,” he said.
Zukunft kissed him on the cheek and stood. “I’m going.”
“Why?”
“I killed her. I deserve whatever happens.”
“It will be better if I’m there?”
“I don’t know,” said Zukunft. Her eyes said, not for you.
Fate was horse shite. Anyone who thought they knew the future was mad.
Bedeckt stared up at this beautiful and deranged girl. Every part of him wanted to close his eyes and sleep. Lay here on this tavern floor until he awoke somewhere else. He felt old, more ancient than mountains.
She killed her little sister. So what? It was an accident. Guilt plagued her, broke her mind, drove her mad. Just another damned Geisteskranken.
“Help me up,” he said.
Bedeckt leaned heavily against the bar. A tankard, emptied and refilled three times, sat half full within reach of his half hand. He’d sent Zukunft to the stables in search of leather and straps with which to bind his belly. If he wrapped his gut tight enough, perhaps he might manage to stay upright and in the saddle long enough to—
Long enough to what? Die?
The tavern door swung open and Zukunft strode in dragging behind her a tangle of leather straps stolen from gods knew how many saddles. It must have been raining hard, as once again her shirt and skirt were soaked through and clinging to every curve. Bedeckt felt bad enough he didn’t care and had no trouble ignoring her.
Hefting the straps, she dropped them atop the bar. Like her, they were sodden.
“Old men hate the rain,” Bedeckt said.
“Old men hate everything.”
He couldn’t argue.
Ducking behind the bar, she returned with several more bar rags and another bottle of alcohol he didn’t recognize. Laying the rags—which looked worse than the last lot—flat, she poured the booze over them.
“That would have done more good in my gut,” said Bedeckt.
She patted his belly. “I think there’s enough in there. Lift your shirt.”
Bedeckt obeyed, lifting both the shirt and the torn chain armour beneath. Her eyes widened as she examined the hashed crisscross of pale scars sheathing his torso. She reached out a finger to touch a particularly large scar running from his left nipple down past the belt of his pants. She pressed, feeling the ridges of hard muscle beneath the fat of his belly.
“I bet you used to be something,” she said, not at all talking to him.
“Something.” He grunted. “I am what I have always been.”
“You must have been amazing when you were my age,” she said in wonder, gaze roving his body as if drinking him in.
“Amazingly stupid,” said Bedeckt, uncomfortable.
She ran soft fingers across his chest. “Is there any part of you that hasn’t been cut?” She looked up at him, lifting an eyebrow, and he became aware of how close she was. He felt her warmth, smelled her sweat. “Maybe I should look you over, find out for myself.”
Bedeckt’s face flushed hot. What the hells? How did she do that to him?
“The straps,” he said.
“Rags first,” she said.
Zukunft helped peel the blood-soaked remains of his shirt away and dropped it on the bar with a wet plop. Next she helped him shuck the tattered remnants of his chain shirt and Bedeckt did his best to ignore the gaping hole torn in its side and the flaking rust of the many bent rings.
His torso naked, Zukunft pressed the booze-soaked bar rags over top her crude stitches. “Hold these in place.”
Once Bedeckt had them held where she wanted, she wrapped his gut in strap after strap. He groaned in pain as she cinched each one tight. Once finished, she stepped back to examine her handiwork. Overlapping bands of leather bound his belly tight. She touched a hand to the wounded side.
“Feel that?” she asked.
“No.”
She pressed a little harder. “That?”
“A little.”
Zukunft pressed harder and he grunted in pain.
“It’ll do,” she said. “Let’s see if you can stand.”
“I’ve been standing the entire damned time.”
“Without leaning on the bar.”
After downing the last of his pint, Bedeckt pushed himself from the bar and stood, weaving only slightly. “Good as new,” he said, grinding his teeth to stop from whimpering.
“Your new is shite.”
“I think you’re going to have to help me to the door,” he said. “And I’m not sure if I can mount a horse.”
“Anything else you’d like to mount?”
“Woman, this isn’t—”
“Oh ho! So I’m a woman now?”
“Girl,” he said. “I’ll tell you what’s shite: Your timing.” You’re off by several decades.
She offered a sad smile and he realized she was on the verge of tears.
“Sorry,” she said, voice quiet. “Lean against me. I’ll help you.”
Bedeckt staggered to the tavern door, Zukunft supporting much of his considerable weight. Glancing over his shoulder he saw the stain of his blood. It was too large. Far too large. He couldn’t believe he ever had that much blood inside him.
It isn’t in there any more.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Give me one hundred Verschlinger Wendigast who will obey orders and I will conquer the world.
—General Misserfolg, Selbsthass
The cold tinkle of metal on metal woke Wichtig. He groaned, his throat dry. Sinuses choked with blood, he’d fallen asleep with his mouth open. He felt like he’d gargled dust.
Everything will be fine. I’m the Greatest Swordsman in the World. Morgen will watch over me. The damned god-brat needs me.
“Calm,” he whispered, “Be calm like the—”
“Shut up.”
“Huh?”
The voice was feminine. If there was a woman in the room, he was as good as free. Wichtig rolled his eyes, trying to see who spoke. The previously empty wood table was now littered with bright and shiny implements of horror. Knives and hooks and surgical instruments for spreading flesh and bone were laid out in loving care, aligned perfectly.
A slim figure stood at the edge of his peripheral vision, face and body shrouded in whispers of spidery gauze.
“You sleep heavily,” she said, voice nasally and hollow.
“Tired,” he said. “Small run-in with an albtraum pretending to be my son.” He wasn’t sure why he told her that, but manipulation often depended on laying a groundwork of subtle facts and watching to find which was the emotional trigger.
The woman didn’t seem to care. “I am Schnitter,” she said.
“Wichtig Lügner,” he answered. “The Greatest—”
“Yes, yes.” She shuffled closer, moving with a lilting limp, and smiled down at him. The gauze offered hints of the twisted nightmare face within.
“You are pretty,” she said. “Shame about the teeth.”
“I did look better with them,” he said, enunciating carefully so as to avoid the embarrassing lisp.
“I meant that it was a shame I didn’t get to take them,” she said, reaching a hand up to caress Wichtig’s cheek. “But the rest will be mine.”
He couldn’t drag his gaze from that hand. The s
mallest and middle fingers were gone, severed at the first knuckle. Noting his attention, she lifted the other hand. The first and ring fingers were missing, surgically removed. None of the remaining fingers had nails; red and raw, they looked to have been recently yanked free.
She smiled at whatever she saw in his face.
Wichtig eyed the stumps of her missing fingers with distaste. “They fell off?”
“Of course not, my pretty.” She leaned close. “I removed them.” She shrugged again, the slightest lift of shoulders. “I am optimizing myself, cutting away the unneeded.”
He blinked up at her, struggling to understand. “Optimizing?”
“And I will do the same for you. I shall pare you down to the barest of essentials, nothing superfluous.”
Feigning calm, Wichtig offered a world weary sigh. “So you’re going to torture me.” He was impressed with how bored he managed to sound.
“No, my pretty. Of course not.” She seemed genuinely upset by the suggestion. “What a terrible thing to say. I’m going to improve you. I’m going to—”
“Optimize me.”
“It’s rude to interrupt,” she admonished.
“You interrupted me.”
“Don’t be childish, my pretty. You shall be perfection, a core of humanity and nothing more. Imagine the freedom.”
“Yes,” he said. “I’m imagining it. I’m guessing I’ll still end up dead.”
Again she looked appalled at his words, like he called her the worst names imaginable. “I would never kill another living thing. I’m a vegetarian, you know. I care deeply about all life.”
“Well this life wants to keep all its bits, necessary or not,” said Wichtig.
“Once they’re gone you’ll understand how much better off you are without them. It’s my gift.”
“Keep your damned gift. I’m no spy and if you torture me, of course I’m going to admit to being a spy.”
“So you admit you’re a spy?”
“No. I’m saying if you torture me I’ll admit to being one.”
“You’ll only admit it if I torture you?” she asked. “Fine.”
Schnitter retreated in shuffling steps and stripped away the gauze to reveal the damage beneath. Many of her wounds remained raw, angry and puckered. Her breasts, carved away, were ragged rolling scars of torn flesh tucked within itself and crudely sewn shut. Her left leg ended in a stump, a simple wood prosthesis strapped into place. The leather chafed her slim hips bloody. Squares of flesh, cut away over many years, left her a patchwork quilt of pain and smooth unblemished flesh.
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