by Prior, D. P.
Boss tensed, but one of the rogues slapped him on the back, and the crowd laughed approvingly.
“Oh, I was meaning to ask you,” Boss said, instantly recovering his poise. “What have you done with Sheriff Tanner and his deputy? To my mind, no one’s seen either of them since yesterday, and that ain’t normal.”
All eyes were on Jeb, and for a moment it was so quiet, all he could hear was the muffled roll of the surf from the other side of town.
Finally, Jeb said, “Why don’t you ask her?”
Maisie snuggled deeper into Sweet’s chest. Unseen by anyone but Jeb, her fingers found their way to the big man’s crotch.
Marlec lifted his head, and some of the color returned to his cheeks. “I followed the husk here, saw what it did in the Outlands before it took possession of Maisie.”
“Took what?” Boss said. He scoffed and fished a weedstick from his robe pocket.
“Look at her,” Marlec said. “Is that the Maisie you remember?”
Shrugs and whispers ran through the crowd.
“Don’t look no different to me,” Boss said.
Farly sidled up closer to take a better look. Bit too close, far as Jeb was concerned. Seemed too old to be ogling her like that.
“You saying this ain’t really Maisie?” Farly said.
“That’s right,” Jeb and Marlec said at the same time.
Farly studied each of them separately then gave the slightest of nods.
“Course they’d say that,” Boss said, patting down his robe for something to light his weedstick with. “They’re trying to cover their arses. The Maresman’s a killer, I tell you; and this bloody Wayist is a rapist, if I ain’t very much mistook. Now, who’s seen my shogging matches?”
“Is he?” Farly asked Marlec. “Is he mistook?”
Marlec nodded.
“Good enough for me,” Farly said. “Ain’t the only thing you been mistook about, Bernid, not since I’ve known you.”
Boss tightened his lips around his unlit weedstick and turned so red it looked like his head was going to burst.
“You was mistook about that rent you said I didn’t pay. Mistook about the fishing tax hike, too.”
There were grumbles of agreement from the crowd, and Boss growled at the back of his throat. Jeb half-expected him to stamp his foot.
“Now,” Farley went on, “no one here needs me to tell them you’re a lying toad, but folks turn a blind eye, seeing as you pay their wages. Most of the time, at least. Question is,”—Farly used his finger to tilt Maisie’s head up from Sweet’s chest—“are you really Maisie?”
A hush settled over the crowd. Jeb caught himself holding his breath. Everyone knew Farly had the gift for telling truth from a lie. Everyone, he assumed, save his mother the husk.
“Course I am,” Maisie said.
Farly swiftly stepped away and made a sign with his fingers behind his back.
“She’s lying,” Buttershy said.
Faster than Jeb could blink, Maisie’s face sprouted scales, and curled horns erupted from above her ears. Her maw opened impossibly wide and clamped down over Farly’s head. Gore sprayed across the verandah, and as the old man’s body dropped, blood gushing from the neck, the husk spat his head into the crowd, and people scattered in every direction, screaming and cursing.
A gunshot boomed, and one of the husk’s horns exploded in a shower of bone shards.
Mortis strode through the chaos and fired again. Maisie’s body slumped to the ground, a crimson rosette blossoming beneath her breast.
The demon-head detached itself and floated up, a sinuous tail of black smoke trailing from it like the body of a spectral wyrm.
For a moment, Jeb could only stare at Maisie’s corpse: it was intact; even the head was her own. Somehow, his mother had merged with it, animated it, and yet now her true form was revealed.
“Mortis!” the husk screeched in a voice full of loathing. “Mortis!” She darted at him faster than an arrow and butted him with her horns.
Mortis crashed to the ground on his back. His gun spun into the air and discharged as it landed. He rolled to his feet fluid as water, whipping both blades from their scabbards and slashing about with controlled frenzy. One clipped the husk’s head; the other passed straight through her gaseous body.
The husk coiled about Mortis’s legs and gnashed at his mask with her teeth. He swayed aside and crashed a sword pommel into her skull. She reared her snakish neck back and came at him again, zigzagging through the air. Mortis belched, and a green miasma smothered her face, forced her to uncoil and retreat.
Mortis was on her in a flash, hacking at her head with one blade, fending off a claw with the other. She ducked beneath his strike, and tore a bloody chunk of flesh from his torso. Mortis screamed, but at the same time, the husk spat out his flesh and gagged. The meaty mass on the ground was fluffy with mold, and a thousand insects wriggled about in it.
When the husk attacked again, she was careful to use just her claws. Mortis threw a sword up to parry, but it was a feint. The other claw passed through his guard and gouged his shoulder. The arm went limp, and Mortis dropped the blade. He backed away, and then the two of them circled each other more warily.
“Jebediah,” Mortis said, “now’s your chance. Redeem yourself.”
Jeb started to draw his saber, wavered, and looked to Marlec.
The Wayist clenched his fist around the scrunched up pages from his book. “I don’t know,” he mouthed. “I don’t know what to do.”
“Darling,” the demon-head said. “Help me.”
Mortis swung for the husk, but she drifted aside.
“Flee!” Jeb suddenly shouted at her. He knew it was a death sentence, as far as Mortis was concerned, but he couldn’t make the decision at that moment; couldn’t take sides. She was a husk, a killer, and the most horrific thing he could imagine, but she was still his mother, in some kind of perverse way. “Flee back to Qlippoth!” He knew she could. She only had to float higher, take to the skies and travel on the wind.
“Skayne!” Mortis yelled. “Kill her!”
The husk hovered out of reach of Mortis’s sword. She turned her blazing eyes on Jeb, searching him, imploring him.
“I can’t,” she said. “Not while he still lives!”
She cast the last word like a javelin and sped after it.
Mortis’s blade was a blur of silver as he deflected blow after blow from her claws. They both moved so fast, the fight was impossible to follow as they twisted and turned about each other like a whirlwind. Bone met steel over and over and over.
Jeb inched toward them, willing his mother to flee; willing Mortis to stand down and see sense.
Mortis was slowing. A claw drew blood from his thigh. He responded by vomiting forth a swarm of flies. The husk twirled higher into the sky to avoid them, then arced down again. This time, when she struck, Mortis anticipated it. He dropped his sword and grabbed her by the horn. She cried out and slashed wildly at him. Each time she raked his flesh, Mortis stiffened, but he only held on tighter, struggling to close his arm as he pulled her nearer and nearer to the poisonous fumes pouring from his mouth. He almost had her.
The husk turned and twisted, cursing and spitting. Mortis tried to bring his injured arm to bear, but he couldn’t lift it.
“Jebediah!” he cried, voice hoarse with effort.
The husk hit Mortis hard in the side of the head with her other claw. The mask flew from his face, and she screamed. Mortis’s bloody eyes floated in a pool of festering pustules and wriggling maggots. Still, he held on to her horn, straining with all his might to bring her closer to his mouth.
“Jebediah!” he cried again.
The husk squealed and tried to thrash her way free, but only her claws and head were solid; her sinuous body simply passed through Mortis where it touched.
“Jeb!” she cried in a shrill voice. “Little Jeb!”
Jeb’s hand came up as if it had a mind of its own. Somehow, he’d drawn
the flintlock without thinking. Fat lot it would do. Useless piece of shogging shite.
“Yes!” Mortis cried, seeing Jeb point the flintlock at the husk.
“No!” the husk cried.
Jeb squeezed the trigger—
—and at the last moment switched his aim.
Hot wetness splashed him in the eyes and mouth as Mortis’s face exploded in a shower of pus and gore.
The husk let out an exultant scream, and Mortis’s body crumpled to the ground. It twitched for a moment and then started to deflate, until all that was left were his clothes lying sodden in a pool of slime.
“Jeb! Oh, Jeb, you did it,” the husk said. Her demon-head swayed toward him on the coiling mist of her body.
Jeb staggered away, dropped the flintlock, and put his hands to his face. The skin was blistering. No, worse than that, the flesh beneath, the muscle and sinew—all melting, bubbling like lava. He screamed as acid burned through his veins, spreading downward to the rest of his body.
“Jeb!” A claw rested on his shoulder. “Jeb, darling, what’s wrong?”
He gritted his teeth against the pain; couldn’t bring himself to look at the husk.
He felt rather than saw Marlec on his other side.
“Jeb?” Fingers tried to pry his hands from his face but quickly withdrew. “Oh, my sweet Lord.”
“What is it?” Jeb screamed. “What’s happening to me?” He dropped his hands and looked from Marlec to his mother. They both recoiled, and even the demon eyes were wide with fear.
“Your face, Jeb,” Marlec said. “Your hands, your—”
“Everywhere,” Jeb cried. “It’s everywhere!”
The burning seared deep into his bones, and all about his skin he could feel pustules forming and bursting. He looked at his palms; black veins were weaving their way up his forearms. He touched his fingertips to his face and gagged. All he felt was a soft, weeping mass.
He fell to his knees; they felt spongy against the ground, and ichor oozed from them. He shuddered and tried to scream again, but all that came out was a hacking cough followed by a succession of sobs.
“No!” he cried, and green mist spilled from his mouth.
He stopped dead still.
All around him there was hush.
Slowly, anxiously, he let out a breath, and there it was again: the green vapor, just like with Mortis.
He stared straight ahead, numb to everything but the implication. Was he dying? Had Mortis’s gore poisoned him?
The torment in his body stopped, and in its place Jeb felt a wave of euphoria crashing against the rock of his despair. Strength surged into his limbs, and his eyes came into focus on Mortis’s mask glaring up at him from the ground.
“He hasn’t killed me,” he breathed to no one in particular.
“Jeb?” the husk said.
He ignored her and instead reached for the mask.
“He’s cursed me.”
With shaking fingers, he put the mask over his face to disguise what he was, what he’d become.
The terrible realization crashed down upon him like a mountain: Jebediah Skayne, half husk, half-decent human—more than half-decent to most women. Horseman, hunter, gambler, lover… Everything he was… gone.
“Jeb, darling…”
Jebediah Skayne, son of a succubus.
Gone.
“Get out of here,” he said without looking at her.
“Jeb?” It was Marlec that spoke.
“You, too. Leave me.”
He was dimly aware of the crowd surrounding him, but no one else dared come any closer. He couldn’t blame them. He wouldn’t have done, either.
“I am still your mother,” the husk said. “You are my son, and you saved me. I won’t forget that.”
He turned his masked face toward her, eyed her insubstantial form up and down, saved a hard look of disdain for the demon-head. “Yeah, well it wasn’t out of love.” There will be consequences, Mortis had said. If I have to do the job for you. He’d come close, too. Jeb wouldn’t have liked to wager on the outcome.
The husk seemed to wilt under his gaze and faded back away.
“And you still killed my father,” Jeb said as he stood, slamming the door shut on the horror of what he’d become. He couldn’t think about it yet. Wouldn’t. “Last warning, bitch: go back to Qlippoth, and if you set foot this side of the Farfalls again, I will kill you.”
“Jeb,” she said in a shaky voice. In the next breath, though, the fire of defiance blazed in her eyes, and she yelled, “I am your mother!”
Jeb advanced a step and pulled his saber.
“You wouldn’t!” she said.
Green breath rolled from the mouth slit of his mask toward her, and in that instant her eyes flared crimson and she shot into the sky like a streak of red lightning. Swollen rain clouds were roiling overhead, and she lost herself among them as they scudded north.
Marlec went to clap him on the shoulder, thought better of it and coughed politely into his fist.
“They’ll come for you now,” he said. “The other Maresmen.”
“I know,” Jeb said.
Maybe it was time. Maybe this game of hunt or be hunted had gone on too long.
Marlec bent down to retrieve the flintlock and handed it back to Jeb. “So, what will you do now?”
Like this? Looking like this?
Jeb raised his eyes to the sky, followed the bank of cloud slowly drifting toward the Farfalls. After what felt an age, he shook his head, spun the flintlock. It stopped mid-spin, half-stuck to the gunge weeping from his finger. He grimaced and slammed it into its holster.
“Who’d have thought?” he said. “First time it fires right, and this happens.” He touched his fingertips to the mask. They squelched when he pulled them away again. “Pass me his gloves.”
Marlec hesitated, and Jeb let out a long, harsh sigh. By the time he’d done, his lungs were empty, and he felt as deflated as Mortis’s corpse. Not physically; but all the anguish had left him just as quickly as his mother drifting on the wind. Flat was how he felt. Resigned. Far as he was concerned, his life was finished; he was just too stubborn to keel over and drop dead right then and there.
“Don’t worry, I’ll get them.” He stooped over Mortis’s corpse and pulled the gloves off, revealing the pox-ridden hands beneath. “It’s not like I could catch anything worse.” When he’d tugged them on, he turned to Marlec and said, “That place you got Gilkrieth and Neumal cooped up: still got room for one more?”
“Always,” Marlec said with a sad smile.
“Even…” Jeb held up his gloved hands, indicated Mortis’s mask on his face.
“For the Lord—” Marlec began.
“—I know,” Jeb said. “All things are possible.”
He didn’t believe it, but what choice did he have? And if the rumors about the Wayists were true, who knows, maybe they’d be able to find a cure, or perhaps pray one up for him.
“Well, wouldn’t that be a happy ending?” Boss said. “A Maresman and a Wayist shacking up together.” He blew out a cloud of weedstick smoke in Marlec’s face, held up a box of matches as if to say he’d found it. “Can’t say it surprises me none, what with you and that husk bitch getting a room together.”
Jeb pushed Marlec behind him and glared at Boss. “Keep on talking, fat man.”
“I fully intend to. At the trial.” Boss gestured with his finger, and a group of rogues moved in, hard eyes daring Jeb to make a move.
“What trial?” Marlec said from behind Jeb. “You can’t seriously—”
“Justice calls,” Boss said, with a wave of his weedstick. “For Tharn.”
A chorus of grunts went up from the rogues.
“For the men on my land.”
Some grumbles of agreement.
“For Sheriff Tanner!”
Silence.
Boss’s cheeks reddened. His chest rose as he drew in a big gulp of air. “For Portis!”
A tentative cheer sta
rted to build, but it was cut short by Terabin Sweet’s fist crunching into Boss’s jaw and sending him spinning to the ground.
“For shog’s sake,” Sweet growled, and the cheering that followed was full and hearty.
Even Marlec joined in, though when Jeb caught his eye, he dried up. All the confidence seemed to seep from him.
They’d both lost something, Jeb knew, and from that point on, each breath, each word spoken or heard, each encounter with another, each touch would be a foray into a strange new land.
“We should leave before Boss comes to,” Marlec said.
Jeb nodded numbly. “Only wish I had coin left for a horse.”
“Well, we’ve a lot to talk about,” Marlec said. “And in any case, walking’s good for the soul.”
“Unless it’s the kind on the underside of your boot.”
Marlec chuckled, but there was little humor in his eyes.
They said their goodbyes to Sweet, shook hands with Buttershy, though Jeb wasn’t really sure why. Probably it was on account of the tear tracks on his cheeks, and the way he kept glancing back at what was left of Farly. Then they walked together across town in silence until they hit the road to New Jerusalem.
“It was on a journey such as this,” Marlec suddenly struck up, “that Our Lord—”
“Marlec!”
“No, hear me out. I’m not proselytizing, I swear.”
“And I’m not listening.”
“Then it won’t hurt if I continue. Our Lord—”
Jeb drew the flintlock and cocked it.
“Not loaded,” Marlec said.
“You sure about that?”
“As sure as Our Lord was when…” Marlec left the sentence hanging and gave an impish grin.
Jeb shook his head and started to put the flintlock away. Then suddenly he remembered how many times it had failed him, what it had cost him the one time it worked correctly, and he slung it as far from him as he could. He was a hunted man now, of that you could be sure, so he was going to need a better weapon. “Wait here. No, keep walking; I’ll catch you up.”
“What? Why?”
“Mortis’s gun.”
“But… the safe house. Gilkrieth and Neumal. I thought—”