Master of Blood and Bone

by Craig Saunders

Ank saw he was serious. Saw a look in his eyes she didn’t recognize at first.

  He’s scared.

  She felt the child, the book, in her mind agree. Then it stepped back, and her mind was all her own.

  And things began to click, and her mind began to work…just like his.

  62

  She corralled her thoughts, tried to get them in some kind of order. They wouldn’t play, so she just let them out…set them loose so she could feel which were right, which were wrong. Thinking aloud.

  Like he did.

  “I think…five months or so have passed,” she said. “The weather. Cold, obviously. Middle or early winter. Can’t tell exactly. The car’s sitting on flat tires. Battery’s probably dead. The food on the table was rotten and in the cupboards, the fridge…it was all rotted, but didn’t smell anymore…”

  Ank closed her eyes to see the memory of the little things better in her mind’s eye.

  “The little things. The weather, the changing of the season…these are the little things. You, shrinking, even…not inconsequential, but…background…right?”

  “You asking me?” said Holland.

  “No,” said Ank, with a smile. “I know these things are true.”

  “Big things?”

  Ank looked at Holland and saw the fear in his eyes, just the same as in hers, she knew.

  “I don’t want the big things to be right, Holland.”

  “Sound it out, Ank. Just an exam. Pass or fail, honey. You know it’s time.”

  “I don’t want it to be.”

  “Part of being a man…or a woman. Knowing what’s what, Ank. Doesn’t matter if you want it or don’t. Some things can’t be changed. Can’t be undone. Sound it out, baby, like you know. Make it true. Own it.”

  “I’m afraid.”

  Holland reached across the table and held out a shaking hand for her to see.

  “Me, too. Do it, get it done. Like a scab. Pull it off. See what’s underneath…”

  Ank paused, head down. The ink on her skin, black, her eyes, black, her hair bone-white.

  She lifted her head and took strength in the sight of his face, ever strong, even now. Ank nodded, and spoke. “Winter. No heat. No power in the house. No post on the doorstep. Dust. No visitors, wanted or not. No bills. No flyers, no junk mail. No postman. No power, not because the bills haven’t been paid, because if you didn’t pay a power bill, you’d get a reminder, followed by more shit, like a visit from a debt collector, eventually. No one’s come. So no power. No heat, no electricity. Because there isn’t any electricity. Not here…”

  “Maybe not anywhere.”

  Ank paused. She couldn’t look at Holland again. Couldn’t listen to the small voice of the child that was once a book and now lived inside, frightened. Couldn’t look at the ink on her skin or her pure white hair hanging down.

  Like a eulogy for the world, she carried on, her voice breaking.

  “The air’s clearer…the sea’s clearer. The sun…it’s a nice day. Cold, crisp. Kind of perfect. An airport to the south, three RAF airbases in Norfolk county alone. Clear winter’s day, there’s always a plane in the sky…but it’s silent. Not silent. Dead. The skies are dead. The sea, too. No boats. Nothing moving out there. No one on the beach. No people. It’s a nice day. Kind of day when people do things. When I moved the hairy guy out onto the beach…no one.”

  “Go on, Ank,” Holland said, his voice soft and sad.

  Ank felt a tear track along the ink on her cheek. “Do I need to?”

  Holland shook his head. “I don’t suppose you do.”

  “Am I right, Holland? Is it the end? Has the time come?”

  Holland shook his head. “I think…an end. World’s not dead, Ank…it’s…hiding. Like it just woke up from a nightmare and realized it wasn’t a dream, after all. Imagine a world of men with their science, their religion, everything all nice and tidy…imagine finding out you were wrong…not just you, but most everyone. The entire world, wrong.”

  “Janus…he’s working toward the end?”

  This time, Holland shrugged. “Janus was always a fucking nut. Who knows? What I do know, though, is that this isn’t over. The world isn’t done. The Gods aren’t all back, Ank. It’s a new world…a world that’s hurting and crying out. Plenty dying, too. But here’s the thing—Janus’ pet wizard put a spell on us, but you broke it. I’m alive. You’re alive. So, some time’s passed…Janus and the mage, they’ve gone to war, right? But we’re not dead, Ank, are we? They fucked up. They’re not perfect. They don’t know everything. They make mistakes…”

  “So, the world’s not all the way dead…and it’s not going to be, right? Because we’re going to stop them. Me and you.”

  Ank’s head stayed down.

  “Right?” he said again.

  Come on, Ank…

  She looked up, black eyes bright.

  “Right,” she said with a firm nod.

  Holland smiled. It was a sad smile, but better than none.

  “Come on,” he said. “We’ve got work, and stories to tell. Maybe time to tell them, maybe not. We’re alive, right? And while we are, it’s not done. I’m not done. I’ve a God to kill. You? You done, Ank?”

  Ank looked at Holland and saw something there that made her get up, out of the kitchen chair.

  “I’m not.”

  “You want a gun?”

  Ank shook her head. “Don’t think I need one.”

  Holland held her head between large hands that were already steadier than they had been. He stared into her black eyes for a long time, then he kissed the end of her nose.

  “Get what you need, what you want. We won’t be coming back.”

  A few minutes later, they stepped out into the cold dead air and began the long walk through the endless dead left in the wake of the mad God’s war.

  BOOK TWO: PRIPYAT, UKRAINE

  IV. TO CROSS A WIDE RIVER

  Said the good Master: Son, thou now beholdest

  The souls of those whom anger overcame;

  And likewise I would nave thee know for certain

  Beneath the water people are who sigh

  And make this water bubble at the surface,

  As the eye tells thee, wheresoe’er it turns

  —From Dante’s Divine Comedy

  Inferno/Canto VII: The Styx: They view the Fifth Circle (Longfellow Translation)

  63

  Solomon’s face was no longer that of a happy young man. Time passed. Months, in fact. Bullets flew. Damage was repairable, but the bodies Solomon took were not utterly immune to harm.

  Here, in the frozen and broken grandeur of what had once been Minsk, he wore a body and a face better suited to the Belarusian weather. In Germany, where their army faced tanks for the first time, Solomon had worn a woman’s countenance and not found it to his liking. In the autumn, as they had ploughed the French fields with the bodies of the dead, he had been a powerful man with strong muscles and hard sinews. For a time Solomon had reveled in the might of his fists and the warmth of the mortal’s weapons in his own hands…but he tired soon, of pursuits so base.

  Now, his dark eyes stared from under heavy eyebrows out in the bright cold day, across a wide river, to the massed armies waiting on the other side. The Russians had so many tanks the ground was barely visible, and here and there the remnant of once mighty buildings stood testament to the Russians’ fervor for battle.

  Bastards were as mad as Janus.

  At his back, in tanks the Americans had once saved for this very moment, was their army. He had no idea how many the enemy had put in the field to halt them, nor did he know how many slaves he had at his command.

  Janus’ command, he thought, and the thought galled him.

  I command them…he commands me. I am no more than a general now.

  Their might (my might) waited before the Svislach River, a tiny hurdle in a vast conquest. The river was frozen thick and covered in snow. The city of Minsk was largely fallen to rubble. It would
stay that way, probably for decades. Maybe even a century.

  Janus and Solomon…destroyers of worlds…or at least the bulk of this continent. Northern France, Belgium, Germany, Poland, now Belarus. Stomped and blasted to ruin.

  Solomon looked up, lazily, as a whine broke the still and crisp winter air. Something heavy and hot and fast exploded behind him. A blistering heat at his back told him the missile had landed close. It did not matter. If this body died, he would simply take another. He liked this body, though. It was inelegant and fat, but it was warm, at least.

  He saw a Russian tank across the river spit fire from its long turret and moments later Janus’ barbaric sword swatted the round from the air. It span away and exploded, tumbling, into the ranks of the army at his side. The men and women burned without complaint.

  Slaves did not complain. Death was their lot.

  Solomon did not turn to look, but shrugged his thick military coat about his shoulders. The slaves of this army were dead already. They just didn’t know it.

  While they waged Janus’ ridiculous war, fires burned day and night. Weapons of war, bombs and bullets. Fighter jets in the sky, raining terrible bombs upon Solomon’s slaves.

  Solomon watched his slaves burning in their vehicles and in their weak flesh. It meant nothing to him.

  Janus, for his part, seemed to enjoy the sights and sounds of war.

  Solomon wiped his body’s nose, which dripped snot, constantly, like a child’s.

  Next, the sprawling lands of Russia waited. A great bear, whose might would be a test in boredom, spread across freezing fields of battle that wouldn’t end until China, Mongolia, or…ever.

  Then, what? Wage war on the seas? On the heavens, in the stars?

  Solomon shook his head and tried to clear his mind of the future. For now, there would be blood on the snow. In all his years, had never seen a sight as beautiful as blood on snow.

  “I’ll show you joy, Sulayman,” Janus told him. And the two-faced God in this, at least, was honest.

  Of course he was. The insane barely ever lie.

  64

  Janus wages war like young men fuck, thought Solomon, despite himself. He took a deep breath of smoke and cold air as he turned his gaze, once again, to that sparkling river and what lay beyond.

  At first, it had been nothing more than a lonely war as he and Janus marched toward shores large enough to hold them.

  A giant in armor with a sword fashioned from a helicopter blade, and Solomon, in a young man’s body. Two beings out of time, walking south across a land that had seen the Angles, the Celts, the Saxons, the Vikings, the Romans rampage across it. Armies with cold iron in their fists, raining blood into the earth.

  The land remembered the blood well.

  Janus towered, then, maybe thirteen feet tall, in impossible armor that man or God should not be able to shift. The ground shook with his steps. Together, blade and fire, they laid the land to waste. But it was a sad, baleful thing. Gods and magic had been gone too long. Nothing but fables and comic books remained.

  They were met with disbelief, at first. This was a land of man and machine. All the magic was gone, the old forests laid low, the sea Gods dumb with poison.

  In a field on the border of Suffolk and Essex they found a dryad chained within a small circle of trees surrounded by mastered crops. Insane, they left her behind, raped, mutilated, then, finally, dead.

  Neither Janus nor Solomon cared whose kind suffered under the lash of war.

  Solomon smiled, remembering, as he watched Janus put a foot upon the ice.

  For a God, thought Solomon, he’s quite stupid.

  Janus’ foot immediately crushed the thick ice. The giant must weigh a good few tons. Thought he could walk on ice?

  Solomon refrained from laughing. He understood the nature of their bargain. Janus gave him his name back. He would not laugh in the face of his master.

  Solomon couldn’t laugh at himself, either.

  I used to be a king. Men lived and died by my hand.

  Now?

  I’m a puppet. No better than a dumb mortal.

  Solomon gritted his teeth, turned his eyes from Janus’ childish rage at the strength of the ice on the river, upward, toward the skies.

  Back in England, he’d taken a slave of a man in an airplane. Once he owned the man’s mind he discovered the plane had a name…a Tornado GR-4.

  It was a plane built for war, and to Solomon’s mind, it was right that a thing of such power have a name.

  Weapons with beautiful names. Sidewinders, Paveways, Brimstone, and finally, a Mauser cannon that spat a stream of fire. Solomon whooped and destroyed a city that had once known a Roman hand and was named Colchester. Maybe they remembered Janus.

  Man, it seemed, had become even better at war in the absence of the Gods.

  Now, in this country called Belarus, Solomon’s slaves were legion. And Solomon was bored of it all. The toys of man, the cold, the food…so terribly bored.

  Solomon clenched his teeth as he heard Janus bellow an order for half the army at his back to lay down their lives to fill the river, with their bodies and their tanks. Solomon’s slaves.

  Who does he think he is? They are mine…mine!

  Solomon felt his anger build and build until he could take no more. His puppets filled the river. Tanks steamed and puffed across yet more tanks, filling the freezing river with steel and bodies.

  It was insane, stupid. Ridiculous.

  He stormed from his position along the riverbank to Janus.

  “Why?” said Solomon, desperately trying to hold his anger inside, but feeling it in his reddening face, in the clenching fists of this mortal vessel.

  “Why what, Solomon?” The God seemed entirely unperturbed. Happy, even, watching the waste of half of their resources.

  “Why this war? Why kill those slaves, waste those machines? Why? What end, Janus?”

  “I do not understand the question, Solomon.”

  “How will we win? Janus…how will we win?!”

  Janus’ mask was motionless. “There is no win, Solomon,” said Janus, as though speaking to an imbecile. “It is war.” Janus’ dog, the little shit spaniel Janus had found in a field in Norfolk, months ago, barked and ran around.

  Even the fucking dog’s gone insane.

  Janus walked away from Solomon and stepped, tentatively, upon the new bridge that was formed of steel and freezing flesh, already icing over. He walked across the bodies of the fallen to cross the river to where Russia waited, and more death…death and death and endless death.

  The Russian tanks hurled their missiles at the bridge, at Janus, but he walked on through the storm as though it were nothing but a hard rain.

  Janus was insane. They both were. Solomon knew this.

  But insane and stupid?

  Solomon made his face, and his thoughts, still, and followed.

  For now.

  65

  The North Sea, the body of water between England’s eastern shore and the shores of France, was cold and harsh, a deep green, or an ugly brown in color. Never blue, or turquoise, emerald, like the shallows of the Mediterranean. The air beside the blistering cold of the sea was full of spume and within the flecked white spray of the sea was carried the stench of brine and chemicals and sewage.

  To Ank, it felt, at last, like a piece of home. They stood atop different land to that beside their cottage, yes…but it was the same sea. Like it had followed them south, and waited for them, right here, on the coast of Kent.

  She and Holland stared through the murky winter air toward France. They shivered in their heavy clothes, got drenched in freezing rain and snow. February brought the deepest cold Ank could remember, but also, on the bitter winds, smoke and ash. On the ground, beneath the snow and ice, in the ruts and frozen boot-prints upon the earth was blood.

  So much blood.

  On the Dartford Bridge, stretching across the River Thames, they met a crush of survivors from the south heading to a nort
h that was no better. There were people in cars, people with children and cats and dogs and luggage, or, like them, people with little but the clothes on their back. Every one of them was marked as survivors by their gray faces and their gray hair. Ash rained down all around them.

  Between the snow and the ash, all color had been bleached from the land.

  Ank, nor Holland, had ever seen so many faces bereft of hope. Nothing was left but misery. From Norfolk to Kent, where Janus crossed the sea, a swathe of broken cities and burned lands.

  Ank had never imagined that the world had room for such horrors, but then Holland was always a thorough tutor.

  War, too, had been part of her curriculum.

  So, this is war? she thought, standing on the Kentish shore.

  Fuck you, Janus, and your stupid war.

  Ank cried many times as she walked half of England to stand where they were now. Once, unable to bear more, she asked him. More than once, she recalled.

  “Why are we walking, Holland?” Ank asked.

  “We’re going slow.”

  “Holland, why? Why?”

  “We go slow until we’re ready.”

  “Jesus, Holland. When do we go fast? There’s no time!”

  “You’re not ready.”

  Ank bit her tongue and they walked on, south, ever south. She’d ask again, after a time, and again. Still, now they were at the end of England, with no more England to walk, she was no wiser.

  They walked the breadth of Kent in a night and a single day, to the coast. The carcass of England behind, nothing left but a dumb kind of shock. Cities still burned and would for a time yet. More would follow.

  Ank was angry. Angry at Janus, and Gods, and wars. But she was angry with Holland, too.

  She was fucking livid with Holland.

  She stood, a girl on the cusp of womanhood, head down. The foul wind blew in from the sea and whipped her hair this way, then that…and still, she couldn’t bear to look at him.