by Scott Hale
“Start from the beginning.”
“My mother’s womb was cramped, but it was comfortable. My twin must’ve tasted good, because I ate him up early on.”
Vrana looked over her shoulder at R’lyeh, who flashed the daggers.
“Ha!” he said; a long trail of yellow vomit dripped from his pursed lips. “We’d traveled the Elys before. Most of us from Nora have. It wasn’t a problem, never is a problem. We got to Geharra and set up in the market, between Myrtle’s Emporium and Myra’s Meat Store. We let them know how much we missed them, which only took a moment—don’t judge—and then we went to work.
“We were doing well for ourselves, selling our wares as we’d done—toys for children, tonics for their parents. It’s not the kind of business that’ll make you rich, but like you, Night Terror, coin isn’t my greatest concern in this world. What do you barter with, creature?” Jakob pointed one crooked finger at Vrana. “Is blood the only currency you know? It’s the most enduring, that’s for sure.”
“What happened next?” Vrana asked, sitting down beside R’lyeh.
“Penance.” Jakob tipped his head at the holy icon he’d written in his own blood. “They were there when they weren’t. You know? It was like they were hidden under all the beds, in all the closets. I see you’re having a hard time following my phrasings: They came out of nowhere. There weren’t many of them, but it was one hell of a fucking surprise. You don’t see that every day in Geharra. We’re not smart men, Richard and I, but when the holy come to a city full of sinners, you needn’t be very smart to know it’s time to go.”
R’lyeh shifted in the shadows. “Sinners?”
“Geharra’s no worse than anywhere else, but every hero needs its nemesis, and Geharra is Penance’s. I reckon we saw forty or fifty or sixty soldiers come through the Eastern Gates. Not many, but enough. We started our packing, and when we were about to be on our way, the council and Geharran guard sealed the city up. No one was getting out. ‘Struck a deal they must’ve,’ Richard said, and that made sense. Made a lot of sense. I don’t know if you sons of bitches have time to keep up on current events between all your senseless murderings, but some say—said—who the hell knows now?—that the Holy Child is—was—who the hell cares?—is—was missing.”
“Penance came to Geharra because they thought the Holy Child was there?” Vrana shared the scuttle crabs between herself and R’lyeh. She could see Jakob’s saliva glinting in the storm light.
The Corrupted shrugged, his eyes fixed on the pieces of meat passing between the two killers. “I don’t know. I didn’t keep that sort of company in Geharra to find out. Give me a bite, would you?”
“Thought you wanted to die,” R’lyeh said as she chewed her food.
“By blade or beating but not starvation!” He leaned forward, gripping the bulge that was his groaning stomach. “Please.”
“How did you escape?” Vrana tossed the last of the crabs to the man, who quickly swallowed them whole.
“Traders go to a brothel in between the Eastern and Western District. Doesn’t have a name. Doesn’t need one. Richard and I and some of the others were hiding out there, drunk off our asses. The water, there was something wrong with it. Some contaminate from the Dead City or some lie like that. The soldiers started preaching, started rounding people up in the streets. They kept talking about ‘her plant.’ We thought they were talking about the Hydra or the Demagogue, but they weren’t. It was someone else.”
“Demagogue? Hydra?” Vrana didn’t mind sounding foolish to the fool.
“All your kind this slow? Or are you two particularly uninformed?” Jakob laughed, farted, and then raised a fist in the air, as though to strike. “Don’t ask me how the Holy Order is put together. There’s the six Exemplars, the Demagogue, and the Holy Child. The Hydra, she controls them all. Come on, cut my throat. Halfway, at least.”
“How did you escape?” Vrana repeated, her tone as dead as the man wished to be.
“Brothel has its tunnels. It’s how the royals keep their reputation out of the gutter they seem so fond of fucking in. Everyone lost their minds and let the soldiers march them off to the Northern District. Richard and I and twenty others made a run for it. We got separated from the rest, came out on the coast. I hope the others made it. They were good people.”
R’lyeh sounded desperate as she asked, “Who was their leader?”
Lightning broke across the black sky, revealing sinister shapes in the clouds. “Didn’t get a good look at him. He was young. No one called him by anything other than ‘priest.’”
“They came over the Divide, didn’t they?” R’lyeh was gripping the tops of her knees hard enough to draw blood. “They took our people, too, didn’t they?”
“I saw some Night Terrors on the last day, like I said. Couldn’t figure that part of it out. Thought you all had come together, made a truce, but then I saw the chains.” Jakob stood up slowly and went to the spot where a fire had once burned. “Just throw me in it when it’s roaring hot. I don’t want to die cold and wet. Been cold and wet long enough.”
“How did they get over the Divide and into the Heartland?” R’lyeh started to shake, but not because she was freezing.
“King Edgar of Eldrus gave them safe passage.” Jakob bunched the kindling together and pulled a flint from his pocket. “I don’t like the way world has become. I’d be gone from it.”
Soon, the Corrupted had a small fire blazing in the corner of the cave. He sat closest to it, his face inches from the flames, eyes staring intensely at its hissing heart. At first, Vrana and R’lyeh kept their distance from the man, but his convulsions became more frequent, so they moved closer. Vrana knew the girl wouldn’t mind if Jakob lost control of himself and fell into the fire—in fact, she appeared to be looking forward to it—but Nora had asked for the man personally.
“What happened to Richard?” Vrana said, waking Jakob as he began to nod off.
“He, uh, didn’t make it.” The rain outside slowed, lessened—reduced from a pounding to a patter. “He didn’t make it through the Elys. I told you everything. You like to kill, don’t you? I would like to die now.”
R’lyeh said, “What did you do to him?”
“Did you know I have two daughters?” Jakob raved. “Aela and Michael. We thought Michael was going to be a boy, but boy were we wrong!” He smiled and then frowned and went stiff. “I didn’t do nothing to Richard! She did! Don’t make me talk about it. It’s best you don’t know. She hasn’t seen you yet. You can still move freely amongst the living.”
“Jakob, calm down—” Vrana’s voice was deep, and her shadow seemed to lengthen from where she sat, “—and tell us what happened.”
“If you take me home, I won’t tell the others what you’re like. I won’t tell them about the masks. I can see they’re masks. I won’t tell them about your kindness.” Jakob rubbed at his crimson arm nervously, as R’lyeh drew her dagger and pointed its tip at him. “We came back by way of Elys. It’s the only way back without a boat or having to cross the Dires. We crossed closer to the center than we used to, heard there were some plants we could eat there, and we found them and ate them. We were all fucked up and turned around, but we made it, made it to the Spine, or a part of it. You, you assholes need to leave it alone and let us fix it. And anyways, uh, he fell in a ditch, hit his head, and died. We were almost out, too.”
“No,” Vrana scooted closer to the man, the beak of her mask grazing against his chapped lips, “you said ‘she,’ and if that’s all that happened, then why are you all the way back here?”
“God damn it!” Jakob’s face contorted. He closed his eyes hard and pulled his cheeks down with his fingers. “We thought it was one of you, a fucking Night Terror. There was a ditch, there was, and that’s where we’d sleep, every time we came home. It was night, and up on the hill a few feet away, we saw something. We thought it was one of you, but it wasn’t. ‘Maybe it’s the man,’ Richard said, and I said, ‘What man?’ and
he said, ‘You know, from the center. We ate some of the roots there, the red ones.’ He was right. We did. But no one believes that shit, the stories.”
“The Woman in White Satin,” Vrana said, while she thought: the Witch.
“Is that what you believe? No, in Nora it’s a man. The Boogieman. He wears a green coat and carries around a sack over his shoulder. He gathers up all the kids in the Elys who’re lost, and when his sack is full enough, he sets it down, crawls inside, and tears them to pieces. Then, he makes another sack from what’s left of the kids and buries the old one. But that’s not who we saw on the hill. It was a woman, but the only thing white about her was her skin. She wore a dress, a rag, really, but that’s it. We thought she was hurt, that she needed help.”
I found her, Vrana said to herself. This is the way into the Void.
“Richard went to her. It was when he’d climbed to the top of the hill that I realized I’d seen the woman before.”
“The one who came to Nora,” Vrana confirmed.
“The one who drowned all my people. Yeah, it was her. You know about that?” Jakob leaned away from the fire. “Richard screamed because she put her arm down his throat. I tried to stop her, but something held me back. I could feel its body pressing into mine, saw its gray arms across my chest, but I couldn’t look back, or look away, and it wouldn’t let me go. Don’t make me tell this, Night Terror,” the Corrupted pleaded. “I’ve been over it enough.”
“One more time,” Vrana insisted. The Witch left him alive for a reason. Did she know I’d find him?
“She… she… pulled parts of him out of his mouth, wrapped it around his neck. She…” Jakob began to punch the floor, leaving bloody prints from his knuckles. “She waved her hand and he… he hit the ground. Richard, he, Richard… he ripped off his jaw. Fuck. Don’t make me. Fuck.” Jakob stopped hitting the ground; he started to pull out his hair. “He took rocks and scraped out his eyes. He tore off his… off his… he tore off his fucking cock and threw it at me. His stomach… it went into him, like a starved dog. He should’ve been dead, but he kept going, Night Terror. Fingernails, lips… ugh, Holy Child, he ripped them off, too.
“Whatever was holding me let me go, and I ran. I fucking ran. Not to the woman but back into the Elys. We were so close. Richard chased me. I could hear him bounding after me. Snorting and snarling and begging to die. I ended up here, stayed here until I thought he’d died or gone. But he’s not dead, he’s not gone. Every time I leave, he finds me, just when I’m about out. I see her sometimes, standing beside him, petting him, laughing at me.
“I tried to kill myself; cut my wrists, made a noose. I was going to throw myself into the sea before you showed up, but I kept putting it off. She won’t let me leave, the cunt; she won’t let me die. You have to kill me. I miss my wife. I miss my girls. But I don’t deserve them. They don’t deserve me, not like this, not anymore. Please, kill me. I know she will do it.” Jakob gestured to R’lyeh. “So let her. Quick or slow, it doesn’t matter. Just get it done.”
“No,” Vrana said, running her fingers down the shaft of her ax. “Tomorrow, we leave this place. I will kill your friend, and I will take you home. You will not question me. This is what must be done.”
Jakob looked to R’lyeh, giving her one final plea for death, but the girl only shook her head. He considered Vrana for a moment; clumps of hair still stuck to his fingertips. “Okay,” he said disappointedly. He lay next to the fire and then slept.
CHAPTER XXIII
When the Spine was broken, its pieces, like bones, were scattered. Corrupted, using the remnants of the highway, then grafted their own roads onto the continental column, but these were destroyed as well. It was down one of those unintended Ribs Jakob now walked, his shuffling feet picking up cement scabs. To his left and to his right, the Elys shivered and swayed, moved by those things that had once haunted his nightmares and now haunted his days.
Vrana crouched and went quietly across the sodden ground, using her ax to part the ghostly grass ahead. She looked across the road for R’lyeh but could only see where she had been. She had warned the girl and the man about the Witch and her Horrors and had shared her own experiences with the two.
“She attacked one of your villages, too?” Jakob asked; he had calmed when he learned Vrana would escort him home.
“I think she resides in the Elys,” Vrana revealed. “I think she takes different forms, but I think it’s here she enters our world.”
“Are we sharing the world now? Because it seems your kind would have us out of it.” Jakob spat into the spitting fire and put his head between his knees. “Maybe she’s just following you, Night Terror.”
R’lyeh cocked her head.
“No, I don’t think so,” Vrana lied. “Just don’t touch it; Richard, I mean,” she said, changing the subject. “The wounds won’t heal the way they should.” She showed her own scars and added, “Trust me.”
The Raven watched as Jakob ambled down the Rib, swaying like the tree at the road’s end he seemed so adamant to reach. He hadn’t slept the night prior. Vrana knew this because she hadn’t either. The Corrupted had sat at the cave’s mouth, legs dangling over the edge. As he stared into the obsidian ocean, he would sometimes point, laugh, or sigh, as though images only for him were reflected in the black waters.
“My father killed a Night Terror once,” he said, his back to Vrana. “He’d gotten drunk and fallen asleep on the beach down near Calhan’s Point. He said he woke up to piss and found a Goat standing over him with a sickle. Father said he caught the sickle with his bare hands—had the scars to prove it, he did—and kicked the goat’s legs out from under him. He drowned the Night Terror, because they thought at the time that was the way to do it. He took the mask and showed it off to all of Nora, but I never saw it; someone had stolen it when I was just a newborn. Kids in Nora used to tease each other about your kind, make up the worst stories imaginable, but I knew if my father could kill a Night Terror, so could I.”
“What’s stopping you?” Vrana asked as smoke from the rekindled fire swirled around her.
“Fear,” he’d said, turning his head. “I’ve only seen a Night Terror this close in my dreams, and if I should move against you, the dream will be over.”
“You seem more collected than earlier,” Vrana remarked.
Jakob laughed at her. “It comes and goes. It’s this place, and the Witch. But the waves calm me.”
“You don’t believe this is really happening, do you?” she asked as R’lyeh turned in her sleep.
“No,” he said as he looked at Vrana and then his Corrupted arm, “because these kinds of things don’t happen.”
Twenty paces ahead, the Rib of the Spine had snapped off, and whereas passage for carts had once been manageable, now it was not, for massive boulders blocked the way. Pieces of the road had been torn up; in the soft soil, the seeds of Petra’s Pest had been planted and allowed to flourish. Across the Rib, massive orange weeds were stretched, fat on the life they had choked out from the surrounding land.
“Your people did this,” Jakob said nervously. He looked at the hints of wagons in the distance, overgrown and sunken into the mud. “Nora would be a better place if not for you.”
Vrana was trying to listen to the man, but her heart was beating hard in her ears as she spied several birds lying dead in the grass and on the side of the road. She picked up speed and brushed the molted feathers from their stiff bodies, making sure not to give away her position. Crows, she thought, moving from bird to bird, each one’s skull cracked open. Blix, she shouted in her mind, scooping up a large bird into her palm. The body was emaciated, nearly naked; the talons chipped, still clinging to flesh; the beak eroded, eaten by acids.
“This isn’t good,” Jakob stammered, becoming flustered. “Do you hear that?”
It’s not him, she said to herself, turning the bird over. Too skinny. He was never remarkable, but this isn’t him. If Deimos sent him to Caldera, he would have never f
lown so far off-course. She set the bird down, quickly dug a hole, and put it to rest. It’s not Blix. She just wants me to think it’s him.
“Vrana!” R’lyeh shouted, emerging from the grass and onto the Rib. “Vrana! It’s here!”
The Horror of the Field bounded up the road, its distant shape growing larger with every passing second. Vrana cursed the Octopus and then joined her and Jakob, to watch as death vaulted toward them on twisted limbs.
“Don’t let it touch you,” Vrana reminded. She hadn’t told them the extent of her connection to the Witch or how it had been established. Ignorance, she hoped, would be enough to shield them through the encounter.
The Raven ran forward and met the Horror midway—sideways, ax out, catching the creature in its torn open gut. The Horror of the Field stopped and turned, a rope of intestines slapping against the infected crater where its genitals had been. It was hunched over like a dog, like a flesh fiend; its head was caved in, with large, black patches of dried blood encrusting its eye sockets. Its arms and legs were warped so that the skin was pulled so tightly the creature appeared impossibly thin. From the Horror’s jawless mouth, a gift from the Witch rested against the scar tissue: a proboscis, translucent and covered in veins, clogged with flesh and shit.
There was no sign of humanity left in Richard: The Witch had taken it all.
The Horror of the Field looked at Vrana for a moment, and then turned and leapt toward R’lyeh and Jakob. Vrana shouted at the creature and brought the ax down into its back. The Horror whipped around, ripping the weapon from her hands. R’lyeh unsheathed her daggers and went underneath the Horror. With a shout, she rammed the blades into its chest, where its lungs, if it still had lungs, would’ve been. The abomination swiped its mangled hand, just missing the girl’s throat as it passed.
Vrana slammed her fist into the creature’s side; the skin there broke and sucked her hand into the muscle beyond. The Horror of the Field shook her off and lumbered toward Jakob. He screamed, but he didn’t welcome the death being offered to him. He hurried backward, picking up pieces of the Rib and hurling them at the creature.