by Scott Hale
R’lyeh crossed the room. The Skeleton in his tattered cloak and rusty breastplate watched her the whole way. She could feel his hard, swollen, bloodshot eyes sizing her up, searching for the story she was about to tell. He lifted his hands, knitted his fingers together, and rested his chin against them. Other than the tone of his voice, there was no telling what the Skeleton was thinking or feeling, because he was nothing but bone.
R’lyeh smiled and took a seat in front of the Skeleton. She peered over the desk and saw that he had been reading a map of Bedlam. There were red marks all over it, in the town and outside it as well.
The Skeleton’s fat, black tongue flopped around inside his jaw. His bones creaked and cracked as he straightened up. His robe started to drift, revealing a portion of his ribs where the breastplate didn’t protect. The bones were covered in a black moss.
Quickly pulling back his robe, he said, “What’d we learn?”
R’lyeh filed the sight away. It was a necessity. She had a whole drawer inside her head marked ‘madness.’
“The church was a church for the Disciples of the Deep. The priest had vermillion veins inside his head, but it seemed like he could control them. A woman came in. She brought her dead son with her. The priest said he had a ‘seed of heaven’ and fed it to her son. He was going to have her bury her son with it in him, but then the dead son started… transforming. And vermillion veins came out and killed her. The priest made it sound like that wasn’t supposed to happen.”
The Skeleton nodded. He took out a pen and made another circle on the map near the riverbanks, where the church would have been.
R’lyeh tried to stop herself, but the confession was already coming out. “I… lost control.”
He set the pen down and cocked his skull. “What happened?”
“The priest heard me. I… killed him.”
“Fair enough.”
“And then I burned the church down.”
“Oh.” The Skeleton’s insane eyes ground against their sockets. “Damn.”
“I got scared.” R’lyeh took off her mask and rested it in her lap. Fiddling with its tentacles, she added, “And the woman and her son had turned into this big, veiny… thing. Seemed like a bad idea to leave that there.”
“How’d you escape?”
“Horseback. Will was waiting outside.”
The Skeleton clicked his fingers against his cheekbone. “How’d he do?”
“He got us out of there quick.” R’lyeh rubbed the scar that ran along her scalp. She did that sometimes, when she was nervous. “He was good.”
The Skeleton leaned in closer. “Anything else?”
“On… on our w-way out.” R’lyeh shook her head. “On our w-way out, we saw a… a shepherd.”
At that, the Skeleton sank into his chair. The hood on the cloak slid down his face. He sat there a moment, his only gloved hand over where his heart had once been.
R’lyeh shrank under his wicked gaze. Without lids or lips, the Skeleton’s stare and horrible grin made her feel like she was facing Death Itself. However, as they sat there in silence, she realized he wasn’t looking at her, but listening to something. The way he turned his head, the way he leaned down and to the left, it was if there were someone else in the room, whispering dark paranoias into the Skeleton’s shadow-drenched skull.
“It’s good you told me first,” he said, at last. “I’m sure he asked you not to say anything. Makes me wonder if he’s seen them before.”
R’lyeh shrugged. “I-I don’t know.”
“Thank you, R’lyeh. Been through a lot to get my family back. Don’t plan on losing them again.”
Lucky you, she thought but didn’t say.
“So.” The Skeleton came forward, clutching his cloak to hide the black moss growing over his ribs. “So, how are you, my resident Night Terror?”
“Oh, uh. I’m… good.” She nodded, smiled, and then quickly changed the subject. “What’s going on with Eldrus and Penance?”
The Skeleton saw right through her misdirection. He laughed at it. Even pointed his sharp finger at her to let her know he’d caught her.
But instead of acknowledging this, he pointed to the walls and said, “A lot. Penance is losing some favor with its followers. There are rumors they’re throwing together an army. Eldrus, on the other hand, not so bad. Disciples keep springing up churches here and there. They’re trying to summon something with all them vermillion veins they keep planting in the ground. They were at it before, a few years back, and now they’re at it again. Or maybe they never stopped. Lost years when I went into the Nameless Forest. Hard to say.”
The Red Worm writhed in her mind’s eye. She said, “Are they trying to summon another Worm? Is that their God?”
And he answered, “Might be. The vermillion veins and Eldrus’ new religion go hand-in-hand. A little girl, Gemma—a worldly thing like yourself—told me they’re summoning what caused the Trauma years back.”
“And we’re going to stop them?”
The Skeleton stared at her a moment, like he had forgotten the purpose of the Marrow Cabal. Then, he said, “A lot of forces seem to be converging nowadays.”
She raised an eyebrow. What did that mean?
The door to Operations swung back. R’lyeh jumped in her chair. In the doorway, the Skeleton’s wife, Clementine, stood. Her red hair, redder than the blood lake behind her, whipped across her pale, tired face.
“Hi there, R’lyeh,” she said, looking a little lost.
R’lyeh held up her hand, said, “Hi.”
Clementine smiled and to the Skeleton said, “Husband.”
“Wife,” he chirped back. He didn’t have lips or muscles, but R’lyeh was pretty sure he was smiling.
“Work day is over.” Clementine leaned to one side, her soft, yellow dress shifting with her motion. “Bed time.”
The Skeleton nodded. “Be there in a minute my sweet, lily-white princess.”
Clementine scoffed, gave him the finger. As she closed the door to Operations, she said to R’lyeh, “Goodnight, dear. Stay indoors, whatever you hear.”
With that warning, Clementine was gone. R’lyeh turned to the Skeleton, her next question written all over her face.
“Mr. Haemo is doing some blood work for me,” the Skeleton said. “Helping me track a lead. Your next mission, if it pans out. Blood work gets greedy. Lashes out like a leech. Don’t want to be near the lake is all.”
R’lyeh nodded and then asked her follow-up: “You sleep?”
“Ha.” The Skeleton sighed and stood. The ratty cloak fell around him like a hungry wraith. Flexing his gloved hand, he said, “Not no more I don’t. It’s a waste of my unlimited time. No, it just calms Clementine if I lay in bed with her ‘til she’s out. It’s the little things that make us human. Or, in your case—” he laughed, “—whatever your kind is.”
R’lyeh hopped to her feet as the Skeleton came around the desk. “You’re going to send me on another mission? After I fucked the last one up?”
“You learned enough from what you accomplished and what you fucked up. You’ve held your own, and I still plan on holding up my end of our bargain. About finding your friend.”
“Vrana.”
“Yeah.” The Skeleton touched her shoulder and—
Skyscrapers. Green gas and busted tubes. A grandfather clock. Letters impaled upon tree branches. Mushroom clouds stretching over a garden of bones. Naked nuns in a convent questing for—
–and then he pulled away. R’lyeh gasped and stumbled backward, against the chair she had sat in. Hot, boiling bubbles of pain bobbed along her brain in a sweeping, pendulum-like flow. She held her neck until the foreign images ran like mucus down the back of her throat.
“I just saw—”
The Skeleton cut her off. “Your next mission will take you to Rime.”
“That’s one of our villages.” Damn it. What did he just do to me?
“Yes, it is.” The Skeleton opened the door. Over his
shoulder, he said, “I need you to convince your people to release one of their prisoners to our cause.”
“What?” R’lyeh threw up her hands. “Wait, I’m not anyone special. They’re not going to—”
“They’re holding Audra of Eldrus. King Edgar’s sister. Turns out she’s not dead at all. Get her to me, and I’ll scour the Membrane myself to find your friend.”
R’lyeh stared at him, dumbfounded. Are you fucking kidding me? she thought.
“Oh.” He stopped, the door almost shut. “Would you mind blowing out those candles for me? Don’t have no breath left to breathe.”
CHAPTER IV
“The Cult of the Worm?” Aeson repeated, as Kistvaen trembled around them.
Anguis nodded. He slipped past Aeson and headed down the hilly span of square-cut rocks that protruded like teeth from the mountain’s innards. Where the elder’s feet landed, bursts of color exploded across the floor, as if the pressure from his weight were causing chemical reactions within the stone.
Aeson followed after him. The prismatic archways narrowed as they closed in towards the bottom of the hill.
“Stop,” Aeson said, reaching out for the elder’s arm.
Before his hand could touch him, the Snake sped up. “We need to speak with the spellweavers.”
Is he going to let me use them to find her? Aeson wondered. He licked his lips. The sour taste of hope prickled his mouth.
“Okay,” he said, quickly reverting back to the diligent lapdog everyone accused him of being. “Yeah, sure. Okay.”
At the bottom of the hill, where the ceiling of the cavern and the archways were low enough to touch, they were stopped by the eighty-foot wall there. Several capillary-like tunnels had been bored through it. Faint lights winked inside the winding shafts from the wisps within. On the wind, Aeson could hear words being constantly spoken in scratchy, spit-slicked syllables. Supposedly, they could take any tunnel to reach the spellweavers, but he knew better than to test that theory, because when it came to the elders, nothing was ever that simple.
“Leftmost,” Anguis said, going to the farthest passage on the left.
“What do the spellweavers have to do with Vrana?” Aeson asked. He leaned into the tunnel; the smoky darkness inside was almost gelatinous.
“She seems to be somehow channeling the Blue Worm’s powers,” Anguis said.
Aeson’s mouth dropped open. “What? But didn’t she seal it away?”
“She did.” Anguis cleared his throat. “Come now. No more delays.”
Aeson followed him into the tunnel. The smoke moved towards them, its clouds tightening into languid limbs. It reached forward, took Aeson’s chin, and shoved its roiling digits into his mouth and nose. He closed his eyes, held his breath; waited until gray murk swept across the back of his lids. Then, when he could smell nothing but ash and taste nothing but earth, he opened his eyes and took a step forward into another location entirely.
Gone were the prismatic stones and the smoke-choked tunnels; they had been repurposed and replaced by what the spellweavers so lovingly called their lair. The chamber was a rough, disk-shaped room with angular walls and narrow trenches meant to resemble the image of a pentacle. Twenty meters across and thirty meters high, the lair, despite its size and few occupants, was stuffed to the stones with gaudy decorations and unnecessary adornments. Large, heavy curtains were drawn across segments of the lair. Plush couches and embroidered chairs sat scattered here and there, covered in dust from disuse. Carpets and rugs, from Old World mansions and museums, blanketed the floor, each of their cultural styles clashing against one another’s. Between the rocky balconies above the main floor, a chandelier had been installed; on it, fifty candles burned constantly, never losing shape or intensity. And in spherical alcoves on the outskirts, black flames wavered, their searing tongues like liquefied obsidian.
For a place inside a volcano, it was one hell of a fire hazard.
But most of it was pure window-dressing; nothing more than a soulless recreation by something that itself lacked a soul. The fanciful and once-expensive décor wasn’t meant to comfort its owners, but soothe the guilt of their masters. The spellweavers who benefited from all of this never used it. No, they stayed where they almost always stayed, which was where they stood now: in the center of the lair, at the heart of the pentacle, naked and convulsing, giving every ounce of their existence to maintain the illusion that made Kistvaen disappear.
There were three spellweavers altogether. The youngest was Enaar, the twenty-four-year-old who had been brought in from Traesk after the Witch murdered his predecessor during her attack on Caldera. Enaar’s responsibility was to support the other spellweavers, be it through channeling his powers into them or cooking them breakfast, lunch, and dinner. He rarely spoke, and every time Aeson saw him, he always looked as if he had been crying.
The second spellweaver, and most powerful amongst the three, was Gisela. At eighty-four years old, she was the oldest known living spellweaver. Gisela was blind, and had once chewed through half her hand to boost a spell through the energy of pain. She had a good sense of humor, but she had to be kept shackled and separated from the rest, because after she bit through her hand, she developed an unquenchable taste for flesh.
The final spellweaver was the one Aeson and Anguis communicated with the most. His name was Verat, and at forty-two, he had yet to succumb to the insanity most spellweavers, like Gisela, were known to contract halfway into their lifespans. When he wasn’t making Kistvaen invisible to those outside Caldera, he spent most of his time walking around the lair for exercise.
“Verat,” Anguis called, as he headed toward the center of the room.
Aeson stepped over the trenches that divided the room into a respectable attempt at a pentagram. They were filled with piss and shit, and the subterranean insects that inhaled the stench and consumed the waste here. Despite the elders’ best efforts to dress the place up, there was always a depraved reminder to dispel the lie.
The spellweavers were a sick secret of their people. Every Night Terror village had a small group of spellweavers, and like Aeson, they were forced through the notion of purpose to dedicate their every waking moment to their craft. Until today, he used to hate coming here for those reasons, but now that he knew they might be able to help him find Vrana, there wasn’t anywhere else he wanted to be.
Anguis stopped outside the center of the pentacle. Enaar nodded at him, but Gisela continued to chant, indifferent to the new flesh in the room.
Kistvaen shook; a curtain unhooked from the wall and crumpled into one of the shit creeks.
Verat’s quivering body went stiff. Eyes darting back and forth in their sockets, he said, “Anguis.” He nodded at the obsidian flames in the surrounding alcoves. “All is well.”
“What’s wrong with the mountain?” Aeson asked. The elders measured its health through the obsidian flames here, as well as the obsidian boulders they kept in the house and the garden of the elders. “It’s an active volcano again, isn’t it?”
Verat bit his lip. His bloodshot eyes shot over to Anguis, as if he were asking for help out of this conversation. The spellweaver started to scratch his forearm. Verat was forty-two, but his skin was so scarred from self-harm he looked twice his age.
“It is,” Anguis said.
Aeson threw up his hand. “Well, what the—”
“It has always been active,” Anguis added.
Aeson tightened his gaze on the elder. “What?”
Anguis nodded at Verat to go back to his work. Then, to Aeson, he said, “Tell me about Marcus Proust.”
Oh, go to hell. Aeson’s face somehow got hotter than it already was. He let his attention wander about the lair to hide the anger mounting inside him. Anguis always did this, always asked him questions the same way a teacher would a student. At first, Aeson didn’t mind, but as the years went on, each question and confrontation made him feel more and more uncomfortable. Lately, it didn’t seem like Anguis was looking
for gaps in Aeson's knowledge; instead, the Snake seemed to be looking for moments to remind Aeson that, despite his best efforts, he would never be as smart as him.
Aeson slipped on his skull mask. It gave him the confidence he needed to stand up to this intellectual bully. “Marcus Proust was a zealot from Whiteshire, a town in the snowy wasteland outside Penance. About eighty years ago, he gained enough followers and support to ride across the Divide and attack Caldera. He wanted to eradicate the Night Terrors, because he thought our people were responsible for all the sin in the world.”
He cleared his throat, fumbled for his words. “They made camp in what’s now the Den of the Unkindness. While they attacked Caldera over the span of a month, they overworked that part of the forest and almost killed it. Eventually, we defeated Marcus’ people. There were a lot more of us back then. Years later, his son vowed to get revenge but that never—”
“That’s mostly correct,” Anguis interrupted.
Rage knotted across Aeson’s forehead. “That’s exactly what you told me. What does this have to do with Kistvaen?”
“We did not beat back Marcus Proust because of our numbers. Not entirely,” Anguis said. “Eighty years ago, our people were much more vicious, much less interested in sustaining a culture. When Caldera was settled at the foot of Kistvaen, it was done so knowing the mountain was an active volcano. The Night Terrors of the time were so radical in their idea of ‘keeping the balance’ that they deliberately placed themselves here, in harm’s way. They believed that once the Night Terrors had killed enough Corrupted, Kistvaen would erupt and burn away the Night Terrors for good because they were no longer needed by the Earth.
“That suicidal fervor lasted a long time. Some Night Terrors even believed they were immortal. They lived so close to Death, they believed they had somehow bought favor with It. But then Marcus Proust arrived with hundreds of soldiers, and every time a battle was fought in these forests, more Night Terrors fell than did Corrupted.”
Verat stepped forward, digging his nails into his dense pubic hair. “And then Kistvaen started rumbling.” He stopped, sat in an oversized chair covered in paisley print. “Our people were losing the fight and, uh, the mountain was looking like it was going to erupt. That didn’t make any sense to the Night Terrors. Marcus Proust saw the signs, too, so he backed off. Didn’t want his own men getting melted.”