The Bones of the Earth- The Complete Collection

by Scott Hale

  “Fuck yeah,” Will said.

  “Will!” Clementine rolled her eyes. “Yes, Felix, we’d be more than happy to throw a wrench in that wench’s schemes. Does that mean we’re going to Eldrus with you?”

  “Would you?”

  She looked at Will.

  Will looked at her.

  “Not sure we have much of a choice. You’re the Holy Child.” She reached for his hand, squeezed for a fraction of a second and then—

  Will whispered, “Mom!”

  —she let go.

  Felix glanced at her, the tingling place on his hand where hers had touched his, and then he noticed her, standing in the doorway of the cathedral: Justine.

  He hurried to his feet, his heart fluttering like he figured it might if he ever went on a proper date. He crossed the terrace, arms out, ready to embrace her.

  But then the fog of seeing her for the first time in a while cleared in his mind, and he realized there was something wrong with the Mother Abbess.

  Justine was hunched, and she had a cane around which her veiny hand was clutched to keep her steady. Her hair covered most of her face, but when she moved, the strands slid aside, and he saw that her face wasn’t her face but a mask. It was a white, bordering on pinkish plaster, mask. It looked like her as much as it didn’t. It was eerie, unsettling. Two leather straps held it in place. To Felix, it looked like a death mask.

  “Justine…?” His voice cracked. “Oh my god, Justine. What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing we can’t handle,” she said, her voice muffled coming from behind the mask. “But it’s best we do not take chances while out in public.”

  Lillian, he thought. It’s getting worse.

  Justine took his hand, the one that Clementine had held, and squeezed it where it’d tingled from Clementine’s touch. “It’s time for us to go.”

  Leading him by the hand, they, with the Holy Children and Clementine and Will not far behind, slipped into Cenotaph. The cathedral was packed. Soldiers, priests, townspeople—anyone and everyone was here, albeit behind the wall of guards that’d formed a path through the main hall to the front doors. They were open, too, the front doors, and Felix could see waiting past them another group of fifty or so soldiers, and even more Cathedrans densely packed on the hill the cathedral sat on itself. They had all gathered here to see him and Justine off, and he wondered if that was why the air felt so different to before. It was hard to place, but it was definitely there: a coolness, like the first winds of spring, and something else; a drowsy kind of feeling, like when Justine used to rub Reprieve on his gums when he was younger. He’d thought them leaving would’ve been different, that like when he’d left Pyra, there would be weeping and wailing and people trying to one-up each other’s “sorrow” about seeing the Holy Child go. But no, this wasn’t that. It was almost as if… as if they were relieved to see him and Justine leave. Or was it something else? It had to be something else. He could almost taste it. And god, it tasted familiar. Why did it make him sweat? Why did it make his stomach twist? Where did he—

  A deep rumbling rocked Cenotaph Cathedral.

  Somewhere in the southern wing, something collapsed.

  Beyond the walls, he could hear great slabs of stone being hewn and hurled.

  There were more than two hundred people in the main hall. Every one of them had gone silent.

  Someone started screaming.

  The Holy Children surrounded Felix. He pulled Justine into him, protecting her with his body. Clementine and Will, part of his holy guard for now, shielded him with theirs.

  “Get out of here,” Clementine said. “Get, Boy!”

  Slender shapes flashed through the air. Stained glass windows exploded outward, holes like wounds stabbed through the center of them.

  The soldiers narrowed the wall they’d formed with themselves around Felix and the others. They were shouting orders, telling him to get outside, to get in the carriage.

  But he couldn’t move.

  He knew what it was that he tasted on the air. He’d tasted it before.

  The Bloodless had escaped.

  Another slender shape whipped through the air. A body on the receiving end went end over end and smacked into a pillar.

  The townspeople tried to disperse, but everywhere they went, they were cut off. They kept making awkward movements. Felix couldn’t see what was stopping them, but there was something running along the floor, preventing them from getting away.

  Clicking.

  Hissing.

  Slicing.

  Slabs of stone swung upwards in the main hall. A trunk the color of raw meat and the size of a horse forced itself through the rubble. Giant, pregnant pink sacs on its sides caught on the debris, ripped open. The noxious fluid spilled across the floor, filling the air with its narcotic-like odor. Those closest to the plant collapsed, unconscious. Others tried to flee, but the Bloodless was faster. From its rioting base, tens of roots shot outwards. They wrapped around people ten and fifteen at a time, and constricted them. In a matter of seconds, nearly the entire cathedral was ensnared.

  And that’s when the hundreds of petals along each root bloomed. The flowers peeled back, went rigid. The light glinted off the sharpness of their edges. And at the center of each petal, the dark red ovaries inside started to drool.

  The wall of soldiers forced Felix out the front doors. He and Justine hurried to those soldiers stationed outside. Catching his breath, making sure Clementine and Will were still with them, he spun back around.

  The Bloodless was tearing into the bodies it’d caught. Each petal whirred and hacked. Gouts of blood ejaculated into the air. But not a drop hit the ground. Instead, the dark red ovaries prolapsed outwards, catching the precious drink. With every moment that passed, the Bloodless grew larger and larger. The trunk was almost touching the top of Cenotaph, and the roots, nearly finished feasting, had begun to snake towards the doors.

  Arms slid beneath Felix’s pits. He fought out of fear, and found behind him, Hex. She dragged him farther away from the cathedral.

  “I knew you weren’t as gullible as you looked,” she whispered in his ear. “Told you Ichor was good for something.”

  Felix’s mind ground to a halt. His body turned to dead weight. He thought of the Bloodless’ box in the catacombs, of the new cracks in the ceiling above it. He thought of the abandoned chapel, of Ichor chained to the altar there; and how every time Hex tortured him, his veins dug further down. The chapel… the catacombs. They’d be one right on top of the other.

  Wide-eyed, he cried, “You did this!”

  Hex dropped Felix. As Justine hobbled over to them, she said, “Technically, Ichor did. I told you if I hurt him enough, he’d try to connect with God. Where do you think these plants come from? Come on, no more faking. You’re amongst friends.”

  She laughed and ran back towards the cathedral.

  Soldiers helped Felix up. There were too many of them to fight back. As they forced him down the hill, towards the rest of Narcissus and the transports waiting below, a female soldier ran past.

  He recognized her immediately.

  She was wearing a cloak the color of human skin.

  “Haemo!” he yelled.

  The mosquito turned around, put on hand on his hip. “Don’t worry. I won’t let a single drop go to waste.” With his other hand, he pretended to shoot Felix and said, “You can thank us in Eldrus.”

  Tens of fighters in plainclothes hurried up the hill. Cabalists, from the Marrow Cabal. They joined Hex’s side. Not wasting a single second, they charged with her and Mr. Haemo into the cathedral, meeting the Bloodless head on.

  If you don’t die, Hex, he screamed in his skull, I swear to God, I’ll kill you myself.

  CHAPTER XXXII

  Audra closed her eyes, propped her legs up against the bathtub, and hidden within a cloud of steam, rubbed one out. The coaxing heat and sheer exhaustion made short work of the matter. In a few seconds, she finished, neither satisfied nor disappoint
ed. Taking a deep breath, she slipped beneath the scalding waters and joined the shadows there.

  Everything was coming along just as they had promised. In the darkest recess of the Deep, where a piece of God’s bowels had been ripped free and forgotten, a garden grew. Richly mulched with eons-worth of digested souls, the city-sized intestinal tract was the birthplace of the Crossbreed, Bloodless, Shadow Bladder, and other mythological plants not yet discovered or named. It was Archivist Amon who’d shared Victor Mors’ writings about the plants, but it was the shadows who’d truly explained their origin to her one rainy, lonely, dreamlike night years ago.

  The Crossbreed, Bloodless, and Shadow Bladder were cultivated by a creature known only as the Maggot, the Vermillion God’s first failed attempt at creating, from Itself, a Worm of the Earth. Unlike the Red Worm which represented violence, or the Purple Worm which represented lust, the Maggot was supposed to symbolize humanity. But humanity was too complex, and unlike violence or lust, the idea, the “force” of humanity was too difficult for humans to get behind. They needed something simpler, baser, to bring them to their knees, and so God decided to appeal to emotion rather than reason and swallowed the Maggot whole.

  But it did not die. Instead, barely alive, the creature hid within the Vermillion God’s system, feasting off the feces of Its fetid campaigns. The Maggot grew stronger and stronger with every passing age, and as it grew stronger, it became more resentful of its creator for abandoning it, until fearful adoration gave way to pure hate. The first Trauma, then, began not on Earth, but within God, when It turned on Itself.

  Audra waited outside the garden. She knew better than to enter it alone. Hundreds of shadows, with their red eyes and silver teeth, watched her from afar, curious to see what she was going to do next. Each shadow was identical to the billion others that inhabited the Deep. When God had consumed the Old World unbelievers, It’d literally reduced them to shadows of their former selves. Audra hated that she felt this way, but without any defining features, let alone some semblance of a personality, these shadows, which flocked to her so eagerly, were nothing more than components for her conjurations. After all, Audra hadn’t grown the Crossbreed using ingredients like Grave Soil or Wormwood. The Crossbreed and Bloodless had been grown here, in the Deep. Philosopher Victor Mors had gotten that detail wrong. The supposed ingredients for spawning the Crossbreed and Bloodless weren’t for the plants, but for the shadows. A perfect ritual with all the necessities allowed the shadows to bring seeds from the Deep to the summoner. And those shadows that carried the seeds? They willingly sacrificed themselves to become as soil to see their creation brought to fruition. A knowledge unlocked by their private sessions with Exuviae.

  A lone shadow stepped up beside Audra. Though billions of identical shadows were scattered across this hellish heaven, somehow, it was this shadow that stood out from the rest. Red-eyed, silver-toothed, with a humanoid figure that was simultaneously both two-and-three-dimensional, there was nothing remarkable or memorable about it. And yet, when she saw or spoke to this shadow, she was certain she was speaking to the same one every single time. It wasn’t until Audra learned how to conjure the shadowy bug she and Deimos rode out of Rime on to escape the Winnowers that she gave the creature a name.

  “Umbra,” she said, staring at the shadow, “show it to me.”

  Umbra led Audra into the garden. The severed piece of God’s intestinal tract sank as they stepped onto it. The organ, older than anything else in this part of the Deep, had long since lost its original color, form, and consistency. Now, it was nothing more than a rotting marsh suspended between the walls of a fathomless chasm; and completely consumed by the literal flora of bacteria that flourished along it. To try and identify what root systems belonged to what plants was impossible. There was no order to the garden, which Audra suspected the shadows did on purpose as a middle-finger to their OCD God. Entangled within thousands of different species here were not only portions of the Crossbreed, but the Bloodless as well. Only the shadows, who’d tended this garden for so very long, would be able to make sense of it. The whole thing reminded Audra of a hairball that’d been smeared across a rug and left for a millennium to collect in its crud whatever came its way.

  Though Audra wasn’t here physically, she still minded her surroundings. The Crossbreed and Bloodless and whatever else was here wouldn’t be able to harm her, but her mind had been open to the shadows for years now, and if they so wished it, they could pour from it and hold her head beneath the bath water until it wasn’t this garden she visited, but Death’s. The shadows were vindictive; they hated the living, and, when possible, escaped from the Deep to meddle in their affairs. Audra knew they only put up with her because she was God’s Speaker, and like all Speakers before her, they were desperate to have her ear.

  Umbra weaved them through the overgrowth. The ground gave way to blue mold and mushrooms. Tumbling vines attached to cyclopean shells pulled themselves along the path. Trees in the form of upside-down crucifixes swelled at their midsections, until they burst open, revealing the skittering spider colonies within. Audra couldn’t prove it, but she suspected it was from these trees the first of the Arachne had emerged. Somehow, they’d escaped the Deep and, with the help of the Black Hour, had grown into something more in the untamed evolutionary pool that was the Nameless Forest.

  Umbra stopped.

  Audra stopped, too.

  A single, thick root—purple, with a reddish char for an underside—blocked their path. Beyond, their way was uncertain. It lay shrouded in a dense, amber fog through which pale shapes, like tadpoles, darted. Through there, the Shadow Bladder waited. It’d grown, too. The last time Audra had visited the garden, there had been far less fog, and she’d even been able to see a hint of the plant’s bladder—that bean-shaped, keep-sized translucent pouch, sitting in a pool of fetid muck, surrounded on all sides by the gaping pitcher plants from which the fog spewed.

  Audra stared at the fog and the pale shapes within it, and the garden as a whole. With nothing more than shit, vermillion veins, and the gifts God gave it, the Maggot had been able to create some of the most devastating weapons known and unknown. Umbra had explained to her the Maggot had intended to invade God’s system with the plants, but Its immune system was too strong. The Maggot abandoned the project. But when it was released by Ruth Ashcroft before the Trauma, it departed from God altogether to explore other means by which to destroy It.

  The shadows, after discovering the garden, were quick to pick up where the Maggot had left off in its work. They considered the mythological plants to be their own forms of the Worms of the Earth. And to the Speakers, they would give them, hoping they would use them in their everlasting battle against God. Lillian had rejected their offers, but Audra, for better or worse, had accepted them whole-heartedly.

  She took a step back from the fog, gasped. Back in Eldrus, in the bathtub, her lungs burned for oxygen. She ignored the pain, though, and marveled at their work. At first, she’d considered attacking Edgar with the Crossbreed, but she had no need to control him. Then, she thought about growing another Bloodless, but realized he would die too quickly. Not wanting to repeat herself, always wanting to try something new, she took Umbra up on her idea shortly after she and Deimos had made it to Nyxis, and settled on the Shadow Bladder. Why control or kill her brother when she could consume his soul, instead?

  Audra shot up out of the bathtub. The water spilled over the side onto the floor. Gasping for air, skin pink and pruned, she searched for a pocket without steam and sucked it into her lungs. It was easy to lose herself in the Deep, and the longer she stayed, the harder God would try to communicate with her. To save herself, she’d have to give almost everything to It, and just when It thought It had her in Its grasp, It would see that, no, It’d been in hers all along.

  “Audra.”

  She pressed herself against the back of the tub, slinging more water outside. The mist parted. By the doorway, Deimos stood. Stripped of his bat skul
l and anything that gave him away as a Night Terror, Deimos was nothing more than a bald-headed, blind-in-one-eye, uglier-than-sin man in a shirt and trousers that gave him the appearance of a fed-up scarecrow that’d ditched his post. His face was bruised behind where makeup had been caked on, and his neck and hands were chewed and swollen from whatever torture Lotus had put him through. The sleeve on his right arm was rolled to his elbow, to prominently display the Corruption that’d been spellwoven there by the Mer awhile back. The heat should’ve brought out its crimson color, but it looked more faded than ever. The spell was wearing off.

  Audra bit her lip, smiled. He looked bad, but he could’ve looked a lot worse. “Are you okay?”

  He rubbed the back of his head. “I miss my mask.”

  “Can I get you anything?”

  “No, I will manage.” He stepped back, looked through the doorway. Coming into the bathroom, whispering: “How much longer?”

  Audra gripped the sides of the tub and came to her feet. Standing, seeing the water run off her limbs, it struck her how skinny she was; how malnourished she must be. She covered herself, not because she was embarrassed to be naked in front of Deimos, but because she didn’t want to see herself. It reminded her too much of Pyra, and the days she’d spent in soiled clothes, imprisoned, tending to Bloodless as she crossed off in her mind the days until she might finally die.

  I’m going to get stronger.

  Deimos handed Audra a towel. While she wrapped it around her body, he grabbed a second one and started drying her hair. She didn’t stop him. Instead, she went slack and let him work her scalp over. She didn’t have much that made her happy, but this right here? This was it for her. The first time he’d done it for her, after she’d gotten vomit in her hair after a long night of drinking, had been the first of many times to come.

  “Felix and Justine are coming,” he said softly into her ear. “Something happened in Cathedra, too.” He got even quieter. “The Bloodless was let loose.”