The Bones of the Earth- The Complete Collection

by Scott Hale

  Sekhet shook her head. She wasn’t having any of this. Reaching into one of the pouches, she took out a piece of raw human meat.

  Vrana’s tongue prickled. Much to her surprise, there was still enough spit in her mouth to salivate.

  “You must be big and strong.” Sekhet flexed like a bodybuilder. “A lot have tried to kill God. We have a lot of meat.”

  Vrana pierced the hunk with her talon and gulped it down.

  “Do you think of Aeson?”

  Vrana choked, blabbered out, “What kind… what kind of medicinal herbs do you have in the Ossuary?”

  “Only what pilgrims bring and leave behind. We harvest Thanatos from the Maggot’s droppings.”

  “Leftovers, and liquefied death, that’s all you have here.”

  “You call it the Ossuary, not the Ritz.”

  Vrana cocked her head.

  “You think of Aeson.”

  “Yes,” Vrana said, turning away from Sekhet towards the Skeleton. “You know I do. I loved him so much.”

  “Love, not loved. He is in the Abyss, with my brothers and sisters. He is gone, but at least he is somewhere.”

  After everything he’d been through, nowhere might be better.

  “Kind of like heaven, huh?” Vrana asked, walking again.

  Sekhet strode beside her. “We all go to the same place when we die. The Abyss is not heaven. This is the way of things.”

  “What about the Deep?”

  “God’s reach is great. It takes what should not be taken. Death is the only true god. She asks for nothing, for in the end, She has everything.”

  Pain and Joy would beg to differ, Vrana thought.

  Murmuring broke out between the mumiya. The eastern guard pointed to the blinding wastes beyond this dune. Neksha hurried over, conferred with them.

  From the vanguard, the Skeleton hollered, “What’ve you got? Viracocha?”

  Neksha and the others didn’t respond.

  “Why do you wish to kill God?” Sekhet whispered.

  Vrana lifted the ax, ready, no, desperate to fight, and said, “Same reason as you. It’s something I have to do.”

  Sekhet thought on this, then said, “There are better ways to kill yourself, Vrana.”

  “None as productive, though.” She laughed. “I’m kidding.”

  “Sure.”

  Neksha finally cried out, “There is nothing. A glimpse of Exuviae. Nothing more.”

  At this, Elizabeth perked up.

  “That going to get worse the deeper we go?” the Skeleton asked, fingering his ribcage.

  “I think it will get worse the deeper you go,” Neksha said. He plodded across the sands to a place towards the front of the line. “The heart is calling to it. The boundaries are weakened in the Ossuary.”

  “Great,” the Skeleton said. “Shit the bed before we even got the damn thing built.”

  Time ran differently in the Ossuary. When they reached the ridges that jutted out over the flats, what should’ve been lunch became a late supper, as day turned to night and the twelve moons lit up in the sky. Internal clock spinning its gears, Vrana grabbed a bite to eat from Sekhet, refilled her canteen from one of the extra sanies the mumiya was carrying, and settled into a groove against the ridge under which they’d made camp. She’d told herself there was no way she was going to fall asleep, but she was out cold in the stifling heat before the first piece of meat hit her beak.

  Elizabeth woke her up. She’d undone the bindings around her face and let them hang loosely around her neck and wrists, giving her the appearance of a heavily tattooed clown. A light dusting of bone coated her lips and the dark pockets under her eyes. In the light of the moons, she looked worn down, not all that different from the ridge itself—severe, aged; uncomfortable. She had a billion-yard stare about her, and Vrana couldn’t help but wonder if Elizabeth wished she’d never left the Nameless Forest all those years ago. Despite its insanity, people had found a way to make a home there. Nothing lived in the Ossuary; only those things already dead to the world.

  “How’re you holding up?” Elizabeth whispered.

  Vrana shrugged one shoulder. “I don’t know why I thought this desert would be like any other and actually get cold at night.”

  “Yeah, I don’t know why you thought that, either,” Elizabeth said, laughing. “Place is fucked.”

  Vrana glanced past her. The mumiya were spread out along the ground, forming with their twenty-one bodies a perimeter. At the center of it, she realized, was her, Elizabeth, and the Skeleton.

  “Laying their lives down for us,” Elizabeth said. “Neksha said the viracocha will come at night and pick away at us.” She wiped her nose, cleared her throat; almost sneezed. “I don’t feel like we’ve earned the right to be protected by them, yeah?”

  The Skeleton shot up from the ground. Mumbling to himself and rubbing the Black Hour’s heart through his ribcage, he wandered off into the desert. It wasn’t until he was out of sight Vrana noticed that, in his wake, he’d left a trail of shavings in the sand, and black gouges in reality itself from which they’d fallen.

  “They’re protecting us to humor him,” Vrana said. “Do you think he really wants to kill God?”

  “I think Bag of Bones needs a hobby. I think he’s done just about everything, yeah? Not much left but killing God.”

  “It could kill him in the process.”

  “Seems like he’s made peace with that.”

  Vrana asked, “Have you?”

  “I’m not trying to die—” Elizabeth contorted her arms, trying to reach an itch on her lower back, “—but I know my chances aren’t good. They’ve never been, yeah?” She scratched and scratched and let out a satisfied sigh. “I’ve been doing dumb, dangerous things all my life. Sitting pretty doesn’t sit right with me, yeah? I know it doesn’t with you.”

  Vrana hummed.

  “If I didn’t fight God here, I know I’d be fighting It back home. Skeleton’s the best chance anyone anywhere has to beat It.”

  “What about the Bad Woman?”

  Elizabeth grumbled as her lower back started to itch again. “She’s my hobby.”

  “You tattooed her into your back, right?”

  “Yeah, I showed you didn’t, I?”

  Vrana shook her head.

  “Well, shit, girl, let me give you the tour. Need to re-wrap, anyway.”

  Beginning at her toes, up to the middle of her thighs, Elizabeth undid the mumiya bindings on both her legs.

  On her left leg, grotesque trees and gothic towers swept across her skin. Thin, vibrant vermillion linework threaded through the piece, as if it were holding it all together. Her foot, a swamp, was almost completely black; the ink broken up only by the small, body-shaped islands that appeared to be writhing in the waters. At her knee and thigh, the meld of nature and man dissolved into a faded sky pricked with faint, bleeding holes. The blood trails that oozed from the heavens led to bats below, hidden in the canopy.

  On her right leg, the scene was much different. Gone were the trees and towers, the gnawed-on sky and carnal swamp. In their place, a honeycombed field floating freely against a multicolored nebula that covered her entire leg and foot. At its center, between the plummets, a lone cabin stood, soft clouds of smoke rising up to meet the orange-streaked sky that climbed like tendrils past her knee.

  Elizabeth put her legs together, turned over on her side, revealing the back of them. The forest on her left met the field on her right, and through the connective details scattered on each leg, the pieces seamlessly blended into one another.

  “Those are amazing,” Vrana said.

  “One foot, or leg, you could say, where I was—” Elizabeth turned over, wiggled her left, “—and one where I’d like to be.”

  “Where’s the cabin at?”

  “Not sure. I used to have the same dream over and over at Our Ladies of Sorrow. It was always of that place. I’ll find it one day.”

  When Elizabeth finished wrapping her legs, she
undid the bindings on her left arm.

  From the tips of her fingers to the tops of her shoulder, the vampyres’ master, Camazotz, had been rendered in all her glorious and gruesome detail. Wings outstretched, head tipped back, the bat appeared to be swallowing a ball of light. Where Camazotz’s claws met Elizabeth’s wrist, the bold swatches of black thinned away into a hive of linework not unlike arteries. They spread into Elizabeth’s palm where, upon reaching the center, they stopped short of the scar there.

  She wrapped her left arm tightly, then let loose her right.

  As with her right leg, the tattoos on her other arm were completely different. It was a patchwork of images separated by borders, like the panels of a comic. From the graveyard that looped around her shoulder, the shipwreck between two mountains on her forearm, to the burning plantation on her wrist, it appeared to depict a timeline of events. There were several panels scattered throughout that hadn’t been filled in, and others that were filled in completely with different shades of gray. It wasn’t until Elizabeth shifted into the light that Vrana saw the skin was raised in these panels. They were brands.

  “What I was, and what I’ve become,” Elizabeth said, looking left then right.

  “You’re scarred,” Vrana said.

  “Things I did I’d rather forget.”

  Elizabeth finished getting her right arm right with the bindings, then she unraveled the wraps around her torso, until she was naked from the waist up.

  Unlike her arms and legs, which clearly depicted pivotal scenes from Elizabeth’s life, her chest and stomach were untouched. Instead, running up her sides and along her collar bone, were ornate flourishes that were simultaneously as beautiful as they were sinister. In a deep black that rivaled that of the Abyss, her torso was outlined by reaching hands and tentacles, grasping fingers and beckoning claws. Seeing them at this hour, with darkness at Elizabeth’s side, the appendages appeared to be coming out of the night itself. They were held back only by the paleness of Elizabeth’s white skin.

  “What’s it look like?” she asked.

  Vrana thought for a moment. “A shell.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah, alright. Finally, someone gets it.” Elizabeth smiled.

  “Hard to say which part is taking over the other. The darkness, or the light.”

  “Isn’t it always? The face pieces are self-explanatory, yeah?”

  They were. The octopus on one side represented R’lyeh, the bones on the other side, the Skeleton.

  “And my back.” Elizabeth turned around. “The things I’ve left behind.”

  Elizabeth’s back was a mural fit for the ceiling of a cathedral. It was grand, opulent; a sprawling scene, operatic in its reach and excess. A single, ruined archway amongst a maelstrom of colors and shapes. Atop the archway and beside were Arachne, lamia, succubae, carrion birds, ghosts, wraiths, vampyres, werewolves, and kinder-lickers; Corrupted and necromancers, with throngs of the undead hoisting them high, and witches tearing across the sky on brooms covered in hair. There were skulls for homes, and amorphous masses of flesh-eating parasites forming castles and keeps on blighted hills. And girls throughout, with blood on their hands and lips, fragments of globes in their wanting grips.

  All of it paled in comparison to the Bad Woman, who was beneath the arch, in the center of it all. Vrana couldn’t believe it was possible, but staring at her frightened her in ways the witches and their flesh fiend hadn’t. It was the size of the Bad Woman; neither skinny nor fat but giant, towering; she must’ve stood eight feet when she was still alive, if not more. It was the shape of the Bad Woman, and the clothes she wore that formed to it; that headmistresses get-up; high collars and thick cuffs, and a black dress as thick and unforgiving as leather. It was the hands of the Bad Woman, or the way her fingers were splayed; a constant expression of disbelief mixed with total damnation; hands that held lives as if they were toys; hands that could crush and pinch; fingers like eels, always cold, always wet, never conditioned; always carrying in them every suffering she’d ever endured, always so willing to dole that same suffering out to those she’d deemed hadn’t suffered enough.

  But really, it was the face of the Bad Woman. An upside-down triangle of blasphemous features. Hair like spiderwebs. Eyes driven deep into her skull; not human eyes, but a goat’s eyes, with a rectangular iris inside which numbers were seared. Her nose was nearly non-existent, and what little there was came to a point with two slits at its end. She had no ears, for it was likely she had no need or want to hear what others might have to say. And her mouth… a cleft lip sneer, lined with row after row of mismatched, crooked and cracked teeth. Vrana could practically smell the stink rolling out of the hole. It smelled like the hot puddles of runoff around a butcher’s table.

  There were four stones at the Bad Woman’s feet. Vrana asked, “What’re those—”

  And then the tattoo moved.

  Vrana jumped back, cried out.

  A few slumbering mumiya lifted their heads. She waved them off back to bed.

  “Is she still holding the bible and rosary?” Elizabeth asked.

  Vrana drew closer to her back. The Bad Woman’s eyes had shifted to meet Vrana’s. “No…”

  “Hmm. The stones are me and my best friends. We had to give a little bit of ourselves to the spellweaver’s ink to seal the Bad Woman into the skin. I’m the red one; Miranda was the purple one; Jessie, the pink. Emily is the white stone.”

  “The stones look really faded.”

  “Yeah, I’m the only one left now,” Elizabeth mumbled.

  “Bleeding.”

  “What?”

  “You’re bleeding a little.”

  “Where?”

  “Around the Bad Woman’s hands, and there’s a few drops on the stones.” Vrana almost wiped the blood away, but she was afraid the Bad Woman would snatch her hand if she did so.

  “I’ve been scratching the hell out of myself since we got into the Ossuary. That, and cutting on that bitch daily… It’s nothing to worry about, yeah?” Despite this, Elizabeth sounded worried.

  As Elizabeth finished wrapping herself up to her neck in mumiya bindings, Vrana, feeling stronger, kicked off the ground and flew several feet into the air. The higher she went, the harder it was to flap her wings, as if she were trying to fly underwater. Gravity was getting stronger, more oppressive, the farther south they went into the Ossuary. By the time they reached the Deep, they wouldn’t be able to do anything but kneel. She imagined God liked that very much.

  Up here, beneath twelve moon sky, there was nothing to see but fog-like night, roiling over this frontier of bone. There was no indication of where they’d come from, or where they were going. Everything that they’d done was a world away, and everything that needed to be done, just the same. By their resistance, they’d been marooned, set aside for their squabbles with the new world order. She could see God taking credit for the Ossuary, should they ever have a moment to speak. It would say that It’d put the desert here on purpose, to lure those in who meant to destroy It—opportunity in exchange for obliteration. All those who’d come before had been reduced to bone, but did It account for the man who came as bone? Hubris, as Bjørn had told her once during training, is a son of a bitch.

  A black splotch, blacker than the black around it, caught Vrana’s attention. A mile out from the ridges, where the land had collapsed into a shivering gulch, the anomaly grew, reaching out with its moss-like appendages, fixing itself onto the texture of reality. She focused her eyes, caught a brief glimpse of the Skeleton within the blackness. He was holding the Black Hour’s heart close to his face, transfixed by the terrible revelations it must’ve been sharing with him.

  By the time Vrana made landfall, Elizabeth was wrapped and sitting snugly between two rocks.

  “Liz, what do you think the heart of the Black Hour’s getting out of this?”

  Elizabeth wrinkled her brow.

  “Skeleton’s obviously not in comple
te control of it. It could stop us at any time.” Vrana settled in beside her. “The way he’s been talking about dying, I figured the heart would die, too, when he uses it on God.”

  “But what if it doesn’t?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t know,” Elizabeth said. “We’ll see what the Maggot has to say.”

  “Good idea.”

  “Hey, Vrana?”

  “Yeah? Yeah, yeah, yeah.” She laughed. “You’re rubbing off on me.”

  Elizabeth scratched her back against the rock. The wind kicked up and blew sand into her hair. “You’re not okay.”

  “How long have you been waiting to say that?”

  “A while.” Elizabeth lingered on the mumiya patrolling the perimeter. “I know you’re strong, yeah? But it’s okay to be weak, too.”

  “Not here, though. Not right—”

  “That was my mistake, too, in the past. Thought there’d be a more opportune moment to grieve. There never is, though. It’s going to get worse from here on out, yeah? Be weak for a while. We’ll take care of you.”

  At some point, Vrana had fallen asleep again, and this time when she woke, she found Elizabeth’s head in her lap. Her wings were folded over her, like a blanket. She heard something, though, and if it hadn’t been Elizabeth then…

  Every single mumiya was awake and standing around something. Neksha was shaking his head, and the Skeleton appeared to be consoling him.

  “Hey…” Vrana shook Elizabeth. “Hey, wake up.”

  Elizabeth snuggled closer to her wings and mumbled, “Five… more… minutes, yeah?”

  “No, get up.”

  She woke up violently, nearly cracking her head on Vrana’s beak. From zero to kill, she leapt to her feet, Red Death sword somehow already in hand.

  Vrana grabbed her ax and hurried over to the mumiya. Before she reached them, she could already tell some were missing. Quickly, she looked around to see if others were still patrolling on the edges of the dark, but there was nothing, save for the soft whispers of wind coming off the dunes.

  A pile of bindings. She saw a pile of bindings in the gaps between the mumiya circled together. Reaching them, her heart sank, because there wasn’t one pile, but six.