by Scott Hale
“Oh, no,” she said, breathlessly. “What—”
Gold flashed at the corner of her eye. In one of the piles of bindings, a piece of wrap lay adorned with a golden rune. Sekhet, her healer, had been killed, too.
Vrana’s hand opened, perhaps secretly hoping for someone to take it, and moments later, Elizabeth did.
“The viracocha came for us,” Neksha said, grimly.
Vrana, unable to take her eyes off Sekhet’s rune, said, “Are they still out there?”
“Yeah,” the Skeleton answered. “They’re watching.”
“Then let’s go after them!”
The Skeleton nodded in agreement. As he and Vrana moved to move, Neksha said, “You will never catch them. They will lead you so far into the Ossuary that, though you may not die, Skeleton, you will not find your way back.”
“I don’t know about that,” the Skeleton said. “Time…” he patted his ribcage where the heart was stored, “… is on my side.”
This is bullshit, she thought. Then: “This is bullshit. How the fuck did they sneak in here and kill six of us?”
Elizabeth dropped Vrana’s hand. “Yeah. I’m not questioning your people, Neksha, but I don’t see any viracocha bodies, not that I know what they even look like. Did they get away?”
A murmur of discontent worked its way through the mumiya.
Neksha said, “They escaped. The viracocha are individualists. They have no society. Each one is an island. Sobek?”
The mumiya named Sobek stepped forward. He drove the bottom of his spear into the ground. Vrana could tell that, like her and the Skeleton, he needed to fight.
“How many were there?”
“I say four,” Sobek boomed.
Vrana searched him for any defining features, and it was on the wraps covering his hands that she finally found them—two emerald-flecked, forked runes.
Neksha said, “The viracocha do not coordinate their attacks, but their strategies are the same. They track their prey through the Ossuary for days at a time. Moving in a large group such as we are, they will likely only attack us at night, when we are exhausted, and thin our numbers. The viracocha have no love for the mumiya, but their true goal is Vrana and Elizabeth, and your heart, Skeleton.
“We are fortunate they are not an organized society, or it is likely all of us would be dead this night. The viracocha are relentless, and plentiful. What little we know of them is that they exist to protect God, the same as us in our quest to aid those who would kill God. They are interested in nothing else. They do not speak to one another, for they have no language, and it is uncertain if they breed. If they are able to capture one of you, they will murder one another many times over, until the reigning captor is able to finally bring you back to their land.”
“Whole bunch of nobodies got their own nation?” the Skeleton said. “Funny how that works out. Almost like they’re not as special as they thought they were. Where’s this land of theirs?”
“Where the Ossuary ends,” Neksha said, “and the Deep begins. To reach God, we will have no choice but to face viracocha.”
“If there’s any of us left,” Vrana snapped.
Neksha said aloud, “Sopdu.”
Another mumiya broke from the circle, joined the side of warrior, Sobek.
“How close are we to making contact with the Maggot?”
Again, Vrana scrutinized Sopdu for something by which to remember him. Like Sobek… and Sekhet… Sopdu seemed important, and like the others, she found a small detail that seemed to be all his own. A small disc, no larger than an infant’s palm, fixed to the side of his neck.
“Two days,” Sopdu said, his words clipped. “South. Bird.”
Vrana cocked her head.
“I show you tracks. I teach you how to read. My mind for your wings. Help each other?”
“Of course,” Vrana said.
“We believed we could escort you across the Ossuary, but most of us are not fighters,” Neksha said. “Six have died tonight. We must survive the nights to come. I wanted you to save your strength, but we must not be prideful. We will need it.”
“It’s yours to have,” the Skeleton said. “You have value, man. You’re not fodder.”
Elizabeth nodded, said, “Yeah.”
Sekhet’s golden rune shimmered once more. Vrana knelt down, took the healer’s bindings in her claw. She thought of her mother, of her mother and Sekhet together; beneath the house, in the dark, one pestering the other about the qualities of this plant or that plant, or the aesthetics of arranging mushrooms. Her first instinct was to push the memory out of her head, stomp on it, and set it on fire, just in case. But instead, she let it linger awhile. It hurt. And it was nice.
“She wasn’t a fighter,” Vrana said.
“She healer,” Sopdu. “Her life to heal your death.”
“The viracocha are watching us, listening to us. They target those who might mean the most to us,” Neksha said.
Of course they do.
Vrana scooped Sekhet’s bindings into her arms and against her chest. “I’m wearing these.”
“I say she would want you to,” Sobek said. “I say you would be wrong not to.”
The next day was worse. Vrana had slept for what must’ve been seconds, and her body was punishing her for it. Every feather in every pore felt as if it were screwing deeper into her skin. Every joint, from the tips of her toes to the tips of her wings, was coated in that dry hurt that made moving like running your limbs through a grindstone. She could barely stop sneezing, and when she did, her nose ran like a leaky spigot, leaving a crusty discharge on her beak. If they were trying to lose the viracocha, then her coughing wasn’t helping. She sounded like a hag on holiday; an old crone who’d been lighting up since the womb. Yesterday, she had thought she was dying. Today, she had to be dead.
There were sixteen mumiya left, Neksha included, and it showed. What’d at first seemed a formidable cadre of outcasts had, after six deaths, been reduced to sad procession, like sick elephants looking for a good place to die. Two mumiya took up Sekhet’s duties as healer and provisioner, and while they fed Vrana her raw human meat without complaint, that was because they did it in silence, their heads downcast. When asked, they refused to tell her their names. She understood why. If the viracocha thought she and these two mumiya might be on friendly terms, they’d be the first to be targeted on tonight’s likely raid.
The other mumiya, Sobek, Sopdu, and Neksha withstanding, were no different. They gave Vrana, Elizabeth, and the Skeleton a wide berth. There was a greater eagerness amongst them to volunteer for patrol and scouting. Sometimes, Vrana would even catch a mumiya or two hanging back, looking back, considering for a moment mutiny and self-preservation. There was more to them than their duty as quartermasters on the campaign to kill God, she knew. There were thoughts and feelings; maybe even hopes and dreams that’d been suppressed to duty but now were in danger of being dashed entirely.
The viracocha may not be the only things we should be worried about tonight, she thought, looking around, catching the mumiya staring at her and quickly looking away. What were you thinking, Neksha? You’ve been at this for eons. There’s no way you’ve always been so impulsive.
“Learn time.” Sopdu waddled up to Vrana with his bowlegged gait. “You look gross.”
“Sure know how to kick a woman when she’s down, Sopdu.”
“Me?” He pointed to himself. “Never kick woman.”
Across the way, Elizabeth and the Skeleton went off with Neksha’s captain, Sobek, to investigate the sandstorm brewing on the western front.
“You smart.”
“Sometimes,” Vrana said with a laugh, “but don’t get your hopes up.”
Sopdu blew outwards, rippling the bindings around where his mouth would be. “Learn time.”
They started immediately. Sopdu hurried ahead—apparently his excursions into the desert had made him impervious to its bullshit—and went down on his knees. There was something there
in the sand, but what it was, Vrana couldn’t say, because it didn’t look any different than anything else.
“Smell it,” he said.
“Sopdu, if I get down on the ground with you, I can’t guarantee I’ll be getting back up.”
He reached backwards, grabbed the front of her leg, and pulled her forward until she almost lost her footing.
“Goddamn it, okay. Hang on.”
“Heh.”
Vrana got down on her knees, sighed. The pressure in her lower back floated up her spine, like a handful of balloons cast to the sky. Never had she felt more comfortable than she did right now, on this bed of bones, in this hellish oven.
“Smell.”
Vrana cleared her nose the best that she could and pressed her nose to the sand.
“You’re not going to smash my face into the ground, are you?”
“Heh, heh.”
She inhaled. Expecting nothing, she got far more. Her nostrils, clogged with stalagmites of snot, were blown wide open. A kind of fragrance she couldn’t place swept into her skull, making her insides itch. She stumbled backwards. Eyes squeezed shut, she waited for the sensation to pass. It was as if something had blown spices straight onto her brain.
“Look,” Sopdu.
She did.
And nothing was the same.
The Ossuary had grown dim, and through the sands, thousands of bands of color, bright and dark, shone. It was a pale pink, almost like blood mixed with milk. Vrana couldn’t tell if it was light or heat, or something chemical, like pheromones or secretions, but whatever it was, she was higher than a kite on it.
“Do you see?” Sopdu asked.
“Ugh, yeah.” Vrana came shakily to her feet. Taking a swig of sanies, she said, “What am I looking at?”
“Maggot marks. Leaves everywhere.”
“The brighter ones are more recent?”
“Yes. More smell. Each part of other. Smell right tracks. See right tracks.”
Vrana watched the other mumiya, Elizabeth, and the Skeleton pass through the shafts of Valentine’s Day-colored light, unbeknownst to their presence.
“The Maggot manufactures specific secretions?”
“For every new God killer,” Sopdu said.
“Wouldn’t it be easier if the damn thing just met us halfway?”
“Killing God not easy…”
“… and finding the Maggot shouldn’t be, either,” Vrana said, finishing his sentence. “Another damn trial.”
“That life. We track.”
Vrana didn’t argue with him. She needed something to do to take her mind off of things, especially Aeson, who was beating on all the windows and the doors of her mind, trying to get back in.
“Hey, Sopdu, I’m sorry about your friends.”
Sopdu shrugged. “They’re not.”
Who would’ve thought there was so much that could go into tracking the Maggot? By the time the light began to leave the Ossuary, Vrana had spent several hours learning about the life of its secretions and the intensity of their colors, and how the scent of each was, in and of itself, a code indicating which routine the Maggot would be engaged in for seven days, and seven days only. Pure white meant the Maggot had charted a course for the northern border between the Ossuary and the mainland, while dirty white meant the Maggot could be found on the interior, circling the poisoned oasis there. Red secretions had the Maggot roaming the coast, where, according to Sopdu, something “like the sea” girded itself on the land. There were many other colors and shades of color to consider, most of which Vrana had forgotten; but for the next four days, theirs was bloody-milk-pink. That meant the Maggot was headed south, to the rock fortresses and the dry thunderstorms desperate to bring them down.
It wasn’t until Vrana and the others had begun to settle in for the night that she felt as if she was beginning to get somewhere with the actual Maggot tracks. There was a texture to them separate from the sand itself. They were like fingerprints, except hardened into a transparent resin that fixed them to the ground, so they could never be disturbed. While the secretions would point her and Sopdu in the direction of the Maggot, it was the tracks that would signal to the creature it was being sought after, for no matter how many miles it traveled, it remained linked to them, like a spider to its web, feeling the subtle vibrations that differentiated friend from foe.
To no one’s surprise, and Neksha’s dismay, the surviving sixteen mumiya continued to keep their distance from Vrana, Elizabeth, and the Skeleton this night. They’d made camp on cracked clay pan several miles out from the aforementioned rock fortresses. Unlike the other parts of the Ossuary, this parched place had some semblance of life. Faint, dark hairs sprouted from the dusty epidermis; and strange trees, porous, almost artificial in texture, held their wicked limbs in praise to the twelve moons above. It wasn’t an ideal location, even if they weren’t being hunted, but there was something about it that struck Vrana as being important; a kind of power in the sand, like the phantom tremors of bygone rituals–dormant, but desperate; yielding, yearning.
Vrana found as good a place as any on the ground and collapsed. Elizabeth was already out hot a few feet away, snoring loud enough to trigger an avalanche. She loosened her mumiya wrappings to let her feathers breathe some and plucked those out that needed plucking. Mind and body no longer distracted, sickness set in, and it wasn’t long until Vrana was shivering all over the place. She had a snort of sanies, finished off the last of the meat she’d been holding onto, and rather than lay down, stayed upright. The viracocha would be here tonight, and she needed to fight in the same way some needed to fuck. It burned inside her; thinking about it only made the need burn hotter, brighter. She needed a release.
“Now you’re a shitkicker like me.”
The Skeleton stared her down as he approached, his wild, lidless eyes nearly as bright as the moons above. The black cloak he wore was salt-streaked and shredded. Through the tears along the chest, she caught a glimpse of the Black Hour’s heart beating rapidly in his ribs. It reminded her of a caged animal.
In a way, he was right. She and Sopdu had spent a good majority of the day sifting through the sands for the Maggot’s droppings. Thanatos was harvested from its feces. It was one of the few commodities the mumiya traded to the drifters and vagabonds who came to Kres with offerings of their own. What those offerings were, Sopdu refused to say.
“I haven’t been around much.” The Skeleton stopped a few inches from her. “May I?”
Vrana nodded, and reflexively began digging with her beak into her wings, cleaning them.
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
She stopped picking at herself, said, “Thanks,” and went back at it.
“I’m not going to harp on it, though. I can tell you don’t want that.”
I kind of do, she thought. Deciding instead to grieve vicariously, she asked, “Must be hard on you, too.”
“Truth to be told, I’ve been lying to myself. I’ve been telling you all I joined up to find a way to die, but that’s not it. I know my wife and son are dead. But maybe they’re not. And if they’re not, I can’t have them living in a world like this. I know what King Edgar tried to do in secret years back. I know what God’s going make him do once Its settled. I can’t have that. Humans are stupid, me included, and gods are nothing but teases. It showed some skin, and now we think we’re in. It’s nothing but a corpse-digger.
“Clem and Will are dead, but if they’re not, I know I’d be here in this desert all the same, trying to save them. I got all this love, Vrana, but damned if I don’t know what to do with it.” The Skeleton laughed, rested his Black Hour-stained tongue on the tops of his teeth. “You don’t got to say it. I know I’ve lost my mind.”
Finished cleaning her wings, Vrana swallowed the mites and bugs that’d been living in them and said, “Me and you both.”
“You get used to it. You’d think the feelings wouldn’t linger, on account of being crazy and all, but I think it just makes it wo
rse.”
“I don’t know.” Dust devils swept across the clay. “Aeson… my mom… they’ve always been there. I can’t figure out a way to… Do I hold on or let go?”
The Skeleton said, “Neither’s worked for me, so it must be both, or something else. Might be we’re just sore losers.”
“Fuck,” Vrana said, smiling.
“I didn’t know your circumstances with Joy. I blame myself a bit for not being around…”
Yeah, if you’d been there.
“It wasn’t on purpose.” He propped his knee up, knitted his boney fingers over it. “Heart’s gone into survival mode. It senses danger, and when it came to Joy and the attack, it found ways to distract me, take me out of the equation.”
“How?”
“Images… lies.” The Skeleton took her wrist—
Rollercoasters filled with headless riders, circling endlessly a graveyard gullet.
—and said, “Like that, but worse. Sorry.”
Vrana shook the images off. Though it’d only lasted a fraction of a fraction of a second, it made her feel so much worse.
“It knows what’s going to happen to it when we get to God, and I don’t think it’s ready to—”
Vrana’s eyes opened to death.
To spears striking the night.
To stray bandages caught on the cracks in the clay.
To battle cries descending into insane babbling.
To betrayal.
Realizing she’d fallen asleep, Vrana grabbed the Red Death ax and jumped off the ground, wings beating hard. An updraft of nausea pushed through her insides like a fist. Her wings gave out. Sickness pinned her to the sands. She vomited up a few chunks of partially digested meat all over herself. Her body temperature plummeted, skyrocketed. She squeezed the ax’s black handle and, ready to faint, charged beak first into the battle.
But where was it? Who were they fighting? She didn’t know what the viracocha looked like, but there wasn’t anyone else here but her, Elizabeth, the Skeleton, and the mumiya…
And the mumiya were attacking one another.
“Skeleton!” she cried.