The Bones of the Earth- The Complete Collection

by Scott Hale

  More were coming, but the Skeleton refused to react. He’d pulled his weight. It was time they pulled theirs. Collectively, they abandoned him for better grounds. They hurried away from the cathedral, to the mess of wrought-iron fences pushed out of and wedged into the silt. Drawing their weapons, they waited, but they didn’t wait for long. The viracocha had learned their lesson. Flesh would give where bone would not.

  Two came for Vrana, canine snouts wet and steaming. Their bindings were extremely loose around their bodies. She tried to track their arms, but now they were wraps wrapping together, and their movements got lost in that whirlwind. A spear stabbed at her. She gasped, sidestepped; but before she could find her footing, the second spear shot out, ripping through the side of her leg.

  “Ah!” she screamed. The viracocha that’d hit her worked the spear deeper.

  Pissed, Vrana smashed the ax into it, cutting it in half. Leaving the spearhead half in her leg, she swiped at the beast’s face with her wings. Her feathers, like razors, slashed across its olive eyes. Temporarily blinded, it stumbled backwards.

  The first viracocha hurried in for scraps. It came at Vrana hard, trading blows between spear and claw as it bore down on her. But she wasn’t fucking around anymore. She deflected the attack until there was an opening, and when there was, she sank the ax into its sternum.

  The blinded viracocha had started to come to. She hurried over to it, grabbed it with her free hand, and beak-butted its chest. She gored it, and clipped through the bones she hadn’t broken, until she tasted heart. She tongued it out, her mouth prickling at its sweetness, and swallowed it.

  Not bad, she thought, gulping it down. Not too bad at all.

  A cloud of gore washed over her. Bodies were exploding around the Maggot, as it funneled the viracocha through the free-standing fences, corralling them like cattle. With every kill, the bug grew fatter and fatter.

  Neksha, however, had abandoned the fences. He swept across the battlefield like a ghost, between the headstone-like markers that were now rising out of the silt for no apparent reason. More agile than his imitations, he ducked, dodged, and weaved through the spears of the viracocha giving chase. Going high then low, he sawed through necks and tendons. But at the endless climax of his killing dance, a thrown spear shot through his shoulder—

  “Neksha!” Elizabeth cried, not far from him.

  —but he shrugged off the blow. With no body to pierce, it took only bindings, instead. Noticing that, Vrana saw a trail of his bindings strewn across the silt. It was as close as Neksha could get to bleeding. It didn’t look good.

  Elizabeth was bleeding, too, mostly from her back, but she wasn’t letting that stop her. Regrouping with the others—the ground pushed out unmarked gravestones like teeth—they pushed towards Dudael together. The most human out of anything else here, Elizabeth seemed to be trying harder than anything else here. With the Red Death sword, she ran recklessly at the viracocha, cutting, slashing, and stabbing the first body part she could get to. It wasn’t that she or the others were stronger than the creatures, but their weapons, infused by Death Herself, killed the abominations at the slightest touch. Baby’s first blade.

  In the shadow of the village, everything caught up with Vrana. Heart beating so fast she couldn’t even feel it pumping anymore, she struggled to breathe the air that wasn’t even there.

  Elizabeth was no better. She’d slowed down, and now, she was bleeding from not only her back, but her arms and legs and stomach. Struggling to kill one viracocha, she had to backpedal as three more of the insectoid werewolves drew nearer.

  Neksha backed her up, but there wasn’t much of him left. Most of his arm’s bindings were gone. A quarter of his face was missing. It looked as if someone had taken a bite out of his stomach.

  The Maggot did what it could, smothering the viracocha with its girth. Nasty, bubbling smears of gore were left where it had been. Yet, there was a limit to its gluttony. The creature was dragging ass. Its body, larger than ever, looked as if it might burst. And the upside-down crucifix on its face? It was regurgitating hot, vibrant chunks of the dead, as if it were desperately trying to make room for more.

  “Atticus!” Vrana cried. She took down two viracocha with one wide, sloppy swing. “Atticus, goddamn it!”

  Dudael rumbled. More viracocha poured out of the junkyard village. There were so many of them. Too many of them.

  Another volley of spears darkened the sky. One impaled Vrana’s foot, pinning her to the ground.

  Elizabeth screamed. Her hand shot to her head, blood leaking out where an ear was supposed to be.

  Neksha, his arm nothing more but three ragged strips, took a spear through the gut. He collapsed onto the dead viracocha behind him, and held himself.

  The Maggot’s powers were failing. Too fat to feed, spear after spear struck its side. The gaping holes bled, and when they bled, viracocha blood poured out, like a water tower that’d been tapped.

  “Come on!” Vrana cried, yanking the spear out of her foot, stomach turning as she could see clear through it. “Come the fuck on!”

  She hobbled towards the wave of death, ax limply at her side. Elizabeth, neck covered in blood and looking as if she might faint, joined her. Neksha managed to get up, but not much else; his torso kept closing in over itself. The Maggot, riddled with spears, pulled itself across the silt, tensing its body as it did so, expelling corpses in an oatmeal-like stream of shit.

  “We just…” Vrana drew back the ax to a horde of fifteen a few feet away. “… Need to give him a little more…”

  Thunder rolled out of Dudael. Deafening vibrations rocked the Deep. The sound barrier bent and snapped, and finally broke, a muddy explosion packing their ears.

  Then, blinked into existence, out of nowhere, from nowhere, a red-striped airliner broke through the clouds above and dove straight into Dudael. Hitting the village, it erupted into a massive fireball. The place was blown apart. Debris and viracocha were hurled into the air, flaming and falling apart in equal measure.

  But the Skeleton wasn’t done. Because for the viracocha on the battlefield, he had another surprise.

  Massive spikes shot out of the ground, impaling them. Barbed wire materialized, between and within them, splitting them apart, wearing them like ornaments. Cars skidded out of rifts in reality, plastering viracocha in drive-bys in, and then out, of oblivion. A massive oak tree grew out of the corpses. Pieces of pavement rose out of the silt, and out of the headstones, too. Attached to the clouds, a wrecking ball came swinging through, taking out forty viracocha in one bone-breaking pass. Sewage tunnels opened, gobbling up the hamstringed and limping. There was a whirring, and then there was an industrial size fan, spinning over the few that were left, trimming them like flower heads. It rained cement. It rained glass. It rained canopic jars.

  The viracocha were dead. Dudael was engulfed in flames. Heaven was theirs.

  Vrana, dragging her gored foot, went to the Skeleton and said, “We’re good, man. We’re good.”

  But the Skeleton, consumed by the Black Hour, body and mind, wasn’t about to stop.

  A tide of toads like froth from an overflowing cauldron built in the sewage tunnels.

  The wrecking ball broke from the clouds. When it hit the ground, it shattered like glass, into human-shaped shards.

  “Stop, yeah?!” Elizabeth wailed, bleeding non-stop now.

  Over the Skeleton, a rust-colored gateway shivered. A portal to Exuviae. The otherworld within it, aroused, fell around him—a glistening orifice of experiences.

  Elizabeth croaked, “Wake up, you dumb shit-kicker!”

  The Maggot and Neksha hurried towards him as fast as they could.

  From the gateway, came a buzzing. And giggling. And hymns. But the hymns weren’t really coming from the gateway, but from everything. Vrana could feel the morbid words seeping out of her pores, out of her very surroundings. Being drawn, like blood, from this unwilling world.

  “A-A-Atticus!” Elizabeth dropp
ed to the ground. A pile of freshly-cut grass broke her fall. “Oh, fuck me. Oh… fuck.”

  Her pain must’ve gotten through to him. He snapped out of it. Everything he’d wrought with the Black Hour vanished, leaving behind only the destruction it’d caused.

  The Black Mass receded into the heart. Vrana couldn’t believe how happy it made her to see his bones again. As the last of the Mass slipped into his ribcage, the portal to Exuviae sealed shut.

  “Get up, Girl!” he said, sternly. He walked, sprinted, and then ran at her. “I said, get!”

  Elizabeth couldn’t hear him. She was kicking and screaming too much to hear anything. Hands tearing at her back, she ripped apart the bloodied bindings there.

  The Skeleton stopped. Neksha and the Maggot kept their distance. And Vrana retched when she saw it.

  When she saw what’d happened to Elizabeth’s back.

  The tattoo was infected. Badly. Like it’d been this way for decades. The skin was red, swollen; covered in sores that wept thick, white fluids. The ink was raised, and hard; as if the spellweaver hadn’t tattooed on flesh but scabs. It was moving, too—the piece. The archway was stretching; the hills and the parasites in them, ambling. The Bad Woman… she was pacing.

  Nobody did anything. Their powers combined might’ve been enough to take down God, but to help their friend, they were nothing. Instead, they stood there, staring, words in their throats, hands outstretched. Even Vrana refused to lead the charge, too scared to do more damage than good. Elizabeth was afflicted with Exuviae. None of them had a cure for that.

  Elizabeth, on her belly, dug her hands into the silt. She arced her back. The tattoo continued to swell. At first, it was a scab, and now, something like a conjoined twin; a single blister rapidly filling with fluid—the size of a hump, and then, an opaque lump that dwarfed her shoulders and legs all at once.

  Fuck this.

  Vrana ran to Elizabeth, but she was still lucid, despite the agony, and screamed at her, “Stay back! Please!”

  Not listening, not willing to watch another friend die before her, Vrana ignored Elizabeth. She splayed her claws, thought of her mother, and prepared for surgery on this burning battlefield.

  The blister expanded. Fluid sloshed inside. Too large and heavy to hold itself, it fell over Elizabeth, leaving her to look like a frog with a single, massive egg hitched to it. Stretch marks ran up its sides. Pinholes opened in the taut flesh that connected the blister with her back; ink dribbled out—whole images riding on that slow drip.

  “I’ll go back in time,” the Skeleton offered.

  The Maggot told him, “No,” and to Vrana: “Be careful.”

  She knelt down at the top of Elizabeth and petted her head. “Just… I’ll… Let me…”

  The blister popped.

  Like curtains ripped from a rod, the milky bubble was hewn from Elizabeth’s back, flaying her from her ass to her neck. A gallon of blood, pus, and serum drenched Vrana, getting into her eyes. She fell backwards, frantically wiping the hot, bitter fluids out of her sockets. The Skeleton was shouting, and the Maggot was moving, and Neksha… he’d simply gasped. But Vrana couldn’t see what they were seeing, not with these liquids in her eyes.

  The world a blur, she stumbled to her feet and went farther back, saying, “Liz? Liz! Are you… is she…?”

  With one final wipe, her vision was clear enough to see she wasn’t. Elizabeth wasn’t anything at all, anymore, and would never be.

  Because standing on her back, her long-nailed bare feet sunk into the raw, exposed muscle there, was the Bad Woman. She’d lost none of her horrifying details in her emergence. Her face, an inverted triangle. Her hair, spiderwebs. Her eyes, goat-like and deeply sunken, spasmed in their sockets, causing the numbers burnt into her irises to blur. The slits of her nose dribbled snot like an infant’s might. Still, she had no ears with which to hear their pleadings. As in the tattoo, her mouth was curved into that sickle-shaped sneer, flashing with pride rows of crooked and mismatched teeth.

  The Bad Woman’s eyes slid to one side, to consider her captor beneath her.

  Liz’s dead. She’s dead. Vrana’s beak hung open. Oh god, she’s dead.

  The Bad Woman kicked Elizabeth. She let out a pathetic mewl.

  Oh, fuck, she’s not dead.

  The Exuvian outstretched her crooked hand, large as any human’s head, and pointing at the Skeleton with her sharp, chipped nails, said, “I’ll be taking what’s ours, Boy.”

  She stepped off Elizabeth, the bottoms of her feet red with Elizabeth’s blood. At that same moment, the Skeleton lurched, hand to his ribs. The heart of the Black Hour was pounding. With each beat, the ground split apart further and further at the Bad Woman’s toes, until the silt gave way to rusted light—another prolapsing portal to the golden orifices of Exuviae.

  “But not now,” she said, stepping into the gateway. “When you most expect it.”

  And with that, she was gone.

  CHAPTER XLII

  Isla was tired of waiting. She’d been waiting for as long as she could remember. Joseph, who’d sent her off with a kiss and a feeble attempt at positivity, had told her it’d been worth it, and if need be, she could hold out a little longer. That was where he was wrong. Patience wasn’t something she possessed, not with others, let alone herself. As she sat here, alone at the top of former Archivist Amon’s tower, she knew she should’ve felt ecstatic, privileged, even. She should’ve felt a burning need to search the room and turn up every stone and piece of furniture, to find any secret messages or relics that’d been missed when they’d cleaned the place years ago. But instead, she stayed by the window, watching Ghostgrave, cussing Edgar out, because after all she’d done for him—giving him the Winnowers, Rime, and now Hex and Sloane—he still didn’t trust her, and he still kept her waiting.

  You don’t want a strong woman in your corner. You just want insane ones, she thought, images of Lotus blowing Itkos’ face off flashing through her mind. You’re not going to come in here and threaten me. I’m not your lapdog, mother fucker.

  Before she’d left her room, she’d caught herself falling into old habits. When Joseph kissed her, she pulled away, said never without my permission, and then planted one him before he had time to consent. Telling her she could wait a little while longer, she became so angry that he had the nerve to assume anything about her, that she almost pushed him against the wall. She didn’t, but she almost did. And he’d seen it coming.

  Planting one sweaty palm on the window, it soon turned into a fist. She hit the glass. It cracked and cut her hand. She bled, but one day, she wouldn’t.

  Isla pulled away from the window. Old habits. That was just as bad as men saying a woman was acting crazy because of “nerves” or “hysteria.” Who the fuck were they to say she had to change? And who the fuck was she to think she had to change for them, they—those nebulous nouns that wanted nothing more than to put a boot in her face? Let them think she’d changed, and when she had a seat at the high table, she’d knock theirs out from under them and bash their heads in.

  A cool wind crept into the Archivist’s Tower. It smelled of pine and burning logs. Whether it was real or not, or it was simply her mind telling her to cut the shit, it didn’t matter. Because one whiff of the stuff sent her stomach tumbling, as she recalled the atrocities she’d committed and allowed to be committed in Rime and to its people. An entire town had been wiped out under her watch. Nothing good had come out of it, either. That was the thing about Lux. She could take the worst and turn it into something more, something better, through sadistic alchemy.

  Isla tongued her lips. She could still taste Ikto. The anger was dying out inside her, and in the ashes, fear. She wasn’t in control of her life, not that she’d ever been. She’d thought that by coming here, she might be. But she wasn’t. Not yet. She was tired of waiting.

  The people need me, she thought, starting to take notice of Amon’s chambers. I can’t wait because they can’t wait.

  Trut
h be told, the tower wasn’t as impressive as she’d thought it might be from the ground floor. Most things were that way, though. Nothing was left but an empty desk, a chair that’d been turned to ribbons, and a few wooden toys by the fireplace. Names had been carved into them. One read Auster, the other Lena. Of course, there were vermillion veins, fresh and old, but she’d seen so many of them at this point they were unremarkable. A few copies, first editions by the looks of it, of The Disciples of the Deep lay here and there. Isla picked one up, flipped through it to a random page.

  Heaven is the wellspring from which all humanity had sprung; therefore, it lies beneath our feet, in the Deep. The vermillion veins are God’s own, and the foundations upon which our land is to be built, so that God’s inspiration can be present in all things. A man—

  Or woman, Isla thought.

  —who would willingly destroy the vermillion veins is a heretic. God’s blood is to be consumed only through religious rites, as man—

  Or woman.

  —is not yet strong enough in faith or spirit to endure the transformation consumption will bring. All of those who bear God’s red mark have been chosen to undergo this metamorphosis, and in time, upon following the Will and Way of the Speaker, shall. A follower of the Disciples of the Deep can be no closer to God than by having God inside them. A follower who is transformed will become an appendage of God, to welcome brothers and sisters, or to smite enemies. They will become the Worms to till the soil of conquests to come.

  Isla stopped there. This was the first time she’d actually paid the book any attention. When she’d been in contact with Eldrus last year on behalf of the Winnowers, Edgar had sent her a copy, along with several seeds of heaven, and a warning about their “potency.”

  Sometimes, she wondered how things would’ve gone if she hadn’t reached out to Eldrus, if she hadn’t betrayed Penance. She’d be on the losing side, that’s for sure, with Joseph Cleon right there losing right beside her. She couldn’t believe Felix and Justine were actually here. God, the look on his face when he gave up the Marrow Cabal and Compellers…