The Bones of the Earth- The Complete Collection

by Scott Hale

  Vrana had failed to heal Aeson, hadn’t even tried with Elizabeth. Now, as always, and even more so these days due to her diet, her blood was screaming for blood. But the Maggot was side-eyeing her, those blue chevrons etched into its face literally leaking its terror. She wasn’t about to become a pacifist. Not even in Heaven could that miracle be worked. But she did do something almost as unbelievable.

  She dropped the ax.

  The Warden spoke: “I can smell the Blue Worm inside you, Bird.”

  Nodding at the Maggot, she started backwards, going deeper into the voiding black.

  “You will be recycled, and for once in your life, you will be useful.”

  An immense pressure of presence built up around her, like a wall. The Warden swallowed everything in front of her, wiping out her line of sight on the Maggot. In this intense blackness, she was blind.

  The loneliness, the grief—the unquenchable yearning—it billowed in her belly, having finally escaped that hole in which she’d buried the feelings for so long. Her arm tickled from where Aeson used to run his fingers up and down it. Her nose twitched, because it’d smelled Bjørn after a long day at the forge. In her ears was R’lyeh’s voice, quietly asking her about the Old World. On the back of her eyelids, Elizabeth’s tattoos ran, like scroll paintings. And on her forehead, crisp and wet, a sloppy kiss Mom had planted there fifteen years back.

  “Do you hear that?” the Warden asked. “I am killing them.”

  She did. It was. Bones breaking. Cloth ripping. There were screams, not Neksha’s or the Skeleton’s, but some combination of the two. Intense suffering; an operatic duet sung solely with cut vocal cords.

  “Kill it,” they cried. “Kill us,” they begged.

  There was lumbering in the darkness, like two beasts fighting for the right to take a fresh kill. She heard a chest crack open, and out of it, a thudding treasure came.

  “To bring such an unholy thing into God’s kingdom is beyond blasphemy,” the Warden said. “How will you repent?”

  Vrana fought every impulse to turn around. She flapped her wings to self-soothe. Her talons. She still had her talons. If she were quick enough, she might catch this mother fucker off-guard and rend it to shreds.

  I can’t. She jumped. The sound of her own thoughts frightened her. You’re a healer’s daughter.

  “Will you get down on your knees?”

  Vrana froze. The voice had come from right behind her head. She smelled its garlicky breath.

  “Will you beg for forgiveness?”

  A second shape, darker than the dark around her, ran over her body, molested it.

  “Will you give yourself to the Deep?”

  Vrana dropped her hand to her side, opened it, and then held it out behind her.

  “When the world is Its, we will crack open the Black Hour.”

  She walked backwards, into where the Warden should’ve been. Instead of stopping her, it walked with her, mirroring her steps, so that the two of them never touched.

  “You stink of Exuviae.”

  Now, the creature was looming over her, its form on the upper rims of her eyes—violent wisps of a lunar flare.

  “These are Worms of the Old World. A New World needs new Worms.”

  Vrana stretched her arm out even further. She pawed in the dark for purchase.

  “Will you become our new Worm? There is no higher honor in Heaven than a celebration of our flaws.”

  The feathers on her wings parted. Her beak started to be pried open. She felt cold appendages running up the sides of her body. They stopped at her ribs and rubbed hard their outlines.

  “You can become so much more in service to God. Your people had plans for you, did they not? We will take you apart, piece by piece. You will not die. There is no Death here. You will live through it all. Forever.”

  Vrana stopped. Her hand had touched something. If it had been the Skeleton’s hand, she should’ve been hit with the Black Hour. She pulled away, confused, and then, taking a chance, reached out once more.

  Her hand closed around Elizabeth’s. She said, “You know, Night Terrors have been good for business these last few months.”

  Her hand closed around Bjørn’s. He said, “I sharpen blades, girl, not clean them.”

  Her hand closed around R’lyeh’s. She said, “It’s from a book. We choose our own names in Alluvia.”

  Her hand closed around Adelyn’s. She said nothing, but squeezed her fingers instead, the closest thing to a hug she could give.

  Her hand closed around Aeson’s. He said, “What was that for?” in that snide tone of his that made her hate-love him.

  Her hand closed around the Skeleton’s, Neksha’s wrap the barrier between the two of them actually touching. And then she ran with them.

  Not looking back, using every muscle in her body, she dragged the Skeleton and Neksha with her. As they ran, the Warden followed. The Worm Chamber rumbled, as if the creature weighed thousands of pounds. It barreled down on them. Its presence rode her. She could feel it in every one of her pores, widening them, to get its hooks in.

  She jerked the Skeleton’s hand harder, swung him out in front of her. She took him in her arms, kicked off the ground, and flew into the air. The Warden grabbed at her wings, clapped them together. Bones fractured, but she fought through the pressure and the pain and kept flying.

  So used to nothing, she couldn’t believe there was something. And something there was. An end to the Warden’s erasing shadow. There, yes there, close enough to touch. The second archway, and the Maggot just beyond.

  She held on tighter to the Skeleton and Neksha. Screaming, she dive-bombed the archway. The Warden’s grip closed around her neck. She narrowly gave it the slip, losing a patch of feathers in the process. Blood leapt from her wound, but that was nothing. She had blood to spare.

  “See me!” the Warden cried.

  Vrana, ever-defiant, never turning around, gave it the middle finger and crashed through the second archway.

  She hit the ground, lost hold of the Skeleton and Neksha. She rolled, end over end. When she almost smacked into the Maggot, it slithered aside, so as to not dissolve her.

  Quickly, she stumbled to her feet, to make sure the others were okay.

  There was the Skeleton, covered in wrappings, as if he’d decided to go out as a mummy on Halloween night.

  “You scared the shit out of me,” the Maggot said, literally sitting on its own waste.

  Vrana looked around. Where was Neksha?

  “That creature is the guardian of the Worm Chamber,” the Maggot went on. “It has no form, because it’d forgotten it, so that it cannot disobey God and release the Worms on its own. It did that to show its devotion.”

  Vrana asked if the Skeleton was okay.

  He said he was alright.

  But where was Neksha?

  “If I’d told you about it, you would’ve looked. The Black Hour would’ve reacted.”

  Vrana looked around the archway, then said, “Where the hell is Neksha?”

  The Skeleton came to his feet, the wrappings hanging loosely off him. “Right here, I think,” he said, a tremor in his voice. “Ah, hell. He went and did something dumb and human on us.”

  CHAPTER XLVI

  The portal to the Void hummed over its watery ley line, captivating with rippling waves its contemptible audience. The flesh fiends, Deimos’ pupils, were mesmerized, just as Isla was at their patience and restraint. They were children a few weeks ago, and now, adolescents. The creatures were already sexually active at birth, but with puberty, they’d become much more. Several of the untaught fiends in the Void had died from their “explorations” as Joy put it, while others had to be segregated to the Void’s noxious pits, where they masturbated to the extent that it qualified as self-mutilation. But these flesh fiends here in Ghostgrave’s torture chamber were different. Though naked and often covered in blood, they had some semblance of civility thanks to Deimos’ efforts. The flesh fiends were raw impulse, unsh
ackled and formless, and for years, they’d haunted the land and campfire tales with their nearly indescribable depravities, and yet to tame them, all it had taken was some guidance.

  Reading Edgar’s notes on the Heartland towns, which was what Isla was doing at this moment, had made her mind more academic than usual in its thinking, but still, there was something to be said for these flesh fiends. She didn’t know how long the glamour of education would last, but if Night Terrors were truly flesh fiends just with baths (again, Joy’s phrase), then this might last forever. Was that good? It wasn’t good. Was it? She knew how desperate the witch had been to have a family of her own, and of how many times she’d failed to find one. In the flesh fiends, she had a family with an endless bloodline, and also, an army.

  But not for much longer. Not if Audra and the others ended up doing whatever the hell it was they were doing. She and Joseph had done their part. He’d been praising Joy from every street corner, sowing curiosity and intrigue by combining Joy’s works with the coming of the Holy Child. While Isla, well, she hadn’t done much at all, except keep her mouth shut and her lips pressed to Joy’s proverbial ring. Her smokescreen was loyalty, as it’d always been, be it here in Ghostgrave, or Rime, or Pyra. It was discomforting to think that the only way she’d climbed the ladder, so to speak, was by holding onto the heels of those above her. That was why she’d worn the burka at the secret meeting in the attic. And that was why, when this was over, she’d cut all the tendons between her and the way to the top. Change? She couldn’t afford to change, not when this land was morally bankrupt.

  The flesh fiends had seen something she hadn’t. Isla, sitting at the back of the chamber on the one good chair that had only a marginal amount of gore on it, leaned in over her knees. Then, she jumped back, as a snarling sound came from behind the room that divided the farthest part of the chamber. There was something back there. Something that scared the flesh fiends. No one was talking about it, and admittedly, she was too afraid to ask what it was.

  The portal rippled grayscale bands. Out of it, Joy stepped, her tender, bare feet landing in a pile of her precious children’s shit. She smiled, lifted her foot, and three flesh fiends in the front row eagerly licked at it until it was clean. When they were done, Joy patted each of them on the head and zeroed in on Isla.

  “Sweet Sister,” Joy said. She never called Isla anything but Sister these days. That wasn’t an accident.

  Isla, well-trained, stood and hugged Joy. Her white, satin dress coughed out a cloud of blood smells when compressed.

  Joy, always the first to let go, let go, pushed Isla away a little, and said, “Tonight is the night. Everything we have ever wanted is about to be ours.”

  “You know, they’re planning something against you,” Isla said, a phrase she’d used several times already to maintain her trust.

  Joy sneered. “Oh, I know. Do you know something new?”

  Isla didn’t hesitate with her answer, because it was true. “They don’t like me.”

  “That’s because you’re a strong woman. I had a husband once, a sheriff by the name of Boone. He was strong. I thought we could be strong together. But when he found out about me, he cut me into pieces and left me in a swamp.”

  “Did you kill him?”

  “You know I did. Him, and the whole town.”

  Isla glanced over her shoulder at the portal. “Why didn’t you stop him?”

  “A lot of animals play dead before they attack,” Joy said.

  “Is that why you’re leaving the Void open?”

  The question might’ve been too much. Joy half-smiled and left Isla to tend to the room. She cleaned it by passing through, absorbing the spilled blood and guts directly into the fabric of her dress. With a mind of their own, they turned to fluids and snaked into her dress, staining, and then receding into that impenetrable field of white. It took several minutes, but when she was finished, the torture chamber was spotless.

  Isla often wondered how much blood was inside Joy’s dress. When this was over, and they did the inevitable autopsy on her corpse, she thought it would be best to start with the dress. She imagined it had an anatomy all its own. A museum of hand-me-down hearts and lungs and other vital organs preserved by oceans of blood. What she could never figure out was what Joy was storing it all for. She never used it, nor ever spoke of it. It was like it was a compulsion, to collect the substance of lives. Everyone had their vices.

  Apparently having been mulling the question over, Joy said, “A deal’s a deal, that’s why.”

  Isla didn’t say anything.

  “Onibi…” Joy stared at Isla, sizing up her to see how well she’d keep this secret. “Onibi has been starving for centuries. Rime and your Winnowers weren’t enough. To track Vrana and her boy toy, I had to promise I’d keep feeding Onibi. One person for every mile between Rime and the Ossuary.”

  “How many miles is that?”

  “A lot,” Joy said, matter-of-factly. “I… shared with Onibi we were going to Eldrus. There is a flooded cavern beneath Ghostgrave. It’s linked with Onibi in Gelid by my portal to the Void.”

  “You have to keep it open, to keep feeding the spirit,” Isla said.

  “Yes, Sister. Onibi thinks it has me. I am only playing dead.”

  Several flesh fiends, two adult males, one adult female, entered through the portal. Behind them trailed Ezra, looking disgustingly dapper as usual.

  “You can’t just… close it? Right now?”

  Joy cocked her head. “Why so many questions all of a sudden?”

  “I… just… don’t think you’re thinking this through.” Isla swallowed hard. “I almost did something s-stupid, too. I mean, I wasn’t thinking.”

  “Oh?”

  “I was going to try to change who I was to fit in. I was going to do it for good. I was going to be weak… on purpose.”

  Buy it, you dumb bitch, buy it. For the love of God, buy it.

  Joy, levitating off the ground, glided towards her. Rubbing her fingers against her thumb, causing small, rotted conjurations to leak off their tips, she looked at Isla as if she were a wounded animal.

  “Like you said, Sister, we’re about to get everything we want. And they’re definitely planning… something.”

  Joy held up her hand for her to stop talking. “You forget, Sister, that nothing can harm me. If they even try to go into the Void, my children will fuck them to shreds. And if they don’t…” She looked at the small room behind which the unseen terror lurked. “Something else will.

  “Sister, have I not kept you safe?”

  Isla nodded.

  “Have I not given you everything you wanted?”

  In a way, she had, and so she nodded.

  “My methods may be unsavory, but are the rewards not sweet?”

  “They are.”

  “If I close the portal, Onibi will still be linked to the Void, and I’m not about to have some spirit no one gives two shits about change the locks on me. After tonight, when all the cocks and cunts with big coffers are groveling at our feet, Sister, we’ll deal with Onibi. And Audra.”

  Isla laughed. “I’m surprised you haven’t killed her yet.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Valac is on our side, right?”

  “No, but he thinks we are on his. Stay clear of Felix tonight. Valac wants some alone time with him.”

  Isla’s stomach turned. “Kill… the Holy Child, too?”

  “Valac thinks we are on his side. We need his patronage.”

  “For what?”

  Joy gestured to the flesh fiends who’d been gathering behind them. Each of them was dressed in hooded, white robes with thick, black linework running down the center. There wasn’t a single drop of blood or erection amongst them. For once, they actually looked as if they could pass for the Choir Joy kept calling them.

  “Songs need ears to be heard. Valac has all the ears,” Joy said.

  “I can’t believe Deimos managed to train them…”

&n
bsp; “I can. Flesh fiends, Night Terrors… This new strain we’ll call something else… But all the same, they’re all highly impressionable. They were meant to be. Even you, Sister, could’ve taught them.”

  Isla could taste the bitterness of the insult.

  “But Deimos is a Night Terror, and, better yet, Audra’s lapdog. The more time he’s spent in our company, the more confident he’ll be in thinking they can outsmart us. It’s a shame you’re not immortal like myself, Sister.”

  Isla shivered: “Why’s that?”

  Joy smiled and turned away.

  It was little comments like that that justified betraying Joy. Going back to her chair, she picked up the notes from Edgar and sat. Scared, and ready to strike with condemnations about how Joy was no better than the patriarchy, she needed to distract herself. She turned to the qualitative narratives from individuals who lived in Bedlam, thinking that, by drowning herself in their sorrows of marginalization, and poverty and poor drug control, she’d somehow feel better about her own situation. Usually, that worked, and then she’d take those experiences, to embody them and make them her own, because the only way to solve things in this world was to make it about you, but she couldn’t do it this time. Like before, even after reading all these accounts and statistics, she still didn’t have a way to fix the continent. All she kept coming back to was Lux’s teachings, and she didn’t have a scalpel big enough to flay the world. She did with Joy, but Joy had just warned Isla that she might die soon. Also, she was supposed to be turning on Joy. She’d said it herself, though. With them together, everything was coming together.

  Isla was getting cold feet. She needed somewhere warm to nuke this germ of doubt growing in her brain. She closed the notes and hopped off the chair.

  “I’m going to get going,” she said.

  Joy was going down the line of flesh fiends, adjusting their robes, sending others back into the Void to be refitted.

  “I was thinking about giving them pointed hoods and masks with eyeholes cut out in them, but that might’ve been a little too on the nose, don’t you think?”