Today, his body felt so heavy. And he knew, he knew. It was all about to repeat again.
Beyla did not like this place. It had too many doors, too many windows, too many floors, and too many eyes. It seemed empty, but there was always someone somewhere walking. If you listened closely, you heard the voices of people talking in next rooms over, but there was never anyone there. It was a dream house, a house built on the ghosts of another time, built on the memories of a world before the cracked sun.
Mims was in the center of the room. Table. Cards on the table: face up. He had his head down and was not even remotely looking at the cards. Beyla knew these cards and she knew that they were used to predict the future. One had a wolf swallowing the moon and another had a nude woman riding a lion to war. The third and final card had a sword on fire on a field of stars. Beyla knew, just looking at the way they were laid out on the table, that Mims was trying to predict the future again.
He looked up at her as she walked in, his eyes not going up, not reaching her eyes, avoiding her stare, her guilty stare. As he watched, he grinned his own grin and Beyla was reminded of the rabbit grin, the skull grin, the too-big-for-mouth-teeth grin.
— We need to go back, she said.
Mims picked up the cards, put them back in his pocket. The room was trashed. It looked like he’d destroyed it the night before, with chairs smashed on the floor, splinters rolling, bed chopped in half with his axe, broken wine bottle spinning, window smashed, stained glass on the ground pointing up like daggers. He rubbed his hands over his eyes. Looked at her.
— We can’t go back, Beyla. You know this.
She calmed her nerves by running her fingers along the pommel of her sword: Sunsorrow. The ancient dreaming sword, stuck at the heart of the glass-god sea. It was hot under her hands. She thought it was breathing and alive and that it too missed Carcosa, of all places. It, too, recognized it as the heart home and longed to go back.
— There has to be a way. They can’t keep us out. They don’t have the right.
He tilted back on the last chair in the room and stared at the ceiling, his eyes closed and his mind deep in thought. He drummed his hands on the table, humming to himself. Beyla watched all this with a calm, detached interest. Like watching a machine slowly calculate the center of the universe.
— This isn’t just another mark, right? We can’t just waltz in there. Even if we had a back door to the place, they’d recognize you right away.
She pulled a dagger from her boot and threw it at the table. It struck there and stood still, vibrating with a sharp note. She barely moved. Mims pulled the dagger out of the wood, rolled it around in his hand, and looked at her, stared right through her like she wasn’t even there.
— Your existence is my death.
Before:
When they first arrived in Xylos, their ship was on fire. The crew ran around screaming. People had flames on their backs, spread like wings, ready to take flight. It smelled like burning meat, like burning hair, like burning wood and cinder and ash and decay. Beyla thought about the children of the crew on board and something inside of her curled up and died.
So, she howled and threw stuff and tried to put it out, but eventually grabbed Sunsorrow and ran over and jumped into the sea and watched from the clear blue waves as it burned. The air was so hot with fire and the sea was cold, ice cold, daggers of cold brushed against her skin.
She heard the screams and the shouts, and wondered when it would stop. The masts crumbled and burst and made noises like thunder. She gulped for air as she swam away, towards the bay where people stood still and watched, wearing animal masks.
Fish brushed against her legs. There went everything. All of their belongings burnt to a crisp, money melting into gold pools, loose gunpowder exploding and sounding like giants stepping on the earth. Even all of the memories of Carcosa curling and black with ash, blowing and billowing towards the city. The heat from the flames was too much to bear. Even from back here, she felt her skin was burning up like parchment, curling up and ashen. She wanted to disappear, to blow away, to drift towards town like a stray scroll unravelled.
Now:
Klack, klack, klack: Mims rolled the dice on the floor. He watched the etched bone spinning, his palm itching, his mind racing. He was trying to pay off their debt and to pay off their room for the past few days. They had no money, no possessions, not a single thing they could offer in trade that they were willing to give.
Beyla stood over the moving dice and watched them rattle. She crossed her fingers and thought that she didn’t want violence, not now, not just yet. Violence was always there, that she knew, but for once, just for a little bit, she wanted to be freed of it.
The innkeep was a man with a fish’s head. He watched with black fish eyes, waiting to see if he would get double what he’d owed or if he’d be out of everything. His fish-eyes dilated, his gills struggling to breathe the air. The dice stopped, crisp and sure, revealing: a skull and a sword.
— Well, then. Looks like you owe me quite a bit of money now, don’t you? I suggest you two pay up nice and proper. We don’t want to get the law here, do we?
Beyla laughed and it was a hideous sound. It looked like she’d have to kill him after all. Sunsorrow stirred in her hands, stretching and waking and yawning. It glowed rust-orange in the dim light of the inn, the whispering shadows shying away from it. She walked forward, sword hungry, sword wanting, sword breathing and bloodstarved.
The fish man blinked at her, looked back at Mims, and sighed.
— Go on, get out, you thieves. And you best run, once you do get. You best run. I’ll have the red-and-gray in here as fast as I can and they’ll be hot on your tail.
Mims didn’t say anything. He scooped up his dice, slung them into his pocket. He then glanced outside, towards the glittering street. Beyla slid her sword back into her sheath and it fell back into endless sleep. It dreamed of wars and fighting and violence. It dreamed of cutting the heads off kings and drinking their blood through its steel blade.
They turned and they left. The fishman stared. His head tracked them, following them, unable to stop glaring at them. His eyes were like two glass marbles, rolling towards them, watching them. As if he were forcing their features onto his memories, forcing them to engrave themselves deep within his mind.
A memory:
Beyla, child Beyla, Beyla running and hiding in shadow-coated streets. Beyla with black hair behind her, braided and flying. Beyla wearing an oversized fur coat since it was the monthlong night, the snowless winter, the middle of summer that brought out the cold and the howling wolves crawling through the streets. Her mother was back in the towers, caring after ghosts that thought they were still dying. Her father was hung upside down in front of the gates, slowly begging for food, punished for killing four men with his own bare hands.
She saw him now, saw him hung by his feet, saw his face red, bright-red with blood, and his hands swollen and swinging. He laughed as he swung. She saw his lips were cracked and bleeding and his eyes were oozing. She looked up at her father and reached her hand up. He smiled down at her, cracked-lip smile.
Around his neck were rabbit bones hooked into a necklace, with a rabbit skull as the centerjewel.
— Dad, daddy!
— Httthhhhmmmmm …
Muttering, chanting, barely words. Yet, his hand reached hers and held it for a moment, a moment too long. The guards walked over and poked her away with their long spears. She looked at them crossed and then smiled up at her dad. She told him she’d get him out of this, she would. She would come and save him. The guards laughed at her for being so small.
Later, she would find an icebridge in the sea and walk across it to a castle that grew in the middle. And she would find in the center of it, deep in the center heart, cold and godless and waiting for her, she would find her sword. The sleeping. The dreaming. Sunsorrow.
Next day and the monthlong night faded away. The icebridge melted and everything was
hot and burning in the light of the cracked red sun. She found her father dead and naked and vulture-pecked. They’d slit his throat in the night, and stolen his clothes and belongings. She went and found the guards from the night before, and she woke Sunsorrow from his century-long slumber.
Death came so easy to her then. It was so much more difficult now.
Sometimes, she dreamt of her dad and woke up to a feeling so lost and empty and stolen. As if somewhere along her life, a piece of her broke. A piece of her childhood, maybe, a piece of her memories, her soul. Something forgotten, lost and left in that ice castle so many years ago. And when she woke, she felt that if she could walk backwards in time and find that broken piece and put it back together, then ... well ... then everything would right itself. She would be good and happy and no longer shattered inside.
She’d hoped to find that in Carcosa. Instead, she found only masks and more masks.
The road was the road of old roads, the oldest of the roads known from before the time of the cracked sun. It stretched across the known world and was as wide as five people standing shoulder to shoulder. It was gray-cracked and yellow lines dashed in the center of it, darting off into infinity. Monks would walk the yellow lines, making the pilgrimage from Yardoza East to the Mazaa Gardens along the western shores. They prayed as they walked, heads bowed and shaved and sunblistered, hands working long beads between stick-thin fingers, their mouths low and chanting.
This was the road they traveled. The oldest road, the road that led from sea to sea and from mountain to mountain. At night it was lit by the lanterns of the dead, where ages ago, the King in Yellow walked the road and hanged anyone he found walking there from iron posts he carried with him on a satchel slung over his back. After the bodies became dry and dead and dust, the light that they held within them crawled out and was trapped by the lanterns above.
And now at night, every night, they turned on after dusk, glowing an eerie bluish-white and whispering of the lives they once lived.
— That innkeeper was strange.
Beyla was in the front of the line, Mims right behind her, monks chanting right behind him. Like an arrow pointing backwards, towards the sea and the islands of Carcosa. Mims scratched his head, looked towards the red sky, and made thoughtful sounds, sounds of wondering, of hmming and hawing, and – oh, yes — of coursing. Then, he said:
— How was he strange? Because he let us go? I think he feared for his life and didn’t consider four shillings worth dying over.
— No, no, I don’t think that’s it.
She stopped and the monks kept walking. They would always keep walking.
— His head, I mean. What? A fish’s head? Is he a mutant? Under a curse? I don’t understand. Is he a living metaphor? A realization? A symbol, a sign from the gods? What does it mean?
Mims looked at her for a moment, rolling his dice in his palm, weighing her, trying to see if she was pulling his leg or not.
— You do know it was a mask, right?
Beyla stopped, stood still, looking towards the edges of the road, towards the horizon, where some sort of future waited for them. She was always amazed at the idea of a future, off in a place and time other than now when she was still existing. She thought about that future and it felt like the past, as if it had already come and gone and left her, and now she wasn’t in the middle looking towards tomorrow. She was in the middle, looking towards the history.
Even this conversation felt worn and old, heavy with repetition.
— That couldn’t have been a mask. He had gills and the eyes blinked. The lips moved when he talked. Masks don’t move like that. They are still, motionless.
Mims started walking forward again, hoping Beyla would follow. She didn’t. It was as if she were frozen in that second, hung still, a pendulum between not the future and the past, but rather, between two pasts that had already happened.
— It was a mask. Didn’t you notice the parades, the carnival? The dancing and the lights? Were you so caught up with your quest for the Loryx that you completely ignored your surroundings? The Festival of the Whispering Red Wind! It’s what Xylos is known for. That and cheap entertainment, if you know what I mean.
She ran up, grabbed him by the shoulders and she stared into his eyes, feeling this moment, existing completely in this moment. She wanted so badly to be anchored to this moment, anchored and real. She wanted to crawl inside of it, to dig deep down with her fingers pushing against the membrane of the moment, to lay a nest and live right here and now. No longer swinging through time but still. Still. Her eyes were manic, wide, desperate. She felt as if she were repeating everything again.
— It wasn’t a mask. He was real, I saw him.
Mims pushed her hand away, shook his head, walked further along.
— It was a mask, your memory is fooling you. A mask, nothing more, nothing less. A complicated, clockwork mask, maybe. Like a puppet, in a way. But a mask, nonetheless.
Later, hours later, and red foxes paced on the road, about ten all told, starved thin with eyes like wild lightning. The monks didn’t stand a chance. They fought and prayed and chanted. Their spirits heard some prayers and not others, and ripped the foxes apart but not others. The road was covered in red and the bodies were chewed through, bone broken.
Fox corpses and monk corpses and praying hands tilted upwards. None of them survived on either side. Beyla had watched, calmly, from a short distance away. Her sword woke to the sound of the violence. It begged her to go out and join it, to fight and relish in it. She knew that the sword would not tell fox from man and she did not want the blood of the monks on her hands. So, she turned and did not watch, just looked back towards the silver mountains.
Mims ran forward and joined in. He was bit in several places and had a claw scratch right over his eye. It would scar, that was sure, and there was blood soaking his shirt and his hair. But he had this wild, joyful look on his face, smiling and laughing as he used his ax to chop-chop-chop.
He pulled back and walked towards Beyla when the monks summoned the spirits. He did not want to be a part of that. The spirits were angry things and Mims had led a shit of a life. He knew they wouldn’t spare him, any more than they’d spare the foxes. And so, they both stood with backs turned, and waited for the sounds of violence to finally ebb out and flow away, gently towards oblivion.
The Spirits Summoned:
Gold and blue and glory-coated, silver hair like fire on head, skull-faced and angry with bodies like mist and dust and ash. Razor fingers reaching through flesh and pulling apart from the inside. Teeth for tearing, tongues for tasting the living, the still-breathing, the unworshiped.
When all was dead, they were satiated and appeased. The sacrifices pleased them and they walked off the road trailing into the twisted petrified trees, essences disappearing behind the stone echoes of plants and vegetables.
A memory:
At the new town, the sea town, the town they lived in after their old home had turned to rust and poison, and the locusts came and devoured all light and all clouds. They were strangers here, at first, at first. Strange people, other people, and they were not used to the sweaty bare backs on the longships, the nets slung in the air and sparkling in the sun, the spears sharp and thrown, and pulled back with swordfish stabbed.
They were outsiders here, her and Mims, refugees, wanderers: forbidden. They were not used to the small mudhuts. They were not used to the spiny-backed crabs the people there rode like horses through the sand and the orange wastes. Everything was different, everything was changed.
This is the memory, here, right after they arrived:
Beyla went down with Mims to the beach. They were older now, old enough still that he yearned and she pushed away. The memory of her father’s corpse still clear in her mind from the last city, the locust-eaten city.
Beyla went and stripped and lay flat on the beach while the harpoons seared the sky. She saw millions of fish, all different colors swimming in the waves. The wav
es crushed and washed over her, over and over again. She lay there, just lay there and let the sea take her in, drag her in, pull her in.
And there, beneath the waves, floating, floating, she was breathless and free, with the countless fish moving around her, dancing against her skin. She felt herself being pulled, further and further down, and there, right there, far under the sea, at the center of the sea, at the heart of the world she saw Carcosa:
sparkling city. purple towers glittering. Not a ruin, no, no. It had a bubble around it. An air bubble. And she saw tall men and women in elaborate masks wandering around in beautiful robes, robes covered in diamonds and jewels, rising up and out of their bodies like cathedrals of fabric.
She opened her mouth in awe and swallowed water and laughed. She wanted to swim closer, closer, but it was too late. She was tangled, caught up in a silverweb strangling. She was pulled now, pulled up and closer to shore, and there her fishfriends were caught, as well. And she could breathe again. She could hear Mims sobbing at the beach, worried that she’d been captured and taken by the sea. But no, it wasn’t the sea that had caught her, but the fishermen, who laughed and joked about it later. They said that they’d caught a beautiful fish that was trapped in the body of a little girl.
THE WOOD OF EPHRAIM
BY EDWARD M. ERDELAC
2 Samuel 18:8: For the battle was there spread over the face of all the country; and the forest devoured more people that day than the sword.
The Judean soldiers had run all day previously from Mahanaim, plunging into the wooded hill country of Gilead, where they surprised the massing forces of the rebel prince Absalom.
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