Clay was immensely grateful they’d found somewhere safe to spend the night. As safe as anyplace in this gods-forsaken forest, anyway. He’d seen enough horrors in a single day to last him another nineteen years. He couldn’t wait to get back to The Carnal Court, but for now he contented himself with the fact that they’d found Matrick alive and relatively unscathed.
When they’d finished dinner Taino shuffled over to a hollowed trunk and scooped them each a bowl of what turned out to be beer. Matrick was the first to taste it. “Delicious!” he declared, and when he didn’t keel over and die shortly afterward, the rest of them drank up as well. As they did so, Taino entertained them by showing off the many treasures he’d managed to accrue over the years.
First was an ancient druin helmet complete with chain-mail sleeves to protect a pair of tall, pointed ears. Next was the skull of a cyclopean bull, which Clay wouldn’t have believed existed were it not for the single empty cavity at the top of its snout. There was a Tetrea board made of onyx and pearl (though Taino confessed to having eaten all of the pieces years ago), and a moonstone bust of some long-forgotten Dominion Exarch that actually blinked if you stared at it long enough. There was plenty of jewellery as well: rings and trinkets, including a medallion that looked similar to the one Kallorek had used to control his golems.
The troll possessed two leather-bound canvas picture books, both of which he insisted on reading aloud in his near-indecipherable accent. The first was Trent the Treant, a popular children’s story that had been one of Tally’s favourites four or five years ago. The second was an illustrated guide to lovemaking among trolls, and the half hour it took for Taino to guide them through his favourite pages was among the most awkward experiences of Clay’s life.
At last the witchdoctor produced an elaborate wooden pipe carved into the shape of a brumal mammoth with its trunk in the air. He foraged briefly among the plants in his yard, then returned and packed the hollow in the mammoth’s back with a sticky brown flower. He used a glowing brand to set the flower ablaze before inhaling the vapour it gave off through the end of the trunk. After a long moment he exhaled a puff of smoke and his wizened face split into a great wide grin.
“Magic mudweed,” he cooed. “Dis ere is de cure for many tings: busted heads, broken wings, de sick what eats the eaters. It’ll mend ya inside and out, tru and tru.” He gave the pipe to Larkspur, who took two long pulls from the trunk. When she finished she offered it to Moog.
“Yes, please!” said the wizard. He gulped a lungful of smoke and then coughed noisily as he passed the pipe around the circle. “Mudweed?” he asked when his fit subsided. “I’ve never heard of it. It is psychotropic? Hallucinogenic? It smells a bit like Shepherd’s Secret, doesn’t it? A bit earthier, though, like Dreamer’s Leaf. How long does it usually take to oooooh shit there it is.” He slumped back into his bed of moss and fell silent.
Matrick took a hit, but Ganelon passed, as did Gabriel. When his friend handed it to Clay he waved it off. “I’m good, thanks.”
Gabe was insistent. “Go for it. Your face looks like someone hit it with a hammer.”
Clay smiled crookedly, though doing so made his nose ache. “Someone did.”
“Go on, then.”
The match had burned out by then, so Clay knelt to light it. Putting his mouth to the trunk he found Taino smiling at him with big yellow teeth and gleaming brown gums. “Smoke up, smoke up,” urged the troll, so he did.
It kicked in almost immediately. The ache in his nose vanished; the pain around his eye disappeared. The throbbing in his back ebbed away. Even his knees and feet stopped hurting as the mudweed took hold. Clay settled into the moss behind him and tried to put the sensation into words, but the words slipped beyond reach, darting like fish in a shallow pond.
Taino had reserved his favourite treasure for last: a trio of hide drums leashed together by leather bindings. He sat cross-legged with the drums in his lap, and only then did Clay realize the troll’s missing arm had regenerated completely. Taino admired his new hand with evident delight. He tested it a few times on the lip of the drum, adjusted the floppy hat on his head, and began to play.
What followed was, for Clay, a journey.
It began with slow, tentative steps. His mind wandered back through the events of the past several weeks. First was the clash with Larkspur and her thralls aboard The Carnal Court, and then the surprised terror in Kallorek’s eyes as he hurled the booker overboard. He watched Gabriel draw Vellichor from a sheath of stone rubble. He remembered Tiamax the Arachnian chittering as he poured Matrick a drink.
Clay found himself alone on the Maxithon floor, turning in place, witnessed by the empty sockets of innumerable skeletal spectators. A turn too far, and the three heads of the chimera roared in his face.
He was dimly aware that Taino had hastened the rhythm of his music, and his mind quickened to keep up. The Riot House went up in flames. A kobold kid with lamp-bright eyes growled in a nest of blades. Raff Lackey promised vengeance above a swollen, snake-bit throat. Clay loosed a flaming arrow over grey waters, watched Lastleaf slip from the wyvern’s back, saw Jain saunter onto the road, stood with Ginny on a hill at dawn. Her eyes that were sometimes green and sometimes gold looked into his.
Come home to me, Clay Cooper.
His daughter laughed from her perch on his shoulders, then cried in his arms as a babe. He felt his callused fingers caress the taught skin of his wife’s swollen belly, felt her lips against his on the bright day they were wed. And now her voice again, hot as the fire in her eyes when she’d asked him on a night long ago: Which are you, the monster or the man?
The drumbeat grew faster still. Time galloped like a running horse, and from its back Clay watched as the golden years with Saga blurred past—the memories so numerous they flashed by only in glimpses. He saw a host of living trees laying siege to city walls, a fortress of black glass buried by earth and time. He heard the laughter of friends, the sighs of lost lovers, the screams of those he’d killed, and killed, and killed.
And here was Kallorek, slick and fat, while Gabriel stood behind him with a smirk on his face.
Our friend here says you can fight.
All at once the drumming slowed. The silence between every beat stretched into eternity. When they came at last they fell in pairs, resounding in his head like the languid breaths of an exhausted heart.
Ba-dum.
A knife scratching at the skin of a white tree.
Ba-dum.
Wait, please. His mother, begging for her life while Clay cowered in the dark.
Ba-dum.
The whisper of rain on the roof above his bed. Raised voices in another room.
Ba-dum.
The glimmer of sunlight through the sway of green leaves.
Ba-dum.
A blond boy points to the field of wind-blown grass behind their home. Why can’t I go there?
Because, he is told by a voice he can barely remember, there are wolves.
Ba-dum.
Ba-dum.
Ba-dum.
Chapter Thirty-three
The Flesheater
When Clay woke it was still dark. All but a few of the coloured mushrooms had lost their uncanny light. The bats had left to hunt whatever it was glow-in-the-dark bats hunted. Glow-in-the-dark mice, he supposed. Matrick and Taino were engaged in a clamorous snoring contest. Ganelon and Moog were sound asleep, and even Gabriel, who barely slept most nights, had managed to drift off.
Larkspur—or Sabbatha, as she’d called herself earlier—was sitting with her arms around her knees, one wing folded over her shoulder like a blanket. The other, the broken one, loomed crookedly behind her. She was near enough to what remained of the fire that Clay could see her face: the strong jaw, the arched brows, the large dark eyes that gleamed like starlit pools by the light of dying embers. She didn’t notice he’d awoken until Clay quietly cleared his throat.
It seemed an effort to pull her gaze away from whatever it was sh
e’d been watching with her mind’s eye. When she did she smiled, and Clay felt his heart skip a beat.
“I had dreams,” she said.
“Me too.”
“Good ones?”
Clay had heard his mother whimpering in the dark. “Not really, no.”
“Me neither,” she said. “Though I remembered a part of my past.”
Clay’s mouth went dry. His mind started running scenarios that began with Larkspur lunging across the fire and mostly ended with him dying at her steel-shod hands. He considered going for his hammer, which lay just out of reach, or maybe diving for Ganelon instead, since waking the warrior was probably his best hope of survival. Finally he swallowed his fear and asked, as evenly as he could, “Like what?”
The daeva chewed her lip for a moment. “Do you know how my kind are born?” she asked.
Eggs? he almost guessed, but instead just shook his head no.
“Immaculate conception.”
“What? That’s impossible,” he blurted, before considering whether or not it was polite to do so.
She laughed quietly. “My father’s reaction was much the same, I’m told. He was away in Phantra when I was conceived, and when he came back north to find my mother pregnant he nearly killed her. He nearly killed me, too. When I was born he left me in the snow overnight as an offering to the Frost Mother.”
“But you lived,” said Clay.
“I lived,” she confirmed. “My father found me the next morning wrapped up in my wings—hungry, but otherwise hale. He left me alone after that. He must have assumed I was blessed by the gods.”
What was it about fathers, Clay wondered, that compelled so many of them to test their children? To insist that a daughter, or a son, prove themselves worthy of a love their mother offered without condition?
“But as I grew older,” Sabbatha told him, “the other children in my village were afraid of me. They thought me a freak, a monster. They called me ‘harpy.’” Her grin turned savage. “I didn’t mind. I even found myself a nest—a cave on a steep hill where I went to be alone. But eventually, when they realized their words had no power to hurt me, they used fists instead, or stones, and neither the gods nor all the feathers in the world could protect me then.”
Clay couldn’t say for sure whether the sympathy he felt for her was real or artificial, but at some point while she was speaking he had ceased suspecting she was about to attack him. “Is that what you dreamt of?” he asked. “Being tortured by those kids?”
The shake of her head was almost imperceptible. “I dreamt of killing them, of hunting them down one by one.” She appeared to take no pleasure in saying this—insofar as Clay could tell—but nor did she seem aghast at this shadow of herself revealed by Taino’s drug. Her voice was strangely even, as though she were still half immersed in the dream, dictating out loud what she was seeing with her mind’s eye.
“The first was a boy named Borys, the village headsman’s son. He had a knife, which he held against my throat while he groped me. He would have done worse, I think, but I took his knife and used it to kill him.”
Clay shifted where he sat. The mudweed had alleviated the gnawing pain in his back, but the daeva’s confession made it hard to get comfortable, even on the bed of plush moss. “Borys had it coming, sounds like.”
Sabbatha’s eyes flickered briefly to his. “Of course he did. And so did the next girl, Sakra. She’d thrown me down a flight of stairs once, so I pushed her off a cliff. And after that was Crystof, who was especially cruel. He beat me worse than any of them, and so I tied him to a tree, and I used a rock to break him, little by little, until he died.”
One of the mushrooms above them lost its lustrous blue glow, leaving the daeva’s face bathed in ruddy red light. “Misha used to cut me. She was younger than me, and smaller, but she’d have one of the others hold me down. Once she pricked my eyes with the point of a nail and threatened to blind me, so I …” Sabbatha trailed off, unwilling or unable to divulge the gruesome details of whatever revenge she had taken upon the girl. “She screamed and screamed, and in the end she begged for mercy. I don’t know why … but I let her go. I might have made her promise not to tell the others who it was that hurt her, but I didn’t. I think I wanted them to find out … to know what I was capable of.”
Clay had a fair idea as to how this story ended. He wondered if all of this had been a part of Sabbatha’s dream, or whether, like himself, she had glimpsed her past in a succession of broken shards and was only now piecing them together.
The daeva blinked several times in rapid succession. Her tongue slipped out to wet her lips and Clay felt his breath catch. “I spent the following night in my nest. By the time I returned to the village my parents were dead, our home burned to the ground. They had cut my father’s head off, left his body in the yard for the dogs. My mother was hung by her feet from a tree and pelted to death with stones.”
“And yet they spared you,” Clay observed.
“Apparently so. Though I can’t recall why, or what happened next. It’s like … a veil, or a fog I just can’t see through.”
The last of the fungal lamps went out, so that only the seething embers remained by which to see. Somewhere beyond the shroud a wild thing howled in the dark as it killed, or was killed. It was hard to tell one way or another with bloodcurdling howls.
“Maybe it’s for the best if I don’t remember who I was before,” she said. In the dark her voice sounded closer than before, more intimate.
“Why is that?” Clay asked.
“Because I can’t have been a very good person. After what happened to my parents, and what I did to those children, what could I have become but a monster?”
What else indeed? Clay knew a few things about trying to escape your past. He was remembering the look on Raff Lackey’s face as the snake in his fist had pumped poison into his veins.
I’ll be waiting for ya, Cooper, the old merc had told him, along with all the rest. Whatever vengeance Raff’s ghost had planned, it would be standing at the rear of a very long and disgruntled line. Just now, though, he was imagining Sabbatha being greeted in death by her own host of accusing wraiths, the first of which would be three ruthless, empty-eyed children …
“You seem nice enough to me,” he said after a while.
Larkspur twitched her broken wing in what Clay recognised as a shrug. “Yeah, well, I suppose that’s what matters now. Taino said my memories might never fully return, or they might come back little by little, or else suddenly, all at once.”
Broadly ambiguous prognoses were exactly the reason Clay didn’t put much faith in doctors—witchdoctors in particular. In this case he hoped the former supposition was accurate: that the woman who had glared so hatefully at him in Conthas and then dive-bombed them during a lightning storm was gone for good. He couldn’t exactly tell her that, however, and so was about to offer something clichéd and conciliatory when he heard the sound of a footfall behind him.
Glancing over his shoulder, Clay was dismayed to find the tip of a sharpened stone spear hovering scant inches from his nose. A face floated in the gloom behind it, skeleton-pale, and a word wriggled into his mind like a worm in an apple’s rotted core.
The word was cannibal.
The cannibal’s name, it turned out, was Jeremy. His grasp of the common tongue was limited, but he and Moog were able to communicate through a combination of frantic gestures and words repeated very loudly and very slowly.
“He’s actually quite a nice fellow,” the wizard told them, as Jeremy and Taino wandered off among the tall plants in the yard. The troll could understand the tribesman’s guttural pidgin, and they had evidently met each other before. “He’s a forager from the Boneface Clan. Hence the skull painted on his face, I guess. Their village is very close to here, he says.”
Matrick whistled quietly. “Good thing we didn’t land there. You’d have been lucky to find our bones. And maybe L—” he caught himself before uttering the name Larkspur
“—maybe Sabbatha’s wings.”
“I didn’t even know cannibals were a real thing,” she admitted. “Do they actually eat people?”
“They do, yes,” Moog told her. “Though they aren’t fussy about it. They’ll eat chicken, beef, pork—anything that bleeds, really. Often they’ll just skirmish with neighbouring clans and eat whoever is unlucky enough to die.”
“That’s mad,” said Larkspur.
Moog shrugged. “Perhaps, but in Grandual we kill each other all the time, for all sorts of stupid reasons. The Ferals, as we call them, use the bones of the dead for tools, the teeth and ears for jewellery, the skin for tents and clothing, and eat pretty much everything else, including the eyeballs. It’s all very efficient, if you ask me.”
Matrick put his arm around the wizard’s slim shoulders. “See, now that’s mad.”
“They don’t eat vegetables, or fruit,” the wizard continued. “They deem plucking your food off a tree as cowardly. Consequently, a great many of them have scurvy.”
Larkspur looked bewildered. “Scurvy? Is it contagious?”
“Gods, no,” said Moog. “But I wouldn’t go kissing one if I were you. Eating people gives you bloody rotten breath, as you might imagine.”
She did imagine, and made a disgusted face that Clay, despite himself, found utterly adorable.
“So what is he doing here?” asked Gabriel.
Moog smoothed the silky length of his beard against the front of his robe. “Their chieftain is very sick, apparently. Jeremy was sent to ask Taino for a cure.”
“Well, he’s the man to see,” said Matrick. “That mudweed of his is magic, like he said. All my bruises disappeared, all my cuts scabbed up, and my arm feels good as new.”
Kings of the Wyld Page 29