The terror was so huge it could not shake her. Or she had become so small the whole world was aquiver, and she could not tell. The only thing left was to tip her head back and back, her gaze traveling up silk and velvet grown dingy, pinprick holes in its splendor, the subtle silver trimming tarnishing.
The Queen’s ravaged face bent down, a grinning moon. Wrinkles spread from the corners of her eyes, no matter how immobile she kept her expression. Fine lines bracketed her mouth, but they were not Marya’s laugh-lines, or even Gran’s marks of dignity. They clawed at the Queen’s face, and her eyes glared through the cracking paper mask of her skin with utter madness.
Her blue, blue eyes.
The slap rocketed against Cami’s face. Her head snapped aside, her neck giving a flare of red agony. She spilled backward onto cold stone, elbows smacking hard, her left hand crying out and her ass immediately numb. On her side now, all her breath gone, curling protectively around herself. But she wasn’t tiny enough to curl up like a pillbug anymore. The Queen’s wooden sandal caught her just under the ribs, and the black spots became huge blossoming flowers as she struggled to get a breath in.
“Bitch!” the White Queen screamed. “You bitch! You little bitch! YOU MADE ME OLD!”
A merciful blankness descended. The real part of her curled up tightly inside her skull, watching while everything outside rocked back and forth, jerking under the force of the blows. It went on forever, and when it stopped, the gray-robed Biel’y slid forward and the handcuffs clicked, and it was as if she had never left at all.
THIRTY-ONE
THE DARKNESS WAS A LIVING THING, PRESSING DOWN with chill gritty fur. Stone above her, stone below, the clink of dragging handcuffs oddly muffled as her body twitched every once in a while.
This was familiar, too. It was a penitent’s cell, meant to punish those who displeased her. In this deep blackness, the black bulge inside Cami’s skull relaxed, and it was like drawing aside soft ragged smoky veils. Or like torn blue gauze sliding down from a mirror’s unblinking eye, and the reflection beneath coming into focus.
The gray-robed, shaven-headed women cooing as they cosseted and cared for her. They were not allowed to speak—the Queen forbade it. Some of them whispered, though, when the smoke lessened and some focus came back into their eyes. They had sought cessation in the Biel’y, a release from the obligations of Above, and had found it.
Who cared what the price was?
Yet they whispered, and she learned. She was wrapped in discarded pale silk and velvet and played with small things—wooden balls, scrubbed-clean trash brought back by the close-cropped men whose pupils all held pale slivers—for the Queen was all the men saw. They brought the baubles to please Her, and the ones She cast aside the women gathered. The women taught the Nameless to count, and she accepted it as normal. What else did she know?
The voice came filtering through the dark, directionless, a hoarse whisper. It muttered, it teased, it tapped at her ears. What did it say?
She was taken to see the Queen from afar sometimes, and told to love Her. Love pleased the Queen. Heart in mouth, excitement running through her entire body, the Nameless loved the beautiful woman in Her finery, the smoke around Her making all the colors soft and hazy, Her smile meaning all was well with the world. There were other times when the women grew drawn and fearful, and the Nameless understood She was not happy. Those times passed, though, sooner or later, and some of the women disappeared. New ones came.
New ones always came, seeking the drug of forgetting, searching for release.
There were other children, too, but she was not allowed near them. They crept around the edges, scavenging in corners, a feral pack. Sometimes She chose a favorite, and jealousy was rank and rife until the favorite, petted and indulged for a while … vanished.
Very familiar. When she moved, pain nipped at her. They had even taken the bandages off, hissing when the feycharmed cloth spat in their hands. She did not struggle.
And then, a great excitement. The women whispering again—the Nameless was needed. She was called for. She was to be brought.
Scrubbed and dried, her long black hair combed and braided, the women making soft sounds of approval, and then the hall with its mirrors and Her, recumbent on a white-draped bed, the blue of her eyes matching the blue of the Huntsman’s. Of all the men, only his pupils held no pale slivers, and he stood to the side as the long pale loveliness stretched, delicately.
“Here is My Nameless,” the Queen chirped brightly. “Come to Me, child.”
And she did, her heart beating in her throat, her skin alive with joy at the nearness. The incense smoke was thick that day, and the Queen was a haze of beauty, the red-winking gem at Her throat the only color in the world. A white page to be written on, a white bird to nestle in the hand.
The Queen’s broad soft hand touched the Nameless’s slender girl-chest. “Here it is,” She murmured, softly, restfully. “Here is the youth and the living.”
“So it is,” the other Biel’y chorused, and the Nameless was confused. Was this a Ceremony? Were they supposed to speak?
“Do you love Me?” She leaned close, her face filling the Nameless’s world. “Me, and only Me?”
Stunned, the Nameless could only nod.
“Say, yes, Mommy. If you can.”
She struggled to shape the words. “Y-yes, M-Mommy.” Her tongue wouldn’t obey her fully, but She looked pleased.
“Oh, someone has taught you to talk, have they? Well, we will punish for that. But for now … ” Her hand tensed, and the Nameless could feel the fingernails, lacquered with white paste and sharpened, through fabric. “Give Me your heart, little Nameless. I want your heart. I will eat it, and grow strong.”
Horror descended. A terrible draining sensation, as the Queen laughed and her fingers flexed. Casually cruel, a cat playing with a mouse before it loses interest. Her jaw snapped, strong white teeth champing just like the dogs’, and the Nameless jerked aside, thrashing and terrified.
Her thin elbow hit something hard and unforgiving, and the gasp of horror passing through the ranks of the Biel’y made the radiance dim. A furious howl arose, for the child, in her struggles, had struck the White Queen in Her lovely, ageless face.
“TAKE IT AWAY!” the Queen screamed. “LOCK IT UP! TAKE IT AWAY!”
And then the pain began.
She shifted, cold stone bruising-hard under her hip, the chill leaching into her bones. The voice was very far away. It didn’t matter. She knew what it was whispering, the same thing it had started whispering after she had done the unforgivable.
“You are nobody,” it breathed, hoarsely. “You are nothing.”
She lay in the stone-closed darkness, the handcuffs biting her wrists, and listened to her heart’s thundering refrain.
I am. I am. I am.
THIRTY-TWO
SHE LAY FOR A LONG TIME IN THE DARK, FLOATING IN and out of her body. The voice kept going, water plinking over stone, wearing away. Her heartbeat was muffled thunder, and the blackness inside her skull was now the softness of a pillow. She could lie still and not think, and everything would be done.
And yet. There was another memory, one that hovered just out of reach. An annoyance, grit in a sandal, the sting of sun on already-burned skin, a poke on an almost-healed bruise.
The Huntsman’s big callused hand trembled on the glass knife’s twisted, ancient handle. His reflections fought too, the mirrors casting back several images of him as he loomed over the little girl on the altar, her eyes rolling with terror, her thin drugged limbs twitching. The smoke was heavy, full of the resinous drug the Queen exuded, mixed with the spices stolen by the close-cropped men and the glowing, harvested fungus. The feral children were all hustled away, and among them was a boy with messy dark hair, the product of an earlier favorite-husband, and so the only one save the Nameless to be unshorn. He was older, and his heart was fine. The Queen said he would make an Okhotnik for Her, one day.
But now, H
er husband-Huntsman stood, and the Queen tensed. She was beside him, Her beauty reflecting in each lovingly polished mirror, the great soughing chanting mass of the Biel’y as yet unaware that something was wrong. They bowed and swayed, some of them falling to the floor and gibbering praises of the loveliness overcrowding the mirrors before them, reflected on every wall of this hall, the heart of Underneath where the Queen was the only light.
The crimson jewel at Her throat flashed. Her red, red lips parted.
“Renew Me. Give Me the heart,” she said, and the cry went up.
“The heart! The heart!”
The Huntsman stared at the drugged Nameless. The little girl writhed, twisting on the pale stone of the altar, crusted with the remains of other ceremonies. Unlike the mirrors, the altar was not cleansed until the Great Renewal. The lesser Renewals were left as a reminder, and atop the water-clear mirrors the small skulls grinned down on the ceremony, a few larger ones sprinkled among them. Set in the walls with cement made from the ground-up light-giving fungus, they wept thin trickles of bleaching-clear fluid that must not be allowed to mar the mirrorshine.
The Nameless’s eyes were open a fraction. Blue eyes, so blue. The knife lifted.
“Give Me the heart.” It was unheard-of, for the Queen to have to ask twice, and the first thread of unease went through the ecstatic writhing crowd.
“The heart, the heart!” they cried.
The Huntsman’s lips moved. Why did he hesitate? This one, he seemed to say, but the screams and moans overpowered whatever he would have uttered.
And the drugged girl, sudden desperate strength in her bony bruised and wasted limbs, committed the ultimate sin.
The Nameless rolled free of the altar. She landed on a heap of picked-clean bones, and the gasps and cries of horror began. She scrambled, darting-quick as a cockroach, for a dark gap between two mirrors, and slithered her skinny body through it as the Queen’s fury shook the world.
And later, in the tunnels, as the Nameless wandered sick and shaking, the Huntsman had arrived out of the darkness. “She will have a heart,” he muttered, and pushed her. “That way, go. Run. Run. She will have a heart. RUN!”
And she had run, through a jumble of confusion and terror, the drug working through her and her entire world shattered, to end fallen and limp in the snow while dogs howled elsewhere.
Whose heart had the Queen eaten that night? It was not a Great Renewal, but She had to have eaten something. Dark blood dripping down her white chin, her eyes closed … whose heart had She eaten?
And had She thought it was Her daughter’s, until age began to crease Her soft blank skin, and wooden hardness spread over the Huntsman’s skin?
Light, searing her eyes. The murmur went on, a queer atonal chant, and she finally understood it was them, the Biel’y, mouthing their ritual response just like the girls at St. Juno’s murmured Mithrus the Sunlord, watch over us all during chapel every school day.
You are nobody. You are nothing.
Hands on her, she was dragged out limp and bruised and filthy. It smelled horrible. She smelled horrible.
How long was I—
She couldn’t even finish the thought. Smoke billowed. The hall was cramped and dark, cell doors flung open. The coffin-cubes of stone were empty toothsockets, leering as her head lolled and she blinked, weakly. Her heart kept going, her lungs did too, and their hands pinched and poked before they lifted her and bore her on a gray-robed wave. Thirty of them, maybe more, and others in the hall. But the great mass of whispering and movement she remembered from before was absent.
Underneath was curiously small now, and the Biel’y were fewer.
Carried through the twisting corridors, the smoke was so thick she could barely see. The past kept looping over into the present, why did she even keep fighting?
Tor. He’ll live, I guess. Marya, though she won’t miss me for long. Rube and Ellie, poor Ellie. They’ll be okay. Ruby will take care of it. Nico … he’ll be fine. They’ll all be fine, really.
She sagged in their hands. The Biel’y began to chant more loudly, a slow ancient tune with the edges of the words rubbed away. Once their choir would have shaken the tunnels with its swelling. Now it was an attenuated cricket-chorus, barely stirring the swirling smoke.
Their hands were cold. Not the bruising chill of the stone, just cold in a different way. Uncaring flesh, forgetting itself. Cami hung, jostled from side to side as the human wave below her marched on bare feet, kicking aside detritus until they came to a more-traveled hall, the fungus dripping clear water as its glow turned to a low punky dimness.
She’s tired. She had to bring me here, she’s eaten too many of them. Her … followers. And the hunters have probably been bringing others down here for her to feed on, but not enough. It was like thinking through mud. That’s why she needs me.
Nico needs me too, a small voice piped up inside her. So does Ruby. And Ellie. They all need me.
And yet she’d been nothing but a problem since she’d run out in front of Papa’s car. An extra puzzle piece, a snarl in the yarn, a break in the pattern. Something foreign, alien, forcing its way into other lives.
We are foreigners, Papa’s voice whispered in her memory. Always, we are strangers in all lands.
Finally, she was hazily glad he had transitioned. He wasn’t here to see this. Had he known what she was?
My bambina. It is arranged.
Had Papa known? And if he had, had it mattered to him?
It doesn’t matter. He’s gone, and I’m … here. She twisted fretfully, took a deep lungful of the smoke. Would it hurt when the glass knife flashed down? Or would she just feel a spike of pain, and then the deep relief of oblivion?
The doors to the mirrored hall were black iron, their surfaces powdered with dried ghost-moss. They creaked and screamed as the Biel’y pushed against them, each groan and wheeze echoed faithfully through the bars of their song, an eerie mock-grieving. Did she imagine the tremors in their upstretched arms, the drunken swaying as if her weight was too much for them?
Your fat ass, Ellie said, softly, and Ruby giggled in her memory, false-summer sunlight golden over them both.
Missing them was a stone in her throat. The knife would flash down, and they would go on without her being the third wheel … but the missing-them was all hers.
Even the Queen couldn’t take that. She couldn’t take the memory of Papa, either, or of Marya’s hugs and scolding, or Trigger carefully showing her how to tie a neat knot, or Nico in all his different moods. Scowling or smiling, angry or relaxed, and yes, even the face he showed when the hunting frenzy had him and she was reminded of just what Family and blood meant.
The Queen couldn’t even take Stevens, or Sister Mary Brefoil conjugating verbs, or Sister Frances Grace-Abiding chiding the girls to lift their knees during calisthenics. Or the cold of snow and the sight of Tor’s scars, just like the Nameless’s own.
The mirrors ran with light. It was not the silvery blaze she remembered. This struggling corpseglow was not magnified by the polished glass. Instead, it fell into the mirrors and vanished. The skulls above were still weeping, and streaks had been allowed to pit the smooth glass surfaces. Cracks and dust showed, and the ceiling was black behind its pall of smoke.
The Biel’y circled the white stone altar, and little things crunched on its surface as they laid her down. It was crusted with layers of filth and dried fluids best not thought about, carapaces of beetles crackling; little things scuttled away from the touch and weight of her flesh. She squirmed, but two of the Biel’y came forward with a long rectangular black velvet box, and when they clasped the silver necklace with its flat not-quite-round medallion around her filthy throat the will to move drained from her. She felt it go, swirling from her toes, the silver stinging as it lay against her vulnerable pulse.
I am, I am, her heart kept saying. Idiot thing. What did it know?
She didn’t even have a name.
They began to sing a little louder,
the Biel’y, but it was not the massive thundering sound it had been before. Still, the mirrors caught and reflected it, and the incense smoke darkened.
The Great Renewal of the Queen was ten years late. But now, finally …
… the hour had come.
THIRTY-THREE
“OUR QUEEN,” THEY MOANED. “GIVE US OUR QUEEN, our light, our life! Give us our Queen! Our Queen!”
Tip-tapping footsteps, mincing, She appeared from behind the largest mirror, the frame of black iron skulls and bones dusty now. Cobwebs had crept between eyeholes and thighcurves that would have never been allowed before.
She lifted her arms, and the sleeves of Her pale silken robes fell back. The skin flopped loosely around Her wasted biceps, and Her fingers were claws. The paste dried on the claw-tips had chipped, and Her face, under a thick screen of bone-white powder, was even more cracked and runneled. Blue eyes blazed, and the red jewel at her throat flashed, stuttering.
“My children!”
The Biel’y moaned, swaying back and forth. They packed into the hall but could not fill it. There simply weren’t enough of them. Maybe fifty, maybe a few more. Without the Great Renewal, they would all slowly fade.
“My children,” the Queen repeated, and they shrieked in response. Her hands spread, She caught the sound and drank at it, Her reedy voice strengthening. “The Great Renewal is upon us!”
“Renew, renew!”
“There shall be a sacrifice!”
“Sacrifice, sacrifice!” Shaven skulls under tight-drawn pallid skin bobbed on scrawny necks.
“My new Okhotnik, My husband-to-be, went Above, and he brought Me a heart!”
“A heart, a heart!”
Tor, she thought, dimly. Everything was very far away. Bringing me presents. Were they really from her? Or did he steal them, thinking she wouldn’t notice? Or did she send them out into the world, into Above, and he was just the way they chose to get to what she wanted?
Nameless: A Tale of Beauty and Madness (TALES OF BEAUTY AND MADNESS) Page 21