“Are you using those?”
Enoch blinked and then reached around his side to unhitch his derech. It was nowhere near as long as Rictus’s massive blade, but it was at least a more similar weapon than the curving iskeyar. Rictus took the sheathed short sword—it almost looked like a dagger in his long fingers—and strapped the scabbard around his bony hips.
“Yeah, keep the bendy one,” he said, grumbling. “I’m half-tempted to march back to that stinking swamp and root around for Caroline.”
“Caroline?” Sera asked, now utterly lost. “Your guitar?”
“No, no, no, no. Caroline is no name for a guitar, silly. Caroline was my sword.”
Rictus exhaled breathily, eyes closed.
“My guitar was named Tess. And I am going back to get her after I cut Váli into little pieces. The swampfolk will leave me be if I’m wearing their god’s ears as a new pair of boots.”
Enoch knew that Rictus couldn’t be turned once he was in a mood like this one. But he knew that Sera would probably try. The angel was trying to instill some order on the situation.
“I know that you’re angry, but . . . but if this monster has been able to capture hundreds of other specters—”
“One hundred and twenty-nine,” interrupted Enoch. “One hundred and twenty-nine other specters.”
She rolled her eyes and continued. “—if this monster has been able to capture so many other specters, what makes you think you can kill it? The Swampmen think this ‘Vah-Lee’ is a god for a reason, Rictus. Besides, we are out of water and Enoch’s ears are bleeding from snuffing out all of . . .” Here she trailed off, apparently unsure if this would be offensive to Rictus.
The specter just waved his hand. “Don’t worry about it. He was doing them all a favor. Truth is, another few weeks up there and I would have lost it as well.”
Enoch looked up at Rictus. “How many more? How many more are there?”
Rictus shrugged. “Pretty sure I was the most recent addition. You see any more behind me?”
They all turned to see. Nothing but empty girders climbing the dune behind him.
Enoch blinked his eyes. “You . . . you’re right. There should be a sequence of eight following Rictus here. The pattern is . . . is ended.” His mind had begun to ache just thinking of that circular sequence again. He tried to shrug it off but found his stomach rising at the thought of that endless, unrepeating pattern . . .
“Good thing, too,” said Rictus, interrupting the thought. “You should see how the Path of Anguish responds to a new tenant. The girders all shake, lift into the air, and grind sideways back and forth across the path. All the specters start screaming—pretty disturbing stuff, even for the undead.”
Enoch had been so relieved about his vigil coming to an end that he almost missed what Rictus said.
“They what? The girders move? I thought they were anchored below the sand.”
The specter rolled his eyes. “I forget that this must all seem so meaningless to you primitives. Yes, Enoch, they move. The girders you see were once part of a complex transport system. The hooks me and my brethren decorated are just the broken ends of a glorified conveyor belt. Its original purpose was to deliver materials to the factories and silos that used to honeycomb this place.”
Enoch couldn’t believe what Rictus was saying. He had been using his ability to kill specters all along this path—never once had he sensed any machinery beyond their synthetically beating hearts.
Rictus grabbed the boy’s hand and placed it on the warm metal girder behind them. Mesha leaped to the ground and began sniffing at the base.
“Follow the girder to its roots, kid. And then follow those even deeper.”
Enoch closed his eyes and looked. Yes, the girder was nothing more than simple metal . . . but . . . following the static lines of the steel shaft deep into the sand, Enoch saw a simple machined joint—a spring-bearing elbow. And then a piston supporting the elbow. And then a linked panel, and another, and another layered over each other like the scales on a serpent’s back all the way back to the root of the following girder. The girders were like spikes along a flexible spine of metal, and yes, there was a trickle of electricity thrumming through all of it.
He should have noticed. This was something easily within his range, something that now seemed obvious to him. Why didn’t I see this? Now that he was focused, he could see that this entire path was part of some gargantuan mechanical system. All buried beneath his feet. Enoch’s mind was already sore from his grim work during the past few days, but he could sense greater systems at work even deeper in the darkness below the sand. Massive shapes, shifting silently. Tirelessly.
Enoch stumbled, falling back into Rictus’s arms. Fresh blood dribbled warm from his ears. He wiped at his burning eyes, and his hand came away red.
“It’s . . . it’s moving down there.”
Sera put her hand on his shoulder. She turned to Rictus. “What does he mean, moving? Where are we? What kind of desert is this?”
Mesha hissed.
“This desert is a stain that your kind left on my home,” came an unnaturally loud voice from the dune above them, “when your bombs burnt this green land to glass.”
They all turned at the sound. Váli had arrived.
A misshapen shadow loomed over dune behind them. Váli was three times as tall as the specter and thickly built. His shape was roughly humanoid but dense and twisted in a way which seemed oddly powerful to Enoch’s blurred vision. The words “barely contained” came to his mind, and he wasn’t sure why.
Váli’s heavy form writhed with trembling, muscular tension. His skin—pink, red, and webbed with pale scars—bulged and rippled as though schools of fish fought through a current beneath his flesh. His knotted limbs trembled and shook—not with any sort of palsied weakness, but with the potent energy of a spring pressed to its limit. Enoch realized, with revulsion, that Váli was unclothed: what he had assumed to be some sort of leathery tunic was actually the monster’s twisted flesh flowing slowly across his giant frame. It was hard to make out any surface details on that viscous landscape, but Enoch thought he saw wetness gleaming from the crevasses between the waves of muscle. Eyes, mouths, and sinuous tongues slid in and out of folds.
Every inch of the monster moved and winked and licked and quivered. Váli spoke from several mouths, but the large, crooked grin on his face remained shut. Enoch saw bits of flesh stuck between jagged teeth and surmised that this one, largest mouth was probably reserved for eating. The two “original” eyes above this smiling maw were mismatched in both size and color, and they rolled inside their orbits in tandem with the smaller eyes scattered around Váli’s body. He took another step closer, and Rictus raised his blade higher.
Mesha hissed again and backed up against Enoch’s leg, nudging him to flee. Rictus unsheathed Enoch’s blade and pointed it at Váli.
“Your brain has been baking in the sun for one century too many, pal. This ‘green land’ was honeycombed with missiles, chem-bombs, and worse—enough hardware to fry the planet to a crisp, as you may recall. All because your shortsighted ancestors wanted to beat the rest of the world to digital checkmate, no matter the cost. Nuking your warmongering patch of the Old World was the smartest thing the etherwalkers ever did.”
The monster stopped and turned to regard Rictus.
“You are much more talkative than the last time I harvested you, specter. Has the Pensanden freed your tongue?” He spat the word “Pensanden.”
“I was here when their fire sealed this place, abomination,” said Váli. “I was deep beneath, but I could still feel the heat. My flesh boiled while everyone around me died. I watched them. I fed on their roasted bodies as I dug free.” Váli’s voice was moist and seemed to come from a dozen throats.
Rictus laughed. “It has been a while since I’ve faced something older than me. Even longer since I faced something uglier. And I’ll bet it’s been a while since you’ve come up against an armed specter who
was sane enough to face you head on, Váli.”
The monster stopped and seemed to consider what Rictus was saying.
The specter bowed. “I look forward to reminding you of what pain feels like. And then introducing you to death. You’re due.”
With his free hand, Rictus gently pushed Enoch back, gesturing for him to take Sera and go. Enoch wanted to resist, but he was in no state to fight. He fumbled for his iskeyar, but couldn’t seem to unsheathe it while his hands were so sticky with blood. His head still ached.
Why am I so powerless? Something to do with the girders . . . the specters . . . the circular pattern . . .
Enoch gasped as another wracking pain cut through his brain. Sera gripped onto his arm tightly and started to pull him away. Mesha hopped from his shoulder and backed away, hissing at the monster at the top of the dune.
Váli opened his large, grinning mouth, and three tongues slid across his lips, across the top, the bottom, and his teeth.
“You are welcome to try, specter.” Váli’s voice was like the rumblings of a crowd of people—men, women, children—all speaking in cold, careful tones. All speaking hungrily. Dangerously. “The mudfolk have brought me countless offerings, as I have instructed them to since the Pensanden first burnt my homeland. You are not the first, nor shall you be the last to try and break my atoning round.”
Enoch’s aching head cleared for a moment, and he pulled back, resisting Sera’s hands.
“Atoning round?” he called out, voice breaking. His head pounded. “You mean the circular constant that you coded into the path? Is there some other reason for the pattern?”
Rictus scowled and moved towards the monster. “Get out of here, kid. Stop asking your damn questions and go.”
Váli snapped his maw shut with a clacking sound, exhaling from several mouths with a sound that could have been laughter.
“There are meanings within every ritual sacrifice, Pensanden.” The monster turned the word into a curse, and his attention was heavy on Enoch. “Some meanings add depth and power to what is given at the altar . . .”
He took a step towards the boy. Rictus tensed.
“. . . and some meanings merely to distract. To draw attention.”
The hatred in Váli’s voice was a physical force, ancient and chilling. Enoch imagined the long centuries of anguish, of singular, driving anger. Hatred was the black energy that roared through this monster’s quivering flesh, the poisonous blood which had sustained it for days without end. And that hatred was focused with dire precision on the Pensanden boy standing in the sand before him.
To distract? Is that why I didn’t notice the machinery under the—
Váli lurched towards Rictus, sweeping a heavy arm around to crush the specter into the ground. Somehow, unbelievably, Rictus was prepared for the attack, and he ducked under the arm with a smooth swing of Enoch’s sword. Blood sprayed across the sand, and the monster gasped from its mouths. Apparently Rictus was right—it had been a long time since Váli’s blood had been spilled.
Spinning to place himself between the monster and his friends, Rictus hissed, “Stop trying to talk with the crazy radioactive man, Enoch.”
Váli whipped around with another arm—an arm that seemed to have grown yellow, bony claws. This was faster than Rictus had expected, and the specter’s rolling dodge only barely avoided a blow that ripped into the sand next to him. He came to his feet and charged the monster in a daring flèche that surprised even Enoch with its speed.
The muscles at Váli’s chest pulsed and then burst apart as a thick, muscled tentacle shot forward to wrap around Rictus’s sword arm and slam him down into the sand. Rictus struggled to his feet and tilted his wrist down to slice clean through the new tentacle—he had fought Váli unarmed before, and the veteran swordsman had been planning for this. Váli grunted and took a step back. The tentacle writhed on the ground, and Rictus kicked it at its owner with a laugh.
“Got any more of those, Beautiful? I can stand here all day, cutting ‘em off as fast as you squirt ‘em at me—can’t wrap me up so easy now, can ya?”
Váli pulled the severed limb into his largest mouth and took another step back, devouring his own flesh while another tongue licked at his bleeding stump. The monster settled back into the sand, and Enoch wondered if it had given up. A dozen smiles flashed across Váli’s chest. Rictus raised his other hand and beckoned the monster to attack.
The sand exploded at Rictus’s feet, and two more tentacles wound around his legs. Váli had sent them snaking through the sand underneath the specter’s feet and was now pulling him down. Rictus stabbed into the ground around him as he sank, filling the air around him with sand as he struggled in vain to cut his bonds. Again, Váli laughed the landslide laughter of a crowd.
Enoch cried out, shook free from his lethargy and drew his sword. He pushed Sera aside and ran towards his slowly sinking friend.
“Enoch!” she cried. “Stay back! We need to keep clear of his—”
Another wave of tentacles burst from the sand at Enoch’s feet, wrapping around the boy. He fell to the ground, sword tumbling. Mesha pounced on the tentacles in a hissing assault of claws and teeth that blooded them but was ultimately futile. One of the tentacles snapped at her, cracking like a whip, and she tumbled across the sand and was still. Enoch cried out and reached for the shadowcat, but he was pulled through the sand towards Váli.
Sera turned to run in a panic to get clear of those tentacles. The sand was already stirring at her feet, powerful undulations almost causing her to lose her balance. She spread her broken wings with a cry of pain, flapping them once, twice. For a second, she was free of the flailing tentacles, but then her right wing collapsed and she fell into the monster’s waiting embrace. Like Rictus and Enoch, she was pulled into the sand, her arms, legs, and wings pinned painfully tight inside the crushing grip of the muscular limbs.
Enoch watched Sera’s failed flight with impotent horror and lifted his head to see the captor. Váli had lost any similarity to a human form. A dozen limbs sprouted from his torso, limbs which bent with a writhing, serpentine strength as they pulled a struggling Rictus, Enoch, and Sera out of the sand and towards him. The limbs were absorbed back into Váli’s frame as they pulled, and Enoch could feel the flesh wrapped around his arms trembling with strange biological heat as the monster consumed itself. He could tell that the explosive transformation had cost the creature a significant amount of energy—the tentacle flesh had grown hotter still, and Váli dragged them all more slowly across the sand. Several of his mouths were panting.
“He’s weaker!” Enoch shouted. “Rictus, see if you can’t break free!”
Rictus turned his head to respond, but another tentacle slid around his neck and tightened like a noose. Váli smiled from his eating mouth, and a flotilla of tongues clicked at him disapprovingly.
“You think I would expend myself like this unless it guaranteed a checkmate, little Pensanden? I had this encounter calculated and won before you even drew your sword.”
That was when Enoch understood. This monster, it thought like he did; it knew his mental abilities well enough to trap him and drain his flagging energies with a meaningless, infinite pattern. Váli had been trained—built? bred?—to think like a Pensanden. It was a monster, all right. A monster like me.
Enoch shouted, trying to find some meaning in this chaos.
“You . . . you are an etherwalker? You are what I will become?”
The smile on Váli’s mouth grew wide and then literally cracked through the sides of Váli’s face—around to where his ears would have been, had he been human—and transformed the monster’s head into a gaping maw. New teeth pushed through the freshly bloodied gums—teeth more edged and carnivorous than those at the front. Váli meant to feed.
Rictus was closest, and the tentacles around the specter bulged and then lifted him into the air above the maw. The monster turned its eyes on Enoch.
“You think your Mesoamerican godfath
ers were the only ones playing with organic computers and human wetware? They were just the lucky first out of the gate, boy. The first ones to grab hold of the net and shake off those behind them.”
He released the uppermost length of the tentacle holding Rictus, and the specter’s sword arm was free. Rictus tried to double over and slash at the tentacles binding his legs, but Váli was too quick—with a hiss, he lunged and bit into his victim’s shoulder. The specter’s sword dropped to the sand as bones crunched under spade-like teeth. Rictus flailed against the monster, digging his fingers into the venous flesh of Váli’s lips and pulling away bloody handfuls of flesh. It was a painful, if fruitless, gesture—the monster moaned from his mouths and then took another bite, severing Rictus’s pelvis and legs from his torso. The specter now hung, spine and withered entrails dangling above the chewing maw, silently clawing at the bleeding flesh around the creature’s mouth. This actually turned Váli’s moan into a scream, and like that Rictus was stuffed into his mouth. Trembling tentacles moved to put oddly delicate pressure on the bleeding, wounded lips, and the rhythmic sound of crunching, snapping bones filled the dry air. Váli’s voice, now smoldering with pain and rage, echoed from the unengaged mouths.
“I’ll credit your specter friend—I’ve not been bloodied in a century. His reward will be to slowly digest in a stomach I’ve grown just for specters—a stomach filled with a thick bile that suspends his nanites in mucus so the acid can do its work. I’ve made sure to swallow his skull intact so he can witness his own dissolution.”
Váli now began to pull Enoch towards him. Even though he knew it was useless, the boy continued to struggle against the tentacles. He could hear Sera struggling as well as she was dragged beside him. He turned his head, tried to see if he couldn’t help . . . somehow.
“Sera! I can’t—”
She was staring at him, face steady, mouthing two words over and over. Enoch couldn’t make sense of what she was saying. He shook his head, confused.
Sera whispered, not wanting Váli to hear. It was a barely audible hiss over the rasping of the sand.
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