Shrieks and wails mingle with the eager pop of elfin flame. The mara slide back into the swamp and for the moment, retreat from light that, to dead black eyes must be like a thousand suns at dawn.
No sign of Gilea.
There’s respite, but my head’s no better. In fact, panting from exertion has made it worse. Half laying on the ground, I consider the sickly fog and wonder. Is it poison? But I felt fine when I came into the swamp, and for the first few step stones.
“Finna?”
No answer.
“Finna!”
“What do you want?”
Her voice is so quiet, and my head so loud. She could be close or far away. I feel she’s far and growing further.
“Come here,” I pant. “I have some questions.”
“No. Absolutely not. You’re going mad, just like the others.”
“I am.” Voices murmur beneath the water, pitiful moans demanding my soul as tribute, as reparations for the evils of men. But the voices come from inside my head, too. “I am, but I want to figure this out, for me and you. I don’t want to die, here, Finna. Help me.”
She slips from beneath the gnarled roots of a tree, little more than a puddle before she takes shape.
“Did the others go mad the further they went into the Tiste, or the more mara they fought?”
“That’s-” She stops, brow dipping. “I don’t know. I assumed it was distance. One camped on the edge of the Tiste for a day and a night trying to puzzle the place out, and he never attracted the mara and he never showed madness, now that you mention it. Not until…” She winces and glances around us. “Until here, the midpoint. So I don’t know for sure, but...maybe the fighting.”
I drop to my knees and clutch my ears. The screams. By Heijl, the screams. “Not the fighting. Their essence is a poison. For me and you but for me...it’s madness, not sickness.”
I’m sure this sounds reasonable. Well-considered. Not the fucking lunatic rambling it sounds in my brain.
She gasps. “What do we do? How do we fix it?”
Hope. I hear hope in her soft words. It spurs me on and dispels some of the buzzing that scrambles my thoughts. “The mara don’t notice you. I need you to hide me. But…” What?
“I can’t wrap you. It’s been tried. The skin of your face. The dead seconds of your mortal timepiece counting down your days when you exhale…”
Is this a real thing or just raving in my mind?
“They would smell you. They will know.”
“Cover me.” Lunacy and desperation surge. “Could you envelope me?”
“I...Perhaps? I’m air and water and base elements. Primordial essence.” She dares toward me a step at a time.
“Hurry. Hurry.” Water laps the island’s edge. So hypnotic. Inviting. It’s where I belong. Crawl to the edge and fall into the soothing dark…
Finna’s wet, gelatinous form is cold against my fevered face, like a slap. She thins; her features disappear, and she flows over me like water.
“If I’m wrong,” she warns in a watery voice, gloving me to the neck, “You’ll drown. You’ll die.”
I can see the faces of the mara, in splinters of my thoughts, and I can’t tell if they’re real, anymore. “It’s better than the alternative.”
I barely finish the word before she slips over my head. I’m covered. She’s my armor, my protection. It’s like plunging my face into a pool. I hold my breath.
“Breathe.” I hear her words inside me. “You have to breath me in, or the mara will know.”
I shake my head. Insulated from the noxious air, my madness has begun to pass, and this restores my instincts and reason.
Mara come tentatively from the water, stalking slow and confused. But they are coming, converging.
“Lir.”
I hold my breath. Spots explode at the edge of my vision.
The mara sniff, hunched and beckoning with their finger claws.
It’s not a brave choice on my part. My lungs simply spasm on a primitive demand. Cool slime flows into my nose and mouth. I writhe, trying to claw free. The spots recede. My lungs raise like furious bellows. A mara looms a finger-length away, staring into my face with her spongy, slack, horrifying visage.
She flails left, right. When her prey doesn’t materialize, and her confusion yields no answers she turns and with a last signaling scream, calls the others into the water with her.
“Oh! Almat, Heijl, and Vigga! I can’t believe it worked.” Finna sounds breathless, as disbelieving as I am.
That’s only the half of it. I’m inside her. There’s no explaining how surreal this is. How her flesh flows over mine, solid but fluid. A living being. I can feel her, flowing around me, across me, inside my clothes, inside my body. When I breathe, she flows in and out of my lungs.
It’s bizarre, and incredible. She’s a part of me, and me of her.
More shaking? She’s moving. I’m not in control of our movements, not totally. My boots sense the spongy ground beneath us, but I feel tumbled along by Finna’s momentum like a twig tumbled along in a stream.
“Is this strange to you?” Her voice is a muffled hum.
“No.”
She stops moving.
“Yes. Yes, it is.” I can’t play the hard-worn adventurer this time.
Finna is silently, moving between the fingers of trees reaching into our boggy path. It sounds impossible, but I can feel what she’s thinking. Impressions, anyway. I wonder if its Meridiana’s gift at work.
What is it?
Finna tightens around me. You can do that?
Guess so.
She’s silent again a moment. I feel stupid for never thinking of this. No offense to you. Just…
Hey, I only thought of it because I was on the edge of insanity. Not like a puzzled it out on a stroke of genius.
If I’m completely honest...She contracts around me with a sigh. I don’t know if I cared.
This might sound cruel from someone else, but I hear faint regret beneath her thought.
I resent Cocidius for making me part of his menagerie. And I resent Nechtan for corrupting my lake and spoiling the Great City. I resent the man in white for leaving, although…She ripples, and for a moment my vision is that of water over a windowpane. It seems he didn’t forget me.
Have you ever been to the garden? In the center of Cocidius’s temple?
No. Not one aspirant survived here. She sounds unimaginably sad.
There’s a Gardener. She gave me the rose extract.
She?
It? It appears female. I guess I don’t know for sure. Anyway.
Gardener in the temple. A gardener in the city. Interesting. Warmth radiates from her, genuine curiosity and delight.
Anyhow, so many of the men who came were ruthless, impatient, cruel. And when they began to lose their minds, I suppose there was already an unwillingness to help. Silence stretches a moment. When she speaks again, her voice is almost too quiet to hear, even in my head. I sound like a monster.
No. But I am amazed at the number of bollock-bags who pass through this place.
Her chuckle vibrates cool goo where it lays against my skin. That’s what it takes to win, I’d assume. Brutality and a willingness to sacrifice anything.
Mm. I can’t agree. Haven’t done a whole lot of that and so far, despite getting in my own way from time to time, I’m still alive.
A ripple of happiness travels through her and over me. The scent of roses fills my every breath, magnified.
Ahead, I can see the shrine, still a hazy blot against the darkness. Mara wander past us, and more than once we have to halt as one shambles across our path. They shriek to each other, and now that they’re not attacking, their voices are mournful. Considering who they were, how they died, I don’t blame them.
I hate this place.
We reach the edge of the last of what can be called land. Ahead, the water is open on both sides, and ripples ahead to a low, tangled cliff with uneven steps cut into rock ben
eath the overgrowth.
Nechtan’s shrine tops the staircase. In the swamp air its little more than a hazy illusion, small and circular and ringed with columns like Cocidius’, but taller, narrower and capped with a domed roof. Once, it must have been bright stone, but after more than a century in the poisoned air it sticks cracked and yellowing from the ground like a decayed tooth.
I don’t see a way across the water. How do we –
On a reflex, I gasp when Finna steps from the bank onto the water, brace to hold my breath and plunge into water that’s clearly much deeper than the rest of the swamp.
Water spins beneath our feet in a tiny vortex. When the spinning grows fast enough, it flows along her skin in a cold jet, levitating and propelling her all at the same time. We flow over the lake without moving a limb.
Finna, you are a marvel.
I feel a shimmer of warmth and pleasure radiate through her, from head to toe. Feel it inside me, where she is one with my deepest places. Just a little trick.
Now and then as we go, I see a face beneath the water, or hair floating like a fan across the surface. A withered arm oscillates like a water serpent, beckoning unknown prey. I shudder.
You’re going to give them peace, reassures Finna. We can’t change what’s done, but you can put them to rest.
Nothing much has changed when we reach the far shore. If anything, the air is thicker, darker here along the border, making its last stand against me.
The temple’s rear half is cut partially into the hillside that extends above it. It looms over us, cut from the darkest nightmares of the Earth, hiding unknown terrors.
The only way out is through, Finna offers. You can no longer enter the city by any other means.
And there can’t possibly be anything horrible waiting inside Nechtan’s shrine, right?
The staircase is divided by what looks like a handrail. It’s wide as my sword from pommel to tip, and concave. I reach out and rest my fingers on it, even though I can’t feel through Finna’s protection.
Very early on Nechtan grew superstitious about coming too close to the water’s edge. He had the shunt made so his shrine could be venerated with offerings to the lake, or so he told his people. It was really for disposing of the bodies. He wouldn’t dare get close to sink them in.
It’s easily one of the more horrible things I’ve ever heard. Fuck that guy.
Finna hops us up the long, worn steps. My heart pounds with each one. What will it be this time? I trained so hard for the fights, and Freya’s realm proved how good a job I’d done. But the puzzles, conundrums, and outright impossibilities? I’m still running to catch up with the idea that my blade isn’t the most useful thing I brought here.
The shrine’s riveted, intricately hammered doors are covered in a blue-green patina. There are no handles, no puzzle or mechanism that I can see. I touch them but can’t feel.
Time to separate, I tell Finna.
She softens, less tensile, and pools slowly at my feet before reforming. I feel her recede, flow from my lungs, my throat. My damp skin prickles in the air. For a second my lungs quiver but won’t fill. A breath finally comes. I feel empty, bereft, like I’ve lost something impossibly valuable. I don’t quite fit in the world the way I used to.
I meet Finna’s eyes. She reaches out, her hand on mine. “I feel the same.”
I try a smile. “Maybe not as separated as before?”
She smiles back. “I hope not.”
Resting my palm on the cold, gritty copper, I push. The doors shudder, but not from pressure. Dust puffs from around the frame, and they swing inward, despite me barely putting force to them.
The splash a water is like a tidal wave, obscuring the low boom of metal striking stone.
“Oh no.” Finna is staring out over the swamp.
Every woman Nechtan ever wronged has emerged, and shuffles toward us, hungry. Is it me, drawing them? The door opening for the first time in millennia?
Doesn’t matter. No turning back. I look at Finna, who bites her lip and shrugs.
In we go.
-The Queens’ Graveyard-
Damp chill seeps beneath my leathers inside the shrine. The walls are carved in once-elaborate reliefs. Maybe still elaborate. It’s too dim to tell. An odor of the grave hangs on the air, sweet decay, rich soil and the timeless mineral of bone. Where it comes from is not hard to guess.
A brilliant shaft of light pours in through an opening at the dome’s zenith, clear sun that comes from somewhere beyond the Tiste’s putrefaction. It sparkles with stars of dust, illuminating the shrine’s only inhabitant.
A figure hangs in the center of the chamber. Or, is suspended. Its skin hangs like pudding in a pale leather sack, and it dangles, arms and legs limp and spidery, long-rotted ligaments pulled by gravity and time. I can’t see anything holding it in place, no chains or structure. Its bald, eggy head bows as though its neck is gripped by the jaws of some invisible creature. But there’s no movement. Its creased eyelids are shut, as far as I can tell grown to its skeletal cheeks.
“It’s true,” whispers Finna beside me. “Part of me thought–” She shakes her head.
I draw cold steel and close a step at a time. No breath fills its chest. It doesn’t stir. Finna tries to step past me for a closer look. I grab the soft curve of her shoulder and tug her back. “Hardly anything that looks dead, is.”
She draws a ragged breath. “Unbelievable... Nechtan.”
The thing starts, animated by its name. It flails arachnid limbs and hisses like wind escaping beneath a door. Its eyes are milky white and bulbous. Are they eyes? They roll in crazed circles, looking but not seeing.
On instinct, I grip my sword and swing.
It passes through, the only sign of its passage a ripple as the blade slices and emerges. Nechtan’s shade goes on hissing and lurching.
Finna and I draw back. Crouch against the wall.
The shade is still suspended, but it moves back and forth now, a leaf in a silent storm. But only as far as the light. It can’t seem to pass beyond the shaft. It can’t escape, but I can’t destroy it.
The astratempus presses insistently inside my chest piece.
Screeching grows closer. Time is short in every sense.
“Here,” I grab one of the doors. “Help me push. Let’s try to buy some time.”
We push, pull, strain in a panicked series of movements. First separate, then together on the same door. Nothing moves. The doors are fixed open.
A single glance outside is enough to turn my guts. There is no lake, anymore. It’s hidden beneath writhing sea, mara upon mara, an army of nightmares. And at their head is the figure I saw in my madness, the succubus banshee. She floats over the water, unfettered.
I back into the room, my blades singing from their sheathes. My mind races; The door will stop the flow to a trickle. It’s a natural bottleneck. Maybe if I…
Fuck. Who am I kidding? I could kill them until the astratempus ticks away the last heartbeat of my life and there would still be more of them.
And something tells me that Gilea won’t die as easily as they do. She’s not like Meridiana, and I can’t imagine they’re the same species.
“Should I coat you?” cries Finna, watching the succubus fly over the last stretch of ground.
“No. It will hide me, but I can’t fight her. Stay back.”
Finna nods and dissipates into a puddle on the floor. I run for shadows at the back of the round room, hoping the sunlight and Nechtan’s mad clawing will blind Gilea to me for a moment.
She blows in with the fury of a storm wind. I clutch my ears to damping the mind-piercing sounds she makes.
Gilea flies at Nechtan, who bangs off the shaft of sunlight like a panicked animal.
She swats at him with a dagger tipped, skeletal hand.
Her strike whispers through Nechtan, same as my blade. It doesn’t stop his panic, but Gilea spins like a dervish, screaming, and flows up to the dome that circles the opening.
Gilea shrieks, follow him, slashes over and over. Her claws pass through, the same as my sword, and she bellows of rage shake the dome, reverberating so loud I have to clamp my hands to my ears.
All the while, Nechtan thrashes, swirls in the beam.
The light. A prison, but also, protection? “Finna, the light!”
Gilea swirls, insubstantial. Her form pulls through itself and suddenly she’s reversed. She turns her attention on me. Her fingers elongate, and she stalks toward me, nails the length of swords scraping across the floor.
I don’t fight her. I run. “The light, Finna!” I hope she hears me, hope she understands. She coalesces ahead of me, and I point as I run past her. “Block it out!”
Finna says something as I pass, but I can’t hear it. The chamber is small, creating a tight track that keeps Gilea on me. Her cries drown out Finna’s words.
Duck. It’s instinct, and I fall into a roll as claws rip the air above me, where I was a moment ago. I come out of my tumble and spring ahead, bashing my head on a stone as I go.
My ears ring, and I shake. Can’t stop, move.
Finna’s scream is my warning. I dodge again, barely avoid blades that slice so powerfully they hum in the air as they pass. I feel the wind of their path, and run, Freya’s gift clearing my head.
I come up behind Finna on my next pass. “How?” she yells, twisting, lost.
“Block! Block the light.”
She flows hesitantly to the shaft of light where Nechtan bounces madly. Her movement feels like an eternity.
I can’t keep this up. As Gilea comes after me, I take a made chance and dive at her, between her legs. It’s so sudden, such a quick reversal, that she misses me, and the air is lit with sparks as her claws rake the ground. I come up behind her, cut with all my strength, a blow that should cut through her spine. My blade tears a hole in the smoke of her form; she slows but knits together.
Great. I’ll never kill her like this.
Finna moves into the sun. Her shape loses form, no longer humanoid. She thins and gurgles upward in a spill of purple fluid, like a fountain.
Temple of Cocidius - Book 2 Page 3