The City Stained Red

by Sam Sykes

  “Kapira Kapira Kapira…”

  At that sound, everything stopped. Yerk’s hand froze above his head. The crossbowmen lowered their weapons and looked down to the streets. The hoods’ grip tightened so hard on their blades as to send the steel quivering like stalks of grass.

  “Kapira Kapira Kapira…”

  “Son of a bitch, it’s one of them,” one of the hoods whispered.

  The circle that had been formed around Lenk and Kataria broke suddenly, parting to give a vast berth to a figure emerging from the devastation of the Souk.

  It was a man. Nothing more to him than a dirty black robe and eyes that looked like they had not blinked in days. His lips moved in rapid hushes, speaking gibberish.

  “Ahmalaa, Kapira, protect me, I have served you, ahmalaa…”

  Nothing but a man speaking nothing but gibberish.

  And this, apparently, was the most terrifying thing in the world to the hoods.

  “Run. RUN.”

  “Gods damn it, they always bring these things out.”

  “Don’t look at it. Don’t look. It sees you if you look at it—”

  Their words dissolved into panicked screams, chasing them on soot-stained skies as they turned and fled, vanishing from rooftops and slithering into shadows. The hooded man was the last to go, shooting Lenk a pitying glance before vanishing behind a stall.

  In their wake, Lenk felt the silence. There were no more cries of the dying and the fearful. The blades that had tolled like steel bells had fallen quiet. The flames smoldered with contented sighs.

  Everything—all the violence, all the chaos—had stopped for this one man.

  “Ahmalaa, spare me, Kapira, Kapira, Kapira…”

  “Are you… well?” Lenk asked. He took a cautious step forward, sword lowering, but only a fraction.

  “Look around you,” Kataria spat, glancing around. “No one here is well.” Her ears pricked up, hearing something his own couldn’t detect. “But I don’t hear fighting. Let’s find the others before anyone else shows up.”

  Lenk looked to the man, as though he might plead for help. But nothing was forthcoming from his lips beyond the same lilting madness.

  “Come on,” Kataria snarled.

  Harsh as she might have been, she was talking more sense than anyone present.

  “Kapira, Kapira, Kapira…”

  Not that that was all that big an achievement.

  Lenk flashed the man a wasted apologetic look. The man’s face twitched, a sort of mad serenity settling upon his face before he hunched over and vomited upon the stones. Lenk cringed, turning away to follow Kataria as she began to walk back toward the center of the Souk where they had lost their companions.

  You tried, he told himself. You would have helped him, if there was anything you could have done. If he was even aware of you—

  “Help…” the man choked out.

  Oh, come on.

  “Help me.” The man looked up as Lenk looked behind. Life left him out his mouth as thick gray chunks of an unknown substance dribbled out of his lips. “I wasn’t prepared. I thought… I thought he would be pleased.” He clutched at his belly, rocking back and forth. “But I wasn’t. It’s so…”

  His arms hung at his sides. His robe fell open.

  “Heavy.”

  Stretched to a smooth, hairless sphere, the man’s belly bulged out of his robes, hanging heavy over his waist and pulling him low. The great sphere of flesh quivered as Lenk stared.

  As though the sight of a pregnant man just wasn’t weird enough.

  “It hurts…” the man moaned, taking a ponderous step toward Lenk.

  “Get back,” Kataria snarled, suddenly at Lenk’s side, arrow drawn.

  “It hurts,” the man said with another step.

  Lenk held his sword up as he moved back a step with Kataria. Neither of them was quite sure what exactly they would need weapons for. But this was hardly the type of situation where one let down their guard.

  “Make it stop,” the man groaned. “Make it st—”

  The man’s voice died in his throat. No more words slipped from his mouth.

  What began to slither out between his vomit-stained lips was something else entirely.

  At a glance, they looked like serpents: four thin, gray tendrils that reached out of the man’s mouth to curl over his lower lip. But they were too bony, too rigid, ending in sharp black spikes, drumming gently on the man’s chin.

  No, Lenk noted. Nails. His eyes went wide. Sweet Khetashe, those are fingers.

  And as though they had been waiting for someone to notice, another four curled up and over the man’s upper lip. Four of them groped searchingly across a face contorted in agony as a panicked scream tried to escape through the man’s mouth, to no avail.

  And that was when they began to pull.

  Lips stretched to their limit and beyond. Skin tore like paper. There was a short, sickening snap as a jawbone became forcibly unhinged. The fingers pried the man’s mouth open, farther and farther. The bulbous gut shrank to a withered pouch of skin. His head snapped backward, his mouth gaped to the size of a door.

  Lenk and Kataria could but stare in horror as the man’s throat grew bulbous as something slithered out of his mouth.

  And stared back.

  A head the shape, color, and texture of a crumbling column of a long-dead building peered out of the mouth. A face stared at the two: the withered, pinched, ancient face of a grandfather who had lived too long to think life was any blessing. Its eyes were black scars, as though someone had taken a coal pencil to its face and simply scribbled them out.

  And yet, in some old, animal part of themselves, Lenk and Kataria knew it was watching them.

  “Run,” Kataria whispered, voice too terrified to make itself louder. “Run.”

  And they did. To where, it was not certain. Nor did it matter. They couldn’t stay here. They couldn’t let it look at them.

  They dived behind the sturdiest-looking stall they could find, peered out as much as they dared. And yet, even that seemed not nearly enough to protect them from the thing’s gaze.

  And whatever it was, it wasn’t done yet.

  The man might have been dead, or perhaps still alive. His eyes were locked in some wide, unthinking stare that knew only horror as the thing continued to crawl out of him.

  An emaciated torso followed, old man arms on old man’s body, gray skin sagging over visible ribs, glistening with bodily secretions. The thing drew itself free, shedding the man as a snake sheds its skin. And like a snake, it sat on a long, serpentine coil that began where the last vestiges of macabre humanity ended. It rose on its tail. It surveyed this world of color, its many reds and blacks, through a face made colorless with age.

  And it spoke. In a voice old and horrible, it spoke.

  “The sleeper awakes.”

  And in that voice, so ancient and so terrible, did Lenk finally realize what he was looking at.

  A demon.

  Old enough to have seen the world born, plucked from the same myths where mankind learned to fear the dark. Lenk knew demons when he saw them, as he had known them when he fought them. And he knew this one was real, alive, strong.

  And searching.

  Its scrawled-out gaze swept from side to side with a ponderousness that suggested the weight of its tall, flat forehead might cause it to teeter over at any moment. Its wizened face was unreadable; no sign in its scribble-black eyes that it could see anything at all.

  And yet neither Lenk nor Kataria dared to move.

  “I know you are there.” Its voice was something ground and gravelly, echoing in the cavern of its own mouth. “The scent of your sin is pungent.”

  It trembled from its poise, falling to a street stained by blood and ash. Its arms trembled out, fingers sinking into the cracks between the cobblestones, and hauled its serpentine bulk across the cobblestones. From withered lips a trident-pointed tongue, the same color as a week-old bruise, flickered out.

>   “I taste the men you have killed,” it groaned. “I taste their last pleas to Gods long gone deaf.” Its head slipped from side to side, contemplative. “This place chokes on despair you have wrought. Come out.”

  With the sound of old bones creaking, the creature turned toward Lenk’s hiding spot and leveled its scribble-black eyes upon him. Its tongue flicked out.

  “Let me taste your sin.”

  Lenk all but hurled himself to the stones to get away from those eyes. He might have tried digging through the rock with his bare hands if he had looked into the thing’s un-stare for one more moment.

  As it was, he pressed himself against the stall with his heart thundering in his ears.

  He nearly leapt out of his flesh when Kataria laid a hand on his shoulder and fixed him with a panicked stare.

  She mouthed the word, voice too frightened to show itself.

  Demon.

  No question. No uncertainty. She had fought the same battles.

  He nodded his head.

  She tugged at her bow once, mouthed another word.

  Fight?

  Her pupils were rimmed with fear at what his answer might be. He imagined she saw the same in his own stare at that moment.

  One never fought a demon. One merely survived them, if one was fortunate enough. They could be harmed, certainly, but not by any mortal weapon. They were once mortal, but that had been lost to them long ago. The only thing that tormented a demon, the only thing that could kill one, was a memory of their former lives.

  Kataria knew this as well as he did.

  And yet there was something else within the fear in her eyes. And when he saw it, he was certain he thought the same thing she did. They were not totally helpless.

  He had fought demons before, yes. And he had done more than survive them. There were ways to slay one… if one was willing to pay.

  He shut his eyes. He forced that thought out and forced his blood warm again. He shook his head sternly.

  Kataria did not look at him. Perhaps she would have been ashamed for him to see the relief on her face as she mouthed two more words.

  What now?

  He bit his tongue. He pointed to the ground.

  Stay here.

  He held a finger to his lips.

  Stay quiet.

  He pointed over her head toward the distant gate. He mimicked walking with two fingers.

  Then run like hell.

  She nodded before she looked at him and whispered, voice nearly inaudible over the sound of the demon’s slithering bulk as it dragged itself farther away from their hiding place.

  “The others?”

  He offered what he could: a hapless shrug.

  He could tell by the anger in her scowl that she hated that answer. Just as he could tell by the defeat in her eyes that she couldn’t think of anything better.

  And so she looked at the ground. And she said nothing.

  He was content to do the same.

  “Lenk!”

  At least until he heard someone cry out in the distance.

  “Lenk! Kataria? Where are you?”

  Even if he hadn’t recognized her voice, he would have known it was Asper calling for them. No one else had either conscience or stupidity enough to go back into a battlefield to look for her friends.

  Just as no one else had quite the bad luck needed to go screaming with a demon about.

  “I hear your cry, child,” the thing beyond the stall rasped. “Let me soothe your fear.”

  A scrabble of nails on stone. A slither of skin on sand. When Lenk dared to peek out to see what was going on, he only caught the last traces of a gray tail disappearing around a nearby corner. The demon had gone. They were alone.

  With nothing but ashes and silence standing between them and the way out.

  “They’ve probably already gone, you know,” Denaos muttered, glancing warily about the abandoned Souk.

  “And when I know that for sure, we’ll go after them,” Asper replied before cupping her hands over her mouth. “Lenk! Kataria! Dreadaeleon!”

  “This isn’t done,” Denaos said. “Footwars are no-man’s-land. If you’re not fighting, you run away. You see nothing, you survive. That’s the rule the Jackals live by.”

  “Forgive me for not trusting thieves to play by the rules,” she replied coarsely. “Lenk!”

  “If they find us here—”

  “You talked us out of the last problem we encountered,” Asper snapped. “If you can’t talk us out of the next, then everything you’ve ever done for these murderers to make them respect you will be for nothing.”

  “Well, what’s made you so snippy?” he asked, indignant.

  “I was nearly killed by your friends, for one.”

  “They’re not my—”

  “And for two, you’re trying to keep me from stopping your friends kill the rest of my friends,” Asper said. “We are not leaving until we find them. Or their bodies.” She tapped the Phoenix pendant at her throat. “I took an oath.”

  “An oath to engage in wanton stupidity in the name of mercy?”

  “To engage in any stupidity in the name of mercy,” Asper whirled on him, snarling. “And even if I hadn’t, I’d do it anyway because it’s the right thing to do. I’m a font of compassion, asshole.”

  In truth, Denaos had a point. Cowards often could be counted on to deliver frustratingly reasonable advice. Even though the battlefield looked clear, nothing about its charred stalls and many corpses suggested it was safe. Beyond that, the fight had ended so abruptly, the Jackals fleeing the scene hotly while the Khovura slunk back into the shadows. Something had to have happened to cause that.

  Something that they shouldn’t go looking for.

  And still, she pressed on. She was a priestess of the Healer. Oathbound to do what she could to help the sick, the wounded, and the dying.

  Though, as she passed the twelfth body, lying unmoving in an ash-tinged pool of blood, she knew everyone here was beyond anything she or Talanas could do.

  Almost everyone, she corrected herself. Focus. Ignore the dead. You can’t help them now. Look for the others. She looked around to the many bodies, the many ashes. If they’re dead, too, then you can worry about what you could have done.

  They walked in silence through the remains of a dignified anarchy. The stalls nobly held fast just long enough for them to pass before collapsing in whispers of soot. The ashes formed a soft carpet for them to walk upon. Even the victims, in their final moments, appeared to have climbed somewhere quiet and out of the way.

  From the stalls, they emerged into the Souk’s center, where they had first been separated. The fountain still babbled gently, bubbling with the red leaking from a body draped over its side. A morbid tranquility settled over the field. The bodies of Jackals and Khovura had been taken by their fellows, leaving only bloody smears where they had lain, and the civilians that hadn’t been fast enough.

  “When I was young, they called Cier’Djaal the City of Centers.” Asper’s voice was choked. “It was where every great thinker, scholar, and priest would congregate. It was always a dream of the Talanites to move their prime temple here, to be at the heart of humanity.”

  She turned around and beheld Denaos, standing amid the smoke and the bodies, a trail of sodden ash sprawled out behind him. He blinked absently.

  “What?”

  “This doesn’t bother you at all? Seeing what your city’s become?”

  “I wasn’t born in Cier’Djaal. It’s not my city.”

  “But you lived here.”

  “Under it, maybe. Around it, at its fringes and in its shadows like any thug, but even the others never saw it as home.” He turned and surveyed the destruction. “Just a place with a lot of people with a lot of money.”

  The easy way he shrugged his shoulders, the way he stifled a yawn, the way he looked it all over like it was a painting done by a bad artist; she couldn’t say what it was about him that made her turn away. But she had to. She coul
dn’t bear to see him like this. So calm. So cold.

  Like this fountain.

  She hadn’t time to notice it before. It was ringed with stone children, hand in hand, dancing around a pillar formed of sculptures of women and men intertwined in joy. Their faces wore ecstasy like masks, hollow and false. Their hands were outstretched to catch the water as it babbled down from the top and became red in the basin.

  It didn’t belong in this city. It belonged in the City of Centers, that mythical, imaginary place where scholars that didn’t exist would gather around it to talk about things that weren’t real. This was stone: uncaring, frigid, perfect.

  And moving.

  Wait…

  Something at the top of the fountain: some imperfect cut, some impure stone. She squinted. What was that supposed to be? An old man? A serpent? She inched closer to get a better look.

  Her mouth opened. A withered hand ending in black nails lashed out and smothered her scream. She felt her feet leave the ground as she was hauled to stare into two coal-black scars where eyes should be. An old man’s face, pinched into a frown, stared into her as the thing uncoiled itself from around the statue and slithered to the ground.

  “Look at it, child,” it rasped with a voice from somewhere dark and old. “What terrible tribute I awake to.”

  Revulsion, terror, sheer animal panic: There was too much inside her to render thought possible, let alone to struggle. She was carried, a trembling, weightless husk, in the thing’s grasp as it slithered through the destruction.

  “In my darkest slumber, I still dreamed of light,” it spoke. “And I awake to a world still sleeping.” It swept its head about, as though those scars-for-eyes could see more than darkness, more than light. “Nothing but the crude and primitive thought that has guided you since you crawled out of the muck.”

  And suddenly, those scars were turned on her. And suddenly, she couldn’t feel herself breathe.

  “He will fix everything. You will see, child. Khoth-Kapira will remedy the errors of your creation.”

  She felt its claws draw tight around her jaw. She felt its nails dig into her skin and her blood run cold beneath its grasp.