She crossed her arms over her chest. Though burnt and bubbled, the flesh was basically whole and we hadn’t yet replaced it. The stapled wound between her breasts remained closed.
“No,” she mouthed.
“No, you can’t, or no, you won’t?”
She stared at me, eyes pleading.
“No, you won’t,” I said. “Why not?”
She huddled her arms tighter.
“A hairy chest isn’t the worst thing.”
That earned me a sharp look. But there was something more, something in the way she held her arms crossed over her chest. For a moment, I thought it was fear of losing her breasts, but that wasn’t it. Right now, most of her looked like a hairy young man. She knew she could replace herself with whatever she wanted at some point. This was temporary.
“Heart,” I said.
Her eyes locked on mine, terrified.
“You don’t want me to see where it should be. Because it’s empty.” I touched her cheek. “I don’t have a heart either. Not a whole one. Not even close. And then, when I do, it’ll be black stone.”
She watched me, eyes softening. A hand, knuckles hairy, reached out to touch my arm.
“What does that say about me?” I asked. “Why do I have an obsidian heart?” Worries I’d kept buried bubbled to the surface. “People don’t have obsidian hearts! What am I?”
Henka pulled me into a hug and kissed my neck, lips corpse cold.
“Fix lungs later,” she whispered. “Must flee.”
Rising, I pulled her to her feet. “We’ll get you fixed up as soon as we’re clear of the mages. I really think I should use Felkrish to take us north again.”
She shook her head, no give in her, and pointed south.
The wizards would likely catch us, but at least we’d be together.
After butchering the two goats for whatever meat I could get quickly—an unnerving experience so soon after having butchered a young man—we put the demon-infested town behind us.
While the wizard I shot out of the air seemed content to fly the town’s perimeter, I suspected this time they’d complete a more thorough search. Would they dare enter the buildings? Would they find the harvested mage, and what would they make of that? I got the impression necromancers were as rare as elementalists. Would they understand what they saw, or assume someone carved him for food? By the end, he and the goat looked awfully similar.
Early in the afternoon we found a farmhouse. A small barn, red paint now peeling with age, resounded with the sounds of goats and chickens. Two horses, swayback mares, watched us from within a shoddily fenced paddock. Only laziness kept them there. Henka gestured at the house, a log cabin with shuttered windows.
I knew what she wanted, what she needed.
Parts.
“I need your help,” she whispered.
Flaying flesh. Peeling muscle.
This was my fault. She saved me, sacrificed herself to keep me safe. Swallowing bile, I nodded.
Decision made, my thoughts raced. I didn’t like it, but this had to happen. Henka needed working lungs. I couldn’t stab whoever lived here in the chest for fear of damaging them.
“Do you need other internal organs?” I asked.
She nodded.
So, I couldn’t stab them in the gut either. How the hell was I supposed to kill them?
Blood. Henka needed blood as well. It played some part in how she fused new pieces to herself. I’d watched as she used the wizard’s blood to work her magic.
Whoever lived here, I’d either have to beat them to death or suffocate them. The thought reminded me of the young woman I killed in the cafe, the way she fought, desperate for life.
When we reached the front door, I knocked. There was, I decided, no point in chatting with someone I planned to kill. It would only make the grizzly work of harvesting them more difficult.
A woman, middle-aged and plump, opened the door. Her eyes widened as she saw me, sword drawn, Henka huddled in her robes, the patchwork quilt of her skull’s flesh visible.
The woman opened her mouth—to speak greeting or call out a warning, I don’t know—and I hit her. I felt the crunch of her nose breaking beneath my fist. Bulling my way into her house, I slammed her into the wall. She hit with a wheeze of air and slid to the floor.
Unsure what I’d face, I spun with my sword drawn and held at the ready. Sitting in a chair at the dining table, a spoon of porridge halfway to his mouth, was a chubby man into his forties. Short hair, jutting out at all angles, added to his look of surprise.
“Stay,” I said. “Stand, and I’ll cut you down.”
He glanced to his wife, sobbing on the floor, hands trying to stanch the flow of blood from her nose, and back to me.
“Stay,” I repeated, putting stern warning in my voice.
I saw it in his eyes. I hit his wife. No sword-wielding teen would get in his way.
He stood.
“Sit,” I said. “Sit down.”
Meaty hands bunched into fists.
“We’re not here to hurt you,” I lied, which might have worked better if I hadn’t just broken his wife’s nose.
Stalking around the table, he collected a chair, hefting it like a club. Only now that he stood did I realize how big he was. I retreated before his rage. How could I fight him without damaging him? Then I remembered two things: We had his wife, and didn’t need him. And I remembered I was a swordsman with years of practice and war.
Letting him get close, I feigned retreat before suddenly stepping forward and lashing out with the sword. The tip scored a deep gash in his wrist causing him to drop the chair. In one smooth motion I stabbed him in the chest. He grunted in surprise. All the strength in the world is nothing with a foot of steel in your lung. Coughing blood, he swung a clumsy punch at me. Twisting the blade, I ducked under his attack, pulled it free, and stuck it in his other lung.
He bared teeth at me in an animal snarl. Again, I twisted the sword, doing more damage, causing terrible agony. Pinioned on my blade, he couldn’t move forward to reach me with those huge hands.
I watched him blink, his slow farmer brain not yet understanding he was dead.
He tried to speak. Frothing blood bubbled from his lips and he cursed me with his eyes. Withdrawing the sword, I was deciding where to stab him next when his knees folded, dropping him to the floor. He lay there, twitching, clinging desperately to a life already lost.
I stood silent witness.
Why had I twisted the sword? Why cause unneeded pain when I could have ended him much quicker? I knew a dozen places to stab a man that were near instantaneously fatal. Why had I toyed with him?
That wasn’t me. I took no pleasure in the suffering of others.
It was him, the old me. The Demon Emperor of PalTaq.
Demon Emperor?
Henka’s touch interrupted my thoughts. She gave me a hug and another cold kiss, though I wasn’t sure why.
Taking a deep breath, preparing myself for what was to come, I said, “I’m ready.”
She shook her head and pointed at the door.
“You’re sure?”
She nodded.
Sitting on the front porch, I watched the sky for wizards. I enjoyed the breeze on my face, the dusty smell of the nearby barn, and tried not to think about what went on in the farmstead behind me.
I knew Henka would never be happy with what she’d get from the woman. Middle-aged, and beginning to sag, the farmer’s wife would be a temporary measure at best.
“She won’t be content until she’s perfect,” I told the frogs and crickets. “She won’t be happy until…until I’m happy.”
Henka wouldn’t be satisfied with her body until she was my perfection, until she’d become everything I wanted in a woman.
It was my fault she’d been damaged, and then the repercussions—what it would take to repair her—would be my fault too.
That wizard’s arm didn’t match, was longer and more muscled than the other. It would hav
e to be replaced.
Patchwork skin, wrinkled and old.
How many young women died, flayed and dismembered, until Henka achieved her goal?
I laughed, a humourless chuckle. I’d been concerned about how much blood she needed to maintain the semblance of life. What a fool.
“She’s a monster,” I told the frogs.
But I was a monster, too.
I was going to help her. I was going to get her whatever she wanted, whatever she needed. I was going to do it because I owed her, because she sacrificed herself to save me without hesitation, and all of this was my fault. But I was also going to do it for purely selfish reasons. I wanted my Henka back. I wanted that flawless perfection.
“Is this who I was?” I asked the crickets.
No, they said, this is who you are.
“Were the wizards right to destroy me?”
Do you care?
By the time Henka finished, the sun had fallen and the creatures of the dark took up their ancient chorus. Stars burned sharp holes in the blanket of night. A warm wind whipped up from the south, bending fields of corn, dry leaves sounding like the whispers of a thousand lost souls.
Though her pale face remained mostly untouched, Henka had shed the hairy limbs. Her torso looked subtly wrong, breasts a little too big, her skin that of a woman in her forties. A vast improvement over the hairy wizard’s flesh, but a long way from the flawless girl I knew.
“How are you?” I asked.
She shrugged with a rueful smile. “Better. But not…” She looked down, shying from my eyes.
“We’ll find you others as we go south,” I promised, and my guts writhed.
Taking my hand in hers, she led me into the cabin, her flesh warm from whatever necromantic magics she worked. The wife lay sprawled on the floor, splayed and open, a terrible sight, blood splashing everything. Ribs cracked and spread wide, Henka had harvested her lungs and several other internal organs. The husband lay where I left him, though he looked sunken and drained.
“Is this alright?” she asked, tentative and timid.
For a moment, I thought she meant the murder and butchery of these people and I wanted to laugh and scream as my mind wrestled with an answer. But then she opened her robes to show me what lay beneath and I realized that wasn’t what she meant at all. She wanted to know if I was satisfied with her new body.
The stapled scar remained. Everything else was different. With Shalayn, by the end I knew every freckle and dimple, every curve and crease. Henka kept changing. I felt off-balance. In fact, I’d felt strangely unbalanced since our second meeting.
“It’s you I love,” I told her. “Not the shell.”
We slept together in the farmer’s bed, curled around each other, though she refused to remove her robes. Well, I slept. The dead don’t rest. I woke sometime late in the night to the distant howl of wolves. Henka lay beside me, watching me sleep, eyes unblinking shards in the dark. She kissed me, lips hot, and I returned to my slumbers.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
After killing the farmer’s horses, we rode them south, exchanging our dead mounts for new ones whenever their appearance decayed to the point they became recognizable as corpses. We stopped at each farming community and village. Henka would ask after the prettiest girls, and we harvested them. We flayed their perfect flesh. We drained them of blood, filling wine and water skins with the precious liquid. Watching Henka work was like witnessing a master butcher. How many had she harvested to get this good?
I claimed their souls, tore their eternal spirits from their bodies and locked them away in my Soul Stone to be later spent, fed to demons.
We left a trail of tears and nightmares behind us as families found the husked remains of their loved ones.
My stomach turned sour, felt like it was trying to consume itself. I envisioned that sky-devouring god from the floating mountains and felt like he was nested in my gut. I swirled around that sinkhole sun, falling forever inward to be annihilated.
Appetite dead, I lost weight, my ribs once again showing.
Nightmares shattered my sleep. Skinned corpses, peeled in great bloody sheets. Odd bits harvested as Henka searched for exactly the right part to build the woman she wanted to be, the woman I wanted her to be. Empty bodies. When I wasn’t haunted by images of butchery, I dreamed of Tien. I dreamed of finding her, of crippling her so she couldn’t cast spells, fingers sliced away, tongue torn free. I dreamed of telling her exactly who I was, rubbing her little snub-nose in the fact she helped bring back the Demon Emperor. I dreamed of torturing her, punishing her for her part in Shalayn’s death. I dreamed of killing her.
Henka became perfect once again, her flawless grace returning with each harvest. Though if I looked close enough, when the light was right, I saw thin lines where the skin tones didn’t quite match. Those lines faded with each day. The cost appalled me, and yet I helped pay it. Guilt ate me from within, forgotten only when we made love and she took me from myself. Henka knew me so well, knew me better than I did. She knew when my thoughts grew dark enough to blind me to the beauty of what I had.
“Life feeds on life,” she said. “Why should death be any different?”
She was right. What were those young women to me? Nothing. Small, pointless lives. They possessed no destiny, certainly not like mine. They would build no empires, found no eternal civilizations.
Still my guts roiled. Snakes nested in my bowels, twisting and coiling and fighting.
I was two men. I was the ancient emperor, inhuman and immortal, a servant to some foul god I could not remember. And I was a nineteen-year-old boy who knew right from wrong, good from evil. The boy despised what I was becoming. The old man rejoiced. Both of us loved Henka. Both of us would do anything for her. Where the Emperor acted without a twinge of conscience, the boy drowned in self-loathing.
I learned something of myself. I wanted to escape into the man I had been. I wanted his cold, his distance. I remembered the dreams, those gemstone eyes fused into his skull. How did the world look through stone?
Henka hoped to make me something better than what I had been—though how she’d know if I succeeded, I had no idea—but the crimes I committed for her were doing more damage than my memories.
I wanted to tell her, to ask her to stop. I couldn’t. I wanted her, the warm sensuous woman her necromancy made her, not the ever-decaying corpse she, in truth, was.
The days grew hotter and longer the further south we travelled and, for the first time, I was almost comfortable. The majority of the population was still pale-skinned, blond-haired and blue-eyed, though many looked closer to red from their time in the sun. Every now and then, however, I caught sight of skin brown beyond a tan. No one was near as dark as I.
Even with the increasing number of brown people, I drew glares of loathing and disgust as we rode our latest undead mounts into the port city of Nachi on the southern coast.
Beginning high on a steep hill that fell only short of being a cliff, the city tumbled toward the ocean. The highest homes were palatial, sprawling wings spread wide. As the streets wound their way chaotically down, the buildings became smaller, simpler. Dirtier. Down by the docks, where the land finally flattened out, most were little more than sheds and shanties, leaning out into the ocean like they might fall in at any time. From up here, among the mansions, I saw evidence that many already had. It looked like the coastline crept ever closer, claiming the next line of shacks. Someday, thousands of years from now, these huge homes would fall into the ever-encroaching ocean.
Was Tien still here, or had she already moved on? Had she boarded a boat bound south, or travelled by land? There were spirit demons skilled at hunting and finding things, I suddenly recalled. Unfortunately, I didn’t know how to summon or bind them. That knowledge lay somewhere further down my path.
I prayed to the god I couldn’t remember that the little wizard was still here.
Dismounting, Henka and I led our recently deceased mounts down the stee
p winding paths and slick cobbled streets. Even up here, Nachi stank like fish, saltwater, and sweating men. Screaming gulls turned the air above the city into a churning cloud of stained white and grey. They shat on everything. They fought each other, a raucous, never-ending battle over the scraps of civilization.
The wizards, I decided, chose the wrong shade of white.
Far below us, in the harbour, a profusion of log jetties stabbed into the ocean like splayed skeletal fingers. Boats of all sizes rocked with the waves and tide. Under the screeching gulls, I sometimes caught the groan of ancient timbers swollen with rot, the low grumble of wood on wood.
“I want to get closer,” I told Henka. “I want to see the harbour, walk the docks. I want to see the ocean up close.”
She stood, looking out over the sprawl and confusion of Nachi. Then she gave me that shy smile and took my hand, her flesh warm but cooler than yesterday. We spent the last of the blood the previous night, and the wine skins hung collapsed and empty from our saddles.
If the looks I received earlier were dark, now that Henka and I held hands, now that it was clear we were together, they were black with revulsion.
Alert, constantly scanning the crowds for Tien, I noticed a trend as we walked: The deeper into Nachi, the lower down the hill, the darker the people were. I, with my sable skin, remained the darkest by far, but the looks of loathing faded. They transformed into something else, something very different. As we reached the harbour the men and women working the docks, brown skinned, long of limb and lithely muscled, watched us pass. Many froze, stopped whatever they were doing, and stared. Some few, the darkest workers, dipped shallow bows, something close to worship or adoration painting their faces.
When I realized I hadn’t seen a pale face or blond hair in several minutes, I stopped. Henka stood with me, still holding my hand. She seemed utterly unconcerned by the attention.
“Why no northerners?” I asked.
She studied the boats moored out on the docks, eyes sad. “The ocean is dangerous. After the Great War, it never returned to its previous state. The elementalists woke its fury, turned it against the Emperor’s fleets, but there was no way they could control it. The depths are still plagued by monsters and demons, remnants from the war. Ships disappear all the time.”
Black Stone Heart (The Obsidian Path Book 1) Page 28