Fox's Bride

by Marling, A. E.

  A giant's face pressed against the window, an eye the size of a cauldron with an iris of sifting white and black sands. A triangle brand adorned the statuesque forehead, and whips of fear snapped through Inannis. He knew the tales. Three sides, three heads, no mercy. The Lord of the Feast. Inannis dared not even move to shut the trapdoor. The colossus spoke.

  “How surprised I was to scent the familiar fears of a dead woman. 'Emesea,' was it?” Chimney-sized nostrils flared as they sucked in air. “She died the day before her execution to spite me, or so I thought. Now I think she must’ve been stolen, like the Golden Scoundrel before her, by a not-priest afraid of dying to Blood Judgment. I must say, the fox stampede was well done.”

  Inannis glanced down into the cellar. The booming voice must have woken Emesea, but he heard nothing from her. Can she wake from her dream? Worries for her pooled in his chest like so much blood and mucus.

  “Yes.” The corners of massive lips spiraled in an impossible smile. “What a shame for you to have gone through all that bother, only to lose her now. But I consider myself a reasonable nightmare. Do as I say, and you'll both live.”

  “You….” Words stuck in Inannis' dry throat. He spoke half to convince himself. “Feasters must be invited inside. You can't come in. Not unless I open the door.”

  “That is our law, but I do not rule by example.”

  With a cracking and a crumbling, one wall fell inward. Orange light spread over rows of warehouse vats. Flames licked red from between mismatched and jagged fangs of a reptilian head. The night dragon loomed over Inannis, its scales black, its eyes trailing a green glow. The maw unfolded its mesh of teeth and spoke with the same booming voice.

  “You'll steal the keys to the tomb of the Plumed God. Tonight. Now.”

  Inannis would have widened his eyes at this, but he was already gaping.

  “And you'll go first into the pyramid. Are you much familiar with tomb traps? If not, tonight they will become familiar with you.”

  The priests had a habit of destroying the records of tomb architecture, once built. Inannis had still bought drinks for artisans who designed traps, and the thief had been amazed how many secrets people would share as boasts to a man dressed as a priest. He had dreamed of robbing a god's tomb, but the risk had given him pause. Those dangers shrank in his mind in comparison to the toothy snout hanging above him, baking his forehead with its flaming hunger. If he could have been honest with himself at that moment, it would have likely taken only a fire-breathing camel to give him sufficient excuse.

  Inannis' cracked lips hurt as he licked them. “Consider it done.”

  Chandur watched himself carry Hiresha through unfamiliar passageways. Stone blocks arched overhead. He would have felt lost in the gloom and was relieved someone else knew the way.

  His arms rested her on an ancient couch. Dust misted around her, and the fabric frayed under his touch. When he pressed close to her, he could feel her heart drumming, and her eyes were as open and wide as he had ever seen them.

  He admitted he had not expected this to happen. True, Hiresha had a shapeliness about her and an intensity he admired, but his need for her surprised him. An emptiness scorched his insides and forced him to pull her closer. His hands slid over the spirals of jewels on her belly, to the taut skin of her flexing back, and lower.

  His fingers stroked aside her hair, and he plucked a trail of kisses from her ear to her jeweled sleeve. Her body was at once soft and firm, warm and cool from ridges of jewels. Her breaths puffed hot against his neck. He thought someone had once told him not to touch unmarried women where he now touched the enchantress, but this felt so right that he snuffed all doubts.

  She stiffened in his grasp, and her eyes turned distant. He felt he should lean back, ask her what troubled her. Instead his hand parted the slit of her dress, and his palm ran up the fine hairs of her leg.

  “Wait.” She pressed her hands against his chest.

  Excitement budded over Hiresha's skin at his coaxing touch, and she had begun to understand why Maid Janny squandered her time with strangers.

  Why would I agree with Maid Janny? A sense of wrongness whispered within Hiresha. Though she felt awake, she sensed she had forgotten to do something. She pushed Chandur back and gave herself room to think.

  As she often did in moments of uncertainty, she reviewed her life plan. Plans are critical, she thought. A life unplanned is a life of chaos.

  First, cure myself of my somnolence. She could not remember researching a solution to her condition, but she felt lucid enough now. She could focus on Chandur's eyes and see the individual lines in his irises like strands of brown silk. Behind him against the stone floor, twelve jars stacked against the wall, some shadowed by his shoulders. She saw something that could have been the white of the fennec's tail whisk between them into the darkness.

  Second, marry, preferably Chandur. Third, transfer my enchantment work to Morimound and raise a family.

  Now she believed she understood. The stirring unease in her stomach was because she started to stray from her plan. “Chandur,” she said, “we must marry.”

  He blinked three times, and the following seconds ground and scraped over Hiresha. She worried she had offended him by proposing, rather than waiting for him to ask her. Worse yet, he might refuse, or laugh at her, or walk away without saying anything as he had at the First Trader's Inn.

  He grinned, and the sight stung Hiresha with relief.

  Pulling her to her feet, he kissed her hand. “Hiresha, I know just where to find your engagement and marriage necklaces.”

  Over the years, she had imagined many men laying the twined necklace of marriage over her shoulders. Long ago, she had even thought Chandur's father might be the one, but his son had surpassed him in every way.

  Fingers laced with his, she bounded with him down the stone passageways, past tables gleaming with curved knives and urns stuffed with limbs ending in hands, feet, or claws. Unease scratched at her composure, but she chided herself for being nervous, as all brides were. She joined Chandur in laughter, and their joy echoed through the tomb.

  Chandur fell to a hush as he rested a hand against a stone door. A painting of a dead man wrapped in linen had browned and smeared. Guards followed the spellsword with heads down, expressions somber. None of them seemed to notice the whiff of foulness that made Hiresha's eyes tear.

  “This is a sacred place,” Chandur said. With the help of three guards, he shoved the door inward.

  A stench of rotting meat blasted over Hiresha, and she staggered back. Chandur pulled her into a room with two square sarcophagi, and she thought she would choke. The air clogged her throat, and she worried it would discolor her dress. Only the thought of Chandur and the marriage they would share gave her the strength to overcome the reek.

  Skeletons and half-decayed figures were strewn over the floor below the stone coffins. Knucklebones stuck into the underside of Hiresha's slipper and pained her. Eye-sockets and shriveled eyelids stared up at her with pitiful blankness. Ribs piled in stacks of rounded sticks, and backbones were clutters of lumpy disks, tinted blue in her light.

  Part of her felt she should have been alarmed, but the men seemed reverent and eager to enter the crypt. She stepped over the corpse of what looked like it once had been a woman, skin yellowed, sagging, and split open in places. The whites of bones showed through the ends of her fingers. Her decaying gown webbed her. In her stiff hair were flakes of brown that once might have been flowers.

  “They all were betrothed to the fox.” Chandur knelt and cupped a chin of a dead woman. Her skin sloughed off at his touch. “The Royal Embalmer convinced only these few to escape with him. So many were blinded, but some recognized true devotion. Over the years, the embalmer robbed the fox god of thirty-four brides.”

  “Then he brought them here?” Hiresha's chest clenched as she tried to speak. “And he—”

  “He had to kill them.” Chandur unclasped two scarab necklaces from the dead woman
's neck. He stood and stroked the edge of the smaller sarcophagus. Scarab shells littered the stone lid, each with a message etched into its shiny back. “He killed them to prove to Ellakht how much purer his love for her had been. And still is.”

  A gold chain was coiled around Hiresha's neck. She shied away from his hands, not knowing quite why. She could not remember sending out wedding invitations. Her guests, the guards, seemed strangers to her. This tomb is not the venue for which I had hoped.

  “Hiresha, I will not harm you. You are different from the other brides. More cunning. More magnificent.” He wrapped his arms around Hiresha as he bound her with the necklace. “No, I will dedicate everything to you, love you as I would have loved Ellakht, so she may know what a mistake she made.”

  “As you would have loved her? You said, 'I.'“

  The Soultrapper is controlling him. The thought pounced upon Hiresha. Using him as a vessel as he did each Royal Embalmer through the ages. I have to escape. Have to find my jewel sash and—

  She twitched, felt a tingling sensation in her mind, and wondered what she had been thinking. All she knew was that Chandur was tying a scarab necklace about his own throat. A guard rested a hand on each of their shoulders. He had a square face and a tuft of hair sticking out at odds with the rest of his black locks, but his voice resonated in the crypt.

  “Those come here to marry this night, take off your necklaces.”

  Hiresha touched the clasp behind her neck but did not try to undo it. Following the Morimound custom, she untied Chandur's necklace for him, and then he undid hers. A bone cracked under her foot, and she winced, hoping her guests had not noticed. She wanted everything to be just so on this day. Or this night? The guards stared on, rapt.

  “Fosapam Chandur, your band is trust. Hiresha, your band is affection. Turn the two into a band of marriage.”

  The guard had misspoken part of the ceremony. He should have said my band is 'commitment.' Hiresha sighed under her breath. Not everything was turning out quite as she had hoped. She had expected the Flawless of Morimound to preside over the ceremony, not some man in dusty robes with a bow strapped to his back. The iris gardens of her estate would have awed all those who flocked to see the union of the most celebrated of enchantresses. This tomb cramped the guests, and the bones distracted her since she had to look down to avoid stepping on them. And there is a definite odor. All the discrepancies pained Hiresha as much as would any mistakes in the carving of a paragon jewel.

  Because what is marriage, she thought, if not the most precious of gems?

  She consoled herself that at least Chandur had chosen to wear her color. How thoughtful. Hiresha might have wished him also to wear the sword she had enchanted for him as its jasper presented so well with the purple coat. Still, he gazed down at her with a flattering intensity as they linked arms and wound the two necklaces together.

  The sight of the gold scarabs also pricked her. Diamonds were more traditional in Morimound, but she supposed they were marrying in another city, after all.

  Why? Why would we marry here?

  She shook her head, wishing she could focus on the joy of the moment, rather than on trivialities. Her life had been planned around this marriage.

  Chandur lifted the twined necklace up over her shoulders. He kissed her brow between her eyes once, then bound the two ends of the gold chain.

  She trembled against him. Her stomach heaved and spun with what she could only assume was bliss.

  He kissed her forehead a second time. With a “snick,” the last cord closed around her throat. Fate Weaver, I thank you. Opal Mind, I honor you. I am married, at last. She felt sick with happiness and wretched with pride.

  “Hiresha of Morimound, you are now Hiresha Chandur.” The guard dabbed his eyes with his over robe. “Fosapam Chandur, you are now a husband. May you treat your wife as the diamond that she is.”

  The guards cheered his name. They clomped over the bones to clasp his arms. One man's words whistled between his missing front teeth. “Ol' Fos the Follower, married? Never would've guessed. You must've prodded him like a grumpy camel.”

  “In point of fact, I was the one to propose to him.” It seemed to Hiresha she had done it not so long ago. She supposed at her age, a short engagement had to be respected.

  “I knew it.” The guard chortled.

  “A drink! Drinks to a married guardsman.” A guard lifted an ancient jug and pried out the clay stopper. Another man blew dust from green glazed cups faded to yellow. They poured a black liquid and passed around the cups.

  “Ack! It's vinegar.” A guard puckered his lips.

  “What? Used to suckling from a camel's teat? You a priest or a guard? Drink it.”

  “A drink to the bride! May she bear many sons.”

  “Two sons,” Hiresha said, “and two daughters.” She had their names picked out after gemstones.

  A guard with sleek black hair and striking blue eyes touched Hiresha's sleeve. “I'm envious,” he said. “He's a great man.”

  The comment struck Hiresha as a little out of place, but she let it pass as she had the other peculiarities. Chandur beamed down at her, and when they kissed, she tasted only a little foulness from the tomb.

  Her eyes caught on the jewels on her sleeve, and then she did frown. She had always planned to wear violet sapphires on her wedding day, but she caught flickers of orange and green within the purple jewels, an internal fire she would not have expected from a gem of the sapphire family. I'm wearing my garnet dress. She could think of no reason why she would have neglected to make herself a new wedding dress, and the feelings of being out of place began to corkscrew through her skin.

  Then she realized it. I must have wished to differentiate myself from the rude, sapphire Feaster. That is why I wore garnets at my wedding.

  Satisfied, she kissed Chandur and rubbed the jewels of her fingers against his chin.

  Chandur would have been baffled trying to express the joy cascading over him. He felt he was drowning in it. Settling farther back in the comfort of his mind, he saw himself press his lips against Hiresha's. He wondered how he could have ever doubted they would wed. The ceremony had felt the most natural thing he had ever done. The gods meant me to stand here beside her.

  The spellsword released his embrace to leap over a few bones to the far side of a sarcophagus.

  “Dejal, Djom,” he said, “help me with this.”

  He and the guards set their hands around the stone lid. Chandur did not know what he intended, and he was excited to find out. Muscles in his back and legs strained as he lifted.

  The lid tilted. Scarab shells with messages written on them tumbled off and crunched underfoot. The guards grunted, setting the slab against the wall. Chandur took Hiresha's hand and led her to the foot of the sarcophagus.

  “Look on her. Is she not beautiful?” He traced two fingers up Hiresha's side, and she shivered under his touch. His hand cupped one of her earrings, filling his palm with blue light. “Isn't she the most amazing woman you've ever seen?”

  Chandur was confused whom he was speaking to.

  His arm wrapped around the enchantress' hip, pulling her against him. “Our happiness will light the night, and with the blessing of the Founder, our marriage will be long and full of bounty.”

  He supposed he had to be gloating to whomever was inside the sarcophagus. Speaking as if the dead person could hear. His eyes dragged on their way to look within as if he feared what he would see. When he saw the mummy he tried not to gasp.

  She's still so beautiful, the thought thrummed within him, even after all these years.

  The lady's burial mask had been set aside to reveal the splendor of her true face. Her skin had darkened over the centuries to the exquisite blackness of a scarab. The tightness of her leather face hid none of the graceful lines of her skull, the ledges of her cheek bones, the arches above eyes with lids sewn together with such craft that no trace of thread could be seen. He still prided himself in the care of his
stitching, though at the time he had wept. He liked to think the salt in his tears had helped this treasure of womanhood endure.

  Memories that Chandur did not recognize whirled within him. He accepted the new with the old. I have no choice, he thought. Only the gods can choose.

  A tearing passion roared within Chandur. He wished for nothing more than to lean into the coffin and kiss the mummy, but he knew her lips would crack and crumble. He overlooked the detail that one of her breasts had flattened lower than the other against the skin stretched over her ribs. Of course, he had sculpted out the pulp of her breast and replaced it with the petals of dried flowers. That her sweet mounds had since shrunk to flaps of leather had only made them more perfect in his eyes. It took all Chandur's sweating, tooth-grinding control not to reach down and fondle them. They would only turn to powder between his fingers.

  My dearest Ellakht, he thought without thinking, I will forever hate you.

  He had hoped to love the enchantress. If only Ellakht could feel a grain of the jealousy that poisoned me. The realization cut into him that he never could love another. Neither could he ever leave Oasis City, his home of centuries. The past rules the present.

  Forcing his gaze away, he cringed at the sight of the enchantress. He at once found her warmth cloying. She moved too much. Her eyes offended him with their life and hope. Have to pluck them out.

  The thought shocked him, but after viewing the mummy, Hiresha revolted him. She's disgracing this tomb. She chose the Golden Scoundrel over me. Anger seared his skin and made him smell burning flesh. He grasped at his side, for his skin knife, but found it gone. His embrace shifted, his hands encircling her neck.

  A recollection flitted through his mind of once wanting to protect Hiresha. Just married her, didn't I? At the same time, he had gained a new understanding. People housed rot and filth under their skin. An infestation of organs. Hiresha could only be clean once he scraped the inside of her ribs and tweezed out the mess of her brain.

  His fingers tightened. Her throat bent inward.