by Sam Sykes
It didn’t matter. None of it mattered.
They couldn’t run fast enough. She couldn’t stop it from happening, no matter how hard she fought or begged or prayed. The light from her arm was blinding. She couldn’t even see their faces when it found a new victim. She couldn’t even hear their screams when it fed.
Bones snapped. Skin split. Something deep inside her ate messily and hungrily. Smoke filled her nostrils. Dust filled her hand.
And each time, she felt stronger.
Yes!
Again.
YES!
And again.
“Stop!”
No matter how much she begged.
“STOP IT!”
No matter how fiercely she pounded on her own arm.
It didn’t end. Not until the screams had faded. Not until the dust blew away in the wind.
When it was over—if it was over—she stood, breathing heavily, at the center of a ring of dust.
Her body was aflame with pain. Not the sick, rotting pain she had carried since her fight with Gariath. Her skin bristled against the sting of cold wind. Her bones hummed inside her. Her muscles twitched and danced and spasmed of their own accord beneath her flesh.
The pain of the wailing newborn. The pain of the first heartbreak. The pain of living.
Amoch-Tethr had saved her. Just as he’d said he would. Just as only he could.
“Gods …” She wept, her tears painful as they slid down her cheeks. She fell to her knees. She clutched her glowing arm. “Gods forgive me.”
“No.”
It was his voice. Amoch-Tethr’s voice. No longer so distant. No longer in her head.
“Gods didn’t save you.” He spoke from somewhere horrifically close. “Gods could never save you.”
“Tell me …” she found the breath to gasp, “tell me what you are.”
The light in her flesh went dark. The red glow faded. Nothing remained but skin.
And his voice.
“They don’t have a word for what I am. They couldn’t think of one when they sealed me away. First in wood, then in stone, finally in flesh.”
Her arm trembled. In her palm, something alive and painful wriggled.
“Things of the earth, I could eat,” he said. “Wood rots. Stone crumbles. You’d think mortals would be easier, but they are … difficult. So much inside you, yet so little of it nourishing. From vessel to vessel, I was passed, fed nothing but hymns and prayers and cries in the night. Until you.”
Pain lanced through her arm. Beneath her skin, something writhed, something grew. She screamed out, doubled over in agony.
“But listen to me go on,” he laughed, airy and gay. “It’d be ironic if we went through all that just for me to bore us both to death with this prattle. Or would it be poetic? Ah, no matter. To the point, then …”
The flesh of her palm twitched. A scream tore itself from her throat. The skin of her hand tore itself apart in a jagged wound. And the frayed edges of her flesh curled upward into a grotesque smile, baring crooked white teeth.
“I’m afraid,” the mouth rasped, pouring black smoke, “our time together is at an end.”
It wasn’t agony she felt. There wasn’t a poet, a priest, or a madman who had a word for what she felt.
For the bright red light that burst inside her. For the scream from no mortal source that came out of her. For the horror that followed as she closed her eyes and prayed to gods who weren’t there.
Her skin shredded, snapped, and popped. Smoke poured out of her every orifice, choking her and rising in great columns. There was the slurping sound of something heavy and dense hauling itself out of the muck of creation. They joined her symphony of pain, her screams and her prayers and her desperate, terrified sobs.
But it wouldn’t end. No matter how raw her throat got, how bright the pain grew, how much she prayed for it, it wouldn’t end. The pain wouldn’t relent. Her body wouldn’t die.
Out of swimming vision, she saw it on the wall: her shadow black by the moon’s cold light. Her body was hunched over into a lump of darkness, rocking back and forth. Her skin twitched, bubbled, burst.
An arm not her own reached out of her back. She saw another one join it. From her back, a shadowy shape blossomed.
She had just recognized it as a head when she, mercifully, fell into darkness.
An hour.
A night.
A few breaths.
She didn’t know how long she had lain there, unmoving, before she felt warm hands on her cheek and a gentle purring in her ear.
“Apologies. I didn’t expect it to take that long.”
Her eyelids fluttered open. She wasn’t sure how that was possible. She wasn’t sure how she was still alive.
She looked down at herself, expecting to find a bloody ruin where a body should be. But aside from tattered clothing and a few red stains, she was whole.
Pain lingered in her, but only in echoes. Slowly, it faded. Slowly, her vision righted itself, and she found herself staring at a woman’s feet.
She looked up, past lean legs and narrow waist, past gaunt belly and small breasts, past thin neck and pointed chin to a broad, haughty smile. She didn’t recognize the woman standing before her—this skinny creature, steam pealing off glistening skin, a mop of brown hair damp with some unnamed ichor, hazel eyes gleaming maliciously.
But the smile …
She knew Amoch-Tethr’s smile.
“You …” She found the breath to whisper. “You’re a woman?”
“Am I?” Amoch-Tethr looked himself—herself—over. “Ah. Well, I suppose that’s to be expected. One does not get as close as we were without rubbing off on each other, hmm?”
“But … I thought you were …”
“Maybe I was, long ago.” Amoch-Tethr smiled broadly. “Truth be told, I hardly remember. Everything about that world feels like a pleasant dream.” She stretched. Her mouth gaped open just a little too wide to look natural as she yawned. The skin of her body clung to her ribs. “But there was one thing I cannot forget …”
She knelt down beside Asper. Her smile opened unnaturally wide, cleanly bisecting her face. Her eyes turned bright red. The hellish glow engulfed her face, painted her skull black. She spoke with a voice from a dank pit, choked on smoke.
“I cannot forget your pain.”
Asper had no strength to struggle. No strength to even scream. Amoch-Tethr seized her by the collar and dragged her close.
“Every prayer, every weeping prayer, I heard. Every doubt, every fear, I felt. You are in such pain, my dear.”
She opened her mouth wide, drew Asper close. Inside her gaping maw, Asper saw an eternity of light.
“Permit me to end it for you.”
No struggle. No scream. Nothing left for that. Asper simply closed her eyes. And waited.
“Renouncer.”
It was not Amoch-Tethr that spoke. Nor Asper. The voice that spoke was so soft that it could barely be heard over the sound of Amoch-Tethr’s imminent feast.
And yet that word, whatever it was, was important.
Amoch-Tethr’s mouth closed. The light faded from her face, then her eyes. She dropped Asper, unceremoniously, and rose to face the newcomer who had appeared behind her.
A man. Perhaps. It was hard to tell beneath the black rags swaddling his tall frame. They hung from him in tatters, a black cloth wrapped around his head, not a trace of anything remotely resembling a face visible beneath it. Yet as he stood, slightly stooped, there was no doubt he was staring at Amoch-Tethr.
Then again, that might have been because she was stalking toward him angrily.
“I will tolerate any number of profanities,” she snarled. “But to speak that word to me during my first meal is to invite death.” She raised a hand. “May yours be instructional, if messy.”
The man made no effort to defend himself. He simply raised a hand. His fingers held no weapon beyond a rolled-up scroll, neatly sealed with wax, which he proffered to Amoch-
Tethr.
And somehow, this was enough to cause her to draw up short and look at it curiously.
“You have a debt to pay,” he said.
Amoch-Tethr glared at him before snatching the scroll. She unfurled it hastily, read through it quickly. Asper couldn’t make out what it said from where she lay, but it looked like no language she had ever seen. Whatever it said, though, made Amoch-Tethr’s anger fade with a smoky sight.
“Qulon …” She rubbed her eyes. “I could ever count on that woman to ruin the mood.” She looked over her shoulder, frowning at Asper with a sort of tender lament. “Still … a debt is a debt.” She shot her a wink. “Apologies I wasn’t able to make it all better, dearest. Try not to miss me too much, hm?”
With a rather obscene spring in her step, naked and glistening as a newborn, the woman, the creature, the curse that Asper had carried inside her for so long went gaily skipping down the street and simply disappeared.
Just like that.
Asper could only stare. Somehow, it didn’t feel real. Thinking back on it, it couldn’t be real. She had felt her skin tear apart. She had seen the shadows. She had seen something … that thing crawl out of her own skin.
And yet her flesh was whole. Her wounds were still gone. She could still feel the energy surging through her, the power that had come with devouring those thugs.
She could remember their faces, their screams.
“Prophet.”
She looked up. A hand was extended to her, wrapped in black rags. No face looked down at her, yet she knew his eyes were on hers.
Reluctantly, she reached out and took his hand. It felt real enough as he helped her to her feet, as he brushed the dirt from her robes, as he plucked a stray piece of lint from her shoulder.
“You’ll be late for your meeting.” The man’s voice was hollow and distant. “It will work in your favor, though. I expect your entrance will be suitably dramatic. I advise against telling them about this part, though.”
“I … don’t know what I’d tell them,” she said. “I don’t know what happened.”
“A lot,” he replied. “You’ll find the words for it, in time. But not now.” He gave her a gentle pat on the shoulder. “You have a war to win.”
And then, he was gone.
As though he had never even been there.
NINETEEN
THE LAST CHIEFTAIN
Does it ever stop?”
Kataria had asked this, once. Back in the Silesrian forest, where she had lain beneath the bough of an ancient willow that bent low beneath the weight of her rain-slick crown. She had lain there, on a bed of red-stained moss, biting back tears in her eyes as she tied an herb-soaked bandage around her leg.
And someone looked down at her, frowning at the cut in her leg that had been meant for her heart. And someone had said …
“For humans, yes. They go back to their homes and light fires to hide from the night. For tulwar, yes. They go back to their families and huddle together against the cold. But we … we were given the bow and the Howling, nothing else. We were given so little. We have to take the rest. For us, the fight never stops.”
She had looked to the corpses of the people lying nearby, her arrows in their throats. The first humans she had ever killed.
“I wish it would.”
These were the last words Kataria had ever spoken to her mother.
A few days later, she was dead.
No body to burn. No last words of her own to impart to her child. She simply vanished and the tribe knew she was gone. It was not uncommon; the Silesrian was large and treacherous. The tribe could not wait for her to find peace.
The storms had lasted all month. It had been raining again when someone else had come to find her. And someone had extended her a white feather, for mourning, and told her to weave it into her hair. And someone had said …
“We won’t forget her. Or them. The ones who did this to her, we will find them, we will kill them. We will show them that this is our land, that they cannot come here with their fire and axes and stones. We will show them that the shicts take what they need and they will know fear.”
She had woven the feather into her hair. She had let it hang there, a weight pulling her head down. The feather she would never take off.
“I don’t care about them. I just want her back.”
These were the last words Kataria had ever spoken to her father.
Many years later, he was still alive.
And she was gone. She had left the Silesrian not many years after she had spoken those words to him. She was not so stupid as to think that any life, let alone hers, could be free of violence, of bloodshed, of death. But she had wanted something else. Maybe something more. Or perhaps just something different.
And someone had given her the opportunity to do that. And someone had come into the forest. And to someone, she had said …
“Holy shit, how is it you’ve lived this long, dumb as you are?”
Those weren’t the first words she had said to Lenk. Nor even the first time she had said those specific words to him.
And now, not knowing if he was alive or dead, she found she missed him.
If only because it hadn’t always been about fighting with him. If only because, once in a while, it did stop.
For a little while, anyway.
She drew in a breath. Against her back, she felt cold rock. Across her skin, a bitter wind slithered. Her head throbbed. Her body ached terribly. Before her, darkness stretched endlessly.
But only for another moment.
She felt fingers across her face. Her head jerked forward as the blindfold was torn from her. She blinked, eyes adjusting to the orange glow of a nearby bonfire. And though the light was dim, it was more than enough for her to see the cold eyes staring down at her from behind a face gaping wide in a scream.
Whoever the poor fucker had been—a father, a merchant, just an unlucky fool who wandered too far into the desert—he was just a decoration now. A dessicated, flayed face nailed into the grinning leer of Shekune’s wooden mask. His open-mouth scream constrated starkly with the toothy smile of the khoshict’s mask.
And both were betrayed by the long, cold emptiness of her stare.
Kataria met those eyes, dark and appraising, with her own. For a long moment, the two of them stared at each other in silence.
And then Kataria lunged.
Her teeth bared in a snarl, she leapt forward, as though to seize Shekune by the jugular and start shaking until something red and wet came out. But she hadn’t even taken a step before her arms were snapped back, thick ropes biting into her wrists and hauling her back against the rock. Only when her wrists were red and her breath was gone did she fall back, settling into a seething, green-eyed scowl.
And Shekune merely stared back.
“Waiting for me to beg?” Kataria growled between labored breathing.
Shekune said nothing. Kataria drew herself up and snarled again, as fiercely as someone lashed to a rock could.
“Well?” she demanded. “What are you waiting for? Kill me.” At Shekune’s continued silence, she lunged forward again. “I SAID KILL—”
Shekune’s hand shot out and clamped around Kataria’s throat, crushing her voice beneath her fingers. Kataria froze, all fury drained as she suddenly fought to find breath again.
It came back to her, slowly, as Shekune’s fingers slowly eased off from her throat. From behind her mask, her eyes drifted lower, toward Kataria’s waist. Her hand followed, sliding from her throat and across her belly before lingering on her belt.
Swifter than her breath, anger returned to Kataria. But before she could make find a voice to go with it, Shekune’s fingers flitted. She seized something from Kataria’s belt, pulled it away, and held it before her.
The map—the simple hide scroll that she had taken from the tulwar—unfurled before Shekune’s face. The khoshict looked it over for a few moments, eyes widening just ever so slightly.
“Th
e tulwar have been tracking us,” she murmured. “I didn’t think those monkeys were capable of it.” She closed her eyes. “They could have ruined everything. I should have paid attention, I should have …”
She let that thought trail off and die. Her eyes turned toward Kataria once more. She rolled the map up and held it up before her prisoner.
“This will save many shict lives,” she said, “hunters that can feed families, mothers that can raise young, even yijis that can provide for us.” She shook her head. “And I wonder, had I never found it, would we ever know? Would you have let them all die?”
She reached up behind her head and tugged at a leather knot. Her riotous braids, all of them laced with black feathers, tumbled around her shoulders. Her mask, with its grin and its scream, fell to the ground and lay in the sand. And when she looked at Kataria again, her long face was full of concern and her eyes were no longer empty.
“Do you hate us that much?”
No hand, no rope, no blade could have rendered Kataria so utterly silent. The question caught her square in the belly, knocked what little wind she had found from her and sent her back against the rock. She stared, openmouthed, at Shekune before shaking her head.
“I don’t hate you,” she said. “Not the shicts. I’m trying to save them. From you.”
“Me?” The wrinkles at the corners of her mouth curled as Shekune smiled sadly. “What would you save them from by killing me? Would you send them into the desert, leaderless, to be picked apart by the tulwar clans?”
“No, I—”
“Would you kill me and rob them of any chance of fighting off the humans who encroach into our land?”
“Not that, but—”
“Would you kill me and let one more family starve, one more child be orphaned, one more—”
“Enough,” Kataria snarled, scowling at her. “If you wanted to convince me of your goodness, you shouldn’t have come to me wearing someone else’s severed face.” She kicked Shekune’s mask away. “You know fucking well what your war is going to do. You’re going to make the humans retaliate against us a hundredfold. No land will be big enough. No family will be strong enough. No shict will be safe.”