by Sam Sykes
Or maybe the shicts just wanted to let her appreciate the deaths she had brought these people before they ended her misery.
Shicts.
Kataria had tried to warn her. She wouldn’t listen.
Yet even now, she couldn’t find the feeling for guilt. She couldn’t even remember the conversation they had. She could barely remember Kataria’s face.
It was as though something had simply … broken. Inside her, something important that should be stronger than iron had just snapped and everything inside her—the instincts that would have told her to run, the horror that would have told her to scream, the sorrow that would have told her to grieve—had simply … drained out.
She had seen death before. But never had she seen so many dead bodies born in one single breath. The sensation of so many breaths sucked out, of so many lives bursting like overripe fruits in one moment … she couldn’t comprehend it. She didn’t know what she was looking at anymore.
No tears to cry. No voice to scream. She had forgotten how to do all that.
She couldn’t feel the breath in her throat. Or the thoughts in her head. Or the fingers on her arms, hanging like dead weights at her sides.
She looked up. The shicts stared down at her. Her mouth hung open, trying to remember what it was for, like a crude and fleshy imitation of the empty smiles elegantly carved into their wooden masks.
She could barely comprehend those smiles. She could barely understand that their ears were twitching, all at once. She couldn’t remember what it meant as they slowly raised their bows and drew their arrows back and aimed for her.
And in the numb emptiness of her mind, the thick fog where fears and hopes and plans and promises had used to be, a single thought whispered to her.
Do not be afraid.
She heard it clearly, as though it were coming from right beside her, a whisper in her ear right before she fell asleep. It sank into her, settled down on her numb scalp, and breathed with its own life.
You have suffered much at the hands of cruel gods, haven’t you? Such terrible violence you’ve seen and yet, even now, they abandon you.
Every word hung uncomfortably clear in her head, a solid thought forced into her skull. On the cliffs above, she saw some shicts lower their weapons and look around warily, ears aloft and twitching. As though they heard the same thing.
I am so sorry I have come too late to save them. But I will make this right. I will take care of everything.
She found her breath and it came hot and anxious. Her pulse quickened. Somewhere, someone fixated a great eye upon her and saw everything: every thought flashing in her head, every drop of blood rushing through her veins, every bead of sweat on her body. Somewhere, someone was watching her. Watching this pass. Watching everything.
There is no need for fear, for shame, for hatred. Let low the burdens your cruel creators have heaped on your shoulders. Let me lift you up. Let me show you the kindness they withheld.
And she knew, without knowing how, that someone was smiling.
I am here for you.
A scream.
Something sharp and wild and human. It filled her ears. Feeling came rushing back to her in a burst of pain. Colors suddenly seemed too vivid, breath too swift, sounds too loud.
Screams assaulted her, coming from seemingly every direction. From the road, people came running: humans who had escaped the shicts, tulwar who had been left behind. She couldn’t tell the difference between them anymore.
The naked terror on their faces made them all look the same.
“DEMONS!”
Over their panicked faces, she could see them coming.
They looked like humans, but far too tall and impossibly beautiful, their skin dark and perfect and their eyes bright like sun. But the way they walked—loping along with such savage enthusiasm, like they had been crawling all their lives and were struggling to remember.
And with each step, they changed.
Their skin twisted. Limbs grew longer. Eyes grew brighter. Their smiles grew wide and bared sharp, glistening teeth. Long tongues flicked out of their mouths. Skin peeled back, became as scales, was left shed on the ground in glistening heaps. Their hair was lost, giving way to naked scalps, and their torsos twisted and became serpentine and their fingers sprouted claws and their mouths gaped open impossibly wide and their voices …
Their voices made her remember what pain was.
Over the humans and the tulwar, she heard them screaming. Theirs was a loud and excited wail, like children running to open presents. They came pursuing the fleeing soldiers, leaping over them and seizing them with their long limbs and dragging them away. They scaled the walls of the cliffs with horrific speed, reaching up to seize those shicts who didn’t flee.
Through the wall of scales and sinew and flesh, Asper could see flashes of horror. The hand of a tulwar reaching out as he was crushed under a pair of massive feet. A pair of Karnerian legs flailing as he was shoved, face first, into a gaping toothy maw. A shict screaming as she was bent and snapped and broken like a toy in unnaturally huge hands.
Asper knew she had to run. But the fear that swept through the crowd hadn’t yet reached her. And whatever instincts screamed at her to flee, something else spoke louder.
There are no fears here. There are no wars here. There are no gods.
At the back of the pass, something emerged.
There is only me.
The sky turned bloodred. The sun seemed to turn its face away, afraid of what was born on that corpse-choked road. Across creation, a black stain grew from the earth and rose to scrape the sky.
It blossomed in the sky, a dead tree rising out of cold earth. It looked like a man, immensely huge with a crown that touched the sky. His arms unfolded in great, godlike birth, welcoming himself into the world. The beauty of his muscular figure unfurled, a tapestry of sinew and skin forever being woven with his great breaths. His eyes were wide open, two stark white portals that opened up into a world free of pain.
He smiled.
And from his face, serpents.
Growing out of his jaw in a writhing beard. Bursting from his brow in a serpentine, hissing crown. Falling from his cheeks like whiskers. They writhed and snapped and hissed and screeched and laughed with the voices of children and of mothers.
Over the ruin of the battle, he presided. He held his arms open wide and bathed in the screams and the carcasses. He looked down on the morbid feast and smiled gently.
And she knew his name.
“Khoth-Kapira …”
She turned.
“Khoth-Kapira!”
She ran.
“Khoth-Kapira!”
She became part of the flood of people swarming across the pass, fleeing from the monstrous creations that boiled around the demon’s ankles. They pursued, wailing and laughing and screaming and begging for the fleeing soldiers to stop and be a part of their beautiful world.
Asper heard them getting closer. She could feel their eyes on her. She could feel his smile leveled down on her. She knew he looked inside her and saw something that he must have. They closed in on her, frothing up behind her and reaching out with their long limbs and their fanged smiles and their wild, excited eyes and—
“Hey.”
She stopped.
In front of her, a shadow appeared.
Not a shadow—the Shadow. The one she had seen back in Cier’Djaal. He stood there, pitch-black against the carnage, staring at her with no face.
“How’s it going, champ?”
She didn’t answer. She didn’t have time. He opened his arms wide, seized her, and pulled her into him.
She felt herself falling into a great darkness.
THIRTY-NINE
HIS HOLY VERDICT
Looking at her, it was hard to believe she had ever been human.
Or something like a human, anyway; saccarii, whatever their origins, were not so different. They had two legs, two arms, two eyes. Hearts full of anger, heads full o
f schemes, tongues full of lies, just like any human.
And they had ambitions.
And as she sat, coiled at the edge of the great wall that supported the Silken Spire, it was hard to understand exactly what Teneir’s had been. Or how they had led her to this.
She had no more legs now. Or maybe she did, under the writhing mass of serpentine tails that coiled beneath her waist. Her skin was gone, replaced by sickly gray scales that glistened in the dying sunlight. Her neck was long and coiled, terminating in a head whose eyes were broad and yellow and whose fanged mouth was curled into a tight frown as she stared out over the city.
“It’s not a mistake that I am here.”
Her voice, at least, was still vaguely normal. It was soft and quiet and full of sadness. For the moment, anyway.
“Grandfather won a spider in a game of dice with a fasha. The fasha tried to cheat him, of course, and Grandfather gutted him in an alley. The spiders bred, made silk, became investments, and our fortunes were made slowly but steadily. Grandfather called it saccarii determination. Father called it luck. Only now, though, do I realize …”
She closed her eyes. A hot wind blew over her.
“It was the divine.”
A smile tugged at her lips. A faint image of the person she used to be flashed across her face.
“I do not mean that as a simple means of explaining away circumstances. That would be crude belief. Faith—true faith—is a means of discovering why things are as they are.
“I did not realize that until I saw my first dead saccarii. From the window of my room, I saw one beaten to death in the streets. A vagrant, my father said, who had found his way into Silktown and was being punished for transgressing. It was that he was poor, and not saccarii, that he had to die. As though that would set me at ease. Yet somehow, I convinced myself it did.”
She looked high into the red sky.
“Until the visions, anyway. They began about two years ago. First, as a voice: a gentle and motherly whisper, telling me that things could be better, that I could fix it. This was when I knew Ancaa was looking over me. All the other gods I prayed to were silent. Only she spoke and told me how to save things.
“So I used my fortunes. I built churches to Ancaa. And yes, I formed the Khovura. I used them to hunt out the rats that infest this city and bring real change.” She shook her head. “I lament the violence they caused, but I will not apologize for them. Everything I did brought me closer to Ancaa, made her visions stronger, until just a few months ago.”
She swiveled on her coils, casting a sharp-eyed scowl across the wall to the first pillar of the Silken Spire and the battered body hanging from it.
“That is when you arrived, am I correct?”
That sounded about right to Lenk. But he had a hard time remembering, what with the shit having been beaten out of him earlier.
He slumped against the pillar, his bound wrists all that were keeping him upright. His attempts at struggle had been brutally suppressed and all he had to show for it was a bleeding forehead and possibly a concussion. The strongest answer he could muster was a flutter of his eyelids as he looked up at the monstrosity slithering toward him.
“The visions became weaker. She spoke to me less. And as time went on, her visions became strange. I began to see your face in my dreams, hear your name whispered in anger, as though she were muttering under her breath. I was uncertain what to make of it. Were you a new prophet? Or were you a vexation that she wished to be rid of?”
She extended a single clawed finger and angled it beneath his chin. He felt blood drip from his skin, gliding down her talon to pool in her palm as she tilted his face up to look at her.
“Or perhaps … she was simply spending all her time talking to you, hm?” A long tongue flicked out between her lips, brushing against Lenk’s cheek. “To this day, I am unsure what happened.”
This wasn’t the first time Lenk had found himself in a situation like this. And, despite whatever dramatic stories defiant, smart-mouthed captives told, he knew from many injuries that mouthing off to someone who had him bound and possessed many means of killing him wasn’t a good idea.
But maybe he just needed to hear himself say it.
“What happened,” he rasped out, “is that your goddess is a depraved demon from hell who has come to twist every living creature into things as horrific as you.”
He expected the end to be swift—gutting his throat, maybe, or just strangling him to death. But instead, Teneir merely stared at him, without malice or hatred. Instead, it was a kind of sadness that creased her face.
“I know,” she said, softly.
“What?”
“I read many of Sheffu’s books back when we were on … better terms. I always had my suspicions.” She looked down at her scaly flesh and frowned. “This is but confirmation. Though I do not hate my gift, regardless of where it came from.”
“It’s not a gift,” Lenk sputtered. “It’s not. He doesn’t give gifts. He—”
“Do you hope to persuade me?” Teneir chuckled. “Do you expect me to fall to the ground and bemoan my choices and beg you to help me make it right?” She shook her head. “I made my choice knowing all that I did. And, if it had to be done, I would do it all again a hundred times more.”
“But … why?”
“How do you view the gods?” she asked. “Do you call on them only in times of need? Do you offer to them only when you think of it? Or are they simply a name you curse when you suffer?” She sighed, running a scaly palm down his cheek. “They are just a word to you, aren’t they? Something you simply say, not quite remembering why you said it?”
“And what are they to you? Another rich father to ask for shiny things from?”
“A partner.” Teneir seized him by the jaw. “This is what you blasphemers neglect. If gods wrought us in their image, then they must also be in ours. They can be taught. They can learn.”
“Taught.” He tried to chuckle, as impotent as it seemed. “You think you can control him? He’s a demon. He controls you.”
“Controls me how? Commands me to build for the poor? Commands me to unite the city? Commands me to envision a future in which no girl has to watch a man being beaten to death from her window again? I welcome it. Gods exist to serve a need. Our needs will shape our god.”
She released his face, sneered down at him.
“He may enter this city as Khoth-Kapira, demon from hell. But he shall live in it as Ancaa, goddess of Cier’Djaal. Together, we shall cure this city of its ills.”
“He doesn’t do that.” He shook his head. “He makes you think you’re the one who wants it, but you’re never in control. Everything you do is for him. And whatever you might think you’ll do to him, he’s thought of it first.”
“Enough.”
A coiled tail lashed out, caught him against the cheek, and struck with such force as to send him slumping in his bonds. He coughed, spit blood onto the stone. He hung there, staring at the ground as his blood pooled onto it. He sighed and shrugged as best he was able.
“Well,” he said, “just fucking kill me, I guess.”
He watched as a serpentine tendril crawled toward him. It coiled around his leg and slithered up around him.
“I will,” Teneir said, “if you desire it.”
Another joined, wrapping about his waist, his ribs, his chest. It squeezed ever so slightly. His body clenched in response.
“If you desire to live,” she said, “I can grant that, as well.”
A third. And a fourth. The tendrils snaked about him, coiling around his arms, slithering across his stomach, curling into a scaly noose about his neck. They tightened, just so, squeezing the barest air from him.
“Live here in luxury. Be free to wander wherever you please. I can do it all for you, if you desire. All you need is to tell me …”
Her coils tightened. His face was forced up. He met a mouth brimming with fangs and twisted in an angry snarl.
“Why you?
”
Her eyes were wide with indignant anger. Her voice was thick with desperation. His eyes, by contrast, bulged and his voice came out in a choking cough.
“What?”
“I have given my life to her,” Teneir said. “I have given my fortunes, my reputation, my very soul for her and she gives me quiet, gentle visions in reply. But you …” Her eyes narrowed to thin ochre slits. “Your name flashes in my head like fire. She spits it, rather than speaks it. But it is always on her lips, always in her thoughts. What have you given her, hm?”
“Nothing,” Lenk hacked. “I gave him nothing.”
“LIAR!”
She howled, slamming his head against the pillar. His vision swam. He gulped down breath, but only scant traces of air found their way to his lungs.
“You did something. You said something. And now all she can think of is you.” Her coils tightened around him. “Why is your face in her mind so clearly? Why does she think of you so often? Why does she speak of you with such anger and such passion, yet offers me only cold politeness? What did you say to her?”
She snarled, her voice becoming a desperate shriek.
“What did you do to her?”
She was squeezing tighter. Her coils trembled with barely contained fury, just as her eyes trembled with barely contained fear. She searched Lenk’s face, looking for any answer. She tilted her ear to his gaping mouth as he strained for breath. Her coils relaxed just enough to allow him the barest, breathless whisper.
“What I did …” he gasped out. He could barely hold on to consciousness, let alone his voice. “What I did … to him …”
“Yes,” she hissed. “Tell me. Tell me and I will let you live. I will let you go. Tell me what you did.”
“I … didn’t …”
He stared her in the eyes. He shook his head. He sighed.
“I didn’t love him.”
Her face fell. Her lips curled into a frown. Her heart sank in her eyes. For a moment, the monster was gone. All the scales and fangs couldn’t obscure the face of the same frightened, sad little girl who had once watched a man die and learned that the world wasn’t as she thought it should be.