by Levi Black
The thing straightens, its back to me. Its hands move, grab the girl’s legs, and pry them apart.
Rage washes over me hot and sharp. I clench my right hand and the knuckles crack like small-caliber gunfire. It’s heavy, swollen with magick that now roars through my veins, driven by a fuck-hot blind fury. The coat squeals inside my skull. Gobbets of raw red magick dribble off the Mark in my palm as I shove it deep into the pocket inside the coat. It’s like sticking it in a bucket of arctic glacier water, sharp prickly burn of extreme cold. Frostbite under the skin. The Mark sizzles as my skin draws tight. My fingers find what they are looking for, scraping on silk cord braided over stone-hard teakwood.
I pull and it comes, sliding out of the pocket in one long sweep of blackened steel.
My hand is full of katana, black-bladed, razored death. Moonlight gleams along the narrow quicksilver line of the sharpened edge, tracing it from my hand to the tip and back again.
It’s the sword of Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, the Man in Black. He lost the coat, he lost the sword inside it.
I drop my arm, holding my sword out and back, ready to strike, and I whistle.
It’s a good whistle, one that cuts the darkness. The thing turns its head just enough to see me over its shoulder. Its eye is a pale smudge in the shadow cast by the brim of the hat.
“Hey, asshole,” I say, “try that shit with me.”
8
THE SWORD HUMS in my grip, my hand tight against the round tsuba that separates hilt from blade. The Mark on my palm pulls on the teakwood and braided cord like a magnet to steel. The magick in me connects to the sword, to the something inside it that makes it more than just a thing of sharp metal and wood. When I found the sword inside the weird pocket in the coat that has no sides and no bottom, just an endless biting cold, I studied it. Longer than the shinai, the bamboo sword I trained with in kendo, the blade has been formed of some black metal, so black it could be mistaken for onyx. The tsuba is of the same black metal and engraved with strange symbols around it that make my eyes hurt if I study them. The hilt sports braided silk over midnight dark teakwood. On a traditional katana, the braiding would be uniform, orderly, in a pattern that would not only ensure a good grip but also be an art form in and of itself. This sword, the braiding is haphazard, chaotic, forming no rhyme nor reason I can see.
And the sword is hungry.
No other word describes the feeling that radiates off the thing. It thirsts for blood, longs to bite through flesh, craves to cleave bone and sink into the marrow.
It whispers along my magick, drawing out that primal darkness we all carry in ourselves, coaxing out the murderous seduction of a stone placed in Cain’s hand. It feeds the same dark desire that makes you want to jerk the wheel and hop the curb and mow down someone on the sidewalk just to see what they would feel like under your tires.
I hate using the damned thing.
I love using the damned thing.
Speaking of damned things, the creature lets go of the girl and turns toward me. Still unconscious, she slides sideways, spilling off the stack of cardboard and onto the ground. Her head hits hard enough for me to hear it thunk like a melon on the pavement.
Please let her be okay.
Maybe God will listen.
Maybe.
The thing straightens and I get my first full look at it in the dim light of the alley. My magick is thrumming in a loop through my body, from my Mark against the sword, to my heart, to my brain, and throughout the rest of me. My eyes are lit up with it and that burns away any glamor that might have fooled me inside.
The thing in front of me is bigger than a normal man, far bigger than me. Its shoulders hunch and its knees knock together, giving it a strange rocking shuffle as it comes toward me. Its face is round and pale, lips the same colour as its cheeks, but its nose is black, a flat oval stuck between big eyes and tiny mouth. It reminds me of something and I fumble around in my mind for what it is.
A teddy bear.
No, a koala. Koala bear.
The wide-brimmed hat isn’t a hat at all but instead is the shape of its skull, the brim being a finlike flange that wraps its temples and flares like gills.
“You are one ugly bastard,” I say.
It opens its mouth, making some garbled noise that sounds nothing like language, and stretches out its arms. Three multi-jointed fingers curl off each palm, tipped in a sharp bone spur meant to hook deep in muscle and hold. We are closing in on each other. I look down and I see that the suit it is wearing is torn open at the fly, the fabric ripped apart.
From the tear protrudes something completely alien.
It curls upward, the size of my forearm and covered with crystalline barbs that angle backward like porcupine quills. The hideous thing bobs at me as the sand dweller shuffles forward, thrusting its hips and moan growling.
Inhuman or not, its intention is obvious.
Pure rage flares inside me, smashing me flat and making me go ice-cold inside. I find that white static spot in my brain that shuts me down to fighting, to dealing damage.
No thinking. Only instinct.
Killer instinct.
I lunge forward, swinging the sword with every bit of strength I have.
9
SPARKS FLY AS the blade shudders to a stop against the creature’s outstretched hands. I’m working the memory of my short training in sword use, leaning into the swing, using my whole body to drive the blade forward. This close I hear the grinding skritching scrape of metal on sand. The thing is crusted in it, like it crawled out of the desert we were in earlier. It dwells in the sand. My blow knocks some off and it flies into my face, crawling along the lower lid of my right eye. I blink, and the sight there goes blurry, washed in hot tears to cleanse the sand away. The collar of the coat flares around my jaw, fanning it away.
The sand dweller’s mouth opens and its growls sound like a small creature being ground to death under a boulder as it shoves me away. I stumble, lashing out with the sword as I do. There’s no aim, no intent other than to keep the blade between me and it. It leans away and then lunges behind my swing, coming in after me. I’m off-balance, way over my center of gravity, already falling from the shove. My body tenses, waiting for the impact. The coat flares around me, spreading like batwings along the ground. Tendrils sharpen to spikes, driving into the ground and anchoring me while the other side of it stretches, pushing me on around. It’s like I’m in a harness on wires. I lean into it and turn with the spin as the creature misses and goes past me.
I whirl, coat whipping with me, sword at the ready.
The sand dweller doesn’t keep running like I expect it to. Instead it leaps and hits the wall of the club, latching on with clawed hands and feet. Its spine bows, making a tall arch as more barbs rip from its skin in small sprays of sand. Its moon face breaks open and it pushes off, leaping and spinning in a long, slow arc, body twisting toward me.
Time contracts, pulling tight, and I see as if in slow motion, my eyes tracking the sand dweller’s trajectory, pinned on my target. I hold until the thing hangs above me at the peak of its leap and move as it starts to fall toward me.
My blade flashes like quicksilver and I feel it bite deep and pull through. I strike blind, trusting my aim. Twisting with my momentum, I turn in time to see half the creature’s penis strike the alley floor in a spill of sand like a shattered hourglass.
Take that, you sick monster bastard.
The creature lands wrong with a grunt that sounds almost mechanical, hitting the ground on its shoulder and neck and crumpling into itself.
The sword howls in my head, a long, plaintive cry, the sound a starving coyote would make if given only one morsel of food. It wants to drive forward, to hack the sand dweller into pieces.
I want to drive forward, to hack the sand dweller into pieces.The sword. It makes me want things.
The coat rustles around me, anxious.
My memory kicks and the first time I pulled the sword from th
e coat rushes into my mind.
10
PAIN SPIKED DEEP in my shoulder, the wavy horn digging, digging, digging, into the joint, driven by the straining night gaunt perched above me. I pushed with my other hand on slick rubbery skin, trying to send magick down to my Mark, but the pain was all there was. It swallowed me, chewed on me, rolling me into its grinding molars. The coat jabbered in my head, a gushing river of noise to the sunspot of agony that stole my vision, destroyed my ability to breathe, to think, to do anything. The horn hadn’t stabbed through, held back by the screaming coat that covered me.
The night gaunt, silent, with no mouth to make sound, just a blank gray slate where a face should be, used its wide, draping batwings surrounding us to pull back. The blinding agony broke like the dawn. It leaned away, about to drive the horn back down, and I could see, for a split second I could see it rear back, slabs of oddly configured muscles bunching under slick rubber skin like a beluga, and I knew this time the coat would not save me. I would be gored, torn open by that twisting length of sharpened spur that jutted from its skull. The coat flared along my chest lifting at the lapel as the sleeve contracted and pulled, yanking my arm across my torso and driving my hand into the gap it had made.
My hand went ice-cold, plunged into the pocket, sinking farther than there was room for it to fit. The cold shocked me, running energy up my spine and into my brain. My vision went laser sharp, everything in hyper-focus. The night gaunt tilted its head, preparing to strike, when my fingers closed on the strangely corded handle of the sword.
The coat convulsed, dragging my arm out and the sword with it, blade up.
The night gaunt drove its blank face into the razored edge, splitting its own skull like a melon full of sticky black ichor that splashed across my face, drenching me.
My magick rolled through my Mark, connecting for the first time with the black-bladed sword of the Crawling Chaos.
Blinking my eyes clear, I pushed out from under the dead night gaunt and crawled to my feet. The sword shook in my grip as my hand clenched, locking down on the hilt, trying to meld my flesh with it. The sword roared in my skull, drowning out the coat, muffling my own magick, obliterating everything that wasn’t its voice, its desire, its raw, greedy hunger. My mouth went dry, throat closing as if I hadn’t tasted water in weeks.
The gore of the night gaunt soaked into the blade, drunk by the eldritch metal there. It wanted more. I wanted more. We wanted to spill all the blood of every living thing in all the world.
I plunged the blade into the dying night gaunt, right between those huge wings, eyes fluttering as the sword sucked up the swiftly fading life force of the monster.
Minutes felt like seconds, no, like thoughts they were so quick, and the sword had drunk all it could from the dead thing.
I pulled it free and looked around, seeking something else to slake the bloodthirst raging inside me.
I was alone, in an abandoned warehouse, in a burned-out part of some town somewhere.
But there was life nearby. The sword could sense it.
I could sense it.
I was halfway to the door before the coat was able to bind me and make me drop the damned sword.
I howled at it for hours until the influence subsided, slipping from my mind like water off glass.
And once it was gone I wept bitterly until the rising of the sun.
11
I LET GO and the sword hilt falls away into the pocket of the coat, its muffled wail trailing off in my head until it snaps off.
The sensation of that makes the skin crawl on the back of my neck and down my shoulders and I shudder.
“Damn, chica, that was some cool shit.”
I turn to the voice and find the kid standing there. He’s not shaking anymore and he’s pulled his pants up some.
I glare at him, not sure what to say.
“How you make that sword disappear?” His eyebrows are pulled together.
“Magick.”
He nods like he knows something. “I get that. My cousin, Jorge, he does that shit all the time, pulling coins from some chica’s ears and shit, hidin’ cards up his sleeve. Always tryin’ to get some, y’know what I mean?”
“It’s not the same.” His mouth moves and I jerk my finger at him, stopping him. “Don’t call me chica again.”
“What’s your name then?”
Should I tell this kid my name?
Fuck it.
“Charlie.”
“Javier.” He smiles and it makes his eyes go sleepy looking. “You can call me Javi if you want.” He pronounces it “hah-vee.”
Out of the corner of my eye I see the sand dweller move, rocking like it is about to stand up. Putting my right hand into the outside pocket of the coat, I point with my left at the girl slumped onto the ground. “Go check on her. Take her inside if she’s okay.”
He glances at the girl and then back at me; the look on his face is unsure.
“I’m not asking, Javier.”
“It’s cool; it’s cool.” He moves off.
I watch him for a second, my right hand feeling around until it closes on what I’m looking for.
I walk over to the inhuman thing huddled on the alley floor.
I pull my hand out of the pocket.
In it is a knife as long as my forearm.
Idolcarver.
Blade of Castration.
The Knife of Abraham.
The Aqedah.
Holding it in my hand makes a tickle run from the back of my throat all the way to the deepest reaches of me. The handle is plain olive wood, worn shiny from generations upon generations of hands holding it. The blade is a triangle-shaped wedge of ancient iron with one sharp edge and a spine as thick as my finger. Holding it is the opposite of holding the sword. This knife was never truly the Man in Black’s. It had been used to hack out idols to Moloch and then belonged to Abraham, who laid it against the throat of Isaac. Later, a Russian tsar and his castration cult used it to make the sacrifice of their own foreskin in some twisted ritual that went bad, really, really bad. The Man in Black claimed he took it from the bloody hand of a dying Nazi.
He’s just fucked up enough for that to be true.
With it, I’ve killed the mad priest of a cancer god, an asshole who hurt me long ago, and stabbed the Man in Black to stop him from killing Daniel with it.
Now I’m going to use it to get some information.
Squatting next to the sand dweller, I grab the flange of skin surrounding its skull. It is hard under my fingertips and slick; the flex it has is stiff like thin plastic instead of pliable, like a fin instead of a flap. I give it a shake. The sand dweller snarls, but it’s weak. There is a puddle of grainy mud spreading beneath it, bleeding out whatever it has in place of blood from the wound I dealt it.
Serves it right after what it was about to do to that girl.
I fight off the urge to go ahead and drive the Aqedah into its face and end it.
“Do you speak English?”
It growls something unintelligible.
Dammit.
I wish for us to understand each other.
The collar moves with the magick but not enough to hurt.
“Tell me how to find the Man in Black.” My voice sounds weird in my own ears, distorted by the translation magick.
The sand dweller looks up sharply, eyes wide. I can see sticky grains of silica packed into the corners of them. “Who?”
“Nyarlathotep. Also known as the Crawling Chaos.”
“He is not a man.”
“Where is he?”
“You killed me. Let me die.”
“Answer the question.”
It moans and leans away. I flick the Aqedah out and slash the edge across its arm. The knife cuts deep, with all the resistance of warm cheese. The sand dweller howls again, jerking away.
“Next time I will cut off another whole piece of you. Tell me how to find Nyarlathotep.”
“I know not where the Crawling Cha
os has crawled to.”
“You know something. Your kind always know something. Tell me.”
It shakes its head.
I lift the knife.
“No, no, no, nonononono…,” it whimpers. “You found me; find him the same way.”
“You don’t think I’ve tried that, asshole? He’s gone to ground and I need you to point to that ground.”
“You’ve killed me. You have no threat.”
I put the Aqedah in my left hand and open my right, lifting it in front of him. I pull up my magick and send it down my arm into the Mark there. Heat traces out the symbol, the intersecting lines, and the curling whorls that make it. The magick begins to ooze out of the Mark, painting him a hot magenta colour as thick gobbets of etheric energy drip off my hand, sizzling against the ground between us.
The words come from somewhere in the darkness inside me. I don’t know them before I speak them but I mean them each and every one.
“Listen and hear and bear witness. I am the Hound in the Night, the Seeker, the Searcher, the Destroyer. I will chase your essence into the ether and I will harry it between my teeth. You cannot avoid me. You cannot escape me. You cannot outrun me. You are prey, mewling and broken in the outer dark. You will ask for the mercy of obliteration and find none at my hand. My plaything, my morsel, mine to keep, mine to kill, mine to destroy, and mine to harm.”
With each syllable my magick grows, the excess of it spitting from my palm like the molten sparks from a welding torch. I feel it in my bones, slipping over my organs. It spills from my eyes and runs in hot tracks down my cheeks, shimmering free off my jaw. Sheer, unmitigated terror lies on the sand dweller’s koala face like a caul.
I lean in, mouth twisting into the savage, toothsome smile of a predator.
“Now tell me how to find the Man in Black.”
12
DAMMIT.
Dammit.
Goddammit.