by Levi Black
The words of Mr. Han, the Kali instructor who visited my dojo and taught knife fighting, come out of my mouth. “It’s not a weapon, it’s a tool.”
“It has killed,” he says. “You have killed with it.”
I look past him at the Man in Black. “Did he hear that from you?”
The chaos god shrugs. He actually manages to look sheepish.
My mouth tastes sour. “It was first used to carve wood. It’s a tool.”
“Put it away and we can talk.”
I shake the knife in my hand. “This knife cut through him”—I point at the Man in Black with the blade—“as if he were butter. You said it hurt him so bad you were able to capture him.”
“I spoke true.”
“I bet it would do the same to just about any god I stuck it in.”
“It would.” The King in Yellow nods. “But not as quick as she can tear out your companion’s throat.”
A purring growl starts to the left and I look to find Ashtoreth wrapped in Mylendor’s arms. The Hound’s hand has transformed into something multi-jointed and curved with talons that shine like volcanic glass dug into the fallen love goddess’s neck. Ashtoreth’s eyes are wide and she mouths something that looks like, I’m sorry.
The motion brings tiny trickles of blood that seep from where points of talons meet thin skin.
I drop the ancient knife back into the coat’s pocket even though I don’t want to. “Let’s negotiate.”
The King in Yellow smiles. “As you wish.”
I hate you.
He waves his hand back toward the Man in Black. “Take care of the Conmortavich. He will be pesky otherwise.”
The Man in Black turns and steps toward the skinhound, his red right hand hanging limply above the striated tissue stretched over the rack that is the skinhound’s rib cage. It crackles with etheric energy, descending slowly.
Then it stops in midair.
The King in Yellow grunts.
The Crawling Chaos folds himself, dropping to a crouch beside the nightmare hellhound that he set after me to drive me into his plans. He hovers on his haunches, head cocked as raw-knuckled fingers twitch and quiver, each minuscule movement causing magick to spatter from them.
His voice drifts over. “What have you done here, Charlotte Tristan Moore?”
Ashtoreth speaks and the effort brings fresh blood around Mylendor’s claws. “She tamed your pet, Seed of Azathoth.”
“Do not name my father again, tiny goddess. It will not go well with you.”
Ashtoreth goes silent.
The Man in Black looks at me. “What have you made my slave into?”
I don’t know what he is talking about, so I shrug and smile and hope it’s cryptic enough to keep him off-balance.
“Is it?” The King in Yellow speaks over his shoulder.
The Man in Black shakes his head. “It cannot be. She has changed him, but not to that extent.”
“Then cage him and let us be about our negotiation.”
The Man in Black shifts, twisting on the balls of his feet. His shoulders move and his elbows go in and out of sight around the wide taper of his back.
I take a step forward.
Ashtoreth hisses and it sounds like a dozen cobras, making me look at her. Her eyes are wide and screaming for me to stay put.
When I turn back the Man in Black is rising. Winnie the skinhound is awake and twisting, his face wrapped in an iron cage muzzle that lets his jaws part just enough for his blister pink tongue to loll out and hang. He shakes his head and drops it to the cobblestones, banging sparks from the rusted iron as he beats and beats and beats his face against the rock, trying to dislodge the cage.
The coat flaps and flutters around me, agitated.
The adrenaline burns along my blood, chasing magick that runs from my sternum to the Mark inscribed in my hand. I let my eyes shift over to See for a mere second and pick up the thread that connects me to the skinhound and I push magick down it. It runs to the hellhound like quicksilver, swirling through him until it hits the cage and reverberates back to me along the connection.
The mask feels like just a mask, just bits of iron forged and hinged together but nothing more.
Nothing ensorcerelled.
Nothing spelljinxed.
Nothing conjured or consecrated.
Just metal, plain and pure.
Deep behind my breastbone a shard of ice crystallizes. It crackle-spreads through my chest, settling around my heart like hoarfrost in deep Norse winter. I hold that cold, my mind a still lake, placid surface not betraying anything that might dwell in the dark, murky depths.
When I speak I let the winter into my voice.
“Stop.”
The word goes straight to the skinhound. He arches his knobbed spine as if I have shocked him and drops to his belly. The iron muzzle scrapes on the ground as he rolls his one baleful yellow eye in my direction. The long pink tongue, now dry and covered with dirt, slurps up between the jagged teeth in his exposed jawbone and he whimpers.
I keep eye contact with him. The coat trills and I lock it out of my mind for a moment. “Does it hurt?”
The skinhound raises a crescent-clawed paw and swipes at the cage. The black nails of it ching off the rusted metal. He shakes his head with a snort that blows wet across the metal that rests against his teeth, turning orange iron oxide into the colour of dried blood.
“Endure it for a moment then. It will not last, I promise.”
The skinhound whimpers but lays his caged head on skinless paws.
The coat shifts, settling back in place.
Lifting my arms in what could be interpreted as a signal of peaceable intent, I look the King in Yellow dead in his lazy eye and say, “Tell me what I have to do to kill that red-handed bastard and don’t you dare jerk me around.”
43
HASTUR MOTIONS WITH his hand and from the edges of the not dark I see movement. His followers struggle to their knees, movements hampered by their straitjackets. They begin crawling away from us, knees thumping dully on the cobblestones, making a rhythmic beat below the thrashing sound the thick canvas of their jackets makes rubbing against itself like a barrel of snakes being shaken. The noise crawls along my nerves and I have to fight to not let that pull my shoulders up around my neck.
To distract myself from the sensation I point at Mylendor. “Let her go.”
Mylendor snarls at me and her tongue is forked and flickering among needle-thin and curling cat teeth. Her eyes slide over to the King in Yellow and he nods. Her mouth moves and that tongue flicks up, swiping across Ashtoreth’s jawline.
“Just as I remember you tasting,” she hisses.
Ashtoreth doesn’t move, doesn’t react, frozen in place save for a tightening around her eyes.
It makes my jaw clench so hard my teeth hurt to see it.
In my ice-cold heart I put Mylendor on the list.
Her claw moves from Ashtoreth’s throat and she stands, all liquid grace and catlike, and when she reaches her full height her hand has returned to normal. She raises it to her mouth and the tips of her slender fingers are still tinged red from the pinpricks of Ashtoreth’s blood. She moves beside the King in Yellow and leans against him, offering her hand up to him.
He leans his head down.
“Just so you know”—I let my voice take a hard edge—“this is jerking me around.”
His eyes roll up at me as his head stops moving.
“Get on with it or I am going to lose my patience.”
He straightens. “What is patience to someone like me? I have all of eternity.”
“No, you don’t. You’re on my timetable. Tell me what you want for Nyarlathotep or me and mine are gone.”
“Yours?”
“Yes.”
Where is Javier?
The Man in Black chuckles.
The King in Yellow chuckles.
As if my thought calls him, he steps through the crawling mass of straitjacketed people
. He looks the same but shaky, like he’s cold. He moves over by Ashtoreth and the skinhound. She puts her arms around him and he leans against her.
Questions roil in my head like storm clouds on the open water.
“Do you want the task you have to perform, my little Heracles?” Hastur asks. “After all, you did arrive under the Yellow Sign with a purpose.”
“I’m not your little anything.” I push my questions aside. “Say it.”
He coughs into his hand and a small cloud of black dots, like tiny fruit flies, swarm from his mouth. “Have you ever been in love?”
“None of your business.”
The Man in Black says, “That is the reason she has come.”
I put my hand up toward him. “Stay out of this.”
“You are bargaining for me; I will not sit idly by.” He waggles the fingers on his red right hand and the spring grass stone glimmers. “Her paramour’s essence.”
The King in Yellow nods sagely. “So you have been in love. I assumed as much.”
“What does that mean?” The words growl out between my teeth.
He indicates with a loose-wristed hand that motions toward my face, the gold bracelet that holds the Man in Black captive shimmies around Hastur’s wrist, and for a second I am tempted to grab it. “You wear the bauble of Ishtar.” He indicates the collar around my throat. He mentions it and I suddenly feel it around my throat, heavier than it was a moment ago.
“Ashtoreth,” I correct.
“The same.” He smiles. “So you know the touch of a love goddess. As I do.”
The emphasis he makes on the word touch causes little insect wriggles along the inside of my skull.
My mouth opens to speak, but Ashtoreth beats me to it.
“The Great She of May-Eve is not a love goddess.”
The mask slips on the King in Yellow and I see a glimpse of the thing behind it, so cruelly beautiful it hurts the backs of my eyes. My vision is still in the non-magick range, so it is a real thing, not my perception. She upset him with that sentence and he slipped, just a tiny bit.
I file it away.
“That is true.” He doesn’t look at Ashtoreth, keeping his eyes on me. “She is no mere sex goddess to be passed around the court to anyone who wants to take their piece…”
He’s not watching Ashtoreth, but I am. His words are causing her to flinch, like blows that can’t be seen.
I know how much words can hurt.
Asked for it.
Deserved it.
Probably a whore.
I heard them all after the newspapers ran the story of what happened to me.
Magick boils in my throat as I speak. It coats every word and I can feel it like venom spilling down my chin. “Don’t say another goddamn word about her.”
He stops talking.
“I am done with this.” I jab my finger toward him, coat ruffling around me. “You gods and your games.”
I’ll kill every last one of you.
He doesn’t smile, but I can feel that he wants to.
“We are eternal. Games are the only thing that we have,” the Man in Black says.
“And stories,” the King in Yellow says.
“Yes, the stories,” the Man in Black agrees.
The King in Yellow smiles. “Then I will tell the story of Us.”
“You two?”
“Not Nyarlathotep and me, that would be a boring old tale of captivity and slavery and one being bent to the will of the other. You will hear instead the story of the greatest love your universe has ever been privy to.”
I shake my head. “You may be eternal, but I don’t have time for this.”
He acts as if I said nothing and continues on. “I saw her across a smoky universe…”
“Here we go again,” Mylendor hisses, licking her fingers like a cat licks its paws after a kill.
And once he begins I can’t tell him to stop.
44
“I SAW HER across a smoky universe, wild and wanton and free in her creative destruction. I found her squatting over the carcass of a planet she had hunted down, arms deep inside it scooping out the meat of it. Streams of sweetly rancid mother’s milk ran from her teats and down her sides to mingle with the honeyjuice that slickened her thighs and her aroma, oh, the scent of her, filled me with a desire I had never known!
“Desire to rage across time itself in search of one spare second.
“Desire to comb an infinite beachhead for one perfect grain of sand.
“Desire to taste every corpuscle ever circulated to find the one perfect strand of genetic substance.
“I moved to her; to get the attention of such a creature as her, I arrayed myself in all my finery, and went to her. She looked up as I approached and in that second she measured me, shook me, pressed me down, and found me wanting her. She sniffed once and her mouths smiled small, sly smiles that made thunder in my belly.
“She gave a little, mocking laugh, turned, and ran.
“The chase was on.
“I stumbled and tripped through the universe, always one step behind, just missing her around an asteroid belt, or almost touching her and then having her slip through some small crack to another layer of subspace. I chased her through singing stars and cold dead voids. I chased her through the colour out of time. I chased her through fire and ice and nothingness and vast stretches of memory and the psychic collectives of countless planets. I tore apart worlds to locate her scent when I slipped the trail.
“I thought I’d lost her a dozen times and every time I was on the edge of giving up I would hear her teasing laugh and I would know that she still wanted me to chase her, to hunt her down. That the game wasn’t just in my head.
“Finally, on plains of psychotromic emotions from a race of long-dead people I caught her.
“I latched on to her and we tumbled, lying amid all the hate and fear that had resulted in worldwide genocide on a planet on the other side of the universe.
“There we made love.
“And as I entered her I understood: I realized that she was vast and so much more than I. This was Shupnikkurat, the goddess of life and fertility; from her was everything born and from her will everything give birth. Every moment of creation in every galaxy she was there. In every piece of artwork, in every dream, in every story ever told, every curse spoken, every time anything new was made there was her touch. Her mark is upon the very fabric of existence and I was hers, completely.
“That night, lying there, cooling in our sated lust, fluids drying under a dying red sun, we had our first child.
“It was a mewling little thing, all long limbs and spine and teeth. It kicked in its amniotic fluid between us, nipping at our fingers as we stroked it and knew the fulfillment of parentage. This was ours, the combining of us brought forth into existence, and as it found its feet we pledged ourselves to each other, for all of eternity and beyond.
“And now someone has taken her, trapped her on your plane of existence, and I need you to bring my love back to me.”
45
MY EYES BURN and are wet, tears tickling as they hang from my jawline.
I don’t wipe them. I leave them there. I’m crying. Fuck it. I do that.
I lost all my shame over crying long ago and far away.
The King in Yellow keeps his head bowed, shoulders rounded so that his urine-coloured robe juts off them with protuberances that may or may not be from his wings. It looks like a sack of sticks and quivers in the low light.
Mylendor has turned her back to us, curling her spine so much she looks like a torso balanced on its end.
Ashtoreth and Javier weep in each other’s arms, Javier’s body jerking as if someone is pulling the organs from his chest.
Even Winnie the skinhound has his caged head turned sheepishly into his own shoulder.
The Man in Black is smiling.
It throws ice water on the sorrow inside me.
This feeling, all this cotton candy sticky love and adorati
on and longing, isn’t real. It’s a trick; I’ve been magicked by an elder god, one who, at best, doesn’t care about my species and, at worst, wants to actively destroy it. I contemplate the emotion in Hastur’s story of intergalactic elder god lust and I know in my heart of hearts he isn’t indifferent to humanity like he claims.
I speak and my words are breaking glass in a silent room; everyone looks up.
“Why do you need me to rescue her?”
He looks up at me. “She has been captured by your kind.”
“Send him.” I point.
Hastur glances at the Man in Black.
“You’ve got him on a string; let him go get your … what would you call her?”
“Queen, wife, lover, mistress, helpmeet.”
“No, her name.”
“Shupnikkurat, Shub Niggurath, Black Goat with—”
I throw up my hand. “I get it. Shubbie will do.”
“I would not suggest you call her such.”
“Point is, you’ve got the Crawling fucking Chaos at your beck and call. I’m just a regular little human. Seems like he could swoop in and save your…”—the word is distasteful applied to them even as I say it—“wife.”
“He cannot perform this task.”
I pull the thread. “Then he is worthless. Give him to me.”
Hastur shakes his head with a small, rueful smile. “Not so easy, Twice-Marked.”
Twice-Marked?
I don’t dwell. I move on. “Why not?”
“She is held by your kind. If they can capture her in all her glory then they can take even him.”
“Sounds like my kind of people.”
“They are humans.”
“Could be worse; they could be gods.” Spit leaves my mouth on that last word.
“Your kind are a mold, a stain, on the universe. You seek and destroy anything including yourselves. You are nothing—you are less than that; you are a nith.”
“And yet one of my kind has captured your queen and you are asking this … what did you call me and mine?… this stain for help.”
“It does gall me.”
I look him in his lazy, drifting eye and point at the Man in Black. “Do you know what he does to your kind?”
“He is my thrall; it does not matter.”