by Chuck Wendig
He sniffs. “A fair point. Good.” Ernesto sits. “We have things we need to accomplish before the Equinox.”
“Like, say, finding me a hubby?”
“Clearly. And tomorrow we will meet and I will have three—maybe four—choices for you in that. Two of them have to fly in. One will drive. The other remains uncertain. But that’s not really the entirety of it.”
“Do tell.”
“You realize that the wedding cannot be here? In this cave?”
She bites at a fingernail. “Yes. It has to be... in some... in-between place.”
“The interstitium. An interstitial realm. A membrane between Above and Below. It is the land of pillars. We must build a key to access this place.”
What? She didn’t know this.
But again—why let that on?
She nods without, she believes, showing her hand. “Yes. I’m aware.”
“So you already have each of the Pigments,” he says, and here she sees in a face already marked with deep lines and stretch marks a bit of the old Candlefly: a glimpse of glee, a flash of cruelty, the curl of the lips that suggests he knows he has one up on her.
She says nothing. Nora thinks this to be some gambit she can’t pick apart.
But he sits there, too. Silent as the sand and stone.
“Tell me,” she finally says.
“You need a wedding ring,” is what he says.
“What?”
“That is the key. A wedding ring. A pair of them, actually. One for you, one for your chosen husband. This ring, this key, must be forged of the Five Occulted Pigments.”
The bottom drops out of her gut. And with it falls hope, spiraling away like whorls of glowing cinders going dark. All five Pigments? She’s never seen Viridian and didn’t they just talk about how impossible it is to get Caput Mortuum?
Candlefly must see the look on her face. He chuckles. “Your blood will serve as the Pigment of the Void,” he says. “That one, we already have.”
The wind, again billowing in her sails. “That’ll work?”
“It should. We have no certainties in this. Just old books and tablets. The ravings of madmen, the dreams of the golemfolk. But it should.” He closes his eyes, seems to be enjoying the sudden warm breeze that fills the grotto. “Blue is easy to come by, obviously. Red is becoming easier. The two problems will be Ochre and Viridian.”
Everything feels dizzy. Her focus balanced on the tip of a wobbling knife.
Candlefly says, “I will find you Viridian. You will have to find the Ochre. I have no easy access to it but it exists, as you well know.”
Nora nods. “I’ll find it.” Somebody’s got big balls, she thinks of herself.
“Good. Meet me here again tomorrow. Same time. I will have my picks for your husband. From there you will whittle and winnow those choices to one.”
She nods. Says nothing. She feels suddenly worried.
Nora retreats back to the passageway behind the rocks.
Candlefly calls after her, “Goodbye to you too, Miss Pearl.”
He’s mocking her.
*
Hrothk is picking at his gun-hand with a pair of tweezers. Unmooring little calcium deposits and pebbly bits from the mechanisms. “If I do not do this,” he says, not looking up as she enters the room, “the weapon will cease to work.”
They’re staying at the bar. Renting a few rooms at the Lupercal—on the Candlefly dime. This room is Hrothk’s, and it is an ascetic’s chambers: he has pressed the mattress against the wall and sleeps only on the box spring. And for him, sleeping is really just sitting cross-legged while the flashing lights behind those quartz-spire eyes go dark for a time. No breathing. No sound. In essence, he is a statue.
“Why are you still here?” she asks him.
“Hn?”
“With me. I don’t get it. To you I’m probably just some... some dumb girl, some dippy twat trying to claw her way out of Hell. You were on a mission when we met. You were doing something, some pilgrimage. What happened?”
“A pilgrimage is rarely a straight line,” he says, not looking away from the tweezers. A little calcite pebble plicks onto the floor, forming scree with the others.
“But why? Why here? Why me?”
He stops with the tweezers and lifts his head, though does not turn his gaze toward her. Is this a thoughtful pose? She doesn’t know. Golems are pretty much the definition of inscrutable. Nora prides herself on being hard to read but these assholes are bonafide stone-faced.
“Our journeys bonded together,” he says, after some time. “The welder’s spark of battle on the 13 Train fixed our metals to each other. Further conflict only strengthened that bond. For the time, as a Knight of Aristovilnus, I am compelled by you. I go where Hell’s breath takes me. And now it takes me to you.”
“You’re sure about that? Because I’m going to ask you to do something for me.”
Now he turns. His head tilted, almost thoughtfully. A facsimile of curiosity, like a robot playing at being human. “Do tell.”
“I need Golden Gate.”
“The Ochre Pigment?”
She clucks her tongue. “Nnnnyeah.” Nora winces. “And I don’t know how—”
“You do not know how to procure a sample.”
Exhale. “Yeah. You were right about the, ahhh, the inter... the middle realm. The membrane place. The place of pillars?”
“The Interstitium. You need a key.”
“And the key needs Ochre.”
“I can do this,” he says.
“You’re sure? We’ve got two weeks.”
“I am sure.”
The two of them stand there for a little while.
Hrothk finally says, “Is there more?”
No, nothing, she thinks, but then she steps into the room and suddenly she’s talking—like some deeper, dumber part of her brain has taken control, like there’s an override deep in her systems and some shadow operative is pulling levers and hitting switches. And suddenly she’s saying:
“I don’t have many friends.” Do you have any friends? a small voice chides. “And given everything—you’ve saved my ass like, too many times to count now—”
“I can count them if you’d like. One: the 13 Train. Two: the goblins in the Screwthread Swamp. Three: the Blood Falls underneath New Mexico. Four: the colony of roach-rats in the sewers before we—”
She laughs. “Okay, yeah, we don’t actually need to count.”
Hrothk shrugs.
“I’m just saying, you’ve done this stuff selflessly. And you haven’t judged me one bit. And man, if you knew my life, all you’d see is judgment. Everybody has an opinion on what I’m doing wrong with my life. My mother before she died. My father before he died. Teachers. Friends. Ex-friends. Boyfriends. Girlfriends. Mortal foes. Mailmen. Dogs I pass by on the street. Feels like everyone is picking me apart way you’re picking at your hand-cannon there.”
“We are forever standing in the judgment of others. What matters is how we deal with that. It is our job to judge the judges. To be critical of criticism and to use higher reasoning to see through to the truth. Those who judge us are sometimes right in pointing out our flaws. But sometimes what they’re really doing is pointing out their own.”
She smiles. A strange feeling. “You’re wise for a big dude made of rock.”
“Golem are capable thinkers but we have been taught over millennia—judged, if you will—that we are dumb as the slab and slag that forms our bodies.”
“Sorry to hear that. You remind me a bit of my father. I think maybe he was smarter than anybody gave him credit for, too.”
“He judged you, but perhaps you judged him, too.”
“Perhaps, rock man, perhaps.”
She steps into the room, then pauses.
“What is it?” he asks.
“I thought about hugging you, but I’m not really a hugger. And I think it’d be weird. Like a snake hugging a mountain or something.”
“Then w
e should just nod at each other, as cohorts.”
“As cohorts.”
He nods at her.
She nods at him.
And that’s that.
25
The Candlefly family. A family of some prominence, especially now. They have never lost the taste of blood in their mouths. They are as venomous as the Snakefaces who have in the past served them. Once, they were the advisors to the Glasstowers, serving in this role for a thousand years. The glow of their little fly lighting the way for all the daemons of all the clans (by which we mean the Glasstowers first and only). But they have always seen that role as but one rung up the cosmic ladder—and their reach for that rung was too quick, too obvious, a task that should have taken two thousand years instead of a single millennia, and their treachery became tired. The Glasstowers pushed them to the margins, and with that, their bright star reached the apex of its arc and began to fall once more toward earth. They scrambled, of course, like a man about to lose his grip on the cliff’s edge. They became increasingly erratic, individuals going off and trying to secure a way forward with efforts of drama and desperation (the Calcutta Metro incident, the Tokyo Sarin attack, the Vithra Incident in New York). It was this desperate scrabbling that, in the end, saved them. They were hungry, and they were master manipulators. The thing worth noting with manipulators is, curiously, once you realize what they are, they become strikingly easy to manipulate.
— from the Histories and Mysteries of the Riven Worlds, by John Atticus Oakes
*
Marriage.
Candlefly does not sleep that night.
Because he can only think about marriage.
He should be thinking about Nora. And the three he has chosen for this, and what will happen if she chooses one of the two he does not care for instead of the one he does.
But as he lies in a dingy, rat-fucked motel room—
(The Paradise Coast Motel—sounds nice as long as you can get past the stained carpets, the stained sheets, the nicotine stink, the mouse turds in the sink.)
—all he can think of is Renata.
Renata Glasstower. His wife. Ex-wife now.
He loves her. He hates her. He needs her.
The betraying bitch. The beautiful queen. His friend. His foe.
Mother and monster.
The marriage was arranged. Nora Pearl has unknowingly seized on that—all the Candlefly marriages are arranged. The daemons of this family are not allowed to choose their own mates because love, while wonderful, cannot be the foundation upon which such an alliance is built. And that, truly, is what it is: an alliance. The pairing of two players for optimal effect. Sometimes that means two daemons with great power bonded together and forged into a sharper, meaner, hungrier blade. Sometimes that means a pawn is placed with a queen so that she may protect him and elevate him.
Ernesto was just such a pawn.
How nice it would be to believe still that he was always a player.
He thought that way, once. Weak people often think themselves strong. Imagining one’s eventual ascent—using the shattered heads and broken legs of your detractors as stairs—is an excellent way to sleep comfortably at night.
But the reality was always that he was a weak-kneed fool. Never weak-minded, or so he likes to hope, but he was born into this life as the child of Erasmo and Catalina Candlefly. Erasmo, long said to have a little Bellbook blood in him. Catalina, pure as any of his clan could be, and nearly as vicious, too. Too eager, was she. Too hungry for a taste of true power, and so she made a move so plain, so blatant—riling up the Hogstooth thugs and attacking a Glasstower lighthouse? Bold. And foolish.
But Catalina always was a bloodthirsty one.
It was, unfortunately, her blood that spilled.
They locked her in a glass case. Eight-sided. A lantern of sorts.
They cut her, first. A hundred little slashes. Bloodletting by tiny knives.
And then they loosed a single Knifemouth Fly into her glass prison. The Knifemouth is a hell-fly, bred supposedly by goblins, with eyes that glow orange in the center and black at the edges like magma crawling up out of volcanic earth. But its eyes are not what matters—what matters is the fly’s mouth. A pair of mandibles, sharp as anything, quicker than a hair’s breadth of a single second. They do not inject and slurp blood as a mosquito does. Their mouth slashes. Blood flows freely. And then they drink, and when they are done drinking, they barf up a little clot of pinworm maggots into the wound. The worms feed and crawl. They slither into the body and...
Candlefly shudders. Sweating. He rolls over and over again. Cold. Hot.
He stood there while they did this to his mother. Him and his sister, Milena. Among a crowd. They watched as the fly circled. As their mother, already weakened from blood loss, swatted feebly at the flying thing. The cuts across her were just icing on this bitter cake—doing the work for the fly so that it did not run the risk of giving her a chance to smash it as it stopped to do its biting work.
The fly landed on a cut. Wriggled inside. Her smacking at the arm even as the fly did its work—Ernesto could not see within that wound but he knew what the Knifemouth Fly does. He knew how that clot of little worms chewed into her. And swam upstream, feeding on her blood.
The Knifemouth maggots work fast.
The crowd gathered and watched.
Milena, his sister, stared in rapt fascination. (Milena hated Mother.)
Ernesto wept. An act that would earn him scorn for a decade after.
The crowd, hungry, eager, began to stomp its feet. And chant. And clap. Mother leaned back against the glass. Weak. Given to delirium. The worms already doing their work. She cried out. A strangled sound. She slumped, but then stiffened. The cords in her neck tight as a gallows rope.
The seizure hit her like a wave buffeting a boat.
As her body shook, her mouth wrenched wide.
And flies spilled out. Hundreds of them. A black, buzzing cloud. Obscuring her so that all she was to Ernesto was a shape behind the swarm.
He ran. He couldn’t take it. Milena stayed, and later would taunt him with what happened next: the new flies simply doubled back upon her, finding more cuts, more entrance points for their horrid squirming children. Again and again until they all took their measure of flesh, until Catalina Candlefly was just a sagging pile of bones and skin hidden beneath a living mound of gleaming black flies.
That stayed with him. Not just as a memory. Not just as a taunt. But as an excuse to keep him down. He was at once both the child of Catalina and Erasmo. Erasmo, a bespectacled Bellbook. Catalina, a vicious kestrel. If anyone wanted to dismiss him, they would simply conjure the name of one of his parents—whichever one applied at the time. Ernesto, you are weak in spirit like your father. Ernesto, you are not to be trusted, like your mother. And so he was ever kept at the margins.
His own marriage, then, was an arrangement never meant to be in his favor. He was a gift—a gift not in the way a bauble or a piece of furniture is a gift, but a gift in the way one might offer up a hound or a bull. An animal of some value, but also a creature with some responsibility. And so he was given to Renata Glasstower. A man with some money and minimal power. A Band-Aid on rent relations between the two families.
He was meant to be a house husband. She would give him children, but he would raise them. He would cook. And clean. And do what needed doing.
Then they fell in love.
That was quite unexpected.
Renata was strong. Reminded him of his mother.
And like his mother, she courted treachery against the Glasstower family. Except they were her own people, and she was tired of playing their games. He was a doorway into the Candlefly clan: capable, spiteful, a knife she could hold against the throats of her own people. She helped him concoct his plans while they raised their two children together—Oscar a child like his own father, Adelina like his own mother or sister.
He wanted to be strong, not weak like the other men—weak branc
hes in a crooked tree. And so he came to New York with designs on flipping the script, turning the table, bringing the god-worms to earth so that he could renew the Candlefly lease with them. Give the Candleflys the backing of the only gods he knew. Grant them access once more to the true power of—if not access to—the Hell beneath their feet.
It all went poorly.
Thanks to Nora Pearl and her car-dent of a father.
Though maybe his plan was always too big, too strange. Simplicity was key.
This time, things feel simple. Attainable.
Though not without nuance. Small complexities that, if not managed, will become major entanglements. A jagged line into a snarling labyrinth. The world is against him here. But he is fortunate. This is not his plan. He doesn’t need to be at its head. He only needs to be along for the ride, pushing it this way, pulling it that way. He is not the captain of the boat—he is merely the vessel’s rudder.
And he wonders if that’s what he’s been all along.
What power it is to steer the ship.
Then comes a pounding at the door.
Aurora, most likely.
He rolls over, the sheets coiled like sea serpents around mid-leg. The alarm clock tells him it’s already five in the morning. He’s been up all night, thinking. Not sleeping.
Aurora, speaking through the door, “They are here, Ernesto.”
She is one of those complexities he will have to manage. She is his keeper, his minder. But she is not his ally.
And if she cannot become his ally, then she may not be allowed to remain.
*
Over the Pacific, gray clouds hang, pulled down by spears of rain—rain that hasn’t yet reached them, though the rumble of thunder threatens otherwise.
Nora looks at the three young men Candlefly has brought with him.
She sees these men not as a selection but as a game. A chess match with only three pieces on the board. Not that she was ever very good at chess. Or maybe it’s that game of cups—a stone hidden underneath one, juggled and shifted and spun around.