by Chuck Wendig
“This is him,” she says.
Owen suddenly looks uncomfortable.
“He’s a thin slip of a man,” Burnsy says. “All the muscle tone of a used condom. Pretty, though. Too pretty, maybe. Think he can hack it?”
“I can hack it,” Owen says, but Nora cuts him off.
“He’ll be fine. I don’t need him for his muscle tone. Just his... infernal genetics.”
“We’re not infernal—”
“You staying for breakfast?” Burnsy asks him. Then shakes his head and turns to Nora. “He staying for breakfast?”
“Sure—” Owen says.
“No,” she answers. “He was just leaving.”
“Was I?”
“You were. We’re done here. Go. I’ll call for you if I need you.”
“But—”
“Dismissed, daemon. Go.”
Owen wears a bitter smile, then nods. “Of course, my betrothed. I look forward to our very special day together.”
She mumbles a goodbye as she fishes burritos out of the bag.
When next she looks up, he’s gone.
“You’ve got a winning personality,” Burnsy says.
“I’m not here to hold his hand and wipe his butt.”
“Yeah, but—” He starts unwrapping a burrito. The smell of egg and salsa wafts. Nora’s stomach does loop-de-loops and barrel rolls, she’s so hungry. “But that’s not like you. You always have an angle. Since you need him I figured you’d be leading him on, stringing him along, tickling his—”
“I don’t need him falling for me.”
It’s then Burnsy pauses before shoving food into his mouth. He laughs. “Oh-ho-ho, I get it now. You’re trying to push him away. Protect him, maybe protect yourself from feeling anything.”
“Just eat your burrito.”
He eats his burrito. Chortling as he chews.
27
The Naga. “Snakefaces.” (Not “Snakeheads,” as some have suggested; Snakeheads is a name given to Chinese human-traffickers.) They have egg-broods born to different castes: assassins, seducers, diplomats, warriors, even poets. (Yes, truly: the poet caste. They remain hidden to most. Sometimes pretending to be human, other times pretending to be Naga or Nagini of a different caste entirely. Their poems are meant not for their lives as they live them but for the Snakefaces who come after, released posthumously. It is something of an insult among the Naga—“You must be a poet,” said to suggest weakness and chicanery. But I digress.) They have long been associated with the Candlefly clan, much as the gobbos are sometimes associated with the Hogstooth and the Trogbody golems once (though less often now) maintained an association with the Bellbook family. It is said that each family has or had some manner of creature associated with it, though why that might be is lost to time. As are some of those species and races of creature—made extinct by the inroads of man or by the other monsters of the deep dark nowhere.
— from the Histories and Mysteries of the Riven Worlds, by John Atticus Oakes
*
Esmerelda Bellbook levers the shell from one pistachio into the meager fissure of another, and uses it to pop the nut. The antiquated elevator—the hydraulics squeaking, the brassy accordion door rattling—churns and clangs downward three floors into the basement of her home. As it descends, she can feel her guts cinch up like shoelaces tied too tightly—the price for getting close, too close, to the Great Below.
The elevator dings. She discards pistachio shells into her pocket and crunches merrily on the salty, earthy treat.
A rumpled, frumpy librarian in appearance, Esmerelda licks salt from her upper lip and steps out of the elevator, and into a room that is home to three corpses.
The room is the control room to the Shifting Prison: a control tower, of sorts, with one end home to a great big window overlooking a massive maze, and the walls to the sides fixed with boxy, gray closed-circuit television monitors from the late 1980s. It is from this window—and from these screens—that the Bellbooks of San Francisco can monitor those who have betrayed the family or violated the laws of the Great Below in some way. Criminals. Deviants. Destroyers of knowledge. Crusaders of ignorance and violence. (And other grotesqueries.)
Esmerelda is coming on shift.
When she left here—not quite twelve hours ago—she did not leave corpses behind.
And yet, here there be corpses.
Two of them are golems: Korg and Brossh, two Trogbodies who have remained in the service of the Bellbooks for hundreds of years (two hundred for Korg, nearly four hundred for Brossh). Korg lies facedown on the dated basketweave carpet. His obsidian head is shattered. Hematite brains gleam from within as steam rises. Brossh sits slumped against the far wall. Head not bashed so much as cleaved in twain: a clean split down his round granite skull. Geode innards glittering. Steam also rising.
(The steam smells like burning minerals. Like ozone and volcanic ash.)
The third is a fellow Bellbook.
Malcolm Bellbook, in fact.
His shaggy, blond hair lies matted against his brow, stuck there not with blood but probably fear-sweat. His bookish nose perches over a mouth frozen in delicate surprise, which in turn hangs open above a throat slit open so cleanly it looks like a gill along the side of a shark.
Well.
Esmerelda chokes down the last pistachio and steps into the room.
This is all quite something. Quite something, indeed.
She rubs her fingers together, freeing them of salt before wiping her hands on her smock to clean off the grease. The Shining Prison has been violated. The sanctity of this place perforated like a balloon by a thrusting pin. This was a safe place.
Something cold presses against her neck.
A tiny movement—just a millimeter’s slide from left to right—illustrates that it is a blade and that blade is very, very sharp.
Blood runs from the cut.
She sucks in a breath.
“Oh,” is all she manages to say.
“You are Esmerelda Bellbook,” a voice hisses in her ear. Essssssmerelda. She smells rot, decay, the coppery tang of venom. A Snakeface.
“I... am.”
Terror fills her. I am dead.
“I require something from you.”
“I will do my best,” she says, voice trembling while her body remains perfectly still. “But killing my people is not an excellent way of asking for a f-f-favor.”
She tries to imagine how the Naga entered this room.
The duct. It’s closed now—even re-affixed to the wall. But she can see the screws have not been replaced fully. They jut out. Just slightly. The ducts were always a concern for her, but she never thought anyone knew they were here.
“They were not forthcoming. I require Viridian.”
“I have none.”
The blade moves another millimeter. The blade bites. More blood. She cries out.
“Your prison has much.”
“It does. So, please, go get some.”
“Your prison is closed to me.”
The Naga is correct. The elevator is coded to her, for she is the warden of the prison. She and two others, of which Malcolm Bellbook—his throat opened and his blood splashed on the security console beneath the big window—was not one.
She must grant one permission to use the elevator. She, of course, can never go farther than this room. But the golems they employ can—and must. The Naga must have realized that Malcom could not help. And the golems can only go down on their own, but cannot offer permission.
The Naga shoves her roughly forward—the blade blessedly taken away at the last second—and she catches herself with her hands. Pain travels up her arms to her shoulders from the shock. A cruel reminder that she is no longer a young daemon.
The Snakeface stands there, wide-mouthed, hundred-fanged. Regarding her with eyes of cloudy agate. Limbs squirming as if they are their own creatures.
The blade—a curved dagger. A blade of an assassin.
“Crawl
to the elevator,” the Naga hisses. “Tell it to carry me.”
“I can’t,” Esmerelda stammers. “I... can’t.”
The Snakeface moves fast. He’s around her leg the way an octopus binds its prey, and before she even knows what’s happening there’s a fast movement and a white arc of heat crosses the back of her foot—and then her mind catches up with the reality, he cut my tendon, he cut my Achilles’ tendon, and the foot suddenly feels like it’s a balloon at the end of her leg filling with blood. She screams.
The Snakeface squirms up her body, pulling itself along by its slithering limbs. It winds one tentacle around her throat, and with another pins her head to the floor.
It slams her skull against the carpet.
“Pay attention,” the Snakeface says. “Pay attention. This is my last job. I will not fail in it. I mustn’t! And so you will give the elevator permission to carry me into the Shifting Prison. And I will get my Viridian. If you do not do this thing—” Thisssssss thing. “—then I will wait for the next warden to show her face and I will cut her, too.”
That would be Florrie. Florrie will be on duty in twelve hours.
Sweet Florrie. Has all the backbone of a black-eyed Susan.
Will Florrie give in? Or will she die amidst her own throat-slit gurgles?
The curved dagger gleams in the fluorescent lights.
“I... won’t,” Esmerelda says, two of the hardest words she’s ever uttered—each word like a tooth pulled from her mouth.
The Naga shrieks and raises the dagger up above its head—
And freezes.
The creature’s forehead—if it can be called that, given its smooth sloped expanse settled in around a nest of coppery scales—oozes a little bead of blood. There’s a slight crunching sound, and the teensy tip of something—like an icepick—appears in the center of that blood-bead. Then it withdraws with a delicate reverse slurp.
The Naga’s eyes go cloudy. Its body slumps to the side.
The air at Esmerelda’s feet begins to shimmer. Like dust made from a broken mirror. The haze takes form, and out of nothing steps another Snakeface.
This one a Nagini.
Copper scales, like the last. Though she shakes her body and a human form emerges—and suddenly it’s a woman with wild eyes shaking a head of blood-red hair.
Esmerelda whimpers. “I don’t... I don’t understand.”
The woman twirls a blade like an icepick.
“That was my brood-mate, Senvar.”
“I st-sti-still don’t—”
“Shh. Shh. Shut up. Humans squawk like parrots. Did you know that? That’s how it sounds to me. The complaints of a dumb bird.”
“Are you going to k-k-kill me?”
“I am not going to—” And here the Snakeface plainly mocks her. “K-k-kill you. My work here is done.” The creature pauses. Even in her human guise she seems to taste the air for prey. “But I will admit curiosity. I thought my egg-brother was leaving our life behind. And yet, here he is—was—clearly on assignment.”
Esmerelda scooches backward so that she can sit up a little bit. The Snakeface woman does not stop her. “He said this was his last. His last job.”
“Last job. Hm. What is this place?”
“The Shifting Prison.”
“I have heard of it but I am unaware of its value.”
Esmerelda thinks to keep her mouth shut. Don’t say any more. But already she’s dizzy. Bewildered. And very, very tired. This woman—this thing—saved her life and now the least she can do is offer an explanation. Especially if that explanation lets her keep her life.
“The Shifting Prison is where we keep our criminals. Deviants. Monsters against the family and—” She winces as fresh pain pinches at her heel. “And sometimes against all the daemon families.”
“Why do you call it the Shifting Prison? May I guess? Tectonic movement?”
“No. It’s because the bodies—they change. The flesh of the prisoners begins to... shift. Flesh begins to calcify. Starting with the extremities. The digits are a marvelous green, an emerald green, and if you pulverize them—”
“Viridian.”
“Yes. Yes.”
“So this is death row.”
“Not always. Sometimes we remove them after we have harvested some powder. So that they lose only fingers, toes, maybe nose and lips.”
The Snakeface ponders. “How horrible.” But she says it as though she is impressed. Pleased, even. “I am leaving now.”
The monster turns to exit.
“Wait!” Esmerelda cries out—louder than she means, and certainly louder than is necessary given the size of the room. “How did you get in here?”
“The duct.”
“But the duct hasn’t changed since I got down here. It’s still attached.”
“Oh, I’ve been here the whole time.”
“Wh... what? Why did you let him do this to me?”
The Snakeface smiles. “I didn’t come here to save you, daemon. I came to kill my brother and, out of curiosity, see what he was up to. I only intervened before your death so that I might ask you questions I could not ask of the golems or your dead friend.”
“But—”
The Nagini shudders again, and once more she becomes the monster. Her tentacles move quickly, like whips, curling around the vents and ripping the cover off the wall with a dented clang and a rattling bang.
Esmerelda sobs softly as the thing flings itself upward into the dark with great ease, shrinking herself down into a much smaller size.
The monster is gone. And Esmerelda Bellbook bleeds.
28
The Five Occulted Pigments all have their purpose. But rumors exist that they have other purposes, too, if you know how to unlock them. Certainly the key used to unlock the doors to Interstitium are one such example: what if you combined the Pigments in other ways?
— from the Histories and Mysteries of the Riven Worlds, by John Atticus Oakes
*
Hrothk shakes off his cloak. Cranes his neck. His bones grind together like millstones. He turns his gun-hand up, pops the fat cylinder. A red snow of rust flakes mixed with pulverized quartz (like glittering flakes of sea salt) form little dunes underneath. Empty shells eject. Clang and clatter. Roll off.
He looks around his chamber here in the back of the Lupercal. It’s not much. Just a card table and a cot—a cot which he does not use because not only does he not require it, but even sitting on it would cause it to fold up around him like a pair of clapping hands. What matters now is that he is alone. He gets up. Checks the other rooms, too. Burnsy isn’t here. Nora isn’t here. He is safe.
The golem enters his chamber and with his one true hand plucks the crystalline eye from his skull and sets it onto the card table.
Swimmy blue light shines from the socket.
A shape appears in that light. Like a shape blocking it. A shadow shifting.
A voice emerges as if from the air—a deep, basso rumble coming from all sides of him. Thrumming deep in his stony bones.
Have you discerned the nature of the girl?
“No,” Hrothk says. “But signs point to a grand inversion.”
Then she must be dispatched.
“Not yet. That is not how we do things.”
You presuppose to tell me our own creeds?
“If I must. We are only to act when we are closest to the truth as we are allowed.”
The light flashes. Threads of darkness bloom like clouds of squid ink, then disappear. A hesitation, then: You are helping her.
“I am simply playing my part, as we always do. We learn nothing ten feet back from the brink. We must be at its edge. Staring down. Only then can we see what waits.”
Another hesitation. Another dark pulse.
You like her.
Hrothk sees his way to the truth of it. He is not a creature given over to illusions. He does like her. Golems find no pleasure in romantic love, and sex is not an act that he would even understand.
But loyalty: that is a golem feature, a bond they can share with others. A very real—if intangible—tie that is hard to deny. And he feels it for the girl. He is loyal to her.
But not to a fault.
He has taken his vows. He is loyal to the order above all else. Not just the order of knights to which he belongs—but the sacred order, the one binding all things. The order that keeps the howling, gibbering wolves of chaos at bay.
Here, though, a curious thing—
Despite his loyalty, he finds himself lying.
“I have no feelings for the girl.”
So you will end her when the time comes.
“If. If the time comes.”
The time always comes, young Hrothk.
“Yes, of course, Knight-Commander.”
And then the light shining from his eye goes dark. Aristovilnus ends the communication with little courtesy. As has been his way since the beginning.
Hrothk reaches for the crystal spires that form his eye—
And he hears the scuff of a footstep behind him.
His gun-arm hangs empty.
One eye out of his head.
But what choice does he have? He stands and spins—
Just as Burnsy clocks him with a chair.
*
Burnsy thinks, Boom. Golem Number Two, down for the count. He should really earn the name The Golemslayer. First that dumb fuck back at the Yonder Market. And now this betraying basket of boulders, Hrothk.
The chair snaps in half.
Hrothk just sits there. Oversized, underbitten jaw grinding.
The Trogbody growls.
Uh-oh.
Burnsy raises the piece of chair again—
But the Knight of Aristovilnus grabs him by the collar, and launches him up and then flings him down—like he’s made of nothing more than burlap and bean-bags. Burnsy yelps and crashes down on the cot. It snaps closed on him.
Hrothk moves slowly, deliberately, but Burnsy doesn’t have time to wriggle free. The Trog presses both sides of the flimsy bed and curls them inward. Cheap aluminum bends and groans. Screws and bolts ping against wall, floor, and ceiling. He folds Burnsy up like a burrito.