by Chuck Wendig
She just doesn’t feel that.
What she feels is fear. And guilt. And shame.
She makes another sound, this one wordless—a mantra-like utterance of frustration made and repeated until the tears at her eyes finally dry up.
And then she presses her palms to the rock just to feel the coldness of the smooth granite and then—
Her consciousness slips—just a little bit, like a bit of food coloring swirling with water, an accidental drop that pulls more of her away than she expected, and she can suddenly feel the Great Below open up all around her, all its channels and fissures—
Someone’s coming.
Fast.
She doesn’t know who or why—only that they’re invisible. Moving silently and swiftly. Nora doesn’t know much. But she knows to be afraid.
She turns and she runs.
Nora’s not limber or athletic. But being plugged into Hell like she is? She knows where every craggy lip and crevice lurks—she doesn’t need light to see, doesn’t need to see the shattered limestone pillar ahead because she feels it in the back of her mind like an itch. She could run this maze with her eyes closed.
But nothing makes her faster. Nothing makes her better than what her body allows. And whoever it is that’s coming after her, they move with a terrifying swiftness, like a bird through trees, cutting a straight line through the diabolical maze.
Still—
Hell gives her the head’s up. Her pursuer is right behind her. Nora can feel the disturbed air, can feel how Hell’s own breath is interrupted—
She skids to a halt, flattens herself against the wall—
A shape, darker than the darkness, leaps past her.
Nora feels a surge of adrenalin. A taste of victory.
She does a hard turn, runs back the other way—
But something ropes around her ankle. Whip-like, but thick—a serpent’s coil.
She pitches forward, crying out.
Another unseen serpent cinches around her neck, hoisting her up and spinning her around. Her windpipe tightens and her face throbs with captive blood.
The air shimmers like glitter tossed in a beam of sunlight. The leering visage of a Snakeface emerges from nothing. Wide mouth. Comb-tine teeth. Flicking tongue. The Naga is braced high up, tentacle limbs mooring her to the walls and ceiling as she draws Nora up, up, up, hanging the girl there as one limb leaves the wall and with a glinting twirl of metal reveals an icepick-like blade.
But the blade stops short of Nora’s temple.
The Snakeface whispers, “You.”
And it drops Nora.
She falls ten feet. Her legs collapse underneath her—one ankle twists and an electric spark of pain goes all the way to her hip. Next thing she knows, the ground rushes up. Her tailbone vibrates with the hit.
The Snakeface drops, silent as a leaf falling.
Then the human guise emerges.
“Sirinas,” Nora croaks, rubbing her ankle.
“Silly little Nora Pearl,” the Nagini hisses. “Hello, girl.”
“What a coincidence,” Nora says. “I didn’t know you shopped here. Great mall. Little dark. You should try the soft pretzels on the second level—next to the Macy’s and across from the abattoir—”
“Someone sent me to kill you but they did not say who you were.”
“Candlefly?” She can’t imagine why, but it also wouldn’t surprise her one bit.
Sirinas chuckles, and returns her blade to—well, wherever it is that the blade goes. “While my caste is often associated with their clan, no. My time serving those honorless maggots has long passed. My brood-mate brother entwined himself with them. There are some serpents that even I will not lie with.”
Nora winces as she stands, and Sirinas offers a hand. A hand that, when Nora takes it, feels like five little rattlesnake tails held fast in her grip.
She leans into the wall, favoring her twisted ankle. “Who, then?”
“Another daemon family. The Bellbooks.”
“I know of them, but don’t know them. Why would they kill me?”
“They said you will be the cause of the grand inversion.”
“Right. That.”
“Are you? Is that true?” Here the Snakeface steps closer and again Nora sees the blade—not out in the open, but flashing behind her arm. Tucked backward. Like a cobra reared back and ready to strike.
“No. Yes. I dunno. It doesn’t matter.”
Sirinas hisses, “This matters very much. So if you want to pass by me with your lungs unpunctured, you will explain yourself.”
“It doesn’t matter because I’m not doing it. Not... getting married. It was a dumb schoolgirl idea, anyway. Chasing rumors. At the end it’s like, oh, hey, the way to solve all your problems is to get married. It’s what everyone tells girls. You just need to grow up, get a man, put a ring on it. And of course the real deal is, this marriage like all other marriages is... junk. Junk. Venom like what you carry around in your mouth all day. So, I’m not going through with it. I’m going to remain trapped down here in Hell until something finally kills me or I lose my mind—” A sudden cry erupts from her, a griefstruck bleat that she cannot contain and does not expect. Now she’s sobbing, eyes pressed into the crook of her arm, shoulders shaking. “Damnit, I don’t want to cry.”
She does this for a while. Trying to bite it back. But it’s like trying to kick at an avalanche—it just keeps coming until there’s nothing left.
Sirinas remains still. Staring all the while.
“I’m not going to hug you,” the Snakeface says.
“I appreciate that.”
They stand like that for a while. Nora leaning against the walls of Hell—the hard, unforgiving walls doing their best to support her. Sirinas staring with the unblinking, uncaring gaze of a sociopathic assassin. Though she can’t really be a sociopath, Nora thinks. She hides it, but the Snakeface has emotions. She cared about her brother and felt stung by his betrayal. And even here, even now, she’s offering mercy to Nora.
Snakefaces have hearts. How cute. Or maybe they have two, three hearts. Nora doesn’t know what waits amidst such monstrous viscera and she doesn’t care to find out.
One thing she wants to know, though:
“Why don’t you want this?” Nora asks.
“Want what? You crying? Because your weakness upsets me.”
“It upsets me, too,” Nora says, feeling sudden and disturbing kinship with this creature. “But what I mean is, why wouldn’t you want the grand inversion, Above is Below and Downstairs is now Upstairs?”
The Nagini does not pause when she says, “Because things have order. They are beholden to patterns. Reality exists because of those patterns in balance. Something so simple as trees taking in carbon dioxide and giving off oxygen is so vital a system. It is, if you can forgive the reference, like everything is married to everything else. Start mucking about and flipping switches, everything goes haywire. Even a little imbalance throws the whole thing into chaos. We are Naga. We have castes. We have roles. My brother thought to subvert that order and find himself a new role. He killed to meet that role and so he had to be killed in return. So, no, I am not a fan of imbalance. I do not seek any kind of disgusting ‘inversion.’”
“Tell me how you really feel,” Nora says, offering a small laugh.
“I did,” the Snakeface says.
“It was a joke.”
“It wasn’t funny.”
“I thought it was—you know, never mind. I don’t really have the emotional throughput to hash this out right now. I should go.” Nora puts some pressure on her foot. Dull pain goes sharp again. But she’ll manage. “I’ll see you. Thanks for not, y’know, killing me and stuff.”
“What will you do now?”
“I go back. Get my things. And I run away. You?”
“I do what I’ve always done. I kill for glory and favor.”
“What will they say when you report I’m not dead?”
Sirinas sig
hs. “I will have to offer them recompense. Three deaths for one should do it. I may be able to negotiate that down to two deaths for your life because we reached an agreement that has you changing your course away from the grand inversion.”
“Thanks.”
“It’s nothing. Go. Run, little girl, run.”
More like limp, little girl, limp.
And limp she does. She doesn’t have to look to feel Sirinas fade from view and slither back through the cracks and cubbyholes of the Great Below.
35
The Vollrath. Reaper-cloaks. Do you know who they are? They are the first kings and queens of man. All the leaders of all the world’s earliest forgotten civilizations. Those who sat on the thrones at Katafasi Hayuk, at Eje Odo, at Domo Boho. They were drawn into darkness, lured into the dark. They gave birth to those who would eventually become the daemons—children that would go against their own parents, who would go against the god-worms themselves. The Vollrath fell from grace—these kings and queens lost their thrones and gave their souls to the Great Below. They serve now as knights of the Hungry Ones—just shadows of who they once were. And yet they still remain parents, and still they continue to mate and have children all their own, black, dark squirming larvae...
— from the Histories and Mysteries of the Riven Worlds, by John Atticus Oakes
*
Nora feels hollowed out. She’s tired. Older than her twenty years on this little blue-green globe spinning wildly around the bright ball of fire she won’t see again for a while. She’ll pack her things and find another cenote some day, some low place where she can sit out and look once more at the sun. But until that happens, she’s going to be stuck here. In the Deep Downstairs. The doorway out locked, the exits all blocked.
She’s packing up. Pitching her things in the backpack without much care—no need to fold, no reason to sit here and do this right. The wedding is—god, it’s in two days, isn’t it? She has to get out of here.
Where to go after this? Who knows.
Maybe she’ll find Hrothk and Burnsy again. She’ll probably wend her way back to New York because, even in Hell, home is home. Maybe she’ll see some things along the way. Hrothk said something about a quartz “waterfall” somewhere south of Minneapolis. And an old city made of bottles—a place for Half-and-Halfs called Middle Mile. Maybe, she tells herself, she can find some beauty down here yet.
Then again, maybe she’ll get taken by goblins, used as an egg receptacle. Or maybe she’ll be bitten by a cankerpede and die from a fever or parasites. Or she’ll end up wandering around lost for eternity and bash her own head in with a rock.
She sighs. Then hoists the backpack over her shoulder.
“Going somewhere?”
It’s the bartender. Kinsey. The Peacock. Her voice is a flutter, a warble.
“Oh. Yeah.” Nora shrugs. “I... I’m outta here.”
“Sorry to hear that. You were a good tenant.”
“I owe you anything?”
“You’re paid up.” Kinsey hesitates. “But it’s not me you should worry about.”
“What?” She tenses. Suddenly, she feels something—
No, no, no—
The walls shimmer and shift. Distorting, as if they’re just made of fabric—or worse, skin—and bulging out as if something’s about to pop through the membrane.
And she knows who, or what, is coming.
She feels the Vollrath before she sees them.
Empty black shadows. Like black cloaks floating without bodies to fill them. Long arms with knife fingers. Dead button eyes that look right through her.
Three of them.
They emerge from the walls and hover there, just out of range.
“You fucking bitch,” Nora spits.
Kinsey shrugs. “Sorry, sweets. I owe debts. I’m compromised.” She looks genuinely sad. “I guess you owe debts, too.”
The reaper-cloaks drift and sway, as if they’re clouds of octopus ink floating in the deep sea. Nora doesn’t know who they are, but she remembers what they can do. They stick those sharp fingers into your heart and mind—into your soul for all she knows—and it’s like sticking a USB cable right into everything that you are. They know you then. They connect to you and drink down all that you know.
She thought they were gone. She’s tried to find them out there but... nothing.
But they’ve been here all along, haven’t they?
Nora runs.
She breaks into a hard sprint, flinging her bag hard. It catches Kinsey in the chin, and the bartender’s limbs flail and she warbles a peacock shriek as she goes down.
But Nora isn’t fast enough. The Vollrath move ten feet in a finger-snap. All three of them are around her, and their knives are out, their eyes flashing. She feels sluggish, like she’s running in cold honey, and the knifes thrust forward as she screams—
It’s like a twisted piece of cold iron rebar jammed down through the top of her head all the way to her feet. Beyond that, even—through her very identity, through her spirit and her ghost and whatever else comprises her intangible self. Everything is bleak, black, and she hears winds howling and voices whispering—chanting—in the dark. Two of the Vollrath hold her in place as everything lists toward total darkness. But the third, the third she sees fluttering up, a soundless void—
It’s holding something.
A black thing, like a squid. Tentacles twitching and reaching.
Reaching for her.
The Vollrath grabs her jaw with its knife-fingers and starts to open her mouth.
*
Splash.
Warm, briny water. Sea water. Salt. Stinging.
She gasps, awake.
She blinks the water away. Sees Ernesto standing there. Striations and wrinkles marking his face with deep lines, stretch marks, bands of discoloration. He’s shaking his head, clucking his tongue. “Nora, Nora, Nora.”
Snarling, she spits salt water at him.
It’s his turn to blink it away. And he raises a pair of fingers to dab away the rivulet of seawater. But where he wipes his away, she is unable.
Her hands are bound above her head. Collarbones aching. Shoulders burning.
Behind him, the line of the sun rises past the mouth of the rocky cove over the flat line of the chalkboard sea. They’re in the cenote. He brought her back. And if this is sunrise, then it’s a day after the Vollrath ambushed her.
The reaper-cloaks.
She struggles to choke back tears and hide her fear.
“You disappoint me,” he says. “You were leaving us.”
“I can’t do it. Won’t do it.”
“Oh?”
“You know what happens, don’t you. If Owen and I...” But she can already see on his face that, yes, he does know.
“The grand inversion.”
“So you don’t care?”
“Care?” He shrugs. “I’ll admit some trepidation. Change is always a bit frightening. But what can I say? I’ve been trapped in Hell. My death hanging there in the pit was the perfect embodiment of Xeno’s Paradox—I withered away by half every day, which means I never truly died, but was always locked in torment. And that torment continues. My wife has left me. Taken my children. My status in my own family has fallen so far a careless step would crush it underfoot. The Candlefly clan needs a win. I need a win. The inversion could help us. And if we can command the god-worms—”
“That’s a big if.”
“What is the choice otherwise? Go to back to Hell? No. I don’t think so.”
“But it’s wrong. The world—”
“You are less than I expected. Do you know that? You come across all knife-sharp and gunmetal. A wicked tongue, a cool temper, catty and capable. Like the best of us daemons. A Candlefly in spirit, if not in name. I admit I was growing almost fond of the idea of having you in the family. But the truth is, it’s all a show. You’re an actress. All of this—” And here he does a dismissive flourish of his fingers. “—is just a trick of the
light. You seem hard but really? You are soft. You have a weakness in you. Cloying and sweet, like a little cup of crème brulee. Just crack the top with a spoon and it’s all custard underneath. But that’s fine. I can use that.”
“Fuck. You. I won’t do it. I won’t submit to marriage. You know that’s how it works. I need to want it. I need to say yes.” She thrusts out her chin, defiant.
“You are correct. Here you might think I am powerless. I can force you physically to do as I wish but to actually submit, to commit to marriage with mind, heart, and words, well...” His mouth forms dark line across his tight skin. “I am not so powerless after all. Do you remember the Vollrath? Reaching into your mouth, ready to deposit one of their squirming larvae?”
Her guts heave. She makes a griefstruck, horrified sound and tries not to gag.
Ernesto laughs. “Don’t worry. They didn’t put it in. It remains an option on the table, of course. The larvae tend to make one quite suggestible, for going against them causes their hosts grave pain of body, mind, and soul. But that imperfect solution may not be necessary and so I had my new friend, Kinsey, stop them.”
Nora tries not to show her relief. She cannot have him seeing her weakness.
Candefly thrusts up a finger. “Ah! But the reason that I will not need the larvae is that I have something better. As I said, I know your weaknesses. I know your heart, much as you’d like us all to think you were born without one.”
And here he reaches in his back pocket. She hears the flip and flutter—
He holds up a photo.
She gasps.
It’s her father. Mookie Pearl. Behind a set of ornate, iron bars. Snarling, face pressed against them—he’s been beaten to piss, his nose broken, lips split, some kind of splayed-out burn across his scalp. Shoulder all torn up. He’s reaching through the bars for whoever is holding the camera—his knuckles are raw, red, freshly scabbed. He’s shirtless, too, and in the center of his chest is something she doesn’t understand. A metal ring, a hole with a little door on tiny hinges...