Elephants and Corpses

by Kameron Hurley

  “And if there’s no money?”

  Tera spat. “Then you’ll have to settle for revenge.”

  Falid, the little trumpeting elephant. “It was not necessary,” Nev said.

  “It never is,” Tera said.

  * * *

  The cult of God’s eye was housed in a massive temple three rings further up into the city. They had no money to wash and dress the part, so they waited for cover of night, when the only thing illuminating the streets were the floating blue bodies of the nightblinders; beautiful, thumb-sized flying insects that rose from their daytime hiding places to softly illuminate the streets until nearly dawn.

  In the low blue light, the craggy red sandstone temple threw long shadows; the grinning eyeless faces carved into its outer walls looked even more grotesque. There was just enough light for Nev to notice that the crossbowmen at the parapet above the gate carried quivers of bolts with purple plumes, just like the ones the boy had used to shoot him and Falid.

  “Over or under?” Nev said.

  Tera chewed on a wad of coca leaves. Whatever viral thing the wizards had given her was finally clearing up. “Under,” she said.

  They slipped away from the temple’s front doors and walked four blocks up to the broken entrance to the sewers. Many had been left unrepaired after the last storm. As they huffed along the fetid brick sewer, hunched over like miners, Nev said, “Why’d you want to talk to the dead, really? We don’t need to talk to the dead.”

  “You don’t,” Tera said. She slapped the side of the sewer and muttered something. She had a better sense of direction than he did. “I do.”

  “You can’t think the dead are still there, if I can run around in their bodies.”

  “I think there’s always a piece of us still there, in the bodies. In the bones.”

  “You’ll talk to me when I’m dead, then? You’re, what—eighty?”

  “I’m fifty-one, you little shit.”

  “Maybe worry over yourself first.”

  “That ain’t my job. And you know it. Here it is. Boost me up.”

  He offered his knee, and she stood on it while working away the grate above. She swore.

  The weight of her on his knee eased as she hauled herself up. The light was bad in the sewers; only a few of the nightblinders made it down here. “Come now,” she said, and he could just see her arms reaching for him.

  Nev leapt. She pulled him until he could grab the lip of the latrine himself. He rolled over onto a white tiled floor. Two lanterns full of buzzing nightblinders illuminated the room. He smeared shitty water across the floor. “They’ll smell us coming,” he said.

  The door opened, and a plump little robed priest gaped at them.

  Tera was faster than Nev. She head-butted the priest in the face. Nev grabbed the utility knife at his belt and jabbed it three times into the man’s gut. He fell.

  Tera clucked at him. “No need to go about killing priests,” she whispered. As she gazed at the body, a strange look came over her face. “Huh,” she said.

  “What?”

  She shrugged. “Dead guy knows where Corez is.”

  “You’re making that up.”

  She spat and made the sign of God’s eye over her left breast. “Sordid truth, there. See, those viral wizards aren’t talking shit. Told you I’d get smarter.”

  “The man is dead. It’s impossible that—”

  “What? Messes with your little idea of the world, doesn’t it? That maybe who we are is in our bones? Maybe you don’t erase everything when you jump. Maybe you become a little bit like every body. Maybe you’re not stealing a thing. You’re borrowing it.”

  Nev turned away from her. His response was going to be loud, and angry. Unnecessary. The guild taught that death was darkness. There were no gods, no rebirths, no glorious afterlives. The life you had was the one you made for yourself in the discarded carcasses of others. Most days, he believed it. Most days.

  They dumped the body down the latrine. “Lot of work to bury your sister,” Nev said.

  “Fuck you. You wouldn’t know.”

  He considered her reaction for a long moment while they waited in the doorway, looking left to right down the hall for more wandering priests. It was true. He wouldn’t know. He’d neither burned nor buried any of his relatives. They’d all be long dead, now.

  “It made you angry I jumped into her body, didn’t it?” he said.

  “Didn’t ask me, or her. No choice, when you don’t ask.”

  “It didn’t occur to me.”

  “Yeah, things like that never do, do they?”

  She slipped into the hall. Nev padded quietly after her, past row after row of nightblinder lanterns. They circled up a spiral stair, encountering little resistance. At the top of the staircase was a massive iron banded door. Tera gestured for him to come forward. He was the better lock pick.

  Nev slipped out his tools from the flat leather clip at this belt and worked the lock open. The lock clicked. Tera pushed it open and peered in.

  Darkness. The nightblinder lanterns inside had been shuttered. Nev tensed. He heard something beside him, and elbowed into the black. His arm connected with heavy leather armor. Someone grabbed his collar and yanked him into the room. Tera swore. The armored man kicked Nev to his knees. Nev felt cold steel at the back of his neck.

  The door slammed behind them.

  The black sheathing on the lanterns was pulled away. Nev put his hands flat on the floor. No sudden movements until he knew how many there were. A large woman sat at the end of a raised bed. Her mane of black hair reminded him strongly of the woman who’d chased them through the street, but the body he knew far more intimately. It was Tera’s sister, her soft brown complexion and wise eyes restored, transformed, by a body mercenary like him.

  Four more men were in the room, long swords out, two pressed at Tera, two more at Nev. They were all men this time, which didn’t bode well. Enlisted men tended to be more expendable than their female counterparts.

  “You stink,” the woman who wore Tera’s sister’s body said. “You realize it was only my curiosity that let you get this far. Surely you’re not stupid enough to risk your necks over a burnt workshop?”

  “My sister,” Tera said. “Mora Ghulamak. You’re not her, so you must be Corez.”

  “God’s eye, that honeyring didn’t have a sister, did she?” Corez said. “Your sister pledged her body to the God’s eye. She disguised herself and tried to flee that fate. But she’s in service to me, as you can see.”

  “My sister’s dead,” Tera said. “We came for her body. To burn her.”

  “Burn her? Surely your little body merc friend here understands why that’s not going to be permitted. A body is just a suit. This suit is mine.”

  “Her body,” Tera said.

  Corez waved her hand at the men. “Dump them in the cistern. There’s two more unblemished dead for my collection.”

  Drowning was the best way to kill a body you wanted for later. It left no marks—nothing that required extensive mending. It was also the worst way to die. Nev tried to bolt.

  The men were fast, though, bigger than him, better armored, and better trained. They hauled them both from the room, down two flights of stairs, and brought them to the vast black mouth of a cistern sitting in the bowels of the temple.

  Nev tried to talk his way out, tried coercion, promises. They said nothing. They were in service to a body mercenary. They knew what she could do with them, and their bodies. They wouldn’t know death. Priests of every faith said they’d never see an afterlife, if they lived as walking corpses.

  They kicked Tera in first. Nev tumbled after her.

  He hit the water hard.

  Nev gasped. It was cold, far colder than he expected. He bubbled up and swam instinctively to the side of the cistern. The sides were sheer. The top was at least thirty feet above them.

  Tera sputtered beside him.

  He hated drowning. Hated it. “Look for a way up.”
<
br />   They spent ten minutes clawing their way around the cistern, looking for a crack, a step, an irregularity. Nothing. Nev tried swimming down as far as he could, looking for a drain pipe. If there was one, it was deeper than he could dive. He could not find the bottom.

  The third time he surfaced, he saw Tera clumsily treading water. Her face was haggard.

  “It’s all right,” Nev said, but of course it wasn’t.

  “How old are you, really?” Tera said. She choked on a mouthful of water, then spit.

  He swam over to her. Looped an arm around her waist. He could last a bit longer, maybe. His body was stronger and fitter. Younger. “Old enough.”

  “The face I see now is young and pretty, but you ain’t twenty-five.”

  “Body mercs have been known—”

  “I know it’s not your body. You spend more time admiring it than a War Minister’s husband spends polishing her armor for her.”

  “That’s the trouble with the living. Everyone wants to know everything.” He had a memory of his first body, some stranger’s life, now, playing at being a mercenary in the long tunic and trousers of a village girl. It was a long road from playing at it to living it, to dying at it.

  “Only ever asked you two questions,” she said, sputtering. He kicked harder, trying to keep them both afloat. “I asked how long you been a body merc, and how much pay was.”

  “This makes three.”

  “Too many?”

  “Three too many.”

  “That’s your problem, boy-child. Love the dead so much you stopped living. Man so afraid of death he doesn’t live is no man at all.”

  “I don’t need people.”

  “Yeah? How’d you do without a body manager, before me?”

  He smelled a hot, barren field. Bloody trampled grain. He felt the terrible thirst of a man dying alone in a field without another body in sight, without a stash of his own. He had believed so strongly in his own immortality during the early days of the war that when he woke inside the corpse of a man in a ravine who would not stop bleeding no matter how much he willed it, it was the first time he ever truly contemplated death. He had prayed to three dozen gods while crawling out of the ravine, and when he saw nothing before him but more fields, and flies, and heat, he’d faced his own mortality and discovered he didn’t like it at all. He was going to die alone. Alone and unloved, forgotten. A man whose real face had been ground to dust so long ago all he remembered was the cut of his women’s trousers.

  “I managed,” he said stiffly. His legs were numb.

  Tera was growing limp in his arms. “When I die in here, don’t jump into my body. Leave me dead. I want to go on in peace.”

  “There’s only darkness after—”

  “Don’t spray that elephant shit at me,” she said. “I know better, remember? I can … speak … to the dead now. You … leave me dead.”

  “You’re not going to die.” His legs and arms were already tired. He hoped for a second wind. It didn’t come. He needed a new body for that.

  Tera huffed more water. Eventually Tera would die. Probably in a few minutes. Another body manager dead. And he’d have nowhere to leap but her body. He gazed up at the lip of the cistern. But then what? Hope he could get out of here in Tera’s body when he couldn’t in his own, fitter one?

  Tera’s head dipped under the water. He yanked her up.

  “Not yet,” he said. He hated drowning. Hated it.

  But there was nowhere to go.

  No other body …

  “Shit,” he said. He pulled Tera close. “I’m going now, Tera. I’m coming back. A quarter hour. You can make it a quarter hour.”

  “Nowhere … to … no … bodies. Oh.” He saw the realization on her face. “Shit.”

  “Quarter hour,” he said, and released her. He didn’t wait to see if she went under immediately. He dove deep and shed his tunic, his trousers. He swam deep, deeper still. He hated drowning.

  He pushed down and down. The pressure began to weigh on him. He dove until his air ran out, until his lungs burned. He dove until his body rebelled, until it needed air so desperately he couldn’t restrain his body’s impulse to breathe. Then he took a breath. A long, deep breath of water: pure and sweet and deadly. He breathed water. Burning.

  His body thrashed, seeking the surface. Scrambling for the sky.

  Too late.

  Then calm. He ceased swimming. Blackness filled his vision.

  So peaceful, though, in the end. Euphoric.

  * * *

  Nev screamed. He sat bolt upright and vomited blood. Blackness filled his vision, and for one horrifying moment he feared he was back in the water. But no. The smell told him he was in the sewers. He patted at his new body, the plump priest they’d thrown down the latrine: the bald pate, the round features, the body he had touched and so could jump right back into. He gasped and vomited again; bile this time. He realized he was too fat to get up through the latrine, but wearing what he did made it possible to get in the front door.

  He scrambled forward on sluggish limbs, trying to work new blood into stiff fingers. His second wind came as he slogged back up onto the street. He found a street fountain and drank deeply to replace the vital liquid he’d lost. Then he was running, running, back to the God’s eye temple.

  They let him in with minimal fuss, which disappointed him, because he wanted to murder them all now: fill them full of purple plumed arrows, yelling about fire and elephants and unnecessary death, but he could not stop, could not waver, because Tera was down there, Tera was drowning, Tera was not like him, and Tera would not wake up.

  He got all the way across the courtyard before someone finally challenged him, a young man about fourteen, who curled his nose and said some godly-sounding greeting to him. Nev must not have replied correctly, because the snotty kid yelled after him, “Hey now! Who are you?”

  Nev ran. His body was humming now, rushing with life, vitality. A red haze filled his vision, and when the next armed man stepped in front of him, he dispatched him neatly with a palm strike to the face. He took up the man’s spear and long sword and forged ahead, following his memory of their descent to the cistern.

  As he swung around the first flight he rushed headlong into two armed men escorting Corez up, still wearing Tera’s sister’s skin. Surprise was on his side, this time.

  Nev ran the first man through the gut, and hit the second with the end of his spear.

  “God’s eye, what—” Corez said, and stopped. She had retreated back down the stairs, stumbled, and her wig was aslant now.

  “You take the scalps of your people, too?” Nev said. He hefted the spear.

  “Now you think about this,” she said. “You don’t know who I am. I can give you anything you like, you know. More bodies than you know what to do with. A workshop fit for the king of the body mercenaries. A thousand body managers better than any you’ve worked with. You’ve dabbled in a world you don’t understand.”

  “I understand well enough,” he said.

  “Then, the body. I can give you this body. That’s what she wanted, isn’t it? I have others.”

  “I don’t care much for people,” Nev said. “That was your mistake. You thought I’d care about the bodies, or Tera, or her sister, or any of the rest. I don’t. I’m doing this for my fucking elephant.”

  He thrust the spear into her chest. She gagged. Coughed blood.

  He did not kill her, but left her to bleed out, knowing that she could not jump into another form until she was on the edge of death.

  Nev ran the rest of the way down into the basements. They had to have a way to fish the bodies out. He found a giant iron pipe leading away from the cistern, and a sluice. He opened up the big drain and watched the water pour out into an aqueduct below.

  He scrambled down and down a long flight of steps next to the cistern and found a little sally port. How long until it drained? Fuck it. He opened the sally port door. A wave of water engulfed him.

  He sm
acked hard against the opposite wall. A body washed out with the wave of water, and he realized it was his own, his beloved. He scrambled forward, only to see Tera’s body tumble after it, propelled by the force of the water. For one horrible moment he was torn. He wanted to save his old body. Wanted to save it desperately.

  But Tera only had one body.

  He ran over to her and dragged her way from the cistern. She was limp.

  Nev pounded on her back. “Tera!” he said. “Tera!” As if she would awaken at the sound of her name. He shook her, slapped her. She remained inert. But if she was dead, and yes, of course she was dead, she was not long dead. There was, he felt, something left. Something lingering. Tera would say it lingered in her bones.

  He searched his long memory for some other way to rouse her. He turned her onto her side and pounded on her back again. Water dribbled from her mouth. He thought he felt her heave. Nev let her drop. He brought both his hands together, and thumped her chest. Once. Then again.

  Tera choked. Her eyelids fluttered. She heaved. He rolled her over again, and pulled her into his arms.

  Her eyes rolled up at him. He pressed his thumb and pinky together, pushed the other three fingers in parallel; the signal he used to tell it was him inhabiting a new body.

  “Why you come for me?” Tera said.

  He held her sodden, lumpy form in his own plump arms and thought for a long moment he might weep. Not over her or Falid or the rest, but over his life, a whole series of lives lost, and nothing to show for it but this: the ability to keep breathing when others perished. So many dead, one after the other. So many he let die, for no purpose but death.

  “It was necessary,” he said.

  * * *

  They crawled out of the basement and retrieved Tera’s sister from the stairwell. It hurt Nev’s heart, because he knew they could only carry one of them. He had to leave his old form. The temple was stirring now. Shouting. They dragged her sister’s body back the way they had come, through the latrines. Tera went first, insisting that she grab the corpse as it came down. Nev didn’t argue. In a few more minutes the temple’s guards would spill over them.