by Mark Eller
Pausing, Ani turned.
"You don’t mean that, Jolson, and I don’t think Missa truly hates you. She’s just angry and frightened. I think she still loves you, has hope for you, but she doesn’t know why. Hell, I don’t know why, but you might think about having a reason ready for her if ever we meet again."
Jolson’s death pale face twitched. He seemed to struggle with some inner demon, but he said nothing. Instead, he simply turned and left.
* * * *
Anithia dozed in her rickety rocker. In the morning it and the beds and the table would be sold when they left for Grace. She had wanted to get to sleep early, but sleep was not to be found. Curled and comfortable, about to drift off, she stiffened.
The night became quiet. Absolutely silent.
Ani sat up slowly in her chair, wide awake, the hairs on her arms standing on end.
With a crash, the front door burst open. A blurred shape rushed in. Ani leapt to her feet and reached in her pocket for the knife, intending to thrust it into the intruder’s heart. She wasn’t fast enough.
Before the knife came clear, a cold, taloned hand wrapped around her throat and squeezed, lifting her high into the air. She gasped for breath, tried to pry the fingers loose, but the grip was too tight. A burning sensation started deep in her throat and traveled further, burying itself into her soul.
Completely helpless, Ani dangled with her feet inches from the ground.
“Where isss it?” A venomous voice, full of death and visions of pain, hissed from near her left ear.
She tried to speak, tried to answer, but could not. The only sound issuing from her mouth was a gurgle.
“Oh yesss, you humans need your vocal chords to speak.” The grip on her throat loosened as the arm lowered, and her toes touched the ground. Air flooded into her burning lungs.
“Now speak!” the creature demanded. It shook her thin frame. The bones in her body jarred together painfully. Inside her, the burning sensation grew as if it consumed her like poison.
“Where is what?” Her voice sounded like nothing more than a frog croaking. She gasped as the hand spasmed on her throat. Talons dug painfully into her neck’s soft flesh.
“It. The spawn you had living in your shed.”
Ani’s heart beat loud and hard. It had finally happened. Something had come for Jolson. The only problem— Jolson was gone!
“Jolson is—” Ani coughed. Her vision began to cloud. She was losing consciousness.
The thing shook her again. “What? Speak up, damn you!”
“Mommy!” A scream echoed through the tiny shack. Missa. Missa was here. In this room!
Anithia panicked. Fear tore through her mind, lending her newfound strength. She kicked her feet out wildly and swung her fists as hard as she could. Each blow felt like she struck concrete, but she didn’t stop. When Missa was in danger, Ani would fight until she no longer drew breath.
A bright light exploded, filling the room. Singing filled the air. The almost sentient pain traveling through her body hissed, recoiled, and then retreated. Ani’s vision cleared.
Before her stood a demon wearing a look of shock and wonder on its deformed face. Gold eyes sparkled in the strange light. Row upon row of razor sharp teeth caught in mid-snarl. Staggering back half a step, the demon lost its grip.
Ani fell to the floor, bruised and weakened, only to have the sound of many boots thudding on her porch bring her struggling to her feet.
Oh gods,she prayed,let it be help.
The light disappeared. The singing stopped.
Ani staggered in the darkness, blinded by the sudden loss of vision. “Missa! Run baby run!” She lunged in the direction she last remembered seeing the demon, willing to sacrifice her life to save her daughter, but all she grabbed was air. Stumbling over something she could not see, she fell to the floor. Pain shot through her knees.
“Kill it! That’s the demon who murdered Larson!”
An oddly familiar voice shouted commands while the room erupted into chaos.
Anithia blinked repeatedly, trying to clear her vision. Around her, swords clashed and men cursed.
Missa! She had to find her baby.
“Missa! Missa! Baby, where are you?” Ani got to her feet again and knocked her thigh into the rocker’s arm.
Wood cracked from near her window. Breaking shutters. Unfamiliar voices shouted epithets, echoing off bare, dirty walls. A horrible screeching tore through Ani’s brain. She clutched at her head and cursed the pain.
“Damn it all! You let him escape! What the hell do you think your weapons are for?”
The familiar voice came again, demanding, angry, and full of ice. The room quieted.
“Calto, please. They are new recruits, barely trained. Patience must be exercised.”
Was that Sulya?
Her vision returning, Ani saw the dark outlines of five people. None were short enough to be Missa.
“Where’s my daughter!” Ani scanned the room again and still didn’t see Missa. Where was the girl?
Cold, icy fear traveled the length of her veins.
One of the shapes walked over to her, curvaceous, long and slender. Sulya.
“There was no one else in the room when we entered, Anithia. We can check her bed?” Sulya’s voice was soft and cultured, as if she were talking to an addled old woman. Insulting.
Praying to the gods she had forsaken, Ani turned and ran into Missa’s room, hoping her baby had slept through all the noise. An impossible dream. Nobody could have slept through the bedlam.
Bursting through the half-rotten door, she expected the bed to be empty. It wasn't. Missa lay curled in its center, lightly snoring. Ani stared in confusion. Only minutes before she would have sworn Missa had been in the sitting room, singing.
Anithia shook her head, not understanding. She had heard Missa call to her, had heard her scream, and then heard her sing. It had to be Missa she had listened to. There was nobody else, but there Missa lay, oblivious to the chaos around her.
“Is she well?” A man carried a lit candle into the room, his face draped by shadows. His voice sounded like the man they had called Calto.
He stepped closer. The shadows shifted, moved away, and Ani stared in shocked disbelief. Swept with weakness and faint, she swayed. She almost fell, but Calto caught her with his free hand. Ani stared into his impossible face while iron muscles held her. The face was hard-planed, unforgiving, and angry in a perfect cruel caricature of her husband.
Her heart stuttered. Her throat constricted. This man had to be a figment of her lonely mind, only the arm holding her was solid, real, his face mere inches from her own.
"Seven and Two,” Ani choked, gasping for air. “Who–who are you?"
The room grew hot. Vertigo engulfed her. Too many people, too much strain, and not nearly enough air. She saw his mouth move, Larson’s mouth, but she couldn’t hear him. Ani struggled to remain conscious, but sight and sound left her world as did his answer.
Chapter 12—Voice Over
Maggie watched Jolson paw through the unwanted refuse of a city’s leavings. He dug past discarded bowls and cracked cups. He tossed aside a broken knife, scooped away a stinking pile of moldy clothes, and finally found the treasure for which he had been searching. With a clumsy hand, he grabbed the chunk of discarded meat and fat. Even from ten feet away, Maggie could see at least a quarter pound of rancid flesh was still attached to the pig fat, maybe more when the weight of the clinging maggots was added in.
Without showing a single sign of distaste, Jolson sank his teeth into the rotting mass. Viln, a filthy young boy whose only clothing was a rag wrapped around his loins, stared at Jolson with disgust. Gagging, he turned away to join the other lost children who would spend a few years living on Yylse’ garbage before they faded and died.
Arching her aged and aching back to loosen its knotted muscles, Maggie stared at Jolson with understanding eyes while he ate the meat, fat, and maggots. The food in Hell, she knew, was muc
h worse than what Jolson held in his single hand.
“It’s a difficult path you chose,” she said once Jolson finished chewing and began sucking fat residue from his fingers. Her voice cracked and broke from the effort of speaking, and that was a hard thing for her. There had been a time when she had been fêted for her voice. Just five years earlier she had sung before crowds and kings. She had been showered with jewels and courted by suitors until Krastos, a minor demon, had broken into her home one evening, killed her lover, and delivered her to Hell to sing for Athos, the lesser god of Hell. For three years she had remained in Athos’s halls before she was finally allowed to leave due to the god’s whim. By that time, her thirty-year-old mind was housed in an old woman’s arthritic body. Hell, she had learned, was not kind to mortals. Apparently, the seven heavenly gods had never intended for Hell to be inhabited by ephemeral beings when they designed Anothosia’s pocket realm, her miniature universe, to house their wayward brethren thousands of years earlier. The unholy miasma required to feed the hellborn took a heavy toll on mortals.
“Are you sure you don’t want to go back?” she asked.
After spending a few moments peering toward a sun riding high in the sky, Jolson shook himself, groaned, and looked back to Maggie. She watched his struggle while he fought to bring out the intellect buried deep within his damaged mind. Lights of knowledge, of understanding, flickered within his dark orbs, faded, and returned once more. His slack and pallid face firmed, and Maggie knew she saw a brief glimpse of the driven being who had escaped Hell.
He gestured to the sun. “Look. Yellow and white, it hides amid the gray wisps of those clouds. It reigns above the blue sky. The sight of the sun, of the sky and clouds, of grass and trees and buildings, and everything else existing in the upper world are a wonder. Everywhere I look I see patterns. I see lines and squares. I see circles and cylinders and delicate lacings radiating beauty because they follow the rules of law. There are no surging waves of changing chaos. There are no nebulous, formless beings capable of taking real shape only when they seep into the upper world. No demons, devils, wyverns, or any of the other hellkind I have always known.”
Sighing, he ran a hand through his filthy hair. “Sometimes, when I first wake after a long hour of sleep, my mind looks upon this new reality and tries to pull it back into something more chaotically familiar. Distant grass warps into gray and black and muddy brown wavelets which swirl and seep to no particular pattern. This pure garbage heap we live on becomes a putrid, shifting mass which resembles a knuckle on Athos’s hand. My mind twists and tries to bring me the comfort of familiarity, but I refuse to give in to comfort’s allure. I’ve worked for too many years at unthreading the dull complacency Athos gave me for a mind. I’ve sweated and bled, been cursed and flogged too many times to willingly relinquish the little bit of sleepy intelligence I have won for myself.”
With a slight shudder, his features slackened, and the lights in his eyes began to fade. “It’s hard, Maggie. It’s hard to hold together enough will to–to— but I won’t go back. I won’t–only will is the hardest of all.”
Maggie reflected on how even his spawn body had suffered in Hell’s chaos. His movements were crippled and slow. Any element of grace he might once have owned was missing, and the intellect which sometimes showed behind his eyes was an elusive wisp he could only occasionally capture. Fortunately, even at his most stupid he had enough brains to follow her suggestions and orders very well. For this she was grateful. His continued obedience was integral to her plans.
She waved a hand toward where Yylse lay several miles away. “Athos’s hunters will come from there. They will take you back.”
“Why?” Jolson asked. “I am no threat to him.”
She gestured toward the jade green hook decorating the end of his left wrist. “Athos is a grasping god. You are his spawn, and you have stolen his hook.”
After wiping his greasy hand on the thin hair covering his bare belly, Jolson clumsily moved closer until he stood only four feet away. He looked at her with confused eyes and a worried frown, but he showed no fear, and Maggie found this surprising. Spawn were created and trained to fear.
“I won’t–s–s–stay,” he said slowly. “I will escape again.”
Sadly shaking her head, she set the first snare to her trap. “You told me a dead woman helped you escape the first time. I’d like to help you, too— I’d like to show you how to navigate these shoals and elude capture, but I’m just an old and stove-in singing whore, too useless to do much more than show you how to scavenge from this garbage pile. No, my friend, I’m too useless to be of much help to you, and I‘m afraid it won‘t be long before you’re taken. Within a few months our two shades will meet in Athos’s Hall.”
Leaning forward, she peered at a face that had lost part of its animation and nodded to herself. Jolson’s mind was caught in a state halfway between brilliance and muddled confusion. Of late, his sessions of full cognizance seemed to be growing shorter and fewer. It wouldn’t be long before there was so little left to him he would be unable to recall how to use the wonderful instrument hanging on the end of his arm. Days, maybe, or a couple of weeks.
Scuttling forward, she whispered in his ear.
“Listen to me, Jolson.” She ran a gnarled hand lovingly over his hook’s sweet curve. It felt smooth, blood warm, and not metal. Against her touch she felt a pulsing thrum which would have been a reflection of Jolson’s heartbeat if the pulse had been quicker. Evil lived within the hook. It was a fell dark thing, and it was alive.
“Think of what it would be like to own grace,” she whispered. “You would walk instead of stumble. You could run from your hunters or maybe even fight them to their deaths. I can give this to you, Jolson. I can make you more whole than you have ever been before. I’ll take care of you. I’ll see to it you remain free.” She ran her bent hand up the length of the hook before resting it on his wrist. “All you have to do is listen to me.”
Shaking his head, he studied her with not quite dull eyes. “What do you want me to do?”
Not too far away children scrabbled in the refuse looking for a scrap of decent food or for the small nothings many of the rich considered worthless. Because she scared the hell out of the younger children, many of those items found their way into her hands. Occasionally, a few small trinkets brought her one or two copper coins. Reaching her crab-fingered hand into a torn pocket, she brought out one of those coins.
“Viln,” she called, holding out her hand for the boy to see what she offered.
Viln gaped stupidly for several moments before scrambling her way. Mocking his efforts, the other children looked on, but jealousy leaked out of their voices.
Pleased, Maggie watched Viln hurry toward her. She peered at Jolson and frowned. She could almost see his mind fading away. Hopefully, he would manage to hold the remaining parts of his intellect together for a while longer. Past experience had shown her it took a few hours for Jolson to drag himself back out of the dark morass after his will wavered and his intellect failed. She didn’t want to wait those hours. She was determined to use him now, because, unlike Jolson’s, her will was iron.
Panting from his run, Viln arrived wearing a lack-wit’s excited expression. Smiling, Maggie dropped the quarter rugdle coin at his feet. When Viln bent to retrieve it, she clubbed him over his head with a piece of scrap iron.
A few moments of checking proved Viln still lived, fortunate but unsurprising. She was no longer strong enough to cause him serious harm, but she soon would be with Jolson’s compliance.
Touching Jolson’s hook with two fingers, Maggie pushed it toward Viln.
“Make me young,” she ordered.
* * * *
My lover now lies ‘neath the morning’s sweet sun.
‘cause he had his fun,
Then forgot to run.
I’m standing ‘bove him jus’s shovel’n dirt
Laughing ‘cause he’ll never lift another maid’s skirt.
<
br /> A half-hearted scattering of applause sounded from the few people standing before a small street-side stage. Maggie frowned unhappily at the muted sound of appreciation. While her youthful voice had returned with the rejuvenation, it didn’t seem to be the exquisite instrument she remembered. From the small audience’s reaction, they thoroughly agreed with her.
Remembering her role, she stretched her arms above her head to accentuate her shape while also changing her frown into a smile. In this game presentation was everything. She needed rugdles to buy a better wardrobe so she could frequent better areas. If she couldn’t earn them by singing, she would earn them on her back. In the past she had utilized both paths during her climb to the top.
When a few copper coins fell into the tin at her feet, her smile became genuine. Those coins were not enough to suit her needs, but they would help. Besides, it felt good to move without the old, familiar aches. For the first time in three years her back felt straight and strong. Her shoulders were firm, and her elbows moved without the sharp pain of weak tendons. She was young and vibrant once more because she had directed Jolson to use Athos’s Hook to take Viln’s youth and grace and give them to her. To earn the spawn’s gratitude, she then ordered Jolson to take her original grace in return because she no longer needed it once she had Viln’s.
Viln, of course, had been given nothing for his sacrifice. He was now a short, crippled old man lying on the garbage heap, fated to die in a few short weeks. Maggie thought his fate a small matter since Viln was little more than refuse himself. In another handful of months he would have died of malnutrition or disease, and then all his wonderful youth would have been wasted.
Lowering her arms, she watched while Jolson lifted the tin and emptied it into a belt pouch hanging at his side. His eyes were dim because he was in his stupid stage, but the dimness wasn’t quite as deep as it had been before. Over the last several days his will had not weakened like she had expected it would. In fact, his cognizant periods sometimes lasted for hours, and this worried her. She did not want him to grow independent until she finished using his hook to add new aspects to herself. On the other hand, when Athos’s hunters came for Jolson, they would also become a threat to her. She’d have to discard Jolson before then. A week, she figured, or perhaps two. Maybe a month.