Viscera

by Gabriel Squailia

Better to be an Ace who believes than a doubting Deuce, he thought, waving his hand in and out of a shaft of sunshine with pure, childlike glee.

  Suddenly he stopped, looking down at Jassa.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Checking something,” she mumbled.

  He could see what she was doing plain enough.

  She’d sat right down on a rock and pulled out that notebook of hers—and was flipping through pages and scribbling notations, as if her time was her own.

  Jassa had ridden him like a fairground pony since the moment he’d become her Deuce, and now that the shoe was on the other foot, she’d given herself an unscheduled break.

  Balling his fists, Rafe leapt down from the tree trunk. “This belongs to the Goddess now,” he sang, swiping the book from her paws.

  Jassa hopped up, ready to strike.

  But Rafe whipped his dagger from its scabbard. “Easy there, Deuce—let’s not forget who Fortune’s chosen!”

  The blood drained from her face. “Yes, my—my Ace,” she whispered, like the phrase caused her pain.

  “Don’t start weeping, now,” he cooed, tapping her chin with the flat of the blade. “These are the rules you taught me, Jass! Surely they’re good enough for you, too?”

  She nodded miserably, seeming to deflate. He caught a glance at the open pages of the book in his hand.

  Gibberish. It was all illegible.

  How long had he been following an imbecile—and why?

  “Please, my Ace,” she whined, “let’s find the path.”

  “Oh, we’ve found it.” Sweeping his cape aside, sheathing his dagger, he shoved her notebook into his bag, noting her distress with a rush of satisfaction. “Follow me, Deuce—I know the way!”

  Off he ran, seeing bursts of color in the trees that probably weren’t there, whooping as the branches swished around him. This wildness had been tamped down by Jassa’s control for so long that Rafe had lost track of what he really was—even under the influence, he’d forgotten what it felt like to soar this high.

  “But Fortune didn’t forget!”

  He tripped on a root, but landed on his feet. Another stroke of luck.

  They were everywhere, now that he knew how to look.

  He really was Fortune’s favorite, wasn’t he?

  How had he ever let Jassa push him down so far?

  Because he was used to following, in a way.

  He’d been cared for, before all this.

  Gingerbeard had been a kind of—

  No use dwelling on it.

  “It’s a new day!” he barked, starting off again.

  “But what will happen, my Ace,” shouted Jassa, still lagging behind, “when night falls, and we’re still in the wood? We won’t make it far without the kiss!”

  The thought almost stopped him. She was right—withdrawal would close around them in a day or two. If they didn’t fix, they might well die out here.

  But this was no way for an Ace to think. “Fortune told me to roll the dice,” he shouted back, “and I’m rolling!”

  Despite himself, Rafe was panting now, his breath short, a familiar stabbing in his chest reminding him that he’d taken things too far already. He’d have to use his newfound status to get some time alone tonight, and give his lungs a break.

  Not for too long at a stretch, they’d told him, and never when you sleep.

  He could feel his pace slowing, his faith draining—and then he saw the tree.

  “Fortune will provide,” he whispered, tingling all over.

  “What’s this?” panted Jassa, coming to his side and bending over with her palms on her knees. “A tree struck by lightning, is it?”

  “No,” he murmured, stepping closer to its dark trunk. “But the ignorant often make that mistake. This is a gazing-tree, Deuce—the biggest I’ve ever seen.”

  It towered over the wood like a grand, shining shadow. Every inch of the thing was blackened, from its twisting roots to its abundant foliage—but no fire had touched it. Its leaves hadn’t burnt, just gone as dark and glossy as obsidian, from stem to blade. Nor were they moving, though a breeze rustled the branches of every other tree in the copse.

  “So you’re just going to gaze at it, then? How’s that meant to help?”

  “Hold your tongue, or I’ll hold it for you.”

  Rafe reached out and grabbed at a low-hanging branch. Both the leaf and the twig that it clung to came off in his hand. He opened his fist, examining the dense, dark, pollen-like stuff that remained.

  After a moment, the motes began to drift back to the branch, clinging to the stub they’d come from.

  “That’s—enchantment,” whispered Jassa, agog.

  “You’re thinking too small.” The powdered bits of stem and leaf were already fitting back into their former shape. “You could claw down this whole tree and scatter its bits to the edges of this wood, and it’d still come back to itself in a matter of hours. That’s no enchantment, Deuce—it’s the will of a god.”

  She shook her head, wide-eyed. “Never heard of Fortune doing anything of the like.”

  “Nothing to do with Her. The gazing-trees belong to Gone-Away Nex.”

  Through the haze of his high, a memory bobbed up.

  Rafe was packing his bag, back at the boarding house.

  He’d wrapped something old in a pair of moth-eaten socks, and stuffed it to the bottom.

  “The Gone-Away,” said Jassa carefully, “are buried under the city, my Ace. And we are miles from there, remember?”

  “But all these lands were Theirs, once.” He swung his bag onto the ground and opened its flap. “And Nex was the Goddess of Connection. She had a vested interest in keeping tabs on everything at once.” Working his arm down through layers of clothing, each grittier than the last, he heard the drash skittering in its box. “The gazing-trees were Her eyes and ears. No matter how far She traveled, She could always watch these woods.”

  “And how do you know all this?”

  He felt the forked handle and closed his fist. “Because my family used to be Her attendants. Generations ago, we kept Her temples, and were rewarded for it. Even after the Gone-Away died, traces of Them remained. Like Nex’s gazing-trees. And these.” He tugged the tool out, feeling its weight in his hands. “Every Davin has one.”

  “A pair of sacred socks.” Jassa sighed. “My Ace, I beg of you, let us—”

  “Shut your fucking mouth, Deuce.”

  He pulled the tool from the fabric, tugging open the ties on its leather case and sliding it free.

  The blade was yellowed bone, worn and chipped. A scapula, or so he’d been told—the shoulder of some long-dead ancestor. He hadn’t thought of it before, but given its size, it must have been a child’s.

  “Is that—a knife?”

  “A spade,” he said. “Not for digging, though. It’s for this.”

  He turned to the tree, thinking of his Gran, all those years ago.

  A Davin cares for the dead, preserving their connection to the living, as Nex willed it. A Davin quiets them for Her, easing them on their way from this world. And in return, a Davin can always find what’s lost.

  Struggling to remember what she’d told him, Rafe knelt by the gnarled root.

  He was too stoned to recall the ceremony, but it probably didn’t matter. His family loved pomp more than they’d ever loved each other.

  “We’re lost,” he said, remembering his mother using her own spade in these very woods. “Bring us to Eth.”

  Then he sunk the blade into the shining flesh of the gazing-tree. The soft substance gave, slumping around the yellowed bone, a puff of black powder surrounding its forked handle.

  Hearing a rustle from beneath, he yanked the spade out, laughing. “You see, Deuce?”

  “I don’t see a thing, boy,” she said—then gave a gasp as the first green tip emerged, corkscrewing up out of the root.

  Five more tendrils followed after, and Rafe stepped back, remembering how quickly this w
ould go.

  “Get back.”

  The site of his puncture was boiling with runners. Touching down on solid earth, they spun themselves into a thick, twining vine that sprouted waxy leaves. It was almost beautiful—and then it burst, dripping with a thick, dark fluid as thorns the length of his fingers split its sides.

  Anchoring itself in the dirt, the vine shot off into the wood, growing faster than they could hope to run.

  “Fortune’s favorite, indeed,” she breathed. “My Ace, do you know how much we could sell that thing for?”

  “Not a lead slug, I’m afraid.” Rafe snapped the spade’s sheath onto his belt, opposite his dagger. “It only works for Davins—bloodline magic, they call it. But it’ll carry us to the mountain of tlak we’ll earn with that satchel!”

  Jassa hefted up the bag of guts, giving a thin-lipped smile. “Now that’s a prayer I can understand.”

  He couldn’t tell if her crisis had abated, or if she was simply playing along. It occurred to him, though, that the role of an Ace was to have enough faith for the both of them.

  Sliding on his pack, Rafe followed the flowing vines, savoring the tlak in his veins like never before.

  You’ve earned this, he thought. It’s high time things went your way.

  Ignoring his warnings, Jassa cleaved too close to the vines and stepped on a thorn as long as her thumb. Despite her complaints, though, and the blood that squelched in her boot, they reached the edge of the wood in a little over an hour, then stood on the brink of a sudden expanse of untrammeled light.

  The low sun gushed over a glistening hill, past the crest of which lay nothing but sky.

  “There’s a killing field, down below.” The stench was powerful, and made Rafe oddly nostalgic.

  Jassa squinted at him, then swallowed her objection. “What I wouldn’t give for a map and a schedule,” she muttered.

  He shook his head. “If there was a battle on, we’d hear it. There’s little danger of running into any soldiers-for-the-day, it’s just—”

  But what was it?

  He traced the dark line of vines over the hill. Not far from the tree line, the path of thorns had swerved straight for this clearing.

  He’d expected to see Eth in the distance, that was all. But this must have been the straightest route. Or perhaps the vines were keeping them safe, steering clear of some unseen danger.

  Nothing was wrong. His high was simply fading.

  “Fortune will provide,” he whispered. Feeling dizzy, he struck out into the light, keeping his distance from the thorny runners.

  The pain felt like an invisible knife stabbing him in the lungs time and again on his way uphill. He was panting by the time he peered over the crest.

  He knew this place. It was the suburban battlefield known as the Thirteenth Designation.

  A carpet of corpses stretched from the foot of the hill to the far edge of the wood, half a mile or more. Light and shade played among the fallen bodies as a series of clouds passed over the sun. The soldiers were sprawled just where they’d died, still clutching their weaponry, which was too cheap to loot—mostly sticks with bent nails driven through the ends, no swords. Their uniforms were so shoddy that the colors had dyed their skin in the rain, all green and purple like a garden of bruises. It was late in the day of their death, and they were beginning to burst. He couldn’t see the maggots, but he could feel them thriving.

  Gorging on discontent, his Gran would have said, as if worms fed on emotion, not flesh. Every corpse is angry, at the start.

  A Davin soothes them until they have nothing left to say. Until their bones are cleansed of complaint.

  A Davin who doesn’t is just taking up space.

  Something wasn’t right. He could smell it.

  One hand drifted to his dagger, the other to his spade.

  “Oh, lovely,” snarled Jassa, stuffing plugs of cloth up her nostrils. “Hundreds of the unquiet dead to offend—and each one ready to rip our luck to shreds!”

  A murder of crows took wing, startled by the sound of her voice.

  “Quiet, Deuce,” he snarled, spotting the tents thrown up past the bodies, near the far edge of the wood.

  But it was too late. A black-cloaked sentry had already emerged.

  The sentry’s hand dropped to his side—and pulled out a yellowed spade of his own.

  “Oh, fuck me,” whispered Rafe, raising a hand.

  The spade had found what he’d lost, all right.

  “What’s happening?” whispered Jassa.

  Rafe gave the signal. “Clan Davin,” he said, his throat thick with misery. “The vines brought us to my family.”

  Rafe’s uncle, down below, gave the all-clear, shaking his head.

  They must’ve known Rafe was coming when they saw the vines. No one else had ever left the clan.

  “Thought you were bringing us to the city, boy.” There was acid in Jassa’s voice.

  “I—I tried.” But instead of thinking of Eth while he’d stabbed the root, Rafe had been remembering his mother, working the magic herself. He’d asked for Eth, but the tlak had jumbled his thoughts.

  “Fortune’s favorite, eh?” muttered Jassa.

  He couldn’t argue. If Fortune did exist, she’d used all this to show him how little she thought of him.

  The rest of his black-cloaked, olive-skinned clan came trudging out of hiding, pushing wheelbarrows, carrying picks and shovels, scowling up at the top of the hill. Half their number set to work on a pile of fresh corpses, lining them up neatly, stripping them down for their baths, setting out their ceremonial robes. The other half got back to scrubbing a row of skeletons exhumed from a pit at the far side of the field, where they’d been buried on the Davins’ last journey through these lands.

  “These are yours?” whispered Jassa. “You’re a—a gravedigger?”

  “Was.” He’d forgotten people called them that. What a tiny part of it all the digging was.

  He should tell her. Tell her now, while he still could.

  Or he could run. They might catch him, or they might just let him go.

  But for all he knew, the path of vines had already withered away behind them, and they’d never find that gazing-tree again. If he fought this, they might well end up dead in the wood.

  “They’ll throw us a feed,” he said, “and help us find our way.”

  At a cost, he knew. But he couldn’t think of anything else to do, and by now his uncle was halfway to them.

  Gritting his teeth, Rafe started downhill. A breeze carried bleach and spices, vinegar and sweat, sweet curd and rotting flesh: the smells of home. “Come on, Deuce. You’ve nothing to fear from the Davins.”

  They stared as he came, and he supposed they had to. When he’d left, he’d barely begun to match outside to in. They’d known about the fights, but they’d never seen where they led. Whatever the changes, though, there was no mistaking Rafe, not with the resemblance so striking.

  “Five long years since we’ve seen you,” called his uncle, keeping his distance, “and this is how you return?”

  Rafe said nothing. He saw shards of his reflection all around. His cheeks stood high in his third-aunt’s face. His unbrushable hair rose like a nimbus from his cousin’s scalp. His lower lip hung pendulous beneath his uncle’s nose. The only thing that set Rafe apart was that the others wore their oily, black cloaks, and on every dark breast the symbol of Clan Davin had been embroidered—a white-bladed spade sprouting thorns from its forked handle.

  Irritable, they all kept their distance, and he imagined for a blissful moment that he might pass through them without speaking, that he’d find a well-marked road to Eth on the other side of the killing field, that he could treat this moment like an unpleasant dream he’d wake from as soon as the drash crawled onto his neck.

  Then he saw his own eyes staring back at him, as if from a mirror.

  “Rafia,” she said.

  The syllables were flat. The name hit hard. Rafe stopped walking and faced he
r.

  His lesser relatives stopped working, watching Lura Davin for their cues.

  Jassa bumped up behind him, her satchel swinging. “Boy, is that—”

  “The thorns said you were coming,” she said. “I found it hard to believe them.” Lura strode through the corpses, her callused feet landing neatly in the spaces between their elbows and their ribs, their necks and their gaping chins. How old she looked, though her eyes were as sharp as ever. They never left his face. “It’s been far too long. But I’m relieved that you finally found your way home.” She stopped in the midst of the field, folding her arms beneath her bosom. She was cataloguing Rafe’s outfit with her eyes, peering at his tight bush of hair. He could feel her holding back a critique. “The spade helped you find your way, then. The old ways show us new ways, isn’t that what Gran used to say?”

  Rafe heaved a shallow sigh.

  There were so many things he could have said just then.

  All he could manage was, “Mother.”

  “Well. You look like you’ve been on the road a while. We’ll eat.” She couldn’t help but glance at his hands. “Do take a moment and wash up, girl.”

  Rafe’s face was burning. Jassa goggled at him.

  “Rafia?” she said.

  There it was.

  Her startled laughter.

  The first of many reasons he’d kept this from her.

  Rafe clamped his hand on her arm. With the other on the hilt of his dagger, he twisted it behind her back and pressed his mouth to her ear. “Never call me that again,” he spat, loud enough for the rest to hear. “Or girl, or she, or her.”

  Then he shoved her down, sprawling among the bodies. Rafe stomped through them, weathering the horrified stares of his relatives, wondering what might have happened if he’d explained himself to Jassa from the start.

  She’d probably have sold him out to the Assemblage, or said the wrong thing in the wrong bar and gotten him killed. Deep down, he’d never really trusted her. So he’d said nothing, just labored to keep his body hidden, earning himself this stabbing pain in his lungs.

  Not for too long at a stretch, and never when you sleep. That’s what Gingerbeard had said, giving Rafe a binder bought dear at Mr. Rue’s. But Rafe had sold it, after, and taken to using bandages, which was idiocy to begin with—and then Jassa had led him to the wood, and he’d spent every moment under her babbling scrutiny.