He tried to anchor his thoughts with the details. Wondering why he and Jassa weren’t bleeding out, he saw the ink shimmering around the edges of the doorway cut into her back, a shimmer that coated her workings, too.
They weren’t dying because the tall woman didn’t want them to die, at least not straightaway. It bothered him that he couldn’t imagine her purpose in all of this—it was like no enchantment he’d heard of.
Witchery, that’s what it was.
“Go ahead,” the bent witch said. “Bring it here.”
A tiny man with a face like a dried apple carried over a bucket full of blood, then poured it carefully into Jassa’s innards.
Her guts bubbled happily, like an animal given a treat, and Rafe started laughing, though it wasn’t funny, exactly. It was more like he’d filled to overflowing with all that he’d crammed inside over the past few months, from Gingerbeard’s slaughter to the catastrophe of this moment, and now it all had to come out however it could. But the trouble with laughing, in the state he was in, was that his mouth was trying to make the noises that were actually coming from behind him, his lungs jerking on the trapdoor bed that the bent witch had swung out of his back.
“What is that awful noise?” rasped the tiny man, and then he looked up at Rafe. “Ach—the crosser’s awake!”
“That word has no place here,” the bent witch murmured.
Rafe stopped laughing.
“But calling me a—what was it?—a ‘mobile excrescence’ is fair game?” muttered the tiny man. “I see how it is.”
The bleeding ghost sipped her tea. “Thought you said these two would be unconscious the whole time.”
“I did,” said the witch. “He should be.”
She strolled around to look at Rafe’s eyes, holding an ink-smeared wooden palette, its edges wrapped in tiny, curling vines. “Unless—hm.” Setting it down, she consulted some arcane diagram. “It could be his withdrawal,” she murmured. “Soaking up the effects of Lady Ley’s blood.”
“Hit him again,” said the ghost, and Rafe, fearful that the bear would swing a balled paw down into his guts, began to twist around, trying to get his wrists loose from the rope.
The tiny man trotted over with the bucket and poured more blood into Rafe’s organs.
Rafe calmed, immediately.
How warm it was inside.
Now he was sleepy, and glad for it. He felt like he might wake anywhere, at any time, even back at Mrs. Dallow’s, before the Second Masque, with Gingerbeard’s big, sweet-smelling arms wrapped around him.
He’d tell them to stay in that night, and all would be right.
But he couldn’t allow himself to forget any of this.
What the woman from the farmhouse was doing to him went beyond vengeance. It would have to be answered, even if her gang of freaks killed him.
Maybe he’d come back to haunt her, if a ghost could haunt a ghost.
“And the tall one, in the furs?” said Hollis, his voice like a nail file on a salt lick. “The human, I mean, not the bear. Tell me her name again, first and last. I’m not trying to be hard on you two, I just need to make sure you’ve been paying attention!”
“Tanka,” gasped Rafe. “Tanka Equi—fuck!”
He was doubled over in pain again. Jassa wasn’t even attempting to make words of her moans. Both of them had been writhing on the floor for hours, neither knowing nor caring where this small, dark chamber was, or why these freaks wanted them to know their names.
It meant something that they did, though.
It meant Rafe and Jassa wouldn’t be allowed to die any time soon.
“I guess that’s as close as they’re going to get,” muttered Hollis from atop the bear’s shoulders.
Umber the bear, thought Rafe, because even their dead pets had names to memorize.
Hollis had climbed atop the awful thing after Jassa’s fumbling attempt to crush his head in her hands. Rafe wished she’d managed it, if only to stop that excruciating voice, though it probably would’ve extended their misery once the others found out.
“I know! We’ll put our heads together and come up with a mnemonic device. Something that rhymes; that’s what seemed to help the kiddies at Cru, when all else failed. Which it did, as a rule. Let’s see: Hollis Runt, rhymes with flawless—”
“Equinox,” sputtered Rafe. “Tanka Equinox. Please, just stop talking.—Fuck!”
The cramps about blinded him this time. His body was slick with sweat, all his muscles were spasming at once, and he could feel every red-hot bone in his body. Worst of all, he was famished, and had no hope of keeping down so much as a sip of water until all this had run its course.
It would take several days, if they were lucky. This was tlak withdrawal, and Rafe couldn’t believe how deep they’d gone into it, or how quickly.
But then, he couldn’t say how much time had passed between the killing fields and here. They’d woken on this floor, surrounded by these flickering mountains of bric-a-brac, wearing ill-fitting clothes of soft leather, already tlak-sick.
“I’m trying to keep you focused,” said Hollis in that hideous voice of his, every syllable ripping through Rafe’s head, “and distracted! I’d read you a storybook, if Tanka would lend me one. But we might as well accomplish something while we’re at it. We have work to do as soon as you’re well! You can even help me carve him, if you’re so inclined—though more precision will be required than your last job.”
“Let us be,” said Rafe, as Hollis swam in and out of focus. “Please.”
“They never will,” said Jassa, clutching the blackened remnant of her forearm to her chest. “Can’t you see? They want us—broken.”
“You got to broken all by yourselves,” said Ashlan from the doorway. “You have any idea what shape you were in when we found you?”
Rafe shoved himself away from her.
She wasn’t a ghost, as he’d believed when he’d seen her in the ring of fire. But he still couldn’t reconcile her presence here with her death in the farmhouse.
His body was wracked with chills, only partly because of the sickness.
I killed you, he thought. Why didn’t you die?
“Anyway,” said Ashlan, looking up at Hollis. “It’s time.”
“Ah, lovely! The show begins. Hoist us up again, would you, Umber?”
The bear restored him to his perch as Tanka entered the dim, empty chamber, climbing atop a tall stool and folding her arms over her legs.
Rafe writhed onto his belly, panting. She was staring at him, but her face was impossible to read. He found no hatred in her eyes, but he still hadn’t heard her speak.
Hollis patted the bear’s ragged muzzle. It opened its jaw, and he pulled a pair of metal boxes from between its teeth.
Rafe’s metal boxes.
“Give it,” shouted Jassa, dragging herself toward Umber’s feet as well as her muscles would allow. “You give it here!”
“Nothing in there, Jass,” said Rafe. Nothing but game pieces, and a drash as hungry as they were.
But she kept on crawling, as if she’d gone over the edge.
Maybe she had. On top of everything else, her hand was gone, and half her forearm with it.
Hollis passed the larger box down to Ashlan, who set it on the floor and slid it toward Rafe with her foot.
“You still haven’t worked it out, Rafe Davin?” said Hollis, flipping open the lid of the smaller box and plucking out a die. “Your companion here was holding out on you. She had a stash of her own all this while. Show him, Ashlan Ley.”
She crouched beside him. “This was in her shoe.”
In her hand was a blood-soaked scrap of cloth. Ashlan peeled it open, and a chunk of tlak tumbled out.
He should have stabbed her when he had the chance.
Jassa was coming, writhing along the floor like a snake.
She looked like she might try to gobble it off the floor if she could get there in time.
“That was ours,” Rafe sho
uted, slapping a palm onto the crumb, rolling over to shield it with his back. “Open the latch,” he said to Ashlan. He didn’t have the coordination to pinch his fingers, but the tlak had stuck to his sweaty skin. “Please.”
She frowned, considering.
His body shook harder. “I can’t do it myself. Open the latch!”
“All right. But you’re feeding that fucking thing yourself.”
The drash let out a frantic clattering as she flipped open the lid, and Ashlan backed away.
The poor beast was starving. Rafe put his hand to the hole in the mesh, and it snatched at the crumb with its mandibles, taking a chunk of his palm along with it.
He was bleeding, but it didn’t matter. He could hear it masticating. Everything was going to be all right.
Jassa had almost shimmied over to him. “My sins have saved us!” she babbled. “Fortune favors the worst. You see that, don’t you? How even now She smiles upon us? My Ace?”
Rafe closed his arms around the blur of the drash beneath its mesh.
Its body was slowing. Its poison was growing sweet. It would be ready soon.
With shaking fingers, he pried up the screen.
Jassa’s heel snapped his jaw shut. A second kick rolled him off the box. By the time he righted himself, she’d already scooped up the drash and pressed it to her neck. As it clamped down, she stroked its carapace with the back of her trembling hand—and bellowed.
There was no pleasure in the sound.
“Jass?” he called. “What’s happening? Jass?”
She sat up, face white, raising her fingers to her neck, where the drash still clung.
It was over too soon.
The freaks were all talking at once, but Rafe wasn’t listening. All he could see was Jassa, her hands steady now, tugging out the drash while its stinger retracted, still dribbling.
She hadn’t even finished the kiss.
“It’s all wrong,” she was whispering. “Is it this?” She pointed at Rafe with her missing hand. “The dark flame? Is it in my body, still? Devouring the sweetness?” She held the drash out to him. “Take it, boy,” she pleaded, sounding dazed, but not drugged. “Show me. Is it me, or is it us?”
It didn’t matter what had passed between them, not now. Rafe, barely breathing, turned his head. As Jassa set the drash on his neck, he looked up at Tanka Equinox, still sitting on her stool, hands in front of her knees.
Her fingers were lacing and unlacing, again and again.
Their tips were stained with black ink.
He shivered, remembering something.
Too black.
It hadn’t been a dream.
She’d opened him up.
She’d remade him.
He clenched his teeth as the stinger plunged, but no rush came. His tongue probed the edges of his teeth, but there was nothing to chew. Just boiling poison in the muscle of his neck, and the deep, sick-making pain of the stinger near his spine.
The nausea, the fever, all the signs of withdrawal were gone—but there was no sweetness, no pleasure, no high.
“It’s us,” he murmured. He clawed the drash from his skin, shuddering.
Its legs waved in ecstasy. At least it could still enjoy itself.
He dropped it in its box and closed the lid.
He and Jassa sat in numb silence as the freaks congratulated themselves.
The sickness was gone, but that only made it worse. It meant there was no end to this. They’d need to shoot again, within a day or two, and for nothing. And then again, and again, with no joy and no release.
He stared up at the freaks. They’d written the rules of this game.
It was time to find out how it worked.
Before he’d thought better of it, Rafe stood. The bear took a step toward him, holding out a paw.
Rafe wiped the sweat from his face, but didn’t back down. They hadn’t gone to all this trouble just to kill him now.
He pointed at Tanka. “You did this. You took us apart and you put us back together wrong.”
“Not wrong. Different.” She slid to her feet, looming over him.
How he wished he was taller.
“All of us, Mister Davin, are made of pathways,” she said. “Some carry us to pleasure, others to pain. I changed a few of yours, as I’ve changed so many of my own.”
“Fuck your pathways. You hacked us open,” said Rafe, “and you played in our fucking guts.”
“Hah!” cried Hollis, clapping his hands. “And are you playing the pot today, Rafe Davin, or the kettle?”
Rafe looked at Ashlan, his face burning.
She stared back at him, rubbing her belly slowly.
Jassa hadn’t moved since he’d taken his kiss. If he’d ever needed one of her craven excuses, it was now—and she wouldn’t so much as look up.
“Speechless, are you?” said Hollis, climbing down the front of the bear, using its ribs like a ladder. “And what could you say, really? Other than, ‘Thank you, Sir Runt, for saving our highly devalued lives.’ If you hadn’t been necessary to us, you’d be halfway to some Devourer’s colon by now. Or had you forgotten all that?”
He had. He’d forgotten most everything, and longed to forget more. “So we owe you,” he said. “Is that it? You’ve experimented on us, and we should be thankful for it?”
“That depends.” Tanka stepped forward, holding out her hands like a pair of scales. “Before we found you, did you want to live? Or die? If you wanted to die, then no, you should not be thankful. We brought you back, and to a version of your life that may well be worse than it was before. But if you wanted to live, Mister Davin, then things are more complicated. You were dying, and we stopped it from happening.” She smiled, and Rafe stared, having no idea what lay behind it. Was she toying with him? “We gave you life, and then we changed your design, which is a kind of taking. So as it stands, we are even—a generous assessment, considering your prior involvement with Lady Ley—and for that, yes, you might well be thankful. It means you are free to go.”
“Hold on a minute,” said Hollis from the floor.
“No.” She held up a finger, and the tiny man shut his mouth. “They are free to go, and live as they are. They may break their addiction, or embrace it as it stands.”
Rafe kept expecting Jassa to interject.
But she wasn’t even listening. She was cradling her blackened arm to her chest, rocking it like a colicky infant.
“If, however, you decide to help us,” said Tanka, “I will restore you. When the job is done, you will be as you were, Mister Davin. Free to indulge, and enjoy your indulgence, without further interference.”
“Those are just words,” said Rafe.
She bowed her head. “As all promises are.”
Rafe stewed a moment, trying to pretend, even to himself, even for a moment, that he might walk away.
Ashlan scratched her chin. “We’re going to eat soon, right?”
Hollis threw his hands up. “Do you ever think of anything but your stomach, Ashlan Ley?”
Rafe remembered the tea and cakes. More than anything, he was hungry. Tlak’s sweetness staved off hunger, for a day at a time—but when it went, it left the body ravaged.
He couldn’t imagine himself hunting in the wood, especially with sickness looming.
He’d never get a mile from here, knowing that Tanka might give him the sweetness back.
And she knew it.
“So this is the game?” said Rafe. “Pretending I have any choice in all this gets you off. You’re gods, is that it?”
That got a reaction from Jassa, though whether it was a laugh or a sob, Rafe couldn’t say.
“I,” said Tanka, “am no such thing.”
“Nor I, sadly,” said Hollis, “but I’ll play the part if you insist on prostrating yourself.”
“Look, this is business,” said Ashlan. “And considering how we met, it seemed like it might be more effective than asking nicely.”
“Then I hope you have a s
olid supply of tlak,” said Rafe, hating how petulant he sounded, “or we’ll only get sick again.”
“Isn’t that how the Assemblage pays you?” said Hollis.
Rafe looked down at him, startled. How much did they know? “Pays us?”
“For the harvest you collected. For Ashlan’s guts.”
“You kept the satchel?” It could hardly be fresh, but it would be better than returning empty-handed.
“Well, no.” Hollis patted Ashlan on the leg. “But she’ll make all you need.”
She glared. “Runt.”
“Oh, come, don’t get shy about it now. She’s invulnerable. A regeneratrix! But it makes her very cranky.”
Rafe’s mind was reeling. “And what’s your plan, exactly? You want—to take down the Assemblage?”
He looked back, worried, but Jassa still had no reaction. The Widow of Lank Street was gone.
He was shocked at the change, but only for a moment.
Rafe himself felt like seven kinds of hell, but he was standing. Advocating for the both of them. Fighting for their restoration, with whatever he had left.
Because, for all her bluster, she didn’t have half his strength.
What we suffer takes half of what we are, Gingerbeard once said, but it makes us twice as strong in exchange.
“No, we have no beef with your cult,” said Hollis. “It’s simple, really. You want to get high, and we want the Puppeteer. Have you ever asked yourself what he does with the organs he collects?”
“I thought—” Rafe looked uncertainly at Jassa. “I thought for some reason he was making us better tlak.” But it sounded like a lie, something she might have told him to keep him from poking into deeper truths.
“Ha! Sweeter candy from the store, is that it? No, Rafe Davin, the Puppeteer wants to send a million of me out into the world, to fill up all its dark closets with leaping, rasping puppets of death. Imagine the courts overrun with mannikins—the streets awash with the slushy runoff of our mayhem! Imagine every city in the world dancing at the end of his strings. Or—or you can help me imagine a better future. One in which he’s tied down and dissected before his nefarious plan begins. One in which he’s rebuilt in ways that will make your change seem like a kiss from an angel.”
“If you want him,” said Rafe, “then he’s yours.”
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