For the purposes of preparing his ceremony, he tried to stop thinking ill of her as he dipped his hands in fresh water and washed her feet.
Then he fished the dice from her sockets, and placed them in the pocket of her shirt, to be burnt. He rinsed her face, not that it did much good, then leaned close to her ear.
“Let’s hope there are no Aces or Deuces where you’re going,” he whispered.
He stood, and the others looked at him with heavy expectancy. Graven Jacks was leaning on a shovel, standing before a voluminous grave, big enough to bury the entire row of bodies. Beside him was Layna, the crosswise girl Loxia had sent him, watching Rafe with a kind of hilarious awe, as if his proximity to these mangled corpses was both a brilliant joke and an act of heroism.
Rafe cleared his throat, feeling like a child playing a god in a Feast Day performance.
“I speak for Jassa Lowroller,” he started, hating his high-pitched voice.
He wished he had Gingerbeard’s comfort with language.
He might as well just borrow their phrasing. They’d hardly mind.
“You never know what’s to come in another person’s story, any more than you know the end of your own. Had she lived, Jassa might not have done any good, the way things were going. But she might have done—better than this.”
He looked at the shattered body of Eth. With the wall down, stories were circulating of eggs with seven yolks, of trees in the wood turning wobbly and pink, like giant lungs. The catacombs had collapsed, and the streets were such a mess he couldn’t imagine how they’d ever be set to rights. Making a home here was madness—but no one had seen a guard in days, and so here they stood, surer with every hour that all this mess was some kind of beginning.
“It might seem odd to bring her out here, among all of these people who died because of what she started. But my family believed that saying what you know of a person soothes them on their way out of this world. Quiets them down, so they won’t disturb any of us. And that the dead folk around them will follow the quiet one.
“So we’ll give it a try. What do I know of Jassa?”
What did he know?
That she shot her snot out of her nose like a rocket, even indoors?
That she’d steal the cake from your plate if you so much as turned your head?
“She had six sisters,” he said, “and all of them served on the killing fields, and died there.”
That played well enough. Graven Jacks grunted, thumping a fist on his chest, and a number of others followed suit.
“She loved to win, and would stop at nothing to do it.”
More of them nodded.
“And she loved to tell stories. Repeatedly, and with an—with an ever-changing variety of details.”
That was all he had, if he was keeping things neutral. He looked down at Jassa.
She was grinning up at him, her face a skinless mask of muscle and clotted blood.
Knowing the Assemblage, he doubted she’d been dead at the time.
“My family taught me, too, to begin every burial with these words, which my mother said were true of everyone who lives long enough to walk and talk—from the most honorable person lying here, down to the very worst.”
He closed his eyes and touched his chest.
“ ‘How they tried,’ ” said Rafe. “ ‘How long, how hard they tried.’ ”
—Gone Away—
Turning from the open door, from the ringing sound of seven infants screaming, Ashlan ran from the city of her birth.
She ran with the century-old child pressed to her chest, her grip the only thing keeping his insides in, her blood on his burlap the only thing keeping him wheezing.
She ran from the chamber where she’d found him smashed on the floor, the seams of his belly burst by a fallen stone, his button eyes still staring up at the locked metal door that kept his giant brother in, just barely able to whisper, I only wanted to see his face.
She ran from the dark tunnels where she’d wandered without food or water, growing wilder as she rammed blindly against walls, fell cursing down pits. She ran as her body’s fluids slowed and stopped, as she healed again and again, reviving her organs until she’d summoned a second skin of pain, a full-body migraine that made every step an agony.
She ran from her hunger, from the things that it wanted, which never left her, and never would.
Still she ran, from the overturned streets of Eth, which finally looked as it did in her dreams—hemorrhaged, tumbled, choked with the dead and the living.
Ashlan ran, and would keep on running.
From the people in their tents at the outskirts of town.
From the shining sun and the promises it would break at dusk.
From all that Eth had been and would be, into the wood, where her mother had gone before her.
Elil Ley, stripping leaves from green branches, talking for days without pause, crashing through the forest as she searched for someone who wasn’t there.
Just as Ashlan had, every time her life outgrew its pot.
Slaughtered at the Uni? Come to the wood.
Lost another lover? Come to the wood.
Money all spent? Come to the wood.
To the wood, where she’d go wild like her mother, praying to her mother’s nameless god. A god who was always just about to save her from her mess, her pain, her appetite.
“Always about to,” she spat, for she’d been talking a while now, rapidly, heatedly, “but He never quite does it. Always on the edge, never over. Until the edge pulls away and it all starts up again.”
Ashlan stopped, staring at a shaft of light that fell through the leaves, striking a heart-shaped rock riven by the roots of a lightning-struck tree.
“Been here before,” she murmured. “Been everywhere before. That’s the problem, isn’t it? Always repeating. Never changing.”
“But your blood,” rasped Hollis, “might have changed any number of things.”
Ashlan startled. The heat came roaring out of her bones, reviving her heart, which started up at double-time.
She’d forgotten he was even here, though his body was tucked under her tunic, pressed close to the bare skin of her breast.
“Those people,” he said. “All the wounded of Eth. You could’ve healed them.”
“You want me to go back?” She shook her head, incredulous. “What is this, a change of heart? You want to make things better before you go?” She looked back, noticing how deep they’d already come, how far away the city was.
He was right. She was a healer.
She knew it as surely as she knew that no force could make her return.
“No,” said Hollis, chuckling weakly. “Not my style. I only mean that you’re not repeating yourself, Ashlan Ley. In your tale of the last disaster, you fed the multitudes with your blood, like a noble fool. Yet here we are.”
“Well, I’m done caring,” she said.
But her body ached to let its blood, to pour it again over his torn skin, to give him just a little more life.
And why?
Because she cared for him?
Because he was, what, her son?
She let out an ugly, snorting laugh as she dashed around the shaft of sunlight, into the trees again.
“I mean, what’s the point,” she said, dodging branches, trying to avoid anything that looked like a path, because there might be other people out here, too, survivors trying to find their way to wherever else, and she wanted only to be alone. “So the Ethians heal up, build themselves something worth living in out of the rubble? Doesn’t matter. Somebody’s going to take it right out of their hands. Some new faction, some other kingdom. In a matter of days.”
“Even with the guts of the Gone-Away buried?” Hollis said. “Isn’t that what everyone’s been fighting over all this while? The power beneath the streets?”
“You could crush it to dust and bury it under three cities. Somebody’s going to find a way to boil it down and strain it out.”
But that had nothing to do with her running. This wasn’t about the heartbreak of her disillusionment. She’d been an idealist once, but that was long ago.
What lay behind that heavy metal door, though—that haunted her.
It had been shut and bolted. She’d checked it, and checked it again.
And still she couldn’t scrub the thought from her mind—that the Kin of Man would get out, sooner or later, and come bursting through the streets, churning through any citizens whose hearts harbored secret ambitions.
He’d slaughter them for their thoughts.
And he was full of her. Made of her.
But this was a lie, too, she thought, filling with sourness as she’d filled with heat. It wasn’t what she was running from.
It was just another mask laid on top of the truth.
Fuck, but she was hungry.
Ashlan ran faster, branches scoring her skin.
“So you’re escaping the cruel and repetitive cycles of history,” said Hollis, sounding dubious. “But where to, Ashlan Ley? Where are you taking me?”
“I don’t know,” she snapped, startling a deer up ahead, which bounded wisely away. “Would you rather die alone, Runt? In the dark, where I found you? I could always dig you another hole! I’ve got nothing but time.”
His little body gripped her.
He was afraid, and she was afraid, too.
It didn’t seem right, that he should be the one to die. All he wanted to do was live, and she’d have given anything to trade places with him.
The urge ripped through her again. Her headache made her want to scream. Soon she’d have to stop and set a trap, or else—
She was running.
Her mouth kept going, spittle flying.
She barely knew what she was saying. She hated herself for saying it.
Hollis had stopped interjecting. She gashed her palm on a sharp rock and bathed him with her blood, peeling him back from her skin to get at his insides. He roused, a little, but she could tell he was fading.
“Hang in there, Runt,” she muttered. “Stay with me.”
“Why,” he whispered, “is that so important to you?”
“It’s just—”
But she didn’t know.
All this time, she’d been trying to keep him safe. Or else she’d been chasing his gold, a treasure that never existed. All in order to die, and she couldn’t, now.
Was that all this return to the wood was? Some manic echo of her former quest?
Did she long to stop living so badly that she couldn’t see the hope was gone? Or was she simply her mother’s daughter, an echo of the madness of Elil Ley, looking for the cure to a sickness of the mind, an ailment that couldn’t name itself?
Ashlan turned, ready to run again, at random, forever.
That’s when she saw the hand.
It hung three feet above the earth, its skin black and shining, its wrist atop a band of spores that snaked across a carpet of fallen leaves. Its palm was flat, perpendicular to the earth.
Stop.
“Tanka.”
Ashlan wasn’t sure whether to be irritated or relieved.
But whatever she’d been running from, or running toward, she wasn’t any more. She’d felt unseen before, except to Hollis, who was so close to death he barely counted as a witness. Now, shamed by this phantom sign of Tanka’s watchfulness, Ashlan packed all her wildness, all her weakness, away—as she’d done dozens of times before, as she would again, and again, so long as the world went on around her. She sat down heavily, no longer talking, just feeling the pain of all that unfed healing in her body and rocking, ever so slightly, over the cool weight on her chest.
In time the bear came shuffling through the forest, a roast bird dangling from its claw. Ashlan snatched it with one bloody hand, ripping through its meat, spitting out the bones. Only after its flesh was gone did she notice the thing had been salted and spiced.
“Thanks,” she murmured, belching.
Umber looked down with sunken, glassy eyes and beckoned her.
She followed after the loose swing of its fur, feeling guilty for feeling better.
There was no point in running now. If Tanka wanted her to dance, she’d dance, whether she resisted or not.
Squirrels and birds burst from the wood before the bear’s lumbering step. It led her to a hill encircled with trees, its grassy face inscribed with a subtle pattern of shining black rings.
“Is it alive?” came a lilting voice from above. “The talking doll?”
Tanka lay on her side in the boughs of a sparse-limbed tree, her fingers playing cat’s-cradle with a floating skein of blackness. The branches around her were laden with the substance of the gazing-tree in patterns no less complex than those on the ground, though whether all this was play or incantation Ashlan couldn’t say.
Then again, she thought, glancing at the painting that hung from Umber’s ribs as the bear dragged the silver-buckled chest onto the hilltop, that distinction might be meaningless where Tanka’s magic was concerned.
“Yeah.” Ashlan folded her arms around Hollis’ body. “He’s alive.”
“Tanka Equinox, I didn’t know you cared,” he whispered, turning his head as far as he could.
“Things have changed,” said Tanka softly, swinging a loop of spores around the branch and lowering herself slowly onto the earth. “For all of us, I suspect.”
“Sure,” said Ashlan. “Jassa sold us out, probably to get the Puppeteer out of her way. That part worked. But Rafe is probably dead. And Runt never had any gold to begin with. Oh, and I’m the one who made him.”
“I realized this some time ago.”
“Of course you did.”
“ ‘Weak rune-work.’ Your irritation spoke volumes.”
Ashlan sighed. “So how was your week?”
“Similarly tumultuous.” Tanka gestured to Umber. Scrabbling at the sides of the silver-buckled trunk, it began to rummage inside. “I spent some time at the University, doing a bit of research. What I found was—unexpected.”
“What does that mean, Tanka?”
“That we should not be too hard on your talking doll,” said Tanka, smiling bitterly, “for we’d have been disappointed regardless of its pocketbook. Both of us, Lady Ley.” She strode to the hilltop. “I’d only just gotten the bad news when the quakes began. I wasn’t surprised when none of you materialized at the boarding house, given the rumors of Jassa’s sudden rise. I spent days there all the same, witnessing both carnage and kindness. Yet however deeply I dabbled with human company, I still ended up withdrawing, without finding any true connection. I began to doubt—well, that I might ever find a suitable father for my child. But perhaps my thinking in that direction was influenced by my research.”
The bear lifted a rubbery curtain of nerves from a sack of black silk, holding it up for inspection. “Yes, Umber dear, that’s perfect.” With help, she draped the curtain over her shoulders and sat, cross-legged, at the center of the pattern of spores.
“What are we talking about, Tanka? What is all this?”
It looked like another trap. But Tanka seemed to be ensnaring herself in it this time.
“I was wrong again, Lady Ley,” said Tanka, adjusting the white, rubbery shawl on her collarbone. “I believed that I understood what you are. But where I had envisioned you as one of many—an immortal child of an immortal, raised as a foundling by human parents—what I have learned is far stranger.
“There’s only you, Lady Ley. And you cannot die, not if you had all the resources in the kingdom at your disposal. And I cannot give birth, at least not with your body as my guide—for you are as infertile as you are invulnerable. Yet you possess a curious flexibility on both counts, and so I propose that we join together all the same.”
She smiled, though it was laced with melancholy. “Let us almost get what we want, you and I.”
Ashlan’s urge to run had returned, redoubled.
“I don’t have a clue what you’r
e talking about.”
“Of course you do,” Tanka said, rolling her head back. “You always have. But your obstinacy, Lady Ley, is the stuff of actual legend.”
The pattern of shining black lines surged up from the earth, soaking her shawl of nerves until it was black as jet.
“What was your name when you were born?” Tanka said, shivering as she lowered her chin.
“Just—Ashlan Ley. My mother didn’t believe in middle names. Enough trouble coming up with all seven, she said.”
“Untrue. According to the Ethian rosters, the first-born of Elil Ley’s only brood was named Hempstead.”
“Imagine being saddled with that,” whispered Hollis.
The fear was no less powerful for being utterly formless.
“Fuck this,” Ashlan muttered, and started to run.
Only to find her ankles ensnared by loops of spore-stuff. She thudded to her knees.
“Hempstead Ley was born completely identical to his brothers,” called Tanka, shuddering as the nerves tightened around her, beginning to pulse. Her skin was flushed, pink and shining. “But one week later, his name was changed to Ashlan—and he was no longer the same. He was you, Lady Ley. I propose the following theory.”
What’s out there? Ashlan had asked. Why are you always out walking in the wood?
I’m not well, Elil Ley said. Anyone can see that. But there’s someone you can meet, sometimes. Someone who can heal any wound, any disease, anything at all. And even when you can’t see them, you can feel them. Like an echo, Ash. Like a ripple.
“That Hempstead’s mother was the last of a long line of temple-keepers.
“That she was—uniquely suited to hear the call of the Gone-Away goddess her family served.
“That she took her infant to a being deep in the wood.
“That this being,” said Tanka, raising a trembling hand to pluck at the pulsing nerves, arranging them on her chest, “was the avatar of Gen the Reviver—come to the end of a long century of life, ready to die and be born again.
“Your mother heard the call.
“Your call.”
Ashlan tried to move, to crawl into the wood if she had to, away from the rest of this.
The black spores tugged her back, their slender shapes strong as iron.
Viscera Page 23