Salt, Sand, and Blood

by MarQuese Liddle

  Before rising from the bed, the pastor ended his prayer asking God for another chance to earn repentance—not forgiveness; he would never beg for that again lest his sins bring a second disaster upon the innocents around him. Beside the bed stood a writing desk, no iron pen, just quills, an ink well, and a basket of bread, chevon, and a small bottle of ale. David added a fresh candle to the food and a striker to light it. Then, with the basket in arm, he was off. All the while on the way down to the chapel cellar, he pondered how long till the baker caught on that he’d been buying bread for two. And he worried the same for the butcher and the candlemaker. This can’t go on much longer.

  That night when she came beating on the portal doors, he hadn’t known the extent of what she was asking for. Not that it mattered. David had already sworn to help in any way he could in his guise as vicar-deacon; so when what began as a maiden begging for sanctuary transformed into hiding a knight from her family and superiors, there was nothing he could do but to keep his promise and pray that God would give him words to resolve it. So far, no luck.

  Lord, you couldn’t have given me a harder penance, the pastor thought to himself creaking down the stairs.

  †††

  “Jael,” the vicar’s voice flooded the cellar, overpowering dark and damp with the odor of fresh bread. There would be ale as well, and cheese or maybe chevon, and a candle Abel packed in a basket for her every morning and eve. “I hope I’m not disturbing you,” he said, stopping on the bottom step. Jael listened from the far corner as he switched out that morning’s basket, retrieving its unused candle which he added to the pile beside the stairs. The vicar sighed. “This is quite a while to spend alone in the dark. I’ve lost count how many days it’s been, but that’s got to be almost a dozen candles.” There was a rustling of baskets, a scratching sound, sparks, then soft yellow light. Leonhardt twisted away from the illumination toward the shade of the corner where her shadow stretched and shrank. She gazed blankly into her mishappen image, struggling fruitlessly to ignore the rub and clangor as Abel fussed through storage. “It’s amazing, isn’t it,” he asked after minute of arranging, “that a little chapel like this has a horde of gold stored in its cellar?”

  The seven gilded braziers, Jael knew he meant, thought she didn’t expect him to begin lighting them. Half were ablaze before the sweetness of frankincense stole her perception, flashing an image of Gavin from the last time she saw him—grinning, golden in the glow of the holy braziers—and this Pareo imposter stood defiling that memory. She exploded to her feet, nearly screamed her first words since going into hiding. “What do you think you’re you doing?”

  The vicar smiled, his icy eyes softened by the gentle flames. “They remind me of someone. Someone I lost and might never find again. The last time I saw him, we burned braziers just like these. We even used the same oil.” He breathed deep the sweet scented air. “That used to be a comfort, to know no matter how far a man strayed, he could walk into any church during a holy day service and it would smell just the same as coming home.”

  “But you’re not supposed to light them just because you want! They’re for holy days only. Burning them like this—it’s, it’s,” Jael stammered, her anger disarmed. None of the words to mind felt quite right, then, “It’s disrespectful to Gavin! That oil is expensive; he wouldn’t want someone wasting the assembly’s tithes for some stupid self-indulgence.”

  “No, you’re right. How selfish of me.” Abel placed a gilded lid atop each of the braziers. One by one, the golden flames snuffed out till in the dim, his eyes returned hard as ice. “But while we’re in the spirit of respecting Herbstfield’s good deacon, maybe you can explain to me why he’d approve of you holing up down here.” Frankincense faded with the hiss of the burning wick, candle wax melting, pattering onto the packed dirt floor. “What are you doing here, Jael?”

  Her eyes fell to the hardened earth. She didn’t possess an answer to that question—that was perhaps the reason she’d come at all. She was lost, groping in the dark with questions of her own, “Why did you help me? It’s a deadly sin to hide a deserter. You could’ve been burned at the stake had they decided to search the chapel.”

  “Because I don’t believe that you’re a deserter, and even if you are, your superior seemed more worried about finding you in one piece. It was difficult lying to him, harder still to lie to your father. Leonhardt is a good man.”

  Young Leonhardt scoffed.

  “What?” asked Abel.

  “Typical Pareo clergy. No mention of God in your list of worries?”

  “If God was the one who punished our sins on earth, this whole world would be reduced to ashes. Man causes himself enough suffering as it is.”

  Jael disagreed. “Not for me. I haven’t suffered nearly enough for what I’ve done.” That made the vicar chuckle. She glared at him expecting an expression of derision, but there was only compassion behind his rough, blonde whiskers.

  “Poor child, do you believe you’re the only one who is hurt by your failings?”

  “Of course not!”

  “Yet here you remain.”

  Guilt and anger swelled together. “Shut up! You’re a fool if you think they’re anything but better off without me, an oath-breaker! A bastard! A slut! A fraud! You don’t know anything about me! If you did,” she choked on the words, “if you did, then you’d throw me out with the rest of the trash.”

  “Then you’d get the punishment you deserve,” said the vicar, his tone dead of jest and sarcasm. The whiplash took Jael aback. She’d been riding high on the back of a wrathful beast drunk with blood and ready to attack whatever Abel said. Only once his angle changed did she realize how little restraint she held over her inborn monster. Absent of prey, its seven heads tore down antagonistic paths, splaying her soul like a man drawn and quartered. Then Abel slew the beast. “If that’s what you truly believe, then confess and be absolved and leave this hall of penance.”

  “Confess?” she asked, “But you’re just a stand in deacon. We’d need a priest or—”

  “Just a moment ago you claimed that I know nothing about you. This is true; the only thing a man knows less than his fellows is himself. But by the same spirit, you know nothing about me either. I pray that you’ll forgive me. I have not been honest with you or the township. My name is David, pastor and missionary of the parish of Babylon—the former parish.” And so he told her of the second purge, of the great city burning, and the separation from his son for whom now he searched in hiding under the nose of the selfsame church that stole everything from him. “I brought it upon myself,” he confessed of war crimes from an earlier life. As a soldier, he’d served her father during the Purge. These were the first details Leonhardt had ever heard of her father’s exploits. The pastor’s words enraptured her, every detail a splash of turpentine confirming Trey’s skepticism, dissolving the glory of her childhood legend and recoloring the canvas with images of black-glassed skeletons, ash and soot, desperate threats, cunning, and subterfuge.

  By the end, she could only stare at him, stunned yet aware of their barter. He had given his story, or at least part of one. The meanderings, hesitations and thousand-mountain stare at the end of his tale—she could sense he was hiding something—and so when the time came for Jael to share herself, she trusted him in equal amount: running from the fight at her father’s house, the night in the tower, the false vigil, the bloodbath at the pagan village, the arrest of Corvin and the death of Vaufnar, Blackheart’s head rolling on the dirt, broken promises—she recounted this series of murder and misfortune, stopping short before the first. Her feelings toward her mother were still reeling between love, self-loathing, and animus-rage. Had Gavin been alive, she might have braved giving form to her turmoil, but she would not face it in front of this stranger. Nonetheless, this man now possessed power over her. And I over him, do not forget.

  “So, what now?” she asked.

  David blew out what was left of the candle, turned and started for the
stairs. “Tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll take you back myself.” Then he paused upon reaching the bottom step. With a tone of relief and welcome exhaustion, “We’ll confess and finally make atonement.”

  †

  There was darkness and sleep, forgotten dreams and early dawn. Jael and David broke their fast on bread warmed in Gavin’s hearth, cleaned and cloaked themselves, then shared a horse for the Leonhardt farmhouse. The snow had melted in the week she was gone, dissolved by spring mourning the death left in the passing of winter. Her tears had turned the road to mud. Easy for a cart to get stuck in, Jael mused, trying to lighten the tightness crushing inside her chest. They were nearly at the farm. Leonhardt could see the house, a brown blotch in a sea of brown, so saturated had the ground become from rain and snowmelt. Field work would be impossible until the soil dried out. Little chance she find Zach hanging around, though her father and mother would most certainly be home, likely bundled around the hearth in the kitchen. Strange, then, that no smoke rose from the chimney. She blinked and winced a few times as they trotted onto to the property, making sure she hadn’t missed any wisps of gray hidden in the overcast sky.

  David halted their hackney at the gate to the stable. Sodden clops and whinnies sounded from inside, three horses at least. Three. It meant they’d found her stolen courser that she’d left at the edge of town, that they’d brought it back, bringing the captain with them, and that he had stayed. Trey had waited for her.

  Leonhardt leapt off the horse into the mud below, splashing loud as the snapping jaws of a brackdragon. She asked David if he would wait in the stable until she called; she wanted to confront them on her own.

  “Something has changed,” he said, grinning, his eyes soft again.

  Jael wasn’t sure if it was supposed to be a question, but she replied regardless, “I realized just now that you were right. God doesn’t punish us. We punish ourselves, and we punish one another. If we could just forgive ourselves and let others forgive us too, then maybe our sins wouldn’t be as bad as we believe. And maybe,” she started as new feelings became language, “we could live in penance and actually deserve it. Like you, in search for your son. I thought it over last night. And this morning. Even if they’d take me back, I don’t believe my life was ever meant for the Cross. So after this—I figured you won’t be staying in Herbstfield, that you’d go on looking for your son—so I thought that maybe I could go with you, to help you find Adam.”

  “‘Enough from the day are our troubles,’” the pastor quoted, still smiling as he led their horse into the stable, leaving Leonhardt to go on her own. She approached the kitchen door with her insides tied in knots. Her heart fluttered, pounded, and lay flat, all at once weak kneed and rigid as she stood before the doorway. Still, no signs of smoke from the chimney nor of lantern light, though inside she could hear the clamber of movement. Feet on the floor, closing in on the doorway.

  “Father?” Jael’s breath hung in the air the faintest shade of white. She pushed the door open as someone pulled from the other side. “Mother?” she asked. “Trey?” But there was no one there, just the smell of soot and sweat. Her eyes alighted on a shattered vase; a broken stool leg; and on the floor a black stain of days old blood. Then a man appeared from behind the door. Robbers…no, Jael remembered why Trey had seemed so afraid that night. The men who’d attacked her father, the robbers that has gotten away. Not robbers. Assassins.

  She reached for her sword, had it half way drawn when the assailant’s blade stuck inside her—a great fang of a knife like the one her father wore.

  Twenty-Seventh Verse

  And so closes the song of Adam and Adnihilo sinking ever deeper into the black of the abyss where measure of time is found only in distance and blind eyes turn inward. Beneath the surface, they saw them—the horrid corpses. Floating furthest in the distance was a woman’s form: hips and bust bloated to grotesque proportions, petrified skin stretched thin to burst by black veins like barren rivers, ancient birthing blood crusted to her thighs, her face a grove of fetid trees and fungi. And between the dead feminine and the living men drifted a child’s body, swaddled to its throat in oil-soaked rags, only its head exposed—like a star cracked and blackened in smoldering repose. But those two primordial corpses clung to the far darkness; nearest the half-blood and the pastor’s son and the lighted mortal surface lay slain a titanic chimeric beast. Black fur turned it invisible in the abyss save for its unblinking amber eyes, square pupils behind a white film of death. It’s head was that of a bear’s, as were it legs, but its body ran long and slender, its tail like a snake. It wasn’t clear what had killed it. Not until they sank closer could they see the great blade thrust deep within its breast, a winged sword like they had seen in the Tsaazaari desert—the very one, they knew—for the fourth figure emerged.

  No later did Adnihilo’s eyes fall upon it than did the lightning surge forth from his forehead—a sudden stroke of violent illumination, too bright for mortal eyes yet too profound to ignore. Amphibious tendrils slithered over the hilt of the sword, retrieved it from the beast, then coiled back to their source. It was a terrible thing to look upon, the face of the pale and Blind Leviathan. Empty sockets that had long swallowed their contents now breathed like nostrils the waters of the deep. And when its maw opened, behind rows and rows of razor-fang teeth stared a mosaic of eyes, alive and unblinking.

  I’m dreaming, thought the half-blood as he watched the monstrosity untangle its serpentine body, begin swimming toward him, jaws open. This isn’t real, he tried to scream, but there was no air, not even in his lungs. Panic took him over, shut his eyes and ears to the notion that he was drowning, that the leviathan was near. This is a nightmare. I’m not here. He imagined himself aboard The Ashen Maid lying naked in Lilum’s bed after days of terror. He was passed them now. Soon, he would wake to warmth enveloping his skin, cradling and comforting, nourishing and soft. His angst dissolved, and Adnihilo thought to himself, If I could just stay here forever.

  Then the Mad Dog barked, “Do even you know where you are?”

  His eyes opened in the mouth of the Leviathan.

  “Hark!” crashed a voice like the new-moon’s tide, and the half-blood woke blind to his surroundings, tumbling head-over-foot on what felt to be wood, every bump harrying him with bruises and splinters. Then, suddenly as it began, the passage opened and spit Adnihilo out onto the red earth below. He hit the ground on the flat of his back and lay there awhile catching his breath. It reminded him of Eemah, the powder-soft dirt strewn with smooth pebbles and warm, though there seemed to be no sun. Heat and light flowed from fissures in the ground, wafting and orange, making visible the tunnel from which Adnihilo fell.

  Not a tunnel, he discovered, but hollow roots of a tree the height of a mountain, grown rampant down the walls, rendering cracks across the ceiling—no, that too was wrong. It was a firmament of stone, the inner surface of a dome plastered and painted. A single mural spanned unbroken. The half-blood lost his breath again taking it in: hordes of angels were locked in war.

  Every shadowed sinew of their godly physiques, every feather of their dove-colored wings, each bead of dripping sweat, each step and plumes of cloud dispersing under their sandals, blood splatter on bronze skin, bronze armour and weapons, ruddy spears and shields—no details were spared by the hand that painted them, nor in each unique grimace toward their foe. Adnihilo’s eyes followed, and what they found he could only call demons, more beast than man, their perverted blood teeming with that of crows, locusts, spiders, and hounds—too many to count among the legionaries—but among the officers, he could see the horse-headed trumpet bearer, unicorn horned and gangly framed, under the shadow of two huge vulturous wings, urging the legion forward. An owl-crowned warrior led the cavalry swordsmen, charging astride his wolf along the left flank—while from the right, centaur horse archers and their jet haired commander loosed shafts like tree branches from bows taller than men.

  Front and center the formation fought demons w
orking engines of war: a hose of fire in the hands of a half-griffon; chariot scythes driven by a three-eyed ogre, snares and spikes laid by an antlered hound, and racks of flame propelled sulfuric arrows launched at the behest of a bloated wasp. Adnihilo eyes lingered on this one. Unlike those that came before it, there was hardly a hint of humanity in its blue-black carapace: six hornet’s wing and six human arms black of skin and fingered with stingers—the one at its abdomen dripping ichor venom; and atop its enormous, arthropoid head wrapped massive eyes of compounded amber, between them, three bright oculi like the points of a triangle, its orientation descending—a tendency shared by the three serpents whom formed the van. The black dragon like a bear and the yet blind leviathan possessed those same three oculi, only theirs shone jasper like those of the red dragon, the third serpent chief among the others, the legate of this legion known as Light Bringer by the Messaii and in Eemah as the Old One. At the mural’s apex he fought in single combat with an angel, red-bronze scales against a golden cuirass, talons and fangs against a flaming sword. Curious, Adnihilo squinted to see the details of this archangel’s face, but a vandal had gotten there first, it seemed, and defaced the angel with crude, black paint vaguely the shape of a spider.

  “Adnihilo!”

  The half-blood bolted upright, broken free from his spellbinding by the urgency in Adam’s voice. The pastor’s son was yet a ways off, perhaps fifty yards impeded by fissures and heat vents. Lilum and Ba’al were present as well, though well behind the desperate Messah scorching himself vaulting over ridges and holes belching smoke. Adnihilo plucked a splinter from his elbow, then one from his knee.

  “Thank God,” Adam started, “we thought we’d lost you in the crossing.” He reached a hand out and helped the half-blood to his feet. “The others were worried a monster had gotten you.”