We Cry for Blood

by Devin Madson

  Under the empress’s watchful gaze, I fed her body, and then I slept. This time Kaysa was alone but for distant chatter and laughter. A horse snorted. Nearby a fire crackled and someone sniggered at a crass joke. The artificial darkness around me smelled musty. A tent, perhaps. Mud. Leather. My hands were still bound, but I was not thinking of escape. He would just find me again. And he had asked for my help. Asked me for help.

  “It’s an army camp, Cassandra,” Kaysa said in a low voice. “I don’t know where.”

  I tried to ask what he was doing. Why he needed help, but while I could hear her and see her and feel her, she seemed too far away to hear me. She closed her eyes, and as she too drifted off, we were together no more.

  Moonlight crept across the floor when I woke. A lantern had been left, and a spare robe garnered from somewhere. Taking up the lantern, I shuffled into the passage.

  The room in which the great tree grew enthroned looked no different to the first time I had seen it. Water still pooled on the stones, and its roots curled around railings and pillars, turning the space into something like a forest cavern. Its boughs spread out like beams, while its leaves fluttered against pinpricks of night sky. Again I couldn’t swallow the feeling I was going around in circles achieving nothing. I had been here before. Done this before. Ought to have been capable of so much more.

  As I crossed the damp, blossom-covered floor, the blessed sound of voices came along the passage. Captain Aeneas and the empress were in the workroom, sitting at one of the benches with a pair of lanterns and a pile of books.

  “Found anything?” I said, shuffling in.

  “There aren’t as many notes here as I had hoped.” Captain Aeneas didn’t look up from the book he was flicking through. “But we might find something.”

  “Not many notes? That’s quite the stack.”

  “Most are books by other people,” the empress said. “About all sorts of subjects. One of them is about the anatomy of legs.”

  “Legs?”

  “Yes. The author seemed particularly fascinated by frogs, but it is hardly useful in this case.”

  I leaned on the bench beside her. “Oh, I don’t know. Perhaps I could put you into a frog.”

  Empress Hana looked up, her dead face ridiculous with its mouth half open in an odd shape. “Can you do that?”

  “Put you in a frog? I don’t know, I’ve never tried. Shall we find one and see?”

  “No, let’s not. I have no desire to get stuck in a frog for the rest of my life.”

  She went back to the book. Pages rustled amid the gentle flare of lantern flame, until she went to grab another book and her jerky movements knocked a pile onto the floor. “Are you all right?” I said. “You don’t want to get stuck in that thing either.”

  “Nor do I want to be weak when there’s still so much to do,” she snapped.

  I didn’t have as strong a connection to her as to Kaysa, but I could remember the pain of Jonus’s body tightening and decaying, the feeling of being trapped. Of suffocating. Would she have stayed there forever? I had tried not to think about it at the time, too afraid of the answer. What happened to Deathwalkers when they died? Did we just… fade away like everyone else, or were there Deathwalkers trapped in corpses all over the world, slowly going mad?

  I shuddered, but rather than answer the question in the Empress’s hard gaze I grabbed a book off the stack and opened it. Its spine cracked.

  “A Comparative Anatomical Guide to the Animals of the Sands,” I read aloud. “Where are the Sands?”

  The captain shrugged. I flicked a few pages, almost every one of them covered in additional information or corrections in a variety of inks.

  “What is… whatever Leo is, called?” I said, causing them both to look up. “I’m a Deathwalker,” I said, realising it was the first time I’d owned the description aloud. “Kocho said he was a Thought Thief, and you said the people who used to own this house were Empaths, but what is Leo? What is the opposite of a Deathwalker?”

  Captain Aeneas screwed up his face, all lines and scars and fatigue in the lantern light. “I don’t recall anyone ever saying it. We weren’t allowed to speak of it.”

  “That’s unfortunate,” the empress said in her dead voice. “Because Miss Marius makes a good point. Knowing its name would make it easier to find references to him. Do you recall any of the other names? There’s a sheaf of papers here about Saki, but that’s all I’ve seen about any of these… conditions.”

  Conditions. She made it sound like an illness, but it wasn’t something one could catch or be cured of; it was how I had been born, how we had been born, and to speak of it like a disease made me squirm. What I could do was monstrous. To live the way Kaysa and I had was terrible. And yet…

  “Is one of them a Ghost Hand?” Captain Aeneas said, leaning close to the lantern to read a line scrawled in the margin.

  “That sounds familiar,” I said. “I think Kocho mentioned them as an… overincarnation? But he said we weren’t like that. He said they have birthmarks on their wrists. Leo and I are just… abnormal.”

  Captain Aeneas snorted. “You can say that again.”

  “You watch it. Just because I am trapped in this weak body doesn’t mean I can’t still jam a knife between your ribs when you’re not looking.”

  “And how far would you get if you did?” It wasn’t even a challenge, just an exhausted piece of truth that left us all quietly turning pages.

  “What if there’s nothing here?” I said once I had flipped through two more books. “What if we’re just wasting time? We could be farther away from Koi by now, we could be—”

  “Where exactly?” Captain Aeneas lifted his brows. “Where do you think we can go that’s safe? We’re in Kisia, which may be marginally safer than Chiltae because fewer people give a shit about Dom Villius, but it is also woefully thin of allies. If you want to be safe, leave me here with Septum and run.”

  That a few seconds of silence passed proved how tempting it was, but Leo might still follow us, we’d lose our only potential weapon, and he had Kaysa.

  I shook my head. “It’s too late now. Tempting as it is.”

  “You just want your body back,” the empress said. “This sudden selflessness has nothing to do with stopping Leo or helping anyone.”

  “Like you’re any better. You only want to help because you feel guilty for ignoring your daughter. Had you paid more attention to what was going on perhaps none of this would have happened.”

  Silence stretched between the lanterns, strained like a tightening string. It snapped when Captain Aeneas closed his book and stood. “I’m going to check on Septum. Don’t kill each other while I’m gone.”

  As his heavy footfalls faded into the depths of the house, I picked up another book, expecting the empress to do the same. Instead she cleared the dead traveller’s throat. “In sharing my body you are privy to certain thoughts and feelings I would not have chosen to share with you,” she said. “They are also incomplete thoughts and memories and feelings not always containing correct context, if what I see of your mind is anything to go by. That being the case, I would prefer if you did not use ill-gained and incorrect knowledge about the inner workings of my mind to bludgeon me with shame to make yourself feel better.”

  I parted my lips—her lips, I reminded myself—but she lifted a hand. “No, I don’t want you to lie and say that was not the purpose. Nor that you were only trying to help. If you can’t see that you’re trying to beat me down and assert dominance in this… relationship… I will have to take full control from here on.”

  Her scathing attack on my character hurt more than the fear she tried to cow me with. I thought of the kind priests who had taught me how monstrous I was, how ignorant I was to the evils I had brought on myself. I had hated my home, but mere weeks at the hospice had been enough to make me wish I could go back. And oh how they had held it over me. “Learn to be better and you can go home, Cassandra. Let us teach you. Let us guide you to
God.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have said it.”

  “No, you shouldn’t,” she agreed, but went on staring at me, her protuberant eyes growing glassy.

  “Stop staring at me like that, it’s creepy.”

  She looked away. “I was merely marvelling at the sight of Miss Cassandra Marius apologising.”

  “Well don’t get used to it,” I said. “It doesn’t happen often.”

  “No, but that means I can trust that when it does, you mean it.”

  I couldn’t think of an answer, couldn’t make sense of the weird squirming feeling my guts were writhing, and rather than focus on it I took up another book. Gender All Around Us by Essa Yirin.

  A quick flip through uncovered no mentions of any soul abnormalities, and I set it aside. “What are we really looking for?”

  “Some understanding of what Dom Villius is and how his seventh body can be used against him.”

  “But against him how? To kill him? To get inside his mind? To control him? We don’t even know what he is trying to do, really, do we? Beyond the whole recreate the deaths of Veld nonsense.”

  “He attacked us at Koi.”

  “Yes, but why? And why kill Commander Aulus? The Nine have been aligned with the church of the One True God for decades; it’s hardly like they would refuse him anything he wanted. And if war with the Levanti is what he wants, why?”

  “They did kill a large amount of the Chiltaen army.”

  I shrugged. “So? He isn’t a general, he’s a priest. And besides, retribution is not one of the lessons taught by his god. God is merciful and forgiving, not vengeful. I might hate the church, but their actual teachings aren’t terrible.”

  As though summoned by mention of his religion, Captain Aeneas stepped back in, looking more exhausted than when he had left. “He’s fine,” he said, before I could ask. “But I think we should all rest. In the morning we can gather what supplies we can find and keep moving.”

  The empress rose stiffly from her seat. “I think we should also leave a message for Torvash.”

  “Leave a message saying what, Your Majesty?”

  “That we were here. We could ask him to leave any information with someone for us if he sees the note. I haven’t given any thought as to who, and of course he might not return, but the chance of answers is surely worth the risk of leaving evidence we were here.”

  Captain Aeneas nodded slowly. “Yes, but I too am not sure who we can trust. And if the note falls into Leo’s hands it could put the person we’ve chosen in danger.”

  “That’s true.” She scowled, the expression all the more frightening on a face losing its muscle tone. “Something to think on.”

  “Indeed.”

  Empress Hana reached her dead hand out to me. “It’s time, Miss Marius.”

  “Can’t you wait until we reach our sleeping mat?”

  She gave me a long appraising look, but nodded, and leaving the last of the books unchecked, we left the workroom, heading back toward the main stairs.

  “I’ve heard many stories about this tree,” Captain Aeneas said as it appeared at the end of the passage. “A tree larger than any in all Chiltae, which cannot be cut down. Its trunk and branches break even the sharpest axes.”

  “Really?” I said. “I’ve never heard of it. It sounds like nonsense, a proud man’s excuse for why he let a tree grow in the centre of his house.”

  “Lord Darius Laroth would have been the first to disparage his forebears,” the empress said, shuffling her corpse along. “But he told me that story when I asked about the tree. He said people once came from all over the empire to try to remove it, but no one succeeded.”

  “Why isn’t it more famous?”

  “Probably because that was a long time ago, so it stopped being an attraction and just became a thing that was.”

  I looked at the trunk. Like every other tree, its bark was rough in some places, smooth in others, all ridges and divots and knots. The branches swayed like supple limbs, nothing about them stiff and unyielding.

  Captain Aeneas saw us safely to our room and bade us goodnight. Again the empress held out her hand, and I could give no excuse to put the reunion off except that I feared how much it was going to hurt.

  A single touch began the great inhalation, my entire body breathing in and swelling, capturing not air but the essence of another person, so large a thing that for a moment I was sure my skin would split like overripe fruit. It didn’t, but everything felt tight and strange and wrong.

  The dead body dropped to the floor, all stiff and pale, with waxen skin and staring eyes.

  “We ought to have done that out in the passage,” I said. “I don’t really want to sleep in the same room as it now it’s…”

  Empty? You’re right. Gosh, I was looking bad, wasn’t I?

  Though every part of me ached, I bent to grab the man’s boots and used the last of my strength dragging him into the hallway before lying down to sleep.

  We found the workroom empty the following morning, and with nothing better to do while waiting for the captain to wake, I settled at the bench and pulled another book toward me.

  “Essays on the History and Evolutionary Anatomy of Northern Dragons.”

  What a life Torvash has led.

  “Kocho said he’s lived a really long time. He isn’t human and doesn’t age like we do.”

  Yes, he told me too. I find I envy Saki just a little, you know, being right here at the cusp of knowledge.

  “I don’t know, he’s a grumpy shit too.”

  But never at her.

  She was right. They had made quite the odd pair.

  I pulled another book off the stack.

  “Mystics and Memaras.”

  I flicked a few pages, but most of it seemed to be about the religious practices of a group of people I’d never heard of. I set it aside and took up another, finding increasing amounts of nothing useful.

  “You’re up early.”

  I hadn’t heard Captain Aeneas’s approach, but I had grown so used to his voice I barely flinched. He brought in a tray of steaming food and set it on the bench. “Breakfast,” he said. “And when I went out to the stables to check on the ox, I found this.”

  He held out a dirty book, its pages all bent and smeared with I didn’t want to know what. “It looks like a notebook. Perhaps they left in a hurry and dropped it. Or it could be nothing. It’s written in Kisian and I don’t know Kisian.”

  He sounded embarrassed. It was not an uncommon language to learn in Chiltae, but most Chiltaens stuck with knowing the differences in our spoken languages and left it at that.

  “Here.” Empress Hana stretched out our hand for the book. “Let me see.”

  Our stomach rumbled at the smell of the food, but ignoring even the steaming pot of tea, she flipped through the book, trying to touch as little of each page as possible.

  “It’s recently dated,” she said. “Looks like it might be some notes they took about you, Cassandra. Oh, look.” She pointed at a neatly transcribed line detailing Saki’s first attempts to move my soul in and out of my body.

  “What does it say?” the captain asked.

  “It says, ‘While Saki has been unable to permanently re-anchor the soul, there is the strong possibility that, in the same way Deathwalker Three is able to move her second soul into the dead, Saki may be able to move a second soul more permanently into a vessel made empty by other means. While I have many theories on how a body may be emptied of its soul without damaging the physical construct of the body itself, the easiest way to test this would be to use the empty vessel that is the sixth body of Memara 21.’”

  She looked up at the captain. “Sixth? Does he mean Septum?”

  “It sounds like it, though you’re right. Septum ought to be the seventh.”

  We could put a soul inside Septum? I said.

  “I think that’s what he’s saying, yes, but I can’t say I’m any more keen on being inside that…
thing than I was being inside a frog.”

  Captain Aeneas tapped the table. “He is not bad, Your Majesty, just… empty.”

  “Exactly,” I said, taking back control to speak. “That’s why I heard the death song coming from your hut back near Koi. It wasn’t because anyone was dead, it was because there was an empty vessel. The soul must only stretch to six divisions and after that…”

  “A hollow shell.” The captain’s voice was equally hollow.

  “Yes, but a living hollow shell,” I said. “One that won’t disintegrate on us. You could use Septum to walk around until we’re able to get Kaysa back.”

  Silence hung while the empress considered this. I could feel her trying to figure out whether her distaste for the idea was because it was a bad idea, or because the body belonged to Leo Villius.

  “I am… not entirely sure that would be wise, Your Majesty,” Captain Aeneas said. “You remember I said they are connected? They know what each other knows and feel what each other feels, and if you were inside that mind it could be…”

  He seemed unable to find a good word and let the sentence fade away. “Could be…?” I prompted. “Overwhelming? Destructive? Because if you don’t have a good reason why it’s a bad plan, I can give you one why it might be a good plan. If they are so interconnected, even one minute inside that body could tell us everything he’s planning and where he is. You might even be able to feed him false information about our whereabouts.”

  “You might be able to,” the captain said. “But there is just as much chance the body could shape the soul.” He huffed out a breath. “Usually you take over dead bodies. Bodies that aren’t connected to a soul, aren’t alive. There is no danger to you in getting in there and… making it walk around.” He paused, but soon went on rather than examine his own blasé attitude to walking corpses. “Septum is not only alive but connected to a living soul, so you’d be sharing a body connected to Leo in the way you and Miss Marius are currently connected and—” He bit his lip and wouldn’t look at us. “And I hope you will excuse me for saying so, Your Majesty, but the sharing of a body with Miss Marius has… changed you. Changed both of you. You are… day by day… little by little… becoming the same person.”