Sin Eater

by Shel, Mike

  “It bears a resemblance to Azkayan calligraphy,” said Qeelb, tracing a curling glyph with a finger. “Perhaps an ancient version of their script.”

  “You’re saying the Azkayans made this place?” asked Kennah.

  “I’m saying there are similarities, Sir Kennah. The Azkayans’ myths and legends tell of great mystics and heroes who traveled round the world and back, thousands of years ago. I don’t know how much truth those stories contain. One of their tales holds that the islands of Hanifax are a lost colony of Azkaya. It’s the theological basis of their attempts to conquer you.”

  “You no longer consider yourself a ‘Faxer, then?” said Kennah, affronted.

  “Bloody Yellow Hells, lad, this body doesn’t feel like the one I was born in. I was poured into it after spending untold years stored in a jar like flour on a baker’s shelf. The body was warehoused in some alchemical soup. Who knows what I am?”

  “Not terribly important just now,” said Bocca. “The master weaver will be here soon enough, and we’ll be on our way.”

  Her father looked weary. With his hands on his hips, he asked, “The weaver?”

  “It’s what the thread is for, Sir Auric,” Bocca chimed, patting him on the shoulder as though he was a little slow. “Now, I understand that this isn’t the type of expedition you’re used to. You know fuck all about the place. Those Syraeic antiquarians weren’t much help, were they? So, you’ll just need to trust me. I’ve gotten you this far, have I not?”

  Her father stared at the man, saying nothing, one hand on the hilt of Szaa’da’shaela. It occurred to Agnes again that he was conversing with the sword, or the sword with him. Could she hear that little hum? Did the blade tremble?

  Then there was a door where none had been, made of dark iron, opening wide into the hewn chamber with an ominous metallic creak. An old woman appeared, in dun-colored robes, bent over and leaning on a cane. Behind her came two more elderly women. Agnes gasped. All three wore soiled bandages wrapped around their heads, bloody where their eyes would be. There was a palpable malevolence in the air, as though it were a foul smell in Agnes’s nostrils

  “Pilgrims?” asked the first in grandmotherly voice, tapping her cane on the stone floor. “What have you brought for us today?”

  “Crimson!” said one of the women behind her, voice deep and hoarse. “For Lord Nightwing’s war banner!”

  “Veridian,” offered the other, patting her wrinkled hands together with glee. “We can do justice to the Field of Lamentations, for the Harlot’s Tale. I’d wager on it!”

  “I’m afraid you’d lose that wager, good sister,” said Bocca, holding up their ball of thread. “Black. Dark as a moonless midnight.”

  “The shogun’s honor guard wears black lacquered armor,” said the one who called for crimson, beaming a toothless grin. “We could finish the Battle of the Cherry Blossoms, finally. Sister Needle will have to relinquish her crown at last!”

  “Oh, no, no. Brother Hem will want to fill in his behemoth, for the Lady in the Deep,” Veridian responded.

  “We will vote on it, sisters,” said the woman with the cane, holding out a greedy, impatient hand. “Give me the spool, pilgrim, now, and you can be on your way.”

  “And what way is that?” asked Bocca, holding the ball of thread behind his back. “Would you have us wandering in the dark to find some stray diviner, drunk on sacramental wine?”

  The old woman scowled and lifted a bandage, as if peeking out from under a blindfold, but what was revealed was a bloody, empty socket, gore staining her cheeks. “Bah! Bocca of the Sharp Tongue, eh? I thought I recognized the voice. You think the Videna has forgotten your last visit? Hand over the black and I’ll let you leave with that tongue of yours still attached.”

  Bocca laughed as she reached out at him blindly, fingers grasping. “Oh, you hurt me, Grandmother Weaver! I believe the Videna has enjoyed our little debates, more than any chat with you. She won the first encounter, I the second, though it made her sour, I’ll admit. Best of three then, eh? Let us in, grandmother. I’m asking courteously.”

  The old woman bared her teeth, like a snarling animal. “The black, you impertinent cur! Hand it over, as a reverent Candle should!” She lurched towards him, but Bocca simply stepped to the side. She let out a hiss and a curse. “Pember blind you twice, Bocca, I can smell you! Why can’t I see you?”

  “Perhaps Pember has blinded you twice, grandmother,” Bocca answered, no longer smiling. “For your unkindness to me, touched as I’ve been by that entity.” The old woman grimaced, putting gnarled fingers to the bloody patches on her bandages.

  “I call you impious!” she cried, as though choking back tears. Some of the malevolence seemed to leave the room, like air from a deflating Revival balloon. “I call you unkind! To treat the Weavers of God’s Raiment with such contempt! You should be hurled from the Cusp for such talk!”

  “You want the black, grandmother,” said Bocca, his voice gone cold and mercenary. “I think it’s worth my charges finding their way to the Videna herself. Walk us through your workshop and we’ll be on our way, to her. You can be about your endless, absurd task.”

  That seemed to wound the old women even more deeply. Though Bocca was working for them, doing what he thought he must to get them to this Videna, something about his exchange with the old women seemed wrong. Agnes was afraid of the woman when she entered the chamber. Now pity crept in, the same one would have for a once-proud beast that had lost its teeth and claws.

  The worry lines bunched and un-bunched on the old woman’s face, one hand kneading the other that rested on her cane. At last she agreed. “For the black,” she said, the master weaver’s effort to wring the emotion from her voice plain. “But mark my words, Bocca, whose true name I will root out like a hog uncovers a truffle: I will not permit you to come this way again. Before that the Videna will have you hurled off the Cusp. And I will bear witness to your broken body on the rocks below.”

  “If believing so helps you sleep tonight, grandmother,” Bocca answered, and one would be forgiven for almost believing compassion informed his response. “I may very well be dead before you pass the Final Veil. We shall see. But for now, here is your black.”

  Bocca stepped up and placed the ball of thread in the master weaver’s hand. She sniffed at it, nostrils flaring, then nodded and handed it to Crimson behind her. “You, who are guided by this Candle,” said the old woman, talking around Bocca as though he no longer stood there. “You may meet the Videna, but she may not be pleased to see you with this rodent as your guide. Not all prophecy is happy. Have a care for whom you consort with, pilgrim. Spirits of the Netherworld can assume a pleasing shape.”

  With that, she and her blinded sisters turned back and closed the iron door behind them. Agnes didn’t see it happen, but suddenly the iron door was no more, and the wall was again a tangle of frilly, indecipherable script.

  “Where has the door gone, Bocca?” asked Kennah.

  Agnes was sick to her stomach, uneasy, as if she were a girl who had spoken aloud during a ritual that demanded silence. “What have you done to us? And what are you?”

  Bocca held up a finger. “I’ve worked a minor miracle for you, that’s what,” he said. “And I’m your bloody Candle.” As he spoke his last word, an opening appeared in the wall, ten feet away; a passage. No door this time, and the sound of conversation came from within. “Onward, intrepid Syraeics!” Bocca sang. “We near our goal.”

  The cocky man entered the dark corridor. Without looking to her companions, or even worrying whether they would come after her, Agnes followed in the wake of their impious Candle, not sure if she was ready for what lay ahead, but weary of waiting.

  The corridor was dark and narrow. Agnes walked with palms on opposite walls, trusting that Bocca was ahead. The hall started to turn to the left, and kept turning, in a spiral, like a snail’s shell. Sh
e tried to picture the map of the place in her mind as she walked, but it was nonsense. The corridor seemed to fold in on itself, to twist in impossible ways. As she navigated the tunnel, she heard bits and pieces of a conversation, or many conversations, she couldn’t be sure which.

  …but after all that, his wife remained barren, and the dukes fell to bickering over which would succeed him to the throne…

  …and the grain silo, along with all contained within it, burned to the ground. Oh! How many would go hungry that winter? Alas…

  …the negotiations collapsed, all because of a single jewel, inadvertently dropped down a sewer grate. A little sapphire and silver cost the lives of hundreds. If only…

  …because of…

  …and then…

  Alas…

  Alas…

  Alas…

  Agnes couldn’t be sure when she first caught sight of the cloth. It trailed on the floor, a tapestry of wondrous craftsmanship, scenes woven into it of every description: farmers sowing seeds and harvesting crops, armored riders galloping across a field, mourners interring their dead, fishermen casting nets, a woman cutting the throat of another, men erecting a mighty tower, a cluster of tonsured monks at prayer, an old man ailing on his sick bed, on and on and on. It was endless. And the blinded women and men who created it, who were creating it, chattered without pausing for breath, though it seemed not one of them listened to another.

  Agnes saw Bocca walking in front of her, paying the blinded artisans sitting on stools to their left no heed, ignoring the wonderful, never-ending tapestry they fashioned. It seemed a sin to ignore the tapestry’s elegant, rolling perfection. She reached out and grabbed him by the shoulder.

  “What is all this, Bocca? How can you pretend this isn’t happening? It’s brilliant!”

  He stopped for a moment, his smile one of weary indulgence. The man was annoyed with her. “Brilliant—and pointless. They knit the Raiment of God, or so they believe. One day, God him or herself will come back to the world. They record the history of all humankind, from beginning to end, so that this god might peruse it. To see what we’ve been up to since he left, I suppose.”

  “For Pember? They believe Pember will come to earth?”

  “Pember?” said Bocca with a scowl, starting to walk again. “Oh, hell no. A great god. One greater than all of your gods. A god without name. So they weave this endless cloak, have for hundreds of years. No idea how big the thing is.”

  Agnes followed behind him. She was overwhelmed by the idea. She didn’t understand it, didn’t know if she could believe it, but she sensed the enormity of it. “It’s…wonderful.”

  “You think so?” marveled Bocca, looking back at her with brow furrowed, lips sour.

  “Is it true?”

  “What?”

  “That a god—”

  “How the fuck should I know? Yes? No? Maybe this creator god will arrive on earth, having forgotten his clothes, and appreciate the gesture. It will give him something to do, I suppose. All that history to read. Frankly, I think he’ll grow tired of the same stories over and over, the same follies, from one people to another, thinking they’re unique, and yet they are all the same.”

  “You’re young for a misanthrope. Why does it make you angry?” asked Agnes, tears in her eyes, overcome by the boundless work of art they marched past, the explosion of color, the rich narratives.

  “I told you I’m older than I look. And it doesn’t make me angry, Agnes. I once would have laughed at it, found it endlessly amusing. Hundreds of priests, over hundreds of years, weaving an enormous garment for a god no one has ever met. But now?” He spat on the stony floor. “I’m disgusted by the waste. Of effort, of time. They have so little of it on this earth, and they spend it here in the dark. What these people do here makes about as much difference in eternity as some nameless adolescent boy spilling his seed into his bedsheets. Perhaps it feels good, but it’s over in an instant, and then there’s the mess to clean up.”

  Agnes slapped Bocca on his back, hard. He didn’t seem to feel it. “How can you be so immune to the beauty of this thing, no matter how absurd it may be? Humankind is capable of great beauty, you know! That’s not nothing!”

  With his back to her, Bocca shook his head slowly. “Beauty withers and dies, Agnes Manteo. It dies on the vine, it’s consumed by fire, it’s smashed to bits, or it rots in the grave. I’m tired. Very, very tired. Of all of it. And yet here we are now. At your destination.”

  The weavers, with their bloody bandages and endless garment, were gone. Agnes and her Syraeic companions stood now in an oval chamber hung with tapestries, gold, green, black, and crimson. Bocca stood, extending a hand to a figure sitting on an oversized throne of polished black marble.

  “The Videna,” he announced, bowing to the Syraeics and then to the throne. “Great and Supreme Oracle of Gnexes, the one hundred and seventy-seventh to wear the guise.”

  The woman was naked, hairless and slender, her flesh frightfully pale, her hands resting on the cold stone arms of her huge regal seat. Her face was hidden by a mask of hammered gold depicting a toad, tongue protruding, heavy-lidded eyes, stylized rays of sun emanating from it like the points of a crown. There were no slits for her to peer through, no opening through which to speak. But she did speak, in a lovely, trilling alto that made Agnes’s skin grow warm at the sound of it.

  “I see you, agents of the Syraeic League, come before me with this serpent that crawls upon its belly. And though he be a clever serpent, I have grown tired of him and his little forked tongue. Ask your questions of me, and I shall answer them true. But then the man you call Bocca must die. You will split him open before me, from crown to crotch, with that Djao thing at your father’s hip, Agnes Manteo.”

  33

  Throne of the Oracle

  Though Szaa’da’shaela parted the smoky incense, making a way for Auric down the winding corridor of rough-hewn stone, he still coughed and choked at the intense odor. The thread that had been wrapped around his wrist was gone, as were his Syraeic companions. He called out for Agnes, who had been ahead of him, then Sira and Bocca, who had been behind. No one answered. He continued forward, feeling uneasy, lightheaded, the tunnel seeming to wrap around itself in violation of physical laws. Auric stopped several times to lean against the stone, to catch his breath, hoping for a gulp of clear air, but always drawing in more of the cloying scent.

  Then the visions began again.

  He was no longer in the tunnel. He stood again on the sodden deck of the Aretha Dell, Agnes lying prone before him, laid open by Szaa’da’shaela, by his careless reflex, a violent rebuke to her restraining touch. He went down to one knee, steam rising from the rent in her flesh, rising into the damp night air. Where was Sira? Why was she not speeding to his daughter’s aid as she had that night? He shouted for her, tried to make himself heard over the sounds of the river that filled his ears. Papa, Papa, Papa, Agnes moaned. With his free hand he reached down to the terrible wound, as though he could bind it with a touch. But her body vanished, only to appear again ten feet further down the hewn corridor, this time gore spewing forth from the rent in her flesh like a gruesome fountain. He stood, feeling anger at the sorcery, hallucinations, whatever deceived him. He moved down the passage, doing his best to ignore the bloody spectacle he staggered past, even as he felt the wet red spray on his face. He had a vague awareness of the weavers and their endless tapestry to his left, sensing more than seeing them, utterly absorbed in their task, oblivious to Auric as he willed himself forward. Then he came upon bits and pieces: a severed finger, the tip of an ear, a foot still in its boot. Though there was nothing really to identify her, he knew those pieces of flesh belonged to Agnes. He knew it was cruel hallucination, but still he was sobbing as he plunged on. Slowly, he lost momentum. Auric wasn’t sure he could penetrate this obscene gauntlet further.

  And then someone took his hand.<
br />
  It was a woman’s hand, gentle, graceful, though not soft; it was the hand of a woman who knew how to swing a sword. Lenda. Lenda guided him forward now, leading him past the carnage. He choked on tears and incense smoke, faltered, but she fortified him, gave him the strength he needed to push on through.

  “I wish you hadn’t died, Lenda,” he said. She squeezed his hand as a reply. “Will you stay with me now?”

  “Always,” she said, but her answer was muffled. It seemed to come from further ahead than it should. He looked up, strained to see through the smoke, and found that a headless body led him, bloody ruin of neck and bone atop its shoulders. He let go of the hand and recoiled, but it was gone. He stood in the tunnel, free of incense now, a light just up ahead. He heard voices: Bocca, Agnes. Auric returned Szaa’da’shaela to its scabbard and headed for the sounds.

  The two of them stood before an outsized throne of darkest marble, upon which sat a naked woman, a crowned toad mask of hammered gold hiding her face. There was no doubt in Auric’s mind they had reached the Videna. It was she who was speaking now, and the first words he heard were, “You will split him open before me, from crown to crotch, with that Djao thing at your father’s hip, Agnes Manteo.”

  Agnes turned around and saw him. The look on her face, a blend of fear, fury, and surprise, set his own heart to racing. “I’ll not be your carnifex, Videna,” she said, defiant, “no matter how this man has provoked you!”

  Auric couldn’t be sure if it was a trick of the light, but the mouth of the Videna’s golden metallic mouth seemed to curl into a hint of a smile. “‘Man?’ You believe you walk with a man? I think him sorcerer, Agnes Manteo, weaving spells just as the priests do thread in the caves through which you passed. Do as I say, girl. Spill him before me, a sacrifice to my Lord and Lady Pember and the hungry earth. In this way you will purchase the prophecy you seek.”