by Paula Guran
“It’s true I’m an upstart,” Lealez said, “but you can’t legally hunt without another hunter.” Per smirked, knowing that even this old woman could not stand against that law.
Bet lowered her machete. “I’d have guessed the story you sold me was as fake as your friend, but I knew the paper, and I knew the signature. If I find you faked that too, you’ll have more to worry about than just one dead Plague Hunter.”
“It’s very genuine,” Lealez said. “We only have four days. They’ll kill tens of thousands in the capital.”
“The note said seven days.”
“It took us three days to find you.”
“I’ll hide better next time.”
Lealez got to per feet. Lealez found per was trembling, and hated perself for it. A woman like Bet looked for weakness. That was Abrimet’s flaw; their fear made them start to cast a plague, instead of waiting it out. A dangerous tell in front of a woman like this. Lealez needed to seal perself up tight.
Insects whispered across the pier. “Bit of advice,” Bet said. “The Order forgives a great deal if you deliver what it wants.”
“You need me.”
“Like a hole in the head,” Bet said, “But I’ll take you along. For my own reasons.”
“What’s more important than eliminating a threat to the Community?”
“You don’t get it,” Bet said. “The last time I got a note on paper like that, it was from Hanere. It’s not just two rogues you’re dealing with.”
“There must be any number of stationery shops where—”
“That was Hanere’s handwriting.”
“That isn’t possible.”
“I turned Hanere over to the Order three decades ago, and read about her death on all the news sheets and billboards.”
“She was drawn and quartered,” Lealez said.
“And burned up in the searing violet flame of the Joystone Peace,” Bet said. “But here she is. And why do you think that is, little upstart?”
Lealez shook per head.
“Somehow she survived all that, and now she’s back to bite the Community.”
“So where do we start?” Lealez asked.
“We start with the sword,” Bet said. “Then we retrieve the shield. Then we confront Hanere.”
“How will we know where to find her?”
Bet pulled her pack from a very high shelf. “Oh, we won’t need to find her,” she said. “Once the objects of power are released, she’ll find us.”
IV.
The Copse of Screaming Corpses loomed ahead of Bet and Lealez’s little pirogue. Great, knotted fingers, black as coal, tangled with the fog, poking snarling holes in the mist that hinted at the massive shapes hidden within. Sometimes the waves of gray shifted, revealing a glaring eye, a knobby knee, or the gaping mouth of one of the twisted, petrified forest of giants, forever locked in a scream of horror.
The copse was a good day’s paddle from Bet’s refuge. When she told Lealez the name, Lealez thought Bet was making fun.
“That isn’t the real name,” Lealez said. The dense fog muffled per words.
“Oh, it is,” Bet said. “It’s aptly named.”
“Does the name alone scare people off?”
“The smart ones, yes,” Bet said.
Ripples traveled across the bubbling water.
“What are these bubbles?”
“Sinkhole,” Bet said. “They open up under the swamp sometimes. Pull boats under, whole villages. We’re lucky. Probably happened sometime last night.”
“Just a hole in the world?”
“Had one in the capital forty years ago,” Bet said. “Ate the Temple of Saint Torch. Those fancy schools don’t teach that?”
“I guess not,” Lealez said. Per gazed into the great canopy of dripping moss that covered the looming giants above them. Their great, gaping maws were fixed in snarls of pain, or perhaps outrage. Lealez imagined them eating per whole. “Why put it here?” per said. “This place is awful.”
“Would you come here for any other reason but retrieving an object of power?”
“No.”
“You have your answer.”
Bet poled the pirogue up to the edge of a marshy island and jumped out. She tied off the pirogue and pulled a great coil of rope over her shoulder. She headed off into the misty marsh without looking back at Lealez. Lealez scrambled after her, annoyed and a little frightened. Bet’s generous shape was quickly disappearing into the mist.
Lealez yelped as per brushed the knobby tangle of some giant’s pointing finger.
When Lealez caught up with Bet, she was already heaving the large rope over her shoulder. She sucked her teeth as she walked around the half-buried torso of one of the stricken giants. Its hands clawed at the sky, and its face was lost in the fog.
Bet tossed up one end of the rope a couple of times until she succeeded in getting it over the upraised left arm of the giant. She tied one end around her waist and handed Lealez the other end.
Lealez frowned.
“Hold onto it,” Bet said. “Pull up the slack as I go. You never climbed anything before?”
Lealez shook per head.
Bet sighed. “What do they teach you kids these days?” She kicked off her shoes and began to climb. “Don’t touch or eat anything while you’re down here.”
Lealez watched, breathless. Bet seemed too big to climb such a thing, but she found little hand and footholds as she went, jamming her fingers and toes into crevices and deviations in the petrified giant.
Lealez held tight to the other end of the rope, pulling the slack and watching Bet disappear into the fog as she climbed up onto the giant’s shoulder. Lealez glanced around at the fog, feeling very alone.
Above, Bet took her time climbing the monster. She had been a lot younger when she did this the first time, and she was already resenting her younger self. Warbling hoots and cries came from the swampland around her, distorted by the fog. Her breath came hard and her fingers ached, but she reached the top of the giant in due course.
She knew there was something wrong the moment she hooked herself up around the back of the giant’s head. The head was spongy at the front, as if rotting from within. The whole back of it had been ripped open. Inside the giant’s head was a gory black hole where the sword had been.
She pulled the knife from her hip and hacked into the back of the head, peering deep inside, scraping away bits of calcified brain matter. But it was no use. The head was empty. She traced the edges of the hole carved in the giant’s head. Someone had hacked out the great round piece of the skull that she had mortared back into place with a sticky contagion years ago. Only she and her partner Keleb had known about the contagion. They would be the only two people capable of neutralizing it before removing the relic.
“Briar and piss,” she muttered.
Below, Lealez screamed.
Bet sheathed her knife as she scrambled back down the giant, aware that her rope had gone slack. Foolish pan, what was the point of a rope if Bet cracked her head open on the way down?
Lealez screamed and screamed, horrified by the rippling of per skin. Lealez had tilted per head up to follow Bet’s progress and left per mouth open, and a shard of the great giant’s skin had flaked off and fallen into per mouth.
Lealez gagged on it, but it went down, and now per body was . . . growing, distending; Lealez thought per would burst into a thousand pieces. But that, alas, did not happen. Instead, Lealez grew and grew. Arms thickened with muscle. Thighs became large around as tree trunks.
When finally Lealez saw Bet sliding down the tree, Lealez’s head was already up past Bet’s position.
Bet swore and leapt the rest of the way down the face of the giant. She took a fistful of salt from the pouch at her hip and threw it in a circle around Lealez’s burgeoning body. Lealez’s clothes had burst, falling in tatters all around per. Bet muttered a chant, half-curse, half-cure, concentrating on the swinging arms above her. Bet pulled a bit of tangled
herb from another pouch, already laced with contagion. She breathed the words she had last spoken in a dusty library in the Contagion College and let the plague free.
All around them, biting flies swarmed up from the swampland, drawn by her cast. They ate bits of the contagion and landed onto Lealez’s body, which was now nearing the height of the petrified giants around them. Per skin was beginning to blacken and calcify around per ankles.
The swarm of flies covered Lealez’s body like a second skin. Lealez squealed and swatted at them, per movements increasingly slow. The flies bit Lealez’s flesh again and again while Bet squatted and urinated on the salt circle.
All at once the flies fell off Lealez. The pan’s skin began to flake away where it had been bitten. The body contracted again, until it was half the size it had been, still giant. Then Lealez fell over with a great thump.
Bet ran to Lealez’s side. The skin had turned obsidian black, hard as shale. Bet took her machete from her hip and hacked at the torso until great cracks opened up in the body. Then she pulled the pieces away.
Lealez was curled up inside the husk of per former self, arms crossed over per chest, shivering.
“Get out of there now,” Bet said, offering per an arm.
Lealez tentatively took her hand, and Bet pulled per out. “Dusk is coming soon,” Bet said, “I don’t want to get caught out here.”
It was warm enough that Bet wasn’t too worried about Lealez being naked, but Lealez seemed to mind, and went searching for per pack, which had been ripped from Lealez’s body. It was a stupid search, Bet thought, because the fog was getting denser, and they were losing the light, and Lealez’s things could have gone anywhere.
Finally Lealez found the remains of per haversack, and pulled on a fresh robe. But the rest of per things were scattered, and Bet insisted they move on and not wait.
“The College will be angry,” Lealez said. “My books, my papers—”
“Books and papers? Is that all you can think about? Hurry. Didn’t I tell you not to touch or eat anything?”
“You didn’t say why!”
“I shouldn’t have to say why, you dumb pan. When I was your age I did whatever my mentor said.”
“Are you my mentor now? You aren’t even officially a Hunter. You would never be approved as a mentor by the college.”
“Is everything joyless and literal with you?”
“You don’t know how the college is now,” Lealez said. “Old people like you tell us how things should be, how we should think, but this is a new age. We face a different government, and new penalties after the Plague Wars. We can’t all go rogue or shirk our duties. We’d be kicked out. The college is very strict these days. People like you would never make it to graduation. You would end up working in contagion breweries.”
“I’m sure you’d like to continue on with that fantasy awhile longer,” Bet said.
Once they were in the pirogue and had cast off, Lealez finally roused perself from misery and asked, “What about the artifact?”
“Someone got to it first,” Bet said.
“Hanere?”
“Only one other person knows where these are. I expect they were compelled to get it.”
“Your partner?” Bet nodded.
“You think they are still alive?”
“No,” Bet said.
At least Lealez said nothing else.
V.
Bet’s partner Keleb, too, had retired, but had chosen a canal that acted as a main trading thoroughfare into the city instead of a hard-to-find retreat like Bet’s. It took a day and a half to reach the shoman’s house, and Bet found herself counting down the time in her head. Lealez, too, reminded her of the ticking chirp of time as they poled downriver. The current was sluggish, and the weather was still and hot.
Despite the stillness, Bet smelled the smoke before she saw it. Lealez sat up in per seat and leaned far over the prow, knuckles gripping the edge of the craft.
The guttered ruin of Keleb’s house came into view as they rounded the bend. The shoman had built the house with Bet’s help, high up on a snarl of land that hardly ever flooded. Now the house was a charred wreck.
Bet tied off the pirogue and climbed up the steep bank. She counted three sets of footprints along the bank and around the house. They had stayed to watch it burn.
Bet poked around the still smoking house and found what was left of Keleb’s body, as charred and ruined as the house.
“Help me here,” Bet said to Lealez.
Lealez came up after her. “What can we do?” Lealez said. “The shoman is dead.”
“Not the body I’m here for,” Bet said. She walked off into the wood and chopped down two long poles from a nearby stand of trees. She handed a pole to Lealez. “Help me get the body rolled back, clear the area here.”
Lealez knit per brows, but did as per was told. They heaved over Keleb’s body to reveal a tattered hemp rug beneath. Bet yanked it away and used the pole to lever open a piece of the floor. Peeling back the wood revealed a long, low compartment. Lealez leaned over to get a better look, but it was clearly empty.
Bet sucked her teeth.
“What was here?” Lealez asked.
“The cloak,” Bet said.
“I thought there were two relics, a sword and a shield.”
“That’s because that’s all we reported,” Bet said. “Because we knew this day would come.” Bet saw the edge of a piece of paper peeking out from the bottom of the cache and picked it up. It was another note, made out to her in Hanere’s handwriting.
“What does it say?” Lealez asked.
Bet traced the words and remembered a day thirty years before, rioting in the streets, a plump painter, and a future she had imagined that looked nothing like this one.
Bet crumpled up the note. “It says she will trade me the objects in return for something I love,” Bet said. “Good thing I don’t love anything.”
Nothing but Hanere, of course. But that was a long time ago. Bet hardly felt anything there in the pit of her belly when she thought of Hanere. It was the time in her life she longed for, not Hanere. That’s what she told herself.
“What a monster,” Lealez said, staring at Keleb’s charred body.
“None of us is a sainted being, touched by some god,” Bet said. “But she’s missing the third relic. She’ll need that before she can end the world.”
Lealez shivered. “We don’t have much time left.”
“There’s a suspension line that runs up the river near here,” Bet said.
“Let’s see if we can find you some clothes.”
“There are only shoman’s clothes here,” Lealez said.
“We all have to make sacrifices,” Bet muttered.
They walked away from Keleb’s house; two people, a woman and a pan dressed in shoman’s clothes, the vestments smoky and charred. Bet expected Lealez to talk more, but Lealez kept the peace. Lealez found perself following after Bet in a daze. For years Lealez had wanted nothing more than to prove perself to the Contagion College. It was beginning to dawn on Lealez just what per had to do to achieve the honor per wished for, and it was frightening, far more frightening than it had seemed when Lealez read all the books about Plague Hunters and Plague Givers and how the Hunters tracked down the Givers and saved the world. No one spoke of charred bodies, or what it was like to be cut out of one’s own plague-touched skin.
The great suspension line ran along the Potsdown Peace canal all the way to the Great Dawn harbor that housed the city. Bet sighed and paid their fare to the scrawny little pan who lived in what passed for a gatehouse this far south of the city.
“College better reimburse all this,” Bet said, and laughed, because the idea that she would be alive to get reimbursed in another day was distinctly amusing.
Bet and Lealez climbed the stairs up to the carriage that hung along the suspended line and settled in. Lealez looked a little sick, so Bet asked, “You been up before?”
“I don’t
like heights,” Lealez said.
The gatekeeper came up and attached their carriage line to the pulley powered by a guttering steam engine, which the pan swore at several times before the carriage finally stuttered out along the line, swinging away from the gatehouse and over the water.
Lealez shut per eyes.
Bet leaned out over the side of the carriage and admired the long backs of a pod of plesiosaurs moving in the water beneath them.
After a few minutes, Lealez said, “I don’t understand why you didn’t tell the College there were three objects.”
“Of course you do,” Bet said.
“It doesn’t—”
“Don’t pretend you’re some fool,” Bet said. “I haven’t believed a word you’ve said any more than I believed your little friend.”
Lealez stiffened. “Why keep me alive, then?”
“Because I think you can be salvaged,” Bet said. “Your friend couldn’t. Your friend was already a Plague Giver. I think you’re still deciding your own fate.”
They rode in silence after that for nearly an hour. Lealez was startled when Bet finally broke it.
“Keleb and I couldn’t defeat Hanere ourselves,” Bet said. “I’d like to tell you we could. But she’s more powerful. She has a far blacker heart, and a blacker magic. We went south, Keleb and I, and got help from sorcerers and hedge witches. They were the ones who created the objects of power. The sword, the shield, and the cloak.”
“How do they work?” Lealez asked.
“You’ll know soon enough,” Bet said. “Not even Keleb knew where I kept the shield, though.”
“But, the other weapons—”
The carriage shuddered. Lealez gave a little cry.
“Hold on, it’s just—” Bet began, and then the carriage hook sheared clean away, and they plunged into the canal.
VI.
Thirty years earlier . . .
Hanere had always loved to watch things burn. Bet sat with her on the rooftop while riots overtook the city. They sipped black bourbon and danced and talked about how the world would be different now that the revolutionaries had done more than talk. They were burning it all down.
“If only I could be with them!” Hanere said.