“One way or another,” Nora whispered to the two birds, “I’m going to get out of this fucking desert. So, I’m going to take you with me, and drink your blood and eat your flesh if that carries me just a few steps farther. Understand?”
Yeah, the way they looked at her, they understood.
They were getting too heavy to hold up. She knelt down on the ground and pinned them there. She commanded the thorny vines of the bushes nearby, and they stretched out, wrapped their branches around the two vultures. Nora wound the brambles so tight their thorns sunk into the flesh beneath the birds’ feathers, staining the black with blood.
“One of you has died already, so I’m going to eat her first.” Nora sat back on her haunches, and conjured her own talons. They were sharp, and obsidian black, replacing her fingers with evil claws. The whispers of the Blade prattled excitedly against her skull. slash slit rend cut tear Great. Now she had its attention. “Watch me so you know that I always do what I say I’ll do. Afterwards, I’m going to break your wings so you can’t fly away.”
She met the malevolent gaze of the leader, its ripped lower jaw tangled askew in the thorny branches. It was going to die in the next few hours, and they both knew it.
Which really only left one more.
Maybe it’d break and show her a water hole it knew of.
Maybe.
If Nora didn’t want to throw up again, she would have to ration herself despite her hunger. She could cook this one now, and try to sleep for a few more hours until sunset. She could cook the meat of the broken leader tomorrow. Three large birds. How long would that last her? A few days? How would she carry all the meat she wouldn’t be able to eat in one meal? Fuck.
clutch rip shred gash
She smiled at the leader again.
“Rejoice, Fury, for you have found a new sister.”
With a flourish of her taloned hand, she ignited the feathers of the dead one, and let the stink of the plumage fill her nostrils.
“Now we are you.”
* * *
Two weeks later, and Nora was still stumbling about in the desert. It was night and she held a torch made from a strip of her tattered clothes wound around the vulture’s thigh bone. She kept the flame alive with power siphoned from the Blade. She was getting good at this. She could also summon a knife into her hand. It looked frail and brittle like blackened glass, but it had proved to be hardy and cut through even the toughest meat like a razor.
She felt sick. She jammed her thumb and forefinger against her eyeballs, trying to reach the throbbing pain at the back of her skull. The Blade was a constant buzz in her ears, but this headache was more likely just fatigue. Dehydration. No food since sunset today. Or yesterday? And no water since a hundred years or so. She had drunk the last vultures’ blood before she killed it, every day a few gulps from a vein by its throat, and it had kept her going for a while. She should have kept it alive longer. But the meat from the other two had spoiled so fast. And she had been so hungry.
She was still heading west. Doggedly. The air was filled with voices, like the incessant whine of gnats. She had left the valley with its stone mushrooms behind and began to climb through the low hills. Sparse grass grew here, thin and golden brown. And … candlewood. The name drifted from her parched lips to her ears, and she was sure she had never heard it before. The plants each looked like a collection of dead sticks thrust into the hard ground at irregular intervals. The bundle of sticks were bent and lonely fenceposts that marched single-file away into the night around her. She lit the tops up so that a row of beacons stretched below the starry heavens. The sight of them made her feel as though she were crossing over the threshold of the terraced low hills into someone else’s home. Someone who had erected a fence to keep out dangers from the desert. Like lions, perhaps, or wicked spirits, people who’d been driven insane by the thirst. People like her.
She staggered through a pass around dawn and found a trail leading south. So she followed it while the sun came up. An hour later, she came upon what looked like a rock island standing out among the red sand waves. She stared at it as she approached, since there was nothing else out here to fix her gaze upon, only endless swaths of sand, the black and white flimmers of heat on the horizon, and the dead sticks of candlewood. She shuffled forward slowly, too tired to even lift her feet.
An hour later, she approached three crumbling stone houses huddled around a central domed structure that had fallen into ruin. The place had the look of one of the Shinar settlements she had stopped at for a night with Owen and Shade. Sand and rubble from a split in the roof had half-filled the domed house, collecting into a small slope beneath the crack. Her feet picked up and she walked up to the split dome. She lowered herself in and relished getting out of the heat. The sunlight lanced in, but here was shade. She wondered briefly how many of the rocks she had passed in the desert had once been places of dwelling. Inside, the lower rooms were cool, and though everything was coated with sand, she found intact sleeping chambers, lush carpets rolled up into heaps and left to fray. She rolled one out and saw rich reds and blacks in bold patterns, none of which had faded. She curled onto it, and closed her hurting eyes, her lids like sandpaper. Someone had been living here until quite recently. Someone who had left behind what they could not carry, and then the desert had come and claimed the place as its own. She slept a few hours and awoke in the perpetual dusk inside the building to the soft plink of … water?
Nora sat and rubbed the sandy gunk out of her eyes.
Water.
She needed water. Was it real, though? Remember the last time she had thought she saw lakes of shimmering blue in the distance, the voices asked. But when she got there, the water turned out to be a mirage? Just more sand and heat frying her brain. And the Blade kept on healing her, but she was so weak. So weak now. It was just her imagination. Why would any sane person leave this place if there were water—
“Shut up! I’m listening.”
She waited a few minutes and then heard another drip. Quickly, she got to her feet and followed the sound. The dome structure was built like a snail’s house. It curved in on itself, winding downwards from the common rooms on the ground level to the shifting sands deep below. Nora passed through rooms that had been cleared.
Drip.
She opened trunks that had been left behind and found linens and clothes and pottery. But no trace of food. She caught a glimpse of herself in a brass hand mirror. Her eyes were large and black like coals. Her short hair stood off in a dark halo around her gaunt face. She ran a hand through her hair to check if there was a skull face on the top of her head, and when she found nothing, she grinned into the mirror.
Drip.
All the while the voices whispering, telling her to go back, get out of here while she can still walk, didn’t she want to get out of here? Listen, they hissed. We can get you out. Go back. What are you doing here? We can get you out of the desert. Back to where other people are. That’s what you want, isn’t it? The life is in the blood.
Drip.
“No. It’s what you want.” Nora’s voice was hoarse, and it echoed in the empty chambers. “More blood. Always more. And how much of me would there be left when we walked out of the desert?”
The voices whispered furiously in the corners, but she ignored them. Finally, she ducked into a small, heart-shaped chamber at the bottommost level of the spiral house. The smell of wetness streamed out of it, a cool claminess settling like ointment on Nora’s sunburned skin. She put a hand against the walls and felt the water bleeding out of the bas reliefs.
“The water seeps down when it rains,” she laughed. “Into the rocks.”
She saw it drip into a shallow pool in front of what looked like an altar. From there it ran in grooves in the slabs of the floor all the way to a round pit, which appeared to be bottomless. A cistern. Of course. She always found herself in a cistern. She stepped up to the altar and drank deeply from its pool, holding the water in her cupped hands,
pouring it over her face and arms when she had finally quenched her thirst.
A statue stood on the altar, chiseled in what might have been granite. A familiar-looking regal lady wearing a crown of flames on her head watched over the life-giving water. She held out one of her arms over the water in what might have been a gesture of blessing. In her other arm, she cradled a child, its body covered in gold foil that was gradually peeling off.
The Highpriestess of Shinar wore a crown of flames. Nora stared at the uncanny resemblance of the Seeress Suranna, and her skin crawled with the reach of her wicked influence. To the people who had lived here, she must have seemed a goddess. A goddess of light and life. Someone worthy of veneration. But Nora knew better.
The water took on a metallic taste in her mouth.
The infant child in the statue’s arms—Suranna had always claimed she wanted to raise her God of Fire from death. Well, here she was styled as the mother of that reborn divinity. A god that she had needed to revive with blood sacrifice. Children burning in sacrificial fire. She knew who the people were who had lived here. They were devotees of Suranna’s temple whore cult. They were child murderers. Rapists.
“They deserve to die.” Two-Faced Nora appeared as a reflection in the altar pool. A chorus of Whisperers joined her in the gathering darkness in the little chamber, their chant echoing in ripples across the water, stirring it. “Fire. We will kill them all with a cleansing fire.”
Nora’s breath hitched and she slashed out at the statue in a burst of anger. A silver arc of light cut through its slender legs, toppling the statue to the ground. The benevolent face smashed into pieces on the flagstones, and the arm holding the gold foil infant broke away. Nora kicked it, and with a faint plop, the golden child fell into the depths of the cistern, vanishing from sight. Her breath came hard now. Nausea crept up from her stomach as the water became blood in her mouth. She grabbed hold of the cool stone of the altar and retched drily as the Blade rifled out her memories of Shinar and showed them to her again and again. The despair, the chanting women, the men standing in line, waiting for a free fuck. The benevolent gaze of the Highpriestess who had taken a child to give to her God.
“They deserve to die,” Two-Face hissed. crack slash break burn
“Yes,” Nora pressed through her clenched teeth. Oh Gods, yes.
She’d had to turn away from that evil once. She hadn’t been strong enough to end it, useless, futile, a failure. But now … she was strong. She was the Living Blade. She could march to the gates of Shinar and tear it all down with one sweeping thought.
Her hands were crackling with silver fire, and the chamber filled with the stink of her burning flesh.
“We can help you.” Nora’s nose was only an inch away from the water from which Two-Faced Nora stared out at her. Hungrily. “Surrender and we will give you what you want. revenge power change strength carnage Everything you want.”
“I can’t.”
Nora squeezed her eyes shut. She shook her head, her knuckles whitening around the stone rim. “I can’t give in. You’re not better than her. You’d just make it worse. You always make it worse. Give in now, and it’d all be my fault, just like in Arrun, and there’d be nothing of me left.”
“Everything you want.” The reflection changed subtly. The skull face faded into the black inky water, and Nora’s doubled face filled out. The cheekbones grew sharper. A stronger line around the jaw. Until she stared at Owen’s face.
“No. It’s a lie. You’re a liar.” Nora screamed at the water, tore herself away from the altar, and landed on floor. The silver fire rushed around the chamber, eating away at the crumbling relief walls.
“You want Owen? We will give him back to you.”
Shards fell to the ground as the entire building rumbled and shook. Nora crawled away on her elbows as debris rained down on her. She looked over her shoulder at the billowing, flowing darkness. It bubbled up out of the cistern and Two-Face was standing in front of the altar, her long bone sword at the ready.
“You want to kill this goddess? We have killed gods before,” it said as its foot crunched down on the broken statue. “They were liars. All of them. Upstarts. Abusers. Tyrants. We slew them, mingled their blood with ours, and became stronger.”
“Madder, maybe,” Nora spat, still crawling away from the darkness spilling forth from the chamber. “More insane.”
“We were carved from the very essence of this world, and we can make you a god.”
“Is that what you told all the other wielders as well? Where are they now, huh? Shreds of darkness trapped inside of you, unable to escape.”
“If you don’t surrender willingly now, we can … wait. We know hibernation well, but we are always remade.”
“I’d rather kill myself.”
“We won’t let any harm come to your body. We will make it strong. We will endure.”
Nora stared at the Blade. She rose to her feet.
“You’re just the same as Suranna. You’re both repeating the same cycle. You don’t care about the people who die for you again and again. You don’t even see them as people, just as …things to help you get stronger. But what use is strength if not to help others with it? If it’s in your power to change things for the better for so many people, but you don’t really care about people, then what is the point? Helping others who are weaker, who are vulnerable, who have to suffer under the systems of power and the hierarchies of strength that you created—that’s real change. That’s real transformation. All you want is to keep staying on top, enduring.”
“You aren’t afraid of death, Noraya Smith?” The two faces clouded, and inky black water poured out of the hollow skull’s eye sockets.
“There are far worse things than death.” Nora laughed without mirth. “I have died a little every fucking time I’ve been told I shouldn’t want what I want. I have died every time I have been thrown to the bottom of a dark pit and kept there with no way out. No, I’m not afraid of death. I’m afraid of having to walk through my life as nothing more than a used husk. I’m afraid I’ll never get to live as who I want to be, that that me will never get a chance, never get the choice, to come out of the darkness. I’m afraid I’ll be trapped forever.”
Nora turned to make her way out of the shaking building. Sand rained down on her as she fought her way back up through the spiral house.
“If you want freedom,” Two-Face whispered from below, “we can give you freedom.”
“Fuck you,” Nora screamed as she ran up the stairs. “You’re stuck with me now, and I’ll give you freedom. If I die, you die. No more being remade for you. I’m going to stop this fucking cycle, if it’s the last thing I do.”
Chapter 8
Nora lay on the hot, jagged stones at the bottom of the ravine and watched the ever-changing sky. For how long had she been here? She didn’t know. For a long time there had only been the black void and utter silence. Then after another length of time without measure, she began to hear the faintest of whispers on the border of hearing. She pushed through the darkness towards the Whisperers, and saw them writhing, wriggling towards her in the black, limned in silver, and hideous. She shuddered, instinctively recoiling from the monsters. But behind her was only darkness. There was nowhere else to go. She fought her way towards them, and the slivers of light bounced from misshapen body to misshapen body, arching towards her, as though eager to see her.
Where the light touched her, her skin crackled and sizzled. Pain shot through the darkness in crimson streaks. But outlined against the light and the hurt, there was also an awareness of something … else out there. Something that waited in the darkness, like a deep hole, a hungry mouth. Something with its own gravity, sucking her into its center. Swirling around it, she felt powerful current that would sweep her along and over the final edge. She knew it was there just as she knew that when she fell, she’d hit the ground. But as soon as she peered directly into the darkness to find the source, to see the edge, all she could sense was
the undertow sweeping her off her feet. She had to struggle to find solid ground.
She cracked an eyelid open, and wished she hadn’t.
She had found solid ground. Had found it head first.
Now there was nothing for her to do but lie and wait for the Blade to heal her broken body. And watch the sky.
The sky was light blue; it was dark blue. Stars wheeled over her, twinkling down from their heights. The sun rose on his fiery chariot, then set. It was hot; it was cold. And still she lay there, dry, spent. Occasionally she blinked or swallowed. She tried not to think. Thinking only hurt. It made her feel. Made her feel like she had really bad ideas when she was angry.
It was better, she had decided—she didn’t remember when—to simply lie here, un-thinking, un-feeling. No hunger, no thirst, no exhaustion, no desperation, no guilt. She was bursting full to the rim with all the whispering voices, couldn’t keep them contained, their silver ripples washing over her entire body. Though they let her be at the forefront of her own mind for quite some time now. That was nice. She even moved her lips to say it out loud: “This is nice.” Instead she heard herself sigh with relief: “I’m still me.”
Her voice sounded cracked, hoarse, and unrecognizable to her own ears after an eternity of hearing so many other voices. So many.
She closed her eyes and lay on the stone. Like the maiden in the ring of fire in that story … she couldn’t quite remember how it went … but she remembered that there had been a maiden, and she’d … done something worth punishing … and someone locked her in a magical ring of fire. Or something. There was something about stories she had wanted to remember, something important Owen had told her before he had died, but it must have fallen out when her head cracked open against the rocks.
The thirst was misery. And out there, somewhere, she could still feel the world out of balance, that soft but steady suction deep within the desert.
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