The Sin Eaters

by Aaron Summers

  She crouched beside him, afraid she might not be able to stand again. A light wind curled across their eyrie. Pungent cumin and fresh ash filled her nose. She looked up to his chin. It loomed almost a foot and a half above her eyes. The top of his head felt as far away as the moon.

  “You’re a tall fella. Are you the boss here? Michael’s boss?”

  He brought his knees and arms back into the self-embrace to look like an immense child sitting in front of a Christmas tree with preternatural patience. The moon’s waning crescent eked a sliver of stolen sunlight for the waiting world below. Set in a velvet blanket and surrounded by a galaxy of silver specks, it waited. He nodded towards it.

  “What? It’s the moon.”

  “What do you see?”

  His voice crawled from somewhere deep inside him. The words were seconds old by the time she heard them. They sounded heavy somehow, rusted, like chains dragged from the silty bed of an ancient loch.

  “I see the moon.”

  She paused and looked up at his dark face. Cords of hair shifted with the wind.

  “Why? What do you see?”

  “The man in the moon. The hare. A pockmarked dead world. A perfect captured memory of stone and history. A pearl. It is the same no matter where I am.”

  Each word stalked from his maw. She wanted to hear him speak more, to hear him roar again. Eliza shook her head and the pheromonal spell broke.

  He reached up to pick the moon from the sky and brought his fingers away with nothing but air between them. He handed his offering to Eliza.

  “And now it may be yours.”

  Eliza reached out her hand but stopped.

  “You see all those things?”

  She looked back to the sky. Fire, not cumin, not sweat, not ash. He smelled like fire itself.

  “You do not?”

  His fingers, longer than her whole hand, released his captured air.

  Eliza quit her crouch to settle down beside him. Cold wind sliced into her burning lungs. The air up here was too thin. She should’ve taken time to acclimate. His body radiated heat. She resisted the urge to move closer to him.

  “Did you invite me here to offer me the moon?”

  “No, Doctor Eliza Reyes. Mikael brought you here.”

  “But you’re his boss. This is yours, right? You’re the Grupo’s patron.”

  The man looked down at her with a carnivorous smile. A bundle of braided hair swung behind his neck.

  “Will you be the one to help me? I have asked and asked,” he swung both arms out across the endless expanse of mountains and valleys to their east, “and wandered from there to here and there again but do not know. The apus do not know. I have climbed their trails and spoken to their wise women. I have scoured their ruins for knowledge. No one knows. I am lost at sea.”

  “Help you with what? That test subject? Michael said he was important but not why.”

  The man smiled again and Eliza shivered. Michael was terrifying but this man… Tim had been imprecise. Not all predators were the same. Michael was the creeping thing that snared flies in its web. This man was the bear that stalked you through the forest.

  “He is important to me. Mikael tries to help. He cannot. The string is torn. It cannot be repaired.”

  “What string?”

  The man tapped his temple.

  “My life, Doctor Eliza Reyes. It is an unwound string that stretches through places I do not remember. Rats and fire and time have ruined its long trail. Michael wants to help me fix the string. It will not be fixed.”

  “And that’s who Charlie is to you. The research subject. He knows something you need to reconstruct your own history. ”

  The man nodded.

  “Okay. Well, I can do that. It’s actually what I’m best at. Taking broken histories and constructing an integrated theory. Not usually for a specific person unless they’re like a major historical figure, but hey, it’ll still work. But you know that already. That’s why you sent Michael for Helena. Is that what the Grupo is for?”

  His neck spasmed twice as he craned to look at her. Had he just glitched?

  “Will you…” His neck spasmed again. “Will you… help me? Helena could not.”

  “Helena was here?”

  “She is trying to help me now.” He spread a hand out towards the mountains. “Out there.”

  His muscular neck looked like it might snap as he spasmed again.

  “Yeah. I can help. But it won’t be free. I need full funding. For a long time. So does my university. Based on all this, you guys have money. And I get to keep whatever research I develop. No weird secret Andean cult group stuff. If you can agree to that… we’ll talk shop. If not, I’m going home.”

  NoYoureNotYouHaveToKnowFindHelenaFigureThisOutPickTheTopAppleDoctorReyes

  “I agree. We go.”

  He untangled himself and rose.

  “Wait, where?”

  “Down. There are people for you to meet. We begin work.”

  He pointed over the edge into the valley to their east. Eliza’s eyes struggled to focus across the extreme distance in the faint moonlight as moon-gray peaks reflected lunar light. A pattern of dim lights finally appeared. There were buildings in the valley. She looked back over to the party house and the Pacific Ocean. Only the mountain kept the structures apart. The two worlds were divided by the earth but intertwined by this man.

  She grabbed his wrist to pull herself up as her legs began to quit. His skin felt like scalding stone.

  “Who are you?”

  The man stepped towards the stairs. His long legs reached down three steps at a time. He turned back to her.

  “This is why you are here, Doctor Eliza Reyes. We will rebuild who I am.”

  He said her name like an incantation that would erase the fog from his past. She chewed her lip.

  “No need for all that. We’re working together now. My name is Eliza.”

  He reached his hand out to help her down the mountain.

  “Yes, Eliza. You may call me Charlie.”

  CHAPTER 7 - THE THINGS BETWEEN SPACE

  The ground rumbled through Fen’s calloused feet. People waited ahead. He did not want to reach the gathering. Their myriad voices rolled together into a sound that meant too many threats. He knew his mother sensed the same risk. She cared little for these gatherings.

  He pressed a palm against the earth. Their voices became a single roar. He decided his mother was right. People should not make so much noise. How could they hear the sparrow’s song if they were squawking at each other?

  His father loved these places but his father was dead now for a whole year. He should not have wasted life exploring the dead cities. Fen still did not understand how he thought climbing around ruined buildings was a good plan. One killed him for it.

  But his father also taught him about people, and the dead world beyond the endless grasses of the Steppe, and how people squawked like chickens and always would until they changed. People changed slowly but they could change. His father would help his mother trade the hides they both carried in bundles for the most useful goods. His father knew many more things than he taught Fen.

  All that was gone back to nothing. He set his stomach against the rising swirl of nauseous pain so often present when he thought about his lost father. Now was not the time. One day soon, he knew, he would sit alone in the tallest grasses and weep. But his mother had not yet wept and so he could not.

  The spoils of his mother’s grief weighed them both down. Fen grew strong in the five summers since his recovery began. He could carry much more than his mother and seldom grew tired while working. He would not allow himself to rest, not since the day he made himself walk, because he could only grow stronger or die. His tight shoulders and aching bowed legs screamed their protests but he cracked a whip and they moved ahead. Never again would those appendages decide his life. He would cut them off first. He would die first.

  “We are here,” she said.

  Fen look
ed back to her for the first time in several hours. Gilded in spring pollen that caked the crevices of her rough skin, she was the image of beauty in his young mind. She looked like the Steppe itself in all its daily danger and perpetual calm. Powerfully muscular around her haunches like all the Running Folk, she wore her raven hair in a simple braid loose against her back. Her familiar finishing knife waited on her hip for anyone to cheat her.

  She had stopped running messages many years before she met his father. The hunt made better use of her natural talents and dispositions than carrying notes from tribe to tribe all across the Steppe. She still held herself like the runners, always rolled forward on the balls of her feet, always primed to move. He longed to follow her path. She wanted more for him than chasing animals until they collapsed.

  “You think too much. Stop.” She had recognized the raptured look on his face reserved only for his parents. “Look ahead to what you have always wanted to see.

  He did. A forest of tents grew up from a deep depression in the sprawling grasslands. They chose well. The depression shielded the living encampment from the harshest shrubland winds. Each tent would be as unique as its occupants. His father’s face washed through his thoughts again and Fen let his mind wander. They had arrived safely, after all.

  “We do not name a thing like the gathering because there has been nothing like it,” his father had told him when Fen was still a crippled doomed child.

  The young boy stared down at his worthless legs and wondered what those people would name him. His father carried him on his shoulders while they counted goats.

  “The foolish folk, the dirt chewers, they built things called cities that were similar in a way. Do you know this word, similar?”

  Fen nodded. He liked when he could show his father what he learned.

  “The same, but not?”

  “Yes, yes! But they built evil places.”

  “Don’t you explore those evil places?”

  “Well yes, I do. But I explore to learn more about what they did wrong so that we can avoid it. There is much value in understanding wrong to learn about right. They dug holes in the ground to steal stone and metal that they crafted into things called buildings. These are like tents that cannot move. A silly idea, I know. These things crumbled when the storms came. The ghosts of our ancestors filled their buildings with their machines and when the storms came, those cities burned first and hottest.”

  Fen scratched his aching legs. How could his father speak so confidently? He hardly stammered. Did the man believe everything he thought?

  “This sounds like a bad thing.”

  “It was. These people separated from the world itself and forgot they came from nothing. So they are similar in only a small way. A thousand tribes or more come together at a gathering. Sometimes they come for a reason, like when a chief is slain, or to share news of the lightning, or to battle the grass fires. Most often, they come because they can. But it is not a thing like my hand is a thing. The gathering does not exist. Tribes come and go as they please. There is no government. There are no laws. It lasts until it does not, whether that is a day or a year. Sometimes it camps in one place. Other times it migrates like the beasts.”

  Fen knew he should say something but his young mind filled with nightmares of fake mountains growing taller each year as people, like ants, scurried around with blocks of stone on their backs. Lightning crowned the arrogant human-made mountains, burning them back to dust. He had never seen the terrible lightning as his mother and father described it but it still haunted his dreams.

  “What does the gathering look like?”

  “Oh, I would not spoil it for you. You will travel there with us one day to sell our goats and hides.”

  “What if I do not?”

  Fen buried his face in his father’s knotted hair as he asked the taboo question.

  “Then… then you will be dead, my son. But do not speak such things. You will heal.”

  “Why do they come together? At the gathering?”

  “Because each person wants to.”

  “There is no chief?”

  Fen held on while his father’s warm laughter shook them both.

  “Too many. Okat of the Bandits, Tome Darion Who Came Before, the Sylvanus. Even now, one named Sadanandan comes to unite the tribes and march south to scour the dirt chewers from their caverns. He will clean the earth and then the lightning will return to the heavens! He is the new Khan!”

  His father shook a fist at the sky as he snarled this last chieftain’s name, but Fen liked the sound of the man Sadanandan.

  “Is it not named a gathering?”

  He felt his father begin to speak but pause. He started again and paused again.

  “That is an excellent question. I had not thought of it before. We do call it a gathering. Perhaps the name is not enough. No one I speak with is happy with this name. They use it because they know nothing else. Until we each adopt a name for it that connects us to the idea, then it has no true name. That is my answer.”

  “Maybe Sandanana will name it.”

  “Sadanandan,” his father corrected, “will name nothing. He could be as big as the sun and it would not matter. He could rip the crypt keepers from their holes and it would not matter. We know the way now. What is learned cannot be forgotten. It lives in our blood. That is the oldest library.”

  Fen frowned at this last odd word.

  “The Age of Masks is ended,” his father said.

  “The chickens!” Fen squawked in his father’s ear.

  “Yes! The chickens. The people who lived before wore masks all of their lives. They squabbled and squawked,” he flared his arms to his sides like wings, “and pretended to be this thing or that thing, but if someone took off their own mask and laughed at all the squawking, the chicken folk turned and pecked them to death.”

  Fen ducked around his father’s jabbing finger.

  “These squawkers created the lightning. They made bad choices and let others choose for them until they had no choice at all. This is what Sadanandan offers. People will follow him without knowing why. They walk his path because he made the path, not because they choose it. Did you know there was once a name for all the people on the earth?”

  His father shifted Fen higher onto his shoulders.

  “Like one big tribe?” the boy asked.

  “Yes. They called it humanity. A tribe for all the people under the stars. Except no one chose to be in the tribe. You were born into it. We know better now. Do you understand?”

  Fen thought he did. He knew no other world than the wide and mostly empty expanse he had seen in his brief years. His father told him many more stories, though, about places like Australia that sat at the world’s bottom in safety from the storms, or Amrike, where his father thought the storms began.

  His thoughts turned back to the gathering in front of him. His mother waited, a rare patient display, while he remembered. She must be remembering, too. Fen was happy his father had not described the gathering. Its eventual name must be a great one to match its glory. More tents waited than he thought people lived in the entire world, even wherever Australia was.

  Blue patterns that looked like woven reeds billowed into the blended afternoon sky. Sparkling green stripes glittered. Tawny hides, with crude stitches plainly visible to show their owners’ wealth, held stiff against the wind. People scurried between the tents. He tried to count them but lost track as they danced among the ropes that held the tents to the ground.

  “How many is that?” he finally asked.

  “Ugh. I do not know.” Her voice sounded like it did when she stalked prey, quiet and somehow angry. “Let us go.”

  They entered the waiting gathering. Fen left his mother with the hides. She was known, favored even, among the tribes she loathed to visit. She ran longer than most hunters were willing to and rarely harmed the hides while killing her prey. She was also as quick with her knife as she was with her feet. No one would cheat her.

&n
bsp; He searched for the grapplers by checking for gaps between the tents’ high peaks. The space between things showed him the way. The shouting helped, too. People hissed, cursed, gasped, and moaned at combatants he could not yet see. Fen counted five, maybe six, languages. Only two sounded enough like his own that he could understand. Why would people speak other languages?

  “Shackle! Lanet olsun sana! Lanet olsun sana!”

  He froze at the woman’s voice. She was grotesquely misshapen, with a squat body as thick as it was tall and slender arms that seemed hardly big enough to contain her bones. A black scar streaked her wretched face. She stank, even to the nose of a boy who lived out on the plains. Her white irises tracked his movements.

  “Shackle!” She threw her hands to the sky. “Lanet olsun sana! Lanet olsun sana!”

  He realized she was hissing at the empty blue sky, brushed the curse from his shoulders just in case, and continued his search.

  He found the contest. Dozens of people formed an unbounded circle around two wrestlers. They looked, as much as the young boy knew, like normal people. He tried to study their various faces but found he only cared about the wrestlers.

  Both grapplers were bald. The hot sun glistened on their absurd muscles. How could any person be so large, much less two? They stood in their traditional position, one crouched low with a knee and both hands in the dirt while the other wrapped his arms around the crouched man’s waist in an embarrassing embrace. Someone whistled three quick trills.

  Fen’s sharp eyes flicked to a tiny grandfather sitting in a nest of furs. He must be the judge. His atrophied legs had not worked in years. The boy started to rub his own thigh but stopped. There was no time for what came before. The audience started shouting at a boy who stood beside the grandfather. He was slender like a sapling. A gap spaced his sharpened front teeth. Fen blinked and saw a girl. He blinked again and saw a boy again, a boy with wavy bronze hair who winked at him and became a girl. Fen felt a momentary tremor in his loins. The ambiguous sapling child clapped its hands. The violence began.

  The mounting man’s shoulders blossomed an angry red beneath the sheen of his sweat. He meant to crush his opponent before the fight even began. The mounted man laughed, jerked his planted leg out from under him, and rolled forward, throwing the would-be crusher into the dirt. The mounted man spun away, panting. He propped his elbows on his knees to catch his breath.