The Year of Our War (25 page)

I deliberated for hours on the Insect threat, as blue-gray silhouettes moved across the room, doubling when bright Tiercel, the morning star, rose.

Asking where Insects come from is not the same as asking how people were made, because at the beginning of the world god didn’t create Insects; they appeared later. Unlike Awians or humans, they’re present in lots of worlds, as I knew from the times I Shifted…I looked at the needle and thought, I want to Shift. I want to go under and not wake up for a very long time. This world that causes me so much distress could just fuck off.

I hesitated, realizing that I am not welcome in Epsilon either at the moment. Owing to Keziah, the Tine would still be out for my blood. I dwelled guiltily on Keziah’s fate. The worm-girl had hinted he might still be alive—Tine prolong their victims in agony, making flesh sculptures till their organs are needed for rituals. Could I help him? Could I save him?

I struggled out of my torn shirt, took the band from my ponytail and used it as a tourniquet. My reflection in the mirror opposite was hunched and strained. Then, as my expression slipped into relaxation, I lay down.

E
psilon, like I’d never left; the marketplace was as strange as ever. I began to walk through the Constant Shopper’s shanty town of stalls, bright striped rugs flapping and racks of crystal beads clattering. The worm-girl’s voice was haunting me: “Never come back to the Aureate.” Why not? Because the Tine will eat me alive. I wandered round Epsilon’s market in painful indecision. “Never come back to the Aureate. Never come back to the Aureate.” My curiosity will be the death of me. I settled feathers that were prickling in the heat.

Cobbled roads ran around the market square’s edge, from which farther streets led to the quarters of the city. Coaches, rickshaws, and single whorses jogged up and down, sometimes scraping street corners, and bringing down the occasional stall. I walked until the cobbles became gold. Here and there scuff marks showed where people had tried to prize them up. There were scattered bloodstains, and withered hands bitten off at the wrist—people soon learn not to steal Tine gold. Tall buildings slid into Aureate glow around me as I walked on, into the Tine’s quarter.

The Transgressor’s Forest is the hair of the Tine’s quarter. It is especially difficult to reach because the head is a large walled enclosure. Hundreds of creatures were promenading gold dust tracks between the twin Cathedrals of the Eyes, down to the Most Hallowed Nazel Grottoes, whereas the Mouth forms an Endless Chasm surrounded by gold teeth and the Ears are convoluted dishes the true names of which are not revealed to the faithless. I ran, dodged, and sometimes flew through this complex, and eventually made it to the high spiked fence of the Transgressor’s Forest. Hiding, waiting, in the edge of a bushy gold eyebrow, I watched.

A Tine wandered into view. His saggy blue arms were pouring a flask of thick red-brown liquid into a watering can. I risked a closer look—he was alone, and seemed quite elderly. His clawed feet drew parallel lines in the glittering dust. He had frayed denim shorts, over which a floppy belly bulged. Thin wisps of white hair hung down a massive muscled back, over the vestigial shell that crawled with violet tattoo knot work. As a belt for his shorts, he wore braided optic nerves—the Cult of the Multiple Fracture. At his waist hung a big key ring, on which, instead of keys, were a bunch of ragged fingers. There were slender ladies’ fingers, soldiers’ thick knuckles, and children’s bitten nails. I saw the turquoise digits of other Tine, and the podgy hairy fingers of lardvaarks, all pierced onto the ring. And they were moving, bending, tapping, stroking…All still alive! The Tine hefted his green watering can, and I stepped out from behind the wall.

Shoulders up and hackles up, the beast growled.

I coughed. “Excuse me? Perhaps you can help. I’m looking for Keziah the Saurian. He’s a gray lizard, about…so tall, long snout with lots of teeth. Have you seen him at all?”

“Grrrr?”

“You know, I left him four months ago, but I think if he’s still alive, he must be here.”

“GRRRRR!”

“Well, if you feel that way, I’ll just be going—”

“How
dare
you set foot in the Aureate!” The creature choked in fury. He took a step toward me and I backed off.

“I’m an immortal,” I said, playing the only card fortune dealt me. The Tine gardener was too enraged to be impressed. Dry lips stuck to sharp canines as he snarled.

“What’s it worth to let me have a look in there?” I gestured at the gate and blue pebble eyes focused on my hand. “Oh yes,” I continued, bringing both long hands up with a flourish. “I was admiring your…finger collection, and I wondered what it’s worth to let me search for my friend in your forest…?”

The bristly beast pulled a razor-sharp knife from its belt. I held my hand out. “After you show me,” I said, teeth gritted, “Keziah the Saurian.”

The Tine’s heavy head nodded. “He’s impailed.”

“What, on a spike?”

“No. In a bucket.”

W
hen I saw them, I was sick. The Tine marched me on, determined not to let me out of his sight among the rows of stinking bodies, the forests of flesh. After all, I owed him a finger. I kept my eyes on the lymph-soaked ground, shuddering. There were rows and rows of canes, irregular against the hot sky. Rows and rows and rows of planted things tied to the canes. Some screamed. The ones that were beyond screaming were worse, because they sighed. And then there were the ones that were beyond sighing, the ones with wet streamers of guts like runners from which new limbs grew. The gardener doused them all with red-brown liquid from his watering can.

We walked underneath a roller coaster made of bone. There were real creatures embalmed on a merry-go-round, and they called out to me through sewn mouths as they spun by.

Still we went deeper, where the smell of rot was salty, too overpowering, and re-formed things with eyes on finger stalks begged to be put out of their agony. Some looked like skinned muscle trees, lumpen and misshapen, and some were skeletal trees in winter, their off-white arms wired to carved wooden posts. Insects kill everything in their path, but Tine are into creative mutilation. The gardener directed me around a clotted bush of digestive organs, bile green and dark purple, and an arterial ornamental garden where sunken things bubbled.

“Keziah?” I called. Why does that tree have so many sets of teeth? “Keziah! Keziah!”

Eventually, “You are one
bad
cat.” A voice softened with mortal pain.

“Shit, Keziah, I’m sorry.” I stopped in front of a tall scaly sapling.

“What you doing back here, dude?” the sapling seethed. “You said you’d stay off the powder.”

“I came to find you.”

“Stunning. Come join the greenery, catch my drift?”

“There are some things I want to know.”

Keziah’s peeling face blinked down from a three-meter-high trellis. Cables, ropes and gory tubes held his backbone in place, all covered with strands of dry slime. Keziah’s guts were in a bucket, which the Tine drenched liberally with his watering can. The Saurian gasped; a membrane-eyelid flicked over his remaining amber eye. Just suspiring, “They’ll never let you go, now. Not for all the meat in Pangea.” He lisped, because he was missing his bottom jaw, which had been replaced by someone else’s.

“Keziah. What is the Royal Court? There was a blond girl, made of worms. She saved me. When you were…”

“Ripped apart. Hurt, that did.” His top lip curved up in a grimace.

“Who is she?”

“I can’t t—”

“Who is she?”

“Bad news, dude. She’s a Vermiform. Captain of the Guard…She works for the King.”

A King in Epsilon, how bizarre. “Who’s that? A Tine?”

Keziah paused and gasped again, looking to the Tine gardener for a little more red water. The gardener was transfixed on me, and didn’t move. “The man you brought here yourself. Dunlin.”

“Dunlin.
Rachiswater?
How?”

“He said we should all pull together…He hates Insects. Oh no. Oh
shit
. Here she comes.”

“Wha—” I broke off as the ground began to tremble. I looked down and pebbles were shaking and jumping about on the ground. A long thin worm scurried between my feet. I jumped. Then all around me were worms, rushing together. Worms came out of the ground, disturbing the pebbles. In a five-meter radius they appeared, running in toward the center, where they met in a writhing pile. Up sprouted a twisting column of worms, taller than me, it consolidated and re-formed into the beautiful girl. She swayed, stood still, her hair was alive.

The gardener fled.

Keziah whined, “Oh for Cretaceous’ sake. We’re doomed.”

“Jant,” the Vermiform said, her voice like harp chords, “we told you not to return.”

“Yes, I know. It was an accident,” I said. “I thought I’d try to save my friend, but as you see, there’s very little left of—”

“You told him about His Majesty,” she accused Keziah.

“Not at all. He—”

“We’re everywhere. We know.”

She held out her arms, and they elongated—worms ran down her shoulders and neck, adding to the ends. Her hair shortened and vanished. Her head shrank, melted like candle wax as worms left it, adding to her arms. The arms were like tapering roots; they came to points instead of hands and the points laid hold of Keziah. He roared in anguish. I took a step forward to help but he shook his scaly head, a sly gleam in his eye. He had an end to his protracted agony. I watched, wanting to run, but I wasn’t going to leave him a second time.

The girl’s shape thinned, her height decreased as worms poured down her writhing arms onto Keziah, where they crawled quickly all over him. She was just a thin column, then the column shrank; she was just arms, then the arms dwindled, shoulder, elbow, wrist, and all her worms were wrapped round Keziah.

Keziah couldn’t shake them off. A moving net of worms surrounded his snout. They crept into his mouth, between his massive teeth, and down his throat. They emerged from his ragged-cut neck onto the trellis, red and sticky. Worms crawled into his eye socket and forced the eyeball out. They pushed between vertebrae and dropped in the bucket.

I had my hand over my mouth to stop screaming as I saw rivulets streaming into his nostrils, eyes and earholes. Keziah’s head hung down. He stopped breathing, and the membrane flashed across his eye socket one last time. I guess enough of the worms had reached his brain and mashed it up. They gushed from his open mouth, and in midair re-formed into the beautiful woman whose shape took a little adjustment as her feet hit the floor. She picked a lone bloodied worm from the bucket tenderly and stuck it back on herself.

She said, “Never come back to the Shift, Jant.”

I said, “No, my lady.”

If she approached me I would run, but I had seen that her worms moved like quicksilver.

“Then goodbye.” Worms at her feet began to dissociate.

“My lady! Wait! I want to meet Dunlin again.”

“He said he doesn’t want to see you. Epsilon is at war.”

“Why?”

“You stupid creature! If I see you again I’ll eat you from the inside out.” The Vermiform raked one hand across her chest, taking a fistful of worms. She molded them like a snowball, mouthed, “Catch!” and threw it. Worms splattered against my face. I squealed and spat, brushing them off—they ran down the folds in my clothes to the floor. When I could see again she was gone, the slightest tremble of gold soil showing her path underground.

T
here was a reorientation, and I woke. I woke in a familiar room, feeling a familiar feeling. I felt like death. I’d passed out with my eyes open, and they were so desiccated the lids got stuck when I tried to blink. I groaned, remembering the thorn-stick pain, metal through flesh.

Tern appeared, being comforting, holding my hand. I leaned over the bed and threw up. Then I started crying.

“What’s the matter? What’s the matter?” she asked.

“It’s nothing. It’s just the reaction of the drug. I’m a useless, stupid Rhydanne,” I explained. Tern climbed in bed with me. Her legs were so smooth.

“Sh! Jant, it’s about time you quit.”

“I can’t,” I said, before I could stop myself. But Tern didn’t see any hidden meaning behind my words. We listened to the sound of heavy rain drumming on the shutters. She stroked my wing for a while and then stopped, a typical woman—they don’t expend any effort to help you if there’s nothing in it for them. I ran my hand up under her skirt and got lost somewhere between crinolines, petticoats and unidentifiable lacy straps. I was a foiled lover, completely at the mercy of too many layers of clothes. Slowly I gained control and stopped sobbing. Tern doesn’t believe in the Shift; nobody does. Poor Tern, she can’t understand why her pathetic husband is killing himself. I hugged her, saying, “I just need to Shift once more and then I’ll quit.”

“Why?”

“I’ll quit forever, I swear it.”

“You’ve said that before.”

“I mean it. Aches to move. Don’t want to do it again.” I rubbed my eyes and only succeeded in making the burning sensation worse.

“Then
why
bloody do it again?”

“I have to. Honestly, Tern. Trust me. Help me. Please?”

She shook her head, gazing in disbelief. I rubbed a hand over her stocking tops, hooked a finger under the suspender and ran it up to the belt at her waist, swept my other hand down her back, undoing hooks and eyes. Tern made an impatient noise and wriggled out of my grasp. “You’re taking me for granted,” she said.

“That’s not the case. I…”

“You simply don’t care that Insects have reached Wrought! It’s under attack!”

She slid from the bed and stormed out of the room, the open back of her dress flapping, her little black wings and narrow shoulder blades sticking out. Her footsteps diminished down the spiral stairs.