The Realm of the Deathless, page 2
“Thank you, Delia said. “I won’t be long.”
Aster nodded and ascended the steps toward the entrance to the gardens.
Delia sighed. She pulled down a peach and bit into it. It was lovely, not quite like the ones she knew from home; a little tarter.
She sat, savoring it, and when she was done, she gazed up at the strange sky.
“Are you here, Kostye? Are you really here?”
There was no answer. She hadn’t expected one. But then a motion caught her attention. A bird in flight, out over the forest. She thought it was an owl.
Okay, Delia, she thought. Don’t read into everything. There are always birds.
But in a place that was the stuff fairy tales were built from, you could never know.
TWO
THE ITCH
Veronica Hale had been alive, once, until she was murdered by a man she trusted. She had been dead for decades, a nov who enticed evil-hearted men to their deaths in the forest pool she inhabited. In that state, she had not remembered her life or any of the emotions that went with living. But then a sorceress named Aster Kostyena and a boy in a wooden body named Errol Greyson restored her memory and eventually a semblance of life. By day she breathed and ate food, and at night her heart ceased to beat, and her blood ran cold.
She had fallen in love with the boy.
But that was not, of course, the end of the story. She had travelled and fought through the distorted fairy tale lands of the Kingdoms, and along the way she had become something else yet again. She had no word for what she was. But she was powerful, and growing more so each day, and whether she was mostly alive or mostly dead no longer seemed like an important question. She was, and that was enough. But traveling that path, she had also incurred a debt, a big one. In order to save the boy’s life she made a promise to a woman named Yurena, to serve her for a year and a day. Yurena kept her end of the deal, and Veronica saved the boy. They fought together once again on the Island of the Othersun and saved Aster’s life.
Then Veronica left Errol and his friends on the island.
When she left, she still had time; her service to Yurena would not begin for days yet. She had chosen to give Dusk her life, knowing what the result would be. Dusk would replace her in Errol’s affections. Given the terms of her deal, she could not tell Errol why she had to leave. If she could, he might promise to wait for her, but he probably wouldn’t. And she could no longer be content with holding herself back just to be someone’s girlfriend, which was exactly what she had been doing for Errol. So it was just as well he find someone else to press his affections on. But it wasn’t as easy as all that. Her heart was mixed. She remembered being the girl who had lain under the stars with him one night and shared their first kiss. It had been her first real kiss, and even if his lips were made of wood at the time, it had been almost unimaginably sweet. Errol had helped her move forward before he began holding her back, and her love for him remained. It would have been hard to spend even a few more days with him, watching him dither between loyalty to her and the hard-candy sweets he had for Dusk.
So she went, to use her last few days of freedom for herself.
There were people beneath the sea, lots of them. Seal people, dolphin people, people with fish tails and human bodies, people who looked just like those above the waves, people who looked like the creature from the black lagoon. It made sense. The Kingdoms were the real stuff from which fairy tales were made, and there were plenty of wonder stories about mermaids and such. Heck, she had been one of those things, and she had lived in thrall of an even more malignant watery creature, a Vadras. But it has just been the two of them, in an old muddy creek. Here, in these seas of the Kingdoms she found splendid cities. She came upon one, bright and full of color, with towers and domes of living coral and inhabitants so beautiful it almost hurt to look at them. Deeper she found a kingdom of people with eyes like lamps who used giant squids for mounts, and they, too, were beautiful in her sight.
There were other wonders, too. For a time she trailed a Leviathan at least a mile long. It had palm trees on its back, and a small tribe of people that lived mostly by fishing. She encountered shoals of fish that glowed like an underwater rainbow. She swam to the edge of a whirlpool with no bottom and wove her way through reefs of living crystal.
A time came when she began to feel a certain path before her, a direction she was supposed to go. She didn’t think much about it but followed her instincts. She soon found herself descending deeper than she had ever gone, into depths where no light penetrated, and water was heavier than lead.
When she realized what was happening, she tried to stop, but it wasn’t possible. She realized her service to Yurena had begun.
And as she slipped into those darkest reaches, she began to feel something terrible, wonderful, and above all, familiar. The Itch.
When she was very young, before she was murdered, Veronica had been taught that the body was temporary, but that the soul was immortal. Her mother had said so, and her Sunday school teacher, and the preacher.
She now knew that was exactly backwards.
Veronica knew well the Itch before murder, the life that needed scratching until it went away. The killing brought an immediate satisfaction of creature desire, but her favorite part had not been the killing, but rather the corpses the slaughter left behind. They were like inside-out reefs, sponges and worms and jellyfish floating in a tiny sea enclosed by a flimsy nest of bone and paper-fragile skin. It was the undoing of them she had loved most, the process of decay, the smooth bones freed of the rough meat that concealed their beauty. In those days she had thought of deliquescence as an obliteration, the erasure of an existence, but now she understood that life was never unraveled by death. The sequestered waters of the body were opened back to the greater currents of the world, and the dead became gardens bursting with new life and growth. Everything a person had ever been was retrieved and put to use by some swelling, squirming thing, and something new created from it. Every atom of the corpse became a part of the living world.
Except for the shining inside, the thing that left behind those bones and guts and convolutions of brain. The soul, they called it where she had grown up. That could be repurposed, too. But it could also be destroyed without leaving a trace.
She felt that death-itch now, that yearning to put an end to something, but it wasn’t inside of her. It was not her own desire, although it reminded her of those lustful thoughts. It was a cold current in the water, welling up from somewhere far beneath—as if reaching for her. Hunting her. Itching for her.
She transformed, became a swarm of sightless krill, her thoughts spreading out in the water like a cloud. Still she descended. The cold brushed by her and was swallowed by the lightless depths, like someone stepping over her grave. For a moment, she thought of ending her journey, of trying again to return to the wan sunlight of the surface. There were a hundred other things she would rather be doing, but in the core of her, she knew she couldn’t. She had made a promise. And as it turned out, a promise was a big deal.
Her mother and the preacher had told her that, too, but she had never believed it. People broke promises all the time accidentally, purposefully, by omission. Her father once promised to bring her a donut when he came home from work, and he didn’t. Her mother once promised to spank her but forgot. Her Uncle Charlie and Aunt Emeline had promised to stay married, but they got divorced. She had promised not to eat a cookie before dinner, but did it anyway, and nothing at all happened.
But that was there, in the Reign of the Departed, the lusterless world where she had been born. Here, in the High and Faraway, when you made a promise of a certain kind, it was a very big deal. And she had made a big one, to that strange and ancient queen, and although in the back of her mind she had always meant to betray that promise, it simply wasn’t possible. The magic bands wrought by her words were pulling her here, to this deep, this hole in the bottom of the world. And there was nothing she could do about it.
This was not the place where she had met Yurena before, or if it was, it had become somehow deeper. That was hardly surprising; the High and Faraway was a changeable place, now more so than ever. It felt to her as if the whole universe was pulling apart, and maybe it was. Maybe, like mortal bodies, worlds could also lose the light inside of them, decay, become the food of future worlds. Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad.
Except that she had friends in this world, and she hadn’t had friends in a long time. As imperfect as they were, she wasn’t ready to let them go completely.
But for now, she had made a promise.
The pull stopped. She felt something stir. She felt a question.
I’ve come back, Yurena, she said. To serve you for a year and a day. Like I said I would.
For a moment there was no reply, but then she thought the darkness became more grey than black. She swam forward, straining to see. She became herself again, or at least something like her human form, albeit one that could survive in these crushing depths.
Shapes appeared in the grey, and then a bit of color. And someone.
Yurena—the monster, or goddess—the snake/fish woman— wasn’t there. But the face was familiar. And the place. Veronica was in a small, warm room, near a little table with a crystal dish of hard candy that looked like rubies, emeralds, and sapphires. Behind that was a window with white curtains, and a glimpse of a green garden beyond. To her right was an old black-and- white TV, with rabbit ears modified with tinfoil, and a rocking chair with a woman in it. Her face was framed in long grey hair worked up in a bun and her skin was like wrinkled paper. She peered at Veronica with piercing blue eyes.
“Grandma?” she whispered.
The old woman shook her head no.
“I am the one you made your promise to,” she said. “Or part of what once was her.”
“Yurena?”
The woman shrugged. “Many names. Many faces. Although I am forgetting all of them.”
“Why do you look like my grandmother? Why does this look like her parlor?”
“I didn’t choose this appearance,” the woman said. “You did. Maybe it was easiest. I don’t know. I’m growing thinner and thinner, child.”
“Well,” Veronica said. “I’m here to do my time. What am I to do?”
The woman grimaced. “I had plans for you,” she said. “Schemes, some would say. I thought I would be stronger now, rather than weaker. But our gamble did not pay off.”
Veronica narrowed her eyes. She remembered the Island of the Othersun, Dusk’s mother, the Queen, the forms she had taken before the end.
“You’re not just Yurena, are you?” she said. “You’re the queen, too, right? Dusk’s mother. You planned to kill Aster and end the curse. But we stopped you.”
“That one,” the one woman said. “Yes, she was one of us. My daughter, my cousin, my granddaughter, myself. Images in mirrors, through a crystal, all just bits and pieces. We could not end the curse. We never could have. It began too high, and too far away.”
“Aster’s dad made the curse, I thought.”
The woman shook her head. “No. The curse made him. Higher, further away, nearer the beginning. It happened there, and we are drawn into imitation of it. We dance on the stage, that is all. We tell the story again and again with the motions of our lives. Until the stage itself breaks.”
“This is getting awfully philosophical,” Veronica said. “I’m supposed to do something for you. Just tell me what it is so I can get on with it or let me go.” She reached over and took one of the candies, a bright red one, and popped it into her mouth. It tasted exactly like nothing.
The old woman’s eyes fixed on her.
“I will tell you a story,” she said.
“Great,” Veronica said. “More stories. Is this one true?”
“All stories hold some truth, or they wouldn’t be told,” the old woman said.
“Uh-huh,” Veronica said. “Like the time I broke Grandma’s window and I told everyone Cousin Gary did it?”
“The truth was that the window was broken,” the old woman said. “The more important truth to you at the time was that you didn’t want to be punished.”
“The truth was I did it and Gary didn’t. So I get the sense of what you’re saying. I expect you are about to tell me some kind of nonsense.”
“My power is diminished,” the old woman snapped, her blue eyes darkening to almost black. “It isn’t gone. You will listen.”
She sounded just like Grandma, and Veronica immediately felt her salt settle a little.
“Yes, ma’am,” she said.
The woman reached over and turned on the television. The screen lit up with electronic snow, but after a moment an image began to form. It looked familiar.
The single channel their television picked up showed horror and monster movies late at night. She wasn’t supposed to watch them, but one night, after everyone was asleep, she’d gone back to the living room, turned on the TV, and put the sound almost all the way down. This was the movie that had been playing that night. It had given her nightmares, but the very next time she saw a chance to watch the Midnight Feature, she had taken it.
It was about a giant monster. It stood on two legs like a man, but it was also scaly like a lizard, and had big horns like a bull. It was stomping on buildings and smashing army tanks. It looked really fake, obviously a guy in a suit running around in a toy-sized city. But she hadn’t seen it that way when she was little. She’d been scared of the monster, which she now remembered had something to do with the giants mentioned in the Bible.
“There was a person,” the woman said. “Neither male nor female, neither human nor beast. Some say they had the form of a giant, or a bull, or a serpent. But whatever form they took, they were the foundation, the stuff of the world. Everything.”
The channel on the TV started changed. Now the monster was a dragon, breathing fire, and then it looked like a man, then a giant spider. Some were from movies she had seen; others weren’t.
It went back to the first one, the giant horned monster. A bomb exploded on it, and when the dust cleared it had fallen over. The TV switched again, to a giant white baboon falling off of a tall building and splattering on the ground. In the next scene it was the reptilian giant again, surrounded by army men and workers, using chainsaws and cranes to cut the monster into pieces. That part, she did not remember from the movie; it had ended when the monster died.
The old woman kept narrating.
“But then that person died, or was murdered, or was sacrificed, and they were slaughtered out into parts. And from those pieces, the world was made. From their blood, the seas and lakes, from their veins streams and rivers, from their bones the spines of mountains, from their skull the sky, from their eyes the sun and moon and stars and from their mind—from their mind, the spirits of us all. The elumiris that inhabits matter and makes it alive.”
Veronica stared at the woman, then back at the television. It didn’t show the monster anymore. In fact, she didn’t know what she was seeing. Like the earlier images, it was in black and white, but it was all shaky, hard to focus on. Like the camera was mounted on something moving extremely fast. There were swirls and blobs of white and grey and she thought that they might be clouds. But then a shape appeared, a curve against darkness, and now she understood she was looking down through clouds, with glimpses of continents and seas. Since it was all black and white it was hard to sort out, but more details emerged from chaos, and she understood she was seeing the Earth from space. Then the camera started to turn, toward something brighter and brighter. For an instant she saw the globe of the world, with the sun rising at its edge, and then everything was blindingly white.
The TV blinked off. The old woman didn’t say anything.
“That’s weird,” Veronica said, after a while. “About the monster being cut up. I saw that movie, and that isn’t what happened at the end. But on the way down here I was just thinking. How everything that dies becomes something else, how when a body rots it gives food and life to all of these other things... .”
“I know what you were thinking,” the old woman said. “That is why I told you this story.”
“Huh,” she said. “I guess I don’t get it. Who killed the giant? Who cut him up? God?”
“There are different stories about that. Some say it was suicide—they did it to themselves. Others say that one sibling killed another, or that its children or a hunter did the deed. That is all beside the point. The point is that this person was unmade to build the world we know. The High and Faraway, the Reign of the Departed, all of it. Now that ancient creature wishes to be made again.”
“Oh,” Veronica said. “It wants its parts back. Its skull, its eyes, its bones, its mind. Its soul. So, everything. And all of us.”
“Yes,” the old woman said. “They have wanted that for an exceedingly long time. From the beginning, in fact. But they were never able to act. Now they can.”
“So to put themselves back together,” Veronica said, “they have to tear all of this apart. All of us apart.”
“Yes.”
“That’s a crazy story,” she said. “Is it true?”
“As I said—“
“No,” Veronica said. “No nonsense. Did it happen? Is it happening?”
“The truth is, the world is coming apart,” the old woman said. “You have seen the signs of it yourself. The other truth is someone wants it to happen. Someone is helping it along. As for the details ...” she frowned. “I forget.”
“So this ... person,” Veronica said. “I’m supposed to fight him now, or what?”
“It has me in its hand,” the woman whispered. “And soon it will close its fist. And it wants you. It needs you.” Her eyes widened. Her mouth worked and her chest heaved as if she was having trouble breathing.
“What’s wrong?” Veronica said.
“It’s a trap,” she said. “They used me to lure you here. You must flee. They must not have you.”
“But what ...”
