The Might of Monsters, page 17
“Tigers always land on our feet,” I say, unperturbed, and take stock of where we have arrived.
The hall is enormous, stretching in every direction, infinite. The spectators are back, this time dancing in pavane, each wraith sheathed in gold. Faint music and clinking glasses, though there are no actual tables or cutlery or, indeed, drinks. Servers go by with empty trays. Attendees chatter in no language I can understand.
“Now what,” Recadat mutters. “Throw ourselves out the window?”
Except, of course, there aren’t any. Nor doors either. I remain still, the way I once remained unmoving in the underbrush: watching, finding the flicker of motion that signified my goal, my prey. The twitch of a nose, a tail. The most subtle shift in movement, in the scent in the wind.
For her part, Recadat is trying; her expression is frozen, distant, as she looks inward and searches for a spell, a methodology, with which to break this slice of unreality and bring us back where we should be. But within Kristiansen’s vast library of mages, there is apparently no immediate way for dispelling this specific construction. There must be something going on with Doctor Leung, too, because Recadat hisses with alarm and once more pours into her restorative power. The surgeon twitches, and otherwise shows no sign of returning to consciousness.
The golden throng moves around us, drinking out of citrine flutes and waltzing. They twirl and giggle and a time or two they brush past me, their touches lingering, suggestive. They fill my mouth with floral notes.
Well. It is all unreal, in any case.
I seize one of the wraiths—to the touch, it’s surprisingly solid. Then I turn my hand to talons, and rake it open.
The blood is very hot, very real, or so it feels.
They scream. They scatter. But for all the infinity of the hall’s breadth, they are defenseless, fawns before the tiger. I chase and rip and tear; the flecks of blood that reach my mouth taste of nothing at all. And I achieve my goal—the floor clears until there is only one figure before us, as radiant as the day she delivered me from bondage.
“Perseverance and a little bloodshed solve so many problems,” Olesya Hua says. But her lips twist into an expression that isn’t quite human, and her teeth hurt to look at. This thing before me lacks her scent and her warmth, and its eyes glow with power—not the orange or the gold I might expect, but crystalline white, prismatic, and burning with alien loathing. “Know this, beast: you will die tired, unable to save anyone.”
This is the thumbprint of our tragedy’s mastermind, the lasting mark of this architect of malice. Its outline is growing too, branching off, fractal—my love reduced to a chrysalis, flesh tearing and bone splintering as the thing that she nurtured with her begins to claw out.
But it is just a shadow of our real enemy, the signature at the bottom of the painting. And like canvas this wraith rips under my claws, and in the vast wound of it the banquet hall tears apart too. A wall of blood spills forth, a high and drowning tide, covering me, covering Recadat and Orfea. I take hold of them both, gripping hard as we fight to keep our footing, to not be swept away by the flood. We hold onto each other as the fairyland tears.
(In the back of my mind, the thought of monsoon season in the jungle, the memory of loping for high ground.)
Sunlight on my face, the sea’s breath in my mouth. We are standing at the docks—the very same area where, a lifetime ago, I came with a beautiful but ailing sorceress to kill the hunters of my kind, the mages who created a flesh market that would turn those like me into meat and organs for the auction. My heart seizes to think of that, to think of our beginning.
Recadat looks up at me, blinking at the change of illumination, at the sudden shift in everything. “Are we out?”
“Yes. No cage, as I said, can hold me.” But my heart is already scrabbling at the cage of control I’ve imposed on it. I must go back. I must ensure Olesya is safe. I must hold her in my arms, and hear her pulse, and feel the flutter of breath in her lungs.
Not yet. I think—I am pretty sure—the Melusine cannot exist without her. For now, she will not be harmed. I cannot charge headlong back into the estate. All that will happen is that I’ll be trapped again, or worse. And then there will be no one to bring Olesya out of the witch’s maw.
But the geas limits my ability to ask for help, to call on Yves, or Viveca, or even Chang’er. At present, it is me and Recadat against… Olesya Hua, the most powerful sorceress in the world, now suborned by an unknown enemy of alien hatreds.
And yet there is relief here, too. The Olesya Hua I know is not gone—just submerged, captive, as much a victim as I. This, I must believe; this, I will fight for.
“Let’s regroup,” I say. “I have a safehouse.”
Interlude: Ouroboros
There's an advantage to a body of quicksilver, the Exegesis thinks; you can penetrate and be penetrated a thousand times over, in dozens of different ways, and each is more satisfying than the last. No pause for sensitivity needed, none of the limitations of flesh orifices.
To an observer, she and her partner must appear to be engaging in mortal combat. The sharp silver of the Exegesis has pierced the tender flesh of the Cynosure in a hundred points, through hands and arms, thighs and breasts. Her silver mouth, meanwhile, laps eagerly and relentlessly between the Cynosure’s legs, drinking both the blood dripping down her stomach and another sort of wine entirely. They’ve been fucking for hours, and the room smells of gore. It has soaked into the sheets, the floor. Red specks the ceiling.
In turn, black tendrils spread through the Exegesis like vines, like ink mingling with water. No part of the Exegesis is untouched—she has been invaded, infiltrated. Left alone, the matter of her would eventually become malleable to the Cynosure’s mesmeric command, and the prospect of violation is delicious. Droplets of mercury quiver on what is left of the mesmer’s face.
Little by little the Exegesis withdraws. It is not so much surrender as an acknowledgment that both have reached satiation. Inhuman coitus, divine even, is excellent but one can hardly hold a conversation through it. The time for mindless intercourse must come to an end; they must proceed with their scheming. One cannot play all the time.
The Cynosure sprawls. Her flesh mends; one of her hands gathers a coil of gut and reels it back into herself. Already her face is returning to perfection—the flawless skin, the generous eyes, the full mouth of a fertility goddess. Her body likewise, the bounty of breasts and softness. She is regenerating her spiderweb dress too, pouting a little when it picks up blood—brightening to red, indelibly—and then sighs. “Well, it can be a nice effect too, a little ombre. You’re so rough with me, by the way. I think you perforated both lungs.”
“Tell me you don’t like it rough, and I’ll call you a liar.” The Exegesis is not unscathed herself, for all that her body is nigh-indestructible. Entire patches of quicksilver have been forced to transmute into flesh, raw and swollen, unconnected nerves and sinews and cartilage. Open wounds and seeping lymph. She is in agony; she is ecstatic. No other can damage her in the unique way the Cynosure is capable of—what luxury. “More to the point, isn’t your other lover terribly jealous?”
“She can be as jealous as she likes. Monogamy is for barbarians.” The Cynosure picks up her left eyeball from her lap and pops it, wetly, back in place. “Oh, be careful with that one in your side, darling, I think it’s a tumor and not the benign kind.”
Quicksilver froths around the area in question. Mortal meat is ejected, slopping to the floor. Another piece follows. This one has a mouth and vocal cords, and it squalls horribly until the Exegesis crushes it underfoot. Fluids burst. The abattoir smells intensify. Clean-up, she thinks sadly, is always the worst part. “You’ll make a flesh woman out of me one day. It’s going to be horrible to have organs again.”
“It’s not all bad.” The Cynosure pats her stomach lightly. “I could give you a womb and plant something inside it. It’ll be an experiment.”
“Pervert,” the Exegesis purrs. “You should try that on the Melusine.”
“My voice doesn’t work on her.” A deep frown. “I can’t figure out why, it works on nearly everything. And it’s not wards or armor on her psyche, it’s more like she doesn’t even hear me. Very rude.”
The Melusine strode into their lives in a burst of blood and bravado, and the two of them have conspired against the interloper ever since. Neither pretends this is for the ineffable ideals of High Command—only the Moloch really believed in the Rectification of Names, and look at where that got her.
No, the Exegesis and the Cynosure have survived this long because they are scorpions that can control their instinct to sting; they can well enough ride the frog across the river, even compliment its slimy skin and beautiful, bulging eyes, and then be on their merry way. And in the case of the Melusine, they were of one mind: there is no future that contains all three members of High Command, and the Exegesis and Cynosure are each the devil the other knows.
So these past weeks, they have met and fucked and torn each other apart, all the while considering their options: subterfuge, enchantment, confrontation. The last is unattractive—the Melusine is viciously violent, and has demonstrated a considerable capacity and appetite for destruction; until now, no one in High Command has ever been responsible for the deaths of a hundred thousand people in such a direct and uncouth manner.
The Exegesis knows herself to be mighty, but trickery and working in the shadows have been her customary ways, not challenging another council member to a duel. The newcomer is a total mystery at that, with no footprints and therefore no blackmail material, nobody to take hostage. All the Exegesis’ efforts to ferret out the woman’s origins have been futile. It is as though the Melusine sprang into existence one day from empty air, to vex and torment her specifically.
“How did it go negotiating to buy Olesya Hua’s bullets?”
It is the Exegesis’ turn to sigh. “Unsuccessful, but I got my hand on one of them anyway. They’re not what they used to be. Potent, but not all-piercing. So, for the moment, assassination is out. Your plant among the Melusine’s acolytes?”
The Cynosure grimaces. “That’s the problem—she’s not taking any. I’m hoping she will recruit some at the gala. I don’t know why she has to be so tough to crack. It makes the game so tedious.”
The Exegesis sighs and rubs the bridge of her nose, hardening her quicksilver skin so that there is actually something to pinch. “We’re thinking too small. She has a plan for the gala, something that she wants. This is not just for show.”
They are both silent for a moment, reasoning through contingencies, possibilities. The Melusine’s brazenness, her lack of care about casualties and consequences, has left them unsettled and uncertain.
“I think,” the Cynosure finally volunteers, “that this calls for a… change in perspective.”
Her conspirator slowly turns to see the Cynosure draped across her chair, eyes cast in a coy look; one finger slips under the strap of her dress, tracing a collarbone.
“That was just the once,” the Exegesis says. “A moment of extremis. Necessary.”
“And this is not?” The Cynosure’s tone is shifting—no longer a flirtatious fertility goddess, but something darker, rougher, more primal. “Nothing else has yet worked, and we can each feel our footing shifting under us. Whatever is coming, it requires our combined strength to see us through to the end.”
It was an act of final desperation—fighting back-to-back against a rising sea of vermin, Cecilie Kristiansen’s cloying laughter lashing them tighter, tearing at their True Names. Two hated foes, united in the common cause of not dying to an even more reviled enemy. Similar to the position they are in currently, the Exegesis must admit. But the cost—
“We swore it would not happen again,” she replies, voice brittle, the sound of an addict trying to reject that one last hit. “We almost didn’t come back at all.”
Years of mutual loathing, of endless scheming, of research and prediction—all of it leading to one final moment of perfect clarity and total understanding.
The Cynosure is rising, advancing. Her hips sway, but her heels dig at the floor like claws, and her shoulders are set with the confidence that the Exegesis detests and is intoxicated by. “Tell me you’ve thought of some way to best our foe, and I will drop this.” She steps closer.
“You’re saying this because it’s an improvement for you—” the Exegesis protests, but her mouth has slid open, expectant and hungry lips meeting again.
Long, sharp teeth bite deep. The Cynosure envelops her, is enveloped in turn, the flesh-not-flesh substances of them meeting and intertwining. It is more than sex; it is deeper than any marriage. For a few seconds the Exegesis resists: flings up the barrier of her will, and makes of it an iron wall. But as the Cynosure seeps into her, she remembers. The rapture of it. The melding that felt like apotheosis.
Cecilie Kristiansen had them dead to rights, there at the end, was moments away from consuming the two of them to gain their unique magics. To take over two more of High Command and ensure her dominion. So they changed the rules of the game, in desperation—quicksilver and flesh touched, and they slipped inside each other, combined themselves into a new being. One that Cecilie had no knowledge of, no True Name to manipulate: they were impervious. Never had the Exegesis felt the way she did in that moment, half of something so much greater than its parts, completed in a way that made every other moment before and after a waking loneliness.
In those moments, they were more. More than human. More than the banal mysteries of this world.
It took them weeks to pull themselves apart, so great was the sensation and so intoxicating the feeling. And they came back different, awakened to previously unknown experiences and desires. Their brutal sex is new, disturbing, visceral, each trying to claw back what they lost—to again be made whole, to seek that sensation of being true in corrupted quicksilver and entrails.
And now, the Exegesis stops resisting.
Mercury and black fluids roil. Organs rupture and blood heats to a boiling point. They are two seas merging, tides crashing and breaking themselves upon the other. They are storms that have chance-met in a wild sky. Power flares through the interstices between them, lightning through clouds. The air cooks; the tumors and gore on the floor sear.
And then they are something else.
What stands in the place of the two women is tall, nearly two meters, broad-shouldered and densely made. Their skin shimmers, opalescent, faintly blue in the right light. Their hair, down to mid-back, has the gleam particular to scarab wings. Separately, the Cynosure and the Exegesis have eyes of shades natural enough; the amalgam boasts eyes in amber, like an owl’s. The ground under their feet is blackened.
They turn this way and that, the sensation of doubled momentum a lurid pleasure. They conjure a mirror and gaze upon themself. A nod; a smile—they are satisfied: there is an easy confidence to them, a swagger almost. Mercury flows and smooths over their body, shaping into a suit and over that a coat. Their hands are long, with perfect fingers and exquisite wrists, like carved instruments. Neither of their halves ever tolerated flaws in their forms, but the combined result is something else again, a product of two perfectionists.
Less pleasing is their immediate prospect, the problem that they melded to face. They look over the information their constituent parts have brought together, feel the warp and weft of the Exegesis’ and the Cynosure’s assumptions and conclusions. From this, they begin to piece together a fuller understanding of their foe, thoughts completing each other, advancing inexorably toward one stark realization.
They curse, in an alto deeper than either the Cynosure’s or the Exegesis’. “We’re going to need some allies.”
Nine: Beasts of the Earth
RECADAT
Dallas’ bungalow broods within the woods of Pulau Sekijang Bendera, remote and far from all civilization, practitioner and not. “I have many safehouses,” Dallas is saying, “stashed away on almost every continent.”
“Do you always anticipate some sort of oncoming disaster?”
The tiger has taken on a different form for our egress to this island, to evade scrying and surveillance. It’s wise, but I’m perturbed as I watch a petite blonde move about the room, her features delicate as a doll’s.
Dallas has laid Orfea on the bed and tucked her in: the doctor continues to be unresponsive, despite my best efforts. I know how to keep her body alive; I don’t know how to do the rest, how to wake her mind.
“Yes,” says the tiger, finally answering my question. “Before.”
She doesn’t elaborate what before means, but I get the clear sense that it’s another epoch, another life almost; that before existed as a sharp delineation from now. There was a time Olesya and Dallas lived in vigilance. Because of Kristiansen? Something else? And that’s supposed to be all in the past. Yet here we are. “How long have we been gone, do you think?”
“Three days,” she says with no uncertainty, no need to look at a clock or a phone. Internal clock, perhaps. Some mysterious feline quality, or at any rate an inhuman quality.
Three days that seemed to us like mere hours. How powerful is the Melusine, to have maintained something like that, to distort not only that illusory space but time’s passage itself. How powerful is Olesya herself? I wonder if she can resist the other her, should she try; how long she can hold out, in a duel. And then I realize I am drawing parallels. How long will I resist the hive’s hunger? How long can I hold out, and remain myself?
Instead of discussing tactics and resources, I find myself saying to Dallas, “Do you change your appearance often?”
She cuts me a look. “No. Why?”
I chew on my lip. I am nearing a question I must ask myself. “Why not? You must have quite a collection.”
“Well, for one, Olesya seems to like my preferred form just fine.” She starts to chuckle—this petite blonde has a higher-pitched voice, making it more a giggle; it adds to the disorientation. Then she sobers. “For another, it took me a long time to find the face I liked best. She was a woman who died with honor, and I wanted to commemorate her. Then I found out she suited me most, felt like me more than all the others.”
