Is the funerary platforms.
Those winds you’re hearing with my ears-I bet you guessed it already. That’s not wind. It’s howls of mindless insatiate hunger.
The voices of the dead.
There’s a storm coming out of the west all right, but it ain’t fuckin’ weather.
››scanning fwd››
“-your ass till it comes out your ears. Had your chance.” I’d need the voice of a civil defense siren to be heard over the screams and howling from the horror show in the camp, but I’m pretty sure Crowmane catches my meaning anyway.
I laugh down into her smoking yellow stare. “I’m comfortable right here.” My instructor in Applied Legendry at Garthan Hold-Brother Clement, his name was-I remember him bloviating about the Vale of the Dead story: How minor incidents become exaggerated to preposterous degrees over only a few years. . Clearly impossible for a single individual, no matter how complete her attunement, to channel power sufficient for yammana yammana yammana bullshit. Pompous old fuck.
Wish he could be down in that camp right now.
The rest of the top bitches have joined the final defense perimeter, a thick wall of wide-eyed, flared-nostril, clenched-jaw fight-to-the-death determination between the howling chaos of the camp and the corral area where they’ve got all their cubs and juvies. Their last line of defense, with all the power they’ve got left. Dunno how much it is. Down in the camp, Black Knife bucks have given up on arrows and spears to use whatever heavy cleaving shit they can lay hands on to hack desperately at the arms and legs of writhing howling shadows that are all teeth and claws and hunger.
I think the bucks might be winning, might have a pretty good chance of containing the corpses and chopping them down. It’s hard to tell.
Goddamn shame so many of ’em we killed went down sliced in half by my bladewand, or with spines or legs crushed by Marade’s morningstar or arms severed or legs hamstrung by Pretornio’s porters. If we’d left their dead in better shape, this would have been a shitload more entertaining. But, y’know. .
It’s still not bad.
From the foot of my cross, Crowmane shows me her age-greyed tusks and sends a wave of dream-Real threat up to close over my head.
You think it can’t be worse for you. I tell you it can.
I show her my own teeth. Probably pretty fucking grey by this time, too. “Now you’re just flirting.”
She snarls up at me and squeezes her ball of Reality-
— and my days of death on the scaffold rewind within my head in a harlequin whirl of white-noon blaze and black-ice midnight until the dead cold carved-oak tree limbs that are nailed to the arms of the cross and connected still somehow to my shoulders and hips spasm and jerk-
Hang on to your balls, kids. My arms and legs. .
She’s bringing them back.
Ligaments twist barbwire through acid-etched joints. Muscle fibers ripped in handfuls like hair from my head, steelclamped around the spikes-
I can feel the spikes again. .
Iron on naked bone scraping blossoms of screaming midnight off my arms-ankles-
Gahh.
Gahhhh.
Fucking pain center. . got that going again too. . betcha . . noticed, huh. .?
huhh-
the spasms and the twisting and the spurt of tears into the blood that trails from my lips-
tellya. . secret. .
secret to-
— gahhhhh-
The secret to great Acting.
Huh.
Huh fuck huh.
Here’s the, the, the secret to great Acting-
give the people what they want.
So I finally let it out: the howling and the sobbing and shit, sure, she’s seen me cry already and she’s heard me moan and sob but here it is: I finally let it all hang out.
All the the begging for mercy.
All the pleading that she just fucking end it I don’t care anymore just make it stop-All the weak sad shit I’ve been sucking back and swallowing ever since I first saw that buck stand up in the badlands.
I give it up. I give it all up.
“I’ll tell you I swear I’ll tell you anything-it’s the Cauldron of Chi’iannon, all right? I know about it! I know! Please-just get me down-! Just make it stop. .”
Fading now: a broken whisper.
Broken like me.
“. . just get me down. I’ll tell you everything. . please. .”
And because she wields a piece of Reality in her right hand, she knows my pain is real. She knows my break is real.
She knows I’m telling the truth.
She goes to the big wheel-crank that controls the angle of my scaffold and turns it until my cross becomes a timber bed. A curl of contempt twists her lips around her tusks. She slashes the ropes that tie me to the cross with the filed-sharp fighting claw below her left hand. She leans across my face, and with the same hand she yanks on the spike through my right arm. The wood squeals as it comes free, and my arm comes with it and my shoulder’s silent roar is loud enough to grey out the universe.
Annnnnd. .
When the world comes to life, I’m off the cross.
Under my back-
— night-cold stone-
Oh god-
Oh god oh god I made it. I’m off the fucking cross.
I made it.
Thank you. Oh, thank you.
The night gathers force in my ears: roars and screams. Smell of burning shit and hair and rotten meat.
Pressure on my chest crushes my sobbing down to thick gasps, then to a choked hush. I open my eyes. It’s Crowmane’s foot.
Long as my forearm. Wide as my hand span. Toenails hooked enough to draw blood from my chest. Her eyes smoke yellow into the stars around her head. Reality pulses around her right hand. Talk now, little rabbit. Talk of this Chi’iannon’s Cauldron. Tell me how I stop it.
Shit.
Gahh. She left-
Fucking spikes’re still in my wrists-
And-ahh, fuck me, fuck me, she left my ankles nailed together, ahh, fuck-
Guess I can give right the hell up on that quick getaway.
Talk now, little rabbit.
So I meet her eyes and give her the truth I promised. “You can’t stop it.”
Without transition her huge foot is on my throat-so goddamn wide she’s breaking my sonofabitching neck-
Tell this again, little rabbit. Tell this for the last time.
If she weren’t crushing my throat right now, I’d tell her I love her.
With weakly trembling hands, I scrabble at her ankle, then let my arms fall back, right thrown across my face to mask what she’s got to think is despair.
Hands work. So do arms. Maybe even legs, if I can take the pain.
She did this for me. And I’m off the cross. She did that for me too.
I love her very, very much.
I don’t need Control Disciplines. The singing in my ears makes the night a wonderland of shimmer and fades the screams and roaring into a distant melody of blood.
Darling. . they’re playing our song. .
From behind my right elbow I manage some whimpering gasps around her huge clawed foot on my neck. “Y’can’t. . stop the spell-’s done-all y’can do. . ’s chop ’m up and burn ’m. .”
She leans over me, shifting weight onto the foot-wide paw on my neck. My cervical vertebrae pop and crackle as the ligaments stretch. Her drool drips down across my face. It smells of rot. Been too gentle with you, little rabbit.