You are nobody. You are nothing.
Hands on her, she was dragged out limp and bruised and filthy. It smelled horrible. She smelled horrible.
How long was I—
She couldn’t even finish the thought. Smoke billowed. The hall was cramped and dark, cell doors flung open. The coffin-cubes of stone were empty toothsockets, leering as her head lolled and she blinked, weakly. Her heart kept going, her lungs did too, and their hands pinched and poked before they lifted her and bore her on a gray-robed wave. Thirty of them, maybe more, and others in the hall. But the great mass of whispering and movement she remembered from before was absent.
Underneath was curiously small now, and the Biel’y were fewer.
Carried through the twisting corridors, the smoke was so thick she could barely see. The past kept looping over into the present, why did she even keep fighting?
Tor. He’ll live, I guess. Marya, though she won’t miss me for long. Rube and Ellie, poor Ellie. They’ll be okay. Ruby will take care of it. Nico . . . he’ll be fine. They’ll all be fine, really.
She sagged in their hands. The Biel’y began to chant more loudly, a slow ancient tune with the edges of the words rubbed away. Once their choir would have shaken the tunnels with its swelling. Now it was an attenuated cricket-chorus, barely stirring the swirling smoke.
Their hands were cold. Not the bruising chill of the stone, just cold in a different way. Uncaring flesh, forgetting itself. Cami hung, jostled from side to side as the human wave below her marched on bare feet, kicking aside detritus until they came to a more-traveled hall, the fungus dripping clear water as its glow turned to a low punky dimness.
She’s tired. She had to bring me here, she’s eaten too many of them. Her . . . followers. And the hunters have probably been bringing others down here for her to feed on, but not enough. It was like thinking through mud. That’s why she needs me.
Nico needs me too, a small voice piped up inside her. So does Ruby. And Ellie. They all need me.
And yet she’d been nothing but a problem since she’d run out in front of Papa’s car. An extra puzzle piece, a snarl in the yarn, a break in the pattern. Something foreign, alien, forcing its way into other lives.
We are foreigners, Papa’s voice whispered in her memory. Always, we are strangers in all lands.
Finally, she was hazily glad he had transitioned. He wasn’t here to see this. Had he known what she was?
My bambina. It is arranged.
Had Papa known? And if he had, had it mattered to him?
It doesn’t matter. He’s gone, and I’m . . . here. She twisted fretfully, took a deep lungful of the smoke. Would it hurt when the glass knife flashed down? Or would she just feel a spike of pain, and then the deep relief of oblivion?
The doors to the mirrored hall were black iron, their surfaces powdered with dried ghost-moss. They creaked and screamed as the Biel’y pushed against them, each groan and wheeze echoed faithfully through the bars of their song, an eerie mock-grieving. Did she imagine the tremors in their upstretched arms, the drunken swaying as if her weight was too much for them?
Your fat ass, Ellie said, softly, and Ruby giggled in her memory, false-summer sunlight golden over them both.
Missing them was a stone in her throat. The knife would flash down, and they would go on without her being the third wheel . . . but the missing-them was all hers.
Even the Queen couldn’t take that. She couldn’t take the memory of Papa, either, or of Marya’s hugs and scolding, or Trigger carefully showing her how to tie a neat knot, or Nico in all his different moods. Scowling or smiling, angry or relaxed, and yes, even the face he showed when the hunting frenzy had him and she was reminded of just what Family and blood meant.
The Queen couldn’t even take Stevens, or Sister Mary Brefoil conjugating verbs, or Sister Frances Grace-Abiding chiding the girls to lift their knees during calisthenics. Or the cold of snow and the sight of Tor’s scars, just like the Nameless’s own.
The mirrors ran with light. It was not the silvery blaze she remembered. This struggling corpseglow was not magnified by the polished glass. Instead, it fell into the mirrors and vanished. The skulls above were still weeping, and streaks had been allowed to pit the smooth glass surfaces. Cracks and dust showed, and the ceiling was black behind its pall of smoke.
The Biel’y circled the white stone altar, and little things crunched on its surface as they laid her down. It was crusted with layers of filth and dried fluids best not thought about, carapaces of beetles crackling; little things scuttled away from the touch and weight of her flesh. She squirmed, but two of the Biel’y came forward with a long rectangular black velvet box, and when they clasped the silver necklace with its flat not-quite-round medallion around her filthy throat the will to move drained from her. She felt it go, swirling from her toes, the silver stinging as it lay against her vulnerable pulse.
I am, I am, her heart kept saying. Idiot thing. What did it know?
She didn’t even have a name.
They began to sing a little louder, the Biel’y, but it was not the massive thundering sound it had been before. Still, the mirrors caught and reflected it, and the incense smoke darkened.
The Great Renewal of the Queen was ten years late. But now, finally . . .
. . . the hour had come.
THIRTY-THREE
“OUR QUEEN,” THEY MOANED. “GIVE US OUR QUEEN, our light, our life! Give us our Queen! Our Queen!”
Tip-tapping footsteps, mincing, She appeared from behind the largest mirror, the frame of black iron skulls and bones dusty now. Cobwebs had crept between eyeholes and thighcurves that would have never been allowed before.
She lifted her arms, and the sleeves of Her pale silken robes fell back. The skin flopped loosely around Her wasted biceps, and Her fingers were claws. The paste dried on the claw-tips had chipped, and Her face, under a thick screen of bone-white powder, was even more cracked and runneled. Blue eyes blazed, and the red jewel at her throat flashed, stuttering.
“My children!”
The Biel’y moaned, swaying back and forth. They packed into the hall but could not fill it. There simply weren’t enough of them. Maybe fifty, maybe a few more. Without the Great Renewal, they would all slowly fade.
“My children,” the Queen repeated, and they shrieked in response. Her hands spread, She caught the sound and drank at it, Her reedy voice strengthening. “The Great Renewal is upon us!”
“Renew, renew!”
“There shall be a sacrifice!”
“Sacrifice, sacrifice!” Shaven skulls under tight-drawn pallid skin bobbed on scrawny necks.
“My new Okhotnik, My husband-to-be, went Above, and he brought Me a heart!”
“A heart, a heart!”
Tor, she thought, dimly. Everything was very far away. Bringing me presents. Were they really from her? Or did he steal them, thinking she wouldn’t notice? Or did she send them out into the world, into Above, and he was just the way they chose to get to what she wanted?