She stared at me with eyes like flint, then went on with her ritual incantation: “I will take your hair as my trophy, your skin as my tapestry, your innards as chum for the demons I will tame. I will please my master with you, and by doing so become her Squire.”
A grin curled my lips. “You will take my blade, aye. The length of it. And if you are lucky, you will die before you glimpse it twice.”
With that, the ground heaved. The stone I had leaned against a moment before flew into the air. A wave of mud broke over the shore and drenched us both in the sour stench of the sea.
So it began.
Some swords ring like bells when struck. My blade and that of the challenger Ili clashed like cities being pitched against one another. She brandished hers with the poise of a champion; I held mine like a beast with a bone.
Mud drenched us. Each time I came close to scoring scalp or severing limb, the quaking earth shuddered, and I lost purchase. The island around us squirmed in the throes of some topological mutation, no longer beholden to the laws of geology. Ili did not taunt me, nor I her. The peals of our blades were proclamation enough.
Near my feet, a geyser of fetid slime erupted. Boiling and blinding, the rust-red gout of fungoid scum made me drop my guard long enough for Ili to clip my breast with her blade. The pain bit into me like the teeth of a living thing. Twisting out of the way, I saw that it was more than a mere nick. Like the Blade of Anothqgg, her sword intersected the space around us in eldritch ways. The incision widened, as if the strike were still happening, as if the moment had slowed down and refused to move on. I collapsed, a kind of fire coursing across my chest. A river of mud opened just before me, as if mocking my wound.
The Blade of Anothqgg skittered from my hands and plunged into it, disappearing from sight.
I raised my arms in feeble defense. Ili stood over me. The point of her blade hovered above my forehead.
Her eyes bored into mine. There was no triumph in her gaze. Only pain, the anguish that comes from one’s soul being strewn through the cosmos, infected by the violation of a lance so holy as to be unholy.
But was life not worth living? Even after becoming the Scabbard of the Blade of Anothqgg, I had loved. Hesitantly, true, but not without pleasure. I had even laughed. It was a bitter, blackened laugh, but perhaps more hearty because of that. Death might free me — who knew? The Great Old Ones worked in unfathomable ways — or it might consign me to an even grimmer fate. I was not yet ready to know.
I grasped her blade. It bit into my flesh. Its vibrations thrummed through my bones. Blood seeped down my forearms, first in rivulets, then in streams.
Ili’s lust was not sated. I could see it in her eyes. Tortured yet unable to veer from her destiny, she tightened her grip. Slick with sweat, a tendon along the side of her neck fluttered elegantly. It was beautiful. Even here, even now, I could know beauty. It came as a revelation to me, and I gasped at the enormity of it, larger and grander than the pulsars I had seen extinguished in uncounted skirmishes between the Great Old Ones.
Ili, however, stayed her hand. Her gaze left me. The ground rumbled and palpitated around us. A force whose puissance overrode our petty squabble seized us, and we both turned our heads as the soil blossomed like a flower.
Out of it came Anothqgg.
I cannot describe him. I would not if I could. With a wave of his hand — I call it a hand, but it was the tip of some serpentine appendage I have no words for — he sent Ili’s head whirling off into the wind, a spume of melted skin and skull.
With the same appendage, he reached into the river of mud that now flowed mightily through the dissolving island. From it he withdrew his Blade. In his hand, it looked nothing like it did in mine. It stretched from his hand to the heavens, in all directions at once, in directions that no coordinates could name.
He offered it to me.
Out of instinct I reached for it.
Then I stopped. I was not in the void, on the battlefield of the Great Old Ones and the Ones Even Older and Greater. I was here. Home. How I loathed it. How it sheltered me now.
I looked around and laughed. It was not a desperate laugh, nor the cackle of the mad. The Ocean Amorphous seethed. Along the horizon, innumerable islands evaporated into palls of oily haze. The planet could not support the weight of Anothqgg, or even the terrible clangor of his voice. Pandemonium danced above me, a swirling storm of desolation as wide as the sky. It seemed to open into the cosmos, which glared down like an exquisite, crystalline eye.
The moon cracked and fell into it.
My home was dying. And in its death, it knew beauty.
I drew my hand away from the Blade. “I am a daughter of this place, this filthy hell, this abscess of putrefaction. I would fight over and die for it, a hundred times over,” I screamed into the hissing maelstrom with labored breath. The storm swallowed the pitiful chitter of my voice. Yet it echoed, and those echoes grew, spiraling outward, elongated and distorted, crawling across the chaos, until my soul emerged, squinting in the dim light of the violet sun like an internal organ thrust into the cruel air.
“Then so you shall,” came the voice of Anothqgg.
He pushed his Blade into me. Not my soul, but my flesh.
As I bled, so did the world. The bedlam fell to mute silence as the atmosphere dissipated around me, leaving no medium for the roar to traverse. The sea poured skyward, a colossal pillar of mud emptying out into infinity. With it, I began to rise.
At last, I belonged.
The Matter of Aude
Natania Barron
It did not take long for the thrill of Aude’s grand scheme to wear off. Once she passed through the high gates of Aachen, disguised as Turpin’s clerk — she had taken the name of Milo — relief quickly found itself replaced by a nagging concern that she would be recognized. Or even worse, that Turpin would betray her.
The bishop had done her a great service in going along with her ruse, but he never would have done so had she not persuaded him with a great and powerful secret. That, and the fact that the Heavenly Mother, the Queen of Heaven, had appeared to her in a dream and told her to keep her brother Olivier from harm. That seemed to carry weight with Turpin.
Aude had always felt a special kinship to the Mother of God, but now all else felt obliterated. Let the men have their Christ the King. She knew the Queen of Heaven spoke to her in ways none of them would ever understand. And now she had a purpose: to save her brother.
Roland was not far ahead of them; she could see the black curls at the nape of his neck, just below his golden helmet. Her betrothed. The man she would spend the rest of her life with, should he return from this bitter war with the Saracen king, Balan. The man she was expected to have children with, to raise a brighter generation, once peace was restored.
But Aude was not concerned that Roland might recognize her. They had spent such a small amount of time together, she was fairly certain he would not know the difference between her and the twenty thousand-odd men in their retinue. He had a habit of finding other things to look at when she was near him, anyway. Theirs was a union of rank and reputation and she was not blind to it, even if she played it so.
No, Roland would not be the challenge. Olivier was.
And Olivier was not only her challenge, but also her reason for leaving courtly life. It was all due to their king, Charlemagne, sending Olivier to fight a giant. A creature known as Fierabras, who was rumored to be the deformed son of Balan himself.
As she brooded over her brother’s doom, the bishop looked sidelong at her, his narrow gaze taking her in once more. If not for those sly, shifting eyes, he might have been a handsome man.