We stood atop the same warehouse where Ma had killed Bab, weeks ago. Three storeys of elevation provided a decent enough vantage to showcase the entire district. My mother had determined that this would be the best position to plan out the battle. It might’ve even been pleasant, were it not for the pile of reeking meat inside the building – treated with some sort of concoction from Miss Tran to make the stench more potent – and a mad-eyed warrior dressed in plate armour. The sight of him set me flinching away in instinctive fear. The terror was blood-deep, and the product of someone else’s life; he was Master Reagan – Bab’s tormentor. All this in addition to an omnipresent buzzing, fraying the edges of my nerves.
I found it difficult to ignore his presence, however he had no trouble ignoring mine. His unblinking eyes swept over the Foot, occasionally settling on two small shapes in the distance. I doubted his unblooded eyes could make out any details, but I could; they were the two other piles of meat the citizens had painstakingly built, each surrounded by a variety of haphazard fortifications, built using furniture, loose brick, and the occasional sharpened stake. One was near the restaurant, whilst the other was near the outskirts of the city. Silhouettes manned the slapdash architecture, too far away to make out any details.
Feeling relieved that I was beneath his notice seemed cowardly, and warred with the anger boiling in my gut, but Ma had told me dozens of times that we needed him. I sniffed, idly fingering the short-sword strapped to my belt. I didn’t see why I couldn’t just shove him off the roof – he wasn’t Blooded, so we only needed his men – yet Ma had been adamant.
She shot me a stern look, my thoughts transparent to her.
My mother turned to Captain Vernon, whose large eyes were narrowed at something across the wastes. “The attractors are set?”
He blinked owlishly and turned to her. “Pardon?”
“The attractors. They are operative?”
“Can’t you feel them?”
She shook her head. Every time I saw Ma, her reduced size struck me. During the week the city had spent preparing, she had shrunk rapidly. Every time I delivered a message, she seemed just a fraction smaller. Now, she numbered only six and a half feet tall – barely a few inches taller than Reagan.
“Hmm,” Vernon smiled, revealing a mouth full of mishappen teeth. “You must need more Godsblood, then. What about you?” He directed his massive eyes towards me.
I pointed to myself. “Me?”
“Can you feel it?”
“I can’t feel a whole lot besides the horrific smell and that annoying buzz.”
He clapped his hands. “Yes, yes! That’s it! You have enough Blood. It is annoying, yes, but it should be very alluring to Dure’s parasites.”
Our entire plan revolved around the parasites being attracted to three specific locations, designed to kill them before they could reach the lake – if it wasn’t alluring, the city was dead. The amount of blood I was encouraged to ‘donate’ to ensure the attractors worked was tremendous – enough to fill a similarly-sized boy three times – however Ma had assured me that, despite common conceptions, the machinery was only taking blood, not divinity. Specialised equipment was needed to extract Godsblood. That, or the Blooded would need to be dead already.
I had known that already. When I was younger, I had tried to get the Ravenblood out manually. It was messy. None of my attempts bore fruit.
Master Reagan – no, Reagan – gave Ma a look upon hearing of my blood. “Your son’s a Blooded?”
She tilted her head in acknowledgement. “Lizardblood.”
“Strange that you would allow one so young to partake, and of such great quantities.”
“It’s a small amount. And he didn’t seek my permission.”
“He had none better?”
“A pubescent has few options.”
He grunted, then set his ravenous gaze upon me. “Ambitious, are we?”
Despite feeling the urge to flinch away, I met his eyes. “It just seemed like a good opportunity.”
His gaze didn’t waver. “I’ll be watching your performance in the coming battle, Orvi.”
“Okay…?” I suppressed a shudder at hearing my name emerging from his mouth. “I will, uh, try not to disappoint.”
The man turned away from me, without even bothering with a dismissal. Immediately, my shoulders sagged with relief. The relief was quickly replaced with anger. Why am I relieved? Am I scared of this man? Obviously, the answer was yes, and that fact infuriated me. But the idea of engaging in an actual confrontation with Master Reagan threatened to send my lunch spilling across the rooftop.
An idea popped into my head, and before anxiety could dissuade me, I opened my mouth. “Why aren’t you Blooded, Mast-, I mean, Mister Reagan?”
Ma’s glare could boil stew. Luckily for me, I wasn’t a broth.
“I mean, it seems perfectly natural for a man with your status to have some.” My tongue instinctively curled into the most obsequious shapes possible. The manic energy of a rabbit in the shadow of a hawk filled me. “But you don’t,” I ended flatly.
Reagan’s armour clanked as he faced me. His expression was manic, maddened – the kind of face I never expected a human to make. I swallowed. He smiled viciously in response. “It’s a symbol of my right to rule. Blooded aren’t human. It’s foolish to let a creature so…” his mouth quirked, turning his smile into a sneer. “Sullied, govern others. How could one corrupted with the divine govern mortals?”
A hateful response danced on the tip of my tongue. I had met dogs with more humanity than the man facing me, after all. And, anyway, would a third son be ruling? Shoving the words back down was easy, with Ma fingering her onyx blade behind him. I could easily see Reagan killing me, then Ma killing him. Jeopardizing the plan the entire Foot had so painstakingly put into place was not the ideal outcome for this day.
“Yup, sounds about right,” I said, bobbing my head up and down. He squinted at me, before turning away. As soon as he did so, Ma strode over and smacked me in the back of the head. I stumbled forward, nearly slipping off the side of the roof before she pulled me back.
“Foolish child,” she hissed. “Do not involved yourself with that man.”
“He makes it so eas-“
She whacked me again. “That is not a request, Orvi. You are smart enough to know my reasons. Say nothing.”
I nodded sheepishly. My mother was right.
Ma sighed heavily. “I will not be here for much longer. We will leave to intercept Dure as soon as Captain Vernon senses him.”
She walked away, shaking her head the entire while. She, accompanied by the rest of the Blooded, would attempt to dissuade the Lizard from moving any closer. Unfortunately, that particular god was renowned for its obliviousness. They would have to hurt it – badly – to get it to notice them. I didn’t like it. I had argued against it. However Ma was uniquely qualified to lead the detachment. After all, General Maja was the only person in the entire Foot who had fought Dure before.
No one would listen to a kid, anyway.
The adrenaline lingering from my exchange with Reagan faded gradually. The Leydenese scion seemed content to ignore me, a fact I was unendingly grateful for. I began regretting my concession to Ma at around the twenty-minute mark. Boredom had settled with the force of a thousand Oxbloods, and the constant buzzing from Captain Vernon’s attractors rattled my nerves thoroughly. The last time I had been this bored, I had vandalised a restaurant. This time all I could do was idly toss shards of masonry and watch it fall down, down, until they hit the dirt below.
I had survived that fall, a few weeks ago. It seemed impossible, now.
“Captain Vernon?” I spoke plaintively. I had spent what felt like the past two years deciding whether to voice my thoughts aloud. The monotony got the better of me.
He blinked as he processed my words. Several moments passed, and he finally responded. “Yes?”
“When’s the Lizard arriving?”
His eyebrows furrowed. “What do you mean?”
I resisted the urge to groan. “Do you have an estimate for when Dure will arrive?”
“Dure’s already here.”
And suddenly, as if Vernon’s words had cleared sand from my ears, I felt it. My body was twice as heavy as it should’ve been. The air was thick, its pressure crushing. I panted. Breathing in was easy, but it felt impossible to exhale it back out. My bloodshot eyes found the pieces of shattered masonry on the street beneath us, gazing as they rolled to the northwest. Except the Foot was almost entirely flat.
Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.
I looked upwards, into the distance. The wastes had a new mountain.
The mass was streaked with hundreds of white stripes, covering the length of its entire form. The distance made it difficult to tell, but from front to back the shape was tens of thousands of paces long, and ten times as tall as any building in the Foot. The image coalesced as I focused, revealing the white stripes’ true form – exposed ribs, peeking through necrotised flesh. Yellow liquid squirted from rotting hide, and seemed to hang in the air as it fell hundreds of meters to the compacted sand below. As I watched, the shape lurches, and a chunk of flesh large enough to house a hundred men sloughs off its body, revealing flesh teeming with hundreds of thousands of monsters, burrowing ever deeper, forming what I know is a network of parasitic organisms, harvesting, consuming, feasting.
What is dying but never dead? Coming infinitely closer to eternal sleep, yet never managing to pass through the threshold? Every man, woman, and child knows the answer; Dure; The Lizard; The Plague; The Undying; The Suffering; The one who endures.
Twelve massive milky eyes stared into the distance, each orb covered with pustules and the writhing, wormlike forms of its parasites. Their gaze was fixed at some point beyond the horizon, and slowly, it dragged itself towards that point. The Foot just happened to be in the way.
----------------------------------------
The Blooded departed, taking my mother with them. I watched them ride out of the city – Ma seated on a great white stallion – until they transformed into specks amongst the nothing of the wastes. The Lizard loomed, its body stretching across a quarter of the horizon. Every second, it dragged itself a little bit closer, and I saw it with a little more clarity. Agony given life; nightmares given home.
Belatedly, I realised I had been staring for nearly an hour. My eyes flicked around. I had forgotten what I was supposed to do.
“Boy,” a voice warbled out.
I flinched and whirled. The owner of the voice was a pale man with strange, orange eyes; a Foxblood named Ass-something, the only of the Leydenese Blooded to remain within the city.
“The parasites have smelled the city.” I looked towards the Lizard. Black masses were leaking from its ravaged form, taking to the air or scuttling across the ground towards us. “Check the other groups.”
Ass-something was right. His job was to keep an eye on the other locations from a distance, and engage if they were close to being overwhelmed. Mine was similar, except instead of watching from afar I asked them if everything was okay, and ferried messages if needed.
I sloppily saluted him – I didn’t know how to properly salute anyway – and clambered down the side of the warehouse. Having a sword – however short – and a leather shield strapped to my back would’ve made the descent unwieldy, but I had the poise of the Fox with me. Two walls of the building had been torn down to allow the scent to spread more effectively. Unfortunately for me, it was extremely effective. The reek of rotting meat was worse than when Ma accidentally sealed meat in a pot for three months. It was almost as putrid as the taste of that same meat when Blake bet chits I couldn’t swallow a mouthful. Easy money.
As soon as my feet hit dirt, I pinched my nose and ran inside, eyes watering. The inside of the former warehouse was dominated by a massive pit, filled to the brim with reeking carcasses in the process of putrefying, and treated with the most wretched concoctions the Foot had ever seen. Never had I felt the burden of Foxblood more. Surrounding the hole were sharpened stakes embedded into the dirt and several layers of barricades, their only entrances windows a grown man would have to crawl through. Squatting around behind the barricades were two dozen men and women, some with a stump for an arm or a peg for a leg; they were Godslayers who had stayed in the Foot after the Raven’s fall. I would’ve been more impressed, had they not all been wearing pegs on their noses.
Huddling in a grimy corner was Blake. Alongside Erin, he was the only member of the Butcher Street Boys old and skilled enough to participate in the mission. Ma had refused the service of any children younger than me, and a significant chunk of my time preparing had been spent thumping kids who pretended to be older than they were – my siblings included.
After all, any unblooded near Dure’s parasites would inevitably catch the plague. There were no guarantees of survival. It was better to keep the numbers low, and competent. Greater numbers of volunteers increased the chances of disease devastating the Foot. It had happened before, and – if we didn’t act carefully – it would happen again.
I shook my head, clearing the sudden bout of sorrow from my head. Moping was useless, and if everyone did their job properly, we would all make it out alive.
“Oi!” I squawked, “is everyone set in here?! You have everything you need?”
One of the men pushed off his haunches and his mouth split open in a smile entirely bereft of front teeth. I blinked. I hadn’t noticed during any of the training manoeuvres, but this was one of Jasmine’s guards: the one who always seemed amused by my presence.
“We’re fine in here, kid.” His pegged nose rendered his voice nasal, though no one seemed to care. The other members of the militia nodded. Blake gave me a thumbs up, his shaking hand undercutting the effect slightly.
“You’re sure? You don’t need ointment, weaponry, oil? The explosives are working?”
“Well, I don’t wanna tetht the bomb,” a few of the veterans chuckled lightly, apparently unbothered by his speech impediment, “but it theems tho.”
“You’re absolutely sure? They’ll be here soon.”
“Relaxth buddy. We’re a damn machine at thith point.”
Ma had spent dozens of hours drilling formations into their skulls. It was a refresher course for nearly everyone but Blake, and the more seasoned warriors were kind enough to take him under their wing.
I nodded. “Alright. Be careful.” I shot my huddled friend a meaningful look. He bit a well-gnawed fingernail. The rest of the team begrudgingly began painting their faces with another alchemical concoction and sidling into various hidden alcoves, where they would wait for the parasites to swarm.
I waved in a manner so awkward I immediately cringed, then broke into a sprint, heading towards the closest pit. Ruined sandstone and mud-brick houses blurred past, many with large holes in their side – each breach carefully made to extract any pieces of furniture too large to fit through doors. Scratched wardrobes, empty armoires, industrial ovens; all formed the centrepieces of various barricades thrown together throughout the area. My route forced me to scrambled over one, then another in rapid succession.
Ma wagered on the parasites having difficulty climbing anything that wasn’t Dure. If she were wrong, the horde of monsters would reach each pit too quickly – overwhelming the militia – or otherwise bypass our trap entirely, wreaking havoc within the Foot’s granaries and food stores. The Fronds had hired a hundred well-built men to stand in a line and kill any that made it past. In the quiet of our home, my mother had laughed at them.
Suddenly, something yanked at my booted foot and I tumbled forward. For a moment I lay on the ground, stunned. That shouldn’t have been possible. Bitter hatred surged at nothing at all, but a sudden shadow fell over me, shaking me from my foetal rage. I rose to a seated position, witnessing several pieces of brick slide across flat dirt. I looked upwards. Dure had gotten closer. Now, it was large enough to block the light of the setting sun. An invisible weight settled on my shoulders.
I ran.
My shield slapped against my back, while my blade slapped against my thigh. The repeated impacts would bruise by the day’s end, however I was certain that would end up the least of my wounds. I sighted something ahead and before my conscious mind had properly processed the image I was leaping, sailing over a hole full of sharpened wood and stone, landing smoothly on the other side. Obstacles like that were the main reason Ma had wanted a Foxblood for a runner.
Another three hastily-scrambled barricades, a pair of hurdled pits and an incredibly close encounter with a pot of flaming spirits thrown by a twitchy militiaman, and then that godsawful buzz was too loud to ignore and I was there, nearly running into the pile of stinking meat set in the middle of an intersection.
A familiar voice set me scowling. “Kid. Report.”
It was Peeler, face still blue from the vicious beating I had given him. The first few times we had spoken, he had flinched all the while. Everyone I knew had pushed me to apologise, if only to make the oncoming operation easier, but I didn’t. I hadn’t been wrong. Peeler knew it, too. I could almost smell his shame.
I still feared him, but it wasn’t inherited fear, this time. I had said ‘hell’ in front of him. The guardsman had the means to destroy me, though he hadn’t realised it yet. The moment he realised what the term actually meant, I was done for.
I wouldn’t let him know that, though.
“Before that, I need to know the current situation.”
Several of the veterans guarding the pit chuckled, seemingly unbothered by the sheer weight the Lizard pressed on everything around it. The Godslayers had been abandoned by House Esfaria. Disdain was their right. Peeler squinted at me, green eyes sparking with every muted laugh, but acquiesced. “There are no problems here. Everything is operational, and we require nothing.”
I nodded. “Same with the central pit. The monsters are coming. Be ready.”
He saluted, and somehow I recognised the gesture as sloppy and mocking. Mirroring it back to him alleviated my petty spite somewhat. Bizarrely, he winced in response. I spat at his feet and bolted.
The third lure would be the first hit. It was the closest to the city’s edge, and as such the most heavily invested in. Successes there would trickle through the rest of the battle. I had checked it several times over the course of the morning, and each time it had been fine. My pace remained unchanged.
It was a long way out. My calves strained. Leaping obstacles and climbing barricades saw them screaming. Buildings became shorter; smaller. Spit evaporated from within my mouth, and for a moment I resented Ma for disallowing water on the battlefield. My lungs heaved air outwards, then pulled it back in. Any loose object slid away from me. Their speed accelerated. It felt like the Lizard was the centre of the world.
I scaled another wall – thrown together from stone chairs mostly. The sight atop it all froze my body.
A seething mass of darkness had entered the city. It spread like pus through an abandoned beehive. Smears of rot covered the ground behind, leading all the way back to Dure. I scrambled downwards, only for my brow to furrow. The buzzing had gotten louder.
I was a second too late in realising the sound wasn’t coming from the lures.
Now, there’s a reason flies are small. A month ago, I hadn’t thought much of it. To me, a fly’s purpose was being smacked away from steaming dumplings, or occasionally an excessively sweaty Ma. Now, I knew that it was because if they got much bigger, they wouldn’t be capable of flight.
The monster that rammed into me hadn’t been informed.
I caught a flash of it and found myself bracing, then I was in the air. Then I was against the wall. Then I was on the ground. Then something was on me.
Punching it saw stinking yellow ichor coating my arms. Insectile legs covered in a thousand tiny spurs sliced my arms up and down, and my attempt to draw my sword saw my elbow smacking into a mud-brick wall before it was fully out. The angle was too poor to fully unsheathe it. I drew my legs to my chest and shoved, but its chest simply sloughed away, allowing me to embed my feet halfway through its chest.
Massive orbs, segmented into a thousand dead, lifeless segments, stared at me. A brick slid past and I snatched it and buried it into the fly’s head, splattering it like an overripe melon. Despite the traumatic injury, I felt its life surging, so I pushed forward. With a howl, my arm sunk into the crevice of its skull, churning it until…
I swore.
You are born amongst thousands of others, into agony, rot, and indefatigable life. There is no thought; no consideration. Only instinct, pain, and unending hunger, briefly sated by sinking your throat into the island you live upon. It’s-
Snapping back with a scream, I flexed my will and blocked the link between the monster and I. It strained against my efforts. Wordless yells left my throat in a desperate attempt to ground myself. Still yowling, I clawed my way out from underneath the monster’s corpse and snatched a handful of dirt from the ground, rubbing it against my forehead. As the dead’s yellow blood was scraped away, the link slowly fell away. Behind me, some ineffable fire flickered and died, and I knew my mind was safe.
I took a moment to catch my breath. A bug. I had nearly been undone by the death of a bug. A thought struck me: had I also absorbed the minds of all the mosquitos and flies I had killed? Wouldn’t I know if I had?
Kicking the wall brought only pain. Tears pricked at my eyes. The whole world struck me as brutally dishonest.
Running was as hard as it had ever been. I ran anyway. My body didn’t just belong to me, after all.