“Get the girl.”
“At once, Inquisitor.” Judith’s ankles clinked under her skirts as her chains shifted into the shuffled gait she used to walk. Cesca followed at a more leisurely pace.
The tatter tree was no more. The tree had come down after many a furtive daylight trip beyond the safe confines of the building. It had been sad to see such an old tradition fall, Rosie had even cried, but Cesca was adamant that there was poetic justice in the gesture. The same wood which had borne the body of Sister Harriet will now bear that of her defiler. The trunk, split and carved into a cross-shaped wooden stake, now stood in the same courtyard where Lydia met her end. The twigs and branches, still filled with colourful ribbons, lay in a pile at the base, ready to be doused in oil and set alight.
Anyone who cared to glance at Cesca would already see the fires reflected in her eyes. As it was, very few dared to meet her gaze.
She watched as her aide counted the barrels, as per Lydia’s instructions, and gently opened the concealed door. There was a short pause, through which she tapped her feet impatiently.
“What is it, Judith? Hurry up.”
“Inquisitor… She’s gone.”
“Gone? Move aside.” She barely gave her a moment before shoving Judith angrily out of the doorframe. Inside, all was a congealed darkness. It wasn’t until Judith passed her the lantern that she saw the ice, the hole, and the disturbing lack of Wille.
“Hm. How disappointing. We let her stew for too long, now all our fun is spoilt.” Cesca pouted.
“It is not too late, inquisitor. Look.” She pointed to what looked like mud upon the ice, which on closer inspection revealed itself to be chilled mounds of reddish pearl iron. Something had disturbed it, sending a smear of crimson across the frozen floor towards what was left of the rightmost wall. More pearl iron was seeping between the brickwork, and a clear handprint was firmly planted upon the stone. Someone had removed their habit, ripped it into strips, and tied it around one of the metal struts protruding from the rubble. The makeshift rope trailed down into the darkness.
“Well, well. I’m very much looking forward to meeting this girl.”
“There is no way she could have survived that fall, rope or no!”
“Have a little faith, Judith. No good cat would give up on it’s dinner, just because the mouse has found it’s hole.”
Cesca planned to make her announcement that evening, but supper was cancelled. Too many Gol had been spotted entering the grounds, elongated shadows of sinew and bone. Sophie instead delivered to every cell and dormitory a small, meaty pie, each one adorned with the initials of the intended recipient. A pile of hot pies was left at the entrance to the undercroft, as no-one really knew where the Nocturnes lived still. Needless to say, the stack was gone by morning. The Etude attic was now full and every bed was taken. The Madrigal bunkhouse had been deemed unsafe, and so the brown-clad women now vied for space in what was once the most generous of the dorms.
“Why are we here?”
Cesca beamed her serpentine smile at the girls she had assembled, dressed in their nightgowns, as their candles flickered in the darkness at the bottom of the stairs. She passed each girl a bundle of thin tapers and a box of matches, speaking to them all as she went down the line.
“The five of you have been good to me since my emergence. I thank you. Now, it is your turn to do a favour for me.” Cesca gestured with her candelabra to the small wooden door around the side from the bottom of the staircase.
“This hatch leads to the undercroft proper. I need you to get me that girl. Wille. Find her, and bring her to me by morning.”
Sister Beatrice simply nodded her silent assent. Lin still looked confused, and in her drowsy state had to fight off a yawn. Magda, usually so languid, looked more alert at night than she ever did in daylight. Sister Hazel was suffering the most, her bleary eyes barely peeking out beneath her lacey nightcap.
And finally, there was Claudia. Whether it was conceit or just pure cruelty that made Cesca place her in the party tasked with bringing her girlfriend back to her death was unclear. Either way, Claudia was immune to such manipulations. She stood idly behind the others with a dreamy look on her face, eyes closed and smile tilted upwards. She would find Wille, either by herself or with the others’ help, it did not bother her.
“Well, what are you waiting for?” With this final farewell from Cesca ringing in their ears the group made their way, in single file, down the winding stairs.
“Ugh, what a pain. Still, perhaps this means we’re in her good books?” Hazel asked no-one in particular. Beatrice turned her candlelit face towards her and nodded in silent assent.
“We better find her though. Imagine if we came back empty handed.” Lin added with a shudder.
The stairwell was narrow and steep, but the corridor they came onto was broad enough for three to walk abreast. There were sconces too, still filled with oil, and they lit them with their tapers as they progressed. The dim light revealed grey stone walls which seemed to stretch on forever, with only the occasional step or side door to break the monotony. Once, they saw a round patch of greyish light, filtering down from some vent up high.
“Wille?” Magda called into one of the rooms, but it was empty. Beatrice shook her head and closed the door of another. After a time the corridor widened into a larger hallway, pillars shooting upwards and getting lost in the dark.
“Magda, how is Sister Freya doing?” Lin asked, her voice echoing. Almost an hour had passed since they descended, with no sign of life beyond themselves. The group had huddled together in instinctual habit.
“Why do you want to know?” Magda had taken it upon herself to use one of the matches to light her long pipe. The bitter smell of nettle and cindered sage enveloped her in the gloom.
“Well, excuse me. I only wanted to know if she was feeling any better.”
“I just find it odd that you would care, that’s all. Being the inquisitor’s little lapdog, and all.”
Lin grabbed her arm and spun the woman round to face her.
“Lapdog? Lapdog? You’re one to talk. If I hadn’t have done poor sister Lydia’s tattoos, do you really think she would have let me off the hook? Do you know what happens when you say no to Cesca? Obviously you do, otherwise you wouldn’t be down here, scrabbling around in the dark.”
“Ah, so it was for selfish reasons you branded the poor girl. That makes it all the better, I suppose.” She blew the sarcasm into the air along with her smoke.
“You can’t judge me, Magda.”
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“True. Only an inquisitor could do such a thing.”
There was baited breath as Lin’s eyes went wide with anger, her hair almost standing on end in rage, and when it seemed as though she were about to slap her the moment was broken by the sound of Claudia puking against a wall.
“Oh my dear, you know you didn’t have to come. Cesca would have understood.” Hazel put a protective arm across her back as the girl clutched at her side and wiped her mouth on her sleeve. “Really, we should get you back to bed, with a nice- Oh! Oh Claudia!”
There were maggots in the spew. Writhing, slick with acid and trails of red blood. Their little bodies mingled together and formed a clotted mass in the centre, smelling faintly of offal.
“Oh dear,” was all she said, as she lifted her hand out towards them. Hazel slapped it away.
“Claudia, no! Sisters, we have to get her back. This isn’t normal.”
Beatrice nodded. Lin and Magda shelved their differences.
“Fine,” Lin said, flicking her long hair behind her. “Let’s return. We can follow the sconces back the way we came.”
“But… Which ones?” Hazel asked. Behind her stretched the lit pillars of the cavernous room, leading back to the corridor they first entered. In front of them, further sconces had been lit, leading them deeper.
“Huh. Well, I guess we’ve found our Wille. Beatrice, help me take Claudia back. Unless you two think you’ll need help with her?” Sister Magda asked, putting out her pipe against the wall.
Hazel and Lin shook their heads in unison.
“We should be fine, she’s been down here for days now. She must be starving. We can handle her.”
The flames led the two of them forwards beyond the pillared room, while the others practically dragged Claudia between them back the way they came.
“What are we going to tell Cesca?”
True to her vows, Beatrice only shrugged.
“Wille…” Claudia murmured, almost silently, as her head lolled to one side.
“Hush now dearie.” Magda said as she hooked an arm around the girl’s legs to lift her up a step. They had wasted away to nothing, so thin beneath her skirts that she could barely feel them. The fabric was heavier than whatever muscle was still left to her. She checked her face. Despite being deathly pale, she was still awake, and her blue eyes didn’t flinch as a single maggot wrapped its way around her eyelashes.
When did that get there? Magda thought, but decided to keep quiet about it. She could already sense that Beatrice was near her limit. The silent nun was shaking as she supported Claudia’s right arm, sending tremors through her body which Magda could feel even on her side.
“Not far now, we’ll have to- Hey!”
Claudia pulled herself free of her caretakers with a surprising amount of strength, flopping against the wall like a ragdoll. She rolled her body into a standing position, fingers splayed as she reached her hands up towards the ceiling. They had stopped beneath the small disc of moonlight. Magda could see it now, faintly above them.
“Well, I suppose we can rest a moment.” She turned towards Sister Beatrice and lowered her voice, scrabbling in her pockets for her smoking pouch. “Honestly, what is wrong with her? Is she sick or just demented? You think she came along to-”
“Nest.” Claudia finished, perhaps unintentionally, as the babbling continued regardless of the conversation. “Nest, nest.”
Beatrice tugged on Magda’s sleeve.
“Hey, hold on, I’m trying to light up.” But the tugging continued. The match flame flickered and went out before she could use it.
“Listen, stop.” Magda looked up in agitation. Beatrice's face was a mask of fear, a haunting visage of gaping mouth and wide eyes - wider even than Madga had thought possible. Sister Beatrice raised her hand and pointed straight ahead, to a place behind Magda, and in those distended orbs she saw reflected a scene so unsettling that her mind refused to make sense of it until she turned, with deliberate slowness, to see for herself.
Claudia’s stomach had burst. The skin which flapped open against her midriff was as thin as paper, more delicate even than the cotton of her habit. Where it had collapsed inwards her spine was visible, pink-tinted and with several fused vertebrae above her pelvis, elongated but free of it’s final constraints it twisted out and down, taking with it several branch-like structures, thick lumbar nerves that rooted themselves with ease into the stonework floor.
And that floor was moving. Writhing, squirming, tangling before their eyes into something - no, some things - with an insectoid skitter but distinctly fleshly visage. Still emerging from deep within her guts poured the maggots with their bulging white bodies, several dormant pupae, and the newly-hatched adult insects displaying rust-tinged carapaces. Beneath the viscera small legs scraped against the stone, and the mass seemed to drone with an incessant and growing buzzing sound that made the entire corridor vibrate.
Beatrice has never broken her vows, not in the several years she had been a sister, but she broke them now. Her scream was no more a voice than the wind, so strong was her terror that she had no choice but to give way to the gale inside her. Like a command, that barely human screech ordered Magda to join it, the two of them screaming in unison and clutching at each other’s clothes with hands that dropped their candlesticks, hands that shook and turned white with tension.
From out of Claudia’s habit flopped a large, globular mass hanging pendulously from her chest, spewing a foul smelling pus. Then another, and another. Six drooping teats discharging an ambrosia eagerly lapped up by her spawn, their curled proboscises flicking quickly in and out at the milky fluid. Some used their lips, from their tiny human mouths, to suck at the nipples.
In a second the spell was broken, their legs unrooted themselves, and the two human sisters ran screaming back down the corridor in the dark.
“Ah…” Claudia’s mouth formed a small sound, not unlike a sigh, as she brought her tendril-like arms up and around her face, the muscle and bone shooting upwards towards the moonlight in a mess of neurons and teats.
---
On the surface, the dawn chorus had started early. Inka was a knife, a knife with a bucket wandering to the well with no purpose. The grounds of Palus Somni had gained several new Gol since the wall had been breached, though never more than a couple at a time. They wandered aimlessly, dragging their bones through the mud. The rock-eating Gol had since left, taking Lydia with it. Back to Ystre, she presumed. Perhaps once things calm down, she will go retrieve her.
There was an unfamiliar sound coming from the well. A moaning, perhaps of wind caught in the tunnel, breathing between the bricks and mortar. Inka paused to listen with her bucket resting on the brickwork.
Knives did not ponder the wind, however, and so she decided once more to remove any telic sincerity from her actions before she attracted trouble. She reached over the well to place the bucket on its tether.
It was sudden, a wisp against her cheek, blowing her hood off her face and sending strands of greyish hair flying. She felt the shock first, long before any pain. Adrenaline works well that way, and for a moment - one which felt like minutes, yet lasted only seconds - she was able to watch as the long tube of blood-streaked meat which had burst from the well flailed upwards into the sky. Pink coils of neural tissue began anchoring it to the ground around her. She could see now that the tube was a face, elongated and passed through such a narrow confinement, only to emerge on the far side a twisted mockery of human likeness.
Inka bit her lip to stop herself crying out, but found that her body was shaking so badly that she ended up biting her tongue and drawing blood.
What’s wrong with me?
Stealthily walking backwards, low to the ground, she moved to pull her hood back over her face but for some reason it didn’t move.
Her arm was gone. Removed from the impact from the emerging underground beast, all that remained to her was a ragged lump of shattered bone near her shoulder. Her blood coated the grass, and she knew then why she faltered, why her limbs shook so, and why for the life of her she couldn’t stop being a human.
The looming face which once belonged to Sister Claudia turned to her position. Her eyes filled with a new mother’s hunger, twin coronet horns rampant upon her brow.
“No! Get away!”
Stop it, knives don’t talk.
“Help me!”
Clear your mind. Clear it, wipe it clean. Now. Now, now!
She screwed up her eyes as the Gol lunged, and her body became warm. The beast was screaming, and at the same time her skin seemed to emanate heat. It took a moment for her to realise that the warmth came from the newly risen sun.
The neurons began to release their grip on the earth as the flesh-beast scrunched up it’s face in confusion and agony, lashing the ground and disappearing back down the hole it came from.
Her last thought, before the darkness overtook her, was that someone would have to board up that well.
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