The wilderlands, p.20
The Wilderlands, page 20
She roared and, like a wild beast, they pulled her from that chamber. Two guards became four, and four turned to eight, and they dragged her to her room. They threw her to the floor and slammed the door behind them.
They didn’t bother to take the weapons she kept in her room; she could not fight the city. They didn’t bother to lock her door, for where could she go? She looked through rage soaked eyes at the city below, Illmiv bubbled to its brim with hate for her.
Like a caged laughing-cat, she paced her room.
“Maybe,” she muttered to herself. “I fight off who I can. I am still fast and nimble—I can run when I need. I could make it to the Wilderlands. I could make for one of the other cities, or, better yet, make it on my own in the greener places of the world.”
But they were empty plans.
She knew she could not make it to another Valforian city. And if she fled to the Wilderlands, so what? She’d be alone in the naked world with no kin to kindle fire with. Just a sadness of a different sort than her tower room.
Eventually, she stopped pacing and just sat and slept and dreamed that, rather than kill her, they might rend her nameless and give her a red coat and a duty. That flavor of tragedy, at least, might keep her going while letting her taste the Wilderlands again—though she would have no one to play ward to as she had not a single friend or lover or child who she had betrayed. Only the vast throngs of strangers she lived above.
It was night when her door opened and the smiling judge entered her room. The girl was spotless from crown to sole. Hair tied in a perfect bun, spectacles exactly in fashion, and robes without blemish or crease.
“Hello, Dhorena,” the young judge smiled, locking the door behind her.
A spark of hate flickered in Dhorena’s gut, but it was quick quenched by the sorrow-mire she’d been soaking in.
“Hello,” Dhorena answered.
The judge made herself cozy in a plush chair Dhorena realized she herself had barely ever sat in.
The judge cleared her throat. “I hope you’ve been comfortable.”
“You don’t.”
“Oh, I do. I do. Because I think you deserve the guilt of comfort before your trial and execution.”
“What do I have to feel guilty for? You’re the one who’s led a coup against me.”
“Well, in point of fact, you would need to actually be a ruler for it to be a coup. I say this is more of a … correction.”
Dhorena squinted at the girl, hoping she might somehow see something about her she couldn’t so far spot. “Why?”
“If there is an error there ought to be a correction.”
“There are many errors. Why me?”
The judge smiled, teeth like gravestones. “You are the biggest error of them all.”
“I wasn’t bothering anyone.”
The judge stood and walked around the room. After a few flaps of time, her eyes settled on the sword Dhorena had on her wall. With steady hands, the judge pulled the Valforian steel from the wall and let her fingers lick its length.
“You don’t remember me.”
Dhorena couldn’t tell for certain if she was speaking to her or the sword.
“We met,” the judge went on. “Years before I was a judge.” She looked over her shoulder at Dhorena.
Dhorena held her gaze, still searching for something she couldn’t see.
The judge went on. “When you first came back, when we all believed your mother might really be in the Wilderlands. Somehow nearly no one but me saw you the way you always were.”
Dhorena stayed silent.
“Am I not worth speaking to?” The judge clutched the sword, her hand shuttersome on the hilt.
“It seems to me you have a mind to say what you’ll say, whether I whisper back or not.”
The judge smiled. Cold, hard, patient. She rooted herself in standing there, eyeing Dhorena up and down. “When you came back to Illmiv, thirteen men died because of your returning.”
“Fourteen.”
“Thirteen noble men of Illmiv, my father among them.”
Dhorena tried not to show the shame that twisted within her.
She stagger-stuttered and groped through her memory to see if she could count the men she’d killed in her first days and match a face to the judge before her. It could have been any of the men she and Knalc had cut-killed on the road outside the city. It could have been Zacharie himself.
The smile slipped away, but the judge was cold and patient as ever. “Do you remember who my father was?”
Dhorena thought to fib, to guess that Zacharie had been her father. But the bends of the young judge’s cheeks and chompers, the shadow of her brow, none of it didn’t seemed quite right to be of Zacharie’s ilk. So she told her true.
“I have no idea.”
Cold and patient.
“I suppose you wouldn’t,” the judge said. “You have shared a council with me these many months and I suspect you don’t know my name. Why should you know his face?”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re not.”
“I am,” Dhorena said. “I don’t feel bad for you, but I’m sorry that happened to you.”
“No … not yet you’re not.” She stepped toward Dhorena. “Perhaps you will be sorry when the city sees to your sins and deems death the best end to you. Right before we burn through the Wilderlands you so love to gallivant through.”
“… was your father Zacharie?”
“That question offends me.”
“Zacharie took everything from my father, all but killing him. That’s why I killed Zacharie. He pushed my mother from her royal seat, leaving her to die in the Wilderlands, that’s why I killed Zacharie. He, the Vox, everyone in this city told me my brother had no soul and so, when my brother died, I couldn’t mourn him. That’s why I killed Zacharie.
“When I got home, I couldn’t accept all the blood and lost loved ones had been for nothing. I knew neither me nor … the Wildman would be able to make it back to the Wilderlands. I knew he’d done what he needed to do by coming here. His coming here was done in part to protect me, which is why I killed him.”
The judge tilted her head. “You mean Knalc?”
A chill chattered its way up Dhorena’s spine, spurring her to stand. She hadn’t heard that name mouthed off since she’d killed the man who bore it.
“How do you know that name?”
“I was there when you killed him,” the judge said. “Maybe not everyone in the crowd heard your Wilder-whispering, but I understood enough of who you were then to know you asked his name before you killed him. A courtesy you did not extended to my father!”
“Only I heard that name. How do you know that name?”
The judge approached her, sword still in hand, until they were within steel-strike of one another.
“I told you, I heard the name. Just because when you were my age you were dull and stubborn doesn’t mean I am.”
Dhorena glanced at her father’s steel still in the young judge’s hand. “Why are you here?”
The cold and patient curve of her lips frosted the judge’s face again.
“I just wanted you to know before you die, that what is happening is law, yes. But, it is also just, and it is personal. I wanted you to know that you are lower than the lowest stone on the wall. I wanted you to know that you are a monster.”
Child, the lowest stone on the wall knows where it sits, and most monsters know their teeth well enough to reckon themselves as such. But the judge was not done, seeing that Dhorena was not word-wounded, she dug deeper.
“A shame you took after your father and will have your name struck from the Mural of Maynes as well. You will die and no one will care, just as when he died. Were it not justice, it would be sad that a nameless man was even more unmade so that his daughter could undo herself.”
Dhorena quick snuffed the spark that sputtered in her stomach. She stood still.
The young judge went on.
“A better death than your mother, who maybe was trying her best, only to become the whore of the beast you killed upon your return to the city. I hear the Wilderfolk often slay each other during copulation, it’s supposed to make the pleasure greater for the survivor. What a joy killing your mother must have been for Knalc and killing Knalc must have been for you.”
Dhorena breathed deep to snuff again her stomach-spark.
“I wish your brother had had a soul so that he at least could have been raised out of the filth he came from when he died. Did you kill him too? Did you get joy from wiping that nameless thing from the face of this earth? Daughters disappoint their parents frequently, so it is not unique that you have failed there. But your negligence as a sibling is unique—how shameful that you either killed him yourself, or that you failed to protect your tongue-dumb, idjit of a brother!”
Dhorena caught the motion of the Valforian steel mid-breath but was too late—
Blood stained the girl’s flesh.
The young judge stopped as sanguine spittle bubbled to her lips, her cold eyes melting. Melting …
Dhorena had been too late to stop herself.
She’d put her father’s blade between her adversary’s ribs easy as sin; simple as breath.
“I’m sorry,” Dhorena said, and was horror-struck to find she didn’t mean it.
The judge slowly sank to the floor, coughing and cloying for speech, but achieving only loss of blood and breath. Snarling, she spat red in Dhorena’s face.
“Please! I’m sorry!” Dhorena screamed, trying desperately to mean it, trying desperately to feel some soul-splintering or sin-shook notion of what she’d done.
The young judge wailed soundlessly on the floor, groaning, which made little more than a seedling sound. Her eyes were hateful and longing.
Tears slipped from Dhorena’s eyes at the sorrow she didn’t feel as she cradled the judge—the girl—there in her room, in her lair. “I’m sorry.” She thought if she said it enough times she might make it true. “I’m sorry … I’m sorry. I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”
That’s how Dhorena knew she was a monster; in her sorry-sorrow, she found she’d failed to notice that the soul had slipped from the shell a long while ago.
Dhorena wailed and waited.
For some reason, the gods—cackling and calloused though they’ve always been—pitied the woman. It was a long while, long past the hour where someone should have come looking, that anyone came for Dhorena.
She was red as sin when they did. She’d never stopped cradling the body of the judge, who kept staring at the ceiling, colder and more patient than ever. Waiting for her killer to be discovered and for hasty justice to be dealt.
The sun had sunk from sight again when she finally heard the rattling of her door.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, but it didn’t matter how or what she whispered. Those cold eyes never answered back.
Child, you mind now that the judge’s body was cold and growing colder all through the unwinding of what comes next.
“Mayness!” a voice called from outside her room, rapping and rattling her door. “We need you!”
“It’s time for my trial,” the woman said. “I’m ready.”
The racking and ruckus at her door grew.
“No, Mayness! We’re under attack!”
“I’m guilty,” the woman said. “I just … I want you to know that now. I’m guilty.”
“Mayness—”
“You ought to have that judge girl kill me. She ought to lop away my head and bleed me on the cobblestones.”
“We need you! Mayness—”
“I killed her father too and I don’t even remember which dead man he was. But we were all fine with it. All the city let me kill men, like the Wilderfolk let Knalc kill my mother. People don’t care whether you kill behind walls or out in the Wilderlands. All they care is who you are while you do the killing and how you do it.”
The ruckus at her door had stopped. The voice had faded.
“I think I deserve to die. Isn’t that horrible? I think I deserve to die and here I am with the gall to keep living. I don’t think I can unlock the door for you though. I … I think I deserve to die, I can’t bring myself to unlock the door, but I can’t bring myself to leave the city. Isn’t that horrible?”
The room, cold and damp and dreary, was suddenly lit. Bright and red and roaring.
From outside the window came a wicked fire-flash and the screaming of unyielding stone diminished. Rock turned to dust as Grandma Dirt cried out.
It was fire indeed that did it, but fiercer fire than the one that started my last story.
This was fire made by Wastefolk. Fire that snaked up the wall along the cracks of construction—living, burning ropes that bled into those walls—indomitable—pulling them asunder. Time flew overhead and let out a warble, for if those walls ever fell—and they did—Time would witness it. Time witnesses the death of all things and will be there to watch Death wither for want of souls to scavenge.
But those walls came down, and as they did, Dhorena rose red from her floor and went to her balcony. As she looked out at a world drowning in red, her first thought was that Death himself had come for her.
There was a child once.
A child who did not deserve all the briary the world had waiting for them.
But look at me, tripping ahead of myself like some green and over eager teller. The child will come, but first, the blast that burned away the wall.
That blast sent dust and ash and screaming every which way and let a legion of Wastefolk scurry into the city like a murder of painted shadows. Oils and elixirs, brews milked from hell-hives, were thrown and tossed onto house and stone and screaming city-folk.
So mightsome was their attack that, when Dhorena waded out onto her balcony, not only were rock and stone wreathed in flames, but the stars themselves were bloodied in the heavens.
Long it was she watched.
Watched the home she’d fought so hard to come back to burn. Like a caravan on the Road.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered to her ash choked home.
Even as she watched the burning, her mind went back to the Wilderlands, just beyond the crumbling walls.
Never mind how long she stood there, watching the smashing and soiling of stone and souls. Long enough for more than one stone to break, long enough for Death to unstitch more souls in a single swoop than he had in eons. The woman began to realize she was waiting.
At first, she thought it was Death she was counting toward. That made her smile. She was ready. Ready to let all her lies and sin come blazing back to her. She closed her eyes ready to surrender to Death, as all must eventually, yet before her lids could stick shut, she caught a light.
Not the light of the hateful, rapacious fire roaring through Illmiv.
The light she saw was distant and white and silent. A silent, pure white lightning against a cloudless sky.
You ever see such a thing? No, no one has.
“Did you see that?” the Mayness of the burning city called to the room behind her, cold and patient. “Did you see that?”
There’s a story I’ve found in my world-wandering, one of the few I reckon is the same atween all folk: Waste, Wall, and Wilder.
Whether you worship the Vulture’s Eye, Aprheus, or Mamma Moon and Pappa Sun—human life, they say, comes from the heavens. I’ll tell you the wilder-how of it as that’s the way it happened and it was in witnessing that happening that heathen gods were finally unfastened from that girl.
Back when Sun and Moon were making Green and smiling rainbows, they too made mortal man to walk the earth and celebrate their union. They shaped life from the flesh of Grandma Dirt using a single brilliant flash—the color of Moon but heaven-hot as Sun’s smile. Like lightning, the beam fell from the heavens.
This is what I realized in seeing that beam. While Sun and Moon are sunder-spun more oft than not, they each hold a bit of their meeting-might inside of them. That power gets flung about when they can’t stomach the horrors humans wring from one another.
I didn’t full know that when I saw it then, but I knew it was a mightsome thing to witness. A miracle cutting through the pure black of night.
I stood, I watched, and Death did not take me.
“Did you see that?”
And like a humming-hawk spurred by Winterwind, I knew in my bones the haven I had to head toward.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered to the room, to the city I had fought back to all that time ago. I tell you, I wanted to save that city. I really did. Affixed by hate or hankering, the place you’re birthed stays in the meat of your heart; I’d seen that which I hated and hankered for go red and burn before. It’s enough to make you love a thing again, even if it’s only ash and mean memory.
You cannot save burning things, child, not when they’re as flame-swallowed as Illmiv was. That’s an ending you can’t interrupt. But to tell you true, I was Mayness, I couldn’t ignore the screams of cooking souls in full. I still hear them sometimes while I sleep …
Yet I did what I could then-there. I seized a coat the color of my father before his sin. I took the knife my mother wielded before her demise. I prayed to the soul of my brother. I looked back one more time at the room—a cold patient place ‘bout to be bubbling with fire.
And I left.
Child, I am a teller of worthy stature, but I can’t weave together the words to tell you how paint-perfect—how pain-perfect—it feels to leave a rotting thing to rot.
I took to the roofs and rafters as smoke and screams and souls rose around me. Even through my boots, I could feel the burning of the city below me. I never looked down though, save to make sure when I jumped from one spot to another that I was not leaping straight to my own demise.
