Breakable Things, page 11
She steps into the hallway. It is time for a different game.
This is a dance: a ballon of escape, arabesques performed on razor-point steeples, entrechat between battlements, Iraline’s weight on her shoulder like a lifetime of guilt.
Yavena doesn’t stop, doesn’t pause, doesn’t think. Every breath is a transaction paid with someone else’s blood. Knife and kris glimmer, a charnel duet, keeping counterpoint with an orchestra of split viscera, opened lung.
Time empties of meaning. Yavena’s world contracts into muscle memory and offal, to reptilian instinct, to a single demand hammering between spasming ventricles. Out, out, out.
Around her, the Gak begin to howl.
Out, out, out.
Yavena traverses arrows and closing gates, past an artillery of talons and physiques made monstrous without the frame of protocol. Who knew, she pants in the red-black dark behind her eyelids, that the Gak could be so terrifying?
Out, out, out.
The howling deafens.
Release. Somewhere between impossibilities, Yavena crosses the final gate and hurtles into the blackness, her lungs boiling. She is barely Ovia at this point, only impulse and the appetite of survival, her body latticed with a thousand red scars. Into the jungle she flings herself, Iraline secure against her spine, and the last thought Yavena births before the Gak’s fortress becomes a memory is this:
Why do the warning horns sound so much like pleasure?
The Dog-King looks up from his chess table, smile light.
“Aaaah, Hahvak, you were right,” he breathes, attention swinging back to the smaller Gak sitting opposite the game board, face shadowed by a ludicrous cap. “Yavena is a runner.”
“I get to marry your brother now.” The little Gak relocates a bishop, his answering grin gleaming with teeth. “Your move, your lordship.”
“So many deaths just because you wouldn’t court him in public? Oh, the games we play, Hahvak. The games we play.”
Hahvak’s eyes are tar black, marrow sweet. “Checkmate. Do we have a deal, your lordship?”
“Of course. Set the board, will you? The new round awaits.”
She runs.
For weeks, for hours, for amoebic eternities, Yavena runs. Until her breath is splinters and her muscles rot. There is no respite, only shards of unconsciousness interlaced with days that will not end and ceaseless nights spent staring into the jungle’s teeth.
The journey is complicated by Iraline’s refutal of her rescue. The first time she wakes, the older Ovia screams, a thunder of rage and grief so loud that Yavena, desperate to circumvent discovery, poisons her with sleep. The second time, Iraline does not cry out, only flees. It is circumstance alone that allows Yavena to retrieve her, weeping, from the dark, Iraline’s ankle a mess of broken bone.
“You need to return me, sister,” Iraline hisses between gasps of pain.
“No.”
“Yavena. Please.” Iraline traps Yavena’s wrist in fingers made iron from desperation. “Please. You need to take me back. You can’t—the Dog-King. He will not forgive this.”
“No,” Yavena repeats and squeezes Iraline’s flesh, an exact application of cruelty that immediately robs the latter of her senses.
There is no third confrontation. Yavena does not permit it. She keeps Iraline docile with venom, her mind chemical-slurred, her movements leaden with toxins. Yavena’s actions are a betrayal, she knows this, a blasphemy of trust, but there is no other hope, no way to go but forward. When they at last they reach the courts of the Ten Thousand Colors, absolution will surely be found.
There is no absolution, only fire.
“What—”
Yavena’s eyes map the labyrinth of the Ovia capital, warped by destruction, its sunset-clasped minarets and aqueducts reduced to a memory. Smoke haunts rubble-licked streets, thick as lies, as anguish.
In the distance, knotting with the funeral hymns of the Ovia, the voice of the Gak, triumphant.
“No.” Yavena exhales, fear clotting, congealing in her throat. She staggers through the archway into the main pavilion, now a landscape of broken bodies, whimpering survivors, and ravaged architecture. “Nononono.”
Iraline, fingers crusted with the grime of the road, says nothing, only slumps to her knees as Yavena releases her.
“No,” Yavena says again, as though the word could subvert the truth of a thousand half-eaten corpses. “How could this—”
Even as the question unspools, an answer decants itself into her mind, a taste like salt, like a sister’s desperation.
You did this.
It is hours before Yavena submits to this knowledge, to the horror of her actions. Hours before she collapses in an alley, her face in her arms, and wails for forgiveness from a city of indifferent ghosts.
The Dog-King is not what Yavena remembers.
He is colossal, primordial, a nightmare made fur and sickle-moon snarl. Where Yavena remembered a scholar’s inquisitiveness, a boyishness of conduct, there is only a predator’s stare, hard and flat and golden behind small amber glasses.
“Why?” It is the only word that Yavena can find.
“Because you betrayed your end of the bargain.”
Yavena jolts forward, one wincing step at a time, back held straight despite the agony that oozes between every vertebra. She can barely feel her left arm, can barely register the connection between tendon and nerve, the muscles flayed almost to ribbons. With a grunt, Yavena transfers her kris to her right hand, her weight to her left foot. Her grip tightens. After all that has happened, she will not bow, will not bend till she carves absolution from the ribs of the king.
“It was one Mother,” she whispers between a mouthful of blood.
The Dog-King bares an indolent smile. “One Mother. One bargain. One treaty.”
“You tricked us—”
“We gave you every opportunity to perform as you should have, and you failed.”
“You used me!” she screams, limping closer, closer to where the Dog-King sits draped over his throne of dead Mothers.
“Perhaps,” replies the Dog-King as he studies a fan of claws. “Perhaps we decided to use you in a stupid little bet with a stupid little mutt, but then thought, ‘Ah! This could be so much more.’ Perhaps we then decided that the Gak required a new world order, one where our pups would know the hunt as our ancestors did, and our meals were taut-muscled and not limp from a lifetime of coddling. Perhaps this was all our fault, but the hawk never discusses business with the hare.”
“I’m going to kill you.”
“Really.”
Yavena squares her stance, swallows copper and bile, tries not to sway even as her head swims with grief and the ice-water fury of those without anything to lose. “I’ve killed everyone else. All of your guards, all of your soldiers. None of them could stop me. I—”
“Yes.” The Dog-King grins, unfolding like the death of nations. “Tell me, little Ovia, why do you think that is?”
for the things we never said
She fits the god’s heart, blood dripping gold onto shaking fingers, into the compartment she’d sawed into her golem. It spasms and then slackens, turgid ventricles relaxing into stillness. Her breath catches against the roof of her mouth, pinned in place by a dry, chewed-on tongue.
This needed to work. She was running out of gods, out of options, out of second chances.
To her relief, the organ convulses again. Once, twice. Uneven palpitations that eventually discover a kind of rhythm, not quite right, but not quite wrong. A full minute passes before she consents to shutting the door, stitching skin over bone with careful, deft strokes. She steps back.
Finally.
The automata stares at her with heterochromatic eyes, one blue, one cataract-silver, both plucked from a cyclops’ skull. It blinks, a slow lidding of the gaze that seems compulsive, not instinctive, a memory appropriated from some foreign neural cluster. The homunculus sways upright, dangling arms and sloping shoulders, mouth drooling black gore.
It wasn't anywhere near perfect, but it was what she had, abattoir parts and a corpse already half-rotted, all she could do with what she was given, and she wouldn't waste time anymore.
“I love you.” The words fracture into a little girl whimper, dust and dried salt on her tongue, a decade of things unsaid.
Recognition catalyzes in the blank gaze, just for an instant, a twitch of vigor that quickly disintegrates, decomposing nerves unable to retain cohesiveness long enough to allow for true emotion. The thing that was her father moans a foghorn note, full of an animal sadness, and she smiles, full of aching, full of lonely.
“I love you,” she says again by way of farewell, before she takes back the breath from her creation and watches, silent, as her father fades from her life again.
she who hungers, she who waits
“Whore.”
Mei Huang considers the merit of an objection and quickly finds it inadequate. The threadbare comfort of a riposte will not put rice in her bowl, or ingots in her purse. Worse, it might even soil her reputation, diminish her standing. So many hours, so much time invested into this. Mei Huang cannot afford wastage.
So she traces a prayer instead to She Who Hungers—singular motion of the finger, discreet—and smiles shark-toothed at the huddle of women opposite her own table, their skin the color of mulberries.
“What did they say?” Her companion is whalebone-pale, nearly translucent and scarred by freckles. Under their skin, there are tributaries of green and blue, starbursts of discoloration. Ugly, Mei Huang thinks, pain traveling upward towards the slant of her right collarbone before she strangles the word into silence.
“Foreigner.”
Before he can argue the incongruity between tone and exposition, the food arrives. Tortoise belly, expertly roasted, the fat salted and luscious beneath a crisp rind. Purple rice, savory with mushroom extract. A sauce of fermented glass-fish and red chili, mashed garlic and rock sugar, a lacing of lime.
Mei Huang feeds her client perfunctorily: slivers of meat, alternated with dainty mouthfuls of rice and judicious compliments. The sauce, she keeps from him. His breed cannot abide heat. But what they lack in spice tolerance, they make up for in voracity. He devours their meal in minutes and then demands seconds, thirds, all in a roaring baritone. She can hear his terror, nonetheless, layered under the machismo, the pounding of a heart that will not yield its harvest, not without the fight it’d become accustomed to.
The waiters respond with golden mead, so thick that it clings to the lip of the pitcher. The smell of the drink is intoxicating. Cinnamon and wasp-blood, an accent of hibiscus. Almost sufficient to conceal the potency of the alcohol.
He drinks in gulps, her in sips.
It is only when his tongue cannot contort around even the simplest of syllables that she clasps his hand and rises, leading him upstairs with a hiss of tasseled silks. Things are always easier this way.
Not every ming-ren abstains from sexual congress, but Mei Huang is one of those who do. There is something elemental, after all, about seeing the body’s clockwork exposed, something that flenses the mystery from the flesh, that reduces a smile to a composition of meat. More importantly, the pursuit of rapture is not dissimilar from an addiction, every encounter only exacerbating the impulse to cultivate greater performances of hedonism. Distractions, all of it, and not a single one meriting its price of indulgence.
Mei Huang lays out her client on the sheets. He has been one of her easier ones. Quick to slumber and eager to please, but not eager enough that he would breach etiquette. A smile slits her face at the memory of his clumsy overtures, almost shy, the performance of a boy, for all his musculature would suggest a man. That was never a possibility. Mei Huang prefers to keep pleasure and providence separate; and besides, her heart lies elsewhere, preserved in resin for the devoted to see.
She disinfects her scalpel in a saucer of boiling water. When the blade is hot enough, she applies the tip to his sternum and cuts, slicing along the breastbone, down to his groin. Skin and muscle part into wings, otherwise undamaged. Mei Huang prides herself on her ability to leave minimal scarring.
Under the marble rungs of his ribs, viscera gleam and pulse.
For a moment, she can see how this vision might invite desire. To see someone, man or woman, revealed as such, to witness them so vulnerable, it is a kind of power, compelling in its rarity. But that is not what she is here for.
Gingerly, Mei Huang leans forward to inspect the glyphs inlaid into the man’s bones: government-issue agate, embedded without artistry; the stones dulled by mucus, no enchantment to preserve their shine. A soldier’s markings and a soldier’s future, a tragedy dug into the trenches. Dead before his twenty-third birthday, his eyes consigned to the crows.
It is strange, Mei Huang thinks as she intones a letter from the Lipless Prophet’s alphabet, how prophecy circumvents borders. No matter the continent or the practitioner, whether they dwell in nubivagant jellyfish or on the spines of the world-turtles, it is all the same, every icon and interpretation, every beginning and every end. The language of destiny is as consistent as mankind’s appetite for murder.
The air disgorges filaments of green and gold, a frothing of light. Like lace, she winds them around her fingertips, their brilliance massing in the cup of her palm. Another syllable is whispered, and reality bends along the axis of her desire.
She exhales. The effulgence unwraps, worms down her arm to seep into the porous calcium of his skeleton. He twitches. Mei Huang tugs the skeins, feels his future clatter into a fresh arrangement. Not a precise art, hers. Nothing that can turn have not into have, but powerful enough, nonetheless, to slide a future along the gradient of near possibilities.
Another death: this time on the battlements, skewered by lances.
“Again,” Mei Huang tells the universe.
And once more, he dies, suffocated by shit and mud.
“Again.”
The lantern-light convulses. Mei Huang repeats the rite so many times it becomes indistinguishable from breath, and still every iteration ends with the soldier dead. The hours gorge themselves on her as she works. Soon enough, she is hollowed through, every scrap of endurance devoured.
“Again.”
The air holds still.
“Again,” Mei Huang repeats, louder, the taste of tin welling in her mouth.
Nothing comes.
She daubs her lips with her tongue, finds blood there too. When was the last time she drank water or sipped from her broth, meticulously prepared the evening before, bone and rich offal boiled to pale liquid? Mei Huang curses her negligence as she paces the cramped guest room, a knuckle wedged between her teeth. Maybe that was why she failed. Maybe, if she had been careful, if she had paced herself, if she hadn’t been so incompetent, the outcome would have differed.
Flagellation refines to fury, and Mei Huang digs nails into her palms, throat constricting. Trembling, she smooths a hand over her skull and then scratches against her chest, just below the collarbone. Her hair is matted and slick with sweat. Stupid, stupid, stupid. What would Mei Ying have said?
A groan alerts her to a new dilemma: the man is stirring.
Mei Huang stumbles to the bed. His chest heaves once, twice, before sleep cauls him anew, cossets him in restive silence. Perhaps the situation isn’t completely irredeemable, Mei Huang decides, plucking thread and needle from her kit.
Quickly, breath starved to flutters, she sews the soldier back together. Her stitches are uneven: one longer than another, one skewed to the right, irrefutably ugly. But Mei Huang cannot indulge in perfection. Up she goes, pursued by necessity, faster and faster, needle glimmering topaz and lucent brown.
She is almost to the top, almost past the summit of his ribs. Hope batters at her lungs, and then his eyes beat open, sclera glistening white as tendon.
A scream unknots in his throat.
“No. No, no, no.” Mei Huang straddles his chest, hoping to pin him down, palm over his mouth. There is so little left to do, so little distance between her and resolution. It cannot end like this. In her panic, she forgets the difference between their physiques, his size and her stature, the ponderosity of muscles engineered in war, and the debility that results from an existence consigned to She Who Hungers. In her panic, she almost forgets how long she’s been waiting for this.
He flings her away. Mei Huang thumps into the wall and slides into the crevice between mattress and masonry, the air jerked from her lungs. She scrabbles upright in time to see her client sit up, see his sutures undo; intestines disgorging over his thighs in oily loops. He gazes down, face bled of color, before his mouth rounds into animal despair.
As a baying loosens, the man’s organs slithering the way of his digestive tract, Mei Huang makes a choice, embraces the inevitability that awaits every ming-ren. She’d expected—wanted—more years, more time in the Courts of Hunger, more opportunity to whet her art, develop finesse. Better now than later, she supposes. A shortened destiny in exchange for a foreshortened grief.
No words are spoken. There is no air, after all, in the sovereignty of deep waters, the rivers that run through the dark of the body. No terrestrial sound save for the moaning of the whales, the dreaming heart. Mei Huang scrawls a prayer with her needle, threading a pattern into her inner arm. It doesn’t take long. In the brain-blindness between saccades, something takes form on the mound atop the soldier’s lap, a smell of salt and anise.
“Littlest Sister.”
“L-Lady—” Mei Huang prostrates immediately, improvised kowtow that is barely sufficient for its purpose, but enough, at least, to carve a laugh from the figure. The world inhales and all motion is pinned to its place. The murmurs in the hallways, the susurrus of footsteps, the clamor of a sleepless inn: all stilled save for the clamor of Mei Huang’s heart singing at last at last at last.
