Hurley's Heroes Collection 2015-2020, page 4
She pulled the knife from her hip and hacked into the back of the head, peering deep inside, scraping away bits of calcified brain matter. But it was no use. The head was empty. She traced the edges of the hole carved in the giant’s head. Someone had hacked out the great round piece of the skull that she had mortared back into place with a sticky contagion years ago. Only she and her part- ner, Keleb, had known about the contagion. They would be the only two people capable of neutralizing it before removing the relic.
“Briar and piss,” she muttered. Below, Lealez screamed.
Bet sheathed her knife as she scrambled back down the giant, aware that her rope had gone slack. Foolish pan, what was the point of a rope if Bet cracked her head open on the way down?
Lealez screamed and screamed, horrified by the rippling of per skin. Lealez had tilted per head up to follow Bet’s progress and left per mouth open, and a shard of the great giant’s skin had flaked off and fallen into per mouth.
Lealez gagged on it, but it went down, and now per body was. . . growing, distending; Lealez thought per would burst into a thousand pieces. But that, alas, did not happen. Instead, Lealez grew and grew. Arms thickened with muscle. Thighs became large around as tree trunks.
When finally Lealez saw Bet sliding down the tree, Lealez’s head was already up past Bet’s position.
Bet swore and leapt the rest of the way down the face of the giant. She took a fistful of salt from the pouch at her hip and threw it in a circle around Lealez’s burgeoning body. Lealez’s clothes had burst, falling in tatters all around per. Bet muttered a chant, half- curse, half-cure, concentrating on the swinging arms above her. Bet pulled a bit of tangled herb from another pouch, already laced with contagion. She breathed the words she had last spoken in a dusty library in the Contagion College and let the plague free.
All around them, biting flies swarmed up from the swampland, drawn by her cast. They ate bits of the contagion and landed onto Lealez’s body, which was now nearing the height of the petrified giants around them. Per skin was beginning to blacken and calcify around per ankles.
The swarm of flies covered Lealez’s body like a second skin. Lealez squealed and swatted at them, per movements increasingly slow. The flies bit Lealez’s flesh again and again while Bet squatted and urinated on the salt circle.
All at once the flies fell off Lealez. The pan’s skin began to flake away where it had been bitten. The body contracted again, until it was half the size it had been, still giant. Then Lealez fell over with a great thump.
Bet ran to Lealez’s side. The skin had turned obsidian black, hard as shale. Bet took her machete from her hip and hacked at the torso until great cracks opened up in the body. Then she pulled the pieces away.
Lealez was curled up inside the husk of per former self, arms crossed over per chest, shivering.
“Get out of there now,” Bet said, offering per an arm.
Lealez tentatively took her hand, and Bet pulled per out. “Dusk is coming soon,” Bet said. “I don’t want to get caught out here.”
It was warm enough that Bet wasn’t too worried about Lealez being naked, but Lealez seemed to mind, and went searching for per pack, which had been ripped from per body. It was a stupid search, Bet thought, because the fog was getting denser, and they were losing the light, and Lealez’s things could have gone any- where.
Finally Lealez found the remains of per haversack, and pulled on a fresh robe. But the rest of per things were scattered, and Bet insisted they move on and not wait.
“The college will be angry,” Lealez said. “My books, my pa- pers—”
“Books and papers? Is that all you can think about? Hurry.
Didn’t I tell you not to touch or eat anything?” “You didn’t say why!”
“I shouldn’t have to say why, you dumb pan. When I was your age I did whatever my mentor said.”
“Are you my mentor now? You aren’t even officially a Hunter.
You would never be approved as a mentor by the college.” “Is everything joyless and literal with you?”
“You don’t know how the college is now,” Lealez said. “Old people like you tell us how things should be, how we should think, but this is a new age. We face a different government, and new penalties after the Plague Wars. We can’t all go rogue or shirk our duties. We’d be kicked out. The college is very strict these days. People like you would never make it to graduation. You would end up working in contagion breweries.”
“I’m sure you’d like to continue on with that fantasy a while longer,” Bet said.
Once they were in the pirogue and had cast off, Lealez finally roused perself from misery and asked, “What about the artifact?”
“Someone got to it first,” Bet said. “Hanere?”
“Only one other person knows where these are. I expect they was compelled to get it.”
“Your partner?” Bet nodded.
“You think they are still alive?” “No,” Bet said.
At least Lealez said nothing else.
V.
Bet’s partner, Keleb, too, had retired, but had chosen a canal that acted as a main trading thoroughfare into the city instead of a hard-to-find retreat like Bet’s. It took a day and a half to reach the shoman’s house, and Bet found herself counting down the time in her head. Lealez, too, reminded her of the ticking chirp of time as they poled downriver. The current was sluggish, and the weather was still and hot.
Despite the stillness, Bet smelled the smoke before she saw it. Lealez sat up in per seat and leaned far over the prow, knuckles gripping the edge of the craft.
The guttered ruin of Keleb’s house came into view as they rounded the bend. The shoman had built the house with Bet’s help, high up on a snarl of land that hardly ever flooded. Now the house was a charred wreck.
Bet tied off the pirogue and climbed up the steep bank. She counted three sets of footprints along the bank and around the house. They had stayed to watch it burn.
Bet poked around the still smoking house and found what was left of Keleb’s body, as charred and ruined as the house.
“Help me here,” Bet said to Lealez.
Lealez came up after her. “What can we do?” Lealez said. “The shoman is dead.”
“Not the body I’m here for,” Bet said. She walked off into the wood and chopped down two long poles from a nearby stand of trees. She handed a pole to Lealez. “Help me get the body rolled back, clear the area here.”
Lealez knit per brows, but did as per was told. They heaved over Keleb’s body to reveal a tattered hemp rug beneath. Bet yanked it away and used the pole to lever open a piece of the floor. Peeling back the wood revealed a long, low compartment. Lealez leaned over to get a better look, but it was clearly empty.
Bet sucked her teeth.
“What was here?” Lealez asked. “The cloak,” Bet said.
“I thought there were two relics, a sword and a shield.”
“That’s because that’s all we reported,” Bet said. “Because we knew this day would come.” Bet saw the edge of a piece of paper peeking out from the bottom of the cache and picked it up. It was another note, made out to her in Hanere’s handwriting.
“What does it say?” Lealez asked.
Bet traced the words and remembered a day thirty years before, rioting in the streets, a plump painter, and a future she had imag- ined that looked nothing like this one.
Bet crumpled up the note. “It says she will trade me the objects in return for something I love,” Bet said. “Good thing I don’t love anything.”
Nothing but Hanere, of course. But that was a long time ago. Bet hardly felt anything there in the pit of her belly when she thought of Hanere. It was the time in her life she longed for, not Hanere. That was what she told herself.
“What a monster,” Lealez said, staring at Keleb’s charred body. “None of us is a sainted being, touched by some god,” Bet said. “But she’s missing the third relic. She’ll need that before she can end the world.”
Lealez shivered. “We don’t have much time left.”
“There’s a suspension line that runs up the river near here,” Bet said. “Let’s see if we can find you some clothes.”
“There are only shoman’s clothes here,” Lealez said. “We all have to make sacrifices,” Bet muttered.
They walked away from Keleb’s house; two people, a woman and a pan dressed in shoman’s clothes, the vestments smoky and charred. Bet expected Lealez to talk more, but Lealez kept the peace. Lealez found perself following after Bet in a daze. For years Lealez had wanted nothing more than to prove perself to the Con- tagion College. It was beginning to dawn on Lealez just what per had to do to achieve the honor per wished for, and it was frighten- ing, far more frightening than it had seemed when Lealez read all the books about Plague Hunters and Plague Givers and how the Hunters tracked down the Givers and saved the world. No one spoke of charred bodies, or what it was like to be cut out of one’s own plague-touched skin.
The great suspension line ran along the Potsdown Peace Canal all the way to the Great Dawn Harbor that housed the city. Bet sighed and paid their fare to the scrawny little pan who lived in what passed for a gatehouse this far south of the city.
“College better reimburse all this,” Bet said, and laughed, be- cause the idea that she would be alive to get reimbursed in another day was distinctly amusing.
Bet and Lealez climbed the stairs up to the carriage that hung along the suspended line and settled in. Lealez looked a little sick, so Bet asked, “You been up before?”
“I don’t like heights,” Lealez said.
The gatekeeper came up and attached their carriage line to the pulley powered by a guttering steam engine, which the pan swore at several times before the carriage finally stuttered out along the line, swinging away from the gatehouse and over the water.
Lealez shut per eyes.
Bet leaned out over the side of the carriage and admired the long backs of a pod of plesiosaurs moving in the water beneath them.
After a few minutes, Lealez said, “I don’t understand why you didn’t tell the college there were three objects.”
“Of course you do,” Bet said.
“It doesn’t—”
“Don’t pretend you’re some fool,” Bet said. “I haven’t believed a word you’ve said any more than I believed your little friend.”
Lealez stiffened. “Why keep me alive, then?”
“Because I think you can be salvaged,” Bet said. “Your friend couldn’t. Your friend was already a Plague Giver. I think you’re still deciding your own fate.”
They rode in silence after that for nearly an hour. Lealez was startled when Bet finally broke it.
“Keleb and I couldn’t defeat Hanere ourselves,” Bet said. “I’d like to tell you we could. But she’s more powerful. She has a far blacker heart, and a blacker magic. We went south, Keleb and I, and got help from sorcerers and hedge witches. They were the ones who created the objects of power. The sword, the shield, and the cloak.”
“How do they work?” Lealez asked.
“You’ll know soon enough,” Bet said. “Not even Keleb knew where I kept the shield, though.”
“But, the other weapons—”
The carriage shuddered. Lealez gave a little cry.
“Hold on, it’s just—” Bet began, and then the carriage hook sheared clean away, and they plunged into the canal.
VI.
Thirty years earlier . . .
Hanere had always loved to watch things burn. Bet sat with her on the rooftop while riots overtook the city. They sipped black bour- bon and danced and talked about how the world would be different now that the revolutionaries had done more than talk. They were burning it all down.
“If only I could be with them!” Hanere said.
Bet pulled Hanere into her lap. “You are better off here with me.
Out there is a world of monsters and mad people.”
Hanere waggled her brows. “Who’s to say I’m not a bit of both? Come with me, we are out of bourbon!” She held up the empty bottle.
“No, no,” Bet said. “Stay in. We’ll sleep up here.”
Bet had gone to sleep while the world burned. But that wasn’t Hanere’s way. While Bet slept, Hanere went out into it.
It was the edge of dawn when Bet finally woke, hungover and covered in cigarette ash, hands smeared in paint from her work earlier in the day. It was not until she sat up and saw the paint smearing the roof that she thought something was amiss. Her gaze followed the trail of paint that was not paint but blood to its origin. Hanere stood at the edge of the rooftop, wearing a long white shift covered in blood.
Bet scrambled up. “Are you hurt? Hanere?”
But as Hanere turned, Bet stopped. Hanere raised her bloody hands to the sky and her face was full of more joy than Bet had ever seen.
“The government is nearly toppled,” Hanere said. “We will be gods, you and I, Bet. There’s no one to stop us. It’s delightful down there. You must come.”
“What did you do, Hanere?”
“I am alive for the first time in my life,” Hanere said. She opened her hands, and salt fell from her fingers. She murmured something, and little blue florets colored the air and passed out over the city.
“Stop it,” Bet said. “What are you doing? You can’t cast in the city outside the college!”
“I cast all night,” Hanere said. “I will cast all I like. Come with me. Bet, come with me, my Elzabet. My love. We can take this whole city. We can burn down the college and those tired old peo- ple and repaint the world.”
“No, Hanere. Get down from there.”
The joy left Hanere’s face. “Is that what you wish for us?” she said. She came down from the rooftop and walked over to Bet. She placed her hands on Bet’s stomach. The blood on her hands was still fresh enough to leave stains. “Is that what you wish for our child?”
VII.
Bet sucked in water instead of air, and paddled to the surface, kick- ing wildly. She popped up in the brown water and took in her surroundings. Lealez was nowhere in sight. She dove again into the water, feeling her way through the muck for Lealez. Opening her eyes was a lost cause; she could see nothing. Her fingers snagged a bit of cloth. She grabbed at it and heaved Lealez to the surface.
Lealez coughed and sputtered. Bet kept per at arm’s length, yell- ing that all per splashing was going to drown them both.
“Head for the shore,” Bet said.
Lealez shook per head and treaded water using big, sloppy strokes. Bet followed per gaze and saw the hulking shapes of the plesio- saurs circling the carriage.
“They eat plants,” Bet said. “Mostly.”
Bet hooked Lealez under her arm and paddled for the shore. The plesiosaurs kept pace with them, displacing great waves of wa- ter that made it more difficult to get to the shore.
Lealez gasped. “They’ll crush us!”
“More worried about the lizards on the shore,” Bet said. “What?”
Two big alligators lay basking along the shore. Bet made for another hollow a little farther on, but they were closer than they should be.
“They only eat at night,” Bet said, reassuring herself as much as Lealez. “Mostly.”
Bet and Lealez crawled up onto the bank and immediately started off into the brush. Bet wanted to put as much distance between her and the lizards as possible. Massive mosquitoes and biting flies plagued them, but Bet knew they were close enough to the city now that they might find a settlement or—if they were lucky—someone’s spare pirogue.
Instead, they found the plague.
The bodies started just twenty minutes into their walk to the shore, and continued for another hour as they grew nearer and nearer the settlement. Soft white fungus grew from the noses and eyes and mouths of the dead; their fingers and toes were blackened. Bet stopped and drew a circle of salt around herself and Lealez, and sprinkled some precautionary concoctions over them.
“Do you know which one it is?” Lealez whispered.
“One of Hanere’s,” Bet said. “She likes to leave a mark. She’s expecting us.”
“Is this where you left the shield?”
“Hush now,” Bet said as the swampland opened up into a large clearing. Nothing was burning, which was unlike Hanere.
Bet stopped Lealez from going farther and held up a finger to her lips. Two figures stood at the center of the village, heads bent in deep conversation. One wore a long black-and-purple cloak. The other carried a sword emblazoned with the seal of the Contagion College.
“Stay here,” Bet said to Lealez. She pulled out her machete and stepped into the clearing.
The two figures looked up. Bet might have had to guess at their gender if one of them wasn’t so familiar. She knew that one’s gender because she’d been there during the ceremony where he’d chosen it. It was her and Hanere’s own son, Mekdas. The other was most likely female, based on the hairstyle and clothing, but that didn’t much concern Bet.
A trade for something Bet loved, that’s what Hanere had written.
“So it was you who broke away from the Contagion College,” Bet said.
Mekdas stared at her. He was nearly thirty now, not so much a boy, but he still looked young to her, younger even than Lealez. He had Hanere’s bold nose and Bet’s straight dark hair and Hanere’s full lips and Bet’s stocky build and Hanere’s talent and impatience. “I left you with the college so you could make something of yourself,” Bet said. “Now here you are disappointing me twice.” “That’s something Hanere and you never had in common,” Mekdas said. “She was never once disappointed in me.”
Bet searched the ground around them for the shield. If they had gotten this far they must have found that, too, no matter that Bet was the only one who was supposed to know where it was. Had Hanere used some kind of black magic to find it?
