(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 8 minutes)
Far far below, yet still so far from the endless country of sad circling nothings that was the halo of Tauntalagmite’s torpor sleep, gray fire blazed. Dead flames would not spread without encouragement, and there it took the form of a strange little parade of four ghosts and one wheelbarrow.
A wailing Hodmim Holz was lashed to a post stuck in it at an angle, like he was a ship’s figurehead. From him smoke billowed out of his mouth, out of the flapping fissures stretched over his collarbone. Pale flame flicked and licked his skin the way lizards taste the air. Pushing him along, forcing the wheelbarrow over every loose rock instead of turning slightly, was Crosscup, so close to his own backsliding goal.
He’d started the city’s consecration on its front lines, stood tall as his scepter, robes as cleanly white as ice mummy molars. Just tapping at the ground, with barely more precision than a blind beggar, was supposed to give him status and accolades. How? How had his tip-tip-tunk-tap turned into this?
Reyvathird. He tunked the sovereign, who spoke of the grabbler, who roused Crosscup’s ambitions, which took him to Mother and Father who had encountered the man, who built Holz’s tower before he could stop their recollection, which drew Architect Radziweiller, which pinned him to these wooden buildings…
So on and so forth, every goal achieved somehow just a step back toward his starting position, every setback more than two. Woe to the unlucky, and forgiveness, the cleric reasoned, for when they break the rules just to keep up with everyone else. Only pouring out his ichor had given him the power to claw back to the starting line.
Without it Holz’s tower wouldn’t be collapsing behind them, along with every other wooden shack they’d passed in the process of clearing the befouled streets. Not many left now. As long as the last one was lit before he met the eyes of Radziweiller again he would not lose anything. He would still be a cleric, still be one of the lucky ghosts who could fit inside Toeteld and not be sent back to the empty country to suckle the void for another eternity.
“I remember you!” he growled as he looked ahead and saw the mead hall. Its width blocked his view of the remaining pyres; once past it he would know how much was left. “Down you go!” He sped up, forcing the procession made up of just Mother and Father to hasten as well. Mother wept, head in her hands. She stumbled and fell on her face often. Gray coals had been scooped into her eye sockets so that her tears were strands of smoke leaving silky puddles in the air.
Father held his son’s staff out in front of him while the boy pushed the wheelbarrow, careful to not let the clerical object’s tip touch the ground. He didn’t know what would happen if someone saw him attempting to unbless anything without proper authorization. All he knew was that the staff wasn’t a fur coat, so he shouldn’t try. The coats were gone. Up in flame that had nowhere to go but the cavern ceiling. Only his family remained. Hold the staff like Junior said. Do what Junior said so he would stay. That way Father could hold them instead.
Their paltry parade reached the entrance to the mead hall. Crosscup wasted no time ramming Hodmim flat against the exterior before he stepped forward and pressed the back of the man’s skull to flatten his cheek as well, put the sullen fires within to a greater surface area. Mother’s bitter cry spiked with the thunk of bone on wood. The cleric had gotten better at ignoring it.
“Where did my parents go?” Hodmim asked the air, hearing what Crosscup tried so hard to disregard. “What has separated us?”
“They’re at rest,” the cleric guessed in a growl like grinding gravel with a boot heel, “as are all fools who don’t see that the ladders of power extend deep underground as well. Now act like a proper gray man and produce what the world wants to extinguish. Breathe!” Holz obeyed, his wits no longer about him so far from the destroyed tower that had painted the inside of his soul with memorial context.
Gray flame oozed from his mouth and lapped at the wall. Burning a few streets down had made Crosscup the foremost expert on this layabout fire, so he knew he could smear it with his fingers before his own flesh caught. With his free hand he rubbed it into the seams between the logs where it had nowhere to go but into the fuel.
Eventually it would proliferate, but not before the smoke, which came out in curtains inside the mead hall and rose. The place was entirely empty of gray men, most of whom had gone to get themselves waterlogged and fed to a fish, but the patrons of the ceiling, the countless thousands of bees, had remained to reclaim the honey from the mead.
The smoke disturbed them greatly, just as it would have out in the sun. As one colossal drip they sluggishly detached from the roof and broke tables under their collective weight. Pouring back out from the flagons they’d scattered, the mass of gray bees rose from a puddle to a buzzing sphere at the center of the hall dripping any individuals that couldn’t quite maintain the swarming instincts of old.
Clearest of choking smoke was the doorway beside a smashed Hodmim Holz; the swarm sought it and squeezed through much to the shock of Mother and Father. The pair balled themselves up inside their clothes, using training that didn’t matter when bee venom had nothing to poison. As they fell over their son only turned his weapon, a slack-jawed burning body, against the bees.
“Get out of here! Clear out!” They could’ve attacked, not with dead venom, but with stingers that would do the damage of serrated knives if their actions were repeated enough times. Above, a bee died after a single sting, but the gray ones could crawl back to where they left it in the flesh, extract it, replace it, and sting again. If they wanted it badly enough they could carve Crosscup like a turkey and carry his slices through the air, dropping them into every neighborhood of Toeteld.
But they didn’t want that, not considering all the smoke he would be brandishing the entire time, that awful smoke, which only clouded the haze of half-death further. In the end the swarm rose together, skirted the column of bubbling smoke from the collapsing mead hall, and headed for higher ground, where they detected the distant sounds of the tiny cluster of their number the exterminator had taken as his gauntlet.
Not long after their distant drone was fully replaced by the crackling, the mead hall collapsed in on itself. It had been the product of precious few memories, produced by nomadic gray who had spied dried Beocroak blood and briefly reminisced on their pasts, barbaric and heroic in equal measure. Then they had moved on, for they would not settle in Toeteld before they had seen it all.
Those that had filled it were nothing-folk, the substance of crowds that cheered or jeered the real heroes. Without the hall they couldn’t pretend they were that sort of warrior, bereft of any memory more valiant than catching loose chickens. After their failure washed them out of the water factory they would be flagging in morale, and would seek the mead hall to restore them. Only a pit would be found, not even blackened, for all of it would never be anything but gray again.
Falling to their knees, and in the process forgetting why they despaired, these failed legends would revert from moth to worm, rise next as peons who mistook their recollections of fighting a grabbler in a man-made river for flights of fancy. Crosscup would not be there to see what he had done to them, for there were more people to do it to. Now that the hall was gone he could see far ahead, up to the Odger Building, which was backed by a high stone wall that appeared to cut off the wooden trail. Finally, his last errand.
Pushing Holz in the wheelbarrow got more irritating as the task wore on, preventing him from noticing that Mother and Father weren’t following. He turned and saw them cowering inside their rags, hiding from bees long gone. Leaving them was wise.
“Come on you dolts! You started this! Help finish it!” The ghouls unfurled, heads swiveling like those of owls. “Hurry! Radziweiller’s making what little skin I have left crawl!” Tripping over themselves, the couple did get moving eventually. They were his only resource aside from his own weak memories, and confused as the old folks were, there was a vividness to what they saved from life completely lacking in the cleric, who needed to cheat with ichor to call such clarity forth.
What was it? What could they have had up there that he never did? He watched coats. She fed the man who watched coats. Crosscup strove to matter; he struggled the way only a living thing could. Why then, was he in the dark? How did they find the light of their child, even mistakenly, while he would’ve remained in the empty country without the clerical order calling up their full reserves for the consecration?
He tried to grind an answer out of the questions with his teeth, unsuccessfully, for the entire trek up to the Odger Building. Up close they saw evidence of wealth and privilege, something that disturbed Mother and Father almost as much as Hodmim Holz tossing himself from a perfectly functional window.
The Odger Building had signs that were painted instead of carved. Metal gutters ringing it were free of rust. No scum in the rain barrel. Another structure had enveloped the well beside it, and tiered housing had been erected around that. It wouldn’t reach the prestige of Bonecushion, but the district was too rich for the stagnant blood of Mother and Father, dunking them in discomfort and unease, for they knew they belonged so much lower.
Toeteld had sprouted into its clear crop now, the towering skeletal arms would reach no closer to the sun. Crosscup, and countless others, were too late, whether they knew it or not. The divisions were sown. Buildings born first, where the blood of the 3,999 fertilized them, closest to Tauntalagmite and the easy escape into the empty country should they find trouble in the city, would be filled with wealth and prestige.
So too would everything from the Odger Building on up, for those neighborhoods would be closest to the sun, would feed on errant animals, and could engage in trade with the most foolhardy among the living.
Between these claw tips of fortune would be the pinch of poverty, prevented from flowing into the darker depths by the walls, moats, and basins of the webbed Castle Coffinnail. Bad memories would pile there, and though gray materials were limited only by their imagination the denizens would still fail to conjure up anything better than hovels, shacks, shit trenches, salty ponds swimming with flies, clothes never dry enough to come down from the line, fog banks of dust looking to infiltrate any doors left ajar, and company that would try to rob you even when nobody could really have anything.
And it would never get any better. Not when Tauntalagmite defeated all the Goodly gods. Not when the sun went out and volcanoes provided the light. Toeteld was chained to its form and circumstance by its people. Memory was as eternal as their grayness, it could provide plenty, even excess, to all, but that was not the way of people who bargained with the queen of infested skulls just to be stuck to one side or the other of the oldest rock.
Somehow bones would be valued over one another, miniature indoor wars fought over balcony views and servant privileges, and markets would be given the weight of the weather, for these were not the living. They were the gray dead, and they could not have happiness, all of their wits, or even vengeance. Or even progress.
Nothing but echoes in a cave. Which are to be expected. And not taken as wisdom just because they last.
“Junior,” Mother implored, tugging on Crosscup’s sleeve, “let’s go home before we make fools of ourselves.” Their presence drew stares, both from their flaming moaning cargo and their shabby attire.
“It was too late for that once you two cockroaches decided to breed,” the cleric snarled, tipping the wheelbarrow for the last time and flattening the rest of Holz against the wooden side of the Odger Building. “Hurry up and catch, damn you. You’re nothing but kindling anyway.”
“I can hear the sea,” Holz said as his face was wiped back and forth across splinter of fine grain. “You know I could see it from my office.” Crosscup was about to tell him to pipe down, but Father distracted him with an insistent tap on the shoulder.
“Junior, look.” The ghoul in white did so and failed to see what Father pointed out, which was the closing-in of the pedestrians, some of whom held their fancy walking sticks as cudgels. Monocles magnified glowering glares. Most mustaches were only half of one, rare was the lip not half-rotted away, but those halves that remained were waxed and twisted into clock spring coils.
No, what Crosscup saw was the stillness of the storm he’d created, the overtaking cloud of smoke that was much of Toeteld’s sky. Beneath it some of his fires still burned when he’d anticipated they’d give up as soon as the last traces of memory could no longer be discerned from the ash heap.
That was a miscalculation that could only be avoided by a gray arsonist who had raised gray flames the way one might livestock. Difficult as they were to create and coax, once a burn was established it stuck around like a smoldering coal seam. Almost fungal in nature, gray embers seeped across ground, peppering it with fruiting flickers, becoming a nuisance.
The cleric, even after everything, almost couldn’t believe his rotten luck. The last of the wooden blasphemies would soon topple, but the state he’d left the land in would clearly not look acceptable to a man like Architect Radziweiller. Lingering fires would have to be put out before anything could be raised in place of the wood, lest one climb inside something stone with termite tenacity and find an aristocrat’s gray wardrobe.
He hadn’t the time to go back, nor the attention to detail that could find and extinguish each ember. There was no heartbeat to hammer on the door of his chest and warn him of Radziweiller’s approach, but he felt it all the same, the tightness of those frequent moments where something was supposed to go his way, but where it always found a path in free fall that he could not predict.
“I’m doomed,” he said, putting his back to the same building he tried to burn. As he slid down he took his ichor bottle and examined it. So much power. Nobody in his way. Yet he couldn’t figure out how to use it. If he poured it out he couldn’t guess which way it would flow. He was not meant for power. It was rain that struck through him rather than flowing over. Not one iota of it would ever defer to him.
He removed the stopper. A droplet leapt, trying to escape him, but rejoined the rest. Tilt. If he could tell where it would flow across the ground, now so even with expertly laid gray cobble, then he was mistaken. Then it was just doubt. Tilt. He did know the flow of power. Tilt. He hadn’t wasted his only life seeking it. Tilt.
Father swooped down and pressed the stopper back in, guiding his son’s hand so he wouldn’t drop the flask. Then he laid the staff across Junior’s knees and patted him on the shoulder.
“It’ll all work out son. That’s how we found each other again.”
“No memory connects us,” Crosscup insisted. “You are nobody to me.”
“I have a feeling,” Father explained, touching his hand to the hollow of his heart, “and it’s the only one I have left.” Then he turned to face the aristocratic creep. “Mother! They can’t have Junior! They can’t have anything of ours!”
“I wouldn’t give them the snot out my nose,” Mother agreed. She pounced on the nearest assailant before they could actually become one, before they could voice the first syllable of their trespassing complaint. One of her talons broke through his monocle, and for a moment she held it up and admired it as a ring. “Father, look what Junior got me.”
“That’s lovely Mother, right proud of him I am.” He kicked a shouting woman in the stomach, collapsing her and her parasol together. A gray someone tried to pin his arms behind his back; a backward headbutt collapsed their nose and blocked their eyes with a veil of gray nasal tissue. Father spun him around and threw him onto the parasol woman, starting a nice heap, though it pained him to treat the coat the gentleman was wearing that way.
The gentleman hadn’t been treating it well either, as a piece of loose cake fell out of his pocket, both smashed and crumbled. Father had seen enough of them coming and going on trays and up and down the dumbwaiters of the Holz lumber office. That was soil cake.
“Always wanted to try some of that,” the working ghoul proclaimed, dropping his knees on his victims while he reached for the cake. “Mother, another treat for you.” He split it in half and tossed it to her. While they gobbled it down the wealthy residents became too strong a tide. Hands were on them everywhere, forcing them to fall back and close a circle around Junior.
“Give it up,” Crosscup mewled. “Though we’ve never had-” An itch. An awareness of something that wouldn’t be possible if he was alive, as there would be too much pain. He rolled and twisted his head to a gray degree. A flame was stuck on his back like a leech, licking his robe.
Crosscup stood as his eyes climbed the Odger Building. The fire was in the walls now, otherwise his clothing wouldn’t have caught, but it still didn’t matter. Nothing could clean up the mess that would be deemed his.
The smoke was behaving strangely. Some was on its way up as expected. One rivulet down. Now two. He leaned in, as did some curious folk ready to rip the family apart moments before. Closer examination only made enough sense of it to create worse confusion. Turned out it was water, escaping from between boards.
What waters needed to escape? The Odger Building didn’t seem the right place to store that particular resource. Indeed it was held together not by reason, but by the separation of memories from two different people. One had reminisced the Odger Building. Another, dangling from a rope, weighed by longing more than flesh, had remembered the voluptuous sea. That sea had poured out from the beginning, blown out of the nearby well, but construction to redirect it to Bonecushion’s canal had disguised all that.
“What did I do now?” Crosscup asked the shadowy nets that caught his soul, that barely kept him from oblivion. Leaks sprung all over Odger and showered them. Sufficiently watered, the fears of the locals overtook their affront and sent them fleeing. He did not speak these next words, but they were plain on the slack of his gray face, eyes scraped empty by the awe of his own folly. Why was he allowed to do what he did? Why didn’t anyone stop him without hurting him?
The gray fire of Hodmim Holz weakened the wood, to cracking, to bending, to bowing to the pressure of a recollected ocean. Explosive gushing rapids broke forth into a mighty river that swallowed the family of clerics and coattails. The waters invaded whichever homes they didn’t outright destroy, carrying away tools of every urban trade, textiles, pets and livestock, all of which could be reclaimed from whatever distance the river created if those remembering them could do so again.
Plateau after plateau it filled, coursed, and overflowed, but after the initial burst of pressure it lacked the strength to overcome most of the stone walls separating rich from poor, noble from ill repute. Owing to the forces that had come before, the draining of the Odger Building followed the trail of weaker wood and cinders, which followed the dripping blood of Beocroak, which moved in a mostly straight line from Tauntalagmite’s Underbelly to the mouth of Wormskoll Cave.
Crosscup saw it in a series of tortured spirals as he was washed and tossed through. The waters stopped the smoke, put out the embers. As soon as this temporary river drained away the clearing would be complete, and the winding wooden trail would be as spotless as he could ever dream of making it. He’d done it. The genius of the plan merely took a while to catch up with his speedy work ethic.
Radziweiller would have to be impressed that one man could achieve it. Who else? the cleric cried out in deafening gray waters. Who else could use the gap between plan and consequence to do so much? No one!
No one except for the exterminator: a man whose primary flaw was thinking too far ahead. Ideas did not just live inside him, they flourished out into expansive landscapes, into Utopian worlds of order and justice. When living inside them he forgot the real world was dimwitted, toxic, corrupt, and unlucky without Goodly oversight. He moved as if his ideas were real, and thus outran everyone and everything he sought to manipulate. He beat them to the confrontation and was left alone, lost in philosophical silence.
A good dog could keep up, so he kept one, and his latest was Plucker. Disobedience was in the animal’s nature, when alive that is, as the garbage-eaters had to ignore every human word to get at their refuse and reclaim its meat, eggs, bones, and mild groggy rot. Then it had met the exterminator, and it had known peace. The search was over. Food could rot away before the mongrel could get to it, but not the standards of such a master. He aged like bones; he spoke like a cairn spun by the wind. Defiance was pointless. Disobedience was suffering.
The gray dog moved through the clean streets and weak dark of the place soon to be called Greendive. It was Toeteld’s toe in the upper world, above the chalk slide, where real light and visible gray snuck in a curious overlap. True plants grew there, fed by waters tossed in during storms: mosses, vines with red woody bodies, fiddleheads that never unfurled, and roots that had their leaves outside Wormskoll. Those trees were slowly weaving a bird’s nest around the cave’s mouth, and if allowed they would eventually close it, for everyone’s sake.
The gray dead who planned to live there were still stunned to find themselves so close to sunlight. They couldn’t find words, for their luck or for the sight of waxy green leaves and little round beetles with ruby red shells. For now they sat out of gray doors, watching morning mists turn to dripping dew down hanging vines, at petite gray tables that might have been part of restaurants. Sometimes they were served by someone with a cloth draped over their arm.
Plucker didn’t have time to snatch their gray scones, cold cream pats, frothy sipping soup, crisped bat wings, or magma-dried compotes. The dog had a scent and a mission. Its nose, and then its body, made its way down Greendive, spiraling in narrow passages, ignoring decorations sat on windowsills to test them, until it reached the gondola deck.
It wasn’t running now. Something had interrupted the currents feeding the water factory; it wouldn’t get up and going again until someone remembered some kind of silo that could contain the leak sprung by the Odger Building. The gondola’s last passenger had made it off before it stalled though, and Plucker found him sitting on smooth rock, resting, swallowing strength for the last leg of his journey to resurface. One eye opened, black pupil judging everything about the dog. The animal did not whimper where others, even gray others, would have.
“You have a master,” Beocroak said as he slowly inhaled through his nose. An animal was good conversation compared to the company he’d had recently, hence the unusual circumstance of him speaking first. Dogs did not nod, but the grabbler understood him all the same when he turned back the way he came and stared at the man.
Comprehension wrapped the long-suffering grabbler, whose blood was now raw from too much gray food, whose skin was paled by lacking light, whose eyes were wet with sorrow again. The details did not come to him, but the slightest breeze from the outside world did, bringing with it a terrible longing and the confirmation of a fear at the core of his heart.
There would be a real fight before he was free. The cosmos had exacted a price, dropped it from the ultimate dark, through the helpless hands of Hexaclete who could not interfere in matters above and beyond even her. Beocroak had buried himself alive; of course it would take a life to undo that.
A real fight. Not these alley brawls. Not a racing swim. Not tossing nobodies out of windows on flicks of gray tentacle. This contest would prove something. No obligation bent it in his favor. Only he could bend it. Or he would be broken and tossed back down with the bear bone chips and the dead lizards with sunk throats that always landed white belly up.
Plucker too understood his body language as he rose and followed at an extremely deliberate pace. Together they climbed back up through Greendive one spiraling stair at a time, Beocroak reaching to feel every hanging plant they passed, calluses gone from his sensation. Each was a feather, first on his palms, then on his mind. There was softness in the world. He wanted it. Did that make it his duty to protect it? Did he have to lose all independence, be its eternal guardian, to feel it, to weep in its compassionate embrace?
“Enjoy your appointment with the exterminator, hehehe,” one of the diners told him as he passed before tucking back into their dainty cup of hot pastimes. The others looked, did absolutely nothing to interfere. These lucky fools had green; there was nothing to gain from his blood.
The dog did not rush him, but Beocroak knew not to test its patience, which was actually its master’s. In a battle with a gray dog, with no weapon at hand, he would lose, as his opponent was clearly too loyal to sway with a roar. He would be helpless against its bite, even though it was but a quarter of what a dog’s bite could be, if it came from a northern ultrawolf instead of a garbage-eater usually dissuaded by a tossed tin.
In what felt like no time at all to the beleaguered grabbler, they arrived. A courtyard. One entrance for men. Many for smaller creatures, as the brickwork of the circular space became spotty over their heads and nonexistent a short ways above that, where curtain vines and moss-swaddled stalactites took over. At a perfect angle he could see real sky and fresh white light, which struck his starved eyes like lightning.
A small gray woman with a knife on her belt was perched in a window arch that went nowhere. Her crossed legs indicated she wasn’t his opponent; she was just there to watch. Eventually she would report to Radziweiller on the outcome, and if things turned bombastic she might tell all of Toeteld, around meals, at festivals, or from the fringes of the empty country to lure souls to the hustle of city life. She could be the bearer of a legendary torch, depending on what kind of fire the two men fought with.
Beocroak stopped when he saw the gray figure stood on the opposite end of the courtyard. Plucker kept on until he was at his master’s side, sitting to receive a stoic pat on the head from the right arm. The left was coated in grumbling bees, hundreds of dark polished eyes crawling across Beocroak, shaping him. Only he, and other grabblers, could see the way the insects moved with each other, reorienting into the best interlocking structure to be used in battle, to be used against that exact foe.
“I don’t know when I realized it was you,” the exterminator said, still facing away. Beocroak’s insides went darker, wetter, colder. A dank moldy log of compressed anger cracked. “And, once again, I never intended to overtake you, but somehow I have. Did I expect too much? Or are these your talents turned into ingrown nails? Have you perfected wasting strength? Only that explains your hobbling pace while so free of responsibilities.”
“Turn and face me,” Beocroak demanded. He didn’t actually want it, but it came about anyway. The voice was confirmation enough. The mastery of the bees’ pattern had settled most of the doubt. The face was overkill. Gray, drawn, thinned to translucence in the hair, the exterminator’s face was still unmistakably that of
Dignidog.
Sour logic sank into the holes of Beocroak’s understanding. Dignidog had pursued him out of Lazuli Pawlm those years ago, unable to rally enough people to his expansionist cause without a tallyweed to his name. Through rhetoric or combat he had planned to drag the man back, to forge him a destiny that fit them both.
Beocroak’s long zag in a rough nowhere had caused Dignidog to lose his trail and pass him entirely. The man had deduced that he was being, at least in part, intentionally eluded, and had used his wits to think as far ahead as he could. The only way to get rid of the scent trail permanently was to use a potion, and to complete the process by bathing in the waters off Rooth Tugt. He would find Beocroak there or he would fail, so he could move with the utmost speed.
“You were going so fast you got yourself killed,” Beocroak said.
“You did the same with sluggishness.”
“I live.”
“No you do not. A grabbler who does not grab what he can has hold of nothing. You are debris in a godless sea, where even barnacles grab passing hulls and make more of life. You, Beocroak, shame of Gaw Digi-Tally, badly created by her in what must be the dementia of her death, are inert.” Silence devoured the air between them. Radziweiller’s assistant sat perfectly still, which she’d learned from the spider that killed her. The men weren’t moving, but the web was. Conflict coursed as wind does. She’d never seen anything like it, alive or gray, and she wondered how many times in history a grabbler had fought a grabbler. They’d fit on one hand.
“You’re too gray to get what you wanted,” Beocroak tried. “Step aside or let me pass through you.” The air sharpened in front of Dignidog’s face; his next word licked like a throng of flame.
“No.”
“I was never going to give you anything. Not my faith. Not my arms. Not my life. You were never close.”
“I’ve never been closer than I am now,” the exterminator claimed. “I will take what you refuse to use. Your blood will be mine, and our memories will paint Toeteld red. This city will be the Lazuli Pawlm of Subtlerrannea, its will spread across all of Hexaclete’s land, just on the side I never anticipated. The butter will be under the bread, counter-intuitive… but still viable.
I will teach the gray dead to grabble. The shadows are but one more hurtle, ten more generations I must wait. Someone alive will learn the will of Gaw from someone dead, just as we did, and there the work will begin. Kneel before me Beocroak. Plucker will tear your throat mercifully, and we will both drink your offering to the softer sister, she who has always wished us to harden so that we might avoid her undoing.”
“No.” Dignidog’s face contorted, almost swirling down his throat as if it were a drain. With real light on his neck he couldn’t suppress his rage any longer. In his exterminator guise of convenience he wore boots. Such unnecessary things didn’t survive grabbler fights, nor their opening theatrics.
Up went one foot, and when it stomped the gray shoe exploded off it in shreds. Every drink in every cup rippled down Greendive. Dignidog stomped again to free his second foot. His toes gripped the summit of Toeteld, capital of the gray dead, tip of Tauntalagmite’s talon, sparkling with beaded venom.
Beocroak’s roar was a digger; it resonated in earth, rock, and water best. Dignidog’s clung to the air with higher tones, traveled less as a sphere and more as a wave, going much farther. Every gray animal in the city would have heard. Some, closest in only a distant sense, would manifest out of memory for the first time in response to the sound.
Before it was over, not yet halfway through, as a gray breath could last as long as its owner wanted, gray animals began to appear in the openings between brick and vine. Cold star twinkle eyes of rock lizards, tree-hopping possums, gilly toads, and papermouth rats perforated the dark nooks encircling them, just outside the crushed column of natural light. Plucker was crouched, barking his best alongside his master. Their maws closed in unison.
“You have no weapon,” Dignidog scolded him. “A grabbler must never be unarmed.”
His tallyweed roared in turn. It pulsed down through Greendive, along the gondola wires, and all throughout the Odger canals. Ghosts heard. They would not arrive in time. Beocroak hoped the force of a living voice would be enough to sway some of the creatures surrounding them. Even those too small to grabble could be held, trained to fight with a finger cage and a croaking song, but the pests were not turned by his coursing blood. Just as faceless bats had left the roof over Dignidog’s new home bald, they showed their fearful respect of the exterminator.
Beocroak wasn’t done roaring, but he saw no hope as he spun around in the courtyard. No inkling of a switching side, nor a claw with uncertain grip. All that happened was a weak cough out of the observing assistant to the architect. The grabbler’s thought paused while his roar went on. What could tickle a gray throat? Either she remembered a flu, for no particular reason, or something had stirred. He turned to her, funneled his mouth, arranged his roar into a bubble that surrounded her.
Sudden convulsion. A typically balanced creature, better at perching than most gargoyles, she too was startled by her forward collapse out of the window and subsequent retching. Her eyes widened, but the gruesome experience could not end until her mouth did the same. From between her forcibly parting lips came the tips of eight segmented legs. Then eight eyes to match. Sickle fangs overshadowing her teeth dropped, and finally she coughed up a carapace orb of impossible size. Sheer disgust made her collapse, and as she fell, saliva-coated silk trailing from her slack mouth, she looked to Dignidog in hope of explanation.
“We always remember spiders as bigger than they were,” he told her. The bug skittered across the courtyard and threw itself with a cat’s leap into the waiting arms of Beocroak. His roar terminated with its landing. In the look shared with the verminous beast he saw hatred and affront in its orb eyes.
It had listened, from the assistant’s throat, while the exterminator said her death was the spider’s fault, the spider’s failure. His idle commentary had disturbed its peaceful rest inside an ornate silken pouch, never to be disturbed by breath that no longer flowed. Now it was in tatters, from its unbearable rage, what would have been futile for eons if not for Beocroak’s call to action.
Neither party knew exactly why the other was so keen on battling Dignidog, but through the experiences of each, of man controlling animal, of spider utilizing man, they found vengeful understanding and absolute commitment.
Spiders of typical size were nearly worthless as grabbler weapons. While they could be convinced to build with their silk, that took time and did nothing in a fight. But the assistant’s fear of what had killed her, of what she suspected was long brooding inside a body that could no longer feel, had exaggerated its proportions to something he could not only use, but invent new combat techniques with between every blow thrown.
Dignidog did not rush him. He’d waited long enough to know he could do it for an eternity. What was another twenty seconds so his pestilent weapon could weave him some frilly equipment? The gray spider certainly did not treat it as mere decoration as it hopped between Beocroak’s forearms and circled them, entwining ropes that were to him ethereal but good enough to hang any ghoul in Toeteld.
“Yes my friend,” he growled to it as it completed his silken cestuses and settled onto his dominant arm, fangs drawn as double blades. “We are nasty together. Bitter as one. This cave dares try and seal me behind Tauntalagmite’s knitting flesh. We will bite and tear our way free!”
“That’s exactly what I’m going to do to you,” Dignidog boomed, raising his bee gauntlet. The thousand stingers configured forward into a reverse mail of curved spines. Plucker crouched, bared even the back teeth that living dog gums couldn’t manage to reveal. Beocroak, same as any other thing declared garbage by his master, could be eaten. “In the name of Gaw Digi-Tally the softer sister!”
“In your own name! Where dwells the mosquito whine of indignity!” Giant spiders could rattle, like certain snakes, as their fangs chattered together. It was the drum roll that sent the two men flying at each other, launching off the floor with grabbler strength, thrown by a ground that feared them and savored their aerial absence.
Dignidog’s free arm disappeared down Plucker’s leaping mouth; he swung his favored companion and released him as a projectile. Taking initiative, the throat spider leapt to meet the garbage-eater. Their clash sent them both to the floor, but Beocroak was able to recall his weapon much quicker by tugging the line still attached to its spinnerets.
Four grabbler arms met in a palm-to-palm contest. Subtle motion, the tiniest caress from a deck cannon of an arm, bent the bees’ stingers down before they could pierce, only effective on those unlucky enough to now be ground between the palms into bug butter that would take the rest of the fight to reconstitute.
Other bees surged over Beocroak’s hand, made their stingers at home in the diamonds of flesh between the spider’s weaving. Beocroak correctly guessed the stingers were desiccated, free of the fine barbs that forced the bee to split from its own weapon. Were these tiny assailants still flesh he could force them out with muscle strain and blood pressure, but their gray condition meant he could only interact via the medium of the willing spider’s silk.
How they determined their stab had been perfected he knew not, but after a painful moment the bees extracted their knives and flew back to the gauntlet, prepared to take another order expressed by the fine hair of Dignidog’s arm. If they were permitted to strike repeatedly, Beocroak’s limbs would be carved down to the bone in short order.
These first pinpricks would not even draw a trickle, as he strained to pressure the tiny wounds shut. Before the bees could be deployed again, his spider stabbed at Dignidog’s vulnerable wrist, convincing the gray grabbler to back away, hardly a retreat considering it created an opportunity for Plucker.
The mongrel was on Beocroak’s back, claws almost as precise as the stingers, teeth sinking into his shoulder. Death before panic, a lesser known motto of the grabblers, was just as applicable in the bowels of the underworld as anywhere else. Calmly, he took a loose coil from his spider and slung it over his head, catching Plucker with a collar. He didn’t have the angle to tighten it, but his weapon was in tune with his idea and had already positioned itself to do so with one scissoring motion from its front set of limbs.
A cinching sound was as good as speech, letting him know he could wring and spin, turning the dog into a cyclonic flail. It howled in protest of being used against its master. Dignidog dropped a stalwart foot forward and braced himself, taking the dog as a blow in order to catch it and tear the silk leash away.
Once freed the dog sprung off his master’s chest and aggressively sought Beocroak’s nearest blind spot once more. Worse, Dignidog had decided there was no point to a free hand, stepping back to the wall in order to equip a gray whip-tailed lizard.
Beocroak’s throat spider wasn’t out of ideas. It took the chance to get down to his legs and wrap them in several bands of silk as well, should he decide to kick at any point. Its efforts would be for naught if he couldn’t come up with a better strategy. The problem was the stinging gauntlet. Tooth for fang, claw for silk, his spider’s petty craftsmanship could best the garbage-eater’s loyalty. But nothing could best the bees. Too small. Too numerous. And their buzzing seemed to grow louder inside his head with every passing moment.
Now armed with a whip, Dignidog charged back in, ready to crack it against his foe and peel out an ideal entrance for bees curious to know if a grabbler’s lungs could be used as a hive. For now all Beocroak could do was take up the spare coils of silken rope attached to the belt his spider had just gifted him and hope to hogtie his opponent.
He dodged the whip. He ducked under the dog. They were back at each other’s throats. Evenly they traded blows, except always there was a haze of bees wafting over, enjoying a stab, and returning. Beocroak’s chest and upper arms were now peppered with blood droplets. At the sparkling crimson sight of them the surrounding gray animals of the nooks and crevices began to pour gray drool, creating a circular trickling waterfall of slime. It was just another tool, and if it was a tool, a grabbler could use it.
Ignoring the stings, which he could do but a handful more, Beocroak jammed his shoulder into Dignidog’s sternum and wrapped his arms around the man’s waist, twisting and heaving to throw him. As expected, the gray grabbler tried to keep his footing, slipping on the gray saliva, forcing him to suffer the toss’s intent.
Before his face could hit the courtyard, Dignidog’s head rebounded. His neck crumpled around a seam; he pawed at the wound in confusion. His whole body was balanced on something invisible that bounced him slightly, cutting deeper into his neck each time. Beocroak tried to take advantage, lunging in to twist off the man’s head and toss it as far as grabblerly possible, which was three times further than humanly.
Plucker stopped him, biting his ankle fiercely. As the man recoiled the dog darted between his legs and rammed his master, sending him back up to his feet and off the garrote. Dignidog felt the cut with the momentarily-naked fingers under his gauntlet. It was clean. The spider must have spun something too thin to see. Had he blood to spill the fight would’ve been over, his dear tallyweed the victor.
The desire to savor the duel, when he knew it was the only secure way to give up his rhetoric and use fists in furtherance of his imperial ideas, was extreme, and it hurt him bitterly to rush things along. It had to be done. The spider could not be given time to seed the battlefield with more invisible razors, Beocroak warned of their presence by his collaborator’s many informative taps.
Cracking his lizard whip now could’ve sliced it on more webbing like sausage pressed through wire, so he released the animal from its obligation and his wrist, choosing instead to focus on his gauntlet. A single grunt informed Plucker of the angle he should take. They were about to strike together when a rising sound stalled the battle.
Bees. Beocroak’s mind hadn’t exaggerated the droning buzz the way the assistant’s had the spider’s girth. More bees were arriving, drawn by the presence of their fellows on Dignidog’s arm. Every bug smoked out of the mead hall by Crosscup was there, ready to reunite with the recently lost glob of themselves and become whole once more; without the warmth of the hall they only had each other.
Gray wildlife retreated, their openings overtaken by swarming twisting veils on relentless vibrating wings. The whole courtyard became their din; Beocroak felt it in the roots of his teeth. This was not a happy reunion; it was the fateful development. A colony did not divide in allegiance. Only one grabbler could wield them.
Both stuck out their arms, fingers raised into crowns of claw: a raven-welcoming shape, a roost pronounced, the call to arms. Both began to roar. Dignidog’s voice went high, into the Goodly heavens, across the lands he wished conquered, circling the radiance of the sun’s keeper Hexaclete. Beocroak’s went low, into the baked rock of the world, into the leavened bubbles where the ghosts griped and groaned, into the spectral fossils of peaceful primordial titans who slept under the oldest rock and would not suffer a living sound without dissolving into the cosmos to escape it.
Indecision turned the colony into a whirlpool, both grabblers in its center. Waves of voice battered them, patches deforming and twisting like sheets in a gale. Beocroak’s might was deep, buried yet alive, calling like old growth forest, like boulders split in twain by unrelenting gravity. But Dignidog had already a kinship with a branch of the colony. They attested to his care, his skill, and slowly the murmur of the gauntlet shifted the character of the vibratory veil. More landed on Dignidog. The were building him a collar, a mantle that could hold the rest as armor and cape.
Do not die underground. Dignidog had not heeded that wisdom. Every fanciful word in his collection was useless without the bedrock of noble understanding to power them, rock that Beocroak would stand upon once more, or Tauntalagmite would flay and rend his soul for so shaking the freshly poured foundations of her capital city. The living were meant to best the dead, until they joined. He would not join Dignidog. Never had. Never would.
There, as the wall of bees tried to leave his side. One small body, but larger than the rest. Wings with an unmistakable fog in the membrane, caused by ceaseless sequestering in the depths of the hive. A dainty buzz discernible from the rest, if and only if the inner ear bones were the hammer and anvil forged for the cries of everything in the world, from dusk-blanketing birds to slugs stuck under stepping stones.
Beocroak lunged, his hand splashing into the bees, fingers forming a perfect cage around his target. He raised it triumphantly, doused it with his roar so its buzz would tune with his thrumming determined base. At first Dignidog did not see what he played at, but kept up his roar in the confusion, and in the dread when he saw through the finger-bars of his enemy to the truth. The queen. Beocroak had spotted and grabbled the queen.
Colonies did not divide, and she was the colony. Her delicate trill, her gray tremble, was the weakest in volume, yet her first word turned the tide in a flash. Bees sloughed off Dignidog so rapidly that he lost his balance. Plucker tried to bite mouthfuls out of the stream and fetch them back, but they stung and carved their way out of his gray gums.
“Now you become a leader!” Dignidog attacked. “Rather than pull our plow you wed this bug and order them about!?” Beocroak’s answer was to roar, on the exhale, on the inhale, as the colony tightened around his body and created a breastplate between two bee-ball pauldrons and matching gauntlets. “They are loyal to their queen! The dog soldiers are loyal to me!”
Dignidog roared again, some of it blown from his neck laceration as a piercing whistle, the sort dogs had to respond to. Plucker had his faith, and was thus the only dog called to serve initially, but now his back was against the wall. All dogs must answer, do their duty. Two whip-taut guard dogs with high necks, sharp ears, and rapier tails leapt out of the rock. They scrabbled to turn and face Dignidog so that he could bury his arms in their gullets.
But Beocroak was done with this charade. No, the dead did not hold a candle to the living. They could only blow it out, hope the dark briefly befuddled them, got them to trip and spill their blood. On a wave of buzzing, the live grabbler was propelled onto Dignidog, who was pelted with a furious downpour of punches, each leaving behind tens of tiny carpenters eager to whittle and drill.
Dignidog’s arms slipped out of the guard dogs as he stumbled backward, all the way to the courtyard wall. The last dregs of drool landed on his face, smeared his vision enough that he could only make out the furor, the raw force of how much he had upset his brother with his cornering barks.
The gray dead did not feel much. Touch was reduced to pressure. Cuts to separation, the sensation of egg membrane peeling from boiled white. Insidious variation on this penetrated deep into his gray flesh, lodging bees in the balled-up cobwebs that were his major organs. There they might stay for all time, stinging and slashing when bored, keeping him from fullest integrity.
He dropped to his knees. Another punch across his jaw dislocated it and gave him stinger stubble. Beocroak sliced with his hands, adorned with countless daggers, and they split Dignidog’s knees from the muscles that might allow him to rise again. By the time he did, Beocroak would be long gone. The rush, the wait, the death in a foreign unconquered land. Going from a subject of Goodly Gaw to Ghastly Tauntalagmite. Just to be felled and left in the chattering dark. Perhaps Beocroak did not have that shred of kindness after all: the flaccid one that made leaders ruthless in battle yet amenable with chambered whispers.
Plucker tried to come to his master’s aid and was prevented by one outcast arm from Beocroak. Bees surging like water washed the dog away, pinned it in place so that all it could do was bay mournfully. The rest of the colony turned back to Dignidog. His stubble had burrowed out of sight; the punch that dropped his jaw filled his mouth with bugs. Together these two fronts riddled his lower face and throat. Soon all that was left was toothy bone collapsing into a writhing shaft. Yet he could still speak, a terrible rattling rasp, but it was the one thing he had practiced more than his grabbling.
“Are you?” the staring corpse asked in its strangled buzz. “Tallyweed?” Beocroak glowered. More of an answer came from the spider as it hopped to Dignidog’s slumped shoulders and wrapped around behind his head. Stabbing limbs found the outer corners of the man’s eyes, forced him to look directly at Beocroak, to take anything the victor might deliver as punishment.
“Someone should have taken your words long ago.” The spider yanked, pulling his head back, opening the remains of the mouth as much as possible. Beocroak readied a thrust that would rip out the gray tongue.
Before he could harvest there came an echo that crawled across the skin and nearly uprooted the hair. Never had Beocroak heard such a thing, not even from the demon of sleep when it sought to torment him with curdled voices of loves long dead. This was the churning digestion of a mammoth centipede, the sigh of a magnificent evil too pent up, the bubble floating in the center of a heart, bobbing with each beat, threatening to lodge and kill. Yet as soon as he heard it he knew what it was. Perhaps his sanity could be saved by denial, if he fled Wormskoll before he saw her, but Dignidog coughed up laughter and loose bees in order to confirm it.
“Tauntalagmite! Come to inspect her new city! Brother, there is no-” An iron hand snatched the tongue out of its roots. The victor, who no longer felt that way, whipped about and threw the organ with screaming force, out the way he’d come. The bees within it would carry it further, hide it away in a crevice, and with luck the ghost of Dignidog would be forever disarmed.
But the final word was in his head. His rival was going to say ‘escape’. Tauntalagmite was arrived. The ghouls came out as kneeling hosts to blanket the streets of Toeteld in what was to her gray moss. One stride of her monstrous legs would cross an entire village. Ghastly gods did not have the perch of the Goodly, the cloud balcony that let them see so much of the world at once, but they did have their greed. They knew what they wanted, and they knew if it was close.
To a god, Beocroak’s entire story would be written plainly on the face of the city: a bloody hand print on eggshell. His trail would be as clear to her as a river of black sky. A living grabbler was a spectacular bauble to add to her collection, alongside other noble lives stolen and pinned to their stands on shelves of oldest rock.
He would have to fly to escape Wormskoll in time, finding himself once more exhumed from a pit of despair by his craft, which had armored him in fifty thousand wings. Though tirelessly gray, and very many, the colony’s strength still could not keep him airborne, but they could let him climb walls like stepladders and leap a fifth as much as a godly stride.
A spinning kick drove Dignidog’s head into the seams of the courtyard. His sole intact eye, shredded from its lid, twitched to watch Beocroak bend and jump to extraordinary height. He kicked off a wall, sent rubble down. In two more ricochets he was out of the shaft and headed toward the light.
Then Dignidog’s last light was snuffed, for a stodgy brick of time, by another stab through his loose eye, courtesy of the now-dismissed spider. It kept its jewelry as it disrespectfully dismounted his remains and aimed itself at Radziweiller’s assistant.
“No!” She scrambled backward, flopped over. “Get back!” It intended to get back, back to her cozy throat with its new trophy. Victory would be much easier for the spider to savor than the man, as when the eye resumed its twitch it could look only into the void of the spider’s gazing death. Let it learn that one wrong word can bury a tongue in a city’s bed and strand its partnering sight in human remains.
She couldn’t avoid its leap, the connection knocking them both out a low courtyard window. Her lips weren’t strong enough against its spreading force. Home gray home. Where one can peacefully hunt for the memory of sweetness.
And where was the gray home of Crosscup? Such a thought swam in his waterlogged mind. As a cleric he’d been allowed to stay with the order, sleeping inside chiseled blocks of stone, like mausoleums before the work was done. Every day was lessons. There were ten thousand ways to use his vestments, his relics, and only a handful of them were sanctioned.
Sometimes he understood what the elders were really getting at. The order only existed to bring glory to Tauntalagmite on its surface. When that skin was peeled away there writhed underneath endless crabs and scorpions of lashing cruelty, all vying to be atop the pile, to feel the warmth of their god’s skin, happy to settle for her magma.
The order was a ladder; it was the establishment of top rungs by the abuse of those much lower and more numerous. Crosscup wondered how he only knew this some of the time. Did he forget because he was gray? No. He forgot because he needed ambition to keep him tethered to sanity. If the order was a trap, and he the juiciest bait, then what could he ever gain?
A hand that knew much better how to gain, and to hold, took his and pulled him out of the pooling muck. Crosscup’s feet insisted on standing, bringing his head spinning back to consciousness. Looking around, there wasn’t much to see. Gray water sat in puddles and trickled off roofs. Splintered wood, soggy and softened, piled beside and in the puddles like beaver dams abandoned for being too uncomfortable to sleep in.
He’d lost his hat. And his parents. He turned. There they were. The pair waved at him meekly, Mother clutching his hat. Scepter? Ichor? He looked down and saw he had them, both held against his chest by one locked arm. The only thing to do was ask himself if he currently knew what the order was.
“I did it,” he said numbly. The way was clear. Stone was already coming up through the debris, thanks to the memories of onlookers drawn by the temporary river. “I managed.”
“In a sense, you goat bell packed with dung.” Crosscup finally recognized who had helped him up: Architect Radziweiller. His coterie of assistants had only grown since their last encounter. Even in life Crosscup had never seen such finely tailored clothing. Chains of bone now held the man’s face together, and an octagonal monocle in place as well.
“This,” the cleric spun, “this is right where we started! Holz’s office was there! Now it’s nothing. And Holz…” There was no sign of the flaming man tied to a post, currently face down in a pig trough many streets away. “Never mind Holz. I did exactly as you requested head architect. I trust,” he tried to stand tall, only made himself look like a slug climbing a dangling thread, “that I shall receive according accolade.”
“You swine tumor,” Radziweiller bristled. “You cracked birth canal! You wet lettuce. I’ve never known such a pale and mealy scabrabbit. Such an egg-eyed brain juggler. Were you any more of an afterbirth-sweating foot lecher I would peel you apart myself and dice your bones into dice, so that the trickster demon of luck could make better use of you than you could yourself.”
“But…” In cold panic he looked to Mother and Father; their jaws went slowly slack. “But… it’s done.”
“Done?” Radziweiller repeated at quintuple the volume. “Done is the single word he says, as if any syllable could free him of his responsibilities. Done how, you nincomporpoise? You belched and dangling sloth gizzard. You suppurating onion of the fens. Somebody, I beg, save my schedule from this upside down pinched pumpkin minge!”
“How else was I supposed to do it!?” Crosscup sputtered, throwing his hands toward the ground. They nearly came off. “Was it not clever to use a man as a torch? Is this not the kind of mind you would want by your side?” He tapped his own skull as if trying to make a dead tortoise walk.
“Naturally I have to spell it out for you,” Radziweiller said, touching his own lapels, succeeding masterfully in his posture correction. “The ichor.” Mother and Father gasped. Crosscup wanted to scream at them for giving it away before he had a chance to lie, but then he saw Radziweiller’s hungry teeth arranged into what could only be called a merchant’s bite. He already knew beyond any doubt the cleric could conjure.
“What about-“
“The ichor? I can see from here that is not the regulated amount set down and poured out, drop by drop, by the order. Even if I couldn’t, you were seen. The first thing I built in my city was its web of eyes. Always am I fed information, from every direction, the whispers in my ears guaranteed to be truth on penalty of double death. What do you think all these fools are for!?” He waved at his assistants, who only dispersed momentarily before clustering around the principal ghoul once more.
“You gave me no choice and no tools! I did what I had to so your order would be seen to completion! Is that such a failure?”
“Tauntalagmite will be the judge of you,” Radziweiller said brusquely, before adding in an opposite manner, “you sprig of rapehazel tossed to season a caul fat gag in the iron depths of a pauper’s chamber cauldron. She is arrived. Only her disruption improves my schedule. Look upon her and weep dust as ye are judged.”
That was when they heard the sound that had nearly made a grabbler’s hair fall from his body like straw. It was a small sound of hers, made by stepping down from one shelf of rock to another, barely the cobbles in her gray garden. To the ghouls it was the chorus of the hell that ruled them, the only kindness they knew, what occasionally let them feel by carrying them in a netted pouch of rasping blue flame.
Perhaps the glow they saw through the haze of smoke and death fog was that pouch, on her belt: the only item of clothing the goddess ever wore. She might need her body freely displayed at any point, to tempt one of the Goodly like her precious oldest thing, or to swallow the disobedient via one opening or another or another. Her acids would teach them a lesson. Or dissolve them. Some said the dissolute were the lucky.
Crosscup saw her in passing at his initiation into the order. It was just the side of her head. She acknowledged his graduating class with an indirect nod, never stopping on her way to her true destination. The attention made him feel like he had a heart again. So did that glow, but only in that he felt it might break.
“Please,” he quietly prayed as the light moved directly over them, “see me.” Clearest was what they saw of her: but one leg from the knee down. It pierced the haze and struck Toeteld nearby, to the cheers of the populace come out to almost see her parading by. Slender and feminine in shape, the skin was a slick purple wrapping around her calves, hidden on the front by wild orange armored plates festooned with craggy nodules and serrated sawing spines. Clawed toes gripped the rock like weak cheese. Then she lifted off to her next step; the light on her belt went with her.
The cleric jolted back to what was left of his senses. His frightened hands probed his robes and body. If there had been a punishment enacted, it was not obvious.
“Hah!” he jeered, pointing at Radziweiller like his entire tunic was a stain on his tunic. “You see!? She knows I do only what must be done!”
“As does that,” said a sneering Radziweiller, pointing himself, “you curd-toothed doe rider.”
“Junior, your stick!” Father tried to warn him, but it was too late by the time he looked. Always a second too late. The carved symbol atop it, the very emblem of their pestilent empress, had become more active. Inside the miniature skull, bridging its sockets, was an endless band of marching centipede. In order to deliver Crosscup’s punishment it found its ends.
None of them saw what it looked like out of its eternal routine, it flung from the skull so quick. Barely any time had passed before it was safe and sound in its new head. Crosscup dropped to his knees and screamed. Not in agony. He didn’t have any. In torment. The symbol of his master circled in and out of the tunnel of his inner face, over the bridge of his nose.
It shredded his brain surface until there was room enough to comfortably move, taking away a chunk of memories, none of them the miserable ones. Gripping it did nothing but temporarily injure his hands. That was no bug. It was Tauntalagmite’s magic chiseled into a figurine. She made them to outlast souls living and gray.
His eyes were gone, replaced, unable to reform while the centipede marched. She had judged, without seeing, without bending down to look at him with her clustered pupils, without smiling with those sickle teeth rooted in her lips, sewing her smile shut so she didn’t instinctively devour everything she worked so hard to cultivate. Not even the empty country was this black.
“Anyone?” he asked pitifully. “Help me, please. I just wanted. That’s all.” Hands were laid on his body, but they were not helpers. A swarm of what had to be assistants viciously tore away his cleric’s robes and robbed him of his ichor, his abandoned staff. “Mother? Father?”
“We’re here son,” Mother said when the assistants moved away and let them close. Father helped him to his feet, cradled his possible child’s head against his shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” Crosscup whimpered. “I don’t remember you. But… I need you. I can’t do it on my own.”
“We remember our Junior,” Father said. “We remembered, and now you’re here.” Together, they escorted him toward the real buildings of Toeteld, to the gray rocks that could hold watertight their poverty of purse and modest income of family.
“Are we supposed to go somewhere in particular, Mr. Architect?” Mother asked a smugly watching Radziweiller, as if he saw cockroaches pulling a stretcher.
“Anywhere you go is where you belong,” he told them. “That’s how I designed it.” No more words passed between them. When they stopped moving it was somewhere confined. Crosscup couldn’t see it, but he felt it crumple around him. Perhaps just a crevice in the rock, where his centipede would feel right at home. None of them were speaking, except, he noticed, Mother and Father were. She was knitting. The click of her needles was so distinct from the tap of the hundred bug legs on his brain bones. Father was brushing the dust from something. A coat. They could all share it as a blanket.
Not a cleric any longer. Not sighted. Lower than he started in death. Yet. There was a tranquility now that he had failed as harshly as a man could fail. Time was just time now. No one’s rigid schedule could deform and squeeze into that hole turned hovel.
Since he couldn’t see, all the images came from his imagination. Nothing contradicted them, meaning his ravings just might be memories. Finally he was free of the hope. Crosscup had never, and would never, lead by example. Only be taken by the hand and led by his senile Mother and his dead Father.
Comfortable gloom settled in not just there, but in all the slums of Toeteld. Castle Coffinnail’s guards, once lined up, were ordered to treat everyone else in the walls as their fellow enforcers, promised a bed in the barracks and two squares of dead bread and gray gravy a day if they kept the rabble to a reasonable volume.
The style of the demon gates had been recreated in a decoration spiraling up Radziweiller Spire, symbolizing the transformation from human floodgate of demonic commerce to lofty and clever grievances that did climb toward the light they could never grasp.
A former sailor on a noose went over the edge of a newly established waterfall, runoff from the factory, his rope catching on a crag so that the torrent would forever pour over his head before its sloppy drop into the abyss.
“Never let me go my briny sweet.”
Finger bones were rolling in wagers of Bonecushion alleys, to learn if unauthorized fortunes could be made, seeing as the chance for unauthorized buildings had come and gone. As the haze of a lower fire and flood was dispelled, those privileged gray so near the light that they appeared thinner than silk were the ones to clearly witness the first strides of their Ghastly goddess Tauntalagmite.
But there was a haste to her. This was not an introductory inspection. A shame, that she had no time to dawdle, to disguise herself as one of her subjects and sample the gray grogs of the taverns or the street walkers who still remembered how to make the noises as if they were alive.
Toeteld was Toeteld now. It would always be there for her to return to, to sit and brood on, to breathe on in order to watch her gray dead performatively wilt so she could feel like she was tormenting the surface world her nature denied her. One piece of it she could have, to keep, to scratch, to lick with cat’s backward tongue, to press and crack and watch, to drug, harass through her obedient demon of sleep, to pale and blind with shadow, to have and to hold.
She knew it was a grabbler, and when she was close enough she knew it was Beocroak.
Her footfalls were impossible to ignore. The man refused to look back, down. Keeping his wits about him just as much as his cloak of bees, Beocroak leapt with all his might, from outcropping to ledge to outcropping, ordering his weapons to keep him aloft as long as possible.
Possibility vanished as natural light intensified. Just as his hide felt genuine warmth, the colony lost its presence, invisibly forced to retreat to the innards of Wormskoll. Beocroak was dropped. None had ever mastered grabbling the air itself. His violent smack against a jutting of rock was cushioned only by layers of dust blown in from the entrance, too few to be called soil. He had to steal his breath back and ignore his bruised bones in order to rise, only making it as far as a kneel.
He wished his senses were deceived, that he was concussed like a lesser man and could believe his situation was not as dire as it appeared. But there was no lie in his eyes or his ears. Tauntalagmite drew closer each moment, evidenced further by his fine hairs beginning to actually scare out of their mooring. Just before she pierced him with wicked claw he would be the image of fear: a naked and blind ratling.
Beocroak reached toward the light, skin attuned enough even through armoring layers of callus to sense the slightest increase in heat just from the outstretched limb. The brook of light distributing through the lines of his palm promised and tantalized. Out of reach. The protuberance of stone upon which he’d fallen might as well have been an island in a boiling sea. Too far to fall. Too far to climb. No living thing roared to would reach him in time to assist. Only one being, the most remote possibility, could conceivably help the sort of man who was never supposed to need it.
His upstretched hand became the grabbler roost, the parapet of knuckled authority, but then it softened, glided into a new humble shape, a sprout asking for rain so it might ask tearfully the next time. She could be behind those clouds, he knew. She could be close enough to answer. He prayed aloud.
“Hear me Hexaclete! I am Beocroak of the grabblers, of Lazuli Pawlm, ward of your buried sister Gaw Digi-Tally! I have drunk the waters of Tallybirth. I have known the power, the man version, of controlling life. And I have failed it, by not using it for the benefit of all.
My failures have sunk me, and this responsibility I accept, but not this consequence. I wish to yet live! Please, save me from dying underground! I plead! Anything you ask that I can provide will be joyously given! Save me my Goodly traits, my goddess! Please! Take me from this wretched hole!”
Behind and below him, the great tyrant arm of Tauntalagmite snaked through the green tunnels of patchy brick where the ghouls sipped their drinks, spitting them out at the glorious sight of her purple skin, the color of perfected bruise, and her knobby orange armor, the hue of halcyon hysteria.
Her bones were bugs of infinite segment, allowing the arm to twist and turn and crackle as it made its way up to the last chasm stranding the grabbler. Anger quickened her grip. He dared pray to Hexaclete in the underbelly. For that he would be swallowed back down, reemerge only when he was fully transformed into a gastrolith golem at the end of the age.
Behind and below him, only just, the mist broke and disgorged her rearing digits, her sharp snakes, her fanged vermin rakes, her rough talons that so abused and overturned the oldest thing for further carnal torture. Her palm would be the worst death for Beocroak the grabbler, the dark lines of which foretold the only decision left to the gray dead: when to accept hopelessness, when to give in, when to fade drowning from the world.
But, proclaimed the shining lines of an opposing palm, only if his prayers, which he repeated stalwartly even as the vile hand’s shadow absorbed his, went unanswered. Through the clouds, just as through the mist, this time with the urgency of loving pity, came a colossal hand of bronzed gold. Gleaming nail beds were the crescent moons of starless night skies: the narrowed eyes of knowing gods who would never do more than chastise indulgence.
“Hexaclete!” Beocroak wept and welcomed, reaching out further, knuckles cracking in yearning, shoulder popping with the breathy lust for life itself.
Both hands converged on the pinnacle of Beocroak’s shortcomings. Both attempted to grab. For a moment he could feel the full brunt of their auras spiraling around each other, around him, as a cyclone of sainthood and villainy. Dream horizons of beatific and sundered lands. Philosophies of clouded-swaddled sun and stark eclipse. Rainbow fruit doves and hooked tapeworms with a taste for their own tails.
Hexaclete was the victor. It was her palm in which Beocroak found himself, soft as dream ground, firm as the crystal tears that sometimes fell from the petrified Gaw. The Goodly goddess’s arm retracted from the cave, back to the sky, perhaps allowing him to witness the magnificent civilization that did cast the shadow called Toeteld.
Tauntalagmite was the greater player of games however. She had not lost this contest. It had been forfeited to play one on a grander scale. The grabbler was nothing in the face of the offense, of a Goodly-Goodly daring to stick her hand where it did not belong to her. The Ghastly claw had curled back, allowed her to have her prize, so that she would not be free to defend herself.
Queen of infested skulls, lash unto the light, cat o’ nine scoring the rocky ceiling of the hidden underworld, Tauntalagmite returned the insult ten thousand fold, arm extending into the searing light of day. On her two nastiest claws there welled droplets of violet venom. A supine flick stole lines of scratch.
Like an eel after a successful strike, mouth overfull with rewards too great to swallow, Tauntalagmite’s steaming arm was sucked back down into Wormskoll Cave. Beocroak couldn’t see the shallow slices in Hexaclete’s arm through the fingers cradling him, but he felt the strike through her, as deeper gouges in his gelatinous soul.
Hexaclete’s hand, its scratches, and its prize slipped above the clouds, putting an end to the folly of the four thousand, who would never attain that fullest number. The grabbler had escaped, body unscathed in terms of what could be healed. There was nowhere safer above, on, or below the continent than the hand in which he was held. No greater master he had ever known. She had drawn him from the hole as a sword is from its scabbard; he would fulfill his prayer and be her weapon against the Ghastly forces. She had only to hold his point level with the quivering throat of the enemy.
Beocroak felt a Goodly tremble.
Blaine Arcade 