“Are you all right?” Kit asked.
“Had better days,” Marcus said. “Had worse, for that. If you’ve still got that salve in your pack, I’d take a couple fingers’ worth.”
Kit hurried back into the trees and returned with the pale leather pack, one of the few objects that hadn’t yet rotted in the jungle. Marcus opened the stone jar and scooped a double finger through the yellow-white salve. It burned like fire when it touched the wound, but it would keep the maggots out.
For weeks, they had battled the land, following animal trails that widened for a hundred feet and then vanished as if they’d never been, avoiding Southling hunters who haunted the nights, and spending as much time scraping for food and water as searching for the reliquary. Kit’s face had lost all its cushion, the skin growing gaunt against the bone. Marcus was fairly sure he’d lost a tenth of his own body’s weight, and he still had a bit of potbelly. The indignities of not dying young.
“I believe I’ve heard of these,” Kit said, staring at the animal. “Kaskimar, they’re called where I came from, but … they were much smaller.”
The actor reached out with his walking stick to prod the corpse.
“Don’t touch it,” Marcus said, a breath too late.
The black eyes clicked open and a paw lashed out. The walking stick flew out of Kit’s hand, cracking against a tree trunk. Kit fell back with a curse, and the beast closed its eyes again.
“Sorry,” Marcus said. “Should have said before. Did it get you?”
“I’m afraid so,” Kit said ruefully. “I may need needle and thread.”
“That deep?” Marcus said, levering himself to his feet. “Let me see—”
“No,” Kit said sharply. “Stay back. It isn’t safe. Just throw me the pack and then get away.”
“Get away?”
Kit nodded, licked his lips, and winced. Marcus thought he saw something tiny and black skitter across Kit’s arm, and his flesh crawled a little.
“It’s the spiders,” Kit said. “There’s too many of them to keep track of. It won’t be safe for you.”
Marcus tossed the pack to Kit’s side and made his way to the other side of the dying beast. The shaking was already less. Kit grunted in pain and started pulling their few supplies out and onto the ground before him.
“How bad are the bites from those things?” Marcus asked
“Hmm? Oh. They raise welts. Itch for a few days.”
The beast took a deep, shuddering breath and didn’t draw another. In a few minutes, Marcus guessed, it would be safe to retrieve his sword.
“Hardly seems fair that they bite you,” Marcus said. “Disloyal, somehow.”
“I don’t believe they know who I am. What I am, for that. I doubt they have minds themselves, even so much as a normal spider might. They act as the mark of the goddess’s authority and the channel for her gifts.”
“Which is why we’re killing her,” Marcus said. “So her power and gifts all go boneless.”
“Yes.”
“Still seems rude of them to bite you.”
“Annoying, yes. But that isn’t why they’re unsafe. I’m using the last of the salve.”
“Use it if you need it. Might as well use nothing as not enough. Why unsafe, then?”
Kit took a sharp breath, his hand pressed to the the wound in his leg. His face paled and the red-black blood that ran between his fingers might have been thick with clots or something less pleasant. A yellow frog, long-legged and shining like a river stone, leaped onto the dying beast’s head, then off again. The animal didn’t stir.
“One might … God, but this does sting, doesn’t it? Ah. One might get inside you.”
“
Kit looked up and managed a smile.
“I wasn’t born with them,” he said. “If I hadn’t been chosen for the temple, I’d be herding goats in the Sinir Kushku today instead of this.”
“Better off too,” Marcus said. “How do they get inside you?”
Kit fumbled on the ground. The black roll of silk thread had a fine bone needle in it, and Kit held it between his teeth, talking around it as he found the free end of the thread. It slurred his words, but not so badly that Marcus couldn’t understand him.
“For me, it was the ritual initiation. I spent five years learning before my mind was ready, or that’s what the high priest told me, and I believed him. I suppose I still do, for that. I can’t imagine how unpleasant it would be to have the goddess enter you if you were unprepared. It only took one. I cut my skin just inside the elbow, and the high priest cut his thumb and pressed it to my wound. That was all. I felt it come in me, felt it crawling through my veins, and then the next day, there were more. Everywhere, and I knew I was changing. I remember embracing it at the time, but we were always warned that the goddess would break an unready mind. Even as it was, there was a day my brothers had to strap me down to keep me from trying to open my skin and let them out.”
“I think I’ll stay with the usual empty prayers and overpriced candles,” Marcus said. “And that could happen to anyone? And when I say anyone, I mean that could happen to me?”
Kit made a little grunt of satisfaction, holding the needle in one hand and gently rolling the thread through its eye. The tiny, sharp shard of bone danced between his fingers, seeming to fly in the dimness like a cunning man’s conjure. With a sigh, he took it between finger and thumb and turned to the work of sewing his skin closed. Tending your own wounds like that was unpleasant, but sometimes the times required it.
“They wouldn’t intend to. It isn’t as though they seek for it,” Kit said. “But if you were unlucky, one might find its way into your blood. A cut would be the simplest, but any path under your skin would do, I think. Eyes. Mouth. Less mentionable paths. I haven’t made the experiment, but that’s what they told me in the temple, and it seems plausible.”
“So it’s never happened?”
“Once,” Kit said, “when I was very new to the world. It was an accident. I was in Borja, and I was drunk. I got into a fight. Not a serious thing; fists, not knives. But I split his lip, and then later on, he bit me. They decided a demon had possessed him, and they threw him on a bonfire.”
“Seems extreme.”
“I convinced them it was called for.”
Kit said the words lightly, but his closed expression spoke of shame. He drove the bone needle through his skin again, pulling the dark thread until the wound narrowed. Tiny red dots marked his hands and the skin of his leg. Spider bites.
Marcus stepped forward, but not too close. Flies were drinking at the corners of the beast’s closed eyes, and he shooed them away. The animal seemed, if anything, heavier in death. Marcus rolled it onto its wide back. His sword stuck out of its chest at an angle, thick with gore and insects. So little time, and the jungle was already hard at work reclaiming the animal, remaking it, folding it into the merciless cycle of eater and eaten. He took hold of the hilt, braced his foot, and heaved. The sword came free on the third try. He squatted on the ground, rubbing the worst of the blood off with moss and old leaves. In a perfect world, he’d have been able to wash it with a real cloth and oil it after. He considered the beast’s body, shrugged, and ran the flat of the blade across the slick black fur. There would be some body oils in the pelt. It wasn’t the most dignified way to treat a fallen enemy, but it wasn’t the worst thing he’d done to the animal that day. He put the sword back into its rotting leather scabbard.
Kit finished his gruesome task and tried standing. It looked awkward and painful. Marcus felt himself making the calculations. If Kit’s wound went septic, getting back to friendly territory would be a hard thing. Kit could likely talk any Southlings they came across into giving them aid, providing the man was still coherent and not lost in a fever. If it was all up to Marcus, their chances would be worse.
And even then, there was only so much longer they could go on before the landscape consumed them. They would become another cautionary tale to excite the interest of explorers and idiots. Any man who cared about his own life would turn north now and hope he hit seawater before his strength gave out. Only that wasn’t the job.
“We can make camp here,” Marcus said.
“And spend all night fighting ants and scavengers?”
“We can make camp a way down from here. Maybe find a little creek.”
“I think that sounds wise,” Kit said. “Let me get my staff.”
While Kit limped into the underbrush to retrieve the fallen stick, Marcus knelt by the dead animal. It was
