Deadhouse Gates

'Capemoths, the harbingers, the eaters of rotting flesh. It's the nectar of decay for them, the rose bloating under the sun. Hood delivered us a promise in the Round at Unta, and it's just been fulfilled.'

Baudin climbed to the rim of the depression, her words following him up. Orange-tinged by the rising sun, he turned and looked down on her. 'So much for your river of blood,' he said in a low, amused voice.

Dizziness washed through her. Her legs buckled and she abruptly sat down, jarring her tailbone on the hard bedrock. She glanced over to see Heboric lying huddled an arm-span away. The soles of his moccasins had worn through, revealing ravaged, glistening flesh. Was he already dead? As good as. 'Do something, Baudin.'

He said nothing.

'How far to the coast?' she asked.

'Doubt it would matter,' he replied after a moment. 'The boat was to have patrolled for three or so nights, no longer. We're at least four days from the coast and getting weaker by the hour.'

'And the next water?'

'About seven hours' walk. More like fourteen, the shape we're in.'

'You seemed spry enough last night!' she snapped. 'Running off to collect Heboric. You don't seem as parched as us, either-'

'I drink my own piss.'

'You what?'

He grunted. 'You heard me.'

'Not a good enough answer,' she decided after thinking a moment. 'And don't tell me you're eating your own shit, too. It still wouldn't explain things. Have you made a pact with some god, Baudin?'

'You think doing something like that's a simple task? Hey, Queen of Dreams, save me and I'll serve you. Tell me, how many of your prayers have been answered? Besides, I ain't got faith in anything but me.'

'So you haven't given up yet?'

She thought he wouldn't answer, but after a long minute in which she'd begun to sink into herself, he startled her awake with a blunt 'No.'

He removed his pack, then skidded back down the slope. Something in the able economy of his movements filled her with sudden dread. Calls me plump, eyes me like a piece of flesh — not to use like Beneth did, but more as if he's eyeing his next meal. Heart hammering, she watched for the first move, a hungry flash in his small, bestial eyes.

Instead he crouched down beside Heboric, pulling the unconscious man onto his back. He leaned close to listen for breath, then sat back, sighing.

'He's dead?' Felisin asked. 'You do the skinning — I won't eat tattooed skin no matter how hungry I am.'

Baudin glanced at her momentarily, but said nothing, returning to his examination of the ex-priest.

'Tell me what you're doing,' she finally said.

'He lives, and that alone may save us.' He paused. 'How far you fall, girl, matters nothing to me. Just keep your thoughts to yourself.'

She watched him peel Heboric's rotting clothing away, revealing the astonishing weave of tattooing beneath. Baudin then moved to keep his own shadow behind him before bending close to study the dark patterning on the ex-priest's chest. He was looking for something.

'A raised nape,' she said dully, 'the ends pulled down and almost touching, almost a circle. It surrounds a pair of tusks.'

He stared, eyes narrowing.

'Fener's own mark, the one that's sacred,' she said. 'It's what you're looking for, isn't it? He's excommunicated, yet Fener remains within him. That much is obvious by those living tattoos.'

'And the mark?' he asked coolly. 'How did you come to know such things?'

'A lie I spun for Beneth,' she explained as the man resumed his examination of the ex-priest's crowded flesh. 'I needed Heboric to support it. I needed details of the cult. He told me. You mean to call on the god.'

'Found it,' he said.

'Now what? How do you reach another man's god, Baudin? There's no keyhole in that mark, no sacred lock you can pick.'

He jerked at that, his eyes glittering as they bore into her own.

She didn't blink, revealed nothing.

'How do you think he lost his hands?' Felisin asked innocently.

'He was a thief, once.'

'He was. But it was the excommunication that took them. There was a key, you see. The High Priest's warren to his god. Tattooed on the palm of his right hand. Held to the sacred mark — hand to chest, basically — as simple as a salute. I spent days healing from Beneth's beating, and Heboric talked. Told me so many things — I should have forgotten all of it, you know. Drinking durhang tea by the gallon, but that brew just dissolved the surface, that filter that says what's important, what isn't. His words poured in unobstructed, and stayed. You can't do it, Baudin.'

He raised Heboric's right forearm, studied the glistening, flushed stump in the growing light.

'You can never go back,' she said. 'The priesthood made sure of that. He isn't what he was, and that's that.'

With a silent snarl Baudin pulled the forearm around to push the stump against the sacred mark.

The air screamed. The sound battered them, flung them both down to scrabble, claw, mindlessly dig into the rock — away. . away from the pain. Away! There was such agony in that shriek, it descended like fire, darkening the sky overhead, spreading hairline fissures through the bedrock, the cracks spreading outward from under Heboric's motionless body.

Blood streaming from her ears, Felisin tried to crawl away, up the trembling slope. The fissures — Heboric's tattoos had blossomed out from his body, leapt the unfathomable distance from skin to stone — swept under her, turning the rock into something slick and greasy under her palms.

Everything had begun to shake. Even the sky seemed to twist, yanked down into itself as if a score of invisible hands had reached through unseen portals, grasping the fabric of the world with cold, destructive rage.

The scream was unending. Rage and unbearable pain meshed together like twin strands in an ever-tightening rope. Closing in a noose around her neck, the sound blocked the outside world — its air, its light.

Something struck the ground, the bedrock under her shuddering, throwing her upward. She came back down hard on one elbow. The bones of her arm shivered like the blade of a sword. The glare of the sun dimmed as Felisin fought for air. Her wide eyes caught a glimpse of something beyond the basin, lifting ponderously from the plain in a heaving cloud of dust. Two-toed, a fur-snarled hoof, too large for her to fully grasp, rising up, pulled skyward into a midnight gloom.

The tattoo had leapt from stone to the air itself, a woadstained web growing in crazed, jerking blots, snapping outward in all directions.

She could not breathe. Her lungs burned. She was dying, sucked airless into the void that was a god's scream.

Sudden silence, out beyond the ringing echoes in her skull. Air flooded her, cold and bitter, yet sweeter than anything she had known. Coughing, spitting bile, Felisin pushed herself onto her hands and knees, shakily raised her head.

The hoof was gone. The tattoo hung like an after-image across the entire sky, slowly fading as she watched. Movement pulled her gaze down, to Baudin. He'd been on his knees, hands cupping the sides of his head. He now slowly straightened, tears of blood filling the lines of his face.

The ground under her feeling strangely fluid, Felisin tottered to her feet. She looked down, blinking dumbly at the mosaic of limestone. The swirling furred patterns of the tattoo still trembled, rippling outward from her moccasins as she struggled for balance. The cracks, the tattoos. . they go down, and down, all the way down. As if I'm standing atop a bed of league-deep nails, each nail kept upright only by the others surrounding it. Have you come from the Abyss, Fener? It's said your sacred warren borders Chaos itself. Fener? Are you among us now? She turned to meet Baudin's eyes. They were dull with shock, though