Fugitives of Chaos

I took one step forward, then another. I held the dress up.

She cocked her head to one side, perhaps puzzled, or perhaps feeling a greater anger beginning to build.

She did not reach for the dress. With one white finger, she reached toward my face. I closed my eyes when she touched me. I don't know what I expected. I expected pain. I expected her to poke an eye out.

She caressed my cheek very gently with a fingertip. I opened my eyes. She lifted a drop of water from my cheek with a fingertip, brought the finger to her lip, and kissed it No, she did not kiss her finger. She was tasting the drop from my face.

I do not know how she could pick one teardrop out of all the rainwater on my face, and I do not know how I knew that was what she had done. But I was sure.

Gently, she lifted the dress from my arms with her other hand. She smoothed the fabric with her hands, and smiled at it, a smile of long-lost memory, wistful and sad.

Still moving with slow gentleness, she reached out with her hand again and took my shoulder. Her fingers dug into my shoulder cruelly. I winced, but did not cry out.

Like a second head of a two-headed giant, her scorpion tail now rose over her shoulder, pointed its stinger blade at my heart, and drew back.

I said, 'I am sorry for your son. I am sorry I didn't love him. I am sorry that he died for me. But I did not kill him. None of these people on this boat killed him.'

There was a blur of motion as the scorpion tail shot forward. I closed my eyes, expecting death. I felt the breeze of rapid motion near my face. Her hand was still digging into my shoulder.

I opened my eyes again, and wished I hadn't. The sting was now hanging four inches in front of my eyes.

I could see every little detail in the way the sting was constructed. The barb had many little backwards-pointing hairs epoxied together into a single shaft. I saw the mucous membranes surrounding the orifice where the sting retracted and extended from the poison sac. I could smell the heady smell of the venom. It smelled a bit like turpentine, or almonds.

I heard a voice. I am not sure if I heard it in my ears, or in my heart.

Who, daughter, who?

I said aloud, 'Will you promise to spare the people aboard this ship?'

Who killed your bridegroom, daughter?

The fingers dug more deeply into my shoulder. The long red nails drew blood from my flesh.

I said, 'Ow! Promise me. Uh—Mother… ? Promise me, please—ouch! Ow!'

A look of impatience came over her face. I could see the tension in the tail rise to a peak, and…

'Mavors! Mavors sent his bird. But it wasn't his fault. Grendel was about to kill Colin, and he…'

She took her hand from my shoulder, raised one finger, and laid it softly across my lips.

Hush, daughter

With another great surge and rustle of snaky folds, her head went swooping away from me, and train upon train of serpent-mass rose and slithered and folded after her. She did not move like a sidewinder, but, rather, she undulated in an up-and-down sine wave, hypnotic.

Echidna moved away. Chairs and tables, pillars and posts, were torn up and thrown aside in the wake of her passage.

She sine-waved out into the storm, and crossed the wreckage of the deck.

Now she was at the rail of the ship, and her size had in-creased by tenfold. She seemed also to be surrounded with a shadow that grew and grew darker as she grew.

Echidna turned and looked over her shoulder at me. Her hair lifted up in a weightless cloud, as if she were already underwater again, and drew a veil across her chins and lips.

Over top of that veil, I could see her eyes, her cold, mad, crazed eyes. In those eyes there was a look of softness.

None of the other women wept for him.

Like an avalanche falling from a sea cliff into the sea, with her graceful hands sweeping back in a swan dive behind her, Echidna fell into the sea. The train of her body surged up in a writhing mass and unwound in midair to follow her into the waters.

After she was gone, I fell to my knees and put my face in my hands, and wept, and wept. These were merely tears of fear, coming now, senseless, now that the cause for fear had passed.

5.

The rain hammered down, less and less.

I looked up when I heard a noise. The rain was getting weaker. I saw a silvery ship in the waters below me, shining.

I heard quick footsteps behind me. I turned just as Vanity, her red hair all plastered down by rain, and sopping wet, threw her arms around me and gave me a hug.

Colin was a few steps behind her.

Vanity sobbed into my shoulder, 'You're alive!'

I said, 'Where are Victor and Quentin?'

Colin said, 'Victor is lowering a lifeboat. Quentin is with him.'

I said, 'And what the hell are you doing here? My orders were for you to change shape and run away.'