Vengeance, My Heart is a work of serialized fiction. Jump to key story links to read earlier content.
It came as a dervish, rising up from the alkali flats bathed in a wash of perpetual twilight; at first a flea on the horizon and growing larger as it drew closer. The shape was largely black with a touch of rich burgundy and loose cloth flapping in the wind, tassels dancing as gravity pulled downward against the wind. The air played tricks with sound, carrying over the sands a firm, but steady crunch of hooves grinding lime on hard pan.
It would be foolish to hail the newcomer, to wish the visitor well, for thieves walked these lands. The pilgrim and his kin had been warned about this, as they had been warned about the ruins near the aged well by which they sojourned. He didn’t issue a command to hide, for there was no place to hide in this barren place save for the well itself, which might be worse than the fluttering black ghost moving their direction on a pale horse. The pilgrim hoped the outrider would see their threadbare robes and worn, twisted-hemp sandals and understand it was custom for pilgrims to give most of their possessions away before their journey. He uttered a whispered curse for not waiting until the next caravan of faithful made the trek. He would have had the benefit of safety in numbers and then perhaps his son—
He let that thought go. What was done was done and wishing for something else was clinging to another illusion to shed when they reached Absalom. If — he reminded himself, not when — they arrived. If they reached the oasis city of this wretched land. He had already begun the process of removing his son from memory.
Through the seas of eternity, the black-cloaked figure came, the blowing silt occasionally blurring the edges of the wasteland vision, washing away the form with the help of the heat rising from the parched plain. They would know soon enough if it was friend, foe or otherwise.
The pilgrim and his family were exhausted from hours of tears and entreaties at the mouth of the ruins after long hours and days traversing these bleak lands. No matter the breadth of their promises in prayers, nor the depth of their shouts, they had yet to receive a response from the dark interior.
They sat there, mute, as the dervish dancer floated to them, nearly close enough to touch, and passed without stopping. The horse hung its head low against the blowing dust, nearly nuzzling its own hooves, its breath coming in labored pulls. The stranger, with head wrapped in crimson, seemed oblivious to the family gathered. Instead, they stared through leaded glasses to something far off in the ocean of sand that mirrored that from which the stranger had emerged.
And the stranger would have passed without incident if the pilgrim’s daughter hadn’t forgotten the honor of her clan and let a sob escape from writhing, tight lips while the drifter cut the space between them and the well-house. The rider drew the horse to a stop, and it snorted in response, anxious to be on, anticipating grain and sweetwater at the end of their journey. The pilgrim reminded himself to beat his daughter after the stranger had moved on. He had warned her every day since they started their journey to Absalom that it was best to greet travelers with silence along the Old Canaan Road, lest she bring unwanted attention to them on this journey. Attention that might result in death. Or worse.
“Is there a problem?” a voice issued from within the waves of the shifting gauze. A woman, which was of some relief to the pilgrim. Chances were less that rape would be involved with the stranger’s arrival, but one could never be too certain. The voice was firm, solid, but easy on the ear.
The pilgrim was about to assure the stranger there was nothing the family couldn’t solve on their own, though he knew it to be a lie. His wife spoke before he could.
“Our son,” she said, the frenzy rising with the pitch of her voice as she spoke. “Our son, he’s within.” She pointed to the open doorway of the derelict building a stone’s throw away leading to the inner workings of the well. The pilgrim promised in silence to beat each of the women in his group later and might have cuffed his wife right then and there if her lack of propriety had not caught him off guard.
The stranger looked over at the building. “Were you not warned before making this journey? Did no one tell you about the places of the Old Ones and the dangers they contain.”
Before anyone could do anything foolish, the pilgrim jumped in. “We had heard tales, but my son is a hard-headed fool. He said he was weary of the sand and wind, and had just wanted respite. We begged him not to go in, but he ignored us and went through the door, insisting he just wanted to get the thick of the dust off out of the wind. He promised he would only go inside the entrance, not a step further. Claimed it was all exaggeration to scare pilgrims and to keep us from finding lost treasures. I reminded him that all pilgrims are to forsake worldly things, but he was never as dedicated to the Pilgrimage as the rest of the family.” Nor were the pilgrim’s wife and daughter, but they cleaved to the clan’s traditions — when a man decided to go on Pilgrimage, his family joined him, as was the Law.
The sound of a rusted door opening came from the blowing sands and the pilgrim could just make out a phantasm of dark wings fluttering to them.
A large crow with eyes like ice appeared out of the scouring haze of winds and perched atop the stranger’s shoulder, studying the pilgrim and his family.
Seeing those matching sets of eyes gave the pilgrim a cold shudder that slipped ice daggers dancing down his spine. He took an involuntary step back from the stranger.
“He should have listened to the warnings. The stories are true enough,” the stranger said, ignoring the bird. She pointed to a still-intact wall of the ruins. “Did he also ignore the message?”
Someone had painted a warning in tar-black paint, but the ever-shifting sands had already obliterated fragments.
D NG R:
Lenn’an Nes !
Do N t Ent r!
The pilgrim offered only a simple truth with a halfhearted shrug, eyes bowed towards his filthy feet in shame. “I’m sorry, mistress. We are simple folk. We can’t read.”
The stranger shook her head. It wasn’t clear to the pilgrim why. Reading was for people who had the time for scholarship, not the dying, working poor. Everyone knew this. It was known.
The stranger seemed poised to leave the pilgrims to their troubles, tensing up as if to spur on the horse, but stopped when the crow on her shoulder called out. It was a harsh sound, a scolding.
Her shoulders slumped in surrender, uttering a sigh.
She dismounted, kicking up clouds of powdered salt with her boots as she landed, forming miniature dust devils in the wind. Aside from the flutter of a pair of black wings to maintain balance, the crow kept his perch on her shoulder while she dismounted. She lifted leaden eyepieces away from her eyes and pulled down the dark wine cloth protecting her face from the salt, winds, and sands.
The pilgrim noted the black tattoo on her pale china cheek. He had no name for what the mark meant, only that it marked her as something other — something that moved in the spaces between the world he knew and whatever lay beyond its edges. Her lapis eyes were a perfect match to the crow’s, burning with cold fire within. Her hair remained wrapped against the elements, but ebon locks escaped the confines of the headscarf to lay in contrast to her fair flesh around her face.
Her hands slipped from the folds of her garb and came to rest at her sides. The pilgrim saw then what he had not seen before — the holster low on her hip, the leather worn dark with handling, and the black grip of the revolver seated within it. A long-barreled thing, old, the kind of old that meant it had passed through hands before hers and would pass through hands after. She drew it from the holster without ceremony and held it loosely at her side.
He had expected iron or steel. The barrel was neither — it was the color of the space between stars, a black so complete it seemed to pull the thin light of the perpetual gloam toward it, swallowing what little there was without reflection, without gleam. The pilgrim had carried a weapon in the Fellen Wars. He knew what a revolver was, what it did, the particular democracy of its violence. But looking at this one made the back of his throat close. It was the wrong kind of black. The kind that felt less like a color and more like an opening.
Her cold eyes looked over the family of pilgrims, each one in turn, drawing their eyes to hers.
“How long has he been inside?”
“Time is so hard in this pla—”
“Make your best guess then,” she interrupted. “Hours? Days?”
The pilgrim felt his guts turn sour as he considered the time his son had been within the structure.
“A day? Maybe two? No more than that, I am certain. There is no sun here, only sand and shadow. This, you know.”
The stranger tried to hide what she thought about the information, but the pilgrim didn’t like what he could pick out from the depths of her eyes.
“You understand, I can’t promise your son will be whole. That is, if I can find him at all,” she explained. “It might be that he’d be better off having died and it may not be a gift to bring him back to you. He may be completely enthralled already. In which case, he may suffer more for having been brought back to you.”
It was the pilgrim’s turn to forget honor as he grasped onto hope, however meager a meal it made.
“We understand!” he exclaimed, his voice catching on the wind and carried to the soft silhouette of far away mountains breaking the irregularity of the alkali flats on which they stood. “Please do what you can for my fool of a son. But we have nothing to offer you save prayers.”
The stranger waved off the air of transaction, her mouth twisted as if the offer were like biting into a bad nut. “I do not accept money or payment from pilgrims. It is unseemly and dishonorable to do so.” She spat some of the silt that filled her mouth in the moments she spoke. “Besides — as I have said, we may not be doing your son any favors by recovering him from the ruins. It may be that I need to finish what has already started to bring him a final peace.”
The pilgrim wasn’t sure what could be worse than death, but he found he trusted the beautiful stranger. “We understand,” he lied. He would have to attend confession and do penance when they arrived at their Absalom, to absolve him of the sin of falsehood before he could make the final steps without a leadened soul to weight his ascent.
“Then I swear to you — I will bring back your son. Or his body, if it is no longer possible. I will make a good faith effort to reclaim what is yours. So be it.”
The pilgrim and his family each parroted the ancient mantra, sealing the contract. “So be it.”
— Story Links —
Beginning of Vengeance, My Heart
Begin with part 1 of the current episode
Next post
Next episode
Table of Contents for Vengeance, My Heart
Leave a comment. Markdown use is permitted.