Vengeance, My Heart is a work of serialized fiction. Jump to key story links to read earlier content.
The ultramarine-eyed stranger closed her eyes and breathed in, whether to garner courage or in regret for making such a promise, the pilgrim couldn’t decide. Perhaps she did it to center herself. It was not his place to know these things — he didn’t want to know. But he would not refuse such a promise of assistance, one normally reserved for those in a higher strata than he, as it had been sworn.
The stranger turned on her heel and marched towards the gaping black mouth of the ramshackle remains. Six dust-scratched eyes followed her passage as she stepped from gloam to gloom, the pilgrim’s daughter whispering a prayer that was only occasionally broken by the serpent’s kiss of sand over sand.
The crow waited until the stranger entered the ruins before it left her shoulder, ice-shod eyes aglow in the twilight of the entrance and radiating as it flew deeper into the eigengrau flooding the room beyond the first chamber, the smallest of beacons in a place that rarely knew light.
Webs crisscrossed the shadows cast in the light of the crow’s eyes and pale, sickly things crept arthritic across their dusty, silken spans, seeking the deeper shadows in which to hide from the glow.
The stranger’s eyes did not cast light in the way her fetch did, but her something had been done to her eyes during her training — she knew not what — to drink up event the faintest of lights to expose the lines and forms holding shape in the shadows. With the crow, she saw better than one sees in twilight, able to discern between dog and wolf.
Beyond the foyer of the ruins was more inky darkness and a still, humid heat rising from the old bricks and concrete. And a deepening silence that swallowed up the loud shush of winds and sand without.
More bold than her, the crow flew deeper into the belly of ruins. The bird flew through a doorway at the stairs where the hallway ended. The threshold had long abandoned the door. The crow lit on the twisted and rusted remains of a metal railing at the top. It looked back at her and beckoned her to follow. And then called again when she stopped to listen for anything she might hear in the darkness.
“So much for the element of surprise,” she muttered, annoyed that the bird had announced her to the denizens within. But then, she reminded herself, the occupants probably already knew she had entered their domain before she had left the foyer if her training held true.
There was an unsettling slope to the floor that seemed to draw her towards the gaping mouth waiting at the end of the hallway. The place had its own gravity, that dragged her ever inward. It disturbed her that she could not tell if was the decrepit and decay architecture that pulled her forward, or if it might be another force coming into play.
Exposed re-bar presented itself as she walked the length of the corridor leading towards the stairwell. Her stride grew more measured as the sicking salty-sweet smell of decay rose from the very walls the closer she came to the hole leading down into the belly of the building. Doors along the way hung off from their hinges, some opening only to bare walls or gaping abysses.
When she reached to top of the stairs her fetch took to wing and dropped down the center, rather than flew, to the bottom of the stairs, a mere two flights away. She had expected the descent to take her further underground and she grunted at the revelation.
Ever impatient, the crow called out for her again, hurrying her along.
Just as the hallway seemed sloped to bring her to the head of the stairs, the stairs themselves slanted at angles that varied with each landing, seemingly designed to keep her unbalanced. Not enough to keep her from standing upright, but enough that her body became a twisted thing trying to find her center of gravity. And still, she that center remained elusive no matter how she arranged her posture.
She leaned against the walls to stay upright as she slipped further into the darkness. That cloying scent of a cat-house offering free throws to all interested parties increasing in conjunction with the air’s warmth with every step.
The stranger paused as she placed her foot at the landing at the bottom of the stairwell, fighting the urge to cover her nose with her right forearm to ward off the smell washing out of the room just beyond the open door.
Steeling herself for what might be laying in wait within, she stepped across the red-flaking remains of the threshold and into the room beyond.
The crow flew to the exposed metal beams in the high ceiling above. It glanced around for a moment before diving to the darkness, bringing his illuminated gaze to focus on a perch on a piece of derelict machinery, more decay than mottled steel.
Again, the bird crowed, beckoning her to come.
Just below the crow sat a young man with features that were equally matched to the pilgrim and his wife outside. He wore a dumb smile that rose from his face in a way that never quite reached his eyes. His eyes showed no expression at all, just an empty blackness.
“You’ve come for the boy,” they said from the darkness.
The young man’s mouth spoke with a voice not his own.
“He belongs to us now.”
The stranger looked at the boy. The smile on his face had no relationship to his eyes. His eyes were somewhere else entirely.
“Does he,” she said. Not a question.
“He came in. He stayed.” The voice had the warmth of the room in it — that same wrong comfort, that heat that had no business being here. “The threshold doesn’t distinguish between the willing and the merely weary. You know this.”
She did know this. That was the problem.
“How long,” she said, “before you’ve finished with him.”
A pause that was almost gentle.
“We’re not cruel,” the darkness said this time, no longer making use of the son as their puppet. “We want you to understand that. He won’t suffer. He’ll simply become — less. And then less than that. Until what remains isn’t enough to carry the weight of what he was.”
“And his body?”
“Stays. For a while. It’s warmer that way.”
She let that sit. Filed it. Oldbone hung heavy in its holster.
“I’m here to take him back.”
“We know why you’re here.” The voices became stained with annoyance. Something shifted in the darkness, more like an attention redistributing itself than movement. “The question is whether you have standing to make that claim. The Ward hasn’t maintained these territor—”
“I’m not here on the Ward’s warrant.”
The silence that followed was a different kind of silence.
“No,” the darkness said finally, the voice shifting from ire to interest. “We can see that.”
The crow above did not move. But it was watching.
A solitary woman shifted from inky shadow into the glow emanating from the crow’s eyes. She was beautiful the way a room is beautiful when someone has spent a very long time arranging it for a guest who was never meant to leave. She examined the stranger, curious, drinking her in with eyes without pupils, without warmth, tinted with the endless night sky.
“I’m not disputing the threshold,” the stranger said. “I’m not here to clear this nest or contest your claim on this structure. I’m here for one person who walked in without understanding what he was walking into, on a road where the warnings have been half-erased by forty years of sand, in a world where the Ward has spent a generation failing to maintain what it was built to maintain.”
She paused.
“I name you: Leannan. I’m acknowledging this threshold. I’m acknowledging the compact governing Old Ones’ territories applies here and that you have standing within it.”
The leannan glanced to the crow watching from the decrepit machinery going to rust. “And witnessed, I see.”
“In exchange,” the stranger continued, “you release him. Not because you’re required to. Because I’m asking you to, in the old ways, with a witness, and I’m offering you something worth more than one half-emptied boy on a pilgrimage road.”
“What are you offering?”
The stranger considered for a moment what she was about to spend.
“The acknowledgment stays. Formally. In whatever record the crow keeps.” The leannan looked to the crow, searching. “You’ve been here a long time without anyone from the Ward recognizing your standing. I’m recognizing it. That has value — more value than he does.”
A long, aching silence.
The leannan glanced toward various corners of the perpetual night surrounding their domain, seeking consensus from her sisters without speaking.
“He won’t be whole,” the visible one said, looking directly at the stranger with her twin wells for eyes. “You understand that. We’re not being cruel in telling you. It’s simply true. What’s been consumed doesn’t reconstitute when the consumption stops.”
“I warned his family that might be the case before I came in.”
“And they accepted it?”
“They said they did.”
Another silence. Then, almost gently…
“They lied,” the leannan says. “You must know that.”
“Yes,” the stranger replies. “I know that.”
Another pause. The stranger knew the sigh that followed was not an expression of sympathy. Pity, perhaps, if leannan felt such things.
“So be it,” said the leannan in a sing-song chorus from around the room as the one the stranger negotiated with stepped back into the shadows.
“So be it.”
At the stranger’s ritual response, the son’s posture changed, softened, no longer in thrall. The crow on his shoulder croaked.
“Come,” the stranger said and the pilgrim’s son stood up and shuffled to follow her as she retraced her long, uneven walk back to the entrance of these ruins left behind by the Old Ones.
She did not look back. The stranger could feel the presence of the young man behind her, there was no need to visually confirm the facts.
At the top of the stairs, she heard their chatter. Perhaps they had thought her gone already. It was more likely they intended for her to hear their conversation if she were keen enough to perceive it.
“The crow is old.”
“Older than the Ward,” one of the other sisters agreed.
“She doesn’t know yet.”
“No,” replied yet another.
A pause. She kept walking, the boy’s shuffling footsteps behind her regular and empty.
“She will,” the several said at once, their words already swallowed up by the dark and distance.
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