Never Knew Another (28 page)

She peeled off her veil. Ela Sabachthani looked older in real life. Jona remembered her with more alabaster powder on her skin, and a vitality that her face no longer held. “Do you feel better, intimidating me and calling me silly names? I am not the king of the night.”

“Your magic will not save you when you die,” I said.

“Your concern for my soul is noted,” she snapped. “Now, what else did you ask me here to talk about?”

“Salvatore,” I said.

“You can’t have him,” she said.

“He is an abomination of Elishta.”

“He is a person,” she said. “A very sad, lonely, little man, who can’t remember his own name if we don’t remind him.”

“A demon child!” I snarled. I stood up on my wolf paws. I was level with Ela’s face. “Polluter of flesh, seducer of innocents, betrayer and destroyer of life!”

She stood up, unabashed. “He’s mine,” she said.

My husband pulled the wolfskin fully from his back. He was tall, and strong. He bowed to her.

“Lady Sabachthani, sit down,” he said. “My wife carries Jona’s mind. She feels strongly about Salvatore, and what he did before Jona died.”

Ela folded her arms. She looked to the gates of the temple. “Why should I stay? You’re only going to insult me with cheap threats and slander my friends.”

“He’s already dead,” I said. “His mind is dead. This city is already your father’s, and the night is already yours. We are not concerned for these things. We only want the demon child, Salvatore. All those men Jona killed, all just men, helping other nobles throw parties that you would not permit to be better than yours. You had men killed for party favors. Do you think the king would listen to us? Do you think we couldn’t make him listen?”

Lady Ela Sabachthani frowned. “Jona was going to get in trouble if I didn’t keep him busy. I had to find something for him to do until I was ready for him. Stand up, like your man. I don’t like talking to beasts.”

I remained a wolf.

“Jona didn’t know everything about me,” she said. “And it took him a long time to figure it out. You carry his mind with you. Tell me something. Tell me what he felt, deep in his heart. Was he a sad, lonely, little man?”

I said nothing.

“Because that’s what I thought he was. Why Salvatore? What about the other one? Have you found that awful maid?”

“She has gone north, beyond the red valley.”

“Why don’t you just chase her? Leave Salvatore alone. He’s mine, and I take good care with him.”

“She’s less dangerous,” said my husband. “She tries to protect people from what’s inside of her. Salvatore cannot. Him first. Then her.”

“I want you to go after her first. By the time you find her, I’ll be done with Salvatore, and he’ll be on his own. What can I give you to get you to do that? A new temple? A place for your ministry among my advisors when I ascend to the throne?”

“What do you have to give that we would want except for Salvatore?” I said. I stood up. I am not Jona. I can stand against her. I can threaten her with truth. “What do you want with demon children? What spell is this?”

She put her veil back on. “No spell this time. And, I give you what is mine to give. What do you think I will give you? Jona would know the answer to that.”

I said nothing.

“Tell me he would have married me anyway, just for the money.”

I shook my head.

“Never?”

“His heart was never yours.”

She turned away. “My sad, lonely, little man. It was so hard to keep him busy, all those aimless nights.” She walked towards the gate.

I called to her back. “Why do you do what you do to them?”

She said nothing.

My husband frowned. He looked at me.
That didn’t go as I expected.

We need to leave, now.

We need to keep all the skulls away from her. We cannot permit any in the city.

Jona knew what she meant. Lady Ela Sabachthani, king of the night, had only one thing to give us: our lives.

***

My husband and I left for her estate on the island right away, trying to reach her land before she could get there, send word about her gift to us. We traveled as man and woman, and cautiously. We took ferries over canals, and carts over the mud-patches that would leave our footprints to be followed by anyone she might send after us. On the last ferry to her estate on the island, we stood between the horses of two fine carriages.

I touched the neck of a white horse. The horse warned me of a strange smell on the ferry. I smelled it, too. I thanked the creature with a stroke of my palm. My husband and I were being watched.

The ferry landed. Two sleepy king’s men sat on chairs and waved at everyone to pass. My husband and I stepped onto the smooth cobblestones. Our shadow was not a demon child. He was only wicked. Wicked is a common thing.

My husband and I looked at each other and nodded. We pulled the wolfskins over our backs and bolted for the Sabachthani estate as fast as horses. We did not bother with the guards. We jumped over the wall and ran.

We followed the shadows of trees to the willow grove where the two hulking forms of steel and meat stood like carriage-sized mantises. They raised their arms at us, menacingly. My husband peeled the wolfskin from his back. “Back, demon,” he said. He raised his hand. We are holy servants of Erin. He threw holy water at them. It burned on their metal shell. They froze up, trembling at us. We could hurt them. They had never known anything that could do that.

My husband stood up next to one of the juggernauts. It stared down at him, like a tree gazing into a man’s face. The monstrous creation shivered like a broken clock. It was so old. Meat rots, no matter how much magic is cast upon it. Dead meat rots.

Steel was fused with muscle and bone to make the beastly things. One of them had a broken, bent-up leg. The other was missing part of its long, mantis-talon. The exposed bones were black beneath the meat that held it. Maggots had tried to grow inside of the wounds, but they died long before they could be born.

Be careful. Don’t touch them.

My husband didn’t listen to me. He touched just the steel face of a monster. He pressed salt through the eye holes, with holy water. This made steam and puss burst and bubble. The steel face loosened. My husband pulled the steel away from the sticky flesh. It had the skull of a man underneath, except all warped and bent into the steel that contained it. This skull had two horns like an ibyx.

I peeled the wolfskin from my back. I had more salt and holy water, for the other construction and the other skull. The magic burned away like acid with the rotting meat. These wounds we made were mortal wounds. The construction of meat and steal would never move again.

My husband carefully wrapped the horned skull in leaves and leather rags. He slipped it into the bag on his back. The final skull stared back at us, mute.

“Salvatore,” I said. “Is your name Salvatore?”

We gingerly peeled back the mask of metal for the skull. It was almost human, but warped in the jaw and one of the eyes. We collected its skull and poured a ring of salt around the rotting demon flesh. Fireseeds took to the back of the monstrous heaps. Ignited, they burned strong and long.

Sabachthani’s alarms had been called in the house. Horses hooves’ galloped. My husband and I had to leave right away. Over the wall, and away into an alley, my husband yanked open a sewer grate we knew. Down, then, and running hard through the dark waterways, we didn’t bother with rowboats. We jumped hard into the water, swam across to the other side of rivers and canals, ran on damp as bathers. We moved so fast, up from the sewer, to the walls, to the woods, and away where no hand of the night could touch our pelts.

At night, we slept in peace on a stone that carried heat long into the night. In the morning, I felt Jona’s mind inside the frayed sea wall at the edge of my consciousness. He was a formless thing, there, inside my head. I walled him in with the scent of the woods. This was my memory, of all the days of my lives.

Salvatore,
said my husband.
I wonder if I don’t know where he might be.

Where?

He wasn’t in the city. She would have known we were looking for him.

Where would he be?

Have I ever shown you the mountain, where I killed the demon’s child before you were born?

This will be your face before I was born?

Does Jona’s memory make you a Senta? Have you looked too long upon Rachel’s life that you are dreamcasting? It is a place to look, and to rest if he is not. It is a guess, but I think it is a good guess because it was a good place to hide once. We have new skulls to study.

They’re only children. We should not call upon Erin for that. I know their life already, warped like that and so young. We already know who did it to them, too.

To the hills, to the highest of the hills, we howled to the wolf packs. We called them with baleful hunting songs. They howled love songs to death over the hills, singing us on.

We climbed the mountain quickly. Sabachthani would have sent word to him that we had left the city. She would have called her pet back home.

The cave was abandoned when we arrived. The bird cages had long ago collapsed into heaps of rain-washed wood and rust. Deep in the back of it, we found a hammock in the dark. It smelled of Salvatore.

My husband laughed.
I didn’t think we’d find him here.

We haven’t found him, yet.

The smells of him were old. He had slept here. We read the tracks of him, walking in with soft boots. He had traps he was using to capture his meat. He cleaned and cooked it himself in a corner. Birds, mostly, with some rabbits, and anything he could find in the hills to eat—acorns ground up against a rock, wild onions, and rosemary. He was here, and now he was gone.

I leaned into his hammock. I swung a little, there.
The new skulls,
I said.

My husband pulled them out. He placed them on rocks.
No,
he said.
There’s no need. They know nothing.

Are you sure?

Look at them again, next to Jona’s.

I did. They were deformed, but more than that, they were smaller.

Children,
I said.
We must go back. They deserved a quick death. They did not deserve what Lord Sabachthani did to those young children.

Sleep a while here. Rest your mind. Dream your own dreams. You have walked long in other lives. I will search my own demon child’s memories from my youth. I will sleep here and remember his life and the people in it, and I will search for Lord Sabachthani.

So, that’s what I did.

We will return to the city, in the depth of night, but not yet.

Salvatore had lived long and long before we knew him. Like the city that hid him from us, Erin would come for him and tear all the buildings down around him. Sunflowers will grow tall and golden there. The wolves will run the dogs away and rule the rocky ground where the bricks lay broken.

I slept in the hammock, and dreamed of the mountain where I was born, far to the east. I dreamed of my own mother’s tongue licking my palm.

I dreamed only of myself.

About the Author

J. M. McDermott’s critically-acclaimed first novel,
Last Dragon
, was on Amazon.com’s Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of 2008 list, and was shortlisted for an IAFA William Crawford Award, among other accolades. He lives and works north of Atlanta, inside a maze of bookshelves and empty coffee cups.