The bloodied shell of a man in front of me ignores the statement entirely. Heaves with strain, utters a curse, fumbles with his jammed sidearm. His once-slick gray suit is a tattered pair of mothwings, inverted in luster, negligible in protection. His right eye is smashed inwards, face halfway to being processed into mulch. The gateway behind him shudders and winks closed, leaving after it naught but knots of deer intestine and graphite-colored feathers.
I step forward. He flicks the tool at me. The jam is resolved in the worst way possible, cruel mechanics turned to shrapnel embedding itself in his torso. One piece reaches me, burrowing into tissues of my left shoulder. It’s not the bullet, just some stray piece of spring. I laugh.
“Don’t worry, I’m not here to expedite your death. It was unwise of you to try and go through unnoticed, but I’m not mad.”
He’s frozen there, blinking at me with his one good eye, shattered fingers still clutching the ruptured gun. I don’t think he believes, but there’s little he can do but bleed either way.
I crouch down on the grass in front of him, inspecting the corporate priest up close. He swallows, with difficulty, finally caving into the situation. His intact tear gland gets to work doing its thing.
“I’m curious, how did you take the palanquin over the river? It’s not exactly… Buoyant, you know?”
“I… We just tied a rope to it, and pulled it across the riverbed.”
“So your master came home charred, in a tin coffin and sopping wet?”
He giggles with me, but is quickly interrupted by convulsion of his stomach, puking out putrid mush and fragments of bone. Opening the gate in such limited time cost him a lot. He’s paying that cost now.
“You’re right, He did. Bet I wouldn’t like His temper whenever He heals again. But I won’t get to see that anymore, will I?”
“You won’t,” - I sit down on ancient stone bricks slick with viscera, hugging my knees, - “The pact between our pilots is null, I feel. This was the last favor. There’s no road home for you.”
I turn my head, peering into the gloom inside the old church. The effigy is spread across the floor in pieces, solid-bronze arrow driven vertically through its bulk, clusters of candles extinguished in a single clap. I hope the one we erected back at Root didn’t get the same treatment. It’s right below our bedroom.
“Just the next hotel,” - he waves the notion off. His snapped thumb flails in an uncontrolled secondary motion, - “Homes are for mice, burrows befit only weasels. Or so He used to say on team briefings.”
“Sucks to be you. I’ve got a pretty good home.”
The lost priest cackles, a long rattling wheeze sublimating into the gentle air.
“Guess any butcher shop’s a villa for someone of your descent.”
“It’s only a butcher shop through your meddling. It used to just be an unusual place. You chose to litter it with corpses.”
“What, suddenly not so proud of being assigned to it anymore?”
His immature jab elicits a smile. It’s something you’d expect from a footsoldier, not an executive. But then again, all are equal in the dirt.
“Oh, I could not be happier. I should thank you, really. But my eighty-odd predecessors would beg to differ. We only recently finished pacifying the ones haunting the main facility, you know.”
“I can assure you, it was… a lot more than eighty.”
I think he expects some sort of reaction, staring at me with an eye sharpened into a defensive spike. I don’t know what that reaction would be, so he gets none. I sit and watch him fade, enjoying the warm trickle along my own skin. My eyes trace the alternating twitching of his wasted limbs. Judging by the grimacing, the limbs are in a fierce competition for the title of “the one that hurts the most”.
His bravado does not last very long. His shoulders slump, and his balding head falls to the once-spotless shirt, now splattered with brown and black. The priest descends into a silent sob. Tears mix with misplaced vitreous humour.
“What are you even… waiting for? Finish me… off, already.”
“That is not my apple to bite.”
“Then why are… Why are you still here?”
“Because you’ll leave behind some usable meat, if I’m lucky.”
“I suppose that makes… sense,” - he sniffles, and his lips twist into a broken smile, - “Privilege we both share. We can indulge with… Less regard for the consequences. I’ve done lines in… spiral on surfaces of entire pool tables. They just took me to Him instead of… ER. And He was just… A bit annoyed. Waved me off.”
“It’s not indulgence. Meat is always in short supply.”
But he doesn’t listen, or doesn’t hear. His eyes peer into something beneath the soil, on a disappearing curve, out of my sight.
“But you know I… Last year I quit… Quit anyways. I have a… Niece. I never got married. Not in the… Job description. But I can’t help… It. Sister hates my ass… Says I’m filthy. Damn she’s right. She’s so right she’d… Shoot me herself, if she knew… What I do, really. But I quit… Last year. So I could… Visit anyways. Tolerate her… Nagging. Play settler games with the… Little devil. We used to go easy… On her, but then she got mad… That she wasn’t getting the challenge. Now she’s just… Better at Catan than… Us.”
A consistent, slow tremor warbles through his body. Like a standing wave. He’s losing coherency. I consider for a second what to cook for Ena next morning. Fried eggs and cucumber salad would probably work. She’s still mostly mute, so I have to cover for her evident nutritional deficiencies without guidance. Oh, should probably add some lemon juice.
“I hoped she would… I hoped to see her again. Before the… Before I hoped… I’d be buried… Up there. Hurled into… Some hot ball of gas or another. We were… Pretty close to… At least before the shutdown… Maybe I should have just… Maybe I should have just became an astronomer like… Instead of this. Maybe I’d be less alone in… At a telescope… Just a telescope… Maybe I should have been on… Receiving end… Here?”
“I was an astronomer, once,” - I repeat.
His neck cannot straighten out again, head weighed down like a solid ball of tungsten. The eyelid has trouble staying out of the way as he looks up at me through the final haze. He can still hear, at least. My action is inconsequential. I take it anyways.
“It doesn’t make us less alone. Nothing does. A human, maybe. But not you or me.”
“What are you… Talking about?”
A shimmer of fear passes through his faltering presence. Like a memory he can no longer push down.
Oh boy.
“I gather your master was never honest with you.”
His voice breaks in half.
“Why are you mean… What did I do? I just wanted to… I just wanted…”
“You wouldn’t have been chosen as a high priest if you were human.”
“But, I… What…”
I tip forth and swing to all fours, crawling in the direction of his broken form, looking him straight in the eye. Rough stonework seams nibble at my callused palms, and tufts of grass leave smudges on my overalls. He would have recoiled, if his limbs still obeyed him.
“You can wear one’s skin. You can bleed one’s color. You can speak one’s tongue. But you can’t be one. The demons choose us because we are like that. Transparent and thin. Disconnected, forever. Like a free-moving lens for their will. The stars won’t fix that. Look at them, throw yourself into them, clump them into shapes, eat them, vomit them out, you’re still the same. You can’t come any closer to human than you are right now. It’s all the same.”
The corporate priest’s labored breath kicks up into a thrum, widening some tear in lung tissue if the sound is to be believed. The fear and hurt inside him is greater than its containing body, spilling into the thirsty grass in a flood of invisible anguish. My fingers reach up to his temple, gentlest touch sufficient to intuit a crack in his skull.
I’m quite happy my master isn’t one to travel with escort. These gateways appear quite bothersome.
Our faces are close, close enough that no movement escapes me. Offal-flavoured air assaults my tongue. His lips don’t listen to him anymore. His end is near. He just cries. However little I revealed still seems to have been too much.
I take up the majority of his sky, fingers pinning down the sides of his kevlar-lined conference attire.
“It’s okay, though. Better late than never. It’s not your fault. Your master did not treat you well. He was supposed to tell you. You’ll die soon, but it’s okay. I’ll tell you a bedtime story.”
Stories tend to calm the crying down. It’s not a long one, or a smart one, but it doesn’t need to be.
“There was once a grove, tranquil and perceptive. It laid in a crevice between great mountains, all blind and deaf and restless and upset. The mountains held grudges, and talked much, and remembered much, but could never hear each other. The grove, tattered yearly by their mutual thrashing, looked to the stars and the moon for advice, and the moon gave it eyes of silver, and stars taught it how to draw with a beautiful, mad dance.”
His breathing steadies again, still wheezing, still no doubt a torment, but it does. I break eye contact, tossing my head side to side in rhythm with my words.
“And so the lateral roots pinched the sides of the mountains, calling attention, and vultures painted new eyes on the cliffsides. And through the grove mountains talked to each other. And through the grove mountains overcame their pain, and and the rivers finally ran steady, and the winters were mild. The mountains heaved in unison, forgetting their differences, and oak trunks grew thick and strong, nurtured by rich waters.”
His crying subsides. He appears to hum something out, giving into my voice.
“Many years passed, and many things lived and died in the grove. But it wasn’t a grove anymore, it had become a forest, thick and mature, but still humble and watchful. Its silver eyes bore witness to the turning of constellations and passing of guests. Some guests were nice, leaving presents for the forest, or becoming presents themselves. Some guests were mean, and ended up damaging it, but it always grew back. Some left after a night. Some stayed forever.”
Tears well in my eyes, world twisted through their veil. Shards of the stone effigy crackle with residual charge, listening in. Orion burns into my retinas.
“But one day, a new kind of guest creature started showing up, deceptively soft, but carrying within them a pain unlike any other. In each, the pain was so deep and severe that mountains themselves shuddered uneasy, and trees felt compelled to turn away, and wolves whimpered and fled upstream, and sky rippled like lakewater. But the forest was patient, and studied the new animal thoroughly, determined to help it. Sometimes it would choose a specimen, and share its vast knowledge of the stars and the mountains.”
His breath on my chest is barely noticeable, but in a final monumental effort he sends his head sliding sideways. It rests against my shoulder, his blood trickling down to blend with mine. It’s below where the metal bit hit me, and the wound closed up already, so it’s fine.
“It was slow, but it worked. Sometimes the guests went mad. Sometimes they fell in love. But then, suddenly, a great number of them appeared, led by a selfish and cruel king. They sought to plunder precious silver eyes from the branches, and began to cut ugly statues into cliffs. The forest screamed and screamed in pain, pleading them to stop, but most of them didn’t dare listen, and those who did were punished greatly by the king’s guard. So the forest called to the mountains for aid, and the invasion was extinguished with a fearsome storm and a great flood from ruptured highland lakes.”
I don’t think he is breathing anymore. But there’s still a pulse. There’s still blood pressure. There’s still time.
“But after the water settled, the forest was left with eroded banks and poisoned soil. It was mangled, and blood of the intruders painted its once-beautiful eyes red. It saw the world in a thousand shattered pictures, and spoke in a thousand angry voices, and couldn’t hear itself in the noise. But it began to heal, flailing at whatever came close in fear of another intrusion. And that fear attracted new kinds of guests, wary guests, angry guests, malicious guests. Sometimes, the sky itself would mirror the hurt of the battle, stars contorting into horrible shapes.”
It’s growing dimmer. Some impatient rodent hovers at the edge of my vision, anxiously studying the scene, wondering if I’m going to leave any for it. I probably will.
“The king that commanded the forces was long dead, washed up in a distant delta, but the forest did not know that. The usurper who came after the king was cunning, sending small, covert parties to study the forest instead. But he wasn’t wise, and still thought to plunder, so they perished often. Until one day, his vizier selected a bastard cub to be sent in, thinking him unwanted and unknown. Of that he was correct. What he did not know is that the cub was of a different species entirely, taken in early, forced to hide his eyes of moon-silver. And early blizzards raged that fall, and angry mycelium pulled the starving cub apart, and he opened his eyes for the first time in years. And she saw the stars dance. And her gaze met the moon’s. And she heard the pines sob. And she felt the moss whisper. And she weaved the assault on her limbs into a song, and through that song the forest heard itself again.”
I stop.
He’s definitely dead now. Has been for a bit.
I toss the body to the side, and it whumps solemnly to the brickwork. In harsh light of the guests’ tube I cut open his clothes, discarding them like a low-value pelt. His actual pelt follows soon.. The body that greets me underneath is almost comically disappointing. After a quick ten-minute butchery, I manage to get a tolerable cut of rough thigh meat, and everything else is hardly worth it between the poor physical shape and widespread internal damage.
But, I can still indulge.
I toss the scissors to the side, and fall back to all fours. No longer constrained by care. I find perch. Ribs crunch under my fingers.
My teeth close on the left carotid, half-exposed by the abdominal cut, still warm. I bite down and pull, putting my whole body into the motion, ripping a section of the artery out. I chew on tough tissue under the tear-distorted sky. Warmth streams down my chest.
An evening pleasantly wasted.