Don't Let the Fairies Eat You (34 page)
“Where?” Kehinde asked.
“From afar.” Thotan looked out a nearby window and the sunlight reflected off a distant, shining surface. “I see it. It’s as cold and glassy as he is.”
Kehinde looked to where her brother did. “I see walking glass, yes. And his death—his neck is broken, I think. It’s muddled.”
The red-dressed priest began the wedding and Thotan began tapping his foot, staring at his sister and the awful foreigner. “Today, we celebrate the joining of our king’s guest, Kosciej of the cold lands, and the woman Kehinde of our city. We ask our ancestors to look upon them well, even when they travel far—”
A scream erupted through the king’s hall as Thotan donned his clay mask and threw his arms back, his neck down, completing the dance of the neck’s snapping. He smiled behind the mask as he looked to the couple, expecting to see Kosciej lying still on the ground, but the foreigner was fine. Kehinde’s neck bent at a harsh angle, her eyes wide in surprise, and she dropped to the floor instead.
“You are Death?” the king cried. “You would kill your own sister?”
Thotan trembled, confused and angry. He couldn’t tell what the king’s death was, and so he couldn’t stop the accusations and usurp the throne. He couldn’t tell anyone’s death, least of all that of the pale foreigner. Thotan turned to jump through the window and came to face his own mask. Kosciej’s hatched soul crawled through the opening, into the hall, seeking its owner.
The soul was a sheet of glass, walking on thin, spidery legs, still wearing some of the fluid from its egg. On its cold surface, Thotan saw his own reflection, a young man in a horned mask, and realized Kehinde had seen her own death in the reflection. “And I called it to her,” Thotan said bitterly. The room behind him roared with anger, and he roared too, reeling back with one fist and smashing the mirror. Shards of its glass sprayed over the floor, others sprayed into his arm, and one chunk dug into his palm and stuck there.
The pale foreigner gripped his chest at that moment, as if something had shattered inside, and he collapsed heavily. The wedding guests’ roar vanished then. Some screamed in fear, and then turned and ran from the king’s hall, believing Thotan still possessed the power to call Death upon them.
Heartbroken and miserable, Thotan lifted his sister into his wounded arms and wandered from the hall and from the city. No one stood in his way, fearing Death would soon find them if they did. He took nothing he owned but the clothes on his back, the glass jutting from his arms, and the mask on his face. His feet carried him through the tall grass, away from roads and villages. He barely ate or drank, but the sun’s heat didn’t overwhelm him and animals, however hungry, kept their distance.
After three days, he saw a dark figure in the grass. “Have you come for me?” he asked.
Death acknowledged it had come for Thotan, but first it needed its face and feet. Thotan was confused and Death told him of his father’s wager, what it had cost the family, and what it had done to Thotan and his sister.
“Why not wait for us both to die and then do what you want?”
Death would’ve liked to do that, but the face and feet hadn’t even been for Thotan and Kehinde. The pieces first belonged to their father and had passed to the children. Out here, in the wilderness, they would pass to the animals, the spirits, and the devils, particularly those of kin to Death, like Bokoraru, and they wouldn’t give the pieces back to their rightful owner.
“Then neither will I,” Thotan said. “Not for free. I want my sister back. I want to live.”
If Death could have groaned, it would have. It struggled to tell him that while death is free, life is costly, even if it has a low cost in some people’s eyes. Anyone could have death, but he had to pay for life. Death had no interest in another wager, so it made a trade—if Thotan gave up Death’s feet and face, he could turn three deaths into one life.
His feet being useless without Kehinde and his life looking lonely without his only family, Thotan agreed. Death touched the boy’s skin, his wounded arms, the glass poking up from his skin, and his mask. It also grabbed its feet from Thotan and its face from Kehinde, though neither seemed to change at all physically. Death then left Thotan with the body in the tall grass.
Thotan carried his sister a while longer until he found a city on the Gray Coast, smaller and quieter than the one where they’d lived for years, but full of people nonetheless. A small stone crypt sat outside the city’s walls. “I’ll leave you here only for a short while,” Thotan told his sister, propping her against a shelf where stone coffins held the long dead.
Setting his mask over his face, he entered the city that had never heard of Death walking in mortal form. People glanced, gawked, and stared, but Thotan said not one word to them. He began dancing a little as he walked, tapping a foot or swinging an arm. While the dance couldn’t call anyone’s death anymore, he did attract attention as street children formed a line behind him, clapping and hopping in his wake. When he’d traveled the city’s major streets and circled back to the entrance, he’d put a crowd together behind him, as if he was a great lord leading them to a party, or a priest leading them to a temple for worship.
Parents swept in behind him, scooping up some of the children before they could wander out of the city. This was fine, as Thotan didn’t want to sacrifice children to save his sister. He had plenty of adults following him, some wearing the same grim faces as the village elder when he’d ordered his family murdered. They followed out of curiosity and a desire to judge. By the time Thotan reached the crypt, he’d glanced back enough to know who he wanted to sacrifice.
“You,” Thotan said from atop the crypt’s stone steps, choosing a rich-looking man. “You,” he said, selecting a surly-looking man. “You are the last,” he said, picking out a purse-lipped woman who he guessed had come to scold the children that followed. All three hesitated at first, and then climbed the steps to where Thotan stood. He beckoned them inside, where it was too dark to see Kehinde’s body, and too dark to see the chunk of sharp glass in Thotan’s hand.
He slit the rich man’s throat, then the purse-lipped woman’s, and though the surly man realized what was happening soon enough to scream, he was not quick-thinking enough to save himself. The glass lodged into his neck and Thotan touched the blood on each dead neck. He then approached his sister, unsure of how this would work.
Her fingers flinched without a word or touch from her brother, and the two siblings embraced fiercely once she’d blinked her eyes and realized her life had come back to her. “You look strange,” she said. “I can’t see your death. Did you evade it, as I have?”
“I’ll explain to you later,” Thotan said, helping his sister to her feet. “We have to find a safe place for now.”
The crowd that had followed Thotan from the city remained when the siblings emerged atop the crypt’s steps, as if they’d been waiting for a miracle, or some new entertainment. Thotan would’ve given them another dance, as harmless to them as the last, but one child began shrieking, and then others noticed Thotan’s hands.
“Blood!” one woman shouted. “He killed them! They’re devil creatures! Demons!”
The words rang harshly over Thotan, echoing from his childhood, and he roared at the crowd. “Any one of you would have killed three meaningless strangers to save your only family! Not one of you could deny it!”
“I can’t see their deaths,” Kehinde muttered. “Perhaps the foreigner was only my first failure. I can’t see a single death among them. How can we escape?”
Stones flew from the crowd then, pelting Thotan and Kehinde, and the two ducked back into the crypt’s darkness. Two men rushed up the steps to follow, but paused when they found they couldn’t see their own hands in front of their faces. They headed back and a rumbling argument began among those who’d followed the masked man from the city. If Thotan could kill three in the dark, he could easily kill two, and no one wanted to risk rushing in as a mob—someone would certainly be killed first.
“What if they burn us?” Kehinde asked.
“They won’t dare,” Thotan said. “This is the resting place of their dead. It would be a curse upon the city for them to burn it. We’ll wait for them to leave. If we’re lucky, Bokoraru will bring animals to us for food. We’ll outlast these people.”
They waited in the darkness for three days, with only the water that leaked through the stone roof when it rained, but no food and no Bokoraru. Once at the end of each day, Thotan neared the crypt’s entrance to see if the crowd had dispersed, and each time he found them there, in greater or smaller numbers, themselves watching and waiting.
On the third evening, Thotan had trouble finding where the darkness ended. The sun should have lit the crypt’s entrance with red light, but he only found a small opening where the sunset peaked through. The wall felt cool, smoother than the other stone surfaces of the crypt, and he realized it hadn’t been there for more than a day. Stretching on tiptoes, he looked through the only small opening in the wall just as the crowd outside brought the last few stones up the steps, to block up the crypt’s entrance forever.
“Wait!” he shouted. “My sister’s done nothing wrong! Let her go!”
No one answered him. They laid the last stones into place, five men lifting each heavy block, and much as Thotan pushed, he couldn’t move a single piece of the wall. He and Kehinde were sealed in complete darkness, and the crowd finally dispersed from the crypt after interring its last two corpses.
Many days passed. A passerby might have heard shouting from within the crypt at first, but the siblings were already weak by the time the wall went up, and the stone building stood silent for a long while.
Then came one evening when a rich family brought their deceased little girl to the crypt, intent on putting her inside, only to find their way barred. They were about to leave, when the father heard a thumping. At first it beat like a drum, but then better resembled a giant’s foot tapping, and then a raspy voice broke through the rhythm.
“Bring three,” it said. “Bring three deaths and she will live.”
The family loved their little girl dearly and though they weren’t warriors, they were wealthy enough to hire assassins. Within a day, three bloody bodies were tossed upon the steps of the crypt, and the little girl sprang to life as if she’d never been gone. The family laughed and cried with joy, and thanked the voice of the temple.
“Tell others,” it said, sounding stronger now.
They did. When a friend’s son took ill and passed away, the father told of the sealed crypt and the voice that brought people back from the dead, if others were offered in their place. Knowledge of the voice spread among the rich first, as their loved ones who died came back again, and again, and the city’s assassins grew rich themselves. Then word trickled down to the city’s masses, and many wondered why they should have to lose their sons and daughters, sisters and brothers, wives and husbands. Many families realized their relatives had vanished to become sacrifices for the miraculous crypt, which was slowly becoming a temple of worship for the voice, and sought out other sacrifices to bring them back.
Fires soon lit the city and screaming filled the streets. The desperate dragged carts behind them, often carrying four bodies—a loved one, and three offerings to this newfound god of life and death. Advisors to the city’s king wanted the crypt torn down, apathetic to whether it disturbed the dead, but when word of the suggestion leaked, a great mob formed outside the palace and set to burning down the king’s home, fearing they’d lose any chance of keeping their loved ones should the king dare defile the house of the voice.
The city’s population dwindled quickly, until the voice called for silence, and all listened who wished to serve the presence within the crypt. “There is a village to the north, where stone houses sit in a field of tall grass, and a witch woman assists in all births and deaths. Bring their deaths here.”
The Gray Coast’s survivors realized, to their relief, that they could take lives from anywhere, and the killing in the city paused for a time. The mobs and families organized into death squads, leaving the city in search of villages, and villagers whose deaths could feed the crypt and restore life to the city’s people.
Bloody war swept across half of the sunset lands, spreading from the Gray Coast to the surrounding villages, and then to the cities with much better defenses. Stone walls broke into rubble, houses disintegrated into ash, blood soaked the tall grass, and bodies piled at the wall that had killed Thotan and Kehinde.
But through it all, the temple stood firm, and no one noticed when a clay mask with curved horns sprouting from its sides appeared over its sealed entrance, staring down at all who approached with pleadings and sacrifice.
