kufoma (n.) the physical remnants of a person who has passed away, with connotations of being those parts that have been shed or left behind.
You'll bring dishonour on the family name, he said, and there was no response from the dead thing on hooks so he said, come, he said, come. No Szymańska should die in the dark.
Not so dead, perhaps. There was a dull sheen, black-on-black, as that bird-dark eye opened, and moved, and narrowed. He had, for a moment, doubted: the glow around her was mere haloed charcoal. He fed it just a little more life; it flared tungsten-silver and faded slower than before.
The gloom was not such an opponent anymore – this dark was, to him, just as clear as midday. There was no light in this room but he could see where She had discarded her implements on the table, the black arcs of ichor She had left on the ground and walls, the scattered yellow petals the curse-maker had left in his wake, and hanging like a carcass, there she was.
He put an arm around her, and lifted her up, just high enough that the meat-hook lost its purchase in her flesh, and then let gravity reassert upon her, lowered her, and propped her up when her legs buckled. He had brought a dirt-green cloak, which he put about her shoulders. Was this what it was to have a sister, a cousin, someone with the same surname as yours and an idea of inevitability?
They began the torturous ascent towards the air.
It was a clear night. Overhead, the sky embraced all: all that was falling or flying was held tight in a strangling embrace, and those stars, which did neither, were being strangled of all warmth and strung out like an incandescent path through the inky dark as a warning to any that might dream of following them to ignition. Oh, but they had no glow to them anymore: it was as though he was regarding them through a dark pair of glasses, dulled and sheenless. Nothing shone anymore.
All the world paled in comparison to the living sparks in the castle beyond them, scintillas flickering in the ordinary breaths of the late evening and the first gentle airs of the early morning. He thought he would never be able to see the stars again, for surely all would be compared to the living atoms with which he now surrounded himself.
One shone brighter than the rest. She had not slept since Her brother had been taken; he could see Her pacing in her chambers, though the curtains had been drawn and the walls of the palace still stood.
A low groan beside him.
He said, how does it feel?
Oh, she said, it's like all of my highs are making love to all of my lows.
The silverlight of the moon above made it all look so much more disastrous than it had seemed in the dark: she was still half-encased in the mass of scales and armoured flesh in which she had tried to protect herself, hard black skin cracking over her joints each time they opened and closed, breaking like a disturbed carapace. She had three skins, then: brown, and black and grey, real and druj and false-imaginary-delusional.
He knew that She had done some damage to her, and each bit had healed back broken: her cheek was all blackened hide where the lesion had faded overnight, and when she turned her head, he could see that the new darkened skin extended down her neck and beneath the collar of her cloak. Where it met her original brown flesh, it rose in red lines like fresh wounds of their own making. Where he had broken a glass over her face eight days ago, scars had healed over the shards of glass embedded in her face, leaving little black speckles like penmarks across her face.
When she closed her eyes, the shadows garrotted her silhouette until she was almost lost. He fed what he could, and stirred her life about as though exposing cinders to the air. With that air, there rose the smell of nettles and blackthorn and sloe, of whiskey and sage and fresh bread, perfume and petrol and ichor.
And she opened her eyes again. They were in a patch of dark here: she may as well have been fretted with basalt, a living girl already cast in the figure of a carved martyr, as much shine to her as to the stars above. They were balancing on razor-margins here. He said, can you feel it?
– she was silent, staring up at the moon.
The king could feel it near. Or so he said.
And she still had one good eye, brown, but it was her druj eye which had life to it, a tungsten-silver spark sickle-carved.
I could, he said, when you took my head, I could – and she interrupted him, and said, with fervour, I feel it.
Deep breath in. The dull glow about her inhaled with her, flexed like an expanding ribcage. It had not been Her intent to kill her, though She might have nonetheless come close out of sheer recklessness and distraction. She had wanted the winged druj for too long to let her slip straight away.
She had pinned a set of wings to the wall yesterday, carved from the druj that had sprouted them, and arrived the next day to find that they had fallen away into black residue lying across the flagstones like so much ash.
Ignacja made it back to the homeland, he said, and she replied, so we were told.
And she was forgiven her betrayal? oh, but he had not realised he sounded hopeful until she had replied bluntly: no, not at all.
Now she brought her gaze down, level with the horizon, staring at the edge of the wall, and she said, how far?
Twelve feet, he replied. Twelve feet was as far as they had managed. They had buried her, after all. She had come out of the ground with lungs filled with soil, and yet she had breathed still for as long as he had compelled her to. He would have liked to try it on some of the others: the captain, perhaps, or the general, or Reiko Morozova, just to see how much of them remained Themselves when it was over, when he had wrung as much life out of them as he could. It would be – it always was – like trying to squeeze lemon juice from a yellow rock.
– she rose on shuddering legs, and began to walk.
He watched her go. For a moment, he thought she might slip the shackles: flight of one kind, if another was barred from her. Her bones moved beneath her skin. Were all druj-things wretched thus?
The corner of his eye was lit up by Her spark, moving down the stairs of the castle, and he knew that She would expect the winged druj in its place when She returned to Her butchery. He would not disappoint Her. You wanted a better story, didn't you? Well, who wouldn't? These words, shrapnel in his brain, leaking from him like all else had. He had always felt like a knife wound in Illéa's canvas, a cruel reminder of the reality lurking outwith the walls, and She had always been good enough to forgive him, over and again. Here was another gash, then: she had one brown eye and one black druj eye, and in the end, she made it ten feet before she could go no further.
The halo around her had shrunk to a black line around her form, before she fell back to her knees, energy ebbing from the grey glow that shrouded her shape. He went to her side, and forced her heart to keep beating, put his fingers into her life and forced it to keep ticking.
There was, somewhere nearby and long ago, the crackle of a fire nearby, and the muted laughter of people playing cards downstairs, and the creak of old floorboards underfoot. He wondered where his Maryam and his Åsmund were, and if they were safe, and if they were alive, and if he could reach them, if he stretched out his hand.
Beside him, she made and swallowed a sound before he could tell what it was. He said, who were you apologising to? Earlier, you were apologising. Much earlier. She had been working: She had been aglow with the zealotry of the true believer, and She would have whittled her bones individually if it would give Her back Her Silas, and she had managed to say this much: i am sorry.
That was confidential, she said, and he replied, interrogations rarely are. Didn't she know he had churned up all the detritus that formed her, rattled all her parts about when she was at risk of slipping somewhere he could not catch her again, like shaking awake someone with a concussion? He knew her better than he had ever known his own self: here was a motherless girl with three fathers, a monster with eleven sisters and eleven brothers, and she had grown up in a house made from ship-boards in the place the apocalypse had come calling two hundred years too early.
My father expects me home, the druj-girl said, Krzysiek asked me to come home before he died, and I have never let Krzysztof Szymański down before.
The only legacy his father had left him was a name that would get him killed and the only legacy his mother had left him was a song, whispered jaggedly thus: when is a monster not a monster? oh, when you used to sing it to sleep; oh, when you are the reason it is so mangled, and She had looked at him, mangled thus, and She had looked away. Now she looked away. He said, that's my name.
I know, she said, without smiling.
It was time to go back inside, back on the table and back on the hooks, a hanged man anew. He said, it's time to go back inside.
The moon was braceleted with constellations tonight. Pale Venus had risen scarlet; next to Mars all afire, it rather seemed as though they were under the gaze of some red-eyed beast in the sky, with white-light freckles where the stars pierced the dark blue veil of the night. His cousin said, if they appeared only one night in a thousand years, we would call them magic too.
A quote from something?
– she said, a hanged man told it to me once.
And she came from a place beyond the Walls, where people said things to one another, where people hung from gallows made from houses made from the wood of old ships, where they raised children and asked them to come home again. They would go to that world – She would see to it, She was set on it, and where She went, what could he do but Follow? – and they would raze it, but he would see it first, see it, and maybe the world would stretch on forever without any walls to curb its unfurling.
Had it been mere misfortune that the Szymańska girl had been chosen as the bait, to make sure the rest escaped unharmed? Or was this what had become of their family in the homeland? Was this all they amounted to? Dishonour indeed. He said du warst der Köder, richtig...?
Nein, she said, and she shook her head, hair feathered around face, each strand picked out in dull shadow-gray, ash-gray, death-near-gray and she said nein, she said ich war ein Krieger.
Well, she didn't seem much like a warrior anymore, if ever she had been. No, she was a pathetic thing, waiting for permission to slip away. The sky faded overhead. The only light in the whole world were the tiny flint-sparks of life within the castle, and among them, shining the brightest, as always it had been, an inevitability, was Her.