“They were . . . ,” she tried to say through chapped, cracking lips.
“They were not with you, I know. They serve a water goddess, and you are no such creature. You’re no creation of hers, I can see that. You are preserved in a different way, and stone is a challenge to a smith like me. Paper I can reduce to ash, and even metal can return to a pliable liquid with heat enough. But stone? That is another fire entirely. To melt such a substance requires pressure, and the coughing force of the earth’s interior. Steel may rust, wood may burn, and earth may wash away. But you, dear thing, were made by someone who means for you to last. Someone means to keep you close for many years.”
“I’m not made of stone.”
“No, but you’re made from it. And in this case, there is no distinction. Tell me, who is your master? Who made you in this fashion, crafted you to stand against the elements?”
“I don’t know if he has a name,” she waffled. “He said we could call him Mossfeaster.”
“Mossfeaster.” The Greek turned the sound over in his mouth, tasting it and trying to tell how well it fit. He brightened, and the room brightened, too, until it was perfectly blinding. “I see, yes. I do see. This is the time for those of us between the cracks, is it not? Creatures like you, and like me. And like them.” He sneered at the place in the curtain of flame where the window used to be.
“Them,” Nia interrupted, desperate to finish the conversation and be away. “Who were they?”
“Why do you ask me? You knew them. I saw it; the woman recognized you.”
“I knew her, yes. Years ago. But why was she here, and who was the man?”
He scowled, and with his anger, the walls burned blue. “Troublemakers. Emissaries from a despised party. But I am compelled to serve them, one and all. It is an understanding I have with the elders, and it is how my peace is kept. I show no preference, and I refuse no requests. My fair and impartial work is established and respected, and those . . . those pathetic guppies would try and rob me of this?”
“I’ll go after them. I’ll bring them back to you, and you can do whatever you want with them.”
“Oh no, I don’t want them back here. And you don’t want to chase them yet, either. Give them time. Let the wretched little fiend execute her plan, for all the good it will do her.”
“Why? What plan?” She asked it fast, because, survivable or not, the heat was appalling. It singed her hair and clothes even as the Greek held it at bay.
“They mean to frame me. They mean to make it appear as if I have broken a truce that is older than their greatest great-grandparents! Whether or not I loathe their precious Mother, I respect the peace. I would never—”
Nia peeled one of her arms up and held it out. “Yes, so you said. But I’m . . . please, I can’t stay like this. Someone is waiting for me outside.”
“Let them wait. No one will enter or interrupt until I drop the blaze and let them approach. And you should be patient. As I said, let the woman do her treachery. It will teach Arahab a thing or two about whom she should choose when she recruits her minions. That idiot girl—”
“Bernice. Her name’s Bernice,” Nia said.
“She means to betray her mistress. She has poisoned her companion, and tried to pin the deed on me.”
“Why would she poison him? It looked like she was trying to protect him.”
“It is a ruse, designed to distract Arahab. It will drain the Old Lady to heal him, if she elects to do so. It will cost her a great deal of power to revive him, because he’s been tainted with the very metals from which she made her Armageddon call. The arsenic is mixed with the bronze to make it harder, but when mixed with water, it becomes an acid, much like its chemical kin, phosphorus. It will corrode the man from the inside out, and it will be difficult for even Arahab to wash it away. The acid is mild enough for ordinary men and women, but it’s much worse for her. For us,” he added. “It is hard for our kind to bear.”
He shrugged his shoulders and waved the cane in a gesture of apathy. “So let her try it. It will make her ill and angry, and she deserves the misery if anyone ever did. Fire and water are not meant to mix in such a fashion, with metal corroding between them.”
Nia felt like she was melting, cooking in her clothes. Regardless of what the Greek said about being able to withstand the heat, she was going crazy standing there in the midst of the inferno. But his information was too helpful, and she was too confused and conflicted to fight him for an exit.
So she asked “Why?” instead of begging to leave, even though she thought she could feel her skin sloughing off and sliding, dripping down to the floor. “Why would Bernice do that? Why would she poison anybody?”
“How should I know? I care nothing for the politicking of the elders, the elementals, or their kith.”
“Well . . .” She began to cough, and then tried to choke it away lest she never be able to stop. “Can you at least tell me where they went?”
“Why would I know that?”
Flustered and frantic, Nia’s eyes were streaming and her throat was closing up with ash. “Then can you tell me—” She gagged on the air and forced herself to finish. “—where the nearest water is?”
“Open ocean?” He used the handle of his cane to scratch the side of his head. “The fort at De Soto, I suppose. It’s a few miles to the south, if that far. But I’m telling you, don’t give chase. Just wait, and the situation will resolve itself. The man will die, the goddess will be aggravated, and the woman will be punished.”
“Thank you,” Nia gasped. “Thank you, I appreciate your help. Can you please let me go now? Please, I’m so . . . I can’t stand it.”
He looked as if he were a little disappointed in her, but he pointed his cane at the window that he’d broken to send Bernice away.
Nia didn’t think twice or ask any questions. She leaped in a diving arc up to the window and through it, hands first and eyes closed. She exploded out into the street and hit the ground rolling, twisting, and gathering her body into a less crumpled shape.
Sam was there before she could finish wiping her eyes; she opened them just wide enough to see through a watery veil of stinging tears that half the block was collapsing.
“Oh my God,” Sam said, because he was watching the fire envelop the buildings more than he was watching Nia recover herself. “Was anybody in there?”
“No one who’ll care,” she said, and as she spoke she could feel her lungs clearing and the lining of her throat growing smoother.
“Somebody’s dead inside? Oh God.”
“No. I mean something is inside, but he’s all right with the temperature. Let’s go. Come on, we have to move.” She crawled and staggered to her feet, even though a well-meaning man in a nice suit was trying to tell her to lie still and wait for a doctor.
The clanging bells of a fire engine sounded a few streets away. A truck was fighting through the crowds and struggling with the narrow streets, trying to come and save the day; but the day was already lost. The Greek’s store was all but gone, and the store next door—whatever it once was—would be a pile of smoldering ash within another minute.
“I wonder if they were covered,” Sam mused quietly, taking Nia’s arm. “No, don’t. She’s fine. She’s with me,” he told the gentleman in the suit. “I’ll take her to a doctor right now.”
“I don’t need a doctor,” Nia swore before she realized she should let Sam do the talking.
“That’s all right, dear, we’re going to go find one anyway.” Then, quieter and into her ear. “A dozen people saw you crash through that window with a fireball behind you, so let them be concerned. Better they’re worried than curious, right?”
“You’re right.” She shifted her shoulder and used it to rub at her face, still half-convinced that her skin was melting and dripping down onto her clothes. “Here, help me up.”
“You’re heavy,” he observed. “I don’t mean you look heavy—”
“I know what you mean,” she sa
id. She hadn’t meant to lean on him so hard. “I don’t care, it’s fine. Let’s go. Which way is south from here?”
“This way, but let’s just get away from these people first.”
The truck was coming closer, moving slowly but with great determination. The crowd was organizing itself in a loose and semi-helpful way; nearby store owners and factory people were pumping water and bringing buckets, barrels, anything they could throw at the blaze. They formed lines in advance of the truck and swung pots, casks, and kegs as fast as they could be filled—anything at all to keep the fire from spreading to the rest of the district.
Nia was still confused and simmering in her skin, still flailing her arms and resisting the urge to scratch violently at her itching flesh. Sam took her hand and took the lead, ducking through the press of people and urging her to follow.
Clear of the worst of the crowd, Sam and Nia dashed out of the fire truck’s way as it careened around a corner and clipped the curb. They ducked into the next open street. People were still running to see the commotion, and business owners and residents were still screaming for water, but the pack was thinner the farther they removed themselves from the source.
“South?” Sam panted.
“What?”
“You said we were going south. How far south, and where exactly? Slow down. We can’t keep running away from the fire,” he told her, softer than a whisper against the side of her face. “We’ll get stopped by the police just for acting guilty.”
“Why?”
“Innocent people run towards a fire, because they want to know what’s happening. Guilty people already know, so they go the other way.”
She nodded, and her head knocked gently against his.
“And you need to cool off anyway. What happened in there?”
She wasn’t sure how best to sum it up, so she told him, “I met the Greek. He’s not human. I don’t know what he is, exactly, but he’s definitely not human. He’s the one who made the fire, and he’s the one controlling it. It won’t go out until he makes it go out.”
Sam relaxed his grip on her waist. “I hope he lets it die down soon.”
She continued. “The Greek talked like he hates the water witch—he called her Arahab, and that’s what she called herself the first time I saw her—but he said she was a goddess.” She held up her hands, counting on them as she thought out loud. “So there’s a water goddess, and a fire monster who talks like he serves a fire god; do you think there’s somebody in command of the air, and another someone in charge of the earth?”
“Probably,” Sam agreed. He didn’t sound very happy about it.
After a minute of silence Nia said, “You know, the best we can hope for is that no one will ever know that anything happened. The world won’t end, the apocalypse won’t come, and Leviathan won’t awaken.”
Sam didn’t respond for a few seconds, and they walked together as if life were proceeding in a perfectly normal way—except that behind them, plumes of black smoke gushed skyward.
“Where are we going again?” he asked.
“De Soto,” she said. “There’s more waiting for us there than just Mossfeaster’s water witch.” Then another thought dawned on her, so she changed the subject. “Listen, did you see anyone escape the shop before I did? There was a woman in there, and a man who looked like he was dying. There was something wrong with him; they couldn’t have gotten away very fast. They would’ve come out the same window I did.”
“Yeah, I saw them. They were dressed up, and they left in an ambulance right before you came out.”
“They what?”
“There was an ambulance—I think someone called the hospital when the first explosion blew out part of the building. They must have, because they got there quick. The woman was crying and upset, and the man was throwing up everywhere. I thought it was from the smoke.”
“So they have an ambulance, and we’re on foot. We need to either find a vehicle or run like hell.”
“I can’t run like hell,” Sam puffed, and Nia knew he was right. He was already panting, and there was no time to wait for him to catch his breath.
She stopped. “You’re right, I know you are. How do I get to De Soto, then?”
“It’s just . . . It’s maybe a mile and a half from here, straight that way.” He pointed. “It isn’t far. But the ambulance took those people to the hospital. Shouldn’t you start looking for them there?”
“They’ll never make it to the hospital.” Nia suspected, but did not tell Sam, that Bernice had already killed whoever drove it and was probably speeding merrily toward the water even as they spoke. “She’s going to hijack it to get back to the water. So here’s what we’re going to do: You’re going to go find a car, or something. Find anything that’s drivable, and borrow it or steal it, it doesn’t matter. Meet me at De Soto as soon as you can.”
“Wait!” he clutched her arm and there was real, deep panic in his eyes.
“I can’t,” she told him. She pulled her arm out of his grasp, and began to run.
To the Water’s Edge
José could feel his insides weakening, bubbling, and dissolving wherever the arsenic mixture spilled, poured, and oozed. His eyes were watering with runny rust and stinking phosphorus. His sphincter failed, and fiery yellow excrement spilled into the back of the ambulance.
Ceaselessly he manufactured orange bile that smelled like eggs and lava, and he cast it out from both ends. Everything the mixture touched began to sizzle and simmer, as if it were pure acid leaking from his body.
“What have you done?” he asked between heaving gags.
“You’ll be all right,” Bernice told him. Her calm was infuriating. She had killed the two men in the ambulance and kicked them out into the ditch, and then she took the wheel and directed the boxy vehicle along the roads. She left the siren on because she liked it, with its screeching red light and tinny wail.
José hadn’t known Bernice could drive such a thing, but she had assumed the wheel and taken the controls with assurance that was—if not masterly—perfectly instinctive.
He watched her wrestle the pedals and jerk on the gears, and the ambulance stalled only once. But as the seconds swept by and the poison coursed through his system, he was losing the ability to notice much of anything except for his own grueling struggle to keep himself from falling apart. How many internal organs could he lose to the gnawing combustion of the poison? How much of his stomach could he live without . . . and how much of his intestines? For over a hundred years, he’d barely thought of himself as a man at all; he was Mother’s child and construct.
But there on the floor of the ambulance, writhing and retching, he remembered that once upon a time he’d been a man with a torso that ticked with life. He recalled the need for food, the constant desire for alcohol or water or nourishment. There was forever some gastronomic distress or fluctuation brought on by the staleness of the ship’s cupboards or strange molds that worked into the breads, onto the meats.
Deep in the back of his memory he recalled a night on an island where the locals had given him cooked fish and a broth that they drank like coffee, though it was thicker and had more texture. He remembered the subsequent pain in his bowels, so intense that it brought on hallucinations and bloody diarrhea. It had been some treachery, then. It had been an attempt at mutiny that had failed and failed catastrophically.
“The captain was supposed to die,” he gurgled around the mouthful of saliva and vomit.
“What, baby?” Bernice called from the cab.
“They mean to kill me,” he recalled, and tried to say it out loud, but the words came out scrambled and damp. The acid from his stomach, from his throat, from his intestines . . . it was eating his teeth. They were crumbling in his mouth when he clacked them together.
His lover caught the general idea, and she responded with that same maddening calm. “You’ll be fine. I’ll get you right to Mother. We’re almost there. She’ll fix you. She has to fix you.”
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“Mother,” he mumbled, his head lolling back and forth, coating his face and hair with his own bile.
He couldn’t remember, he couldn’t recall, he couldn’t focus. What was that noise? That awful, jangling, rattling mechanical sound, coupled with the piercing whine that spun around in circles over his head—where was it coming from, and what did it mean? He couldn’t concentrate.
There was an island, and his first mate had wanted his ship and his crew, so he’d paid the natives to . . . And there was a meal on the beach, while drums were . . .
No. There was a small, dark shop, and it was empty when he and Bernice had let themselves inside. He’d watched her from the second room as she entered the third chamber and through the curtain that wafted and waved, parting around her and behind her; he’d watched her rifle through the jars and canisters. She’d grabbed what she wanted, then returned to him in the middle room.
She’d mixed the powders and shavings in a crucible, because there was no jar that would hold it. She’d held up the grayish reddish powder and had poured something on top of it. When the two combined, the concoction had begun to sizzle and spit.
“Where did you learn it?” he’d asked her then, and he tried to ask her now from pure delirium.
“In church,” she’d told him then, but she did not answer him now because she could not understand him anymore. His tongue was coming apart, dropping into strips of saggy flesh that flopped around in his mouth or fell out in chunks.
“In church?”
“There was a church, back on the island. I did some digging around in there. I told you, I haven’t liked this idea for a while. I don’t want the world to end, not yet. I’ve been trying to think of ways to put it off, and I thought . . .” She hadn’t bothered to finish her sentence, instead handing him the crucible with the foaming, disgusting mixture.