Барб Хенди - Of Truth and Beasts

His interest in Chane’s little brass ring grew.

“ I still ... cannot ,” he pleaded. “Please, my Beloved ... I starve.”

Unearth your need, like a droplet in sand ... and then another ... until you find means to serve. Dig and borrow for it, if you must, but do not pray to me to salve the wounds of your failure.

Sau’ilahk sank deeper into dormancy under Beloved’s rebuke. The only source of life he could think of was the caravan. He did not have the strength to search for it, let alone any memory that would let him awaken at its constantly changing location. He remained lost in the black silence, not knowing for how long.

All that was left to him were the painful past memories of his god that made him seethe in silence. The Children had never been treated this way. Though he had earned Beloved’s displeasure through disobedience, he had done all he could to regain a state of grace in his god’s awareness. When trapped between faithful service and desperate need, he was treated like ... an insect in the dirt, just short of a whim to step upon it.

And the world reappeared.

Sau’ilahk spotted the barest gray in the eastern sky, and panic set in. Had he remained dormant for too long? He could not bear a whole day in darkness amid such hunger, and he sagged like a limp scarecrow draped in black sackcloth.

All that filled his awareness was the road.

Not the sands of the great desert from long ago, but packed earth with stones exposed by decades of weathering and use. Drops of water were not what he needed, though they were more plentiful here than in the dunes. The sting of Beloved’s rebuke ran through him like a wasp’s poison in the veins of living flesh.

Where there was water, or just moisture, even in another’s remains, it could sustain a tiny life. He had once been such sustenance at the end of his living days.

That old, old memory still haunted and sickened him.

All had been mysteriously lost at the war’s end. Or, rather, the war had simply ended for no reason he had understood. Years had passed since the night that he received the “blessing” of eternal life. Then one night, the Children simply vanished.

Sau’ilahk went to the mouth into Beloved’s mountain, and it was gone. Not as if blocked by a collapse or filled in with stone and earth. The opening simply was not there anymore ... as if it had never been there.

Gone were the guardian locatha, those hulkish abominations like the offspring of a man and some monstrous reptile. The tribes and others of the horde began to disperse, but not before they turned on each other. Northerners and other defectors in the war turned against the desert tribes. Tribes turned on each other, no longer needing the excuses of old blood feuds. Packs and herds of the Ygjila—what would one day be known as goblins—tore into any but their own kind.

They massacred each other over what little spoils of war had been gained, and then fled into the peaks and across the sands. Amid it all, the Children’s offspring from the battlefields hunted and harried the living in the nights. They slaughtered anything for as much blood, as much life, as they could gain so deep in the desert.

Sau’ilahk fled with the remains of his underlings among the Reverent.

In more years that followed, he searched for any trace of the Children. Each year, he grew more afraid and maddened by spite. For when he looked in his polished silver mirror, his own visage was too much to bear.

Lines had grown on his once beautiful face. His glistening black curls of hair steadily dulled with streaks of gray. His joints slowly lost their range of motion amid growing aches at every movement. Food consumed for its comfort became mud upon his tongue, devoid of all taste. And his days became as his nights as his sight began to fail. That last loss was almost a relief from ever looking into the mirror again.

Sau’ilahk had grown old.

He withered, cheated by the lie of eternal life. It was not until after his heart finally halted its weak beats that a truth made his fear grow all the more. When he finally died, he could see again.

Sau’ilahk lay in the tent upon piled rugs for a bed, amid the haze of funerary incense. All around him, the remaining Reverent in their black robes and cloaks murmured prayers for Beloved to welcome him into the afterlife. Sau’ilahk was little more than a withered bag of bones as he watched them, knowing he could not be dead if he could now see.

His followers bowed their heads and closed their eyes, though some faces appeared subtly relieved rather than mournful. He tried to take a breath to rebuke them for prematurely dismissing him.

Sau’ilahk could not draw air—nor could he move his mouth. He could not blink or close his eyes—or if he did so without knowing it, no one noticed ... and he could still see them.

The nearest swiped a hand across his old face as if to shut his eyelids. Still he could see them, hear them.

Some of the lesser Reverent left in that last night of his “life.” Three remained to whisper among themselves, until whispers became sharp words. They argued over whether or not to bother fulfilling his final decree concerning proper burial. In the end, two of the trio won out by using a hooked-point blade to tear out the throat of the third.

It brought Sau’ilahk no satisfaction.

He lay mute and paralyzed, unable to tell them he was not dead, even as they stripped and washed his withered flesh. They wrapped him in strips of black burial cloth, layer by layer, so suited to Beloved’s most reverent of the Reverent. Even as they rolled the strips over his eyes, again and again, he still watched them. He screamed from within as they bore him off, though no sound escaped his still lips.

They lodged him in a small cave high in the great mountain range. As they crawled back to the opening, all he had left to see was a rough stone ceiling an arm’s length above him, torchlight still flickering upon it. That light began to grow dim as he heard the stones being piled.

Until that flicker vanished altogether, and there was only silence.

Sau’ilahk’s silent screams turned to sobs as he came to know Beloved’s truth. He had his eternal life, but not eternal youth. All his beauty was gone, but not the prison of his flesh in its death.

How long did he wait until they came?

Something entered his awareness in the dark. Like a spark he could not see, it skittered around the space of his tomb. And then another—and another.

Something pulled, jerked, and tore at the cloth strips over his sunken belly. A small form scuttled over his face and burrowed into the cloth over his right eye.

Were they worms, beetles, flies? What had crept and flitted too many times, too close across his cloth-wrapped face, only to wriggle through the wraps over his desiccating flesh? How long had it taken for them to amass?

Was it days, moons, or even years in that dark silence, until all he felt and heard was their burrowing, their biting and gnawing? It became a distant thing to be eaten alive—eaten dead—like a wound so harsh, the mind shuts it out. Horror numbed any sensation too torturous to bear.

For slow ages Sau’ilahk lay there, eaten away in small pieces while the rest of him decayed, until ...

Out of dark dormancy Sau’ilahk rose one night through the mountain-side, his first utterance a scream that had built within him over a century. No longer anchored in flesh, dawn soon cut into his madness and drove him back down into a dormancy as dark as his tomb had been. But he rose again under the stars after the following dusk, still mindlessly wailing and unable to touch anything, most of all himself.

Even now, as he stood upon the road Wynn had taken, Sau’ilahk quaked under those endless years. Only the sound of scuttling in the dark had kept him company. That and the screams of his thoughts, so loud they could have cracked his dried bones if he had had a true voice.