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ayellowbirds · 6 years ago

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After a brief hiatus due to a day in which i didn’t get any writing done, we’re on to the results of the ninth night of writing. 15,478 words so far! This one’s double-length, to make up for lost time.

i’m currently only able to work for 14 hours a week; donations to support this are welcome! Feel free to let me know when you’ve donated, I’ll see about including a tribute of some sort to you in the text of the story:

https://www.paypal.me/ayellowbirds

https://ko-fi.com/ayellowbirds

As always, keep track of the tag for updates!

(logo fonts are Bradley Gratis and Yiddishkeit Bold)

I really do appreciate everyone who reblogs or likes these posts. It’s been very encouraging to see this response, and i hope that i’m rewarding that interest with the kind of content you want to see!

Click the Read More to continue, or click here for the previous part, and here for the first part!

BACK TO THE PRESENT, WHICH IS COMPARATIVELY THE FUTURE

Belaset fully expected there to be heavy thumps against the door at her back as she held the door shut.

After all, there was a walking, evidently hungry dead person back there.

Also a very naked one, which was somehow much more unsettling than when she had been an inanimate body being loaded into a chest of solid ice. Belaset found herself wishing she had not kept to the habit of leaving behind the tachrichim. A little bit of linen, a little bit left to the imagination, and why was she thinking about the body’s state of dress when it was animated after being dead and rotting?

“I swear, Doc, this has never happened before,” she said, putting as much of herself against the door as possible.

There still hadn’t been any thumps, yet. But then, the corpse had let them leave the room in peace.

There were sounds of movement, though. Was it ransacking the room for weapons? Another way out?

“I don’t imagine that it has,” Menax replied. He was rooting around in a closet, and when he came out, he was carrying—a book?

“No offense intended, and I’m sure you know more than me about this kind of thing,” Belaset said, taking note of scratching sounds from the other side of the door, “but I have to figure that throwing a book at it won’t stop this thing.”

“I wasn’t counting on that, but who knows,” Menax replied, flipping pages and tracing his finger over the text. “We cannot resolve this situation without understanding what we are facing, and simply throwing everything in the kitchen at it will teach us nothing, especially as she appears to be cognizant.”

Belaset felt her eyes narrow at that, which had the added effect of bringing the book in the doctor’s hands into clearer focus. Unlike all the medical texts and broadsheets in the Stafroph, this had something on the cover in the Aleftav, the ancient alphabet of the people of the land.

Whether Belaset counted as a person of the land—perhaps ironically, as being a half-giant seemingly born out of the environment itself meant she was literally of the land—had come down to one thing, when she had first met her kohenet, and it had been decisive. For although she was wholly and stubbornly illiterate when it came to Icarian writing until recently, she could read the Aleftav with fluent comprehension without even realizing when she was reading something written in a language she did not speak.

Pára Djanim, written by hand on a plain white cover. To My Soul.

Menax’s hand was moving faster over the pages, mumbling words to himself. His eyes seemed about to bulge out of their sockets.

“What is—” Belaset began, and then felt a thump at her back.

“My family was from Ocoiti,” Menax said, mumbling something under his breath before continuing, “and I remembered my nona would always tell my nono stories about her adventures. When she traveled as a girl, she wrote in this book, for him to read when she returned, because his illness kept him from going with her—ah! Here!”

Another thump, and then another. Wait, was it a thump, or a knock?

Menax came over, showing Belaset some pages on which an old-fashioned cursive hand was matched with… well, fairly amateurish illustrations. This one showed a, well. Belaset supposed it was a hand? Sticking out of the ground? There was a square next to it, with some little circles on top, and Z’’L written on it. A grave, she guessed.

“In her travels, she met cousins who told stories about the powers from the old country, in the Original Land,” he explained, while Belaset felt something pushing under the door. Could a corpse kill you by poking you with its finger? She didn’t ask out loud, as Menax continued, “they told stories about sorcerers who would enslave you not only in life, but in death, and about heroes who rose after dying, again and again. The Icosans tried to learn this magic, but the gods denied it to them, because they did not recognize Icarian authority, and the Icarian god kept that power for their Emperor alone.”

Something rustled against Belast’s hand, which had been planted on the floor. A leaf? A dead, dry finger? She felt it slip into her grasp. Was it paper?

“The Icarians who tried to take this power,” Menax continued, now going into full lecture mode as if making a presentation to a classroom instead of standing in his kitchen while the living dead tried to escape his private study, “found themselves cursed by it, and became evil spirits, haints of the body instead of the soul. Nona said that the old word, the Original word, was ‘jumbee’. But Icosans being Icosans, they changed the pronunciation; it came to be that, when a dead person got up and walked around like that, they called it a ‘zombie’.”

Belaset lifted her hand up, and looked in her palm. A crumpled sheet of paper. On it, written in both Aleftav and Stafroph in a hurried fashion, were the words, “please, need food. Very confused”. She handed it to Menax, who looked at it, and nodded as though that had answered all his questions.

He walked back over to the cutting board, clapping the book shut. “I think that we have something like that, here. Some warping of magic of resurrection—that is why the body did not move until now, something delayed it and the, ah, ‘zombie’ rose in a flawed, partial manner.”

He returned with a wooden plate loaded with the remaining ananas rings.

In his other hand, was a tin salt shaker.

“I would like to offer our guest some hospitality,” he said, passing the shaker to Belaset. “If things do not go as planned, could you see about getting some of this into her mouth? Nona Simera found that the taste of pure salt should at least temporarily paralyze them.”

He then indicated the door.

“If you please?”

Belaset took a deep breath, and rose to her feet. Or rather, she shuffled forward so that she was kneeling in a way that did not block the door, not feeling like trying to stand up in the small space of Menax’s house. She would be the first to admit that she had no idea how it was she fit indoors in the first place, but she always felt claustrophobic trying to stand up straight when she did.

The salt shaker felt like a shot for a sling in her hand, the weight reassuring her. And if worse came to worst, she wasn’t exactly defenseless.

She’d heard of other half-giants, even met one once, when she went to the city. Where her body had unusually large legs compared to the rest of her, others seemed to be similarly disproportionate. She’d met that one whose hair grew to a volume several times that of the rest of his own body regardless of how it was cut. And she’d heard tell of a woman with great and curling talons in place of fingernails, and a boy with ears so large he could shelter a minyan under them. In general, other half-giants used these traits to achieve remarkable deeds.

So, Belaset had a lot of confidence in her ability to kick anything in existence out of her way.

She just wasn’t sure that she could do it without kicking down the walls of Menax’s house.

A FEW MONTHS AGO

“For this assignment, the four of you will be adopting identities that insert you into the popular culture of young people near the suburban campuses of the Imperial University at Palse Rjat,” Lieutenant Yslireb explained, reading from the official papers. “We have reason to suspect that anarchist cells have been using the entertainment venues of the student population as a base for recruitment, including the theatre near Fishtaykh, and the restaurants and coffeehouses there and in Mutneberg.”

He continued describing details of the area in a steady drone as V. looked through the supplies she had been given for the assignment—a disguise, personal effects for the new identity, and notes that she would be expected to memorize and destroy.

N. leaned over to look at her box, having already spread her own over the entirety of her personal space in their dormitory, from the top of her bunk to the surrounding floor. B. was taking pains not to step on any of it as she walked past to hand J. his own box, hefting the crate with ease that J. could not match. From his spot at the door to the “boys” bedroom, he suddenly doubled over trying to hold up the wooden box in the same one-handed manner his teammate had, before switching to both hands.

None of them had offered an explanation to Yslireb as to why V. had been in the girls’ room when he had arrived at that late hour with the details of their next mission, and the Lieutenant had no pressed the matter beyond a quirk of his upper lip that threatened to turn into a sneer.

That sneer manifested fully, now, as he read aloud the details of V.’s role.

“In light of the recent exemplary performance of V.” he said, giving the animal surname that V. could not abide, “in infiltrating the subversive culture at the Institute of Alienism by posing as a young man with profound sexual dysfunctions, the administration of the Corpse deems that he….”

V. tuned out most of Yslireb’s attempts to get a rise out of her. She’d found the mission at the Institute to be a good opportunity to explore herself and learn about new trends in the studies of sexuality and gender—and then direct the imperial forces to make arrests and seizures that didn’t target the people and information she had left out of her official reports. And while she’d kept quite a lot from her teammates, she’d also started to open up more about things she’d been feeling for longer than she could properly express them.

It felt good to get some of it off her chest, regardless of what Yslireb and those like him might think. Besides, her status as one of the Corpse kept rising with each new mission, and the officials trusted her with more and more vital intelligence. She hadn’t yet had an opportunity to ask, but she’ probably soon be within the top three. If not the Crown or the Brain, at least the Right Eye.

And once she got to the top, she’d have the status to be able to pick and choose missions, and maybe even retire to a peaceful life that left all of this behind, after a while. After all, hadn’t S. been able to even backtalk the instructors, ever since they first announced the rankings? And then he was given the ignominious surname of “Sherets”—a crawling, wriggling thing. His emblem was a worm. He might even have dropped down to the bottom five for all his attitude.

No, she’d been playing it smart. Not too eager to please so as to not invite too much responsibility, but enough to be seen as reliable. And she’d learned from all those incidents in her tween and teen years—learned the lesson the Captain had subtly tried to teach, that the key isn’t to not break the rules at all, but to not get caught. After all, the whole point of the Corpse was stealth and subterfuge, to protect the Empire’s interests by means of covert activity.

And now she was being assigned to take on a role that was so near to her true self, the deceit was that she was being deceitful about it in the first place.

Well, as long as nobody listened to Yslireb.

NOW—FOR A MOMENT, IF YOU PLEASE

She slipped the paper under the doorway, silently hoping this would work. She still didn’t understand what had happened, but she’d seen her reflection for a moment in a window, and since then had avoided rising up high enough for that.

She looked like she’d been dead for at least a day, if not longer. And her face and throat were damaged beyond what a living person could—

—A face she’d trusted, that had trusted her, screams of betrayal. Eyes turning dark, hair going white, face growing long. Disappearing into the woods, something shining in her teeth. She’d escaped, but—

—how had she gotten here, in this condition? What had happened to her retrieval by her rowmates, or, barring that, by another row in the Corpse? And her body was entirely naked. Everything was gone, including her emblem. But where had it—

—A face she knew, in the crowd. Someone she couldn’t stand. A few words whispered. A finger pointing, a cry of protest ignored. The ground, too cold and too hot beneath her. Light gone quickly, and then, in the silence, boots. A familiar voice, a hand reaching into her blouse, searching for something.

The thing that kept the magic that brought her back to life every time she had died, before.

She could make all kinds of guesses based on her education in magical theory and practice, about the long exposure of her body to the emblem and the repeated action of resurrection leaving some kind of partial impression of the magic on her body. It must have caused some kind of delayed half-resurrection, leaving her in this incomplete, decayed form.

She didn’t feel pain anymore, not since the initial shock, except as a dull full-body ache far less severe than things she had been trained to tolerate. Even the knife still stuck in her left hand was more noticeable just as a _pressure._ Far more noticeable, far less tolerable, was the horrible feeling of total emptiness. She had been hungry, thirsty, starving before. She’d died of dehydration that one time. But she’d never felt it nearly this bad, and it took all her self-control to not start chewing off bits of herself, or pieces of furniture.

She wasn’t sure if the process of decay had been arrested, but she hoped so. At the very least, her eyes seemed to be working at normal function, in spite of the horrible cloudy yellow color she had seen in the glass for a moment.

If she extended her awareness enough, trying to put herself out of the physical feelings and focus on the spiritual, she could feel a magical substance—something otherwise invisible and intangible—suffusing her body, concentrated on places where she ought not to have had any function. If she could have drawn a picture of it in that moment, there would have been a bright glow around each major muscle, and even more so at her throat and eyes, and then again in the pit of her stomach.

The pit, again.

ONCE MORE, A FEW MONTHS AGO

“What do you mean by that?” Yslireb asked, his usual distasteful expression replaced by something more confused.

He’d arrived at the pre-mission check-up to repeat more of the same needless things that he had already insisted on saying when he first delivered the assignment. As Eciurtal checked V.’s height and weight, she’d let slip some minor comment about wondering what her ranking was after all this time.

“Well, after the first announcement,” she said, looking at the way the scales bobbed while her weight shifted ever so slightly from one foot to the other, “I figured we’d have been told how we were doing, over the years.”

Silence.

That was not a good sign.

“You mean, you thought that—” Yslireb sounded like he was choking on his own tongue, “—after more than a decade! You’re asking now?”

As he lapsed into something halfway between hysterics and a coughing fit, V. very carefully turned to look at Eciurtal. The Chief Nurse had always been very sympathetic to them. Perhaps because she related to the unknowable ancestry of the orphan children of the Corpse. Now, her expression was almost heartbreakingly cold. A touch of pity, yes, but so steeled it was hard to find it there.

“The ranking is, it was,” she began, and then looked to Yslireb.

He managed to right himself, spittle hanging from his chin. “It’s _static,_ you idiot! His Imperial Majesty decided it one time, for the rest of your lives! It doesn’t change just because you do better!”

The world seemed to quiet around her, even Yslireb’s voice as he said something about the rankings being based on the Emperor’s impressions of them as children. That the time and attention he needed to devote to running a global empire wasn’t to be wasted on….

Well, she didn’t hear the rest, because for some reason, she was walking out of the medical wing. Yslireb was yelling something after her, interrupted by those cough-laughs. Eciurtal was saying something, too.

V. didn’t hear any of it, though.

All she could hear was a voice from many years before, telling her, “number four, the Pit of the Body, the Source of Vitality,” before moving on to the next child.

#yenne velt: dead names #my writing

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