Veto
We’d found her, but the finding brought me no comfort.
For one thing, Florin had been right. Perdy was far more than she appeared. An ethereal creature, seemingly made of white mist, she played around in the water and gazed wistfully into the depths as it rippled. Long horns spiraled and curved out of her red hair and I had little doubt that beneath the surface of the lake, hooves rather than feet disturbed the dreams of fish.
The other problem was that creatures very much like her surrounded her. I counted eleven others, all cavorting in the shallows, all slightly less human versions of her. Aside from the odd translucency and the horns, she was mostly Perdy; I recognized her easily. The look of utter misery on her tear-stained cheeks broke my heart. The others were far stranger, elongated faces ending in delicate snouts and black almond-shaped eyes peering from under gracefully arched white eyebrows.
The lake sparkled like blue-white starlight from their glow. When they walked out of the water and stepped onto the island, bright blue flames rose from their hoofprints. The ground was charred to a crisp, and specks of gray ash rose from it, climbing hot air currents like snowflakes in reverse.
Mesmerized, I stepped out of our shelter and into the open without thinking. Before I knew what I was doing, I was ankle-deep in the water and calling out like a cheerful child on the first day of school.
“Perdy!”
I stopped mid-wave when the horror on her face registered, bringing me violently back to awareness. She reached an arm toward me and half opened her mouth, but the others were upon her in a moment, dragging her away. She hadn’t a chance.
They were a blur of white flame battling against a strong wind. One shot into the water, her reflection shimmering on the surface for a moment before rising into the sky. The curious mirror image made me blink hard, and I couldn’t have sworn which the real creature was, and which the reflection. Another handful followed, and the same odd effect confused me. They plunged soundlessly into the depths, sending only mirages into the sky. In moments, they were all gone, Perdy with them, leaving nothing but bright turquoise afterimages that trailed upward and downward from where they played.
I blinked hard to clear my eyes and when I opened them again, the island was no longer visible, every little trace that anyone had ever been there wiped away into blackness. I could hardly see anything at all other than a charcoal fog and a few feet of oily water. Frightened, I turned back to my friends and found them frozen in various stages of their attempts to stop me. Rareș was nearest, the anger on his face evident. I started to say something, I’m not even sure what, when he grabbed me by the shoulders.
“You fool! You bleeding skull of an ox!”
He shook me until my teeth rattled, and I didn’t know which way I was facing anymore.
Eugen’s voice barely registered somewhere behind him. “Stop that!”
Rareș let go of my shoulders, swung round, and hooked him right in the face. It can’t have been full strength, because Eugen staggered back but stayed on his feet. A warning shot, at most. Then, he turned on me again.
“You just cost me time I don’t have.”
He stormed off back among the trees, and after a moment we followed in stunned silence.
* * *
Our fire roared but lit, at most, a couple of steps around it. The dark ocher sky gave no light, and the woods around us were filled with unfamiliar noises.
Cheșa had vanished into the woods and returned with two large turtle-like creatures, armored from head to toe in interlocking steel-colored plates that reflected firelight. They struggled and tried to jab at him with the bone horn that protruded from their noses, but he held them at arm’s length by the tail and they didn’t stand a chance. A slice of his wicked hunting knife later, and they were meat.
I took them from his hand and placed them belly-up around the fire, letting them cook in their own shells. Cheșa emptied his pockets, which were full of an odd sort of apple. No larger than an average walnut and pale pinkish-white, they looked entirely unappetizing. He broke one open in his hands and revealed a violent blood-red and juicy pulp. The rivulets running down his hands left ruby trails.
I called Eugen over to take a look.
“I don’t know, it seems dangerous. The meat can taste bad, at most, but red fruit….”
“Not all red fruit is poisonous.”
“But some are lethal.”
Cheșa searched among the pile of apples until he found the one he was looking for. It was battered and chewed on, covered in little nibbles where something had obviously pecked away at it.
He signed flight and poked at the apple.
Birds ate these. Many. They won’t kill us.
“That’s a good sign.”
The turtle-things tasted muddy and bland, but were fine strong meat; the apples were every bit as sharp and sweet as their color had promised. Even Rareș ate, though he looked sicker and more feverish by the minute. After his outbreak, he never said another word beyond, “We need fire.” He did the work, ate the meal, then lay with his back against the warmed-up boulder and rolled himself a cigarette of something heinously smelly one-handed.
Cheșa poked me in the ribs and nodded to him.
“Why me?” I asked.
He raised his eyebrows. I sighed.
Nearing him was like walking into a smokehouse full of spoiled eggs. He puffed and looked at me through reddish lashes, eyes sparkling behind them, the impossible fever from an infection he couldn’t already have developed shining in them.
“I knew you were going to be trouble the moment I saw you handle a white-hot blade.”
“Why am I trouble?” I sat by the fire, a respectable distance away.
“Because if you weren’t here, I’d probably have tied the old fool to a tree, sent the young fool running home, and been done with my business by now.” He puffed a circle of bluish smoke toward me, and I struggled not to gag. “Who are you?”
“What do you mean? I’m Anna. Are you well?”
“No, I’m not well. But what I meant is this – who are you to this place? A defender or an attacker?”
“What if I don’t want to be either?”
“A coward’s choice. Sometimes, choosing neither side is an attack to both. Coward, and a fool too, and I don’t think that’s you, girlie.”
I didn’t know how to respond to what seemed almost a compliment, but I couldn’t walk away either. Cheșa was right, I had to find out what was wrong with him before he led us all into some sort of disaster.
I hoped shock would stir the pot. “Why are you dying?”
He sat there unflinching and puffed some more. “We’re all dying.”
“You’re dying faster.”
“Don’t be so sure. That whole town, and you in it, don’t have long.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Don’t you see it? Pah, you wouldn’t. You don’t know what it was like before you got here. It used to be hard, sure, but it made sense. There was a balance to things.”
“Not anymore?”
“Not for a long time. Winter’s been getting slowly harsher, Tides have been getting more erratic, more Whispers break the rules, and it happens slowly enough that most people can pretend it isn’t happening. We used to have so many more animals, you know?”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Sure. Great healthy herds of cattle, and wild game. And healthy children.”
His eyes bored dark and heavy into the fire. A rustle drew both of our attention to the right, where the edge of our firelight met with the edge of the woods, but nothing stirred further.
“There were few children left even before they were taken to make more Walkers. Now there won’t be any. No sane ones, at least, to take us into the future.”
On the other side of the fire, beyond the log bench, a slithery splosh came from the edge of the lake. We paused for a moment, staring into the darkness, but nothing appeared. Our nerves wouldn’t do well under an entire night of that.
“Where do you come into that story, Rareș? Why’d you get mad at me? I met you just a handful of days ago, fit and strong and full of—”
“Anger and despair, yes, quite full of it. I’d already had enough before I lost my third child, and my wife walking off into the woods left me with little to care about. Maybe I could have taken the personal injury, but with Paul gone…he was going to do something for us, that lad. He was the one to get us in line. Sharp and tough as a steel nail. He’d have stopped the madness.”
He was all that. “I’m so sorry.”
“Enough of that. I’ll do it my way and die trying.”
“At least you admit you are here to do a specific thing, and it was never about helping me.”
He smiled thinly and studied me.
I huffed, defeated. “You have your reasons, and they’re not my business. At least tell me what you know about Perdy? It’s clearly more than you’ve led me to believe.”
“I know next to nothing about her fine self. I’d been so sure she was one of us. I guess you never can be sure.” He shook his head and stared into the fire. “I know a little about her companions, the Iele. I suppose she’s a Iala too.”
“Think she’s there by choice? She hardly looked pleased.”
“Hardly matters. You scared them away and cost us time I don’t have.”
“Then let me help you.”
He scoffed. “Paul said you were a helper. That’s who you are, plain to see. It’s just – I wonder, who will be more deserving of your help, in the end?”
“Let that be you, then. Deserve it.”
He chuckled. “Do people ever get tired of you being so goddamned nice around them all the time? So goddamned nice and sweet and expecting the best in everyone. It must be exhausting for them. It must be hard for any flawed person to live up to. I couldn’t bear it for long.”
I almost choked on my own heart. It was unfair to hear it laid out like that, in such an inappropriate moment. The very thing Alec spat back into my face, calling it deceitful. The way I hid what a monster I actually was.
He carried on, unconcerned, but more softly. “You can’t help. I came here to die, that’s a fact. The only question is whether I’ll be able to even the odds for our people before I go.”
He leaned forward and eyed the others suspiciously. They were having their own quiet conference on the log bench, using hand signals and drawing diagrams in the dirt, comparing those to the smattering of stars that blinked into existence overhead. I was sure at least Cheșa could hear us, if not both of them, but they were smart enough to pretend not to.
“My wife, may she find her way out into the light, stumbled on many things dark and terrible in her mad search to end the curse on our line. Sometimes the tales held seeds of truth. One such tells of a powerful Whisper that sneaks into houses and curses human children who would otherwise have become too strong, so she can take them for her own. She’s the queen of her kind, the thirteenth Iala.”
“Thirteenth?”
“You had a glimpse of the other twelve Iele on the lake. Her handmaidens. She trusts them. They’re the only way to reach her. If anyone, mortal or Whisper, tries to find their way down to her sunken throne, they drown.”
We twisted to mark the progress of something fluttering through the upper branches. The quantity of motion around us was starting to unnerve even me.
“But with a Iala? Well. Even I could. This morning, when we spoke…. Was it this morning? Blast it. When we spoke, I was just starting to ask myself how I might get in here. If it wasn’t for you and the hound, I’d have probably flayed myself some Prickies.”
He snarled in their direction, and Cheșa nodded back. I had a feeling the Master was losing patience with the smith.
“You made a wish on the Om to find Pierduta. I made a wish to find someone who’d take me to the queen. I guess the old turkey shot two humans with one stone, eh? I never expected your little red-headed friend would be my way, but so be it. I wish I could say that changed things for me, but it don’t.”
“So that’s why you were rabid when I accidentally scared her off. But she’ll be back, surely? She has to, now that she knows we’re here.”
“Aye, they come back every night. I just pray it’s not too late for me.”
What was the fool planning to do once he got to the Queen of Whispers, exactly? I was about to ask when a strange brushing noise came from the woods, as though something exceedingly large had failed to pass through the canopy without disturbing it. Necks craned, we fixed that point, pupils wide open and searching, but the night betrayed nothing but the outline of black trees against the shallow brick-red sky.
We jumped again when a thin, raspy voice came from far below that rustle.
“Spare some food?”
Whoever it was stayed well in the darkness beyond our circle of light. Something about that voice washed waves of shivers down my shoulders and back like cold water.
Rareș and Cheșa came round the fire and stood by us, and I felt a familiar tap on my shoulder.
Don’t.
Before I could ask why, the voice came again from right near the boulder. Still, I could see nothing.
“Spare some food?”
Eugen’s hushed and hurried tone barely registered over the crackling of the fire. “That’s twice. We have to, if he asks again. What if it’s him – I know, Cheșa, but what if….”
The third time, it came from the water, without any sign that it had moved in any way from one place to another.
“Spare some food for an old fool, long of tooth and thin of wool?”
Before we could argue any further, Rareș stood with a great groan and grabbed the last of the turtle meat sitting in its upturned shell on his way up. “Show yourself and you can eat with us.”
A great tumult of leaves and branches drew in from all directions, snaking through the trees and heading toward that one spot that last held the disembodied voice. A dry, gnarly looking man of indecipherable age and greenish hue stepped out into our light. His eyes were too large, and it seemed like he kept them half closed and his head half turned to compensate.
“How kind and grand, my dear young man.”
“Young? Ha. I’m not young.”
“That would depend on where one stands.”
He twirled his fingers in front of his almost motionless face in lieu of expressions and eyed each of us in turn, lingering his viscid gaze on me a little longer. Eugen opened his mouth to speak, trembling, but Cheșa shot him a warning glance that was unmistakable. It hit me square in the chest too. Clearly, they knew what sort of danger we were dealing with, and I took my cues from them.
The old manlike thing waddled up to the food, sidestepping, grabbed it with a hooked hand, and retreated back into the shadows. He hid behind hunched shoulders and slurped away at the meat, throwing an empty shell back at us within moments. It flew between me and Eugen and we dodged, sending him into fits of raspy cackles.
“Now that you’ve eaten, old man, why don’t you tell us what else we can do for you?”
He glared at Rareș from under weedy brows, sucking at each uncommonly long and multi-jointed finger in turn to get all the meat juices. “No, no. Your part is through. It’s now what I can do for you.”
“For us?”
“Just you and you alone showed kindness to my weary bones.”
“I need nothing from you but peace. Be on your way.”
“You want to get her. I know how.”
Rareș tensed up and stepped forward toward the moldy looking thing. It hissed and drew back into the shadows, quickly continuing its speech before anyone could intercede.
“There’s foul sweat upon your brow. You poisoned yourself for no reason. The queen, she won’t eat human flesh, and if she did? She’d have them fresh. You’re dank and dead and out of season. Nice try, goodbye!”
The words fell out of me before I could dam them. “So that was your plan, you pile-brained ox!”
Rareș shooed me with one hand. “Be quiet, girl.” He took another step toward the old Whisper. “I’ve taken Unseemly Hemlock, that’s true. There’s nothing left to do now but go through with it. Leave me be.”
“You won’t be around for dawn.”
Rareș seemed poised to send the thing to the devil again, then chewed on his lip for a moment. “And you’ve got a better idea?”
“Rareș, don’t—”
“I said be quiet!” His voice was a roar.
The creature cackled. “I might. I might not. Might, might not. There’d be a price. A sacrifice.”
“I gave you food.”
“Meat only lasts a moment, much like the lives of men. What I want is eternal – shame, and regret, and pain. That’s what it takes to gain the strength to live again.”
The thing looked at me and I could swear its pale cerulean hair moved and wiggled in rhythm with its cadaverous fingers, still held up in front of its face. The only feature on that face noticeably alive at all were its eyes, now opened halfway, already four times what they should have been.
“A real deal, a real treat. Something fresh and juicy for these ancient teeth to eat. Her Majesty may not indulge, but I enjoy the fear, if not the meat. The remorse, in particular, is my favorite morsel.”
Half-shadowed, it chuckled rusty nails and lies. Its long arms reached toward me, and even though it was much too far to touch me, I couldn’t help but step back and trip over myself. Seemingly out of nowhere, Cheșa stood in front of me, arms outstretched, knife in hand.
It withdrew, sank into the gloom a little farther, and looked to Rareș again.
“My way is plain and guaranteed. Trade me one friend. Pick any. Who doesn’t have too many?”
Rareș raised his eyebrows and looked at us where we huddled together.
“Don’t you dare!” Eugen launched himself at Rareș, bare hands reaching for his neck, red rage all over his face.
Before he could take more than two steps, Cheșa grabbed him by the back of his shirt, twisted once, and threw him backward hard, right into the shrubs behind us. Rareș and the creature continued as if nothing more upsetting than a breeze had passed.
“How?”
“I’ll make you the strongest thing that’s ever been, enough power to break the queen. A day is all I need to whisper you a song. Rather than spend it dying, you’ll spend it growing strong, and by the time night rolls around, you will be good and be done. And then? Well, this whole world can be yours to amend.”
“Who are you, to offer me something like this?”
With a great whoosh and a bang, the thing withdrew all the way back into the woods, and its horrible slithering and rushing among the canopy resumed. All around us, the forest itself protested against the unnatural creature.
“Ask your boy. He’ll name the thing that made you king.” The shrill voice traveled around us at such a speed we could barely follow its position with our eyes.
Rareș turned to Eugen, who howled into the wind. “Zburătorul Zmeilor. You know his reputation, Rareș! Deceit and fear, breaking families, taking hostages, and sowing regret wherever he goes.”
“Aye, the wind spirit.” Rareș spoke more calmly, and I could barely hear him over the din. “But powerful as the Devil himself, and never breaks a deal.”
The creature hissed. “Oldest and strongest of all the Zmei kin. If I can’t give you what I said, you can wear my skin.”
“If I say yes—”
I gasped and choked on dust and leafy bits. After all he’d just seen, and knowing that creature was evil, still? It was beyond belief. The wind died down to a constant, relentless low groan circling around us.
“You accept?”
“On my terms. You heal me of the poison.”
“Said and done, otherwise you’d be gone. But if I’ve got to be this nice, I get to choose the sacrifice.”
“No.”
From behind the boulder, a large shape poked out halfway up the trunks. It was the head of the old creature, only massive now – the size of a small cottage, huge burning eyes like windows into hell. It snapped sharp teeth at us, barked, “Yes!” and slithered back into the woods as quickly as it came, withdrawing on what looked like a serpent’s body covered in feathers, thick as a country road.
“If you won’t haggle, we won’t deal.”
“I’ll give you one veto, and that’s the last I’ll say. Take it now or meet your end, and I will eat your corpses anyway.” The voice circled around us faster and faster. “Like I ate your foolish lad. He thought himself quite smart.” A massive, upturned snout poked out from between two trunks, pointing luminescent eyes right at me. “I think you well enjoyed his heart.” Then, it withdrew again.
Eugen next to me gripped my elbow tightly and, with a look of utter desperation on his face, shouted, “Paul?” but nobody answered, not even I.
“Your decision, now!”
Rareș looked to me sadly and mouthed an apology that would never have cut through the bellow of the wind. He turned back and shouted at the woods. “Deal!”
Treetops waved against the bloody sky as the massive serpent changed direction and swooped away from us. It took a long, winding arch that crashed and cracked everything in its way, not bothering to dodge between the trunks anymore, and aimed itself at us again.
At me.
The earth trembled in its wake, trees swinging away like waves behind an oar. I had no doubt that it was coming right at me, and no recourse but to turn and run, stupidly, as though I had any chance of escape.
Cheșa reached for me, Eugen tugged on my elbow, but I shook both off and ran for the edge of the clearing. Behind me, the roar got closer and closer, until I felt the vibrations of it on the back of my neck. I willed my feet not to stumble, though I could barely make sense of where I was going. What I was thinking. Then, from behind me, Rareș’ massive boom of a voice rose.
“Veto!”
I felt the currents that traveled with the creature rush upward against my back, almost ripping the clothes off my body as it shot off into the air. I turned back just in time to see a serpent as long as a winter night made of cold air and dead leaves and covered in slimy green scales thunder down onto us from a great height.
It reached us in a moment and opened a scissor-filled mouth to Eugen. With more presence of mind than I’d thought him capable of, Eugen waited for the last minute before flinging himself to the side, banking on the massive creature being slower than he was. He was only partially right.
It caught him across the chest, throwing a spray of blood clear across the campsite, the boulder, and our fire. The flames went out with a hiss and plunged us into utter darkness from which only its fiery eyes glowed, glancing back at us once as it faded into the distance.
Everything went black as the inside of an oven. All I knew of the world around me was made up of heart-wrenching screams coming from Eugen, and far more disturbing and almost inhuman moans from what must have been Rareș beyond him.