Michael Fosburg

The Maw

Jacob took the rain-slick stairs down into Kadal Station. Lighting snaked across the sky, illuminating ragged clouds and distant curtains of storm. Magelight cast a watery glow across the nearly-empty terminal, giving the scene a fathoms-beneath-the-sea feeling. The man in the booth who sold Jacob his ticket could’ve been a waterlogged corpse in a sunken gibbet for all the life he showed. His eyes were craters filled in with night, his skin clammy white.

Behind Jacob, the steam engine known throughout the land as the Beast pulled into the station in an earsplitting haze. Its whistle, sharper than a trapped animal’s howl, cut through the thumping of pistons and venting steam. Porters clad in liver-colored robes disembarked from carriages to stand before the doors, staves held out before them.

He looked from the ticket in his hand to the restlessly idling engine.

What if… he thought, his mind leading him to drink from a poisoned trough for the thousandth time. What if I go back to Khara, one last time? Beg on my knees for her forgiveness, for her love—perhaps if we spent some time in the country, mended fences…

But the country was already curling at the edges with the Blight, and Khara was done with him. Had been done with him since Jonboy died. If Jacob’s mind was slow to catch on, his heart was ahead of the curve. There was nothing of his old life left—not even the gardens that were his life’s great joy and work. Those too had been caressed by the inexorable gray that crept across the land. And as a dying man’s limbs will grow cold and gray before the heart finally seizes, the Kingdom carried blithely on, ignoring its dying hinterlands with decadent unconcern.

He travelled light: two changes of clothes, a few vials of fungicide, and his last specimens of Blight. These he stored in wax-sealed glass jars swaddled in silk. There was little else to bring.

His hand tightened on the ticket.

Waiting to board, Jacob found his eyes drawn to the curves of the Beast’s chassis, which shone verdantly beneath the magelight. It had an almost chitinous flair, reminiscent of the carapaces of the beetles he’d see about his now-Blighted gardens. The frame stood a monstrous ten span high from wheels to roof. Once, while idling away a holiday at his family’s cottage on the Shellstrewn Shore, he and Jonboy had come upon a beached whale dying under the summer sun. The creature’s rubbery skin was cracked and oozing, its great eyes clouded over, and yet the sheer immensity of the thing had still radiated awful, primal power. Jacob felt that now, standing before the rumbling steam engine. It was foolish to feel so awed by a machine. But he eyed the Beast uneasily all the same.

A lad who looked about Jonboy’s age was hopping and jumping impatiently in the next line over. Perhaps sensing his stare, he glanced at Jacob and grinned widely. It was a look that promised adventure and trouble and an endless sunny summer far and away from heartache. It was Jonboy’s grin. A lump rose in Jacob’s throat. He swallowed it down and tried to return a smile despite the sadness and guilt that whipped at his exposed soul like cat o’ nine tails. A tall man who seemed to be the boy’s chaperone stared at Jacob. He could’ve been the brother of the ticket seller, wrapped as he was in pale skin which just barely covered his bones. He smiled with lips that had too much flesh relative to the rest of his body, and then the Beast’s piercing whistle called its scant passengers to board.

Jacob spared one last glance at the lad as the tall man—his father or uncle, surely—led him away through the swirling curtain of steam and smoke.

 

The Belly

He boarded, melancholy smothering him like a damp shroud. Porters slammed shut the doors and disappeared into compartments at the head of each carriage, and then the Beast leapt forward, nearly knocking Jacob over as it caught its speed without the gradual building of momentum he’d been expecting. The whistle shrieked and the Beast surged again, and this time Jacob did fall, his feet tangling beneath him, arms pinwheeling for balance. His head struck a seat on the way down, and the world flared red then fizzled to black.

When he came to he was seated by a window, the Croagh River flashing by, its inky skin filmed sporadically with lightning. Kadal Station had dwindled to a vague smudge of magelight to the south. Across the aisle from Jacob sat a bespectacled young man with thinning red hair and a scholar’s gray frock, who was looking at him nervously. Jacob groaned and rubbed his head, and the young man let out a relived breath.

“Thank gods,” he said. “I really didn’t want to sit next to a corpse until New Razen.”

Jacob winced as the fingers exploring the back of his head came away red. He would have a knot there soon enough.

“Varish,” the scholar said, retracting his outstretched hand when he saw the blood and pivoting the gesture into a halfhearted wave. “I picked you up when you knocked your head. People aren’t prepared for the acceleration. A wondrous fast thing, this,” he said, gesturing expansively to the Beast.

“That it is,” Jacob said, and introduced himself. He looked around. The carriage was nearly empty.

“Is the Blight truly as bad as they say?” Varish asked, peering at him owlishly from behind his spectacles. “We hear rumors that it can’t be stopped.”

“It’s cancer in the land,” Jacob said, and reached into his bag to reassure himself the seals of the jars had not been broken. The young scholar shifted in his seat uncomfortably.

The moment was smoothed over by the arrival of a young woman wearing a dark brocaded coat cut in a fashion that Jacob hadn’t seen about the Kingdom. She took a seat across from the scholar, resting her knee-high black boots on the empty seat beside him.

“You both look as though someone killed your dogs,” she said, biting into an apple.

The scholar offered the laugh of a man overeager to please. Jacob’s smile was polite and thin. His head throbbed and he closed his eyes as a dizzy spell dropped his skull into his feet.

“This is Carmine. Carmine, meet Jacob.” Varish straightened his shoulders and puffed out his chest, looking from the woman to Jacob, who could tell this sort of introduction was a novelty for the lad. Beautiful women didn’t make a habit of courting Mice, as gray-clad scholars were often called.

And she was beautiful, in an indirect sort of way. She had skin pale as cream but marred in places by dark, chevron-shaped birthmarks. Ebon hair fell in artless curls past her shoulders. Her eyes were the verdant green of spring’s first rain-fed shoots.

“We met at DuCorte Station,” she said. Her smile was wide and just a bit wicked. “I bumped into poor Varish and made him drop his books.”

“It was really quite a scene,” Varish said.

“Most academics treat their dusty old tomes like children. It was so refreshing to meet a man who didn’t come apart at the sight of a dropped treatise on Skivaldric funeral dirges, or whatever it is you study.”

“Cryptodemonology,” Varish said.

A crooked finger of lightning jabbed the earth. The windows blazed with purple-white light and thunder split the night like a titanic axe. The scholar jumped in his seat, and the woman laughed.

“So you’re a summoner of ancient spirits, then?” She asked playfully.

“Invocation is strictly forbidden,” Varish said, grinning boyishly and waggling a stubby finger. “I dabble. It’s all very hush hush at the Academy, you know.”

Carmine smiled and turned to Jacob. “And what is it that you do? And where are you bound on so strange a mount as this?”

“Stragnos—end of the line.” And remembering her first question: “I was…I am, rather, a botanist. I’ve been working on a counter to the Blight, but my efforts…well. They haven’t been met with success.”

Carmine made an impressed noise that might have been artfully masked boredom.

“And you?” Jacob asked.

Carmine tipped her head toward the scholar. “As I told Varish here, I’m a traveler. I study the world, and my lectern is the road beneath my feet.” She clicked the worn-down heels of her boots together. “I’ve seen all I cared to of the Kingdom, so I figured I’d shoot north and see where I land.”

Jacob nodded. Those were the bones of his plan as well. Perhaps there were answers there that he had overlooked in the Kingdom—different species of toadstool to study, possible weaknesses to exploit…

The dry whisper of flesh made other as Blight filled every pore, spores exploding from Jonboy’s transformed flesh in wheezing bursts—

The memory cleaved Jacob like a bolt of lightning through a dead tree, demarking life as it had been—a happy, humdrum existence with wife and child and teeming green gardens—and as it was now. And what did he have now, truly? A seat on a monstrous steam engine, a bag filled with death, and a heart much the same.

Carmine’s hand rested lightly on the scholar’s robed knee, but her eyes were for Jacob, regarding him with something that resembled concern but felt like something else entirely. Varish seemed aware only of the small, pale hand inching up the gray slope of his leg.

Jacob looked away. The land sped by in a dark blur.

 

The Heart

He dozed. And dreamed.

He stumbled through a forest overtaken by Blight where unspeakable things grew tall and glowed faintly in the spore-obscured twilight. From somewhere close by came sounds of choking and thrashing. Sounds—to Jacob’s ears—like the Blight at the terminal phase of its fruiting. Sounds that forced thoughts of Jonboy into his mind.

Jacob shut his eyes and willed it away, and eventually the sound faded, and the thick, swampy air was still again.

The ground was soft with rot. He sank up to his knees in foulness with each step.

He labored to reach the tree at the end of the path, driven by the obscure motivations of the dream, and when he looked down he saw gray nodules bursting from his skin, but still he struggled through the sucking rot even as his body was sloughing apart and exploding into the air, and when he came to the tree he saw it was not a tree at all but a monstrous toadstool, mottled and bloated and ribbed with gills that dripped viscous gray fluid, and when he thrust his hands into its putrid flesh his hands alit upon a body that he feared would be Jonboy’s, but still he plunged into that horrid flesh, searching desperately, deeper—

He woke with a scream caught in his throat, his cramped body bathed in cold sweat. The carriage was empty except for the woman in the seat beside him. Carmine watched him from over the rim of a thick book.

“You were struggling in your sleep,” she said, shutting the book. Dust erupted from its pages in such a way that brought Jacob back to his dream, to spores expelled from collapsing flesh.

“Where’s…ah—where’s Varish?” He asked, forgetting the scholar’s name in his post-sleep fugue. The knot on his head throbbed with each anxious heartbeat.

“He departed at Queensroad Station while you slept. He charged me to give you his warm regards when you woke,” she said, smiling.

“I thought his stop was New Razen.” Carmine shrugged. “Who can truly know the mind of a scholar?”

Night still held the land, lit only occasionally by skeins of lightning. In those brief moments he saw that they had passed into lands lost to the Blight. Trees sagged beneath blankets of rot. The landscape lost its definition, was rendered a uniform, rolling gray.

“Wonderful, isn’t it?” She asked, and seeing the look on his face, amended: “The Beast, that is.” She ran her hand along the carriage wall as though stroking the flanks of hound. “Older than the Kingdom. The last great work of the Magi. And even now, in the midst of it, untouched by the Blight.” Her eyes took in the soft vault of the carriage’s ceiling. Jacob followed her gaze. Organic-looking struts flowed down to brace the carriage’s sides at equidistant intervals.
“If only the Magi could protect the land with the same passion they do their engine,” Jacob said.

“Magic doesn’t behave that way,” she said, tracing the vein-like patterns on the wall with a lacquered fingernail. “To know something—to understand it down to its essence—is to gain mastery over it. Whether it’s a flower,” she said, and nodded to Jacob, “or a bolt of lightning. Or the storm that breeds the lighting. The Magi can no more control the Blight than they can the lightning, because they don’t understand it. But they understand the Beast. And the Beast, Jacob, is older than nature.” She stretched her long limbs. “There’s no spell that wards away the Blight. The Blight flees before the Beast.”

“How do you know this?” he asked.

“I read,” Carmine said. She tossed him her book. Jacob scanned the cover: Apocryphae of the Third Sumastrian Age: Fae, Beastes, & Demones High and Lowe.

“This is one of Varish’s books,” Jacob said. Carmine shrugged. Her lips were very red. The strange, chevron-shaped birthmarks were no longer apparent on her milky skin. They were the barest suggestions of pigmentation, faded like ghosts of old wounds.

“So it is. He must’ve left it behind. He was quite the forgetful boy.”

The atmosphere inside the carriage had become thick, swampy. It was an effect the Blight had on the air, Jacob knew, but it heightened the feeling of unreality that hemmed him in.

Dark needles of dream punctured his memory. A desultory flicker of lightning scattered across land and sky, and for a moment Jacob thought he saw the spire of a colossal toadstool towering in the distance. He remembered rot-moistened skin parting obscenely for his hands, the decaying stink of it. But now, in the matrix of mind where memory met dream, Jonboy’s blue eyes peered out from the stem of the toadstool, his mouth wrenched down in a wordless howl of agony.

Jacob had told him a hundred times, a thousand, to stay away from the little shed at the northern edge of his gardens—had warned him every day of the dangers of meddling with anything that grew there. But Jonboy had his father’s questioning nature and love for growing things, and the specimen of Blight Jacob had been studying for weaknesses—a tiny gray-capped toadstool encased in glass—had been left unattended as Jacob went to fetch a different mixture of fungicide.

If he had been thirty seconds sooner returning…

Jacob looked up with burningeyes. Carmine stared into them hungrily, longingly.

The Beast’s whistle sounded in the depths of the night like the call of a creature searching the world for a counterpoint; the last of its kind, joined to the will of hungry men who understood and shared in the loss it felt.

Jacob would not remember the final leg of that journey. He would not remember passing beyond the Kingdom, leaving the lurching gray Blight behind. He would not remember glimpsing the pile of unclaimed books beneath Carmine’s seat as he disembarked. He would not see the lad whose sunny grin had been so like Jonboy’s, or remember his last vision of the lad—led away by the too-thin man into the boiling steam-and-smoke maw of the Beast, the engine restless on its haunches, trembling like a famished hound.

 

Transformation

They walked along the smooth stone of the Stragnos Way, the old road that wound a blue-black scar through green countryside. Carmine’s voice unspooled on the buzzing spring air. It sounded half song, half whisper—a melody just below the electric hum of cicadas and the honeyed calls of birds. She wove a tale of grief and horror, elaborating on banishment to the Thin—that dark hollow between the worlds—and of return, aided by the stuttered summoning of one naïve, red-haired scholar.

And she spoke of hunger. Always the hunger.

“I sensed a companion in you,” she said, brushing hair out of her eyes. “Your shadow is as dark as mine.”

Jacob said nothing. He knew something about dark shadows, for the truth of it was, the Blight had been born in his gardens. He had bred down the most potent toadstools in all the land to better cultivate his soil—to enrich it and improve its clumpability—but soon discovered that this new species was something else entirely, an aggressive variant that shrugged off even the most potent of fungicides. It became his obsession to contain and control, and when it sprang into Jonboy’s flesh a monstrous evolution was triggered, and then the land withered beneath it.

He felt despair gust through him. The task was too immense for him—his crimes were too great.

He had killed the land. Killed his son.

He felt Carmine’s hand on his shoulder. Her green eyes stared levelly into his. One of his jars of Blight in her hand.

“To know a thing—to truly understand something, down to its essence…” She stripped away the wax seal with a slash of her lacquered fingernails.

Is to master it.

Her unsmiling lips did not part for word or breath. Jacob felt the force of that truth reverberate in the hollow of his heart, struck like a deep note from a drum. She handed him the jar. Blight trembled within, eager to find the wind.

In his dream, the stalk of that colossal toadstool had parted for his searching hands. There had been a body nestled there, a mockery of life enwombed.

It had not been Jonboy.

Perhaps this was the answer he had come north to find.

Glass shattered against the old stone of the road. From across the hazy distance he heard the Beast call out, forlorn and searching, as spores swarmed on the air.

Jacob closed his eyes for the last time. His flesh began to whisper like a field of husks stirred by a breeze. Carmine took his hand as fingers curled away. She kissed his lips as they peeled apart in a howl lost beneath an eruption of spores.

And as the wind broke and bore him beyond all grief and memory, what little remained finally began to understand.

 

K is for Kenosis