Maroto, enchained. But not in actual chains, oh no, that would have been far too boring for his mute captors. Instead of more traditional manacles his hands had been enveloped in thick, tacky webbing. A sticky noose of the same material encircled his neck and rose from his nape up into the close air of the caverns, tethering him to the pale, bloated thing that had spun his shackles. It crawled upside down on the ceiling of the tunnels, keeping pace with the prisoner and his guards as they led him deeper and deeper into their grotesque realm of pulsing, fleshy walls and shiny outcroppings of bone.
When they first took Maroto, he thought that beneath their spiny black armor the Tothans might have been human, or something similar—wildborn, maybe. As their squid-dragon carried him away over the treetops he had even let himself indulge in fantasies where the Tothans were fun-loving freaks of comely cast who would welcome him to their revels, once he explained how he and Bang hadn’t actually been spying on their army but were marooned on Jex Toth completely by accident. He gave up on that particular fancy as soon as they flew into the cave system where rock and earth gave way to gleaming musculature and soft, oozing stalactites. Nothing remotely human would choose to dwell in such a foul hell, and whatever parties went on down here he’d sooner sit out.
After the monstrosity released him from its tentacles he splashed down in a warm pool of gelatinous slime teeming with thankfully unseen creatures that ate away the net-like web they had first bound him in. As soon as he slipped free of the disintegrating lattice he was hauled out of the goo by more of the Tothans, and before he could recover from the shock of it all, fresh webbing was applied to hands and throat by the fat white arachnid that drew its silk from a grinning human mouth in the base of its furry abdomen. When it rappelled back to the ceiling of the meat-cave, tightening Maroto’s noose as it did, he decided that here at last was an occasion so profoundly terrible that he had no fucking time to spare for self-doubt or self-pity or self-loathing. Up until the moment he escaped this nightmare—or bit off his own tongue to bleed to death, if all else failed—his every thought and action would be dedicated to self-preservation.
And so the Mighty Maroto marched obediently forward, trying to keep his cool and think rationally even in this hellscape that looked like the insides of a giant animal and smelled like an overfull terrarium in a low-rent bughouse. The funk to this place definitely had an insect origin, or at least that was the closest touchstone to the cloying, oily stench that made Maroto’s eyes water. Not surprising, that, between the spiderbeast they had used to bind him and the beetle-like cast of their armor—now that he was able to take a good look at the Tothans’ ridged, thorny black plate he was guessing it wasn’t just made to look like bug shell but had actually come off some heretofore unknown species of giant insect. It was a fleet look, he had to admit, the pieces locking together so tightly he couldn’t see a hint of chain or leather between the chinks, nor even an eye-slit in the blank, sharp crowned faceplates, yet the pair of guards moved twice as gracefully as Maroto would have in armor half as bulky. They carried neither weapons nor equipment—at least, none that he could see—but sharp as their clawed gauntlets looked he wasn’t in a hurry to tangle with them.
Faceless soldiers armored in grotesque chitin, stinking of a rancid earwig nest. A domesticated spider-thing the size of a small dog, but Maroto was the one on the leash. He had assumed bugs would be the end of him, yet never in his wildest stingdreams had he imagined such a dramatically literal finale. Here in the bowels of this manifest nightmare he remembered something his old friend Carla Rossi had told him one night when they were both whacked out of their wigs on black centipede meat, following some long-forgotten production in some never-remembered town:
“Hell ain’t going to hold no fresh horrors for the likes of us,” she’d slurred through electric-blue lips, tears in her eyes from sentiment or her smeared greasepaint or some combination of the twain. “No, if the gods are cruel, as we well and fucking truly know they are, then hell’s going to be nuthin’ more than coming right back to where you started—only this time, you can’t leave.”
In the moment he’d figured the drag clown was referring to her shitty hometown on the Imperial frontier, but given the current insect overtones to Maroto’s fate he had to wonder if Carla wouldn’t have been better off reading fortunes than working the stage. He didn’t know if you’d call it irony or poetic justice or what, but there was undeniably a certain dramatic something to Carla’s sloppy mouth predicting this over-the-top twist half a lifetime ago. The worst part was Maroto had finally kicked the bugs once and for all, too, only to wind up here! Now granted, he’d thought he was clean and clear a few times before only to step back in that familiar antbed, but looking around this insectoid inferno one thing was for certain—if he managed to escape his captors he was never, ever banging another bug so long as he lived. Never.
The ribbed passage they escorted him down was dark as clotted blood, but where his bare feet struck the membranous floor it gave off pulses of black light that illuminated the shaft in front of them. Glancing back he saw three glowing trails of footprints on the floor, and a smaller, fainter track on the ceiling. Weird. Also worth keeping in mind—even if he somehow slipped free of both these guards and the arachnid overhead he’d leave an unmistakable trail wherever he went, so long as he was down in these caverns. The more he saw of this subterranean horror show and the more turns they took in the labyrinth of softly contracting tunnels, the more obvious it became that the only way he was getting free of this place was if they escorted him back out again.
“So, uh, real nice digs you’ve got here,” Maroto said in Immaculate, trying one last time to engage his captors. “I know y’all didn’t say you spoke Crimson or Immaculate or whatever when I asked before, but you didn’t say you didn’t, neither, so how about just a nod or something? Figure you’ve got your orders not to talk to prisoners, and I respect that, but it’d be nice to know if you hear anything I’m saying, yeah?”
If they did they still weren’t giving any indication, neither of the guards so much as turning their helmets in his direction. Their continued silence had gone from rude to downright creepy, but presumably someone down here would be able to understand him, otherwise why keep a potentially hostile prisoner alive? Actually, that was a question he was happier not contemplating at present …
Then came real light up ahead at the end of the tunnel, bright and yellow and welcoming as the sun he hadn’t seen in however many hours he’d been down here in the guts of Jex Toth. When they reached the mouth of the cave he no longer found the brightness so inviting, coming as it did from the roof of the eeriest chamber yet. They had emerged onto a ledge overlooking a sprawling grotto that must have been a mile wide and just as long. Far above stretched an illuminated, fan-vaulted ceiling that would have been the envy of every Chainite cathedral on the Star, if only the ribs hadn’t actually been ribs. The great sunken hall looked even gnarlier than the rest of this place, with phosphorescent rivers crisscrossing the already moist meatscape, steam belching from obscenely winking pits, and a lumpy ziggurat rising from a glowing lake in the center of the cavern … And there, beached on the polyped shores of the luminous loch, was a piebald mass of twitching white meat and squirting black geysers that made Maroto need to take a knee.
He was not creative enough to imagine what dark fluids it might be jetting up, or from whence in the mountain of flesh these fountains might originate. Hells, he was too far away to even begin to guess just what in the unholy fuck it was, but he was already far closer than he ever wanted to be. The spider’s noose tightened around his neck as he fell to his knees on the nauseatingly spongy floor, but then it relaxed before he could choke himself out. Was this why people knelt in prayer? Not from thoughtful deference to a higher power, but because some things were so enormous and terrible that your only recourse was to make yourself as small as possible, hoping you wouldn’t be spotted?
The sticky rope around Maroto’s neck tugged him insistently back to his unsteady feet, and he closed his eyes, on the verge of tears. He had never known animal terror like this before—he had been prepared for the worst when he sacrificed himself to save Bang, of course he had, but what the fuck even was this place? It would be his tomb, of that there seemed little question, because what mortal could hope to stand strong against such horrors as he couldn’t even bring himself to look at for more than an instant?
One of the guards nudged him forward, and Maroto Devilskinner, the Barbarian Without Fear, whimpered.
Something heavy landed on Maroto’s shoulder, thick whip-like limbs wrapping around him for purchase, and he gave a little scream that echoed to embarrassing proportion in the grotto. He tried to throw it off him, but even if his web-mittened hands had been able to find purchase on the hissing spider-thing that tightened its legs and the noose around his throat in equal measure the two guards seized his arms, reminding him of just how very wrong his day had gone … and after a promising start, too. At least he had saved his sweet-palmed Captain Bang from a similar fate, and clinging to that scrap of relief he allowed the monster on his back to get comfortable.
Bang was safe, and so were Dong-won and Niki-hyun. Maroto breathed in the malodorous air, told his heart to calm the fuck down. Diggelby was probably high as fuck in his plush tent right now, and maybe Bang had been right when she’d given him her pep talk, maybe Purna had survived the Battle of the Lark’s Tongue after all. Maybe Choi and Din and Hassan had made it out all right, too, and they were all safe. They were all safe and alive and an ocean away from whatever hell their old friend had slipped into. Maybe—
Slack returned to the noose as the two guards dragged him forward, and then they unexpectedly released him as his bare feet found purchase on smooth steps. He opened his eyes but kept them focused on the enamel stairs set into the veiny cliff face beneath the overlook, a treacherous path that led down to the floor of the cavern. He should hurl himself over the edge, sparing himself whatever came next, because whatever it was it couldn’t be good—these monstrous legions that dwelled within the heart of Jex Toth wanted him alive, and that probably meant he should be dead, for the sake of the Star.
He took a deep breath, ready to jump off of the cliff and plummet to his death … but not ready enough, his knees nearly knocking together, and he took the first step down instead of going over the side. He remembered his father laughing in his face when he told him the clan had decided to name him Craven, and years later the look of scorn on his nephew’s face when they had met in the Cobalt camp. They had all been right about him—he was a coward, and telling himself that going forward to face whatever awaited him below was braver than ending his life now didn’t really wash. Here at the end of his adventures, Maroto was alone with himself, and found the company less than agreeable.
Alone was all he deserved, sure, but pity the simpleton who couldn’t long for more than that.
And if he could have only one other person down here beside him, in this horrible place he couldn’t even process, to go down beside him, to hold his hand as they both fell for the last time? It was still her. It would always be her. If only because she was the only one he’d ever met who would have still been able to summon a smile, even here, and ask him just what the devils he’d expected to see waiting for them at the finish, after the lives they’d lived? Heaven wasn’t for the likes of them.
And real talk now, the main reason he wanted her here was because if one of them deserved this shit it damn sure wasn’t him; he wouldn’t even be here right now if it weren’t for Cold Zosia.
Another, harder nudge to the neck from a bristly gauntlet, and he took another shaky step. Heights had never bothered him, and now at the one time he would’ve probably been better off slipping he found himself with bad vertigo and would have welcomed a steady hand to help him down the slick path. His captors stayed behind at the top of the overlook, however, letting him proceed on his own. Or as close to on his own as he was going to get, so long as the unpleasantly hot and disconcertingly soft arachnid clung to his back. As he descended the narrow stair a familiar burning returned to his calves, and he almost laughed to think how just a few short hours before he’d been hiking up the side of a scenic mountain with a handsome pirate keeping him company, and now he might be miles beneath that very spot.
Almost laughed, right, but not bloody quite. He paused to lean against the pulsing wall of meat until his head stopped spinning but the monster on his back immediately tightened its noose, and he felt even less like chuckling. There’s a limit to everything, even a man’s ability to find gallows humor in his own ill fortune. As he reached the bottom of the sweaty-stepped path and finally made himself look up from his feet, he figured things weren’t getting funny anytime soon. Not that kind of funny, anyway.
A figure was walking swiftly toward him, through a field of wavering, luminescent meat fans. That the person appeared to be human would normally have put him at ease, but somehow this only made them more horrific. Maroto believed just about anything was possible in this world where devils granted miracles and monsters of every conceivable shape stalked and squawked; seriously, now, he’d just tromped through the literal bowels of a long-lost kingdom, so he was willing to accept anything that greeted his eyes … or almost anything, it turned out, because even though he was looking right at this he still couldn’t believe it.
The dead stayed dead, that was one of the few truths the Star round. Nothing could make them stir, not deviltry nor witchery, not bugs nor drugs … yet as soon as Maroto saw the approaching figure lit up from the orange-shimmering field of flesh at its feet he was sure of one thing, and that was that while this stranger should have been long dead, it wasn’t. Despite the brightness of the glowing, anemone-like fans the spindly person was cloaked in flowing shadows, and as it reached Maroto he realized this was due to the thousands of cockroaches that crawled over its naked form. It was so desiccated he couldn’t begin to guess if it had skewed more to the masculine or feminine by birth if not by identity, translucent skin stretched taut as a cannibal’s drum over its sharp skeleton.
“Fuck me,” Maroto whimpered as the bug-clad mummy came to a stop spitting-distance away, its eyes bright and ageless in its bleached, cadaverous face. It cocked its head at him like a rooster sizing up a grub, the swarm of insects going still and forming an uncanny approximation of old-timey Immaculate attire. Aside from the chitinous slippers and trousers, shirt and housecoat, the monster’s only trappings were rings made of bleached white vertebrae that crowded its left hand and a rather gaudy choker of yellow gold and red stones in the shape of miniature skulls.
“I, um, come in peace?” said Maroto when the creature took no immediate action, because you always had to hope for the best even when the worst was coming in for a great big sloppy kiss. In response its shriveled lips parted in a grin that revealed stunningly white teeth. It raised its hand, thick rings clattering on thin fingers, and reached out for Maroto’s face.
That wasn’t on, no fucking way. Normally he would’ve lashed out if some horrible monster was trying to get its dirty digits on him, but he was loath to touch this thing, even in self-defense … lest he provoke it. This fiend filled him with pure, concentrated dread, and rather than attacking it or batting away its outstretched hand he jumped back—and bumped into a second living corpse.
This one looked male—the tumescent prick rising like a mast from the maelstrom of insects swarming his crotch was a tell, and with a wordless cry of revulsion Maroto pushed away from him. This sunken-eyed ancient boasted a bloated gut and liver-spotted wattles that somehow rendered him even more gruesome than his emaciated peer, his hungry eyes the only sharp thing about him as a soft fat tongue ran over soft fat lips. Maroto’s world got all tight and treacly the way it did in only the shittiest of shitshows, each moment passing so slow he had plenty of time to think about what to do next instead of just reacting …
Or so it usually went, anyway, but fast on his feet and his wits as Maroto was operating, these things were a good bit faster. A third came out of nowhere—as in, she appeared out of thin air, that was how fast she was—and swept his legs out from under him with a shin so thin it looked like it should’ve detonated on impact with his thick calf but hit harder than an iron rod.
Anyone else would have gone down, and gone down hard, but Maroto threw himself into a roll and came up running. Never, ever underestimate the value of a well-timed roll followed by a breakneck flight. He crashed through the wavering meat fans, finding them less like the soft flesh they resembled and more like jagged coral. The spider creature on his back tightened its noose around his throat, trying to choke him out. He slapped over his shoulder and put his hand through its surprisingly soft carapace, ripping the thing off him in gooey chunks even as his world went dim from lack of air.
The Hell of the Coward Dead. Old Watchers forgive him, he had always doubted his ancestors’ warnings, had never believed that the ancient ways were anything more than savage superstition, but as he staggered forward he knew, yes he fucking did—he had finally ended up where his dad and sister had always warned him he was bound, and it damn sure wasn’t Old Black’s Meadhall. He was dead and in hell. Not the first time he’d jumped to such a morbid conclusion, but this time he reckoned he was really onto something.
A behemoth reared above him out of the living foliage, all the more ghastly for its familiarity. It was the larger cousin of the monster whose eggs he and Bang had stolen what seemed like a decade past—a huge black-shelled nightmare somewhere between a crab and a cobraroach, with a giant, sharp-fanged human face on its chest and snatching hairy arms in place of mandibles. The one he had lured down to the beach was big enough it could have eaten him in a few bites, but this mother could do the job in one, swallowing him whole if it had half a mind.
It looked like it intended to do just that, and Maroto reeled sideways, arms and legs refusing to do his bidding anymore—he had massacred the monster on his back, but its webbing continued to garrote him, and his fingers couldn’t find purchase on the caustic noose …
But then the great monster was dismissed, fleeing as if in fright from the posse who waded through the broken meat-ferns to crowd Maroto’s asphyxiation. Their spindly hands were all over him, unpleasantly reminding him of the gross arachnid he had torn off his back as they explored his body. The morbidly obese one squeezed and prodded Maroto’s midsection, drool dangling from his split-sausage lips, and then the withered woman hooked her fingers under the noose and tore it free, allowing their quarry to again breathe the stinking fumes of their lair.
They kept giving each other knowing glances as they inspected Maroto with obvious relish, more and more of the shriveled old figures emerging from the bleeding landscape until there must have been a dozen of the things surrounding him. The close air crackled as the fiends gathered, and as he gasped like a landed trout Maroto reckoned by their rapidly changing expressions and fiercely knowing looks that his captors were communicating with one another by some silent, unknown means. They were intelligent. In some way he couldn’t begin to guess, yes, and no doubt of diabolical intention, sure, but they were a pack of thinking creatures, and as an impossibly old man softly gummed Maroto’s bicep and then let out an appreciative moan, he figured he’d at least piqued their interest.
“I’ll help you,” he gasped in Immaculate, hoping the universal trading tongue extended all the way down here to the bottom basement of the Sunken Kingdom of Jex Toth. “I’m useful. Whoever you are and whatever you want, I’m your boy. Just let me go.”
The fat man delicately kneading Maroto’s flattop paused, as did the rest … and then, one by one, they began to scream. At him. In his face, leaning in close, the shrill sounds so raw they made Maroto’s throat ache in solidarity even as the rest of him trembled in panic. Then the original, roach-wreathed ancient reached down from where it had been standing aloof from the others, its spine-ringed fingers finally grazing Maroto’s nose … and immediately triggering violent hallucinations.
Burning worlds.
The frozen blackness of the place between the stars, beyond the Gates.
A crowd of priests performing a ritual Maroto himself had once enacted, to bind devils, and horror of horrors, offering themselves in sacrifice instead of animals.
Armies marching, cities smoldering.
A garden of monsters.
Legions of the black-armored Tothans marching through Diadem, across the Isles and the Dominions, the Frozen Savannahs melting beneath the vile secretions of their titanic warbeasts and snow falling on the deserts of Usba as their sorceries ripped holes in reality, the armies of Jex Toth conquering the Star absolutely.
The world as sacrifice.
“Fuck.” Maroto gagged on the word, on the hot spew ejecting from his guts as the visions faded, leaving him alert and aware in a netherworld of living muscle and meat beneath a breathing sky, held down by the high priests of Jex Toth, who had vanished along with the rest of their kingdom half a millennium past. He wasn’t in the Hell of the Coward Dead after all, and figured going forward he would just have to assume he was still alive until proven otherwise … which might not be a long wait, anyway, considering the pack of fiends crowding their prone victim.
Eyes stared from black pits set in white faces, fingers stroked him with sensual menace, the creatures looking almost as amazed by Maroto’s living body as he was by their mummy-like forms. They weren’t screaming en masse anymore, and Maroto pulled a hand free of their groping paws and wiped the wetness from his eyes. Blood streaked the back of his hand in lieu of tears, and the ring-fingered monster elbowed its fellows away and started shrieking again, right in Maroto’s face. He flinched back from the shrill death rattle, but then caught a word of antiquated High Immaculate, and then a second, and tough though it was to parse with just the one good ear, with some effort he was able to tune in to the shrill frequency.
“—you will help us! Indeed!” It crowed, reaching into its scuttling coat and withdrawing a crude dagger fashioned from curled black horn. “Our first sacrifice!”
Thin fingers tightened hard as steel all over Maroto, but while most of the cohort were enthusiastically laying hands on him the bloated man seemed to take nearly as much umbrage to this suggestion as the sacrifice himself. The ancient didn’t scream, didn’t speak at all, but it was plain from the shuddering of his pruny jowls and the shaking of his spoiled-salami fingers that he disapproved. From the crackling waves of energy Maroto felt flowing back and forth over him, he was sure the two monsters were exchanging something, if not words. More visions, perhaps?
“Kill me if you must, but kill me last!” Maroto cried in High Immaculate, or as close to the formal dialect as he could manage. “You want to sacrifice the Star? Good! I can help you do it! Kill me last and I’ll do anything you want!”
The last shred of Maroto’s pride left his lips along with the futile words. It was almost a relief. Ever since falling in with Purna he had been planning on dying like the hero he had never been in life, but that was the thing about plans—they had a way of getting fucked, and without the benefit of coconut oil to ease the passage.
At least his words had gotten the monsters’ attention. A pair of them immediately released him, falling all over each other as they made the worst sounds imaginable … sounds he realized were rattling laughs, or as close as their withered bodies could manage. The woman who had knocked his legs out from under him began to sob as she stroked Maroto’s neck, the lanky hair she dangled in his face swarming with spiders. Through his revulsion he realized her sick cries were more rasping words of High Immaculate, her sharp fingernails now lightly scratching his chin as she spoke.
“Sacrifiiiiice! Yessss! The first shall be the laaaaast!”
“It will do anything?” the one with the dagger screamed at Maroto, and intense and dreadful as this exchange was he still saw it as a definite improvement. He had them communicating in a way he could understand, and the more he understood them the better his odds at ingratiating himself. “It will let us peer inside for proof?”
“It will!” howled the fat geriatric, placing its puffy fingers around Maroto’s throat. “Open its heart! Open its head!”
“Hey now, let’s not get carried away with—” Maroto began, trying to wriggle free, but the original horror reached out again with its ringed hand. Which was better than the dagger but not by much … and in fact might have been substantially worse, as fingertips that felt carved of ice first massaged Maroto’s sweaty brow and then began to press into the flesh. Had the pain been unbearable the experience might have been borne, but the feeling of the fingers gently pushing through skin and then into his skull barely hurt at all … and that made it even more horrible, Maroto writhing from an indescribable sensation the likes of which he had never before experienced, grinding his teeth so hard they felt primed to explode.
Then the horror of the moment fell away as Maroto was again overwhelmed by visions, but this time they came not from the ring-fingered Tothan but his own violated brainmeat. Didn’t make them any better; hells, they might be worse, ’cause the carnage he saw repeated in his mind’s eye wasn’t some monster’s prophecy but his own personal history—memories of murder and worse, as he helped Cold Zosia win the Crimson Throne. Then came the conjuring of the devils they bound in Emeritus, and for the first time since the torrent of visions washed over him Maroto was able to catch his breath, even as he sensed the Tothan catching his.
The ancient didn’t fully break from the trance-like state, the interruption too mild for that, but it did give Maroto just enough time to realize the interloper in his brain must not be aware of what was coming next, that he was as much a passenger in this stream of memories as Maroto himself … and if no one was driving this runaway cart, that meant a quick-witted barbarian might grab the reins. He tried it out, thinking as hard as he could of his old theater troupe who had been so big on method acting—and it worked! When they came into sharp relief he focused on the time he and Two-eyed Jacques and Carla had set the playhouse of their rivals on fire. Right enough, the memory presented itself as clear as the night it went down, the air thick with smoke and the stench of burning wigs, the screams of the trapped patrons and the laughter of his friends, and at the edges of his now-aching skull Maroto was sure he could feel a shiver of pleasure from the Tothan peeper.
You like that, don’t you? Maroto thought to himself, and to his guest. You said you’re looking for proof, yeah? I don’t know if you wanted proof of how helpful I’d be, or proof of why I’d sell out the Star to you freaks, but there’s plenty of both in this rotten old keg. Drink it up!
And now that he had the hang of things, Maroto did his best to drown the mind-reading old monster under a tidal wave of his baddest behavior. Happy memories of Purna and the crew had no place here, nor did lusty thoughts of Choi or Bang, nor did he share a single reminiscence of his nigh-constant self-pity and hollow pledges of reformation. His many wasted years nursing a bug habit were excised from this version of his past, as were his good deeds, few and far between though they might have been. No, he had a job to do here, and that was convincing this deathless wizard or whatever he was that the Mighty Maroto was an asset to any war against humanity.
The fall of Khemmis, the fight for Nottap, and the executions he had carried out in Eyvind.
The taking of Wild Throne, where he had led the suicide squad in charge of leading the Imperials into a Cobalt trap.
The madness at Windhand, the first time Maroto saw Crimson soldiers go berserk and start attacking each other instead of the enemy, eating alive anyone they could lay hands on, even themselves.
Finally the Battle of the Lark’s Tongue, where history repeated itself, and then his epic wrath and pledges of vengeance against his former friends, first against Zosia and then against Hoartrap. The Tothan really seemed to like that last bit, Maroto reliving his fury, recapturing his willingness to burn the world, if that was what it took to avenge Purna’s preventable death on the battlefield. And with nothing else to offer from his long catalogue of crimes, he tried something new—instead of a memory of past violence, he conjured up a vision of his own, one where he donned a suit of sharp black beetlemail and led the Tothan legions against the people of the Star, using all his experiences to show them how and where to attack each Arm, relishing in the slaughter, the sacrifice, knowing as he did that he, too, would be put to the blade, but only at the end … this was his reward. This was his reward. This was his reward.
“This is your reward,” the spider-haired woman moaned in his face, Maroto shuddering as the memory-voyeur slipped its ghost hand out of his skull. He somehow knew that flesh and blood fingers hadn’t actually penetrated him, knew he wasn’t dying of a massive head wound … but it sure as fuck felt like it. “The first shall be the last! You shall volunteer your every secret, you shall volunteer your supple flesh, and so shall the first become the last!”
“Last in line, anyway,” muttered Maroto as the fell creatures helped him to his feet. He should have been disgusted with himself for collaborating with these things, for selling the whole damn Star to buy himself a little time, but all he felt was relief. This was the role he’d always been destined to play, and Maroto was star material from way back. It was time to get evil. “Got some conditions before I’ll pledge myself to the cause, though.”
“Connnnnnnditions?” the ring-fingered Tothan screamed, turning back to Maroto with wrath writ large and clear on his white face. Some of the others resumed their deranged laughter, the bloated man bleating his incredulity. Even the moaning woman recoiled from him.
“Yeah,” said Maroto, swaying in place in the oozing clearing of broken meat fans, surrounded by primordial, hostile, and obviously insane Tothan priests. He was about to find out if they were just toying with him or if they were really taking him on board. “I’ve got three underlings on the island. I’ll tell you where they’re hiding and you take them alive, then turn them over to me. That’s my first condition—once I’ve got my squad back together we can talk about what else I need, and what we can offer in exchange.”
The ancients laughed harder and a few others wandered away from the scene, but Ghosthand, Bloato, and Spidertresses seemed to be discussing it. Now that he’d had one of them reach into his skull on top of showing him all those ugly visions Maroto was getting properly attuned to their way of conversing, projected thoughts brushing past his deaf ear like whispered voices tickling his good one … and tickling his nose in the process. He hadn’t noticed it before, given the overall fustiness of this place, but now that he was tuned-in he was sure that each one of these things gave off their own uniquely fetid funk that seemed to buoy their intentions back and forth. He tried to lean in to the faint sensations and their accompanying odors, wondering if he could somehow learn their nonverbal tongue, when the spider-haired crone snapped her hand in his direction, screamed something he didn’t understand, and fell upon him with all her fury.
Well, so much for his brilliant plan—it had been worth a try, anyway. As she lashed out with talon-like black fingernails Maroto stepped into her assault instead of away from it, meaning to grab her wrist with one hand and knock her shriveled head off with the other. He’d take down as many of these shriveled-up Tothans as he could before their minions overwhelmed him, because now that his initial horror at their appearance and powers of headfuckery had passed, he wagered their ancient bodies were no match for his mighty mitts. He’d take them apart with his bare fucking hands, one by one until—
Spidertresses moved so fucking fast Maroto would have felt dizzy even if she hadn’t backhanded him so hard in the temple he went flying, the meat reef that cushioned his landing bursting like giant blisters. He lay in the wet, warm wreckage, too stunned to move, and right around the time he realized he should be doing something she came for him again. He tried to fight her off but felt as helpless as a babe, arms that looked frail as twigs slapping down his defenses. He was too focused on trying to beat her back to even cry out, but she sobbed for him even as she mounted her quarry.
Pointy fingers closed around his throat, her eyes gleaming in her skeletal rictus, dozens of grey spiders tumbling from her hair onto his face, into his open, gasping mouth. Even as his world grew bright and fuzzy and desperate from lack of air, his end at hand, he could feel the little blighters biting his lips and tongue and the roof of his mouth, white-hot pinpricks, and he braced himself for one last attempt to save himself, to throw off the sprightly crone who straddled his gut, pinning his elbows beneath her knobby knees …
But his body wouldn’t listen. It was over.
Except it wasn’t?
“They call you Devilskinner,” said a regal voice as the woman stopped choking him. Her hand remained around his throat, but now the grip felt tender instead of cruel, fingertips stroking his bruised skin as he gasped the muggy vapors of this living fen. As everything came back into focus he saw it was still Spidertresses who spoke to him, and his flush of relief at being granted a reprieve turned to ice-cold dread as he saw the changes that had overtaken her, slight though they were. Bloodshot and wild but still human eyes had turned as black as the inside of a crypt. Swift, jerky movements had become slow and deliberate. And most unsettling of all, that voice … the shrill screams of the Tothans had been unpleasant, yes, but this deep, rich timbre was so, so much worse. “You have trafficked with our kind before, mortal. You have not only gazed into the First Dark, you have drawn forth our gifts.”
Unsure if he should answer this at all, or how, Maroto just gulped. It seemed a suitable response for the occasion, though he ended up swallowing a few spiders. He was so captivated and terrified by the creature atop him that he scarcely noticed.
“Scheme away, little ape,” it told him, grinning licentiously as the hand at his neck moved up to stroke his deaf ear … and instantly healing that irksome war wound, so that he heard its proclamation in perfect stereo. “Serve or betray, fight or flee, first sacrifice or last in line, it matters not—you are ours, and very, very soon we will welcome you home. Countless eons after this world has gone as quiet as all the others we shall keep you pressed to our breast, your reward as endless as our love … But first we must reap our harvest, and you will bear witness to the end of mortal days upon the Star.”
“Thank you,” Maroto blubbered, believing every word this devil spoke. “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”