LITMIR.BIZ

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bled into the hum of corpse-gnawing flies.

      Anna looked sidelong at Andriv, sensing the subtle heat building between her ribs. “Did they?”

      “They don’t know,” Andriv said, lowering his head.

      “Their sole task is to know,” Anna snapped. “We came here with certainty, brother, and I will not leave without it. Empty words lost their comfort long ago.”

      Again the brother spoke, his tone rising with the vigor of the chastised, but she did not listen. She moved into the cool, rancid shade of the porch, unable to cease the restlessness in her heart. They don’t know. Those words sickened her as much as a swell of acidic fumes as they wafted through the threshold. Then she was inside, forcing herself not to inhale, not to think. Her first steps—squelching, wet—echoed with startling effect, and soon the darkness resolved to a bluish, murky landscape, crowded with blunt shapes and—

      It had been too long since she’d witnessed such violations of flesh.

      Blood covered every patch of the room, oozing and crusting in various stages. Bright red spattering across the ceiling, maroon streaks that stretched from wall to wall, pools of glossy garnet that had been smeared by careless steps. Yet blood was the least of their defilements. Mounds of deconstructed bodies littered the floor: severed arms, bludgeoned heads, maggot-riddled torsos, jawbones and tongues and cracked rib cages, all left in disarray like the remains of an inhuman feast.

      Pale, naked bodies had been hung from the walls using iron stakes. Their eyes were raw pits, gouged out by blades or beaks. Their limbs extended from their body with grotesque, impossible length, each bone and socket and fleshy mass stretched out along a line of sinew, resembling the anatomical displays in the academies of Nahoran herbmen.

      Anna’s throat clenched. The bodies were full-grown, largely men, and the few women among them were marked by southern flesh.

      Something scratched, breaking the stillness.

      A cluster of knucklebones, still draped in layers of withering tissue, stirred against the soil. They clacked against one another, hovered a hair from the ground, revolved in spastic rhythms end over end. Hayat’s scorched odor rose from the bones.

      “By the fucking Grove.” Lukas’s voice barely pierced Anna’s awareness. More footsteps tapped over the porch.

      The gentle drumming of blood resumed. Anna tracked its source, honing in on the soft splashes and slurping. And as she matched the pattering to the mutilated bodies lining the walls, her skin prickled into gooseflesh.

      None of the droplets reached the soil. Nothing flitted downward at all, in fact. She watched the bright, shallow pools beneath the bodies contracting, wadding up into crimson orbs that began an impossible ascent to the ruptured bellies and sliced legs above. Their sounds were erratic, hollow, as though refracted through some warbling membrane and stitched together to make them whole again. Now she could see the floor slithering, churning about in weird maelstroms, spawning pockets of jumbled whispers that swelled and devolved into broken rattling.

      “Anna.” Konrad’s voice cut through the gore, the nausea. “You don’t need to see it.”

      But her gaze crept over every bit of marrow and glistening flesh, shutting out everything beyond traces of the Starsent. Near the room’s center a set of shriveled lungs twitched and shifted over the soil, exposing the corner of a wooden frame. Shadows lined the inner lip of the boards, hinting at the sort of storage spaces she’d raided in flatland dwellings, the cold recesses of clay pots and honey jars and cowardly men.

      “Now, I’ve known wicked sights,” Lukas growled, “but this is something else, girl.”

      She turned to face the fighters.

      They were huddled in the doorway, eyes wide with this proof of true malice, true barbarism, true hatred in the world. The tips of their boots were aligned across the threshold, but none passed it. Several northerners paced along the windows, sparing momentary glances before returning to their ritual chants.

      “Did you search the lower level?” she asked them.

      “Best have a worldswalker burn out whatever the fuck’s seeped into this nest,” Lukas said, backing away with his ruj against his shoulder. “Or just put it to the torch. But take this from the bloodied source, would you? That’s no place for life.”

      Konrad clutched at his stomach. “Never thought I’d find a day when our truths collide.”

      Flowing silk garments dazzled in the sunlight beyond the porch. Nuhra approached like a scalpel’s sweep; she shouldered through the crowd with swift, certain steps, maintaining her porcelain visage as she looked upon the bodies and their hexed stirring. As she waded through the remains, her spine rigid and gaze leaping about, her curiosity only seemed to deepen.

      “You know what happened here,” Anna whispered, “don’t you?”

      Nuhra blinked at her.

      “If you know what’s below us, you should speak now,” Anna said.

      “I see what you see, Kuzalem,” Nuhra replied. “My form is blind and deaf to the presence of the Starsent. Yours is not.”

      Sparing a glance at the fighters, who had now leaned inward, yet still resisted the urge to wander closer, Anna moved to Nuhra’s side. Cartilage slid and cracked beneath her heels. “Outside,” Anna said softly, “you knew that something was here.”

      “I knew only of suffering,” Nuhra said. “This vessel has an animal’s senses.”

      “So it seems.” Moving to the room’s center, Anna used her boot to clear away the dissolving remnants of a head and splintered spine. Beneath it was the cover for the wooden frame. It was thin and dripping and resting lopsided over its hole, covered in writhing maggots. As Anna brushed it aside with her foot, it began to vibrate against dampened soil, humming with arcane fervor.

      Faded daylight spilled down into the storeroom, illuminating a dusty square of setstone and dried blood. Lining the surrounding shelves were dark, leathery slats and circular bronze caps. Tomes and scrolls.

      “Just what we need,” the tracker mused. “More sacks to haul out.”

      “Get a rope,” Anna said, mustering a forceful voice that drowned out the assembly’s muttering. She waited for their footsteps to trot off over the soil, soon joined by whispers and retching and foul southern curses.

      Nuhra moved to the frame’s edge and peered down. “A most curious crypt, sister.”

      “What was this place?” Anna asked. “Some sort of ledger archive?”

      Her giggle was cold, cutting. “The Nahorans hunted my lineage with undying tenacity. A shelter from the storm was all we had.”

      Anna narrowed her eyes. “Your lineage held her?”

      “No, no, this was a serpent’s den,” Nuhra said soothingly. “But a shard of our knowledge slumbers here.”

      Gazing back into the musty shadows, Anna spotted the empty slots and racks that had surely held compendiums, treatises, rites. “Did they bring her here?”

      “The serpents were delighted to host the Starsent, sister.”

      “Then she came for what they had,” Anna whispered. All around her the bones scraped and blood slurped and cartilage creaked in decaying sockets, thick with the whispers of the dead. Thick with Ramyi’s indiscretion. “She came with help, too.”

      “You sound certain.”

      “Even the Starsent is bound by our nature,” Anna replied. “Whatever did this was imbued with her markings, but it wasn’t her. Not alone.”

      Nuhra lifted her nose and breathed deeply, creasing her black lips in what could’ve passed for a smile. “Her nature, her bindings. Semantics, dear sister.”

      “Those bindings are the only thing staying

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