Chapter 32
Freedom
“Hello, Asphodel,” says Kelpie, and Artemis stumbles where she stands, balance shocked away by the simple truth of her companion’s words. This figure—this construct—this flensed horror out of nightmare is Asphodel Baker, long dead and buried, yet somehow here returned.
“You’re dead,” says Artemis, and her lips are numb, the words lightly slurred by the effort of forming them.
“I was,” says Asphodel. “As I told you, I’ve been walking along the graveyard path. I would have returned sooner, but Dionysus wanted to have words with me over a friend of his, who I’d treated poorly but with the best of intentions. I understand his anger. I still say I did only what I had to do.”
“Why have you restrained our friends?”
“Your friends? Why, little moon, they were mine long before they were yours, and they’ll remain mine long after you’ve waned and been forgotten. All cuckoos belong to me. They were born of me, and they’ll return to me when they’re unmade. I’ve taken only what’s mine to have.”
“They’re not all cuckoos. I’m not a cuckoo.”
“No,” allows Asphodel. “But the alchemist is mine, by teaching, and the reborn girl is mine, by proximity. She stinks of failed experiments and rewritten methodologies. A layer of wax covers her flesh in every way of seeing without the eye, marking the number of times she’s been used to make a Hand of Glory.
They aren’t bone of my bone as the cuckoos are, but they’re mine all the same. ”
“And Chang’e?”
“Allows my Jack, my beautiful Jackdaw, to wander the labyrinthine corridors of her mind and take what he pleases. He rewrites her at her own request, and she shines, immortal and shackled in her own impossible way. They’re all mine to claim.
They all belong to me. You belong to me, because of what my boy did to your mind.
He stopped up the very passage between mortal blood and moonlight, and made of you something closer to the old gods than the diminished Lunar creatures of my time, much less of this time.
Everything here is mine to have and use as I desire. ”
Asphodel moves closer. Her feet never fully leave the floor; when she lifts them, red threads of viscera and tissue connect her to the greater mound of flesh surrounding them.
Artemis thinks she can see the answer in that connection: if they break Asphodel’s connection to the lab, they may break whatever terrible power she’s using to control their friends.
Dodger, at least, is aware of her surroundings. If she could open her eyes or speak, she would. The fact that she doesn’t means she can’t, which means she’s being suppressed somehow, forced down below the surface of herself.
“It’s all about sympathy,” says Asphodel.
“That’s the real magic in this world. Not divinity, or blood, or any of the other things people try to pin power to.
Sympathy is what connects us, what keeps us from unraveling into the void.
I walked the graveyard path for decades.
My Up-and-Under was enough to anchor me there, until dear James began to succeed with his own experiments, began to birth new cuckoos into the world.
Their sympathy gave me an immediate tether back to where they stood, and as their number grew, that tether got stronger.
Even losing James wasn’t enough to sever it through.
Other alchemists began mirroring his work, using what I’d left behind to craft their own cuckoos—but they were always mine.
Every cuckoo is mine, no matter who has the making of them, because they carry my storm within them. ”
“You just said it wasn’t about blood,” says Kelpie. She steps forward, closer to Artemis, so that their shoulders almost touch, but not close enough to interfere when Artemis decides to draw her bow. “How can it be about the sympathy with you when it isn’t about blood?”
“Because it’s not blood. It’s lightning,” says Asphodel. “I was born of a storm, nestled in the womb of a woman who had never known the touch of a mortal man, and every cuckoo carries my lightning inside them, a fragment of a segment of a storm bound inside their bones. They belong to me.”
“You’d belong to him, if he cared to claim you,” says Artemis, voice going sharp. “I’m an Olympian. I know what it means to serve a storm. You’re toying with dangerous forces, alchemist. You’re not going to have the ending you’re aiming for.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.” Asphodel continues moving closer.
“But I’m here now, and I’ll have an ending, and that will be enough.
I can see that you won’t yield to me. That doesn’t matter much.
You have something of mine.” She snaps her skinless fingers and Kelpie crumples, collapsing to the wet, sticky floor without making any effort to catch herself.
She lands in a tangle of limbs, hair fanned wide, one hoof twisted beneath her body at a painful angle.
“Kelpie!” cries Artemis, lowering her bow as she moves to kneel by her companion.
“I don’t understand why they wasted the lightning to make her,” says Asphodel, turning back toward the others.
“An artificial moon, I can see the purpose, but to embody the hind? To make a form with elements of human and deer intermingled, so that it can never walk normally in the world? It’s a waste of resources and of power. I’ve no further use for her.”
She waves her hand, and Kelpie begins sinking into the floor, the flesh dragging her down inch by inch, opening around her limbs and, as she settles into the space this creates, closing again around her. Artemis gasps in horror and drops to her knees, trying to yank Kelpie free.
“You can’t have her!” she wails, as the floor fights back and drags Kelpie ever more steadily down.
“I already do,” says Asphodel. She continues onward until she stands in front of Judy, Lilianne, and Smita—the three she has the loosest claim over. Leaning forward and reaching out with skinless fingers, she caresses Judy’s cheek.
“Yes,” she says. “I think this will do.”
And the skin begins to slide from Judy’s face onto her hand, leaving raw, gleaming muscle behind. There is no blood. If there’s any mercy in this, it’s that there is no blood. But when her eyelid slides away, Artemis can see her eye rolling frantically. Like Dodger, Judy is awake.
And Kelpie is still sinking. Artemis has other things to worry about. Frantic, she reaches foe her belt and draws the knife she always keeps there, only hesitating for a moment before she drives it into the floor all the way to the hilt and begins to cut.
Blood wells up where she slashes through the flesh, hot and steaming and turning everything around her into a sticky mess in seconds.
Judy’s stolen skin slithers around Asphodel, wrapping around her own exposed muscles and concealing them.
She doesn’t look back at Artemis or the still-sinking Kelpie, only continues to allow the skin to cover her, one terrible inch at a time.
“You’ve lost, little moon,” she taunts. “This was never a fair fight. My alchemists brought together everything I needed, built me the perfect cocoon and left the sympathies to resonate until they were enough to call me out of the Up-and-Under and back into the world. All I had to do was wait. I’ll take what’s been embodied for my use, and then I’ll take the City, and no one will stop me. ”
“What do you mean?” snaps Artemis.
“I mean, a natural incarnation is deep and rooted in the bones of the person who carries it. But a cuckoo? Stop the storm, sever the strand. Snatch the strand, braid it into your own sympathies, and continue on. I just needed to wait until all the tools I was going to need had been prepared.”
Asphodel pulls her hand away from the now-flensed Judy, turning her stolen face back toward Artemis and Kelpie.
She smiles, lips pulling back from straight white teeth, and she could be any woman walking naked down the street, she could be an ordinary person and not a nightmare brought back from the dead by some implacable working set in motion more than a century ago. She could be anyone.
She is Asphodel Baker, and she is beautiful, and she is terrible, and she keeps smiling as she hooks her finger toward Kelpie, who cries out—the sound practically a bleat, more animal than human—and sinks fully into the hole that surrounds her, going entirely limp.
Artemis fumbles for her wrist, checking her pulse, then picks up her bow and stands, turning to aim an arrow at Asphodel’s chest.
“You can do that, if you think it might do you any good,” says Asphodel, with evident disinterest. “Can you kill a dead woman with an arrow made of moonlight? It sounds like something out of a story, and I’m more story than scholar right now: it might fell me.
But it might not, and in the time it takes to draw, your friends will die.
You can kill me, or you can save them. Choose. ”
Roger, Dodger, and Erin are limp in their cocoons of meat and sinew; Lilianne and Smita are still unconscious; Judy hasn’t made a sound, but her uncovered eyes are wild and staring, while tears leak from the corners and run down her naked cheeks. Artemis lowers her bow.
“Good choice, little moon,” says Asphodel. “Now, if you don’t mind, I have business beyond the Up-and-Under. Shine as you like, but shine not on the City. That passage has been closed.”
She walks away then, and when she reaches the flesh-sealed portal out of the room, it opens for her, allowing her to pass through into whatever waits beyond.