Chapter 61 Mullayne
Mullayne
Langzu – the den northeast of Bian
Avagnith the adventurer went to the depths of the world, to Unterra, and returned after a length of ten years.
Hers is the only verifiable account we have of a mortal returning to the surface after finding their way to the land of the gods.
She said she missed her friend and could not bear to be apart from him any longer.
They became lovers, yet even as they did so, Avagnith was putting her affairs in order.
She gave away her finest jewelry, signed her home over to a friend in need, and wrote letters to everyone she cared about.
And then, six months after returning to the surface, she quietly died.
Mull’s prison was filled with meat hooks. The lamp outlined the sharpness of the metal, glinted off the shimmering god’s blood on the floor. The room was empty now except for him, the door solid metal and locked from the outside.
The lock turned.
Dread filled him. Sometimes, when the lock turned, it was just a meal being thrust into the room before the door clanged closed again. Sometimes, it was Kluehnn. There was fear in the uncertainty, in not knowing if he was getting the aspect or food.
The aspect did, at times, emerge from the hole in the corner of the room, and Mull was served two meals a day, so that at least meant, probability-wise, if the lock turned it was likely food.
But probability didn’t ease those feelings of dread.
He couldn’t reason his way out of them, and the fact that reason held no sway in this dark, bloody room made the whole experience a thousand times worse.
He’d come to the den thinking he could face any obstacle and overcome it, and now he knew there were obstacles that were far beyond him, that he couldn’t overcome no matter how hard he tried.
He was altered, he was alone, he was imprisoned – and he couldn’t change anything about any of these facts, much as he wanted to.
A hand appeared around the door, and then another, and the tension at the back of Mull’s neck exploded into a paralyzing fear. He didn’t know how the godkillers and the converts could stand it, bowing before the aspect, making themselves vulnerable in such a way.
His breathing quickened and he seized a meat hook from above. It was a play he’d made before, but he never executed an experiment only once.
The god flowed into the room, teeth bright by lamplight, filaments reminding Mull of nothing so much as the last stray hairs on a bald man’s head come to life.
The aspect seemed a mockery of life. There was nothing beautiful about it, nothing that spoke of generations of trial and error.
It was an amalgamation of terrible, incongruent parts.
He lifted the meat hook, and the aspect only laughed, the sound echoing from stone. “Must we, Mullayne Reisun?”
It crouched so all its hands and feet touched the floor, and crept to him with the speed of a centipede. Mull swiped the hook; the god caught it in one hand and wrenched it free.
In the next moment, he’d cocooned Mull in a cage of hands and cloven feet, claws scratching at his throat, threatening more than just scratches. “What did you tell the gods?”
“Only that you were powerful, but you were leaving the den. Everyone knew.” Everyone knew – including Rasha. He’d given up so much more than he’d intended: his name, his clan, his purpose in coming to the den, his encounter with Hakara and her crew.
He’d thought, in those daydreaming moments at his desk, that he would stand against torture, that he’d have the mental and emotional fortitude to feel pain and then be able to compartmentalize it, to examine it with intellectual detachment.
Instead, he’d caved almost immediately, telling the aspect nearly all it wanted to know.
He just wasn’t who he’d thought he might be. There’d been comfort in never having been challenged in this way, because back then, he could tell himself there was a chance he’d react with valor. Instead, he’d found the depths of himself, and they were not nearly as pristine as he’d once imagined.
He’d let his friends die. He’d let himself be permanently altered. He’d been caught.
Once, these had all seemed impossibilities, and yet here he was.
Kluehnn was going to torture him, one way or another.
He’d committed too many sins against the god to escape with his life.
The least he could do was to keep Rasha from losing hers.
Maybe she’d do something more worthwhile with it than he had.
“What else did you tell them?” One claw pierced the junction of neck and shoulder, digging in so deep it scraped against his collarbone. “What do you know?”
He couldn’t even think of a convenient lie. He would have told Kluehnn anything, if only he could think of something that made sense. So he divulged the most secret information he knew. “I read about the pact you made. The corestones.”
Kluehnn’s eyes narrowed. “The seeds.”
The door scraped open. Kluehnn’s head whipped about.
A cohort of godkillers entered, dragging two bodies behind them. “We found them trying to spy near the den,” the godkiller at the front said, her pronged horns catching the light. “Forgive the interruption.”
Kluehnn said nothing, only waited as they hung the naked bodies on the hooks.
As soon as the door closed behind them, he let Mull go – so quickly that he landed hard on the ground, his shoulder aching.
By the time he had rolled to a sitting position, the aspect was already at one of the bodies, both mouths fastened on the god’s leg.
A low shock rippled through him. Kluehnn was eating the god.
But when Mull stopped to separate his emotional reaction from his thoughts, it all made a strange sort of sense.
Why would they keep the bodies instead of burning them, even if a god’s body never decomposed?
How would this room not become crowded? A part of him had just assumed they would throw the bodies into the pit when they ran out of space, but now that assumption seemed silly.
A crunch of teeth on bone echoed through the cave, and Mull curled into the corner, letting his mind tumble forward, away from the fact that something very horrifying was happening only a few steps away.
If this was what the aspect lived on – and he had never seen it eat anything else – then of course the gods would take the bodies when they raided the den.
Of course they would burn them. It wasn’t just about honoring their dead. It was about weakening Kluehnn.
If he didn’t have enough to eat, he’d have to attack.
Pont had often despaired of ever teaching Mull to brawl, so he’d done the next best thing – he’d given him books on military strategy, both to help with his Cressiman and to at least be able to honestly tell Mull’s parents he was teaching him how to fight.
Some of that knowledge had filtered into Mull’s brain, because he knew that forcing an enemy into a position where they had to attack gave you an advantage.
It made them predictable, and predictability meant you had the leisure to respond in a way that would give you the upper hand.
Mercifully, Kluehnn did not return to questioning him when he’d finished eating his fill. He left the room, the two gods still hanging, one with his leg partially chewed away.
The lock turned.
The first thing Mull did was search the bodies. He found nothing useful. He sagged to the floor, his knees just shy of the puddle of shimmering blood. When he lifted his gaze again, all he could see from this angle was the gruesome, jagged thigh bone Kluehnn had left behind, jutting out from flesh.
When Kluehnn came back, he’d eat again. And when he ate, he’d be vulnerable.
Mull reached up and felt the end of the bone. Sharp as the point of a blade. He pulled. The body only swayed in response to the pressure. He lifted his other hand, digging his claws into flesh.
These were not the most dignified moments of Mull’s life, and all told, they were moments he hoped he would quickly forget.
He tried to tell himself it was just like butchering a chicken – an activity he’d only completed once, to understand the underlying structure.
For all his scholarly detachment, the cold, slimy feel of dead flesh made him want to retch.
He swallowed his bile. He used his new strength, his new claws. He cut away the tendons and pulled the bone free. Then he snapped off one of the jagged pieces.
Sleep took him before he could enact the second part of his plan.
The next turning of the lock caught him unawares, laid out on the floor.
He was lucky. It was a meal – a thin porridge with unidentifiable bits of meat and woody vegetables.
He ate it quickly, keeping the bone close.
He was unsure whether it was day or night; all he knew was that he needed to stay awake if he wanted to live.
He stood next to the door, the sharp-edged bone tucked into his waistband, the shard between his fingertips.
He found himself nodding off even while standing. The aspect would still be hungry – it would have to still be hungry after not eating for so long. Mull propped himself against the wall, blinking.
The lock turned again.
The sound woke him fully, his heartbeat quickening.
Just as the door opened, he shoved the shard of bone into the space that appeared between the hinges.
Then he leapt back, just as the door closed on the shard.
He couldn’t be sure if it had held, if it had stopped the door from latching, but he couldn’t check either.