Khaw The Salt Grows Heavy

1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-80336-343-1
Verlag: Titan Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 128 Seiten

A sensuous and strange horror novella full of creeping dread and delicious gore, twisting mermaid myths into something sharp, dangerous, and hungry, for fans of Christina Henry, Carmen Maria Machado and Eric LaRocca. After the murder of her husband and the fall of his empire, a mermaid and her plague doctor companion escape into the wilderness. Deep in the woods, they stumble across a village where children hunt each other for sport, sacrificing one of their own at the behest of three surgeons they call 'the saints.' These saints play god with their magic, harvesting the best bits of the children for themselves and piecing the sacrifices back together again. To save the children from their fates, the plague doctor must confront their past, and the mermaid must embrace the darkest parts of her true nature.

Cassandra Khaw is an award-winning game writer, whose fiction work has been nominated for several awards. You can find their fiction in places like F&SF, Year's Best of Science Fiction and Fantasy, and Tor.com. Nothing But Blackened Teeth is published in 2021. They currently live in Montreal, Canada. They can be found on Twitter mostly! twitter.com/casskha

Autoren/Hrsg.

Khaw, Cassandra

Leseproben

In the minutes before dawn arrives, when the indigo horizon has only just begun to bleed, a reddish-gold seeping between the cracks in the mountain line, I slip from the hovel and pad towards a hut alcoved by the trees. I can smell them. The eyes, the heart, the amputated hand. A sour-sweetness, faintly chemical, as though of roses beginning to ferment, underscored by a wash of roasted marrow, rich fat. And magic too. Fecund, familiar. I push the door and a slant of light baptizes the dark, limns the rosewood shelves and their occupants in cobalt, the bottles thick with offal. But they are not what I am here for. I find what I’m looking for on an oval of black stone. Though unprotected, no frost has touched them. The heart, in particular, is unusually warm. The three surgeons had described these parts as vestigial, no more important than a twist of hair, or the skin scraped from the back of a knee. This, they said, was an example of the providence that they’ve vowed to share, the benediction that awaits those who would persevere, would permit themselves to suffer. Heaven can only be bridged by agony, they cried. One day soon, there wouldn’t even be need for that. One day, the surgeons whispered, there would be no reason to fear mortality. If only the faithful endure. After all, look: have they not detached the very hand from one, removed the eyes from another, exhumed the heart from the third? Do they not stand among their acolytes, not only alive but vigorous? Was this not proof enough of numinosity? So I eat them, the detritus they’ve left behind. I pop the eyes into my mouth first. They are almost ephemeral, tasting of ice and salted limes. The hand is a more complicated flavor: gingery, unctuous, the phalanges crunching like pork crackling beneath my teeth. And the heart—no pang of metal or rotting tissue here, but something exponentially more divine, its potent sapidity recalling my first memory of being conscious, and aware of my bathyal womb. As I lick the surface clean of its juices, I wonder if my plague doctor would object to what I’ve done, or if they’d laugh. Either way, the surgeons had said they have no use for these. * * * “We should leave.” I lave my tongue across my teeth, savoring their calcium flavor, the few strings of tissue caught between. How I’d missed this, longed for this: taste in its orchestral complexity, every flavor note relayed without exception. My voice—I do not recognize the chords, its abraded cadence, but the shape of it? Still enough of mine that I ache at its echoes. The flesh of the surgeons is more restorative even than the ambitions of my hope. Whatever else they are, whatever else they might represent, they are good meat, nonetheless. “You can talk.” The plague doctor sits up straight. It is strange to see them without their usual regalia, their robes strung on a line outside the open window. Instead of black, they now wear alkaline white, their vestments not unlike what a travelling monk might don: close-fitted with asymmetrical paneling, the collar high enough to kiss their lower lip. Drenched in the morning sunlight, their copper skin almost glows. “I’d always thought—” “That I was possessed by a drowning hunger for the sun and as such, chose to surrender my voice for a chance to have the sun warm my shoulders? That I loved him, my husband, with such fury, that I laid everything I was at his feet like a dowry? No. Lies, all of them. Myths to make my captivity more palatable. He cut out my tongue and fed the pieces to me.” I touch fingertips to my throat. Something about my repast had been exceptionally curative. “But later, we can sift through the falsehoods. For now, we need to leave.” “What did—” The question catches between their teeth, a hissed intake of breath. “Oh.” I smile. “They said these things were extraneous.” The plague doctor angles a strange look, eyes liquid. As they rake fingers through coal-dark curls, an epiphany articulates itself: all these years and not once have they offered the use of their name. They sigh. “You’re surprisingly eloquent.” “When you do not have the option for conversation, there arises a wealth of time for personal instruction.” I fold myself into the opposite chair, a smile budding. My voice rasps and scratches, rusted by the silence, but it is mine, still mine. “Let us be gone.” “We can’t.” “Why?” “The children—” Their voice knots itself in old memories, dies before it can be born. That crack in their facade, the one I’d glimpsed in the woods, I see it dilate again and a drop of terror pitches into their expression. In that moment, they are young, haunted, eminently breakable. I glance at the window. No one else has arisen yet. No one save our missing host, I suppose, ill-fitting as the description might be. After all, the word implicates some measure of consensuality, and I suspect her agreement was never courted. Certainly, her behavior suggested as much. Late into the previous night, after the last torch had burned itself black, the girl who’d first summoned us—fox-haired, scrawny—entered to nest beside the dwindling fire. She wouldn’t speak to us, would only glare from between matted bangs, glowering as the plague doctor ransacked her notes. “You want to free them.” “That would be presumptuous.” Wryness winds itself through their voice. The plague doctor rises, paces to the windowsill where their mask rests drying, the monk’s cloth of their garments whispering hoarse secrets. “I want them to free themselves.” “Why?” “Did you not see what they did to the poor boy? No child should live through an eternity of that. Trust me. I’ve spent enough time under those curious hands to—” The plague doctor falls silent. Ah, I think. “The surgeons. They’re the ones who made you, weren’t they?” They say nothing. I read instead the answer in the tension lines of their mouth, their opaque gaze, the blanched knobs of their knuckles as they crumple the fabric of their robes into a trembling hand. “Whatever the case,” I say, gentle. “I suspect that your makers—” They tense at the word. “—will not take kindly to what I have done. Forget what their disciples might do, regardless of whether their saints survive.” I graze their shoulder blade with a touch and say, not unkindly, “We should leave. Now.” A spill of voices. Too late, then. I turn as the door gapes open, soundless, and a boy slips through, his face unfamiliar. Today, there are no bones wefted in the hair, no paint on soft cheeks; a fresh-scrubbed angelicness is in residence instead. He smiles, a crack between his incisors. “You two hungry? The saints are asking to have breakfast with you.” The plague doctor dons their mask, lips thinned beneath the sloping dark. “Show the way.” The boy grins, effulgent. He prances forward, never once looking behind, already confident that where he marches, others must follow. We exchange another look, the plague doctor and I. With a slanting of their hand, they gesture me closer, close enough to mantle me with furs scavenged from our little quarters: squirrel skins, rabbit hides, delicate as eyelashes. The ritualism of my dressing, the attention they invest in the act, every motion elegiac, elegant; it proposes the presence of an unconsummated tenderness, something more profound than camaraderie. I tilt my cheek, feel their breath puff against my flesh, and there is the sense of timelines fractalizing. In some other world, somewhere, perhaps they kiss me: lightly, feverishly, with the emphasis of desperation, with hesitation, with passion requited. Here, they only chuckle and pull away. The two of us move in simpatico, keeping time with each other, always parallel, dark and light and the smell of plasma from my clandestine repast cooling on my fingertips. We are led to a banquet table, clumsily ornamented. Four figureheads, one to each leg, their arms raised to support the wood. The faces are hideous: gashes for the eyes and mouth, the jaws swollen to tumors. The three surgeons slouch in their thrones, hats crowned with red poppies and glistening grey thorns, willow-branch braids. Today, the three wear pantalone half-masks, enamel-crusted leather in the pigments of violent death. A gluttonous amount of food—berries, black as bruising; figs; roasted poultry; fried capers; cheeses pungent with salt—lies piled in front of them, untouched. Around them, the children cluster. There are only two little stools opposite where the surgeons sit like idols on their carved wooden thrones. The plague doctor makes them wait. They smooth down both sleeves, one after another, adjusting the glide of creamy fabric before they straighten, stride forward. I watch as I always have: watch, wait, teeth demurely withheld. “Discipline by deprivation, then?” A trimming of venom in their smooth contralto, candid. “Yes,” says one. “Yes.” “You seem—” The third surgeon—the one with the tenor, the one who had gouged out his eyes—sighs and...