Twilight of the Wolves Read online

  But the grey shadow, her eunuch, fought every step and begged to leave.

  Then the drums and then the steam and then the fire and then the songs. Metallic pounding and grating, loud and deep and boring inside, collapsing veins and closing arteries. The towers rose and spit steam and the bowels of the world vomited fire and all was red and hot, the air wavering from their song and dance. Sao’s heat kept her alive, kept her breathing, and she dove inside of him, his obsidian fur swallowing her, guarding her from all that was without.

  Their odd metallurgic voices rising and tinging like a storm of swords raining twisted metal, their inhuman sound a gash through the bubble that contained them, fragmenting spacetime all around and with each drumbeat, caustic and on fire, the ripples became waves, but Sao followed them deeper into the heart of Yiyuyan.

  A city of fire and iron, Death and poison, where organic and construct met and mated and recreated life. Spires and chapels, steam thick in the air from yawning cavities deep into the world glowing red from an uncanny heatsource deep in the bowels of a world they pulled from the ether and inhabited with metallic mutilated men singing merrily in language that clanged and pounded. It worked its way inside her, a parasite needling into her brain, into her body, listening to her, hearing her, copying and multiplying, becoming more and more within, feeding off her life and her pulse and her very thoughts, her fears and desires. The language dove within and did not rewrite but copied until the copies became too much to be ignored and her brain took note and began to decipher the code even as the metal words stole away the old ones, the wolf ones and the human ones, and all turned to iron.

  But Sao rose, his fur bristling, his tails waving, and he spoke within her, his voice everything, a thousand voices but only his, the ocean inside a mountain or the waterfall within a well, Do not fear them and do not listen.

  The wolfwords rushed through and washed away the ironwords, the poison language of Yiyuyan, the city deep in the bowels of the space between worlds, where spacetime refracts and only just stays together.

  A great spire of white smooth metal rose straight up and unimaginably high surrounded by the lunar flowers and Sao’s body scorched and soothed and the wolfgirl dipped inside him to feel what he felt but he blocked her and instead stepped within her and sang for her. He sang for her along with the lunar flowers and her body melted into his and they existed within the blaring and tumultuous metallic cacophony, a dissonant percussive flood and they all sang and danced and beat their metal again and again until their voices rose and Sao slid the girl from his back.

  He pressed his snout into the wolfgirl’s face and nuzzled her as she threw her arms around him. Her heart faltered and cracked but she could not say why. The look in his eyes and she started screaming but couldn’t make a sound as he stepped towards them and their metal arms and fiery skin and black lifeless eyes. Sao walked away from her and she felt the absence as a vortex ripping her into a thousand pieces and into a thousand directions. But her shadow was there and he covered her. For the first time, he initiated contact and touched her and she felt all that was within him again. All the Deaths and lives and memories swirling around the hollow of his body and she knew that he was barely alive, a small flickering flame caught within the hurricane of demons and gods. He held her tight and he smelt of ash and cinder and nothing. Nothing and no one, he clung to her and spoke, There are better worlds than these, but she didn’t understand, didn’t want to understand, for her Moon was walking away to the flowers, to that great white spire glistening in the light of distant stars, of different realities.

  The Yi spoke but she could not understand and Sao reached the base of the spire and turned to her. His face and body flashing from human to demon to wolf and cycling so over and over but his eyes remained the same deep amber eyes, even when his body became human, he kept the eyes of the wolf. His tiny lithe frame and his great hulking wolf body, a transient temporality.

  He smiled weakly, his eyes washing out, tears flooding and she felt them in her own eyes and the shadow spoke again, There are better worlds than these, but still she didn’t understand but only kept shaking her head mouthing No no no in every way she knew how but just not ever aloud.

  He howled and her vision went black and the Yi fell silent and she heard him disappear, his life rushing out with each pulse of his heartbeat. The scent of godblood was thick in the air, transforming it, and the Yi erupted and her chest burned and she screamed from the pain and pang that she already knew would never end. She felt her body changing, parts of her falling away, new ones growing, but most of what she felt was a fade and the pain and confusion blotted out the loss of Sao, her Moon, her everything, and she was unaware of the violence swallowing them or the way her shadow fought to keep her alive and she would spend the rest of her life wondering if it was worth it, to stay alive, to breathe without Sao.

  They came for her and Death took her by the hand and erupted into spacetime, a grey world swallowing them and she felt him fading and dying with every moment they spent inside that hazed halflife. The fury beyond them in Yiyuyan escalated and Sao’s body was ripped apart and she saw his blood on their faces, in their mouths, and his eyes. His eyes watched her still without blinking, without dying. He watched her for as long as he still existed with all Yiyuyan crumbling to ash and dust around him.

  And then she was awake in the forest and she was human. The forest was silent and her shadow lay beside her.

  Shaking him, her shadow, he was soft and pliant and fragile as if his skin was made of paper and his bones were made of twigs. His body gave way beneath her hand and she rolled him to face the light and she saw his contorted face without eyes or a tongue. Handless and bloodless, he was shrivelled and dead but there was no one to take him home to the Goddess he left behind. He died alone for her and she knew he loved her and if she had tears within her she would have given him all that he asked for.

  But she was human. She was human and the world was silent.

  And the Moon would never shine again.

  And she would howl no more.

  The suns rise and the city is ours. Luca is ours. There are no soldiers killing the young men but many Invaders are dead. Dead at my hands, at the hands of many others. Silent blades killing the night. Thousands of bodies left to rot in the daylight.

  The cheers and chanting continues, all voices united. My body light, heady, dizzy as I stumble through the city seeing the starving and mutilated cheering alongside those who are yet whole. None of us lost but all gained. The Deathwalkers prowl the city and take them away, remove the Invaders from our land forever. The walking shadows, the hands and mouths of the Goddess bringing all the newdead to the shore and the ocean. He was a boy once, before he was a wraith. They all were.

  Happy, elated, I smile and people touch me, we call one another Sister, and we laugh. An overwhelming ecstasy in the air thinning the years of pain, making it a memory, containable, something we can walk away from, lock away, murder.

  But they swarm around him and I run to him screaming, my joints cracking and creaking, screaming so loud that I can’t make a sound, my lungs ragged and torn, my voice stolen away. They surround him as he stands over his dead father, crying.

  Alyc, too young to understand. Too young to see this and ever forget it.

  The Deathwalkers, ten of them, crowd around, their song harrowing but calming, as if I know it and have known it since before I was born. They take him in their hands and the roots keep me where I stand, mouth hanging open, blood beating the sludge of my life harder and faster until I can barely stand. They pull at him and raise him up and the heart within me is gnawed on by the gods who have cursed everything and stolen away all that ever held meaning. Before my eyes, they take him and my body is an empty husk of dried meat and I’ve seen this before in the memories of my shadow, the only thing he left behind.

  The screams echo in my head and your eyes appear and a wolf cries a thousand years away but it echoes to the present and I reach to
him, pushing Death away, pushing all of them away, shouting out their song, drowning out the dead to make room for the living. I push and I scream and I kick and I tear at them until the boy is in my arms.

  Alyc, my heart, I hold him, kiss him, run my hands over him to keep him alive, Oh my heart, what are you doing? Where are you going? Where are you going, dear heart?

  My eyes close and his face pressed against my cheek, he whispers, Daddy’s gone, and I cry though I try not to but I cry harder and harder until Alyc holds me and consoles me and I can still taste his father’s blood as the Deathwalkers turn and disappear into the shadows, my vision a blur, Lord Alexander’s body just a heap of ash in the wind, and the tears will not stop even as the wolves all howl in my head from thousands of days ago when the forest still sang for me and the Moon still shone and Alyc holds me together even as my body crumbles away and I tell him this is the last day in my body and he whispers, stroking my hair, Auntie, there are better worlds than this.

  “There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say,” Cyril Connolly wrote, and we believe he was right.

  Perfect Edge seeks books that take on the crippling fear of other people, the question of what’s correct and normal, of how life works, of what art is.

  Our authors disagree with each other; their styles vary as widely as their concerns. What matters is the will to create books that won’t be easy to assimilate. We take risks, not for the sake of risk-taking, but for the things that might come out of it.