Jacob's Children, Part 1: The Mountain (Patreon)

She tires so easily now. The stump of her left hinder twitches sometimes, phantom sensation crawling up and down its absent length, and often her gnawed and ruined wings beat madly of their own volition. In the last chiliad something has clogged the ovary which runs along her keel. It hurts. She worries that it is not eggs. Still, the scent of food is in the air. There are whispers in the canyons that a mountain fell last night where the broken wastes meet the soiled verge of the Graywood. One of the singing people — long black legs and finely curled antennae — told her this, and she is hungry.

So she travels. First along the canyons, dim and narrow, too small for the long yellow teeth and sharp, translucent claws of the dust lions, branching one into the next. She follows a map time has etched into her brain and the flickering length of her ventral nerve, where the breath of the wind comes into her and tells her of approaching death. Near first light she comes across an abortica in the juncture between two grimy canyons where dead skin drifts in pale, translucent flakes through the air. He has suffocated in his moult. She feels him, small and wingless, tastes the bitter traces of his last panicked half-thoughts, and nourishes herself a little until fear of the juncture’s exposure drives her onward. 

Others join her. A few at first as she enters the bowed and polished lands of the Delta, travelers who go along with her or pass her by or watch in silence as she goes herself, and then more as they spill into the Via Espina — the way of the spine, named for the bones brought long ago to rest along its channel — and join the river making pilgrimage. The musk of their excitement is intoxicating. For a while she feels young again. 

Light and darkness move over the canyon. It is wider here, more open, but the mountain’s footsteps do not shake the world, and the ghost who sometimes brings a scythe of death down on the hidden people’s gatherings is nowhere to be seen or smelled or tasted. Perhaps she sleeps. The traveler smelled her, once. A dizzying hothouse stink that drove her mad with terror and excitement almost for a terciad. Now, she thinks, the strain would be too much. Her last moulting left her near to death, and would have claimed her had she not had the luck to drag herself into a spill of yellowed sugar half-dissolved and hardened to a sticky paste. Perhaps an angel left it for her, one of those silent flitting things which at dark circle the dim suns set in the stained firmament above. 

She stops to rest and the river carries her, bumping and jostling. She fears her antennae will break. She fears her wings will spasm and she will be injured and borne under and suffocated beneath surging bodies. None of these things happen. Instead she sleeps, and wakes, and sleeps again, and dreams of sugar thundering through her veins, of its white crystals spinning through her, dissolving into light and life and pale fire, and of the angels circling, always circling, voiceless and dusty-winged, until the cries of dust lions on the hunt drag her back to wakefulness.

They are ahead, up on the canyon’s rim, reaching in where the Spine yawns widest to pull pilgrims from the press. Long jaws full of teeth drip warm saliva on the throngs below. Teeth. Chitin buried under meat. The crawling horror of these monsters, ten or twenty times the size of any of the silent folk, bodies twisted inside out so that their flesh pulses fever-hot against the open air. They are eating. Four or five of them. A feast. Teeth puncture braincases and sever nerves. Claws shred gossamer wings and winkle limbs out of their oozing sockets. The silent people die.

Numbers are your sole defense. By the time she reaches the hunting ground the lions have been glutted and retreated toward their holes in the Between, the black country of wire and copper where the weavers sometimes spun their manors of light silver silk. Rich food in the Between. Colonies and colonies, and the bones and husks of others long-abandoned in the shadow of the past, but no safety. Armored serpents. The warm breath of hell which only an age ago winnowed the people near to nothingness. She can remember the drifts of the dead.

There is a scratching in her ovary. Hatchlings after all, perhaps. She spares it little thought. Above, the firmament narrows once again as the canyon walls contract and the surging river of the people picks up speed. Chitin and wing-silk. The dark pools of her people’s eyes. The smell of food is thickening. Particle rain smelling of feces and sour sweat. Her absent hinder aches and itches. She rubs her forelimbs against one another to relieve the phantom pain, but it’s no use. It has sunk down into her. It lives in the chitin of her vessel.

Up and out of the Spine along a slanted length of iron red with flaking rust, hundreds of the people swarming it ahead of her. Nymphs scurry underfoot. There are not so many of them. Soliads have passed. She is so tired, but the ripe brown stench of decay is everywhere. Antennae sweep and tingle, crossing signals and spreading the chemical language of their eager agitation up and down the river of unspeaking pilgrims. She climbs the iron road, limbs dragging with fatigue. Others check and buffet her until she must stop and rest and let them tread upon her in their passing, and then at last she comes with the last dregs of the pilgrimage out onto the splintered plain and sees the mountain where it fell.

How to take in the body of a god at once? Vast arcs and planes of weathered skin. The grimy fibers of the Graywood no more than helpless fingers against his fallen bulk, not trees but a touch as light as whispering. The hot wet cavern with its ivory sentinels and before it an alluvial fan of sweet, acrid vomit dripping down into the nearby trenches and arroyos of the wastes. His eyes, if they are eyes, huge and silvery and leaking waterfalls of something clear. He rises in dark woolen pleats and crisp, starched cliffs. Dull gray hair lies curled along the edges of his vomitus. She is overcome by the force of his stench, by the corrupt wind that blows over his unimaginable bulk toward which the hidden people scurry without caution or restraint, vanishing into its umber shadows, scaling an outflung stanchion ending in a kind of claw stiffened in death to a gnarled temple of bent bone.

She follows with the swarm. Closer in, the mountain swallows up the firmament and the dark gape of the threshold to the wood flanked by its sheer white cliffs until there is nothing but its oily pores. Already the pilgrims are climbing him, seeking the soft give of decomposing meat. Clogged pores and the tentpoles of buried bone — the secret chitin of an inverse self — beneath sagging folds of jaundiced flesh. Explorers traversing cracked lips and bleeding gums. Daring each other deeper and deeper into the acidic blackness of the mouth. She passes them, finding her purchase in the cloth that pools around a knob of bone, scaling inch by inch with faltering strength the escarpment of the mountain’s ruin. She is tired. Her ovary is burning. She can feel movement inside it.

Sweat-damp cotton. Veins like stilled rivers beneath nearly translucent skin. The others burrowing through the sea of fabric, hunting the stink of shit and gummy, nameless secretions down the fallen bulk. She can see back across the Waste when she reaches the crest of the god. The mountain. Few others follow. Near the waxy pool of a cupped flower of skin she scents a richer stink, a fatty whiff of something unfamiliar. Her body quivers with the furious tension of her ovary. Something exits her. An egg? She turns, limping, and sees a long, hooked yellow worm dragging behind her. No panic. Only resigned disgust. 

She turns back to the cup of skin, and to the dark hole at its ridged and scalloped center. Her ventral nerve burns with dulled sensation. Can life fly so quickly from her? She finds sadness at last. What had it been? How many nymphs have fallen from her body, and how many of those survived their moults and grew instar to instar until their wings — hers beat spasmodically — bloomed from their exoskeletons and dried in the hot wind of the dark Between. How many had fed and grown strong on the skins and excretions which she’d left behind? Where had she been, and what would change at her cessation? Little? Nothing? She makes one of the poor, thin sounds the hidden people can, and at the mouth of that dark cavern she begins to die.

There are memories. Gliding from the high cliffs of the waste where water thundered into a steel sea. The sharp stink of her own agitation in her first rut, and the males who had come and loved her. Chiliads and chiliads ago. She thinks, as she forces herself down deeper into the comforting constriction of the tunnel in the mountain’s flesh, fine hairs brushing against her scarred chitin. She can hear the work of parasites within the mountain. She can hear the sizzle of pale acid denaturing.

And ahead is the taste of ozone, of electricity, and the chemical roar of some terrible place lost down in the dark, and the awful weight of bone around her and the eggs and nymphs spilling at last from her still body, feeling her with still-wet antennae, cleaning birth slime from their limbs and crawling over one another until one by one the siren song of the great thing below calls them at last around her silent wreck and down, down, through twisting white canals and spiracles gnawed through old yellowed bone into the dark, where they begin to eat.