It's storytime! Read a science fiction/fantasy short story from Lightspeed Magazine here at io9.
The soldiers slit the woman’s throat every evening before bedding down so they can sleep without worry. She mocks them but never fights the knife coming to her. Two of the men still take turns watching her in case she heals before the rest of the cadre wakes; so far she hadn’t surprised them but a weapon drawn is a weapon able to kill.
“The next city is waiting,” he answers, a vileness at the back of his tongue as he tugs at the rope. “Up.”“I say this as a warning not a threat: as a storm tosses about both evil and righteous alike, so too was I born of the same nature.”He tugs the rope again. “They travel as a company of ten plus the bloodwright in tow, along a route marked by their chief and his counsel. Their home, the archipelago of White Chain, lies behind them in shades of black, a churned slurry of ash and kinblood.
The bloodwright cracks the excess phalanxes from her smooth sockets and he hates himself for the envy that rolls through him like a rot-filled tide. If there is one thing Vaikan wishes he could not see, it is himself.When the bloodwright first boarded their ship, accompanied by the head spellwright, the Blades couldn’t help but scoff at her, some in abject disgust and others in anger. She had seen a soft and studious life, waited on by others so she could hone her bloodcraft.
Immune to her bloodcraft, they pleasured themselves over the neutered power of her. When Vaikan’s turn finally came, he pretended at taking out his cock and rammed his hips into hers, acting out a quick rut while the rest of the men wrestled each other and howled out broken war songs, drunk and raging. Beneath him, the bloodwright kept her head tilted starboard, eyes locked on the moon-cut crests of waves.
The bloodwright crouches against the corridor wall amidst the frenzy, clutching her head with shivering hands. A guard draws up his sword two-handed to skewer her through the head but Vaikan sends his sword through the guard’s spine, crumpling him in place.“Get the fuck up, wright, we have to go,” Vaikan snaps, hauling her up by her arms, hating himself for enjoying the plush sink of flesh under his fingers.
“You know nothing of—!” A hail of arrows drums into the lift around them, skims across Vaikan’s shoulder and thigh, and glances off the hard bone of the bloodwright’s eyeless face., he thinks, and uses all his brute strength, the momentum of his weight, to slash through the barrel-thick rope. “Can you walk?” he asks, hoping he will not have to carry her. Pouches of bubbly white fat make up her breasts, thick sheets of suet covering her stomach, the back of her arms, and thighs. The rest of her is a stringy brocade of white and red muscle pulled tight across her body.“Yes,” she says, grasping his shoulder as she finds her feet. She has something like a face again, no longer just a smooth plain of white of bone but a mask of tendons and writhing veins.
It takes several days of sailing on belligerent currents and beneath the storm-wracked sky to realize they are still far off from their destination, their course wrecked. There are no islands between Taramong and Tereti Mo, no spits of sand they can set up camp on to rest and warm themselves. Vaikan spearfishes and nets their daily meals, paces the meager length of their ship, rows and rows, and curses the bastard godlings of the sky and sea.
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