By any standard, this was objectively nonsense. More than that, it would almost certainly have been directly contradicted by the evidence of Marsh’s own experiences.
Still, a tiny pointless part of me wanted to at least try. Giving up my Wyrm stew as a bad job, I drew my chair closer to him, and he flinched slightly. “Impure, meaning everybody who isn’t like you?”
He had the good grace to flash the tiniest expression of guilt. “So Master Truelove teaches. So the Church teaches.”
If I could have granted myself one wish then, it would have been to be able to call bullshit on my own faith as easily as I could call bullshit on Marsh’s. Which as wishes wentwas probably pretty selfish. I reached out and took his hand, threading our fingers together so that their meaninglessly distinct shades of brown overlapped. And I took the tiniest bit of hope from the fact that he didn’t pull away. “And you think a slaughterer-god is going to pick its victims based on”—it was so foreign to my way of thinking I could barely express it—“pigmentation?”
“So I was taught,” repeated Marsh. And I’d have called it a bad answer but I knew the strength of it.
“And the Beast—the great Beast the captain hunts? You think that will leave you for last too?”
Marsh blinked. “So I was taught.”
I looked down at our hands and tried, really tried, to see where he was coming from. “Okay, so let’s say you’re right. Are you really saying your entire religion is just… just based on wanting the monsters to eat me before they eat you?”
Marsh nodded. “Yes.”
“Isn’t that… extremely depressing?”
He snatched his hand back. “It’s a depressing world,” he told me. “And if all I have to look forward to is watching the god between the stars consume you in the moments before it consumes me, then”—he looked down and drew in a deep, ragged breath—“then that’s a lot more than I’d have otherwise.”
There wasn’t much I could say to that. If I’d been more pious I’d have explained to him about the Father’s love and how it could be his at very reasonable rates. If I’d been a better blasphemer, I’d have shown him how to build a pyre out of dogma and warm himself beside it.
But I was just me. A lost, confused half a heretic. Fuck, even the hand I’d reached out to him hadn’t been mine. It had been rebuilt by Aphrodite Pharma State along with most of the rest of me, phalangeal reduction and osseous narrowing. I didn’t own my body any more than Marsh owned his soul.
Still a tiny, hypocritical part of me resented him for it. For not realizing that he’d been lied to his whole life. For not having the guts to atleastcome and join me in the horrible halfwayplace between believing and unbelieving, where you yearned for the certainties of childhood even though you knew they were bullshit and felt like a failure every time you found another one of the hooks the old doctrine left in your heart.
An even tinier part of me thought that maybe he’d change one day. That maybe there was hope for him.
There wasn’t. Fate—if fate is real—or blind chance had other plans for Marsh.
And when the monsters did finally come, they took him the same way they took everybody else.
CHAPTER
FORTYHead
Like me, you might be ever so slightly disappointed that this chapter isn’t about going down on somebody in a shipboard toilet.
I mean I completely did, obviously. It was a three-year voyage and with media storage glitching out there was no other way to pass the time except scrimshawing, which as we’ve already very firmly established I’m shit at. That’s just not what this chapter is about.
If it helps, somebodyiseventually going to wind up covered in sperm.
The most important part of the butchering—so important that it’s not trusted to humans—is the severing of the head and ridge and their careful removal to the draining station on the floor above the hold.
Since I’d never seen it done before, I stayed for the whole process this first time. I stood on a walkway overlooking the upper chamber and watched as the floor opened and a hundred mechanical arms and automated winches hoisted the great head of the monster into place.
It rose slowly, far more slowly than it had ever moved in life. And because the head was so valuable its armored plates had been left in place, in case some stray bone shard or metal fragment might damage the precious contents.
The whole hunter-voyage is a long carnival of beautiful horrors, but standing there on a rickety metal platform looking up at the head of somebody else’s god—or an aspect of it, or a servant of it, I still wasn’t clear on the theology—I saw the greatest beauty and the greatest horror I’d seen all voyage, except maybe in the captain. Somehow being severed from the body and held up inside the ship made the head seem even bigger than it had in the sky, or hanging from the keel. Part of that was just proximity, of course. During the hunt you’re farther away and the distances are big enough that you can’t get a reliable sense of perspective. Then during the cutting-down you’re far too close so you don’t appreciate how huge it is, any more than you appreciate the size of the wall you’re fucking against.
But here it was far enough away that I could see the whole of it, yet still close enough that I could see what “the whole of it” actually meant. How broad and tall and magnificent it was, even with its eyes and feeding tendrils removed so it was little more than carapace lined with membranes, its mandibles hanging slack and useless beneath a severe, shearing upper jaw.
We weren’t due to start draining for an hour or so, which meant I’d assumed I’d be alone in the station, but I was wrong. I heard footsteps clanging harsh and metallic from around the lee side of the head and, just as I was trying to work out if I should stay or go, I heard the captain’s voice.
“And what have you seen?” she was asking. Asking the head, it seemed. “In your voyages through red skies and white skies and into the cold and crushing seas that no ship may sail? What secrets have you gleaned from the dead on the winds of Jove and the celestial cold that birthed you?”
Looking back, I sometimes catch myself wondering the same thing you might be wondering right about now. Which is why anybody in their right mind would trust a woman like that to lead them into danger.Can’t you see, I find myself screaming at the younger me,that a woman who soliloquizes at the severed heads of monsters is clearly bad fucking news?Hell, Q as good asdidscream that at me—okay, she didn’t scream it becausescreaming wasn’t her style, but she told me, repeatedly—and I didn’t listen to her either. So I certainly wouldn’t listen to my allegedly wiser future self.
