io9 is proud to present fiction from LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE. Once a month, we feature a story from LIGHTSPEED’s current issue. This month’s selection is “The Blade and the Bloodwright” by Sloane Leong. You can read the story below or listen to the podcast on LIGHTSPEED’s website. Enjoy!
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.
By morning, the sawn red threads of meat and muscle will have restitched her banyan-brown neck and she’ll wake them with gritstone curses, scolding them for cutting too roughly into her vocal cords. The horror of her rasping, gurgling voice does not match the rest of her; she is arc and undulation, a mountain of rounded bends, long hair a windfull banner of black mist. All a crass indulgence in the face of the men’s strong knife-cut frames, hard nets of muscle starved into severe contour.
Vaikan never volunteers to kill the bloodwright. Touching her would be undeserved, hateful. Cutting her was a new obscene intimacy he couldn’t force himself to try. Hers is a body that has borne change beyond all his reckoning and he cannot stifle his envy at that knowledge. Walking or riding beside her was enough of an endeavor; contact would mean calcifying their gross differences and the contrast would fill his thoughts with venom.
He sees to the woman while she lives under daylight and gulps down the antidote that will keep her from killing him. The brackish tincture, sown with her blood, drips resinous down his throat and he feels the immediate effects, the prickling on his skin like a false cold sweat. Latent nausea and the beginnings of a fever mists away. One sip every dawn, the spellwright had said, would keep the woman’s creeping influence from them all, preventing their flesh from sickening and deforming.
There is no way to stop her when she draws on her macabre craft, the spellwright told them. Not even her own will can temper what she has become.
As the rest of the exhausted cadre rouses, Vaikan prepares the woman for travel and wipes the crusted veil of blood aproning her heavy breasts and round belly. The highpoints of her body flake where it has burned. The southern seas are ruthless to sail and a seaside cave on a nameless atoll is their first camp on solid ground in weeks. While he feeds her strips of dry fish, the soldiers around them debark their double-hulled vessel to the stony beach and go about the rote habit of bringing themselves off. The spellwright had instructed them to masturbate upon each awakening, to rid themselves of the fire in their blood and ground themselves in meditation; the bloodwright thrived on such elemental imbalances, naturally encouraging any disparity of energy in the body until its perversion made itself manifest.
“You must take better care of yourself, soldier,” the bloodwright says as she accepts another briny white strip. Her teeth look loose in her mouth as she pulls the meat away. He makes sure his fingertips don’t touch her lips. “You never do. And I can feel a skewing.”
She is right and Vaikan knows this. Touching himself in her presence fills him with disgust; at her for being what she is, at himself for what he is not. To touch himself is no relief, just another new sickness for him to bear. Without reply, while she chews and chews, he unbinds the rope hobbling her legs and makes a leash.
“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.”
Vaikan knows her nature well enough. Not even a storm could match her in viciousness.
He tugs the rope again. “Up.”
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. Their enemies, an alliance of island kingdoms, will come to know the taste of the Chain’s fury.
This is their divine mandate and they will see to it every craven chief is compensated with an equal share of suffering, for they are the Blades of the Chain and there is no concealing yourself from their fine edge. Like the bloodwright has been reared to rend and mend the body, so too has Vaikan been educated from birth to be what he is: a Blade, a soldier loyal to the chief and brother to his fellow warriors.
The first island-city they wipe out, Vaikan and his soldier-brother Naru bring the bloodwright to the night market. Rara Vo had little in the way of military strength but it had provided the food and weaponry needed to keep the Six Chief alliance strong. They arrive as two sons with their mother coming to sell their share of ambergris from the flensing farms and bypass the watchmen’s suspicions easily. They wait till deep in the evening and take up a central position in the city, amidst the mudbrick tower blocks and high tree mansions. On this night, the woman’s neck remains whole. Her power is wanted.
Before the bloodwrights had been bent to the task of war, they had been healers, re-weaving and unmaking the sickly machinations of humanity’s wild flesh. But now her spirit knows only one thing: to call the flesh of her enemies into new form.
Arms wide, eyes closed and bleeding, she offers no hesitation. The call is felt from the youngest urchin in its cradle to the most high chief. Before Rara Vo’s spellwrights can stir and attempt a counter magic, she is in them. In their sleep, the skin of their enemies begins to harden and pale. Blood fills with calcic particulate and coagulates. The drying seams of all their orifices sluggishly seal. Some wake choking, panic, begin to flee but there is no escape now. Their screams stay locked behind conjoined teeth as their soft organs calcify and the city fills with the sounds of muffled moans and the snapping and grinding bones. Their skeletons ulcerate, twisting into vast spires of ivory, erupting from every home and tavern, piercing through buildings, through the high canopies.
By the end of her unleashing, anything with a heartbeat has turned to bone. The bloodwright falls to her knees, weeping, foaming at the mouth, her body churning like an angry sea. There is no stopping bloodcraft, a magic thought to be eradicated from the great seas for centuries.
There is no stopping her.
When they push off from the island and look back, great spikes of bone impale the sky, knifing high past Rara Vo’s tallest trees. At the furthest point without vanishing, the island looks gripped by the talons of a great dead beast, rising from beneath the foundation.
Cleaning her is necessary after these attacks, Vaikan learns. The magic calls to her flesh as well as others. He uncloaks her and sees the marks of her power: a skeletal crown of spikes juts from eyes and temples. Her vertebrae rise in thick protective spikes. Sharp bones pop from the tips of her fingers like long cat’s claws. After he scrapes dried red tears from her face, the foam that collected around her mouth, she tells Vaikan she can still see just fine.
“You wept,” he says, when most of the men have bedded down for the night. He is partly suspicious but mostly eager to find some vein of weakness he can tap. Will she be able to carry out the rest of their attacks? “You pity our enemy.”
“I pity us all,” she murmurs, chewing the bone claws from her fingertips. “But I gave them a better end than they gave us.”
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. It reflected in her figure, her bearing, the unblinking gaze she held each of them with. Vaikan knew she was wholly unprepared for the danger they were sailing into. She was the only one of her kind that they knew of in all the kingdoms of the sea and she carried herself as such; no chief would stomach such a perversion of magic. But then no chief had undergone what the White Chain had.
During the war in the Chain, she and all the novice wrights had been hidden away from the war. Unlike Vaikan and his men, she had missed the half-shark barbarians tearing apart fleeing families and the oil-spitting war petrels, covering the battalions in an accelerant for their fire-tipped arrows. Better we preserve them and their potential magicks than risk them for a temporary victory, the chief had decreed. And indeed, no victory had been gained, even temporary, and his surviving subjects were furious at such folly.
Vaikan had begrudgingly led the woman to the back of the ship, affronted at her cool confidence, the unscarred hills of skin and clean, flowing hair. A fully-fledged bloodwright could bend the shape of their being into any shape at a thought; that she chose this shape, even with all the forms she could take, laced a bitterness through his perception of her.
As a boy before the war, Vaikan had seen three bloodwright children at distance, training under the tutelage of a spellwright. The exercise was to grow their na Source: Gizmodo