Page 62 of The Shape of Monsters
“Never say never, Never,” the Moon-Eater cackles gleefully, meanly, with all the love in his consciousness. “Tell me.”
The spider mines explode just after midnight while Shade stands inside a bonfire in his fortress. He’s focused on letting his flesh be real,his nerves real, makes himself a man and the pain is excruciating. It locks his jaw, cracks his teeth. He stops breathing on instinct, only to take deep choking hot breaths of acrid smoke, coughing blood. He feels so much so terribly, screams so loud, that what he doesn’t feel is the earth tremble, or the echoing string of explosions deep in the city. A runner comes with a ribbon alarm and shows Eliri the Adept Hand and Amado the Reconciler, and Eliri throws tiny pebbles into the flames for Shade’s attention. When he exits the sacrificial fire he’s good as new. Eliri tells him something set off one of the missing spider mine triggers left over from the Renovation War, and the mines exploded in a string across the northeastern fortress precincts, arcing just into Rivermouth. She has to go help Irsu with triage.
And Never appears from somewhere, hissingIriset is out there with her terrible husband.Shade wants to snarlWho cares about them, care about me, stay with me!but Shade actually needs Iriset Sunderer and Lyric Aharté—or at least wants them. Wants what they can do, what they promise by existing. So he goes with Never to scour the fiery streets, bypassing rubble and bodies.
Three hundred years ago, fifty even, Shade might have stopped to help people bleeding out, to lift a beam away from a dying whatever, to put out a fire, to summon wind, but he’s over it by now.
Never leaps from rooftop to rooftop, darting across broken walls, arms spread with cloak-like wings behind it. They billow mysteriously and glint in firelight. Shade watches fondly, distantly, and keeps himself to the shape of a young man. A boy, really. In the same firelight, his crater-red skin is difficult to detect. He looks like he’s from the Bow, or an Ur-Syel halfling, except his long, streaming straight hair. There’s no human group with exactly his chosen morphology. But there will be someday. The miran. His children, not Aharté’s—Aharté doesn’t even exist, unless she’s a numen, too, but Never says she’s not. (Says as if sheisreal, but something else.)
They find Iriset and Lyric in a dark alley of shattered cobbles and roof tiles, the sunderer’s face covered in blood as she cradles her husband in her lap. She’s breathing soft and shallow, and Shade grabs at Lyric, who doesn’t seem to be breathing at all. Except—he is. His heart pumps strong despite the jagged patterns of messy design pulsing off him and through him. Focused around his face. As Never speaks with Iriset, Shade hovers his hand over Lyric and senses what’s been done: the marriage of flesh and design, rudimentary, primitive, butit’s working.
“You’re mad!” he declares, laughing, and looks to the sunderer and his cranky friend Never, and he can’t stop laughing because this is wild, raw, and he loves it. That’s her own eyeball in Lyric Aharté’s face. It’s so rare for humans to be like this. She could have used anything, anyone, any number of injured surrounding her or even a chunk of stone, but she used her own eye. She gouged it out and she’d nearly died herself from the strain of it. The Moon-Eater cannot believe it, but it’s true. Maybesheis Aharté, maybe sunderers are the real gods of the world.
He wants to take her home and wrap her up and give her anything she wants. But what Iriset wants—what she says Lyric Aharté wants—is to go to Rivermouth.
Shade scowls until he remembers Eliri will be there, and she’ll know if what Iriset has done is lasting.
He picks up the little priest and Never holds its sunderer close, and they move fast together this time, Shade in the lead, leaping, skimming, practically flying until they arrive at the expanse of the Rivermouth small king’s estate. It has low, open buildings with twilight-blue lanterns shining and a force-shield Shade easily bypasses.
Within, the broad courtyard is crawling with humans as they organize injured and survivors between infirmary and refugees, the small king’s people quick to react even hours into the disaster. Theyremember the war, they remember this kind of night too clearly, and they all still obey the commands of Roc Aliel, the beefy leader of the Cult of Hopeful Design.
Shade lands before Roc, a craggy-faced man some fifty years old now, and Shade says, “Where is the best surgeon and where is Eliri?”
Taken aback, Roc raises his hand to shade the bright rays of the rising sun. “Moon-Eater?”
“Where, Roc Aliel? Now.”
Roc shakes his head at the line of people awaiting his attention, and turns on his heel to lead Shade and Never with their injured baggage into the fortress itself, beyond inner walls where there are force-pagodas lit up in lines of gilded power to deaden noise and keep out interference. He points at the central pagoda, and Shade moves quickly.
He and Never lay out their patients, and the surgeon marches over. She’s a tall woman of Bes and Sarenpet descent, with her short silver hair pressed back under a headband and design bandoliers crossed over her chest. Her lips purse in anger at the disruption, but she says nothing to deny the red god. Shade says, “This one had surgery in the field, an eye replaced. This one did the donation and surgery.”
The surgeon’s eyes widen.
“Both hearts beat strongly. Check the work, stabilize everything.”
The surgeon looks between Lyric and Iriset almost frantically, but just then Eliri the Adept Hand steps in, looking haunted, and cries, “Iriset!” The quartz chimera kneels at Iriset’s bedside, and that makes the decision for the surgeon. She goes to Lyric, unwinding a diagnostic mesh from a pocket of her bandolier.
Shade stands beside her, giving her space as she spreads the mesh with a flourish, then uses a salt-tipped stylus to lock it in place. She manipulates it, turning it this way and that, drawing it up his body, toward the eye. She marks a few places with static buttons but keepsmoving until the mesh concentrates over his neck and face. It shivers, tightening in a few places to indicate greater harm, but the surgeon only frowns thoughtfully and says, “This is raw, but it is tied in well. That woman did this, in the wreckage?”
“Yes.”
The Moon-Eater glances over at Iriset, where Eliri is setting a similar mesh over her with Never’s aid. They’re whispering quietly at each other. He frowns.
The surgeon beckons her assistant over, who Shade had been ignoring because the youth wouldn’t meet his red-moon eyes and Shade ignores anybody unwilling to look at him. “Shave back to here,” the surgeon says, pointing at Lyric’s hair two finger spans back from his hairline. “There’s a crawling repair design already working. Need to shore up the bones and then triple-check the connections of this replacement eye before the patient is put into a deep sleep for a few days.”
“Lyric will survive?” Shade asks, and the surgeon nods, already focused on her work. He stalks over to Iriset, glances at Never, who is glaring at Eliri with those vivid pink eyes as it strips Iriset of the bloody scraps of her robe.
Eliri says very gently, “Moon-Eater, tell this one that Iriset is not dying.”
Shade glances at Never. “Why do you care so much?”
Never’s anger, irritation, every evidence of life vanishes, cut off from its expression and physicality until it is a shell of itself, a haunted doll of a numen, and Shade hates that. Never says, “You are right.”
Then it disappears.
The Moon-Eater finds Never perched on a pinnacle wind catcher that arrows up from one of the peaked roofs of the Rivermouthfortress’s internal buildings. Never looks glorious and stormy, a thin ray of light balanced on a toe, its arms crossed over its chest, its hair snapping in the morning wind, black trousers and tight robe holding close to its body so it is a vivid silhouette against the sky. Unmissable.
Shade lifts himself through the air, evening out the mass of his body until it’s easier to float, and instead of feeling empty he feels like a cloud.
