Hear my words, Great Riashmanei, and I will deliver you paradise beyond your understanding.
Riashmanei, I have divined our allegiance. I have cast aside the material world for seven days and seven nights until God wreathed me in the sight of you, red-coated and striped by the night, asleep in a bed of stars.
Riashmanei, do me one service and you will never hunger, never tire, never want.
Hear me. No other creature will come bearing such gifts. Hear me, please.
Can you hear me?
Yes, girl, I hear you. Get you from this place.
• • •
Great Riashmanei, I am the sorcerer of Ukrasil. At the touch of my hand, I have grown trees that bear pearls instead of fruit. I have spun weightless thread from the inky darkness of the woods. I pulled our temple out of the ground and into the sky. I bade the dead speak and the living silent. I offer you the fortunes of the world.
Find those who will speak with prey. Rid my mind of your voice.
What must I lay at your feet? For an audience with you?
• • •
Great Riashmanei, I have felled him myself. See, the blood on my fingertips. Emerge from your den and feast on him.
I needn’t be fed.
Look, then.
Her face, round like the moon. And oh, her eyes. Amber yellow, just caught by the sun. A third one opens at her brow. Another step, and her paw slips into sunlight, her claws and toes spread as wide as the gazelle’s still chest. She smells strangely of jasmine.
Guard your thoughts, girl.
Riashmanei—
No. Killed herds with a flick of their wrists, men; laid waste to tree and river with their machines, men. What means it me that you have killed this thing with metal and fire? May the same be done by an infant.
I have not touched a rifle in my life! Look, really look: I met the gazelle at dawn, having waited three days in the beating sun. I folded myself up small beneath a grove of brambles, and, my ear to the earth, I listened for his footsteps first, then those of his kin, and then they came in a storm over the brush. I drew a veil of silence over myself, pulled at the wildness that lives in my blood and painted myself in the colors of the landscape as your mother painted your coat with stripes in the shapes of tree trunks. I reached over my head to the down-hanging, leafy branch, which I touched just lightly enough to mimic a gentle sway brought by the breeze. So did the gazelle trot toward me and reach for that leaf, close enough then that I could hear the whirling of his blood and I—
See I now. You—
sank inside of him,
and the shower of his blood upon you—
like a rainstorm.
Fine, then. Speak.
How does he taste?
As fear does. Speak your piece, girl.
I am sent by my master on this pilgrimage. I am to find the path to the next sorcerer of Ukrasil. I am destined to return with you.
Destined by whom?
By God.
What says this god to you?
To speak with God, I must make myself open and waiting. Not just my mind, but everything. When I lie on the altar, I am bare but for my collar. I lie there and my urine scalds me. The sun sets and I am shivering and my skin has split where it has been trapped between stone and bone for too long. The air is a beating heart. I can’t see, and then It is upon me. In my mouth, my lungs, my stomach, deep in my gut, my ears, beneath my eyes. It knows me like It would know the shape of an egg in Its womb. I do not need to say that I grow too old for this work. I do not need to say that I must fetch the mother of my successor. I recall the shape of my own mother, seen at the advent of my birth as the barbs of her tongue enveloped my face. I must find another one like her, but in my selfishness I ask that she is not so cruel. That she is good and kindly. And once I have been emptied, I fall into a slumber more akin to death, and this is when I see you. When I hear your name. Thus I have sought you.
Bear I you a new sorcerer?
In return: heaven.
Live you in this paradise?
I do?
I do, yes. I do.
Whelp your own, then.
My children cannot weave even baubles of light, so diluted are they from the font of our magic. I am only half my mother. I will never ride in the kingdom of demons as you may. I scarcely hear those made of spirit, even God. Even God.
Have your mother bear you a sister.
She will not. We have already given her everything.
Listen: destined not are we. The last who has not moved eastward with the changing winds, am I. Into estrus have I come, and slather the dogs over the smell of me—you, one of them. Out of practicality only have I been chosen by your god, such that it would not have to wait for its lap-hound to cross forests for its prize.
I have come far—
And farther still when refuse I you. Seek out those east of here who have moved on to the bitter colds where the querraroot still grows, and maybe then, will find you what you seek.
Must I leave?
Ask not I, girl.
• • •
Why don’t you join the others?
Why are you collared?
• • •
The night has grown dark and cold with her returning. Count how many times the moon has risen and set since she left. Riashmanei, where have you been? She wakes me with her footfalls, with the blustering quality of her breaths. The ground bends beneath her strides, space folding and unfolding itself in flashes of light. I have this for you, a magpie. I will tell you how it died. All her eyes are embers. Even her shadow overtakes me, stretching past me only to be broken by silvery dapples. Riashmanei—
Hunting I, also.
Oh, your coat—
This is nothing.
You’re bleeding.
Those who wrong me perish.
She stinks of flowers now: a feverish, hot reeking that haunts her as she walks back into her den. I will follow her out of the nest I have made beneath a cassia and watch as she lets herself lie heavily on a cold slab of sandstone. Claw marks run down her back, her haunches, but even these have started to knit themselves back together again in a latticework of shining thread. She shudders, goes still, and shudders again. She digs furrows into her earthen bed with daggered claws, and I reach out a slow hand until I find the skin beneath her fur—and yank it back, clutched to my breast, blisters forming on my fingertips. How awful to bear.
Sorcerer. When bear cannot I my earthly body, seek I the querraroot, so might I enjoy the company of spirits and imps to this plagueish fever; so might I escape some place where pleasure is rightly at my tongue. But it has been a year since the sun scorched the last saplings saw I. Escape not I to another world without it, so hunt I still for new saplings. But waste me my time no longer. Remain I here, and sleep, and breathe, and think of winter.
But why suffer when the solution is at hand? Pick the best from the pack, and you will be allowed at last to rest.
And let some disgusting beast drool over my back? Doom myself to months of this? Of pains and illness? Of growing thin to grow another? Let it tear me apart on the way out and eat the fat from my ribs as it grows, still? No, seen I bitchqueens, and have I no part in it. For two weeks’ time, so suffer I.
Yet, with the blooming spring, you will come into estrus again. And again—there is no end to this. Let me take you away from here. There is no suffering in paradise. You will have the gentlest of lovers. You do not even have to look upon his face. You will eat from sparkling trays of meat and bone and liver until you grow fat. Eat, vomit, and eat again. When the birth pangs hit you, you will be cradled by ether’s soft hands. This is not a pain to remember. And when it is born, it will be carted away to the waiting breasts of your maids. Never will your milk steal the shine from your coat. If you wish it, you will never see it. You do not even have to taste it. After, as you live out your days here, estrus will no longer bring you pain, fevers, and children, but ecstasy.
There is no suffering in paradise?
There is no suffering in paradise.
Lie you to me.
Never.
The sores on your back. Your collar—
Given to me by my master, identical to the one she wore for her own master so long ago. You cannot see it, but my lead stretches back to the city, to her open hand, so I may find my way back.
So you may be dragged.
Not all pain is suffering. Some pain is necessary.
Trembling little girl. Be silent. Feel the cold metal bite at your neck. Reared you your own young and tore you the throat out of your own prey and yet have they made you small. Look at your slavers: master, mother, god. Asked you that I be good and kindly, but see the lies told to you again, again, again. Terrific, am I. You are. Feel my teeth—lose you a finger to my maw? I can’t. Anything that falls from my womb, eat I, willingly or not planted therein.
I cannot return without you.
Trap me, then. Force me into the city. If you are as powerful as you say.
I can’t.
Dog.
I can’t.
Yet, learn you how to collar another?
From my master, I would.
Crack you open, girl; speak.
Everything I have learned, I have learned from her.
Speak.
Beneath—
Everything I have learned, I have learned beneath her whip. Choked at the neck by her—pulled back into her waiting hands.
See, girl.
Riashmanei, I have been smelted in her furnace. Before her I was nothing.
• • •
Thought I you left for good.
No. Look here.
Sorcerer? How? Where?
My master has coaxed a querraroot to life in her greenhouse. Three years of tending. It fruited this spring.
Stole you it.
I returned only briefly. My master is none the wiser.
Through Riashmanei’s nose, the root smells more strongly like: ungulate musk, anise, the sourness of the air before a thunderstorm. Her nostrils flare wide and her hair stands on end, and after a while she exhales, eyes drifting closed as she stretches her paws out in front of her.
Question not I a gift. Cut it finely, then. Crush it between the rocks.
Yes, lovely.
Pinch off the powder. Beneath your tongue, place it.
Mine?
Must I repeat?
I can’t ride in the kingdom of demons. I never could.
Ride with me, then, girl. Her tongue slithers out from the confines of her mouth, so I place my hands between her canines. She laps up all that I have ground. She is burning hot, but I remain. Quickly now, she says. Quickly. She pulls at my brain as if she is made of claws inside and out. I scramble my way deeper into her mind, and the first thing I find:
The querraroot-smell again, like urine, in our nostrils heavy. Already our body sways, our heart slows.
The world yawns wide as I peel back the curtain of her eyes.
We see her den: the crawling mosses and the roots of a silk-cotton tree that make up its ceiling, the bones of her meals scattered across the ground. Outside we smell the trickling water of a nearby rivulet where her mother bathed her tail to nose, the cypress clearing where she felled her first hare and raced with her sisters, the now-withered brush where once she chewed on querraroot as only a cub and as she slept saw a star on the horizon and tore at everything in her way until she was there, finally, and woke after to soft rains. Home.
Then, my human face stares back at us, its nose burnt by days spent in pools of noontime light and its hair tangled with brambles. It has big, sad eyes. The sorcery that wafts off of its collar is a miasma. It wraps its fingers over the gold, mouth agape, but already we are—
Fall we fall.
• • •
Open your eyes, sorcerer.
It hurts.
Do it anyway. Regard you the sky, a crown of three suns at her brow. Feel the eyes of the ground reach beneath your feet, perched on their gelatinous fingers. Climb onto my back. If you are to fall, clutch you me until I bleed instead. Your magics will not work here, not by your master’s theory. Before us: birthed the angel Zarul the forest here from his gut, his mouth open wide. Grew the plants between the roots of his teeth and fed from his saliva and hung from the caverns of his skull. Carved the imps their homes from red stone and towers of marble and glass and strung up their jewels and down their banner until prod both they at the tops of the trees.
Where are we going?
Find you the glowing jewel on the horizon: the city Avrexes. Illuminated by the shining mouths of vulture-harpies, imprisoned at the peak of that fortress and struck with iron until sing they. Go we there. Bow we our heads beneath Zarul’s canines and over the pulsing cavern of his throat. If all you have known is paradise, sorcerer, bathe you I in hell. See you what your mother has seen, and what her mother has seen, and on and on. Your mother—placated she in a golden prison, dressed in silk, and fed buttery offal from the beautiful hands of her lovers. Capable she of all your sorcery and more, should she learn your master’s theory—but she does not. Will not. Why should she? Controlled not she like a human on a lead, like one raised from infancy to obey.
My mother picks out a new companion every week. They are always pale and wide-eyed, and they love her. When she is done with them, she eats them. The heart, first.
Look you now, sorcerer. Lope us down the path to the city, marked by runes and embers that crackle beneath our steps. See the thieves and vagabonds that celebrate the coming of us. Know you what it means them: the arrival of an earthly spirit with dripping claws and dripping teeth. Ride they those animals that are like me and my kind: not quite of earth but not quite of spiritkind, either, and perhaps at the taste of their own wine, ride they will into our lands and torment us, too.
But for now, shakes this one himself free of his riders, whose screeches dot the air and whose bodies crack and bend as they meet the ground. Walks he on, crushes their skulls beneath his hooves, and when meet his horns my shadow, bows him his head.
Regard you him a moment: gleaming horns, black lichenous pelt, eyes two emerald clusters grown from his stony face. Dig my claws into his neck and taste him here; press my weight into him until cracks his spine and overflows the meat between my toes. Drink you, girl: eat. There now, utters he a last whispering breath—perhaps a word. Semen and urine mat down the fur at his thighs. Pity you him?
Not this one.
His taste?
If this is hunger, I have never been full.
Good or kindly am I not, sorcerer. Eat.
His heart trembles so.
Born you from gluttonous stock, also.
When I was a child, I walked as you walked. Space bent itself between my steps, my wildness was everywhere, so the trees would cradle me and laugh when I laughed, mourn when I mourned; I did not have to ask it because then we were one and the same, there was no ending to me, but I was told that I would amount to nothing if I could not control it, mold it to humankind, so I did. And if it leaked out of me, she would carve my skin. A new prayer, the names of those past, painted on me, until it never happened again. The collar, wrapped around me, my reward.
Watch you the procession continue on, bending around our new corpse as if only a boulder on the path. Watch you, on and on, and go we down to the city’s gates. Overlaps this place the earthly Ukrasil, and within it, dwell demons and dreamers both—your poor humans, having wandered here from the forest of their slumber, stumble about half-realized. Vanish they to the waking world when slaughtered by their nightmare. Guarded, this gate, by lumbering, salivating beasts that, at the flash of my teeth, cower before us, and so leap we over them and into an ocean of passersby: the merchants and visitors, riders and prey. Slip they, slink, circle around my feet and still break they apart underfoot, split like berries and pulp. Above us swoop wyverns and crow them. Hold butchers their fillies by the knees and let dribble their blood between the cobblestones, lapped up by imps and dreamers alike.
Higher now, please?
From the roofs, see you the city’s streets populated by grains of sand. Beneath saliva-string, machine-smoke, and blood-trail, hold jewelers long-fingered and glinting-eyed their opals and diamonds out to those who ride by. Carve they faces into tanned indigo hides, or pile they freshly harvested intestines into hearth-fires. Between those who appear almost human are there haggard dogs with an eagle’s talons, and shake beasts their heavy heads or sharpen they their horns against marble pillars. But only a moment take we to leap down again and pluck what want we. The head of a tanner leaking down my throat. The hand of another broken into bits. The warmth of the inside of their bellies, split open and aching for my snout, and—
Anything?
This kingdom, your ficus; its belly, your fig.
The jewels, the smell of the market, the dirt, the dirt, and their blood?
Anything at all.
Dips she at the waist, her waiting fingers piercing the smoke, enamored just with the feeling of this strange air slithering about her. Forgets she not the needle-prick pain of existing in a world that is not her own, but becomes it something else nestled beneath her skin and waiting.
Do you come here every time? Is this all that you eat?
Sometimes forget I the city entirely and venture instead down the forest’s throat, or climb I up the mountainous trees that reach even the suns, or offer I myself up to the chariot-beasts that pull in the clouds, dashed beneath their cloven hooves. Anything, anything at all to eat and run and leap, to become overfull with the pleasures of the world, to make this my garden.
Down we again to the streets, find my mouth their corpses. Run those who live, crawl between my legs, swatted by the lashing of my tail. Fed as much by the chase as the meat, girl; run them down.
If only I were so terrible as you.
Taste you them through me. Nose I around the organs of a corpse, grab flesh and pull until rips it apart and slides down my throat, where soothes it every part of me. Feel you now the stones cracking under my claws, the smoke billowing past our ears, the smell: fear they the beauty of us, the tigress and her rider.
And behind us now, burst open the gates by the highwaymen who see the churning in our shadow, the chaos left in our wake and so pillage they the market stalls, the death-sellers and slavers.
Swells the din of the crowd and skitter forth the city guard, gnarled and winged. Slick-red you with your meal, already, sorcerer; wide-eyed and taut, face to the sky. Perhaps be you as terrible as I. Run, say you, Run. Race we them, over roof, gate and tower, over pillars carved from translucent stone and under the hanging fingers of iron-hewn giants ever sleeping in the clouds above.
Rise the city’s hackles: make both thieves and their beasts a home here, should avoid they the guards’ shimmering glaives.
Shriek you when their spears fly overhead, duck and laugh though you are in no danger of falling. Break you your nails through my hide until blood bubbles up around them, and laugh you still. Flesh is one meal only; so is the rush of the air about, the icy-cold shock of their blades glancing my fur. And so run we and keep running until shows the moon its face.
But worms a guard three scarred fingers beneath the collar and pulls. The sorcerer—flung back by the force of it, rise her own hands to her neck as chokes she.
Off of me now; the cold where she once was as unbearable as my once-fevered womb.
Struggle your feet to find purchase, sorcerer!—stand you, rise you. Sharp is the blade at your belly. The guard that has you: grinning.
Riashmanei!
Sink I my teeth beneath the collar, latching onto the metal, and in my haste have I sliced her from jaw to collarbone, shallowly but just enough. Lifts the skin away from muscle beneath, ruby red and shuddering. Find I the guard’s flesh; torn to ribbons, but tastes it like ash. Then trickles her blood into me, into my gut. Need not I the whole of this jaunt to sate me. Sorcerer, had I drank of you sooner, would you have been all that I ate. Please, say you. Almost ask you me to break it, to free you, as should you, but instead—
—will I find her whip to my back when she feels the lead severed, should I die this time when she finds me, will she go for my throat or will I, if she dies will she die like the gazelle, will she die—
—No. Will I kill?—
—if you had to, Riashmanei, would you leave for the east? Tear out your heart? Leave it all behind? The river the clearing the den the place where your mother died. I see her pelt strung up between the branches, alone—
—arrive we at the moment where the pain hits you, and instead whimper you and find your hands on my fangs. Thinks you of nothing else, consumed by it as am I of you.
Again, please. Your teeth, again.
Pull I and the collar shatters.
• • •
The sorcerer wakes in Riashmanei’s den. The tigress breathes softly, her flank spring-water cool. When the sorcerer stands, her vision swims and her mind presses swollen against her skull. She stumbles to a puddle of rain and, kneeling beside it, washes her belly, her legs, her face. Her fingers brush across the skin of her neck once, then twice before she notices the wounds—the pain of them, at her touch, reverberating through her—left by the tigress’s teeth, and she whips around to find it: her collar scattered into shards across the dark stone floor, so that they, illuminated by the morning’s first light, glitter like pinprick stars and the tigress like the sun.
• • •