Sam Sykes - Tome of the Undergates

‘So, what do you do?’

Lenk brought the hatchet down, splitting the log and sending its halves flying off. The echo of the chop lasted an eternity throughout the forest, silencing the laughter of the wind.

‘I suppose,’ Denaos whispered, ‘you ask “why”?’

Taire was her name.

Asper remembered that about her, remembered it the first day she had heard it.

‘ Like. . a paper tear? ’ she had asked the girl, scrunching up her nose. ‘ What kind of name is that? ’

‘ What kind of name is Asper? ’ she had replied with a smile, sticking her tongue out. ‘ The name of a slow-witted tree or a snake with a lisp ?’

Her tongue was long and pink, never coated. Her eyes were big and blue, not cold like Lenk’s, but vast like the sky. Her hair was long and golden, not dirty like Kataria’s, but glistening like the precious metal.

She was always smiling.

Temple life was hard. Asper had been told that before she ever felt called to join. She learned it in the days that followed, during the dissections of the dead to discover what they had died from, ferrying salves and medicines from the apothecary to the common floor where the elder priests tended to the sick and the dying, forced to look upon men, women and children as they coughed out their last breath so that she might know why she served the Healer.

Taire was never shy, never afraid, life never seemed hard for her. She was always the first to peer curiously into the open corpse, the fastest to get the medicine to the common floor while greeting every patient that walked in, the only one who would hold someone’s hand as they left the world on Talanas’s wings.

Taire had taken Asper’s hand and placed it on the dying. Taire had helped her fumble with the medicine. Taire had stayed up reading the tomes on the human body, late into the night, with Asper. Taire was not the reason Asper had entered the temple. Taire was the reason she served the Healer.

Taire had begged.

Her disappearance was officially marked down as ‘lamentable’, never pursued with any particular interest. Children fled from the temple all the time, even the brightest and most enthusiastic students occasionally finding it too stressful to continue with the training. The gravedigger had looked half-heartedly about the temple grounds. The high priest sighed, gave a prayer and made a note in the doomsday book. Taire’s belongings were folded into a bundle and put into storage in the bin marked ‘unclaimed’.

There was no corpse, no suicide note, nothing to indicate she had ever existed besides the sooty mark on the floor of the dormitories.

And Asper.

No one had asked the shy little brown-haired girl who was always rubbing her left arm where Taire had gone. No one had paid attention to the shy little brown-haired girl who cried in the night until long after Taire was forgotten by all.

All except the one who knew that she had begged, like the longface, like the frogman.

She hadn’t forgotten any of them. She hadn’t forgotten the pain she felt, that they shared, as her arm robbed them of all. She could still feel it, would feel it long after whoever kept track of such things forgot that the longface in Irontide had ever existed. She would hear them scream, hear their bones snap, hear their bodies pop, hear them beg.

Her arm was one part of the curse. That Asper would never forget was another.

And she hadn’t forgotten that, for as many times as she looked up to the sun and asked, ‘why?’ no one had answered her.

‘It happened again,’ she whispered, choked through tears brimming behind her eyes.

Asper turned. The pendant did not look particularly interested in what she was saying as it lay upon the rock. The forest danced, shifted overhead, casting a shadow over the silver-wrought phoenix. Its carved eyes turned downcast, its gaping beak resembled something of a yawn, as though it wondered how long her weeping confession would last.

‘It happened again,’ she repeated, taking a step closer. ‘It happened again, it happened again, it happened again.’ She took another step with every fevered repetition until she collapsed upon her knees before the rock, an impromptu altar, and let her tears slide down to strike upon the pendant. ‘It happened again.

‘Why?’

The pendant did not answer her.

‘Why?’ she said, louder.

‘Why, why, why, why?’ Her knuckles bled as she hammered the symbol, straining to beat an answer out of it. ‘Why does this keep happening to me? Why did you do this to me?’

She raised her hand to strike it again. The phoenix looked out from behind the red staining its silver, uninterested in her threat. Like a parent waiting for a child to burn itself out on its tantrum, it waited, stared. Her hand quivered in the air, impotent in its fury, before she crumpled beside the rock.

‘What did I do to deserve this?’

Asper had asked that question before, of the same God, on her first night in the temple. She had knelt before his image, carved in stone instead of silver, far from the loving embrace of her father and mother, far from the place she had once called home. She had knelt, alone, and asked the God she was supposed to worship.

‘ Why? ’

And Talanas had sent Taire.

‘ Because ,’ the young girl who was always smiling had spoken from the back of the chapel, ‘ someone has to. ’

And Taire had knelt beside her, before the God that seemed, in that instant, better than any parent. Talanas was loving, cared for all things, sacrificed Himself so that humans might know what death was, what sickness was, and how to avert them. Talanas cared for His priests as much as He did His followers, and in the instant Taire had smiled at her, Asper knew that Talanas cared for them both, as well.

‘ Has to what? ’ she had asked the girl then.

‘ Has to do it ,’ Taire had replied.

‘ Do what? ’

‘ That’s why we’re here ,’ the girl had replied, reaching out to tap the brown-haired girl on the nose before they both broke down into laughter.

‘I don’t deserve this,’ Asper whispered, broken upon the forest floor. ‘I didn’t do anything to deserve this.’ She raised her left arm, stared at it as it grinned beneath its pinkness, knowing it would be unleashed again. ‘ You gave this to me.’

She rose to her knees, thrust her left hand at the pendant as though it were proof.

‘ You did. It isn’t what I wanted. I. . I wanted to help people.’ She felt her tears sink into her mouth as she clenched her teeth. ‘I want to help people.’

‘ To serve mankind ,’ Taire had said as they flipped through the pages of the book. ‘ To mend the bones, to heal the wound, to cure the illness. ’

‘ What for? ’ Asper had asked.

‘ You’re weird, you know that? ’ Taire had stuck out her tongue. ‘ Who else is going to do it? ’

‘ Talanas? ’

‘ You don’t pay attention during hymn, do you? Humanity was given a choice: free will or bliss. We chose free will and so it’s up to us to take care of ourselves. Or rather, it’s up to us, His faithful, to take care of everyone else. ’

‘ Why would anyone not choose bliss? ’

‘ Huh? ’

‘ I would forsake free will in a heartbeat if it meant I didn’t have to feel pain any more, if I didn’t have to cry any more. ’

‘ Well, stupid, you’d be a slave, then. ’

‘ What’s wrong with that? ’

‘ What’s wrong. . ’ Taire had sputtered, looking incredulous. ‘ What would be the point of life if you never knew pain? How would you even know you were alive? ’

Asper had felt pain. Asper had felt Taire’s pain, that night in the dormitories. Asper had felt it as her friend begged and she could do nothing about it. Asper had felt it for the years after, as she had grown up, told herself it was an accident, told herself that she needed to atone for it by following Talanas.

‘Well, I have followed you,’ she whispered to the pendant. ‘And you’ve led me to nothing. I. . I always wondered if I was doing good, being amongst these heathens. Never once did I suspect I was doing wrong.’ Her tears washed away the blood on the silver. ‘ Never , you hear me?

‘But what am I supposed to do with this?’ She grabbed her arm, its sleeve long since destroyed. ‘What good can come from this? From leaving nothing to bury? From robbing someone of everything? What good? ’

The pendant said nothing.

‘Answer me,’ she whispered.

The wind shifted. The pendant shrugged.

‘Answer me!’

She turned her arm, levelled its fingers at her throat.

‘If you’re there, if you’re listening, you’ll tell me why I shouldn’t just turn this on myself and end it all.’ She shook her arm. ‘I’ll do it. I’ll do the one good thing I can with this arm.’

A tear of salt leaked past its beak. The pendant yawned. She looked around furtively, found a hefty brown stone. She pulled it up, raised it above her head, fingers trembling as she aimed it over the pendant.

‘This,’ she said, shaking the rock. ‘This is real. This rock is real. Are you?’ she snarled at the pendant. ‘ Are you? If you are, you’ll tell me why I shouldn’t just destroy you. If you aren’t, you end with this pendant. All you are is silver … just a chunk of metal.’ She growled. ‘A chunk of metal with three breaths. One.’

The pendant did not do anything.

‘Two.’

The pendant stared at her through hollow eyes.

‘Three!’

The rock fell, rolled along the earth to bump against the trunk of a tree that loomed over a brown-haired girl, crumpled before a mossy altar, clenching her left arm with tears streaming down her face as a chunk of metal looked upon her with pity.

‘So,’ Denaos spoke loudly to be heard over the sound of hammering, ‘why the sudden interest in the fairer sex?’

Lenk paused and looked up from his duty of nailing wood over their wrecked boat’s wound, casting his companion a curious stare.

‘Sudden?’ he asked.

‘Oh, apologies.’ The rogue laughed, holding up a hand. ‘I didn’t mean to suggest you liked raisins in your curry, if you catch my meaning.’

‘I. . really don’t.’

‘Well, I just meant you happened to be all duty and grimness and agonising about bloodshed up until this point.’ Denaos took a swig from a waterskin as he leaned on the vessel’s railing. ‘You know, like Gariath.’

‘Does. . Gariath like raisins in his curry?’

‘I have no idea if he even eats curry.’ Denaos scratched his chin thoughtfully. ‘I suppose he’d probably like it hot, though.’

‘Yeah, probably.’ Lenk furrowed his brow. ‘Wait, what does that mean?’

‘Let’s forget it. Anyway, I’m thrilled to advise you on the subject, but why choose now, in the prime of your imminent death, to start worrying about women?’

‘Not “women”, exactly, but “woman”.’

‘A noble endeavour,’ Denaos replied, taking another swig.

‘Kataria.’

There was a choked sputter as Denaos dropped the skin and put his hands on his knees, hacking out the droplets of water. Lenk frowned, picking up another half-log and placing it upon the companion vessel’s hole.

‘Is it that shocking?’ the young man asked, plucking up a nail.