BEAST OF THE WOODS

Chapter 17

Within this enclave lay a giant human body composed of many other bodies. And within its belly, which had been ripped open, there lay the bodies of animals too various to describe. And these bodies too had been torn apart and remade to create still stranger creatures. And those creatures had their own as well. The scene seemed to recede from us as we watched it, as if my mind wanted to put as much distance there as possible. The face of the giant human body was various - a patchwork of so many different possibilities that culminated in a gashed, Beastlike muzzle. Flesh is only flesh, skin only skin, muscle only muscle. It can all change and be changed. There was a desperation to it, as of someone frustrated, thwarted, looking for a solution that never came.

The stain across the walls, across the ceiling, across the floor, had smashed through the glass divide between us and that tableau. The stain ended here even if the corridor did not. Somehow this change in logic unnerved me more than the box of starlings - more even than the body within bodies laid out before us.

"What is the meaning of us?" she whispered.

I know she meant "What is the meaning of this?" but that is not what she said.

"Keep moving," I said. "We are almost at the end now."

"What kind of end can that be?"

"The great man is nearby, I can tell."

"But we have no weapons."

"That is our weapon."

"I expected..."

"Stop."

At first, the corridor seemed to end in a blank wall - as disconcerting as following an arm with one's gaze only to have it end in a nub. But no: it curved once again, and beyond the curve was the office of the great man. A sparse desk. A windowless existence. Parts of things all over the floor, red and various. No chair. It was not needed.

In the light from the lamp on the desk, we could see that a giant raven stood there. It had a beak huge and ominous, which had the sheen of steel but the riddled-through consistency of driftwood, riven with wormholes and fissures. A clacking black tongue within the beak. A head like a battering ram. A body the size of a mastiff. Instead of legs and claws it had thick human forearms and hands. The fingernails were long, curved, and yellowing.

The raven inclined its head and turned one giant, bottomless eye toward us - an almond of pure black with just a hint of light reflecting from it.

"It didn't take them long," the raven said, in a deep, refined voice. "It didn't take them long at all."

At the sound of that voice, my partner began to cry: a soft weeping that I echoed from somewhere deep inside.

But I had a mission. We had a mission. Now, when it didn't matter, I took her limp, cold hand in mine and held it tight.

"We have a message to deliver," I said.

"Oh?" the raven said, considering me coldly. I saw now that dried blood had flaked all across his razor beak. "And what message is that? I'm busy here."

"You are to stop. You are to stop," I said.

"Stop what?" Bemusement beneath the dark feathers.

"Out there, they want you dead."

A soft, chuffing laugh that a bird should not be able to make. "There is no out there. Anymore."

"No," I admitted. "We didn't find much. But every time you change something, it changes there."

"Some day it may be enough," he said.

My partner made a sound, as if to speak.

"Don't you recognize her?" I asked.

"Her?" he said. "Her?" Peering.

"Don't you recognize me?" she said. "I recognize you."

The raven with the human hands turned back to his desk. Beyond that desk was a formless darkness. "That was a long time ago. That wasn't here. That wasn't this."

"It could be," she said, and took a hesitant step forward. And then another. I saw the courage that took, although I don't believe in courage.

The raven's head whipped around, and it said, almost with a snarl, "Stay back."

She stopped.

I heard a lurching sound now, coming from down the corridor. Every light behind us was dark. We existed only in the round glow of the lights in the office. I was trying to remember a life before this that might have been nothing but smoke: a cottage by a stream and a cool night with friendly stars and the weight of a woman's head against my chest as we looked up from the wet grass.

"We are here to make you stop," I said.

"I know," he said.

"Don't you remember?" she said, as the dead talk to the dead. But she was staring into the darkness beyond.

I was close enough now. I lunged across at him, in the motion I had practiced a thousand times under his watchful eye.

My arm around the surprisingly delicate neck. A quick, wrenching twist. The raven's eyes rolled up. It dropped to the floor. Dead.

I stood there, staring. Was it to be that easy?

It was not.

The darkness moved, came out into the light. It was him. Again. Much larger, but the same. The eye regarding me from above was not without love.

"I couldn't let you after all," he said. "The work is too important."

"Don't you remember?" she said, again. My partner now seemed caught in a loop. I could not help her.

The lurching came nearer.

"Your predecessor is almost here," the raven said. "I cannot stop, and you cannot stop me."

"Some day you will be convinced," I said. "And you will let me."

"Some day I will finally sleep," came the rumbling voice.

There was a wetness behind me, and a soft guttural sound as of a throat that has been cut and yet the flesh lives.

"Don't you remember?"

A sadness entered the eyes of the great man. "I remember enough to let you decide."

It was useless, but I tried. I lunged up at him, but my predecessor had caught up to me. A hand that was not a hand on my arm. A kind of intensity of motion that sucked its way into my skin, all of my skin. Tore it off. Tore it all off. All of it.

Brought me struggling to the box of starlings. Shoved me in. Left me there. Waiting for the moments when the great man and his new-old queen walk by. Waiting to sense them from the way the wings ripple differently across my face, the way the beaks and heads and claws suppurate and wriggle and try to escape, and keep trying to escape. Breathing in the spaces between.

One day, he will let me go, with or without her. He will release the starlings up through the ruined second story, through the chimney, to explode out into the sky, over the old woods. They will no longer know they are birds, as I no longer remember what I was before. But we will be flying and falling, falling and flying, and against that beating of atrophied wings, against that sharp blue, I will see the gravel path and the bridge beneath us. Returning. Remembering.

While my predecessor feeds upon me.

FIXING HANOVER

When shin can't lift it from the sand, he brings me down from the village. It lies there on the beach, entangled in the seaweed, dull metal scoured by the sea, limpets and barnacles stuck to its torso. It's been lost

a long time, just like me. It smells like rust and oil still, but only a tantalizing hint.

"It's good salvage, at least," shin says. "Maybe more."

"Or maybe less," I reply. Salvage is the life's blood of the village in the off-season, when the sea's too rough for fishing. But I know from past experience, there's no telling what the salvagers will want and what they will discard. They come from deep in the hill country abutting the sea cliffs, their needs only a glimmer in their savage eyes.

To shin, maybe the thing he'd found looks like a long box with a smaller box on top. To me, in the burnishing rasp of the afternoon sun, the last of the winter winds lashing against my face, it resembles a man whose limbs have been torn off. A man made of metal. It has lamps for eyes, although I have to squint hard to imagine there ever being an ember, a spark, of understanding. No expression defiles the broad pitted expanse of metal.

As soon as I see it, I call it "Hanover," after a character in an old movie back when the projector still worked.

"Hanover?" shin says with a trace of contempt.

"Hanover never gave away what he thought," I reply, as we drag it up the gravel track toward the village. Sandhaven, they call it, simply, and it's carved into the side of cliffs that are sliding into the sea. I've lived there for almost six years, taking on odd jobs, assisting with salvage. They still know next to nothing about me, not really. They like me not for what I say or who I am, but for what I do: anything mechanical I can fix, or build something new from poor parts. Someone reliable in an isolated place where a faulty water pump can be devastating. That means something real. That means you don't have to explain much.

"Hanover, whoever or whatever it is, has given up on more than thoughts," shin says, showing surprising intuition. It means he's already put a face on Hanover, too. "I think it's from the Old Empire. I think it washed up from the Sunken City at the bottom of the sea."

Everyone knows what shin thinks, about everything. Brown-haired, green-eyed, gawky, he's lived in Sandhaven his whole life. He's good with a boat, could navigate a cockleshell through a typhoon. He'll never leave the village, but why should he? As far as he knows, everything he needs is here.

Beyond doubt, the remains of Hanover are heavy. I have difficulty keeping my grip on him, despite the rust. By the time we've made it to the courtyard at the center of Sandhaven, shin and I are breathing as hard as old men. We drop our burden with a combination of relief and selfconscious theatrics. By now, a crowd has gathered, and not just stray dogs and bored children.

First law of salvage: what is found must be brought before the community. Is it scrap? Should it be discarded? Can it be restored?

John Blake, council leader, all unkempt black Beastd, wide shoulders, and watery turquoise eyes, stands there. So does Sarah, who leads the weavers, and the blacksmith Growder, and the ethereal captain of the fishing fleet: Lady Salt as she is called - she of the impossibly pale, soft skin, the blonde hair in a land that only sees the sun five months out of the year. Her eyes, ever-shifting, never settling - one is light blue and one is fierce green, as if to balance the sea between calm and roiling. She has tiny wrinkles in the corners of those eyes, and a wry smile beneath. If I remember little else, fault the eyes. We've been lovers the past three years, and if I ever fully understand her, I wonder if my love for her will vanish like the mist over the water at dawn.

With the fishing boats not launching for another week, a host of broadfaced fisher folk, joined by lesser lights and gossips, has gathered behind us. Even as the light fades: shadows of albatross and gull cutting across the horizon and the roofs of the low houses, huddled and glowing a deep goldand-orange around the edges, framed by the graying sky.

Blake says, "Where?" He's a man who measures words as if he had only a few given to him by Fate; too generous a syllable from his lips, and he might fall over dead.