The New Weird - Ann VanderMeer [85]
Out in the darkness, something flashed, a fang as tall as I. Blood would be spilled, likely mine. My breath caught in my throat. Courage did not lie in lack of fear, rather it lay in passing fear by.
"Why-y-y-y-y-y?"
"One was sent."
Then the fisheater screamed and leapt across the torrent, vanishing into a darkness ever more glittering with tall, toothy knives.
Wall-Eye spun, jabbed me in the chest with his metal arm that clattered with the motion. "What is this insanity?" he demanded.
"I do not know!" I understood my duty ― to leap screaming after the fisheater. My legs would not move.
The Gillikin priest shoved me in the chest. "You are the Shadow. Stalk the darkness."
Not trusting myself to words, I nodded, then drew the Blades Sinister and Truth. My legs wobbled, then strength returned with a settling of my heart as I took a running jump past my slinking sense of fear into the darkness after my little dead man.
Into the maw of the Lizard.
The Dark Towns can be seen as imagined involutions of heat and pain and flickering life. Perhaps they arose from the dreaming mind of Earth, perhaps from our own whirling distractions. Perhaps they simply willed themselves into being. In either case, Dark Towns are where the real and the dream are woven into a single fabric, a continuum of sensibility that scales quickly past reason in times of deep shadow or blood-boiling fear. The Dark Towns are the night mind of the world.
Right now the night mind was in a killing mood.
We tumbled, the Lizard, the fisheater and I, within a fountain of water. One moment the air was firm like a stepping stone, then it was a falling sinkhole the next. Small as I had ever heard it to be, the Lizard flashed, scales dark to the point of nothingness, teeth now gleaming fire-bright. It was no bigger than a man, no bigger than I. The fisheater flew as if he had been born a bird, swelling in his flight, his skin rippling, his robes bursting at the seams.
As Wall-Eye had suspected, this was no terrified little pervert from the surface. I tumbled toward the invader, trying to reach him before he did some greater damage. My life was no longer at issue ― the Lizard was under direct attack.
An attack I had brought to bear.
I had failed as a Shadow.
Even as I snagged the hem of the fisheater's robe, it tore loose. His sallow skin and straggled hair rippled and shredded away into something bright and terrible. It was like seeing a jeweled beetle erupt from a rotten pupa ― where there had been a little man, lost and afraid, there was now a ruby-suited clown with the head of a black dog and hands made from dozens of knives.
I had my Blades two and true to face him, and into battle I pushed through the falling water over the racing of my heart.
The Lizard snapped and roared, turning the water to steam as the ruby-suited clown slashed at its flanks. The clown's suit glowed like bright blood, so I could not see what wounds he might take. I chose instead to slash at his ears, stabbing with the Blade Sinister, catching crosswise with the Blade Truth.
I took a length of steel for my trouble, my shadow suit rippling as it tried to accept the blow before passing the edge through to the skin of my thigh. In this airy place, the battlefield of Ooze's imagination, I rolled away from the cut, receiving a ragged slash in lieu of the muscle-tearing wound intended for me.
My second slash at the ruby-suited clown's ear was more successful, setting a silky, pink-lined flap of fur to float free in the curtain of water. I flipped the Blade Truth in my hand and used my fingers on the hilt to retrieve the scrap, barely escaping disembowelment as I did.
Then the Lizard finally awoke to its task, swelling ever larger with the anger and disease of Ooze's thirty thousand souls to engulf the head of ruby-suited clown