A Practical Guide to Sorcery

Chapter 270: Liminal

Siobhan

Month 5, Day 16, Friday 9:00 p.m.

Siobhan looked up to the sky above the village, leaning more of her weight against the tree supporting her as the world seemed to tilt and twist dizzyingly. Storm clouds like pus-filled boils hung low and heavy over the village, ready to burst. Somehow, the sky itself seemed to have descended, looming low and predatory. There was…something there. Siobhan squinted, trying to understand what she was seeing. It was uncannily captivating, and before she knew it she had taken a step forward, but a sudden surge of nausea allowed her to turn her head away. She scrambled backward and heaved a couple of times, but pressed her cheek to the rough bark and managed to keep from vomiting. “Don’t look at the sky,” she warned Rory weakly.

As if her words had triggered something, he broke into a run.

Siobhan lunged for him, one hand grabbing his arm and the other the seat of his pants. She let her legs collapse, falling half to the ground and forcing Rory to drag her. He couldn’t make it more than a couple of steps, weighed down by his pack as well as her larger form.

“Don’t go in there!” she cried. “Do you want to die?” Everything in her was screaming that this place was wrong, wrong, and deadly dangerous.

“My family is in there,” Rory said.

Siobhan slowly released her hold on him. She’d been gripping so tightly that her knuckles were stiff.

He turned to look down at her. “We live on the edge of the village. I might be able to get to my house. Maybe they’re still hiding inside, like Ma wanted.”

“Maybe they already escaped,” Siobhan tried. “Maybe they went to look for you at my house.”Rory’s expression was flat. “Maybe,” he agreed, though neither of them believed it. “But my house is closer. I have to go there first.”

Siobhan climbed back to her feet. She wanted to tell him that he would have to go alone, because she wouldn’t put herself in danger for his family. She wanted to bash him over the head with a rock and drag him to safety. She wanted to simply walk back into the woods and pretend none of this had ever happened.

Instead, she forced her mouth to say, “We have to move carefully. If we can get them out…” She hesitated, because she didn’t actually know what to do to be safe. “We’ll take them back to the shaman’s house. And from there, we’ll walk to Edelbrook and send an emergency message to the constable. When the postman comes through, we’ll have him alert the Red Guard.”

Rory looked back toward the village, his gaze lost and his voice distant. “And we’ll move away and never come back. We’ll live somewhere else.”

Siobhan hummed a tacit agreement. She gave him the tree-pruning artifact she’d taken from the shaman’s house, then took one of the hairs from her pocket and re-strung her weapon bracelet.

Together, they approached the alien wound in the world.

She could feel the slow change, as if the air were thickening with every step. The light was wrong, and the sounds of life, the wind in the trees, and the distant low tones of the ocean grew muted and eventually faded away entirely.

Siobhan’s skin crawled from toe to scalp. With every breath, every step, every time she blinked and opened her eyes again, the world assaulted her with something her conscious mind couldn’t quite understand but that her hindbrain screamed and fought against with desperate rejection. The village reminded her of the time she had found the corpse of a baby deer in the forest. Thinking it was injured and hoping to help, she’d rushed toward it. She’d stroked the soft fur on its cold little cheek before noticing movement from its belly. Shifting aside a bit of brush revealed the baby deer’s stomach, bursting with maggots, ruptured sores, and writhing pustules where bore-flies had laid their eggs in the corpse.

She had screamed and screamed, and Grandfather had collected the bore-fly larvae in a little vial. “It is easy to die, and hard to live,” he’d said. “We all prey upon each other, killing so that we might live, and the weak cannot even complain. This is the harsh truth of reality.” When he was finished, he’d burned the corpse with a spell so hot that only a tiny handful of ash remained.

Afterwards, Siobhan had nightmares of bore-flies eating holes in her flesh for weeks, something she had never forgotten.

Siobhan and Rory came across no people, but there was quite a lot of blood splashed across the streets. The red fungus seemed to pulse and grow thicker wherever it encountered the fluid that so closely matched it in color.

Several doors were hanging open, but she didn’t need that to see into the buildings, whose walls were mostly replaced with thicker growths of sticky veins. Carved bones framed doorways and propped up missing roofs, leaving houses open to the descending sky.

The houses were watching, calling for her to walk into their bone mouths, and her skin wriggled in return. Her stomach yawned with aching emptiness.

Siobhan stopped walking. “Rory, slap me.”

“What?”

“My hands are occupied. I can’t do it myself.” Something about her tone or expression convinced him, and Rory gave her a sharp slap across the face, hard enough to jerk her head to the side.

He shook his stinging hand and hissed.

She took a deep breath and looked around, feeling suddenly sober. She could almost see a version of the village that still had walls, whose streets were mud and cobblestone, and whose sky was far above and uncontaminated. But only almost. “Slap yourself, too,” she ordered. “It will help.”

Rory complied, and they stared at each other as matching red handprints bloomed across the tender skin of their cheeks. “The nightmares are trying to get us,” he said.

“Yes.” That was as good a way to describe it as any. “Don’t fall asleep. You might forget who you are.”

Rory shivered and switched his pruning artifact to the other hand so he could wipe his sweaty palm on his pants.

They continued walking, though the village was so strange that she could only be sure they were walking in the general direction to reach Rory’s house. She didn’t quite recognize anything.

Mom had once told Siobhan that dreams were a liminal space, and Siobhan had really liked the sound of the word. That was what she was sensing now. There was the village here, but there was also something else. It was eating the village. Or absorbing it. Or, somehow, the opposite of that, forcing the village to absorb it instead. And in this everlasting moment of transition, reality was one side of a spinning coin, the dream-place its opposite, both balanced on the threshold of certainty. The world was waiting to decide which side would fall face-up and become the future.

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Even though they had both lived here their whole lives and should have had no trouble navigating, she and Rory were struggling to keep their thoughts clear. They had to stop periodically and use pain to orient themselves. She could only blame this disorientation for the fact that they were halfway across the cobbled main street before they realized a group of villagers were massing together only a few buildings down.

Siobhan and Rory froze like two fawns sensing danger.

Almost as if that were a trigger, every single head turned their way simultaneously. Like the villagers shared a single mind. It was the creepiest thing Siobhan had ever seen, and she had to hold back a cry of horror between teeth clenched so tight they threatened to crack.

Siobhan stared, and as her heart began pounding like a panicked jackrabbit, the acid rush of adrenaline seemed to clear her senses. She caught an almost-glimpse of the world that should have been. But the villagers didn’t change back into their original forms.

They were all naked, and she wished that was the worst of it. Their bodies were all skeletally thin, with translucent, corpse-pale skin that showed the bones and purple-black veins beneath. Of course, their stomachs were all huge, and within the distended, cloudy sacs were feet, an arm, a hand. All separate, with human teeth marks showing clearly around the edges.

Though afterward she wasn’t sure if it had been on purpose or simply her fingers spasming from terror, Siobhan released the drawn strand of hair. The carved bone bracelet in her other hand thrummed as a faintly glowing cone shot forward, point-first. It slammed into one of the villagers, piercing a couple of inches deep with a “thump” that sent them sprawling backward.

The villagers stumbled around, joints moving awkwardly, their stick-like legs unstable under the oversized burden of their bellies.

They parted enough for her to see what they had been doing. At the center of the crowd knelt another villager. A man without any signs of the curse.

They had been butchering him.

His belly was split open from pubic bone to throat. His organs and entrails had been removed already. Several of the villagers had pieces of him in their hands—slippery, shiny, and stinking. They had been eating him. Even as she watched, one of them sucked a length of intestine up as if it were a large noodle, then chewed with bulging cheeks and wide-open, yearning eyes.

Until that moment, Siobhan would have thought this was the worst possible thing someone could do to someone else.

But they had also impaled the man on a stake to keep him kneeling upright. The stake entered from his bottom, went through his open abdominal cavity, and speared out through the side of his neck, forcing his head to hang to the side grotesquely. His eyes had been dug out, along with his tongue. His ribs had been broken open and stretched backward, and the villagers had been threading wire between the bones to keep his ribcage splayed open, as if his corpse was meant to be put on display like a piece of art.

Siobhan whimpered and stumbled as she turned to run, and like cats drawn gleefully to a fleeing mouse, the curse-touched villagers gave chase. They moved strangely, as if they had partially forgotten the way joints were supposed to bend and how the human body worked in concert. They gave off a sense of being half animal, half puppet, but their eyes were alive with fervent rapacity, and Siobhan knew that she and Rory would die if they were caught.

Thankfully, they were slower than the two panicked children, and for a moment, she thought that she and Rory would be safe. But then they rounded the corner and almost ran into another group of curse-touched villagers huddling around a human corpse. Again, they seemed to be staging it.

They turned to attack immediately, and Rory thrust out with the pruning artifact, clipping it together several times and sending translucent, emaciated limbs flying. He froze for a minute, gaping and white-faced, and might have been caught if not for some of the villagers who had suddenly been de-limbed sprawling to the ground and causing those around them to trip.

Siobhan used another hair to draw her bracelet bow artifact again, then shot a villager who was approaching from behind in the face. One shiny eye burst like a grape and their head snapped back hard enough to throw them off their feet.

She grabbed Rory’s hand, and they sprinted away, turning several corners at random to escape. Suddenly, Siobhan found herself surrounded by thinner versions of the red fungal-like veins, very much like thick spiderweb. She must have ducked into an alley without thinking, but her panic had made the last few minutes a confusing haze. The tendrils were slightly warm and pulsing, and every time she touched one, it seemed to stick to and wind around her.

Flailing, she broke through layer after layer, growing increasingly panicked as the tendrils grabbed at her face and pressed into her eyes, nose, mouth, and ears. Just as her hysteria was about to reach a crescendo, she broke free into the street again. She fell to her hands and knees, then scrabbled forward and away from the red web until she had put a safe distance between it and herself. She clawed at her face and ears to tear away any remaining tendrils, and though there were none, she left stinging scratches across her skin in several places before she calmed enough to stop. She’d lost her shoes.

That was fine. She would rather go barefoot than go back for them.

Siobhan took a few moments to gasp for breath and sob with relief, then climbed wearily back to her feet. One benefit of the extreme panic was that the adrenaline seemed to help center her in the version of the village she knew, but the other side had already grown stronger and more dominant. Soon, it would be the only reality.

Siobhan stilled with horror. Where was Rory? She spun around looking for him, then peered back into the alley, but didn’t see him within the swaths of extracted, half-desiccated veins—no, web. She shook her head to try to clear it and stamped her feet helplessly. She was too afraid of bringing attention to herself to yell his name. Immediately changing her mind despite her fear, she called out softly, then went still and quiet like a field mouse as she waited for a response.

None came.

Where had she lost him? She couldn’t go back the way she’d come; the residual light from the sun was already gone—too fast—and nothing looked familiar. Siobhan was lost. She pulled out the compass. Her chest tightened as the lodestone needle spun around aimlessly, but then relaxed somewhat as it settled on wobbling back and forth over a thirty-degree range that she hoped was generally north.

Since she had no idea where Rory was, or where she was, Siobhan would go back to her house to gather more supplies for escape. She tried to hold onto the hope that Rory and his family would make it out on their own. At least he had the pruning artifact, so he could protect himself somewhat in the worst-case scenario.

She crept through the darkening streets, thankful with every step not to see more of the curse-touched. The moon was full this time of the month, but it hadn’t yet risen, so without any light from torches or people’s windows, the streets should have been dark. However, she could still see, and after a moment of confusion, she realized it was because the festering abscesses pretending to be clouds in the sky above were glowing slightly, bathing everything in a sickly, ghostly light.

Siobhan almost didn’t recognize the town hall when she saw it. The walls and roof were gone, and dozens of curse-touched villagers were building something within. They were humming in concert, but the sound her ears heard didn’t quite match up with the vibrations that traveled through her body.

Siobhan squinted as her brain tried to interpret what she was seeing and hearing. A sudden lurch of dizziness made her blink, and when she opened her eyes, she saw that they were building a giant sculpture made of flesh. A kneeling giant with its ribs torn open and its hands raised toward the sky. It was the same pose the villagers earlier had been tying their half-eaten corpse into.

Her eyes screamed as if they were being grated with sand and ached like they might burst from pressure. She jerked her head away, then fell to the ground and vomited. She was shaking, dizzy, sweating, and cold at the same time. Some of her vomit had splashed on her hands, and she stared at it in dread and revulsion. It was thick, clear, and faintly sweet-smelling. The chunky, rancid mess spread out to cover a larger area than it should have.

She reared back, sobbing in panic as she frantically scraped at her hands, trying to remove the slimy, putrid, vile liquid. How had that gotten inside her?

She looked up again at the town hall, careful not to stare at the statue. There was a small stage, which stood in a beam of otherworldly light from the clouds. Upon it, hands raised as if the curse-touched were a choir and he some kind of musical conductor, was Claudio. His one visible eye glowed golden-amber, a small beacon of warmth against the ghastly night. Though he was not split open from throat to pelvis like the giant flesh-sculpture, he slowly knelt to match its pose.

And as if he could sense the touch of her attention, his gaze snapped to hers.