Necroepilogos

Shilu — the nightmare of seamless metal and obsidian spikes into which she had transformed — cut Lykke into three pieces.

Her shoulder slammed into Lykke’s chest, ramming lances of black steel through the revenant’s ribcage, shattering bone and pulping flesh. Blood spluttered from Lykke’s mouth in a strangled cough. Shilu’s bladed arms blurred outward to either side, then scissored inward. One sliced through Lykke’s white sundress and opened the soft flesh beneath, bisecting her at the stomach, passing through skin and spine like a hot wire through cheese; the blade was out and trailing an arc of blood before Lykke’s breached intestines boiled forth in a ruptured mass. Shilu’s other arm scythed through Lykke’s delicate neck. The decapitation was so swift that for a moment Lykke did not appear wounded, but then her neck exploded in a fountain of gore. Her blonde curls tumbled aside. Blood splattered against the grey ceiling, falling as crimson rain. Lykke’s head hit the floor with the crack of a skull fracture; her torso followed, landing with a wet splat of splayed guts and spilled fluids, bile and chyme pumping and pooling from the ruin of her belly. Her legs and hips remained upright for a split second — half a white sundress drenched with scarlet, fancy white shoes stained with blood, painted toenails drowned in red. Then the legs followed the rest of her corpse, slumping to the floor.

Shilu stood amid the dripping gore, her front and face speckled with misted ruby droplets.

She had abandoned her human disguise, her soft brown skin, her long silken hair. ‘Shilu’ was a machine figure of black chrome and lightless blades. Her feet were spear-tips. Her face was a pale mask. Wide dark eyes stared down at Lykke’s remains.

Eseld could do nothing but watch. She was still immobilised, frozen by some magic or science beyond her comprehension.

Eseld had witnessed and experienced many strange horrors during the unending cycle of her damned unlife. She had seen zombies so changed by nanomachine consumption that they were barely recognisable as human; she had hidden from revenants who were capable of tortures and cruelties she could not have imagined in true life; she had witnessed weapons and artefacts which seemed to her like infernal wizardry and alien invention. She was surrounded every day by the world-corpse of the city, reminded every hour of her status as a microbe inside a rotting leviathan. She had met monsters and predators, seen miracles of technology, been shot and killed by guns she could not begin to understand — and been devoured by living horrors at the very edge of mortal madness.

But she had never been frozen in place by the whim of another, like a mouse before a snake. She had never seen a revenant’s entire body flow like molten metal and reform into a living knife. She had never met anything like Shilu. Whatever Lykke was, she had not stood a chance.

The crimson splatters on Shilu’s black-metal skin began to vanish. Shilu’s body was absorbing the blood.

Eseld needed to scream. She needed to run. She needed to curl up in a ball on the floor and sob and weep and pray this end would be a quick one, for an angel of death stood before her, unveiled in terrible glory.

But Eseld could not move a muscle.

Shilu opened her pale polymer lips, and spoke to Lykke’s trisected corpse.

“Get up.”

Lykke’s mangled intestines jumped like a nest of snakes. Severed ends writhed and wriggled and rose into the air. The two halves of her sundered bowels found each other and clung together, braiding themselves tight like rubbery, blood-stained ropes. Lykke’s legs jerked and bucked, kicking against the slippery grey floor; her arms flapped and slapped amid the reeking fluids. Bones cracked and snapped as she rose — knee sockets enlarging, elbows turning backward, femurs expanding. New joints burst from inside her legs and arms — twists and knots of muscle and bone. Her hands grew thick and wide, planted flat on the floor, fingers tipped with
long white claws. Her spilled blood and viscera and intestinal fluids flowed back upward into her open wounds, sucked into the rents in her flesh, or simply absorbed into her skin. Lykke’s legs and torso heaved upward and stood — not in the upright pose of a human being, but as an upside down curved bridge, hands and feet planted on the floor like the four paws of a beast.

The stump of her neck sealed over with a blood-red plug, then extended into a barbed tail. The open mess of her guts remained parted, intestines waving like tentacles. Her white shoes fused into gnarled hooves. Her white sundress shimmered and shifted, then burst into a cloud of bloated, glistening, milk-white flies.

The monster was now twice Shilu’s height and several times her body weight. Eseld had never seen a living thing this large except the graveworm. Lykke was larger than a bear — larger than Taran. Eseld did not understand where the mass had come from, but the revenant had grown into a giant.

Shilu stepped back.

Lykke picked up her own severed head with a cluster of gut-tendrils. The bouncy blonde curls became razor-sharp twists of bleached steel. She held the head over her own groin, suspended on a neck of intestines. She pointed the face down at Shilu.

Lykke’s eyes snapped open, glowing a bright and toxic green. A grin ripped her mouth open like a bloody slash in pale flesh. White teeth had turned jagged.

“You sneaky little cunt!” Lykke shrieked. Her new voice hurt Eseld’s ears, shook her guts and eyeballs, and made the floor vibrate. Lykke’s plague-fly dress buzzed in time with her words. “You have more permissions than you were letting on! Enough to get all up inside me! And I don’t let just anybody do that, hahahahahaha!”

Lykke’s laugh made Eseld’s eyes water. She couldn’t even blink to clear the tears and blot out the pain.

Shilu didn’t answer. She raised her blades.

“Whatever,” Lykke spat, turning sour. She pawed at the floor with one white hoof, gouging the metal. “You won’t land the same trick twice! Your flesh-mask is off now. What are you going to do, spring at me again and hope I fall for it a second time?”

“Stand down,” Shilu said. “Go back to the network. This is a mistake.”

“Shishi,” Lykke purred, backed by the chorus of her pestilent aurora. She raised her severed head higher as she spoke, on a neck of tangled guts. “You can’t fight forever, not without access. You’ve got nothing outside ambient. But I can go for days on a droplet of honey. I’m infinite. I draw on an endless well. What are you going to do, fight me until you’re exhausted, just to show that you’re a good little doggy? Nobody cares!”

“We can debate later, when the mission is over,” said Shilu. “Stand down or get out of my way.”

Lykke sighed — a sound like a roaring fire consuming human flesh. “Okay, now you’re boring me.”

Lykke charged.

Shilu dived aside, rolling across the grey metal floor. Lykke galloped at her like a steed from the mouth of hell, all open entrails and slavering tongue, clad in a buzzing cloud of bloated flies, denting the metal with her hoofed feet and the claws of her modified hands. Shilu dodged the first charge and came up on one knee, raking a blade-arm down Lykke’s flank as she passed. Shilu’s blade parted a fan of ribs and flowered open the monster’s hipbone.

But Lykke didn’t care. Her open ribs transformed into teeth, the wound becoming a dripping maw, snapping shut inches shy of Shilu’s head. Her shattered hip twisted like an opening blossom; a gleaming point glittered in the centre of the bloom. That point shot forth and tried to spear Shilu through the leg with a tendril of metal-tipped flesh. Shilu turned the spear aside with a flourish of one sword-arm — but she staggered back with the impact.

“You can’t beat me off by cutting me up, Shishi!” Lykke screeched. She bounced off the wall with a clatter of hooves and a splatter of intestinal tendrils, rearing up to crush Shilu beneath her bulk. “Is this how you won so much favour, by hitting things with swords!?”

Shilu tried to dive aside a second time, going left. Eseld saw the mistake and wanted to scream, but her lips and vocal cords were as paralysed as the rest of her. Lykke had predicted the dodge; she fell upon Shilu’s intended trajectory with hooves and tendrils and spears of stabbing flesh.

But Shilu turned her leftward dodge into a rightward jink, flickering through the air so fast that her black metal body blurred against the grey background. She twitched her hips; three spikes of lightless metal extended from her skin like the stinger of a wasp, slamming through Lykke’s chest and side, retracting as fast as they had shot forth.

Lykke howled — with laughter.

The blood trailing from her three fresh puncture wounds hardened and rose, turning into a trio of thick tentacles, each tipped with a fist of stiffened crimson.

Three fists crashed into Shilu’s metal torso. The angel of death went flying, knocked off her feet. She hit one of the windows with a clatter of metal on glass — and a sickening crack-a-crack as the window fractured under the impact.

But the window held. Shilu dropped to the floor with a crunch.

Lykke raised her tendrils, her tentacles, her ghoulish severed head. “You can’t win a contest of arms against infinity, Shishi! If you don’t want to lose, you may as well cut off your own head. Isn’t that what your people used to do, back in life? Something like that, anyway. Come on, let me see you cut your own throat!”

Shilu rose to her pointed feet, framed by the endless rot of the corpse-city and the black skies beyond. The clouds were churning and thickening with an oncoming storm. A dribble of blood trickled from one corner of Shilu’s mouth. She wore no expression on her pale mask.

“Internal bleeding?” Lykke said; she seemed surprised. “Oh, you really are fragile. Wow!”

Shilu raised her swords.

“Stand down and return to the network,” she said. “I won’t warn you again.”

Lykke clucked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “And there you go ruining all the fun. Shishi, it’s not worth playing if you don’t show any—”

Shilu leapt at the monster.

The black-metal scarecrow and the white-clad demon moved faster than Eseld’s eyes could follow. Shilu and Lykke traded blows in close proximity, blades and tendrils and teeth and spikes flashing and cutting, snapping shut and lashing through the air. Shilu sliced into Lykke’s flesh again and again, opening bloody rents in her pale skin — but each wound closed with a wet slurp or opened into some new horror, fanged and dripping, full of digestive juices or sucking membranes. The monster spouted new limbs from the ragged orifices of her wounds, grew eyeballs in her back, flowered open her ribcage and hips into snaking tentacles of blood-slick bone.

Shilu’s metal skin turned aside Lykke’s teeth and claws, but she could not withstand the kinetic force of every blow. She was knocked aside, pushed back, thrown off her footing.

Lykke raised her decapitated head above the fray. “Bored now!” she announced.

The swarm of bleached and bloated flies about Lykke’s body suddenly flowed toward Shilu, taking advantage of a moment during which she was off balance. A river of insect bodies pushed in through her parted lips.

Shilu turned aside and vomited — heaving up a mass of fused and melted flies, their pale bodies turned to slush in an instant, cooked by her inner fires.

Lykke did not press the opening. She stepped back.

Shilu tried to raise her sword-arms once again — but then she blinked, twitching and shivering, taken by a fever, by the chills, by a hand inside her body.

Lykke grinned. She raised a hoof and hit Shilu with a lazy side-swipe, catching Shilu in the middle. Shilu went flying a second time, her black-metal body gone limp. She sailed in an arc through the air, beyond the limit of Eseld’s restricted vision. Eseld heard Shilu land with a clatter of metal on metal, smashing into the detritus of the security checkpoint. She rolled across the floor, then lay still.

Lykke cackled. “Without permissions, you don’t even own your body! Come on, Shishi. Get up and let’s finish this off so I can crack your shell and root around inside.”

Eseld heard Shilu stand up, metal clacking against metal. She walked back into view. Something was very wrong with her body — she kept twitching and tensing up.

She stopped well short of Lykke and raised her swords.

Lykke grinned. “One more round? Really?”

“I told you I wouldn’t warn you again,” said Shilu.

Lykke rolled her eyes. “You’re mine now, Shishi. Fine! Come hereeeeee baby!”

Lykke charged, galloping across the blood-smeared grey metal.

Shilu twisted one foot, as if bracing for a fancy riposte.

Eseld still believed in God. She believed that a loving God had created the world and everything in it. God was all powerful, knew all things, and loved all things. This love was sometimes beyond human comprehension, which was why evil things happened; this was also why good people sometimes suffered and bad people often prospered. But Eseld had long since accepted the fact that God was dead; the throne of heaven lay empty and cold. Even God’s inscrutable love was missing from the world. During some of her early resurrections she had attempted to figure out what had gone wrong. Had God aged and died? Had God been killed — by humans? By the devil? By something else? In time she had accepted that the exact events did not matter. All that mattered is that creation had been abandoned to madness and decay. All the angels were as rotten as the world, and could offer these pitiful mortals no hope at all, for they had surely perished along with God.

But here, for the first time in so many cycles of death and resurrection, with so much of her mind worn away by time and pain and grief, Eseld knew she beheld a demon.

Lykke was a demon, intimate with the taste of victory.

The demon slammed into Shilu at full speed; Shilu’s metal spear-tip feet scraped across the floor as she caught the charge. Hooves battered at Shilu’s head and shoulders; bone-tipped tentacles whipped at her torso and constricted about her chest. Dripping maws snapped shut on her limbs and hips. Body weight pressed down on her, threatening to crush her against the floor. Bloated flies mobbed Shilu’s ears and eyes, swarming over her skin, looking for another way in to infect her with more twitches and shivers. Lykke’s severed head descended, razor teeth gnashing and snapping to bite off chunks of Shilu’s metal body. A dozen more mouths opened in Lykke’s fly-shrouded flesh, to pull Shilu apart by the arms and legs.

Shilu let it happen. Her blade-arms sank deep into the soft and spongy flesh either side of what had been Lykke’s groin, all the way to Shilu’s elbows.

Lykke screeched: “Bet I can freeze you like I froze those zombies, Shi—”

Shilu’s black metal skin crackled with a blue shimmer, like lightning flashing across a storm’s underbelly.

Lykke screamed.

Her white flesh and bloated fly-cloud recoiled from Shilu like shadow from flame.

The scream turned into an ear-splitting note, then descended to a blood-choked gurgle. Lykke’s body lost definition, her sharp edges melting into rubbery blue translucence. Her cloud of flies died all at once, falling upon her like droplets of rotten, milky rain. Her legs collapsed, folding up as they lost rigidity. Lykke’s mass hit the floor with a wet slap of blubber, then appeared to shrink, as if draining away through a hidden grate. Her face melted, eyeballs running down her cheeks, mouth vanishing amid the mess. She turned to slime, then to nothing.

Within ten seconds no trace of Lykke remained. Not even a drop of blood.

Eseld was released from the spell binding her limbs and lungs; she toppled backward, heaving for breath, shaking all over. She caught herself on one of the metal tables bolted to the floor.

Shilu straightened up. She did not twitch or jerk. Her blades melted back into hands and forearms — not of soft brown flesh, but more of that lightless chrome and black metal. She flexed the mechanical fingers of her right hand, then looked down at her fingertips. A droplet of white formed at the sharp point of her right index finger, the exact colour of Lykke’s plague-fly dress. Shilu watched the droplet for a second, then flicked it onto the floor. The droplet vanished.

Eseld felt an emotion she had not experienced since true life — awe and wonder, like looking up at a starry night sky from within a forest clearing, and knowing that God had made the world good, for her.

A choked sob came from behind Eseld. She tore her eyes away from Shilu.

Behind her, the fresh meat was having a breakdown.

Sky — the tall and strong one with the reddish skin — was collapsed on the floor, sitting on her backside, weeping openly, hands clawing at her own cheeks, on the verge of hyperventilating. Cyneswith, the smaller but older one with all the freckles, was still on her feet, staring at the point where Lykke had vanished, mouth agape with wordless fascination.

Cyneswith met Eseld’s eyes. She closed her mouth and swallowed. “Fairies are terrifying.”

“ … yes,” Eseld said. Fairies, demons, what was the difference? “Yes, they are.”

Cyneswith raised both hands and put her palms together, as if praying. She bowed her head. “Thank you, Lady Shilu.”

Shilu turned away from her vanquished foe. Wide dark eyes stared without expression.

Eseld swallowed. “What are you?”

An angel, she told herself. An angel of death. Or a demon, a fallen angel like—

“All three of you stay exactly where you are,” Shilu said. “Do not move. Disobey and I will kill you. Do you understand? Answer verbally with yes or no.”

Eseld said: “Yes! Yes. Yes.”

Cyneswith froze, head still bowed. She murmured a tiny ‘yes’.

Sky was hyperventilating now, heaving for breath. She managed to speak: “No! No, I don’t— no, no— what was that, how was that possible, what—”

Eseld snapped without looking back, “Do as she says!”

Sky gulped twice. “I’m just— I’m not moving, I’m just sitting here, I— o-okay, yes, yes.”

Shilu walked up to Eseld. Her spear-tip feet tapped on the grey metal floor. Eseld focused on those feet and wondered how Shilu kept her balance — if she didn’t think about that, she might scream and scramble backward. Eseld held herself perfectly still to avoid flinching away from the angel of death.

Shilu stopped, close enough to touch, or to impale and rend Eseld’s body on her blades and spikes and black metal angles.

“Look at me,” Shilu ordered.

Eseld raised her gaze and looked into Shilu’s wide, dark eyes, the only part of her which still looked human.

“Don’t move,” said Shilu.

She raised her right hand and made it smooth, so the edges would not cut. Then she cupped Eseld’s chin and leaned forward, staring deep into Eseld’s eyes.

Wide and dark as a sea of oil; Shilu’s eyes shimmered with a sudden glitter of emerald light.

“Ah!” Eseld winced. Pain bloomed inside her head. Her vision blurred and her hearing went dull. Her brain was full of cotton wool. Her skin tingled all over, as if pricked with a million needles. She gasped and jerked in Shilu’s grip, but Shilu held on tight, squeezing Eseld’s jawbone.

Then the pain passed and Eseld’s senses cleared. Shilu let go of her chin. Eseld staggered back, gasping for breath, blinking and twitching, rubbing at her face. Her knees were weak. Her skin was flushed. She felt fragile and vulnerable, violated somehow, as if Shilu had been rooting around inside her skull.

“You’re free to move and speak,” Shilu said.

Before Eseld could react, Shilu stepped around her and repeated the process with Cyneswith, cupping her chin and staring deep into her eyes. Cyneswith winced and flinched, gasping with pain, writhing and whining. She arched her spine and bucked in Shilu’s grip. Shilu held her longer than she had held Eseld, until Cyneswith was panting ragged, caked in sweat, flushed all down her front, hair stuck to her scalp.

Then Shilu let go. Cyneswith’s knees gave out. Eseld darted forward and caught Cyneswith under the armpits.

“You’re cleared,” said Shilu. She moved onto Sky and said: “Get up.”

Sky shook her head. “I-I don’t think I can, I—”

“Get up or I’ll kill you,” said Shilu.

Sky lurched to her feet, still panting for breath, eyes wide with delayed panic and the onset of trauma. Shilu grabbed Sky’s chin — reaching upward this time, because Sky was taller. She stared into Sky’s eyes until Sky snorted with pain, then shook all over. Sky’s eyeballs rolled into the back of her head. She gritted her teeth and tried to resist, but gave in with a deep whine in her chest, heaving and spitting.

Shilu let go. Sky staggered back, but kept her feet.

“W-what was that!?” Sky demanded. “What was that, were you reading data off my retinas? What—”

“None of you are compromised,” Shilu said. “You are what you appear to be. But all three of you contain scraps of anomalous code.” Shilu paused, then said: “I don’t understand what this means.”

Shilu turned away to face the bank of windows, staring through the glass which had cracked under her own body weight. She looked down at the ground, at the tomb’s outworks beyond the walls.

“I don’t understand what any of this means,” she repeated.

Eseld made sure Cyneswith could stand before she let go of her. “You alright? Cyne— Cyneswith?” she hissed. They were both still shaking from Shilu’s examination, both flushed, both covered in sweat. Cyneswith was bright red beneath her freckles, eyes full of tears.

Cyneswith nodded. “Cyn. Yes. I can stand.”

Sky was hugging herself, trying to pull herself together, staring at the ground and struggling not to slip into hyperventilation again. Eseld nodded toward her. Cyneswith took her meaning and went to touch Sky’s arm. Sky flinched; for a moment, Eseld thought Sky might attack Cyn, but then she backed down.

Eseld turned back to Shilu — a black-edged scarecrow of blades and spikes, outlined by the cracked glass and the corpse-world beyond. The sky was darkening with the beginning of a storm. Droplets of greasy, gritty rain speckled the windows.

Eseld crept closer, but made sure to stay to one side. She did not want to surprise Shilu.

“May I … ask a question?”

Shilu answered without looking. “You don’t have to ask permission. I am not your master.”

“What … what are you?”

“The same thing as Lykke.”

Fallen angel.

Eseld wanted to ask so very many questions. What are you really? What was that fight about? Why is any of this happening? Why did you stare into our eyes and ransack our souls? What do you mean we’re full of ‘anomalous code’? What’s your mission?

Instead, she said: “What do we do now?”

Shilu didn’t answer.

“ … Shilu?”

“I don’t know what to do,” Shilu answered. She stared into the gathering rain. “None of this makes sense. Events are moving beyond my control.”

“But … you beat the demon, right?”

Shilu looked directly at Eseld. Her pale mask was more expressive than her fleshy face had been, brow furrowed, eyes narrowed. “The what?”

“Lykke. You beat Lykke. That’s pretty under control.”

Shilu blinked. “No. I didn’t kill her. She’s still nearby. I only disrupted her current physical matrix. The same trick will not work twice. In fact, it should not have worked even once. She should have been knocked off balance, perhaps disoriented for a few moments. Instead she acted as if I had disrupted her inter-nanonic definitional matrix.”

Eseld swallowed. “Can you make it permanent? Can she be killed?”

Shilu’s mouth twitched — was that the hint of a smile?

She said: “Ambitious, zombie. Yes, there are certain methods by which a physical matrix can be permanently disabled, but they are beyond my current access and permission levels. As for physical damage, mm, maybe. Application of gravity, heat, enough electromagnetic force to pull her atoms apart. Fire would work, but it would need to be very hot indeed. And she would need to be signal-caged so she doesn’t just slip into any nearby high-density nanomachine hosts. We lack the means.”

“Then shouldn’t we be running? We’ve got to get out of here. Can we outrun her?”

“Unlikely. We’re marked in the network. She has full access. Doesn’t matter how fast I move now. Besides, I believe she’s playing with … ”

Shilu trailed off. Eseld finished for her. “Playing with you?”

Shilu blinked again. She examined Eseld, looking her up and down. Eseld felt exceptionally naked in front of this machine-person of black metal and burnished chrome and blushless polymer.

“Or with you,” Shilu said. “I’m not sure.” Then: “Why do you look at me like that?”

Eseld let her eyes flicker up and down Shilu’s form; she wasn’t sure if she should answer, or if Shilu would find that offensive.

“Oh.” Shilu said. Her skin suddenly broke and re-set, like oil sliding off the surface of pottery.

Shilu transformed back. Light brown skin and long black hair, human and short, with ordinary feet and hands. Her expression remained identical.

Eseld shook her head. “Y-you don’t have to—”

“It is better to keep the truth concealed from other revenants,” Shilu said, then sighed. “What am I saying? What am I doing? You cannot possibly be important to any of this. One of those girls back in the resurrection chamber might have been. I should have been decisive and protected them all. But you three? I’ve checked you. You’re not. Nothing but scraps and leftovers. Then again, I do not have access to the network. I do not know what to do. I do not understand what is going on.”

Eseld didn’t know how to react to that. If Shilu didn’t understand what was going on, then what hope did Eseld have?

All Eseld knew is that Shilu was the strangest thing she had seen in all her many resurrections — and Shilu had slain a demon, if only temporarily. On an intellectual level, Eseld knew that Shilu was not an angel and Lykke was not a demon, at least not literally. She understood computers and nanomachines, she knew what the graveworms did and how firearms spat bullets. She had learned so much about science and technology from other zombies, even if only in bits and pieces, early in her cycles of death and rebirth.

But Lykke was a demon, and Shilu was the same — a fallen angel.

Eseld began to feel an emotion she had not entertained in many resurrections.

Perhaps not every angel was dead. Perhaps the throne of heaven could be filled once again. Perhaps hope was not all poison in her belly and brain.

And right now, Shilu was still her best chance of getting out of this tomb, and her only chance at escaping that monster if it returned again. Cyneswith and Sky stood even less chance of survival. Sky was calm now, though her eyes were still wide and alert, her muscles tight, her face pulled taut — a professional killer, her trauma neatly packaged and ready to go. Cyneswith waited for instructions as if born to take orders, clinging to Sky’s arm and listening to the ‘fairy ladies’ with rapt attention.

Eseld took her chances: “I think we would all like to get out of here. Please, Shilu. We should be moving, shouldn’t we?”

Shilu said nothing for a moment, then sighed again. “Alright. I’ve changed my plans. I’m going to the gravekeeper’s chamber. That’s my best shot at getting rid of Lykke, and that’s also the location of the armoury. We’re going in the same direction. If you keep up, you may have a better chance of survival. If you get there, you’ll be in a good position.”

“The … the what, pardon?”

“Armoury. Where they keep the guns.” Shilu turned away and started toward the stairs.

Eseld gestured at Sky and Cyneswith to follow, then picked up her feet and scurried after Shilu.

“No, no, I’m sorry,” Eseld said. “I know what an armoury is, though I— there’s an armoury inside the tomb? And what do you mean, gravekeeper’s chamber? Somebody tends to this place, between resurrections?”

“In a manner of speaking. Don’t think about it, zombie. You just focus on getting your hands on some guns.”