Singing With All My Skin and Bone by Sunny Moraine

Author:Sunny Moraine [Sunny Moraine]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Fiction, Fantasy, Dark Fantasy, Short Stories, Dystopian, Weird Fiction
ISBN: 9780995094901
Google: kmTFjwEACAAJ
Amazon: B01G2CO6S6
Publisher: CHIZINE PUBN
Published: 2016-05-21T23:00:00+00:00

*

At the crest of a hill Sebastian stops again, Jaime stops with him and they turn.

It’s a mourning process done at high speed and in the midst of utter confusion, because how can any sense be made of this? But there is sense. Sebastian feels it like the hidden shape in a picture puzzle as he watches the water surging into the city.

All at once Jaime is dragged away from him. There is the flash of a blade. Sebastian stares stupidly at it, at the wild-eyed man holding the machete to Jaime’s throat. Jaime is staring back at him, hands limp at his sides—his surprise and the resulting lack of a struggle may be what, for the moment, has saved him.

“Heard you were running.” The man presses the blade into Jaime’s throat and there’s a corresponding trickle of blood. Jaime does not cry out and Sebastian feels a strange flush of pride. “You can’t just run. Not with that kind of plata tangled up with your ankles.”

Sebastian holds out his hands. His gaze flicks from Jaime’s face, abnormally pale in the red light, to the shattered road that continues up the hill. He hears thunder behind him. “Please…”

“Yes, say please. Plead with me. Make it so much sweeter when I cut this little cacorro’s head off.”

His eyes meet Jaime’s again; there is nothing he can say because fear makes men crazy. And in the last minutes of both of their lives, with all their good fortune burning and drowning below them, he is not going to abase himself. He feels every muscle coiled, ready to spring.

He never does. A rearing horse, white-eyed, rotten hooves crashing into the side of the man’s head in a spray of blood and pinkish brain matter. The man doesn’t have time to scream. Jaime, as he drops to the ground, does not scream either.

But the horse does. And then there are more, surging around them, thundering, reeking. Sebastian has fallen to one knee. Jaime is motionless. The horse stands over him, nostrils flaring. Its eyes are white, but not without expression. Lost rage. Hatred. Sebastian has seen it before. At that flash of familiarity all the fear vanishes and he understands: it’s about using. It’s about being used. And cast aside when one is used up.

He reaches up in supplication, his head bowed. He is thinking of the flies on the eyes of the dead horses, how he had wished then that someone had closed their eyes while they were sticking their heads on the stakes, because it had seemed like such a final insult.

“Lo siento,” he whispers. “Perdoname. Por favor. Forgive us all.”

The horse stares at him for a long moment. White-eyed gaze, drowned in hate. More horses around them, more white eyes. Ring upon ring of them, staring, surging. Going still. Sebastian drops his arms.

And then, one by one, the horses go.

It doesn’t feel like forgiveness. It feels like blood for blood.

Buenaventura lies burned and drowned, and the parts of it that have not perished in water continue to do so in fire.

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