Mother was buried in the Ansul of Chapwyn Cemetery. We couldn’t get one of their priests to do the service, due to some stipulation about suicide. This sent Father into a wailing rage, which deepened the sense of weight and sadness that only the family of a suicide can tell.

  Father was able to convince a martial priest from the SS to come out. Formerly delegated to sprinkling incense on brand-new war dead, he waved his hands and saw her into the dirt. Word had passed through the ranks, and it was the only time I got to see a dressed array of some of my father’s brothers-in-arms. I saw men whom I didn’t know console him in ways I’d wished then that I was able.

  We rode back home, me behind him on the notch of a one-man saddle. I put my arms around his abdomen, a place that was once as hard as mountain stone, now turned to gut. I retracted them and decided to take my chances with a slipping grip of the saddle blanket.

  —

  The times immediately after Mother’s characteristic exit were filled with an even greater silence at home. Well, silence between the remnants of the family more like—taking into account the tarts with more legs than years left on earth who frequented the place. Abysmal void at the dinner table followed by broken glasses, head-tilt feminine laughter, and sex made for a house better fit for a madman.

  It took Father no effort to find these women, and I surmised that at least one of them contributed to my mother’s suicide—maybe all of them. Years prior, I guess there would have been some hatred for my mother. Why couldn’t she have informed me of her discovery, and why couldn’t we have just left? But coin and shelter are not just given, and past the mere pragmatics, I also know how some are slaves to their own omissions, and I never pondered why there wasn’t a note.

  To separate myself from the clamor that had become home, I delved deeper into my projects and fought with all my might not to acknowledge my budding interest in Father’s ill-gotten company. Many a time, a dissection was halted to ponder the contents under a silk black dress.

  One evening a rotten carriage, pulled by a set of mares looking just as bad, brought three women to our door. When they stepped out I was dizzied by the heavy sway of the redheaded leader’s breasts. The other two were quite young, close enough to my own age, but all were equally dressed for their trade.

  There was a sickening wave of emotions for my father right then. Disgust—how could you disgrace your dead wife’s bed with the juices of women whose names you wouldn’t remember in the morrow? Envy—how utterly enthralling these women were, and then how I would have joined my cold mother for a chance just to feel their warm embrace.

  I ran off to my cellar, seeing it as this ridiculous hiding place for bones. Weeping with my face in my hands helped; taking breaks only to—well. One night while spying on Father through a bedroom window, I saw two of his voluptuous companions do to him, one hand on top of the other, what I did furiously and frequently to break up the crying.

  Hours must have passed before I emerged, for it was dark and the wind licked cold. As I walked up to our side door, it swung open, almost toppling me over. The three women filed out in their slightly rearranged attire. The night did not conceal the return of the redhead’s jiggle, a sight that sent my soul wailing back into the cellar.

  This time, however, before I could make my retreat, one of the young ones thwarted me. By the light of the moon and a street lamp I saw her: fair skinned, golden-eyed. Her hair was the color of dew on lilies, which she wore in braids that ended at the crack of a backside I already held visions of. Perky breasts exposed their contours under an evilly cut garment, and above them were eyelashes that batted at me.

  “Hi,” she said as if talking to someone capable of speech. “You’re Augy’s boy?”

  “By blood,” I managed to squeak out, utterly amazed at my own response.

  I don’t know if it was because we were both standing as still as Lirelet statues, or if it was because I was still mouthing by blood to myself in half-astonishment, but I didn’t hear their ride pull up. It was her glance that notified me. Once pulled out of whatever jackassery I was surely swirling around in, I heard the full rattling of the carriage and smelled the low-burning lamps affixed to its mean wooden face.

  “Time we’re off, Somyellia,” the endowed leader confirmed. The motherly tone wasn’t lost on me—both in its oddity and its ability to soothe—as she and the other pranced down our wooden steps. This time I didn’t stare at her tits. It was as if she never had them.

  Somyellia, as she was called, looked at me, tilted her head, bit her bottom lip.

  “I…I can take her home,” I said.

  “I don’t know, young master,” said the ranking mistress.

  “Come now, Morlia,” Somyellia said to her. “Deny such a strapping youngling?”

  “Silence, Morlia,” wedged a croaking voice from the carriage. “You want her, it’s twenty silver more. She’ll be back by morning.” The words ran up my spine like a dry tongue.

  “I have it,” I found myself saying.

  “Somyellia,” spoke the carriage, “come back with the money.”

  As the carriage departed, she looked more like a girl playing dress-up than one of Augy’s whores. But she wasn’t playing anything. She had cavorted and hiked her legs up in palaces and mansions all throughout Nilghorde—perhaps all Rehleia—perhaps beyond our watery borders. She’d bounced atop soldierly bodies. She’d escorted the unrepentantly wealthy, on her hands and knees above pits of decorated hunting cats and amid silk and gold. I was a whelp, and she had either found an appeal in my innocence or had much more devious plans in store.

  Under a swollen moon I meandered. Her lip was bit again, and to my terror I’d once more lost my powers of speech. Pollen from nearby gardens filled our noses, and if it weren’t for the decay on my clothes we would have looked like characters right out of the Poems of the Classics. Wind ran around our bodies, and the moon peered down upon its children.

  “What is your name?” she said.

  “Seasmil.”

  “That’s an unusual name. What does it mean?”

  “I—I don’t really know,” I said. She was beautiful and thought-provoking! “Never thought about it much. I was named after a relative. Does yours mean something?” While sunk in self-consciousness, I shifted my attention as best as I could from the ornaments adorning her to thoroughly digging a small hole in front of me with the toe of my boot.

  “Of course,” she popped. “All who are kin to Maecidion the Virulent possess names with direct meaning.”

  “What?”

  “Mine means daughter of the sleeping demon,” she said in the manner of a small child announcing their alignment with a favored pit fighter, flag in hand. She giggled, and her big gold eyes flashed. “Why are you covered in all that filth?”

  “Oh, no I was—do you want to see something?”

  Maybe it was because my dismal lab was the only thing I could claim in the whole world as my own. Or maybe it was because she had looked at me with the eyes of a woman who may have really bore the meaning of her name.

  She nodded, and with her hand in mine, I escorted her to my dark cellar of experiments, where I hungered for an experiment of a different kind.

  As with many men’s first, I was in a state of euphoric confusion. Starting things off was a showing of human skulls. The stall tactic was excruciation itself, made only greater when they all found a way to tumble out of my fumbling arms. Aside from the stock insecurities of adolescence, the aroma of my lab—a thing I’d grown so accustomed to that my nose could almost omit decay—burst into my face as if it were the first time ever smelling a corpse. Surely, she would take flight up my stairs, this creature sitting on a table so covered in macabre. Most women would have stopped at the cellar door, yet she began to undress in the stench and shadow.

  Never taking her eyes off of me, she undressed as she had so many times before.

  Her buttocks rested on the edge of the table. Her dress was shed with the flick of a leg. Her arms were locked at the elbow, hands gripping the edge. Her mouth hung open, bee-stung lips moist and shining in the candlelight.

  The candlelight itself; a thing between those shelves and pillars as familiar to me as portraits on a wall. On this night, though, the light gave birth to shapes that danced as if spectators to an enchantress…and me, standing awkwardly with a handful of skulls.

  She curled a finger: come hither. I dropped the skulls again. My eyes were locked on a soft and sideways grimace. A faint patch of hair above it wanted to be smelled, and I walked closer, into the gap that her legs had made.

  She gripped the back of my head with one hand and my small boyish buttocks with the other. “Show me you’re your father’s son,” she said, showing her teeth. As she pulled me closer I felt like an animal caught in one of my snares—almost.

  Our lips met, and she had my trousers off and my horned member grasped before I could even realize her perfume didn’t overwhelm the odors that I’d momentarily forgotten. A cacophony of little pops and squishes erupted when I pressed her back against the table. I thought she was going to go berserk, but to my amazement, and to my delight, she smiled. We rolled off the table and onto the floor.

  When our needs had been met, we stood up and looked at the other. She was still smiling; that girly side of hers having returned, save for the fact that she now looked like a recently feasted ghoul. I must have been a sight to see too, relishing the mixture of sex and death that was to become my adult life.

  After we emerged, I took her to meet Celly, whom she endeared with petting and rubbed her face against with shut-eyed kisses. She soon informed me of the whereabouts of her unsavory quarters, and told me not to worry about the silver. I did not question her.

  It was time to go.

  Filled with the empowerment of sexual knowing, and drugged with the aroma of rot and her strong perfume, I stole one of my father’s horses.

  We sprung forth into the air. Wolves from the forest howled as we galloped out of the Templeton District, always on the lookout for a roving patrol. We were bound for the deformed, cobbled alleys that formed the crime-ridden Thunder Bustle District, where you were as likely to bump into a sorcerer weaving their outlawed magic as you were to lose your purse.

  As we rode, she clutched my waist, buildings and landmarks of the city flying by. Our route went from dirt to the clickity-clack of cobblestones. Eyes peered out, lurking behind glass windows that never opened. We avoided the shadowy figures that approached us when I paused at an intersection for Somyellia to get her bearings. The salt smell thickened. Except for the horse underneath us, we were the only living things for the last leg of our journey.

  We arrived at the backside of an old warehouse busy leaning into the sea. It was a block of wet black, grayed at the edges by some source of light. At the door were the ugliest men I had ever seen. Armed with pikes, their scars came either from disastrous afflictions of acne or battling fierce beasts with dispositions for biting.

  “This is it, Seasmil,” Somyellia said with a calmness that had no place there. “Thank you for the ride.”

  She walked up a series of waterlogged steps to the guardsmen, and whispered something in one’s ear that was met with a nod. Turning to face me, she looked like a thing of beauty who had chosen to give up beauty for darker delights, but whose attraction had yet to wither. Her hair now an unkempt mess of twists and shoots, she smiled and waved and disappeared through a doorway to a place that I wanted to follow at the expense of my very soul.

  The brief introspection was cut short when a blood-wrenching scream erupted deep in the alleys, followed by a mob of hurried feet.

  I was now again the boy from Templeton, on his father’s stolen horse, without a weapon or a guide. I proceeded to fly through the wormy spaces, between buildings all appearing abandoned. Trying to remember the direction in which we had come, and later avoiding the shaking lanterns of surely pursuing sentries, I made it back to the barn before sunrise.

  I tended to the horse and agonized over the minute details of the gear, mostly what side of any particular piece was facing the wall and what wasn’t. But more than that, I agonized about her. Would I ever see her again?

  Boys shedding their innocence for the more nefarious practices of adolescence is the source of ocean’s worth of poetry. My towering escapade with Somyellia was no exception. Only such an encounter could intoxicate me enough to run off with one of Father’s horses. Carrying out my clandestine venture undetected only provoked my sense of achievement. Although doing so far too young for the approval of the bland and proper, I had peeked into the vault of teeming secrets that no book or vial could contain or explain. I was hooked, and I found myself a terrible thirst in a raging storm.

  At the expense of my bungling studies, I set my eyes on that dancing, warm flesh. An addled burrow of Nilghorde meant nothing. I was the second Seasmil; trapper of teethed mites, owner of skulls, avoider of the Ward, and one whose vigor listened not to the gray and cockless distracters of recourse or consequence.

  Father had taken an even more nominal interest in my happenings. An increased workload and a growing penchant for the bottle carried him off into an advantageous solitude. I could stay in my lab for a full day and night, just to emerge for some wonted ramble of housework to be done. I was far past the days of subtle paternal want and hopes. Neglect was my ally. As long as my chores were done, my scholarly work fulfilled, and my changing face occasionally seen, I was free, and my loins would find their quenching, even if it meant the coming of terror.

  And such quenching mandated that I did indeed see her again. On the backs of stolen horses, Somyellia and I rode to new places to sow oats and memories alike, many lost now like rain in the sea. I became well versed in the ways of women. For she would on occasion nestle away one of her coworkers, and for my pleasant discovery they’d execute carefully rehearsed acts on my body, often tied down and blindfolded. Her expertise from her employment left me mesmerized and trembling, always outdoing herself with random accessories of opium, leather, or blood.

  We chased moonlight, dancing wickedly behind tall graves before defiling them with human juices. She showed me the black arts of her Ordrid kind, explaining she’d shown promise in curses. I gave her animal hearts with Mother’s few remaining jewels deep in the tough muscles.

  I became somewhat of an expert in avoiding the black-drabbed ruffians en route to acquire her: a toss of silver here, a swift gallop over a rotten fence. I declare, I learned more about the Thunder Bustle, and remained uncut, than the most resourceful local. I became a most regular of irregular sights in front of that ogre-guarded door. Once she was wrapped around me, like the plague dressed in silk and wolf’s fur, we would disappear into the smoke, shadow and brick maze to some predestined bungalow. Alone, we’d commence our carnal rites, and not the howling of the forest wolves or roaring of the sea could drown our ecstasy.

  We both found a happiness that was all our own. When her work bid her away, I would pass the time with half-hearted dissections and long walks with Celly.

  —

  Celly—or Lord Cellurzga, as Somyellia sometimes insisted, supposedly paying homage to one of her Ordrid ancestors whose royal feet, if left too long on wood, revealed seared hoofprints—grew into a beautiful hoofed beast. Our voyages through the forest were done in the contented silence that romance books always fawn on about. And maybe I’m guilty of wordy romancing too, as you may have already nocked that critic’s arrow. But this silence was pristine, interrupted only by the occasional predator that met staff and stone, and a lone stumble into our land’s reigning religion: a rural Chapwyn encampment.

  I was lured one day by moans I believe belonged to a wounded deer in a tabernacle of young pine. The moans of such a deer struck by some woodland malady became a circle of men, no more than a handful, wrapped in the same filth-white garb as the tabernacle’s roof. They were all kneeling, bent so far forward one fell over into the dirt. In the center stood a priest, in cleaner sheets and holding an unspooled scroll in one hand and an uprooted plant in the other. Both the scroll and plant lowered as he watched Celly, myself, and my fang-nicked staff descend the slope of bramble and ferns.

  “He who walketh with Animal as Man is either thy steward of sentience or Animal himself.” The Chapwyn priest wasn’t reading from his dirty old scroll, but that didn’t mean the obscure verse hadn’t come right from the vellum. Lack of familiarity with this particular passage—any particular passage unsheathed at random—perhaps was the one thing I shared in common with the lay, scroll-thumping Chapwynite.

  The verse lingered on the leader’s face, emaciated and worn like ship wood, and the rest had either risen or turned to behold the object in question. I heard Celly’s hooves, curious and cautious as they clopped down on wet leaves. Coming up against my thigh, my freehand found a good patch of his wool to grab and rest in. Animals that you don’t kill can smile, I swear to you. Celly’s made the warmer of the parishioners giggle.

  “Didn’t mean to interrupt,” I said, eyeing the slosh of heavy-boot trails that led back to somewhere in Nilghorde. I was now close enough to this rustic communion to knock a kneeler over with the muddy end of my staff. Beyond them, wooden bowls made an inner ring around the priest’s feet. In them were what appeared to be equal dispersings of water, bread, hand axes, and shit. “Didn’t know this was—”

  “An intruder,” the priest fired, “on Tersiona’s faithful hath only strayed from his own wander and intruded on only that which hath been seen before he beeth born unto the world.”

  It may have been them rising in unison that backed me. My staff would’ve dispatched them with a few hard swings, but religious synchronization was a human convention new to me.