Page 104 of The Merciless Ones

She’s hunched forward in her throne like a toad, squatting over the deathshriek in her lap – a small, light purple creature with whitish-gold quills and blood-eaters sprouting across his body. Horror sears through me as I take in the sight. The deathshriek’s big black eyes are wide open with agony and fear, and grey sores mark his skin, blossoming everywhere blood-eaters sprout. The vines coil around his entire body, connecting him to Etzli. Malignant divine vines spraying that awful, heavy odour as they feed.

I stand there, my mind still unwilling to comprehend what it’s seeing until, suddenly, a roar rings out from beside me. “Demon!” Emperor Gezo shouts.

He rushes at Etzli, but she languidly gestures. Vines erupt from the ground to coil around him, and then blood-eater flowers begin to blossom, their spiked roots digging into his skin. The smell of rot blooms, adding to the already noxious bouquet. The former emperor is almost immediately rooted into place, his body firmly secured by the vines now writhing around him.

It seems like centuries before Etzli straightens to regard me, but when she does, the movement is slow and serpentine. “Deka…” she says in that lazy way of hers, surprise colouring her features. Thunderclouds wreathe her head, a sign of her displeasure. “How did you open the door? It was locked.”

“I don’t know,” I say, my voice strangely distant, even to my own ears. “I just did.” My thoughts are scattered, ephemeral things now. I struggle to gather them, but the blood is rushing so fast to my head, I think I’m going to faint. “What’s happening?” I feel almost like a confused child when I point. “What are you doing to that deathshriek?”

Etzli frowns, the human expression uncanny on her inhuman face. Her white eyes catch mine. “You weren’t supposed to see this. I command you not to see this.”

The words reverberate in my skull, an imperative that penetrates so deep, even my heart pounds the instruction: Do not see, do not see… The darkness around me fades; the vines disintegrate. All that’s left is the Chamber of the Goddesses as it always appears to mortal eyes – pure white, that ceiling reflecting the sky. The sight would refresh my soul, except the sky reflected by the ceiling is ominous today. Dark – no hint of stars to be found. It’s that way for a reason, but I’ve forgotten why. Think, think, Deka. I grasp at my thoughts, but they keep flitting away, little butterflies I can never quite seem to catch. My head is pounding now. It’s almost like there’s some sort of barrier there, a cloth, muffling my brain.

But I came here for a purpose, I remind myself, shaking my head in an effort to focus. I have important news I must tell the mothers. I glance back at the dais only to find Etzli looking at me with a strange expression. Why is she staring at me like that?

“Please, help me!” a youthful male voice shouts.

And the cloth muffling my brain dissipates, leaving me back in that dark room, Etzli awake on the throne, smothering the deathshriek on her lap with vines. Tears flow from the deathshriek’s eyes, desperation and fear shining there. He seems so young, so very, very young. He must have been around my age when he resurrected.

How did he even find his way here? The thought rises almost distantly, no doubt a reaction to the horror I feel. Male deathshrieks resurrect deep in the earth, don’t they? The reminder spurs the memory of that jatu, the one I still can’t quite decipher. I shake it away.

“Please!” the deathshriek cries. “Help me!”

The words jolt me out of my shock. I run towards him, hands outstretched. “Mother Etzli, stop!”

But Etzli’s lips curl into a sneer of displeasure as she looks down at the deathshriek. “Be silent,” she commands, tapping his lips.

The boy – because that’s what he is, a boy – makes an awful choking sound in reply, then his mouth wrenches open impossibly wide. A small gold blood-eater slithers out, the flower unfurling brilliant gold petals. Golden roots spread across the boy’s face, leaving rot in their path as the plant gorges itself, a bloated leech embedded deep inside him. Within seconds, his body has turned grey from the onslaught, then he’s gone, dissolved to reddish sludge before my very eyes.

It all happens so fast, I don’t even have the chance to move. To save him. I don’t even have the chance to comprehend what is happening. I slump to the floor of the dais, my feet suddenly lacking the power to stand. Even after everything I’ve learned about the mothers, everything I’ve experienced, I still can’t fathom this – can’t even begin to understand.

“Why?” I whisper, grief and horror making it almost impossible to speak. “Why did you do that?” No one deserves a death like that – no one. Not even the jatu.

“Because we have to feed, have to gain power,” Etzli replies, unbothered. “That is what their kind is for. That is what all of this is for. To feed and gain us power.”

She gestures, and all the vines in the room begin to vibrate, petals and stems making an eerie rustling music. Horror shudders over me as I take in their star-shaped flowers, those black petals snapping hungrily. The same petals cover the entire mountain. In every corner, on every wall – everywhere anyone turns – there’s a blood-eater. There’s always a blood-eater. And Etzli uses them to feed her and the other goddesses…

Comprehension shatters through me.

No wonder Etzli doesn’t seem worried that we’re under attack. No wonder none of the mountain’s natural alarms were signalling when the Idugu’s army barrelled through. Etzli wants the army to come. She wants the true jatu to fight their way through the jungles, where hordes of blood-eater vines wait, anticipating their next meal. And if she wants it, that means all the mothers do. I glance from one sleeping goddess to the next, sickened. They’re all connected, four wills intertwined into one. Which means everything that’s happening here is their will. I shudder as I realize how horrifying the situation truly is: all this was planned.

When the mothers sent me off to find the purported angoro, what they really sent out was a lure – one they knew the Idugu would not be able to resist. They knew the Idugu would think that they were weakened; that their counterparts would try to entice or even kidnap me away and that I’d resist for as long as I could. This whole time I’ve been playing hide-and-seek with the Idugu, the mothers have been waiting for this: the moment the male gods would throw caution to the wind and send their army of sons here. The moment thousands of true jatu would arrive, cattle for the mothers to slaughter.

Mothers.

The irony of the word sears through me. The Gilded Ones don’t deserve to be called mothers; they don’t deserve to be called anything at all. They don’t care that they’re killing the children of their own counterparts, the children they themselves birthed from those golden pools. All they care about is that they regain the power they lost long ago. That they remain ascendant, as they’ve been ever since I freed them.

My entire body is trembling now, I’m in such a state. “You said you came to free us, to lead us to a higher form of existence,” I whisper, my voice as broken as I feel.

“And we will do so after we defeat our counterparts. But in order to do that, we must feed. Must regain our powers.”

Etzli utters this lie without even blinking an eye. Without even so much as a twitch. But then, she truly believes it, doesn’t she? Like every person who has succumbed to madness, she believes her definition of reality as she sees it, and her reality demands more worship, more sacrifice – just as the Idugu’s does.

The gods are all false, every one of them. I understand what Sayuri meant now.

I stand there, staring at her. “So the other mothers, they know?” I ask.

I need the confirmation, need to know whether the other Gilded Ones have fallen prey to the madness infecting Etzli.

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