“This is the church? It looks exactly like every other building we’ve passed.”


    “Everything in Janusgate needs to be easy to take down and reassemble, just in case it gets wrecked during one of the shifts. So you get wood, cheap nails, and not much thought to architectural merit. Here, come feel under the doorknob.”


    They stood on the outskirts of the central agglomeration of structures, on a walkway near the top layer. Beyond, the towers became loose and indistinct, like a stage backdrop drawn by a child. Just looking at them made Anya dizzy.


    She joined Renee before the plank-door. The frame was built into a squat, amorphous compound, its sole distinguishing feature a crude steeple. It was piled on top of several other structures, and while the walkway on which she stood was empty, Anya smelled boiling oil and heard the mirthful cries of a small gathering below.


    “How do the congregants know where to find it?”


    “Priest lives here, probably. Shifts mostly happen during dawn or dusk, so he just needs to be here then.”


    Renee tried the doorknob, and found the door bolted from the inside.


    “Your arts can sense people, right? Anyone home?”


    Anya pricked her finger, and yelped in surprise as dozens of warm bodies bloomed into focus around her. Janusgate was dense, and people were stuffed like lemmings into the neighboring buildings.


    “Yes. At least fifteen, but it’s hard to count when there’s so many. They seem to all be close together, not too far in front of us.”


    “Alright. No busting through the front door.”


    Renee looked around, then stepped off the walkway and onto the mess of beams bracing the church against the adjacent building. She shimmied down them, stopping in front of a boarded-up window on the level below. From her purse, she procured a miniature hammer.


    “Come on down. We’ll get in here.”


    “Um, Renee, if you fall-” Anya looked over the edge of the walkway, and an intense wave of nausea swept up to meet her. There was no stone below, only a hundred-foot drop into the slick-black ooze.


    “I won’t! And you won’t either, if you step where I tell you. Put your hand on that beam first, make sure to really get your claws in, then step down.”


    Anya swallowed and let Renee guide her. By the time she reached the window, the weasel had already got it open.


    They swung into what appeared to be a storage room - several flimsy pews stacked in a corner, and a few cabinet-sized icons showing a dormouse woman surrounded by bees. There was a table with woodcarving tools next to them, and shavings littered the floor. From above, they heard a group of people milling about.


    Quietly opening the sole doorway, they found themselves in a narrow hallway. Beams had been crudely attached over several holes in the floor, and faint light streamed in from the structures below them. There were a few doors, one of which was chained with a heavy padlock. And from behind the locked door, a faint noise…


    Bzzzz. Like a violin bowed with a rusty saw.


    Bylat.


    “You hear that? Sounds like wasps.”


    Anya nodded. Her ears twitched uncontrollably.


    “We check that one last.” Renee went to the door across the hall, and found it unlocked.


    A room holding a neatly stacked pile of wood planks, a box of nails, and a set of axes and hammers.


    Next to it, what appeared to be the priest’s bedroom. A mattress sized for a large person, a drawer holding tattered robes, and a dust-free iconostasis.


    “Got a note here, but it’s not in Gaulish.”


    Renee held up a scrap of paper filled with neat Hellenic characters.


    Mirabel Blanchet - apostle candidate? Buy more bread next time. Ask Gabriel about herbs for pain?


    “You can read it?”


    “It’s in the language of Hellas, south of Rus. Some of the liturgies of St. Georgei and St. Ascalon are written in it.” Anya explained the scant contents of the note.


    “You know, when I’m Miss Penrose, I’ll have a drawing room full of books, and I’ll spend all day learning things from them. Maybe I’ll become half as clever as you.”


    “I have no doubt you will surpass me.”


    “Hah, think of that! And just a few years ago I was pilfering grammar-books to teach myself letters.”


    Anya smiled, and for a moment was able to forget the wasp-drone coming from the locked door. Then it was back, boring into her skull.


    One final room, holding only a toilet. A few dead flies were scattered around its base.


    Then they were back before the padlocked door. Renee removed a bundle of pine bark from her purse, lighting it to produce a plume of strong-smelling smoke. She slid it under the door on top of a thin glass plate, and started working a lockpick into the keyhole.


    “The smoke’s supposed to calm down the bees. Alain suggested it. Said he used to do it all the time when he was a farmboy.”


    “Farmboy?”


    “He never told you? He’s from a smallholder family up in Albion. I don’t know how he became a knight, but supposedly he’s known Yvon for a long time. And known him, if you understand.”


    Renee twisted her pick, and the lock clicked open. She stood, taking a deep breath. Her tail flicked aimlessly.


    “If you run out of blood for that knife of yours, feel free to start using mine.”


    Anya nodded, held the knife before her, and slowly pushed open the door.


    A corpse stared back at her, a wasp slowly crawling from one of its hollow eyes.


    Before she could scream, Renee’s hand clamped firmly over her mouth.


    There were four corpses in total, although only one of them was remotely fresh. Two mustelids, a rodent, and a cat. They seemed to have been mummified, as patchy-furred skin was still stretched taut over their faces. Their abdomens had been cut open, and were filled with papery wasps’ nests. On their forehead, each bore a holy symbol marked in yellow paint. In the center of the room, there was a tray with a few scraps of off-color meat. Mercifully, Renee’s smoke hid much of the smell.


    “St. Math preserve me, and keep me in thy heart,” Renee whispered.


    Anya breathed in, closed her eyes, breathed out, and opened them. It had always worked during the war.


    “The wasps are just ordinary insects. No arts, as far as I can sense.” Renee’s smoke seemed to have worked, as the wasps did not approach them.


    “Ordinary insects that built their homes in someone’s guts. Fuck, Anya, where are their legs?”


    Renee was right. All of the corpses were missing their hips and legs. Instead, sheets of strange, translucent material were crumpled around their lower torsos.


    “By all the saints, what the fuck were the Blanchets doing here? They know better than to get involved with weird shit like this,” Renee said. She knelt next to the oldest corpse, and poked its sheets. They crumbled at her touch, revealing a hollow interior smeared with dried organic residue.


    “They were cut open after they died, I think. It’s hard to tell, but the wounds would look different otherwise.” Anya analyzed the corpses. The cuts were crude, probably with a saw to get through the ribs. The ends of the torsos were oddly flayed, dessicated flesh tearing into jagged strips. Not like any wounds Anya had seen.


    “Could’ve been poison. Miri told me followers of St. Artimus bury their dead, so whatever happened to these ones isn’t normal.” Renee took a notebook from her purse and sketched the painted symbols.


    “Nothing about this makes sense.” Anya tilted her head, trying to find some pattern in the broken bodies. She remembered the war, how she learned to recognize the mutilations inflicted by each type of Gaulish arts. Blackened skin caused by ice, branching burns caused by lightning. But the unions of corpse and insect before her felt far more wrong.


    “No, it doesn’t. So we keep moving, and don’t let it get to us.” Renee pulled Anya from the room, relocking the door.


    Footsteps on the staircase, and a surprised voice.


    “Hey! What’re you doing down here? You wander off?”


    Anya’s tail flagged, but Renee was already moving, dropping her tools into her purse and hiding the rabbit’s surprise from the deer on the stairway. He was an adolescent, his ears still too large for his muzzle, and wore patched-up rags.


    “Oh, sorry! First time here, just trying to find a place where my companion may relieve herself. We’re from Rue de la Cochonne. The Blanchets introduced us to Father Levidis a few weeks ago.” Renee spoke smoothly, switching to the rough accent of the slums.


    “Blanchets? Heard one of ‘em tried to sell us out to some highborn wolf. Nearly got the Father killed.”


    “Let me guess, Annette?” Renee shrugged. “Born too crafty for her own good.”


    “Hah, sounds like you would know. Oh, um, washroom is the door on the right. But be quick, we’re doing communion soon.” The deer went back up the stairs, and Renee exhaled. She waited a minute, and they went upstairs


    They emerged in a small hall, its back wall dominated by a crude iconostasis cobbled from several smaller icons. A large group of people of all species crowded around something at the end of the hall. Renee led Anya to a pew in the back.


    “Brothers and sisters, please take your seats.”This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.


    From a door to one side of the iconostasis, a long-horned black bull emerged. He held up a hand, and the people filed into the pews. They had been standing around a circular tub constructed in the floor, lined with sheets of metal and filled with shallow water. There was a person lying in it, but-


    Anya gasped. The person was a young squirrel woman, but from her white dress emerged a bloated insectoid abdomen, so large she had to curl to fit in the tub. Her legs were pushed aside at an unnatural angle, as though her pelvis was broken. She bore a serene expression, and Anya noticed dozens of holes on the abdomen opened and closed in time with her breathing. Through the semi-translucent exoskeleton, she could see blood-red organs pulse and throb. Renee squeezed Anya’s hand, and Anya saw the weasel had gone pale in the face.


    Well. Our journey to Parisi continues to prove endlessly surprising.


    “Tell me what the loshad mochi I’m looking at.”


    No less than St. Artimus of Ephesus in the flesh. Not her flesh, of course, but she seems to have taken to it nicely.


    “Saints aren’t like draugr. They can’t manifest through people.”


    A bud cannot bear fruit, but a flower may.


    “We don’t have time for riddles.”


    Shame. I have already divulged more than I am technically permitted.


    “Overlay with her, then. Let me see.” Anya shifted the knife into her grip.


    Enkidu did as she instructed, stretching his incorporeal form to caress the squirrel. She frowned for a moment, as if feeling a chilly gust, but quickly returned to her peaceful visage.


    “Is she…one creature?” Renee whispered.


    “In a way. By the saints, it’s like someone took two creatures and wove their flesh together.”


    The woman’s upper body was normal, although her heart and lungs were greatly engorged. Anya quickly found why - the woman’s blood vessels emptied into a great pool of mixed fluid in her abdomen, and her heart struggled to maintain enough pressure for circulation. Where the two halves met, the body was an impossible jumble, mammalian tissues and strange organs commingling in a delicate braid. Throughout it all, a sense of peaceful, nurturing light suffused her body. And something else, something that stank like graveyard soil.


    “She’s in pain. Her heart isn’t big enough for her body, and it’s nearly worn out. Someone used death-arts on her, but it just masked the problem.” Focusing on the heart, Anya could feel it - little flickers of agony, like ice pressed against her mind.


    The priest was reading from a holy scroll, something about a promised saint-field of olives and honey. Near the front, a mother hushed a crying infant.


    “Um, fuck.” Renee shook her head, thinking for a moment. “I’m going to try to get inside that door the priest came from. No one in there, right?”


    “No. We can see everyone in the building.”


    “Great. Sit tight.”


    Renee rose, and began sulking around the outer wall of the room. When the priest finished his sermon and the congregants closed their eyes in prayer, Renee broke for the door, disappearing from view.


    “Alright, alright. Enough of my rambling.” The priest’s low voice reverberated through the chapel. “St. Artimus has bestowed her blessing upon us, and we welcome it with open arms. Young ‘uns and mothers first, then the rest of you. Lucie, are you ready? Lucie?”


    He knelt next to the squirrel, and her head rolled over to meet his eyes.


    “So soon, Father? ‘Tis hardly been a day since the last time.” There was a haunting vacuity to her words.


    “It has been a week, Lucie, and I see you are stretched taut.”


    “Oh. Of course it has been a week. We are ready, then.”


    The congregants swarmed forward, forming a loose line. The deer was first, pushing aside a young magpie. He whispered a prayer and knelt before the squirrel, taking the base of her heavy abdomen in his hands.


    She closed her eyes, and a squirming contraction ran down her abdomen. There was a spurt of sticky slime, and an egg emerged into his waiting palms. He broke its membranous surface with his thumbs and poured the contents into his mouth. Milky yolk surrounding a plump grub. The priest anointed his forehead with orange powder.


    I suppose we know why the Blanchets weren’t going hungry.


    “Enjoying the show?”


    Something buzzed on the back of her head, and she felt cold steel slide against her neck.


    “No screaming, no moves, got it? Or my little friends pump you full of venom and I leave you with one less head.” The voice was hoarse.


    Breathe in, breathe out. Focus.


    “I’ll burst your heart.”


    “Do me a favor and try, sweetheart.”


    She cast her mind behind her, expecting to find pliable meat. But there was nothing there. At least, nothing her arts could sense.


    “Not working, is it? Listen, Gardener wants you alive for some saints-forsaken reason, so you’re be a good girl and drop that knife.”


    Anya’s breaths shortened. She could feel the wasp on her head moving, searching for a thin patch of fur.


    “Now.” The knife pressed harder.


    Her arts-sense leaped forward, finding a single point of life behind the iconostasis. Squeezed the muscles in Renee’s hand once, twice, thrice.


    Come on, weasel.


    She let go of the knife. Before her, the communion continued to progress, and the congregants did not even glance at her.


    “Who’s Gardener?”


    “Don’t know, don’t care. But he’s gonna get these bloody marks off me.” Her assailant picked up her knife.


    “Did you kill Mirabel?”


    “See the bull up there? Once the squirrel croaked, he was gonna have your rat buddy replace her. I just moved up the schedule.”


    “May your soul sink to the bottom of Nowhere, and rot there for a thousand years.”


    “Already got a one-way ticket. But Gardener’s gonna take care of that. Yeah, just a little longer, and Gardener’s gonna fix me right up. Now move it. End of the bench, out the doorway.”


    Anya slowly rose, and began to walk to the front door. She heard a faint sound of wood splintering.


    Run away. Run away, and don’t look back.


    “Nice, nice. Easy does it.”


    Crack.


    A section of the roof burst open, and Renee leaped down. Her claws gored into the assailant’s back, while her long, flexible neck snapped forward, driving her canines into his throat. A crunch, as the force of her landing snapped his neck. He fell to the floor, black gunk leaking from his wounds. The wasp on Anya’s head fell off.


    “Renee-”


    “Hunter! Hunter! By the saints, she killed him!!” The young deer screamed, and Anya found the full gaze of the room upon her.


    “Stay back. Thih man is a wicked mahus.” Renee stood, a piece of the assailant’s neck caught in her mouth. Anya saw that he was a marmot in a heavy cloak, with the start of honeycomb on his neck. His hands were necrotic, covered in strange writing. She snatched her knife from his palm.


    “Hey, isn’t she that girl who was already around that back-stabbing rat? Mirabel, wasn’t it?” A sparrow spoke up. Some of the larger congregants shifted to the front of the group.


    “Alright, time to go. Hold on tight.” Renee bit off one of the marmot’s hands, chucked it into her purse, and wrapped her arms around Anya’s torso.


    “What are we-ahhhh!”


    The weasel charged forwards. They crashed through the flimsy wall of the church, and then Anya’s stomach was thrust into her throat as they fell through a cat’s cradle of beams. They struck a sturdy roof two stories down, tumbling over one another as Renee’s claws scrambled for purchase. Anya felt her femur crack.


    Just before they careened over the roof, Renee pulled them to a halt.


    “You ok?” Renee brushed sawdust off her dress.


    “Yearghh.” Anya whimpered. “Need to…”


    She tried to raise her knife, but the blinding pain refused to fade.


    “By the saints, your leg.”


    “Can fix it. Just need blood. Wait, no, what are you-”


    Renee lifted the hand that held the knife, then winced as she drew it across her arm. The blood evaporated, and Anya reformed her bone as quickly as she could. When she could stand, Renee pulled her further onwards, leaping onto a ladder and sliding down to a walkway just ten feet above the black lake at Janusgate’s base.


    “You should have gone. Back to Yvon, away from all this.”


    “Do you have hay for brains? Already got one dead friend, don’t need another.” Renee put her hands on Anya’s shoulders and shook her. “Besides, we’re both in one piece, aren’t we?”


    “Renee,” Anya wrung her ears. “I’d like to go back. There’s something I need to do.”


    Renee frowned.


    “You think you can fix whatever’s wrong with that squirrel.”


    “…yes. Otherwise, I don’t think she’ll last long.”


    “Anya, you’ve got a sweet little soul, and one day it’s going to get you dead in a ditch.”


    “Then-”


    “Not today, though. We lie low for a few hours, then circle back. I know a few taverns that might still be around.”


    “Thank you. By the way, um, when you killed the marmot. You looked like you knew what you were doing.”


    They began to walk together. Out of the corner of her eye, Anya saw something long and sinuous slip through the water below them.


    “Yeah. Mother taught me, and it always came naturally. Get on their back, use your momentum to knock them off balance, get your teeth around their spine, and rip. Only my second time killing for real, though.”


    “Renee, when I tried to use my arts on that marmot, I couldn’t sense him at all.”


    “Meaning?”


    “Like he wasn’t alive at all.”


    “Well, guess I still only got one corpse to my name. I hope St. Math doesn’t hold it against me.”


    “Who was the first?”


    “Don’t want to talk about it.”


    Dawn was coming to Janusgate, and they stepped through what few rays of sunlight filtered through the edifice above them.


    —


    “Ah!”


    The squirrel’s eyelids flicked open, the eyes beneath already locked onto Anya’s face. She was pretty, despite the years of exhaustion stamped onto her face - sunset-red fur, long tufted ears, rich brown eyes flecked with unnatural gold. Her abdomen was substantially slimmer than it had been before the communion.


    “You are not Father Levidis.” The same serene, hollow voice as before.


    “No. You can call me Anna, or Anya, if you’d like.” Anya glanced around the empty church. Renee stood watch at the doorway.


    “You are tired. Should I lay for you? Already they cry out within me. Wishing for union.”


    Close to death, an animal may divert all bodily resources to a final burst of reproduction.


    “You’re hurt. Your heart and lungs are nearly at the point of collapse.”


    “They are. But I feel no pain. I am cradled in light.” The squirrel brought her hands to her abdomen, caressing it as one might a baby.


    “I think I can fix it for you.”


    “Then I would not leave Father Levidis so soon. You may.”


    The squirrel removed her dress without shame. The abdomen began just below her belly button, and the skin where the two halves met was furless and inflamed. It bore a single grey hand-mark.


    “The man who made that mark refused communion. I was saddened.”


    Anya got on her knees next to the squirrel. She could see the eggs filling the squirrel’s abdomen, and the shifting grubs within.


    “What is your name?”


    “Artimus. I had another, once. It was not important, so I forgot.”


    “Artimus, I’m going to expand your ribcage, and then grow your heart and lungs. It shouldn’t hurt, but it might feel strange.”


    Artimus looked to the air just behind Anya.


    “Will that beast help? It does not seem kind.”


    “I keep him on a short leash.”


    This would take a fair amount of blood. She pulled up her dress and stabbed the knife into her calf.


    This is a terrible idea. That thing is a freak, an aberration. Just looking at it from this close is making my eyes hurt.


    “You don’t have eyes. Not real ones, anyways,” Anya whispered.


    Sometimes I need to phrase things in ways your puny mortal brain can comprehend.


    “The offering is made. Take it, and fulfill the duty to which you are bound.”


    The blood evaporated, and Enkidu overlayed with the squirrel. She shivered, clutching her arms to her sides, but said nothing.


    Yikes. Even in the few hours Anya had been away, the squirrel’s condition had noticeably worsened. She would need to work quickly.


    So much of how she’s put together is wrong, slapdash. There shouldn’t be a major artery there, it doesn’t make any sense. But I’m quick, and clever, and if we move things like that…pizdets, no, we’re losing blood pressure…there, that’s stable. By St. Georgei, how did any of these creations last more than a day?


    Slowly, Anya performed her task. She kept hoping she would fall into a comfortable rhythm, enjoy the power weaving around her fingertips, but she felt only creeping dread. She could sense that there was even more wrong beneath the squirrel’s torso, where her ovaries and uterus had been multiplied into a snarl of egg-bloated ducts, but she dared not touch the insectoid parts of the squirrel’s anatomy.


    “Alright, I’m going to enlarge your heart now,” Anya said. “Flesh, progress beyond your limits, and perfect thy form.”


    Artimus’ upper torso swelled, and her heartbeats became slower, more powerful. She exhaled, and smiled. Several of her teeth were missing.


    “It feels better. I can see the light in your heart.”


    “Good. Just a little cleanup, and…there.”


    “All finished?”


    A voice boomed, and Anya leapt, twisting in the air to see the bull priest standing on the staircase to the basement. She had become so engrossed that she had not noticed his approach.


    “Stay away from her!” Renee dropped to a four-limbed stance, ready to spring forward.


    “Hide those claws. I have no intent to harm you.” The bull sat on the wood floor. He was tall, at least a foot taller than Yvon, but his face and neck were gaunt.


    “Did you transform her?” Anya asked.


    “I opened the way for St. Artimus. I could never do it as well as my Father, but I must try, over and over. Eloise, the squirrel, she volunteered. Wanted her sister’s kits to have food.” The bull spoke slowly, with a thick accent.


    “We saw the room in the basement,” Renee interjected.


    The bull raised his hands.


    “Kill me if you like. You are certainly capable of it. Let the saint decide if I am worthy of her mercy.”


    “Who was the marmot?” Renee asked.


    “A chimera. Not unlike Eloise, I think. I do not know how he found us. He was lost, hurting. He offered to take away Eloise’s pain. Fix my failures. I knew he could not be honest. But I acquiesced.”


    “Fine. Anya, are you done?” Renee stood up.


    “Yes. I did what I could, but I…can’t predict how much longer her body will hold. Goodbye, Artimus.” Anya curtseyed.


    “So soon? Goodbye, rabbit.” The squirrel raised a hand and slowly waved.


    Renee faced the priest. Anya saw that the weasel’s hands were clenched.


    “You made a mistake, and Mirabel is dead, her soul forever lost to her kin. But wallowing in grief will get you nowhere. Stand up. You owe that much to the living.”


    Renee took Anya’s hand and led her out, into the bright-orange glare of the Janusgate sun.