I wake chewing on someone else's tongue.
It is thick, rubbery, half-rotted, and it has been in my mouth long enough that the taste has become part of me. A dead man's weight pins me to the frozen mud; his bowels burst across my stomach sometime in the night and dried into a stiff, cracking shell. When I try to breathe, the tongue shifts, brushing the back of my throat like a worm looking for a new home. I spit it out. It lands on my cheek and sticks there, glued by blood and snot.
The tent is a tomb.
The canvas above me is torn; gray, diseased light leaks through like pus from an infected wound. My stump throbs in perfect rhythm with something older, deeper, something that has been waiting beneath every battlefield since the first man learned to kill his brother. The bandage is soaked through with yellow-green rot. When I move, the scab tears and the raw end of the bone grinds against the cloth. The pain is no longer pain. It is a mouth, and it is starving.
They kick the flap open.
Two soldiers. One has no nose—just a wet red hole that whistles when he breathes. The other has eyes the color of old piss. They grab me by the hair and drag me into the open. My scalp rips; warm blood runs down my neck and mixes with the crusted socket where my right eye used to be. The empty hole weeps a constant thin fluid that stings the branded flesh beneath.
Outside, the camp is a single, endless scream that never quite reaches the air.
Men sit in the mud rocking, clawing their faces raw. One soldier has peeled his own lips back to the gums with his fingernails so he can never close his mouth around the screams again. Another has sawed his left foot off with a bayonet because, he says, the pain in my missing hand crawled into his ankle during the night. They left him where he fell. The crows are already inside him, burrowing through the soft parts of his belly while he watches with dull, accepting eyes.
No one stops them. Mercy is a word that died here long ago.
They shove me toward the latrine trench.
The trench is a living mouth.
Thirty feet long, eight feet deep, brimming with liquefied men. The surface is a thick skin of scum and fat. Arms float upright like pale reeds. Faces bob just beneath, eyes boiled milky white, mouths frozen open as if still begging. Every few seconds a bubble rises and pops with a wet, obscene sound. The smell is not a smell. It is a living thing that crawls into your lungs, lays eggs, and waits for you to cough them up.
A sergeant with a necklace of dried human ears hands me the stirring pole.
It is slick with shit and fat and things that used to be fingers. I have one hand. The pole slips. He laughs—a sound like knives dragged across bone—and grinds the butt of his spear into my stump until the scab tears wide and the raw bone grinds against wood. Pus spurts. The pain is white, then black, then a color that has no name.
"Stir, noble whore," he says. "Stir until the meat loosens."
I stir.
The bodies shift. One corpse rolls over and stares up at me with my own face—same cheekbones, same branded boar seared into the cheek. Only his eye socket is empty and clean, as if whatever took it was polite enough to wipe its mouth afterward. I keep stirring. The pole catches on something soft. A child's torso, no older than ten, uniform still clinging to the bones. The face is gone. Something ate it.
Something grabs the pole from below.
A dead hand—black, bloated, nails split—closes around the shaft and pulls. Hard. I am dragged forward until my knees hit the edge and my face breaks the surface. The filth closes over my head.
Underneath, it is warm.
Underneath, the dead are still moving. They press against me, soft as rotten fruit. One corpse still has its eyes; they open and stare into my empty socket as if looking for the twin that was burned out. Cold fingers slide into my mouth, my nose, the wet ruin of my eye. They taste me the way a tongue tastes a cracked tooth. Another hand finds the raw end of my stump and pushes inside, curling around the bone like a lover who never learned the word no.
I thrash. My lungs burn. I claw upward and break the surface vomiting black water, someone else's teeth, and a thick ribbon of my own bile that stinks of copper and rot.
The guards are pissing into the trench while they laugh. One aims directly for my face. The stream is hot, then cold, then just another layer of filth that will never wash off.
They leave me there until the sun is high and the trench steams like a cauldron.
Hours later they drag me out. My skin is pruned and gray. Leeches the size of my thumb cling to my neck and chest. One has burrowed into the branded flesh on my cheek and pulses with every heartbeat.
They throw me a crust of bread hard enough to crack a tooth. I eat it anyway. The crumbs taste of ash and old blood.
Evening comes without ceremony.
They chain us—twenty cripples, madmen, and men who simply stopped speaking—to the wagon wheel for the night. Iron cuffs bite into my remaining wrist until the skin splits and the bone shows white. The man beside me has chewed his own tongue in half; blood bubbles with every breath and drips onto my shoulder. The man on my other side is already dead, but the body keeps jerking because the rats are eating him from the inside out. I can hear them chewing.
Across the fire, Commander Moloch is skinning a deserter alive.
The man is young—nineteen, maybe twenty. His screams are high and animal. Moloch works slowly, peeling long strips from thigh to ankle, nailing each strip to a spear shaft while the boy watches his own skin flap in the wind. When the legs are done, Moloch starts on the arms. The boy's voice gives out halfway through. Only a wet clicking remains.
Moloch notices me watching. He smiles the way a wolf smiles at a three-legged deer.
"Tomorrow," he says, licking blood from his knife, "we open the old barrow. The one the sappers cracked last week. Something down there still moves. You'll be first inside, Count's son. One hand, one eye—perfect for the narrow places."
He tosses something. It lands in my lap with a wet thud.
My severed hand.
They dug it up from my father's courtyard, pickled it in brine and piss, and carried it here in a jar. The fingers are swollen black, the nails split and curling, but the Veal signet ring still gleams on the smallest finger. A note is pinned through the palm with an iron nail driven all the way through.
For when you learn to crawl again.
With love,
Father
The paper is soaked in old blood. Some of it is mine.
I stare at it until the fingers seem to curl, beckoning.
Night falls like a coffin lid slammed shut.
The chained men weep, pray, or try to bite through their own wrists. One succeeds. The arterial spray is warm across my face. It tastes like home.
I sit very still and listen.
The heartbeat beneath the earth is louder now. It knows my name. It has always known my name. It is patient. It is proud. It is coming.
And for the first time since the hatchet fell, I smile with the half of my face that still can. The brand splits wider; pus and blood run together like tears.
Let them open the barrow.
Let them send me into the dark.
The dark has already sent something up.
It is wearing my skin.
It is learning my hate.
And tomorrow, when they shove me down those stairs of bone and rot, it will open its eye inside my chest and show them what a second son can become when every gentle thing in him is flayed away one strip at a time.
The trench keeps its dead.
Tomorrow, I start collecting interest.
.