‘I want you to know, Job, I hold nothing against you.’
Job couldn’t see anything but darkness. And yet, he felt it twist, warp. It spun and stretched and seemed to pull at his guts, tear at the lining of his stomach. He heard a clattering. Sand scattering on metal. The air was cold and sharp as knives.
‘I will never hold anything, ever, against you. Who Eats Poems can restore more than a leg, after all. You are a hero, for this, Job.’
Job was half certain this is what death felt like. His joints felt all stopped up by concrete. He might have been wrought from a single, unmoving block of iron. When he breathed, his entire chest rattled. He was burning, aching. And the icy breeze battered against him.
Elder Nettle had wasted no time in dragging Job to the maw of Who Eats Poems. Two Tatterist guardsmen, spared from the chase in the walls, were with him. One of them had been cuffed to Job. The tunnelgun hung from his belt.
Dragging became very literal. Job had spent what felt like three long days doing nothing but sprinting. His head was squeezing in on itself, like it was becoming an hourglass shape. Fearful adrenaline pumped uselessly through him, flooding nowhere. He was a mass. His legs left long grooves in the sand.
‘Here we are.’
The pit devoured moonlight. Its sides shone like fish scales, purple, light blue, silver. Bits of junk, or slithering sheets of sand, gleaming. It lowered, a small funnel, then dropped, straight, into darkness. God’s throat. The wind whistled as it careened into it. Job clanked, scraped, against the sand.
‘Traditionally?’ asked a guardsman, behind.
‘I think it depends on how much he will let us,’ said Elder Nettle. He looked down to Job. Slumped over, practically dead already. A wretched sight. Elder Nettle was quiet, looking at him, for a bit. ‘What think you, Job, of having your head cut off?’ he said, cheerily as he could.
Job pondered that. ‘Fuck yourself,’ he answered. Aches, throbbing all over. But, he had no nerves. What was aching? Bent circuitry? Dents in sheet metal? Where was the pain coming from?
‘Fuck yourself to the moon and back,’ he said, after a few moments of catching his breath.
Elder Nettle craned his head back and inhaled the night air. Be bold. Don’t shy away from what’s necessary. One man, to get them back on their feet. That was all it would take. It was not a return to the old days, of course. That would be–barbaric, of course. No doubt. A dip, was all. A quick dip.
‘Just… chuck him in, then.’
‘Chuck me in,’ Job grumbled. ‘Christ.’
‘That’s an old swear, Job,’ said Nettle. ‘Are you a Christian?’
‘Don’t try and small talk me right as you’re going to feed me to your god,’ Job hissed. ‘I don’t like you remotely.’
‘That’s fine,’ said Nettle. He gazed over the horizon, over the pit. The guardsmen hung awkwardly to the sides. One of them, at the back, was seated, looking into the sand.
Job had no bones and no skin and no veins. His brain was all wiring and plating. Electrons flicking.
‘Well?’ said Job.
‘Y-yes,’ said Nettle. ‘Let’s throw him, Pinnick.’
So went the steady march down the slopes of the pit. Sand flowing around debris. A chunk of metal dancing down, flipping, plummeting.
Job remembered, finally, that he felt nothing. That there was nothing to him but dull numbness, and the cold it brought. All sensations did not so much fade as resolve into never having been, at all. The wind flapped against him. He didn’t feel it.
He twisted. It was a sudden, mechanical force. Actuators wailed, jutted to full power. Elder Nettle was flung away, stumbling, rattling. He shrieked, clambered up the slope for safety, grasping handfuls of sand.
Pinnick’s eyes were wide. He hung onto Job, desperately. The ground lurched, groaned under them. Job gasped, and twisted again. Pinnick let go suddenly, stumbling back.
Job swung his fist into Pinnick’s mouth. More debris crumbled beneath. It was a rattling, a singing. Orchestral, thoroughly. Something that used to be part of an engine gave way beneath Pinnick and he slipped, sword clattering in the sand.
Job’s vocabulary decreased in that moment. It blurred into a scrambling mess and all he could fit from his mouth was ‘gun’ and ‘fuck’. He wrestled with Pinnick, tugging at the tunnelgun, when he, wailing, ripped it from Job’s hands, flinging it over the hill, disappearing.
Job gasped again, punched Pinnick in the mouth, again.
He spun around to face one of the other guardsmen. He circled Job steadily. The moonlight shone on his armour, his sword. He loomed over Job.
‘What are you gonna do?’ slurred Job, drifting aside as the ground beneath him slid away. ‘Stab me?’
The guardsman stabbed Job. It was a swift, sudden lunge, and Job swore and twisted aside, heard the metal screech, felt a sensation of a long scratch digging into his side. He felt blood flowing. Job lunged, wrapped his fingers suddenly around the blade.
‘I’m made of metal,’ he exhaled, tugging at the sword. Bleeding, blood flowing, warm and fat and liquid. The guardsman dug his feet into the earth, bent forwards and–Job kicked him in the shin. The guardsman gritted his teeth, stumbled as the debris he stood on swum aside. And Job tore the sword from his hands, hissing to himself. He looked down, over his arm, at his stomach. Metal, just metal, nothing more. Lines of pale light in the curves, scratches, that was all. And the debris under him slipped aside, and he clattered clumsily down.
‘Job!’ Elder Nettle stood atop the slope, far back, so only his upper body was visible.
‘What?!’ Job shouted, clambering upwards, kicking away a grasping hand.
Elder Nettle’s face was pale and chalky. It was long, eyes wide. He stammered momentarily, lost. ‘Stop that!’
Job clambered towards him, flinging sprays of sand aside. The swirling wind danced against Job’s back and he heard, again: Mercy. Mercy.
‘You have–two gods, here,’ Job spat, dragging himself up the slope. Nettle was backing away, leaning on his feet to look for Pinnick and the other guardsman.
‘What are you talking about?’ said Nettle. He was unarmoured, dressed in his office robes. He pulled a tiny dagger from within his cloak.
‘Who Eats Poets. You idiot,’ Job wheezed. He turned, glanced at the clambering guardsmen behind him. ‘Who Eats Poems isn’t going to eat me. You’re sacrificing me to that.’
‘There’s only one God,’ retorted Nettle, fabric flapping over his face.
‘Don’t–give me the stupid statement of-’
‘Don’t you talk back to an elder,’ Nettle hissed right back. ‘Who Eats Poets is the old name of God. Back when we fed him heads and we actually had things. But he changed, and so did we. How–do you even know that?’
Job heard something rattling behind him. He spun around, just in time to throw himself back. Pinnick’s sword cut the air, ran a line over the front of Job’s coat. He was still crouched, arising from the slope, ready to strike again, and Job brought his foot down onto his head. He hit the debris, crunched.
Not my name, not my name, murmured the swirling wind. It was low, under the rattling and breathing and clambering. But they all heard it. And they all froze, turned, gazed at nothingness.
A prophet, I beg. To beget my purposes. The sound of fabric flapping in the breeze. A figure in the sides of their vision. A leg. A torn cloak, waving in shadows.
A body. A form. The last one faithful. The last one to remember my name…
‘Who Eats Poets,’ said Elder Nettle.
‘Who Eats Poets,’ said Job.
‘Who Eats Poets,’ said the guardsmen.
Elder Nettle, who had fallen to his knees, whose cheeks glistened with tears: ‘Who Eats Poets!’
A dizziness passed over them. Shadows leapt, pranced from the pit. A shadowy fuzziness straddled the sides of their eyes, slunk in the air.
Job, consciousness swimming, saw Elder Nettle swirling. Growing in strange parabolas, like a shifting of perspective, curving, bending. The ground shifted around him. Sand and debris danced aside for him. Job saw him, tilted, curved, crescent-shaped, in the air. His features pulled out, like something poorly photoshopped, creases in the fabric clumsily stretched. And his face extended upwards. And the tears rolling down his cheeks, long, dripping, warping.
Job saw masses of curving flesh sway towards him, felt them wrap around his neck. He was being grabbed by fingers that swept around him multiple times in spirals, and an arm that bent outwards, inwards, light ringing strangely around its edges. He was hoisted into the air.
CRACK.
‘Who Eats Poets,’ sang Job, spinning to the earth and landing in a crashing, dizzy heap. He saw the hole punched in the things chest, saw the proportions of it. Saw the way it revealed the stars inside its stretching, elongating contours.
‘Job. Job.’
Job felt, again, someone grab his shoulders. He was, once more, being dragged. His brain had turned liquid, sloughing, flowing all honeylike and lumpen. It solidified, steadily, however. The stars stopped spinning. He felt the ground beneath him.
‘What is this, Job?’ asked Linda.
‘My tunnelgun,’ Job answered.
‘Not…’ Linda murmured, gesturing vaguely ahead. ‘I mean… Nettle.’
Elder Nettle, stretched into the air, crescent-shaped. The moonlight threw long streaks over his body. The light spun, swept on him, flew off his edges. The hole in his chest roiled and danced. Bloody smatterings of meat were folding, knitting together. He was still. Breathing. Fathoming. And, curiously, he turned around. His every movement sent the curvature of his body swinging wildly. He shifted into strange parabolas, bent, rolled.
Linda pointed, fired the tunnelgun. CRACK. It swung back, snapped into her wrist, tilted its face upwards. Nettle waved an arm, and a mound of debris exploded metres to the side.
‘Enough of that,’ murmured Nettle. His mouth opened into a great long slit, but the words, his voice, were uncannily unchanged. But for a certain dullness.
And Linda fired again. And again. Explosions of sand. Chunks of debris flying. Great cylindrical holes in the ground. He took a lazy step, and junk flowed around him, slid aside, collapsing down the sides of the pit.
‘The slope,’ Job mumbled.
‘The slope,’ Linda agreed.
CRACKCRACKCRACK
It all roared with a groaning clicking creaking rattling like old bones snapping. The ground folded in on itself, crumpled downwards and tumbled. Something had awakened. Some thin fine thread had been cut. Nettle collapsed to his knees, sunk, was dragged back. Job, swaying, still dizzy, felt himself dragged, too. Debris pulled away from under him. Sand flowed. Job and Linda scrambled, desperately, up.
There was a horrible screeching of metal, and then a snapping, and then more screeching. Job slipped, grabbed another lump of ground that slipped and rolled away. He glanced back, saw an elongated arm swinging in the air, before suddenly vanishing. It all screamed and increased in swirling volume until–
It was silent. Particles of sand hovered in the air. Metal screeched, as Job was dragged, facefirst, across sand, debris.
Nobody was really sure what the consequences of feeding a god to another god would really be. It had ended up, at the very least, in a sort of divine indigestion. Every elder in town awoke with the exact same resolution that the Feeding ought not take place today, perhaps even this month.
Theologically speaking, it was a confusing time.
The flapping, mothbitten scraps that had been Who Eats Poets, who had devoured the chopped heads of artists and children, whose bodies were laid in rows under the old offices, were dead, of course. Or, rather, as dead as a god could really get. Scraps could be torn into smaller scraps, could be torn into patches, torn into strands. Job supposed even then, floating in sunlight, any mote of dust could be its remains.
The cult wars stopped, at least for a bit. More conflict did not seem like a helpful addition, at that particular time. The Tatterists waned, faded, wobbled. People stepped up to reform it, and those reforms were reformed, and so on. The clattering in the walls was mostly kids feet, then.
And a day of mourning passed, for Elder Nettle. Poems were dedicated to him. Flowers were dug out out of crevices, from under rusted wrecks and torn wheels. He was an intensely flawed, and rather too murderous man, but, still, a pillar of the community. Everything he did, he did for Who Eats Poems. He represented almost the perfect adherent. Apart from the murder stuff.
‘What does that say about… us?’ Linda had asked, afterwards. ‘Us’. A floaty, vague us. It enshrouded, floated out, encompassed. Hovered on the town.
‘Suppose you just need more people around to keep you on the right track,’ said Job. ‘Uh. You know. Against human sacrifice.’
So it went.
Job stayed for days further. It was a stressful, awkward time. Job wasn’t able to appreciate that he was unconscious for most of it, being unconscious and all.
‘Did you really tell Nettle you could kill me, when you scouted me out back then?’ Job had asked, packing his things, stuffing his new supplies into his bag.
‘Yeah,’ Linda answered, sewing a patch onto Anh’s bag. A tear had worked onto it, somehow, at some point.
‘Oh. I thought he was threatening me.’
‘Nah. I could’ve. Still can.’ She nodded at Job. Grinned.
Job tried to grin back.
So he left. Hopped from car to car. They thinned, steadily. They were gilded in the evening light. And he slid past them, short clanking canyons. And the flies buzzing at midday, and the crackling of sand in the breeze on windows.
In the evenings, godlings trundled across the skyline. With warping limbs and hulking, stomping legs. Arched backs black and edges gleaming. Some of them even scraped against the clouds.
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