The carriage rattled into a fever-dream of a town, where vendors screeched like carrion birds over their wares: "Sweet cakes! Sixteen silvers for a taste of heaven's crumb!"
"Madame! Madame! Deep-fried steak—six silvers, six sins forgiven!"
A warped wooden plank lay sunken into the muddy road, its chipped letters bleeding rust: WELCOME TO VALLEI VAN VLAMMEN. The orphans pressed their gaunt faces to the carriage grates, breath fogging the iron bars. Brigitte's fingers trembled at the sight of a tavern spilling drunken laughter, its patrons' teeth glinting like bone dice.
"Farmers Association Reserve Only!" Barbed wire coiled across the road, guarded by four men whose faces seemed carved from spoiled pork. Their leader—a mountain of muscle and scar tissue—stepped forward, his ax glinting. "State yer business," he growled.
Sister Everline descended, her wimple starched to a blade's edge. The guard's sneer softened as she tilted her face upward, pale as communion bread. "God's work," she murmured, pressing two tobacco-stained dollar bills into his palm. The wire uncurled like a serpent repenting.
Beyond it sprawled Marcus Valentine's fiefdom—acres of blight masquerading as bounty. Wheat swayed with blackened husks, tomatoes split like festering sores, and garlic bulbs oozed a sticky resin that reeked of corpse breath. Workers hunched like beetles, loading spoiled harvests into trucks marked VALENTINE & SONS PURVEYORS.
"Sister Everline!" Marcus Valentine waddled forward, his belly straining against a waistcoat embroidered with rotting sunflowers. Sweat gleamed in the folds of his neck, pooling above a cravat crusted with old wine. "Fifteen years, and you've not aged a day! Unlike my cabbages—ho ho!"
Sister Everline's smile could have chilled hell. "Neither have your jokes, Marcus."
He herded the children past fields where onions sprouted tentacle-like roots. "My great-great-grandsire Marcus Valentine IX claimed this land after burning its witches. Their curses, our blessing!" He gestured to a shriveled tomato. "See how the Lord provides?"
Lila's nails dug into her palms. Every crate overflowed with rot—grain webbed with mold, potatoes hollowed by maggots.
"Sir Marcus, are you rich?" Child 97 blurted.
"Rich?" Marcus patted his gut, its jiggle echoing through the silent fields. "In faith, yes! In coin?" He winked. "The Lord hates a frugal shepherd."
The farmhouse loomed—a bloated structure sagging under ivy that pulsed like diseased veins. Nana awaited them in the shadowed foyer, her spine bent like a scythe.
"Marcus Valentine!" She brandished a rolling pin. "Drunk again, are we? These are children, not draft mules!"
"St. Agatha's lambs, Nana!" Marcus wheezed. "Here to... ah... bask in our humble harvest!"
Nana's milky eye fixed on Child 09. "You've not aged a day since '05."
He crossed himself. "The Lord preserves His tools."
Nana smiled and led them to a banquet hall where moth-eaten banners sagged from the rafters. The table groaned under platters of maggot-riddled rice and mutton gray as storm clouds. The children ate like penitents at their last meal—tiny bites held on their tongues until the fat dissolved. Brigitte's tears dripped onto her fork.
Lila alone paused, her gaze snagging on Marcus whispering to Sister Everline by the whiskey cabinet: "This batch scrawnier than '05. The Administrator's won't pay top dollar for—"
Sister Everline silenced him with a glare.
Thorns of Communion:
The wheat field breathed corruption. Each stalk bowed under the weight of rust-black kernels, their splits oozing a sap that reeked of vinegar. Nana's cane crackled through the rows like a whip, her shadow stretching monstrous in the midday sun.
"Bend lower, maggots!" she barked. "God rewards suffering before skill!"
Lila clawed at the blighted soil, her fingers threading through roots fat with tumors. Beside her, Brigitte knelt like a penitent, hacking at weeds with a rusted sickle.
"If we fill ten baskets," she whispered, "d'you think they'll let us taste the mutton again?"
"Mutton's rat," Lila said, tossing a worm-eaten onion into her basket. "Rancid. Like everything here."
A cry pierced the air. Child 97 collapsed, his cheek split by Nana's cane.
"Devil's idler!" Nana hissed. "You'll thank me when Judgment burns the sluggards first!"
Brigitte shuddered. "She's worse than the Headmaster's hound."
Nana's cane halted before Child 142. "You." A gnarled finger hovered. "Smuggling sins in your cuff?"
"Dirt," He lied, staring at the old woman's milky left eye. "Only dirt."
Nana leaned closer, her breath sour with communion wine. "I've buried a hundred liars in these rows. Pray your dirt doesn't bury you."
The cane moved on.
Nana's cane struck a stone, her screech scattering crows.
At dusk, the orphans limped to the barn, baskets sagging with decay. Brigitte clung to Lila, her fevered whispers frantic.
"Take me with you. To Sernet. I'll split the labor, I'll—"
"No."
"Why?"
Nana barred the barn door, her silhouette a jagged scar against the moon. "Sleep light, little lambs," she crooned. "Tomorrow's harvest is hungrier."
Sinners' Hymn at the River Styx:
Lila moved through the fields like a shadow puppeteered by rot. She stripped a scarecrow of its moth-eaten hood, the burlap reeking of mildew and failed harvests. Its straw fingers brushed her cheek—farewell, sister—as she vanished into the bruised twilight.
The guards snored at their posts, their breaths rumbling like a landslide. The barbed wire gleamed wetly, its barbs hung with tufts of fur and what might have been hair.
VALLEI VAN VLAMMEN slept fitfully. Tavern signs creaked like gallows ropes. A drunkard swayed past, vomiting into a fountain choked with dead leaves. Lila pressed herself into an alley where the walls wept algae, her pulse syncing with the drip of brackish water.
A foot scuffed stone.
She lunged, slamming the pursuer into mud churned by rats. Brigitte's hood fell back, her face moon-pale beneath the filth.
"Why?" Lila hissed, pinning Brigitte's wrists.
"Same reason you stole the scarecrow's shroud!" Brigitte smiled.
The bonfire hissed like a serpent in the riverside junkyard. Five figures hunched around it, their faces carved by firelight into masks of ruin:
The Leper: Skin flaked like birch bark, fingers melted to stubs.
The Opium Queen: Pupils swallowed by black, a silver spoon dangling from her neck.
The One-Armed Prophet: A sleeve pinned with fishhooks, his stump weeping.
The Freckled Widow: Eyes like smashed garnets, lips chapped bloody.
The Forger: A nose split by old violence, ink stains mapping his knuckles.
They skewered eels on rusted spikes, the flesh sizzling with a sweetness that clung to Lila's teeth.
"Your turn," rasped the Leper. Ash drifted from his collar.
Brigitte adopted a nasal whine, fingers fluttering like a sparrow's wings. "Laundress, me! Scrubbed the blood from a bishop's sheets. Saw names in red… ledgers, debts. They burned my shed."
The Widow nodded, her freckles pooling in the firelight like old blood. "Eyes lead to sin. Sin leads to the river."
"And you?" The Leper's stumps gestured to Lila.
She let her voice curdle, thick with an accent from the capital's gutters. "Silk model for Monsieur Levant. Watched him put a bullet in a girl's throat for smiling crooked. Hunted like a stag since."
Brigitte stifled a gasp. A lie, yet truer than the girl knew.
"Fish don't swim this river," Lila said, eyeing the eels' glassy eyes.
The Prophet rotated his skewer. "Venture the deeper sea, little ghost. Where the drowned bob like apples."
The Forger spat into the flames. "You stink of Rev. J. Morgan of Montreal piety. Why's a pretty corpse like you sniffing Sernet?"
Dawn clawed at the horizon as Lila and Brigitte crept back. The scarecrow's hood hung heavier now, its stink seeping into their scalps.
"You lied," Brigitte whispered.
"So did you."