Free The Devouring God by James Kendley

party. The eighth shouted at them. All at once, the jaws of the seven popped open, each man’s lips peeling back in a painful rictus. They raised their eyes as one, still passing the knife with chilling precision. Moments before, they had been a ragtag band of quarrelsome farmers, and now they moved as a single creature. As the eighth fell silent and rose to back away from his fellows, the seven set upon him. They quickly overpowered him and pinned him to the sand. While he still lived, they began to separate his flesh from his bones with the stone knife.
    The cameraman changed vantage points several times to capture the smallest details of this ritual. The grinning farmers bathed unconcernedly in the spewing blood. The blade passed from hand to hand as rapidly as before save for quick, dipping slices into the meat of their victim. Each farmer engaged his gruesome tasks with both hands, each slicing skin, retracting muscle, and restraining the victim for his fellows in turn, and together they were as efficient and impassive as laundry maids folding sheets. When a bone became disarticulated from the quivering carcass, the stone knife passed on as the bearer of the bone quickly picked away any remaining flesh, severing muscles or trailing ligaments with his teeth before licking the bone spotlessly clean.
    The cannibalism, even though there was a great deal of flesh consumed in the process, seemed incidental to this ceremonial cleansing. Even painstaking processes like the disarticulation of the small bones in the hands and feet and the disassembly of the cranium were performed so quickly and efficiently that the knife itself was always in motion, always there when the next bone was in need of freedom from the flesh surrounding it. In the end, the brains were dumped unceremoniously on the heap of hide and organs stretched in a rough five-­pointed star on the sand—­one hideous smear for each appendage and one for the flayed-­open head. The bones, cloven from the flesh and cleaned in a specific order perhaps relayed from the knife itself, were interlocked to form a cantilevered platform on which the cleaned blade finally was placed.
    The seven, blackened with the drying blood and offal of their flayed comrade, knelt before their hideous new altar. Their gaze fell then upon the camera operator. The seven stood in unison and the nearest retrieved the stone blade from its ghastly cradle. The camera shook but the cameraman held firm as the seven advanced. Suddenly, bright red blossoms sprouted on their heads and torsos, new and urgent growths in the blackened field of dried blood. They fell as one, shot to pieces.
    Immediately a spry old man in priestly robes, accompanied by a young man in an Imperial Navy officer’s uniform, stepped into the scene. The old man, the hems of his robes instantly stained with blood, grasped the knife with fire tongs and tried to wrest it from the dead farmer’s grip. The fingers would not release. The old man pulled, lifting the dead man half off the ground. The farmer’s head lolled on the sand, but even in death, his lips were pulled back in that horrid grin.
    Finally, the officer drew his sword and struck off the farmer’s hand. The old priest unceremoniously dumped the knife into the stone box, hand and all. As he hauled the lid back onto the box, he indicated where the officer should cut the ropes, and the officer complied. As the priest turned away, the officer cut him down with a single stroke. The old man folded to the ground, murdered too quickly to register surprise. The officer deftly flicked the blood from his blade and sheathed his weapon. He gestured wordlessly to the cameraman.
    Takuda sat up blinking. “What’s a rosette?”
    â€œA sort of floral pattern that loops out and comes back through the middle, like a chrysanthemum,” Mori said. “I had to look it up. Strange character combination.”
    â€œSo it’s possession. This