by Samuel Sykes
She stalked off silently, swiftly, leaving him alone with his conscience.
Could have gone better.
True, he admitted.
She might hit you less if you actually talked to her, you know.
That sounds really hard.
Good point. Want a drink?
Wanted one, yes. Needed one, yes. He needed many things at that moment. The most important of which became apparent when he looked back, toward the distant huts and the figure standing amongst them.
Bralston stood out in the open, unabashed, unafraid. A Librarian did not need to hide. This Librarian, however, didn’t bother to hide many things. The stare he fixed upon Denaos among them.
Denaos, too, did not bother to hide his stare. In the moment they met, the brief moment before Denaos turned and stalked into the distant forest, there was a brief trial. Accusation, confession, sentence, all handed down in the span of a blink.
And Denaos knew what he needed most, then. In the feel of heavy leather on his wrist and in the sound of feet crunching upon sand, following him into the forest, he knew.
This, at least, would be easier.
FOUR
THE DEAD MIND
She was floating, drifting upon a current that seemed to obey her without a word. Through the fish that had thinned from colorful curtains to ragged schools, over coral that was dying out and becoming barren desert underneath Lenk’s feet, still stubbornly bound to the sandy floor.
But no matter how he changed his pace or tried to navigate through the coral, she remained always above him. Her shadow was colder than he had expected.
“You’re not talking,” he said.
A condition she was apparently not prepared to break with his stunning observation.
“If you don’t talk, this all seems slightly more insane,” Lenk continued, throwing up his hands. “Because now I have to start looking for meaning everywhere.”
He swept his stare around the sea floor. The coral had vanished, leaving nothing but the most stubborn outcroppings of rock. The sole fish was a lone, ragged creature: something that vaguely looked like a bloated axe-head if bloated axe-heads were capable of eating disorders and stares that belonged to veterans, whores, and herb-addicts. Everything about the creature suggested something that had no business existing and being keenly aware of it as it slowly swam away from decent sea-going society.
Lenk blinked, staring blankly. “Okay, this one is going to take some doing.” He held out his hand, as if to grasp the meaning implied by this finned degenerate. “All right … it looks like a … what? Some kind of hoe? So, it’s suggesting I invest a future of farming … fish?” He furrowed his brow, looking thoughtful. “I guess that’s not the weirdest way this could—”
“Ask me.”
Her voice struck him across the cheek. A shadow stared down at him, not nearly dark enough to hide the merciless blue of her stare.
His words tasted like salt. “Ask you what?”
Her glare and the abrupt end to his heartbeat suggested they both knew the answer. It didn’t start again until the words had pulled themselves from his mouth.
“Who are you?”
She shook her head. His heart moved under her gaze, trying to avoid being seen behind an immodest curtain of flesh. He wanted to say anything else. If he didn’t say it, though, someone else would.
And they would speak much louder than she could.
“What do I have to do?” he asked.
“Kill.”
“I don’t want to.”
“I wasn’t talking about your friends.”
“Neither was I.”
She looked inside him. What she saw caused him to turn his head down. He was not lying.
“You listened,” she whispered, “to the demons.”
Neither was she.
He had listened when the demons had spoken to him. Specifically, when the demon spoke to him. Ulbecetonth, the Kraken Queen, Mother Deep; he could still hear her voice coming from the faint place his conscience should speak from. And like a conscience should, she begged him not to.
Not to interfere with her plans, not to embark on his errand to retrieve the tome, not to spill the blood of her faithful and her children. Not to force her to listen to the cries of her dying children as they bled out on his sword.
If he let his mind empty, in the moments between his breathing and the voices talking in his head, he could hear them, too. They cried so loud. And so often.
“Why?” she asked.
“She spared my life,” Lenk said, looking at the earth as though his reasons lay in the sand. “She told me things that made me feel better.” He tried to ignore her stare. “She told me I could avoid this … this whole thing with the tome, with them, with … with her.”
“And so you want to kill them, anyway? But not the demons? Lenk, how—”
“I AM BREATHING UNDERWATER.” He scowled at her, heart pounding. “This is the third time this has happened to me. The last time involved a giant set of teeth in the earth that tried to argue with a voice in my head that’s kept me from trying to kill myself while also telling me to kill a woman I really want to talk to despite the fact that she left me for dead so she could cavort with a headhunting, hideskinning, green-skinned, long-eared son of a bitch, so forgive me if this sounds a little complicated.”
He rubbed his temples. His head hurt. Suddenly, there was so much pressure. His mouth tasted of salt. The world, this world, began to move beneath him while he stood still. He felt uncomfortably warm as her shadow shifted off of him.
All this, though, he barely noticed.
“I don’t want to do this anymore,” he said. “I don’t want to kill people, any people. I don’t want to feel naked without my sword. I don’t want to feel right when I’m covered in blood and I don’t want to live without—”
The massive hole he only noticed when his heels went over the edge.
He scrambled away from it, falling to hands and knees as he whirled about. The coral and its colors were far behind him. The sea floor was only barely beneath him. Before him, this world had simply stopped, disappearing into a vast and endless blue.
“Where are we?” he asked.
“Hell,” someone replied. Was that her?
“Why?”
“You brought us here.”
“No.” He rose to his feet, shakily. His head was spinning. His heart was thundering. His words drowned in his ears. “No more riddles. No more crypticisms. No more interpretations. You came to me. You brought me here. You have to tell me what to do.”
“Jaga.”
“What of it?”
“Duty.”
“What duty?”
“What we do is not our choice. We weren’t born with that. We’re not lucky people, Lenk.”
“People? Do you mean you and I or … are there more of us?” He clutched his head, trying to dig into the flesh of his scalp and extract the memories. “There was a man … man in ice. I remember … I remember. It’s me. My memories, my friends, my voice …”
“Ours.”
He was floating now, too. This world disappeared. His world was at the surface, far away. That world opened up beneath him. He was nowhere.
No more heart, no more head with heavy thoughts to weigh him down. In their place grew something cold.
“Our voice.”
His head throbbed, pounded, swelled, expanded.
“Our duty.”
Erupted.
He felt his eyelid twitch, then tremble, then bulge. Ice and skull cracked as a translucent, jagged spike formed where his mind had been and pushed steadily outward. Something came loose within him, with the sound of his eye socket creaking, then shattering.
He didn’t even notice it until his eyeball was floating out before him, staring back at him and the jagged icicle that blossomed from its socket.
“Our death.”
He felt the back of his head split apart as another frigid spike emerged like a horn. H
e felt his mouth fill with frost, felt the thin layer of his cheek’s flesh burst in a red flower. His fingertips split apart, spine snaked out of his back, shinbones shattered as the icicles grew out of him and continued to grow until they filled the ocean and froze it.
Only when he had no voice did he think to cry out.
The frog was still twitching when he brought it to his mouth. His canines sank into its flesh and he felt the dizzying rush of raw venom on his tongue. Lately, it only took a moment for the sensation to pass.
Bones crunched behind his lips. He swallowed and a mess of pulped flesh and poison slid down his throat.
“I’ve had dreams.”
His voice was raw with venom when he spoke.
“When I was young, anyway. I wonder if every tribesman has them. I don’t think I ever asked.”
His toes twitched, all six pale green digits digging into the soil. He felt connected to this earth, kin to it; poison flowed through it as it did through him.
“We didn’t ask questions in the south. Maybe it’s different in the Silesrian. I don’t know. I once asked my uncle if he knew. He looked at me and didn’t say a word. He slid a Spokesman into my hands, patted me on the head, and pointed me toward the humans.
“I had been alive for … fifteen years?” He scratched his chin, fingers rubbing over the inked scrawl of tattoos that ran from brow to navel. “Fourteen, maybe. Just married at that point. We did that earlier in the south. Maybe it’s different in the Silesrian. My wife was the first person I ever asked. She just looked at me and shook her head.
“I stopped thinking about it, as much as I could. Time passed. I killed humans. Humans killed my uncles. Humans killed my wife.” He waved a hand. “My son, too. It doesn’t matter. All tribesmen die. They went to the Dark Forest and I continued fighting. We were losing, of course. It’s impossible to fight humans and win … or it was.
“The dreams … didn’t stop.” He scratched his bald scalp. “I still had them and they didn’t make sense. Maybe that was how I tried to figure it all out and get an answer. They lasted for a while.”
His ears twitched. He reached up, running a long finger along each length, counting each of the six notches in them, as if to reassure himself that they were still there.
“It was when I learned why we fight that they finally ended.
“I found one of them. I couldn’t tell you what nation he belonged to or what god he worshipped. All humans looked alike to me. But I found one, alone. I suppose it would have been smarter to wait for the others, maybe to interrogate him.
“But I was hungry. And I heard it—” he tapped his temple “—right here. And I wanted to hurt him. So I did. We fought for a bit. I struck his head with my stick. He cut me in the thigh with his sharp sword. When our weapons were lost, we fought with fists and teeth.
“And I don’t know when I had come on top of him, or when I had found his throat with my hands. Everything was just moments, things that happened without me knowing how. One time, my fingers felt the hair on the back of his neck. The next, my thumbs found the hard bump in his throat. I couldn’t remember either when I started to squeeze.
“I wondered if he knew the human who had killed my wife. Maybe he was. It was unlikely. There are so many humans. But this was one less. And because this was one less, there would be one more of us.”
Naxiaw looked up and stared across the clearing at the young woman sitting cross-legged at its edge. She stared at him intently. There was no more fear in her green eyes anymore, no more tension in her scrawny, pale body. Her ears rose upright, each one twitching and attentive.
“And that’s when I knew what it meant to be a shict.”
She took a long moment before she spoke. When she did, he wasn’t listening; words were something she was too good with, something she used too often. His ears twitched, listening to her other voice.
She could still speak through the Howling, the wordless language of their people, but in the same way that a child could still speak. The voice of her mind and body, spirit and anger, was a sporadic thing: snarling one moment, spitting the next, then whimpering, then weeping, then roaring.
She tried to hide it behind words. She tried to distract from it with questions she thought were insightful. But he could hear her Howling. Just barely.
He said nothing to her spoken words. He stayed silent as she rose up from the earth and offered some excuse that would mean more to a round-ear. He stared as she waved briefly, then awkwardly bowed as though it meant anything, and then turned and slipped out of the forest.
The Howling lingered behind her, shrieking and crying long after she had vanished. She was frightened, she was confused, she was barely a shict.
Still …
“You seem surprised,” a voice answered his thoughts from the bushes at his back.
“Not surprised,” he replied without looking behind him.
“Then what?” another voice, deeper and darker.
He had asked them to stay behind. Their presence would only have frightened her further. She wasn’t ready to rejoin a people she wasn’t sure she was a part of.
That will change.
“I’m not convinced it will, Naxiaw,” Inqalle said, emerging from the underbrush. “She’s been around humans for a long time. You agree the kou’ru have infected her.”
“Diseases can be cured,” he replied.
“We hope, at least,” Avaij added, his voice sharp and smooth where his sister’s was rasping and harsh. “We’ve all heard her Howling, though. If she can’t be cured—”
“Then what, brother?” he asked. “We leave her to die? Kill her?”
“Of course not,” Avaij replied.
“Maybe,” Inqalle said.
“We do not kill the sick.” Naxiaw rose up from the earth. “We treat the sickness, we kill the disease.”
“The human,” Avaij muttered. “You’re convinced that the death of one round-ear will bring our wayward sister back.”
“Not convinced.”
“Hope is not something for the s’na shict s’ha,” Inqalle said. “Our people know.”
“Then you know we cannot kill her and we cannot sit back and let her suffer.”
He turned and regarded his tribesmen. He wondered how the human would see them: tall and proud, limbs corded with green muscle and dotted with tattoos, black hair hacked and hewn into crested mohawks. Their weapons were sharp, their eyes were sharp, their canines were sharper still as their lips curled backward.
Humans had tales about the greenshicts, his people. They feared them, rightfully. This human might look upon them with terror in his blue stare. This human might fight back. To survive was the nature of disease.
But in these two, Naxiaw saw only brother, only sister, their Howling speaking clearly. If they doubted his methods, they did not doubt his goals. They would not let their sister suffer.
It would hurt, of course. She was attached to the silver-haired monkey, as much as she might wish they did not know. She might rave, she might rail against them, she might even mourn.
No illness was cured without pain.
Kataria drew in a long breath and released it. When the last trace of air had passed her lips, she opened her eyes.
“No,” she said. “You are wrong. The answer isn’t in blood. It hasn’t been so far. And the answer is not in you. I offer you no apology and I ask for no forgiveness, brother. Everything I have to find out, I can’t be told. I have to find it. If it means going with the humans, then so be it. Live well, Naxiaw. I will.”
She nodded firmly, smiling. There it was. Everything she had been holding inside her, everything she had refused to admit to herself, much less to the s’na shict s’ha.
She had said it and believed it.
If Naxiaw had actually been standing before her, she would have been just fine. As it was, the pig-sized, colorful roach in front of her merely twitched its feathery antennae and made a light chittering noise; as far as personal epiphanie
s went, it seemed unimpressed.
“Oh, like you’ve heard better,” she said with a sneer as she stalked past it.
Despite the insect’s lack of approval, she came out of the forest lightheaded. The meeting with the greenshict had gone well. Ominously well, considering she had told him it would be their last. She hoped he understood that. She hoped he heard that.
She could still hear the breathy, fumbled excuses in her own ears. She couldn’t understand them, of course. But she hoped Naxiaw was a little more accepting of incoherence.
And how could he not be? She chastised herself. What with that stirring performance of stuttering excuses and half-concocted logic, it’s amazing he’s not here beside you right now to give you a teary hug before he sends you to a human, the kind of breed that he’s sworn to kill and you are, too.
Were. She corrected herself. She had been sworn to kill humans, or so she thought. She had listened to the old logic that told the old reasons that supported the old story. The one that said humans were a disease that threatened shict and land alike, hence they must die.
And for as long as she could, she believed them.
But that time was over. The old story had never resonated with her as it should. The old reasons had never carried enough weight. The old logic had brought her nothing but a distinct pain in her belly that grew sharper every time she looked at Lenk and he looked back at her.
And they both remembered that night, when he had looked into her eyes with a blade to his throat and called out for her.
And she had turned her back on him.
But this isn’t about him, she told herself as she crept into the daylight. No, no. This is about you, and what you know is a shict and who you know you are and who you have to kill and what you have to do and how many times you have to tell yourself this before you finally believe it.
It was getting easier, at least.
Daylight met her with the sun rising higher in the sky as dawn was left behind and a bright, angry morning took prominence. Coming from the darkness of the forest, she was nearly blinded as the sun cast a furious glare off the sand.
It wasn’t enough to blind her to the flurry of activity, nor to the dread welling up inside her at the sight of work at the shoreline.
