by Samuel Sykes
The center of the scene was dominated by the restored companion vessel they had salvaged, trying its hardest to appear seaworthy and aided ably by its scaly attendants. The lizardmen known as Gonwa worked diligently: sanding out its roughness, testing the sturdiness of its mast, securing its rudder. There was a vigor to their work, a frightening eagerness to get this vessel and its passengers to sea.
Considering said vessel was to deliver them into the maw of an island whose location was known only to the flesh-eating serpents and skull-crushing lizardmen who dwelt there, Kataria suspected she should feel a little insulted.
Not too late, you know, she thought as she began to trudge across the sand toward the worksite. You could still kill them all and run. They’d never see it coming. Well, Lenk might … I mean, you did want to kill him only a week or so ago. But only two people know that.
And one of them just seized her shoulder in a heavy hand with heavy claws.
Granted, given all that Gariath could do with his claws, she suspected she ought not to have snarled at him when he effortlessly spun her to face his vast chest. She had to look up to meet his black eyes.
And when he looked down at her, it was a harsh gaze set beneath a pair of horns that traveled down a snout brimming with sharp teeth in a bare snarl of his own.
At the best of times, Gariath didn’t need a reason to kill a person, even one that approached his vague definition of “companion.” Given that he had a slew of reasons, ranging from her abandoned plot to kill the only human he respected to her witnessing him talking to invisible people, she had to wonder, not for the first time, why he hadn’t done it yet.
That wasn’t the sort of musing one did vocally. And when he did no more than thrust an arm at her, she counted herself lucky.
“Here,” the dragonman rumbled.
He let go of the long object in his hand, leaving it to teeter ominously before collapsing against her. She buckled under its weight, struggling to keep it up.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“What you asked for.”
She looked down at the object. A spear … or a harpoon? Hard to say; the amalgamation of metal long rusted and old wood left the weapon’s exact purpose vague beyond being something suitable for stabbing.
Still, that was what she had asked for.
“I should remind you this thing has to go into a snake the size of a tree.” She hefted the massive weapon; a long sliver of wood cracked and peeled off. “We want to impale it, not give it splinters.”
“Your plan,” Gariath grunted.
She stepped aside twice as he shoved his way past her: once for his immense shoulder, twice for the batlike wings folded tightly against it. She failed, however, to account for his tail, creeping out behind his kilt. It snaked up behind him, lashing at her cheek with enough force to send her snarling. Not as hard as he could have, just enough to remind her of the dangers of not giving him a wide enough berth.
“If you don’t like what I found, you can go find another one.”
He gestured over his shoulder with a broad hand. She didn’t have to look hard to see what he gestured to.
It was staring back at her.
Considering the sheer number of the skulls littering the island, she suspected she ought to be used to their massive, empty eye sockets staring at her, their shattered jaws and fractured skulls paled in comparison. Still, one never truly became accustomed to seeing a thirty-foot-long unholy amalgamation of man and fish lying dead.
And they were just one macabre feature of the graveyard that was the beach. Fragmented ballistae dotted the landscape, their rusted spears caught between ribs whose flesh had long rotted away. Catapults lay crushed, the only remains of their ammunition within the gaping holes of the demonic skulls. Most curious were the monoliths: great statues of robed figures, holy symbols of gods carved in lieu of faces, sinking on rusted metal treads and lying in pieces on the beach.
The war in which mortalkind battled Aeons, the corrupted servants of the Gods, for supremacy. Nothing remained of that battle besides this graveyard.
That, she thought, and the tome. Which is why you’re going to Jaga in the first place. Hence the plan, hence the spear … the rotting, rusty spear … She blinked. You know, if you do kill them, the chances of this plan killing you are far lower.
She ignored that thought. It was getting easier.
“The shict is insane.”
She had been intended to hear it. Tact and volume were not qualities known to the Gonwa, or their leader.
Tall and lean, sinew and scales, Hongwe shook his head as he surveyed the vessel’s progress. He scratched the beard of scales drooping from below his chin, a low hiss emanating from behind pressed lips as a long tail twitched behind him.
“Completely insane,” he muttered again.
“I can hear you, you know,” she said.
“Good,” the Gonwa replied. He turned upon her, narrow yellow eyes staring at her from behind a blunt snout. “Better to remind you again and clear my conscience before you decide to kill yourself.”
“Look, I know we’ve only known each other for a week now,” she said, grunting as she leaned the spear against the vessel. “But trying to kill ourselves is sort of what we do.”
“Sometimes each other,” Gariath growled as he stalked forward to stand beside Hongwe.
“Right, sometimes.” Kataria did not miss the knowing glint in his eye.
“And I tell you again,” Hongwe said. “Your biggest danger is not anything with teeth or arrows.” His voice was sharp, threatening. “The shenni-sah-nui, the Great Gray Wall, is a reef so sharp with stone and so thick with fog that anyone, human, Gonwa, or Owauku, doesn’t even see the rock that impales him. No one passes but the Shen.”
“And the Akaneeds,” Kataria said. “They know the way.”
“Jaga is their home. Jaga is the home to snakes that swallow sharks. Appreciate that for a moment. The least of your concerns are the Shen.”
“Not true.”
The voice was a withered one, something so used to joviality and whimsy that its mournfulness was something that stuck in flesh instead of ears. As they looked up to the nearby rocky outcropping, it was easy to see who had spoken it. Togu’s body, too, had once been taller; as much as a reptile with a body like a beer keg could be, anyway.
Now the Owauku sat upon the rock, hunched over, head bowed.
Good.
A spiteful thought, Kataria knew, but a just one. That Togu lived at all was a decision of Lenk’s she neither understood nor questioned. The creature, king of his people, had welcomed them to his home of Teji, delivered them from their shipwreck, only to deliver them again into the hands of the netherlings. Lenk, perhaps, only saw his betrayal as just that.
Kataria had been aboard the ship, though. Kataria had seen the creature known as Sheraptus and had seen what he had done. Kataria had heard Asper scream.
And it was only out of acknowledgment of her own betrayal that she obeyed Lenk’s decision and didn’t put an arrow in Togu’s gullet.
“The Shen are not like us,” he said. “Maybe once all green people were from the same stock. But while the Gonwa swam and the Owauku starved, the Shen killed. They killed when our peoples separated so many years ago, and they have never stopped. They come out of Jaga in their canoes, the Akaneeds swimming with them, and they kill. They kill with clubs. They kill with arrows.”
He turned to stare at her. His eyes were bulbous yellow things, moving independently of one another as they both turned upon her.
“The Shen will kill you, too. All of you.” He shook his head. His scaly whiskers shook with it. “I will not mourn.”
“We die, you die.”
It was Lenk who spoke, Lenk who came trudging through the sands. Lenk spoke in certainties these days.
“Kataria, Gariath, and I are going to Jaga,” he said, fixing his gaze upon Togu, whose own eyes quickly faltered. “This ship sinks, we die, we don’t come back. Denaos
, Dreadaeleon, and Asper take care of you.”
“There’s no need for threats,” Hongwe said, unflinching from Lenk’s stare. “The boat will deliver you as far as you can manage it. It’s solid, Gonwa craft. But you will not return. This journey is madness and the Owauku must suffer for it?”
“And Gonwa,” Lenk said. “You didn’t lift a finger to warn us. You could have prevented this.”
Speechless, Hongwe looked to Gariath, pleading in his eyes. The dragonman stared at him for a moment before shrugging.
“Rats die,” he said. “We didn’t.”
“I couldn’t trust you to die, then,” Gonwa sighed, rubbing his eyes. “I trust you now.”
“Fine,” Lenk said. He looked to the vessel. A pair of Gonwa hefted the splintering spear into it. “Is it loaded?”
“With your weapons and everything else you wanted.” He looked to Kataria. “Including the rope.”
“And the rest?” Kataria asked.
Hongwe stared blankly at her, as though he desperately wished he didn’t know what she was talking about. After that hope joined many others in death, however, he sighed and motioned one of his scaly workers forward.
The Gonwa nodded and, from behind the boat, produced a wooden bucket, filled to the brim with what might have been best described as the porridge of the damned. Barbed roach legs, feathery antennae, the occasional rainbow-colored wing all protruded from a thick slop of glistening insect entrails, their stench ripened by the sun to give the aroma of something not satisfied to offend only one sense.
Despite the fact that a single whiff caused tears to form in her eyes, Kataria grinned. She looked to Gariath and gestured to the bucket with her chin. The dragonman stared at her, challengingly, before grunting and holding his hand out over the slop. A claw dug into his palm and cut a thick line of blood that eagerly dripped out to splash upon the entrails.
Lenk stared at the ritual, brow lofted, until he clearly couldn’t stand by any longer. He turned to the shict.
“Kataria,” he said simply. “Why?”
“I’ve got a plan,” she said.
“Should I know its details?”
“Should you? Absolutely.” She shrugged. “Do you want to?”
“Outstanding.” He sighed deeply, rubbing the back of his neck.
She couldn’t help but grin. It was in those moments when he stared at her like he wondered what he had done to be cursed with her that she remembered what he was like before that night. In his despair, he was Lenk again, and she smiled.
She suspected she should be rather worried by that.
“Answer me this, at least,” he said. “Who has to die for this plan to work?”
“Ideally?”
“Realistically.”
“Well, no one has to die,” she said, smiling broadly.
Maybe his sense of humor was just that macabre, or maybe something in him was too strong to be kept behind the impassiveness that had been across his face for the past days. Either way, he looked at her and, even if it was only slight and fleeting, he grinned.
“You don’t need to know everything.” She reached out, placing a hand on his shoulder. “Trust me.”
And, an instant before she knew what she had said, he was gone. His grin faded, his eyes faded, he faded entirely, leaving behind a flat stare. To stand beside him was to feel a chill and she turned away.
“Where’s Denaos?” Lenk asked, not bothering to look at her. “I’ve got something to tell him before we leave.”
“Rats hide with rats,” Gariath said. “He’s with the crying one and the moody one.”
The dragonman’s recent decision to upgrade Asper and Dreadaeleon from “the tall one” and “the small one” hadn’t done much to distinguish either.
“I’ll find him,” Lenk said, trudging off toward the forest.
Kataria watched him go. Even if he hadn’t said anything, the accusation hung in the air where he had just stood, as it did whenever he looked at her.
“You’re feeling guilty,” Gariath noted, apparently also sharing it.
“And you’re not?” she asked, turning around. “You abandoned him, same as me. We all left him to die on that ship.”
“I am not,” he said, hefting the bucket of guts and loading it into the vessel. “I left because I knew he wouldn’t die. And if I didn’t know that he would not die, I wouldn’t care if he did.” He turned a hard black stare upon her. “Why?”
She flinched. “Why what?”
“Why do you feel guilt?”
“It’s an emotion common to those of us not reptilian,” she muttered as she stalked to the other side of the boat.
“Not to shicts.”
“Are you trying to intimidate me?” she snarled. “Trying to tell me I’m not a shict like you did back then? It’s not going to work this time.”
“When I said it that day, you ran,” Gariath replied. “Now, you bare your little teeth at me. I almost killed you that day. I can do it better today.”
“I’m not afraid of you.”
“Shicts should be.”
She opened her mouth to respond, but not a word came out. Instead, she merely furrowed her brow. “Are you being philosophical or stupid?”
“Same thing. Regardless, I never say anything that doesn’t make sense.” He turned to stalk away, back to some other work. “If it makes sense to you, I guess you can celebrate being a little less moronic today.”
She almost regretted calling out to him. “Thank you,” she said. “For not telling Lenk about … you know, about how I was going to kill him.”
He waved a hand. “If you try again, so can I.”
She stared down into the vessel. Like a child straining for the attention of its mother, the curve of her bow, fur-wrapped and sturdy, peeked out at her. A week ago, she had wanted this weapon to kill Lenk, to kill anyone to prove she was a shict.
She still might not know who she was, who Lenk was anymore. But she knew she had a bow. She knew she had a plan. She knew she had a goal.
That would have to be enough for now.
“No time to worry about the rest,” she whispered to herself.
“What could there be to worry about?” Hongwe muttered from nearby. “Chasing an unholy book into a reef filled with—”
“You know, Hongwe,” she snapped, “after a while, that kind of negativity really starts to dampen the mood.”
FIVE
DRASTICISM
Wizards were elite. That word still had meaning even among men who turned breath to ice and spark to fire with a word. To Librarians, the word had definition, relentlessly branded upon scalp until it bored into skull.
To Bralston, the word had weight.
To be elite was responsibility, not privilege. To be elite was to do that which could be done by no one else. To be elite was to stand and see the heretics burned, the renegades crushed, their assets seized from wailing widows and their homes burned to set the example to those who would fall under the dominion of the Venarium and not respect its laws.
Elite, Bralston had seen many deaths, only a few of them in his home city of Cier’Djaal. Whether by fire or force or messier means, Bralston had never been fazed by death.
Not until he had seen the riots.
The Night of Hounds, some called it, the Comeuppance, the Fires; the riots had many names. It was all to describe the same thing, though: the night the Houndmistress, champion of the common people of Cier’Djaal and bane of the criminal syndicates that haunted her streets, was brutally murdered in her bed.
And the Jackals, pushed to the point of being wiped clean like the scum they were, took their vengeance. On guards, on politicians, on commoners and merchants and whores and anyone who wasn’t dressed in a hood and carrying a blade, they exacted their toll upon the city that failed to expel them.
There had been fire. There had been force. There had been mess. On such a scale that the elite could but watch the city burn.
All because of one man.
The man who sat in the clearing now, head hung low and shoulders drooped as he murmured like a common drunk. That’s what he was, Bralston reminded himself. Maybe he had been something more when he had wound his way into the Houndmistress’s confidence and slaughtered her in the night, but no longer. He was a drunk, a thug, common.
And Bralston remained elite.
He was reminded of that word’s weight as he stalked into the forest clearing.
The man’s head shifted.
“Asper?” the rogue asked, voice cracked and dry.
“No,” Bralston answered.
“Oh,” he muttered, returning to staring at the sand. “It’s you.”
Bralston stared at the back of his head. Maybe he couldn’t see the man’s face, but everything else screamed guilt: the stoop of shoulders that had been so broad when they rubbed against the Houndmistress’s, the mane of reddish hair that had been dyed time and again, the voice that had plied and charmed and tongued all the right ears to earn the role of advisor to the woman who would try to save a city infested with human gangrene.
Bralston remembered him, before he had been called Denaos.
“I don’t have the tongue for entertaining wizards,” the man said. “Not the kind that could be matched by hearing their own voice. So, if you need something—”
“Murderer.”
Denaos turned his head, just enough for Bralston to see his eyes, just enough for Bralston to know. And slowly, Denaos turned away.
“So that’s it, then? Just right out with it?” Denaos chuckled. “No talent for subtlety.”
“No subtlety is needed for this,” Bralston said. His voice came on hot breath and beating heart, no more discipline of the elite. “It has no place amongst matters of justice.”
“The only men who bring up matters of justice are those who think themselves worthy of delivering it.”
“There is no worthiness, only responsibility.” Bralston felt the blood rush in his veins, but held himself back. Eyes, shoulders, tongues; these were suspicions. Librarians needed logic, evidence to justify the kill, however worthy. “And it falls to any man who knows what you’ve done.”
