The Skybound Sea

by Samuel Sykes

  “What’s that?”

  “The goopy gray stuff. I’ve got a little bit left.”

  “A little bit doesn’t sound like enough,” Denaos said, rooting around in the bag haphazardly.

  “It won’t be,” she snapped. “But it doesn’t matter. We’re in the middle of a Gods damned jungle. It’ll be a miracle if he isn’t already infected.”

  He pulled a small wooden jar from the bag, flipping the latch on its lid and handing it to her. She poured some of the thick, syrupy liquid into her hand before snarling and hurling the jar at him.

  “I said charbalm, moron! This is mutterbye! A digestive.”

  “They’re not labeled!” the rogue protested, ably sidestepping the projectile.

  “I said gray and goopy. How much more description do you need, you imbecile?” The insult was punctuated with a frustrated slap on Lenk’s shoulder and, a breath later, the scream that followed and sent her wincing at him. “Sorry.”

  Denaos muttered something under his breath as he rooted through the jars, swabs, and vials, tossing each one upon the ground before producing something and thrusting it at her. Satisfied, she scraped out a thick paste and rubbed it upon the burn wound. Lenk eased into her arms, the salve apparently soothing some of the pain.

  “Not enough,” she muttered.

  “Why not?” Lenk asked.

  “Possibly because I used it all trying to fix another idiot’s mistake weeks ago.” She sighed, spreading the salve with delicate precision. “Still, assuming bedrest and coverage, I can probably keep the infection down until we reach the mainland.”

  “Can’t you use something local?” Denaos asked. “A root? An herb?”

  “Charbalm requires more refinery than I can do with a mortar and pestle. You don’t find it outside of apothecaries.”

  “Surely, there’s something …”

  “If I say there isn’t, then there isn’t.” Each word was spat between clenched teeth at the rogue. “You need tools to make charbalm: distillation, mincing, rare herbs and roots … other healy stuff.”

  “Healy stuff,” Denaos said flatly. “You know, between that and your enlightened description of the stuff as gray and goopy, I’m not sure I feel—”

  “I don’t give a winged turd what you think,” she roared at him. “I am a PRIESTESS of TALANAS, you ASS. I know what I’m doing. Now give me a Gods damned bandage and then hurl yourself off a cliff.”

  A man, quite possibly insane, lay burned and wounded in her arms. Another man, quite possibly dangerous, scowled at her with suspiciously dark stains on his tunic and another man’s hat in his hands. It was not, in any sense, the sort of situation where she should allow herself a smug, proud smile.

  But, then again, she had just rendered Denaos speechless.

  “What did you learn?” Lenk asked from Asper’s arms, voice rasping.

  “About what?” Denaos growled, rifling through the bag, all humor vanished.

  “You’ve had a day with the netherling. What did you find out about them? Jaga? Anything?”

  “Not a lot, thanks for asking,” Denaos replied. “She’s as helpful as you’d expect a woman capable of reversing the positions of your head and your scrotum to be.”

  “You’ve gotten better out of worse.” Lenk’s voice was strained with distant agony as he shrugged off Asper and staggered to his feet.

  “I’ve had time to do that. Time and tools.”

  “You’ve got a knife and you’ve had a day. What you got from Rashodd—”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “And yet you—”

  “It’s not that simple.” The narrow of his eye left nothing so light as a suggestion that not talking about it would be wise. A threat would be more accurate. “We won’t find anything useful from her.”

  There had been times when Lenk’s voice commanded, times when his gaze intimidated. Despite size, despite injury, Asper knew both she and Denaos looked to him for reasons beyond those. But never did his voice inspire cringe and never did his gaze cause skin to crawl than when he spoke as he did now.

  “Kill her.”

  Denaos sighed, rubbed his eyes. “Is that necessary?”

  “Well, I don’t know, Denaos. When it comes to killing women who are capable of reversing the positions of your head and your scrotum, is it more necessary or practical?”

  “What, exactly, makes this one any different from the others you’ve killed?” Asper asked, rising up and dusting off her robes. The gaze she fixed on Denaos was less scornful than he deserved; perhaps she simply had to know.

  “It’s complicated,” the rogue offered, not bothering to look at either of them.

  “It is not,” Lenk insisted, his voice cold. “We get the tome. We kill anyone who is in our way.”

  “She’s tied to a chair in a hut.”

  “She’s dangerous.”

  “She’s not going anywhere.”

  “Not yet. Not ever.” Lenk narrowed his eyes. “No loose ends. Our duty depends on it.”

  When Denaos looked up into the man’s stare, his own was weary. His voice dribbled out of his mouth on a sigh.

  “Yeah. Fine. What’s one more, right?”

  He flipped the wide-brimmed hat in his fingers, tossed it to Lenk. The young man caught it, looked it over, furrowed his brow.

  “This is Bralston’s,” he noted.

  “And now it’s yours.” He slipped on a smile. “It’s just that easy.”

  He turned, disappeared into the forest. Lenk stared at the hat in his hands for a moment before turning to Asper.

  “Fix whatever else you need to fix with my shoulder,” he said. “I leave in an hour.”

  “And Denaos?”

  “Stays here with you and Dread. We have a better chance of slipping in with fewer people.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  Lenk didn’t seem to hear. Or care. She told herself that was rather a wise attitude to have for the rogue. The less she cared, the better. Less chance of him failing, then.

  That was a wise attitude. Reasonable.

  She tried to convince herself of it as she plucked up her bag and produced a bandage and swab. She looked at Lenk as he knelt down to collect his shirts and the agitated red mass upon his shoulder, glistening with too little salve.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Because,” his voice was gentle, “I wanted to see if it would hurt.”

  SIX

  HALLOWED, HUMBLE, SOAKED IN BLOOD

  He placed a foot upon salt-slick stone. Barely more than the scuff of boot on granite. The silence heard him and came out of a thousand little shadows and pools of water to greet him with resounding echoes.

  A thousand footfalls greeted him in the gapingly empty hall, as though by sheer repetition the massive chamber could pretend there was life in its depths. It committed itself to the illusion with every step he took, each echo rising and waiting for him to speak and be repeated a thousand times and complete the deception.

  Sheraptus was not in the habit of indulging anyone, let alone stone.

  His nostrils quivered, agitated. He was not about to indulge them, either, by placing cloth to nose and masking the stench. He shut his eyes, forced down his distaste and drew in a sharp breath.

  The air sat leaden in his nose, heavy with many things as he continued down the great, empty hall. Sea was first among them and with it salt, acrid and foul. Dormant ash was there, in great presence. And something else. Something familiar.

  His boot struck something and he stumbled forward. Pulling the black hem of his robe away exposed a pale, hairless face staring up at him with lifeless black eyes and a stagnant aroma wafting from a mouth filled with needle teeth.

  No. His crown burned upon his brow, smoldering with thought. Not that.

  But close. The scent of death, heaviest and most pungent, was not making it particularly easy to sense out that enigmatic aroma. Understandable, he thought, given all the corpses.

  He ha
dn’t been at Irontide when it all happened, when his warriors had stormed the fortress to retrieve the tome and kill the demonic leader known as the Deepshriek. As he swept a glance about the hollow chamber, though, he absently wished he had been; he certainly wouldn’t have left all these corpses about.

  They lay where they had fallen, white and purple, frogman and netherling: gored, cut, rent, stabbed, impaled, trampled, ripped, strangled, drowned, broken, and decapitated. They swelled only barely from salt water. Gulls had not come to feed upon them, as though they were too unclean even for vermin.

  He could understand why they hadn’t feasted upon the frogmen, of course, demon-tainted filth that they were. He felt vaguely insulted that his warriors were similarly untouched, as though there were something wrong with them.

  But he had not come to survey the damage; there were always more warriors. Rather, he had come seeking something else.

  What it was, he wasn’t entirely sure. Why he felt drawn to it, he was only barely certain. That made his ire rise.

  But it was here, amidst a rotting feast uneaten.

  And so he slipped across the floor, searching. In the stagnant pools of water that remained, in the flock of the crushed and beaten and drained of blood, he found something.

  Not what he was looking for.

  Cahulus. Male. Once, a loyal and devoted member of his inner circle, brother to the other two loyal and devoted members. Once, reckless with his nethra, hurling fire and spewing ice with whimsical abandon. Once, in command of the warriors sent to take this fortress.

  Now, dead. The gemstone he once wore, like the three set in Sheraptus’s own crown, was gone.

  Dead. With eyes sunken into rotted flesh, with a dried torrent of blood staining his filthy and salt-stained robes, with his lower jaw lying eight feet away from his face.

  Dead.

  Like the rest of them.

  Like the ones back on his ship that was now at the bottom of the ocean.

  The ship from which he had escaped. The ship he had survived. And they hadn’t.

  “Good afternoon.”

  The Gray One That Grins spoke clearly, as always. His voice was soft and lilting, bass and clear; music that slid easily out between teeth as long as fingers. His voice did not echo; music that Irontide did not want to hear.

  He turned to regard his companion. Thin and squatting upon long, slender limbs, the light of the sinking afternoon sun painted him black against the gaping hole that wounded Irontide’s granite walls. His namesake teeth remained starkly visible.

  “It is afternoon, isn’t it,” Sheraptus observed. “It was morning when I came here.”

  “Apologies. It was not my intent to keep you waiting.”

  “Accepted, with full gratitude, of course.”

  Sheraptus never had cause to cringe before. Hearing his own voice, echoed a thousand times and welcomed into the deathly halls, was certainly a poor cause to have now.

  The Gray One That Grins tilted his head. “Your voice betrays discomfort. Pardon the observation.”

  “And your notice compounds it,” Sheraptus muttered, waving a hand. “Apologies. It’s this place. It reeks of death.”

  His associate tilted his head again, thoughtful. “I suppose it might. I really hadn’t noticed.”

  Sheraptus glanced down at Cahulus, who looked like he found that hard to believe. Then again, it was hard to gauge the expressions of a man with half a face.

  “Oh,” the Gray One That Grins said. “You look and see the corpses.”

  “There are so many of them.”

  “I had thought such things would not perturb you.”

  “I merely see them.”

  “Ah. The issue is, at last, uncovered.”

  “Surely, you are not blind to them.”

  “A lack of sight, fore or current, has never been attributed to me. Rather, I see somewhere else when I look upon these halls. I see somewhere long ago, somewhere much more preferable.”

  He rose, suddenly no longer squat, but frighteningly tall. He became more so as he straightened his back with the sound of a dozen vertebrae cracking into place, a sickening eternity between each. Upon spindly shadows for legs, he walked down the hall.

  “This was where the tapestry walked,” he said. “A long and decadent thing of many names and deeds, each one exaggerated as a tapestry should be. It walked between pillars, each one carved from marble in the shape of a virgin, holding flame in hands unscarred.”

  Sheraptus found himself watching the space where the Gray One That Grins had just been, or where he was about to walk. Never did he look at those long, thin legs. Never did he even think about looking higher.

  “That’s where it ended.” A long sliver of a finger pointed at the far wall. “That’s where the altar lay. That’s where I knelt in prayer, side by side with the woman that would come to be called Mother.”

  “I misunderstand or you misremember,” Sheraptus said. “I was told this was a stronghold for overscum. Pirates, like the ones that allied themselves with our foe.”

  “It was. After that, it was a house of prayer for that Mother again. Before that, it was a house of war for those who drove her from it. Irontide is but one more meaningless name. It has existed in a cycle: worship, then slaughter, on and off since its creation.”

  Sheraptus looked to Cahulus. Then to the frogman beside him, the thing’s ivory skin stained pink with the rotting bundle of intestines split so neatly from its belly. Then to the netherling who still held the blade, even as the fragmented cord of her spine jutted from the shredded purple of her back.

  “And now, a house of charnel.”

  “There will be more. Possibly this one again. Such is their nature.”

  “Demons?”

  “Demons.” The Gray One That Grins’s laugh was less pleasant this time. “It is not a demon’s nature to destroy, but to reclaim. For them, it is a choice. The same is not said with any great conviction for humans.”

  “Humans?”

  “Humans.”

  “The lack of specificity is dreadfully unhelpful.”

  “Specificity?”

  “Just learned it.”

  “It is impressive.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You are welcome.” The Gray One That Grins tilted his head to the side, settled down on his haunches. “As to your complaint … how many humans do you know?”

  Sheraptus looked again to the corpses for as long as he could stand. When he looked back to his associate, seated in merciful shadow, his face wore disgust and disbelief on either side.

  “They did not kill this many.”

  “Your warriors and demons killed each other, true. The humans did not kill this many.” His voice dropped. “But they have killed many.”

  Many.

  Sheraptus turned the word over in his head, contemplated every quantity that could bear such a title. How many had been in Irontide that were struck down by those overscum? How many had blood spilled upon the sand by their blades? How many had the humans sent to the bottom of the ocean when the ship was destroyed?

  The answer was simple, and grim.

  “But not me,” Sheraptus whispered.

  “Pardon?”

  “I survived.”

  “You are possessed of immense power, as well as the Martyr Stones to fuel it and the confidence to wield it.” The Gray One That Grins’s voice dropped. “Your surprise at your own survival … concerns. As does your inability to deal with these humans.”

  “You doubt me?” Sheraptus imagined the threat might have sounded more forceful if he could bear to face the creature.

  “Apologies for dancing around the issue, but … my associates are concerned. They have insisted upon moving forward with your assault.”

  “We have been gathering the forces necessary for pressing the attack. All our information suggests Jaga is not a place to be traipsed into with a few fists of warriors.”

  “Information?”

  “Specifi
cally, the kind of information that comes from sending thirty warriors out and finding pieces of them washing up on shore days later. We don’t even know where the island lies, much less how many reptiles infest it or how well it’s defended.”

  “Hence part of the reason for my insisting upon this meeting.” The Gray One That Grins swept a glance about the ruined halls. “Your insistence on meeting here, though, comes as a surprise.”

  “It is difficult to explain.”

  “To a man that cannot see the field of corpses before him for his seeing the past behind him?”

  Sheraptus clicked his tongue. “I suppose I felt … called here.”

  “Called.”

  His voice was darkening with each moment. Sheraptus had never felt a twinge creep up his spine at that. Then again, he considered, his associate’s voice had never been anything but music before.

  “It’s difficult to explain.”

  “Attempt. I implore you.”

  Sheraptus turned to face Irontide’s vast, corpse-strewn silence. He had not seen the battle, the knee-deep seawater that had since drained out of its wound, a fine layer of blood spilled over it with a peppering of ashes from smoldering demon flesh. Now, with stagnant pool and cinders scattered to the wind, he could still feel it.

  There. In the darkness, there was something darker: a spot of blackness that might be considered for soot if it weren’t just too perfectly black, too utterly insignificant not to be noticed, as though it tried to hide from him. He felt it there, too.

  “A sensation.” He tapped on the black iron of his crown. “Something … out there and in here.”

  “One hesitates to point out who just complained about a lack of specificity.”

  “It is like … a feeling, vague and fleeting,” Sheraptus continued, “something that is there, but not there. Knowledge without evidence.”

  “You describe …” His associate’s voice was a slow and spiteful hiss. “A sensation shared by virgins who don’t bleed and men who swallow gold and excrete stool that is only brown. Do you now look to the sky and whisper quiet prayers to invisible creatures with invisible ears?”

  “Gods do not exist.” A casual refusal; no thought, no conviction. “This is … was something like sensing a power. Nothing I had sensed before the island.” He furrowed his brow as he swept his stare about the gloom. “I felt it then, too. In the shadow of the statues there and when …”