by Samuel Sykes
“Don’t open your eyes.”
“Why not?”
“Because the world is ugly,” she replied. “And thought is beautiful. Whatever you’re thinking of right now is infinitely more beautiful than whatever it is that awaits you when you open your eyes.”
“And if I’m thinking of something ugly?”
“What are you thinking of?”
You, he thought. How much I miss you. What kind of life I’ve led where I couldn’t be with you. Whether I was wrong all this time and there are gods and there are souls and mine will wander forever when I finally die, far from your arms, and how much more that fact terrifies me than the other one. Always you.
“Nothing,” he replied.
“Simply nothing?”
“Nothing is simple.”
“Precisely,” she said. “And because nothing is simple, nothing is beautiful. There is nothing more beautiful. That’s why your eyes must stay closed and you have to hold onto that.”
“To what?”
“Nothing.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“It doesn’t have to. It’s beautiful.”
“I’m opening my eyes now.”
And when he did, there was nothing. There was no ground. There was no sky. There were no trees and there was nothing to burn and turn to ash. There was nothing.
But her.
And her head in his lap. And her black hair streaming like night. And the ink drying upon her breasts. And her smile. And her scent. And her. Always her.
“Did I not tell you?” she asked.
“You said nothing would be as beautiful as what I was thinking.”
“And?”
“It is.”
“Then I was right.”
“I can’t admit to that.”
“Why not?”
“Because then you’ll be rubbing my face in it all day and night and I’ll never get any sleep. Not that it matters, anyway, I’ve got to be going shortly.”
“Where do you have to go?”
“I have to go after that man. He killed a lot of people.”
“Maybe he had a good reason.”
“There is never a good reason for killing that many people.”
“How many have you killed?”
“I don’t want to talk about this right now.”
“Then you shouldn’t think about it so much.”
“It’s my duty to think about it.”
“I thought your duty was to uphold the law of the Venarium.”
“It is.”
“Is he wanted by the Venarium?”
“No.”
“Then you can take the day off, surely. We can sit here and think about nothing until we have nothing left, and then we’ll have nothing to worry about.”
“He killed people.”
“So have you.”
“He nearly destroyed Cier’Djaal.”
“Perhaps he didn’t mean to.”
“He could have killed you.”
“You could, too, if you wanted to.”
He sighed deeply, shut his eyes. “Stop this.”
“Stop what?”
“Trying to get me to stay. I can’t.”
“You have to.”
“Why?”
He opened his eyes and beheld her smile. Her teeth were painted bright red. Another thick droplet of crimson fell and splattered across her forehead, another falling upon her eye, another upon her lips, until her face was slick with blood and her scent was copper tang and sour life.
“Because,” Anacha said, “you’re dying.”
Bralston opened his eyes with a gasp and felt the air whistling through his neck. He stared down at the earth glistening with his own blood. He pressed a hand to his throat. He felt sticky life on his palm.
Cracks in the seal, he thought. It’s not holding as well as suspected. That would explain the fainting … and the massive blood loss. No one ever said gaping throat wounds would be simple. Don’t laugh at that. You’ll bleed out. Apply another seal. Quick.
His spellbook lay flung open at his side, several pages torn from its spine, red fingerprints smeared across those that remained. He forced his hand steady as he reached down, tore a page with two fingers. The merroskrit came out hesitantly, eventually demanding a second hand to pull it free.
It wasn’t meant to come out easily. Wizards were meant to think carefully before using it, emotion never guiding the decision. Emotion caused disaster. Bralston didn’t have enough blood to decide if this was ironic or merely poetic.
He pressed the page to his bloodied throat, situated it firmly over the wound, as he had done the last three. The cause would need to be dire to use even one.
Ideally, this was just dire enough.
His voice had bled out onto the sand. He had no words left to coax the fire to the hand he pressed over his throat. All he had left were screams.
And so he screamed. The fire came, bidden by anger rather than will, shaped by agony rather than discipline. With only emotion to guide it, the fire seared his throat with furious imprecision. It branded the merroskrit to his flesh, over the cracks in the seal, shutting the blood back in his throat where it belonged.
For now.
His hand came back smoking, tiny curls of flesh sizzling into plumes of gray smoke upon his palm. Running out of skin was never a problem he thought he might encounter, but here it was. Merroskrit could overcome an inanimate host easily enough and adapt to it, but it lacked the willpower to adapt to a living one. Eventually, his body would reject it.
He was going to die.
This was certainty. The seal would hold only for a while. Two days, if he was lucky.
Two days. One to plan the rest of his life. Another one to live it.
If he was an average, ignorant person who prayed to the sky, anyway. Librarians could not take an entire day to plan, even when they had more than two to spare. Librarians were meant to act.
And yet, emotion had killed him once already.
Logic and duty demanded the pursuit of the criminal Denaos. One day to track him down, one more day to make him pay for the life he failed to take. It would satisfy the emotional urge, as well. Everyone would be happy. Everyone not on fire, anyway.
And yet, some part of him that did not yet lay glistening on the sand wanted something else. A day for poems, a day for letters, a hundred pages long for a single person. Penned in ink, blood, mud, it didn’t matter. Folded into a hundred paper cranes and sent on a breeze to one person in Cier’Djaal.
Back to Anacha.
Then find a nice, quiet spot, lie down, and die.
Over there, perhaps: beneath that tree. Lovely spot to rest forever. Maybe she would come visit his grave someday. That would be nice.
Maybe she would tell the Venarium what had happened to him. Maybe they would nod solemnly and come back to harvest his body and give him the honors that his duties demanded. The heretics had been slain. The law of the Venarium had been upheld. He would be harvested, turned into merroskrit, and his name would be written down in the annals of the finest Librarians to have served.
He could die a happy man.
And another man, who had murdered hundreds of people, would live.
And Bralston knew what his choice had to be.
Two more pages came out of his spellbook. Ordinary paper, nothing special but for the words he smeared upon them in crude, red lettering. One of them contained much: many names of important men, many thoughts summarizing many events. Many words.
The other contained just five.
He folded them both as delicately as he could. The cranes they became were sloppy, slovenly things, wings askew and heads insane. The words he spoke to them were gravelly and agonized, incomprehensible even in a language already incomprehensible.
But he spoke them. And they flew. They rose shakily into the air, wobbling precariously as they sailed over the treetops and disappearing with not much hope for success into the sky.
&
nbsp; Bralston rose to his feet, drew a deep breath. It was ragged, like knives in his neck. He shut his eyes and felt his coat spread out behind him. Its tails rose, forming into leathery wings and flapping silently.
In his mind, he could sense it: a quivering, trembling power, like a flame stirred by the beating of a moth’s wings. Dreadaeleon’s strength, waxing and waning with the Decay that coursed through his body. He was moving farther away.
Chances were good that Denaos was with him.
Like his cranes, Bralston rose shakily into the air. The magic rushed through him like a river, crashing where it had once been flowing. It was hard to control, harder without words to guide it.
But he flew.
As he must.
TWELVE
GODS WITHOUT WATER
The statue rose from the sea.
A stone god with stone hands, its face lay in fragments about the hem of its robe, leaving nothing beneath its cowl but a mass of shattered granite. The ship that had so valiantly carried it to its fate lay crushed behind it, broken deck straining to keep it from drowning along with the rest of the vessel.
It shifted in some slight, imperceptible way. It sighed, as it had doubtlessly sighed for centuries.
It was an old god who had been crumbling as long as the mist had been here. But its hands were still strong, still whole, still stone.
It needed nothing else.
Its palm broke through the great, gray wall, parted it like a curtain and left it to crumble alongside it face. It was a testament to its strength.
Almost as strong a testament as the shattered ribcage wrapped around its wrist.
Whatever the beast had been, it had never been a god. It lay before the statue, sprawled in the parted stone curtains, skeletal claws sunk in the rock in a long-ago effort to resist the statue’s stone palm. It still screamed now, from shattered ribs and out a skeletal mouth, into eternity.
And past the wall, past the bones, past the stone monolith, Jaga lay exposed.
Maybe not, Lenk thought with a sigh. “Exposed” isn’t really the word for Jaga. Nor “welcoming” or “convenient” or “not conducive to bodily injury, decapitation, and possibly castration.”
He pursed his lips, pulled them apart with a thoughtful pop.
Of course, that’s not one word, is it?
But many years and many blades had taught him to consider everything, even if there technically wasn’t any evidence that the Shen had any fondness for castration.
There was no evidence that the Shen would live on an island surrounded by a giant wall, either. There was no evidence that a race of canoe-paddling, club-swinging, loincloth-clad lizards had the time, skill, or patience for crafting such a formidable defense, let alone decorating it so elaborately.
But there it was: an eternity long, a god high, and brimming with depictions of noble men marching defiantly into the sea to be greeted with a riot of fish and coral before falling like children into the arms of a woman, vast as the wall she was carved into.
Traitor.
He cringed. They came again. Not his thoughts. Burrowing into his head.
Liar.
Murderer.
Blasphemer.
He closed his eyes, tried to breathe deeply. It was harder than it seemed.
Kill.
Destroy.
Unseat.
It never worked anyway. Talking didn’t, either. But it was at least harder to hear them over the sound of his own voice.
“Kind of odd, don’t you think?” he asked.
“What do I think?”
Kataria’s breathless voice came ahead of her as she clawed her way to the top of the pillar. Her scowl burned beneath the satchel of supplies and quiver upon her back as she hauled herself up.
“I think that every time I wonder if I might be wrong to think you’re an imbecile, you go and make such a monumental observation as noting that this whole adventure might contain some things that might be considered odd.”
“I mean it’s odd even for us,” Lenk replied, gesturing at the centuries-old carnage. “Where did this wall come from? The Shen couldn’t have carved it.”
“Why couldn’t they have?” Kataria asked as she wrung out her hair. “We don’t know anything about them beyond their attitudes toward our heads being attached to our bodies.”
“They couldn’t have built it because there’s no way a race can grasp the finer points of mass masonry projects while the concept of trousers still eludes them. And what about this?” He waved his hands at the monolith and the ship struggling to keep it from sinking. “What is it?”
“This is the fourth one we’ve seen today. What’s odd about this one?”
“They were all over the place on Teji, mounted like siege engines. This one’s a ship’s ram. What are they doing here?”
“Same thing they were doing on Teji,” Kataria said, shrugging. “Standing around, being ominous.” She adjusted the satchel on her back. “This is the only way in and we’ve been following the wall for hours. You had all that time to ask stupid questions.” She clapped his shoulder as she moved forward. “Now, we move.”
She took the lead. And he followed.
Again.
Kataria could never be called “shy,” what with the various insults and bodily emissions she had hurled at him. But she had never really seemed interested in leadership roles. Possibly because it took up time that could be spent jamming sharp things into soft things.
Yet she easily pushed past him. She looked at him expectantly before sliding down the other side of the pillar. Like he was supposed to follow.
It made sense. Her hearing was sharp, her eyes keen. If anything was going to leap out of the mist to kill them, she’d know long before he would and might tell him. And yet, he couldn’t shake a suspicion that came from her newfound confidence.
The voice wouldn’t let him.
“She does not fear you.”
I don’t want her to fear me. He thought the thoughts freely as he moved to follow her. It was a little refreshing to hear a more familiar madness.
“You do. And you are right to.”
All right, humor me. Why?
“Because you want her to know what she did. You want her to feel pain.”
I don’t.
He left it at that. He tried not to give it any thoughts for the voice to respond to. Futile. He felt the cold snake from his head into chest as the voice looked from his thoughts into his heart.
“You do.”
He slid down the pillar, found Kataria standing at the edge of its rocky base. A network of old carnage stretched before them: splintered wood, jagged stone, a bridge of gray and rot that led to the monolith’s improvised entrance.
“Looks clear.”
Lenk took a step forward. Her hand was up and pressed against his chest. Her eyes were locked intently on his.
“It looked clear right before Gariath was swallowed whole.” She shrugged the satchel off, handed it to him. “I’ll go first.”
He wasn’t quite sure what to think as she hopped nimbly from rock to rock, lumber to lumber across the gap of sea. Fortunately, he had someone who did.
“She turns her back to you.”
Lenk hopped after her. She’s just confident.
“Careless.”
Protective.
“Stupid.”
She’s hardly stupid.
“We are no longer talking about her.”
He followed her silently across the rocks, trying to keep head as silent as mouth.
Kataria nimbly skipped across the stones and wreckage ahead of him, canny as a mountain goat. But his eyes were drawn to her feet, how they slipped, just a hair’s breadth, with each step. She was getting careless, distracted by something.
It would be a small effort, barely anything more than an extra hop and an outstretched hand. A gentle shove and—
Stop. He shook his head wildly. Stop that.
“Delusional.”
What
did I just say?
They wound their way across the precarious footing, onto the shattered hull of the ship, over the stone god’s shattered face. As they squeezed through smashed ribs, Lenk paused to note just how odd it was that this was his second time doing this.
They had been everywhere on Teji. The giant fish-headed beasts littered the beach amidst the wrecked artillery and rusted weapons in numbers so vast as to paint the sand white. Their skulls had holes punched in them with boulders. Their limbs had been twisted beneath splintering shafts.
A war, the Owauku had said, between the servants of Ulbecetonth and her mortal enemies.
A war that had reached all the way to the Shen.
And, as he crawled beneath a fractured collarbone the size of a ship’s plank, Lenk began to wonder which side they had been on when the walls broke.
And, as he emerged from the hole, set foot upon finely carved stone, he found that the list of mysteries surrounding the Shen grew obnoxiously long.
The highway stretched out before him, behind him, around him, wide enough for ten men to walk abreast of each other as it wound between the two great walls rising up on either side of it. The bricks of the road were smoothed to the point that they would have shined if not for the shroud of gray overhead and the black splotches staining them. Pedestals where statues had once stood marched its length, host to stone feet without bodies, stone faces amidst pulverized pebbles.
A battle had obviously raged here. What kind of battle, he had no idea. Because for all the blood, all the destruction, there were no bodies.
Only bells.
He had seen them before: abominations of metal hanging from wooden frames by spiked chains, so severely twisted that they looked like they might not even make a sound. They did, of course. He had heard it before. He still heard it as he looked at them now. It still made his head hurt.
The mist did not spare him the sight by politely obscuring it. It lingered at the edges of the wall, wispy gray fingers like those of a curious child peeking over. But it never came farther, as though out of respect. However old the mist was, the stone was older. However long it had been here, the road had been here longer.
That raised questions. He had enough of those.
Where is she?
That one, in particular.
“Lurking. Waiting. To kill you.”
