by Samuel Sykes
Dreadaeleon hadn’t even noticed the lightning crackling on the longface’s fingers until they were raised and thrust in his face.
“Just as that power is not yours to wield.”
By the time the longface spoke the word and sent the forked lightning from his fingers, all Dreadaeleon could muster was a feeble hand raised in defense. But in the flash that it took, he needed nothing more. He could feel the electricity enter his skin as though it belonged there, snaking into his body and disappearing into his fingertips with a few stray sparks. It crackled inside him, settling into his body like a new home.
And the two shared a look of shock, neither having expected that. But neither had the opportunity to dwell upon it.
The distant rumble grew to a roar. They turned and saw the wall of water rushing down from the staircase, becoming a colossal wave unto itself. It swept away the living and the dead, the screaming and the silent, the faithful and the faithless alike in a pitiless rush.
“Ah.” Sheraptus sighed. “I see.” He clicked his tongue. “They really are fickle, aren’t they? It seems a little unfair.”
With that, the longface folded his hands behind his back and walked. Slowly. Toward the water.
“What are you doing?” Dreadaeleon demanded. “You can’t—”
“Enough with the limitations, little moth,” Sheraptus said, waving a hand over his shoulder. “They saw fit to give you the crown and give me … this. I suspect you’ll find that limitations mean nothing to those willing to recognize their insignificance.”
“But where are you going?”
The water rushed up to meet him. Sheraptus had but enough time to look over his shoulder and smile.
“I suspect we’ll find out.”
And he disappeared beneath the flood.
Dreadaeleon should have dwelt on just how psychotic that was. Or on how he could have saved Greenhair. Or on the fate of his friends. But desperation lent clarity to thought. He drew in a breath, spoke the words, and released.
The wall of force formed nearly instantaneously. Nothing more than a flick of his wrist, a wave of his hand, and the air became rippling, solid, parting the colossal flood as easily as he would fold paper. And in brief, fleeting moments of clarity, he could but marvel at how effortless it all was. How easily the power flowed from him, how he felt nothing burning or breaking inside him to do it, how swiftly the water carried the blood and the bodies and the skeletons around him.
But only in brief, fleeting moments.
The rest of him was dedicated to trying not to listen to the screaming as he heard the Gonwa’s voices rise to shattering and fall silent, one by one, until their agony was a candle flame flickering in the wind.
THIRTY-FIVE
AWASH IN GLORY
Waist-deep in water, Dreadaeleon waded among them, and the dead would not stop looking at him.
Bobbing in the water, their long faces still screwed up in a battle they had not stopped fighting, the netherlings scowled at him. Hollow and empty as they had been in life, the skeletons of the Abysmyths stared at him from fleshless eye sockets as they lay submerged beneath the crystalline water. The Shen …
The Shen floated upon the lake that had been the ring. Face down. Motionless.
He paused and looked to the mountain. The clouds swirled overhead. Perhaps unable to bear giving the rest of the sky a look at what happened on the earth below. The water still vomited from the mountain’s face, though in a slow, steady stream that twisted down the shattered stone stairs and beneath the ribs of Daga-Mer’s colossal skeleton.
The fleshless titan froze in death, reaching out to the mountain with a bleached-white hand, as though still, in some small way, alive. As though, if he could but try a little harder, he could reach what he sought.
All in your mind, old man, he told himself. There’s no one left here but you.
He looked over the ring. The entirety of it was submerged, the bones and bodies bobbing along its surface like lilies of purple and white.
Somewhere in his mind, someone whimpered.
They’re still alive, he thought. Some of them, anyway. After all that. After all you did to them … He paused, shook his head. Stop that. You didn’t know. And by the time you did, there was no choice. The power was there, you happened to have it, so you had to use it and …
He paused and wondered if the Gonwa could hear him as he could hear them. He paused and wondered if they had heard this before from someone else.
Off to the side, he could hear the sound of splashing. He whirled about, hand extended, power leaping to his fingertips. The Gonwa could but groan.
Gariath didn’t even bother to look at him as he trudged through the waters. The dragonman moved slowly, limping. Stray bits of cloth and leather had been tied tightly around his middle, staunching a red stain. Over each shoulder and under one arm, he carried a body.
He paused as he came to Dreadaeleon and grunted. “Alive?”
The boy nodded; considering everything, it didn’t seem a stupid question. “You?” After Gariath nodded, he looked to the bodies. “And what about—” His eyes widened. “Is that Asper?”
“Yes and yes,” Gariath replied. “Alive. Not sure how.” He shook Denaos’s prone body under his arm. “This one either.”
Dreadaeleon looked to the limp, blackened figure of Mahalar and frowned. “And …”
“You don’t need to ask and you know you don’t. Give me something to put them down on.”
A dull whimper in his mind as he breathed over the surface of the water and formed a small floe of ice from his breath. Gariath slumped the bodies upon it. Sure enough, Asper and Denaos drew in short, shallow breath.
“Anyone else?”
Dreadaeleon looked around the ring. The waters chopped gently.
“What of Lenk and the pointy-eared human?” Gariath grunted. “Did they—”
“I don’t …” The boy’s eyes widened. “But maybe …” He tapped his cheek. “Greenhair.”
“What?”
Dreadaeleon ran to where he saw her last and found her there. The icicle that had pinned her to the earth was but a sliver. Her body was torn and twisted where the waves had sought to take her and the frost had sought to keep her. Dreadaeleon reached down and plucked her from the water.
She seemed a fluid thing, then, head lolling in his arms and hair streaming down into the water. Without substance. Without weight. The gaping hole in her body was clean, as though the water had taken her blood with it when it cleaned this cursed place.
“Lorekeeper.”
She spoke. No melody. No song. Words. Crude and painful to hear.
“Lorekeeper,” she gasped.
“I’m here,” he said.
“The Kraken Queen … dead.”
“I know.”
“I … did it. For the Sea Mother. Duty fulfilled. I …” She could not lift her head to look at him. Her arm could only brush against his cheek.
And her arm went limp. And she faded. And she dissolved. Flesh into water, hair into water. She spilled through his grasp, down into the water to disappear into the endless blue.
“She’s dead.” When he finally said it, after so many times he wondered how he might, he was surprised at how easy it was. “Just like that.”
“You were expecting her to live?”
“No …” He looked away, then back to the water. “But …”
Gariath didn’t ask. He didn’t have to. Dreadaeleon’s fingers began to weave, knitting into complex, painful-looking gestures. He coaxed the waters to rise in a column and with delicate brushes of his hands, he sheared the liquid away until it resembled something more shapely, something human.
“Sheraptus was right … in a way, of course, but not the correct way. Magic isn’t meant to be used this way—recklessly, that is—but what are limitations, anyway? We recognize the function of the power as it pertains to our bodies, but what of our minds? He negated the costs of magic—”
Dreadaeleon
winced sharply, rubbing at his temple.
“That was a law that could not be circumnavigated. Not until he figured out a way. And if one law can be made pointless, what of others? What else could we possibly do with it? What else can be made insignificant?”
He stepped back. The water hung in the air, no longer a column, no longer even human. She was blue, of course, and liquid, but everything else about her—the flow of her hair, the fins upon her head, the crystalline hum she made when Dreadaeleon flicked her liquid body—was her.
“The siren,” Gariath muttered. “You … just—”
“I did,” Dreadaeleon said, beaming. “I can. Lenk, Kataria, anyone else, maybe even all the Shen lost today, if we can recover their bodies. If power can be transferred, if a being can be broken down into energy, then surely it can be reconstructed. Surely, with the proper motivations and more thorough thought than Sheraptus, I could …”
His smile was wide when he turned to Gariath.
“Gods, do you realize what this—”
His smile disappeared when Gariath punched him.
“Yeah.” The dragonman grunted as he caught the boy and tore the crown from his head before letting him drop into the water, the liquid Greenhair splashing into nothingness after him. “I do.”
For as much trouble as it had caused, it was like paper in Gariath’s hands, its iron bending in soft, whimpering creaks as he wadded it up into a mangled, blackened mess.
“What are you doing?” Dreadaeleon sputtered, flailing to his feet. “What the hell are you doing, you moron? STOP! That may be the only chance we have to—”
“There’s nothing you can say that will make me stop,” Gariath grunted, continuing to mangle the crown. “And only a handful of things you can say that won’t make me punch you again.”
He turned and threw it. It tumbled out of sight, disappearing somewhere beyond the line of kelp. Dreadaeleon itched at his scalp, his mind suddenly seeming a very empty, constrictive place.
“WHY?” he demanded.
“It was a cursed, evil thing.”
“Can you tell me why it was a cursed, evil thing? Because you can’t understand it? Because you don’t know how anything works if you can’t hit it real hard and make it do something?”
“Yeah,” Gariath growled, “because I don’t understand it. And because I don’t understand how someone thinks you can pull a dead body up, put something in it, and call it alive again. And I don’t understand how you can think anyone having that kind of power is a good thing.” He snorted. “So, in the absence of understanding, I turned to violence. It worked out pretty well for me.”
Dreadaeleon opened his mouth to retort, found himself silent as his eyes were drawn to the edge of the ring. The kelp forest parted as they came emerging from the shadows. In numbers too small for the leaves to even notice their passing.
At their head trudged a creature with a bent back and a long shard of bone wedged in his eye. Behind came the others, holding the prone bodies of a man with silver hair and a bloodied woman, both unmoving. They came until there were but a few.
Shalake said nothing as he looked past Gariath and Dreadaeleon to the ice floe and the blackened body of Mahalar. He said nothing as he looked to his few brothers, who stepped forward and deposited Lenk and Kataria upon the ice. And he said nothing as he bent low and began to pull a body of one of his fellows from the water.
And they said nothing, as one, as the Shen who knew they were dead were collected and heaped upon the ice by those who had yet to admit it.
THIRTY-SIX
FAREWELL TO THE DEAD
It was enough smoke to choke a god. But then again, it was a lot of fire.
Because there were a lot of bodies.
Still.
Three days after.
On the beaches below, they worked as one. The Gonwa and Owauku had come from Teji, summoned by Shen that had once threatened them. They carried the bodies, they built the pyres from coral and wood, they bore the torches. They filed between the fire and the pile of dead, green flesh in a slow march, as they had since dawn, as they did at sunset, until they moved with such certainty between deaths that it was impossible to tell the difference between them.
“We do not burn our dead.”
Lenk looked up. Jenaji stood at the edge of the cliff, staring down over the beach. The sole patch of sand that was not walled away from the world.
“When my father died,” he said, “it was by a human sword. We were raiding a ship that wandered too close. Shalake called him a hero. We left him his club, his shield, and let the tide rise and take him.”
He looked down at the bodies below. “We had ways of doing things. Ways that we had done things when we were one people. The years came. The Gonwa grew lazy, the Owauku grew stunted. Their suffering changed them. We loathed them for it. We made them swear oaths that our ancestors took when we were still one.”
Lenk looked to the center of the beach, the largest pyre, the brightest fire. Mahalar. They had set him ablaze first. Three days later, he was still burning.
“It took us this,” Jenaji said, gesturing to the scene below, “to see what they had seen. All that you see below is all that remains of us. All of us. We found only bodies and embers on Komga. We came to Teji on bended knee. We begged the Owauku, the weakest of us, to come and bring wood for …”
He sighed. “Less than one hundred. Three islands, each one of them a graveyard. And all that we had, the best of us, flies on the wind.”
Lenk looked down at the fire and smoke. He rubbed the secured poultice on his shoulder. He coughed.
“So, yeah, I’m fine,” he said, “like I was saying. Just … uh …” He coughed again. “Thought you’d want to know.”
Jenaji looked at him. He smiled weakly.
“I mean, thank you, for your help,” he said. “When we came down from the mountain, I probably would have died if you hadn’t helped us. Kataria collapsed, probably from carrying me all the way down—thanks for not mentioning that, by the way—but, uh … thanks.”
Jenaji held his stare for a long while before turning back and grunting.
“It’s fine.” He rubbed his eyes. “You did us a service. The Shen would be proud to die for this. We did our duty. We died well.”
Jenaji paused, shook his head.
“No. I still don’t believe it.”
Lenk glanced to his sword at his side. It would seem a little petty to thank them for fishing it out when the waterways beneath Jaga emptied out, he thought. And his request was going to be awkward enough already.
“So, this might be a bad time what with the whole … mass death and such,” Lenk said, “but …”
Jenaji didn’t wait for him to finish his thought. He took the satchel from his waist, held it up before him.
“Look at that. It weighs nothing. Toss it in a fire, it would burn like any other book. And for this …” He looked out over the fires and sighed, tossing it into Lenk’s lap. “Take it. Whatever reason we had to care about it is gone now.”
“We’ll be gone in a day or two,” Lenk said. “Are you sure you can spare a vessel?”
“And food,” Jenaji said. “And a sea chart we seized from one of the ships. It will take you back to your lands.” He looked at the tome for a moment. “Had we just given that tome to you, perhaps none of this would have ever happened. Irony?”
“Poetry,” Lenk replied. “But I guess, all things considered, we’re kind of lucky.”
“Luck is why you are alive and my brothers are dead.” Jenaji shook his head and sighed. “If we were lucky, I would never have met you.”
Lenk looked at Jenaji as the lizardman turned and stalked down the ridge.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“Away.”
“I mean, where will you go? You and your people?”
“Same answer.”
He watched him go to join the procession heaping bodies onto the fire. He looked down at the satchel in his lap. H
e didn’t open it. He didn’t need to. No voice called to him, he felt no great desire to open it. Whatever inside him that had spoken the book’s language was now silent.
Now, the Tome of the Undergates was just a book.
And he was just a man sitting on top an island made of corpses.
“That’s it?”
He looked over his shoulder. Kataria stood at the edge of the kelp forest, arms folded over her chest, bandaged about the limb and midriff.
“Yeah,” he said, holding up the satchel. “It’s over. Everything is over. We can go back and get paid now.”
“And you’re all right?” she asked.
“Mostly,” he said, rubbing his shoulder. “Asper stitched me up, did her business and such. I was in and out for a lot of it and I think she said something about sneezing killing me or something, but—”
She was turning and walking. He called after her, her ears were folding over themselves. She disappeared into the forests.
And Lenk and the tome were left upon the cliff.
“Patron’s coin,” Denaos cursed, “you’re supposed to be lighter without armor.” He grunted as he pulled the corpse to the pyre. “But you won’t lend a hand, will you? You don’t even care.” He wiped sweat from his brow as he looked down disdainfully at the burden. “What with being dead and all.”
He had shut her eyes. Once more when they had somehow opened themselves. He had considered blindfolding her, but he didn’t think it would help. Even in a cold, blind death, he could feel Xhai hating him.
“Not like you deserve this, anyway,” he growled. “You tried to kill me. A lot of people have done that before and gotten away with burials much less pretty than this.” He looked down at her, shrouded in the leather wrapping, and frowned. “I don’t have to do this, you know.”
He dropped her a few feet away from the crude pyre he had assembled at one of the few remaining dry spots at the edge of the ring. A meager thing, cobbled together out of whatever he thought might burn. She could knock it down, smash the pieces and jam the sharp bits somewhere tender without ever breaking a sweat.
