by Sam Sykes
‘The cure is nigh.’
‘Cure it!’ the Omens shrieked excitedly. ‘Cure! Cure! Cure!’
It happened with such quick action that Lenk had no time to turn away. In the span of an unblinking eye’s quiver, the demon took the Cragsman’s arm in its own great hand and, with barely more than a wet popping noise, wrenched it off.
‘HELP ME!’ the man wailed. ‘ZAMANTHRAS! DAEON! GODS HELP ME!’ Tears ran in rivulets down his forehead, mingling with fat, red globs that plopped upon the sand. ‘PLEASE!’
‘And for what purpose, my son?’ The Abysmyth shook its great head. ‘Why do you make so much noise, calling to Gods who know not your name nor your suffering? Where is your mercy from heaven? Where is the end to suffering?’
It flicked its taloned hands, sending the appendage flying to land amidst the sands. The Omens let out a collective chatter of approval, bobbing their heads, their bulbous eyes never looking away from Lenk.
‘Where is it?’ they asked. ‘Where is the end? Where are the Gods? Where is the mercy?’
‘Sea Mother,’ the man began babbling a prayer, ‘benevolent matron, bountiful provider, blessed watcher. Wash my sins away on the sand, deliver me to my-’
‘NO!’
The Abysmyth’s howl echoed across the sea, across the sky. The Omens recoiled, fluttering off their branches to hover ponderously for a moment before settling back down. The demon’s black hand trembled as it pointed a claw at the pirate.
‘No blasphemies,’ it uttered, ‘no distractions.’ It shook its great head. ‘There is but one Mother here, one who may provide you with the mercy you seek.’ Its hand lurched forwards, seizing the pirate’s other arm. ‘Can you not see the truth I seek to give you? Can you not see what woe you wreak upon the world?’
‘Can you not?’ the Omens muttered. ‘Can you not see?’
‘The way becomes clear,’ the demon nodded, ‘with suffering to guide your path.’
Lenk grimaced at the sound of ripping, turned away at the sound of meat sliding along the sand, closed his ears to the sound of the man’s shrieking. It was too much.
‘Don’t bother,’ the voice replied, effortlessly heard over the pirate’s agony, ‘he made his path, chose his destiny. He deserves not our aid.’
‘He doesn’t deserve this,’ Lenk all but whimpered.
‘His sins will be washed clean in the demon’s blood. Now, patience.’
‘Can you hear it now?’ The Abysmyth pulled the man up, bringing him to eye level. ‘Can you hear Her wondrous song? How it calls to you. . how I envy you to hear it for the first time. Let Her hear your joy in the whisper of your tears.’
‘Let Her.’ The Omens giggled. ‘She hears all, She delights in your discovery and Her song shall guide you.’
‘Do you hear it?’ The Abysmyth shook the man slightly. ‘Do you?’
There was nothing left to drain from him, however, no more agony upon his face, no more pain to leak from his stumps. He merely dangled there, mouth agape, eyes barely open. Only the glimmer behind them told Lenk that he was still alive, only the shine of what once had been hope, snuffed out. The Cragsman’s lips quivered, mouthing soundless words to him.
Kill me, he pleaded silently, please.
‘So,’ Gariath muttered, ‘what was it?’
Dreadaeleon glanced up at the dragonman, licking his lips as he finished slurping a liquid from a tin cup.
‘What was what?’
‘What called you?’
‘Ah.’ The boy’s eyes lit up. ‘It was actually quite interesting. I’m surprised you’re curious.’
‘I’m not.’
‘Then why did you ask?’
‘Because,’ the dragonman replied, ‘if it calls to you again, I plan to kill you before you can do something stupid. To that end, I’d like to know what to listen for so I can act before you do.’
‘Pragmatic.’ The boy inclined his head. ‘The truth is, I’m not entirely sure. It was something of a song without words, music without notes.’ He paused, straining to think. ‘Flatulence without smell? No, no, it was purely auditory.’ His nostrils quivered. ‘It occurs to me, though, I’d think you could smell whatever it was long before I heard it.’
‘Your thinking tends to be brief and often fleeting,’ Gariath grunted. ‘I can’t smell anything with you drinking that bile.’ He pointed to the tin cup clenched in the boy’s hands as Dreadaeleon squeezed his waterskin over it. ‘What is it, anyway? It smells like bat dung.’
‘It is.’ Dreadaeleon took a brief sip. ‘Some of it, anyway, mixed with the diluted sap of several trees, primarily willow, a few pinches of a powder you’re better off not knowing the name of and a drop of liquor, usually a form of brandy or whiskey, for kick.’
‘Why drink it?’
‘It eases my headaches.’
‘Uh-huh.’ Gariath scowled at the boy. ‘And the bat dung?’
Dreadaeleon smacked his lips thoughtfully. ‘Flavour.’
Gariath’s eyes glowered, muscles quivering with restrained fury. For a moment, a thought occurred to him, as it often had throughout his company with the humans, that this might be the sign he was waiting for. This might be the one act that indicated that these meagre, scrawny creatures had finally done something so deranged that they needed to be put down like the crazed animals they were.
‘What?’ Dreadaeleon asked, unaware of how close he was to having his head smashed in.
Not today, Gariath thought, easing his arm rigidly against his side. If you get his blood on you, you won’t be able to follow the scent. Later, maybe, but not now. Bearing that thought as a burden, he snorted and turned about, continuing to stalk down the beach.
‘Where are we going, anyway?’
‘There has never been a “we”,’ Gariath growled. ‘There is “I”, who stands, and “you”, who gets in the way.’
‘Right.’ Dreadaeleon nodded. ‘“We.”’
‘“We” would imply that I and you are on the same standing. ’ He turned about, making a spectacle of his toothy grimace. ‘We are not.’
‘In that case, where are you going?’
Just tell him, the dragonman told himself. If he finds out it’s a long way to go, maybe he’ll collapse from the thought of so much effort. Maybe then the tide will come in and drown him. He grinned at that. Then his stink won’t be a nuisance and Lenk won’t have anything to complain about.
‘I’m following a scent,’ he finally told the boy.
‘Food?’ Dreadaeleon asked.
‘No.’
‘Water?’
‘No.’
‘Other dragonmen?’
Gariath stopped in his tracks, his back stiffening. Slowly, with a look of violation flashing in his black eyes, he turned to regard Dreadaeleon.
‘You’re using magic on me,’ he snarled, ‘trying to read my thoughts.’
‘Telepathy,’ Dreadaeleon corrected. ‘And I’m not, no. I couldn’t with my headache, at least.’ He beamed a self-satisfied smile that begged all on its own to be cracked open like a nut. ‘I simply used inference.’
‘Inference.’
‘The act of-’
‘I know what it means.’
‘Ah.’ The boy nodded. ‘Of course. I simply meant that, given the way you seem to be sniffing at the air, there’s only a few things you could possibly be seeking. Common beasts, with their advanced senses of smell, usually only seek food, water or mates.’
‘Clever,’ Gariath grunted. ‘Very clever.’
‘I thought so.’
‘Aside from one fact.’ He held up a single clawed finger. ‘This particular finger is one of five, which belong to one hand of two, which is the exact same number of feet I have, all of which I’ve used to split the skulls of, rip the arms off, smash the ribs of and commit other unpleasantries upon,’ he jabbed the boy, sending him back a step, ‘humans much smaller than you who called me much kinder things than a common beast.’
Dreadaeleon’s eyes went wide
with a certain kind of fear that Gariath had seen often in him. With predictable frequency the boy, for he was nothing more than a boy, constantly realised he was not the man he pretended to be. Such a reaction was usually caused by his conversations with the tall, brown-haired human woman or with the taller, red-skinned dragonman. Such reactions, too, frequently had visceral effects.
‘I. . I didn’t. . I mean, I don’t want to-’
Stammering.
‘It wasn’t my intention-’ Dreadaeleon shifted his gaze from the dragonman.
Looking at the ground like a whelp.
‘You must believe me-’ The boy’s knees began to knock.
‘I do,’ Gariath interrupted.
Though he hated to admit it to himself, there was a certain gruesome pride that came with making a human soil himself, but such reactions were reserved for times when he wasn’t on the hunt. Human urine was filthy, yellow and filled with the stinks of liquor. He couldn’t imagine a bat-dung drink smelling any better coming out.
The boy’s sigh, so heavy with relief, did not serve to strengthen Gariath’s faith in the human bladder. Rolling his eyes along with his shoulders, he turned about and began to stalk further down the beach.
‘Well, can I help?’
‘There’s a lot of things you can help,’ Gariath growled in reply, ‘such as your belief that I want to hear you any more.’
‘I meant can I help you find whatever it is you’re looking for?’ Dreadaeleon scurried to keep up with the dragonman’s great strides. ‘I’m not bad with scrying.’
‘With what?’
‘Scrying. Divination.’ He beamed so proudly that Gariath could feel the boy’s smile searing his back. ‘You know, the Art of Seeking. Amongst the wizards of the Venarium, it’s not considered worthy of much more beyond a few weeks of study, but it has its uses.’
Gariath paused, his ear-frills twitching slightly.
‘Magic,’ he uttered, ‘can find lost things?’
‘Most lost things, yes.’
When the dragonman turned to face Dreadaeleon, the boy no longer saw Gariath as he remembered him. In the span of a single turn, the red-skinned brute’s face had shifted dramatically. Wrinkles, once seemingly perpetually carved into his face by an equally perpetual rage, had smoothed out. His lips had descended from their high-set snarl to hide his teeth.
Before, Dreadaeleon had never seen anything within his companion’s eyes, so narrow and black had they been. Now they were wide, so wide as to glisten with something other than restrained — or unrestrained — fury, and they stared at him from a finger’s length away.
‘How does it work?’ Gariath growled.
‘Um, well. .’ The boy struggled for words in the face of this new, slightly less reptilian face. ‘It’s a relatively simple art, which, as I suggested, is what places it so low upon the Hierarchy of Magic.’ He began to count off his skinny fingers. ‘The first of which being the Five Noble Schools: fire, ice, electricity, force and-’
‘Tell me how it works.’
Gariath did not demand, not with any great anger, at least. His tone was so gentle and soft that Dreadaeleon blinked, taken aback.
‘I just need a focus,’ he replied as confidently as he could, ‘something that belonged to the Rhega.’
Gariath’s face twitched. ‘Something that belonged to the Rhega.’
‘Right.’ Dreadaeleon nodded, daring a smile. ‘So long as I have something to focus on, something that bears the Rhega’s signature, it should lead us to more Rhega.’
‘As simple as that?’
‘Just so.’
Dreadaeleon barely had any time to close his eyes before the fist came crashing into his face. His teeth rattled in his skull, chattering against each other like a set of crude ivory chimes. His coat-tails fluttered behind him like dirty brown wings as he sailed through the air before striking the sand, gouging a shallow trench with the force of his skid before finally coming to an undignified halt.
He heard the thunder of Gariath’s footsteps before he felt the thick claws wrap around his throat, hoisting him aloft. His head swam, ringing with the twin cacophonies of his magic headache and the force of Gariath’s blow. Through eyes rolling in their sockets, he could barely make out the great red and white blob before him.
‘There are no more Rhega,’ Gariath snarled. ‘Your breed saw to that.’ His roar was laced with hot, angry breath that would have choked Dreadaeleon had he been able to breathe. ‘And now you want to piss on their memory with your weakling, filthy magic! SIMPLE?’
The boy’s shriek was caught in an explosion of sand as Gariath hurled him to the earth. With the pain echoing through his body in bells of agony, the vicious kick the dragonman planted in his side seemed nothing more than a particularly bloody comma in his furious sentence.
‘There are no more Rhega,’ Gariath repeated, ‘just so.’
The dragonman might well have been a ghost, so faint were his footsteps, so hazy his outline in the wizard’s eyes. Dreadaeleon tried to speak, tried to choke out a query as to what he had done to deserve such a thrashing, an apology of some sort, or perhaps just a plea for help as he felt something growing smaller within him, deflating as air escaped him without returning.
He had no more mind for questions or pleas, however. The dragonman’s shape faded in the distance as he stalked away, his footsteps now silent, as was everything else. The world became numb, all sounds fading before the ringing in his ears.
All but one.
It was faint at first, a slow and gentle lilting of the wind, a voice carried on a stiff breeze that he could not feel. Slowly, it grew louder, searing his ears as it began to drown out the ringing in his head.
So familiar, he was barely able to think, caught between the symphony and chaos murmuring through his brain. I’ve heard it before, I know.
It grew closer and stronger, something between a hum and a purr, escalating to include a faint whistling and breathless gasp. Soon, it began to tinkle, as though it were a gem of sounds being cut into tiny, euphoric crystals.
A song without words, he thought, so pretty. . so pretty. .
His body was numb now. It no longer hurt to blink; the fact that he could not breathe no longer worried him. He lost himself in the song, agony forgotten as he listened to the delicate voice.
Ah, I remember now. He nodded weakly to himself. From the boat. . it’s calling to me again.
And he let himself be called, slipping away into darkness. His vision went blank, eyes closing so that nothing else in the world would matter, not even the shadow creeping over him and the cold, pale hand reaching for him as he lay motionless in the sand.
Fifteen
YOU, TOO, SHALL HEAR
‘She is speaking so clearly now.’ Had he any nerve left to be shaken, Lenk certainly would have lost his at the near-orgasmic bliss with which the Abysmyth sighed. His courage, however, was long devoured, vanished under the flocks of Omens who gnawed incessantly at the body parts strewn across the ground. They shredded with their teeth, slurped long strings of greasy meat into their inner lips, all the while chattering their graces over the bounteous meal they had been served.
‘We hear Her,’ they chanted between chews, ‘and so are we blessed. We hear Her.’
The Abysmyth, in response, shook its colossal head.
‘But there yet remains no virtue in hearing Her name echoed by the choir.’ Slowly, it fixed two great empty eyes upon Lenk. ‘And you? Do you hear Her, my son? Have your ears been freed?’
‘Don’t answer,’ the voice inside his head uttered, ‘it wants an answer.’
‘Why?’ he barely managed to gasp to his unseen companion.
‘It is an abomination, and like all abominations, it knows it is nothing. It is a preacher, and like all false preachers, it craves validation. It does not belong in this world. It needs a reason to exist.’
‘And we,’ Lenk muttered, ‘are that reason?’
‘No,’ the voice replied, ‘we
are the reason it dies today.’
‘You keep saying that, but how? How do we kill it?’
‘As we kill everything else.’
Lenk’s eyes drifted to the armless man dangling from the Abysmyth’s claws, his eyelids flickering, straining to stay open through the pain long enough to mouth his silent plea to Lenk: Kill me, kill me, kill me. His wordless chant was like that of the Omens: repetitive, droning, painful to hear, or to imagine hearing.
‘Can we-’
‘He is lost,’ the voice interrupted callously, ‘he is of no use to us, either.’
‘But we can’t just-’ Lenk attempted to lift a leg to move forwards.
‘We shall.’ He felt it go numb under him.
‘I don’t-’ He tried to tighten his grip on his sword.
‘We do.’ The weapon felt like a lead weight, useless at his side.
‘My son,’ the Abysmyth gurgled with an almost sympathetic inclination, ‘do not fear what your eyes behold today.’ It held up a single, webbed digit and shook it back and forth. ‘For the eyes are what weaken you. Through ears, you shall find your salvation.’
‘No …’
The word came too softly from Lenk’s lips, his own voice paralysed with fear as he watched the demon’s arm crane up to its dangling captive. It pinched one of the Cragsman’s meaty legs with two massive fingers, rubbing it between the digits thoughtfully.
‘And so do I grant two gifts today,’ it continued, keeping a giant black pupil fixed on Lenk. ‘To you, the deaf, I grant the gift of hearing.’ With a thick, squishing sound, the eye rotated back to the pirate. ‘And to you, the misled, I offer you this gift-’
‘No.’
Lenk spoke louder this time, but without conviction, his voice little more than a tiny pebble hurled from a limp wrist. Such a projectile merely bounced off the Abysmyth’s leathery hide, unheeded, unheard.
‘For no God you claim to know has ever bestowed upon you this quality of wisdom.’ Against the sound of the leg being wrenched free from its socket, the sound of paper ripping, meat splattering, the Cragsman’s shriek was but a whimper. ‘Where are they now, my son? Do they hear you, even as you scream? Even as you beg?’
