by Sam Sykes
And still she raked.
Boots crunched. She felt a shadow descend upon her.
‘Lenk,’ she gurgled, choked, ‘help.’
He stood above her, unmoving, shadowed by the blend of smoke and sunlight.
‘Lenk,’ she said again, voice straining to get out through the ooze.
He twitched, knelt down beside her.
She opened her mouth to plead again, but found herself breathless. Blood froze in her veins, breath forgotten as her jaw went slack. She gasped; the ooze found its door into her body and flooded in. Her next breath was the last she took before she felt herself slip away, but even through the darkness of her eyes, she could still see him.
Lenk, skin as grey as a drowned corpse, eyes blue and burning, bereft of pupils.
Seventeen
BURY YOUR FRIENDS DEEP
‘Is it working?’
Asper could feel Lenk’s eyes with such intensity they threatened to crack her skull. His stare darted between the priestess, sweating and pumping knotted hands over her patient’s chest, and the shict, who lay breathless upon the ground.
Asper kept her actual thoughts to herself; it just seemed in poor taste to tell him his concern over his dying companion was slightly irritating.
‘I don’t know yet.’ She pressed a pair of fingers against Kataria’s throat. ‘This sort of thing works on drowning victims, but only if we get to them quickly.’ No pulse; she kept her head low to conceal her frown. ‘Really, I just have no idea if it works on drowning by demons.’
‘Well, try-’
‘Oh, is that what I’m supposed to be doing?’ she snarled over her shoulder at him. ‘I’m not putting hands on her chest for your enjoyment, you know. Back away, moron!’
He nodded weakly, backing away. Such readiness to obey distressed her. It was exceedingly unlike the young man to so willingly bow out of such a situation. Then again, she considered, it was exceedingly unlike him to express any interest in death. Yet he seemed to be dying with the shict, moping about her soon-to-be-corpse like a dog around its dying master.
Asper forbore to tell him this.
She was sorely tempted to tell him to stop staring at her, though. His eyes bored into the back of her skull, drilling into two well-worn spots in her head where other, weary stares had rested. Gazes from mothers with fevered children, fathers with raped daughters had left the first scratches upon her scalp. Soldiers with wounded comrades and sons with ailing elders had bored even deeper.
Lenk’s stare, however, went well beyond her skin. He peered past hair, flesh, blood and bone into the deepest recesses of her mind. He saw her, she felt, and all the workings of her brain.
He knew she couldn’t save this one.
NO! she shrieked at herself inside her own head. Don’t think like that. You can do this. These hands have healed before, countless people. These hands. .
Her gaze was drawn to her left hand, resting limply upon the shict’s abdomen. It twitched suddenly, temptingly. You could end it all, you know, her thoughts drifted, just a bit of pressure, like you did to the frogman. Then, poof! All over! She won’t have to suffer any more. .
‘No, no, no, NO!’
She ignored the concerned stares cast her way, ignored her hand, ignored everything but the placid expression upon Kataria’s face and the stillness of her heart.
‘I can do this,’ she muttered, beginning chest compressions anew, ‘I can do this, I can do this.’ She found solace in the repetition, so much that she barely noticed the tear forming at the corner of her eye. ‘Please, Talanas, let me do this. .’
Lenk stared at Asper’s back, watching the sweat stain grow longer down her robe.
It was a hard battle to resist the urge to rush up beside the priestess, to see if he could help, if he could do something. He was used to fixing things: fixing the fights between his companions, fixing the agreements between him and his employers, fixing to jam hard bits of steel into soft flesh.
That’s how it should be.
He should have been able to fix this.
The sound of metal gently scraping against skin was loud, unbearable. He cast a resentful, sidelong scowl at his companion. Denaos, however, paid no heed to the young man, gingerly working at his fingernails with a tiny blade. Eventually, it seemed Lenk’s stare became a tad more unbearable and Denaos glanced back at him.
‘Sweet Silf, fine,’ he hissed, ‘I’ll do yours, if you’re so damn envious.’
‘Kataria,’ Lenk replied sharply, ‘is dying.’
‘To be more precise, Kataria may already be dead.’
Lenk blinked at him. Somewhere in the distance, a gull cried.
‘What?’ Denaos hardly looked at him as he plucked up a waterskin from the ground and took a drink.
‘This doesn’t bother you?’ Lenk all but shrieked at the tall man, snatching the skin away. ‘You can’t even keep yourself from drinking her water?’
‘It’s our water, you milksop. She’ll have her drink if and when she wakes up. Have at least an ounce of faith in Asper, would you?’ Denaos glanced over to the priestess. ‘She’s doing her best. She’ll do what’s right.’
‘Really?’ Lenk permitted a squeal of relief to tinge his voice. ‘You’ve seen this sort of thing before?’
‘Once, aye.’ He nodded appraisingly as Asper pressed her lips against Kataria’s once more. ‘But the spectacle cost me a pouch of silver.’ He became aware of Lenk’s angry stare after another moment. ‘What?’
‘What is wrong with you?’ The young man forced an angry snarl between clenched teeth. ‘I almost suspect Gariath would be more sympathetic in this than you are.’
‘He’s further up the beach,’ Denaos gestured, ‘far more curious about dead demons than he is about Kataria.’ He cast a smug smile at Lenk. ‘Besides, it’s not like he’d do anything more than I am save urinate on her corpse.’ He coughed. ‘Out of respect, of course.’
‘Then maybe you should go and linger with him,’ Lenk snorted. ‘If we’re lucky, I’ll only have to come back to see one of you still alive.’
‘Unsurprising as it might be, I find the near-dead to be rather more pleasant company than that lizard.’
‘Then do me,’ Lenk paused, ‘and her the respect of showing proper manners and worrying a little.’ He grunted. ‘Or by seeing how many daggers you can fit in your mouth. Whichever.’
‘Worry?’ Denaos made a scoffing sound. ‘Would that I could.’
The wind between them died. Lenk turned a scowl upon the rogue.
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Frankly, I’d rather not say.’
‘Then you shouldn’t have said it in the first place,’ Lenk snarled. ‘What do you mean by that?’
The rogue’s shoulders sank as his head went low to hide the rolling of his eyes.
‘Really, you don’t want me to continue. If I do, you’ll get all upset and pouty, then violent. You’ll do something you’ll later regret, then come crawling back like a worm to tell me I was right and, honestly, I’m not sure if I can stand such a sight.’
‘Whatever I do, I’m guaranteed to regret it less if you don’t have the testicular-borne valor to finish your thought.’
Denaos half-sighed, half-growled.
‘Fine. Allow me to slide a shiv of reality into your kidneys. ’ He shrugged. ‘If she dies, it’ll be a tragedy, to be certain. She was a fine shot with that bow of hers and a finer sight for eyes used to far too much ugly, I’ll tell you. But it’s not like we’re losing anyone. .’ He paused, tilting his head, wincing as though struck. ‘I mean. . in the end, she’s not one of us. She’s just a shict. No shortage of them.’
Lenk blinked once. When his eyelids rose, it was not through his own stare that he saw his hands reach out and seize the tall man by his collar. It was not his arms that trembled with barely restrained fury. It was not his voice that uttered a frigid threat to the rogue.
‘The only regret here,’ he whispered, ‘is that my s
word is stuck in a corpse that isn’t yours.’
This is it.
The thought rang through Asper’s head solemnly, like a dirge bell.
It had to happen eventually.
Her breath was short, sporadic.
You did your best. .
Kataria’s face was almost part of the scenery, so unchanged was it. As much as Asper searched, as much as she prayed for a twitch of lips or flutter of eyelids, she found nothing. The shict seemed more in a deep dream than a breathless coma, more at peace than in pain.
That might be a sign, her thoughts flooded her head like a deluge, that’s Talanas’s mercy to you. What do you know about this, anyway? You can tie up scratches and kiss scraped knees, but you can’t heal a damn thing without bandages.
She pressed her fingers against Kataria’s throat; no pulse. . still.
It’s not so bad. You can’t save them all. Remember the last one? She was in so much pain, but you managed to take that away. Her left hand twitched involuntarily. You can do the same for your friend, can’t you?
‘Shut up,’ she snarled, ‘shut up!’
She forced her mind dark, silenced the voices in the rhythm of chest compressions and the futile monotony of breathing. There was solace in monotony, she knew, comfort in not seeing ahead. She forced her gaze away from the future, focused on the now, the lifeless shict and the quiet muttering.
‘I can do this,’ she whispered, ‘I can do this,’ she told herself as she had for so long, ‘please, I can do this. .’
She drew in her forty-third breath and leaned closer to the shict’s lips. She hesitated, hearing a sound so faint as to be a shade more silent than a whisper: a choked, gurgling whisper.
‘Please,’ she whispered again.
The lifeless muscles in Kataria’s body twitched. Asper forced herself to continue, biting back hope.
‘Please.’
The gurgle came again, a little louder. Kataria’s body jerked, a little livelier.
‘Kat. .’ She was terrified to raise her voice. ‘Please. .’
A smile wormed its way onto Asper’s face. The shict’s pale lips parted, only slightly, and drew in the most meagre, pathetic of breaths.
‘Yes,’ her giggle was restrained hysteria, ‘yes, yes, yes!’
Her eyes widened with a sudden dread as she saw something bubble in the shadows of her companion’s mouth.
‘Oh, no! No, no, WAIT!’
As though possessed, the shict’s body shuddered violently, her mouth stretching so wide as to make her jaw creak threateningly. A torrent of translucent bile came flooding out of her, arcing like a geyser as her lungs were brutally evacuated.
Groaning, Kataria rolled onto her side and expelled the last traces of the muck with a hack. Body trembling, she had barely the strength to fall upon her back. The sun seemed bright and harsh above her, her breath foreign and stagnant on her lips.
Through fluttering eyes, she became aware of a shadow falling over her. She tensed, her voice forgotten, a scream bursting from her lips as only a faint, ooze-tinged squeal.
Two wicked blue moons stared down upon her. Her heart raced, head glutted with fragmented imagery: grey flesh, silver hair, two blue eyes burning like cold pyres, pupilless.
She opened her mouth to scream again, but caught herself. Or rather, a pair of strong hands caught her by her arms, pulling her closer. She writhed in the grip, unwilling to stare into the eyes that shifted before her. As dizziness and half-blindness faded, she beheld a gaze that was dominated by two big, hound-like pupils.
‘Calm down,’ Lenk whimpered, ‘just calm down. You’re fine.’
‘Fine,’ she repeated as she took in his face, his pink skin and blinking eyes. ‘I’m fine.’ She paused to cough, forcing a weak smile on her face. ‘I mean, as far as nearly dying goes.’
‘Fine.’ He nodded. ‘Just don’t strain yourself. Take breaths as they come.’ He raised her to a sitting position as he eased a waterskin into her hands. ‘Drink. You’re sure you’re well?’
‘A damn sight better than some of us,’ someone snarled from behind.
Asper’s scowl burned two holes in the mask of viscous sludge covering her face. Her lips quivered from behind the vomit, as though she sought to scream but thought better of it. Fuming so fiercely as to make the bile steam, she resigned herself to grumbling indignantly and mop-ping the substance with her sleeve.
‘Oh, you messy little sow.’ Denaos giggled as he joined his companions. ‘Gone and eaten your pudding like a fat little baby, have you?’
Artfully dodging the glob of vomit she hurled at him, he approached Lenk and Kataria with all the candour of someone who had not just recently dismissed a looming death as an unfortunate inconvenience.
‘And how are we today?’ he asked with a broad smile. ‘I was slightly worried we’d have to cut your body into six pieces so that you wouldn’t come back.’ He added a knowing nod. ‘That’s what happens when shicts die, you know. They’ll come crawling right out of the grave to rip your eyes out and eat them.’
‘One would hope she’d have the sense to rip out your tongue first.’ Lenk hurled his voice like a spear at the rogue, though Denaos seemed to dodge that just as gracefully as he had the vomit. ‘Maybe she’d like to hear what you-’
‘Well, that’s all fine, fine and dandy.’ Denaos interrupted the young man with a timely spear of his own. ‘Good to know we all emerged from another near-death experience with only one of us nearly dying. A fine score, if I may say so.’
Lenk opened his mouth to retort, but a hacking cough from Kataria shredded that before it reached his lips. Settling for an icy stare at Denaos’s nonchalant expression, he raised the waterskin to her lips, pulling his hand back as she swatted at it.
‘I’m not an invalid, round-ear,’ she growled, shaking his arm off from around her. After a few frenzied gulps, she wiped her mouth. ‘What happened, anyway?’
‘We were hoping you might tell us,’ Asper piped up. ‘Denaos and I came at the sound of screaming.’
‘Late,’ Lenk muttered.
‘Cautiously late,’ Denaos shot back.
‘At any rate,’ Asper continued, ‘we found you unconscious and the whole beach scorched halfway to heaven.’
‘Hell,’ Denaos corrected.
‘What about Lenk?’ Kataria asked.
‘What about Lenk?’
‘He was here. He saw what happened.’
‘I don’t recall.’ The young man offered a helpless shrug. ‘We were hit pretty hard.’
Kataria’s breath caught; she levelled a hard gaze at him.
‘We. .’
‘Yeah,’ he nodded, ‘you and me.’
‘The demon bashed him good,’ Asper added. ‘He was just coming out of it when we arrived.’
He wasn’t out, Kataria thought.
The visions bloomed in her mind: the onyx sheen of the Abysmyth’s black blood, the surgical silver of Lenk’s sword. They flooded through her with grotesque vividness, matched only by the horrifying sounds that replayed in her mind.
‘MOMMY! MOMMY! IT HURTS!’ She recalled the demon’s wailing voice. ‘MAKE IT STOP! MAKE IT STOP!’
Lenk had said nothing.
Someone else had.
‘Stay,’ it had uttered through his mouth, ‘we kill.’
Whoever had spoken had leaned over her, stood with flesh grey as stone and eyes blue as winter.
Someone not Lenk. .
‘Whichever of you did whatever,’ Denaos added with a grimace, ‘someone seems to have hit the demon back. . rather hard.’
‘The demon.’ Kataria’s head snapped up. ‘What happened to it?’
The Omen hopped across the sand, sweeping bulbous eyes over the chaos. Despite the smoke seeping into the two gourd-like organs, the thing did not so much as blink. It recalled, vaguely, in what served as its mind, that there had been more of it just a moment ago.
Then there was noise, noise that hurt its ears. It didn’t care for that
noise, so it stayed away. Now, there were none of it left. It turned about, faced the sea and tilted its head. There was one of it there moments ago, it believed. It chattered its teeth, calling to the other.
All that answered it was the sound of wind and a great, black shadow quickly falling over it.
‘Disgusting,’ Gariath muttered, wiping thick, black fluid off the sole of his foot.
It wasn’t so much the texture of the thing’s blood, reminiscent of a large beetle’s, that irritated him as it was the smell. He cast a dark scowl over the beach: sand still pumping acrid smoke into the air, fighting the stinging salty reek for dominance, as the stinking panoply of electricity, blood and fear congealed into a fine, vile perfume.
With a growl, he gave the Omen’s corpse a kick, sending it spiralling through the air like a feathery, blood-dripping ball to plop at the top of a heap of similar misshapen amalgamations. Gathering them in one spot did nothing for the odour.
With a sigh, Gariath thrust his snout into the air once more, testing it. Nothing but the stink of carnage and fire reached his nostrils. He found his fists tightening of their own volition, his skin threatening to burst under his claws. Every whiff of the air only brought him more of the same stinks, denying him any other scents.
So close, he snarled internally, I was so close. I was right on top of it. . then THIS!
The beach’s odour had struck him like a wave, drowning all other aromas. It was only because of its sheer overwhelming stench that he had come to it and found two worthless humans agonising over two other worthless humans.
At that moment, he had excused himself to hunt down the remaining Omens that had been hopping aimlessly around the sands. He needed something to vent his rage upon and crushing the tiny parasites seemed only slightly more appropriate than crushing his companions; besides, one of them was already dead.
