by Sam Sykes
She found him in a sudden shock as her hands clasped around flesh that froze like a fish’s. She swallowed hard, ignoring this sign as she had done the last, hearing in the faintest whispers Riffid cursing her for her stupidity.
Another hand reached out to clasp about hers and she froze. Through the leather of his glove, through the leather of hers, she could feel it, a sensation that caused her to go breathless as he squeezed her fingers in his.
Warmth.
‘You’re alive,’ he spoke.
He spoke, she told herself, unable to fight back the smile creeping onto her face. Lenk spoke. No one else.
‘Come on,’ she urged, pulling at him.
They staggered out into the stagnant air and the dying light of the torches. She drew in a sharp breath before looking at him, afraid to find grey flesh or pupilless spheres staring back at her.
Instead, she saw a man barely alive. His shirt was tattered and clung to a body that was stained red in areas. His leg, rent with a jagged cut, barely seemed capable of supporting the rest of his wiry frame. Deep circles lined his eyes and his smile was weary and accompanied by a sharp wince.
He looks so weak, she thought, like a sick dog or something. Why she should find that endearing, she did not know. The faint smile that crept to her face quickly vanished by the time her gaze drifted to the black-stained blade and the severed, golden-haired head in his grasp, however.
She cleared her throat. ‘Busy in there?’
‘A bit,’ he replied as he tucked the head’s glimmering locks into his belt.
He paused at the centre of the corridor, noting grimly the Abysmyth corpse striped by sizzling green lacerations. Quietly, he looked her over, frowning at the bruise upon her flank, the cuts criss-crossing her pale skin, the dried trail of blood under her nose.
‘How was your day?’ he asked.
She sniffed a little. ‘Pleasant.’
‘So long as you kept yourself occupied.’ He took a step forwards, then winced to a halt. Smiling sheepishly, he extended his arm to her. ‘Help me?’
‘Help you?’ She gestured to her own wreck of a body. ‘I fought a hulking, purple-skinned white-haired man-woman! ’
He patted the severed head at his belt. ‘I took the skull off a three-headed shark-lady.’
‘She kicked me,’ Kataria said, gesturing to the long bruise running down her flank, ‘might’ve broken my ribs, too. This was all after I stabbed her.’
‘Yeah? Well, she. .’ Lenk looked at the head disparagingly. ‘She yelled at me.’
Kataria stared at him blankly. He coughed.
‘Really loudly.’
She pursed her lips. He sighed and offered his shoulder to her.
‘Fine, get on.’
‘No.’ She took his arm instead, draping it over her shoulder. ‘You’d probably soil yourself with the effort, anyway.’ She grunted, bolstering him. ‘You owe me, though.’
‘I’d offer my blood, if I hadn’t left it behind.’ He chuckled, then winced. ‘It hurts to laugh.’
‘Then stop telling terrible jokes.’ She guided him down the corridor. ‘Denaos lived.’
‘Pity,’ he replied. ‘And the others?’
‘Possibly.’
‘Possibly what?’
‘Either.’
He squeezed her hand and she froze. His grip was still warm.
‘You’re alive,’ he whispered, the faintest edge of hysteria in his voice.
‘I am,’ she replied in a voice just as soft.
‘And you’re still here.’
She hesitated, looked down at the ground and frowned.
‘Yeah. . I know.’
‘I didn’t think-’
‘Don’t ruin it by starting now.’
And so they hobbled in silence until they reached the water’s edge. There they stopped, there they stared at themselves in the gloom.
The liquid seemed slightly less oppressive now, the air a bit cleaner, if tinged by a distant stench of burning. Kataria glimpsed Lenk’s reflection in the water as it twisted and writhed. Odd, she thought, but as distorted as it was, she could still pick out his features, his silver hair and his blue eyes.
What comfort she took in that was lost the moment she spied her own reflection, however. The creature of pale skin and green eyes stared back up at her, twisting, contorting and fading. She frowned, for even as her reflection re-formed, she still didn’t recognise the shict looking back at her.
‘Kataria,’ Lenk began, sensing her tense under him, ‘I-’
‘Later,’ she grunted, adjusting herself and him as they slid into the water.
If there was a later, she would handle it then. Whatever excuses needed to be made, whatever apologies had to be voiced to herself, to her Goddess, to her kin, could be made later. For now, they were both alive.
And Kataria couldn’t help but think it would be easier if one of them weren’t.
Thirty-One
THAT WHICH FADES
Denaos had never believed the idea that one of his particular talents should prefer the darkness. The sun was far more pleasant; it illuminated, it warmed, and didn’t mind at all if one happened to admire it nude, unlike certain people with primitive notions of modesty and boundaries.
‘We could learn a bit from you, my golden friend,’ he whispered to the great yellow sphere, reaching down to scratch a particularly errant itch.
After the eternity it had taken to leave Irontide, the sun was a particularly welcome sight. It was two long days in a dank, decrepit stone hall stinking of ash and blood before they were rested enough to make the long swim back to Ktamgi. The effort was made all the harder by the grievous injuries sustained during their excursion to the crumbling fortress. Even Asper had tended to them with a degree more listlessness than usual; many of his companions still lingered in uncertain fates.
But, he thought, they aren’t here now.
And so Denaos lay upon a beach blissfully free of demons, netherlings or hulking she-beasts while at least three of his companions were threatened with the imminent possibility of a slow, agonising death.
It was a good day.
Naturally, the thought occurred with a twitch of an eyelid as he heard the sound of footsteps on sand, someone has to come and ruin it.
‘Hey.’
Lenk’s voice, he thought, was a dull and unenthusiastic brick hurled through a pleasant stained-glass window depicting a rather tasteful scene of curvaceous nude women and apple trees. Knowing that such a thing would be lost on the young man, he chose to say something different.
‘Naked here. Go away.’
‘We’ve got work to do,’ Lenk replied with an unsympathetic tone. ‘The boat needs to be repaired. There’s wood to chop and nails to hammer.’
‘Why in the name of all good and virile Gods did you think that coming to a naked man with messages of chopping wood and hammering nails would persuade him?’ Denaos snorted. ‘Get someone else to do it.’
‘Everyone else is gone.’
‘Gone where?’
‘I don’t know, just. . gone. I can’t find any of them.’
‘Well, why don’t you scurry off and see if they left any scat to track them by?’ He snorted and folded his hands behind his head. ‘Or, for a better idea, why don’t you just go and rest yourself? Your leg can’t be feeling too well.’ He coughed. ‘Not here, of course. Go find your own stretch of beach.’
‘I feel fine.’
Denaos arched his neck, regarding his companion who stood, he thought, far too close. Still, the young man looked to be standing firm, favouring his uninjured leg, to be sure, but largely unaffected. It struck the rogue as odd that someone who had been bitten by a demon shark should be standing only two days later, but that was a concern for another time.
‘I’m incredibly comfortable right now, I’ll have you know,’ the rogue muttered. ‘I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but it takes a considerable amount of effort to achieve the precarious position in which
sand does not reach up into my rear end with eager, grainy claws and I’ll not have you ruin it.’
A period of silence, punctuated by the idle banter of the surf, followed before Lenk spoke again in a voice decidedly meeker than his own.
‘Please?’
‘Whatever for?’
‘I need to talk to someone.’
‘About what?’
‘Things. . you know.’
‘So talk,’ the rogue replied. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’
‘I can’t. . I mean, not here.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well, back in Steadbrook, whenever we needed to talk about something, we’d do it over work.’ Lenk rubbed the back of his neck. ‘And it’s not like we can get off the island until someone finishes the vessel, anyway.’
‘I think I see,’ Denaos said, humming thoughtfully. ‘You’d like to talk to me, but instead of doing it like a human being free of mental illnesses, you’d like me to indulge you in this quaint little ritual devoted to furthering your already stunted social skills and rewarding you for not acting like a normal person.’
‘Basically.’
Denaos yawned, then pulled himself to his feet. ‘Fine.’
‘I mean, it’s nothing all that important,’ Lenk said to the rogue’s back as the taller man began walking towards the pile of nearby tools. ‘I’m just a little. . confused.’
Denaos froze for a moment, then sighed. He waved a dejected hand as he turned around and began walking to his discarded clothing.
‘Hold that thought. This sounds like the kind of conversation I’ll need pants for.’
It dangled like an ugly fold of aging flesh, Dreadaeleon thought as he stared at his reflection in the shore’s tide-pools. The filthy grey streak of hair that hung over his brow continued to mock him, continued to chide him for his stupidity.
He had suspected this might happen, which was why he made a point of staying far away from his companions. They wouldn’t understand; how could they? None of them had the Gift, none of them had the mental capacity to comprehend a fraction of magic’s laws and extents, let alone its prices.
The Venarium’s records were full of cautionary tales of those who had overextended themselves: flesh melting from bones, bodies exploding into flames after misspeaking a word, young ladies giving birth to two-headed calves after being a bit too close to a wizard when he sneezed during an incantation.
Rapid, concentrated aging was the most common — and the most lenient — of the punishments. He supposed he should be grateful that he would only suffer from one marred lock.
Regardless, he lifted his shirt, checking his torso for any sign of liver spots, wrinkles, prominent veins. Nothing, he noted with relief, as there had been nothing when he checked twenty breaths ago.
The grey lock was warning enough, though, and he absently considered keeping it as a reminder of his failure. His companions wouldn’t understand, of course, but why should they? They weren’t the same as he was. They were lesser, stupid, still clinging to the belief that gods and spirits would protect them.
Ridiculous, he thought, the notion of beings in the sky that could reshape mountains and raise the dead without a thought. Power had a price, any logical mind knew. Nothing could be created without being taken from somewhere else, whether it was fire from the heat of a palm or ice from the moisture of a single breath. That was the law, the law of magic, the law of the Venarium.
Or, he thought as he reached inside his coat pocket, that used to be the law.
He pulled the red jewel out, observing it as it dangled on the black chain before him. Perfectly spherical, save for a noticeable chip on its face, the jewel ate the light of the sun, rather than reflected it. That, he told himself, was the sign that this was it, the tool that the longface male had used to cheat the laws of magic.
I mean, he told himself, what else could it have been? He had searched the corpse thoroughly, inside and out after performing a bit of impromptu dissection. Nothing differentiated the longface from himself, save for his purple skin and this. . this tiny jewel.
That particular heretic was dead, it was true, but how many more were there? Where did these ‘netherlings’ come from and what did they hope to gain by fighting demons? Who was this ‘Sheraptus’?
And what, he asked himself with a sudden surge of fury, made them look at Asper the way that one did?
The memory of the long face, and its broad grin and hungry eyes, still burned in his mind with an anger far greater than any heresy the black-clad wizard might have committed. The memory of a purple hand extending to touch her, her, his companion, sizzled within his skull. The stink of his own soil filled his nostrils at the thought of it.
Dreadaeleon sighed, pressing his face into his hands. The strain had been too much to bear, he knew, and undoubtedly she would, too. Still, even after that, after drawing upon so much that even his bladder could not hold, he hadn’t even been able to save her. Gariath had to do that, leaving him as nothing more than an afterthought with wet pants and a breathing problem.
Somehow, he had imagined the scenario working out far more gallantly.
He should have pushed himself further, he knew, he should have had the strength to fend off that netherling and a hundred more. He should have flung them aside on waves of fire and roars of lightning, creating a ring of destruction to shelter her from the carnage.
He was a wizard! He was the absolute power!
Power, he thought ruefully, so limited. .
But instead of all that, he had soiled himself and crumpled up in a heap, leaving her to whatever malice the netherling had planned for her. And once again, it had been Gariath, superstitious, brutish, barbaric Gariath, who had done what he could not. And if it hadn’t been Gariath, he told himself, it would have been Denaos with a dagger in the back or Lenk with a killing blow of his sword.
Or even Kataria, standing triumphant over an arrow-laden corpse as Asper swooned at the shict’s feet.
While not an entirely unpleasant image, the fact of the matter remained that it would not have been him who saved her. It would never be a scrawny boy in a dirty coat. He would never have that kind of power.
At least, he thought as he wrapped his hand about the crimson jewel, not on my own.
‘You are well, Lorekeeper?’
Dreadaeleon found himself incapable of starting at the voice. It was far too melodic, far too soothing to cause anything but a smile. He looked up, wearing that smile, to regard an angular, pale face framed by flowing locks of kelp-coloured hair and a pair of feathery gills.
‘I am, thank you,’ he replied.
‘Your hair. .’ Greenhair noted, frowning at the lock of grey.
‘Yeah, well. . prices and the like,’ Dreadaeleon muttered as he climbed to his feet. ‘You know how it is.’
‘I do not,’ she replied flatly.
‘Oh.’ He paused, cleared his throat. ‘Well. . it’s, ah. . difficult.’ Forcing a larger, far more awkward smile onto his face, he continued, ‘Where did you scamper off to, anyway? We missed you.’
‘Oh,’ she said, blinking. ‘Did you throw something at me?’
‘No, I mean. .’ He held up a hand, drew in a deep breath. ‘Where did you go?’
‘I went. .’ A pained expression crossed her face, though Dreadaeleon found it hard to decipher that from her features. ‘Away.’
‘Where?’
‘Somewhere else, Lorekeeper. It is not important.’
‘Why, then?’
‘That is even less important.’ She eyed the boy curiously for a moment, something dancing behind her alien eyes. ‘You. . were victorious in Irontide?’
‘Roughly,’ he replied. ‘It was difficult. There were demons, some kind of. . sacs, I don’t know.’
‘Even fiends have mothers, Lorekeeper, and they are all birthed from the wretched womb of Ulbecetonth.’
‘Those things,’ Dreadaeleon said, cringing, ‘were eggs?’
‘They were nothing me
ant for this world. What is important is that they are destroyed.’ She leaned in to him, regarding him through a wary expression. ‘You did destroy them?’
‘Not personally, no. There was a longface there. He burned them with fire.’ The boy scratched his chin. ‘Fire that wouldn’t go out. .’ He scratched a little harder. ‘He was defying the laws, he cheated.’ His teeth clenched unconsciously as he scratched harder at his hairless chin. ‘He … he almost. .’
‘Lorekeeper. .’
He felt his blood on his hands the moment she spoke. Muttering a curse, he wiped his chin off on the lapel of his coat, hiding it from the siren’s curious gaze. A futile gesture, for her eyes seemed to focus on something past the dirty fabric, past his skin and bone.
‘You are. . not well,’ she observed.
‘I’m fine,’ he replied coldly. ‘It’s just. .’ He sighed, looking at his hands, so scrawny, so feeble. ‘I should have been the one.’
‘To kill the Abysmyths?’
‘To kill the Abysmyths, the frogmen, the longfaces, to find the tome, to kill the Deepshriek, to. .’ To save Asper, he added mentally, but all I did was piss myself and fall down, like an old man, with barely any blood on my hands.
‘So long as they are dead, what does it matter?’
Because what’s the point of having the power if I can’t use it? Because why is it fair that I can be beaten by brute force and superstitious myth? Because why can’t I be the one to turn the tide, to get the treasure and win the woman?
‘Because,’ he whispered, ‘there are laws.’
He continued to stare at his hands as the pale, webbed fingers slid around his own, closing tightly over them. Quietly, his stare was drawn up and into her fathomless eyes, her gentle, thin-lipped smile.
‘Laws are not important,’ Greenhair whispered, her voice but a ripple on the water.
He could feel his breath catch in his throat as he stared into her eyes, his hands go so weak and malleable under hers as she pushed them aside. He could feel his legs cross awkwardly over each other in a vain attempt at concealing as she drew herself closer to him, feeling the chill of her body through the garment wrapping her.
