by Sam Sykes
He did not move as the man approached, held by his great stare. He did not move as the man walked right through him, unflinching. He turned and watched him disappear into the shadows of the cavern, vanishing completely the moment his foot touched gloom.
‘This … this isn’t real,’ he told himself. ‘But it feels so …’ His head began to ache. ‘Have I seen this before?’
‘One of us has.’
He turned and saw more figures approaching over the ridge: more men, though softer of body and eye than the one that had just come. They approached in the same winking step, and each time they appeared in his vision, their faces were harder set. There was fear there, hate there, intent there.
They were clad in old armour, carried old blades, old spears. Their cloaks trailed behind them, stained and battered and torn. Clasping them together upon their breasts, Lenk saw a sigil.
An iron gauntlet clenching thirteen obsidian arrows.
‘The House,’ he whispered. He hadn’t seen it since he had first accepted the task of pursuing the tome, but at a glimpse, he recalled it instantly. ‘The House of the Vanquishing Trinity, the mortals who marched against the demons.’
‘Mortals have the capacity to march against many things. Enemies and allies alike.’
‘They’re going to …?’ Lenk began to ask.
‘You know the answer to that.’
‘They’re going into the cave.’
‘Answers lie in there.’
‘Should I …?’
The voice said nothing. He was left standing, watching as the men vanished, one by one, into the cavern. He was left standing as the river fell silent. He was left standing, watching, wondering. Wiser, he thought, not to follow ghostly hallucinations into lightless caverns born of dead forests.
But he did. Going back, after all, was not an option.
It never was.
Thirty-Eight
THE DEAD, HONOURED AND
IMPOTENT
Gariath did not fear silence. Gariath feared nothing.
Still, he found himself deeply uncomfortable with it. Ordinarily, discomfort wasn’t such a problem; the source of it, after a few stiff beatings, would eventually become a source of much more manageable anger, which would warrant further beatings until only tranquillity remained.
But those sources of anger and discomfort were frequently made of flesh, meat. Silence was not. And he could not strangle the intangible.
He had tried.
And he had failed, so he remained in uncomfortable, awkward, intangible, fleshless silence as he stalked through the forest.
Occasionally he paused, fanning out his ear-frills to listen for an errant whisper, a trace of muttered curse, even a roach’s fart. He heard nothing. He knew he would continue to hear nothing.
Grandfather had left him.
He wasn’t sure what had happened to cause it, but he was certain of it now. Not merely because he hadn’t seen, heard or smelled the ancestor since he had dragged himself out of the surf last night. It was a deeper absence, the perpetual, phantom agony of a limb long lost.
Or a relative …
He continued on through the forest. The silence continued to close in around him, seething on his flesh as though it were new, raw. Not so unreasonable, he thought; he had lived his life without silence thus far. As near as he remembered, the Rhega were a people of perpetual noise, living in a world that thundered against them: the barking of pups met with the roar of rivers, the mutter of elders accompanied by the rumble of thunder.
Since then, he had experienced any number of howls, groans, shrieks, screams, grunts, cackles, chuckles and countless, countless bodily noises. That, too, seemed long ago, though.
For the first time, he heard silence.
He didn’t like it.
And yet, he pressed ahead, instead of returning to the cheerful, stupid noises and their fleshy, meaty sources. Theirs was silence of another loud and useless kind, though today it had become a melancholy, self-loathing silence.
He had smelled them in a musky cocktail of guilt, hatred, despair and abject self-pity. All of them carried it, some daubed with scant traces of it, others wearing it like a mane about their heads.
Well, he corrected himself. Almost all of them.
It was unusual enough to find Lenk without a smell that it had given Gariath pause when they briefly crossed paths that morning. Usually, the young man bore the most varied odours, usually varying scents of exasperation. Today, when they brushed past each other without a word and exchanged a fleeting glance, he knew the young man was different. Today, the dragonman had inhaled deeply and scented nothing. Today, he had felt a chill when he met Lenk’s eyes.
Just a fleeting sensation, there and gone in less than an instant; the human was the same human who had cried out like a coward last night, the same human who had fallen into useless babble, the same human whom Gariath had graced with one and only one glance before he leapt overboard to pursue the Shen.
But it had been clear in Lenk’s eyes, in a silence that struck the whistle of the breeze dead, that Gariath was not the same dragonman from that night.
And that dragonman had told him nothing, about the pointy-eared one’s plot to kill him, about the demons on the island, about the longfaces, about anything. Because the man he had seen was not the man from that night, and the man he had seen would brook nothing but silence.
He snorted to himself; too much silence, too little meaning in it all. It was starting to aggravate him. Absently, he began glancing around for things that would make the most noise when struck. Trees, rocks, leaves: all defiantly, annoyingly mute.
He pressed forward, stomping his feet on the earth as he did, crunching leaves under his soles. He needed to break the silence, he thought as he pushed through the underbrush and stepped into a great clearing amidst the forest. He needed something to speak to.
And, in the instant he felt the sun upon his skin, he knew he had found it.
He craned his neck up to take it all in: its massive, unblemished grey face; its weathered, rounded crown; its tremendous earthen roots extending into the lapping waters of a great pond.
An Elder, the familial rock from which all Rhega began and ended, loomed over him. He surveyed it, unmarked and unadorned as it was, and felt a smile creep across his lips. The Elders were the basis, the focus, the stability behind any Rhega family. And, judging by this one, it had borne many burdens of many of his people.
His people.
They had been here in numbers great enough to raise this rock and call it their earth, once.
Once … He felt his smile fade at the words echoing in his head. And a long time ago.
The scent here was faint; that couldn’t be right, he thought. The Elder was titanic. The scent of the Rhega, of their memories, their families, their children, their wounds, their feasts, their births, their elders … he should have been overwhelmed, brought low to his knees by the sheer weight of the ancestral aroma.
But the smell was one of stagnant rivers, moss-covered rocks. Not alive, not dead, like the rot between a dying winter and a bloody newborn spring, barely faint enough for a single memory, a single statement to make itself known.
But it did make itself known.
Over and over.
Ahgaras succumbed to his wounds and died here, the scent said.
Raha bled into the earth and died here.
Shuraga fell and, his arms ripped from his body, died here.
Ishath held his dead pup in his arms and ate no more …
Garasha screamed until his breath left him …
Urah walked into the night and never returned …
Pups fell, elders fell, all fell …
He drew in their scent, though he did so with ever-diminishing breath, his heart conspiring with his lungs, begging him to stop smelling the memories, to stop wrenching them both. But he continued to breathe them in, searching the scent for anything, any birth, any mating, any defecation, anything but thi
s endless reeking list of death.
But he found nothing.
He felt them, each one of them, in his nostrils.
And in each expulsion of breath, he felt them, each one of them, die.
‘Five hundred.’
At the sound of the voice, he turned without a start. His body was drained, a shell of red flesh and brittle bones in which there dwelt no will to start, to snarl, to curse. All he could do was turn and face the grandfather with eyes that sank back into his skull.
‘Exactly,’ the grandfather said.
‘What?’
‘There were five hundred Rhega that fell here,’ the ancestor said as he walked wearily to the water’s edge. ‘I spent over a year taking in their scents to find their names, Wisest. I doubt you have that long.’
‘I don’t have anywhere to be.’
‘You do … You just don’t know where yet.’
They stood, side by side, and stared. The waters of the pond lapped soundlessly against the shore. The wind in the trees had nothing to contribute. The Elder was the grave into which all sound was buried and lost, so inundated with death that even the great sigh of the earth was nothing.
‘How did you find this place, Wisest?’
Grandfather’s voice brought Gariath back to his senses, his attentions to the heavy object dangling from his belt. He reached down, plucked it from the leather straps that held it there, and held it up.
Grandfather looked up into empty eye sockets beneath a bone brow.
‘I asked the skull,’ Gariath replied.
‘You went back to find it.’
‘I needed to know what you wouldn’t tell me. The skull knew.’
‘The dead know.’ Grandfather stared out over the pond. ‘I had hoped you wouldn’t have ears for their voices.’
‘It didn’t say much,’ Gariath said. ‘I could only hear fragments of words, like it was talking in its sleep. It knew where the Elder was.’
‘All dead things know where the Elder is.’ Grandfather sighed and made a gesture to the pond. ‘It speaks because it can’t remember that it should be asleep. Do what is right, Wisest.’
Gariath nodded, kneeling beside the pond to let the skull fall from his hands into the water. In its empty eyes, he saw a kind of relief, the same kind that followed an important thing remembered after having been forgotten for so long.
Or maybe I’m just seeing things.
It did not simply vanish into the water. Instead, it remained stark white against the blue as it fell, still vivid in his eyes no matter how much it shrank. The sunlight caught the water’s surface, turned the blue into a pristine crystal through which he could see the muddy bottom and the stark white that painted it.
He stared into the water.
Five hundred skulls stared back.
‘This was a pit when I brought them here,’ Grandfather said. ‘When it was all over, when I was the last one alive … I dug the earth open and lay them within. It rained – a long time it rained – and this pond formed.’ He nodded. ‘Rivers and rocks. The Rhega should lie in water.’
The sunlight was chased away by clouds. The water masked itself with blue again. Gariath continued to stare.
‘How?’ he asked.
‘Same way everything died on this island,’ Grandfather replied. ‘In the great war.’
‘Between Aeons and mortals? I thought the humans fought that.’
‘They did. Would it surprise you, Wisest, that we fought alongside them? In those days, we fought along many creatures that you would call weak.’
‘It does not surprise me. The Rhega should have been there to lead, to inspire, to show them what courage is.’
‘And you know courage, Wisest?’
‘I know what the Rhega are.’
‘So did I, back then. So did we all. We thought ourselves full of courage … That was reason enough to fight.’
‘To hear the humans tell it, the Aeons threatened all mortals.’
‘They did,’ Grandfather said. ‘But the Rhega were made of stronger things than crude flesh and bone. No matter what the humans tried to tell us, we were apart from their little wars. If we died, we returned to the earth and came back. Let the humans be concerned with heaven.’
‘Then why did we fight?’
‘We had our reasons. Perhaps life was too good for too long. Perhaps we needed to remember what pain and death were. I don’t know. I’ve thought of a thousand reasons and none of them matter. In the end, we are still dead.
‘But we fought, all the same, and in that day, we became a people obsessed with death. When the first Rhega died and did not come back, we turned our thoughts to killing. If we did not kill, we died. If we did not die, we killed. Over and over until we were the red peak upon a mountain of corpses.’
‘And you died in battle with the rest?’
‘No,’ Grandfather said. ‘I should have, though. When the children of Ulbecetonth marched against the humans and the earth rattled under their feet, I marched alongside everyone. I climbed their great legs. I shamed the humans and their stupid metal toys by splitting their thoughts open.’ His eyes narrowed, jaw clenched. ‘I leapt into their minds. I tore them apart until I could taste their thoughts on my tongue.’
Gariath recalled the great ravine, the greater skeleton that lay within it, and the massive hole split open in its skull. He recalled how Grandfather had crawled into that hole and vanished, as he seemed to vanish now, growing fainter with every breath.
Suddenly, he sprang into full, bitter view with a deep, unpleasant laugh.
‘And still, I am obsessed with death.’
‘How did you die, Grandfather?’
The ancestor’s body quivered and grew hazy with the force of his sigh.
‘When I crawled out of that skull, when I stopped hearing the screaming, I looked and saw I was the only one left,’ he said. ‘The dead were everywhere: the demons, the humans, but I was the only one concerned for the Rhega, the only one concerned for the dead. The mortals had moved on, pushing Ulbecetonth back to her gate. I was left alone.
‘So, I cut the earth open around the Elder and I dragged their bodies back, finding every piece.’ He paused, glancing into the water. ‘Almost every piece, at least. But the Rhega came back … not born again, as they should have been, but as I am now. They still wanted to fight, they wondered where their families were, they had so many reasons and they were all so tired …
‘And so, one by one, I bade them to sleep. Then I watched them sleep. I watched for so long I forgot the need for food, for water … and when I came back, there was no one left to bid me to sleep.’
He turned and stared hard into Gariath’s eyes.
‘When you are gone, who will bid you, Wisest?’
Gariath met his concern with a scowl.
‘You think I’ll die?’
‘We all die.’
‘I haven’t yet.’
‘You haven’t tried hard enough.’
The dragonman offered the ancestor nothing more than a snort in reply, his hot breath causing the spectral form to ripple like the water at their feet. Gariath returned his stare to the water. Through the obscuring azure, he could feel their gazes. In the earth, he could smell their final moments.
But in the air, he couldn’t hear their voices, not even the whispering sleep-talk of the skull. They all rested soundly now; staring, dead, utterly silent.
‘What is it you feel, Wisest?’ Grandfather asked. ‘Hatred for the humans for drawing us into this war? A need for vengeance against the demons?’
‘You can’t read my thoughts, Grandfather?’
‘I have been inside your heart,’ the spirit replied coldly. ‘It’s not a place I want to go back to in the best of times.’
‘Take your best guess, then.’
After a long, careful stare, the ancestor obliged him. His prediction was manifested in his great, heaving sigh. The accuracy of it was reflected in Gariath’s unapologetic grunt of confirmation.
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‘What is it you plan to do, then?’
‘The skulls are silent. Their scent is nothing but death,’ Gariath said, folding his arms over his chest. ‘This earth is dead. It has nothing to tell me.’
‘The earth is dead, yes, but those that walk upon it still live.’
‘I agree,’ Gariath replied.
Grandfather’s eye ridges furrowed, a contemplative look rippling upon his face.
‘That is why I am going to find the Shen.’
And when the ripples settled, there was fury plain upon the spirit’s face.
‘The Shen?’ Grandfather snarled. ‘The Shen are a people just as obsessed as we were … as you are.’
‘Good company to keep, then.’
‘No, you moron! The Shen are what dragged us into the war!’
‘But you said—’
‘I said we had a thousand reasons, and none of them mattered. The Shen were the original one, and they matter least of all.’ Upon Gariath’s confused look, he sighed and raised a hand. ‘Shen, Owauku, Gonwa … all descend from a single ancestor, born to serve Ulbecetonth. In them, we saw people who could not hear the rivers or smell the rocks. We were moved to sympathy. We gave our lives for them.’
‘And they pay it back. I have seen them. They are brave; they are strong.’
‘They are dead. They just don’t know it yet.’ Grandfather’s lips peeled back, his teeth stark and prominent despite the haziness of his form. ‘We killed for them. We died for them. And what have they done? They continue to kill! They continue to die!’
‘For what they believe in.’
‘What do they believe in, Wisest?’
‘They are Shen.’
‘That is not a reason to live—’
‘And I am Rhega!’ Gariath roared over the ancestor, baring teeth larger, sharper and far more substantial. ‘I remember what that means. No Rhega was meant to live alone.’
‘Then don’t!’ Grandfather said. ‘There may still be more out there, somewhere. Go with the humans. Even if you never find another Rhega, you will never be alone!’
