by Sam Sykes
She beat hands against his arms, unfelt.
‘Those things, the Akaneeds,’ he snarled, his breath a fine mist, ‘they didn’t attack immediately. They didn’t act like beasts at all! Someone sent them!’ He slammed her head upon the ground. ‘Was it you? Did you do this to us? Did you kill Kataria?’
She drew back a hand. Tiny claws extended from her fingers, unnoticed.
His next words were a startled snarl as she drew her hand up and raked the bony nails across his cheek. He recoiled with a shriek and she slithered out from under him like an eel. Before he even opened his mouth to curse her, she was on her feet and rushing to the sea. In a flash of green and a spray of water, she vanished beneath the waves.
‘You can’t run,’ Lenk growled as he staggered to his feet. The agony in his leg made its presence known with a decidedly rude sear of muscle. He collapsed, reaching out for the long-gone figure of the siren. ‘I’ll … kill …’
A glint of viscous liquid upon his fingers, tinged with his own blood, caught his eye. He brought it close, watched it swirl upon his hand even as he felt it swirl inside his cheek. His eyelids fluttered, pulse pounded, body failed.
‘Poison,’ the voice hissed inside his head. ‘You idiot.’
He made a retort, lost in a groan and a mouthful of sand as he collapsed forward and lay unmoving.
The cold, Lenk decided, when he regained consciousness, was sorely missed. When he managed to realise that he had a rather impolite crab scuttling over his face, pinching at tender flesh in search of something to devour, he also realised that his skull was on fire.
Or felt like it, at the very least.
He cast a look up at the sky, saw the shroud of clouds that masked the sun. Yet he still burned. Even the mild light that filtered through in rays that refused to be hindered seared his eyes, his flesh.
Fever.
He felt an itch at his leg, reached down to scratch and felt moist and scaly flesh under his nails. However long he had been out, the sun had suckled at his wound and left a mass of green-rimmed skin weeping tears of blood-flecked pus.
That would explain it.
He looked around for Greenhair, wondering if perhaps she might be able to make another makeshift bandage to stem the flow. He felt an itch on his cheek quickly followed by a sting of pain.
Oh, right …
The urge to chase her down and beat a cure out of her was fleeting; even if she hadn’t vanished into the sea like the shark-whoring ocean-bitch she was, he couldn’t very well search the whole beach on a limb that begged for a merciful amputation.
He was so very tired.
Perhaps, he reasoned, it would be better to just wait for Gevrauch’s cold hand on his shoulder. Perhaps it would be better to be the final period in the Bookkeeper’s last sentence on a page marked: ‘Six Imbeciles who Fought for Gold and Were Eaten by Seagulls. Big, Ugly Seagulls. With Teeth.’
Yes, he thought, better to die here, wait for it. Wait to see the others … wait to see my family. Following that thought came his grandfather’s words, with no voice to accompany them.
‘Gevrauch loathes an adventurer,’ he had said to him once, ‘because they never know when to die. We don’t return the bodies we were loaned when the Bookkeeper asks for them. Recognise when it’s your time to die. Suffer it. Say a prayer to Him and maybe He’ll forgive you refusing your space in His ledger all these years.’
Sound advice, he thought.
His boat was likely at the bottom of the sea, along with the fortune he had chased. His companions likely weren’t far away, drifting either as half-chewed corpses or long, sinewy Akaneed stool. After both of those images, the fact that he had no food or water didn’t seem quite so worrying.
He would not like to upset the Gods and be sent to hell; he had seen what came out of that place. No, no, he told himself, it’s over now. All the suffering, all the pain he had experienced in his life all led up to this: a few moments of heat-stricken delirium, then off to the sea to be picked clean by crabs and eels.
Sound plan.
A wave washed over his leg; he felt something bump against his bare foot. He explored it with his toes, expecting to find splintered driftwood, maybe from his craft. Or, he thought, perhaps the remains of his companions: Asper’s severed head, Denaos’ chewed leg. He chuckled at the macabre thought, then paused as he ran a toe against the object.
It was not so soft as flesh, not even as wood. He felt firmness, a familiar chill as blood wept from his toe.
He fought to sit up, fought to reach into the surf and was rewarded with hands around wet leather. Almost too scared to believe that he was touching what he thought he was, he jerked hard before fear could make him do otherwise.
His sword, his grandfather’s sword, rose with all the firm gentleness of a lover in his hands. Its naked steel glittered in the sunlight, defiant of its would-be watery grave. The sun recoiled at its sight; there would be no angelic glow of deliverance from this sword, he thought. This was a sword for grey skies and grim smiles.
None had smiled grimmer than Lenk’s grandfather.
‘Remember, though,’ he had finished, ‘you and I, we’re men of Khetashe, men of the Outcast. He has no place in heaven for his followers. He loathes us for the reputation we cast on him. So why should we die when He wants us to?’
Lenk felt his own smile grow as he struggled to his feet. It might very well be his time. The sword’s arrival might have been coincidence, might have been charity from the Gods: an heirloom to take to his grave. He followed the Outcast, though, and Khetashe had never sent him a divine message he would be expected to listen to.
He turned and looked over his shoulder, toward a distant wall of greenery. A forest, he recognised. Forests were plants. Plants needed water. And so did he.
Water first, he thought as he stalked toward the foliage, sword clenched against his body. Water first, then food, then find Sebast and keep him around long enough for me to find the others.
His smile grew particularly grim.
Or at least something to bury.
Five
WHITE TREES
‘ Tell ell me, Kataria,’ she had said once, ‘what is a shict?’
‘I learned that ages ago,’ her daughter had grumbled in reply, ‘I could be learning how to skin a buck right now if I wasn’t here being stabbed with trivia. A buck. I could be coated in gore right now if — OW!’
After the blow, her daughter had muttered, ‘Riffid led the shicts out of the Dark Forest and gave us instinct, nothing else. She would not indulge us in weaknesses and we prosper from Her distance and — OW! No fair, I got that one right!’
‘You told me what your father says a shict is.’
‘Everyone agrees with him! You asked me what a shict was, not what I thought one was! What do you want me to say?’
‘If you could predict what I wanted you to say, you wouldn’t have gotten hit. That’s what it means to be a shict.’
‘So, violent hypocrisy makes a shict? That sounds pretty simple.’
‘You disagree?’
‘I do.’
‘Then tell me.’
‘No.’
‘No?’
‘Whatever I tell you, you’ll just hit me until I say what you want me to say. If I’m saying what you want me to say, I’m not a shict. I know that much.’
She had smiled once.
Kataria stared up at the sky, folding her arms behind her head as she lay upon the shore. The sun was moving slowly, sliding lazily behind the grey clouds, completely unconcerned for her careful scrutiny of its progress. By the time it peered out behind the rolling sheets of cloud, as if checking to see if she were still watching, she estimated three hours had passed.
She craned her neck up, looking past her bare feet.
The shoreline greeted her: vast, empty, eager. It was all too pleased to show her the rolling froth, the murmuring surf, the endless blue horizon stretching out before her.
And nothing more.
There was no wreckage, no movement, not even a corpse.
She sighed, turning her gaze skyward again, wondering just how long it was acceptable to wait for signs that one’s companions might have survived after being cast apart in an explosion of sea induced by a colossal, flesh-eating sea serpent.
What does one look for, anyway? she wondered. Wood? A severed limb? She recalled the Akaneed’s gaping maw, its sharp, flesh-rending teeth. Stool?
Very little sign of any of that, she noted with a sigh. And why should there be? What were the chances of one of them washing up, anyway? And if they did, why would they wash up as she did, having lost nothing more than her bow and boots?
They were dead now, she told herself, floating in the sea, resting in a gullet, picked apart by gulls or about to wash up as a bloated, pale, waterlogged piece of flesh. They were dead and she was alive. She should count herself lucky.
She was alive.
And they’re dead.
And she was not.
And he’s dead.
And she was a very lucky shict.
Shict, she repeated that word in her head. I am a shict. Shicts are proud. Shicts are strong. Shicts don’t fight fair. Shicts were given instinct by Riffid, nothing more. Shicts fight to protect. Shicts fight to cleanse. Shicts kill humans. Humans are the disease. Humans are the scourge that overruns this world. Humans build, humans destroy, humans burn and humans kill. Shicts kill humans. Shicts do not trust humans.
Nature conspired in silence at that moment. The roar of the ocean lulled, the whisper of the breeze stilled, the sound of trees swaying stopped. All for a moment just long enough for her to hear a single, insignificant thought that crept into the fore of her consciousness.
But you did.
The creeping thought became a sudden rush of memory, memories she had tried her best to shove in some dark corner of her mind until she could experience a blow against her skull and lose them.
But they came back, no matter how much she tried to block them out.
She remembered the sight of a silver mane, remembered how she thought it was so unusual to see in a human. She remembered how that had made her lower her bow, lower the arrow that had been poised at his head, a head so blissfully free of suspicions and projectiles alike. She remembered being intrigued, remembered following him out.
Shicts kill humans, she told herself, trying to drown the memory in rhetoric. Shicts slaughter humans. Shicts cleanse the world of humans. Mother told you what shicts were.
But she could not drown the sounds. His sounds, the sounds she had studied and learned: the murmurs that meant he was nervous around her, the griping that meant she had said something he would think about if not talk about, the sighs that meant he was thinking about something she had yet to learn about him.
Humans don’t have thoughts, she growled inwardly. Humans only have desires. Humans desire gold, desire land, desire whatever it is they don’t have. Father told you what humans were.
And through it all, she heard the distant beat of a heart. The sound of a heart that had beat fiercely enough to drown out the sound of a roaring sea. The sound of a heart that she was supposed to cut out, the sound of a heart that had fed the pulse in a throat she was supposed to slit. His heart, his pulsating, hideous human heart that she had heard before they departed. His horrific heart. His human heart. The heart she heard now.
But that’s just a memory. This knowledge came without forcing, the thought resounding in her head only once. Those are just sounds. He’s dead now.
And the memories were gone, leaving that thought hanging inside her head.
He’s dead. Your problems are solved.
She rose up, stiffly. She turned from the ocean, not looking back.
He was dead. He was a dead human. Her world was restored. She didn’t feel anything for a dead human. Dead humans did not have heartbeats. She was a shict once more.
This is more than luck, she told herself. This is a blessing from on high.
That thought gave her no comfort as she walked over the dunes and away from the shore.
She was a shict. For her, all that was on high was Riffid.
And Riffid did not give blessings.
‘What is a human?’ her daughter had asked.
She had paused before answering.
‘Your father should have told you.’
‘You said Father didn’t know what a shict was.’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘You implied it.’
‘And you wonder why people hit you.’
‘If you can’t answer it, just say so and I’ll figure it out for myself.’
‘A human is … not a shict.’
‘That’s it?’
‘That’s enough.’
‘No, it isn’t.’
‘Has anyone ever told you you’re amazingly bull-headed?’
‘Grandfather says they filed down my antlers after I was born. But that’s not important. What is a human?’
She had wandered away from their village, into the part of the forest where the earth beneath their feet and the ancestors that came before them were one.
‘Humans are … not like us, but also like us. They fight, they kill, just as we do. And what we claim is ours, they claim is theirs. Our cause is righteous. They say theirs is, too. We do what we must. They do as they do.’
‘Then how do we know they deserve to die?’
She had stared at a grave marked with long white mourning feathers.
‘Because they knew we deserved it.’
She journeyed over the dunes, through the valleys of the beach as the sun continued to crawl across the sky. Always, she found her gaze drifting off to the distant forest and shortly thereafter to her own belly as it let out an angry growl.
The knowledge that any food to be had would be found in the dense foliage gnawed at her as surely as the hunger that struggled to wrest control over her from a frail and withering hope inside her. In fact, she knew, it would be wiser to go into the woods now, to begin the search for something to eat as soon as possible, lest she find herself too weary and starving to conduct a more thorough search later.
Still, she reminded herself, it’s not like it’s hard to find something to eat in a forest. You’ve never had trouble sniffing out roots and fruits before. Hell, find a dark spot and you can probably find a nice, juicy grub.
The image of a writhing, ivory larva filled her mind. She smacked her lips. The fact that she was salivating at the thought of a squishy, tender infant insect brimming with glistening guts, she reasoned, was likely a strong indicator that she should go seek one out, if only to keep herself from dwelling on how bizarre this entire train of thought was.
And yet, no matter how strong the reasoning, she continued to walk along the beach, staring out over the waves. And always, no matter what she hoped to see, nothing but empty shoreline greeted her.
Stop it, she snarled inwardly. Forget them. They’re dead. And you will be, too, if you don’t find food soon. This isn’t what a shict does. Look, it’s easy. Just turn around.
She did so, facing the forest.
Now take a step forward.
She did so.
Now don’t look back.
That, as ever, was where everything went wrong.
She glanced over her shoulder, ignoring the instant frustration she felt for herself the moment she spied something dark out of the corner of her eye. Tucked behind a dune, bobbing in the water, she could see it: the distinct glisten of water-kissed wood.
Her heart rose in her chest as she spun about and began to hurry toward it, despite her own thoughts striving to temper her stride.
It’s wood, she told herself. It doesn’t mean anything beyond the fact that it’s wood. Don’t get your hopes up. Don’t get too excited. Remember the wreck. Remember the Akaneed.
As she drew closer, the boat’s shape became clearer: resting comfortably upon the shore, intact and unsullied. She furrowed her brow
, cautioning her stride. This wasn’t her boat; hers was now in several pieces and probably jammed in one or two skulls right now.
So it’s someone else’s, she told herself. All the more reason to turn back now. No one with any good intentions would be out here. It’s not them. It’s not him. Turn back. She did not, creeping around the dune. Turn back. Remember you’re alive. Remember he’s dead. Remember they’re dead. They’re dead.
And, it became clear as she peered around the dune, they were not the only ones.
A lone tree, long dead but clinging to the sandy earth with the tenacity only a very old one could manage, stood in the middle of a small, barren valley. She peered closer, spying rope wrapped tightly about its highest branches, hanging taut. The grey, jagged limbs bent, creaking in protest as macabre, pink-skinned fruit swayed in the breeze, hanging by their ankles from the ropes.
She recognised them, the humans hanging from the tree. Even with their throats slashed and their bodies mutilated, their blood splashed against roots that no longer drank, she knew them as crewmen from the Riptide, the ship she and her companions had travelled on before pursuing the tome, the ship whose crew was supposed to come seeking them after they had obtained the book.
Apparently, they had found something else.
About the base of the tree, they swarmed. Kataria was uncertain what they were, exactly. They didn’t look dangerous, though neither did they look like anything she had seen before. She peered closer, saw that they resembled roaches the size of small deer, sporting great feathery antennae and rainbow-coloured wing carapaces that twitched in time with each other. They chittered endlessly, making strange clicking sounds as they craned up on their rearmost legs to brush their antennae against the swaying corpses.
And then, in an instant, they stopped. Their antennae twitched soundlessly, all in the same direction. A shrill chittering noise went out over them and they scattered, scurrying over the dunes before whatever had alarmed them could come to them.
