by Sam Sykes
“What, exactly, makes this one any different from the others you’ve killed?” Asper asked, rising up and dusting off her robes. The gaze she fixed on Denaos was less scornful than he deserved; perhaps she simply had to know.
“It’s complicated,” the rogue offered, not bothering to look at either of them.
“It is not,” Lenk insisted, his voice cold. “We get the tome. We kill anyone who is in our way.”
“She’s tied to a chair in a hut.”
“She’s dangerous.”
“She’s not going anywhere.”
“Not yet. Not ever.” Lenk narrowed his eyes. “No loose ends. Our duty depends on it.”
When Denaos looked up into the man’s stare, his own was weary. His voice dribbled out of his mouth on a sigh.
“Yeah. Fine. What’s one more, right?”
He flipped the wide-brimmed hat in his fingers, tossed it to Lenk. The young man caught it, looked it over, furrowed his brow.
“This is Bralston’s,” he noted.
“And now it’s yours.” He slipped on a smile. “It’s just that easy.”
He turned, disappeared into the forest. Lenk stared at the hat in his hands for a moment before turning to Asper.
“Fix whatever else you need to fix with my shoulder,” he said. “I leave in an hour.”
“And Denaos?”
“Stays here with you and Dread. We have a better chance of slipping in with fewer people.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
Lenk didn’t seem to hear. Or care. She told herself that was rather a wise attitude to have for the rogue. The less she cared, the better. Less chance of him failing, then.
That was a wise attitude. Reasonable.
She tried to convince herself of it as she plucked up her bag and produced a bandage and swab. She looked at Lenk as he knelt down to collect his shirts and the agitated red mass upon his shoulder, glistening with too little salve.
“Why?” she asked.
“Because,” his voice was gentle, “I wanted to see if it would hurt.”
SIX
HALLOWED, HUMBLE, SOAKED IN BLOOD
He placed a foot upon salt-slick stone. Barely more than the scuff of boot on granite. The silence heard him and came out of a thousand little shadows and pools of water to greet him with resounding echoes.
A thousand footfalls greeted him in the gapingly empty hall, as though by sheer repetition the massive chamber could pretend there was life in its depths. It committed itself to the illusion with every step he took, each echo rising and waiting for him to speak and be repeated a thousand times and complete the deception.
Sheraptus was not in the habit of indulging anyone, let alone stone.
His nostrils quivered, agitated. He was not about to indulge them, either, by placing cloth to nose and masking the stench. He shut his eyes, forced down his distaste and drew in a sharp breath.
The air sat leaden in his nose, heavy with many things as he continued down the great, empty hall. Sea was first among them and with it salt, acrid and foul. Dormant ash was there, in great presence. And something else. Something familiar.
His boot struck something and he stumbled forward. Pulling the black hem of his robe away exposed a pale, hairless face staring up at him with lifeless black eyes and a stagnant aroma wafting from a mouth filled with needle teeth.
No. His crown burned upon his brow, smoldering with thought. Not that.
But close. The scent of death, heaviest and most pungent, was not making it particularly easy to sense out that enigmatic aroma. Understandable, he thought, given all the corpses.
He hadn’t been at Irontide when it all happened, when his warriors had stormed the fortress to retrieve the tome and kill the demonic leader known as the Deepshriek. As he swept a glance about the hollow chamber, though, he absently wished he had been; he certainly wouldn’t have left all these corpses about.
They lay where they had fallen, white and purple, frogman and netherling: gored, cut, rent, stabbed, impaled, trampled, ripped, strangled, drowned, broken, and decapitated. They swelled only barely from salt water. Gulls had not come to feed upon them, as though they were too unclean even for vermin.
He could understand why they hadn’t feasted upon the frogmen, of course, demon-tainted filth that they were. He felt vaguely insulted that his warriors were similarly untouched, as though there were something wrong with them.
But he had not come to survey the damage; there were always more warriors. Rather, he had come seeking something else.
What it was, he wasn’t entirely sure. Why he felt drawn to it, he was only barely certain. That made his ire rise.
But it was here, amidst a rotting feast uneaten.
And so he slipped across the floor, searching. In the stagnant pools of water that remained, in the flock of the crushed and beaten and drained of blood, he found something.
Not what he was looking for.
Cahulus. Male. Once, a loyal and devoted member of his inner circle, brother to the other two loyal and devoted members. Once, reckless with his nethra, hurling fire and spewing ice with whimsical abandon. Once, in command of the warriors sent to take this fortress.
Now, dead. The gemstone he once wore, like the three set in Sheraptus’s own crown, was gone.
Dead. With eyes sunken into rotted flesh, with a dried torrent of blood staining his filthy and salt-stained robes, with his lower jaw lying eight feet away from his face.
Dead.
Like the rest of them.
Like the ones back on his ship that was now at the bottom of the ocean.
The ship from which he had escaped. The ship he had survived. And they hadn’t.
“Good afternoon.”
The Gray One That Grins spoke clearly, as always. His voice was soft and lilting, bass and clear; music that slid easily out between teeth as long as fingers. His voice did not echo; music that Irontide did not want to hear.
He turned to regard his companion. Thin and squatting upon long, slender limbs, the light of the sinking afternoon sun painted him black against the gaping hole that wounded Irontide’s granite walls. His namesake teeth remained starkly visible.
“It is afternoon, isn’t it,” Sheraptus observed. “It was morning when I came here.”
“Apologies. It was not my intent to keep you waiting.”
“Accepted, with full gratitude, of course.”
Sheraptus never had cause to cringe before. Hearing his own voice, echoed a thousand times and welcomed into the deathly halls, was certainly a poor cause to have now.
The Gray One That Grins tilted his head. “Your voice betrays discomfort. Pardon the observation.”
“And your notice compounds it,” Sheraptus muttered, waving a hand. “Apologies. It’s this place. It reeks of death.”
His associate tilted his head again, thoughtful. “I suppose it might. I really hadn’t noticed.”
Sheraptus glanced down at Cahulus, who looked like he found that hard to believe. Then again, it was hard to gauge the expressions of a man with half a face.
“Oh,” the Gray One That Grins said. “You look and see the corpses.”
“There are so many of them.”
“I had thought such things would not perturb you.”
“I merely see them.”
“Ah. The issue is, at last, uncovered.”
“Surely, you are not blind to them.”
“A lack of sight, fore or current, has never been attributed to me. Rather, I see somewhere else when I look upon these halls. I see somewhere long ago, somewhere much more preferable.”
He rose, suddenly no longer squat, but frighteningly tall. He became more so as he straightened his back with the sound of a dozen vertebrae cracking into place, a sickening eternity between each. Upon spindly shadows for legs, he walked down the hall.
“This was where the tapestry walked,” he said. “A long and decadent thing of many names and deeds, each one exaggerated as a tapestry shou
ld be. It walked between pillars, each one carved from marble in the shape of a virgin, holding flame in hands unscarred.”
Sheraptus found himself watching the space where the Gray One That Grins had just been, or where he was about to walk. Never did he look at those long, thin legs. Never did he even think about looking higher.
“That’s where it ended.” A long sliver of a finger pointed at the far wall. “That’s where the altar lay. That’s where I knelt in prayer, side by side with the woman that would come to be called Mother.”
“I misunderstand or you misremember,” Sheraptus said. “I was told this was a stronghold for overscum. Pirates, like the ones that allied themselves with our foe.”
“It was. After that, it was a house of prayer for that Mother again. Before that, it was a house of war for those who drove her from it. Irontide is but one more meaningless name. It has existed in a cycle: worship, then slaughter, on and off since its creation.”
Sheraptus looked to Cahulus. Then to the frogman beside him, the thing’s ivory skin stained pink with the rotting bundle of intestines split so neatly from its belly. Then to the netherling who still held the blade, even as the fragmented cord of her spine jutted from the shredded purple of her back.
“And now, a house of charnel.”
“There will be more. Possibly this one again. Such is their nature.”
“Demons?”
“Demons.” The Gray One That Grins’s laugh was less pleasant this time. “It is not a demon’s nature to destroy, but to reclaim. For them, it is a choice. The same is not said with any great conviction for humans.”
“Humans?”
“Humans.”
“The lack of specificity is dreadfully unhelpful.”
“Specificity?”
“Just learned it.”
“It is impressive.”
“Thank you.”
“You are welcome.” The Gray One That Grins tilted his head to the side, settled down on his haunches. “As to your complaint. . how many humans do you know?”
Sheraptus looked again to the corpses for as long as he could stand. When he looked back to his associate, seated in merciful shadow, his face wore disgust and disbelief on either side.
“They did not kill this many.”
“Your warriors and demons killed each other, true. The humans did not kill this many.” His voice dropped. “But they have killed many.”
Many.
Sheraptus turned the word over in his head, contemplated every quantity that could bear such a title. How many had been in Irontide that were struck down by those overscum? How many had blood spilled upon the sand by their blades? How many had the humans sent to the bottom of the ocean when the ship was destroyed?
The answer was simple, and grim.
“But not me,” Sheraptus whispered.
“Pardon?”
“I survived.”
“You are possessed of immense power, as well as the Martyr Stones to fuel it and the confidence to wield it.” The Gray One That Grins’s voice dropped. “Your surprise at your own survival. . concerns. As does your inability to deal with these humans.”
“You doubt me?” Sheraptus imagined the threat might have sounded more forceful if he could bear to face the creature.
“Apologies for dancing around the issue, but. . my associates are concerned. They have insisted upon moving forward with your assault.”
“We have been gathering the forces necessary for pressing the attack. All our information suggests Jaga is not a place to be traipsed into with a few fists of warriors.”
“Information?”
“Specifically, the kind of information that comes from sending thirty warriors out and finding pieces of them washing up on shore days later. We don’t even know where the island lies, much less how many reptiles infest it or how well it’s defended.”
“Hence part of the reason for my insisting upon this meeting.” The Gray One That Grins swept a glance about the ruined halls. “Your insistence on meeting here, though, comes as a surprise.”
“It is difficult to explain.”
“To a man that cannot see the field of corpses before him for his seeing the past behind him?”
Sheraptus clicked his tongue. “I suppose I felt. . called here.”
“Called.”
His voice was darkening with each moment. Sheraptus had never felt a twinge creep up his spine at that. Then again, he considered, his associate’s voice had never been anything but music before.
“It’s difficult to explain.”
“Attempt. I implore you.”
Sheraptus turned to face Irontide’s vast, corpse-strewn silence. He had not seen the battle, the knee-deep seawater that had since drained out of its wound, a fine layer of blood spilled over it with a peppering of ashes from smoldering demon flesh. Now, with stagnant pool and cinders scattered to the wind, he could still feel it.
There. In the darkness, there was something darker: a spot of blackness that might be considered for soot if it weren’t just too perfectly black, too utterly insignificant not to be noticed, as though it tried to hide from him. He felt it there, too.
“A sensation.” He tapped on the black iron of his crown. “Something. . out there and in here.”
“One hesitates to point out who just complained about a lack of specificity.”
“It is like. . a feeling, vague and fleeting,” Sheraptus continued, “something that is there, but not there. Knowledge without evidence.”
“You describe. .” His associate’s voice was a slow and spiteful hiss. “A sensation shared by virgins who don’t bleed and men who swallow gold and excrete stool that is only brown. Do you now look to the sky and whisper quiet prayers to invisible creatures with invisible ears?”
“Gods do not exist.” A casual refusal; no thought, no conviction. “This is. . was something like sensing a power. Nothing I had sensed before the island.” He furrowed his brow as he swept his stare about the gloom. “I felt it then, too. In the shadow of the statues there and when. .”
He shut his eyes and, as happened whenever they stayed closed for more than a moment, he saw her again. Long and limber and writhing helplessly in her bonds, the scent of her tears cloying his nostrils and the sound of her shrieking drawing his lips apart. And, again, when he began to feel the swell beneath his robe, he looked into her eyes wide with fear, into a mouth jabbering nonsensical pleas to creatures that weren’t there.
And he sensed it again.
“We never told you.”
He turned. The Gray One That Grins was close now, too close.
“We never told you what led us to seek the tome, what led us to pry open the doors of worlds like a child pulls open closets, what led to us discovering the hole that we pulled your race out of,” he hissed. “The war.”
“Between mortal and Aeon,” Sheraptus replied. “Your invisible gods made creatures that did not obey them and your mortals fought against them. They are returning and you wish for my degenerate race to handle them.”
“I did not say ‘degenerate.’”
“Feel free to refute the implication.”
The Gray One That Grins chose not to. “The tome’s power is in its memory. Look into its pages and you will find confirmation of any tale that emerged from the war, the horrors that demons visited upon mankind. Go further and you will find the truth that there are simply too many atrocities in any war to be held by only one side. When demon tortured mortal, when Aeon enslaved mortal, mortal struck against demon in the most vile way he knew how.
“The monoliths.”
The great, gray statues that did not stand, Sheraptus remembered. Or rather, that had not always stood. They were still and calm on the beaches of Teji: robed figures with hands outstretched, arcane holy symbols in their hoods instead of faces. But they had not always been intended to be there; one did not mount iron treads upon a statue’s base for that.
“They are a product, a refinement of centuries of ha
tred for the Aeons,” the Gray One That Grins whispered. “Love dulls, awe blinds, only hatred hones. The mortals hated their oppressors, Ulbecetonth and her children, with such passion that fire and steel and poison and spit were not enough. The monoliths were.”
“And what are they?” Sheraptus asked.
“Children,” the Gray One That Grins said. “Some of them, anyway. Grandfathers and teachers and midwives, whatever they might have been as Aeons before they were called demons. All of them ground down by hate, mortared in hate, chiseled with hate, and sent against their parents and grandchildren and students and patients. The demons fled before them.”
He flashed a long, macabre grin.
“What demon would not? What would terrify a demon, after all, beyond its companions, its children, and its lovers being forever imprisoned in statues in the shape of the Gods that had cursed them so?”
“The monoliths are. . underscum?”
“Were. Were weapons, too. Effective ones. They terrified the demons, broke their ranks and sent their immortal minions fleeing. They gave the armies of the mortals a fighting chance, but not enough to be truly successful.
“That was when they took more from the demons they captured. They ripped something from them and put it in something more mobile, more malleable: prisons of flesh instead of stone.
“Difficult, of course. Touch the demon to the head and the vessel will not obey. Touch the demon to the heart and the vessel will die. In the end, their hatred for the demons was strong enough to refine that process, too, and they were instilled in the arm.”
He held up a long, gray limb.
“The left one.”
Sheraptus narrowed his eyes, focused again on the sooty spot, the spot too small and too neat not to be noticed amidst the passive carnage.
“And what happened?”
Sheraptus spoke softly, distracted. His eyes remained on the spot too dark, too deep, a black spot painted by a stiff brush in a trembling hand.
“Gods create. And as demons run anathema to Gods. .”
A spot. Not blood. Not flesh. Not ash.
