by Sam Sykes
“SCUM!”
He swung wildly in his attempt to dislodge the man’s grip. But his tail followed him with each movement and Lenk followed the tail, evading each wild lash of claw and club with tenacious grip and desperate prayer.
After a few snarling moments, Shalake stopped and Lenk felt the tail tense in his grip as the lizardman heaved, raising the appendage up with the intent of smashing it and its silver-haired parasite upon the ground. Lenk seized the opportunity and the lizardman’s loincloth at once, pulling himself up onto the creature’s back.
As one might expect of any reasonable reptilian horror, Shalake’s protests were loud, roaring, and interspersed with several clawing fits as he tried to reach for the man lodged squarely in the center of a back too broad for his arms to reach. With cries of alarm, several Shen rushed forward to help to be knocked aside by wild sweeps of tail and club.
While it hadn’t seemed like a particularly expert idea in the first place, stuck in the middle of the reptile’s massive back seemed an especially poor position to be in. Particularly once Shalake calmed enough to formulate a plan. The lizardman turned, lined his back up with the stone monolith and, with a snarl and snap of legs, backpedaled furiously toward it.
They struck with a shudder of rock, narrowly knocking Lenk from his precarious perch as he pulled himself up to the lizardman’s shoulders. The folly of that, too, became all too clear at the sight of Shen bows drawn and aimed for the target that had so generously made itself clear of their leader.
Arrows shrieked. An arm wrapped about his neck and pulled back hard. His head struck stone. Shalake tore himself free. In the blur of motion, the only thing that Lenk could even be vaguely sure of was that he wasn’t dead.
Even that was uncertain; he hadn’t expected to see those green eyes staring down at him again anywhere outside of hell.
“Kataria,” he whispered.
“Stay down,” she snarled at him, drawing an arrow back.
“You. .” he said, trying to claw his way up, “you left me. . again.”
“I came back.” She trained the bow upon the Shen. “And I said stay down.” Absently, she pressed her foot upon his chest, pinning him to the top of the statue. “Don’t make yourself any easier to shoot than you already did.”
He craned his neck up and saw her fire wildly down. The arrow found the thick flesh of Shalake’s shoulder, another found his calf, forcing him to the ground. The third remained drawn in her bow, a thin bargaining chip aimed at Shalake’s neck, reminding them what should happen to their precious warwatcher if their arrows left their bows.
And there she stood, facing down two dozen Shen and six arrows drawn upon her, with him under her boot, refusing to move, refusing to leave.
He looked at her, then to the Shen. Their fingers twitched, getting impatient around the fletchings of their arrows. She’s going to die.
“Good,” the voice whispered.
No, I mean, she came back to die. She came back for me and she’s about to die because of me. .
“There is still no discussion here. Stay down and let her die, then we escape and. . what are you doing?”
“What are you doing?” Kataria echoed, casting a growl out the side of her mouth. “I said stay down.”
Lenk ignored her, pushing her foot aside, crawling up to join her. He stared down the Shen beside her, as bows were trained upon him, as Shalake cast his amber scowl up at him. He stood beside her, refusing to listen, refusing to leave.
“Fool,” the voice hissed. “Why do we always make such progress and then you go and throw it all away?”
Lenk didn’t have an answer for that. Lenk didn’t have a plan for how to avoid the arrows trained upon him and Kataria. Lenk didn’t have any thought for survival, for betrayal, for anything beyond standing beside her.
Bows creaked. Angry hisses rose from the crowd. Fingers twitched. Yellow-eyed scowls were cast upward. Lenk tensed. Kataria pulled her arrow back farther. Somewhere in the distance, something let out a keening roar growing steadily louder. Lenk drew in a deep breath. Then paused.
Wait, he thought, looking toward the wall, what was that last part?
And then everything went terribly wrong.
With the scream of rock and the roar of sea, the wall exploded. Shield-sized shards of stone went flying on a red-tinged mist as the Akaneed tore through the wall with a great, keening wail that spat blood and froth, carried on a wave that roared alongside it, sliding it through stone, over stone, toward stone.
The impact shook the highway, sent Lenk and Kataria tumbling off the monolith, sent the Shen collapsing to the ground, sent all eyes to the great sea serpent sliding toward them. Mere paces away from the assembled pink and green skins, it came to a slow, sliding halt upon its side, the wave that had carried it onto the road slithering away and settling back, leaving its macabre delivery before them.
Understandably, all previous hostilities were forgotten as all eyes settled upon the vision of ruin before them. The Akaneed was no less majestic in death, but the awe it commanded now was one of red and black, of a skull smashed to bits so thoroughly that shards of bone jutted from the crown of its head, of teeth smashed through its lips, of two eyes dug out with wounds old and new, and of a pool of blood growing with the multitude of crimson streams pouring out of its gaping maw.
Its jaws that now twitched and moved as though they still had some life that had not yet leaked out onto the road.
Two red hands reached out, pushed back the upper jaw and then the lower jaw, as though opening a gate. Gariath crawled out of the beast’s gullet, tumbling out and onto the blood-pooled ground. With a sniff, he rose to his feet, flicking his hands clean of gore even as the rest of him glistened with a cocktail coating of thick, viscous fluids.
He emerged from between the curtains of shattered teeth, gently splashing in the pool of blood beneath him as he did. He paused six paces away, suddenly aware of the crowd, stunned into silence, eyes upon him. He stared back, his black eyes expressionless. Then, he glanced over his shoulder at the dead serpent, then back to the crowd, and grunted.
“Well?”
“Rhega. .”
The word echoed among the Shen, from mouth to mouth, as the lizardmen rose to their feet, their yellow eyes wide and locked upon the dragonman.
“Rhega. .”
And from foot to foot, the movement followed. They began to back away, slinking into the coral forest beyond the shattered inner wall. Their bodies twisted and contorted, slipping easily into the brightly-colored, fossilized foliage.
“Rhega. .”
It continued to whisper, long after they had gone. It continued to echo, long after Shalake had followed them and paused, looking over his shoulder with an expression hidden behind his headdress. It continued, long after they had left them: the man, the shict, the dragonman, and the giant, dead Akaneed.
Lenk didn’t even bother for it to finish before he turned on Gariath with a furrowed brow.
“What the hell was that all about?” he demanded.
Gariath blinked, looked back to the Akaneed, then to Lenk. “What, is that a joke?”
“They looked at you like you were like. . like. .”
“Yeah,” the dragonman grunted. “Because I am.”
“And they just tried to kill us,” Lenk snarled. “And you. . and they. .” He reached down, plucked up his fallen, blood-slick sword. “I should. .”
Gariath folded his arms over his chest, every patch of his flesh dripping with the life of the beast he had just crawled out of. “You shouldn’t.”
“Look, can we do this somewhere that doesn’t reek as much?” Kataria asked with a sigh. “The Shen are gone, but the smell of this thing is still here. I’d just as soon be far away from both, if that’s all right.”
“And you!” Lenk snapped, whirling upon her. “You. . left me.”
Her expression went blank. Her voice went soft. “I did.”
He found himself stricken into a dum
b silence at that, followed by an equally dumb question. “Why?”
“Because I wanted to come back to you.”
“That. . doesn’t. .”
For but a moment, he saw it. Without frown, without a crack in her voice, it happened. Her eyes glistened. With tears that might have been mythical, they were gone so quickly.
“I know,” she said, shouldering her bow. “There’s a break in the forest up ahead. We can get through there and plan our next move.”
She stalked off. Without so much as a question, Gariath began to follow her. Lenk fell in line beside him, casting a sidelong glower.
“I still don’t like it,” he said.
“Okay,” Gariath grunted.
“I don’t like how they look at you.”
“All right.”
“And if it turns out you look at them the same way, you know what I’ll do.”
“Uh huh.”
Lenk nodded grimly as he sheathed his sword on his back. He would have said nothing else if not for the involuntary curl of his nostril. He eyed the viscous coating of fluids upon Gariath’s flesh.
“So, uh,” he said, “do you need to. . wash? Or something?”
“No,” Gariath replied without stopping. “It was a gift.”
SIXTEEN
NO EARS WHERE WE NEED THEM
He set foot upon the sand and took not a step farther.
The clouds slid across the sky in a slow-moving tide, drowning the sun. What little light made it through served only to paint the earth with shadows that waxed and waned. The world continued to move, oblivious to his eyes upon it.
And yet. .
“I know you’re there,” Lenk muttered.
And the world muttered back.
As though his words had lit a candle inside his head, they came back. Fluttering like little moths on whispering wings, he felt their voices in feathery brushes against his ear.
“Traitors,” they growled. “Traitors everywhere.”
“Plotted against us,” they hissed. “Jealous. Envious.”
“Didn’t want this,” they whimpered. “Never asked for this.”
“Seen them. Everywhere. Coming.”
“Want death? Give them death. All of them.”
“Blood. So much. . blood. .”
The more he listened, the clearer they became. The clearer they became, the more he listened.
And as he did, he found his eyes drawn up to the ridge, to the naked and pale skin of a slender back that was turned to him. To long, twitching ears that couldn’t hear the voices.
The voices that grew louder when he stared at her.
“Traitors. Closing in. Kill them all.”
“They hate us. Fear us. Good reasons. Make them suffer.”
“Why do they make us hurt them? Never wanted to kill anyone. No choice.”
He waited for them to say more. He waited for them to speak just an octave higher, to speak just a little clearer, to tell him what to do to make them go away. To make this terrible pain that grew in his chest whenever he looked at her go away.
As he looked at her now. As she didn’t look at him.
And they said nothing. The light extinguished, the moths flew away on their whispers. He held his breath for fear of missing a precious word over the sound of his own exhale. Air and patience ran out as one.
“Well?” he asked.
And, in a voice that whispered into his ear with a humid breath, the wind answered.
“It won’t stop, Lenk.” It spoke, in a voice uncomfortably familiar, uncomfortably close. “Not with blood.”
He blinked.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“What,” another voice, the only one he recognized, the one with ice and hatred said, “is what supposed to mean?”
As one of the few moments of pride for a man who could describe schizophrenia as routine, Lenk had always consoled himself by saying he had never truly felt the desire to bash his own head on a rock and try to find out exactly what it was in his skull that made him think it was at all logical to hope the disembodied voices would make sense.
But he supposed everyone had bad days.
His had gotten worse once he heard that voice. That voice that had spoken to him, rather than just having spoken. That voice that spoke to him like it knew him, rather than like it could command him.
He hadn’t heard it in his head or his heart. It spoke to him like he wasn’t insane. In a voice so comfortable, so familiar, so warm that it hurt that he couldn’t hear it anymore.
And that made him want to lie down and die quietly.
But, it wasn’t the first time he had felt that way. It wasn’t the first time he had tried to ignore it, either, as he shouldered his sword and trudged up the ridge to join her.
He found Kataria where he had left her, staring out over the ridge, slowly making up curses after she had long run out of real ones.
“Bloody, reeking, skunk-slathered balls,” she spat into the air off the ridge. “Maybe the best thing to do would be to squeeze through and come out on the other side as a pile of blood and guts.”
He didn’t have to ask. The small break in the forest of coral and kelp they had found had lasted as long as it took to find the small clearing. Past that, things got more complicated.
Before them, a jagged garden grew. Red thorns twisted over themselves in their eagerness to reach the companions. Jagged yellow fans twisted out of one another, rising like razor-edged suns. Pale-blue spears jutted out in clusters like the petals of flowers grown large on blood.
In those few gaps surrounding the clearing where the coral did not grow out with vengeful sharpness, kelp rose in walls of green, swaying impassively, unmoved by Kataria’s frustration as she continued to search for a way out that didn’t involve leaving behind several pounds of flesh and blood.
“It just goes on for miles,” Lenk observed. “Makes you wonder what the point of having the Shen around is.”
“I don’t know,” she spat back, “maybe so they’ll make you stop asking questions.”
“Oh.”
“By shooting you.”
“Right.”
“In the head.”
“Yeah,” he said, “I get it.”
He spoke loudly, clearly, trying to drown out the other voices.
“Want to kill us? US?”
“Make them suffer. Make them die.”
“Gods will understand. Had no choice.”
It wasn’t working.
He opened his mouth to speak a little louder before she held up a hand to silence him, head bowing with the weight of her sigh.
“Sorry,” she said. “That came out wrong.”
“How. . how else was it supposed to come out?”
“Less. . shooty.” She waved her hand at him, turned back around. “Look, just don’t talk to me for a while. I need to figure it out.”
“Figure what out?”
“How they got through here in the first place. .”
She didn’t emphasize the word, didn’t so much as blink as she said it. All the same, his blood ran cold as he looked intently at her and asked.
“Who are ‘they’?”
She wasn’t listening. Not to him, anyway. Her ears did not twitch so much as turn on her head, sweeping slowly from side to side like her eyes. They would stop momentarily, fixed on some direction, and her head would follow. Whatever she heard, she wouldn’t tell him.
Someone else did.
“Going to kill us. Going to try.”
“Fear us. Should fear us. Will fear us.”
“Make them stop. . make them stop. .”
He resisted the urge to shake his head as he stalked away from her, noting with only mild relief that they faded the farther away he drew.
“She waits. .”
Most of them, anyway.
“She will strike soon,” the voice, his voice, spoke in cold clarity. “She bides her time. She would strike you down. He would, as well.”
“Who?”
Absorbed in his own thoughts, he only realized Gariath was standing in front of him once he collided with the dragonman’s massive winged back. The young man staggered backward, snarling at his companion.
“What the hell are you doing there?” he demanded.
“Standing in one place, waiting patiently for someone useless to bump into me so I can hear him say something annoying,” Gariath replied without turning to face Lenk. “Or maybe just resting, having just spent a day lodged in a snake’s throat.”
“Or,” Lenk spat back, “maybe you intentionally got in my way just so you could beat me about the head with what you think is witty.”
Gariath cast the slightest sliver of a disinterested stare over his shoulder. “You’re touchy today, as well as stupid.”
“Why shouldn’t I be?” Lenk said. “I’m surrounded by. .”
“Betrayers.”
“Murder.”
“Blood. Everywhere.”
“Coral,” he muttered.
“Probably not,” Gariath muttered. He held up a hand with a fresh cut upon it. “I tried breaking it earlier. It’s sharp and hard as teeth. If it is coral, it’s not the kind we know.”
“And we’ve got no way out. That’s what’s bothering me. Kataria’s acting strange, too.”
“So are you,” Gariath grunted. “And you were both strange yesterday. How is it any different today?”
“I’m not strange.”
“You can’t go forty breaths without being strange.”
“You’re not helping things. I’m a little. .” Lenk hesitated to finish the sentence.
“Hate them.”
“Fear.”
“Never wanted this.”
“Wary is all,” Lenk said. “Everyone’s on edge. It doesn’t help when she’s staring out over the coral and listening to something no one can hear.”
“People who talk to something no one can see don’t get to be that picky,” Gariath replied.
“Some exception can be made for me,” Lenk replied, forcing his voice through his teeth. “Given that my only other company is the giant ugly reptile whom the other giant ugly reptiles treat like a god.”
