by Sam Sykes
Gariath shrugged, snorted. “Stupid.”
“Stupid? Did you see the way they looked at you? They would have ripped off their loincloths and castrated themselves right there if you had asked them to.”
Gariath grunted. “Thirty-two breaths. And it’s stupid because the Shen don’t have a god.”
“How do you even know that?” Lenk demanded. “How do you know anything about the Shen beyond the fact that they tried to kill us.”
“Not me.”
“Not yet.”
“Not ever.”
“You can’t know that. You can’t know them. What do you know about them that makes you think they won’t?”
“They are Shen.”
“And what does that mean?”
“Everything.”
“Nothing. It means nothing beyond the fact that they’re savages. Beasts. It’s a matter of time. You can’t even see it. But they’ll kill you. They’ll turn on you. They all will betray you and no one will be around to hear you scream.”
It wasn’t until he saw Gariath standing tense, hands tightened into fists, eyes narrowed sharply upon him, that he realized it hadn’t been his voice that had just spoken.
“They are Shen,” Gariath said. “I am Rhega. I have nothing else.”
“You have us,” Lenk replied.
“I have you.” Contempt strained Gariath’s laughter. “Tiny, stupid weaklings so numerous that they have the privilege to look at each other with suspicion. A tiny, stupid weakling telling me his life is hard because he cannot trust a tiny, stupid weakling because she listens to things other than him.”
He took a step forward, driving Lenk a step back.
“A tiny, stupid, pathetic weakling so obsessed with his own tiny, weak, pathetic problems that he thinks he can tell me I can be happy with nothing and that I cannot trust the only people I’ve seen in years that are even a little like myself.”
He leaned down, eyes hard, teeth harder. And fully bared.
“I have you. I have nothing.”
He turned away.
“Now, turn around and walk away before I run out of reasons not to break you in two.”
Lenk did not look away. Not immediately. “How many do you have?”
“One and a half.”
That did it.
Though he found little relief once he turned away from the dragonman. If anything, the voices grew stronger as he stalked down the ridge, away from Kataria and Gariath and into a small copse of thick, swaying kelp.
“Paranoid. Fearful. Felt the same way.”
“No one. Trust no one.”
“Only wanted them to like me.”
“I don’t need this right now,” Lenk muttered to himself, rubbing his eyes.
“You do,” the voice said. The others went mute, as if in reverence. “You deny those who would help you, those who are with you, the only ones who are with you.”
“There’s just so many talking all at once and all saying the same thing over and over and over. .”
“Because you refuse to listen. Because they can help.”
“Then how do you explain the voice that contradicted them all?” he asked. “The one that said that it wouldn’t stop with her death?”
“There was no such voice.”
“I heard it.”
“I didn’t. You were hearing things.”
Lenk’s mouth opened, hung there as he searched for an answer, somehow never having quite anticipated that the voices in his head one day may question his sanity. Finding none, he closed his mouth, drew in a sharp breath and casually went about the business of searching for a rock sharp enough to bash his head open with.
As he searched for one that looked like it would hurt a lot in the row of kelp before him, he saw it.
Out of the corner of his eye: a flicker of movement, a rustle of leaves amidst the kelp’s trancelike swaying, a shadow sliding behind a veil of tuberous green, yet unaware of his presence.
His hand slowly slid to his sword. Not that he could tell exactly what dwelt behind the curtain of greenery, but be it Shen or worse, he had never found preemptive violence to have served him wrong before. Before the blade could even be drawn, though, the kelp shivered and the creature came out.
He tensed, ready for a Shen attack, ready for a demon to have somehow followed him here, ready for Kataria to be on the other side and ready to kill him, ready for absolutely anything but this.
But there it was.
Hanging in midair.
Like it belonged there.
A fish.
It did not fly, nor even float, so much as simply. . be there, as if it were in water. Its translucent tail swayed back and forth, its fins wafted and wavered like elegant fans, its black-and-white striped scales glimmered as it hung, staring at Lenk with a glass-eyed expression.
As though he were the one with the problem.
It floated there for a moment longer, mouth opening and closing, as if waiting for Lenk to say something.
“Uh?” he grunted, squinting one eye at the creature.
Unimpressed to the point of offense, the fish swam about in a half-circle, offering a rather rude swish of its tail as it turned away from Lenk and vanished back into the kelp.
With the full knowledge that there was absolutely no way in heaven or hell he was going to ever not regret it, Lenk stepped forward. Knowing damn well that it was a bad idea, he slipped a hand through the veil of kelp and found no dense, forbidding forest beyond it. With the absolute certainty that staying back and waiting for one companion or the other to kill him was probably smarter, he drew in a deep breath.
And stepped through.
The air grew thicker, even as the kelp thinned out around him. There was no impenetrable hedge like there had been before and it was easy enough to make his way, pushing aside stalks of swaying leaves in pursuit of the fish. Nor was there any easy breath to be found here; the air didn’t so much grow humid as it seemed to debate whether it should drown him or not.
And yet, he pressed on, if only because it was harder to think with the thicker air and thus harder to hear any voices. And as he did, the kelp thinned out more and more until he emerged from the towering weeds at the edge of a shallow valley.
And as he cast eyes suddenly unable to blink over it, he finally found the words.
“Well, that’s alarming.”
They swam.
In great, shimmering rainbows of scales painted red and black and gold and blue and green, they swam. In twisting pillars of silver mouths chasing silver tails endlessly into the sky, they swam. In slow and lazy clouds of riotous color, over each other, into each other, against each other, they swam.
In the tens of hundreds. Through the air. With no water at all.
The fish were swimming through the sky.
And amidst the curtains of brightly colored scales, other life lurked. Rays, their fleshy fins wafting like wings, swam across the sandy floor. The shadows of sharks lurked at the edges, swimming gingerly between clouds of fish and seeking the unwary. Octopuses floated nonchalantly through the sky, colors changing as they passed in and out of the clouds of fish, as though defying the laws of reality was not worth giving even half a crap about.
The coral bloomed in all its twisted color and jagged splendor. The kelp swayed impassively in great clumps. Starfish clung to jutting rocks. Crabs scuttled across skeletal trees of hardened coral. Eels slithered in and out of dark holes.
Across the valley, an ocean without water sprawled.
And Lenk stood at its edge and watched, near breathless.
Not with awe. The sky, a shifting quilt of blues too deep to be sky and grays too thick to be clouds, roiled overhead. The air it offered was lead, weighing down his lungs as he breathed it in.
Between that and. . this, whatever it was before him, he wondered if it might not be smarter to turn around, leave, and pretend it hadn’t ever happened.
“What in Riffid’s name. .” someone whispered from beh
ind him.
He turned and saw Kataria parting the kelp and emerging from the forest, Gariath close behind her. Both their eyes were fixed upon the sea of fish and sky before them as they came up beside Lenk at the edge of the valley.
She was saying something. Probably cursing. He didn’t care. He couldn’t hear.
He found his gaze drawn back to the valley, back to the endlessly shifting tides of scale and shimmer. What passed for a sandy floor was largely hindered by more coral, more exuberant and numerous than had been present before. Gaps of bare sand wound through the brilliant, jagged fans and reaching thorns of coral like worms through a corpse, their labyrinthine curves offering only the vaguest hint of safe passage.
His gaze continued past them, over them, drawn farther into the forest by a sense of foreboding.
It was faint. It was far away. It was at the dead center of the reef. It might not have even existed. But as he stared at it, he couldn’t shake the feeling of intimacy that came with it, as though far away, something was staring back at him.
And it spoke with terrifyingly pristine clarity.
“She is going to kill you.”
He shook his head and became aware that he was standing by himself on the ridge. With some indignation, he threw a glare down toward his companions, already heading toward the path to the trench.
“Hey!”
Kataria paused with an offensive dramatic sigh, looking over her shoulder. “Are you coming or not?”
“Sorry, I was just distracted,” Lenk said, gesturing over the reef, “what with the giant invisible sea of flying fish that should not be, and all. Have you seen this kind of thing before or. .”
“It was impressive to begin with, but now I’ve seen it,” Kataria replied. “I’ve also seen giant snakes, lizardmen of varying sizes, giant black fish-headed priest-things, seagulls that look like old ladies, I could go on.” She shrugged. “I mean, this is weird, yeah, but we’ve seen and done weirder.”
“I was eaten by a giant sea serpent,” Gariath offered.
“Gariath was eaten by a giant sea serpent.” Kataria nodded, gesturing to him. “You don’t see him getting distracted.” She shouldered her bow, casting a wary glance around before trudging toward the reef. “Now, come on. It’s dangerous to stay out here.”
It was with some hesitance that he followed her.
Not for fear of the reef. Not even for fear of her. But for the fact that the moment he set foot upon sand, it came again. Between the crunching of sand beneath his feet, it whispered to him.
“She speaks truth,” the voice said. “She hurries you to your death. She will kill you. She will leave you to die.”
Lenk forced his voice low, burying it below a whisper. “Well, which is it?”
“You will die,” it whispered. “She will be the cause. You know this.”
“How do you figure?” He kept his eyes lower than his voice, staring at the ground as he stalked between the coral.
“Because you do not want to know.”
“You’re going to have to explain that one to me.”
“You do not know why she left. You do not know why she returned. You do not know why she goes ahead and leaves you behind. You do not know what she thinks, what she does, why.”
His eyes were locked on her back, ten paces ahead of him, as she wound her way through the reef, ducking under low-hanging branches, sucking in her belly as she skirted alongside a jagged, reaching crest. Her eyes were locked only ahead, her ears heedless of what he whispered, upright and listening for that which he could not hear.
“Why she will not look at you.”
He came to a sudden halt. Above him, the coral formed a spiny canopy of thorns through which the dim sunlight came in rays impaled. Around him, a school of fish, unmoved by his plight, slowly plucked amongst the coral with their puckered lips and glassy eyes. Before him, Kataria continued to press on.
Without looking back.
“Because,” his words cracked, not convinced of itself, “I don’t want to.”
The voice said nothing.
The voice didn’t need to say anything.
He tried to walk with messier, louder steps, tried to hum a tune, tried anything that might be loud enough to drown out the sound of his own thoughts.
But he couldn’t shake the thoughts from his head any more than he could shake his eyes from Kataria as she continued to wind her way through the coral. He couldn’t stop wondering. Why she wouldn’t look at him, why she acted the way she did, why he never even asked her once to justify herself.
Even if he knew it was because he was afraid of the answer. Death-his by her hand, hers by his-was a fear fast fading against another: the fear that he might live through it all.
The fear that the tome would be found, that he would save the world, get paid, shoulder his sword, and look, with an easy smile painted by the light of a setting sun, to his side.
And not see her there.
He didn’t want to think about that. And he was terrible at humming. And so, he pressed on, and tried not to think.
He wound his way through the coral, following the distant crunch of his companions’ fading footsteps. They had stopped altogether by the time he saw daylight again as the sand faded beneath his feet and gave way to thick, gray cobblestones stacked neatly upon each other.
Kataria knelt upon it, studying its surface. She glanced up at his approach and instantly tensed, eyes narrowing. He stopped in his tracks as her eyes bored into him, as her body grew taut, ears pricking upright. She rose, walked toward him. He took a step back.
It wasn’t until after she had walked right past him that he realized his hand had gone to his sword.
Easing his fingers from the hilt, he turned and saw what she saw. The path behind them was completely bare of fish, of kelp and, most notably, of dragonmen.
“Where’s Gariath?” she asked.
“Off doing dragonman things?” Lenk replied, shrugging.
“What are dragonman things?”
“Whatever he wants them to be, I guess.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I don’t know. I said some things to him earlier. He might have taken them personally.”
“If he had taken them personally, he would have twisted your legs until you could pick your teeth with your toes.” She waved her hands dismissively toward the road. “We don’t have time for this, anyway. It’s not like he’s never done this before and it’s not like there’s not more important things to worry about.”
Lenk glanced down at the stones beneath his feet. “Right. Another highway. .”
“Half of one,” Kataria corrected.
Lenk followed her gaze and frowned. The great scar of stone, jagged and curving, frowned back.
The other half was simply. . gone, replaced by the vast nothingness that yawned open beside it. A jagged edge of stone embraced a seeping edge of darkness like a lover, marching beside each other through the reef to disappear around a bend in the distance. The highway and the chasm, hand-in-hand, stretched into endlessness.
The reef grew up around it, over it, encroaching upon it as though it were an embarrassing blemish that it hoped to hide behind wild color. As well it might, the highway was thick with the signs of war: burnt banners on shattered standards, bloodstains painting the pavement amidst fallen weapons, and more of the twisted bells, lined up in a chorus hanging silent, some teetering over the edge.
And yet, as black and foreboding as it was, the grotesqueness of the highway only made the chasm beside it more alluring. From however far below, kelp grew, the color of a bruise the moment before it darkens. It shimmered, almost glowing as it wafted, reaching out of the chasm with swaying leafy fingers as though it sought to pull itself out to join the rest of the reef.
And against the vivid purple, the darkness of the chasm was all that much more absolute. And it was the darkness that drew Lenk’s eyes, a familiar sensation, uncomfortably distinct, alarmingly close.
As he peered into the darkne
ss, something peered back at him.
“She’s going to kill you.”
“What?” he whispered back.
“I didn’t say anything,” Kataria replied. “Though I might as well.” She pointed down the highway. “We follow this as far as we can, then. It looks like it’ll go on for a while.”
Lenk could only barely hear her. The voices returned, clearer, bolder, and much, much louder.
“Lead us to die.”
“Betrayed us. All of us.”
“Should do something. Why didn’t I do something?”
“Do what?” he whispered.
“Follow it,” Kataria replied, blinking. “It’s a road, isn’t it? It has to lead to somewhere.” She clicked her tongue. “And if I’m at all clever-”
She paused. He blinked.
“Something wrong?” he asked.
“No. . I just kind of expected someone to insult me before I could finish that thought. Anyway. .” She thrust a finger toward the horizon. “I’d guess it leads there.”
In the distance, rising over the reef like a colossus, the mountain stood wearing a halo of clouds. But even at this distance, one could see that it was carved, lined with twisting aqueducts down which blue veins of water ran.
“If I were to hold onto a book full of weird, mysterious gibberish, I’d hold it there,” she said. “And if it isn’t there, we’ll be in a better position to find where it might be.”
“It doesn’t make sense,” Lenk whispered. “All this stonework and there’s only Shen and fish here. Who made it?”
“Not right. Nothing right here.”
“Danger. Danger all around us.”
“A trap. We walked right into it.”
“That’s kind of beside the point, isn’t. .” Kataria’s voice drifted away as her ears went upright again, sweeping from side to side, listening.
He waited for her to look back, to look at him. She did not.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Traitors. Everywhere.”
“Want them to die. All of them to die.”
“She’s going to kill you. You’re going to die.”
“It’s nothing.” Her ears focused forward like shields, she began to walk down the road. “Stay here.”
