by Sam Sykes
“Stop,” Xhai said.
“I can’t,” he replied, limping toward her.
“It isn’t supposed to end this way. You can’t die for her.”
“Well, I can’t die for myself.”
“You’re supposed to die for me,” Xhai said. “You’re supposed to die trying to kill me. That’s what we do. We kill until we are killed.”
“Not for me. I always should have died for her.”
“For her.”
“Yeah.”
Her ruined face twitched for a moment, trying to remember what it was supposed to look like. But it could find no snarls. Despite her torn mouth and her broken teeth, despite the blood painting her purple skin and her ruined arm, Semnein Xhai, Carnassial and killer, looked hurt.
He staggered toward her. She struck him to the earth and he did not rise. There was no enthusiasm in her boot as she pressed it between his shoulder blades.
He didn’t even bother to scream. He didn’t fight. His mask lay somewhere else, between a pool of his own blood and the dead sikkhun. What stared at Asper as he lay on the ground was him.
A man. Broken. Whose mouth could only twitch with a word he desperately wished he had breath to speak.
Sorry.
Asper found herself rising to her feet. Only the barest part of it was her. Only a faint desire felt through the agony to rise up and go to him. The rest, that which forced her to her feet, that which propelled her forward, came from elsewhere. Came from the paper creature on the rubble. Came from the thing inside her that it recognized. That thing remembered Xhai.
That thing wanted to see her again.
Her left arm rose up. Xhai didn’t look up. Not until Asper felt her fingers against the Carnassial’s throat. Not to strangle, not to harm, just to touch. The thing inside her remembered that skin, that strength beneath it. Xhai felt it, too. Xhai remembered. Xhai looked up.
“No,” she whispered as she looked at Asper. “No.”
Sorry.
Asper pretended to say that. Her voice was on fire. Her limb was alive. The hellish light erupted from her palm, swept over her flesh and painted her bones black. It raced up her arm, onto her shoulder, splitting cloth and flesh and baring the black skeleton beneath.
Her grip was death. Xhai swept her arm up to shove her off. Her fist bent, arm snapped and folded in half, fingers curled over so that their tips brushed the hairs on the back of her hand. She clenched her jaw so hard that the jagged shards of teeth punctured her gums.
“No. NOT AGAIN.”
Sorry.
She could only pretend. The thing inside her reached out, leapt into Xhai’s own flesh. She could feel it keener than she ever had. It was searching. It was digging holes in the Carnassial. It was looking for something else.
It had a voice.
Where is it, where are they, where are the rest of them, what are these bones, oh, they break so easily, what is this skin, why does it split apart, what is an arm, a leg, a rib, they all snap and break, and there is nothing in her anymore but bone and blood and I need more and I never find it and I can’t find anyone else like me and where is he, I heard him emerge, I heard him scream, I thought he was there in those people, in that creature, in that girl, in Taire, I remember Taire, I keep hearing Taire, but he wasn’t there, I need them, I need to talk to them, I need to see them, let me out, let me out, let me-
“SAVE ME-”
Xhai was still alive. Xhai was bending. Xhai was breaking. And she was screaming.
Screaming his name.
“No, no, no, no, NO!”
It was Asper screaming now. Asper hurling herself to the ground. The fire retreated, dissipating back into her flesh, leaving bare and steaming skin. The muscle beneath was ablaze. The blood boiled. The voice inside her was a jumble of wordless babble. It was still there. It wanted out. It wanted the paper creature.
It wanted something like it.
And now that it was so close, so close to the familiar, it was talking. It was within her. Alive.
She heard footsteps. Heard breathing. Above all of it, after all of it, Xhai was still standing, still walking. The Carnassial came to a halt over the priestess. Asper didn’t look up. She knew what she looked like.
“It talked to me.” Asper whispered softly. “It was in me. It was awake. I could feel it, all this time, feel it screaming. But. .” She shook her head. “It’s like. . that thing in the statue. That’s in me. That’s. .” She inhaled, felt the tears forcing their way out the corners of her eyes. “I stopped it. I couldn’t let it. I couldn’t give it anything.”
“Why.”
Xhai’s voice was a croaking thing, a voice that belonged to something without a throat. Not a question. Not one that she thought had an answer.
“Because you cried out his name,” she said. “Like you. . I don’t know. But you’re down here because of him, we’re fighting because of him, he acts like he knows you better than anyone, you kill, you’re dying, I hurt you. . and you still called out to him like. .” It ached to say it. “Like he was going to save you.”
“Why.”
“I guess. . I didn’t want that. For you.”
“Why.”
“I don’t know. I can’t-”
“Why.”
A fist against the back of Asper’s head. She fell to the ground.
“Why.”
A boot to her side. She reeled.
“Why.”
Again. Again. Striking with what were once limbs, twisted beyond recognition. Again. Again. Snarling in a voice that wasn’t hers.
“Why. Why. Why. Why. Why. Why.” Xhai, snarling and striking and flailing as Asper quivered on the floor, trying to protect herself. “Why do you do that? Why do you not act like you’re supposed to? Why aren’t you dead?”
She looked up and saw Xhai. Saw one eye wide, the other a thick crunch of flesh and shards of bones where the eye socket had folded upon itself. She saw her mouth flapping, the jaw separated at the chin. She saw blood seeping out between jagged teeth.
She saw a woman who shouldn’t be alive.
She felt the broken woman’s twisted arm and bent legs hammering her into the ground.
She left Asper there as she collected her sword, dragging it behind her on a withered arm. She hauled it, hefted it over the woman who had not died, who tried to kill her, who hurt her worse than even he had.
“Wait.”
No urgency. No desperation. Denaos pulled himself wearily to his feet, pausing to spit out a glob of blood on the dusty ground. He didn’t hurry.
“Don’t kill her,” he said.
“I have to.”
“No, you don’t.”
“This is the way it has to be.”
“Why,” he asked. Not a question.
“Because there’s no other way. There is killing and there is dying and the more you do it, the more it makes sense.”
“And then the more you do it, the more you keep waiting for it to make sense,” he said. “You want to kill her because she hurt you, because you think that doesn’t happen, because people like us. . we aren’t supposed to get hurt. But people like us,” he gestured between them, “it’s not a necessity. We just don’t know anything else.”
Xhai looked down at Asper.
“There’s another way.”
She looked to Denaos through her good eye. The rogue approached her, held her gaze despite one eye swollen shut.
“Take me instead,” he said.
“You mean kill you.”
“I mean take me,” he insisted. “So long as you never choose anything else, you’ll never have anything but death.”
“I don’t need anything-”
“Liar. If that were true, you wouldn’t look at Sheraptus like your sikkhun looked at you. You want something else. You can have something else.”
He came to a stop. Two paces away from her.
“So choose.”
Xhai looked at her blade, hanging from her hand, like it shou
ldn’t be doing that. She grimaced at it, at the withered stump of a hand with only three working fingers holding it. She frowned at her reflection, so distorted in the iron that it almost looked like a living thing.
And then she looked back up at him. Staring at her through one good eye. Blood weeping from his face. Broken, battered, alive. Choosing her.
Over her.
“Come to me,” Xhai said.
He did.
Limping forward, broken and battered and pretending he wasn’t, he came to her. Hers, something of her own. Something that didn’t belong to Sheraptus. Something that she didn’t kill to earn. The little pink female could live. Who cared.
She had something.
She had him.
And he was sliding his arm around her, drawing her close. And she found the touch painful, but impossible to turn away from. She slid closer to him, pressing her ruined body to his. She closed her good eye as she felt his hand slide around her shoulder. She smiled a torn mouth as she felt the heel of his hand slip so easily into the crook of her neck.
She was still smiling when she heard the click and the blade entered her throat.
When he pulled away, when her blood spurted out to splash upon the floor, she looked at him.
“You lied,” she said, uncertain of what that word meant.
“It’s what I do,” he replied.
She looked at him for a moment. Her arm moved before either of them knew. The blade sank into his side, biting through flesh all the way to something soft and dark. He shuddered. He grimaced. He looked surprised.
When he fell, he did not rise.
When she fell, she was last.
And they lay. Broken.
THIRTY-TWO
GREAT, DEAD, OLD ONES
Once, it had been great.
It had begun as something old and vast, the empty spot where the mountain’s blood had carved out the cavern. The stalactites still hung overhead, teeth in a stone mouth that stretched in a great echoing chamber.
They had made it greater. They had carved the great stone steps into the sides of the cavern, the long stone walkway that circled its center, the tremendous statues of Ulbecetonth that rose up on all sides, womanly shoulders holding up the cavern roof in a testament to her strength and beauty.
The heart of the mountain. Once, it had been her throne.
War had unmade it. War had brought the banners of the House of the Vanquishing Trinity hanging over the walls, draped around the necks of Ulbecetonth’s statues like nooses. War had brought the great flood that drowned the middle of the chamber in dark water.
The heart of the mountain, Lenk thought as he stepped out of the archway into the tremendous chamber, was dead.
“He lied to us,” Lenk muttered. “Why the hell do I keep trusting dead people in ice?”
“Probably because having to interact with dead people in ice is a problem for you,” Kataria replied, following him out. Her bow was nocked with an arrow drawn. She scanned the room. “Look, there are other archways all along the wall here. We can try to follow one of those out.”
“Who knows how far they go,” Lenk said. “And what are we going to find on the other side?” He shook his head. “The man. . he said to follow the sound of running water. I know I heard it.”
The water here was not running. The water here was barely even water. It was liquid shadow, a great teeming lake stretching from the stone walkway to the back of the cavern. It had been choked with so much blood and suffering and hate that it had become a living thing itself, a great hungry blackness that ate the green light burning from braziers hanging high in the toothy ceiling overhead.
And yet, as dark as it was, he thought he could almost see something beneath the surface. Something darker still, something staring at him from beneath the darkness with a hateful familiarity.
And then, whatever it was blinked.
“Let’s go,” he said, turning around.
“Which way?” Kataria asked as he pushed past her and started toward a random archway.
“It doesn’t matter. We have to go. We never should have come here.” He broke out into a jog, moving faster with each step. It was looking at him, whatever it was, watching him go, glaring at him. He could feel it. He could hear it. “Hurry the hell-”
He had no more mouth to speak. As he approached the darkness of the archway, a shadow fell over his face. An emaciated, webbed claw seized him by the throat, lifted him up and off his feet. The ensuing struggle was meaningless, the limbs flailing against the fist and reaching for his sword ignored as his captor strode out of the shadows.
The Abysmyth’s vacant stare took on a kind of serenity as it swiveled empty white eyes upon Lenk. Its voice gurgled from its gaping jaws with a throaty clarity.
“You turn from light, fearing blindness,” it said. “You fight fate, fearing oblivion.” It drew Lenk up in its grasp, closer to its jaws. “What great gifts have you missed in the name of your fleeting terrors?”
It only barely quivered when the arrow entered its eye. Instead, it swept its gaze toward Kataria, unhurried. Its head didn’t even wobble as another arrow lodged itself in the beast’s mouth. The shict strung another arrow and let it fly, planting another one in the beast’s eye, face, mouth.
“Does it not ache, child?” it spoke, shafts splintering between its teeth. “The desperation? The futility? Can you not feel the change beneath your feet?”
“Shut up and drop him,” Kataria snarled, drawing another arrow. “Unless you like the feel-”
Not another word could pierce the webbed hand that clasped over her mouth. She could not struggle from the other hands seizing her arms, forcing the bow from her grasp, the arms wrapping around her torso, the weight of hairless bodies forcing her to the ground. She snarled, she bit, she fought and spat. The frogmen pinning her took it with stoic silence, holding her steady even as she struggled to get free.
Lenk cried out to her and felt the Abysmyth’s talons press against his throat. Even then, he struggled, flailing until another titanic claw caught his arm. It was only then that he noticed another frogman come scampering from the black water, searching over him with webbed hands until they found what they sought in his satchel.
With trembling reverence, the frogman pulled free the perfect black square of leather that was the tome. Eyes, demonic and frogman alike, turned toward it with breathless adoration as the creature slowly slid back to the water.
The man in the ice, Lenk could only think, he led me here. He wanted me to come here to die.
Or to kill.
“Is it cold?”
Risen from the surface of the blackness like a stone, two golden eyes peered over the water at Kataria. Strands of auburn hair floated atop the water like kelp, eerily delicate.
“The earth,” the voice came from the darkness. “The stone. Is it cold?” The eyes narrowed sharply. “It always felt such, even when we had legs, even when we walked upon it. She made it bearable, of course, but now it’s. . cold. It’s hard.”
The shadow clung to its skin as it rose out of the darkness, rising with needy tendrils as a human face, milk-pale, glass-boned, rose on a thick stalk of gray flesh. The woman’s lips pulled into a frown.
“We were Her most trusted, Her most ardent. We turned to Her when our families turned us away, when our lovers turned us to whores, when the earth turned us to bodies. And She welcomed us.”
“And She loved us.” Another head rose from the water, hair ebon black, eyes narrowed angrily. “And took us from cold earth. And when the mortal armies and your wicked people came for Her, we leapt into the darkness after Her. And we came back. For this.”
The Deepshriek turned both heads to the frogman with the tome and nodded. The creature dove beneath the water, disappearing into shadow.
“Don’t-” Lenk managed to speak before the demon’s claw tightened around his throat. He struggled with one arm, grasping and beating on the demon’s hand, hoping the other wouldn’t be noticed as
it crept closer to the hilt of his sword.
“Are you so selfish, creature?” The Deepshriek spat the words. “Did you not see the suffering your breed caused? Did you not look at the faces of the hollow children and the dead? Do you think that your own twisted nature is enough to deny the world Her warmth?” Fangs bared, a hiss burst forth. “I heard you speak to that cold thing in the darkness.”
“I am nothing like-”
“You are. You are everything like it. She has been in your head. She has seen your thoughts. Murder. Treachery. Hatred. All that grows in your mind is born of the same murderous seed. You came here to kill Her, She who only wishes to be reunited with Her children.”
Its eyes steadied. Its lips closed. It smiled.
“That’s why She wants you be alive to see this.”
The heads disappeared beneath the water. Lenk reached after them, as though he could still stop them. The Abysmyth held fast, not even bothering to remove the arrows from its eye.
And soon, the darkness was alive. Words burbled up, too powerful to be contained by the gloom, too powerful to be spoken by mortal lips. Red light flashed in great spurts beneath, illuminating them in flashes: Abysmyths and frogmen swimming in a dark halo. The Deepshriek’s heads bent over a book as its shark body swam around it, the epicenter of the endless circles. A great shape, a vast circle of light that painted the darkness in brief flashes, ever longer, ever wider.
The Aeons’ Gate.
Opening.
And from the light, something greater emerged, something painted dark against the crimson, a stain of ink spreading into a pool of blood. Great tentacles emerging, golden stars winking into life, a pair of bright jaws opening.
“No, no, no!” Lenk screamed.
His blade was in his hand, drawn free. He swung it, struck the Abysmyth’s arm. It dropped him, though with no great roar of agony, no blood. His blade could no longer hurt the thing. He had left that power behind, in the chasm. His shoulder hurt. He was tired. He was terrified.
He didn’t care.
He ran toward Kataria. His blade could still cut the frogmen. She lashed out a leg, striking one in the groin. It gurgled, loosed its grip on her. The others tried to seize her arm as she reached up and began to claw at their eyes.
