The Skybound Sea tag-3

by Sam Sykes

  Unless he died from his wounds. Which still hurt as he rose onto his elbows. He thought briefly about rousing Asper to check his stitches, salve and bandage regimen. But a quick look at her, curled up in sleep with her back to Denaos and Dreadaeleon wedged in rather rigidly nervous sleep between them, discouraged him. Gariath hunched over at the rudder, quietly dozing above the satchels of fruits, fish, and water the Shen had sent them on their way with.

  They slept a tired, dreamless slumber for the weary and the wounded.

  Most of them, anyway.

  At the prow of the boat, she lay, arms over the railing, head tilted backward staring aimlessly up at the sky. Only the rise of breath in her belly and the twitching of her ears suggested that she was alive.

  She was not a beautiful sight, not ethereal or mysterious. Her skin did not glisten in the moonlight, though the beads of sweat upon her body shimmered. Her hair hung in dirty, messy strands about eyes lined with weariness. Her muscles were tense, her body hard and unyielding, those parts not covered in bandages or filthy leathers. Her ears were scarred with ugly notches. Her curves were small and hostile. Her skin, bandaged and not, was coated in grime and sweat.

  She was Kataria. And every part of her was bloody, dirty, and beautiful.

  And she hadn’t spoken to him in a week.

  He hadn’t pressed her. Most of his time had been spent getting treated by Asper, arguing with Denaos over the sea chart, or trying to break up fights over who had to look which way when it was someone’s turn to make water.

  In all that time, she hadn’t so much as looked at him.

  But the woman in his dreams had told him to wake up. He was awake now. And she was there.

  He edged over to her, trying not to wince with the effort. He hesitated when he drew close to her, then he opened his mouth to speak. Her hand shot up.

  “Not yet,” she whispered. “You should hear this.”

  He waited. She didn’t say anything. He looked around as her ears went erect.

  “Hear. . what?”

  “Wait until she comes close.” She pointed over the edge. “There.”

  A great shadow of some old fish, vast and with a horizontal tail like an axe blade, slid beneath the surface. And so close, Lenk thought he could hear it. A low, keening wail. A long, lonely dirge.

  “She’s singing,” Kataria said. “She’s the only sound down there. I don’t think there’s any fish left in these waters.” She frowned. “Maybe that’s why she sounds sad.”

  “Because there’s nothing left for her?”

  And then, she looked at him with two eyes. In one, there was the way she had always looked at him, with the fondness, with the laughter, with the curiosity. And in the other, there was the way she had looked through him, with the fear, with the anger, with the cold appraisal of a predator sizing up prey.

  Between them, there was something else entirely that she looked at him with. And he stared straight at it.

  “Because something happened,” he said, “and whatever was supposed to happen, didn’t, and now everything’s changed. And she’s not sure what happens now.”

  She looked down at the deck and drew her knees up to her chest.

  “Yeah. Something like that.”

  A long silence passed. The waters chopped at the boat’s side.

  “What do you think you’ll do when we get back to the mainland?” she asked.

  “My original plan was to get paid, take the money, and go hack dirt somewhere until I die,” he replied. “Maybe that won’t happen again. But I want to find somewhere to hang up my sword.”

  “Liar.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “You’ve lost that sword a hundred times and it keeps finding you,” she said. “If you hang it up, it’ll just come back. You keep calling to it.”

  He looked at it, sitting in its sheath next to the tome. “Maybe I’ll put it to better use.”

  “Than what? Killing? What else is it going to do?”

  “I don’t know. Guard duty or something. Something good.”

  “There are only a few good things you can do with a sword,” she said, frowning. “And none of them involve what you do with it.” Slowly, her eyes became one, full of doubt, full of fear. “Do you want to kill forever?”

  He found himself hesitating before answering. Of course, he didn’t want to kill forever. But could he? Even without the voice, she was right. The sword returned to him. And he never hesitated to call it.

  “Say no,” she said.

  “No.”

  “Liar.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  “No, because you can’t answer it truthfully. You don’t want to kill, but you’re not going to have a lot of choice. What you are. .” Her voice drifted off, she struggled to find the words, much less speak them. “You’re. . I don’t know. All this and I still don’t know anything about you except one thing.”

  He didn’t ask. Not with his mouth.

  “I. .” The words came slow and painful. “I feel. . things.”

  He blinked.

  “Things.”

  “And they make me scared. And they made me scared in the chasm when I shot Naxiaw to save you. And they made me scared when you touched me. And they make me scared now that I’m talking to you, because I’m not sure what they are and I don’t know what they make me and I don’t know what I’m going to do because I have them.”

  He didn’t have an answer. No answer he could voice, anyway. Because everything he could say would only convince himself of the obvious: that she was a shict, that he was a human, that there were differences that went beyond ears and that he had almost killed her over them.

  Because whatever the voice had told him, he had listened. Whatever the voice had asked him, he had agreed. Whatever part of him that had wanted to hurt her. . was part of him. Not a voice.

  She would be safer without him. She could go back to her tribe, tell them she had made a mistake.

  “You should go,” he said. “Go back.”

  “No.”

  “It’s for the-”

  “Sorry, but are you of the impression I don’t mean what I say when I say it?” She snarled, baring canines. “I’m not going back. And if you bring it up again, I’ll eat your eyes.”

  “Oh. Okay, then.”

  “Sorry, it’s just. . I can’t go back. Because of these things. Not all of them are about you. I. . maybe I am a shict. I’ve got the ears and I’m good with a bow. But there’s some part of me that isn’t. And if I go there, I’ll feel. .”

  She sighed, rubbed her eyes.

  “But if I stay, we’ll never stop killing. Shicts, humans, whatever else. They’re still my family. They’re still people. I can kill them, sure, but after this. . whole thing with the tome.” She looked up at the sky. “There was just so much blood.”

  There was nothing he could say to that. Everything he could say would just be confirmation. Everything he might suggest would end in “you can’t stay.” And every whisper he could make would be desperate and end in “please don’t go.”

  Strong men would say “leave.”

  Good men would say “watch, I’ll throw my sword overboard for you.”

  Wise men would say nothing at all.

  “I. . you. . it’s hard.”

  Lenk said this.

  “Because everything about you is hard. The way you look at me, the way you talk to me, the way I am. .” He rubbed the back of his neck. “It’s all hard. It was hard when I met you. It’s never not going to be hard and even when it’s not, it’s going to be painful.”

  “So why do it?”

  “Because I don’t have anything else. I’m not talking about family or something like that, either. I just don’t. . know what else to do besides fight and kill. Even when I say I’m going to go to a farm, it all sounds fake, like something I’m never going to ever see and I can just keep talking about it like that makes me better for wanting it.”

  She was loo
king at him now. Hard. Her stare was unbearable. But he couldn’t look away from her. Her eyes, even in the darkness, seemed huge. And the more he looked at them, the larger they seemed. They grew to take him in and they became everything, her eyes.

  “But then you look at me. And then I touch you. And then I smell you. And there’s something else there, besides killing and fighting. And I want that more than ever. And I’ll do whatever it takes to hold onto it.”

  He reached out and took her hand. He pulled her to him. She slid onto her belly, against his body, her back curving and her body sliding into the slope of his as though she always belonged there from the very beginning. He could feel the breath in her stomach, the scent on her hair, the fear in her eyes.

  And it hurt.

  “So. . just tell me what that is. I’ll figure out the rest.”

  There was nothing they could have said. Nothing he could say to allay their fears. Nothing she could say to convince him this was a good idea. Nothing that came on words that were too full of things that would make them be afraid.

  And so he drew her closer to him.

  And she leaned into him.

  And he felt her breath fill him and she felt the callouses on his hands against her back and they felt themselves slide into each other as though they had always been supposed to do that.

  And he closed his eyes.

  And she closed hers.

  And she laid her head upon his chest.

  And he held her.

  And they said nothing.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  I MISSED YOU, TOILETS

  “They were not good people. They were not moral people. They were not of particular fiber but for the sinew that fueled their often-misguided deeds.” Knight-Serrant Quillian Guisarne-Garrett Yanates lowered her head, placing a bronze gauntlet to her breastplate. “But they were, indeed, children of the Gods. And at least one of them was definitely a priestess, questionable though her choices might be, so that should at least earn them a little favor. So. . you know. . have fun in hell.”

  She turned and flashed a smile beneath a tattoo under her right eye. The dark-skinned man with the bald head and the well-made clothes seemed less than impressed.

  “It loses something toward the end,” Argaol said.

  “Like what?”

  “Like any semblance of sanity or dignity.”

  “They’re lucky they’re getting this much from me,” Quillian replied with a sneer. “I doubt there are two people in the world that would give an elegy for a group of unsanitary adventurers, let alone practice it.”

  “For there to be a funeral, there need to be bodies.”

  “Several weeks missing? In that tiny boat? No word from Sebast or anyone we’ve sent after them? In the absence of a body, I opt for logic.” She glanced at the shorter man in the even-better-made clothes next to Argaol. “From what I understand, we have little choice.”

  The harbormaster of Port Destiny glared at her. “I’m simply saying, as I was before you went off and did. . that, that you have no bodies so you can have no funerals, so your request to stay in port without extra charge has been denied.”

  “And as I was telling you,” Argaol replied, “it’s out of my hands. The charter doesn’t want to leave yet, so we don’t leave.”

  “And where is the charter? This. .” The harbormaster flipped through a ledge. “Miron Evenhands.”

  “Lord Emissary Miron Evenhands,” Quillian corrected. “You speak of a member of good standing of the Church of Talanas and would do well to remember that.”

  “And said character is somewhere. . out there.”

  Argaol swept a hand out toward the distant city, its spires rising from the blue sands of the island and sprawling well past its boundaries into the ocean, a city standing on rocks and pillars carved by someone that no one cared to remember or honor.

  “He went there a week ago and hasn’t come out of the city since. We checked the temples, the inns. He’s got some kind of sense that lets him know when people he owes money are coming, I don’t know.”

  “The charter you signed made it perfectly clear that you couldn’t keep a vessel like this,” the harbormaster said, gesturing to the great three-masted vessel moored next to them, “without the fees.”

  “Yeah, whatever,” Argaol grunted. “You can take it up with his bodyguard.”

  “It’s been well past the date we agreed to meet up with the adventurers,” Quillian replied with a shrug. “The Lord Emissary insists on waiting longer out of compassion, but he is a reasonable man. Within a few days’ time, he’ll come to terms with the fate of the heathens and we’ll be on our way.”

  “Then you’ll pay for those days and however many more it takes for you to wait,” the harbormaster insisted. “The concerns of Talanas or his emissaries are not mine and-”

  “And?” Quillian punctuated the question with the gentle clink of a bronzed gauntlet resting on the pommel of a longsword.

  The harbormaster eyed her blade carefully for a moment. “I’m a civil servant, Serrant. There is little you can do to me that life already hasn’t.”

  “There will be no need for any of that.”

  Austere and pure as a specter, Miron Evenhands glided across the dock. Tall and stately, he walked through a press of dockhands and sailors toting loads to their ships without so much as brushing against them. His white robes remained bright and untarnished by salt, water, or more unsavory substances around the dock. His smile was soft and benevolent, as though he were meeting his granddaughter instead of interrupting impending violence.

  “Will there be a need for getting answers? Because I might like that,” the harbormaster said as Miron walked between them.

  “All shall be answered in time,” the Lord Emissary replied, his gaze cast out over the harbor waters.

  “And in the time it takes, there’s the matter of the coin-”

  “In much more humble terms, I must concur with the heathen, Lord Emissary,” Quillian interrupted. “The adventurers are long dead and their mission doubtlessly failed. Our time would be better served formulating a secondary strategy for the procurement of the tome.”

  “I didn’t mind them so much, but this is costing me some money, Evenhands,” Argaol chimed in. “And she’s probably right. They’re probably dead. Eaten. Whatever. It’s just not practical to wait any longer.”

  “Faith often contradicts practicality,” Miron replied. “And for this, the faithful are rewarded.”

  “With coin, I hope,” the harbormaster grumbled.

  “Something much better,” Miron replied.

  The smile upon his face grew broader. He took a slow, deliberate step to the side to reveal the shape. A small, black dot on the horizon growing closer until it took shape. A boat, six bodies aboard, rowing tirelessly toward the harbor.

  “The knowledge that the Gods do, occasionally, listen. Even if it takes a few weeks of praying.”

  “That and the opportunity to look as smug as a bloody-” the harbormaster grunted as Quillian delivered a stiff elbow to him.

  The vessel rowed its way forward, a reeking cloud of stench heralding the arrival like several cherubs possessed of indigestion. It was fitting for the rabble that clawed its way off the ship with a few weapons, clothes stained white with salt, hair stiff from dried sweat, bodies in various stages of disrepair and all eyes sunken.

  Lenk was alive in name only. But that was enough for him to stand before Miron as he held up the satchel.

  “Here.”

  His voice came on a very soft breath. “Is that. .”

  “Uh huh. Doom of the world, key to heaven, all that good stuff.”

  Miron accepted it with eyes wide. “I must admit, in some part of me, I doubted you could actually retrieve it.” His whispers were reverent, eerily so. “I prayed, of course. But how could a man pray to Gods to retrieve an item they so loathed? How could a man ask for that which could unmake their creation? How could-”

  “Hey.” Lenk
cleared his throat. “I haven’t bathed in a couple of weeks now.”

  Miron looked at him blankly.

  “Just. . thought you should know,” Lenk said, “before you got going there. So. . we’re going to go remember why outhouses are made with only enough room for one person, if you know what I mean.”

  “I do not.”

  “Well, think about it for a while. I don’t really have the time and you don’t have the stomach for me to paint a picture,” the young man said, pushing past. “Just point us to wherever you’re staying and we’ll catch up real soon. You know, after everyone’s bathed and eaten things that don’t taste like insoles.”

  “Wouldn’t have had that problem if you had just heard me out,” Denaos said, tossing a sack out of the vessel and climbing onto the dock. “It’s not like it was a bad idea.”

  “Cannibalism is not typically noted as a traditional second resort after the meat runs out,” Dreadaeleon replied as a spell carried him up and over the rogue’s head and onto the dock.

  “We could have had a more thorough discussion of it if we hadn’t all argued who’d be eating who.”

  “Who’d be eating whom.”

  “And that’s why everyone decided we’d eat you first,” the rogue muttered. He glanced to Lenk. “Did he tell you where we’re bedding down or what? Some of us need baths.”

  “Some of us desperately so,” Asper replied, glaring over her shoulder as she crawled onto the dock.

  Kataria came bounding up after her, teeth bared in a snarl. “If you were intimidated by a shict’s natural odor, you should have thought of that before you decided to stay in a boat for weeks with one.”

  “I didn’t have a choice or an issue with your aroma. .” Asper cringed at the memory. “Not until you started. . rubbing yourself on things.”

  “Well, how do you let people know what’s yours, if you’re so damn smart?” The shict snorted, sneering at her. “Kept you from touching my share of the food, at least.”

  “And mine,” Asper muttered.

  “Should’ve said something. Or rubbed something.” Kataria snarled. “Can we feed little miss ‘can’t-eat-something-that-someone-else-touched,’ then?”