God's Last Breath

by Sam Sykes

  And still, she clung to it, that last word. She held it tightly and tried to tell it all the things she desperately wanted to, until the pain was so sharp and so intense that she almost collapsed on the deck.

  Her ears fell. Wet eyes opened. Her mouth fell, but no word came out.

  And she let Kwar go.

  Silence. Nothing but the night breeze and the sound of water lapping against the ship’s hull. Neither of them was loud enough to drown out the great, empty sound in Kataria’s mind. And their plain ugliness felt like a knife in her skull in the wake of that singular sound.

  Stupid, she thought, cursing herself. It’s better this way. How was it ever going to work? It wasn’t. You hurt Lenk for her. You owe it to him to … to …

  She drew in a breath. It hurt.

  And she betrayed you, didn’t she? She helped Shekune. She betrayed you … to save your life, she betrayed you. She saved you and …

  Something lurched into her throat. She snapped her teeth down, as though she could decapitate it and send it back down.

  There’s a war. Shekune started a war. You’ve got bigger shit to worry about. You’ve got tribes to save. You’ve got to help them.

  Wetness stung at the corners of her eyes. That sick feeling in her belly spread to her body. The blood rushed from her head. She clung to the railing to keep from falling over, bit her lower lip.

  Don’t you cry, stupid. Don’t you fucking cry. Not now. Not here. There’ll be time for tears later … there will … there …

  Maybe that was true.

  Maybe there would be time for tears later. Maybe there would come a time when she could bury these feelings, this pain in her chest. And maybe, one day, it wouldn’t hurt quite as bad.

  But now, in the night, as fires faded and stars were mercilessly quiet, they came anyway. And here, on the deck of a ship taking her far away, it hurt.

  And she couldn’t help it, no matter how many times she cursed herself for doing it.

  Kataria leaned over the railing, buried her face in her hands, and cried.

  He could hear her.

  Above the coughing and the restless moaning on the ship’s deck, Lenk could hear the sounds of her tears.

  It was an odd feeling, really. She was always the one to hear him approaching. She was always the one to hear his breathing. Sometimes, he swore she could hear his thoughts. He had never really heard her, as he did now, the sound so sharp it felt like it could cut right through him.

  Was this, he wondered, what she felt like when she heard him?

  A great shape shifted next to him. He turned and saw a pair of great avian eyes glittering in the dark, an almost accusatory glare locked on him.

  “Don’t give me that look,” he muttered. “Don’t you think I want to go to her?” He shook his head. “She’d hate that. Trust me.” He looked long to the railing where she leaned. “This”—it hurt to say it—“this is something she wants to do alone.”

  Colonel MacSwain’s horned head swiveled toward Kataria. After a moment, he lowered his head sullenly onto his forelegs, content only to watch. Lenk sighed and leaned against the scraw’s great bulk.

  They had been given a wide berth by the ship’s crew and her refugee passengers. The Djaalics had chosen to sleep in even more cramped conditions rather than risk getting near the great beast. Just as well; he had been injured in his fall. He would need time to recover.

  “It’s funny,” Lenk said. “I’m sure there have been some problems I’ve solved without the sword.” He looked at his empty hands before him. “But honestly, I can’t think of any. And right now, I feel like … if there were a way I could stab it and make it all better …”

  He stared at his hands for a long time, his callused fingers and scarred palms. Hundreds of battles, dozens of bodies, and they couldn’t do a damn thing but sit here on his lap and wait. And even if violence could have solved this …

  His sword was gone.

  Along with everything else.

  Shuro had disappeared, of course, and if he ever saw her again, she would kill him. His companions had been scattered—to conquest, to war, to hungers and curses he couldn’t understand. And Cier’Djaal, his new life, any life, was gone.

  He hadn’t even been able to call the city his before he had lost it forever.

  Really, the loss of a sword—a piece of metal he had been trying to drop ever since he picked it up—shouldn’t have made him feel as he did right then. He shouldn’t have felt so weak, his empty hands shouldn’t have felt so heavy, he shouldn’t have felt like he couldn’t help her.

  But he did.

  Because it had been his sword. And through everything, it had been the one thing he had been able to hold on to. Until now.

  A long moment of silence passed. Lenk looked around him. Nothing but the still night air and a sky full of stars greeted him. And yet, even though he had struck the fiend down himself, he somehow expected Mocca to show up any moment with that enigmatic smile of his and tell him exactly what to do.

  Find another sword, he would say. The steel is not the weapon. You are. Take it up and be strong once more.

  And maybe he could do that.

  Maybe.

  His ears pricked up. Footsteps on wood. Soft breath. A pair of eyes locked on him.

  He looked up.

  And there she was. Dirty with dried sweat and grime. Her clothes torn and tattered. Her eyes were dark and exhausted and still wet.

  But she was here. And so was he.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey,” he replied.

  Colonel MacSwain looked up as she approached. He raised one of his wings, making a space for her. She settled against his side next to Lenk, leaned against the beast, and patted his flank. The scraw let out a contented purring sound.

  Lenk felt the rise and fall of the beast’s side as it breathed quietly, settling back down to sleep.

  “The Sainites came by,” he said. “They’ll want him back, eventually.”

  She sniffed. “He likes me better.”

  “Still …”

  “He’ll be ready to fly in a day or two,” she said. “We’ll be gone. If they still want him, they can come fight me for him.”

  He smiled at that. The very mention of the word fight made him weary, as he could tell it did her. Yet he knew she’d beat every last one of them into the earth. Hopefully, it wouldn’t come to that. Hopefully, they would be gone before long.

  Asper wouldn’t need them. In fact, it would be easier if they were gone. She would have a hard enough time dealing with Muraska without them wanting to know about demons.

  They couldn’t go to Gariath. He was still a bloodthirsty brute. But he was no longer their bloodthirsty brute. And whoever he was—and whoever called him their leader—they wouldn’t be safe around any of them.

  Dreadaeleon had vanished after the evacuation. Perhaps he had turned invisible. Or maybe disappeared into another world entirely. Nothing seemed impossible for him anymore. Lenk didn’t know who or what he was anymore.

  And Denaos …

  Well, maybe he just couldn’t bear to see Denaos again.

  “We could go back.” He almost didn’t realize he was speaking until he had said the words. “We could fly back to Cier’Djaal and find her.”

  Kataria shook her head.

  “We can’t,” she said. “The city will be crawling with tulwar by then. The desert will be full of shicts. She’ll be silent. Even if she wasn’t … she …” She closed her eyes. “We can’t.”

  Lenk turned back to his hands. His empty hands that couldn’t fix this. He stared at them.

  “I just thought …”

  Her hand appeared in his. Her fingers wrapped around his. She squeezed them tightly. And when he looked up, her smile was soft and warm.

  “I know you did.” She slumped over onto him. She laid her head on his chest. Her ears twitched against his chin and she pulled his arm around her. “And I knew you would.”

  He felt
her breath on his chest, he felt his heartbeat in her ears. She was warm and tired and filthy and beautiful in his arms. And with everything else gone and all the battles behind him, he found nothing hurt quite so much anymore.

  He looked to the sky, held her closer. “Where do we go, then?”

  “I want to go someplace warm. With less people.” She looked up at him. “Where do you want to go?”

  He looked down at her. “I want to go home.”

  “Where is that?”

  A fair question. His childhood home was gone. Shuro was gone. Cier’Djaal was gone. She could never return to her home, either, after what Shekune had done. They had no money. They had no weapons. They had no food.

  But they had a scraw.

  And they had the night sky.

  And they had the sound of his heartbeat in her ears and the feel of her warm hands on his scars and the way she looked right into him sometimes.

  “I guess,” he said, “home could be anywhere.”

  “Anywhere.” She yawned, exposing her canines. “That sounds good. Let’s start there.”

  She fell against his chest. Her breath was hot on his skin as she fell asleep. He leaned back against the scraw and closed his eyes. His body, with all its scars and its aches, settled into a weary groan. But it was a comfortable pain, a familiar pain.

  And it did not hurt quite so bad anymore.

  extras

  meet the author

  Photo Credit: Libbi Rich

  SAM SYKES is the author of the acclaimed Tome of the Undergates, a vast and sprawling story of adventure, demons, madness, and carnage. He lives in Arizona. He once punched an ostrich. What a great guy.

  if you enjoyed

  GOD’S LAST BREATH

  look out for

  THE FIFTH WARD: FIRST WATCH

  by

  Dale Lucas

  A watchman of the Yenara City guard has gone missing. The culprit could be any of the usual suspects: drug-dealing orcs, mind-controlling elves, uncooperative mages, or humans being typical humans.

  It’s up to two reluctant partners—Rem, a hungover miscreant who joins the Watch to pay off his bail, and Torval, a maul-wielding dwarf who’s highly unimpressed with the untrained and weaponless Rem—to uncover the truth and catch the murderer loose in their fair city.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Rem awoke in a dungeon with a thunderous headache. He knew it was a dungeon because he lay on a thin bed of straw, and because there were iron bars between where he lay and a larger chamber outside. The light was spotty, some of it from torches in sconces outside his cell, some from a few tiny windows high on the stone walls admitting small streams of wan sunlight. Moving nearer the bars, he noted that his cell was one of several, each roomy enough to hold multiple prisoners.

  A large pile of straw on the far side of his cell coughed, shifted, then started to snore. Clearly, Rem was not alone.

  And just how did I end up here? he wondered. I seem to recall a winning streak at Roll-the-Bones.

  He could not remember clearly. But if the lumpy soreness of his face and body were any indication, his dice game had gone awry. If only he could clear his pounding head, or slake his thirst. His tongue and throat felt like sharkskin.

  Desperate for a drink, Rem crawled to a nearby bucket, hoping for a little brackish water. To his dismay, he found that it was the piss jar, not a water bucket, and not well rinsed at that. The sight and smell made Rem recoil with a gag. He went sprawling back onto the hay. A few feet away, his cellmate muttered something in the tongue of the Kosterfolk, then resumed snoring.

  Somewhere across the chamber, a multitumbler lock clanked and clacked. Rusty hinges squealed as a great door lumbered open. From the other cells Rem heard prisoners roused from their sleep, shuffling forward hurriedly to thrust their arms out through the cage bars. If Rem didn’t misjudge, there were only about four or five other prisoners in all the dungeon cells. A select company, to be sure. Perhaps it was a slow day for the Yenaran city watch?

  Four men marched into the dungeon. Well, three marched; the fourth seemed a little more reticent, being dragged by two others behind their leader, a thickset man with black hair, sullen eyes, and a drooping mustache.

  “Prefect, sir,” Rem heard from an adjacent cell, “there’s been a terrible mistake …”

  From across the chamber: “Prefect, sir, someone must have spiked my ale, because the last thing I remember, I was enjoying an evening out with some mates …”

  From off to his left: “Prefect, sir, I’ve a chest of treasure waiting back at my rooms at the Sauntering Mink. A golden cup full of rubies and emeralds is yours, if you’ll just let me out of here …”

  Prefect, sir … Prefect, sir … over and over again.

  Rem decided that thrusting his own arms out and begging for the prefect’s attention was useless. What would he do? Claim his innocence? Promise riches if they’d let him out? That was quite a tall order when Rem himself couldn’t remember what he’d done to get in here. If he could just clear his thunder-addled, achingly thirsty brain …

  The sullen-eyed prefect led the two who dragged the prisoner down a short flight of steps into a shallow sort of operating theater in the center of the dungeon: the interrogation pit, like some shallow bath that someone had let all the water out of. On one side of the pit was a brick oven in which fire and coals glowed. Opposite the oven was a burbling fountain. Rem thought these additions rather ingenious. Whatever elemental need one had—fire to burn with, water to drown with—both were readily provided. The floor of the pit, Rem guessed, probably sported a couple of grates that led right down into the sewers, as well as the tools of the trade: a table full of torturer’s implements, a couple of hot braziers, some chairs and manacles. Rem hadn’t seen the inside of any city dungeons, but he’d seen their private equivalents. Had it been the dungeon of some march lord up north—from his own country—that’s what would have been waiting in the little amphitheater.

  “Come on, Ondego, you know me,” the prisoner pleaded. “This isn’t necessary.”

  “’Fraid so,” sullen-eyed Ondego said, his low voice easy and without malice. “The chair, lads.”

  The two guardsmen flanking the prisoner were a study in contrasts—one a tall, rugged sort, face stony and flecked with stubble, shoulders broad, while the other was lithe and graceful, sporting braided black locks, skin the color of dark-stained wood, and a telltale pair of tapered, pointing ears. Staring, Rem realized that second guardsman was no man at all, but an elf, and female, at that. Here was a puzzle, indeed. Rem had seen elves at a distance before, usually in or around frontier settlements farther north, or simply haunting the bleak crossroads of a woodland highway like pikers who never demanded a toll. But he had never seen one of them up close like this—and certainly not in the middle of one of the largest cities in the Western world, deep underground, in a dingy, shit- and blood-stained dungeon. Nonetheless, the dark-skinned elfmaid seemed quite at home in her surroundings, and perfectly comfortable beside the bigger man on the other side of the prisoner.

  Together, those two guards thrust the third man’s squirming, wobbly body down into a chair. Heavy manacles were produced and the protester was chained to his seat. He struggled a little, to test his bonds, but seemed to know instinctively that it was no use. Ondego stood at a brazier nearby, stoking its coals, the pile of dark cinders glowing ominously in the oily darkness.

  “Oi, that’s right!” one of the other prisoners shouted. “Give that bastard what for, Prefect!”

  “You shut your filthy mouth, Foss!” the chained man spat back.

  “Eat me, Kevel!” the prisoner countered. “How do you like the chair, eh?”

  Huh. Rem moved closer to his cell bars, trying to get a better look. So, this prisoner, Kevel, knew that fellow in the cell, Foss, and vice versa. Part of a conspiracy? Brother marauders, questioned one by one—and in sight of one another—for some vital information?

  Then Rem saw it: Kevel, the pris
oner in the hot seat, wore a signet pendant around his throat identical to those worn by the prefect and the two guards. It was unmistakable, even in the shoddy light.

  “Well, I’ll be,” Rem muttered aloud.

  The prisoner was one of the prefect’s own watchmen.

  Ex-watchman now, he supposed.

  All of a sudden, Rem felt a little sorry for him … but not much. No doubt, Kevel himself had performed the prefect’s present actions a number of times: chaining some poor sap into the hot seat, stoking the brazier, using fire and water and physical distress to intimidate the prisoner into revealing vital information.

  The prefect, Ondego, stepped away from the brazier and moved to a table nearby. He studied a number of implements—it was too dark and the angle too awkward for Rem to tell what, exactly—then picked something up. He hefted the object in his hands, testing its weight.

  It looked like a book—thick, with a hundred leaves or more bound between soft leather covers.

  “Do you know what this is?” Ondego asked Kevel.

  “Haven’t the foggiest,” Kevel said. Rem could tell that he was bracing himself, mentally and physically.

  “It’s a genealogy of Yenara’s richest families. Out-of-date, though. At least a generation old.”

  “Do tell,” Kevel said, his throat sounding like it had contracted to the size of a reed.

  “Look at this,” Ondego said, hefting the book in his hands, studying it. “That is one enormous pile of useless information. Thick as a bloody brick—”

  And that’s when Ondego drew back the book and brought it smashing into Kevel’s face in a broad, flat arc. The sound of the strike—leather and parchment pages connecting at high speed with Kevel’s jawbone—echoed in the dungeon like the crack of a calving iceberg. A few of the other prisoners even wailed as though they were the ones struck.