by Ben Galley
Her whistle was piercing. ‘Come, Anoish!’
The horse grumbled, looking around at the fresh tubers and muddy water with bright eyes.
Nilith was already halfway out of the oasis. ‘Now, damn it!’
Hearing the tension in her voice, Anoish obeyed and trotted after her. She placed a hand on his mane and swung her leg up and over his bowed spine. He burst into a limping canter, grunting whenever that fourth hoof touched the ground. Nilith made herself small against his back, as if it would help.
They made the hut in time to hear the distant rumble of hooves bearing down on them. Harsh shouts echoed across the shrinking stretch of desert. Nilith only heard voices, not words, but they were familiar enough to make her skin prickle.
‘Down the ramp, Anoish, carefully,’ she hissed, praying he wouldn’t follow in the poorly chosen footsteps of her previous steed.
The horse had heard the shouts, felt the vibrations in the sand, and was having no qualms at all about hurrying. He clip-clopped down the uneven slope, skidding here and there but staying steady. Nilith was preoccupied watching his hooves, but when she heard the yell, she looked up so fast her neck crunched.
‘Agaaah!’
Nilith saw Ghyrab falling, like an old tree submitting to a storm. His face was scrunched up, hand clasped to the back of his head. Farazar stood behind him, holding a rock in his shaking hand. His blue hair wavered in the breeze. He hit the bargeman once more before reaching to loose the rope from about its wooden bollard.
‘No!’ Nilith cried, sending Anoish galloping down what was left of the slope. She pushed and she pushed him, but it was all in vain. The horse skidded to a halt on the lopsided boards, a dozen feet short of the barge’s sides. Farazar stood holding the tail of the rope, wearing that infuriating smile of his.
‘You bastard, Farazar!’ Nilith screeched. ‘You come back here!’
He blew her a kiss. ‘I am the emperor, aren’t I, wife? I’ll do as I please!’
Leaping from Anoish’s back, Nilith threw herself into the water, trident still slung across her shoulders. The cold of the river stole her breath away, but she thrashed for all her worth, making great strokes through the water. She could feel the blacktooths sliding past her kicking feet, and it spurred her to grab the back of the barge.
Farazar came running, bloody rock held high.
‘Time to part ways, dear!’ The rock crashed down on the wood, brushing her hand as she switched grips. She grappled for the trident at her back, but the infernal thing refused to swing around. Nilith tried to catch the ghost’s next blow, but the sharp sandstone cut a ribbon of skin from her palm. Blood dripped in her face as she lashed at him with her nails. It was useless. Farazar had the height, and on the next swing she was forced to let go. The current took hold of the barge and pulled it out of reach.
‘See you in Araxes!’ Farazar cackled.
Panting hard, every other breath one of water instead of air, Nilith had no answer. Not even a threat or an insult. Instead, she paddled to the canyon wall, finding boulders and crannies to cling to while she gained her breath. A sharp whinny reminded her where she was.
The Ghouls!
On the jetty, now a stone’s throw upriver, the horse had been nuzzling at Ghyrab. Anoish had got the old man onto his knees, but no further. Nilith was elated he wasn’t dead.
‘Ghouls, Ghyrab! They’re coming!’ Nilith hollered, cupping a bloody hand to her lips. She stumbled back into the water, making slimy fish scatter. Something sharp grazed her ankle, and she hauled herself as far out of the water as her shaking hands could manage.
‘Hide!’ he roared in reply, as hoarse as steel dragged over stone.
Nilith did her best, wedging her forearm into a small nook in the cliff face and standing tiptoe on a boulder that had evaded being eroded. If she pressed herself close enough to the warm sandstone, the jetty disappeared out of sight. All Nilith had to do was stay in that position, and already she was shaking with the effort.
A crimson rivulet coursed from her clenched fist and down the rock face, making the water squirm with the thrashing of skinny charcoal fish. A few snapped at the air with their tiny barbed teeth. They were no longer than her forearm, but there were enough of them to make her curse.
Nilith gasped as her toe slipped. ‘Well, fuck today already.’
She poked her head out to see Ghyrab trying to shove Anoish into the water. The horse could see the blacktooths, and wasn’t budging an inch. Nilith whistled sharply, and the horse relented, splashing heavily into the river. The fish around her were briefly distracted, swimming off to investigate a bigger meal, and she allowed herself to relax slightly.
Ghyrab, blood streaming down his ear and neck, lowered himself into the water with a gasp, and then pushed the horse under the jetty’s planks. Nilith lost sight of them in its shadow.
She waited there, legs trembling with the effort of hugging the cliff, listening to the vibrations in the rock as the pounding hooves grew closer. Shouts now filled the air: orders of, ‘Over there!’ and ‘Down to the river!’
Figures wrapped in ashen mail and black leather emerged from the rift in the rock and strode for the jetty. Half wore faces painted like skulls, the rest white masks with dark slits for eyes. They were unmistakably Ghouls. Nilith sucked in her stomach as she forced herself closer to the stone. The fish were trying to wriggle out of the water, blood-crazed now she’d painted the river red. She tried to shift her foot higher.
‘Nobody here, Boss!’ yelled one of the figures.
There came a hawking sound above her, beyond an overhang. A glob of phlegm came sailing down to splash in the river. Nilith held her breath.
‘Bah! We’ll follow the river! They can’t be far along now, eh!’ called a voice Nilith was very familiar with. One that made her skin prickle. There was a difference to it, however, as if somebody had burned away half her lips.
Krona’s orders were taken up and passed on by her captains. ‘Back on your horses, you bastards!’ came the shouts.
Nilith’s foot chose that moment to slip from the cliff face, unceremoniously dumping her in the water between the boulders. She splashed and flailed, trident clanging against the sandstone. It took all her nerve to stay still, fighting off the eager fish with weak punches.
One of the Ghouls on the jetty hung back, curious at the noise. He stood at its end, peering down the canyon through his mask of charcoal face-paint. Nilith submerged herself up to her eyes, pretending to be just another boulder at the edge of the river, her black hair just a mass of weeds. Beneath the rippling waterline, she was a fighter full of rage. Every moment the Ghoul lingered, the more the little teeth snagged at Nilith’s clothing, pulled at her hair, and nibbled at her limbs. She thrashed and she kicked, and though she longed to roar, only bubbles escaped her mouth.
Finally, the man grew bored and lumbered back to the rift, no doubt disappointed not to have bloodied the sword hanging limply in his hand.
Nilith dragged herself from the water, streaming red from a score of cuts on her thighs and shoulders. Still the fish writhed beneath her shaking heels. Insatiable fuckers.
It felt an age before the rumble of hooves moved far enough downriver. Finally, Anoish scrambled his way back to shore, letting all his enraged neighs out at once. He too was speckled with bites, adding a crimson tinge to his brown and cream.
Ghyrab was also painted red. The fish had feasted on him like beggars attacking a buffet. Too weak to hoist himself onto the jetty, he followed the horse’s path out of the shallows. He crumpled to a heap in the sand, and lay there for some time.
Nilith spent some of her own deciding whether to swim or wait for rescue. Given her ‘rescue’ was in the form of a half-conscious man and a beast with no hands to speak of, she resigned herself to a frenzied and draining swim.
She made it onto the jetty with twice as many cuts as before, and with lungs that burned as if she’d swallowed a coal. She lay in the sunlight, letting the day’s fire
dry the mud and cake her wounds, and turn some of her panic to relief. Only then could she drag herself up to check on the others.
Anoish was fine. Curled up and in a foul mood, but fine. The bargeman was gasping for water with lips that looked like the edge of a barren well. It took her several trips, but with cupped hands Nilith managed to bring him enough water to rouse him to a state in which he could speak. Or better yet, rant.
‘Fuckin’ shade. Stealing my fuckin’ barge! I’ll beat him bloody sense—’
‘You can do whatever you want to him, but first we need to get him back.’
‘And my fuckin’ barge!’
Nilith cringed at the sight of Ghyrab’s head wound; deep and ugly, and showing a sliver of skull. No brain, though, which was always a good sign. Fortunately, Farazar’s ghostly arms were still weaker than flesh. ‘And your fucking barge.’
She ripped up parts of their tunics to make a bandage for his head wound, then for a few of the deeper fish bites.
‘Fuckin’ blacktooths. Can’t even eat them to teach ’em a lesson.’
Nilith patted her trident. ‘Then we’ll just kill them for sport, when we have the time.’
Ghyrab nodded, eyes half-closed, though for once not in laziness. The sand was red around him. ‘Triple.’
‘What?’
‘I want triple for my barge. Even if we get it back, I want triple whatever you were going to pay me. That’s twice you’ve almost killed me now.’
Nilith smiled as she got him to his feet. Anoish stayed where he was.
‘Come. Let’s get you in the shade, you old thief. You’re worth your three silvers.’
The man flinched in her grasp as if he’d been struck by another rock. ‘Three silvers?!’
‘Well, you did say triple what I was going to pay you.’ She chuckled, trying to lighten the mood. It sounded hollow. There was nothing to laugh at. The Ghouls were back and Farazar was gone. All she could think of was her accursed husband, probably laughing his blue head off somewhere downriver. Whether she caught him or Krona did, he would not be laughing for long. Nilith prayed it would be the former.
‘Come on. We need to move.’
It took a great deal of stumbling and precious moments wasted to get Ghyrab up the ramp, and many more to the tiny oasis. Nilith crouched low, wary of the dust still clogging the air, and stared about like a chick left alone in a nest.
The cool of the palms was welcome, and Ghyrab sank into the long emerald grass with a sigh. Nilith almost did the same as exhaustion pounced on her. She shrugged it off, seeking a palm to lean against instead. Before she found one, she remembered the tubers in the shallow puddle, and she tottered in its direction.
‘Bloody ghost,’ Nilith muttered to herself as she waded through the foliage, cold against her sweaty fingers.
The flasks were gone. They had not floated off, and there was barely any depth for them to sink. Nilith crouched to check anyway, and heard the whoosh of a blade sail over her head.
She rolled through the puddle, spraying water as she jumped upright. The skull-faced Ghoul came at her, a scimitar clasped in both hands swinging madly back and forth. Nilith dragged her trident from her shoulders and held it level and spinning.
The scimitar met the trident’s points, shearing one away completely before Nilith could lock his blade and drag him closer: close enough to punch him in his painted face, right in the jagged grin. Fierce, red and sleepless eyes stared at her from between the smears of paint and charcoal.
The Ghoul came at her again, and this time she blocked the blade with the trident’s shaft. It was a mistake. The heavy scimitar cleaved it in two and cut a scarlet line in her tunic. Nilith staggered away, throwing the splintered lower half at the Ghoul. He batted it away and kept coming.
Nilith floundered. She waved the trident’s head in wild arcs to keep the man at bay. A few he fended. The others he dodged. She kept pressing until they were standing in the puddle again. Dark mud sprayed as they danced.
The scimitar’s point caught her in the shoulder blade, and as she hesitated, a fist connected with her temple. Orbs of light filled her vision. Nilith tottered away from him, trident falling out of her grasp.
When anybody without a sword faced somebody with a sword, the usual answer was to run with great intensity in the opposite direction. In that panting, dripping pause, the thought crossed her mind, but the runner in Nilith had been beaten out of her long ago by a wizened old fight-meister named Hock. It was he who’d taught her other answers to such one-sided situations.
Nilith grabbed a thick handful of reeds and ripped them from their shallow roots. She held them out like a length of rope. The Ghoul laughed through his mask of paint, thrusting at her. Dodging aside, Nilith wrapped the reeds around the scimitar’s blade until she had a handle. With a twist, she wrenched the weapon out of his grasp, but a fist found her ribs before she could wield it. Nilith fell with the sword still wrapped in her hand. With a splash and a foul-breathed roar, the Ghoul landed atop her. His forearms pressed into the blade’s blunt side. Nilith turned her cheek as the sword crept downwards. She could feel her opponent shaking with the strain; the buckling of the reeds before the razor-edge; the heat of the blood starting to pool in her palms.
‘She’ll want me alive!’ Nilith croaked through the effort. The Ghoul didn’t seem to care. He only pressed harder, driving his head against his forearms. They traded spit in their ragged grunts, eyes duelling.
With a last reserve of strength, Nilith screeched as she pushed upwards, switching her grip to free her fingers. The Ghoul responded with a cry of his own. The blade sliced into Nilith’s cheek, but she had already grasped its wielder’s cloth-wrapped ears. Her sharp nails dug into them, drawing his head in as her thumbs plunged into his dark eyes. She felt his eyeballs split as she drove past the bone and deep into his face. The scream that ripped from his throat was blood-curdling. All thoughts of murder crumbled in the face of pain. The sword was forgotten as he began to flail blindly.
The beating was ferocious. Nilith’s head swung back and forth between punches, unable to fight back with her thumbs still locked in his eye sockets. Charcoal-stained fingers groped her face, eager to repay the favour. Instead they found her throat, and began to squeeze. Nilith gasped for breath. It was only when shadows started to cloud her vision that the Ghoul stopped dead.
Very dead, it appeared. A barbed trident point was poking from the side of his head. With a wheeze, he toppled to the mud beside her. Behind him knelt Ghyrab, ashen-faced and half alive. He nodded to her.
‘That’s three times now…’ he whispered before crumpling back to the green earth alongside the Ghoul.
Nilith staggered upright, and her legs bowed like sickle moons. Her entire body shook violently. All she tasted in her mouth was blood, and not all of it was hers. Bile threatened to wash it away.
‘Farazar…’ she gasped, groping eastwards. ‘Got to—’
Down she went, demolishing a clump of flowering plants before striking the ground. The blow knocked out what little sense she had left in her, and she fell into darkness. Nilith struggled with it, fought it, but in the end it won. At least it was a sweeter darkness than death.
The ugliness of nightmares woke her: visions of trickling water over black stone, of slipping in it over and over as she climbed and endless slope, dragged against her will by some force. She had looked behind her to see five burning points in a coal-black sky, settled around a sixth, and a glowing blue figure with a crown being lowered onto his head. Before it touched his brow, the rock beneath her fell away, and she plummeted into wakefulness.
Nilith placed a hand to her heart to steady it, but her unfamiliar surroundings weren’t helpful. No barge and strip of blue between red rocks, just shade and reaching palms. Grass and dirt filled her mouth, crunching against her teeth.
She pushed herself up before remembering the wounds on her hands and forearms. They stung, and she vowed to wash them before they festered. Other wound
s spoke up as she got to sitting, then a low crouch. Standing could come later.
Farazar.
Nilith looked up through the palm fronds to eye the position of the sun. It was in the west, and at such an angle that it made her stomach clench. Though that may have been the early stink of the Ghoul.
Her eyes found the corpse, bloody and blind. The trident’s forks were still lodged in his brain. She trembled to look at him. He was not a victory; he was a sore reminder of how close she’d come to failure. One man hiding in some grass had almost ended her great toil. In truth, the narrow miss choked her, but on hearing a snore, she swallowed it and scowled liberally about the oasis. There were more pressing matters.
Anoish was grazing greedily on the grass, attempting to demolish the oasis before they departed. Nilith left him to it, glad he could finally recover his strength. She scooped up some of the smashed tubers and a coconut and went to find Ghyrab. The bargeman was curled up and snuffling. Makeshift bandages had stopped the bleeding, but his head wound needed stitching if it wasn’t to rot. In the desert, festering wounds claimed more souls than the heat.
‘Farazar,’ she said, shaking the bargeman. ‘We need to find him before Krona does. With his body, they can claim him, or worse.’
‘Mmmf.’
She hooked an arm under his and lifted Ghyrab’s dead weight. ‘Move yourself, you old bastard! I can’t leave you here.’
‘River spreads. Fucker’ll slow.’
‘I don’t know what that means.’
‘Marshes… before the turn.’
The bargeman’s head lolled onto his chest, baring his ghastly wound to her between the bandages. For a moment Nilith thought he had passed, but the beat her fingers felt in his throat told her otherwise. She tied his dressings tighter, then stole some more strips from the Ghoul’s shirt to bind her own arms.
It took plenty of attempts and some water from the puddle to be able to whistle. The horse hadn’t heard the clang of blades, but he heard that. Moments later he came trotting, looking grumpy, as though he had been disturbed from a nap. His sides had scabbed in the sun.
