The Skybound Sea

by Samuel Sykes

  Right behind her.

  She whirled about.

  And Denaos came to a stiff, sudden halt.

  The Long, Slow Kiss hung, its metal lips trembling with his palm, a mere hair’s breadth away from Asper’s face. His breath hung in his throat, afraid to come out lest the blade move just one more hair’s breadth. Likewise, he refused to move back, to relinquish any chance he might have of putting the blade in the netherling’s throat.

  So, he settled on his heels, steadied his hand, and looked to her face for any sign that she might move and give him the opportunity he sought. She merely smiled.

  “That won’t work,” Xhai said, her voice grating.

  “Sure it will,” Denaos replied crisply. “Just move her to the left a little.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Do I?”

  He had heard enough lunatic philosophy from the netherling to know that asking her to continue was something he would regret. And yet, a distraction was a distraction.

  “You know that even if I put her down right now, she’s still going to die.” Xhai’s voice was unnervingly cold; a rare feat for one who could rarely be described as anything particularly warm or fuzzy. “Maybe I’ll stomp her head before I bleed out. Maybe she’ll be swept out to sea and drown. She’ll still be dead.”

  “You do tend to have that effect on people.”

  “It won’t be me that killed her.”

  His face twitched: a momentary spasm at the edge of his mouth, involuntary and lasting only as long as it took to blink. But Xhai didn’t blink. She had seen how her words had struck him.

  “She came to me,” Xhai continued, voice growing blacker with each breath. “She spoke of reason and fate and a lot of other words that mean ‘weak.’ She came to ask me if I was sorry. She said she had done it for you, to keep you from killing.”

  Another twitch; surprise, this time. Surprise that he hadn’t wanted to kill the netherling, surprise that Asper had realized that, surprise that she thought him worth the effort.

  “She wanted to know the reason for all of it,” Xhai said. “The reason why you hadn’t killed me. The reason why you would have to.”

  “For her.” The words came out unexpectedly, crawling out of dry lips on a weak and dying mouth.

  “NOT FOR HER.” Xhai didn’t bother to hide the snarl, she embraced it with broad, sharp teeth. “Never for her. It was for me. For us. You and I, we kill because we kill. There is no reason for it beyond it being what we do, what we know has to happen.”

  Whatever semblance of logic the netherling thought this might possess was blatantly mad. Whatever truth she wanted to force upon him was forever marred by the fact that she was a killer, a depraved minion to a depraved master.

  He could have told her any of this, if only to get her to stop talking.

  “There are scars on our bodies,” she said, “there is blood on our hands. We left a long line of corpses to come here. And here we are, you and me. Two more corpses left. Yours or mine … and hers.”

  His hand began to tremble, heart began to quicken.

  “She lives in a lie,” Xhai said. “Of invisible sky creatures and bedtime stories. She wants to think there’s a way for any of this to end without killing. Stupid, even if she wasn’t talking about you.”

  But he couldn’t stop, couldn’t stop her from talking, couldn’t stop himself from listening.

  “She can’t see the bodies you’ve left behind you.”

  The woman wouldn’t let him. Not the woman before him, not the woman unconscious. The woman at the corner of his eye: white skin, wide eyes and smiling, at him, telling him in words without words through that great red slit in her throat.

  Telling him that the netherling was right.

  Telling him that he was a murderer and Asper would die, because of him; that she already had.

  Telling him to look. To look at her. To look at Imone.

  He did.

  And he felt his jaw explode as Xhai smashed her fist against it. Overkill, he realized as he fell to the earth; it hadn’t taken much to send him there. And once he felt the sand crunch under his body, he didn’t feel much like rising again.

  Not with so many people looking at him with eyes open and eyes closed and eyes glazed over and dead.

  “Uyeh!”

  “Toh!”

  Iron voices were calling out, chanting. He could see the dark shadow that was the ship coming forward, oars being drawn up as it bobbed into the surf and toward the shore.

  Xhai turned, looked over her shoulder. “My Master calls.”

  “Your master is dead,” Denaos replied.

  He wasn’t entirely surprised when she smiled at him like she had a very awful secret.

  “Don’t,” he said, trying to rise to his feet.

  “I do,” she said. “Because he calls. Because that is what I do.”

  “Don’t take her.”

  “He wants her.”

  “You can’t know that.”

  She looked at him intently for a moment before raising her arm: a twisted and mangled mess, it nonetheless bowed to her will. She clenched cracked and bent fingers, forcing it into a fist. The knucklebones and wrist bones and cracked skin and visible veins conformed to the command in a series of sickening pops.

  “I know she did this to me,” Xhai said, voice growing hotter. “With whatever she has inside her. He will want to know.”

  “He doesn’t,” Denaos insisted, forcing himself to his knees. “He doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t care about what she did to you. He doesn’t care about you. He wants her,” he pointed to Asper, “her flesh and her screams. You know what he’ll do to her. You know what he does to all of them. He doesn’t deserve them.”

  “He is the Master,” Xhai snarled. “It is his right to take. He wants her.”

  “And you don’t,” Denaos said, “and it isn’t. You don’t want him to have her or anyone else. You deserve him.”

  He wasn’t sure if she had even bothered to hide the twitch, the snarl that was less than her usual display of anger and so much more than all the fury she had shown him before. He chose to focus on it, regardless, his eyes upon her mouth as he spoke.

  “You kill,” he said, “because of him.”

  Her lips trembled.

  “They die,” he said, “because of you.”

  Her teeth clenched.

  “It’s for you. All for you,” he said. “And he wants her. He doesn’t deserve her. You deserve him.” He opened his arms in submission. “And me.”

  And her lips pursed shut. No snarl, no smile, no frown. Nothing she had in her limited repertoire of expressions could she offer to those words. Her eyes had never needed to show anything in their milky whites before. And so she simply stared, blankly, at him.

  “Take me,” he insisted. “Leave her behind, where he can’t get her. It’s not about her. You don’t want her.”

  The ship pulled up alongside the beach, groaning as a great black behemoth as it drew itself through the waves. Purple faces lined up at the railing, dead-white eyes stared down at him, at her, expressionless but for the contempt that could not be contained by death.

  And when he looked back at Xhai, he saw those same eyes, that same hatred, moments before she turned around.

  “I want her,” she said, “to suffer.”

  And she walked into the waves, striding effortlessly through the surf that tried vainly to push her back. Through it, he could see Asper’s eyes fluttering open, hear her groaning as she rose from her stupor. Still too numb to notice Xhai hoisting her up over the railing, she flopped up into the waiting hands of the netherlings. Maybe that numbness would continue.

  Maybe she wouldn’t even know how he tried to save her, how he had failed so miserably, how he had sat on his knees and watched her simply be taken away. All because he never wanted Asper to look at him like Xhai had.

  Maybe that would provide him a momentary comfort when he thought about what they would do to he
r, he thought, shortly before he turned his blade on himself for his cowardice.

  He heard footsteps scurrying behind him. He heard the shrill cries of a boyish voice too angry to know it was boyish. Dreadaeleon, he thought. Dreadaeleon had seen everything.

  Maybe he would kill him, Denaos thought, spare himself the trouble.

  As it was, Dreadaeleon didn’t even seem to see the rogue. He went running past, eyes locked firmly on the ship as it began to pull away in the surf. No cries for it to stop, no shrieks of impotence, no words at all.

  Only Dreadaeleon, who came skidding to a halt just shy of the lapping surf. Only Dreadaeleon, with the blue electricity cavorting up and down his arms with crackling laughter. Only Dreadaeleon.

  And the sound of thunder.

  He flung his arms forward with difficulty, as though he carried a great weight upon his wrists. He flung that weight out from pointed fingers, the electricity bursting from his fingertips with its shrieking laughter. It did not sail through the air; it was at his fingers at one moment, and at the next, it was raking against the ship’s hull, sending smoldering splinters sizzling into the surf as it split apart the wood.

  Iron voices could express panic, too, Denaos noted. Or at least, they did when the longfaces disappeared from the railing and dove for cover. Xhai remained snarling, defiant, even as she leapt from the surf and seized the ship’s railing to haul herself up and over.

  Scrambling for weapons, maybe. Looking for bows and arrows. Denaos didn’t know. Denaos was having a hard time paying attention to anything past the curtain of steam rising from the sea and the boy in the dirty coat who turned and scowled at him with eyes glowing red.

  “Well?” Dreadaeleon asked. “Why didn’t you do anything?”

  “I …” Denaos replied. “I don’t … I don’t …”

  “And I … don’t …”

  The boy shot out a hand. Vast, invisible fingers seized Denaos about the waist. The boy clenched it into a fist. The fingers wrapped, tugged at Denaos’s body, pulled him across the sand.

  The boy flung his hand in an overhead pitch and shouted.

  “CARE!”

  And Denaos flew.

  He knew this was the right thing, of course, to fly to the aid of a companion and rescue her from the same fate he had failed to rescue her from just nights ago. This was a good, moral thing to do. Reasonable.

  Didn’t stop him from screaming, though.

  He came to a stop amidst a crash of bodies, hurtling into the netherlings as they had plucked up bows to return fire upon his companion. They tumbled to the deck, a tangle of limbs and a mess of metal.

  Denaos liked to think they hadn’t even noticed the blade slipped into their jugulars, at least not until he rose from the heap of purple flesh and walked away on red footprints.

  He caught sight of Asper first, awake and wide-eyed and silent against the jagged knife pressed to a throat laid bare. Xhai second, impassive and dead-eyed as she clenched hair in one hand and a hilt in the second. Both saw him, both spoke to him, one with words and one without.

  “This isn’t going to work,” Xhai said.

  “Sure it will,” Denaos said, advancing slowly. “You hate her too much to kill her like this. You’ve got too good of a reason to cut her throat open.”

  Xhai said nothing. The hard lump that disappeared down Asper’s throat, gently scraping against the blade as it did, as her eyes grew ever wider, suggested his confidence was not entirely shared. And still, Denaos advanced.

  “You’re not going to kill her,” he said. “Not when you can do worse. Not when you need to show me there’s worse.”

  Xhai narrowed her eyes. Asper let out a faint squeak, more than ready to lose a few locks of hair and not quite sure she wouldn’t just find the blade planted in her belly later. And still, Denaos advanced, smiling.

  “And because you’re not going to kill her,” he said, growing closer, “this is where the last corpse falls. This is where you and I die,” he said, rushing forward, “this is where—”

  Whatever he was going to finish that thought with, he was sure, would have sounded better if he wasn’t forced to tell it to the hilt that rose up and smashed against his mouth. Asper’s sudden leap to her feet and snarl of challenge, too, would have likely been more effective if Xhai had not simply jerked down hard and sent her into the deck by her hair.

  And he would have felt worse about all this, of course, had his head not suddenly assumed the properties of a lead weight: dense, senseless, and utterly useless for anything but lying there.

  “Not this way,” Xhai growled as she hoisted him up and over her head. “Not so easily. And not because of her.”

  He was vaguely aware of her carrying him to the railing. He saw, vaguely, the shape of Dreadaeleon throwing his arms backward. He felt, vaguely, the sensation of air ripped apart as the sand erupted behind the boy and an unseen force sent him sailing through the air toward the ship, eyes glowing and coattails whipping.

  “Should have killed me before,” Xhai snarled. “That would have been better.”

  It was then that Denaos was reminded that lead weights had at least one more use.

  Her arms snapped forward and he flew, tumbling senselessly through the air. He didn’t hear Dreadaeleon’s cry of alarm, barely even felt it when he collided with the boy and the two went crashing into the surf.

  He only really rose from his stupor when he was aware that he wasn’t breathing. Everything was forgotten: Dreadaeleon, Asper, Xhai, whichever one of them had sent him into the sea. He could think only of escape, only of air.

  He scrambled, flailing against a shapeless, shiftless tide. It was by pure chance that he found the sky and gulped in a thick, rasping breath. It was by dumb luck and a lot of kicking that he managed to find the shore, crawling out in sopping leathers and hacking up seawater onto the sand.

  After a moment, as he balanced precariously on his hands and knees, it all came back to him: breath, sense, Asper … and how exactly he had managed to fail so many times in one day.

  It seemed as good a time as any for Dreadaeleon to rush up and kick him in the side.

  “You useless moron,” the boy snarled, delivering another sharp kick that sent him rolling onto the ground.

  Denaos winced, clutching his ribs and wondering when, exactly, the boy had found time to develop any kind of muscle.

  “You know,” he settled for saying, “I liked you better when getting angry just made you urinate uncontrollably.”

  “Why didn’t you do something?” the boy demanded, drawing his leg back. “Why didn’t you attack her?”

  “Complications.”

  “You just stood there,” the boy snarled, kicking at him again.

  “Hung there,” Denaos said, arms shooting up to catch him by the foot, “by my throat, in the grip of a woman whose size is only rivaled by her philosophy in terms of lunatic things that should not be.” He twisted the ankle, brought the boy to the ground. “What about that does not sound complicated to you?”

  “Why did I use you?” Dreadaeleon muttered, kicking away and scrambling to his feet. “I could have saved her by myself. I could have stopped her.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I don’t know,” Dreadaeleon said, rubbing his head. “There was an itch … on my brain, or something. Something talking in my head, I don’t know.”

  “Next time, just say ‘complications.’ ” Denaos pulled himself to his feet. “Makes you sound cleverer.”

  Dreadaeleon didn’t seem to be listening. Dreadaeleon didn’t seem to be doing much beyond pacing, watching the ship disappear beyond the horizon, a black dot vanishing. Denaos followed his gaze, wondering, perhaps, if he had been lucky enough to be underwater when Asper had started screaming.

  After a moment, Dreadaeleon seemed to come to a decision.

  “I’m going after them.”

  “Uh huh,” Denaos said, rising to his feet.

  “They can’t get too far on oars alone,�
�� the boy said, turning around sharply. “Bralston has a wraithcoat, he can—”

  Denaos was up, standing before him in the blink of an eye. “No, he can’t.”

  “Yes, he can,” the boy replied sharply, trying to maneuver around the rogue. “Just because you’re too much of a coward to do anything doesn’t mean he won’t.”

  He had just found his way past the man’s bulk when a hand shot out, clamped his shoulders, and spun him about. He stared into Denaos’s stare, something harder and colder than had ever been offered to him.

  “Think,” the rogue said. “And think hard. Bralston is concerned with a netherling that he thinks is dead and with taking you away from here. Which of those sounds like he’s going to be giddy to help you?”

  Dreadaeleon’s eyes narrowed with suspicion. “How did you know he—”

  “You’ve been rehearsing speeches at the lizardmen for a day now,” Denaos snapped. “Some of them do speak our language, you know, and they speak it to anyone who will listen.”

  “He’d want to go after them, regardless,” Dreadaeleon said. “He’d want to track them down, to finish them off. They served a renegade, a violator of the Laws of Venarie.”

  “He would, yes,” Denaos said. “Without you. He’d kill them. He’d rescue her. Do you want her to see his big ugly face when he bursts in to save her? Or do you want her to see—” he stopped shy of saying “us,” “—you?”

  Denaos knew his logic had been accepted, as flimsy as it was, the moment he felt the boy shrug his hands off. He turned and stalked toward the shore, staring at the point where the ship had vanished.

  “Then we need a way to pursue them,” he said.

  “That seemed a nice trick when you flew off the beach,” Denaos replied.

  “That was pushing,” Dreadaeleon said. “A momentary inspiration. We use magic to hurl things around all the time, turning it on an unmovable object would naturally propel us forward. But it’s limited and it’s strenuous.”

  “You didn’t look strained.”

  “That’s good,” Dreadaeleon replied. “You just keep contradicting me and I’ll sit here using my vast intellect to consider how to help Asper before she’s reduced to chunks of sopping meat. This is a great plan.” He rubbed his temples. “And they’re out of sight now, and we don’t even know where—”