by Sam Sykes
The woman looked up at him and he saw the tears. In other circumstances, he might have offered a smile, an embrace for her. For now, he returned her resolute nod with one of his own.
‘When the other woman wouldn’t scream anymore,’ the female continued, ‘when she wouldn’t cry, the man burned her.’ She winced. ‘Alive.’ She paused to wipe away tears. ‘I’d seen magic before, seen wizards use it. But they always were weak afterward, drained. This man …’
‘Was not,’ the Lector finished for her. ‘She witnessed several similar instances from this man and three others on the island. None of them so much as broke into a sweat when they used the gift.’
And this couldn’t have been sent in a letter? Discussed in private? Bralston felt his ire boil in his throat. We had to drag this poor thing here to relive this? He rose and opened his mouth to voice such concerns, but quickly clamped his mouth shut as the Lector turned a sharp, knowing glare upon him.
‘Your thoughts, Librarian.’
‘I’ve never heard of anything purple with two legs,’ Bralston contented himself with saying. ‘If it is a violation of the laws of magic, however, our duty is clear.’
‘Agreed,’ Annis replied, nodding stiffly. ‘Negating the physical cost of magic is a negation of the law, tantamount of the greatest heresy. You are to make your arrangements swiftly and report to our sister school in Port Destiny. You can find there—’
A ragged cough broke the silence. Lector and Librarian craned their gazes toward the grinning Cragsman, their ire etched into their frowns.
‘Pardon us for not living up to your expectations of noble and self-sacrificing men of honour, kind sirs,’ Shunnuk said, making a hasty attempt at a bow. ‘But a man must live by the laws his fellows put down, and we were told that gents of your particular calling offered no inconsequential sum for reports of all deeds blaspheming to your peculiar faith and—’
‘You want money,’ Bralston interrupted. ‘A bounty.’
‘I would not take money from faithless hands,’ the Djaalman said sternly. ‘But I will take it from his.’ He gestured to Shunnuk.
Bralston arched a brow, certain there was a deeper insult there. ‘A report of this nature carries the weight of ten gold coins, typical for information regarding illegal use of magic.’
‘A most generous sum,’ the Cragsman said, barely able to keep from hitting the floor with the eager fury of his bow. ‘Assuredly, we will spend it well with your honour in mind, the knowledge of our good deed only serving to enhance the lustre of the moment.’
‘Very well, then.’ The Lector hastily scribbled something out on a piece of parchment and handed it into a pair of twitching hands. ‘Present this to the clerk at the front.’
‘Most assuredly,’ Shunnuk replied as he spun on his heel to follow his companion to the door. ‘A pleasure, as always, to deal with the most generous caste of wizards.’
Bralston smiled twice: once for the removal of the stench and twice for the relief he expected to see upon the woman’s face when she learned of the justice waiting to be dealt. The fact that she trembled again caused him to frown until he noticed the clenched fists and murderous glare on her face. It was then that he noticed the particular hue of the purple discoloration on her face.
‘These bruises,’ he said loudly, ‘are fresh.’
‘Yes, well …’ The Cragsman’s voice became much softer suddenly. ‘The laws that man has set upon us and such.’ Seeing Bralston’s unconvinced glare, he simply sighed and opened the door. ‘Well, it’s not as though we could just give her a free ride, could we? After what she’d been through, our company must have been a mercy.’
‘Not that such a thing means anything to heathens,’ the Djaalman muttered.
Bralston didn’t have time to narrow his eyes before the woman cleared her throat loudly.
‘Do I get a request, as well?’ she asked.
The two sailors’ eyes went wide, mouths dropping open.
‘You did give us the actual report,’ the Librarian confirmed.
‘You …’ Shunnuk gasped as he took a step backward. ‘You can’t be serious.’
‘What is it you desire?’ the Lector requested.
The woman narrowed her eyes, launched her scowl down an accusing finger.
‘Kill them.’
‘No! It’s not like that!’ The Cragsmen held up the parchment as though it were a shield. ‘Wait! Wait!’
‘Librarian Bralston …’ Lector Annis muttered.
‘As you wish.’
The next words that leapt from the Librarian’s mouth echoed off of the very air as he raised a hand and swiftly jerked it back. The door slammed, trapping the two men inside. The Cragsman barely had time to feel the warm moisture on his trousers before Bralston’s hand was up again. The tattooed man flew through the air, screaming as he hurtled towards Bralston. The Librarian uttered another word, bringing up his free palm that glowed a bright orange.
Shunnuk’s scream was drowned in the crackling roar of fire as a gout of crimson poured out of Bralston’s palm, sweeping over the Cragsman’s face and arms as the tattooed man helplessly flailed, trying desperately to put out a fire with no end.
After a moment of smoke-drenched carnage, the roar of fire died, and so did Shunnuk.
‘Back away!’ Massol shrieked, holding up his holy symbol as Bralston stalked toward him. ‘I am a man of honour! I am a man of faith! I didn’t touch the woman! Tell them!’ He turned a pair of desperate eyes upon the woman. ‘Tell them!’
If the woman said anything, Bralston did not hear it over the word of power he uttered. If she had any objection for the electric blue enveloping the finger that was levelled at the Djaalman, she did not voice it. Her face showed no horror as she watched without pleasure, heard Massol’s screams without pity, no tears left for the carnage she watched lit by an azure glow.
When it was done, when Bralston flicked the errant sparks from his finger and left the blackened corpse twitching violently against the door, the Librarian barely spared a nod to the woman. Instead, he looked up to the Lector, who regarded the smouldering bodies on his floor with the same distaste he might a wine stain on his carpet.
‘Tomorrow, then?’ Bralston asked.
‘At the dawn. It’s a long way to Port Destiny.’ The Lector raised a brow. ‘Do bring your hat, Librarian.’
With an incline of his bald head and a sweep of his coat, Bralston vanished out the door. The Lector’s eyes lazily drifted from the two corpses to the woman, who sat staring at them with an empty stare, her body as stiff as a board. It wasn’t until he noticed the pile of ash still clenched in the charred hand of the Cragsman that he finally sighed.
‘Waste of good paper …’
Two
TO MURDER THE OCEAN
There was no difference between the sky and the sea that Lenk could discern.
They both seemed to stretch for eternity, their horizons long having swallowed the last traces of land to transform the world into a vision of indigo. The moon took a quiet departure early, disappearing behind the curtain of clouds that slid lazily over the sky. With no yellow orb to disperse the monotony, the world was a simple, painful blue that drank all directions.
The young man closed his eyes, drawing in a breath through his nose. He smelled the rain on the breeze, the salt on the waves. Holding up his hands as though in acknowledgement for whatever god had sent him the unchanging azure that emanated around him, he let the breath trickle between his teeth.
And then, Lenk screamed.
His sword leapt to his hand in their mutual eagerness to lean over the edge of their tiny vessel. The steel’s song a humming contrast to his maddening howl, he hacked at the ocean, bleeding its endless life in frothy wounds.
‘Die, die, die, die, die!’ he screamed, driving his sword into the salt. ‘Enough! No more! I’m sick of it, you hear me?’ He cupped a hand over his mouth and shrieked. ‘Well, DO YOU?’
The water quickly settled, foam d
issipating, ripples calming, leaving Lenk to glimpse himself in ragged fragments of reflections. His silver hair hung in greasy strands around a haggard face. The purple bags hanging from his eyelids began to rival the icy blue in his gaze. Lenk surveyed the pieces of a lunatic looking back at him from the water and wondered, not for the first time, if the ocean was mocking him.
No, he decided, it’s far too impassive to mock me …
How could it be anything but? After all, it didn’t know what it was requested to stop any more than Lenk did. Stop being the ocean? He had dismissed such thoughts as madness on the first day their tiny sail hung limp and impotent on its insultingly thin mast. But as the evening of the second day slid into night, it didn’t seem such an unreasonable demand.
The sea, he thought scornfully, is the one being unreasonable. I wouldn’t have to resort to violence if it would just give me some wind.
‘Hasn’t worked yet, has it?’
His eyes went wide and he had to resist hurling himself over the ledge in desperation to communicate with the suddenly talkative water. Such delusional hope lasted only a moment, as it always did, before sloughing off in great chunks to leave only twitching resentment in his scowl.
Teeth grating as he did, he turned to the creature sitting next to him with murder flashing in his scowl. She, however, merely regarded him with half-lidded green eyes and a disaffected frown. Her ears, two long and pointed things with three ragged notches running down each length, drooped beneath the feathers laced in her dirty blond hair.
‘Keep trying,’ Kataria sighed. She turned back to the same task she had been doing for the past three hours, running her fingers along the fletching of the same three arrows. ‘I’m sure it will talk back eventually.’
‘Zamanthras is as fickle as the waters she wards,’ Lenk replied, his voice like rusty door hinges. He looked at his sword thoughtfully before sheathing it on his back. ‘Maybe she needs a sacrifice to turn her favour toward us.’
‘Don’t let me stop you from hurling yourself in,’ she replied without looking up.
‘At least I’m doing something.’
‘Attempting to eviscerate the ocean?’ She tapped the head of an arrow against her chin thoughtfully. ‘That’s something insane, maybe. You’re just going to open your stitches doing that.’ Her ears twitched, as though they could hear the sinewy threads stretching in his leg. ‘How is your wound, anyway?’
He attempted to hide the wince of pain that shot up through his thigh at the mention of the wicked, sewn-up gash beneath his trousers. The agony of the injury itself was kept numb through occasional libations of what remained of their whisky, but every time he ran his fingers against the stitches, any time his companions inquired after his health, the visions would come flooding back.
Teeth. Darkness. Six golden eyes flashing in the gloom. Laughter echoing off stone, growing quiet under shrieking carnage and icicles hissing through his head. They would fade eventually, but they were always waiting, ready to come back the moment he closed his eyes.
‘It’s fine,’ he muttered.
Her ears twitched again, hearing the lie in his voice. He disregarded it, knowing she had only asked the question to deflect him. He drew in his breath through his teeth, tensing as he might for a battle. She heard this, too, and narrowed her eyes.
‘You should rest,’ she said.
‘I don’t want—’
‘In silence,’ she interrupted. ‘Talking doesn’t aid the healing process.’
‘What would a shict know of healing beyond chewing grass and drilling holes in skulls?’ he snapped, his ire giving his voice swiftness. ‘If you’re so damn smart—’
Her upper lip curled backwards in a sneer, the sudden exposure of her unnervingly prominent canines cutting him short. He cringed at the sight of her teeth that were as much a testament to her savage heritage as the feathers in her hair and the buckskin leathers she wore.
‘What I mean is you could be doing something other than counting your precious little arrows,’ he offered, attempting to sound remorseful and failing, if the scowl she wore was any indication. ‘You could use them to catch us a fish or something.’ Movement out over the sea caught his eye and he gestured toward it. ‘Or one of those.’
They had been following the vessel for the past day: many-legged insects that slid gracefully across the waters. Dredgespiders, he had heard them called – so named for the nets of wispy silk that trailed from their upraised, bulbous abdomens. Such a net would undoubtedly brim with shrimp and whatever hapless fish wound up under the arachnid’s surface-bound path, and the promise of such a bounty was more than enough to make mouths water at the sight of the grey-carapaced things.
They always drifted lazily out of reach, multiple eyes occasionally glancing over to the vessel and glistening with mocking smugness unbefitting a bug.
‘Not a chance,’ Kataria muttered, having seen that perverse pride in their eyes and having discounted the idea.
‘Well, pray for something else, then,’ he growled. ‘Pray to whatever savage little god sends your kind food.’
She turned a glower on him, her eyes seeming to glow with a malevolent green. ‘Riffid is a goddess that helps shicts who help themselves. The day She lifts a finger to help a whiny, weeping little round-ear is the day I renounce Her.’ She snorted derisively and turned back to her missiles. ‘And these are my last three arrows. I’m saving them for something special.’
‘What use could they possibly be?’
‘This one’ – she fingered her first arrow – ‘is for if I ever do see a fish that I would like to eat by myself. And this …’ She brushed the second one. ‘This one is for me to be buried with if I die.’
He glanced at the third arrow, its fletching ragged and its head jagged.
‘What about that one?’ Lenk asked.
Kataria eyed the missile, then turned a glance to Lenk. There was nothing behind her eyes that he could see: no hatred or irritation, no bemusement for his question. She merely stared at him with a fleeting, thoughtful glance as she let the feathered end slide between her thumb and forefinger.
‘Something special,’ she answered simply, then turned away.
Lenk narrowed his eyes through the silence hanging between them.
‘And what,’ he said softly, ‘is that supposed to mean?’
There was something more behind her eyes; there always was. And whatever it was usually came hurtling out of her mouth on sarcasm and spittle when he asked such questions of her.
Usually.
For the moment, she simply turned away, taking no note of his staring at her. He had rested his eyes upon her more frequently, taking in the scope of her slender body, the silvery hue pale skin left exposed by a short leather tunic took on through the moonlight. Each time he did, he expected her ears to twitch as she heard his eyes shifting in their sockets, and it would be his turn to look away as she stared at him curiously.
In the short year they had known each other, much of their rapport had come through staring and the awkward silences that followed. The silence she offered him now, however, was anything but awkward. It had purpose behind it, a solid wall of silence that she had painstakingly erected and that he was not about to tear down.
Not with his eyeballs alone, anyway.
‘Look,’ he said, sighing. ‘I don’t know what it is about me that’s got you so angry these days, but we’re not going to get past it if we keep—’
If her disinterested stare didn’t suggest that she wasn’t listening, the fact that the shict’s long ears suddenly and swiftly folded over themselves like blankets certainly did.
Lenk sighed, rubbing his temples. He could feel his skin begin to tighten around his skull and knew full well that a headache was brewing as surely as the rain in the air. Such pains were coming more frequently now; from the moment he woke they tormented him well into his futile attempts to sleep.
Unsurprisingly, his companions did little to help. No, he thought as he
looked down the deck to the swaddled bundle underneath the rudder-seat at the boat’s rear, but I know what will help …
‘Pointless.’
Gooseflesh formed on his bicep.
‘The book only corrupts, but even that is for naught. You can’t be corrupted.’ A chill crept down Lenk’s spine in harmony with the voice whispering in his head. ‘We can’t be corrupted.’
He drew in a deep breath, cautiously exhaling over the side of the ship that none might see the fact that his breath was visible even in the summer warmth. Or perhaps he was imagining that, too.
The voice was hard to ignore, and with it, it was hard for Lenk to convince himself that it was his imagination speaking. The fact that he continued to feel cold despite the fact that his companions all sweated grievously didn’t do much to aid him, either.
‘A question.’
Don’t answer it, Lenk urged himself mentally. Ignore it.
‘Too late,’ the voice responded to his thoughts, ‘but this is a good one. Speak, what does it matter what the shict thinks of us? What changes?’
Ignore it. He shut his eyes. Ignore it, ignore it, ignore it.
‘That never works, you know. She is fleeting. She lacks purpose. They all do. Our cause is grander than they can even comprehend. We don’t need them. We can finish this ourselves, we can … Are you listening?’
Lenk was trying not to. He stared at the bundle beneath the bench, yearning to tear the pages free from their woolly tomb and seek the silence within their confines.
‘Don’t,’ the voice warned.
Lenk felt the chill envelop his muscles, something straining to keep him seated, keep him listening. But he gritted his teeth, pulled himself from the ship’s edge.
Before he knew what was happening, he was crawling over Kataria as though she weren’t even there, not heeding the glare she shot him. She didn’t matter now. No one else did. Now, he only needed to get the book, to silence the voice. He could worry about everything else later. There would be time enough later.