“Where are we going?” Alixa asked.
“The sea. Quickly!”
Alixa obliged, taking Jasen by the wrist and helping him to his feet. Damn, it was so painful … and he was so tired, damn it.
I’ll sleep in my bed soon, he thought, and he looked forward to it for five full seconds before remembering that his bed was gone, had been gone since the day before he left on this mission to save the village.
“We’d saved it,” he moaned, clutching at that stray thought. It should have felt comforting, but it was cold instead.
Alixa frowned down at him. “What?”
He looked her in the eyes, blinked slowly. “We’d saved Terreas.”
She stared back for a long moment before she nodded. “I know.”
Shilara made her way around the cart. Their belongings had been thrown off in the fall, and most lay strewn across the beach, dug into small craters of sand. She sifted through them, one hand pressed to her side, lumbering awkwardly.
Her spear. Finding it, she bowed low—the expression on her face was terribly pained—and then, staggering back to the cart, she raised it over Scourgey’s head—and sliced through the reins holding her in place.
“Get up,” Shilara ordered the scourge. “You’re loose.”
Scourgey didn’t need telling twice. Now freed from her shackles she could scramble free from beneath the wooden beam pressing her to the ground, and she did, with a flailing of limbs that dug pits in the sand and flung it out behind her.
Jasen was up too. He closed his eyes, arm slung over Alixa’s shoulder for support. Each breath was labored, shallow; too deep and his ribs felt as if they would penetrate a lung.
Perhaps they would. No way of knowing for sure what was intact in there.
Doctor can look me over, he thought.
He frowned. No doctor anymore.
No one left on Luukessia at all, save for them. Just three people desperately running to the sea.
The sea. They were right on it. He twisted back to look at it—and there it lay, a sight he’d wished his whole life to take in with his own eyes, shimmering waters golden and alive with the dancing rays of a setting sun. Salty air filled his lungs, and it was a rich smell unlike any he had ever known.
If only he could separate it from the taste of blood.
“Move,” Shilara barked—or wheezed. She was limping already. “Go.”
Alixa obeyed. She pulled Jasen into motion with her, granting her shoulder for support.
At first his feet were unwilling. And that was confusing, because when Jasen looked down his legs still reached the ground in straight lines, but his brain told him they’d become utterly tangled. Yet as they limped on, they moved more easily, lurches becoming gentler stumbles.
Scourgey followed, whining.
Alixa threw a glance behind her. “They’re gaining.”
Shilara pursed her lips. “We’re not going to make it.” She’d taken to using the spear as an over-large cane. It left soft impressions in the sand behind her.
“We will!” said Alixa frantically.
Shilara turned, squinting across the flatlands that met the beach. “We won’t,” she muttered. “We’re all of us injured. We’ve no boat.”
“We have to do something,” Alixa said. “We can’t just … just lie down and wait to die!”
No? But it sounded so good to Jasen at this moment.
They staggered on, a loose line, three broken humans and their friendly scourge. All limped, this final short leg of the race reduced to an agonizing crawl.
And still the scourge came closer, closer …
“What do we do when we get to the water?” Alixa asked.
“I don’t know,” said Shilara.
“What? I thought you’d planned for this for years!”
“My boat is tethered miles from here. We’ll never reach it in time.”
“We could...swim?” Jasen asked, the memory of days spent crossing the deepest part of the creek with careful strokes coming back to him, the rite of passage all the boys of Terreas crossed. He could swim, if his hands and legs could remember how.
“I suppose we have to,” Shilara said tautly. Blood and sweat streaked the ash on her face.
Crossing the creek, he could do, the dozen or so paces where it grew too deep to touch bottom. But swim for miles?
He couldn’t. Body in full working order, maybe; alien though it was, he would try his hardest. But now, a wreck … treading water was about all he could do, and the part of his brain that still worked was dubious about even that.
He wouldn’t last long, whatever the case.
On they went. The shore came nearer and nearer. The sand had been blown into small dunes, no more than a few inches high, arrayed in softly undulating waves along the beach. They’d not been touched by human feet for years, decades, and there was a strange beauty in the way their footprints broke that untouched landscape. How that could be, Jasen was not sure. Was it the fact that humanity still lived, still fought on, even despite the odds stacked so deeply against them? Or perhaps Jasen’s brain still was not operating at full capacity, and his sense of beauty had gone askew.
Must be the latter. After all, beyond those soft divots were the scourge.
Closer. They were so much closer than when last he’d looked. He could smell them.
“We won’t make it,” he murmured.
“We will,” Alixa said—but there was a tremor in her voice, conviction sapped. “We have to keep going.”
“I don’t know that I can,” he breathed.
“You can!” Alixa said. She grabbed him by the arm again, pulling—
Shilara gripped him too. “Go,” she ordered—
For a long moment, the world was frozen. Jasen met Shilara’s gaze, his eyebrows knitted low on his red, wheezing face … and he saw her for the first time perhaps since this whole thing began, saw just how tired she was, how far this had pushed her, the great distance they had come together—
That order shone in her eyes, desperately:
Go.
Where?
He opened his mouth to ask, ask this woman who had led them, endangered her own safety for a village that had shunned her—
Then she shoved him ahead of her.
Maybe it was his own momentum carrying him onward now, but damn it, he went. His bones ached, his body moaned, threatening to break under so much duress … but the shore was close, its waters so inviting, for he had longed so long to do this, to step into them—
Salvation.
The single word floated through his mind.
They were three hundred yards away … two hundred and fifty … two hundred …
Scourgey loped on, keeping pace. She limped least of all and could’ve outpaced them easily. Yet she kept close, whining, throwing her head from side to side the way Milo did.
“She’s scared of the water,” Alixa breathed as though reading Jasen’s thoughts. “It’ll be okay,” she whispered to Scourgey.
Scourgey whined back.
Jasen turned around, saw—
“Shilara?”
He stopped, and Alixa was forced into stillness beside him—
Shilara was not with them. She stood back a hundred yards or more, on her own. She just stood there, waiting. Coming toward her, implacable, racing across the dunes—
The wave of scourge.
“Shilara!” Alixa cried.
“Get to the water!” Shilara boomed without looking back—and her vocal cords had found some last store of power to draw on, for there was nothing papery or thin about the way she shouted now. “I make my stand here, so you might live on!”
“Shilara, they’ll kill you!” Alixa screamed.
Shilara lifted her spear to the sky. “Then I will take as many of the bastards with me as I can!”
She turned to face the scourge, less than thirty seconds away—
“Hear me, vermin, and know my name, for we have met before! I, Shilara Annabella Gre
ssom, stand to fight you once more—one last time! In the name of my ancestors, those who came before me, and those I ward now, my descendants, I stand before you!”
“Shilara!” Alixa screamed—
“Go,” Jasen said, eyes wide. “Move!” And he yanked her into motion again—toward the lapping shore.
“But Shilara—” Alixa cried.
“For too long you have sullied these lands! You have slaughtered the kind, good, noble people of Luukessia, now to the last of them. I will not fail my ancestors. Meet me in battle, you scourge, and know that I will not fail the next links in the great chain that stretches from my ancestors unto me and now to—”
And then they were on her.
“SHILARA!” Alixa cried.
Shilara swung the spear, stabbing out madly. She ducked backward, avoiding the snapping of jaws as the beasts surged around her, all focusing on their sole target. The flurry was mad, chaotic, and for the first time Jasen understood how she had survived the war when so few of her compatriots had managed the same. She was a warrior, honest and true, fighting swiftly, with finesse the likes of which Terreas could have learned from as she jabbed and thrust and pivoted, battling back the tide.
It was the only time Jasen would see it; for though she stayed them valuable seconds, the scourge overcame her, scrambling over the corpses of their own to snap at her with relentless jaws. One moment she was there, fighting the mass—then next they had overflowed her, blotting her from sight. One last skyward bob of the spear—then it was gone.
“NO!” Alixa screamed. She fought him—
“We’re almost there!” Jasen wheezed. She was strong and he was weak now, and it was all he could do to drag her onward. “Please, Alixa—don’t let her death be for nothing!”
With that, Alixa stopped fighting him. She looked back, one last time, and then followed along as he pulled her forward, across the shores—
Water splashed Jasen’s ankles. Alixa’s were wet a moment later—
Scourgey whined at the shore—then, with a cry of abject terror and purest pain, she followed, stepping out into the sea close behind Jasen.
The waters rose—
“They’re coming again,” Alixa said, dull and flat, all life seeming to have left her.
“Move,” Jasen breathed.
The water covered up to their knees now. Scourgey’s whining was shrill, pausing only for a breath to refill her lungs. Her rotten scent had turned up a notch, salt taking over in the brisk air, and Jasen realized, idly, that this was what fear did to all creatures. It had made him and Alixa and Shilara sweat on the road to and from Wayforth, when their lives were threatened, and it made Scourgey’s odor intensify too.
All animals, he thought. That was all they were when it came down to it: animals.
And this desperate march into the sea was proof of that basest instinct of all: the need to survive. Even when everything had been lost, and Shilara, their guide, was gone, when they had nothing to live for and nowhere to go—still they waded through the waters, up to their waists now …
The scourge had found the ocean’s edge.
Do not follow, Jasen willed. Do not follow …
One leapt out—
It screamed as it landed in the water. Footing lost immediately, it crashed down into salty sea. No deeper than half a foot, but the noise the beast loosed was like a rabbit caught in a trap. Its head plunged under, cutting the sound off; then it was up, and it staggered back to the sand.
“Yes,” Jasen breathed.
“Should we stop?”
Jasen was tempted to say yes, they should … but the scourge clearly did not learn from the efforts of the rest of their pack. Others followed, whining away. One turned back; another suffered the same fate as the first, head going under as its legs gave way. A third overcame the terror, though, and it lumbered after, deeper—
“Keep moving,” Jasen said.
The water was up to chest height now—
“I have to swim,” Alixa said. The water sloshing about her was deep enough to spill into her mouth. It made her words burble.
“Swim,” Jasen told her—and he did the same, feet leaving the packed sand below. He thrust his arms out—
Scourgey latched hold of him from behind.
He cried out—the force of it bobbed him under for a moment—then he was spluttering. Saltwater stung his eyes, filled his nose and mouth—
“I’m not a raft!” he moaned, her weight pulling at him.
“There are more coming,” Alixa said. She was close to crying again. How she’d held it in this long …
Jasen longed to look over his shoulder, to assess. But Scourgey made that impossible. So he said only, “Swim farther out!”
They did. And it hurt, oh ancestors, did it hurt … but the deeper waters were the only thing keeping them safe.
Something thrashed behind them.
A wave of panic swept over him. “What’s happening?”
“They’re drowning,” said Alixa.
Jasen closed eyes, nodded. Small relief—but not enough of it. “Good. Go deeper.”
“What about Shilara’s boat?”
“I … I don’t know. She didn’t say where it is.”
“So what do we do?”
“Just … just swim.”
And they did, kicking legs until they were a hundred and fifty yards out, far enough that their feet would never touch the bottom …
Far enough that the scourge would not follow.
There, they ceased.
Jasen turned back. It was awkward, Scourgey clinging to him. Her claws dug in, making him hiss with pain.
No scourge followed. The sea was flat behind them again, ripples from Jasen and Alixa and Scourgey shrinking to nothing long before they reached the shore.
The scourge waited there, an army of wrinkled, leathery, grey beasts. They watched under the setting sun. It was reflected in their black eyes, a fiery orb sinking lower and lower as they watched—and waited for Jasen and Alixa to return.
33
Shilara was gone. Terreas was gone. Their families were gone.
And now Jasen and Alixa bobbed in the water, just treading. The shore teemed with scourge as far as he could see, waiting, watching for them.
“What do we do?” Alixa coughed.
Waves pushed at them from behind. They were not so large as to spill over Jasen and Alixa’s heads, pushing them under—but they did force them ever closer to the shore. Both kicked their feet to remain back, but they could only keep it up for so long. The salt in the water kept them buoyant enough, even with Scourgey clutching Jasen’s back, whining and struggling … but they’d not slept last night, had been through hell today. How long could they truly keep it up?
“I don’t know,” said Jasen. “Keep swimming.”
“I can’t,” Alixa said, breath coming in short gasps.
A harder wave rushed at their backs. This one curled over, and a salty spray soaked Jasen up to his ears. Scourgey shrieked, using him almost as a ladder to keep herself above the water’s surface, and Jasen felt the sting of a claw slicing the skin of his arm.
“Relax,” he hissed. He’d have added, “Please,” but did not. The scourge did not know the meaning of the word, and he needed to save his breath. Already his lungs were aching. If they had any hope of outlasting the scourge arrayed on the beach, he needed to make the most of every lungful of air he could manage to take.
They’d lost everything today, everything except each other. But what more was there to say?
His arms ached, legs ached, head ached. He was fighting the currents with everything he had, but his strength was flagging, and now he wondered …
What was there even left to fight for?
Luukessia was overrun. The last haven had been turned to ash, magma spilling over it. Only the scourge remained in this land, and they waited on the beach for their last prey to return, to come back as the sky turned darker and darker.
One thing J
asen knew in his very bones: they could not survive in those waters for much longer, kicking desperately to keep themselves afloat under the towering mountain of smog pouring out of the cratered mountain over the horizon.
There was nothing left.
No hope.
No one to save them now.
And nothing to go back to.
The realization sunk into Jasen like a heavy ball of metal dropped into water. It rolled through him like he’d taken a drink of the stinging, salty water, coming to a stop in the pit that had once been his stomach.
They had nothing to go on for.
All was lost.
If one of these waves should rush over their heads now …
He closed his eyes, swallowing hard, not daring to acknowledge the rest of that thought.
“Alixa,” he croaked.
She was but a shadow in the growing dark. “Jasen?”
He wanted to say—so much. Where to begin? He wished to apologize, first, for dragging her into this. But then, if he hadn’t, she would be dead anyway, buried under a flow of magma back in Terreas with the rest of its people. Though, perhaps that would have been quicker …
He wanted to commend her for her bravery. She had flown in the face of everything she believed these past days, everything she held dear. She had faced terrors the likes of which she would have never imagined she would face even a week ago, defied all convention and her nature. She had called him courageous and brave less than twenty-four hours ago, and said she wished to be more like him. But now as he floated here, taking stock—she was better, so much better.
He’d always longed for adventure, to cross beyond the border. She never had. Who had been braver to go on this journey? Certainly not he; he was just heeding the call of his nature. No, it was Alixa, who had defied her own to come along … she was the brave one here.
There were so many things to say—
“Jasen,” Alixa said, voice picking up with sudden life. “Look!”
He turned in the direction of her wide-eyed stare.
There, against the twilight—burned the light of a single torch.
“Something is out there,” Alixa said—and there was desperation in her voice, raw, determined, so utterly hopeful—for this light, whatever it was, wherever it came from, might yield the promised salvation they’d sought in the race to the sea, might offer escape, might offer life when it had seemed theirs was to be stripped away from them once they finally succumbed to fatigue or dared to embrace it.
A Haven in Ash Page 27