by Sam Sykes
“Why what?”
“Why are you going off alone? Why do you keep going off alone? Why do you turn your back to me?”
She winced; not a good answer.
She sighed; a worse one.
“Stay here.”
“I need to talk to-”
“JUST STAY HERE.”
Sprinting away was not the best answer, either. But at least it got her far away fast enough to ignore whatever he said next. He’d have more questions and her answers were only going to get worse from there.
Like there’s a right answer, she thought ruefully. What are you going to tell him? “Hey, stay here while I go try to find the greenshicts I hung around with when I still kind of sort of maybe wanted to kill you. I’ll bring you back a snack.”
Her belly lurched into her throat. She swallowed it back down on a wave of nausea.
Not that the truth is much better. Go on and tell him it hurts when he looks at you. Go on and see what happens when you tell him you know he wants to hurt you.
She sighed, closed her eyes.
So, that’s settled. Running away was the right answer. You can’t help if it’s still a terrible one.
She looked up to see the wall of kelp rising taller, swaying slowly, freakishly.
Terrible and useless.
The inner wall was all but powder. Nowhere near as thick or as strong as the outer, it had crumbled to a thin line of shards that valiantly tried to hold back the kelp forest. Not that it was needed; the kelp was a wall unto itself, green and vast and utterly impregnable, marching endlessly along the road.
It was a sign, she knew. An omen sent to tell her that she should go back, talk to him, tell him that she was trying to protect him, that he made her hurt, that she wanted to hurt, that she knew he wanted to hurt her.
Riffid didn’t send omens.
But Riffid was the goddess of the shicts.
Kataria was a shict. . wasn’t she?
She sighed, rubbed her eyes. This was stupid. Maybe she shouldn’t go back. Maybe it would be easier to just sit here and wait for something to come along and kill her and save her the trouble.
Not likely. She cast a glower about the highway. For the home of the Shen, you’d think there’d be more-
Her hand shot up, thumped against her temple, trying to beat that thought out.
No! NO! Do not finish that thought. You know exactly what will happen if you do.
She settled back on her heels, drew in a sharp breath. The kelp swayed silently. The mist boiled silently. The stone watched silently. She released it.
There. That wasn’t so hard, was-
Her ears twitched, then shot straight up at a sudden sound.
“Oh, come on-” she snarled under her breath.
Anywhere else, it might have been a murmur lost on the wind and never heard. Here in the silence, the sound of a bowstring being drawn was so loud it might as well have been using a cat as an arrow.
Hers was just as loud as she whirled around, arrow leaping to string as she aimed it upward.
The Shen squatted, bow drawn on her, high upon the wall. Not so high that she couldn’t see the malicious narrow of the lizardman’s yellow eyes or the glint of the jagged head at the end of a black shaft.
It stood frozen upon the wall like a green gargoyle. Its lanky body was breathless, unmoving, rigid with the anticipation of the ambush she had just ruined. Muscle coiled beneath scaly flesh banded with black tattoos. Nostrils quivered at the end of a long, reptilian snout. It did not move. As though it hoped that she might simply forget it was there if only it sat still long enough.
She wasn’t sure why it hadn’t shot yet. Maybe it wasn’t sure if it was faster than her, had better aim than her. Or maybe it was waiting for something else.
“This isn’t fair, you know,” she called up to it. “I didn’t even think your name.”
The Shen’s tail twitched behind it, the only sign it was even alive.
“Can you understand me?”
It said nothing.
“Look, I can admire anyone who can sneak up on me.” Her ears twitched resentfully. “Even if you are all the way up there. So, one hunter to another, I’ll give you this.” She gestured with her chin. “Walk away. You’re not who I’m looking for and this is an ambush you don’t want to waste. Come back later. I’ll be distracted. You can take another shot at me then.”
A low, throaty hiss slithered between its teeth. Whether it understood her words or not, the creak of a slackening bowstring, if only by a hair’s breadth, suggested it recognized intent. She returned the gesture, by an even scanter hair’s breadth.
It stood still.
Just a breath longer.
In another breath, it had dropped its bow and reached for something at its waist. In one more, her bow sang a one-note dirge. No more breaths came after that.
Its eyes didn’t go wide, as though it wasn’t particularly surprised that this had happened. It didn’t grope helplessly at the quivering shaft lodged in its throat, merely grabbing it purposefully and snapping it with one hand while the other clenched whatever it was at its waist. It met her gaze for a moment and she saw in its yellow stare something determined, unfazed by death.
And then, it pitched forward.
She hurried over as it struck the stones with a muffled thump and lay still. It was most certainly dead, unless its spine had always bent that way and she just hadn’t noticed. But in death, it still stared at her, still resentful, still clinging to that resolve.
Just as it clung to the item in its hand.
She leaned over the lizardman, reached down, prised apart its clawed fingers with no small effort. And there, curved and cylindrical, she saw it.
“A. . horn?” she muttered.
Another question. Another complication. Things never got less complicated when walking lizards were involved. And now she would have to go back to Lenk and tell him all about this.
“KATARIA!”
Assuming he didn’t come to her first.
She saw him rushing toward her. She heard him curse through fevered, rasping breath, felt his voice like a knife in her flesh. His legs pumped, his eyes were narrowed, his sword was drawn.
And bloodied.
The arrow was nocked before she even knew it was in her fingers, raised before she knew whom she was aiming at. It was so instinctual to draw on him. So easy to see him as a threat.
So easy to just let go of the arrow and-
No, she thought. Not again.
She lowered the weapon and sighed as he came charging toward her. She closed her eyes as he came within reach of her. She grunted as he shoved rudely past her and kept running.
She furrowed her brow, opening her mouth as if to call after him. No words came, though; she was far too confused.
“SHENKO-SA!”
Right up until she heard the warcry, anyway.
The Shen came surging up the highway in a riot of color. Lanky green muscle trembled beneath tattooed bands of red and black, weapons of bone and metal flashed in their hands, yellow eyes grew gold with fury at the sight of her.
Great webbed crests rose from their scaly crowns, displaying colorful murals tattooed on the leathery flesh. Giant fish on some, serpents on others-various peoples in various stages of dismemberment seemed a rather popular choice.
They bent at the waist, long tails risen behind them as they picked up speed, raised their weapons, and howled.
Like hounds, she thought. Big, tattooed, ugly hounds. With weapons. Sharp ones. She glanced up the road. Why aren’t you running, again?
If her head couldn’t form a response, her feet did. And they spoke loudly and in great favor of screaming and running away. She agreed and tore off down the highway, folding her ears over themselves to block the sound of a dozen warcries growing louder.
She saw Lenk a moment later, the young man leaning on his knees and trying desperately to catch his breath. She opened her mouth to warn him, to tell him that they w
ere close enough behind that he had to keep moving.
“YOU SON OF A BITCH!”
That wasn’t a warning, but it made him move, regardless. He sheathed his sword and took off at a sprint, falling in beside her.
“You could have warned me,” she snarled between breaths.
“Did you not see me running?” he screamed back. “What, did you think I was just that excited to see you?”
“You had your sword drawn! I didn’t know what was happening!”
Her ears pricked up at a faint whistle growing steadily louder. She leapt and the arrow cursed her in a spray of sparks and a whine of metal as it struck the stones where she had just stood.
“How about now?” he asked. “If you’re still confused, they’ve got more arrows.”
And in symphonic volleys, the arrows wailed. They came screaming from atop the walls, making shrill and childish demands for blood, skulking in clattering mutters when they found only stone.
The archers took only a few opportunistic shots, shouldering their bows and racing atop the wall after their fleeing pink targets as soon as they moved out of range. But there were always more archers and ever more arrows.
Precise shots, Kataria noted. Hungry shots. Little wolves of metal and wood. And like wolves, they came from all sides.
She glanced over to the side. The kelp had thinned out, giving way to another, stranger forest.
Coral formations rose out of the sand and into the gray sky. Jagged blue pillars, spheres of twisted green, great cobwebs of red thorns, and sheets of yellow blossomed like a garden of brittle, dead gemstones.
It might have been beautiful, had each formation not been host to yellow eyes lurking in their towering pillars, green feet perched upon the colorful branches, bows bent and arrows drawn.
They ducked, weaved, hid where they could, tumbled where they had to. Arrows snarled overhead, jagged tips reaching with bone-shard barbs. They darted behind one of the twisted bells to avoid a volley. The arrows struck, sent the misshapen metal wailing, screaming, weeping, laughing, grinding sound against sound in a horrifying cacophony.
Kataria clamped hands over her ears, shouted to be heard. “How far back are they?”
“I don’t care!” he shouted back. “Just keep going until we can find someplace to hide!”
She glanced over her shoulder. The tide of Shen seemed a distant green ebb. They had checked their pace, pursuing with intent, not speed. They were up to something. Or maybe lizards just weren’t meant to run on two legs.
“Must be the tails,” she muttered. “We’re bound to lose them soon. For a bunch of crafty savages, you’d think they’d have a better plan than just chasing us and-”
“Damn it, Kat,” Lenk snarled. “Why the hell would you say that?”
She didn’t have to ask. The moment she turned, she saw it, looming overhead, its gray so dark it stood out even against the cloud-shrouded sky. The monolith statue stood upon the wall, palm outstretched, a symbol of a great, unblinking eye set within its stone hood.
While it certainly didn’t seem to object to the cluster of Shen around its feet trying desperately to push it over and onto the road below, Kataria picked up her speed.
“Stop!” Lenk rasped. “We’ll never make it!”
“Yes, we will! Just go faster!”
He did go. Faster than her, even. Their breath became soundless, coming so swiftly and weakly it might as well not exist. Their legs pumped numbly beneath them, forgetting that they were supposed to have collapsed by now. They had nothing left to give but the desperate hope of passing before the statue fell.
Whatever god it was supposed to represent, though, the monolith appeared unmoved.
By their efforts, anyway.
The collective heaving of ten Shen proved to be far more persuasive.
The monolith tilted with a roar of rock and the wail of wind as it teetered and pitched over the wall, plummeting to the road below. She felt the shock of it through her numb feet, coursing up into her skull as the old stone god smashed against the rock below, sending a wave of pulverized granite dust erupting.
His legs desperately trying to remember how to stop, Lenk skidded into the great stone eye with an undignified sound. He came to a rasping, gasping halt.
Kataria did not.
With an almost unnerving casualness, she leapt, racing up his back, onto his shoulders, leaping off of him like a fleshy, wheezy stepping stone and scrambling atop the statute’s stone flank. She turned, looked down at him as he scrambled to follow her, failed to even come close.
She clicked her tongue. “Okay, so I was halfway right.”
Had he the breath to respond, he probably would have cursed her. Had he the energy to lift his sword, he probably would have thrown it at her. She didn’t watch him for long, though. Her eyes were drawn down the road, toward the advancing Shen horde. Archers continued to slither out of the coral forest to join the tide, bows added to the throngs of clubs and blades raised high and hungry for blood.
But even that did not hold her attention for long.
Her ears did not prick up at the sound, for she did not hear it. She felt it, in the nothingness of the mist. Determination. Compassion. Hate. Anger.
Naxiaw.
He was out there, somewhere. Somewhere close. Watching her, even now. And his were not the only eyes upon her.
But the Shen were also close. And growing closer. Stay and chase them off, she thought, and the greenshicts would come and kill Lenk. Leave to chase off the greenshicts and the Shen would kill Lenk. Neither option was attractive.
But then he decided for her.
“I can’t make it,” he said, finally finding his breath. “You have to go.”
“Right,” she said, making a move to leave.
“Wait!”
“What?”
“I didn’t mean it! I was trying to be noble!”
“Ah. .” She looked at him and winced. “Well.”
And Lenk was left staring at an empty space she had just occupied. Had he breath to speak, he still wouldn’t have had the words to describe what he felt just then.
Someone else did, though.
“Told you,” the voice whispered.
Don’t be an asshole about this, he thought in reply.
“More important matters, anyway.”
The voice was right. Lenk knew that the moment he heard the hissing behind him. Breath coming heavily, sweat dripping from his brow, Lenk turned around very slowly. But he was in no hurry.
When he finally turned to face them, the Shen were waiting.
THIRTEEN
HEAVEN
“I have been looking for you. . for a long time.”
Sheraptus’s eyes burned as he cast his stare upon the scene below. Forgepits burned, alive with the sounds of metal being twisted into blades and breastplates, audible even from his terrace. The sound of creation carried so far.
“You are not pleased to see me again,” he closed his eyes, whispering to his guest behind him. “It is hard to blame you.”
Another scream rose up from below as another slave, one of Those Green Things, was shattered beneath an iron sole. The cargo the slave carried fell to the ground, splashing in the red life that seeped from its many, many cuts.
“But that seems like an eternity ago. Since then I have found. . questions. I don’t like them. A netherling knows. We are born from nothing. We return to nothing. There is only bloodshed and fire in between. There are no questions that do not have this answer.”
The sikkhuns howled with wild laughter as the dead slave was hauled by a female to their pit and tossed in. Their hunger was a thing alive itself, the gnashing of their jaws and the ripping of scaly green meat, the cycle of life to death, death to nourishment, nourishment to life.
“But there has to be more,” he said. “It was simple in the Nether. There was nothing. But here? The slaves barely put up a fight when we came. All this green, all this blue. .”
He swept a
hand to the face of the sprawling forest, scarred by an ugly sea of stumps. Its lumber had been hauled to the surf, turned into the long, black ships bobbing in waters stained by soot and blood and scraps of flesh.
“They didn’t even fight for it. Why? Is there simply more of it that they can take later? But if there is more. . who made it?” He clenched his fist, felt the anger burn out his eyes. “Metal does not take shape without fire and flesh. Ships do not construct themselves. This? All of this, someone had to have made it.”
He shut his eyes, felt the fires smolder beneath his lids as he drew in a deep breath and exhaled.
“That’s why I asked them to find you, specifically, out of all of your small, weak race. I wanted to find you. .”
He turned around to finally look at his guest. A pair of beady eyes mounted upon tiny stalks looked back. The crab scuttled across the plate, its chitinous legs rapping upon the metal. It would go one way, find its path terminating in a long fall from the pedestal, move another way, find a similar conclusion, try the other way.
It was almost as if it wasn’t even listening, Sheraptus thought contemptibly.
He swept over to the plate, plucked the crustacean up gently in his hands. It had taken time to understand how to take something so small without crushing it. He had practiced. And upon his palm, the crab scuttled one way, felt the palm’s width end, scuttled the other way.
“And you waste it all,” he whispered. “You and Those Green Things and the pink-skinned overscum. . you have all of this, and you simply move about. You do nothing with it.” He turned his hand over gently, watched the crab flail briefly, then right itself upon the back of his hand. “Why?”
He found his ire at the crab’s silence boiling. Not that he expected it to simply up and start talking, but it could at least do something different. He jabbed it with a finger, pushing it around on his hand.
“Do you simply not know what to do with it all?” he asked. “Does the sheer vastness of it all overwhelm you? Or do you simply choose to do nothing with it?”