by Sam Sykes
Their blood poured not in streams, but in a cloud that blossomed at the top of the tether holding her swaying in the air like a red dandelion. Fish darted in and out of the cloud of red, dark shapes on dark fins, glassy eyes reflecting nothing as they seized pieces of purple meat in their jaws, shook fiercely and swallowed them whole before swimming back for another bite. At least a dozen sharks, heedless of biting iron, flesh, or bone, feasted.
Being made of the kind of meat that probably wouldn’t go down as gently as the dead kind, the sharks had as much interest in Gariath as he had in them. He glanced down the road, toward the distant mountain. If the Shen were anywhere, they would be there. Why else would they bother to string up so many meaty warnings?
But he didn’t take another step forward.
He couldn’t very well with someone following him.
“Let’s get this over with,” he said with a sigh. “I can smell you. I’ve smelled you since I got here. I smelled you back on Teji.”
His eyes swept the horizon, the jagged coral canopies and wafting kelp reaches revealed nothing but thick air and empty sky.
“I don’t know exactly where you are. The air’s too thick to smell that. But you might as well come out.”
He threw out his hands to either side, gesturing to the vast road cutting a smooth stone path through the coral.
“It’s too open for an ambush. You can’t sneak up on me. So just find whatever courage you have and-”
He stopped suddenly. Somehow, having one’s head smashed from behind made talking harder.
He staggered forward, straining not to collapse as his eyes rolled in his sockets and his brains rattled in his skull. He flailed blindly, trying to ward off his attacker, wherever it might have been. His vision still swimming, he found footing enough to whirl about and face his foe.
And his foe, all seven green feet of him, stared back.
Another pointy-eared human, he recognized. A pointy-eared green human. A pointy-eared green human with hands for feet and what appeared to be a cock’s crest for hair.
There had to be a shorter word for it. What had the other pointy-eared human called it? Greenshict? She had carried their scent, too.
This one was taller, tense, ready to spill blood instead of teary emotions. The greenshict’s bones were long, muscles tight beneath green skin, dark eyes positively weeping scorn as he narrowed them upon Gariath.
He liked this one better already.
At least until he looked down to his foe’s hand and saw, clenched in slender fingers, a short, stout piece of wood.
“A stick?” The fury choked his voice like phlegm. “You came to kill me with a stick?”
The shict snarled, baring four sharp teeth. Gariath roared, baring two dozen of his own. The stones quaked beneath his feet, the sky shivered at his howl as he charged.
“I WAS EATEN TODAY AND YOU BROUGHT A STICK?”
He lashed out, claws seeking green flesh and finding nothing as the greenshict took a long, fluid step backward. He flipped the stick effortlessly from one hand to the other, brought it up over his head, brought it down upon Gariath’s.
It cracked against his skull, shook brain against bone. But this was no cowardly blow from behind. This was honest pain. Gariath could bite back honest pain. He grunted, snapped his neck and caught the stick between his horns to tear it from the greenshict’s grasp.
The stick flew in one direction, his fist in the other. It sought, caught, crushed a green face beneath red knuckles in a dark crimson eruption. Bones popped, sinuses erupted, blood spattered. A body flew, crashed, skidded across the stones, leaving a dark smear upon the road.
Therapeutic, Gariath thought, even as the blood sizzled against his flesh. It hurt. But he couldn’t very well let the greenshict know that.
“I AM RHEGA!”
Yelling hurt, too. Possibly because his teeth still rattled in their gums. A trail of blood wept from his brow, spilling into his eye. The greenshict had drawn blood-with a stick.
Impressive, he thought. Also annoying. He snorted; that hurt. Just annoying.
The greenshict did not so much leap as flow from his back to his feet like a liquid. He ebbed, shifting into a stance-hands up, ears perked, waist bent-with such ease as to suggest that he had simply sprung from the womb ready to fight.
Suggestions weren’t enough for Gariath. He needed more tangible things: stone beneath his feet, blood on his hands, horns in the air, and a roar in his maw as he fell to all fours and charged.
And again, the greenshict flowed. He broke like water on a rock, slithering over Gariath, sparing only a touch for the dragonman as he leapt delicately over him and landed behind him. Gariath skidded to a halt, whirled about and found his opponent standing.
And just standing.
He didn’t scramble for his stick. He didn’t move to attack. He just stood there.
“Hit back,” Gariath snarled as he rushed the greenshict once more. “Then I hit you. Then you fall down and I splash around in your entrails.” His claw followed his voice, twice as bloodthirsty. “Don’t you know how this works?”
The greenshict had no respect for Gariath’s instruction or his blows, leaping away, ducking under, stepping away from each blow. He never struck back, never made a noise, never did anything but move.
Slowly, steadily, to the floating corpses.
The next blow came and the greenshict flew instead of flowed. He leapt away and up, hands and feet finding a tether and scrambling up. Hand over foot over foot over hand, he leapt to the fresh netherling corpse and entangled himself amongst its limbs, staring down at Gariath.
Impassively.
Mocking him.
“Good,” he grunted, reaching out and seizing the tether. “Fine.” He jerked down on it. “I’ll come to you.”
Hand over hand, claw over claw, he pulled, drawing his prey and the corpse he perched upon ever closer.
One more hard pull brought him within reach and Gariath seized the opportunity. His claws were hungry and lashed out, seeking green flesh. That green flesh flew again, however, leaping from the corpse. The flesh his claws found was purple and wrapped around a thick jugular.
That promptly exploded in a soft cloud of blood.
Engulfed in the crimson haze, he roared. His mouth filled with a foul coppery taste. His nostrils flared, drank in the stench of stale life. No sign of the greenshict, no scent of the greenshict. Annoying.
But merely annoying.
At least, until the shark.
He saw the teeth only a moment before he felt them as they sank into the flesh of his bicep. He had seen worse: steel, glass, wood. That was small comfort when this particular foe was hungry, persistent. Its slender gray body jerked violently, trying to tear off a stubborn chunk.
Gariath snarled, struck it with a fist, raked at it with a claw. The beast tightened its grip, snarled silently as it shredded skin, growing ever more insistent with each attempt to dislodge it.
It was only when he felt the stick lash out and rap against his skull that he remembered there was a reason for trying to fight off a shark on dry land.
He staggered out of the cloud, his writhing parasite coming with him, his suddenly bold foe right behind him. The corpse went flying into the sky and the rest of the sharks flew for the easy meal. Not his. He would have to get the only shark with principles.
The greenshict leapt, stick lashing out like a fang. It struck against wrist, skull, leg, shoulder, anywhere that wasn’t a flailing claw or a twisting fish. The pain was intense, but it wasn’t as bad as the insult of being beaten with a stick. Gariath fought between the two, dividing his attention between the shark and the shict and failing at fending off either.
A choice had to be made.
And the shark was only acting out of hunger.
When the stick came again, Gariath’s hand shot out to catch it. He found a wrist instead and, with a sharp twist, made it not a wrist. The greenshict’s limb came apart with a satisfying snap,
not as satisfying as the shriek that followed.
Gariath held onto that sound, clutched it like an infant clutches his mother. He used it to block out the pain as teeth sawed through his flesh. He used it to ignore the sensation of being tasted. He used it to find enough strength to tighten his grip, twist his body, and fling.
A discus in flight, the greenshict flew through the corpses, twisting violently through the air before crashing onto the road and skipping like a stone, each impact punctuated with a cracking sound. He skidded to a halt slowly-bleeding, broken, but breathing.
He didn’t flow to his feet. He rose and staggered like an earth-bound thing. His body protested with popping sounds, bones setting themselves aright as he swayed on his feet. Gasping, he sought his stick and found it nearby. With the taste of his own toxic blood in his mouth, he turned to find his foe.
The shark’s glassy eyes and gaping mouth greeted him.
A gray hide kissed a green cheek. The fish’s razored flesh ripped apart the tender skin of the greenshict as Gariath swung the beast like a club, smashing it against his foe. The dragonman’s hands bled, the writhing tail causing denticled skin to rub his palms raw.
Small price.
One hundred pounds of writhing, coarse hide struck at the greenshict. Countless saw-teeth ripped at his flesh in a blind panic. Fins slapped, jaws gnashed, blood wept, bones snapped, and the screaming lasted only so long as the shict still had breath.
Gariath did not stop once he ran out. He did not stop until his foe fell to his knees, then to his belly, then to his face. Gariath gave him a few more thumps with the fish on principle before he stared down at a mess of red cuts and battered green skin, the creature hanging limp in his hands, a flaccid spine encased in so much useless meat.
Gariath released the beast from his grasp. It never even struck the ground, but lazily drifted into the thick air above, another course for its former brothers’ grim feast.
The dragonman was bleeding, breathing hard. Every step brought back echoes of the greenshict’s stick, his bones still rattling inside him. But that was more than could be said for the long-eared thing. He knelt beside his green foe, reached down to seize a fistful of blood-smeared hair and twisted it up to face him.
What looked back at him was only half a face. One eye was lost in a thick mass of bruising, the other held only the faintest glimmer of life. The greenshict’s nose had become a flute: a mess of holes through which breath whistled faintly. All these paled next to the creature’s grin, though, as he smiled at Gariath with only half his teeth, the other half either scattered on the ground or embedded in the shark’s hide.
“Good fight,” the greenshict rasped.
“I won, so yeah,” Gariath replied.
“You didn’t.”
Gariath glanced over the unmoving mass of red, purple and green that was the greenshict’s body. “I don’t know. By anyone’s standards, the fighter that looks like a half-digested turd at the end is the one who lost.”
“That is fine. Whether you live or die is irrelevant to the victory.” He smiled a little broader. “Your death is not our concern.”
Gariath narrowed his eyes, growling. “Whose is, then?”
“One of our own’s.”
“The pointy-eared one? You wanted to kill her?”
“We saved her. We cured her. By killing the other one.”
“And how do you intend to kill Lenk when I’m about to force you to kiss the stones?”
“There are more of us. I keep you away. Inqalle will have killed him by now. Naxiaw will have cured her by now. She will be safe.”
Gariath said nothing as he stared through the greenshict, into nothingness. When he spoke, it was soft. “Why are you telling me this?”
“To remind myself,” the greenshict rasped, breath harsh and bleeding, “why I am dead.”
“For her? All this, for her?”
He stared into Gariath’s eyes, even as the last flicker of life left his.
“For family,” he replied, “everything.”
Gariath released him. His head fell unceremoniously to the stone where it lay. Where he lay. Unmoving.
Instantly, the dragonman regretted not having smashed his face into the pavement. He wondered if he still could, just out of spite. Not that it would matter, the shict had still spoken and Gariath could still hear those words.
And they irritated him, like an itch at the very center of his back.
His stare drifted away from the corpse and farther down the road as his thoughts drifted to the human. To Lenk.
And the words still bothered him.
“He is not floating, I see.”
Only rarely did Gariath ever take offense at being sneaked up on. Only rarely did anyone ever do it without the consequence of being crushed into a pulp. When he whirled, he caught a pair of yellow eyes peering out from beneath a bone headdress.
Shalake glanced down at the greenshict’s corpse.
“The sea is picky as to who it takes up to the clouds. Perhaps this one would not have fed the sharks as well as the purple things.”
“We are far from the sea,” Gariath pointed out.
“Sky, sea. .” Shalake shrugged. “The difference is pointless on Jaga. Enough blood has been shed here that the island took it as its own, used it to find its own life.”
“Whose blood?” Gariath asked.
“Everyone’s. Demon’s, Shen’s, human’s. . Rhega’s.”
Another word that bothered Gariath. “You speak the name like you’ve been saying it for a long time.”
“We have stories of the Rhega,” Shalake replied, head turning down a bit. “And only stories. You are the first we have seen since the war.”
“A war. .”
Gariath remembered. The bells, the monoliths, the destruction on Jaga. The bones, the corpses, the decaying weaponry on Teji. The spirits. The ghosts. The Rhega.
Grandfather. .
“What kind of war?” he asked. “Who did the Rhega fight? How did they die?”
“I am the warwatcher. I lead the battles. I swing my shenko. Mahalar holds the stories.” He eyed Gariath’s injuries. “Also, the medicine.” He turned about, began to stalk down the road. “Come, Rhega. We will tell you.”
“Tell me what?”
“Everything we can.”
He watched Shalake a moment longer. Then, a stray scent caught his nostrils. The familiar odor of fear and lust and pain and anger that always came with humans. It hung in his nostrils for a single desperate moment, almost overpowering as it cut through the thick air before disappearing.
Back down the road.
“You have something else you need to attend to, Rhega?”
Gariath looked down the road for a moment before turning.
“I have nothing.”
NINETEEN
DEATH LANTERNS
Beneath the world, between earth and hell, the differences between life and death seemed more trivial.
The chasm stretched out into a vast trench beneath the highway, a great and cavernous maw into which the sun was swallowed and promptly digested in a stomach of stone and sand.
Here, the signs of battle hung like afterthoughts, a bad dream that could never really be forgotten: corpses entangled amidst the phosphorescent kelp, bones layering the earth, weapons shattered into shards, and the bells, hanging from cliffs, half-buried in sand, swaying delicately and precariously from nooses of kelp and coral.
In the stillness, silence. In the darkness, death.
And still, there was light.
The luminescent violet glow of the kelp and coral was made all the more vivid by the lack of sunlight, painting the sands the color of a dying sky, giving the skeletons an insubstantial flesh, casting a thousand different hues in the reflections of a thousand shattered weapons.
And still, there was life.
Or supposed life, anyway.
They hung; like lanterns, like mirrors, or perhaps like stars that had fallen too far and
had forgotten how to get back home. But they hung, in quivering and undulating blobs, thick as jellies, weightless as feathers, their tendrils hanging from viscous bells to brush against the sea floor and caress the hollow cheekbones of the dead.
A beautiful sight, Lenk would have thought as he darted between their reaching tentacles, had he not been struggling to keep footing and breath alike. He would have to make a note to come back and reflect on the beauty when he wasn’t running for his life.
Somehow, the interesting things only ever seemed to crop up when someone was trying to kill him.
And this time he had not the sense to notice the life around him. Because this time he had not the sense to think beyond a single word.
Run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run. .
“Turn around, fool,” the voice hissed in reply, trying to wrest control from him with an icy, unseen grasp. “Turn and fight.”
No sword, no sword, no sword, could be anywhere, anywhere, can’t see her, can’t hear her, run, run, run, run, run-
“There is nowhere to run.”
Before him, a world the color of a bruise stretched into infinity: great wreaths of violet kelp swaying upon a carpet of sand and bone. Behind him, a world of refuse ran with no end in sight: skeletons of many creatures spread on every spike of coral and swath of kelp with artistic abandon.
Around him, nothing but darkness, offering no escape. In which anything could hide. Including him.
He ran toward a crop of kelp, weaving himself into the folds of it, trying to disappear amidst the violet plantlife.
“This cannot save you,” the voice whispered. “Not hiding. Not running.”
“Kill them. Kill them all.”
“Hate them. Want them to die.”
“They want us to hurt. We can’t. Not anymore.”
“There is only one way out,” the voice spoke: louder, colder, clearer than the others.
They scratched at his skull, it gouged deep furrows in his eardrums. Theirs were a thousand gnats buzzing in his ear, it was a cricket chirping on the surface of his brain. They growled, hissed, whimpered. It commanded.