It is, I discovered, not an enjoyable one.
A wide channel of seawater lay like a fat canvas of pooled ink beneath us, a broad tail of pale moonlight gushing across it. Sometimes the clouds would come and take the moon hostage, which made it worse. Maybe it was serene at first, soaring above the night sea, but after a while, it feels you’re rushing headlong into oblivion. The blackness tugs at your eyes, blends everything together in a distinct depression of lifelessness. I knew the ocean churned below the spindles of fire from the phoenix’s wings, but up here, it looked as dead as a dreamless sleep.
Whether we’d finally caught up to the sun, or it had caught us, I couldn’t say, but after several hours, the pinkness of a ripe grapefruit crested the horizon. Lysa eventually woke, lifting her chin from the indentation it’d made between my shoulders. Tylik hadn’t slept at all. Each time I looked at him, a pair of big white ovals stared back at me.
Sometime before noon, the endless sea finally ended.
“There’s Lith,” Lysa said, pointing at the haze of clumped structures far in the distance.
Lith sat inside the bosom of crags, its rear pointed toward a shoreline of jutting gray rock that stabbed into unfurling waves. Some people have a romantic notion of the ocean, that it’s a blue wonderland edged with soft golden sand where happy thoughts proliferate. In some places, that’s true. But not here. Here, if you went for a brisk walk at the water’s edge, you’d sooner slip and impale yourself on an earthen spike, which is where unhappy thoughts proliferate.
Once you got past the shoreline, though, the harsh landscape unraveled into fields of grass and colorful meadows. Well, at least when I was here last, that’s how it was. Now the meadows had dried up, the flowers a crisp brown.
With a flick of my mind, the phoenix descended. “You see Patrick or Dercy’s men down there?” I asked Lysa, assuming they’d taken the city months ago.
“No. It looks empty—Astul! Astul, look out!”
I saw it coming from the corner of my eye. A blur. Moving fast, gaining speed. Rising from behind Lith.
At the precise moment my mind registered the blur as a spear — an ungodly long, thick spear — it slammed into us.
The phoenix cawed. A horrifying screech drenched in pain and terror. Like a capsizing boat, the bird wavered. Fire licked the sunburst sky as it rolled on its side.
“I’m falling!” Lysa cried.
“Hold on to me,” I hollered, looping my arms around the bird’s neck for better leverage.
Straighten, I thought. Land. Go down. Land. Fucking land!
The phoenix answered with a meager squawk. A glance to my right revealed a wooden shaft protruding from its belly.
Singed grass vaulted toward me. The earth tilted sickeningly, as if I’d gotten pissed on some good wine.
Another squawk, and the phoenix began righting itself, struggling against the air like an invisible hand was pushing it back.
It arced its back and aimed its wings toward the sea. The wind rippled its burning plumage, a loud burble that filled my skull. With a twist of its head, the bird blinked its yellow eyes at me and cawed.
My body went cold, and my skin shivered. “It’s saving us.” Astonishment muffled my voice.
With the phoenix’s wings angled to provide a buffer against the speedy descent, the ground now crawled toward us instead of lunging. But when we hit it, crawl would have been one of the last words I’d have used to describe the landing.
The malleable body of the phoenix crunched through the dry meadow, bouncing with a thud off the stiff dirt. The impact lurched me head-over-shoulders, possibly more than once.
Lying flat on my back, I gasped for breath. It hurt, felt like something in my chest had caved in. Slowly, air seeped back into my lungs, and the feeling I might be dying subsided… slightly.
Feeling that this wasn’t the proper time to take stock of my injuries, I jumped to my feet and surveyed the wreckage. The phoenix lay limp about fifteen feet away, its flames extinguished.
Something roused in the bent stalks of grass. A headful of strawberry-blond hair.
“Lysa!” I yelled, running to her. “Are you all right?”
“Ow,” she said as I helped her to her feet. She bent over her knees and groaned. “What was that?”
“A spear.”
“I know that. I mean — wait, where’s Tylik?”
With squinty eyes, I scoured the brush. Nothing moved.
“Tylik!” I called.
No answer.
“Astul!” Lysa cried. “Over here, over here. He’s under the phoenix.”
I took off toward the fallen bird, cutting down thick spires of stale grass. I fell to my knees, prepared to push the dead-weighted phoenix off my friend.
And that’s when I saw the blood. And the tip of the spear, joining Tylik’s stomach to the bird’s body. The rusted tip winked in the sun, out of the hole in his spine.
I spider-walked over to the shaft. I’d yank that fucking thing right out, stand it up tall and impale the heathen motherfucker who did this. Right up his fucking arse, till his mouth bled an orange rust.
“Astul…” Lysa laid a hand on my shoulder as I grunted and pulled.
The phoenix’s body jerked listlessly. So did Tylik.
“Astul. He’s dead. I’m sorry. We can’t do anything for him.”
Another yank. Another pull. A kick, a twist. A solid frustrated punch into the ground. I stood and wrenched my blade from its sheath.
“You,” I huffed, “haven’t seen what I have. I’m not leaving him here.”
Beyond the meadow, toward Lith, there was a rumble. A subtle roll of marching thunder.
“Um,” Lysa said. “The ground is shaking.”
“They’re not taking him,” I spat, rising my sword high above my shoulders. “Not today. Not ever. Not like my brother.”
With a furious swing, the ebon edge masticated the strong haunches of the phoenix, shattering its bones.
“I can feel it in my toes,” Lysa said. “What’s happening?”
Another swing, this one a clean cut through the remaining splinters.
I leaned down and hefted the back half of the dismembered phoenix into my arms, along with the spear and Tylik’s body. Vigor fed me all the strength I needed to carry the weight without wavering. No, anger. That’s what fed me. A lustful anger.
“Go,” I barked. “Walk.” Thunder hunted us. It lurked closer by now, a threat that boomed in my ears. “Actually, run.”
Tylik’s head bobbed in my arms as I jogged behind Lysa. His blood had turned cold, soaking a chill into my flesh as it seeped through my jerkin.
We took cover behind a large slope. I laid Tylik on the ground and withdrew an ebon dagger, the only one I had left.
Flecked sparks jumped from the flint as I struck it with my sword.
Lysa grabbed my arm. “What are you doing?”
“I have a theory,” I said. A couple more strikes and some smoke winnowed beneath Tylik. Starting a fire isn’t always so easy, but parched grass can make even a novice look like he knows what he’s doing.
Flames ticked upward as the air fed their hunger. Tylik’s blood was burbling.
An urgent tapping of fingers knocked against my back. “Um. Astul. Um. There are—” Lysa fell silent, simply pointing into the meadow from where we’d come. Finally she said, “They look like an army… that’s dead.”
Bones and ill-fitting flesh scoured the meadow. They were on their knees, crawling and sniffing about. Then one of them picked its head up. It had coal for eyes. At least until it saw us, then there was a glimmer, like the universe imploding.
“Run,” I said.
Chapter Six
You can’t always trust your eyes. They play tricks on you sometimes. They lie to you, conjure up things that aren’t really there, or hide things that are — like a doorsill that I’d once tripped over while piss drunk. That’s also the story that explains the scar above my brow.
I wi
shed more than ever that my eyes were filthy liars now. But as I took a gander behind me, a hungry horde rampaged through the field. Folds of skin sloughed off their legs and arms, dripped like molten cheese from their cheeks.
“Over there,” Lysa said, gesturing with a flick of her hand toward the craggy shore.
The ocean? How could that possibly improve our situation? Unless dead things couldn’t swim, we’d wall ourselves off. At least by moving headlong into open terrain, there was a chance we could outrun them.
But Lysa had already taken off toward the shore, ignoring my not-so-kind request to reconsider.
“You’re bloody stubborn, you know that?” I hollered, bounding after her down a serrated rock slope wet with sea spray.
My feet hauled off in different directions as the soles of my boots slid across muck, sending me thumping onto my ass. I bounced back up, back bruised, cheeks feeling like I’d been at some alternative brothel where the women wielded whips.
Earthen shards and pockets of wet sand pockmarked the terrain. A misplaced narrow channel of red water discolored the dirty sand. No, not water. Blood. Leaking from a cut on Lysa’s foot.
She refused to slow. In fact, with each glance she shot back at the dead who pursued us, she seemed to move faster.
I didn’t need to look back. I could hear them, growling, cawing with distorted voices thick with phlegm. Some of them sounded like their brains had been cut to bits, a sloshing and gurgling in their throats. But others, they spoke. Tongues forming words that you don’t ever want to hear a dead man say. Things like, “I’ll off your fucking cock.” That there is a vision that, while depraved in and of itself, sounds even more perverse coming from a jaw half rotted off.
Bright red shells of big crabs burrowed themselves in the sand as their homes trembled. I leapt over what rocks I could, climbed over those I couldn’t, and went right around those big fuckers that towered like trees with pointy swords at the end.
Lysa unexpectedly ducked and swerved left, vanishing behind an outcropping of black slate. Following a pair of bloody footsteps brought me to her. She was on all fours, hair flinging to and fro as she crawled desperately toward a gaping hole cut inside the shelf that separated the fields from the shore.
Moments later, we were sitting — quite uncomfortably — inside darkness. A low lithic ceiling pressed down against the back of my neck.
The dumb broad had led us into a dead end. Lovely.
Well, not much to do now, except wait for the uglies to come and take us. Shove their bones right up our asses, gouge out our eyes, whatever it was they did. Could it still be considered necrophilia if you were fucked by a corpse, rather than the other way around? I’d hate to go down as Astul, A Necrophiliac in the end.
Lysa shivered against me. I wanted to push her away, tell her to go make friends with a wall. She may have been proficient at mending wounds, but getting out of sketchy situations? Probably the worst I’d ever seen. Certainly the only person who would get me killed.
But something strange happened there in that cool, wet cave: we were still alive after several minutes. In fact, the hounds of death didn’t come close to sniffing us out. Literal sniffing, mind you. They seemed to snort like a pig after truffles, mouths gaping, nostrils — if they had them — flaring toward the sky. Then, seemingly disinterested, they left.
Or had appeared to. I sure as shit wasn’t wandering out there to seek confirmation.
Silence, the oldest of friends, hung around Lysa and me for a while, until finally she said, “There’s something I guess I should tell you now.”
“I hope it’s how you can fix a cricked neck,” I said. “Because I don’t think looking straight ahead is in my future, near or distant. This cave is fit for a toddler, not a grown man.”
“It’s about why the reaped went away.”
“The reaped? Oh, so they have names now? Here I thought all relevant information was trapped inside books stuck on the shelves of the Lith library.”
Lysa scraped a loose stone along the ceiling. “The really important stuff is.”
“How do you know this? Oh, my, wait. Wait just one moment, Lysa! You’re a seer, aren’t you? Not a conjurer, but a goddamn magician who can peer into the future. Ooooh, tell me what my future holds. Do I get to make sweet love again to a beautiful, big-breasted woman, or will my cock be cut off by these reaped fellows?”
The sun waded shyly into our humble abode, creeping around the edges of the scabrous cave. It illuminated Lysa’s small, round face. She looked tired. Perhaps of me.
“If Mr. Assassin prefers being Mr. Sarcasm, then I won’t tell you anything more.”
I thrust my ebon blade into the sunlight, amplifying its black glean. “Then I’ve no reason to keep you around any longer.”
“I heard once that a real dangerous man doesn’t make threats. He doesn’t need to. To answer your question, no. I am not a seer. Do you remember me telling you how I visited Lith when I was younger?”
I grunted.
“Amielle personally brought me there. Or here, I guess. I stayed for almost two years. There was lots of studying. That’s actually mostly all I remember, the very long days of reading books and listening to lectures. How to open the hidden chambers in your mind, how to feel your way into someone else’s thoughts. Then there were ethics. Months and months of ethics.”
“Lotta good that did the conjurers.”
Lysa frowned, almost wistfully. “Well, it’s not really that simple, you know? I mean, mothers and fathers teach their children on Mizridahl to act civil, but there’s still wars, right? The conjurers didn’t necessarily disavow their ethics when they tried to take Mizridahl, just as a young boy my age doesn’t disavow his morals when he marches to war. Once he returns home, he doesn’t start killing everyone.”
I leaned back, forgot I was in a cave, and clonked my head off the ceiling. Stars dashed across my eyes.
“Are you okay?” Lysa asked.
“I’m fine, and I’m not interested in hearing excuses for those mind fuckers. Get on with the story.”
She sighed. “One day, there was this man. I’ll never forget his face. It was so pale. His eyes were blue, but not the alive kind of blue. Not an ocean kind of blue. They were so very cold. He was there to see Amielle, but she was away. He had with him what I later learned was a reaped. It looked just like those that chased us — like it’d been taken right from its grave. And that’s why there are no more free waddling chickens in Lith.”
“What?”
She grinned like a child. “I’m working on my storytelling. Now you wanna know more, right?”
“Lysa…”
“Okay, I’m sorry. But there was a chicken involved. It walked right past the reaped. The reaped immediately dropped to all fours and ripped open the chicken like an animal, stuffing feathers and bones and skin right into its mouth. Everyone, and especially myself, was frightened. But the man — the one with blue eyes — said the thing was being trained on chickens. And he said—“
“Wait,” I said, “this blue-eyed bastard — who was he? A conjurer?”
Lysa shook her head. “Most definitely not a conjurer. I’m not sure what he was. Anyway, the man said the reaped only attacked because the chicken moved abruptly, that it could see well but its sense of smell was poor.
“So, I thought if that was still true, maybe the salt from the ocean would overwhelm their sense of smell. I guess it worked, huh?”
“Wow,” I said, utterly astonished. “You are unfathomably worthless.”
“What?”
“Worthless. You, Lysa Rabthorn, are worthless. Worth-fucking-less. You knew the conjurers were associating themselves with walking, talking, animated corpses, and you didn’t say one bloody thing to me about it in Vereumene.”
“I didn’t—”
“Didn’t what? Didn’t remember? Didn’t think it was important? What did you not?”
The shadow of her scowling mouth rose up like a claw across the ceiling
of the cave. “I thought it was an experiment, okay? I never heard about them again, the reaped.” She tucked her hands into her pits and brooded. “Maybe I shouldn’t have saved you.”
“Maybe not.”
“I wish I hadn’t. I really wish I hadn’t.”
“You’d rather be anywhere else than with me right now, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Then go!” I shouted, flinging my hands wildly toward the ocean. “Go out and explore the fucking world, Lysa. Go on!”
“I’m not going out there, and you can’t make me.”
“I can make you do anything.”
She heaved herself up against me, pushing the tip of her nose into mine. “You. Don’t. Scare. Me.”
“I should.”
We both looked opposite ways, into our respective walls.
My chest burned: a hot, gaseous symptom of hatred. That’s the stuff there, isn’t it? Hatred. You push it back, ignore it, till it builds and builds. Then it erupts. Not a slow overflow, either, but rather one enormous plume of furor and malice.
Hatred — I desired it. I needed it. It dripped from my mouth like grease as I chomped down and devoured it, delighting in the anger it bred and savoring the adrenaline it pumped. The hatred wasn’t for Lysa — she was just a vessel, the nearest thing I could attach my loathing to. A reason for me to indulge.
I had a brother out there who was supposed to be dead. Now he was probably one of these fucking reaped, mindlessly preying on the living. Knowing that was a terror in and of itself, but what I didn’t know was far more frightening. Did these risen corpses retain some semblance of their mind? What if they knew and understood who they were? Another form of conjuring, perhaps.
Shit just breaks down from there. Lost a good friend in Vayle, had the Black Rot fractured into nothingness. Had every bit of my identity stripped right from my core. Who am I? I wondered. Still an assassin, or something more? Something greater? What was my purpose now? Fucking metaphysical questions I hadn’t asked since I was fifteen — mindful interrogations that quite frankly shook me to my core.
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