Black Halo

by Sykes, Sam

  ‘Fine, then,’ Kataria spat as she turned away. ‘I’ll figure it out myself, as usual.’

  The shict’s impending departure should have been a relief, Asper knew. After all, any problems Kataria was like to share were equally likely to be foul, unpleasant and possibly involving the marking of territory.

  And yet, she couldn’t help but catch a glimpse of Kataria’s face as she turned away. A choked expression, confused, lost.

  The shict had a question without an answer.

  And the priestess had an oath.

  ‘Wait a moment.’ Her own words should have been a worry, Asper knew, but she forced a smile. ‘I can listen, at the very least.’

  Kataria turned and stared as Asper took a seat upon a patch of moss, gesturing to the earth before her. With a stiff nod, Kataria took a hesitant seat before her. For an age, they simply sat, staring at each other with eyes intent and befuddled respectively. After waiting long past what would be considered polite, Asper cleared her throat.

  ‘So,’ she said, ‘what did you want to—?’

  ‘This is supposed to be anonymous,’ Kataria interrupted, ‘isn’t it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I thought there were curtains or something.’

  ‘In a proper temple, yes,’ Asper replied. ‘But … look, even disregarding the fact that we’re in a forest, disregarding the fact that you asked me to do this, I’ve known you for a year now. Kat, I know you by voice and by smell both.’

  ‘What I smell is a loss of principles,’ Kataria replied, far more haughtily than someone clutching a roach leg should be able to. ‘And you, my friend, are reeking.’

  ‘Oh Gods, fine!’ Asper loosed a low grumble as she shifted about in the earth, turning her back to Kataria. ‘There, is that better?’

  A sudden jolt was her answer as Kataria pressed her own back against the priestess’.

  ‘Sort of.’ The shict’s hum reverberated into Asper. ‘Is there any way you could do this in a different voice so—’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Fine.’

  The shict’s snarl was the last noise she made for a long moment. In the silence that followed, it occurred to Asper with some mild dismay that she had never actually wondered what her companion felt like. She had always suspected that Kataria would be more relaxed, her muscles loose and breath coming in slow and easy gulps of air.

  Someone who cuts wind with as much abandon as she does would have to be relaxed, right?

  But there was nothing but tension in the shict’s body. Not the kind of nervous tremble of dismay at having another woman’s bare flesh touching her own that now enveloped Asper, Kataria’s tension was muscle-deep, her entire body feeling like she had been twisted so tightly that she might explode in a bloody, stressful mess at any moment.

  One more regret for ever having agreed to this, Asper thought.

  ‘So, did you want to talk about?’

  ‘What’s it like?’ Kataria interrupted.

  ‘What’s what like?’

  ‘Being a coward.’

  ‘What?’ Asper began to rise. ‘Did you get me to sit down just so you could insult me? Because it seems like a lot of work for something you already do standing up.’

  ‘Wait.’ Kataria’s hand shot out and wrapped with a desperate firmness about Asper’s wrist, yanking the priestess back to the earth. ‘I mean … I’ve watched you. When we fight.’ Her grip tightened. ‘You’re scared.’

  Asper opened her mouth to retort, but found precious little to say by way of refuting the accusation, and even less to say to pull her hand back.

  ‘I suppose,’ she said, pressing her back up against the shict’s again. ‘It can be a frightening thing, combat.’

  ‘But you don’t run,’ Kataria continued. ‘You don’t back away.’

  ‘Neither do you,’ Asper replied.

  ‘Well, obviously. But it’s different with me. I know how to fight. If I can kill it, and I usually can, I do kill it. If I can’t kill it, and sometimes I can’t, I run away until I can kill it and then I come back, shoot it in the face, tear off its face and then wear its face as a hat … if I can.’

  ‘Uh …’

  ‘But you,’ Kataria said, her body trembling. ‘You look so terrified, so uncertain … and really, sometimes, I’m uncertain when the fight breaks out. I don’t know if you’ll make it out of this one or that one and I expect you to run. I would, were I you.’

  ‘But,’ Asper said softly, ‘you’re not.’

  ‘No, I’m not. I don’t stick around if it’s not certain.’ The shict leaned back, sighing. ‘It was all certain when I left the forest to follow Lenk, you know? I knew I couldn’t stay there because I didn’t know what was going to happen. But everyone knows what a monkey will do. Even one with silver fur just fights, screams, hoards gold and tries to convince himself he’s not a monkey.’

  ‘Fighting, screaming and hoarding gold is all we’ve done since we left on the Riptide,’ Asper said. ‘Come to think of it, it’s all we’ve done since I met you.’

  ‘So why doesn’t it make sense anymore,’ Kataria all but moaned as she slumped against the priestess’ back. ‘This was all so much fun when we started. But now we’re just sitting around in furs, talking instead of killing people.’

  ‘And … that’s bad?’ Asper asked. ‘I’m sorry, I really can’t tell with you.’

  ‘That’s bad,’ Kataria confirmed. ‘I should be running.’

  ‘But you’re not.’

  ‘And why am I not? Why don’t you run when you feel like it?’ The shict scratched herself contemplatively. ‘Duty?’

  She swallowed the question, and Asper wondered if Kataria could feel her own tension as it plummeted down to rest like an iron weight in her belly. Why did she stay? she wondered. Certainly not to protect her friends. I need it more than they do. To survive, then? Maybe, but why get involved at all with them, then? Duty?

  That must be it.

  Yeah, she told herself, that’s it. Duty to the Healer. That’s why you fight … that’s why you kill. It’s certainly not because you’ve got an arm that kills people that you can’t possibly run away from. No, it’s duty. Tell her that. Tell her it’s duty and she’ll say ‘oh’ and leave and then there will be two people who hate themselves and don’t have answers and you won’t be alone anymore.

  ‘Is it your god?’ Kataria asked, snapping the priestess from her reverie. ‘Does he command you to stay and fight?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ Asper replied hesitantly, the question settling uneasily on her ears. ‘He asks that we heal the wounded and comfort the despairing. I suppose being on the battlefield lends itself well to that practice, no?’

  Is that it, then? Are you meant to be here to help people? That’s why you joined with them, isn’t it? But then … why do you have the arm?

  ‘You have your own god, don’t you?’ Asper asked, if only to keep out of her own head. ‘A goddess, anyway.’

  ‘Riffid, yeah,’ Kataria replied. ‘But Riffid doesn’t ask, Riffid doesn’t command, Riffid doesn’t give. She made the shicts and gave us instinct and that’s it. We live or die by those instincts.’

  And what of a god who gives you a curse? Asper asked herself. Does he love or hate you, then?

  ‘So we don’t have signs or omens or whatever. And I’ve never looked for them before,’ Kataria continued with a sigh. ‘I’ve never needed to. Instinct has told me whether I could or I couldn’t. I’ve never had to look for a different answer.’

  Is there a different answer? What else could there be, though? How many ways can you interpret a curse such as this? How many ways can you ask a god to explain why he made you able to kill, to remove people completely, to your satisfaction?

  ‘So … how do you do it?’

  It took a moment for Asper to realise she had just been asked a question. ‘Do what?’

  ‘Know,’ Kataria replied. ‘How do you know what’s supposed to happen if nothing tells you?’

 
; How would a woman of faith know if her god doesn’t tell her?

  ‘I suppose,’ Asper whispered softly, ‘you just keep asking until someone answers.’

  ‘That’s what I’m trying to do,’ Kataria said, pressing against Asper’s back as she pressed her question. ‘But you’re not answering. What do I do?’

  ‘About your instincts?’

  ‘About Lenk, stupid!’

  ‘Oh,’ Asper said, blanching. ‘Ew.’

  ‘Ew?’

  ‘Well … yeah,’ Asper replied. ‘What about him? Do you like him or some—’

  The question was suddenly bludgeoned from her mouth into a senseless cry of pain as something heavy cracked against her head. She cast a scowl over her shoulder to see Kataria resting the gohmn leg gently in her lap, not offering so much as a shrug in excuse.

  ‘Did … did you just hit me with a roach leg?’ the priestess demanded, rubbing her head.

  ‘Yeah, I guess.’

  ‘Why did you just hit me with a roach leg?’

  ‘You were about to ask something dangerous,’ Kataria replied casually. ‘Shicts share an instinctual rapport with one another. We instantly know what’s acceptable and unacceptable to speak about.’

  ‘I’m human!’

  ‘Hence the leg.’

  ‘So you’ve graduated from insults to physical assault and you expect me to sit here and listen to whatever lunacy you spew out? What happens next, then? Don’t tell me.’ She started to rise again. ‘How many times have you been hit in the head today?’

  Kataria’s grip was weak, her voice soft when she took Asper by the wrist and spoke. Asper could feel the tension in her body slacken, as though something inside her had clenched to the point of snapping. It was this that made the priestess hesitate.

  ‘I’m asking you to listen,’ the shict whispered, ‘so that I don’t find out what happens next.’

  Uncertain as to whether that was a threat or not, Asper settled back into her seat and tried to ignore the feeling of the shict’s tension.

  ‘The thing is, we’re not even supposed to talk to humans,’ Kataria explained. ‘We only learn your language so we can know what you’re plotting next. Originally, I thought that being amongst your kind would be a good way to find that out.’ She sighed. ‘Of course, within a week, it became clear that no one really had anything all that interesting going on in their head.’

  Asper nodded; an insult to her entire race was slightly more tolerable than an insult to her person, at least.

  ‘I should have run, then,’ Kataria said. ‘I should be running now … Why am I not?’

  ‘Is it’ – Asper winced, bracing for another blow – ‘just Lenk that’s keeping you here?’

  ‘I protected him today,’ the shict said, a weak chuckle clawing its way out of her mouth. ‘He was going into one of his fits, so I stepped forward and did the talking. I protected a human.’

  ‘You’ve done that before, haven’t you?’

  ‘I’ve killed something that might have killed a human before, but I never did … whatever it was I did,’ Kataria said. ‘He just needed help and I …’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ Asper said after the shict’s voice had trailed off. ‘And you did it because of his … fits did you call them?’

  ‘Have you noticed them?’

  Asper closed her eyes, drawing in a deep breath. She wondered if Kataria could feel her tension growing, if she could feel the chill racking her body.

  Fits, she thought to herself. I have noticed no fits. I have noticed what Denaos whispers, how he accuses Lenk of going mad, slowly. I have noticed the emptiness of Lenk’s eyes, the death in his voice, the words he spoke.

  ‘Tell me,’ Asper said softly, the words finding their way to her lips of their own accord. ‘Do you listen to your instincts?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Even when they tell you something you don’t want to hear?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Let’s talk about Lenk for a moment.’

  ‘All right,’ Kataria replied hesitantly.

  ‘We don’t know where he came from aside from a village no one’s heard of, we don’t know who his parents are, what his lineage is or even where he got his sword.’

  ‘That’s not fair,’ Kataria protested. ‘Even he doesn’t know that.’

  ‘And does he know who taught him to fight?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I learned from the priests, Dreadaeleon was taught by his master, even Denaos likely learned all that he knows from someone,’ Asper pressed. ‘Who taught you to fire a bow? To track?’

  Kataria’s body tensed up again, the kind of nervous tension that Asper had felt many times before. Uncertainty, doubt, fear. It ached more than she thought it might to put Kataria through them. But her duty, too, was clearer than she thought it might be.

  ‘My mother,’ Kataria said. ‘But what—?’

  ‘Have you ever known,’ Asper spoke silently, ‘anyone who fights, who kills as naturally as Lenk does?’ At Kataria’s silence, she pressed her back against her. ‘Have you seen him after he kills?’

  Her question was not delivered with the cold, calculating tone she thought would be befitting. It was choked, quavering, but she could hardly help it. The realisations were only coming to her now, with swift and sudden horror. But perhaps that wasn’t so bad, she reasoned; perhaps Kataria would be comforted to know someone shared her plight, someone that was trying to help her.

  And she would help the shict, she resolved. Helping people, regardless of what kind of people they were. That was why she had taken her oaths.

  ‘I … I have,’ Kataria replied with such hesitation that Asper knew the same images filled her head.

  ‘I’ve seen everyone kill,’ Asper whispered. ‘I forced myself to, to know how it was done, if … if I ever had to. Denaos boasts, you exult, Dreadaeleon pauses to breathe, even Gariath took the time to snort. But Lenk … does nothing. He says nothing, he doesn’t react, but he looks … he looks …’ The dread came off her tongue. ‘Satisfied. Whole.’

  She could feel Kataria tremble, or perhaps that was herself, for she frightened herself as much as she tried to frighten her companion. But perhaps both of them needed to be frightened, she reasoned, both of them needed to be scared in the face of this new realisation that, in the absence of any demon or longface, Lenk might be the greatest threat.

  ‘Who looks like that?’ she asked. ‘What would make a man act like that?’

  Trauma? Madness? Something else? Whatever plagued him, whatever threatened him, threatened them all, Asper knew. And as she felt Kataria tremble, felt her go limp against her back, she knew her friend knew it as well.

  ‘Your instincts were confused,’ Asper said softly. ‘You wanted to run, as would anyone, but you want to help and only a few can say they would want that.’

  But in this knowledge, Asper found peace, as demented as it sounded to her. In Kataria’s sinking body, she found the urge to rise up. In her friend’s suffering, she found a strength that allowed her to reach down and take Kataria’s hand in her own, a strength that would carry her to the peace the priestess felt, a strength that would carry Lenk.

  This was her purpose, her duty.

  ‘And we will help him,’ Asper said, giving her hand a gentle squeeze. ‘It’s not gods or instinct that make us do it.’

  ‘Then what is it?’ Kataria asked, her voice weak.

  ‘You,’ Asper said gently. ‘You will do it, because you’re in love.’

  This was the moment she lived for, the moment that had been far too rare in coming lately. The face of a child told they would walk again, the exasperated gasp of a moments-old mother told their infant was healthy, the solemn nod and sad smile of a widow who heard the blessings said over her husband’s grave.

  And now, she thought, the embrace between races supposed to be enemies, the long road to helping a friend recover.

  This was it.

  This was her purpose.

>   This was why.

  She released Kataria’s hand and turned around. Her companion did not, at first, but she waited patiently. It would come slowly, with great difficulty. It always did, but the reward was always greater in coming. And so she waited, watching as Kataria tensed, as Kataria clutched the gohmn leg in trembling fingers, smiling.

  She continued to smile.

  Right up until the leg lashed out and caught her in the face with such force as to snap her head to the side.

  ‘Wh-what?’ she asked, recovering from the blow with a hand on an astonished expression. ‘I didn’t mean to say—’

  ‘I’m not.’

  The leg whipped out again, struck her in the side with more force than a leg should be able.

  ‘Okay, you’re not, but—’

  ‘I’m not.’

  Again it lashed out, found her elbow. It snapped, leaving a red mark upon Asper’s flesh covered by the stain of its basting juice. She didn’t even have time to form a reply before Kataria whirled, hurling what remained of the leg at her.

  ‘I’m not.’

  She lunged, took Asper by the shoulders and hurled her to the earth. No anger in her face, no sadness, no tears. Nothing but something cold and stony loomed over her, a face as hard as the fist that came down and cracked upon her cheek.

  ‘I’m not, I’m not, I’m not, I’m not, I’m not, I’m not, I’m not—’

  No protests from Asper, no denial but for the feeble defence she tried to muster, raising her hands to protect her face, futilely, as the shict blindly lashed out and struck her over and over, once for each word, each kiss of fist to face a confirmation, each bruise that blossomed a reality.

  And then, it stopped, without gloating, without a reason, without even a noise. Asper heard the shict flee, heard her running with all the desperation one flees for their life with.

  The sound faded into nothingness. The trees whispered as the sun began to set behind them. In the distance, toward the village, a whoop of celebration rose. Their feast was starting.

  She should rise, she knew, and go to it. She should rise, even though her body was racked with pain. She should go, even though her legs felt dead and useless beneath her. She should see the others, even though her eyes were filled with tears. She should see them, they who had beaten her, lied to her, disparaged her faith and tried to throttle her.