God's Last Breath

by Sam Sykes

  “We sensed it, too, on the upper level,” the other Librarians said. “We arrived too late to help.”

  Shinka nodded. “Unfortunately, it seems the heretic escaped. His restraints had been applied improperly.”

  “The clerks that tended to him last,” one of the Librarians said, a trace of black humor in his voice, “will be punished accordingly.”

  Shinka searched the chamber and saw one of Annis’s bodyguards—the male one—lying unconscious on the floor. She strode toward him and, with a flick of her wrist and a word of power, sent her flames out. The man’s screams were wretched, but brief, as the flames hungrily ate away cloth and flesh until naught was left but a nondescript pile of molten flesh.

  “Annis fought bravely, having tried to stop the heretic,” she said, once the screaming and the fire had both died down. “Though he succeeded in nearly incinerating the heretic, the madman’s desperation allowed him to fight well beyond his abilities.”

  She muttered a word, let out a breath. A cloud of cold frost poured from her lips, ice crystals dancing within. At her gesture, they drew together, forming a thick icicle as long as a sword. It hovered in the air, dancing at her fingers, following like a particularly vicious puppy as she returned to Annis.

  He glared up at her, breathing heavily, unable to do anything else. Though even as weak as he was, the hatred boiling off him was enough to fill the room. And yet Shinka did not so much as blink.

  Not as she flicked a finger at him.

  Not as she sent the icicle toward him.

  Not as it plunged through his chest.

  “Unfortunately, he succumbed to his wounds during the fight,” she said.

  Annis’s face contorted in agony. But no scream followed. She had aimed the icicle perfectly, driving it through his chest so that it perforated his left lung. He had no breath to scream, to gasp, to do anything but collapse onto his side and begin the long, agonizing process of choking on his own blood.

  “A true hero of the Venarium,” one of the Librarians said. “He will be remembered.”

  “He died in my arms, gasping for air,” another added. “His last words were begging me to remember his legacy.”

  “It remains my greatest shame to this day,” a third muttered, “that I arrived too late to save him.”

  Shinka watched as Annis twitched on the ground. She watched as blood dribbled from his mouth. She watched as the anger and hatred on his face slowly uncoiled into the wide-eyed emptiness of death. And when he finally stopped moving, she turned away and offered a shrug.

  “It’s not perfect, I suppose,” she said. “There are a few holes in it. But we’ve enough support in the Librarians that the concomitants and apprentices will accept our version of the story.” She narrowed her eyes ever so slightly upon the assembled conspirators. “Assuming no one is having second thoughts.”

  “Just one …” A Librarian looked toward Dreadaeleon and gestured with his chin. “What about him?”

  Shinka glanced at Dreadaeleon with a quirked brow, as though she had only just now noticed him. She went to his side, leaned down beside him, studied him coldly.

  “Dreadaeleon,” she said, “can you hear me?”

  He couldn’t imagine what his face looked like—for he couldn’t feel his face anymore. But he guessed from her deepening frown that it didn’t look good. She picked up his hand and raised it—he couldn’t feel that, either. His fingertips were black as pitch, dark veins creeping down into his palm.

  “Decay,” she muttered. “Too much magic, too quickly. It must have taken everything you had to fight Annis.” She looked to him and sighed. “I suppose it’d be too much to hope that you simply believed in our cause that much, hm?”

  “It’d be kinder to kill him,” one of the Librarians said. “He’s served his purpose.” She glanced to the incinerated carcass posing as him. “Besides, this guy is a little too tall to be the heretic.”

  “No,” Shinka said. “I made an agreement with him. We are forging a new Venarium this night and its first act will not be one of dishonor.” She sighed, lowered Dreadaeleon’s hand. “Find a way to get him out of the tower. Take him to my rooms at the Golden Lotus, at the edge of the Souk.”

  “And do what?”

  “Nothing.” She rose up. “Make him comfortable. Give him water if he’ll take it, food if he asks for it. Though I think his vocal cords were burned away. Tend to him for a few hours.”

  She looked down at him and offered him one more frown. Though there was no pity in her face, no lamentation for his fate in her eyes. Rather, hers was the fleeting sorrow of farmers who saw their tools broken before the harvest. It was weary, it was weak, it was brief.

  And she turned away from him and walked through the ashes of the hall, leaving him as just another pile of debris among many.

  “It won’t take long.”

  THIRTEEN

  AN ECHO UNSPOKEN

  How long had they run, she wondered?

  It seemed an eternity ago that they had started. The yiji had been so swift beneath them, and yet the tulwar had still chased them. Even when it had all but keeled over, panting, they couldn’t be sure they had lost their foes. And so they had sent their beast to roam in another direction while they fled south.

  The moon had been high in the sky, dropping like a stone, when they were finally so far that they could be certain they had shaken pursuit—or so tired they hadn’t cared. It had taken more time still to find the giant rock formation towering out of the dunes, to find the small cavern scarring its stony face. By the time the fire had been made, the fur had been laid out, the water had been drunk, there was no blood left in her limbs and no breath left in her lungs.

  They had run so long, so far, so swift that she felt she might simply collapse.

  And still, Kataria could not sleep.

  Or rather, it would be truer to say she would not sleep.

  Not while she still had to save everyone.

  Her fingers were trembling—whether from exhaustion or from anticipation, she couldn’t tell—as she raised the scroll before her. A piece of dried hide bound by a simple twine, a patch of dark red where the tulwar that had carried it had bled out on it.

  A simple thing. A dirty piece of leather. And yet she almost had not the will to open it, not the hope to lose if it was not what she needed.

  Her mouth dry, she didn’t think of water. Her body aching, she didn’t think of sleep. She pulled the twine free, let it unfurl.

  A map—crude lines in coarse charcoal on dirty hide—but it was unmistakably a map of the desert. Here was a marking of a destroyed village, there a drawing of a canyon, there the oasis they had fled from. And through it all ran a thin red line of dried blood. Alongside it, numbers, crosses, markings she didn’t recognize at first.

  Yet the longer she stared at it, the more it came together: the map, the words the tulwar had spoken before she had fought them, the lines and the markings.

  “Shekune.”

  Her lips trembled as she whispered the name.

  “This is it,” she whispered. “They’ve been tracking her.”

  It hardly seemed like a thing that could be done, tracking a shict. But still, Shekune moved with an army. Armies moved slowly, left signs. And if any tulwar could have done it, it would have been those tulwar who had risen from the dead as though rising from a rough night’s sleep.

  Even the unnaturalness of that encounter seemed so distant, so insignificant, compared to what she had found.

  “Look! They actually did it!”

  She looked over her shoulder, beaming. Kwar wasn’t looking at her. Her back was turned to Kataria as she stood at the cavern’s mouth, staring out over the rolling desert. She was breathing heavily, leaning on a nearby stone.

  Probably still exhausted, Kataria thought. And who could blame her? She had seen what Kwar had done to that female tulwar—all that rage, all that blood, all that screaming. It was hard to imagine that just that morning, the khoshic
t had lain still as a corpse.

  But that, too, seemed distant and insignificant. As did everything before this map, this chance.

  She studied it further, stared at it carefully. The markings that seemed alien at first slowly began to take shape. She could see crude symbols depicting pointed ears, arrows marking directions, crosses marking stops. Slowly, a pattern began to emerge.

  “It’s a loop,” she whispered to the map almost reverently, as though she expected it to smile with leather lips and nod knowingly. “Shekune makes a pattern around the desert. Setting traps, maybe. Talking to troops? Securing lines?”

  She shook her head. Her heart thundered inside her.

  “Doesn’t matter,” she muttered. “We know where she goes.” She narrowed her eyes and studied the pattern a little more closely. And it dawned on her. “They mark the number of times she’s been at one of these places. Where’s she going to be next?”

  And then she saw it.

  A crude little drawing. A tiny blotch of black coal on the hide marking a rocky pass. Just a little north of the oasis they had been at, in fact. Barely a day’s ride.

  Nothing more than a little smudge of charcoal on a dirty piece of hide.

  That was all that she needed to save everyone.

  A tiny dirty smudge was going to stop a war.

  “We did it.”

  She didn’t want to laugh. She knew it wasn’t going to be that easy. But she couldn’t help it. She laughed, despite the aches in her body and the hoarseness in her voice; she laughed so hard it carried her to her feet.

  “We know where she’s going to be next!” she laughed. “We can stop her! We can save everyone!” She turned toward Kwar. “We can …”

  She looked up from the map.

  Kwar was looking at her.

  The khoshict stood at the mouth of the cave, staring at Kataria. Her arms hung limp at her sides. Her mouth hung open, numbly. Her body shook with breath so ragged, Kataria thought she might keel over and die.

  But Kwar was alive.

  In the burning of her dark eyes, a lightless fire that brimmed with warmth. In the tremble of her skin, glistening with sweat. In the sound of her heart beating so fiercely Kataria could feel the sound of it in her own ears.

  Kwar was alive.

  “I killed them.” Kwar’s voice was soft, painfully so, the hush of a knife sliding out of a leather sheath. “I stabbed them. They just got up. I stabbed them.”

  “They were weird, yeah.” Kataria shrugged. “But we lost them. There’s nothing to—”

  “I killed them.” Kwar didn’t seem to hear her. She looked down at the ground. “I was lying there, on the dirt, and I couldn’t feel anything and I couldn’t move and I couldn’t hear …” She shook her head, swallowed hard. “But then I did … I heard …”

  She looked up. And Kataria felt the khoshict’s eyes upon her. And then, she felt the khoshict’s eyes look through her, peer past her clothes and past her skin and her hair and see something inside her that made Kataria’s belly clench.

  “I heard you.” Kwar’s ears twitched, living and trembling and excited. “I heard your Howling.” She reached up, laid a hand across her own chest. “I heard you here.”

  “You saved me.” Kataria was only barely aware of her own voice, which sounded so clumsy by comparison. She was only barely aware of how her own ears trembled. All she could feel was Kwar’s eyes, searching through her, beneath her, into her. She looked away. “Thanks. Thank you for that.”

  Kwar shook her head, giving no sign that she had heard Kataria. “And I … I didn’t think anymore. I wasn’t thinking about anything, about how heavy my head felt or about Shicttown or about Thua or … or …”

  She suddenly swept toward Kataria with such swiftness and such purpose that she almost backed away. Something inside her, that thing that clenched her belly and made the hairs on the back of her neck rise up, shouted at her suddenly to run.

  And something else inside her made her stand still.

  “And I don’t know if that makes me bad for doing that or for not thinking, but I felt … I felt good.”

  Kwar’s eyes were wide, wild with the fire burning in them. Her breath was heavy and hot on Kataria’s skin. And still she stayed.

  “I could feel my legs again. I could feel my breath. And I couldn’t think of anything …” Kwar shook her head. Her lips twisted into a snarl, baring her broad canines. Her eyes narrowed upon Kataria. “I couldn’t think of anything but … but …”

  She swept forward. Her hands shot out, seized Kataria by her arms, pinned them to her sides. Kataria saw big, broad canines rush toward her. Inside her, something let out a long, loud sound.

  There was no softness in the kiss.

  No gentleness in Kwar’s lips, no tenderness in the way her tongue slid past Kataria’s own. There was only a hungry need, a growling, trembling energy that poured out of her mouth, out of her skin as her belly pressed against Kataria’s. And it shook so hard that she might just explode.

  And still, the sound of her snarl, of her skin against Kataria’s, of her sweat sliding down her body, was not so loud as the Howling. The long, endless sound that rose up inside Kataria’s head and raced into her chest and echoed there. Long. Loud. Screaming.

  Alive.

  She broke away just as suddenly, almost shoving herself off Kataria. Her eyes were still wide and her body still shook, but this time with a sudden fear, just as primal as her hunger had been. Her mouth fumbled over her words before she found one to latch onto.

  “Sorry!” she said. She shook her head. “Sorry. Sorry. You told me not to touch you and I didn’t mean to … I just couldn’t … I had to … I felt …”

  Maybe she found more words. Kataria couldn’t tell. Kataria couldn’t hear. The noise inside her, Kwar’s Howling, only grew louder. And inside her own head, rising from somewhere deep inside her, she could hear another sound, the same one she had heard when she had almost died at the hands of the tulwar earlier that day.

  Maybe it was that noise that made her reach forward. Maybe it was something else that made her grab Kwar’s hand. Maybe it was something she had buried deep enough that she had forgotten she had it that made her pull Kwar toward her.

  Kataria couldn’t tell. Kataria couldn’t hear.

  Feet tangling, tripping over each other as Kwar slid into her, pressed her back. Cold stone on bare flesh, the chill of sweat mingled with dust as her back pressed against the cave wall. Teeth at her neck, closing down on the tender skin just beneath her earlobe. Hair in her fingers, braids twisting in her hand as she pulled her closer.

  They found the furs laid out somehow, when their legs wouldn’t carry them anymore. Kataria looked up as Kwar straddled her waist, saw a silver drop of sweat peel off her brow and fall, splashing cold upon her collarbone. The khoshict’s eyes, wild and dark against the firelight, stared at her.

  “Are you … are you sure?”

  Her body twitched. She seized Kwar by the hand, pulled her down toward her. They tumbled across the furs until Kataria rose up over her. She leaned down on her hands, her hair brushing across Kwar’s face as she felt a smile spread across her own.

  “Trust me,” she whispered.

  Her hand found Kwar’s cheek, just as Kwar’s hand found hers. The khoshict closed her eyes, smiling as she sought to hang on to that hand as it slid downward. Kataria felt the trembling, twitching anger in her body—the roar that spoke so loud inside her that it drowned out all the sorrows and all the hates that had come before.

  Kataria’s fingers brushed lightly across her neck, trailing down over her collarbone, sliding between her breasts. Her stomach tensed, fine hairs rising in a halo around her navel as Kataria’s hand fumbled at the knot of her sash, tore it free. The cloth of her kilt fell away in folds. The muscle of her leg tensed, as Kataria’s hand slid down it, over it, between it.

  She leaned down closer. Kwar looked up at her with eyes that she had thought she had never seen, an impish cu
rl of a smile that she once thought was gone. And she felt her own smile grow broader as she closed her eyes, leaned down, and pressed her brow to Kwar’s.

  “I missed you.”

  Her fingers wandered up, found soft skin and the shudder of a breath drawn quick and held. Kwar’s hand slid around her, pulled her close. She felt the dust and sand that covered Kwar mingle with her sweat, the coarseness of the mixture on her own skin as she pressed herself against the khoshict. She felt the curve of her back as she arched her neck for sharp teeth to find. She felt fingers curl around her arm, draw her close with such desperate need that it ached more deeply and sweetly than all the agonies that had come before.

  If there were words, she did not have them. They were lost in the sound that rose up. No mournful cry, no savage roar, no anger or hate or sorrow behind their Howling. Just two wordless voices, two tuneless songs, meant only for each other and silent to the world.

  Until the nails drew red across the pale skin of her back. Until Kwar’s belly pressed up as her back arched and she let out a soft cry into the night. Until Kataria fell upon the furs, hair matted in damp locks against her brow, and her body would barely find the strength to draw breath. Until they lay there, Kwar’s head against her chest, her arm around Kwar’s waist, and their Howling went so soft it was just another breeze across the desert.

  She didn’t want to say anything. Words felt so clumsy now, dumb and useless. But still, they clawed their way up her throat and into her mouth. She tried to keep them there, hidden behind her teeth.

  It should have been easy to forget that they lived in a world where they needed clumsy words. It should have been easy to forget that they lived in a world that would be torn apart before too long. It should have.

  But times like these, when she felt someone warm and brimming with life beside her, were too rare.

  And this world would never be so kind as to let her forget that.

  “I have to stop her.”

  They hung in the air, in the smoke of the dying fire, so long that she thought Kwar hadn’t heard her—or wouldn’t.

  “I have to kill her.”