by Sam Sykes
He blinked.
If it’s any consolation, old man, your bowels probably won’t work enough for you to shit yourself.
There was that, at least.
That and the creeping numbness working its way through him as the rest of him shut itself down, one organ after the other. First his liver, then his bowels, then his—
“Hey!”
A noise from downstairs. One of the Librarians called out.
“The door! Get to—”
His voice was lost in the sound of wood splintering. A scream tore through the house. There was a sharp cracking sound, a scream, something heavy smashing against the wall.
A few words of power spoken. He felt the barest tingle of magical energy expelled, though even that had to be immense for him to feel it through his dead nerves. The temperature dropped inside the room. Frost magic? He couldn’t tell. Another shriek, another snap, then two more, and something heavy hit the ground.
“Something’s wrong,” the female Librarian said, leaping to her feet. “We have to help!”
“What about him?” the man asked, glancing at Dreadaeleon.
“Are you fucking stupid?” She pulled the door to the room open and snarled over her shoulder at her companion. “He’s a corpse. Leave him to—”
There was a flash of movement. Something pale appeared in the doorway. A pair of slender arms seized the woman by the throat, choking the scream out of her as they hauled her out of the room.
Dreadaeleon couldn’t see anything else. He could only hear it: the rip of flesh, the spatter of blood, the cry of the man as he leapt forward, speaking a magical word that never finished.
There was a brief silence.
There was a blur at his side.
And the room shook as the Librarian’s body flew through the air, struck the wall, and fell limp.
“You know, in my day, magic was more effective.”
A soft and feminine voice reached Dreadaeleon’s ears. He heard soft feet padding across the floor, each step accentuated by a squishing sound. A shadow fell over him. With monumental effort, he managed to look up at the person standing beside the bed.
“Things were a little more … passionate back then.”
A woman: short, brown-haired, completely naked, and painfully skinny. Her hands were on her hips, visible through her skin, red-stained fingers smearing blood across her flesh. Her smile looked too big for her thin face as she looked down at him, her lips bright with a smear of blood.
“None of these rules and regulations, just unbridled power.” She sighed wistfully, then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “I saw the first people try to harness it. I saw them draw it in. I saw them explode.” She stared emptily off into the distance. “Such bright flashes they made. They positively lit up the night.”
She looked back down at him. He stared back, motionless and silent.
“Ah. You’re the one who doesn’t believe in gods, hm?” She laid a hand on his cheek, let her fingers slither down his throat. And despite his numbness, she radiated such painful warmth that he could still feel it. “I listened to your little rants so many times. Infuriating. There were times when I wish she had simply laid me against you and let me consume you so that I could show you.”
Her voice became a purring rasp as she leaned beside him.
“There are some tortures too exquisite to have been made by mortals.” She sighed, letting her hand trail down his chest, sliding inside his shirt and groping at his flesh. Her touch burned him, but he had no voice to scream. “Mm. But I suppose this is just as good, no? Here you are, about to die, and in answer to a prayer, some divine figure descends to save you. I would love to linger and see how you explain this. Alas.”
She giggled as she stood up, swung one leg over the bed, and straddled him. She leaned down, pressed her skinny frame against him, and took his face in her hands. Her breath was foul, reeking of acrid smoke as she drew closer to him. Behind her lips, past her teeth, at the back of her throat, a red light, vile as a fever, glowed.
“This is only a brief visit,” she said, her lips brushing against his. “I’ve a lot of work to catch up on these days. But before any of that …”
Her tongue flicked out, brushed against his cheek. He smelled flesh burning.
“I have a debt to pay.”
And then she seized him forcefully, hauled him up, and kissed him.
Or, at first, he could almost pretend it was a kiss. At first, he could almost pretend it felt human. Her lips were on his. Her tongue was in his mouth. Her fingers were around his cheeks. She tasted him, breathed him in, closed her eyes. She was warm. So very warm.
And then she was ablaze.
She let out a great breath, such that her already tiny body seemed to shrink with it. He felt something enter him, passing from her mouth into his. He could feel it fill him, rushing into numb extremities and setting them ablaze. It felt as though she were breathing black smoke into him, a thousand dancing embers rising inside him, burning him from the inside. The numbness did not leave him. Not completely.
But in the pit of his blackened belly, he could feel something settle and take root. A great emptiness that yawned open inside him. The ashes of an ancient fire that had burned since the beginning.
A hunger. So deep and so painful as to make his dead body ache.
She pulled away from him. She licked her lips. Wisps of steam trailed her tongue. She hopped off him, but the warmth remained. His entire body felt like it was on fire, yet he couldn’t move to extinguish it, couldn’t find the voice for his pain.
“Do you suppose there’ll be a legend about this?” she asked. “As the years go by, will you tell the people you hurt of the mysterious creature who visited you in the night and left you with a terrible gift? Or will you pretend this is all just a bad dream?”
She shrugged and giggled. It was a frightful sound.
“My debt only begged me to give it to you, not to tell you what to do with it. But these kinds of divine interventions always come with a bit of wisdom, don’t they?”
She glanced to her side, where the male Librarian lay, trembling and broken against the wall. She reached down, hoisted him—easily one and a half times her size—up with the barest of effort. She poised him, bleeding from his head, eyes full of terror, at the edge of the bed, just a hairbreadth from Dreadaeleon’s hand.
“For what it’s worth, I can see where you’re coming from,” she said. “Vile men go unpunished while good men languish. People starve in a world that brims with plenty. Were I to look at the world as you do, I might also doubt the existence of the gods.
“But I’ve been around. I’ve seen the beauty of this world. I’ve seen the abundance of it.” She smiled. “And I have tasted it. It exists to sate, just as we exist to hunger for it. One does not truly appreciate this gift, this mortal curse the gods handed down to us, until one embraces it.”
She leaned down low. She closed her eyes. She laid a simple kiss on his forehead.
It burned.
“I’ve given you something very special, Dreadaeleon Arethenes. Use it.”
She patted the dying Librarian gently on the head. She offered a decidedly girlish giggle and, with a spry twirl, skipped out the door, her feet squishing in the pools of blood left behind.
Dreadaeleon would have called it a bad dream. He dearly wanted to, in fact. He would have liked nothing better than for this to be the last throes of his dying mind before he slipped off into nothingness.
But he couldn’t find the mind to do so. He couldn’t ignore the painful warmth coursing through his blood on a torrent of embers. He couldn’t look away from the shattered bodies around the room. He couldn’t ignore the hunger.
It did not so much gnaw at him as devour him from within. He could feel that great gaping void inside him opening wider, consuming more of him with every moment. It was something black and ancient and foul inside him. Something he couldn’t ignore.
Just as he couldn’t i
gnore the body, fresh and quivering and bleeding, next to him.
He couldn’t say how he knew to do it. Nor could he say where he found the strength to do so. But somewhere, in all that darkness inside him, he clawed up every last bit of energy he had. He forced it all into his hand. And, trembling, he raised it just a few hairbreadths.
And placed them against the Librarian’s flesh.
Everything just seemed to happen all at once, without him even trying. The heat inside him all rushed to his hand, poured into his fingertips. He saw the Librarian’s face contort in agony. He heard him let out a scream. He smelled the smoke of burning flesh as the skin gave way beneath his fingers.
And something else entered him.
The void inside him contracted, shrank. The hunger eased back, sated. The numbness began to creep away.
He drew a breath.
It was long and deep and pure.
TWENTY-THREE
THE LAST VIRTUE
Being totally honest with yourself, how much of your life have you spent running?
Lenk didn’t have the breath or the saliva to ask the question aloud, so he settled for merely thinking it.
It started with Steadbrook, right? Pulled yourself out of the ashes and the corpses you left there and started running away with them. Then you’ve just been running from one trouble, one kill, one gold coin to the next.
He found that hard to deny. Even if he had the energy to do so, he wouldn’t have been able to argue it very effectively.
All right, so admittedly, you’re really more just trudging now.
That, he thought between long drags of his feet, was even harder to deny.
But the question remains …
He looked up, stared out over the dawn creeping over the endless dunes ahead.
Where the fuck do you think you’re running to?
That was an excellent question. He could tell it was excellent because he didn’t have an answer for it and it made him profoundly uncomfortable to think about. And he had spent a very long time running from exactly those kinds of questions.
It was never a question of what he was running from. That was always fairly evident: monsters, bigger monsters, armies, angry debtors, angry lovers, a goat one time …
And, most recently, the end of the fucking world.
Likewise, it was easy to answer exactly why he was always running from something. It was just simpler to define oneself in relation to how and by what he could be maimed, eviscerated, or devoured. When life was decided by who wanted to end it, it was easy to see where to go.
And, to be fair, it wasn’t as though he was lacking for people that wanted to kill him.
He played the events of the previous night over and over in his head, without even closing his eyes, and, somehow, he still couldn’t believe they had happened.
Or rather, he couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen them coming.
Had it been arrogance that made him believe Khoth-Kapira? A belief that he, and only he, could have changed the world by releasing a demon into it? Or maybe it had just been desperation, a desire to save everyone and the fear that he couldn’t, that made him think a creature from the pit of hell could have helped him.
But he knew, in some deep and tender part of him, that it hadn’t been any of that.
He knew he had set Khoth-Kapira free because he was running, again. Running away from the fact that he couldn’t put down his sword, so he freed Khoth-Kapira to do it for him. Running away from his fear of losing Kataria, so he freed Khoth-Kapira to save her. Running, running, running …
All that running, he thought, and where are you now?
He looked down at the sand beneath his feet. About seven feet across, two deep furrows cleaved their way through the dunes. He had picked up the wagon’s tracks a few miles back and just started following them.
Back then, he told himself he had a plan—find the wagons, recuperate there, figure out what to do next. But that was a lot of running and a lot of thinking in the meantime.
And now, as he trudged up a dune, to where a tall sandy rock jutted from the crest, he found it very hard to do either.
He leaned against the stone, breathing heavily. He wiped sweat out of his eyes and stared long over the horizon. Just beyond the dunes, he could see the wagons. Three of them: the last remnants of merchants, maybe, or just a few people who hadn’t heard the desert was a dangerous place yet.
They’ll have water, he told himself. They’ll have food. You can get some of both. Somehow. You can take it if you need it. He looked down at the sword in his hand. Then, you can stop Khoth-Kapira somehow. Just like you set out to save Cier’Djaal. Just like you tried to stop killing. He licked his lips. Water. Food. Maybe a quick nap. Then save the world. Sounds doable, right?
He nodded to himself. He took a step forward. He collapsed onto the sands.
Or you could lie here and die. That’d be fine, too.
And the longer he lay there, the more it seemed like a good idea.
He looked to his left. He saw the sword lying there beside him, like a lover; the only thing that he hadn’t lost, this entire time. The only thing that he hadn’t thrown away, hadn’t driven away, hadn’t ruined. The sword was still there. The sword was always there.
It would have been so nice to lie to himself, to tell himself that these were freak coincidences that had led him to the path he had taken, that cruel fate had guided him back to bloodshed, that he had been deceived and tricked into so much bloodshed, so much chaos.
But the truth was, he was just really good at it.
Everything that had happened so far, happened because he made it happen. Every drop of blood spilled, every life taken, they had been his to claim. He had done it. All of it.
Would it be so bad, then, if he just sat here and let it end?
Not a bad thought. He tried to pull himself up but managed no better than sitting against the sandy stone. You’ve tried everything but simply sitting still and doing nothing. He closed his eyes. He let his head rest against the stone. That’s what you’ve been doing wrong this whole time.
Some part of him rebelled at the thought, of course. His sword hand itched. His shoulder ached. The part of him that knew he was at fault and should fix it—a noisy, wretched little part that he had tried to drown, smother, and suffocate at various points in his life—spoke out.
But these were faint and fleeting feelings. His thoughts came more clearly, spoke loudly.
Stopping demons, saving cities, protecting people … that’s hero’s work. He smiled. You’re no hero, are you? Heroes have things work out. Heroes get happy endings. His smile faded. Heroes get the girl.
A cold wind blew.
You’re a killer. No shame in admitting that. You were born that way, right? He nodded. Right. But the thing about killing is, you never really make things better by doing it. You just end up with more dead bodies, right? He sighed. Right. So, the best thing to do is let someone else handle this one. Take one more killer out of the world, save the world a few more dead bodies. It’s for the best, right?
The sun rose higher in the sky.
Right?
A many-legged insect crawled across his hand.
Right?
He shut his eyes tighter. He drew in a breath. He held it.
And he waited.
He lost track of time, of breath, of everything, drifting into something cold and black for a long time.
Until the sound of sand crunching under feet filled his ears.
His eyes opened reluctantly, squinted against the rising light of day. He peered down the dune as someone came trudging up the path his weary footsteps had carved in the sand.
Lenk had heard, from men who found greater meaning in blood than he could, that the dying often experienced visions before the last light left their eyes.
Images of shadows coming to drag them away were common, as were visions of past regrets and accomplishments. But far and away, he had heard, the most common were vision
s of loved ones.
To that end, he thought, it made sense that he should see her, the scrawny shict in dirty leathers, caked in sweat and grime, stalking wearily toward him. It seemed a little unfair that his dying vision of her should not be at least a little cleaner-looking, but he supposed it was fitting that the last thing he should see was her as he remembered her.
But as she trudged close enough for the stink to hit him, he knew he wasn’t dead yet.
And neither was she.
She came up to the stone, without saying a word, without sparing him a glance, and collapsed beside him. Her skin reeked of dried sweat and dust, glowed red from exertion, as she tilted a waterskin up and messily drank of it. After a noisome belch, she passed it to him without looking at him.
He, however, looked at her. Stared at her, in fact, as if to make sure she wasn’t actually just a hallucination. But the waterskin felt real as she pressed it against him, and her annoyed growl sounded real enough. And the water that he poured down his throat left him feeling alive again.
He drank as much as he could before handing it back to her. She drained the rest, tossed it away, leaned against the stone, and closed her eyes.
And, for a very long time, they simply sat there and let a heavy silence blanket them.
And, since he had ruined everything else, Lenk thought he might as well ruin that, too.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” she replied.
“Thanks for the water.”
“Thanks for not having any idea how to cover your tracks.” She pointed out toward the desert. “Picked up your trail a while back. Could have followed you in my sleep. How is it you haven’t died out here?”
“Just lucky, I guess.”
Another silence, not quite so heavy, not quite so long, fell over them.
“So,” he said, “how’ve you been?”
“Not great.” She scratched her flank. “You?”
He smacked his lips. “You first.”
She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hand. “I got kidnapped, learned that my people are following a psychotic woman hell-bent on dragging them into war, escaped, watched Shicttown burn, tried to stop her, failed, got captured again, and now I’m basically going to watch my entire race get wiped out because I couldn’t stop her.”