by Sam Sykes
He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. Because he knew she couldn’t not acknowledge it, because he knew she had to ask.
Because he knew her. As she knew him.
Somehow, she had always known.
“I’m not going to ask.” She forced her jaw firm, stared into the darkness of his hood. “Just show me.”
He waited a long moment, a black pit staring at her. Then, slowly, he inclined his head. His hands went up to his hood. His fingers tugged it back. She held her breath.
He looked much as he had. Paler, of course, but she had been expecting that. But he was still handsome, his jawline still strong, his smile still easy. But his eyes didn’t gleam as they used to. The mischief and the malice and all the secrets they had hidden were gone, and left behind was something dark, something so dark it swallowed the light.
And so, so sad.
“Hey,” Denaos said.
“Hey.” She did not try to weep, yet the tears came all the same, sliding down her cheeks. “You look … you look good.”
“Oh yeah? You think so?” He gestured to his face. “Well, you know, the gods give you a gift, you do your best to take care of it.”
He cracked a grin. And it looked just like the countless ones he had given her. His lips were pale, but other than that? It was just like him, only … not.
It would have been easier if he were a monster, some rotting thing with the bones of his cheeks exposed and hollow eyes. But it looked just like him. Like he had never left. Like she had never left him.
“Yeah.” She nodded shakily. “You’re … you look …” She stared at him. She bit her lower lip. She shook her head. “You look great.”
He reached a hand out to her. “Asper …”
“FUCK!” she screamed. She buried her face in her hands. She clutched her hair and tried to tear it out. “I can’t! I can’t fucking do this! I can’t pretend like you aren’t … you aren’t …” She looked at him with desperate, tear-streaked eyes. “What the fuck are you?”
He blinked. If her tone bothered him, he didn’t show it. He stared into the fire. His eyes did not reflect its light.
“Dead,” he said, softly. “I don’t have a fancy title for it or anything. I’m just … dead. I went into the river. I went somewhere dark. And when I came out, I was like …” He held up a hand, tugged free a glove. Four pale stumps where fingers should have been wriggled. “You’d think she’d at least give me back my fingers, but beggars, choosers, you know how it goes.”
“She? Who is she? Who did this to you?”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said, tugging his glove back on.
“What do you mean, ‘don’t worry about it’? How do I not worry about this? Why should I—”
“Because you have bigger problems,” he replied, terse. “Fuck, you always did this. Go around talking about faith, about trusting a higher power, but you have to go and demand an explanation for everything. I’d expect this shit from Dread, but not …”
He saw the tears running freely down her face. His voice trailed off. He sighed, then lowered his head.
“How is Dread, anyway?”
“He’s … he’s bad.” She shook her head. “He’s gone. I don’t know where. I don’t know where Kataria or Lenk are, either. Or … or …”
She all but toppled forward with how her head came crashing into her hands. Tears fell through her fingers, pattered on the floor. The sound that came from her was something that had been born long ago, feeding for months, growing fatter every time she tried to deny it. A long and ugly sound that she was ashamed to make in front of him, in front of anyone.
And through it, she could but make a shuddering whisper.
“I’m sorry.”
“What?”
“I’m sorry, Denaos,” she sobbed. “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t fucking—”
“I should have saved you. I should have helped you. I should have listened to you. I’m sorry for failing you, like I failed Dreadaeleon. Like I failed this city. Like I failed Gariath and … and …”
Something cold slid around her wrist. His hand slowly took hold of hers. He gently pulled it away from her face. With his other, and all his missing fingers, he tilted her chin up. His smile was colorless. His smile was cold.
But it was his smile.
“You always do this shit, too, you know?”
“What?” she asked.
“Dreadaeleon was a shithead. He was our friend, but he was a shithead. This city treated you like garbage. Gariath tried to kill you and I never once listened to you. And somehow, you take all these facts and pretend like they’re your fault.”
“They are!” she insisted. “I could have done something!”
“How?”
“I don’t know. I could have thought of something. I could have fought harder, I could—”
“What would that have done?”
“It’d … it’d work out, somehow, I don’t know! But I could have done something. I should have done something.”
“Why?”
“BECAUSE I’M THE ONLY ONE WHO TRIES, GODS DAMN IT!”
It all but tore itself from her throat. She hadn’t been thinking it. She barely realized that she had said it. But it came, all the same, and it hung in the air between them.
She was the one who tried. She was always the one who had struggled for something bigger. She was the one who had fought the hardest for the smallest stakes. She had always tried.
And she had always failed.
And that realization, even as it felt like an iron coming off her chest, felt like a dagger being driven into her breast. She felt the urge to cry again, or simply to lie down and not move for a long time.
But Denaos simply squeezed her hand. His smile didn’t falter.
“I wonder what you did to piss off Talanas so that he stuck you with a bunch of fuckers like us,” he said.
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
“You did. Because you’re right. You are the one who tries. You’re the one who always wanted to do things differently, even if we didn’t.” He shrugged. “You’re also kind of a smug asshole about it, but that’s besides the point.”
“This isn’t making me feel better.”
“If I wanted to make you feel better, I’d tell you about the times I almost showed you why they called me Silky Digits back in Redgate.”
“How was that—”
“What you need is to hear the truth,” he interrupted. “Gariath, Dreadaeleon, Lenk … they were all going to do whatever they were going to do. And me …” He smiled sadly. “Everyone pays their debts, eventually. You can’t do anything for us now, no matter how hard you try. But because you’re you, you’re going to keep trying. So try for someone that needs it.”
He gestured to the window with his chin.
“It’s a little before midnight right now. Khoth-Kapira won’t come now, she said. He wants to give the city time to appreciate his presence, to savor him. He’ll be here soon, though. Tomorrow.”
She nodded. “I’ll be ready.” She sniffed. “I’ll fight harder this time. I’ll—”
“You don’t have the soldiers to fight him. What you have is a city full of people who you said you’d protect.”
She shook her head. “How do I do that?”
He smiled. “That’s where you try.”
The tears had stopped without her noticing. The pains had abated. She stared at his hand, fingerless and maimed, and frowned.
Could she have truly stopped that from happening? Any of this? Maybe Denaos was always going to end up carved up like dinner. Maybe Gariath was always going to one day turn against her. But if that was the case, why did she even try with any of them?
And, without knowing, a smile tugged at her face.
Because he knows me, she thought. And I’m the one who tries.
And without quite realizing it, she whispered, “I can do this.”
FORTY-ONE
THE
DEMON REPENTANT
When they had just been ink stains on a map, they had been easier to handle.
Their scent had been pungent, but only slightly. They had been easy to count, easy to track. They hadn’t even been real: just a few black blots on a ratty old parchment.
But now the smell of their rotting bodies was overwhelming. The sight of them was too many to count. And no matter how many times he tried to envision them as ink stains on a map, they were still corpses.
Corpses that had been warriors.
Corpses that had followed him into battle.
Corpses that had cheered his name just moments before they had died.
Gariath couldn’t even see them all from the top of the rock, but he knew they were there: impaled on spears, ripped limb from limb, ground into the earth. They had given their lives.
All so he could face a single human he hadn’t even been able to kill.
That was the part that stuck in his hide like an arrow—or another arrow, at least. He felt no guilt for leading the tulwar to their deaths. Neither they nor he had ever pretended they wouldn’t die. But he had promised them good deaths, deaths at the hands of warriors, deaths that would mean their children wouldn’t have to fight so hard.
And instead he had given them a meat grinder. Instead he had led them into the jaws of the shicts and their thousands of arrows for teeth. Instead he had led them into … into …
Whatever the fuck he was looking at.
Gariath had seen demons before. And before, the word had always seemed like a fancy way to say big thing that takes slightly longer to kill. But the great shadow that loomed over the pass, the titanic creature that looked down over creation through baleful white eyes as a crown of serpents coiled upon his brow …
It would take a great long time to kill that thing.
He was miles away, yet Gariath could still see him clearly, so huge did Khoth-Kapira stand. The great demon could rampage across the Green Belt, if he chose, be at Cier’Djaal in a few great strides and topple the entire city in just a few more. Yet, for a reason known only to the demon, he seemed to be concerned primarily with surveying the ruin of the battle that had been, the madness he had ruined good deaths with.
But, Gariath supposed, if the demons hadn’t killed them, it would have been the shicts. And if it hadn’t been the shicts, they would have broken on the humans.
In a moment of quiet, a single thought echoed through his mind.
It was all for nothing.
Suddenly, Khoth-Kapira swept his gaze toward Gariath’s perch. There was a temptation to call out to the demon, to challenge him to come and finish the job he’d started.
But what would be the point?
It was a weariness, bone-deep and etched in every wound, that dragged him to the edge of the dune, down its face, and made him trudge to a small clearing nearby. And every step he took, he felt more tired. By the time he reached it, and the two shadowy shapes sitting in the shadow of an abandoned shack, he had forgotten how his legs worked and simply collapsed, seeing no particular need to rise up again.
Chakaa didn’t seem to notice. She was busy reaching around her back, tongue stuck out and one eye shut in concentration as she groped for something she couldn’t quite reach. After a moment, her face lit up.
“Hah!”
There was the sound of something tearing. She jerked free an arrow, a tuft of her black fur hanging from its head, and held it up proudly.
“I thought I would never get that out.” She glanced to the much larger shape sitting beside her. “Not that you were any help.”
Her gaambol, some great black-furred thing, opened a single yellow eye and regarded her with keen distaste before returning to resting. She snorted and glanced over at Gariath, who was sprawled out with considerably less grace than a gigantic, smelly monkey.
“Or you,” she added.
Gariath didn’t see the point in responding.
Chakaa looked up over him. She squinted into the night and frowned.
“It hasn’t moved,” she said. “Why does it just sit there, staring at the dead? Does it admire our work?”
Gariath had known demons to be many twisted things, including macabre. It wouldn’t surprise him if Khoth-Kapira was simply taking in the grandness of the slaughter. But he had expected cackling, depraved smiles, wild-eyed glee.
All he could recall on the demon’s face was a very long frown.
But he didn’t see the point in telling her that, either.
“It’s not chasing the clans, then.” The sigh she let out was not a sound he thought he had ever heard from her. “That is some small fortune, at least. The clans escaped. The ones that were left, anyway.”
Left?
Had there been any left? When Gariath had looked out on the devastation, the road of corpses, it seemed all he had seen was tulwar bodies, mangled and broken and ground into the earth. He found it hard to remember what a living tulwar looked like. When he pictured the faces of Daaru and Mototaru, he saw only the same wide-eyed, openmouthed mask, all features twisted away in agony, repeated over and over.
“And there will be more clans,” Chakaa said. “Reinforcements must have reached our camp by now. Soon, we will be strong enough to fight again. Soon, we will have the steel to bring this beast low. And what a crash it shall make when it is! We shall—”
“Would you shut the fuck up already?”
The words oozed out of his mouth like spittle. He flung an arm over his eyes and growled into the night.
“It’s over. If the clans ran, they should keep running. They should forget the people who died here. And the ones who did should wait until their Tul spits them out into a new body or however the fuck this works and pray they don’t remember anything about this mess.”
He flashed a sneer at her. Behind her white paint and the spatters of blood, her face was empty.
“Big dramatic speeches are something humans puke out when they know they’ve lost. They make big words to hide behind and pretend they’re not small and stupid. Don’t pretend to be as small and stupid as they are. This wasn’t a fight. There was never a fight. There’s not going to be another one.”
That was that. He’d finally said it. And now he waited for her to go away and leave him to die.
Chakaa was crazy, but she wasn’t stupid. Even a mind as damaged as hers could see that he was right. And if she couldn’t, all she had to do was go out over the ridge and look at the corpses. Then she would leave, go back to wherever the Mak Lak Kai festered, and he could get on with the business of joining the dead.
“You’re wrong.”
The voice wasn’t hers. It was so soft and so gentle that it had no business being in a mouth that spit blood and hurled war cries like they were spears. So he simply snorted.
“I’m never wrong,” he growled.
“You are about this one,” she said. “There will be another fight.”
“There won’t. This is over.”
“Then there’ll be another one without you. There will never be an end to fighting because that is what tulwar do. We are born, we fight for what little we get, we die, and then we come back and do it again. This is why the Tul brings us back, because the fighting is never done. Stay here, the clans will still fight. Die here, the clans will still fight. This demon-thing burns the world to cinders, the clans will fight for the ashes, the Tul sending them back over and over.”
“Except you,” Gariath replied. He eyed her sidelong. “Daaru told me that the malaa don’t come back.”
She pressed her lips together and nodded. “That is true.”
“Then you don’t need to fight,” he said. “You can let go. Or you can fuck off and go do whatever you want. You don’t need to fight for them, either.”
“That is also true.”
“They fear you.”
“And that.”
“They hate you.”
“And that, as well. You have a point somewhere, maybe?”
“That is the point, idiot!” He roared to his feet, baring teeth at her. “This whole thing, all this death, it’s been for nothing! We came here to break the humans, we didn’t. They didn’t die well, they just died! Shicts shot them, humans stomped them, demons tore them apart, and we have nothing to show for it but a chunk of wet earth.”
He stormed toward her, thrust a claw in her face.
“And you, the one whose name they spit on, want to go back and fight again? For what? Do you like the taste of their spit?”
“No.”
“Then don’t be an idiot,” he snarled. “Leave them. Go fight for yourself.”
She shook her head. “I can’t do that.”
“Why?”
She looked down at the arrow in her hands, wrenched from her own body, bloodless. She rolled it around in her fingers, toying with it.
“Because if I do …” She looked up at him. “If you do, they go back to fighting over nothing. They go back to fighting over too little food to eat and too little land to rest on.” She shrugged. “And what do they care? When they die, the Tul takes them, and they are born again somewhere else. Maybe somewhere better. Maybe worse. And if it is, they just die again and the cycle repeats.”
She tapped the arrow to her arm, to her leg, to her torso. To the dozens of knotted scars across her flesh, to the wounds she had earned that day that refused to bleed.
“But not the malaa,” she said. “We get only what we have now. And what we have now is clans that hate us, Humn that fear us, land that is not ours.” She regarded him thoughtfully. “But with you … we had something more.”
“We had death,” he spit. “That’s all I gave them.”
“They were going to get that, anyway. Do not be so arrogant to assume you’re the only one who can kill people. I do it all the time.” She hummed thoughtfully. “When you told the Mak Lak Kai to lead the charge, they did so eagerly. We were pleased for the opportunity.”
“The honor.”
“I didn’t say that. I said ‘opportunity.’ We wanted to show the other clans. We wanted to protect them. But mostly, we wanted to push forward to this land you were leading us to.”