by Sam Sykes
She spit onto the ground. Her ears flattened against her head. She scowled down at her feet.
“Yeah, I did it. I let your army die. I let Asper’s army die. I let my people go make themselves into murderers. And I did it for him.”
She stared up at him, right into those stone-knife eyes.
“And because I did, he’s alive. I chose him. I chose to save him. And at least one person is alive because of me.” She met his stare and she did not blink. “How many are alive because of you, Gariath?”
She expected him to strangle her right there. Or maybe snap her like a branch and toss either half of her aside. Or perhaps he’d just open his mouth a little wider and bite out her throat right then and there.
That would all be fine, she thought.
If he killed her right now, she would die as the only shict, the only woman, the only person on this dark earth who had ever struck Gariath, killer of monsters and men, totally speechless.
And for a moment, as his body tensed and his hands curled up into fists, she thought that was just what he was about to do. She gritted her teeth, she met his scowl, and she did not turn away.
The blow came.
Again and again, his fist rose and fell.
And with each blow, red smears blossomed.
He continued to hit the side of the shop, until there was a deep dent in the wood and splinters were lodged in his skin and his blood painted the wall. And when he could hit no more, he snarled, he roared, he cursed the shop for not falling down when he needed it to.
And when his voice had been exhausted, he let loose a great, heavy breath and slumped to the stones.
“There was someone I could have killed.” His voice came out on a ragged breath. “Someone I could have broken. I could have killed someone and stopped this.”
“That’s not how it works.”
“That’s always how it works.”
“Not this time, you dumbshit,” she grunted. “It never did work. We’ve just been killing this whole time hoping it was going to get better and lead to something else, but it hasn’t. And if all I get to walk away from this with is just one person, just …” She winced, as though it hurt to say. “Just him. Then that’s what I’ll take.”
She stalked to where she had left her bow and quiver and snatched them up. She walked back to him and looked down at him. He hadn’t looked this small before.
“There’s going to be a lot of dead bodies when this is all done,” she said. “You’re welcome to all of them, if you want. But me?” She looked at her bow in her hand and frowned. “I’m either walking out of here alive with him … or we’re both going to be two more corpses out there.”
Gariath stared down at his hands, bloody and laden with splinters. He unfurled his fists and looked at his claws.
“And I,” he whispered, “I will—”
“I don’t give a shit what you do,” she said, interrupting him. She reached down and snatched up the wooden bowl in front of him. “And give me your curry.”
With that, she stalked away.
The first time she had met Gariath, she had thought an arrow, maybe even a hundred arrows, wouldn’t stop him. And now, the last time she thought she would ever see him, she could hardly believe he had been stopped by just a few words.
They were different now.
But that was a worry for a woman with more shits to give and less curry to eat.
It had started simply enough: just two men eating curry silently. Lenk wasn’t sure at what point he had started staring at his companion. But it was fairly evident when his staring became noticed.
Denaos sighed. He speared a forkful of curry and spoke through a full mouth.
“Go ahead and ask.”
“Can you even taste that?” Lenk asked.
“Eh.” Denaos shrugged. “Not really.”
“So, why do it?”
“It’s nice to pretend to be normal sometimes.” Denaos stared down at his bowl of curry. A sad smile crept across his features. “You know the worst part?”
Lenk had never really found Denaos’s grin unsettling before that moment.
“I can remember it.” Denaos ran his finger along the inside of the bowl. “I remember the thickness of it, the way it feels going down, the spiciness of it. I remember the first time I had it, when I was fresh off the boat from Muraska. Thought I’d shit my innards out the first time, but after that, I couldn’t get enough. I ate it as often as I could. But now?”
He pulled back a finger stained with red sauce. He put it in his mouth, sucked it clean. He smacked his lips, staring out to somewhere far away.
“Nothing.” He swirled the curry and rice about in his bowl, watching it thoughtfully. “It’s like I’m always halfway there, but I can’t quite make it all the way. I remember how everything’s supposed to work, but no matter how hard I try to make it, it just … doesn’t.”
Denaos was a man who had routinely slit throats, poisoned drinks, tortured people for information, and spun lies as easily as spiders spin silk for as long as Lenk had known him. Yet all that grisly business was not half so uncomfortable to watch as Denaos being serious. The rogue had a face ill-suited for frowns and sorrow, and its colorless pallor made him look even worse.
“I’m sorry,” Lenk whispered. “I should have done something, I should—”
“Don’t.” Denaos fixed him with a dark-eyed glare. “I believe Asper when she says it because she means it. You’re just trying to make yourself feel better.”
“That’s not true.”
“Relax.” Denaos waved a hand. “That’s what she does. She saves people, bleeds for the poor and the sick, always thinks of others. You know.” He took another bite of curry. “Like a moron. But you and me, we’re not like that.”
“Bullshit,” Lenk said. “I’ve saved plenty of people.”
“So have I. But you and I both know that it’s simply incidental. You and I, we kill monsters. If someone gets saved, then hey great, that’s a bonus. But our talents have always lain in putting pointy bits into soft bits.” He grinned at Lenk. “Haven’t they?”
Lenk thought to protest that, to insist he had always tried his hardest. But his mouth was too full of curry to allow room for that much bullshit. He merely swallowed and sighed.
“Yeah …” He looked down from their perch atop the curry shop’s roof. “Yeah.”
The streets lay empty and broken. This neighborhood had seen some of the worst fighting, with its roads scarred by fire and its windows shattered. The curry shop seemed to be the only person, let alone business, still around.
For this, you’re going to die tomorrow, he told himself. Is it worth it?
He looked down at the bowl in his hands and considered.
It was pretty good curry.
“If it will soothe you …” Denaos’s whisper returned him from his reverie. “You could have had all the gods on your side and a magic wand that shot fire from one end and pissed whiskey from the other and it wouldn’t have made a difference.”
Denaos held out his fingerless hand and wriggled the stumps.
“This … was a long time coming.”
“This?”
“Well, maybe not this, exactly, but I knew I wasn’t going to end up somewhere nice when this was all over. Fuck, I knew it after the first throat I cut.” He leaned back onto his elbows, stared out over the city, and frowned. “But I didn’t stop, then, either.”
There were moments in a man’s life, Lenk’s grandfather had once told him, where one simply knew something was a bad idea. To open a door when one heard a knock late at night, to follow a shadow out into a storm, to turn down an alley one had just heard a scream from; these were things it was safer not to do.
And what separated wise men from foolish men was the wisdom not to do them.
Lenk’s grandfather had taken a puff on his pipe, contemplative, and spoken once more.
“And what separates men like us from both of them is that we do them, anywa
y.”
And so, even though he knew he shouldn’t, Lenk asked.
“What did you see?”
Denaos’s face, already colorless, simply seemed to fade away. The ghosts of his grins and his frowns vanished and left behind something white and empty as a field of salt. He stared at something far away, something he would always be able to see, no matter how hard he shut his eyes.
“It’s funny,” the rogue whispered. “It was always said that, when you go, if you’ve paid your debts and didn’t squeal on anyone on your way out, Silf opens his hall to you and you’re awash in wine and whores for eternity. That sounded nice and all, but I liked the Talanite version.”
“What’s that?”
“Asper told me once …” He closed his eyes. “It’s a very big, very blue sky. Your worries about coins, about the bad things you’ve done, about the people you’ve let down, simply slide off you and you start to float there.”
Lenk nodded. “That does sound nice.”
“But when I went under …” Denaos’s voice grew so hushed that Lenk had to strain to hear it over the murmur of the breeze. “I saw Asper. And you. And the others. I saw all the things we had done and all the people we killed and all the ale we drank and times we cursed each other out and the jokes I told and the times you laughed. And I saw them …” He reached out with his fingerless hand, as if to grab something that wasn’t there. “Just getting smaller. And smaller. And smaller.”
He dropped his hand, still staring.
“And the last thing I saw was her face … and then she got so small, I couldn’t see her anymore.”
Lenk stared at him for a moment. “And then?”
“And then … nothing.”
“Darkness?”
“Did I say darkness?”
“You said nothing.”
“And I meant nothing.” Denaos shook his head. “What do Khetasheans say happens when you die?”
“My grandfather had two different answers, depending on how much he’d had to drink,” Lenk replied. “In one, we waited in the earth until the Wanderer passed our graves and then we rose to follow him across the world. In the other, we got stuck in a hole in the ground and stayed there until we were wormshit.”
Denaos lofted his brows. “Huh. Which was the one where he was sober?”
“I can’t remember.”
The two men remained silent for a long time, quietly eating their curry. When there was no more curry, Lenk scraped the last few traces of sauce from his bowl. When there was no more sauce, he simply kept scraping.
He looked up at Denaos and opened his mouth to speak but found his heart lodged in his throat. Even trying to find the words caused a deep pain to resonate in his chest. And this time, Lenk did not think he had to strength to overcome them and ask.
“I don’t know if that’s what’ll happen to you when you die.”
Denaos, however, answered anyway.
“Maybe that’s what happens to men like us,” the rogue said. “Maybe that’s hell for us. We spend all our lives making a big, bloody mess so the gods will notice us and then … nothing.” He sniffed. “Still …”
He turned his eyes toward Lenk. And in them, Lenk saw a vast, yawning nothingness that he dared not meet for too long.
“If you’re worried,” he said, “it’s never too late to run.”
The thought was tempting. He had tried fighting. He had tried not fighting. He had never tried simply running. Turning, dropping everything, running for the gate and continuing to run until this all seemed like a terrible dream.
Khoth-Kapira could take this wretched city; it was a hellhole, anyway. The world could rot and wither under endless war; there was more earth than people and they couldn’t be everywhere. He could find a place where he would be safe, where he could live in peace.
But that thought, tempting as it was, sat ill with him.
Because, he realized, it wasn’t his peace he was concerned with.
Not anymore.
“It is,” Lenk sighed. He looked out over Cier’Djaal, to the distant gate. “Maybe it always was.” He set a hand down on the sword at his side. “It was me who couldn’t put down the sword, me who couldn’t stop killing, me who made this whole shitty mess we’re in. I can’t run away from myself.”
“Yeah.” Denaos echoed his sigh. “I guess you can’t.”
“In the end …” Lenk turned to his friend and offered him a smile, as warm as he could make it. “If we die for each other, then that’s something, isn’t it?”
Denaos looked back at him, blank. “Something shitty, maybe.”
Lenk frowned. “But you said—”
“Yeah, you clod, I was brutally murdered and returned to a nightmarish hell of an unliving existence so I could teach you about the magic of friendship.”
“Well, don’t fucking yell at me, I was trying to make this nice for both of us.”
They fell into another silence. Lenk glanced at Denaos’s curry. The rogue grunted and handed the bowl over to him. He stirred the dish around with his fork for a moment.
“So,” he said, “you say the last thing you saw was her face?”
Denaos nodded. “Yeah.”
Lenk speared a forkful of chicken and chewed it. He stared out over the city that he had destroyed and was about to die to try to save what was left. He nodded, sniffed.
“That doesn’t sound too bad.”
FORTY-FIVE
HIS WORD
No speeches. No grand armies marching to war. No fire raining from the sky.
The end of the world began with one weary man with an unpolished sword walking out of a dark corner.
Beneath the endless gray clouds of the sky that slid overhead like ink from a spilled bottle, he walked into the graveyard where civilization had been buried. With the shattered stone crunching beneath his feet, Lenk counted his steps.
One …
Two …
Three …
And all the way to fifty-three, which took him to the center of the ruined market.
And there he stood. As the sunset’s orange glow veiled itself behind the gray sheets, he stared out over the horizon of the city. He slid his sword out from its scabbard and tossed the leather to the ground. He sat down on the shattered stone. He laid the sword naked in his lap. He closed his eyes.
And Lenk began to wait.
An hour, perhaps. Or maybe just a few breaths. Too weary for fear, too nervous for courage, his thoughts were empty as he sat, hands on the steel of his weapon, and waited.
Until it happened.
Somewhere in the distance, a great sound of thunder. But it came not from the sky. The noise came from the earth. He felt its shudder in the stones beneath him, shaking his bones in his body.
One.
Stones shattered. The skeletons of burnt-out buildings toppled into ash. The last panes of glass cracked and broke and made glistening graveyards on the streets.
Two.
Rats fled across the roads in tides, swarming out toward the sea. The last gulls and ravens and carrion birds flew from their rookeries and disappeared into the great gray sky.
Three.
The sky let out a long and breathless moan. The clouds settled and grew dark overhead. A night bereft of stars or moon spread over the city as the wind groaned and clawed itself across the sky.
Three steps. That’s all it took.
Lenk opened his eyes.
And Lenk looked up at the great darkness that spread across the sky.
Blacker than the night. Eyes empty and pale. A crown of serpents writhing, flashing ivory fangs with every excited hiss as they burst from his skull, his jaw, his neck. He stretched tall enough to scrape the heavens.
Though Lenk wondered if he had not seemed much bigger before.
Amid the rubble of the city and the destroyed buildings, Lenk thought he must have looked like one more piece of dirt: gray and grimy, run-down and broken. He would have felt it, too.
Were it not Kh
oth-Kapira’s great eyes focused intently on him.
The demon stared at him for a time. Then he looked up and cast his gaze out over the city. His serpents schooled after him, turning their bloodred gazes out toward the distant buildings.
“Listen.”
His voice spoke not to Lenk. His voice spoke to the bones in Lenk’s body, the blood in Lenk’s veins, the skin drawn across Lenk’s sinew. And Lenk could feel them respond.
“Can you hear them?” Khoth-Kapira boomed. “Their prayers? Their cries?”
Lenk looked up at the great demon without rising.
“What do they say?” he asked.
“They weep for their loved ones. They weep for the tragedies they have seen.” He closed his eyes, content. “They look to me and beg me to save them.”
Lenk nodded, slowly.
“I believe that. I did the same thing, once.”
“And did I not give you what you asked for? Did I not give you the peace you craved? Would I not have given you everything, had you not been so ungrateful?”
“I believed that, too.”
Khoth-Kapira stared down at him, his baleful eyes growing so wide that they almost drank the night. Lenk had to squint to see past them, to the dark creature they belonged to. To remember he was here to kill this thing.
“So much potential,” the demon bellowed. “You could have been there, at the start of this new world. I would have given you everything you would want and things you did not even know you needed.”
“You still would.” He rose to his feet and took his sword up in his hands. “Am I right? If I asked you right now to give me those things, you would.”
The silence of Khoth-Kapira’s response was deafening.
“But you can’t. Now I know what you’re really offering. And what you give isn’t for me. It’s for you. It’s always been for you.”
“And because of this … this horrid blasphemy you believe, now, you have come to battle me?”
“No.” Lenk shook his head. “I’ve come to kill you.”
In the stories, the great villains would bellow at such a threat. They would laugh and gloat and spew dramatic lines denying how any creature so small could ever hurt them, thus setting the stage for their inevitable defeat.