by Sam Sykes
“What you’re guarding is something I’m willing to kill for.” He sneered. “Do they pay you enough to die for it?”
“Kudj not privy to rationale behind fasha decision,” the vulgore rumbled. “Kudj not even know what Kudj guard. But Kudj sure it not worth more blood.” He pointed a massive finger over Gariath’s head. “Squib go. No more blood today.”
“Gariath disagree,” the dragonman growled.
He took a step forward. It hurt.
It shouldn’t hurt, he said inwardly. You’re Rhega. The strongest. You’ve fought demons. You’ve killed things that should not be. Why does this hurt so much?
And as he took another step, as he felt that ache in his chest, he realized. Months ago, that spot had been empty, possessed of a comfortable numbness that sat quietly in his chest and waited for him to die. Now, something inside him wanted to live, wanted him to feel the pain and turn around and run.
Fear?
No. Fear was something cold to move weaklings. Whatever this was, it was warm, it was painful, and it was immensely annoying.
And whatever it was, he resolved not to let it get in the way of killing himself. He lowered his head and ran toward the vulgore, biting back the pain shooting through him.
Kudj settled squarely on his stumpy legs and sighed.
“Always violence,” he grunted. “Kudj often feel like tiny posy, blown about by cruel winds of demand economy.” He raised his hands and cracked his knuckles. “But, if squib wants—”
He stopped talking right about then.
It turned out that it was more difficult with a thick iron chain around his neck.
Daaru appeared atop the behemoth’s shoulders, the chains from the door drawn tight in his hands, wild color painting his face as he bared his teeth in a savage snarl. Kudj flailed beneath him, staggering back and forth, torn between the need to smash and the need to breathe.
Daaru jerked hard on the chains, steering the behemoth toward Gariath. The dragonman backed up as Kudj staggered closer until his wings struck the outcropping he had been hurled against. The massive vulgore swung his head, throwing Daaru from his back. But the tulwar held fast to the chains, dangling from the vulgore’s neck. For a moment, Gariath got the impression of a large, unruly cat with a fleshy, colorful bell dangling from its collar.
But only for a moment. In another breath, all he could see was the opportunity.
He leapt, seizing the chains and hauling Daaru back down to earth. He could feel his muscles strain and threaten to rip as he and Daaru dragged the gasping, flailing behemoth toward the wall of the ruined building. Chain in hand, Gariath leapt over it, suspending himself over the water as the chains pulled taut upon the wall’s edge.
He braced his feet against the stone. He tightened his grips on the chain. He roared. He pulled. Hard.
And the stone shook beneath him.
He felt the chains shudder. He felt his body ablaze with the effort. He felt the bricks of the wall come loose as the chain pulled the behemoth’s face into the wall and smashed it against the stones. Gariath gritted his teeth. He bit back the pain in his chest.
And he pulled again.
And again.
And again until dust clogged his nostrils and the stones lay in a crumbled heap and his palms bled. And when he dropped the chain into the water, Kudj lay before him. The chains hung loosely around his neck as he rolled onto his back and groaned. His eyelids fluttered against a face riddled with embedded chunks of lumber and stone fragment. He drew in deep, desperate breaths.
But he did not move.
Nor did Daaru.
The tulwar stood, staring at the dragonman with eyes wide, color fading from his face.
“No one has ever done that to the vulgore,” he gasped, looking at the ruin of bloodied stone. “No one has ever done… that.”
“Uh-huh,” Gariath grunted.
He stepped over Kudj’s massive arm and past Daaru, toward the building. The door hung off its hinges; the lock lay smashed where Kudj had rammed it. Fine steel, strong metal, and it lay in pieces now. Had Gariath just been a tad slower, tripped just a little, that might be him.
It might still be him on the inside, for all he knew. The pain in his chest hadn’t grown any softer. He hurt. He bled. All for what was behind this door.
Kicking it open would have been dramatic.
Also painful.
Gariath settled for just shoving it, watching it collapse inward. Inside, darkness reigned. Moonlight seeped through shattered windows in thin slivers, choked by crumbling support beams and hanging mold. The ground was sodden and sandy, rising only a finger’s length above the water.
And his nostrils were filled with the reek of death.
The third step he took was met with a thick squishing sound. He looked down. The stains on the sand were darker than water, darker than even the night. Blood. Lots of it.
He heard something in the darkness, the sound of slurping and chewing. He proceeded carefully. It didn’t matter. What lurked in the darkness wasn’t paying any attention to him.
A thick head attached to a bulbous body supported on eight spindly legs bent over a mess that glistened in the moonlight, eagerly slurping thick, quivering strands into a pair of mandibles.
Gariath wasn’t sure what it was—the way he unconsciously backpedaled, the way he unconsciously gagged—that made the spider aware of his presence. But the creature twisted its thick head, turned eight bulbous eyes upon Gariath, and made a chittering noise that sounded almost embarrassed. Despite the fact that it was the size of a horse, the spider skittered away like a frightened child, scrambling up the wall and disappearing out a window to a pair of waiting servants, who quickly disappeared with it.
“W-work…”
A voice.
Weak, soft, pitiful. Yet in the silence, unignorable. Gariath looked down to the quivering mess the spider had been feasting upon. And the quivering mess stared back, still alive.
“They promised us work.”
Not at him, though. The eyes that looked up hadn’t closed in days; they were pried open and blind with terror. The voice that spoke to him was hoarse; it had screamed itself raw and red long ago. The body that lay before him was merely half a human; whatever else there had been had since disappeared down the spider’s gullet.
“They… they promised us work.”
Gariath knelt down beside the man. From the waist up, he was human. Wrapped in a dirty tunic, a wrist shackled to a nearby support beam, he looked fine but for the terror that had been carved into his face. From the belly down, everything that he was was red and glistening, flesh and sinew stripped away in a messy aftermath of a glutton’s feast.
“Gold,” the human whispered. “Fasha Ghoukha… he had so much, they… they said just go into the building… locked us in, said it was for the silk. They watched us… watched it… watched…”
The last of the human’s voice bubbled out on a thin trail of saliva. His lips twitched numbly, speaking silent words to ghosts. In the gloom behind him, Gariath could see half a dozen others like him. Worse than him. Devoured completely, ripped apart with a child’s delight, the less palatable bits left for smaller scavengers.
Clinking chains brought his attention back down. The man’s shackled wrist groped blindly against the sand. It brushed against Gariath’s knee and stiffened with a needy reach. Slowly, Gariath touched the man’s hand. And instantly, he could feel the heat drain from it, all the desperate warmth of a dying man vanishing into the darkness and leaving behind something cold and half-eaten.
As though he had been holding on through the entire feast just for this touch.
Maybe there was more to the human than this cold meat before him. Maybe he had a family he needed to feed. Maybe he needed money to feed himself. Maybe he once had a face that wasn’t frozen in fear, eyes that could still see, mouth that could still speak.
But Gariath couldn’t tell anymore.
When he looked down, he could see only
meat that should have been human. In his head, he could see other humans—his humans—made out of the same meat, dying cold and alone with only the touch of someone they couldn’t see to comfort them in their time of death. When they died, he wondered, would they die the same way? Would they leave behind the same cold meat?
And leave him alone?
They were weak. They were pitiful. They were not Rhega. But they were more than meat. To him, they were much more. And he knew how much that realization should bother him, but he did not feel it.
He rose to his feet without realizing he’d moved. His feet felt numb and senseless as he waded out into the water. His earfrills couldn’t hear anything as Daaru assailed him with questions. And his hands were cold when he reached down and gently took the sword from Daaru’s scabbard.
All he could feel now was the pain in his chest. The pain that had grown worse when he saw the cold meat, when he realized that humans could do this to each other, when he realized that the human back there could be any human. His humans.
All he felt was pain. Not the water around his legs as he walked toward Kudj’s prone body. Not the sword in his hands as he raised it over his head. Not the dryness of his unblinking eyes as he stared intently at the vulgore’s throat.
“Gariath.”
Daaru said his name. He couldn’t hear that. He tightened his grip on the sword.
“Gariath, stop.”
Daaru put a hand on his shoulder. He couldn’t feel that. He brought the sword down swiftly.
“STOP!”
Daaru slammed his fist squarely between Gariath’s shoulder blades. He felt that. The sword fell from his hand. And his hand whirled around to strike the tulwar against his face and sent him twirling into the water. Daaru made to rise but stopped as the dragonman leveled a finger at him.
“Don’t.” Gariath spoke flatly. “Don’t get up. I will kill you.”
“And him, as well?” Daaru asked, color rising in his face. “What did you see there?”
“People. Humans. Made into meals for monsters. There are some things in this world no one should die for.” He glanced back at Kudj, reached for the sword. “And there are some things they should…”
“Don’t,” Daaru growled, beginning to rise.
“Go and see it if you’re not convinced. Just don’t expect me to wait.”
“You can’t kill him!”
“I assure you, I can.”
“You let that human go when I should have killed him,” Daaru snarled, hauling himself to his feet. “He tried to kill me. For money. You’d let a human go but kill a vulgore?”
“That was different.” Gariath plucked up the sword, raised it again, closed his eyes. “This is different.”
“It is different,” Daaru cried out as the sword came down. “HE’S ONE OF US!”
A hairbreadth from the vulgore’s neck, the blade stopped. The steel grazed the flesh with each labored breath Kudj took. But Gariath couldn’t bring it down, just as he couldn’t shut his earfrills to the tulwar.
“He’s one of us,” Daaru repeated. “He plays the humans’ game. Look at his harness. Look at the sigil. He works for Ghoukha. Fasha. Human. We all do. We don’t have a choice. Neither did he.” His voice lowered. “He has nothing else.”
The next thing Gariath heard was the splash of the sword dropping into the water. The sound of his own voice was strange to him. It was full of fury earlier, but now it sounded hollow, empty.
“Nothing,” he repeated. “He has nothing.”
“None of us do,” Daaru replied. “We do what we can.”
“Do what? Watch the humans feed each other to spiders? Beg for their gold while they make you do it? What life is that?”
“The only one we’ve got.”
This place was ill. This world was diseased. These people were sick. And here he was, in it all, with his humans, the ones he was willing to kill for, the ones he was willing to bleed for. They wanted to come here. They wanted to live here. They wanted to stay here and grow as sick as the rest of them.
This, he realized, was the pain in his chest.
It was this city. It was this world. It was these humans. And this was what their illness was doing to him.
Without a word, he turned away. Without a scent to follow, he began to walk out of the Sumps, back toward the world where the humans pretended they weren’t ill.
“Where are you going?” Daaru called after him.
“I am going to get a better life.”
He could hear the water sloshing behind him as Daaru followed. “How?”
And when he spoke again, he could hear the fury in his voice. “By taking someone else’s.”
TWENTY-TWO
THE SUN AND ALL ITS CHILDREN
Before she knew anything else, she knew she was warm.
For a very long time, she was content to feel only that, unwilling to open her eyes and admit that the night had ended. She felt it on the pelt beneath her, baking atop hard-packed sand. She felt it in the shafts of sunlight seeping in through the tears in her tent. She felt it in the sosha she had drunk settling contentedly in her belly.
It was the warmth of the glutted lion that bade her to forget things like morning and remember only the feast of the night before. The fires she had danced around with the khoshicts, the roar of the songs she had sung, the sosha dribbling down her chin. There was still a chill in her, though. That which came before the hunter put an arrow through the lion’s gullet.
That which she had felt every morning she awoke next to him.
She resolved, groggily, to forget those mornings, as well as this one, and reached down to pull the furs up over her.
She found no furs upon her leg. Instead, her fingers brushed across flesh, bare, tense, and far warmer than hers.
Her eyes snapped open and stared into a pair of broad canines seated in a long blade of a smile.
Her first instinct was to leap to her feet and scramble away: impossible, what with the weight settling down upon her. Her second was to lay a fist into those teeth; even more difficult, what with her arms trapped beneath the legs straddling her. Her third was to scream and curse.
But she wasn’t about to give Kwar the pleasure.
“How long have you been there?” she asked, keenly aware of how weak her voice sounded in a suddenly dry mouth.
“Good question.” Kwar hummed, settling back on her haunches as her weight came down on Kataria’s belly. “Maybe an hour?”
“I find that amazingly disturbing.”
“Because you have no sense of commitment.” Her grin stretched a little wider. “Except when it comes to drinking, anyway. I’m surprised you’re still standing.” She glanced down at the paler shict pinned beneath her and coughed. “I mean, figuratively. Either way, you act like you’ve never had sosha before.”
“I haven’t.” Her voice felt uncomfortable in her throat, reluctant to pass her lips. “We never had any drink in the Silesrian.”
“Really?” Kwar leaned down, peering far too intently at Kataria, as though the truth of that statement lay somewhere up her nostril. “My mother gave me my first taste of it when I went on my first hunt.”
“Well, mine didn’t,” Kataria snapped, fighting the urge to crane her neck up and bite the khoshict’s nose.
“I still use her recipe.” Kwar’s eyes glittered with the same predatory mischief in her smile. “Did you like it? Be honest.”
“It was good.”
“Just good?”
“You told me to be honest.”
“I meant honest in a way that made it clear you were completely blown away by my magnificent prowess at fermentation.”
“I was enjoying it a lot more before this part,” Kataria snarled. She tried to tug her arms free and found them still firmly pinned between her sides and Kwar’s legs. “Get off.”
In response, Kwar drew her legs tighter and placed her hands on her hips. “Not until you say it. Say I’m a mistress of fermentation.”
>
“You’re a mistress of fermentation.” Kataria clenched her teeth and felt her spine go rigid beneath her as she struggled more. “Get off.”
“No, not like that. Say it like you mean it. Poetic-like.” Kwar rocked as Kataria squirmed beneath her, but looked otherwise inattentive as she scratched her chin thoughtfully. “Say that I’m as skilled as the canniest trapper, if my quarry were yiji-milk. Or, something like—”
“I said GET OFF!”
Both shicts were surprised. At the anger in Kataria’s roar, at the sudden buck of her body beneath Kwar, at the way she hurled the khoshict and sent her tumbling to the sandy floor.
Kataria shot up onto her rear end and, as if it had been waiting until she was awake enough to appreciate it, the headache hit her. A slow, steady drum pounded in her skull, her body was painfully tense, and her heart beat with a terror that she was only now aware of.
But she could feel it as keenly now as she could a couple of days ago in the Souk, when they had seized her and called her a monster.
Only now, there was no warm body beside her to at least pretend to seek comfort from.
And so she leaned forward, placed her head in her hands, and pretended that the pain in her head was the worst thing she was feeling.
Against the pain in her head and the terror in her heart, she could only barely feel Kwar’s touch as her fingers brushed timidly against her shoulder. Faint, too, was the khoshict’s voice, the mischief fled from between her teeth and leaving something small and soft behind.
“Sorry,” she whispered. “I’m sorry.”
Kataria wanted to say something to that. Something soothing, like: “It’s all right. I’m fine. I’m perfectly okay.” But there were only so many lies she could tell herself in a day, let alone in one morning.
“I… I went too far, didn’t I?” There was tenderness to Kwar’s voice starkly at odds with her hardness, the qualities that made her seem like a shictish legend. “I do that, sometimes. I don’t really pay attention and I don’t listen to other people. Thua says our mother was like that. He says it’ll hurt me someday.”