Black Halo (87 page)

‘And still, I am obsessed with death.’

‘How did you die, Grandfather?’

The ancestor’s body quivered and grew hazy with the force of his sigh.

‘When I crawled out of that skull, when I stopped hearing the screaming, I looked and saw I was the only one left,’ he said. ‘The dead were everywhere: the demons, the humans, but I was the only one concerned for the
Rhega
, the only one concerned for the dead. The mortals had moved on, pushing Ulbecetonth back to her gate. I was left alone.

‘So, I cut the earth open around the Elder and I dragged their bodies back, finding every piece.’ He paused, glancing into the water. ‘Almost every piece, at least. But the
Rhega
came back … not born again, as they should have been, but as I am now. They still wanted to fight, they wondered where their families were, they had so many reasons and they were all so tired …

‘And so, one by one, I bade them to sleep. Then I watched them sleep. I watched for so long I forgot the need for food, for water … and when I came back, there was no one left to bid me to sleep.’

He turned and stared hard into Gariath’s eyes.

‘When you are gone, who will bid you, Wisest?’

Gariath met his concern with a scowl.

‘You think I’ll die?’

‘We all die.’

‘I haven’t yet.’

‘You haven’t tried hard enough.’

The dragonman offered the ancestor nothing more than a snort in reply, his hot breath causing the spectral form to ripple like the water at their feet. Gariath returned his stare to the water. Through the obscuring azure, he could feel their gazes. In the earth, he could smell their final moments.

But in the air, he couldn’t hear their voices, not even the whispering sleep-talk of the skull. They all rested soundly now; staring, dead, utterly silent.

‘What is it you feel, Wisest?’ Grandfather asked. ‘Hatred for the humans for drawing us into this war? A need for vengeance against the demons?’

‘You can’t read my thoughts, Grandfather?’

‘I have been inside your heart,’ the spirit replied coldly. ‘It’s not a place I want to go back to in the best of times.’

‘Take your best guess, then.’

After a long, careful stare, the ancestor obliged him. His prediction was manifested in his great, heaving sigh. The accuracy of it was reflected in Gariath’s unapologetic grunt of confirmation.

‘What is it you plan to do, then?’

‘The skulls are silent. Their scent is nothing but death,’ Gariath said, folding his arms over his chest. ‘This earth is dead. It has nothing to tell me.’

‘The earth is dead, yes, but those that walk upon it still live.’

‘I agree,’ Gariath replied.

Grandfather’s eye ridges furrowed, a contemplative look rippling upon his face.

‘That is why I am going to find the Shen.’

And when the ripples settled, there was fury plain upon the spirit’s face.

‘The
Shen?
’ Grandfather snarled. ‘The Shen are a people just as obsessed as we were … as
you
are.’

‘Good company to keep, then.’

‘No, you moron! The Shen are what dragged us into the war!’

‘But you said—’

‘I said we had a thousand reasons, and
none
of them mattered. The Shen were the original one, and they matter least of all.’ Upon Gariath’s confused look, he sighed and raised a hand. ‘Shen, Owauku, Gonwa … all descend from a single ancestor, born to serve Ulbecetonth. In them, we saw people who could not hear the rivers or smell the rocks. We were moved to sympathy. We gave our lives for them.’

‘And they pay it back. I have seen them. They are brave; they are strong.’

‘They are
dead
. They just don’t know it yet.’ Grandfather’s lips peeled back, his teeth stark and prominent despite the haziness of his form. ‘We killed for them. We died for them. And what have they done? They continue to kill! They continue to die!’

‘For what they believe in.’

‘What
do
they believe in, Wisest?’

‘They are Shen.’

‘That is not a reason to live—’

‘And I am
Rhega
!’ Gariath roared over the ancestor, baring teeth larger, sharper and far more substantial. ‘I remember what that means. No
Rhega
was meant to live alone.’

‘Then don’t!’ Grandfather said. ‘There may still be more out there, somewhere. Go with the humans. Even if you never find another
Rhega
, you will never be alone!’

Gariath’s expression went cold, the rage settling behind his eyes in a cold, seething poison, a poison he all but spat upon the ancestor.

‘This is what it’s been about, isn’t it?’ he hissed. ‘This is why you told me to find Lenk. This is why you did not lead me here, why you tried to keep me from coming here. You would have me run into the arms of
humans
, like a fat, weeping lamb.’

‘I would have you live, Wisest,’ Grandfather snapped back. ‘I would have you find more
Rhega
if you could. If you couldn’t, I would have you die and have no need to come back. Amongst the Shen, you cannot do that.’

‘Amongst the Shen, I can learn more. Do you know what it was like to hear the word
Rhega
instead of “dragonman”? Do you know what it is to smell things besides greed and hate and fear?’

‘I know their scent, pup. Do you?’

‘That’s not important.’

‘It is. You know what’s important; you just won’t admit to it. You know that the humans are important. You know that without them, you would have died long ago. After your sons—’

‘
Never
, Grandfather.’ Gariath’s voice was cold, his claw trembling as he levelled it at the spirit. ‘Not even you.’ Waiting a moment, challenging the ancestor to speak and hearing nothing, he snorted. ‘I kept myself alive. The fire inside me burned too bright to be contained by death.’

‘Fires burn themselves out. The humans gave you purpose, gave you direction.’

‘Stupidity.’

‘Then why did you try to kill the shict when you knew she was going to kill the silver-haired one? Why did you go to save the two females you claimed to hate?’

‘To kill, to fight’

‘To what end? Because you
knew
that if they died, you would, too. In some ugly part of you, Wisest, you know it. Follow the humans. Live, Wisest. The Shen can give you nothing.’

He paused for a moment before turning and stalking away.

‘They can give me answers.’

‘They cannot,’ Grandfather called after him.

‘We’ll find out. I am going to find the Shen, Grandfather. If I return, I will tell you what I’ve learned.’

‘You won’t return, Wisest,’ the spirit shrieked. ‘Wisest!’

He did not turn around.

‘Gariath!’

He did not stop.

‘
LOOK AT ME, PUP!
’

He paused.

He turned.

A fist met him.

Grandfather’s roar was as strong as his blow. Gariath felt his jaw rattle against the knuckles, felt it course through his entire body. The silence was gone now. In the wake of Grandfather’s enraged howl, the wind blew and shook the trees, the water churned and hissed in approval. Four hundred and ninety-nine voices found a brief, soundless voice.

Gariath could hear them, but only barely. Grandfather’s roar drowned out all sound. Grandfather’s fists knocked loose his senses as they hammered blow after blow into his skull, as if the spirit hoped some great truth was slathered upon his knuckles and would drive itself into Gariath’s brain.

But Gariath’s skull was hard. His horns were harder.

Grandfather learned this.

Through the rain of fists, Gariath burst through, a cloud of red mist bursting from his mouth to herald his howl as he drove his head forward and against the spirit’s. It connected solidly, sending the ancestor reeling. He followed swiftly, going low to tackle the spirit about the middle.

Claws raked his flesh; he ignored them. Fists hammered his skull; he disregarded them. More than one foot found itself lodged in a deeply uncomfortable place; he tried his best to ignore that, too, as he hoisted Grandfather into the air and brought him down low.

And hard.

Gariath was panting. Grandfather didn’t need to breathe. The spirit continued to lash with a vigour and hatred better suited to someone young. Or to a
Rhega
, Gariath thought, feeling a faint urge to grin. But his admiration lived only as long as it took for him to recognise the disparities between them. Gariath was bleeding flesh and rattled bones. Grandfather was rivers and rocks. The ending of this fight was clear to Gariath.

And his heart ached to finish it.

‘You’re tired, Grandfather,’ he said.

And the spirit’s eyes went wide. He did not stop fighting; the ferocity behind his blows only increased, his roar took on a new savage desperation.

‘No, Gariath,’ he snarled. ‘I am not tired. I will fight you so long as I have to. I can’t let you throw everything away. I can’t let you end up like—’

‘Go to sleep, Grandfather.’

Blood leaked from a split in his brow, weeping into his eyes. He shut them tight.

When he opened them, nothing remained on the earth beneath him but spatters of his own blood.

He clambered to his feet. His body did not cry out in agony. Rather, his muscles sighed and his flesh complained. Cries were for proud battles, wounds that had earned the right to scream out. This was not such a battle.

He carried his bleeding and battered body away to recover. He wasn’t sure where the Shen came from, but he was certain he would have to be strong to reach it. The Shen were strong, after all. They were Shen.

And he was
Rhega
.

So were those who lay in the lake behind him. Their cries were quiet now, though. That brief spark of life that had surged through them had died, and the world had died with it. The wind was still. The earth was quiet. The waters were calm.

Silence settled over the clearing once again, as though it had never left. Gariath tried to listen to it, his distaste for it gone. It was preferable, he thought, for if he stopped long enough, if he let his ear-frills adjust to the silence, he could hear a single, solitary voice, not yet dead, far from alive.

It drew in a quiet breath. There was no breeze for its quiet sigh to be lost on.

He tried to ignore it.

There was ice.

Everywhere in the cavern, Lenk stared back at himself, his face distorted by the crystalline rime that coated the cavern walls, the dim light seeping through holes in the ceiling reflected upon its surface. At the mouth, it was mirrorlike, and he met his own worried gaze a dozen times over a dozen glances. With each step deeper, the rime solidified, became cloudy and thick.

His face became distorted in it: elongated, flattened, crushed, reduced to a pink blob, shattered into a dozen jagged creases. And through each mutation, each abomination, his eyes remained unbroken, unaltered, unblinking as they stared back at him.

As he continued down into the cavern, the ice became thicker, cloudier. He shivered. It was not the callous, emotionless cold that chilled him. Rather, the ice was heavier with more than just water, cloudier with more than just white.

Hatred.

It radiated off the cavern walls, a cold heavy with anger, crueller than any chill had a right to be, seeping through his flesh, into his bones and clawing at him with hoary fingernails from the marrow out. He felt it now, but while it was painful, it was not new. He had known this cold before. He had felt this hatred before.

‘This can’t be right,’ he whispered, fearful of raising his voice that the ice might hear him. It was why he kept himself from screaming. ‘There can’t be ice in this part of the world.’

‘
There is
.’

‘It can’t be natural.’

‘
You forsook the ability to deny the unnatural long, long ago
.’

He said nothing, staring deeper into the cavern’s rimed gullet. The light did not diminish, but it changed, shifting from the dying light of a golden sun to the dim azure glow of … something else entirely. He stared down it. He did not want to do more than that.

‘
Go
,’ the voice responded to his hesitation.

‘I don’t think I want to.’

‘
Going back is not an option
.’

‘It could be,’ Lenk said.

‘
They betrayed you
.’

‘It’s hardly the first time. I remember once, Kataria was eating something she said was rabbit meat and offered me some. It turned out to be skunk meat. She laughed, of course, but it’s hard to feel bad when someone eats a skunk for the sole purpose of trying to trick you into eating it, too.’

‘
Stop it
.’

‘What?’

‘
Stop trying to justify it. Stop trying to excuse it. Stop denying what is apparent
.’