Authors: Sam Sykes
‘What’s that?’
‘
And stop pretending you don’t know. I speak from inside you. We both know that they have always thought less of you
.’
‘That’s not entirely true.’
‘
You brought them together. You gave them purpose, gave them meaning. You never asked for any of them. They came to
you.’
‘Yes, but—’
‘
They used you. You brought them salvation. You brought them hope. You brought them reason. The moment they had those, the moment you required aid, they abandoned you. They betrayed you. They betrayed
us.
That cannot happen. Not again
.’
‘Not again? What do you mean?’
‘
Go into the cave
.’
‘I don’t know if—’
‘
GO
.’
The command came from mind and body alike, a surge of blood coursing into his legs of a volition beyond his own. In resisting it, he was sent to his knees, then to his hands as his body rebelled against him, torn between his will and another.
‘
Resist now. I know you must, because I know you. You will always resist, at first. This is your strength. When you come to accept it, when you embrace us, we will be that much stronger for it
.’
He had no response, for he had no voice. His throat swelled up, was sealed as if by a hand of ice that gripped his neck and squeezed tightly. He gasped in breath, the cold cutting his lungs like knives. He felt his body go numb, so numb that he didn’t even feel it when his face crashed against the cavern’s floor.
It was not a darkness that overtook him, so much as a different kind of light. He did not fall, but he could feel himself struggling to hold on. He shut his eyes tight. He went deaf to the world.
Senses returned to him, after some time.
Not his senses, though.
Through ears not his own, he heard them: a dozen voices, rasping with frost, cold with hatred. They came drifting across his ears on icy breezes, whispering in words that he had heard before, in the stream and outside the cavern.
‘
… unnatural. The whole lot of them. Look at their eyes. They look at you and all they see is an obstacle. They’d kill you, given half a chance. Who cares if we’re on the same side? Which god do they fight for? Not ours, I can tell you …
’
‘
… this tome they’re writing. What of it? The blasphemies in it, the sacrilege. They would aid and abet the Aeons even as they march with us against the Traitors of Heaven. Whose side are they on? Can’t trust them, can’t trust them at all …
’
‘
… see what they did to the priest? All he was did was dedicate the battle to the Gods. And they killed him. They didn’t just kill him. They did to him what they did to the demons back on the beach. There’s nothing right about dying that way …
’
‘
… not my fault. We have our orders. They had their orders. They chose to forsake them. They were going to turn on us, sooner or later. They look down on us. They hate us. They hate the Gods! They had to die. Not my fault I had to do it …
’
He rose, groggily. His legs were beneath him, he was certain, but he could not feel them. He was breathing, he was certain, but he couldn’t taste the air on his tongue. He lurched forward, uncertain of where he was going, but certain he had to get there. His stride was weak, clumsy. He staggered, reached out for balance and laid a palm upon the ice.
Hatred coursed through him.
A voice spoke inside his heart.
‘
They’re going to betray you
.’
He reeled from the sheer anger that coursed into him like a venom. The ice clung to his palm greedily, unwilling to let him go. He pulled away, leaving traces of skin on it. He was in pain, but he could not feel it.
He continued, swaying down the hall. He brushed against the wall.
‘
It is in their nature. They are weak. Cattle
.’
Agony; he was sure he should feel that. There was no time to dwell on it, no time to feel pain. Pain was fear, fear was doubt, doubt made strong wills falter and turn back. There was no turning back.
Another staggering step. Another brush against the ice.
‘
Man’s destiny is his own to weave, not the dominion of Gods. They would seek to enslave mortals all over again, through churches instead of chains
.’
More pain. More ice.
‘
The tome was written in case the House was wrong, in case we needed to destroy the Gods as well as the demons. It was written to help mankind. They cower before it, call it blasphemy
.’
A light at the end of the cavern appeared: no welcoming, guiding gold, but something harsh, something seething, something terrifyingly blue. He continued towards it and the voice did not stop, whispering to him as the cavern grew narrower, as the ice closed in around him.
‘
We’ll show them. We’ll teach them. We can live on our own, without gods or demons. They will all burn. Mortalkind will remain
.’
A wall of ice rose up before him, clear and pristine. A figure dwelled within it, a man cloaked in shadow.
‘
We have our duty. We have our commands. Darior gave us this gift that we may free mortals. We were made for greater things than heaven
.’
His features were sharp and angular and harsh. His hair was white and flowing. His eyes were shut. His lips were shut.
‘
They are going to kill you. They are going to betray you. It is their nature. To let you live is to deny their comforting shackles. To let the tome survive is to acknowledge that they might be wrong
.’
A dozen arrows were embedded in his flesh. A dozen knife hilts jutted from his body. A dozen bodies wearing battered armour and stained cloaks were frozen in the ice with him.
‘
Darior made us that we might serve a greater purpose. It is our nature to cleanse, to purify, to kill. Demons, gods, heretics, liars, murderers … any that would seek to enslave mankind. But it is their nature to doubt, to fear, to hate. They will hate you. They will betray you
.’
Lenk felt his arm rise of its own volition.
‘
You cannot let them deny you this purpose. You cannot let them destroy you. You cannot fail. You cannot disobey Darior. You cannot abandon your duty
.’
Lenk felt his hand fall upon the ice.
‘
You cannot let them stop you
.’
Lenk felt the man’s eyes open. Lenk stared into a vast, pupilless blue void.
‘
Kill them or they will kill you
.’
And then, Lenk felt himself scream.
I
n a blackening row, the frogs smouldered on a thin wooden skewer.
Kataria stared as their colours, the myriad greens and blues and reds and yellows, vanished under a coat of black as the fire licked at their bodies, made their bellies swell and glisten with escaping moisture. The frogs stared back at her, through eyes growing larger in their tiny sockets, the fear they could not express in life coming out in death.
Finally, with nearly inaudible popping sounds, their eyes burst. Naxiaw plucked the skewer from the fire, glanced it over, and handed it to Kataria. She took it from his hands, looking it over with a frown.
‘You put them on six breaths ago,’ she said, slightly worried.
‘They are cooked in six breaths,’ he said, his shictish deep and sure where hers was soft and hesitant.
‘They’re still toxic,’ she replied, glancing at their glistening bellies. ‘The poison hasn’t evaporated from them yet.’
‘That’s why you use only six breaths.’
‘So, they’re still poisonous.’
‘They are.’
‘Why even cook them, then?’ She managed a weak grin in the face of their charred countenances. ‘Or do they just taste terrible raw?’
She looked up and found no grin on Naxiaw’s face. He was staring at her.
Still
, she noted.
And with an intensity too severe for the situation, as though whether or not she were about to chew up some roasted amphibians would answer a dire question she had been privately pondering for ages now, and whether or not she licked her lips afterwards would dictate what he did next.
Not for the first time, she found herself glancing to the thick Spokesman Stick resting against the rock he sat upon.
Saying nothing, she bit one of the toasted creatures from the skewer. They were bitter and foul on her tongue, the aroma of cooked venom filling her nostrils. They were quite toxic, quite terrible to taste; she found herself wondering again what the point of cooking them was.
Texture, perhaps?
She bit down. A pungent flower bloomed in her mouth, and her lips threatened to rip themselves from her face, so fiercely did they pucker.
Apparently not
.
Yet, under his stare, she continued to pop them into her mouth, chewing them up as much as she could tolerate before they slid as greasy lumps into her belly. She met his gaze as she did so, watching him as he watched her, as he continued staring.
No
, she realised as she saw the careful steadiness of his eyes,
not staring
. Her own quivered a bit.
Searching
.
She did not ask for what. She didn’t want to know. She tried not to even think about it, for she didn’t want him to find it. Yet with eyes and instinct alike, he searched her.
She had sensed him reaching out again, as she had all that morning since rejoining him in the forest after reclaiming her clothes from the Owauku. She had sensed him peering through the veil of the Howling, whispering over its roar to her, trying to reach her through their communal instinct. Of him, she could sense nothing. Of her, it was clear by the faint twitch at the edges of his mouth that he sensed only frustration.
It was discouraging, she admitted to herself, that the connection they had shared on Sheraptus’ ship had been lost so completely. There was a comfort in his instinct melding with hers, a soothing earth to bury her fear beneath, and she dearly wished to feel it again. How had it been lost? she wondered. What had changed since last night?
She fought to keep the despair off her face.
Oh, right
.
Meeting Naxiaw should have been the first thing to do that morning, she knew. Going to Lenk should have been something that never happened. She had already made her choice between them, between a human she should hate and a people she should adore, three times. She had made it when she looked into his eyes. She had made it when she heard him scream her name and plea for help.
She had made it when she turned away.
She was shict, she told herself. Her loyalty was to her people. She owed him no excuses, would give him no reasons, would offer no apologies. And she had remained faithful to that vow when she came to him that morning, found him shrugging his shirt over a freshly stitched wound.
She had met his eyes, then, and was unable to say anything at all.
Perhaps that was why she unconsciously evaded Naxiaw’s probing instinct: a fear he might see what happened that morning, a dread he might know why they couldn’t connect, a gripping terror he might have a solution.
She looked to the Spokesman again.
She found herself surprised to see it there still and not, say, embedded in the skulls of one or more of the humans. Naxiaw had seen them, after all, when the two shicts had pulled themselves from the reaching ocean. He had paused, a mere fifty paces from them, and stared. The implications that had seized her with a cold dread then had surely dawned on him as well.
Despite his captivity, he was still fresh and energetic. Coming from a fight, the humans were not. He was still strong, limber and swift. The humans were weak, exhausted and burdened with each other. His Spokesman leapt to his hands like an eager puppy. The humans’ weapons hung from their hands like leaden weights.
He was shict.
They were not.
She had braced herself, then. For what, she wasn’t sure. The uncertainty paralysed her, rendered her incapable of doing more than staring dimly, unsure what more to do. A shict, she knew, would have rushed down with him against them. A companion, she told herself, would have stood between him and them.
But a companion would not have stared into her friend’s eyes and turned away when he screamed her name.
And a shict would not have felt wounded when he stared back into hers the following morning and turned away when she said nothing.
Kataria had done nothing that night. Kataria continued to do nothing. As much as she cursed herself for it, that did not surprise her.
What did, however, was the fact that Naxiaw had followed her example and let the humans be. Of all the qualities the
s’na shict s’ha
were legendary for, tolerance and patience were not among them.
Why he had vanished into the forest, continued to wait here, she did not know. Why he had met her with nothing more than an offer of cooked amphibians, she could not say. What he hoped to find in her as he stared at her so intently, she had no idea.