Black Halo

‘Worry will cause you nothing but pain,’ Greenhair whispered. Her voice seemed to rise now, the whispering crescendo to a melodic choir. ‘You need only rest, silver-hair. Fear for them later. Close your eyes … You need only worry about one thing.’

‘What’s that?’ he asked, barely aware of the yawn in his question, barely aware of the iron weight of his eyelids.

‘Where is it?’ she whispered, a gentle prod in his ear.

‘Where’s what?’

‘The tome,’ she prodded again. ‘Where is it?’

‘This,’ another voice, harsh and cold against her melody, hummed inside his head, ‘is wrong. We must search, not rest.’

‘The Akaneeds leave nothing …’ Lenk repeated, his own tone listless.

‘How does she know of the serpents? Why does she want us to sleep?’

‘You must have had it,’ Greenhair whispered. ‘You have read it. You know where it is.’

‘She does not know that,’ the voice growled, drowning out her whisper. ‘She cannot know that.’

‘How,’ Lenk muttered, ‘do you know that?’

He felt her tense beneath him, even as he felt his head tighten.

‘I … I do not …’ she began to stammer, the melody breaking in her voice.

‘She’s in our head,’ the voice roared, echoing off his skull. ‘Get out! Get out! GET OUT!’

‘OUT!’

He shot up like a spear, whirling around just as she scrambled to get away from him. Her pale, slender arm was held up in pitiful defence before a slack-jawed, wide-eyed face full of terror. He was unmoved by the display, as he was unmoved by the hot agony in his leg. That pain quickly seeped away, replaced with a chill that snaked through his body, numbing him to pain, to fear.

To pity.

From beneath the emerald locks, a large, crested fin rose upon the siren’s head. The same coldness that numbed his muscles now drove him forward as he leapt upon her and wrapped his hands about her throat, slamming her to the ground.

‘No more songs, no more screaming.’ It was not Lenk’s voice that hissed through his teeth, nor his eyes that stared contemptibly down upon her. ‘You … betrayed us.’

She choked out a plea, unheard.

‘All you care about is the tome! Pages! Nothing but pages of demonic filth! Kataria … the others …’ He felt his teeth threaten to crack under the strain of his clenched jaw. ‘They mean nothing to you!’

She beat hands against his arms, unfelt.

‘Those things, the Akaneeds,’ he snarled, his breath a fine mist, ‘they didn’t attack immediately. They didn’t act like beasts at all! Someone sent them!’ He slammed her head upon the ground. ‘Was it you? Did you do this to us? Did you kill Kataria?’

She drew back a hand. Tiny claws extended from her fingers, unnoticed.

His next words were a startled snarl as she drew her hand up and raked the bony nails across his cheek. He recoiled with a shriek and she slithered out from under him like an eel. Before he even opened his mouth to curse her, she was on her feet and rushing to the sea. In a flash of green and a spray of water, she vanished beneath the waves.

‘You can’t run,’ Lenk growled as he staggered to his feet. The agony in his leg made its presence known with a decidedly rude sear of muscle. He collapsed, reaching out for the long-gone figure of the siren. ‘I’ll … kill …’

A glint of viscous liquid upon his fingers, tinged with his own blood, caught his eye. He brought it close, watched it swirl upon his hand even as he felt it swirl inside his cheek. His eyelids fluttered, pulse pounded, body failed.

‘Poison,’ the voice hissed inside his head. ‘You idiot.’

He made a retort, lost in a groan and a mouthful of sand as he collapsed forward and lay unmoving.

The cold, Lenk decided, when he regained consciousness, was sorely missed. When he managed to realise that he had a rather impolite crab scuttling over his face, pinching at tender flesh in search of something to devour, he also realised that his skull was on fire.

Or felt like it, at the very least.

He cast a look up at the sky, saw the shroud of clouds that masked the sun. Yet he still burned. Even the mild light that filtered through in rays that refused to be hindered seared his eyes, his flesh.

Fever.

He felt an itch at his leg, reached down to scratch and felt moist and scaly flesh under his nails. However long he had been out, the sun had suckled at his wound and left a mass of green-rimmed skin weeping tears of blood-flecked pus.

That would explain it.

He looked around for Greenhair, wondering if perhaps she might be able to make another makeshift bandage to stem the flow. He felt an itch on his cheek quickly followed by a sting of pain.

Oh, right …

The urge to chase her down and beat a cure out of her was fleeting; even if she hadn’t vanished into the sea like the shark-whoring ocean-bitch she was, he couldn’t very well search the whole beach on a limb that begged for a merciful amputation.

He was so very tired.

Perhaps, he reasoned, it would be better to just wait for Gevrauch’s cold hand on his shoulder. Perhaps it would be better to be the final period in the Bookkeeper’s last sentence on a page marked: ‘Six Imbeciles who Fought for Gold and Were Eaten by Seagulls. Big, Ugly Seagulls. With Teeth.’

Yes, he thought, better to die here, wait for it. Wait to see the others … wait to see my family. Following that thought came his grandfather’s words, with no voice to accompany them.

‘Gevrauch loathes an adventurer,’ he had said to him once, ‘because they never know when to die. We don’t return the bodies we were loaned when the Bookkeeper asks for them. Recognise when it’s your time to die. Suffer it. Say a prayer to Him and maybe He’ll forgive you refusing your space in His ledger all these years.’

Sound advice, he thought.

His boat was likely at the bottom of the sea, along with the fortune he had chased. His companions likely weren’t far away, drifting either as half-chewed corpses or long, sinewy Akaneed stool. After both of those images, the fact that he had no food or water didn’t seem quite so worrying.

He would not like to upset the Gods and be sent to hell; he had seen what came out of that place. No, no, he told himself, it’s over now. All the suffering, all the pain he had experienced in his life all led up to this: a few moments of heat-stricken delirium, then off to the sea to be picked clean by crabs and eels.

Sound plan.

A wave washed over his leg; he felt something bump against his bare foot. He explored it with his toes, expecting to find splintered driftwood, maybe from his craft. Or, he thought, perhaps the remains of his companions: Asper’s severed head, Denaos’ chewed leg. He chuckled at the macabre thought, then paused as he ran a toe against the object.

It was not so soft as flesh, not even as wood. He felt firmness, a familiar chill as blood wept from his toe.

He fought to sit up, fought to reach into the surf and was rewarded with hands around wet leather. Almost too scared to believe that he was touching what he thought he was, he jerked hard before fear could make him do otherwise.

His sword, his grandfather’s sword, rose with all the firm gentleness of a lover in his hands. Its naked steel glittered in the sunlight, defiant of its would-be watery grave. The sun recoiled at its sight; there would be no angelic glow of deliverance from this sword, he thought. This was a sword for grey skies and grim smiles.

None had smiled grimmer than Lenk’s grandfather.

‘Remember, though,’ he had finished, ‘you and I, we’re men of Khetashe, men of the Outcast. He has no place in heaven for his followers. He loathes us for the reputation we cast on him. So why should we die when He wants us to?’

Lenk felt his own smile grow as he struggled to his feet. It might very well be his time. The sword’s arrival might have been coincidence, might have been charity from the Gods: an heirloom to take to his grave. He followed the Outcast, though, and Khetashe had never sent him a divine message he would be expected to listen to.

He turned and looked over his shoulder, toward a distant wall of greenery. A forest, he recognised. Forests were plants. Plants needed water. And so did he.

Water first, he thought as he stalked toward the foliage, sword clenched against his body. Water first, then food, then find Sebast and keep him around long enough for me to find the others.

His smile grew particularly grim.

Or at least something to bury.

Five

WHITE TREES

‘Tell ell me, Kataria,’ she had said once, ‘what is a shict?’

‘I learned that ages ago,’ her daughter had grumbled in reply, . ‘I could be learning how to skin a buck right now if I wasn’t here being stabbed with trivia. A buck. I could be coated in gore right now if – OW!’

After the blow, her daughter had muttered, ‘Riffid led the shicts out of the Dark Forest and gave us instinct, nothing else. She would not indulge us in weaknesses and we prosper from Her distance and – OW! No fair, I got that one right!’

‘You told me what your father says a shict is.’

‘Everyone agrees with him! You asked me what a shict was, not what I thought one was! What do you want me to say?’

‘If you could predict what I wanted you to say, you wouldn’t have gotten hit. That’s what it means to be a shict.’

‘So, violent hypocrisy makes a shict? That sounds pretty simple.’

‘You disagree?’

‘I do.’

‘Then tell me.’

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘Whatever I tell you, you’ll just hit me until I say what you want me to say. If I’m saying what you want me to say, I’m not a shict. I know that much.’

She had smiled once.

Kataria stared up at the sky, folding her arms behind her head as she lay upon the shore. The sun was moving slowly, sliding lazily behind the grey clouds, completely unconcerned for her careful scrutiny of its progress. By the time it peered out behind the rolling sheets of cloud, as if checking to see if she were still watching, she estimated three hours had passed.

She craned her neck up, looking past her bare feet.

The shoreline greeted her: vast, empty, eager. It was all too pleased to show her the rolling froth, the murmuring surf, the endless blue horizon stretching out before her.

And nothing more.

There was no wreckage, no movement, not even a corpse.

She sighed, turning her gaze skyward again, wondering just how long it was acceptable to wait for signs that one’s companions might have survived after being cast apart in an explosion of sea induced by a colossal, flesh-eating sea serpent.

What does one look for, anyway? she wondered. Wood? A severed limb? She recalled the Akaneed’s gaping maw, its sharp, flesh-rending teeth. Stool?

Very little sign of any of that, she noted with a sigh. And why should there be? What were the chances of one of them washing up, anyway? And if they did, why would they wash up as she did, having lost nothing more than her bow and boots?

They were dead now, she told herself, floating in the sea, resting in a gullet, picked apart by gulls or about to wash up as a bloated, pale, waterlogged piece of flesh. They were dead and she was alive. She should count herself lucky.

She was alive.

And they’re dead.

And she was not.

And he’s dead.

And she was a very lucky shict.

Shict, she repeated that word in her head. I am a shict. Shicts are proud. Shicts are strong. Shicts don’t fight fair. Shicts were given instinct by Riffid, nothing more. Shicts fight to protect. Shicts fight to cleanse. Shicts kill humans. Humans are the disease. Humans are the scourge that overruns this world. Humans build, humans destroy, humans burn and humans kill. Shicts kill humans. Shicts do not trust humans.

Nature conspired in silence at that moment. The roar of the ocean lulled, the whisper of the breeze stilled, the sound of trees swaying stopped. All for a moment just long enough for her to hear a single, insignificant thought that crept into the fore of her consciousness.

But you did.

The creeping thought became a sudden rush of memory, memories she had tried her best to shove in some dark corner of her mind until she could experience a blow against her skull and lose them.

But they came back, no matter how much she tried to block them out.

She remembered the sight of a silver mane, remembered how she thought it was so unusual to see in a human. She remembered how that had made her lower her bow, lower the arrow that had been poised at his head, a head so blissfully free of suspicions and projectiles alike. She remembered being intrigued, remembered following him out.

Shicts kill humans, she told herself, trying to drown the memory in rhetoric. Shicts slaughter humans. Shicts cleanse the world of humans. Mother told you what shicts were.

But she could not drown the sounds. His sounds, the sounds she had studied and learned: the murmurs that meant he was nervous around her, the griping that meant she had said something he would think about if not talk about, the sighs that meant he was thinking about something she had yet to learn about him.

Humans don’t have thoughts, she growled inwardly. Humans only have desires. Humans desire gold, desire land, desire whatever it is they don’t have. Father told you what humans were.

And through it all, she heard the distant beat of a heart. The sound of a heart that had beat fiercely enough to drown out the sound of a roaring sea. The sound of a heart that she was supposed to cut out, the sound of a heart that had fed the pulse in a throat she was supposed to slit. His heart, his pulsating, hideous human heart that she had heard before they departed. His horrific heart. His human heart. The heart she heard now.

But that’s just a memory. This knowledge came without forcing, the thought resounding in her head only once. Those are just sounds. He’s dead now.

And the memories were gone, leaving that thought hanging inside her head.