Black Halo

She felt Dreadaeleon beside her, the fever of his body seeping out of his glowing red eyes. His hair hung about his face, coat about his body as he swayed precariously on overtaxed feet. He stared at the monstrosity and the rogue without acknowledgement for the latter’s imminent demise. Instead, he merely raised a hand, a small circle of orange glowing upon his palm.

‘Hot,’ he whispered, eyes suddenly blossoming into burning red flowers. ‘HOT!’

The word that followed next, she did not hear. But she did see the circle become a spark, flickering and twisting like a rose petal as it flew from his palm and wafted with an orange glow toward the two combatants. The creature took no notice of it as it sizzled over the mist, nor did it look away from its victim as the little spark drifted up and came to a rest with a hiss upon the thing’s whisky-soaked brow.

HothothothotHOTHOTHOTHOTHOTHOT …

The whispers came in short, staccato shrieks. Denaos was dropped, forgotten as the creature erupted into flames. It writhed in a pillar, blue light sputtering out in the inferno that consumed it. Asper thought she could see something in its figure, now illuminated in the blaze, that seemed vaguely familiar. The shape of its torso, a mockery of womanly figures, perhaps, or the feathery gills that were burnt away like sticks of incense as it hurled itself to the earth.

She wasn’t about to try to get a closer look as the horror pulled its body across the ground, leaving a trail of ash behind it. Its wails, its whispers left her mind as the creature left the courtyard, pulling its burning body through a hole in the wall to disappear into the night.

Asper watched it for but a moment before her attentions were brought back to the scrawny boy beside her, legs giving out beneath him.

‘Did it …?’ Dreadaeleon muttered as he collapsed onto his back. ‘Saved again …’

She knelt beside him, felt his brow. The fever was no worse that she could tell; it was simply exhaustion stacked upon exhaustion. That simple spark had pushed him to a brink he was nowhere near well enough to tread upon. And like the spark, he flickered. He needed water; he needed rest.

‘Stay …’ he whispered, reaching for her. ‘Hot … hurts … but I did it … I saved …’

‘I know you did,’ she replied, smoothing the hair from his brow. ‘And I’ll be here, but I have to help Denaos, too.’

‘Denaos?’ His eyes and mouth twisted into anger. ‘Denaos? He did nothing! It was me! I saved you! I’m the hero!’ He tried to rise, but fell back, gasping. ‘I’m the … the …’

‘Please, Dread,’ she pleaded as she laid him back down to the stones. ‘Just a moment.’

‘Assholes,’ he muttered as his eyes closed, mouth still contorted in a snarl. ‘Both of you.’

No time to heed or take offence, she rose from his side and hurried to Denaos’. Pulling his head up to her lap, she could see the wound in his neck, the seeping green venom. She checked him over quickly, hands flying across his body. His breathing was swift and laboured, but steady. His muscles were tensed, but neither turning to jelly nor hardening with preemptive rigour. His pulse raced, but was there. He was wounded and poisoned, but he wasn’t going to die.

Because of her.

‘Gone,’ he whispered.

‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘it ran away.’

‘I meant my whisky,’ he croaked out through a dry mouth.

‘Yeah. Sorry.’

‘Not your fault.’ He grinned. ‘Not completely, anyway.’ He tried to muster a brave laugh, but wound up cringing. ‘It hurts.’

‘The wound’s not the worst I’ve seen,’ she said with a sigh. ‘I think you might—’

‘Last rites.’

‘What?’

‘Last rites.’

‘No, you’re not—’

‘I don’t want to die without absolution.’

The hand he laid on her arm was gentle. Her arm throbbed beneath his touch, rejecting the warmth of another human being. She fought the urge to tear it away.

‘I don’t want to die,’ he whispered.

She knew she couldn’t offer him last rites; he wasn’t going to die. There were no signs of a fatal poisoning; the claws had missed his jugular, and the venom likely wouldn’t do much more than hurt terribly. For all the wretched things he had done, he was going to live … again.

To offer last rites would be deception, a sin.

She could have told him that.

‘Absolution,’ she said instead, in a gentle voice, ‘requires confession.’

‘I …’ His eyelids flickered with his trembling words. ‘I – I killed her.’

‘Killed who?’

‘She was … it … so beautiful. Just cut her … no pain, no screaming. Sacred silence.’

‘Who was it, Denaos?’ Urgency she did not understand was in the quaver of her voice and the tension of her hands. ‘Who?’

The next words he spoke were choked on spittle. The agony was plain in his eyes, as was the alarm as he looked past her shoulder, gaping. He raised a finger to the cleft tops of the walls. She followed the tip of it, saw them there, and stared.

And in the darkness, dozens of round, yellow eyes stared back.

Twelve

INSTINCTUAL SHAME

Semnein Xhai was not obsessed with death. She was a Carnassial, proud of the kills she had made to earn the right to be called such, but only those kills. Deaths wrought by hands not her own were annoying. They left her with questions. Questions required thinking. Thinking was for the weak.

And the weak lay at her feet, two cold bodies of the longfaces before her.

‘How?’ she snarled through jagged teeth.

‘Perhaps they were ambushed,’ Vashnear suggested beside her.

The male held himself away from the corpses, hands folded cautiously inside his red robe as he surveyed them dispassionately. His long, purple face was a pristine mask of boredom, framed by immaculately groomed white hair. Only the thinnest twitch of a grin suggested he was more than a statue.

‘It is not as though females are renowned for awareness,’ he said softly.

‘They’re renowned for not dying like a pair of worthless, stupid weaklings,’ she growled. ‘What did they die from?’ she muttered, letting her voice simmer in her throat. After a moment, she turned to the female beside her. ‘Well?’

The female, some scarred, black-haired thing with a weakling’s bow grunted at Xhai before stalking to the corpses. She surveyed them briefly before tugging off her glove. Xhai observed her fingers, three total with the lower two fused together, with contempt. Her particular birth defect, like all other low-fingers, relegated her to using the bow and thus relegated her to contempt.

Her three fingers ran delicately down the females’ corpses, studying the savage cuts, the wicked bruises and particularly well-placed arrows that dominated the purple skin left bare by their iron chestplates and half-skirts. After a moment, she nodded, satisfied, and rose up. She turned to Xhai and snorted.

‘Dead,’ she said.

‘Well done,’ Vashnear muttered, rolling his milk-white eyes.

‘How?’ Xhai growled.

The low-finger shrugged. ‘Same way we found the others. Smashed skulls, torn flesh, few arrows here and there. Somethin’ came up and got ’em right in the back.’

‘I told Sheraptus you shouldn’t be allowed to roam without one of us accompanying,’ Vashnear muttered. ‘If females are incapable of thinking that someone might ambush them in a deep forest, then they’re certainly incapable of finding anything of worth to use against the underscum.’

‘And what would you have done?’ Xhai asked.

His grin broadened as his eyes went wide. The crimson light leaking from his stare was reflected in his white, jagged smile.

‘Burn down the forest. Remove the issue.’

‘Master Sheraptus said not to. It will infringe on his plans.’

‘Sheraptus believes himself infallible,’ Vashnear said.

‘He is.’

‘And yet he wastes three females for each hour we waste looking for means to slaughter the underscum when we have always had the answer.’ He pulled a pendant out from under his robe, the red stone attached to it glowing in time with his eyes. ‘Kill them all.’

‘That won’t work against their queen. The Master says so.’

‘He cannot know that.’

‘He has his ways.’

‘And they are not working.’

Slowly, Xhai turned a scowl upon him. ‘The Master is not to be questioned.’

‘Males have no masters,’ Vashnear replied coldly. ‘Sheraptus is my equal. You are beneath him and beneath me.’

‘I am his First Carnassial,’ Xhai snarled back. ‘I lead his warriors. I kill his enemies. His enemies question him.’

Vashnear lofted a brow beneath which his stare smouldered, the leaking light glowing angrily for a moment. It faded, and with it so did his grin, leaving only a solemn face.

‘Our search continues,’ he said softly. ‘I’ve sent Dech out to find further evidence. We will find her before we lose a Carnassial instead of a pair of warriors.’ He walked past her, his step slowing slightly as he did. ‘Carnassials are killers. Nothing more. Sheraptus knows this.’

She turned to watch him go. At her belt, her jagged gnawblade called to her, begging her to pluck it free and plant it in his back. On her back, her massive, wedged gnashblade shrieked for her to feed it with his tender neck flesh. Her own fingers, the middle two proudly fused together in the true mark of the Carnassial, humbly suggested that strangulation might be more fitting for him.

But Sheraptus had told her not to harm him.

Sheraptus was not to be questioned.

‘What do we do with the dead ones?’ the low-finger beside her asked.

‘How far behind us is the sikkhun?’ Xhai asked.

‘Still glutting itself on Those Green Things we found earlier.’

‘It’ll still be hungry. It fights better when it’s been fed.’ She glanced disdainfully at the corpses. ‘Leave them.’

The low-finger followed her scowl to Vashnear and snorted. ‘He’s weak. Even Dech says so. His own Carnassial …’ She chuckled morbidly. ‘If whatever’s killing us kills him, no one will weep.’

Xhai grunted.

‘Who knows?’ the female continued. ‘Maybe if we don’t come back with him, we’ll get a reward from the Saharkk.’

Xhai whirled on her, saw the distant, dreamy gaze in her eyes.

‘What did you call him?’

‘Saharkk?’ The low-finger shrugged, walking past her. ‘It means the same thing.’

She had taken two steps before Xhai’s hand lashed out to seize her by the throat. Xhai heard the satisfying wheeze of a windpipe collapsing; she was right to listen to her fingers.

‘He wants to be called Master,’ Xhai growled. ‘And I don’t share rewards.’

The low-finger shrieked, a wordless, breathless rasp, as Xhai pulled harshly on her neck and swung her skull toward the nearest tree.

Kataria felt the bones shatter, the impact coursing through the bark and down her spine. She kept her back against the tree, regardless, not moving, not so much as starting at the sound of the netherling’s brutality. She held her voice and her breath in her throat, quietly waiting for it to be over.

But she had met Xhai before, in Irontide. She could feel the old wounds that the Carnassial had given her begin to ache with every moment she heard the longface’s grunts of violent exertion. She knew that when it came to Xhai, nothing painful was ever over quickly.

Her victim’s grunts lasted only a few moments. The sound that resembled overripe fruit descending from a great height, however, persisted.

The sound of twitching, chittering, clicking caught her attention. She glanced at the tremendous roach standing before her, its feathery antennae wafting in her direction as it studied her through compound eyes. Long having since recognised the oversized pest for what it was, she did nothing more than raise her finger to her lips. Futile, she thought; even if the roach could understand the gesture, she doubted it could make enough noise to be heard over Xhai’s brutality.

Apparently, the roach disagreed.

Its rainbow-coloured carapace trembled with the flutter of wings as it turned about and raised a bulbous, hairy abdomen to her. Her eyes widened as the back of its body opened wide.

And sprayed.

Screaming was her first instinct as the reeking spray washed over her. Cursing was her second. Turning around, dropping her breeches and spraying the thing right back quickly fought its way to the fore, but she rejected it as soon as she felt the tree still against her back.

At the other side, a body slumped to the earth with a splash as it landed in a puddle of something Kataria had no wish to identify. The sound of Xhai’s growl and her heavy iron boots stomping off quickly followed and faded in short order.

Kataria allowed herself to breathe and quickly regretted it as the roach’s stench assaulted her nose. The insect chittered, satisfied, and scurried into the forest’s underbrush. Still, she counted herself lucky that the only thing to locate her was a roach.

A roach that sprays from its anus, she reminded herself, wiping the stuff from her face. And the longfaces almost found you that time.

She grunted at her own thoughts; the longfaces were crawling over the island, roaming the forest and its edges in great, noisy droves. They were searching, she had learned from the few times they deigned to speak in a language she could understand. For what, she had no idea and she didn’t care. She was on a search of her own, one that could not be compromised by the addition of bloodthirsty, purple-skinned warrior women.

The Spokesman stick in her hand reminded her of it, with a warm assurance that it had tasted many human bones before.

She stared down at it contemplatively. The s’na shict s’ha, her father said, often claimed that their famed sticks earned their names for the fact that each one possessed the faintest hints of the Howling. The trees they were carved from drank deeply of shictish blood spilled in their defence. They carried the memories of the dead, perpetual reminders of the duties that every shict carried.