Black Halo

Once, long ago, that thought wouldn’t have seemed so bad. But … that was before. Before I stopped fighting, before I put the sword down and had a chance to breathe. It wasn’t by choice that I stumbled across this realisation. On Teji, there’s nothing to fight, nothing to kill, nothing to worry about killing me.

And … I find that I kind of like it.

Without anything’s entrails to spill upon it, I find myself doing a lot of walking on the ground instead. I spend most of my days walking down the beaches with Kataria, listening to her tell me about the various plants, shells and driftwood we find. At least half of the stuff she spews, I’m certain she’s making up, but every time I feel like accusing her, she smiles and … looks at me.

Not look looks at me, but … looks at me, like I’m something she wants to look at. She stares at me, not in the way that suggests she’s looking for something beneath my skin, but like my skin is fine as is. She stares at me and I don’t mind. There’s nothing screaming in my head.

I’m … not hearing the voices anymore so much.

I’m even starting to remember my old life, before this all happened. I can remember my family. Not their names, but their faces, the colour of my grandfather’s beard, the feel of the calluses on my father’s hands, the smell of the tea my mother brewed in the morning. I can remember cows I’ve milked, dogs I’ve fed, barns I’ve swept …

All while I’m around her.

It’s not all great, to be perfectly honest. I still dream, and when I do, I dream of flames, of big blue eyes without pupils. And while I’m at ease with the Owauku, their taller, bearded friends, the Gonwa, eye me with distaste. Perhaps they knew, at one point, I planned to kill them? I don’t see why they would take offence at that, really. I didn’t know them at the time; it was going to be a perfectly honest killing.

And … I’m still hearing the voices.

That’s another thing. I did just write ‘voices’, with an ‘s’. There’s another one, I think … a fainter one than the first one, not so loud, not so demanding. The first one was like a fist: jabbing, pounding at the door to let it in. This one … is subtler, like a wiggle of the knob, a hand pulling at the sheet around me, someone moving a cup of tea from where I set it down.

And sometimes, it’s not so subtle. It tries to break the door down, tears the sheet off, slips and breaks the cup. It gets so loud … so ANGRY …

But let’s not think about that. There’s more important things to worry about.

For example, Sebast is now almost a week overdue. The ship that Argaol promised to send to pick us up has never been seen, even when Kat and I wait on the beach for any sign on the horizon. The Owauku assure me that if any did arrive, they would tell me. Frankly, I believe them, since any boat that came would be instantly harried by them as they sought to trade with it.

I should be more worried about this than I am. But I’ve since decided that Argaol wasn’t as good as his word. It’s really not that big a surprise; he managed to get six bloodthirsty lunatics off his ship. Why would he send anyone to go get them back?

Still, I’m not too worried. Even if it’s fallen into disuse, this is still a trading post. It’s still close to the shipping lanes. There’s no reason to expect that a ship won’t eventually come by. If all that means is a few weeks stuck in a loincloth walking down the beach alongside Kat, who I must say looks pretty smashing in her own, then I’m fine with that. Naturally, I’m a little disappointed that there are no more humans on the island.

Strange, though, I don’t recall if Togu ever told me what happened to them.

Not that I go out of my way to spend time with Togu, actually. Amongst the Owauku, or even amongst all the horrible things I’ve seen, he definitely ranks as one of the worst. He is living proof that the Gods exist and that their sense of humour appeals only to themselves. It’s as though they made some dwarfish, scaly creature with giant gourds for eyes and a horrifyingly strange accent and decided he just wasn’t irritating enough without having the insufferable speech prowess of a six-headed politician crossbred with a forty-handed merchant.

I’m content to mostly spend time with my companions, even if the reverse isn’t true.

Asper has nothing but harsh words and ire for me, though I gather she’s short with everyone these days. Why, I cannot say. I know something … occurred when she was tending to my wounds, something that is largely accredited to the stress of the situation and her lack of clothes. Denaos tells me something similar occurred shortly after she woke up and spoke to Dreadaeleon. He didn’t have any time to check on her, of course, since shortly after, he made the acquaintance of the Owauku and became wise to their insatiable voracity for human pants.

Either way, his attentions are solely on her, in the same way a voyeur’s attentions are solely on a lady’s unguarded window. Dreadaeleon isn’t much better. His conversation is curt and brief and, every time, he always scampers behind a hut or a bush to avoid me. If I wasn’t so trusting, and if I didn’t care so little, I’d say he was hiding something. And every day I thank Khetashe that pubescent wizards are as loath to share their problems as I am to hear them.

We’ve kept eyes open for signs of Gariath, albeit not very widely. Perhaps it’s just the peace that Teji has infected me with, or perhaps it’s the fact that he’s a deranged, flesh-eating lunatic, but I can’t say there’s much of a reason to look very hard.

In short, I have to say that Teji might be the best thing that happened to me. Despite the disappearance of my sword, the tome and all my clothes, I’m … almost happy.

A ship will come, eventually. We’ll get new pants. We’ll get new boots. We’ll clean the sand from our buttocks, wash our faces in fresh water, read books with real words and never have need to pick up a sword again.

Hope … doesn’t seem such a bad thing.

Eighteen

THE BENEFITS OF SWAYING GENITALS

On the very small list of upsides that came with wearing a loincloth, Dreadaeleon counted the ability to urinate without adjusting the garment to be somewhere between gross exposure to insects with a taste for his flesh and the persistent sensation of having a dead rodent lodged up one’s rectum.

Though he had been enjoying all in obscene measure since his arrival on Teji, he found the former to be the one most practised.

Of course, he told himself, it wasn’t his fault. Venarie was not a precise art. Even the most careful practitioner could find himself strained too much, his spells improperly channelled, and end up with the occasional premature liver spot or loose bladder.

Surprisingly enough, the boy didn’t take much comfort in that.

Instead, he pressed his hands against the reed wall of a nearby hut and attempted to convince himself that clenching his teeth and grunting would pass as casual behaviour amidst a plethora of lizardmen. If they had taken notice of this the first dozen times he had done it, they had long since ceased paying attention to the scrawny fellow with the trail of yellow dripping down his leg.

‘Come on,’ he whispered, ‘finish, finish …’

Even knowing this was far beyond his physical control now, let alone his verbal control, he couldn’t help but urge it along. Thus far, he had been able to convince himself that such commendations were all that kept his companions from finding out. Relief had come when Kataria began tending to Lenk, and Denaos had never really taken an interest in him before.

It was Asper’s outburst that caused him conflict. On the one hand, the doubtless endless inquiries as to his health that she would have usually hurled at him were better off avoided. Fortunate, he considered, for he hadn’t yet figured out a way to make loss of bladder control sound like the kind of thing she would want to concern herself with. But at the same time, she was snappish and curt with him, as well as everyone else, and did her best to avoid them all.

And, he thought with a sigh, he had indeed grown fond of the sight of her in Teji’s native garb.

The stream ended with a shudder as he carefully wiped himself down with a handkerchief one of the Owauku had offered him in exchange for a brief display of fire dancing along his fingers. Not quite an even trade by his reckoning, since that display had likely been the reason behind his sudden breakings of the dam.

He found himself hard-pressed to stay mad at the creatures, though, if only because he found himself hard-pressed to even look them in their tremendous, rotating eyes. This became doubly difficult due to the fact that he was especially hard-pressed to find any way to avoid the creatures.

He looked down from the lip of the sprawling, spiralling valley that was their village. Sandy paths topped the concentric rings of stone that formed their streets and held their reed huts. Tiny, swift-moving streams flanked each road. And walking upon these roads, swimming in these streams, dozens of little green blobs scampered about.

Scampering was apparently one of their very few ambitions in life, haggling and yelling at each other being the others. But above both of these, they seemed very fond of lounging. Under the shade of their lean-tos, amongst the pools fed by the waterfalls dripping in from the forest that loomed over their valley, in the half-drowned sandy bottom of their village; it didn’t matter where they happened to fall, the Owauku had turned laziness into an art form.

And because of this, Dreadaeleon found himself wondering, once more, where this particular village had come from. The stone circles were far too smooth, far too orderly to be anything born from nature. The waterfalls did not trickle of their own accord, but were fed into their streams and pools from aqueducts and trenches that undoubtedly had required many very patient men a long time to carve from the rock. But the creatures scarcely seemed to have the attention span required to carve a slur into a coconut, much less hew this marvel of sand and stone and stream.

He studied for as long as he dared until he heard the unmistakable cry of greeting. He assumed it was greeting, anyway; the Owauku’s language tended to blend salutations, curses and propositions into remarkably similar words. The dozens of green blobs became dozens of pairs of bulbous golden globes as they all looked up at him, yellow smiles splitting their faces and stubby appendages waving at him. His grin and wave were equally meek as he noted with no undue relief that only the Owauku demanded such a reaction.

The Gonwa were mercifully curt.

There was no shortage of the lankier bearded lizards walking amidst the sandy pathways, either. Very rarely did the more stoic creatures even deign to notice their companions’ presence, and when they did it was only with a mutter in their own language and a downturn of their eyes.

Side by side with the Owauku, they didn’t look particularly strange, and their smaller cohorts didn’t seem to mind their presence one bit. Together, they soaked in the dozens of pools that lined the rising sandy ridges in the valley, each one fed by gently trickling waterfalls, flowing swiftly from the forest above to splash in the pools below, sending cascading droplets against the damp earth and …

His eyes widened as he felt a sudden warmth cascade down his inner thigh.

‘Oh, come on,’ he whispered, turning back to the hut’s wall.

The effects of an overuse of Venarie were random and imprecise, ranging anything from pink sweat to instantaneous internal combustion, swiftly followed by external combustion. Horror stories lingered about the occasional bout of extreme overindulgence that resulted in spontaneous hermaphrodite transformation combined with the sudden growth of tails, fins, horns and extra mouths.

Dreadaeleon supposed he ought to be pleased that an uncontrollable bladder was all that he suffered.

And he was, indeed, pleased up until the moment he heard a familiarly unpleasant voice behind him.

‘Well, well,’ the distinctly masculine voice muttered, ‘watering your garden, are you?’

He whirled about, seeing his horrified visage reflected in Denaos’ broad, white grin. The tall man folded his arms over his naked chest and canted his head to the side at the boy, the wrinkled lines in his face suddenly giving him a decidedly sadistic visage.

‘I’m not sure what you know of botany,’ the rogue said, stifling a chuckle, ‘but you won’t be growing any daffodils with the fertiliser you’re using.’

‘How long have you been standing there?’ Dreadaeleon demanded, painfully aware of the startled crack in his voice.

‘You’re never happy to see me anymore.’

‘Possibly because you watch people while they urinate for purposes I cannot begin to even summon the will to fathom.’

‘Intimidation, mostly,’ the rogue replied with a shrug.

‘I don’t follow.’

‘Well, see, a fellow who can sneak up on you and put steel in your kidneys while you’re not looking is just unpleasant. A fellow who can do all that while you’re indulging your glittering wine?’ His grin took on an exceedingly unpleasant quality. ‘Well, there’s a man to be scared of.’

‘I suppose I should have clarified,’ Dreadaeleon muttered, waving a hand, ‘I don’t want to follow. Go away.’

‘I don’t see why I should,’ Denaos replied. ‘You’re doing well enough.’

‘Did you take me for the type that would lock up while being watched?’ the boy growled.

‘Well, no.’ The rogue chuckled. ‘That would be weird.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Anyway, mind telling me?’

‘Telling you what?’

‘Why, precisely, you go wherever you please? Being amongst half-naked reptiles is hardly an excuse to cast modesty to the wind.’

‘It’s not your place to know.’

‘It is my place to ask,’ Denaos retorted. ‘Frankly, if you’re going to go explode in some magical blaze of fire, I think I have the right to know.’