Black Halo

‘And yet … here I am.’

‘Only because no one,’ she whispered sharply, ‘scars Semnein Xhai and dies swiftly.’

The face that stared at Denaos, it was evident, was a face used to rigid, expressionless demands for obedience. The trembling of her lips, the clenching of her teeth, was something her face struggled, and failed, to contain. Rage boiled beneath her skin like a purple stew of skin, bone and hate.

Lenk assumed it was rage, anyway, not possessing the unique brand of insanity that accompanied the ability to guess at a longfaces’ emotions. How Denaos remained calm in the face of them was likewise a mystery. He was used to seeing Denaos as a trembling, scurrying thing, not the kind of man that would stare down a tower of quivering muscle and iron without so much as flinching.

The sight, Lenk thought, was impressive enough that he would remember the rogue as this, instead of the splattered mess of quivering red chunks he was undoubtedly about to become.

‘You cut me,’ she all but squealed, her voice brimming with something beyond anger.

‘It’s what I do,’ he replied, without blinking.

That the man was thrown to the earth, Lenk expected. That the longface’s foot rose up was likewise predictable. That Xhai stepped over the rogue and stalked towards her fellow netherlings instead of bringing the foot down in a spray of bone shards and porridge spatters, however, threw him.

‘Get me my scumstompers,’ she roared to the longfaces. ‘The big, spiky ones!’

That was more like it.

‘Denaos,’ he grunted.

‘Oh, I’m just fantastic, thanks,’ Denaos groaned back. ‘What’s that? You didn’t ask? No. Why would you? I’m just getting my meadow muffins kicked out of me. You have to sit on the cold hard ground. How are you doing, Lenk?’

No time to humour him, Lenk made his question swift. ‘Where are they?’

‘He didn’t see, obviously,’ Dreadaeleon replied. ‘If he was drunk enough to start showing remorse, he didn’t see anything but a pool of his own vomit before he passed out.’

‘I didn’t have enough time to do something nearly so satisfying before that fish-woman put me under,’ Denaos grunted.

Lenk blinked, the echoes of a fading song bleeding in his mind. The siren, he thought, Greenhair. She’s responsible for this? For knocking me out?

‘Tried to be,’ the voice chuckled blackly. ‘Was not. Took iron and fists for that.’

‘She likely put the others out, as well,’ Denaos muttered. ‘Thank goodness we had someone who could shoot lightning out of their asshole on-hand to not do a gods-damned thing about it.’

‘As though it’s my fault,’ Dreadaeleon snarled. ‘I was as powerless as you!’

‘You cannot piss fire and be powerless!’

‘You’re not even supposed to be talking about this! You said you wouldn’t!’

‘Oh no! Denaos lied? Really?’ The rogue gasped, rolling his eyes. ‘Is this still even a surprise anymore?’

The boy made a reply, shrill and whining. Lenk could hear the tall man growl back. He could see the longfaces looking anxious, tending to blunted weapons with whetstones. He felt Togu’s presence, breath leaking from a quivering throat begging to be cut. He knew he had been betrayed, that he was likely to be killed, very soon, very messily.

Somehow, that seemed so … unimportant.

‘I’m not afraid,’ he whispered. One of the two prisoners beside him replied; he ignored them both. ‘Why is that?’

‘Fear is useless to us. It is for other … things. Not us.’

‘I am concerned, though … for her.’

‘Also useless.’

‘I wish I knew she was safe.’

‘Why?’

‘I left things … unsatisfied.’

‘Satisfaction is important.’

‘I need her to be safe.’

‘She does not feel similarly.’

‘You know this?’

‘Yes.’

‘You can sense her?’

‘No.’

‘Then how do you know?’

‘Inevitable.’

‘I … need …’

‘We do not.’

He had no more words for the voice; they, too, were unimportant. He knew no words would convince the voice. He knew he could say nothing to deny the voice. He knew nothing would make the voice wrong. He knew this, without knowing it.

He knew this, because the voice knew it.

And the voice sighed, or seemed to, for it, too, knew something of him.

‘She is not dead.’

‘No?’

‘You don’t need her.’

‘I need her to be—’

‘She will.’

‘How do you—’

‘BRING HIM FORWARD.’

A shudder through the sand, feet charging forward; Denaos put up no particular resistance as a pair of netherlings hoisted him up and brought him toward Xhai.

And her scumstompers.

She still possessed feet, but he was only fairly certain. The amalgamations of metal wrapped about her ankles, forged with enough care to only passingly resemble boots, belonged on something that used them to crawl out of hell. They brimmed with spikes, rough and jagged, no space left uncovered.

He saw it, widened his eyes. Dreadaeleon saw them, all but squealed. Denaos undoubtedly saw them, said nothing, did nothing.

The voice answered the question before he asked it, slowly, softly. ‘He is at peace. He knows his sins, did what he could for them. His life is complete.’

‘It isn’t,’ Lenk whispered. ‘Is it?’

‘His duty is to accept the inevitability.’ It spoke firmly, swiftly. ‘Ours, no different.’

‘You’re not making sense,’ Lenk said, eyelids twitching. ‘You say one thing, then another, and they contradict each other and I don’t know which to listen to.’ He swallowed hard, gritted his teeth, almost afraid to ask the question that plagued his mind. ‘Are … you alone in there?’

‘We are not.’

‘Do you mean “we” as you and I or—’

A groan of agony drew his attention back.

The netherlings dropped Denaos before Xhai. He fell to his knees and no farther, staring up at the female impassively. She stared down at him, cruel, contemptuous, trying to hold back the rage trembling beneath her face.

‘Why don’t you scream?’ she asked.

‘No reason,’ he replied.

‘I’m going to kill you.’

‘I’ve had worse.’

‘I’m going to stomp you into the ground, stomp your bones into jelly, stomp the jelly into pulp and stomp the pulp until there’s nothing left. I’m going to spill you out on the earth and splash in your entrails.’

He stared up at her, grinned.

‘I scarred you.’

She shrieked, raised her foot, the spikes glistening in the moonlight.

And nothing more came of it.

Something happened: a shift in the night breeze, a calm of the waves, a collective twitch through a dozen purple faces. Suddenly, milky white eyes turned upwards; the fury that fuelled each of them leaked out of their mouths as they opened and turned out towards the ocean. A strange placidity settled over them, a pack of purple hounds scenting meat, stilling their barking maws and wagging tongues in anticipation.

‘Coming,’ the voice whispered.

‘Them?’

‘He.’

‘He always comes like this,’ Togu whispered from his perch. ‘The world knows when he arrives. The sea knows it first. The sky knows it next because the sea is quiet. We know it last, because the night is too dark and the world is quiet. It doesn’t want him to see. Nothing good wants him to see.’

He hopped off his perch, glanced at Lenk with eyes too narrow for anything but fear.

‘Don’t look into his eyes, cousins. You don’t want him to see, either.’

The netherlings cleared a space at the beach, parting as though bidden by a wind unfelt and hauling Denaos with them. That same wind seemed to continue to blow through, cut across his flesh and chill him.

‘I can feel it, Lenk,’ the boy said on weakening breath, ‘a power … constant … wrong. It doesn’t stop. It should stop. It needs to stop.’ He grimaced, in pain. ‘Hot, cold, cold, hot. Why won’t it stop?’

Lenk, too, felt it; not the wind, but the leaves it picked up, the scent of smoke on it, the humidity it carried. A taint, one he was familiar with.

‘A demon?’

‘Their servant.’

‘Ulbecetonth?’

‘Her enemy.’

‘Our friend?’

He knew the answer as soon as he saw the shadow upon the water.

A ship, he recognised, pulling itself through the water, towards the shore, with no oars, no sails, no source of motion. At the prow, a pillar of gloom. A man, tall and black, crowned by three pinpricks of red light, fire upon shadow upon shadow.

Him.

It came to a perfect halt, barely grazing the sand. The figure waved a hand, dismissed everything, demanded everything. Everything complied.

The netherlings backed away. The earth quivered; the sand drew itself together, smoothed itself out and made itself presentable to him. It rose to meet him in a perfect staircase. His foot hit the step with no sound, and the netherlings took not a breath, dared to utter the word.

‘Master,’ bubbled out amongst them.

‘Sheraptus,’ Togu said, silent as the figure descended the stairs and regarded him.

The three red lights swung back and forth, tiny fires in a halo of black wrapped around a long, purple brow. His sigh crept out of a pair of thin, purple lips. Long, silky white hair rested on thin, drooping shoulders. Seas were silent, skies were still; the world held its breath, for fear that it had angered him.

‘And all that greets me,’ he whispered on a voice long and dark, ‘is death.

‘I have seen death before.’ He tilted his head up towards the distant forest. ‘But in my land, Togu, I have never seen green. I have seen no rivers and blue skies, no birds and insects, no rain clouds …’ He shook his head. ‘And you meet me in the dark, on a clear night, on a beach laden with death. Death, I have seen before.’

A pair of eyes opened. Bright. Crimson. Fiery.

‘I will see more of it.’

The voice was languid, liquid, the threat inherent in it ebbing away as soon as it passed his lips, wasted. Or rather, Lenk thought, unnecessary. There was something inherently threatening about the man, something that went beyond the black robes, the glowing red jewels and the black crown about his brow.

‘Power …’ Dreadaeleon whispered, his voice pained. ‘He’s leaking it.’

Magic, perhaps, Lenk thought; that wasn’t hard to believe, given that the characteristic crimson pyres that lit up a wizard’s eyes were perpetually burning in his stare. But what Lenk sensed was not magic. It was the unseen, unmoving breeze about him, the unscented stench about him.

The taint all too plain to both Lenk and the creature inside his head.

‘Sense it,’ the voice muttered. ‘He’s killed many. Demon, mortal … child, mother … he’s watched them suffer; he’s drunk their pain.’ It shifted, becoming hard and rigid. ‘He will again if we do not do our duty.’

‘Who …?’ he asked. ‘Whose pain?’

Cold sigh. Warm sigh. Two answers.

‘You know.’

‘Where is it?’

Another voice, neither warm nor hot, brimming with boredom and hatred. Him again. Sheraptus.

Togu did not bother defiance against his question, did not bother to interpret it as anything other than the demand that it was. He glanced over his shoulder, spoke a word in his native tongue. From around a standing skull, a quartet of Owauku approached, bearing a wooden palanquin upon their shoulders with Bagagame, head heavy and eyes thick, at their head.

They passed Lenk, keeping their gazes low. He paid them no mind, watching instead the objects heaped upon the wooden platform: all of them his or his companions’. He spotted Denaos’ knives, Asper’s pendant, Kataria’s bow. His sword was up there, too; he supposed that should have galled him. The fact that his pants were right next to it should have enraged him.

Neither of those was the reason for the sudden flash of icy heat that seared through his head on a pair of voices.

‘NO!’

‘What?’ he asked, wincing.

‘He cannot be allowed to have it! It does not belong to him! It belongs to … no one … no, to YOU! TO NO ONE!’ His head pounded, seared with fever, frozen with cold before the voice finally howled in twisting cacophony. ‘HE CANNOT HAVE THE TOME.’

Sheraptus glanced over to the boat, raised a white eyebrow. The netherlings followed his gaze, reverence shifting to scorn the moment their gaze left his face. The male seemed to take no notice, though, as he glanced to the bound companions.

‘This is them?’ he asked.

The shape that rose up from his vessel was instantly recognisable. The skin, white even in darkness, and the crown of emerald-coloured hair were extraneous detail. The palpable aura of treachery denoted the siren’s presence long before she showed her gills.

‘That is … most of them, yes,’ she replied, shaking her head. ‘There was another with them … a beast on two legs with red skin.’

‘Dead,’ Denaos muttered. ‘Thankfully.’

‘If that is the case, then they are all here and—’

‘You three,’ Sheraptus said, pointing to a trio of netherlings, ‘search the island for signs of this thing. If this is the same red thing that netherlings could not kill, I doubt he was slain by anything else.’ He ignored Greenhair’s stammered protests as the trio grunted and set off down the coast, instead turning his gaze to the palanquin. ‘Now, then … where is it?’