Black Halo

Her lips remained still, her ears unquivering. It was only through her eyes that he knew she wished to say something to him. But what? The question ripped his mind apart as he searched her gaze for it. A plea for help? An apology? A farewell?

He was likewise aware of his inability to do anything for her. His bonds would not allow him to rise, to escape. The searing heat and freezing cold racing through him would not allow him to weep, to speak. And so he stared, eyes quivering, lips straining to mouth something, anything: reassurances, promises, apologies, pleas, accusations.

‘Take that one to the ship, as well,’ Sheraptus ordered the netherling holding her.

It was only when Kataria was hoisted up onto a powerful shoulder, only when her eyes began to fade as she was hauled through the surf, only when her gaze finally disappeared as she was tossed over the edge of the black boat that he recognised what had dwelled in her gaze.

Nothing.

No words. No questions. Nothing but the same utter lack of anything beyond a desperate need to say something that he had felt inside of him.

And only then did he realise he could not let her disappear.

‘Very well, then,’ Sheraptus said, pointing to a cluster of netherlings. ‘You five. You have … pleased me. I think you deserve a reward.’ He barely hid his contempt at their unpleasantly beaming visages. ‘The tome is all we require. Everything else can be destroyed.’

‘What?’ Togu spoke up, eyes going wide. ‘We had a deal! You said—’

‘I say many things,’ Sheraptus replied. ‘All of them true. It is my right to take what I wish and give as I please. And really, you’ve been quite rude.’

‘Sheraptus … Master,’ Greenhair spoke, ‘I gave them my word that—’

‘Bored,’ the male snarled back. ‘I am leaving. Come or stay, screamer. I care not.’

Confusion followed as netherlings hurried back to their boats, Sheraptus idly shaping his earthen staircase and returning to his own vessel. Greenhair reluctantly followed him aboard. Blades were drawn, cruel laughter emerging from jagged mouths. Togu shouted a word and his reptilian entourage fled. White, milky eyes settled on helpless, bound forms.

Lenk cared not, did not hear them, did not look at them. He watched the boat bearing Kataria slide out of view, vanishing into the darkness. He swallowed hard, felt his voice dry and weak in his throat.

‘Tell me,’ he whispered, ‘can you … can either of you save her?’

No more heat. No more fever. Something cold coursed through his blood, sent his muscles tightening against bonds that suddenly felt weak. Something frigid crept into his mind. Something dark spoke within him.

‘I can.’

Twenty-Nine

THE SCENT OF MEMORY

The grandfather wasn’t speaking to him anymore.

Unfortunately, that didn’t mean he wasn’t still there.

Gariath could see him at the corner of his eyes, held the scent of him in his nostrils. And it certainly didn’t mean he had stopped making noise.

‘We had to have known,’ he muttered from somewhere, Gariath not knowing or caring where. ‘At some point, we had to have known how it would all end. The Rhega were strong. That’s why they came to us. They were weak. That’s why we aided them. That was what we did, back then.’

Of all the aimless babble, Gariath recognised only the word Rhega. How far back, who ‘they’ were, when the Rhega had ever helped anyone weak was a mystery for people less easily annoyed. He wasn’t even sure who the grandfather was speaking to anymore, either, but it hadn’t been him for several hours, he was sure.

The shift had begun after they had left the shadow of the giant skeleton and its great grave of a ravine behind them. The grandfather suddenly became as the wind: elusive, difficult to see, and constantly flitting about.

He talks more, too, Gariath thought, resentfully. Much more annoying than the wind.

He had long given up any hopes for communication. The grandfather vanished if Gariath tried to look at him, met his questions with silence, nonsensical murmurs or bellowing songs.

‘We used to sing back then, too,’ the grandfather muttered. ‘We had reason to in those days. More births, more pups. We killed only for food. Survival wasn’t the worry it is today.’

Granted, Gariath admitted to himself, he wasn’t quite sure how the effects of senility applied to someone long dead, but he was prepared to declare the grandfather such. The skeleton had obviously been the source, but further details eluded both Gariath’s inquiries and, eventually, his interest.

The grandfather had faded from his concerns, if not from his ear-frills, hours ago. Now, the forest opened up into beach and the trees lost ground to encroaching sand. Now, he ignored sight and sound alike, focused only on scent.

Now, he hunted a memory.

It was faint, only a hint of it grazing his nostrils with the deepest of breaths, an afterthought muttered from the withered lips of an ancestor long dead. But it was there, the scent of the Rhega, drifting through the air, rising up from the ground, across the sea. It was a confident scent, unconcerned with earth and air and water. It had been around longer, would continue to be when earth and air and water could not tell the difference between themselves.

And he wanted to scream at it.

He craved to feel hope again, the desperate yearning that had infected him when he had last breathed such a scent. He wanted to roar and chase it down the beach. He resisted the urge. He denied the hope. The scent was a passing thought. He dared not hope until he tracked it and felt the memories in his nostrils.

There would be time enough to hope when he found the Rhega again.

‘Wisest,’ the grandfather whispered.

Gariath paused, if only because this was the first time he had heard his name pass through the spirit’s spectral lips in hours.

‘Your path is behind you,’ he whispered. ‘You will find only death ahead.’

Gariath ignored him, resuming his trek down the beach. Even if it wasn’t idle babble, Gariath had been told such a thing before. Everyone certain of his inevitable and impending death had, to his endless frustration, been wrong thus far.

And yet, what his ears refused to acknowledge, his snout had difficulty denying.

Broken rocks, dried-up rivers, dead leaves, rotting bark – the scents crept into his nostrils unbidden, tugged at his senses and demanded his attention. The scent he sought was difficult to track, the source he followed difficult to concentrate on.

Each time they passed his nostrils, with every whiff of decay and age, he was reminded of the hours before this moment, of the battle at the ledge.

Of the lizard …

His mind leapt to that moment time and again, no matter how much he resisted it, of the tall, green reptile-man coated in tattoos, holding a bow in one hand, raising a palm to him. He saw the creature’s single, yellow eye. He heard the creature’s voice, understood its language. He drew in the creature’s scent and knew its name.

Shen.

How could he have known that? How could he still know that? The creature had spoken to him, addressed him, called him Rhega. How was that possible? There weren’t enough Rhega left on the mainland, let alone on some forsaken floating graveyard, for the thing to recognise him. And he was certain he had never seen it before.

And yet, it had intervened on his behalf, saved him from death. Twice, Gariath admitted to himself; once with an arrow and again with the surge of violent resolve that had swept through him afterwards. That vigour had waned, dissolving into uncomfortable itches and irritating questions.

Questions, he reminded himself, that you have no time for. Focus. If you can’t feel hope, you sure as hell can’t feel confusion until you find them.

‘Find what, Wisest?’ the grandfather murmured. ‘The beach is barren. There is nothing for us here.’

‘There must be a sign, a trace of where they went,’ Gariath replied, instantly regretting it.

‘There are no Rhega here.’

‘You’re here.’

‘I am dead.’

‘The scent is strong.’

‘You have smelled it before.’

‘And I found Grahta.’

‘Grahta is dead.’

The grandfather’s words were heavy. He ignored them. He could not afford to be burdened now. He pressed on, nose in the air and eyes upon the cloud-shrouded moon.

Thought was something he could not carry now. It would bow his head low, force his eyes upon the ground and he would never see where he was going.

‘The answer lies behind you, Wisest,’ the grandfather said. ‘Continue, and you will find something to fear.’

The spirit was but one more thing to ignore, one more thing he couldn’t afford to pay attention to. So long as he had a scent to track, answers to seek, he didn’t have to think.

He wouldn’t have to think about how the beach sprawled endlessly before him, how the clouds shifted to paint moonlight on the shore. Still, he made the mistake of glancing down and seeing the shadows rising up in great, curving shards farther down the beach.

Bones, he recognised. More great skeletons, more silent screaming, more shallow graves. How many, he wasn’t sure. He didn’t have the wit to count, either, for in another moment, the stench of death struck him like a fist.

It sent him reeling, but only that. What made him stop, what made his eyes go wide and his jaw drop, was the sudden realisation that he had been struck with no singular aroma. Another scent was wrapped up within the reek of decay, trapped inside it, inseparable from it.

Rivers. Rocks.

Rhega.

No.

That was not right. The scent of the Rhega was the odour of life, strong, powerful. He seized what remained of his strength, throttled it to make himself stagger forward. He would get a better scent, he knew, smell the vigour and memory of the Rhega that undoubtedly lingered behind it. Then everything would be fine. He would have his answers. He could feel hope again and this time, he’d—

He struck his toe, felt a pain too sharp to belong to him. A white bone lay at his feet, too small to belong to a great beast, too big to be a hapless human corpse. Its scent was too … too …

‘No …’

He collapsed to his knees; his hands drove themselves into the dirt and began digging. He sobbed, begging them not to in choked incoherencies. Thought weighed him down, fear drove his hands, and with every grain removed, white bone was exposed.

No.

An eye socket that should have held a dark stare looked up at him.

No!

Sharp teeth worn with use and age grinned at him.

NO!

A pair of horns, indentations where ear-frills had been, a gaping hole in the side of its bleached head …

He was out of thought, unable to think enough to rise or look away or even touch the skull. He knelt before it, staring down.

And the dead Rhega stared back.

‘That’s why the scent is faint.’

Gariath recognised the voice, its age and depth like rocks breaking and leaves falling. He didn’t look up as a pair of long, green legs came to stand beside him and a single yellow eye stared down at the skull.

‘It’s in the air, the earth.’ He squatted beside Gariath, running a reverential hand across the sand. ‘So is death. No matter how many bones we find and return’ – he paused to sigh – ‘there are always more.’

Gariath’s stare lingered on the skull, afraid to look up, more afraid to ask the question boiling behind his lips.

‘Are they …?’ he asked, regardless. ‘All of them?’

The Shen’s head swung towards him, levelled the single eye upon him. ‘Not all of them.’

Words heavy with meaning, Gariath recognised, made lighter with meaninglessness. ‘If a people becomes a person, there are none left.’

‘If there is one left, then there is one left. Failure and philosophy are for humans.’ He glanced farther down the beach. ‘They have been here.’

Gariath had not expected to look up at that word. ‘Humans?’

‘Dragged through here, earlier, by the longfaces,’ the lizardman muttered, staring intently at the earth. ‘We had hoped Togu would take care of their presence, but not by feeding them to purple-skinned beasts. He encourages further incursions.’ He snorted. ‘He was always weak.’

‘You have been tracking them? You are a hunter, then?’

‘I am Yaike. I am Shen. It matters not what I do, so long as I do it for all Shen.’

‘You can hunt with one eye?’

‘I have another one. I am still Shen. Other races that teem have the numbers to give up when they lose one eye.’ He hummed, his body rumbling with the sound. ‘Tonight, we hunt longfaces. Tonight, we kill them. In this, we know we are Shen.’ He glanced at Gariath. ‘More bones tonight, Rhega. There are always more.’

‘There is a lot of that on this island.’

‘This?’ Yaike gestured to the skull. ‘A tragedy. The Shen were born in it, in death. We carry it with us.’ He ran a clawed finger across his tattooed flesh. ‘Our lives are painted with it, intertwined with it. In death, we find life.’

‘In death, I have found nothing.’

‘I am Shen.’ Yaike rose to his feet. ‘I know only Shen. Of Rhega, I know only legends.’

‘And what do they say?’

‘That the Rhega found life in all things. I am Shen. For me, all things are found in death.’

Yaike’s gaze settled on Gariath for a moment before he turned and stalked off, saying nothing more. Gariath did not call after him. He knew there was nothing more the Shen could offer him, as surely as he knew the name Shen. And because he was not sure at all how he knew the name, he felt no calm. Thought felt no lighter on his shoulders.

Answers in death, he thought to himself. I’ve seen much death.

‘And you haven’t learned anything, Wisest,’ the grandfather whispered, unseen.

Death is a better answer than nothing.