Black Halo

‘I do,’ she said, drawing herself up to her knees. ‘It’s my choice. Mine.’

‘Not if you keep doing this, it isn’t.’

‘You’re a brigand,’ she whispered spitefully. ‘What do you care where you get it? You think I couldn’t do better? I’m the one settling here.’

‘And you chose to do that?’

‘It … it doesn’t matter,’ she said, wincing. ‘I need this. I need to know that I can still … that it’s still my …’

‘Not this way.’ He turned. ‘Not with me.’

She watched him stalk away, his shoulders heavy, weighing down his stride. She whispered to him on a breathless, stagnant voice.

‘I have been through …’ She shook her head violently. ‘I’ve given so much. And every time I ask for a blessing, try to take a favour, I am denied.’ She stared fire into his spine. ‘At the very least, I thought I could count on you to do what you always do. I should have remembered that what you always do is fail me in every way conceivable. You’re pathetic.’

‘I can live with that, at least,’ he replied, continuing to stalk away.

‘I hate you.’

‘That, too.’

He disappeared into the forest. And she was left alone. She did not weep.

Who would hear it?

The stream continued through the forest, Lenk discovered, and its whispering voice went with it. It murmured between trees, whimpered under rocky brooks, roared through hard ground, grew softer as it thinned into shallows, grew louder as it deepened. Lenk followed it all, listening to it.

It was probably a bad sign that he was beginning to understand it.

Never long enough to get a complete sentence, sometimes not even a full word; the stream was always freezing as he walked past, its flows and ebbs becoming hissing, crackling ice every time he laid eyes on it. But when his own breath grew soft and the water was thin enough to freeze with barely a sound, he could hear it.

The words were ancient, or alien, or simply incomprehensible. He could not understand them, anyway, but he could grasp the message behind them. They were not happy words spoken from a pleasant voice. They uttered, decreed, spewed messages of hate, vengeance, duty.

And betrayal.

Always betrayal.

Every other word seemed to carry that frustrated, seething hatred born of treachery. It rose from the stream, hammering at the ice with its voice, its words mercifully muffled behind the frigid sheets.

It was probably a worse sign that the voice was familiar.

‘I remember it,’ he whispered, ‘in the forest on my first night here. It spoke of betrayal then, too.’

‘This island is a tomb,’ the voice answered. ‘The dead have seeped into it with all their hate and their sorrow. Most have had centuries to let the earth consume them and their emotions with them. For some hatreds, that’s not nearly long enough.’

‘They sound so familiar, like I’ve heard them before.’

‘One of us has.’

He frowned, but did not ask the voice anything more. He pressed on through the forest, following the winding stream and its angry voice. He couldn’t tell if it was speaking to him. He didn’t want to know. If he did, and if it was, he would want to turn back.

And turning back, returning to them, was not an option.

It never was.

Before long, he found the stream’s end. Like an icy tongue from a great, black maw, it slithered into the shadows of a great cave set in the hillside. Here, the forest was at its deepest stage of decay. The leaves hung black off trees that had been brimming with greenery only a few paces back. The air was stale, stagnant and frigid.

It was most certainly a bad sign that he wasn’t bothered by any of this.

He watched as the ice continued without him, continuing down its freezing, murmuring path into the darkness. His ears pricked up, however, as for a few fleeting moments, he could hear them: words, clear and coherent, echoing in the gloom.

‘Don’t like it,’ a voice whispered. ‘Don’t like it and don’t want to go in there. Not with him …’

‘We have our orders,’ another replied. ‘They’ve got to die, all of them.’

‘They helped us at the battle, though, killed more demons than any—’

‘Don’t act like you haven’t been thinking of it. They’re unnatural. Abominations. Make it swift. In the back. Just don’t look in his eyes.’

‘Follow me,’ a third voice, cold as the air outside. ‘This cave is supposed to lead to a way around the enemy. We will cleanse this earth of their taint. Our duty is upheld.’

His eyes widened at the sound of it, the feel of it. It rang inside his ears as he had felt it ring inside his head before. Its rasping chill was all too familiar, the force behind it all too close to him. He heard it as it echoed inside the cavern.

He heard it as it spoke to him.

‘Go inside.’

‘What will I find there?’ he asked.

‘Nothing good.’

‘Then why should I?’

‘We will only find truth in the dark places.’

‘I’ve gone this far living a lie. It’s not been all bad.’

The voice didn’t need to respond to that. Immediately, the memories of the previous night, of the screaming, of the backs of his companions, came flooding into his mind. He sighed, lowering his head.

‘I’m afraid.’

‘Wise.’

‘I don’t understand what’s happening.’

‘You will.’

An urge, not his own, rose within him and bid him to turn around. He beheld the figure instantly, standing upon a nearby ridge. A man, it appeared, cloaked in shadow with white hair. Lenk took in his harsh, angular features immediately, ignoring them as soon as he spied the hilt of a sword peeking over the man’s shoulder.

But before Lenk could even recall he didn’t have a weapon of his own, he found himself arrested by the man’s stare. His eyes were a vast blue that seemed to take in Lenk as a shark swallows fish. They stared at him: intense, narrow …

Bereft of pupils.

The man approached. Lenk found it hard to keep track of him as he walked down the ridge. His form was there, and not there, vanishing each time he stepped into a shadow, appearing when the wind blew dust that became his body. He took a step and was somewhere else, moving with an erratic fluidity Lenk had only seen in dreams.

He did not move as the man approached, held by his great stare. He did not move as the man walked right through him, unflinching. He turned and watched him disappear into the shadows of the cavern, vanishing completely the moment his foot touched gloom.

‘This … this isn’t real,’ he told himself. ‘But it feels so …’ His head began to ache. ‘Have I seen this before?’

‘One of us has.’

He turned and saw more figures approaching over the ridge: more men, though softer of body and eye than the one that had just come. They approached in the same winking step, and each time they appeared in his vision, their faces were harder set. There was fear there, hate there, intent there.

They were clad in old armour, carried old blades, old spears. Their cloaks trailed behind them, stained and battered and torn. Clasping them together upon their breasts, Lenk saw a sigil.

An iron gauntlet clenching thirteen obsidian arrows.

‘The House,’ he whispered. He hadn’t seen it since he had first accepted the task of pursuing the tome, but at a glimpse, he recalled it instantly. ‘The House of the Vanquishing Trinity, the mortals who marched against the demons.’

‘Mortals have the capacity to march against many things. Enemies and allies alike.’

‘They’re going to …?’ Lenk began to ask.

‘You know the answer to that.’

‘They’re going into the cave.’

‘Answers lie in there.’

‘Should I …?’

The voice said nothing. He was left standing, watching as the men vanished, one by one, into the cavern. He was left standing as the river fell silent. He was left standing, watching, wondering. Wiser, he thought, not to follow ghostly hallucinations into lightless caverns born of dead forests.

But he did. Going back, after all, was not an option.

It never was.

Thirty-Eight

THE DEAD, HONOURED AND

IMPOTENT

Gariath did not fear silence. Gariath feared nothing.

Still, he found himself deeply uncomfortable with it. Ordinarily, discomfort wasn’t such a problem; the source of it, after a few stiff beatings, would eventually become a source of much more manageable anger, which would warrant further beatings until only tranquillity remained.

But those sources of anger and discomfort were frequently made of flesh, meat. Silence was not. And he could not strangle the intangible.

He had tried.

And he had failed, so he remained in uncomfortable, awkward, intangible, fleshless silence as he stalked through the forest.

Occasionally he paused, fanning out his ear-frills to listen for an errant whisper, a trace of muttered curse, even a roach’s fart. He heard nothing. He knew he would continue to hear nothing.

Grandfather had left him.

He wasn’t sure what had happened to cause it, but he was certain of it now. Not merely because he hadn’t seen, heard or smelled the ancestor since he had dragged himself out of the surf last night. It was a deeper absence, the perpetual, phantom agony of a limb long lost.

Or a relative …

He continued on through the forest. The silence continued to close in around him, seething on his flesh as though it were new, raw. Not so unreasonable, he thought; he had lived his life without silence thus far. As near as he remembered, the Rhega were a people of perpetual noise, living in a world that thundered against them: the barking of pups met with the roar of rivers, the mutter of elders accompanied by the rumble of thunder.

Since then, he had experienced any number of howls, groans, shrieks, screams, grunts, cackles, chuckles and countless, countless bodily noises. That, too, seemed long ago, though.

For the first time, he heard silence.

He didn’t like it.

And yet, he pressed ahead, instead of returning to the cheerful, stupid noises and their fleshy, meaty sources. Theirs was silence of another loud and useless kind, though today it had become a melancholy, self-loathing silence.

He had smelled them in a musky cocktail of guilt, hatred, despair and abject self-pity. All of them carried it, some daubed with scant traces of it, others wearing it like a mane about their heads.

Well, he corrected himself. Almost all of them.

It was unusual enough to find Lenk without a smell that it had given Gariath pause when they briefly crossed paths that morning. Usually, the young man bore the most varied odours, usually varying scents of exasperation. Today, when they brushed past each other without a word and exchanged a fleeting glance, he knew the young man was different. Today, the dragonman had inhaled deeply and scented nothing. Today, he had felt a chill when he met Lenk’s eyes.

Just a fleeting sensation, there and gone in less than an instant; the human was the same human who had cried out like a coward last night, the same human who had fallen into useless babble, the same human whom Gariath had graced with one and only one glance before he leapt overboard to pursue the Shen.

But it had been clear in Lenk’s eyes, in a silence that struck the whistle of the breeze dead, that Gariath was not the same dragonman from that night.

And that dragonman had told him nothing, about the pointy-eared one’s plot to kill him, about the demons on the island, about the longfaces, about anything. Because the man he had seen was not the man from that night, and the man he had seen would brook nothing but silence.

He snorted to himself; too much silence, too little meaning in it all. It was starting to aggravate him. Absently, he began glancing around for things that would make the most noise when struck. Trees, rocks, leaves: all defiantly, annoyingly mute.

He pressed forward, stomping his feet on the earth as he did, crunching leaves under his soles. He needed to break the silence, he thought as he pushed through the underbrush and stepped into a great clearing amidst the forest. He needed something to speak to.

And, in the instant he felt the sun upon his skin, he knew he had found it.

He craned his neck up to take it all in: its massive, unblemished grey face; its weathered, rounded crown; its tremendous earthen roots extending into the lapping waters of a great pond.

An Elder, the familial rock from which all Rhega began and ended, loomed over him. He surveyed it, unmarked and unadorned as it was, and felt a smile creep across his lips. The Elders were the basis, the focus, the stability behind any Rhega family. And, judging by this one, it had borne many burdens of many of his people.

His people.

They had been here in numbers great enough to raise this rock and call it their earth, once.

Once … He felt his smile fade at the words echoing in his head. And a long time ago.

The scent here was faint; that couldn’t be right, he thought. The Elder was titanic. The scent of the Rhega, of their memories, their families, their children, their wounds, their feasts, their births, their elders … he should have been overwhelmed, brought low to his knees by the sheer weight of the ancestral aroma.

But the smell was one of stagnant rivers, moss-covered rocks. Not alive, not dead, like the rot between a dying winter and a bloody newborn spring, barely faint enough for a single memory, a single statement to make itself known.

But it did make itself known.

Over and over.

Ahgaras succumbed to his wounds and died here, the scent said.

Raha bled into the earth and died here.

Shuraga fell and, his arms ripped from his body, died here.

Ishath held his dead pup in his arms and ate no more …

Garasha screamed until his breath left him …

Urah walked into the night and never returned …

Pups fell, elders fell, all fell …

He drew in their scent, though he did so with ever-diminishing breath, his heart conspiring with his lungs, begging him to stop smelling the memories, to stop wrenching them both. But he continued to breathe them in, searching the scent for anything, any birth, any mating, any defecation, anything but this endless reeking list of death.