Black Halo

And his heart ached to finish it.

‘You’re tired, Grandfather,’ he said.

And the spirit’s eyes went wide. He did not stop fighting; the ferocity behind his blows only increased, his roar took on a new savage desperation.

‘No, Gariath,’ he snarled. ‘I am not tired. I will fight you so long as I have to. I can’t let you throw everything away. I can’t let you end up like—’

‘Go to sleep, Grandfather.’

Blood leaked from a split in his brow, weeping into his eyes. He shut them tight.

When he opened them, nothing remained on the earth beneath him but spatters of his own blood.

He clambered to his feet. His body did not cry out in agony. Rather, his muscles sighed and his flesh complained. Cries were for proud battles, wounds that had earned the right to scream out. This was not such a battle.

He carried his bleeding and battered body away to recover. He wasn’t sure where the Shen came from, but he was certain he would have to be strong to reach it. The Shen were strong, after all. They were Shen.

And he was Rhega.

So were those who lay in the lake behind him. Their cries were quiet now, though. That brief spark of life that had surged through them had died, and the world had died with it. The wind was still. The earth was quiet. The waters were calm.

Silence settled over the clearing once again, as though it had never left. Gariath tried to listen to it, his distaste for it gone. It was preferable, he thought, for if he stopped long enough, if he let his ear-frills adjust to the silence, he could hear a single, solitary voice, not yet dead, far from alive.

It drew in a quiet breath. There was no breeze for its quiet sigh to be lost on.

He tried to ignore it.

There was ice.

Everywhere in the cavern, Lenk stared back at himself, his face distorted by the crystalline rime that coated the cavern walls, the dim light seeping through holes in the ceiling reflected upon its surface. At the mouth, it was mirrorlike, and he met his own worried gaze a dozen times over a dozen glances. With each step deeper, the rime solidified, became cloudy and thick.

His face became distorted in it: elongated, flattened, crushed, reduced to a pink blob, shattered into a dozen jagged creases. And through each mutation, each abomination, his eyes remained unbroken, unaltered, unblinking as they stared back at him.

As he continued down into the cavern, the ice became thicker, cloudier. He shivered. It was not the callous, emotionless cold that chilled him. Rather, the ice was heavier with more than just water, cloudier with more than just white.

Hatred.

It radiated off the cavern walls, a cold heavy with anger, crueller than any chill had a right to be, seeping through his flesh, into his bones and clawing at him with hoary fingernails from the marrow out. He felt it now, but while it was painful, it was not new. He had known this cold before. He had felt this hatred before.

‘This can’t be right,’ he whispered, fearful of raising his voice that the ice might hear him. It was why he kept himself from screaming. ‘There can’t be ice in this part of the world.’

‘There is.’

‘It can’t be natural.’

‘You forsook the ability to deny the unnatural long, long ago.’

He said nothing, staring deeper into the cavern’s rimed gullet. The light did not diminish, but it changed, shifting from the dying light of a golden sun to the dim azure glow of … something else entirely. He stared down it. He did not want to do more than that.

‘Go,’ the voice responded to his hesitation.

‘I don’t think I want to.’

‘Going back is not an option.’

‘It could be,’ Lenk said.

‘They betrayed you.’

‘It’s hardly the first time. I remember once, Kataria was eating something she said was rabbit meat and offered me some. It turned out to be skunk meat. She laughed, of course, but it’s hard to feel bad when someone eats a skunk for the sole purpose of trying to trick you into eating it, too.’

‘Stop it.’

‘What?’

‘Stop trying to justify it. Stop trying to excuse it. Stop denying what is apparent.’

‘What’s that?’

‘And stop pretending you don’t know. I speak from inside you. We both know that they have always thought less of you.’

‘That’s not entirely true.’

‘You brought them together. You gave them purpose, gave them meaning. You never asked for any of them. They came to you.’

‘Yes, but—’

‘They used you. You brought them salvation. You brought them hope. You brought them reason. The moment they had those, the moment you required aid, they abandoned you. They betrayed you. They betrayed us. That cannot happen. Not again.’

‘Not again? What do you mean?’

‘Go into the cave.’

‘I don’t know if—’

‘GO.’

The command came from mind and body alike, a surge of blood coursing into his legs of a volition beyond his own. In resisting it, he was sent to his knees, then to his hands as his body rebelled against him, torn between his will and another.

‘Resist now. I know you must, because I know you. You will always resist, at first. This is your strength. When you come to accept it, when you embrace us, we will be that much stronger for it.’

He had no response, for he had no voice. His throat swelled up, was sealed as if by a hand of ice that gripped his neck and squeezed tightly. He gasped in breath, the cold cutting his lungs like knives. He felt his body go numb, so numb that he didn’t even feel it when his face crashed against the cavern’s floor.

It was not a darkness that overtook him, so much as a different kind of light. He did not fall, but he could feel himself struggling to hold on. He shut his eyes tight. He went deaf to the world.

Senses returned to him, after some time.

Not his senses, though.

Through ears not his own, he heard them: a dozen voices, rasping with frost, cold with hatred. They came drifting across his ears on icy breezes, whispering in words that he had heard before, in the stream and outside the cavern.

‘… unnatural. The whole lot of them. Look at their eyes. They look at you and all they see is an obstacle. They’d kill you, given half a chance. Who cares if we’re on the same side? Which god do they fight for? Not ours, I can tell you …’

‘… this tome they’re writing. What of it? The blasphemies in it, the sacrilege. They would aid and abet the Aeons even as they march with us against the Traitors of Heaven. Whose side are they on? Can’t trust them, can’t trust them at all …’

‘… see what they did to the priest? All he was did was dedicate the battle to the Gods. And they killed him. They didn’t just kill him. They did to him what they did to the demons back on the beach. There’s nothing right about dying that way …’

‘… not my fault. We have our orders. They had their orders. They chose to forsake them. They were going to turn on us, sooner or later. They look down on us. They hate us. They hate the Gods! They had to die. Not my fault I had to do it …’

He rose, groggily. His legs were beneath him, he was certain, but he could not feel them. He was breathing, he was certain, but he couldn’t taste the air on his tongue. He lurched forward, uncertain of where he was going, but certain he had to get there. His stride was weak, clumsy. He staggered, reached out for balance and laid a palm upon the ice.

Hatred coursed through him.

A voice spoke inside his heart.

‘They’re going to betray you.’

He reeled from the sheer anger that coursed into him like a venom. The ice clung to his palm greedily, unwilling to let him go. He pulled away, leaving traces of skin on it. He was in pain, but he could not feel it.

He continued, swaying down the hall. He brushed against the wall.

‘It is in their nature. They are weak. Cattle.’

Agony; he was sure he should feel that. There was no time to dwell on it, no time to feel pain. Pain was fear, fear was doubt, doubt made strong wills falter and turn back. There was no turning back.

Another staggering step. Another brush against the ice.

‘Man’s destiny is his own to weave, not the dominion of Gods. They would seek to enslave mortals all over again, through churches instead of chains.’

More pain. More ice.

‘The tome was written in case the House was wrong, in case we needed to destroy the Gods as well as the demons. It was written to help mankind. They cower before it, call it blasphemy.’

A light at the end of the cavern appeared: no welcoming, guiding gold, but something harsh, something seething, something terrifyingly blue. He continued towards it and the voice did not stop, whispering to him as the cavern grew narrower, as the ice closed in around him.

‘We’ll show them. We’ll teach them. We can live on our own, without gods or demons. They will all burn. Mortalkind will remain.’

A wall of ice rose up before him, clear and pristine. A figure dwelled within it, a man cloaked in shadow.

‘We have our duty. We have our commands. Darior gave us this gift that we may free mortals. We were made for greater things than heaven.’

His features were sharp and angular and harsh. His hair was white and flowing. His eyes were shut. His lips were shut.

‘They are going to kill you. They are going to betray you. It is their nature. To let you live is to deny their comforting shackles. To let the tome survive is to acknowledge that they might be wrong.’

A dozen arrows were embedded in his flesh. A dozen knife hilts jutted from his body. A dozen bodies wearing battered armour and stained cloaks were frozen in the ice with him.

‘Darior made us that we might serve a greater purpose. It is our nature to cleanse, to purify, to kill. Demons, gods, heretics, liars, murderers … any that would seek to enslave mankind. But it is their nature to doubt, to fear, to hate. They will hate you. They will betray you.’

Lenk felt his arm rise of its own volition.

‘You cannot let them deny you this purpose. You cannot let them destroy you. You cannot fail. You cannot disobey Darior. You cannot abandon your duty.’

Lenk felt his hand fall upon the ice.

‘You cannot let them stop you.’

Lenk felt the man’s eyes open. Lenk stared into a vast, pupilless blue void.

‘Kill them or they will kill you.’

And then, Lenk felt himself scream.

Thirty-Nine

THE KINDEST OF POISONS

In a blackening row, the frogs smouldered on a thin wooden skewer.

Kataria stared as their colours, the myriad greens and blues and reds and yellows, vanished under a coat of black as the fire licked at their bodies, made their bellies swell and glisten with escaping moisture. The frogs stared back at her, through eyes growing larger in their tiny sockets, the fear they could not express in life coming out in death.

Finally, with nearly inaudible popping sounds, their eyes burst. Naxiaw plucked the skewer from the fire, glanced it over, and handed it to Kataria. She took it from his hands, looking it over with a frown.

‘You put them on six breaths ago,’ she said, slightly worried.

‘They are cooked in six breaths,’ he said, his shictish deep and sure where hers was soft and hesitant.

‘They’re still toxic,’ she replied, glancing at their glistening bellies. ‘The poison hasn’t evaporated from them yet.’

‘That’s why you use only six breaths.’

‘So, they’re still poisonous.’

‘They are.’

‘Why even cook them, then?’ She managed a weak grin in the face of their charred countenances. ‘Or do they just taste terrible raw?’

She looked up and found no grin on Naxiaw’s face. He was staring at her.

Still, she noted.

And with an intensity too severe for the situation, as though whether or not she were about to chew up some roasted amphibians would answer a dire question she had been privately pondering for ages now, and whether or not she licked her lips afterwards would dictate what he did next.

Not for the first time, she found herself glancing to the thick Spokesman Stick resting against the rock he sat upon.

Saying nothing, she bit one of the toasted creatures from the skewer. They were bitter and foul on her tongue, the aroma of cooked venom filling her nostrils. They were quite toxic, quite terrible to taste; she found herself wondering again what the point of cooking them was.

Texture, perhaps?

She bit down. A pungent flower bloomed in her mouth, and her lips threatened to rip themselves from her face, so fiercely did they pucker.

Apparently not.

Yet, under his stare, she continued to pop them into her mouth, chewing them up as much as she could tolerate before they slid as greasy lumps into her belly. She met his gaze as she did so, watching him as he watched her, as he continued staring.

No, she realised as she saw the careful steadiness of his eyes, not staring. Her own quivered a bit. Searching.

She did not ask for what. She didn’t want to know. She tried not to even think about it, for she didn’t want him to find it. Yet with eyes and instinct alike, he searched her.

She had sensed him reaching out again, as she had all that morning since rejoining him in the forest after reclaiming her clothes from the Owauku. She had sensed him peering through the veil of the Howling, whispering over its roar to her, trying to reach her through their communal instinct. Of him, she could sense nothing. Of her, it was clear by the faint twitch at the edges of his mouth that he sensed only frustration.

It was discouraging, she admitted to herself, that the connection they had shared on Sheraptus’ ship had been lost so completely. There was a comfort in his instinct melding with hers, a soothing earth to bury her fear beneath, and she dearly wished to feel it again. How had it been lost? she wondered. What had changed since last night?

She fought to keep the despair off her face.

Oh, right.

Meeting Naxiaw should have been the first thing to do that morning, she knew. Going to Lenk should have been something that never happened. She had already made her choice between them, between a human she should hate and a people she should adore, three times. She had made it when she looked into his eyes. She had made it when she heard him scream her name and plea for help.