An affinity for steel, p.169
An Affinity for Steel, page 169
And he didn’t care that the netherling male atop his beast turned a bloodred stare upon him and smiled broadly as he shouted something.
Not a word of power. No, this red-robed male was feeling bold. His words were for the beast beneath him and its six ears unfurling like sails. The creature’s gibbering cackle matched its master’s as it was spurred forward, claws rending the ground beneath it as it rushed toward Lenk, tongue lolling out from gaping jaws.
The motion was seamless, driven by numb muscles. He didn’t feel himself falling into a slide across the rent earth and under the beast, he didn’t feel the wind break as jaws snapped shut over his face. Every bit of awareness in him was for the steel in his hands and the great, furry underbelly above him.
Without a word, he twisted the blade up.
And thrust.
A wailing shriek poured out of the beast’s mouth as something warm and thick fell from its underbelly in black curtains. It reared back, taking Lenk’s blade with it. From beneath a shower of gore, he twisted as the thing bucked and stamped, ripping up stained sand and tossing its master from its back.
The male tumbled to the ground, cursing as its beast scratched and shrieked, trying futilely to dislodge the weapon from its gut. But neither he nor Lenk were concerned about it any longer. Lenk’s attentions were on the male’s neck, the male’s on Lenk’s hands wrapping around it.
“Don’t touch . . .” the male tried to gasp. “Diseased, unclean . . .”
No words for the male. No breath to speak them. No chance to wave fingers or spit ice or fire or anything else. There was no magic here. Only flesh. Only the purity of choking the life out of a monster.
And it was pure, Lenk thought. His hands fit so easily around the male’s neck. His windpipe felt big as a column to his fingers. He could see his own eyes in the male’s horrified stare, his own pupilless stare. He could feel his fingers turning gray, the color draining from his arms, his face. He could feel his body going numb, the warmth leaving him and the bitter, comforting cold that began to blanket him.
And he could feel that part of him, that small and angry part, growing large inside him. And it felt good to feel this way again.
“He dies.”
This numbing cold.
“He is weak.”
This bitter voice.
“And we cannot stop.”
This death in his mouth.
“You ever notice how easily we run away?”
Another voice. That one was smaller. That voice was another part of him that spoke weakly inside him. But it was insistent. It kept talking.
“You’re supposed to be doing things for yourself now.”
It was something that made him uncomfortable to hear.
“If you still want to run away, you can keep holding on.”
It wouldn’t shut up.
“But if she could see you now . . .”
She would scream.
He let go.
Without knowing why, he released the male from his grip. Without knowing how, he fell breathless to his rear and felt a fever-sharp warmth grip him. And without even knowing who he was facing anymore, he watched the male hack and scramble to his feet, eyes burning brightly as he held out a palm and spoke a word.
The fire in his hand lived and died in an instant, sputtering to smoke as an arrow bit him in the shoulder. No Shen arrow. This one had black fletchings. This one sang an angry song and ate deeply of the male’s shoulders. This one was joined from the side of the ring.
Lenk was barely aware of her as she came rushing out from the forest, bow in her hands, arrows heralding her with angry songs. She was a creature of black ash and bloodied skin and red warpaint, overlarge canines big and white against the mask of darkness and crimson that obscured every patch of bare skin on her.
Maybe Kataria was alive. Maybe Kataria’s angry ghost had returned just to save him. Or maybe to take him back to hell with her.
But first, she would deal with the male.
Her arrows flew at him, begging in windy wails for a soft piece of purple skin to sink into. The male spoke word after word, throwing his hands up, twisting the shimmering air into invisible walls to repel her strikes. But she would not relent, and his breath had not returned. One would get through, eventually.
Unless she reached into her quiver and found nothing there.
The male found his breath in a single, wrathful word. He thrust two fingers at her. The electricity sprang to him, racing down his arm and into his tips. She pulled something from her belt and hurled it at him. Something shiny. Something golden.
He twisted his arm at the last moment as the thing tumbled through the sky toward him. The lightning left his fingers in a crack of thunder and a shock of blue. Glass erupted in the sky, fell like stars upon the ground.
The liquid that followed in a thin, yellow, foul-smelling rain, was decidedly less elegant.
For a moment, the entire ring seemed to fall silent. The battle seemed too distant to be heard. The world seemed to hold its breath. The male’s mouth was opened a hair’s breadth. His eyes were wide, white, and unblinking as rivulets of waste trickled down his brow and onto his crimson-clad shoulders.
And then he began to scream.
Over and over, breath spent and drawn and spent again every moment in utter, wailing horror. He stood frozen, ignoring everything else but the reeking liquid coating him. He stood screaming about contamination and filth and infection in every language he knew.
He didn’t stop until Kataria tackled him about the waist, pulled him to the ground and jammed her knife in his throat. His screams continued to escape in bubbling, silent gouts. She no longer seemed to care.
The sigh she offered as she rose to her feet seemed not weary enough to match the creature that had emerged from the forest. She was a creature painted gray and black by ash and soot, her eyes and teeth white through the dark mask painted across her face. Her body was likewise stained, the darkness broken only by scars of bright-red blood. Cuts criss-crossed her arms, swathed her midriff, tore her tunic and her breeches. Her hair was thick with dust and the netherling’s blood painted a long stain from her chest to her belly.
All that remained of the shict that had gone into the forest were the feathers in her hair and the dust-tinged sigh that left her.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey,” he replied, staggering to his feet. “You’re alive.”
“Yeah.” She sniffed. “Plan didn’t work.”
“I know.”
“Kind of want to kill Shalake.”
“Yeah, me, too.” He glanced over his shoulder. The battle at the barricades had ended, the netherlings pressed back. “We should go back.”
“We should.” She swayed slightly. “You mind?”
He shook his head and turned around. He felt her collapse into him, no more strength in her to walk. Hooking his arms under her legs, he hefted her onto his back and began to trudge back, stepping over bodies and gore-stained sand.
He made a note to remember to go back for his sword once she was clear.
“So . . .” he said, “that was what the jar was for?”
“Uh huh.”
“So . . . uh, why did you bring it back?”
“What was I supposed to do? Just leave my piss behind where anyone could get it?”
TWENTY-EIGHT
HIM
It might have been well-cooked leather that Asper wiped the cloth against, maybe the tenderer part of an alligator in heat, she wasn’t sure. Something bright red was underneath, not pale and pink. She drew back the cloth and saw not a white spot left. It wasn’t a cloth anymore. It was all black and red now, rust peeled off a sword.
She sighed, dropped it with the others onto the stairs.
“You could at least help me,” Asper muttered, plucking up a small jar from the stone. “You know, so I don’t feel quite like a mother cat bathing a cub.”
Kataria didn’t bother to look up as she took a long swig of water from the skin. “If you used your tongue, you’d talk less.”
“And then I’d choke on smoke and blood and paint and . . . and . . .” Her eyes were drawn to the heap of cloths. “Should I ask what the other smell was?”
“I’ve never lied to you before,” Kataria said, shaking her head.
“Right.” Asper rolled her eyes as she dipped a pair of fingers into the thick, goopy balm and rubbed it onto the woman’s shoulder.
It was the last inch of exposed skin not touched by a bandage or charbalm. Beneath the soot and the ash and the blood, Kataria had been red and raw. She had been spared the fire, though the heat had kissed her lightly, but sloppily, leaving a lot of black-stained spit behind. Even beneath all the soot and paint, she had been cut. Red lines ran down her arms, her abdomen, the palms of her gloves. Her right ear continually flicked, perpetually perturbed by the bright gash across its length.
The priestess looked up over the sky and the fonts of smoke still pouring out of the forest.
“How?” she asked.
“Climbed,” Kataria replied, not following her gaze. “With great fervor, with great speed. Had to circle around, got back just in time.”
“To . . .”
“Yeah. To see it.”
Asper wouldn’t have asked even if Kataria’s tone hadn’t suggested that doing so would result in severe bodily harm. They had all seen it.
Him, Asper corrected herself. We saw him. Lenk. He’s a him. Not an “it.” He’s still . . . he’s still . . .
She wasn’t sure how to finish that. She wasn’t sure what he was. What sort of creature moved like he had? What sort of creature’s skin went gray as stone in the blink of an eye?
He was Lenk.
And only now she started to wonder what Lenk was.
It was a question she wasn’t prepared to ask herself, let alone the green-eyed black-and-red hellbeast he had carried back with him. And yet, the shict’s body shuddered with a sigh beneath her fingers.
“Whatever happened,” Kataria whispered, “whatever did or didn’t . . . or barely didn’t . . . he’s all I have left.”
Not technically true, Asper noted as she looked up from the stairs down to the barricade and the battlefield. She also had a corpse wallowing in various liquids lying in the sand next to a large and hairy corpse of a sikkhun, whose blood still seemed to be leaking out of it hours later.
But that was only one corpse. There were more at the barricade. And most of those belonged to Gariath. They had been stacked in heaps of flesh and iron, walls of flesh to shore up those spots where the coral had been shattered. In heaps of limbs, pools of blood, and shattered skulls they lay, struck down by machete, club, or overzealous fellow netherlings who had tried to push past them.
The Shen dead had been removed, taken farther up the stairs by fellows with eyes too envious for Asper to feel very confident in them. Even if they had lost far less than the netherlings, they were still far fewer than their foes, who were showing remarkable restraint as they lingered at the center of the ring.
Occasionally, a stray knot of longfaces would grow too excited to heed whatever commands the Carnassials would shout at them and charge forward. Regular hails of arrows from the Shen archers above kept them at bay, littering the field with their bodies.
The Shen below screamed at them to stop shooting, howled at them to let the warriors come, to give them the fight they deserved. Even the occasional star-shaped blade that came crashing through their barricades did little to diminish their bloodlust. They would have sounded just like the netherlings, Asper thought, if not for one thing.
The voices of the Shen were glutted, fat and slow with whatever confidence Gariath and Lenk and Kataria had given them. Theirs were cries of leisure, simply asking for seconds. The netherlings were hungry in their shrieks, starving in their swords. They needed more.
They were netherlings. They would have more.
Because he would give it to them.
She stared out into the crowd, so far and still so vast. The tangles of purple flesh and black iron were so dense, yet she searched and she stared and she feared the moment her eyes would catch him and—
“Stop it.”
Kataria’s growl was low, threatening. Her glower was sharp and cast over her shoulder like a spear as she thrust it at Asper.
“Stop what?”
“Looking for him. You know he’s down there.”
Kataria held her gaze for a long, painful moment. And the moment stretched, long enough for her to realize the pain was not from Kataria’s eyes, but from the quake of her jaw as she fought to keep it fused shut.
“You were supposed to kill him,” she whispered through her teeth. “You said you would.”
“I didn’t.”
“You were supposed to—”
“I didn’t.” Kataria snarled. “And I can’t right now. I don’t know if I can ever.” She gestured to the blade tucked into the priestess’s sash. “And that’s not going to be as useful as you think it is.”
“I’m not going to use it on him,” Asper said.
“I know what you think you’re going to use it for.” The shict’s ears folded against her head. “Whatever it is that kills him or you . . . it’s not going to be me or that blade.”
“Then what?”
Kataria took another long swig of water. She looked at Asper and offered no words. She looked out over the field and said nothing. No poignancy in the silence, no meaning. No answer.
Asper’s fingers scraped an empty bowl. The last of the charbalm lay glistening upon Kataria’s pinkened skin. She set it back inside her satchel, hiked it up over her shoulder.
“I should go down to the barricade,” she said. “There might be wounded down there.”
The priestess left without another word exchanged between them.
Kataria had no objections leaving it at that. She could have easily pointed out that there were never any “wounded” amongst the Shen, merely the dead and the envious living. She could have stayed and talked her through whatever she felt after Sheraptus’s return, told her that he was whole and whatever the priestess had done to him wasn’t enough. She might have even felt better about her own failure to kill him.
But her ears were upright and rigid with the sound of dust settling upon stone. Her burned skin tingled with the sensation of being watched. And her teeth ground behind her lips as she rose and turned upon the withered, decaying creature standing a few steps above her.
“You are alive,” Mahalar observed. Not with any great relief.
“Yaike isn’t,” she replied. Not with any great sympathy.
“Their loss weighs on me heavily.”
“Then why did you send them out there to die?” At his raised eyeridge, she chuckled, an edge of hysteria to it. “You told Shalake to let me go attack Sheraptus alone. Shalake agreed to it. I’ve seen the way he looks at you. He wouldn’t send them out against your wishes.” She pointed a finger at him. “So you changed your wishes.”
“It was no wish. I asked Yaike if he would save us all. He took his warriors to do just that.”
“By what? Ruining an ambush? Ruining all our chances for survival? I had him in my sights. I would have killed Sheraptus and we’d be facing a rabble of disorganized, leaderless animals instead of . . .” She swept a hand out over the battlefield. “That.”
“Whatever is ruined is made so by you.” There was no anger to his voice. He spoke in a cool, dusty observation. “You weren’t supposed to survive.”
“There’s a reason killing your own isn’t really a viable military strategy, you know. Mostly because it’s completely stupid and makes your own come back to beat the stuffing out of you.”
Mahalar did not so much ignore her as make her transparent. His dull, amber eyes stared through her. He shambled down the steps and walked through her, in front of her in one moment, behind her in the next. When she turned, his back was brazenly turned to her, his eyes down upon the barricades.
Lenk sat there, a silver pimple on a green backside, amidst the Shen that pointedly did not look at him. His sword lay in his lap, blood stained his hands, his eyes were somewhere far away.
“Did you hear it?” Mahalar asked.
“Hear what?”
“Him.”
“I saw him.”
“Then you saw what we all saw. You saw him cleave them apart, stain the sands with them, rip them open. You saw him bring down that monster, nearly kill the male. All on his own.”
“I saw what happened to him. I saw the way people looked at him when he came back.”
“But you didn’t hear him.” The wistfulness in his voice bordered on the obscene. “No one did, of course. If they had, they would try to kill him, as they killed the girl in the chasm, the rest of them. The voice has that effect on people who do not understand it.
“I do, though. I heard it. I heard it screaming in his head, clawing against his skull. It begged for more, cried out with joy, wept and wailed as he ripped them apart. It was just like I heard it the last time, when they all spoke out in unison, when their voices were as one and their swords slew demons.”
He exuded the kind of morbidly nostalgic sigh the rest of his scaly brethren did. It trailed from his lips on a cloud of dust.
“I didn’t understand what they were, anymore than you understand what he is. But I watched him since he came to Jaga. I knew that your death would enable him to kill. Kill the netherlings, kill Ulbecetonth, kill everything if we merely stepped out of his way.”
He shook his head. “I don’t blame you for surviving, no more than I blame myself for placing our survival above yours. But in doing so, you’ve ruined us, shict.” He twisted his gaze out to sea, to the dark storm clouds gathering over the waves. “But I suppose you can’t hear that, either.”
“I hear everything, lizard.” Her ears folded flat against her head. “And all I hear out of you are a bunch of reasons that fail to convince me that I shouldn’t kill you.”
“And yet . . .”
“And yet, I’m still aware of where we are: wedged up the collective rectums of a hundred reptiles who would be left leaderless against a horde of longfaces and who would probably eat me alive if I laid a hand on you.”
