Arms caught him about the waist, a pair of bodies brought him low as the air was cut apart in a metallic wail. Flesh and bone exploded in a bouquet of red and white flowers as the great, jagged star tore through the Shen behind them, carrying through bodies and screams to impale itself in the stone stairs.
“Down! Down! Keep him down!” Denaos cried.
“There’s more coming, Lenk! Stop moving, you idiot!” Asper shrieked, trying to hold him down.
“JAHU! ATTAI WOH!” Shalake howled.
Shields went up around them, a poor defense against the jagged stars descending from the air. In the distance, between the scaly green legs, Lenk could see them hurled from great wooden arms on the netherlings’ ballista. He could see them fly into the air, whirring violently before falling like falcons, ripping through coral, shields, flesh, bones, sand, stones.
And still, the screams were drowned out. And still, the blood spattering the earth around him was nothing. Nothing compared to the rush of purple flesh and black metal charging toward them.
“ATTAI-AH! ATTAI-AH!” Jenaji screamed from the steps. “ATTALA JAGA! SHENKO-SA!”
His warcry was echoed in the hum of bowstrings, a choral dirge that sent arrows singing through the sky. Fletched with feathery fins and tipped with jagged coral, they rose and fell in harmony, their song turning to battle cry as they tipped and descended upon the charging netherlings.
They sought. They found flesh, digging into necks, thighs, wriggling between armor plates and jutting out of throats. Some fell, some stumbled, some tripped and were trampled by their fellow warriors. But one still stood.
A great hulk of a female, armor stark gray like an angel wrought of iron, swinging a massive slab of metal over a helmet flanged with spikes and edges. She embraced the arrows like lovers as they found a bare bicep, a flash of thigh, a scant spot of skin just beneath the collarbone.
She laughed. She bled. She lowered her head.
And she did not stop.
The Carnassial did not meet her foes. She exploded into them. A coral barricade was smashed into fragments, many of them embedded in her flesh to join the arrows as she met the cluster of Shen warriors full on. For a moment, their warcries died in their throats and their numbers were meaningless.
She swung her slab of a sword, cleaving shields in two, swords from wrists, heads from shoulders in one fell swoop. She stepped forward with each blow, driving the warriors back as more netherlings rushed into the gap she had cloven into the barricade. Those Shen that fell screamed, steamed like cooked meat as sheens of sickly green liquid gnawed at their wounds.
She threw her bloodied sword up. She presented a body wrapped in metal and kissed in blood and shards. She roared.
“AKH ZEKH LA—”
The fist struck her and rang her like a cathedral bell. The sword clattered to the ground next to the jagged teeth she spat out beside it. She blinked. She looked up.
Gariath’s black eyes met her first.
His fist came after.
He pounded her relentlessly, hammering blows into her face, into her body. His fists were cut upon her armor and his blood joined hers upon her flesh. And still she would not fall. And still she looked at him with a mouth shattered and a body bleeding and roared.
And his reply was the ringing of metal.
He clapped his hands against either side of her helmet, ignoring the spikes biting into his palms, ignoring her blows hammering his body, ignoring everything but the feeling of squeezing an old coconut between his hands. His earfrills were shut. He could not hear anything. Not the defiant roar, not the groaning of metal, not the sickening splitting sound that came before a thin line of blood spurted out from a much narrower visor and she hung limply between his palms.
She fell.
His wings flew open. His jaws flew open. His head flew back.
His roar was long, loud, and it spread like the fire on the sky.
The Shen took up his howl, bastardizing it with words and neutering it with order. Gariath’s anger was pure. It drove his fists into netherling jaws, thrust his claws into netherling flanks, brought his jaws to netherling throats. The Shen followed his example, machetes and clubs held high to push their aggressors back as arrows from the stairs picked off those unfortunate enough to get clear enough of the action.
“There you go, then,” Denaos muttered. “There are no problems that can’t be solved by letting Gariath do whatever the hell he wants to. Stay down and everything will be fine.”
Absently, Lenk wondered if he couldn’t begin to predict disasters by Denaos’s assurances that everything would be fine. For at that moment, a wounded sky was ripped further by the cobalt bolt of electricity that lanced over the heads of the warriors to strike at the staircase. An explosion of dust and stone fragments erupted, sending Shen archers flying from the staircase, their screams lost in the thunder.
Through the press of bodies and the spines of barricades, the male was visible. Far from the melee, seated atop his sikkhun, his burning red eyes were visible through the veil of smoke wafting from his fingers. The words he spoke were unheard, the gesture he made insignificant, the bolt of lightning that sprang from his fingers was neither.
It shot across the sky to rake at the stairs once more. No explosion came this time, no screams or flying bodies. Only a grunt of effort and the flapping of a dirty leather coat from a figure positively tiny against the cluster of Shen. Dreadaeleon extended two fingers and like a rod, the electricity snaked to them, entering his body with a cobalt crackle and a sizzle. The boy panted with the effort, his body shaking with the absorbed power, tiny sparks flew from his mouth.
He wouldn’t last to take another.
That, some small, bitter part of Lenk reasoned, was good enough to do what he did.
“Someone tell the archers to—” Denaos’s words were cut short by a cry of alarm as the young man slipped from his grasp. “Hey! Wait! WAIT!”
That would have been good advice, the more sensible part of Lenk realized as he leapt over a barricade, ducking stray blows and snarls as he charged past the melee. But that part wasn’t speaking loudly enough.
The part that had watched the fire in the sky, that had wanted to kill Shalake, that saw the forest burn with Kataria inside it was roaring now, laughing with a strength that dulled sense and reason and any part of him that told him this was suicidal stupidity.
He didn’t even feel his legs beneath him. He didn’t feel the sword in his hand. He didn’t feel how cold he was. There were netherlings coming toward him, those few who had stayed behind to guard the male. He could barely see them. He didn’t need to.
His sword knew where they were, his sword spoke in the ringing of steel and the splitting of flesh and told him he wasn’t needed here. It lashed out with mechanical precision, unaware of him as he was of it as he ran past them. It cleaved hand from wrist, opened belly from navel to sternum, found a throat and cut it.
No pause to avoid the stray blows of iron and fist that caught him. No need to. He wasn’t in control now. Something else was.
And in the back of his mind it cried out with a breathless shriek of joy the way it did in his nightmares.
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. his 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.