“We die, you die.”
It was Lenk who spoke, Lenk who came trudging through the sands. Lenk spoke in certainties these days.
“Kataria, Gariath, and I are going to Jaga,” he said, fixing his gaze upon Togu, whose own eyes quickly faltered. “This ship sinks, we die, we don’t come back. Denaos, Dreadaeleon, and Asper take care of you.”
“There’s no need for threats,” Hongwe said, unflinching from Lenk’s stare. “The boat will deliver you as far as you can manage it. It’s solid, Gonwa craft. But you will not return. This journey is madness and the Owauku must suffer for it?”
“And Gonwa,” Lenk said. “You didn’t lift a finger to warn us. You could have prevented this.”
Speechless, Hongwe looked to Gariath, pleading in his eyes. The dragonman stared at him for a moment before shrugging.
“Rats die,” he said. “We didn’t.”
“I couldn’t trust you to die, then,” Gonwa sighed, rubbing his eyes. “I trust you now.”
“Fine,” Lenk said. He looked to the vessel. A pair of Gonwa hefted the splintering spear into it. “Is it loaded?”
“With your weapons and everything else you wanted.” He looked to Kataria. “Including the rope.”
“And the rest?” Kataria asked.
Hongwe stared blankly at her, as though he desperately wished he didn’t know what she was talking about. After that hope joined many others in death, however, he sighed and motioned one of his scaly workers forward.
The Gonwa nodded and, from behind the boat, produced a wooden bucket, filled to the brim with what might have been best described as the porridge of the damned. Barbed roach legs, feathery antennae, the occasional rainbow-colored wing all protruded from a thick slop of glistening insect entrails, their stench ripened by the sun to give the aroma of something not satisfied to offend only one sense.
Despite the fact that a single whiff caused tears to form in her eyes, Kataria grinned. She looked to Gariath and gestured to the bucket with her chin. The dragonman stared at her, challengingly, before grunting and holding his hand out over the slop. A claw dug into his palm and cut a thick line of blood that eagerly dripped out to splash upon the entrails.
Lenk stared at the ritual, brow lofted, until he clearly couldn’t stand by any longer. He turned to the shict.
“Kataria,” he said simply. “Why?”
“I’ve got a plan,” she said.
“Should I know its details?”
“Should you? Absolutely.” She shrugged. “Do you want to?”
“Outstanding.” He sighed deeply, rubbing the back of his neck.
She couldn’t help but grin. It was in those moments when he stared at her like he wondered what he had done to be cursed with her that she remembered what he was like before that night. In his despair, he was Lenk again, and she smiled.
She suspected she should be rather worried by that.
“Answer me this, at least,” he said. “Who has to die for this plan to work?”
“Ideally?”
“Realistically.”
“Well, no one has to die,” she said, smiling broadly.
Maybe his sense of humor was just that macabre, or maybe something in him was too strong to be kept behind the impassiveness that had been across his face for the past days. Either way, he looked at her and, even if it was only slight and fleeting, he grinned.
“You don’t need to know everything.” She reached out, placing a hand on his shoulder. “Trust me.”
And, an instant before she knew what she had said, he was gone. His grin faded, his eyes faded, he faded entirely, leaving behind a flat stare. To stand beside him was to feel a chill and she turned away.
“Where’s Denaos?” Lenk asked, not bothering to look at her. “I’ve got something to tell him before we leave.”
“Rats hide with rats,” Gariath said. “He’s with the crying one and the moody one.”
The dragonman’s recent decision to upgrade Asper and Dreadaeleon from “the tall one” and “the small one” hadn’t done much to distinguish either.
“I’ll find him,” Lenk said, trudging off toward the forest.
Kataria watched him go. Even if he hadn’t said anything, the accusation hung in the air where he had just stood, as it did whenever he looked at her.
“You’re feeling guilty,” Gariath noted, apparently also sharing it.
“And you’re not?” she asked, turning around. “You abandoned him, same as me. We all left him to die on that ship.”
“I am not,” he said, hefting the bucket of guts and loading it into the vessel. “I left because I knew he wouldn’t die. And if I didn’t know that he would not die, I wouldn’t care if he did.” He turned a hard black stare upon her. “Why?”
She flinched. “Why what?”
“Why do you feel guilt?”
“It’s an emotion common to those of us not reptilian,” she muttered as she stalked to the other side of the boat.
“Not to shicts.”
“Are you trying to intimidate me?” she snarled. “Trying to tell me I’m not a shict like you did back then? It’s not going to work this time.”
“When I said it that day, you ran,” Gariath replied. “Now, you bare your little teeth at me. I almost killed you that day. I can do it better today.”
“I’m not afraid of you.”
“Shicts should be.”
She opened her mouth to respond, but not a word came out. Instead, she merely furrowed her brow. “Are you being philosophical or stupid?”
“Same thing. Regardless, I never say anything that doesn’t make sense.” He turned to stalk away, back to some other work. “If it makes sense to you, I guess you can celebrate being a little less moronic today.”
She almost regretted calling out to him. “Thank you,” she said. “For not telling Lenk about . . . you know, about how I was going to kill him.”
He waved a hand. “If you try again, so can I.”
She stared down into the vessel. Like a child straining for the attention of its mother, the curve of her bow, fur-wrapped and sturdy, peeked out at her. A week ago, she had wanted this weapon to kill Lenk, to kill anyone to prove she was a shict.
She still might not know who she was, who Lenk was anymore. But she knew she had a bow. She knew she had a plan. She knew she had a goal.
That would have to be enough for now.
“No time to worry about the rest,” she whispered to herself.
“What could there be to worry about?” Hongwe muttered from nearby. “Chasing an unholy book into a reef filled with—”
“You know, Hongwe,” she snapped, “after a while, that kind of negativity really starts to dampen the mood.”
FIVE
DRASTICISM
Wizards were elite. That word still had meaning even among men who turned breath to ice and spark to fire with a word. To Librarians, the word had definition, relentlessly branded upon scalp until it bored into skull.
To Bralston, the word had weight.
To be elite was responsibility, not privilege. To be elite was to do that which could be done by no one else. To be elite was to stand and see the heretics burned, the renegades crushed, their assets seized from wailing widows and their homes burned to set the example to those who would fall under the dominion of the Venarium and not respect its laws.
Elite, Bralston had seen many deaths, only a few of them in his home city of Cier’Djaal. Whether by fire or force or messier means, Bralston had never been fazed by death.
Not until he had seen the riots.
The Night of Hounds, some called it, the Comeuppance, the Fires; the riots had many names. It was all to describe the same thing, though: the night the Houndmistress, champion of the common people of Cier’Djaal and bane of the criminal syndicates that haunted her streets, was brutally murdered in her bed.
And the Jackals, pushed to the point of being wiped clean like the scum they were, took their vengeance. On guards, on politicians, on commoners and merchants and whores and anyone who wasn’t dressed in a hood and carrying a blade, they exacted their toll upon the city that failed to expel them.
There had been fire. There had been force. There had been mess. On such a scale that the elite could but watch the city burn.
All because of one man.
The man who sat in the clearing now, head hung low and shoulders drooped as he murmured like a common drunk. That’s what he was, Bralston reminded himself. Maybe he had been something more when he had wound his way into the Houndmistress’s confidence and slaughtered her in the night, but no longer. He was a drunk, a thug, common.
And Bralston remained elite.
He was reminded of that word’s weight as he stalked into the forest clearing.
The man’s head shifted.
“Asper?” the rogue asked, voice cracked and dry.
“No,” Bralston answered.
“Oh,” he muttered, returning to staring at the sand. “It’s you.”
Bralston stared at the back of his head. Maybe he couldn’t see the man’s face, but everything else screamed guilt: the stoop of shoulders that had been so broad when they rubbed against the Houndmistress’s, the mane of reddish hair that had been dyed time and again, the voice that had plied and charmed and tongued all the right ears to earn the role of advisor to the woman who would try to save a city infested with human gangrene.
Bralston remembered him, before he had been called Denaos.
“I don’t have the tongue for entertaining wizards,” the man said. “Not the kind that could be matched by hearing their own voice. So, if you need something—”
“Murderer.”
Denaos turned his head, just enough for Bralston to see his eyes, just enough for Bralston to know. And slowly, Denaos turned away.
“So that’s it, then? Just right out with it?” Denaos chuckled. “No talent for subtlety.”
“No subtlety is needed for this,” Bralston said. His voice came on hot breath and beating heart, no more discipline of the elite. “It has no place amongst matters of justice.”
“The only men who bring up matters of justice are those who think themselves worthy of delivering it.”
“There is no worthiness, only responsibility.” Bralston felt the blood rush in his veins, but held himself back. Eyes, shoulders, tongues; these were suspicions. Librarians needed logic, evidence to justify the kill, however worthy. “And it falls to any man who knows what you’ve done.”
“And what have I done, Librarian?”
“You killed people.”
“I’m an adventurer. I’ve killed lots of things.”
“You killed people.”
Denaos did not stir from the log he sat on. But his voice had an edge when he spoke, something crudely sharpened and dripping with rust and grime.
“The only men who tell me I’ve killed people,” he said, “don’t know how many people I’ve killed.”
“Fourteen hundred,” Bralston replied. “Fourteen hundred men, women and children with families and pets and homes that were burned to the ground the night you murdered her.”
Denaos hung his head low, rubbed the back of his neck.
“More.”
Bralston recoiled. He stared in disbelief, at the confession and the sheer disregard with which it had been offered, a sprinkling of sugar from delicate fingers over a plate of charred flesh.
The word became much heavier than any other. It and the sight of the man threatened to unhinge him, to force him to raise hand, to speak word and turn man to ashes on the breeze. He turned away to resist the urge. Heavy as the word was, another still had weight.
“How many?” he asked.
“Many,” Denaos replied, without so much as a stutter. “Mothers, whores, businessmen, politicians.” He paused. “Children. Not as many as her death caused. But these ones . . . I looked into their eyes. I had chances to stop. Many chances.”
“And you did not.” Bralston removed his hat, ran a hand along his bald scalp as though trying to smooth the rogue’s words into something that didn’t cause the mind to recoil. “How many chances?”
“I’ve got one left,” Denaos replied. “One I’ve been riding for about a year now.” He sighed. “The tome . . . it’s all I can hope for to balance the scales.”
“You think there are scales? There is balance for what you did?”
“I was given another chance. By the Gods.”
“There are no gods.”
“There must be a reason why you haven’t killed me yet.”
“I had to know.”
He replaced his hat on his head, drew in a breath. The power, his power came flowing back into him. It leapt to his fingers, magic hungry and railing against all the discipline his position was supposed to carry, a magic hungry for vengeance.
“I have responsibilities,” he said. “That will soon be fulfilled.”
Silence.
And then laughter; not sadistic, not conceited. Humorless. A joke that wasn’t funny and had been told far too many times.
“And you waited until now?” the rogue chuckled. “Well, that was silly of you.”
Bralston’s roar was nothing. His magic spoke for him in the crack of thunder and the shriek of lightning as he whirled about and thrust his fingers at the man. The power was reckless, a twisting serpent of electricity that leapt readily and ate hungrily, tearing up sand and splitting log and leaving scorched earth and burnt air.
And, he thought with a narrow of his eyes, no body.
The man was gone, but only from sight. The man would not leave, not after all he had told Bralston. The stink of liquor and guilt lingered, however subtle.
And Bralston had no talent nor need for subtlety.
In death, as in life, the netherling continued to hate.
It had hated the heated blade that dismembered its corpse, resisting each saw. It hated the fire that now ate at it, devouring purple flesh long since blackened with agonizing slowness. And Asper was sure, in whatever nothingness this thing’s soul now lurked, it still hated her.
Hard to blame her, Asper thought; she knew she wouldn’t have much in the way of understanding for someone who had dissected, chopped up, and burned her. And she was not sorry that she had done it to the longface, either.
She was a netherling. A brutish member of a brutish race that served blindly under a brutish, sinister, filthy, horrifying, grinning, always grinning, eyes on fire, teeth so sharp, and smile so broad as he slipped his fingers inside—
She shut her eyes.
She could never maintain that train of thought without returning to that night, to the creature known as Sheraptus, and what he had done to her. Every sense was defiled at the very thought of him: eyes were sealed shut for fear of seeing his broad grin, ears were clamped under hands for fear of hearing his purr, and no matter what she did, she could not avoid, ignore, or block out the sensation of his touch.
Of his two long fingers.
Nor could she ever forget screaming for help, for someone, for anyone. For Kataria, who had fled. For Denaos, who came too late. For the Gods, who did not answer.
Maybe the netherling had screamed out for something when she died, Asper wondered idly. Maybe she had called out for Sheraptus when Lenk cut her open with his sword.
She wasn’t sure why she was still staring at the corpse.
When she heard footsteps, she didn’t turn around. There was no man, no woman, no dragonman or lizardman she wanted to see right now. Or ever again
“Where’s Denaos?”
Lenk. Not the worst man she had expected; certainly not worth turning around to face.
“Not here,” she answered stiffly.
“Obviously,” Lenk replied. “I was hoping you’d know where he was.”
“Gariath can sniff rats out. I can’t.”
“You’re calling him a rat now, too,” Lenk observed. “I always thought you had the more affectionate names for him.”
“I called him a scum-eating vagrant who lies through teeth that should have been broken long ago.”
“Still,” Lenk said.
The silence that followed was awkward, but preferable, and all too brief as Lenk’s eyes drifted to the burning netherling.
“What did you find out?” he asked.
“Nothing useful.”
“You tear a longface open and apart and find nothing useful?”
Asper pointed to the dagger, its hilt jutting from its place wedged between the stones surrounding the fire it smoldered against. “I had to heat the damn blade to cut this one apart. They’re resilient. Amazingly so. Nothing you didn’t already know.”
“That’s it?”
She sighed. “If I had to offer any sort of advice, it would be to aim for their throat. They seemed to have the least amount of muscle there.”
“Handy. Hopefully Denaos has discovered something more useful from the big one.”
“Such as?”
“Where Jaga might be.”
“I thought Kataria had a plan for that.”
And, as a cold silence fell over them at the mention, Asper had the unique sensation that Lenk suddenly was staring intently at her throat.
“Then why,” she asked with some reluctance, “do you need Denaos?”
“Kataria’s plan might not work. Something could happen while we’re trying it.”
“Like what?”
The answer came just a moment too slow. “Something. There’s no sense in going into this without doing everything we possibly can.”
“I can agree with half of that sentence.”
“The one that means you’re going to be unbearably difficult and whiny about this?”
“You go blindly into a certain-death situation, recently wounded and not at all well, and I’m being difficult for expressing concern?” She rubbed her eyes, sighing. “This is different than before.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning I’m not just calling you insane to be charming, you stupid piece of stool.” She whirled on him, blood pumping too much to keep her mouth shut any longer. “This is not improbable, this is not even impossible—this is futile. Going completely blind into a situation where your best bets for success rely on a she-wolf who would just as soon abandon us the moment she thought our ears were too round and a cowardly, backstabbing thug who makes treachery into a hobby, searching for a stupid book to stop demons that had no interest in us until we went after the book so we could talk to a heaven that does not exist.”