‘Shut up!’
Lenk’s swing bit nothing but air, its metal song drowned out by the chattering screeches and laughter of the creatures above. He swung his gaze up with his weapon, sweeping it cautiously across the branches, searching for his hidden opponent.
Back and forth, back and forth …
‘It’s very bad form to give up the argument when someone presents a counterpoint,’ Lenk snarled. ‘Are you afraid to engage in further discourse?’ He shrieked, attacked a low-hanging branch and sent its leaves spilling to the earth. ‘You’re too good to come down and fight me, is that it?’
‘Now,’ a voice asked from the trees, ‘why is it that you solve everything with violence, Lenk? It never works.’
‘It seems to work to shut people up,’ Lenk replied, backing away defensively.
‘That’s not a bad point, is it? After all, Gariath isn’t talking anymore, is he? Then again, neither are Denaos, Dreadaeleon, Asper … Kataria …’
‘Don’t you talk about them! Or her!’
He felt his back strike something hard and unyielding, felt a long and shadowy reach slink down toward his neck. He whirled around, his sword between him and the demon as it stared at him with great, empty whites above a jaw hanging loose.
‘Abysmyth …’ Lenk gasped.
The creature showed no recognition, showed nothing in its stare. Its body – that towering, underfed amalgamation of black skin stretched tightly over black bone – should have been exploding into action, Lenk knew. Those long, webbed claws should be tight across his throat, excreting the fatal ooze that would kill him.
‘Good afternoon,’ Lenk growled.
The Abysmyth, however, did nothing. The Abysmyth merely tilted a great fishlike head to the side and uttered a question.
‘Violence didn’t work, did it?’
‘We haven’t tried yet!’
The thing made no attempt to defend himself as Lenk erupted like an overcoiled spring, flinging himself at the beast. My sword can hurt it, he told himself. I’ve seen it happen. Even if nothing else could, Lenk’s blade seemed to drink deeply of the creature’s blood as he hacked at it. Its flesh came off in great, hewed strips; blood fell in thick, fatty globs.
‘Is the futility not crushing?’ the creature asked, its voice a rumbling gurgle in its rib cage. ‘You shriek, squeal, strike – as though you could solve all the woes and agonies that plague yourself and your world with steel and hatred.’
‘It tends to solve most problems,’ Lenk grunted through a face spattered with blood. ‘It solved the problem of your leader, you know.’ His grin was broad and maniacal. ‘I killed her … it. I took its head. I killed one of your brothers.’
‘I suppose I should be impressed.’
‘You’re not?’
‘Not entirely, no. The Deepshriek has three heads. You took only one.’
‘But—’
‘You killed one Abysmyth. Are there not more?’
‘Then I’ll take the other two heads! I’ll kill every last one of you!’
‘To what end? There will always be more. Kill one, more rise from the depths. Kill the Deepshriek, another prophet will be found.’
‘I’ll kill them, too!’ Lenk’s snarl was accompanied by a hollow sound as his sword sank into the beast’s chest and remained there, despite his violent tugging. ‘ALL OF THEM! ALL OF YOU!’
‘And then what? Wipe us from the earth, fill your ears with blood and blind yourself with steel. You will find someone else to hate. There will never be enough blood and steel, and you will go on wondering …’
‘Wondering … what?’
‘Wondering why. What is the point of it all?’ The creature loosed a gurgle. ‘Or, more specifically to your problem, you’ll never stop wondering why she doesn’t feel the way you do … You’ll never understand why Kataria said what she did.’
Lenk released his grip on his sword, his hands weak and dead as he backed away from the creature, his eyes wide enough to roll out of his head. The Abysmyth, if it was at all capable of it, laughed at him with its white eyes and gaping jaw.
‘How?’ he gasped. ‘How do you know that?’
‘That is a good question.’
The Abysmyth’s face split into a broad smile.
Abysmyths can’t smile.
‘A better one, however,’ it gurgled, ‘might be why are you attacking a tree?’
‘No …’
Words could not deny it, nor could the sword quivering in its mossy flesh. The tree stared back at him with pity, wooden woe exuding through its eyes.
Trees don’t have eyes. He knew that. Trees don’t offer pity! Trees don’t talk!
‘Steady.’ His breathing was laboured, searing in his throat and charring his lungs black inside him. ‘Steady … no one’s talking. It’s just you and the forest now. Trees don’t talk … monkeys don’t talk … people talk. You’re a people … a person.’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘Steady. Things are hazy at night. In the morning, everything will be clearer.’
‘They will be.’
Don’t turn around.
But he knew the voice.
It was her voice. Not a monkey’s voice. Not a tree’s voice. Not a voice inside his head. Her voice. And it felt cool and gentle upon his skin, felt like a few scant droplets of water flicked upon his brow.
And he had to have more.
When he turned about, the first thing he noticed was her smile.
‘We never get to watch the mornings, do we?’ Kataria asked, sliding a lock of hair behind her long ear. ‘It’s always something else: a burning afternoon, a cold dawn, or a long night. We never get to sit down at just the right time when normal people get up.’
‘We’re not normal people,’ he replied, distracted.
It was difficult to concentrate with every step she took closer to him. The moonlight clung to her like silk slipped in water, hugging every line of her body left exposed by her short green tunic. Her body was a battle of shadow and silver. He felt his eyes slide in his sockets, running over every muscle that pressed against her skin, counting every shallow contour of her figure.
His gaze followed the line that ran down her abdomen, sliding to the shallow oval of her navel. His stare lingered there, contemplating the translucent hairs that shimmered upon her skin. The night was sweltering.
And she did not sweat a single drop.
When he returned from his thoughts, she was close, nearly pressed against him.
‘We aren’t,’ she replied softly. ‘But that doesn’t mean we must be expected to not enjoy a morning, does it? Don’t we deserve to see the sun rise?’
His breath, previously stale with disease, drew in her scent on a cool and gentle inhale. She smelled pleasant, of leaves on rivers and wind over the sea. His eyelids twitched in time with his nostrils, as though something within him spastically flailed out in an attempt to seize control of his face and turn it away from her.
‘This doesn’t sound like you.’ His whisper was a thunderous echo off her face. ‘Not after what you said on the boat.’
‘I regret those words,’ she replied.
‘You never regret anything.’
‘Consider my problems,’ she said. ‘I am just like you. Small, weak and made of the same degenerate meat. I share your fears, I share your terrors …’
‘This isn’t you,’ Lenk whispered, his voice hot and frantic. ‘This isn’t you.’
‘And you’ – she ignored him as her hands went to the hem of her shirt, her face split apart with a broad smile – ‘share my meat.’
His confusion was lost in her cackle, attention seized by her hands as they pulled her tunic up over her head and tossed it aside, exposing the slender body beneath. His eyes blinked wildly of their own volition, and with each flutter of the eyelids, she changed beneath him. Her br**sts twitched and writhed under his gaze for three blinks.
By the fourth, they blinked back at him.
Eels, perhaps? Snakes? He could contemplate their nature for one more blink before they launched from her chest, jaws gaping in silent, gasping shrieks forced between tiny, serrated teeth. His own scream, he felt, was nothing more than a fevered sucking of air through the hole that was quickly torn in his throat by their vicelike jaws.
His hands were iron, their bodies were water. He slapped, clawed, raked at them. They chewed, rent, ripped his flesh, brazenly ignoring his desperation. He felt blood weep from his face and mingle with his sweat in thick, greasy tears.
He collapsed under the assault of their teeth and her shrieking laughter, curling up like a terrified, squealing piglet, marinating. He shivered through his tensed body, expecting the teeth to return at any moment and start raking his back and chewing on his spine.
The agony never came. Nor did the death he was certain would come from having one’s face torn off and eaten. He reached up and touched his face, feeling greasy and sticky skin beneath. He looked up.
She, or whatever had been posing as her, was gone.
Shaking, he pulled himself to his hands and feet and crawled to the brook, peering in. His face was red, smeared with blood, but from long lines that raced down his cheeks. Long lines, he thought as he noticed his hands, that perfectly matched the strip of fingernails glutted with skin.
Though it seemed slightly redundant to say so after engaging in philosophical debate with a simian and committing bodily assault on a tree, Lenk felt the need to collapse onto his back and mutter in a feverish whisper.
‘You’re losing it, friend.’
‘Understatement.’
Lenk blinked at the voice, coldly familiar after such a long and fiery silence inside his head. He fought the urge to smile, to revel in the return of a more intimate madness. It didn’t matter how hard he strained to resist, though; the voice sensed it.
‘Seems pointless to try to resist.’
‘Where were you?’ Lenk asked.
‘Always with you.’
‘Then you saw … all that?’
‘Know what you know.’
‘Your thoughts?’
‘Our thoughts.’
‘You know what I meant.’
‘The point is no less valid. Nothing that has happened tonight was real.’
‘It seemed so—’
‘It wasn’t.’
‘How do you figure?’
‘For one, she’s dead. Fact.’
‘It’s a distinct possibility.’
‘A certainty. Listen to reason.’
‘Greenhair said she didn’t find any other bodies. It’s perfectly sane to believe the others might be alive.’
‘One would be hard-pressed to take advice on sanity from he who hears voices.’
‘Point.’
‘Referring to your dependence on them. Why bother insisting that they live?’
‘I … need them. They watch my back, help me during the hard times.’
‘We have each other.’
‘We have nothing but hard times.’
‘Their deaths are clearly a sign from heaven. We waste time and effort mourning them.’
‘No one’s mourning anyone yet. They could still be alive.’
‘We could be back in Toha right now if not for them, the book safe and away where it belongs and our body aching to wreak vengeance upon the next blight that stains the earth. They are a hindrance.’
‘No, they aren’t.’
‘It is them who needs us. They wouldn’t survive without us. They didn’t survive without us. They are useless.’
‘No, they aren’t!’
‘We have our duties. We have our blights to cleanse. The demons fear us, fear what we do to them. We were created to cleanse the earth of impurities. These companions can only be called thus because they were considerate enough to cleanse themselves for us. They’re better off dead.’
‘No, they aren’t!’
The last echoes of the voice vanished, forced out of his mind as he threw himself into a fervent rampage of thought. He sprang to his feet, began to pace back and forth, muttering to himself.
‘Think, think … you don’t need that thing. Think … it’s hard to think. So hot …’ He snarled, thumped his temple. ‘Think! This isn’t just fever causing the hallucinations. How do you know?’ He ran a finger at one of his scratches. ‘Well, it makes sense, doesn’t it?
‘No,’ he answered himself. ‘Nothing makes sense.’ He gritted his teeth, the effort of thought seeming to cause his brain to boil. ‘You were hallucinating strange things, thoughts that never occurred to you before. Why is that odd?
‘Because hallucinations are a product of the mind, are they not?’ He nodded vigorously to himself. ‘You can’t hallucinate something you don’t know, can you?’ He shook his head violently. ‘No, not at all. You can’t hallucinate monkeys with philosophical ideas or trees with latent desires for peace, or …
‘Kataria.’ He blinked, eyes sizzling with the effort. ‘She wasn’t wearing her leathers when you saw her. You’ve never seen her without them, have you? No, you haven’t. Well, maybe once, but you always think of her in them, don’t you?’ He threw his head back. ‘What does all this say to us? Hallucination of things that are not the product of your disease or your mind? Either you’re dead and this is some rather infinitely subtle and frustrating hell as opposed to the whole “lakes of fire and sodomised with a pitchfork” thing, or, much more likely …’
‘Someone else is inside your head.’
His breath went short at the realisation. The world seemed very cold at that moment.
He glanced down at the brook. Eyes cloudy with ice stared back. A thin, frozen sheet crowned the water. As he leaned down to inspect it, it grew harder, whiter, louder.