“So,” he interrupted himself, “what’d you think?”
“Huh?” the Owauku asked.
Yes, exactly.
“Admittedly, the ending could use some polish,” he continued, forcing a smile onto his face, “what with the . . . the crying and begging and all. But ultimately, the theory is sound and the conclusion is solid. Bralston can’t reject it without serious thought.”
The Owauku’s head bobbed heavily, not quite large enough to suit its massive eyes comfortably, nor quite small enough to convey the subtle difference between politeness and comprehension.
“So,” Dreadaeleon said, “what, you think maybe present the hypothesis more quickly?”
“Mah-ne,” the Owauku replied crisply, “sa-a ma? Sa-ma ah-maw-neh yo. Sakle-ah, denuht kapu-ah-ah, sim ma-ah taio mah lakaat. Nah-se-sim. Ka-ah, mah-ne.”
Dreadaeleon nodded carefully, made a soft, humming sound.
“So,” he said, looking up and sweeping his gaze about the village and the various green-skinned things milling about, “which one of you speaks human again? We can do this over.”
“NAH-AH! AH-TE MAH-NE-WAH!”
He turned around, saw the other Owauku rampaging forward, if legs that closely resembled pulled sausages could rampage. As it was, he came closer to rolling downhill than rushing forward. Whatever urgency was not present in his stride, however, was more than made up for in his voice.
“Ah-te mah-ne-wah siya!” he cried out. “SAKLEAH-AH-NAH!”
After the Owauku serving as Dreadaeleon’s audience caught the rushing one’s arm, all forms of comprehension that the boy might have pretended he had quickly vanished. The two began exchanging words, gestures, rolls of their bulging eyes with tremendous frequency. And yet, as alien as the rest was, one word, repeated often and with great fear, he picked up.
“Longface.”
Between the direction the rest of the Owauku came fleeing from and the rather distinct sound of someone’s tender something being stomped on, the rest was relatively easy for Dreadaeleon to figure out.
And he was off, heedless of his imminent death as he could be.
Which, it turned out, was not a lot.
This isn’t smart, you know, he told himself as he pushed past and stepped over the fleeing Owauku. Whatever the longface is doing, you can’t handle it. You’re dying already, you know. Did you forget? The Decay? That thing that breaks down your body and magic and blends them together? Bralston could handle this. You should find him. Denaos would be able to do it well, too. Hell, even Asper could—
He didn’t come to a screeching halt at the sight of the netherling, towering tall and menacing with the unconscious woman draped over her shoulder. He didn’t think to express his shock with a pithy demand that she halt or a curse-laden command that she drop her captive. He didn’t think about heroics or that he was going to be dead sooner than he thought or how nice it would feel for Asper to find him standing triumphant over the villain.
Dreadaeleon came to a slow, leisurely halt.
He watched the woman stalk toward the distant shore, heedless of him.
He said no words, made no gestures, felt nothing.
He simply flew.
The sand was gone beneath his feet, the power bursting from either hand and bringing the air to silent, rippling life. His left shoved against the wind and sent him flying through the air, coattails whipping like dirty wings. His right extended, palm flat, and struck with the sound of thunder.
The air twitched, an unseen wall of solid nothing erected by a tremble of palm and flick of finger. The netherling didn’t see him coming, didn’t see the wall that stretched before his palm. She didn’t need to. The power bursting before his palm struck her as a stone strikes a river.
And she, too, flew.
She cried out, some trifling and insignificant noise against the sound of the air smashing against her and the wind carrying her and the mutter of the tree that rejected her body with a crack and a weary groan.
Asper lay upon the ground. He knelt beside bloody, broken her, earth-stained and unconscious her. She breathed, she lived. Why, he didn’t know. He didn’t care.
He heard the netherling rise in the creak of bones, the bare of teeth. He saw her rise before the dent she had left in the tree, a spine perforated by splinters arching as she did.
Inside his head, there were words being spewed in a language he couldn’t understand, some things about logic, sense, not dying a horrible death under purple hands, that sort of thing.
Words were just noise now, same as whatever the netherling was saying to him as she stalked forward. Buzzing, annoying, worthless little words he couldn’t hear over the sound of his body: fire smoldering under his skin, thunder dancing across his fingers, ice forming across his lips to the angry beat of his heart.
He was alive.
Asper was alive.
Facts the netherling had strong and decisive disagreements to as she broke into a tooth-bared, fist-curled, curse-filled charge. As her eyes burst into wild white orbs, his closed. As her roar came out on a hot breath, his drew in gentle, cool, cold, freezing.
When he could feel the earth shake beneath her stride, he opened eyes and mouth alike. His breath came out in a cloud of white, smothering her roar, consuming her flesh in tiny gnawing jaws of icicles and shards of frost. She was swallowed by the cloud, disappeared in the freezing mist. But he could hear her: voice dying as tongue was swollen, skin cracking as rime coated flesh and shattered and coated again, stride slowing, stopping, ceased.
When all sound was frozen, he shut his mouth. The cloud waned before him, a nebulous prison holding a frozen captive. An impressive feat of power, one that would leave any wizard drained, much less one diseased as he.
And you’re not even sweating, his thoughts crept in, uninvited and unwanted. You’re still alive. No fatigue, no sign of Decay. This isn’t right, is it?
He tried to ignore the sensation of something scratching at the back of his skull. Thoughts weren’t important. His fading life was not important. The frozen body in the cloud, the power he summoned to his hand to shatter it, only scarcely more important. The fact that Asper lay behind him, breathing, saved . . .
Because of you, old man, he thought, unable to stop. You’re the hero. You’re alive. You’ve done it. She’s going to wake up and see you standing over a bunch of shattered chunks of red ice that used to be a person and she might think that’s a little weird at first, but then she’ll know what happened and she’ll reach up and . . . and . . .
She’s going to wake up, right?
Something twitched behind his brain, an itch that couldn’t be scratched.
Maybe . . . just look . . . just check . . .
He glanced over his shoulder. She was still there. Still breathing. Just as he knew she would be.
He furrowed his brow. Wait . . . if you knew she would be, then why—
A loud cracking sound interrupted his thoughts. A second one interrupted his ability to stay conscious.
The netherling came out of the cloud, her rime coating shattering into pieces, her breath a hot and angry howl as it tore from her mouth. Her fist shot out, snowflakes and shards shattering in a cloud of white and red as her fist hammered his chest.
And again, he flew.
Like an obese, wingless seagull.
Xhai took only a moment to admire the distance she sent the scrawny overscum flying. Of course, part of that might have to do with the fact that half his body weight appeared to be his coat. Still, it was hard not to smile as she watched him sail through the air, tumble across the sand, skid against the earth, and come to a halt in a pile of dirty leather.
But it got easier to resist the urge when she glanced over her shoulder and saw the dark ship bearing her passage drawing closer. Another glance at the unconscious overscum in the sand was all it took to remind her why she didn’t have time to stalk over and finish off the dirty, skinny one.
There were, for once, more important things to do than kill.
She shook herself, brushing off the frost and the tiny bits of skin they spitefully took with them. She held a hand up, noting the tiny red gashes left behind. Tiny, weak wounds from tiny, weak power. “Magic,” they called it. Nethra was different.
Nethra was power. It didn’t leave tiny pinpricks. It destroyed. Master Sheraptus commanded nethra, she thought as she hefted the unconscious female up and hauled her to the shore. In his hands, it was pain.
The kind this scum deserved.
The ship was drawing closer to the shore. She could hear the rowing chants as the vessel crept forward like a many-legged insect upon the surface.
She stared out over the waves contemptibly as she stood in the surf. Their arms were as weak as their voices, their chants lazy and distant as they hauled their vessel closer. Weak enough that she could hear her own breathy curse, her own bones creaking inside her, sand shifting beneath a foot, a faint click.
Right behind her.
She whirled about.
And Denaos came to a stiff, sudden halt.
The Long, Slow Kiss hung, its metal lips trembling with his palm, a mere hair’s breadth away from Asper’s face. His breath hung in his throat, afraid to come out lest the blade move just one more hair’s breadth. Likewise, he refused to move back, to relinquish any chance he might have of putting the blade in the netherling’s throat.
So, he settled on his heels, steadied his hand, and looked to her face for any sign that she might move and give him the opportunity he sought. She merely smiled.
“That won’t work,” Xhai said, her voice grating.
“Sure it will,” Denaos replied crisply. “Just move her to the left a little.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Do I?”
He had heard enough lunatic philosophy from the netherling to know that asking her to continue was something he would regret. And yet, a distraction was a distraction.
“You know that even if I put her down right now, she’s still going to die.” Xhai’s voice was unnervingly cold; a rare feat for one who could rarely be described as anything particularly warm or fuzzy. “Maybe I’ll stomp her head before I bleed out. Maybe she’ll be swept out to sea and drown. She’ll still be dead.”
“You do tend to have that effect on people.”
“It won’t be me that killed her.”
His face twitched: a momentary spasm at the edge of his mouth, involuntary and lasting only as long as it took to blink. But Xhai didn’t blink. She had seen how her words had struck him.
“She came to me,” Xhai continued, voice growing blacker with each breath. “She spoke of reason and fate and a lot of other words that mean ‘weak.’ She came to ask me if I was sorry. She said she had done it for you, to keep you from killing.”
Another twitch; surprise, this time. Surprise that he hadn’t wanted to kill the netherling, surprise that Asper had realized that, surprise that she thought him worth the effort.
“She wanted to know the reason for all of it,” Xhai said. “The reason why you hadn’t killed me. The reason why you would have to.”
“For her.” The words came out unexpectedly, crawling out of dry lips on a weak and dying mouth.
“NOT FOR HER.” Xhai didn’t bother to hide the snarl, she embraced it with broad, sharp teeth. “Never for her. It was for me. For us. You and I, we kill because we kill. There is no reason for it beyond it being what we do, what we know has to happen.”
Whatever semblance of logic the netherling thought this might possess was blatantly mad. Whatever truth she wanted to force upon him was forever marred by the fact that she was a killer, a depraved minion to a depraved master.
He could have told her any of this, if only to get her to stop talking.
“There are scars on our bodies,” she said, “there is blood on our hands. We left a long line of corpses to come here. And here we are, you and me. Two more corpses left. Yours or mine . . . and hers.”
His hand began to tremble, heart began to quicken.
“She lives in a lie,” Xhai said. “Of invisible sky creatures and bedtime stories. She wants to think there’s a way for any of this to end without killing. Stupid, even if she wasn’t talking about you.”
But he couldn’t stop, couldn’t stop her from talking, couldn’t stop himself from listening.
“She can’t see the bodies you’ve left behind you.”
The woman wouldn’t let him. Not the woman before him, not the woman unconscious. The woman at the corner of his eye: white skin, wide eyes and smiling, at him, telling him in words without words through that great red slit in her throat.
Telling him that the netherling was right.
Telling him that he was a murderer and Asper would die, because of him; that she already had.
Telling him to look. To look at her. To look at Imone.
He did.
And he felt his jaw explode as Xhai smashed her fist against it. Overkill, he realized as he fell to the earth; it hadn’t taken much to send him there. And once he felt the sand crunch under his body, he didn’t feel much like rising again.
Not with so many people looking at him with eyes open and eyes closed and eyes glazed over and dead.
“Uyeh!”
“Toh!”
Iron voices were calling out, chanting. He could see the dark shadow that was the ship coming forward, oars being drawn up as it bobbed into the surf and toward the shore.
Xhai turned, looked over her shoulder. “My Master calls.”
“Your master is dead,” Denaos replied.
He wasn’t entirely surprised when she smiled at him like she had a very awful secret.
“Don’t,” he said, trying to rise to his feet.
“I do,” she said. “Because he calls. Because that is what I do.”
“Don’t take her.”
“He wants her.”
“You can’t know that.”
She looked at him intently for a moment before raising her arm: a twisted and mangled mess, it nonetheless bowed to her will. She clenched cracked and bent fingers, forcing it into a fist. The knucklebones and wrist bones and cracked skin and visible veins conformed to the command in a series of sickening pops.
“I know she did this to me,” Xhai said, voice growing hotter. “With whatever she has inside her. He will want to know.”
“He doesn’t,” Denaos insisted, forcing himself to his knees. “He doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t care about what she did to you. He doesn’t care about you. He wants her,” he pointed to Asper, “her flesh and her screams. You know what he’ll do to her. You know what he does to all of them. He doesn’t deserve them.”
“He is the Master,” Xhai snarled. “It is his right to take. He wants her.”
“And you don’t,” Denaos said, “and it isn’t. You don’t want him to have her or anyone else. You deserve him.”
He wasn’t sure if she had even bothered to hide the twitch, the snarl that was less than her usual display of anger and so much more than all the fury she had shown him before. He chose to focus on it, regardless, his eyes upon her mouth as he spoke.
“You kill,” he said, “because of him.”
Her lips trembled.
“They die,” he said, “because of you.”
Her teeth clenched.
“It’s for you. All for you,” he said. “And he wants her. He doesn’t deserve her. You deserve him.” He opened his arms in submission. “And me.”
And her lips pursed shut. No snarl, no smile, no frown. Nothing she had in her limited repertoire of expressions could she offer to those words. Her eyes had never needed to show anything in their milky whites before. And so she simply stared, blankly, at him.
“Take me,” he insisted. “Leave her behind, where he can’t get her. It’s not about her. You don’t want her.”
The ship pulled up alongside the beach, groaning as a great black behemoth as it drew itself through the waves. Purple faces lined up at the railing, dead-white eyes stared down at him, at her, expressionless but for the contempt that could not be contained by death.
And when he looked back at Xhai, he saw those same eyes, that same hatred, moments before she turned around.
“I want her,” she said, “to suffer.”
And she walked into the waves, striding effortlessly through the surf that tried vainly to push her back. Through it, he could see Asper’s eyes fluttering open, hear her groaning as she rose from her stupor. Still too numb to notice Xhai hoisting her up over the railing, she flopped up into the waiting hands of the netherlings. Maybe that numbness would continue.
Maybe she wouldn’t even know how he tried to save her, how he had failed so miserably, how he had sat on his knees and watched her simply be taken away. All because he never wanted Asper to look at him like Xhai had.
Maybe that would provide him a momentary comfort when he thought about what they would do to her, he thought, shortly before he turned his blade on himself for his cowardice.
He heard footsteps scurrying behind him. He heard the shrill cries of a boyish voice too angry to know it was boyish. Dreadaeleon, he thought. Dreadaeleon had seen everything.
Maybe he would kill him, Denaos thought, spare himself the trouble.
As it was, Dreadaeleon didn’t even seem to see the rogue. He went running past, eyes locked firmly on the ship as it began to pull away in the surf. No cries for it to stop, no shrieks of impotence, no words at all.
Only Dreadaeleon, who came skidding to a halt just shy of the lapping surf. Only Dreadaeleon, with the blue electricity cavorting up and down his arms with crackling laughter. Only Dreadaeleon.
And the sound of thunder.
He flung his arms forward with difficulty, as though he carried a great weight upon his wrists. He flung that weight out from pointed fingers, the electricity bursting from his fingertips with its shrieking laughter. It did not sail through the air; it was at his fingers at one moment, and at the next, it was raking against the ship’s hull, sending smoldering splinters sizzling into the surf as it split apart the wood.
Iron voices could express panic, too, Denaos noted. Or at least, they did when the longfaces disappeared from the railing and dove for cover. Xhai remained snarling, defiant, even as she leapt from the surf and seized the ship’s railing to haul herself up and over.
Scrambling for weapons, maybe. Looking for bows and arrows. Denaos didn’t know. Denaos was having a hard time paying attention to anything past the curtain of steam rising from the sea and the boy in the dirty coat who turned and scowled at him with eyes glowing red.
“Well?” Dreadaeleon asked. “Why didn’t you do anything?”
