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
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.