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.
They were netherlings. They would have more.
Because he would give it to them.
She stared out into the crowd, so far and still so vast. The tangles of purple flesh and black iron were so dense, yet she searched and she stared and she feared the moment her eyes would catch him and-
“Stop it.”
Kataria’s growl was low, threatening. Her glower was sharp and cast over her shoulder like a spear as she thrust it at Asper.
“Stop what?”
“Looking for him. You know he’s down there.”
Kataria held her gaze for a long, painful moment. And the moment stretched, long enough for her to realize the pain was not from Kataria’s eyes, but from the quake of her jaw as she fought to keep it fused shut.
“You were supposed to kill him,” she whispered through her teeth. “You said you would.”
“I didn’t.”
“You were supposed to-”
“I didn’t.” Kataria snarled. “And I can’t right now. I don’t know if I can ever.” She gestured to the blade tucked into the priestess’s sash. “And that’s not going to be as useful as you think it is.”
“I’m not going to use it on him,” Asper said.
“I know what you think you’re going to use it for.” The shict’s ears folded against her head. “Whatever it is that kills him or you. . it’s not going to be me or that blade.”
“Then what?”
Kataria took another long swig of water. She looked at Asper and offered no words. She looked out over the field and said nothing. No poignancy in the silence, no meaning. No answer.
Asper’s fingers scraped an empty bowl. The last of the charbalm lay glistening upon Kataria’s pinkened skin. She set it back inside her satchel, hiked it up over her shoulder.
“I should go down to the barricade,” she said. “There might be wounded down there.”
The priestess left without another word exchanged between them.
Kataria had no objections leaving it at that. She could have easily pointed out that there were never any “wounded” amongst the Shen, merely the dead and the envious living. She could have stayed and talked her through whatever she felt after Sheraptus’s return, told her that he was whole and whatever the priestess had done to him wasn’t enough. She might have even felt better about her own failure to kill him.
But her ears were upright and rigid with the sound of dust settling upon stone. Her burned skin tingled with the sensation of being watched. And her teeth ground behind her lips as she rose and turned upon the withered, decaying creature standing a few steps above her.
“You are alive,” Mahalar observed. Not with any great relief.
“Yaike isn’t,” she replied. Not with any great sympathy.
“Their loss weighs on me heavily.”
“Then why did you send them out there to die?” At his raised eyeridge, she chuckled, an edge of hysteria to it. “You told Shalake to let me go attack Sheraptus alone. Shalake agreed to it. I’ve seen the way he looks at you. He wouldn’t send them out against your wishes.” She pointed a finger at him. “So you changed your wishes.”
“It was no wish. I asked Yaike if he would save us all. He took his warriors to do just that.”
“By what? Ruining an ambush? Ruining all our chances for survival? I had him in my sights. I would have killed Sheraptus and we’d be facing a rabble of disorganized, leaderless animals instead of. .” She swept a hand out over the battlefield. “That.”
“Whatever is ruined is made so by you.” There was no anger to his voice. He spoke in a cool, dusty observation. “You weren’t supposed to survive.”
“There’s a reason killing your own isn’t really a viable military strategy, you know. Mostly because it’s completely stupid and makes your own come back to beat the stuffing out of you.”
Mahalar did not so much ignore her as make her transparent. His dull, amber eyes stared through her. He shambled down the steps and walked through her, in front of her in one moment, behind her in the next. When she turned, his back was brazenly turned to her, his eyes down upon the barricades.
Lenk sat there, a silver pimple on a green backside, amidst the Shen that pointedly did not look at him. His sword lay in his lap, blood stained his hands, his eyes were somewhere far away.
“Did you hear it?” Mahalar asked.
“Hear what?”
“Him.”
“I saw him.”
“Then you saw what we all saw. You saw him cleave them apart, stain the sands with them, rip them open. You saw him bring down that monster, nearly kill the male. All on his own.”
“I saw what happened to him. I saw the way people looked at him when he came back.”
“But you didn’t hear him.” The wistfulness in his voice bordered on the obscene. “No one did, of course. If they had, they would try to kill him, as they killed the girl in the chasm, the rest of them. The voice has that effect on people who do not understand it.
“I do, though. I heard it. I heard it screaming in his head, clawing against his skull. It begged for more, cried out with joy, wept and wailed as he ripped them apart. It was just like I heard it the last time, when they all spoke out in unison, when their voices were as one and their swords slew demons.”
He exuded the kind of morbidly nostalgic sigh the rest of his scaly brethren did. It trailed from his lips on a cloud of dust.
“I didn’t understand what they were, anymore than you understand what he is. But I watched him since he came to Jaga. I knew that your death would enable him to kill. Kill the netherlings, kill Ulbecetonth, kill everything if we merely stepped out of his way.”
He shook his head. “I don’t blame you for surviving, no more than I blame myself for placing our survival above yours. But in doing so, you’ve ruined us, shict.” He twisted his gaze out to sea, to the dark storm clouds gathering over the waves. “But I suppose you can’t hear that, either.”
“I hear everything, lizard.” Her ears folded flat against her head. “And all I hear out of you are a bunch of reasons that fail to convince me that I shouldn’t kill you.”
“And yet. .”
“And yet, I’m still aware of where we are: wedged up the collective rectums of a hundred reptiles who would be left leaderless against a horde of longfaces and who would probably eat me alive if I laid a hand on you.”