“Two more we left behind.”
Kataria wasn’t helping.
“We had no choice,” he said.
“I know,” she said, sighing. “I know. But we left them behind with her. With Xhai.”
“And that means we’re not here with Xhai,” Lenk said. “That’s something.”
“Is it? I can’t even see my hand in front of my face. Can you?”
He collided with the heel of her palm and recoiled with a snarl.
“You’re hilarious.”
“I’m angry. I also have no idea where we’re going and I have no idea why it is you think we shouldn’t stop and try to figure it out. And of course, you’re not going to tell me. Because that would just be too sane, wouldn’t it?”
He was pleased she couldn’t see him wince at that. After all that had happened, he had thought sanity and accusations surrounding it wouldn’t be such a touchy subject. That had been before they had fled into the tunnels, though, before they had run through the winding darkness to escape the netherlings.
Before someone, somewhere, down there in the dark wet stone, started muttering his name.
“We lost the netherlings, didn’t we?” he said. “We’re still alive. The tome is still in the least dangerous hands possible. We. . we did good.”
“We left them behind.”
“What the hell did you think was going to happen?” His voice did not echo in the darkness. “Why the hell did you think I wanted to run? I had everything I wanted back there. You, no voices in my head. . but you said we shouldn’t run and I thought you were right.”
“I was right then and I’m right now,” she snarled back. “I’m right all the Gods damned time and we should go back.”
“Through a bunch of netherlings to dig ourselves out of a heap of rocks? We might emerge in time to see Xhai strangling Asper with Denaos’s intestines. We go forward.”
“At the very least, we should stop and check your shoulder.”
“We go forward.”
“Lenk.”
He said nothing.
“Never should have come here.”
She hadn’t said that.
The wall became cold beneath his hand, a kind of urgent cold that reached out with stony fingers to intertwine with his. He felt a pulse through his palm, an airless breath drawn in. And when it released, the light came.
“But you did,” the man in the ice said. The light in his eyes filtered through the tomb of frost, staring past Lenk and into nothing. “And you brought it back here.”
He was strong. And he was dead. His beard was white and his lips moved mechanically. Cords of flesh pulled him against a pillar of rock and crushed his body into macabre angles beneath the tomb of glassy frost, blackened and frozen in ancient rigor. His eyes beamed with blue light. His voice was hollow.
“You should not have returned, brother.”
Kataria was shivering, hovering around Lenk, uncertain whether to hide behind him or stand before him. She tried to make her chattering teeth seem a bare-toothed snarl. Lenk stared into the man’s eyes. He felt cold. It didn’t bother him.
“What the hell are you supposed to be?” she demanded of the man in the ice.
“I am the one who stayed behind, to watch my brothers, to see the end of this war. I am the one betrayed, the slayer who waited for the world to betray us as he said it would.”
“So. . is that whole thing your name or do you have a regular one?”
“I once did.”
“And. . what are you?”
The answer came, no matter how badly he wished it hadn’t.
“He’s me,” Lenk said. “They all are.”
“Who?”
In answer, the glow from the ice grew brighter, enough to illuminate the tunnel into a cavern. They stood upon a high ledge above a chasm yawning into nothingness. And below, a dozen other blue lights bloomed like dead flowers, reflecting off a dozen other tombs of frost.
They marched into the darkness, with their swords high and their black cloaks flying and their eyes alight with a cold fury that death could not diminish. In scenes of battle and of death, with arrows and blades and wounds decorating their flesh, they were frozen. They endured, constant as the death in the air and the dead beneath their feet. Demons, humans, wearing the images of Ulbecetonth and of the House of the Vanquishing Trinity, skeletons all, long gone from the battle the people in the ice still fought.
“Riffid,” Kataria gasped breathlessly, staring out over the pit.
“That name is memory,” the man in the ice said. “They cried out to many gods in that war. For nothing. We are too far gone from the sun. No god can hear us down here.”
“What happened?” Lenk asked.
“This is where we ended it. All of it,” the man said. “The mortal armies were failing. The demons were endless, the Aeons were all-powerful, the Gods were deaf. All was lost for the mortals and their House. Until he decided to intervene.”
“Who?” Kataria asked. Neither man answered. She looked to Lenk. “Who?”
A desperate incredulity was lit upon her face. A demand, a plea, something that pained him to see. He didn’t want to admit it any more than she wanted to know.
“Him,” Lenk repeated. “Mahalar spoke of you, the ones who killed the demons. But you only carried the swords, didn’t you? It was him who gave you the power, him who speaks through you. It was him who killed the demons and drove back Ulbecetonth.”
“What?” Kataria asked.
“God of Gods,” the man in the ice answered. “He had no name. Like us. He had no need for them. He decided there would be no demons, no gods, no rulers of mortality. The terrible burden of their existence was theirs to bear. Ours to deliver.”
“You talk like you aren’t one of them, aren’t mortal.”
“I am no god. My flesh rots beneath this ice. My bones snap under her grasp. But I am not like them. They hated him for his declaration. They hated us for delivering it. Men and the gods they served. They turned on us here, in this cavern, in this battle as we fought to make it to the drowned throne of the Kraken Queen. A pitiful jest. Without us, they could not kill her. They could only lock her behind doors of meaning.”
He sighed centuries out into the darkness.
“And you returned her key, brother.”
Lenk looked to his satchel. Even in the darkness, even obscured by the pouch, the barest glimpse of the tome’s cover revealed a blackness that refused to be obscured. If anything, it grew darker, heavier, more significant. An eager child perking up when it knew someone was talking about it.
“The tome. . you wrote it?”
“Long ago. He knew that the gods would need to be challenged one day, as the demons were, that tyrants could never be traded for tyrants. And he told us to write the book, with all the knowledge of the demons and mortalkind and all that it meant to fear and hope. It was intended to stay in our hands.”
He laughed the sounds of ice breaking.
“And he was right. Yours are the only hands left, brother.”
“What is it you think I’m going to do with it?”
“There is no thinking, brother, for there is no question. There is only certainty and his will. You will use the tome as you are meant to, as he wills you to.”
“And if I refuse?”
“Reiteration is a poor defense against inevitability, brother. All that he speaks shall pass. He, the God of Gods, told us our duty, so we carried it out. He told us to kill, and we did. He said we would be betrayed, we were, as you knew you would be.”
He did not look behind him. It did not help. He could feel the hurt in Kataria’s stare as keenly as any metal.