Xhai looked down at Asper.
“There’s another way.”
She looked to Denaos through her good eye. The rogue approached her, held her gaze despite one eye swollen shut.
“Take me instead,” he said.
“You mean kill you.”
“I mean take me,” he insisted. “So long as you never choose anything else, you’ll never have anything but death.”
“I don’t need anything-”
“Liar. If that were true, you wouldn’t look at Sheraptus like your sikkhun looked at you. You want something else. You can have something else.”
He came to a stop. Two paces away from her.
“So choose.”
Xhai looked at her blade, hanging from her hand, like it shouldn’t be doing that. She grimaced at it, at the withered stump of a hand with only three working fingers holding it. She frowned at her reflection, so distorted in the iron that it almost looked like a living thing.
And then she looked back up at him. Staring at her through one good eye. Blood weeping from his face. Broken, battered, alive. Choosing her.
Over her.
“Come to me,” Xhai said.
He did.
Limping forward, broken and battered and pretending he wasn’t, he came to her. Hers, something of her own. Something that didn’t belong to Sheraptus. Something that she didn’t kill to earn. The little pink female could live. Who cared.
She had something.
She had him.
And he was sliding his arm around her, drawing her close. And she found the touch painful, but impossible to turn away from. She slid closer to him, pressing her ruined body to his. She closed her good eye as she felt his hand slide around her shoulder. She smiled a torn mouth as she felt the heel of his hand slip so easily into the crook of her neck.
She was still smiling when she heard the click and the blade entered her throat.
When he pulled away, when her blood spurted out to splash upon the floor, she looked at him.
“You lied,” she said, uncertain of what that word meant.
“It’s what I do,” he replied.
She looked at him for a moment. Her arm moved before either of them knew. The blade sank into his side, biting through flesh all the way to something soft and dark. He shuddered. He grimaced. He looked surprised.
When he fell, he did not rise.
When she fell, she was last.
And they lay. Broken.
THIRTY-TWO
Once, it had been great.
It had begun as something old and vast, the empty spot where the mountain’s blood had carved out the cavern. The stalactites still hung overhead, teeth in a stone mouth that stretched in a great echoing chamber.
They had made it greater. They had carved the great stone steps into the sides of the cavern, the long stone walkway that circled its center, the tremendous statues of Ulbecetonth that rose up on all sides, womanly shoulders holding up the cavern roof in a testament to her strength and beauty.
The heart of the mountain. Once, it had been her throne.
War had unmade it. War had brought the banners of the House of the Vanquishing Trinity hanging over the walls, draped around the necks of Ulbecetonth’s statues like nooses. War had brought the great flood that drowned the middle of the chamber in dark water.
The heart of the mountain, Lenk thought as he stepped out of the archway into the tremendous chamber, was dead.
“He lied to us,” Lenk muttered. “Why the hell do I keep trusting dead people in ice?”
“Probably because having to interact with dead people in ice is a problem for you,” Kataria replied, following him out. Her bow was nocked with an arrow drawn. She scanned the room. “Look, there are other archways all along the wall here. We can try to follow one of those out.”
“Who knows how far they go,” Lenk said. “And what are we going to find on the other side?” He shook his head. “The man. . he said to follow the sound of running water. I know I heard it.”
The water here was not running. The water here was barely even water. It was liquid shadow, a great teeming lake stretching from the stone walkway to the back of the cavern. It had been choked with so much blood and suffering and hate that it had become a living thing itself, a great hungry blackness that ate the green light burning from braziers hanging high in the toothy ceiling overhead.
And yet, as dark as it was, he thought he could almost see something beneath the surface. Something darker still, something staring at him from beneath the darkness with a hateful familiarity.
And then, whatever it was blinked.
“Let’s go,” he said, turning around.
“Which way?” Kataria asked as he pushed past her and started toward a random archway.
“It doesn’t matter. We have to go. We never should have come here.” He broke out into a jog, moving faster with each step. It was looking at him, whatever it was, watching him go, glaring at him. He could feel it. He could hear it. “Hurry the hell-”
He had no more mouth to speak. As he approached the darkness of the archway, a shadow fell over his face. An emaciated, webbed claw seized him by the throat, lifted him up and off his feet. The ensuing struggle was meaningless, the limbs flailing against the fist and reaching for his sword ignored as his captor strode out of the shadows.
The Abysmyth’s vacant stare took on a kind of serenity as it swiveled empty white eyes upon Lenk. Its voice gurgled from its gaping jaws with a throaty clarity.
“You turn from light, fearing blindness,” it said. “You fight fate, fearing oblivion.” It drew Lenk up in its grasp, closer to its jaws. “What great gifts have you missed in the name of your fleeting terrors?”
It only barely quivered when the arrow entered its eye. Instead, it swept its gaze toward Kataria, unhurried. Its head didn’t even wobble as another arrow lodged itself in the beast’s mouth. The shict strung another arrow and let it fly, planting another one in the beast’s eye, face, mouth.
“Does it not ache, child?” it spoke, shafts splintering between its teeth. “The desperation? The futility? Can you not feel the change beneath your feet?”
“Shut up and drop him,” Kataria snarled, drawing another arrow. “Unless you like the feel-”
Not another word could pierce the webbed hand that clasped over her mouth. She could not struggle from the other hands seizing her arms, forcing the bow from her grasp, the arms wrapping around her torso, the weight of hairless bodies forcing her to the ground. She snarled, she bit, she fought and spat. The frogmen pinning her took it with stoic silence, holding her steady even as she struggled to get free.
Lenk cried out to her and felt the Abysmyth’s talons press against his throat. Even then, he struggled, flailing until another titanic claw caught his arm. It was only then that he noticed another frogman come scampering from the black water, searching over him with webbed hands until they found what they sought in his satchel.
With trembling reverence, the frogman pulled free the perfect black square of leather that was the tome. Eyes, demonic and frogman alike, turned toward it with breathless adoration as the creature slowly slid back to the water.
The man in the ice, Lenk could only think, he led me here. He wanted me to come here to die.
Or to kill.
“Is it cold?”
Risen from the surface of the blackness like a stone, two golden eyes peered over the water at Kataria. Strands of auburn hair floated atop the water like kelp, eerily delicate.
“The earth,” the voice came from the darkness. “The stone. Is it cold?” The eyes narrowed sharply. “It always felt such, even when we had legs, even when we walked upon it. She made it bearable, of course, but now it’s. . cold. It’s hard.”