“You are alive.”
Even against the Abysmyth’s skeleton, Hongwe looked tiny. Too clean to belong on this field. He stood with only a few cuts, another pair of waterskins hanging from his waist.
“I am,” Gariath replied. “So are you.”
“I was in the battle. Lost. But I am alive. And. . and. .” His gaze drifted to Gariath’s midriff.
“And?”
“And you’ve got a spear in you.”
“There’s a little spear in all of us.”
“I don’t think that’s-”
“Look, I have lost a lot of blood, so if you could speed this up a little.”
“The Shen have been trying to recover their people, salvage the dead and the wounded. I do what I can to keep the demons and longfaces away.”
Gariath looked down at the skeletal Abysmyth. “You do a good job of it.”
“The water comes from the mountain,” Hongwe said. “My father swore the oaths. My father remembered the stories. My father told me. Everything.”
“It’s not enough.”
Hongwe looked over the carnage raging and frowned. “It is not.”
“Why, then? They are not your people.”
Hongwe sniffed. “Close enough.”
Gariath stared for a long moment. He drew in a long breath and inhaled only the scent of blood and fear. He could hear no screams through the thunder and the pain. No ghosts. No humans. No Shen.
Only a voice.
“Come to me.”
From the earth.
“Come to me.”
From the water.
“Come to me.”
For a single moment, the battle died on one side. Abysmyths looked up from tearing their longfaced victims apart. Frogmen stood stock-still, heads turned upward even as netherlings lopped them off in messy blows. The great beast Daga-Mer stirred upon the field, the smoke dissipating from his form as he cast his great red gaze up, over the heads of his children and his foes and the bodies.
Toward the voice.
Toward the mountain.
“She calls to us!” the pale man atop Daga-Mer’s skull cried out. “Mother Deep cries to the faithful!”
“On the cries of the Mother do we march,” the Omens shrieked in choral ecstasy as they flocked overhead, writhing and twisting in the bloody wind, “on the faithful’s feet, we march to the mountain.”
The mountain.
Where the humans had gone, where the Shen still were. And one by one, they began to move.
Gariath reached out instinctively, tore the waterskins from the Gonwa’s waist. Without thinking, he began at a light jog, trying not to think about the spear in his flank, about the blood that still wept, about the fact that he was charging into a wall of advancing demons.
This plan required him not to think. If he did, he might start wondering exactly how he planned to use a pair of waterskins filled with freaky magic liquid to stop clashing armies of longfaces and demons. He might start thinking how stupid the only plan he had to stop them was. He might start noticing how idiotic it was to do this for them. For the humans, for the Shen, for the things that weren’t Rhega.
He had abandoned the former, the latter had abandoned him, he had found not so much as a ghost of a Rhega here, and he was charging toward a walking mountain of flesh and blood through the waves of demons and netherlings with a pair of waterskins.
Not a good plan.
But close enough.
Arrows flew, swords shot out to catch him, some scored against his flesh. More of the longfaces, though, either chased the frogmen and demons who broke off from the fight to begin a march toward the mountain or found themselves collapsing, exhausted or dead, without a foe to fight.
That didn’t matter. The humans were the ones who fought the little things. Gariath had always sought the biggest and strongest, the ones most capable of giving him the death he had craved. The only difference between then and now was that he was no longer seeking his own death.
That and this thing was much bigger than anything he had ever fought before.
“Come.”
Daga-Mer stirred to life with the noise. The smoldering black flesh began to grow bright red, his blood illuminated as it spread from the beating of his heart, into his veins, into his eyes. He rose from the earth, the corpses of those that had been beneath him when he fell peeling off like grains of sand as he turned toward the mountain.
Gariath leapt, found the titan’s ankle a mountain unto itself. Each knob of flesh, each ancient scar, each slab of metal grafted to the creature’s skin gave footing. Hand over hand, foot over foot, Gariath began to climb.
Daga-Mer seemed to take no notice of the red parasite climbing up his leg, of the ballista bolt and chain still sunk in his chest, of the demons, frogmen, and netherlings he crushed underfoot with each great stride. And the demons did not look up themselves as he marched across the blood-soaked ring. They were crushed into pulp without a sound, those bodies that still twitched trying to catch up in his wake.
And Gariath climbed, over knee, onto thigh, up bony hip. Ignoring the pain in his side, ignoring that he had next to no idea what his plan was and no idea whatsoever if it would work.
Over metal, over flesh, over lightning-charred scars.
Ignoring the blood that dripped from him, the blood that dripped from the sky, the puddles of blood and bodies on the ground that might be the humans.
Rib over rib, clinging to the beast’s flank, watching the titanic arm swing like a pendulum with each step.
Ignoring everything. Everything for this. For them.
He drew in a breath. It hurt. He leapt for Daga-Mer’s arm. He caught the beast’s wrist, wrapped his arms around a forearm the size of a tree and looked up. The great head, hell-light pouring out of its eyes, looked as far away as a mountain itself. He snarled, he bit back pain, he raised an arm to climb.
He never even saw the fist coming until it had connected with his jaw.
On the other side of the forearm, blade slung across her back, the Carnassial took exception to Gariath having the same idea as she had. He couldn’t say when she had jumped, when she had started climbing, nor did he care. For when she snarled at him and bared her teeth, he showed her his.
Up close.
He caught the hand as she moved to strike him and, with a swift jerk, hauled her from her precarious footing and into his jaws. Between helmet and armor, his teeth found the flesh of her throat. And with one more jerk, he tore free a purple chunk, spitting it out after her as she fell, her scream painted on the wind in red.
And he climbed, still, not thinking about how much it hurt, how he could still feel pain, how his grip felt slippery the farther he got up. How, if he fell, he would be the last Rhega to fall here and disappear forever and leave nothing behind.
Only flesh. Only climbing. Up the forearm. Onto the bicep. Over the rusted plates grafted onto the blackened skin. Climbing. Bleeding. No more feeling. No more thinking.
“Lastonelastonelastone. .”
Whispers in his head, the closer he got.
“Dieherediehereherehere. . nomorenomorenomore. .”
Irritating.
“Nomorefatherssonsweepingchildrencryinginthesandohpoorbeastgobacktotheearthandwaittodrown. .”
A light atop the shoulder. A face appeared over the blackened flesh. A withered hag’s head, bulbous and sagging, dominated by black void eyes and a lantern light on a gray stalk from the middle of its head. It smiled with two mouths at him and spoke in whispers.
“Shecomesshecomesshecomes. . theyalldiediedie. . likeyoulikeyoulike-”
Interrupted. A thick red claw around a twig of a neck would do that.
“No more thinking,” he growled. A quick pull.
Whatever a demon plummeting to the earth sounded like, he didn’t care. It hurt to hear, but pain required feeling. He was done with all that. The spear shifted inside him, the wound grew bigger. That would be a problem for creatures weighed down by thought, by fear, by pain.