“I’m here,” he said.
“The Kraken Queen. . dead.”
“I know.”
“I. . did it. For the Sea Mother. Duty fulfilled. I. .” She could not lift her head to look at him. Her arm could only brush against his cheek.
And her arm went limp. And she faded. And she dissolved. Flesh into water, hair into water. She spilled through his grasp, down into the water to disappear into the endless blue.
“She’s dead.” When he finally said it, after so many times he wondered how he might, he was surprised at how easy it was. “Just like that.”
“You were expecting her to live?”
“No. .” He looked away, then back to the water. “But. .”
Gariath didn’t ask. He didn’t have to. Dreadaeleon’s fingers began to weave, knitting into complex, painful-looking gestures. He coaxed the waters to rise in a column and with delicate brushes of his hands, he sheared the liquid away until it resembled something more shapely, something human.
“Sheraptus was right. . in a way, of course, but not the correct way. Magic isn’t meant to be used this way-recklessly, that is-but what are limitations, anyway? We recognize the function of the power as it pertains to our bodies, but what of our minds? He negated the costs of magic-”
Dreadaeleon winced sharply, rubbing at his temple.
“That was a law that could not be circumnavigated. Not until he figured out a way. And if one law can be made pointless, what of others? What else could we possibly do with it? What else can be made insignificant?”
He stepped back. The water hung in the air, no longer a column, no longer even human. She was blue, of course, and liquid, but everything else about her-the flow of her hair, the fins upon her head, the crystalline hum she made when Dreadaeleon flicked her liquid body-was her.
“The siren,” Gariath muttered. “You. . just-”
“I did,” Dreadaeleon said, beaming. “I can. Lenk, Kataria, anyone else, maybe even all the Shen lost today, if we can recover their bodies. If power can be transferred, if a being can be broken down into energy, then surely it can be reconstructed. Surely, with the proper motivations and more thorough thought than Sheraptus, I could. .”
His smile was wide when he turned to Gariath.
“Gods, do you realize what this-”
His smile disappeared when Gariath punched him.
“Yeah.” The dragonman grunted as he caught the boy and tore the crown from his head before letting him drop into the water, the liquid Greenhair splashing into nothingness after him. “I do.”
For as much trouble as it had caused, it was like paper in Gariath’s hands, its iron bending in soft, whimpering creaks as he wadded it up into a mangled, blackened mess.
“What are you doing?” Dreadaeleon sputtered, flailing to his feet. “What the hell are you doing, you moron? STOP! That may be the only chance we have to-”
“There’s nothing you can say that will make me stop,” Gariath grunted, continuing to mangle the crown. “And only a handful of things you can say that won’t make me punch you again.”
He turned and threw it. It tumbled out of sight, disappearing somewhere beyond the line of kelp. Dreadaeleon itched at his scalp, his mind suddenly seeming a very empty, constrictive place.
“WHY?” he demanded.
“It was a cursed, evil thing.”
“Can you tell me why it was a cursed, evil thing? Because you can’t understand it? Because you don’t know how anything works if you can’t hit it real hard and make it do something?”
“Yeah,” Gariath growled, “because I don’t understand it. And because I don’t understand how someone thinks you can pull a dead body up, put something in it, and call it alive again. And I don’t understand how you can think anyone having that kind of power is a good thing.” He snorted. “So, in the absence of understanding, I turned to violence. It worked out pretty well for me.”
Dreadaeleon opened his mouth to retort, found himself silent as his eyes were drawn to the edge of the ring. The kelp forest parted as they came emerging from the shadows. In numbers too small for the leaves to even notice their passing.
At their head trudged a creature with a bent back and a long shard of bone wedged in his eye. Behind came the others, holding the prone bodies of a man with silver hair and a bloodied woman, both unmoving. They came until there were but a few.
Shalake said nothing as he looked past Gariath and Dreadaeleon to the ice floe and the blackened body of Mahalar. He said nothing as he looked to his few brothers, who stepped forward and deposited Lenk and Kataria upon the ice. And he said nothing as he bent low and began to pull a body of one of his fellows from the water.
And they said nothing, as one, as the Shen who knew they were dead were collected and heaped upon the ice by those who had yet to admit it
THIRTY-SIX
It was enough smoke to choke a god. But then again, it was a lot of fire. Because there were a lot of bodies.
Still.
Three days after.
On the beaches below, they worked as one. The Gonwa and Owauku had come from Teji, summoned by Shen that had once threatened them. They carried the bodies, they built the pyres from coral and wood, they bore the torches. They filed between the fire and the pile of dead, green flesh in a slow march, as they had since dawn, as they did at sunset, until they moved with such certainty between deaths that it was impossible to tell the difference between them.
“We do not burn our dead.”
Lenk looked up. Jenaji stood at the edge of the cliff, staring down over the beach. The sole patch of sand that was not walled away from the world.
“When my father died,” he said, “it was by a human sword. We were raiding a ship that wandered too close. Shalake called him a hero. We left him his club, his shield, and let the tide rise and take him.”
He looked down at the bodies below. “We had ways of doing things. Ways that we had done things when we were one people. The years came. The Gonwa grew lazy, the Owauku grew stunted. Their suffering changed them. We loathed them for it. We made them swear oaths that our ancestors took when we were still one.”
Lenk looked to the center of the beach, the largest pyre, the brightest fire. Mahalar. They had set him ablaze first. Three days later, he was still burning.
“It took us this,” Jenaji said, gesturing to the scene below, “to see what they had seen. All that you see below is all that remains of us. All of us. We found only bodies and embers on Komga. We came to Teji on bended knee. We begged the Owauku, the weakest of us, to come and bring wood for. .”
He sighed. “Less than one hundred. Three islands, each one of them a graveyard. And all that we had, the best of us, flies on the wind.”
Lenk looked down at the fire and smoke. He rubbed the secured poultice on his shoulder. He coughed.
“So, yeah, I’m fine,” he said, “like I was saying. Just. . uh. .” He coughed again. “Thought you’d want to know.”
Jenaji looked at him. He smiled weakly.
“I mean, thank you, for your help,” he said. “When we came down from the mountain, I probably would have died if you hadn’t helped us. Kataria collapsed, probably from carrying me all the way down-thanks for not mentioning that, by the way-but, uh. . thanks.”
Jenaji held his stare for a long while before turning back and grunting.
“It’s fine.” He rubbed his eyes. “You did us a service. The Shen would be proud to die for this. We did our duty. We died well.”
Jenaji paused, shook his head.
“No. I still don’t believe it.”
Lenk glanced to his sword at his side. It would seem a little petty to thank them for fishing it out when the waterways beneath Jaga emptied out, he thought. And his request was going to be awkward enough already.
“So, this might be a bad time what with the whole. . mass death and such,” Lenk said, “but. .”