Jenaji didn’t wait for him to finish his thought. He took the satchel from his waist, held it up before him.
“Look at that. It weighs nothing. Toss it in a fire, it would burn like any other book. And for this. .” He looked out over the fires and sighed, tossing it into Lenk’s lap. “Take it. Whatever reason we had to care about it is gone now.”
“We’ll be gone in a day or two,” Lenk said. “Are you sure you can spare a vessel?”
“And food,” Jenaji said. “And a sea chart we seized from one of the ships. It will take you back to your lands.” He looked at the tome for a moment. “Had we just given that tome to you, perhaps none of this would have ever happened. Irony?”
“Poetry,” Lenk replied. “But I guess, all things considered, we’re kind of lucky.”
“Luck is why you are alive and my brothers are dead.” Jenaji shook his head and sighed. “If we were lucky, I would never have met you.”
Lenk looked at Jenaji as the lizardman turned and stalked down the ridge.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“Away.”
“I mean, where will you go? You and your people?”
“Same answer.”
He watched him go to join the procession heaping bodies onto the fire. He looked down at the satchel in his lap. He didn’t open it. He didn’t need to. No voice called to him, he felt no great desire to open it. Whatever inside him that had spoken the book’s language was now silent.
Now, the Tome of the Undergates was just a book.
And he was just a man sitting on top an island made of corpses.
“That’s it?”
He looked over his shoulder. Kataria stood at the edge of the kelp forest, arms folded over her chest, bandaged about the limb and midriff.
“Yeah,” he said, holding up the satchel. “It’s over. Everything is over. We can go back and get paid now.”
“And you’re all right?” she asked.
“Mostly,” he said, rubbing his shoulder. “Asper stitched me up, did her business and such. I was in and out for a lot of it and I think she said something about sneezing killing me or something, but-”
She was turning and walking. He called after her, her ears were folding over themselves. She disappeared into the forests.
And Lenk and the tome were left upon the cliff.
“Patron’s coin,” Denaos cursed, “you’re supposed to be lighter without armor.” He grunted as he pulled the corpse to the pyre. “But you won’t lend a hand, will you? You don’t even care.” He wiped sweat from his brow as he looked down disdainfully at the burden. “What with being dead and all.”
He had shut her eyes. Once more when they had somehow opened themselves. He had considered blindfolding her, but he didn’t think it would help. Even in a cold, blind death, he could feel Xhai hating him.
“Not like you deserve this, anyway,” he growled. “You tried to kill me. A lot of people have done that before and gotten away with burials much less pretty than this.” He looked down at her, shrouded in the leather wrapping, and frowned. “I don’t have to do this, you know.”
He dropped her a few feet away from the crude pyre he had assembled at one of the few remaining dry spots at the edge of the ring. A meager thing, cobbled together out of whatever he thought might burn. She could knock it down, smash the pieces and jam the sharp bits somewhere tender without ever breaking a sweat.
Could have, he corrected himself. Probably would have, too, if not for. . well, you know.
Now, it seemed as though a pile of driftwood and sticks would be something to defy her. She was heavy. He was tired.
She stirred. For a moment, just a fleeting moment that had saved his life before, he wondered if, after all that, she could still be alive. But he saw Asper’s hands around Xhai’s ankles. The priestess did not look up at him.
“On three,” she grunted, “one. . two. .”
They placed her upon the pyre awkwardly; she looked more like she had been smashed to rest than laid. The flint would not start and the spark would not catch at first; it was afraid to come out. When it caught and she was engulfed in flames, they watched her burn; as mangled as her face was, after all she had been through, she still looked pissed as hell.
No one said a thing.
It was a fitting funeral for Semnein Xhai, first of the Carnassials.
And then Denaos had to go and ruin it.
“Should you say something?” he asked without looking at Asper.
“She didn’t believe in my god, or any god. What would I say?”
He looked to the fire. “I guess you’re right.”
She looked to him for only a fleeting moment. It was enough for him to feel it, like a brief slap. Embers rose with her sigh.
“I don’t know who she was. I don’t know anything about her beyond the men she was drawn to. Maybe if we knew each other in another time, if they didn’t exist, we wouldn’t have hurt each other like we did.”
Denaos observed a moment of silence.
“Probably not,” he said.
“Yeah.” She sighed. “Probably not.”
Another silence followed. Not nearly long enough before she asked.
“Would you have given a funeral for Bralston, too?”
“I would.”
“He wanted to kill you, too, didn’t he?”
“He did.”
“But you-”
“Yeah. I did.”
“Why do you mourn for them, Denaos?”
He rolled his tongue over in his mouth a moment. He stared intently at a stray ember burning out on the ground.
“I learned to read when I was eight. First thing I did was visit every temple to every God that had a holy scripture and ask to see it. They all talked about redemption, but there was never any list to it. You just did good and went to be at the side of your God when you died. And they all contradicted each other.”
He sniffed. The ember danced slightly on the breeze, growing bright.
“I killed my first person when I was five. Little boy in Cier’Djaal. He took a liking to me immediately. I wasn’t from Cier’Djaal, so everyone was fascinated by the little pale northerner. The boy’s father was rich. There was a celebration for his son’s fifth birthday. The little pale boy was invited. I remember a big, silver platter with honeytreats. I asked the little boy if he wanted to play a game. A couple of moments later, I showed the little boy’s father his son’s four biggest fingers in one hand and the bloody knife in the other. Took a note to the Jackals and by the end of the night, I was eating honeytreats before I cleaned the blood off my hands.”
The ember rested upon the sand again and dimmed.
“There were a lot more before Imone. I had a talent for killing. I could do it pretty easily, too. Put on a mask and I could be a lover, a supporter, a genuine friend. Knife them in the dark or get them to do what the Jackals wanted them to. ‘Friendly murders,’ they called them back then.”
The ember sizzled to a dull, dark splotch on the ground.
“I guess it was when Imone die-” He paused, caught himself. “When I. . I killed her, two years after our wedding night, that I started really reading. I went to every scripture, every book, of every god and kept re-reading them, hoping I missed something. Maybe there was some kind of passage marked ‘for those of you who have especially fucked everything to the point that you are almost totally definitely going to burn when you die, please read on.’”
He sniffed again.
“There wasn’t. So I packed up and I went and I just kept going until I met you and Lenk and the others. I needed to do something good, but I was only good at killing. So I suppose I just do what I can to show the Gods that I at least mean good. Like giving killers funerals, sending them to whatever god will have them. You’ve got to figure that you do what you can, when you can, as often as you can, eventually someone up there will tell you you’re okay and you’re coming to heaven with everyone else, you know?”
He finally looked at her. She was still staring at the fire.