“You know what I mean.”
“Do I?”
He had heard enough lunatic philosophy from the netherling to know that asking her to continue was something he would regret. And yet, a distraction was a distraction.
“You know that even if I put her down right now, she’s still going to die.” Xhai’s voice was unnervingly cold; a rare feat for one who could rarely be described as anything particularly warm or fuzzy. “Maybe I’ll stomp her head before I bleed out. Maybe she’ll be swept out to sea and drown. She’ll still be dead.”
“You do tend to have that effect on people.”
“It won’t be me that killed her.”
His face twitched: a momentary spasm at the edge of his mouth, involuntary and lasting only as long as it took to blink. But Xhai didn’t blink. She had seen how her words had struck him.
“She came to me,” Xhai continued, voice growing blacker with each breath. “She spoke of reason and fate and a lot of other words that mean ‘weak.’ She came to ask me if I was sorry. She said she had done it for you, to keep you from killing.”
Another twitch; surprise, this time. Surprise that he hadn’t wanted to kill the netherling, surprise that Asper had realized that, surprise that she thought him worth the effort.
“She wanted to know the reason for all of it,” Xhai said. “The reason why you hadn’t killed me. The reason why you would have to.”
“For her.” The words came out unexpectedly, crawling out of dry lips on a weak and dying mouth.
“NOT FOR HER.” Xhai didn’t bother to hide the snarl, she embraced it with broad, sharp teeth. “Never for her. It was for me. For us. You and I, we kill because we kill. There is no reason for it beyond it being what we do, what we know has to happen.”
Whatever semblance of logic the netherling thought this might possess was blatantly mad. Whatever truth she wanted to force upon him was forever marred by the fact that she was a killer, a depraved minion to a depraved master.
He could have told her any of this, if only to get her to stop talking.
“There are scars on our bodies,” she said, “there is blood on our hands. We left a long line of corpses to come here. And here we are, you and me. Two more corpses left. Yours or mine. . and hers.”
His hand began to tremble, heart began to quicken.
“She lives in a lie,” Xhai said. “Of invisible sky creatures and bedtime stories. She wants to think there’s a way for any of this to end without killing. Stupid, even if she wasn’t talking about you.”
But he couldn’t stop, couldn’t stop her from talking, couldn’t stop himself from listening.
“She can’t see the bodies you’ve left behind you.”
The woman wouldn’t let him. Not the woman before him, not the woman unconscious. The woman at the corner of his eye: white skin, wide eyes and smiling, at him, telling him in words without words through that great red slit in her throat.
Telling him that the netherling was right.
Telling him that he was a murderer and Asper would die, because of him; that she already had.
Telling him to look. To look at her. To look at Imone.
He did.
And he felt his jaw explode as Xhai smashed her fist against it. Overkill, he realized as he fell to the earth; it hadn’t taken much to send him there. And once he felt the sand crunch under his body, he didn’t feel much like rising again.
Not with so many people looking at him with eyes open and eyes closed and eyes glazed over and dead.
“Uyeh!”
“Toh!”
Iron voices were calling out, chanting. He could see the dark shadow that was the ship coming forward, oars being drawn up as it bobbed into the surf and toward the shore.
Xhai turned, looked over her shoulder. “My Master calls.”
“Your master is dead,” Denaos replied.
He wasn’t entirely surprised when she smiled at him like she had a very awful secret.
“Don’t,” he said, trying to rise to his feet.
“I do,” she said. “Because he calls. Because that is what I do.”
“Don’t take her.”
“He wants her.”
“You can’t know that.”
She looked at him intently for a moment before raising her arm: a twisted and mangled mess, it nonetheless bowed to her will. She clenched cracked and bent fingers, forcing it into a fist. The knucklebones and wrist bones and cracked skin and visible veins conformed to the command in a series of sickening pops.
“I know she did this to me,” Xhai said, voice growing hotter. “With whatever she has inside her. He will want to know.”
“He doesn’t,” Denaos insisted, forcing himself to his knees. “He doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t care about what she did to you. He doesn’t care about you. He wants her,” he pointed to Asper, “her flesh and her screams. You know what he’ll do to her. You know what he does to all of them. He doesn’t deserve them.”
“He is the Master,” Xhai snarled. “It is his right to take. He wants her.”
“And you don’t,” Denaos said, “and it isn’t. You don’t want him to have her or anyone else. You deserve him.”
He wasn’t sure if she had even bothered to hide the twitch, the snarl that was less than her usual display of anger and so much more than all the fury she had shown him before. He chose to focus on it, regardless, his eyes upon her mouth as he spoke.
“You kill,” he said, “because of him.”
Her lips trembled.
“They die,” he said, “because of you.”
Her teeth clenched.
“It’s for you. All for you,” he said. “And he wants her. He doesn’t deserve her. You deserve him.” He opened his arms in submission. “And me.”
And her lips pursed shut. No snarl, no smile, no frown. Nothing she had in her limited repertoire of expressions could she offer to those words. Her eyes had never needed to show anything in their milky whites before. And so she simply stared, blankly, at him.
“Take me,” he insisted. “Leave her behind, where he can’t get her. It’s not about her. You don’t want her.”
The ship pulled up alongside the beach, groaning as a great black behemoth as it drew itself through the waves. Purple faces lined up at the railing, dead-white eyes stared down at him, at her, expressionless but for the contempt that could not be contained by death.
And when he looked back at Xhai, he saw those same eyes, that same hatred, moments before she turned around.
“I want her,” she said, “to suffer.”
And she walked into the waves, striding effortlessly through the surf that tried vainly to push her back. Through it, he could see Asper’s eyes fluttering open, hear her groaning as she rose from her stupor. Still too numb to notice Xhai hoisting her up over the railing, she flopped up into the waiting hands of the netherlings. Maybe that numbness would continue.
Maybe she wouldn’t even know how he tried to save her, how he had failed so miserably, how he had sat on his knees and watched her simply be taken away. All because he never wanted Asper to look at him like Xhai had.
Maybe that would provide him a momentary comfort when he thought about what they would do to her, he thought, shortly before he turned his blade on himself for his cowardice.
He heard footsteps scurrying behind him. He heard the shrill cries of a boyish voice too angry to know it was boyish. Dreadaeleon, he thought. Dreadaeleon had seen everything.
Maybe he would kill him, Denaos thought, spare himself the trouble.
As it was, Dreadaeleon didn’t even seem to see the rogue. He went running past, eyes locked firmly on the ship as it began to pull away in the surf. No cries for it to stop, no shrieks of impotence, no words at all.
Only Dreadaeleon, who came skidding to a halt just shy of the lapping surf. Only Dreadaeleon, with the blue electricity cavorting up and down his arms with crackling laughter. Only Dreadaeleon.