But there it was: an eternity long, a god high, and brimming with depictions of noble men marching defiantly into the sea to be greeted with a riot of fish and coral before falling like children into the arms of a woman, vast as the wall she was carved into.
Traitor.
He cringed. They came again. Not his thoughts. Burrowing into his head.
Liar.
Murderer.
Blasphemer.
He closed his eyes, tried to breathe deeply. It was harder than it seemed.
Kill.
Destroy.
Unseat.
It never worked anyway. Talking didn’t, either. But it was at least harder to hear them over the sound of his own voice.
“Kind of odd, don’t you think?” he asked.
“What do I think?”
Kataria’s breathless voice came ahead of her as she clawed her way to the top of the pillar. Her scowl burned beneath the satchel of supplies and quiver upon her back as she hauled herself up.
“I think that every time I wonder if I might be wrong to think you’re an imbecile, you go and make such a monumental observation as noting that this whole adventure might contain some things that might be considered odd.”
“I mean it’s odd even for us,” Lenk replied, gesturing at the centuries-old carnage. “Where did this wall come from? The Shen couldn’t have carved it.”
“Why couldn’t they have?” Kataria asked as she wrung out her hair. “We don’t know anything about them beyond their attitudes toward our heads being attached to our bodies.”
“They couldn’t have built it because there’s no way a race can grasp the finer points of mass masonry projects while the concept of trousers still eludes them. And what about this?” He waved his hands at the monolith and the ship struggling to keep it from sinking. “What is it?”
“This is the fourth one we’ve seen today. What’s odd about this one?”
“They were all over the place on Teji, mounted like siege engines. This one’s a ship’s ram. What are they doing here?”
“Same thing they were doing on Teji,” Kataria said, shrugging. “Standing around, being ominous.” She adjusted the satchel on her back. “This is the only way in and we’ve been following the wall for hours. You had all that time to ask stupid questions.” She clapped his shoulder as she moved forward. “Now, we move.”
She took the lead. And he followed.
Again.
Kataria could never be called “shy,” what with the various insults and bodily emissions she had hurled at him. But she had never really seemed interested in leadership roles. Possibly because it took up time that could be spent jamming sharp things into soft things.
Yet she easily pushed past him. She looked at him expectantly before sliding down the other side of the pillar. Like he was supposed to follow.
It made sense. Her hearing was sharp, her eyes keen. If anything was going to leap out of the mist to kill them, she’d know long before he would and might tell him. And yet, he couldn’t shake a suspicion that came from her newfound confidence.
The voice wouldn’t let him.
“She does not fear you.”
I don’t want her to fear me. He thought the thoughts freely as he moved to follow her. It was a little refreshing to hear a more familiar madness.
“You do. And you are right to.”
All right, humor me. Why?
“Because you want her to know what she did. You want her to feel pain.”
I don’t.
He left it at that. He tried not to give it any thoughts for the voice to respond to. Futile. He felt the cold snake from his head into chest as the voice looked from his thoughts into his heart.
“You do.”
He slid down the pillar, found Kataria standing at the edge of its rocky base. A network of old carnage stretched before them: splintered wood, jagged stone, a bridge of gray and rot that led to the monolith’s improvised entrance.
“Looks clear.”
Lenk took a step forward. Her hand was up and pressed against his chest. Her eyes were locked intently on his.
“It looked clear right before Gariath was swallowed whole.” She shrugged the satchel off, handed it to him. “I’ll go first.”
He wasn’t quite sure what to think as she hopped nimbly from rock to rock, lumber to lumber across the gap of sea. Fortunately, he had someone who did.
“She turns her back to you.”
Lenk hopped after her. She’s just confident.
“Careless.”
Protective.
“Stupid.”
She’s hardly stupid.
“We are no longer talking about her.”
He followed her silently across the rocks, trying to keep head as silent as mouth.
Kataria nimbly skipped across the stones and wreckage ahead of him, canny as a mountain goat. But his eyes were drawn to her feet, how they slipped, just a hair’s breadth, with each step. She was getting careless, distracted by something.
It would be a small effort, barely anything more than an extra hop and an outstretched hand. A gentle shove and-
Stop. He shook his head wildly. Stop that.
“Delusional.”
What did I just say?
They wound their way across the precarious footing, onto the shattered hull of the ship, over the stone god’s shattered face. As they squeezed through smashed ribs, Lenk paused to note just how odd it was that this was his second time doing this.
They had been everywhere on Teji. The giant fish-headed beasts littered the beach amidst the wrecked artillery and rusted weapons in numbers so vast as to paint the sand white. Their skulls had holes punched in them with boulders. Their limbs had been twisted beneath splintering shafts.
A war, the Owauku had said, between the servants of Ulbecetonth and her mortal enemies.
A war that had reached all the way to the Shen.
And, as he crawled beneath a fractured collarbone the size of a ship’s plank, Lenk began to wonder which side they had been on when the walls broke.
And, as he emerged from the hole, set foot upon finely carved stone, he found that the list of mysteries surrounding the Shen grew obnoxiously long.
The highway stretched out before him, behind him, around him, wide enough for ten men to walk abreast of each other as it wound between the two great walls rising up on either side of it. The bricks of the road were smoothed to the point that they would have shined if not for the shroud of gray overhead and the black splotches staining them. Pedestals where statues had once stood marched its length, host to stone feet without bodies, stone faces amidst pulverized pebbles.
A battle had obviously raged here. What kind of battle, he had no idea. Because for all the blood, all the destruction, there were no bodies.
Only bells.
He had seen them before: abominations of metal hanging from wooden frames by spiked chains, so severely twisted that they looked like they might not even make a sound. They did, of course. He had heard it before. He still heard it as he looked at them now. It still made his head hurt.
The mist did not spare him the sight by politely obscuring it. It lingered at the edges of the wall, wispy gray fingers like those of a curious child peeking over. But it never came farther, as though out of respect. However old the mist was, the stone was older. However long it had been here, the road had been here longer.