While it certainly didn’t seem to object to the cluster of Shen around its feet trying desperately to push it over and onto the road below, Kataria picked up her speed.
“Stop!” Lenk rasped. “We’ll never make it!”
“Yes, we will! Just go faster!”
He did go. Faster than her, even. Their breath became soundless, coming so swiftly and weakly it might as well not exist. Their legs pumped numbly beneath them, forgetting that they were supposed to have collapsed by now. They had nothing left to give but the desperate hope of passing before the statue fell.
Whatever god it was supposed to represent, though, the monolith appeared unmoved.
By their efforts, anyway.
The collective heaving of ten Shen proved to be far more persuasive.
The monolith tilted with a roar of rock and the wail of wind as it teetered and pitched over the wall, plummeting to the road below. She felt the shock of it through her numb feet, coursing up into her skull as the old stone god smashed against the rock below, sending a wave of pulverized granite dust erupting.
His legs desperately trying to remember how to stop, Lenk skidded into the great stone eye with an undignified sound. He came to a rasping, gasping halt.
Kataria did not.
With an almost unnerving casualness, she leapt, racing up his back, onto his shoulders, leaping off of him like a fleshy, wheezy stepping stone and scrambling atop the statute’s stone flank. She turned, looked down at him as he scrambled to follow her, failed to even come close.
She clicked her tongue. “Okay, so I was halfway right.”
Had he the breath to respond, he probably would have cursed her. Had he the energy to lift his sword, he probably would have thrown it at her. She didn’t watch him for long, though. Her eyes were drawn down the road, toward the advancing Shen horde. Archers continued to slither out of the coral forest to join the tide, bows added to the throngs of clubs and blades raised high and hungry for blood.
But even that did not hold her attention for long.
Her ears did not prick up at the sound, for she did not hear it. She felt it, in the nothingness of the mist. Determination. Compassion. Hate. Anger.
Naxiaw.
He was out there, somewhere. Somewhere close. Watching her, even now. And his were not the only eyes upon her.
But the Shen were also close. And growing closer. Stay and chase them off, she thought, and the greenshicts would come and kill Lenk. Leave to chase off the greenshicts and the Shen would kill Lenk. Neither option was attractive.
But then he decided for her.
“I can’t make it,” he said, finally finding his breath. “You have to go.”
“Right,” she said, making a move to leave.
“Wait!”
“What?”
“I didn’t mean it! I was trying to be noble!”
“Ah. .” She looked at him and winced. “Well.”
And Lenk was left staring at an empty space she had just occupied. Had he breath to speak, he still wouldn’t have had the words to describe what he felt just then.
Someone else did, though.
“Told you,” the voice whispered.
Don’t be an asshole about this, he thought in reply.
“More important matters, anyway.”
The voice was right. Lenk knew that the moment he heard the hissing behind him. Breath coming heavily, sweat dripping from his brow, Lenk turned around very slowly. But he was in no hurry.
When he finally turned to face them, the Shen were waiting.
THIRTEEN
“I have been looking for you. . for a long time.”
Sheraptus’s eyes burned as he cast his stare upon the scene below. Forgepits burned, alive with the sounds of metal being twisted into blades and breastplates, audible even from his terrace. The sound of creation carried so far.
“You are not pleased to see me again,” he closed his eyes, whispering to his guest behind him. “It is hard to blame you.”
Another scream rose up from below as another slave, one of Those Green Things, was shattered beneath an iron sole. The cargo the slave carried fell to the ground, splashing in the red life that seeped from its many, many cuts.
“But that seems like an eternity ago. Since then I have found. . questions. I don’t like them. A netherling knows. We are born from nothing. We return to nothing. There is only bloodshed and fire in between. There are no questions that do not have this answer.”
The sikkhuns howled with wild laughter as the dead slave was hauled by a female to their pit and tossed in. Their hunger was a thing alive itself, the gnashing of their jaws and the ripping of scaly green meat, the cycle of life to death, death to nourishment, nourishment to life.
“But there has to be more,” he said. “It was simple in the Nether. There was nothing. But here? The slaves barely put up a fight when we came. All this green, all this blue. .”
He swept a hand to the face of the sprawling forest, scarred by an ugly sea of stumps. Its lumber had been hauled to the surf, turned into the long, black ships bobbing in waters stained by soot and blood and scraps of flesh.
“They didn’t even fight for it. Why? Is there simply more of it that they can take later? But if there is more. . who made it?” He clenched his fist, felt the anger burn out his eyes. “Metal does not take shape without fire and flesh. Ships do not construct themselves. This? All of this, someone had to have made it.”
He shut his eyes, felt the fires smolder beneath his lids as he drew in a deep breath and exhaled.
“That’s why I asked them to find you, specifically, out of all of your small, weak race. I wanted to find you. .”
He turned around to finally look at his guest. A pair of beady eyes mounted upon tiny stalks looked back. The crab scuttled across the plate, its chitinous legs rapping upon the metal. It would go one way, find its path terminating in a long fall from the pedestal, move another way, find a similar conclusion, try the other way.
It was almost as if it wasn’t even listening, Sheraptus thought contemptibly.
He swept over to the plate, plucked the crustacean up gently in his hands. It had taken time to understand how to take something so small without crushing it. He had practiced. And upon his palm, the crab scuttled one way, felt the palm’s width end, scuttled the other way.
“And you waste it all,” he whispered. “You and Those Green Things and the pink-skinned overscum. . you have all of this, and you simply move about. You do nothing with it.” He turned his hand over gently, watched the crab flail briefly, then right itself upon the back of his hand. “Why?”
He found his ire at the crab’s silence boiling. Not that he expected it to simply up and start talking, but it could at least do something different. He jabbed it with a finger, pushing it around on his hand.
“Do you simply not know what to do with it all?” he asked. “Does the sheer vastness of it all overwhelm you? Or do you simply choose to do nothing with it?”
It scuttled to escape his prodding finger, flailing as it found itself upon his palm again. And still, he tormented it.
“And why are you even here? What are you supposed to do? If you have no purpose, then how can you-”
He hissed as he felt a sting shoot up through his finger. The tiny pincers released him almost immediately, leaving little more than a bright red slash across the digit and a distant pain that grew to nothing in the blink of an eye.
In the next blink, his fingers had curled around the thing. He spoke a word, felt his eyes burn, felt the crown burn upon his brow. The flame coursed through his palm, licked his fingers. His nostrils quivered with the scent of cooked flesh.