The flashes grew stronger, their laughter louder, their macabre jokes increasingly hilarious as they plucked at her skin. Hair smoked, stood on end. Her lips curled back to expose gums. A nipple blackened amidst a mass of twitching flesh.
The chains caught Asper, tried to pull her back. She continued to walk forward, unthinking, unfeeling. The searing of her wrist, she did not notice. The shattering of stone behind her, she did not hear.
“Louder, now, louder,” Sheraptus coaxed. “It can’t be too much longer now.”
What tore out of Nai’s mouth was without words, without emotion. It was the kind of raw, vocal bile offered up when there was nothing left within her. From deep in the darkness beyond the chamber, more voices lent theirs to hers, more screaming joining with hers.
They clashed like cathedral bells at first, each one striving to be heard over the other, before finding an agonized harmony, blending into a single perfect scream.
Asper didn’t even hear the chains break, nor did she hear the sizzle of burning metal as the manacle fell from her left wrist, scorched and blackened. She noticed her palm glowing with hellish red light, the bones black and visible beneath a transparent sheath of skin, only when she raised it up, extended it authoritatively, marched toward the black figure.
And wrapped it about Sheraptus’s skinny neck.
Instantly, the laughter stopped, the screaming stopped, the speaking stopped. The lightning leapt back into Sheraptus’s hands, which calmly lowered themselves to his sides, as though he had simply lost interest.
The only sign that anything was wrong was the sickening crack resounding in the silence as his shoulder popped out of place.
“What. . what is. .” he gasped for a moment before there was a faint sucking sound, his windpipe collapsing.
“I don’t know,” Asper said, tightening her grip. “But it was sent here for you.”
Something broke beneath him, a shinbone snapping, realigning awkwardly, and snapping again until his right leg possessed six different joints. He collapsed to his knees, body trembling as though it were about to come undone.
“You. .” he rasped in great, inward breaths, “you. . pure. . destruction.”
Asper said nothing. The hellish red light of the arm intensified, grew fat off the suffering. Sheraptus held up an arm, watched it twist and diminish, as though something sucked the sinew right out of it until there was nothing left but brittle, marrowless bones.
“Only. . gods. . Aeon in. . a human,” he rasped. “Gods. . help. .”
Snap. His knee erupted.
“Help. .”
Snap. His arm folded in on itself.
“Gods. .”
Creak. His neck began to-
“MASTER!”
She heard the cry, heard the iron boots crashing on the stone floor. She had been discovered, she knew, even without looking to see the netherling charging up the corridor, sword at the ready. Not yet, she knew; they might kill her, but not before she could kill him.
As the netherling approached, she flew her right hand out errantly, intended to catch a blow meant for her neck, to swat impotently at the netherling, anything to buy just a few more moments to finish what she had started. She expected nothing.
She certainly didn’t expect her fist to find the female’s ribcage.
And she didn’t expect to feel it explode beneath her hand.
The netherling fell backward, wailing and clutching her side. Asper felt her own grip on Sheraptus loosen as her wide-eyed attentions turned toward her right hand. Her wonderfully normal, uselessly normal right hand.
Upon whose palm a faint, white dot of light began to glow, like a great eye opening for the first time.
It stared at her and she stared at it, unblinking. Within it, she could feel her blood flow swiftly, perfectly, in perfect harmony with the beating of her heart. And even as it slowed, she felt the throbbing pain of her left hand diminish, its hellish red glow dim, only for the white pinprick of light to grow wider, the eye broader.
She blinked. It stuttered.
And then winked out completely.
She continued to stare at her palm, once again perfectly normal. She stared right up until she heard the sound of metal boots two steps behind her.
Xhai had come without warcry or concern, letting her fist speak for her. And Asper was sent reeling, succumbing to its argument as she flew across the cavern, struck the wall, slid to the floor.
Xhai was upon her instantly, boot pressed to her throat, digging its sharp heel into the tender flesh of her neck. She gurgled, pounding at her foot with wonderful, useless, normal hands once more. Xhai narrowed her eyes, pressed a little harder.
“STOP!”
Sheraptus’s voice was barely a voice at all. More a suppurating gasp. His hand swept with no authority, but merely flailed.
“Not kill. . her,” he rasped. “Take away. . sent for me. .”
Xhai frowned, looking from him to her.
“NOW!”
He didn’t specify, Xhai didn’t ask. She reached down, seized Asper by her hair, and began to drag her away. The priestess didn’t care, her eyes fell to the girl hanging from the wall, whose blackened flesh still smoked, whose body still twitched.
Who still drew breath and whispered.
And through the pain and the confusion, Asper smiled as she was hauled into the darkness.
She was far away when Sheraptus made another noise, far too far to hear him chuckle to himself. Far too far to see him stare up, past the cavern roof, past the sky above, into heaven.
“Great suffering. . still alive. .” A contented smile came over his face. “You do listen.”
FOURTEEN
“QAI ZHOTH!”
It began with one cry, an iron voice torn from a throat, somewhere amidst the bustle and bloodshed on the beach. And at one cry, one by one, they looked up.
The shaven-headed metalshapers wiped the sweat from their brows as they looked up from the white-hot iron in their forgepits. The slave drivers held their whips at bay, giving their scaly, reptilian drudges but a moment to lower their loads and bleed quietly as their taskmistresses looked up. The females hauling yet another broken corpse to the sikkhun pits stopped, looked up, smiled broadly.
And one by one, the cry was taken up.
“QAI ZHOTH!”
“AKH ZEKH LAKH!”
“EVISCERATE! DECAPITATE! ANNIHILATE!”
They leapt from throat to throat, roaring over one another, accompanied by weapons thrust into the air, purple muscles flexing, howls of bloodlust. Even as the cries died down, the fervor did not. It filled the nostrils of the netherlings, drove their activities to frenzy.
The call had gone up. Bloodshed was close.
Hammers rang out nearly continuously as the shapers strained to finish just one more sword that they may start just one more sword. Whips cracked harder, forcing slaves to run instead of trudge as they hauled more and more loads. Bodies not quite dead-the weak, the starving, the ones that took just too long a break-were added to the corpses flung into the sikkhun pits to stoke the appetites of the beasts and drive their hunger-crazed, warbling laughter to ravenous cacophony.
The netherling war machine was a sight to behold, Yldus thought.
As it had been the first time he saw it. And the second time. After the forty-fifth, he surprised himself by realizing that one could grow tired of the sight of a bunch of females working themselves into a furious frenzy of snarling, spitting, and headbutting.
“Funny,” he muttered to himself.
“Which part?” his companion growled behind him. “The fact that the invasion of Jaga is leaving without me? Or the fact that it’s leaving without me because of you?”