“Because-”
“Even better, why don’t you just drop your trousers right now and work up a good, flaming piss that sets them all ablaze like you did a few days ago? Why are we here, skulking about like rodents?”
“I would have hoped that, in our time together, you’d grasp that magic isn’t so mystical that it can be just summoned up like that. There isn’t an opportune moment to-”
“There is never not an opportune moment to shoot fire out of your prick!” Denaos snapped sharply. “What is it, then? Back on the beach, you were nearly unstoppable. Days ago, you were pissing fire.” He stared intently at the wizard. “What’s going on with you?”
“It’s complicated,” Dreadaeleon sighed, rubbing his eyes. “And I don’t have time to-”
It wasn’t clear what he was trying to say when the boy’s body suddenly jerked, nor when his eyes bulged out, threatening to roll out of their sockets. Nothing was clearer when he snapped at the waist, leaning heavily on his knees as he loosed a torrent of vomit upon the ground to coalesce into a brackish green pool. Things were certainly disgusting, Denaos thought, and disgusting for a solid ten breaths, but whatever was happening to him didn’t become any more obvious.
That didn’t happen until the vomit drew itself together of its own volition, shuddered as if it were taking a deep breath and then, with a slow, leisurely confidence, began to slither off on a carpet of bile.
Denaos turned a slack jaw to Dreadaeleon, who merely wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and sneered.
“I’m dying, Denaos.”
“I see. .” the rogue replied, his tone suggesting no real willingness to continue with this conversation, yet compelled all the same. “Of. . what?”
“The Decay,” Dreadaeleon replied. “The barriers that separate the magic from my body are collapsing. I’ll slowly lose more control over both and, eventually, my skin will catch fire, my lungs will freeze inside my chest, and my nerves will splinter and erupt out of my skin.”
“Which will be on fire.”
“On fire, yes.”
“Well. . that’s. .”
The wizard affixed him with a glare. “That’s what?”
“I guess I just thought it would have a more impressive name?”
“What?”
“Something like ‘the dragonblood,’ or ‘the frothening,’ or ‘that which explodes without mercy.’”
Dreadaeleon narrowed his eyes sharply. “I am going to explode. My frozen innards will fly out of my body and burst into pink and black snow and children will make snowmen with my kidneys.”
“I know, I know! I’m sorry! I just-”
“You just what? You’re just concerned about me being out here? Thinking I can’t handle it? Thinking that I’m totally powerless because my own body is rebelling against me and soon I’m going to be chopped up for spare parts and turned into a book because I’m far more useful in death than I was in life?”
“Those weren’t going to be my exact words, but. .”
There was more to that retort, he thought, and it was going to be clever. But he said nothing more the moment he noticed the tears welling up in Dreadaeleon’s eyes, the moment he remembered the wizard was just a boy.
A scared, dying boy whose remaining fluids that had not just come out of his mouth were now dripping from his eyes in thin streams.
And he wanted something from Denaos, that much was obvious. A nod maybe, possibly a big hug and a weeping reassurance that everything was going to be fine and that they were going to rescue Asper themselves and Dreadaeleon was going to be proven a proud and powerful wizard over whom she would swoon after she told Denaos that everything he had ever done would be forgiven and he would go to heaven and he’d stop seeing the woman with the slit throat every time he stopped drinking.
But he couldn’t tell Dreadaeleon that.
Lying was a sin. An awfully convenient sin, given the circumstance, but Denaos couldn’t afford any more.
And what the wizard got was something different.
“I’ll go gather your vomit,” Denaos said with the kind of hesitation that suggested he had hoped he’d never have to say that.
What was that? Dreadaeleon asked himself as he watched the rogue stalk away. What was that look? What was that? Pity? He pities me? A lowlife, scum-sucking, barkneck like him pities me? He sneered, felt a salty tear drip into his mouth. Probably because you’re crying like a. . like a woman or something. No, not a woman. She wouldn’t want you to say that. It’s demeaning. Stop that. Stop all of it.
He couldn’t.
Weak. You disgust me. You’ll disgust her. And when they hack you up, your pieces will disgust everyone else. You’ll be the only wizard useless in life and in death. Look at you, unable to do anything but sit here and weep. How are you supposed to be the hero? How are they supposed to respect you? How are you supposed to save her?
“You are not, lorekeeper.”
As odd as it felt to say, he knew Greenhair was standing behind him even before she spoke in her lilting tone. There was always something that preceded her arrivals: a feeling at the back of his head like cricket legs rubbing together, a sudden calm that washed over him, and the fact that she only ever seemed to show up when he felt a particular kinship with things that came out of livestock rectums.
As such, he didn’t turn around to look at her. He didn’t even speak to her, didn’t acknowledge her existence at all.
“You have exactly until I blink to leave before I roast you alive,” he muttered.
Or tried to, anyway.
“I do not wish you any distress,” she said, her voice a river flowing into his ears to pool beneath his brain. “But I do not think you are in any condition to be making threats.”
He half-smiled, half-sneered as he turned to face the siren. His attentions were instantly drawn to her head, framed by feathery gills wafting from her neck, a fin rising from a crop of hair the color of the sea, a pair of blank, liquid eyes staring intently at him. All the color and oddity framed a face that was expressionless. A serene, monochrome portrait: perfectly and terrifyingly empty.
“I’m always willing to make the effort,” he said, “especially when it comes to deranged sea tramps that have attempted to sell me to the very purple-skinned longfaces I’m surrounded by right now.”
Her mouth trembled into a frown. “I have never claimed to be incapable of regret, lorekeeper, nor mistake or misplaced ambition.”
“And which one do I owe this visit to?” He glanced over his shoulder at the sound of a distant warcry. “Because if you’re looking for another regret, just raise your voice a little.”
“I have no desire to draw the attentions of the longfaces,” she replied, averting her gaze guiltily. “I have. . reconsidered my alliance with them.”
“Understandable, what with their constant desire to kill things.”
“It was their unique talents that drove me to seek them out,” Greenhair said, a tone of accusation creeping into her voice. “The tome is too much to trust to mortals, the chance that the demons might seize it too great. I could not take that risk, for the sake of my waters and beyond.”
“QAI ZHOTH!” a longface’s roar rose over the ridge.
“If you want to ask them something, I’d do it now,” Dreadaeleon replied, lowering his voice. “Before things get weird.”
“I was. . mistaken. My faith in them was driven by their talent for slaughtering the demons. I did not suspect that their prowess might come from serving someone far darker.”
“Darker?” Dreadaeleon asked, sarcasm replaced by curiosity. “What do you mean?”