“Wary is all,” Lenk said. “Everyone’s on edge. It doesn’t help when she’s staring out over the coral and listening to something no one can hear.”
“People who talk to something no one can see don’t get to be that picky,” Gariath replied.
“Some exception can be made for me,” Lenk replied, forcing his voice through his teeth. “Given that my only other company is the giant ugly reptile whom the other giant ugly reptiles treat like a god.”
Gariath shrugged, snorted. “Stupid.”
“Stupid? Did you see the way they looked at you? They would have ripped off their loincloths and castrated themselves right there if you had asked them to.”
Gariath grunted. “Thirty-two breaths. And it’s stupid because the Shen don’t have a god.”
“How do you even know that?” Lenk demanded. “How do you know anything about the Shen beyond the fact that they tried to kill us.”
“Not me.”
“Not yet.”
“Not ever.”
“You can’t know that. You can’t know them. What do you know about them that makes you think they won’t?”
“They are Shen.”
“And what does that mean?”
“Everything.”
“Nothing. It means nothing beyond the fact that they’re savages. Beasts. It’s a matter of time. You can’t even see it. But they’ll kill you. They’ll turn on you. They all will betray you and no one will be around to hear you scream.”
It wasn’t until he saw Gariath standing tense, hands tightened into fists, eyes narrowed sharply upon him, that he realized it hadn’t been his voice that had just spoken.
“They are Shen,” Gariath said. “I am Rhega. I have nothing else.”
“You have us,” Lenk replied.
“I have you.” Contempt strained Gariath’s laughter. “Tiny, stupid weaklings so numerous that they have the privilege to look at each other with suspicion. A tiny, stupid weakling telling me his life is hard because he cannot trust a tiny, stupid weakling because she listens to things other than him.”
He took a step forward, driving Lenk a step back.
“A tiny, stupid, pathetic weakling so obsessed with his own tiny, weak, pathetic problems that he thinks he can tell me I can be happy with nothing and that I cannot trust the only people I’ve seen in years that are even a little like myself.”
He leaned down, eyes hard, teeth harder. And fully bared.
“I have you. I have nothing.”
He turned away.
“Now, turn around and walk away before I run out of reasons not to break you in two.”
Lenk did not look away. Not immediately. “How many do you have?”
“One and a half.”
That did it.
Though he found little relief once he turned away from the dragonman. If anything, the voices grew stronger as he stalked down the ridge, away from Kataria and Gariath and into a small copse of thick, swaying kelp.
“Paranoid. Fearful. Felt the same way.”
“No one. Trust no one.”
“Only wanted them to like me.”
“I don’t need this right now,” Lenk muttered to himself, rubbing his eyes.
“You do,” the voice said. The others went mute, as if in reverence. “You deny those who would help you, those who are with you, the only ones who are with you.”
“There’s just so many talking all at once and all saying the same thing over and over and over. .”
“Because you refuse to listen. Because they can help.”
“Then how do you explain the voice that contradicted them all?” he asked. “The one that said that it wouldn’t stop with her death?”
“There was no such voice.”
“I heard it.”
“I didn’t. You were hearing things.”
Lenk’s mouth opened, hung there as he searched for an answer, somehow never having quite anticipated that the voices in his head one day may question his sanity. Finding none, he closed his mouth, drew in a sharp breath and casually went about the business of searching for a rock sharp enough to bash his head open with.
As he searched for one that looked like it would hurt a lot in the row of kelp before him, he saw it.
Out of the corner of his eye: a flicker of movement, a rustle of leaves amidst the kelp’s trancelike swaying, a shadow sliding behind a veil of tuberous green, yet unaware of his presence.
His hand slowly slid to his sword. Not that he could tell exactly what dwelt behind the curtain of greenery, but be it Shen or worse, he had never found preemptive violence to have served him wrong before. Before the blade could even be drawn, though, the kelp shivered and the creature came out.
He tensed, ready for a Shen attack, ready for a demon to have somehow followed him here, ready for Kataria to be on the other side and ready to kill him, ready for absolutely anything but this.
But there it was.
Hanging in midair.
Like it belonged there.
A fish.
It did not fly, nor even float, so much as simply. . be there, as if it were in water. Its translucent tail swayed back and forth, its fins wafted and wavered like elegant fans, its black-and-white striped scales glimmered as it hung, staring at Lenk with a glass-eyed expression.
As though he were the one with the problem.
It floated there for a moment longer, mouth opening and closing, as if waiting for Lenk to say something.
“Uh?” he grunted, squinting one eye at the creature.
Unimpressed to the point of offense, the fish swam about in a half-circle, offering a rather rude swish of its tail as it turned away from Lenk and vanished back into the kelp.
With the full knowledge that there was absolutely no way in heaven or hell he was going to ever not regret it, Lenk stepped forward. Knowing damn well that it was a bad idea, he slipped a hand through the veil of kelp and found no dense, forbidding forest beyond it. With the absolute certainty that staying back and waiting for one companion or the other to kill him was probably smarter, he drew in a deep breath.
And stepped through.
The air grew thicker, even as the kelp thinned out around him. There was no impenetrable hedge like there had been before and it was easy enough to make his way, pushing aside stalks of swaying leaves in pursuit of the fish. Nor was there any easy breath to be found here; the air didn’t so much grow humid as it seemed to debate whether it should drown him or not.
And yet, he pressed on, if only because it was harder to think with the thicker air and thus harder to hear any voices. And as he did, the kelp thinned out more and more until he emerged from the towering weeds at the edge of a shallow valley.
And as he cast eyes suddenly unable to blink over it, he finally found the words.
“Well, that’s alarming.”
They swam.
In great, shimmering rainbows of scales painted red and black and gold and blue and green, they swam. In twisting pillars of silver mouths chasing silver tails endlessly into the sky, they swam. In slow and lazy clouds of riotous color, over each other, into each other, against each other, they swam.
In the tens of hundreds. Through the air. With no water at all.
The fish were swimming through the sky.
And amidst the curtains of brightly colored scales, other life lurked. Rays, their fleshy fins wafting like wings, swam across the sandy floor. The shadows of sharks lurked at the edges, swimming gingerly between clouds of fish and seeking the unwary. Octopuses floated nonchalantly through the sky, colors changing as they passed in and out of the clouds of fish, as though defying the laws of reality was not worth giving even half a crap about.