Gariath snarled, struck it with a fist, raked at it with a claw. The beast tightened its grip, snarled silently as it shredded skin, growing ever more insistent with each attempt to dislodge it.
It was only when he felt the stick lash out and rap against his skull that he remembered there was a reason for trying to fight off a shark on dry land.
He staggered out of the cloud, his writhing parasite coming with him, his suddenly bold foe right behind him. The corpse went flying into the sky and the rest of the sharks flew for the easy meal. Not his. He would have to get the only shark with principles.
The greenshict leapt, stick lashing out like a fang. It struck against wrist, skull, leg, shoulder, anywhere that wasn’t a flailing claw or a twisting fish. The pain was intense, but it wasn’t as bad as the insult of being beaten with a stick. Gariath fought between the two, dividing his attention between the shark and the shict and failing at fending off either.
A choice had to be made.
And the shark was only acting out of hunger.
When the stick came again, Gariath’s hand shot out to catch it. He found a wrist instead and, with a sharp twist, made it not a wrist. The greenshict’s limb came apart with a satisfying snap, not as satisfying as the shriek that followed.
Gariath held onto that sound, clutched it like an infant clutches his mother. He used it to block out the pain as teeth sawed through his flesh. He used it to ignore the sensation of being tasted. He used it to find enough strength to tighten his grip, twist his body, and fling.
A discus in flight, the greenshict flew through the corpses, twisting violently through the air before crashing onto the road and skipping like a stone, each impact punctuated with a cracking sound. He skidded to a halt slowly-bleeding, broken, but breathing.
He didn’t flow to his feet. He rose and staggered like an earth-bound thing. His body protested with popping sounds, bones setting themselves aright as he swayed on his feet. Gasping, he sought his stick and found it nearby. With the taste of his own toxic blood in his mouth, he turned to find his foe.
The shark’s glassy eyes and gaping mouth greeted him.
A gray hide kissed a green cheek. The fish’s razored flesh ripped apart the tender skin of the greenshict as Gariath swung the beast like a club, smashing it against his foe. The dragonman’s hands bled, the writhing tail causing denticled skin to rub his palms raw.
Small price.
One hundred pounds of writhing, coarse hide struck at the greenshict. Countless saw-teeth ripped at his flesh in a blind panic. Fins slapped, jaws gnashed, blood wept, bones snapped, and the screaming lasted only so long as the shict still had breath.
Gariath did not stop once he ran out. He did not stop until his foe fell to his knees, then to his belly, then to his face. Gariath gave him a few more thumps with the fish on principle before he stared down at a mess of red cuts and battered green skin, the creature hanging limp in his hands, a flaccid spine encased in so much useless meat.
Gariath released the beast from his grasp. It never even struck the ground, but lazily drifted into the thick air above, another course for its former brothers’ grim feast.
The dragonman was bleeding, breathing hard. Every step brought back echoes of the greenshict’s stick, his bones still rattling inside him. But that was more than could be said for the long-eared thing. He knelt beside his green foe, reached down to seize a fistful of blood-smeared hair and twisted it up to face him.
What looked back at him was only half a face. One eye was lost in a thick mass of bruising, the other held only the faintest glimmer of life. The greenshict’s nose had become a flute: a mess of holes through which breath whistled faintly. All these paled next to the creature’s grin, though, as he smiled at Gariath with only half his teeth, the other half either scattered on the ground or embedded in the shark’s hide.
“Good fight,” the greenshict rasped.
“I won, so yeah,” Gariath replied.
“You didn’t.”
Gariath glanced over the unmoving mass of red, purple and green that was the greenshict’s body. “I don’t know. By anyone’s standards, the fighter that looks like a half-digested turd at the end is the one who lost.”
“That is fine. Whether you live or die is irrelevant to the victory.” He smiled a little broader. “Your death is not our concern.”
Gariath narrowed his eyes, growling. “Whose is, then?”
“One of our own’s.”
“The pointy-eared one? You wanted to kill her?”
“We saved her. We cured her. By killing the other one.”
“And how do you intend to kill Lenk when I’m about to force you to kiss the stones?”
“There are more of us. I keep you away. Inqalle will have killed him by now. Naxiaw will have cured her by now. She will be safe.”
Gariath said nothing as he stared through the greenshict, into nothingness. When he spoke, it was soft. “Why are you telling me this?”
“To remind myself,” the greenshict rasped, breath harsh and bleeding, “why I am dead.”
“For her? All this, for her?”
He stared into Gariath’s eyes, even as the last flicker of life left his.
“For family,” he replied, “everything.”
Gariath released him. His head fell unceremoniously to the stone where it lay. Where he lay. Unmoving.
Instantly, the dragonman regretted not having smashed his face into the pavement. He wondered if he still could, just out of spite. Not that it would matter, the shict had still spoken and Gariath could still hear those words.
And they irritated him, like an itch at the very center of his back.
His stare drifted away from the corpse and farther down the road as his thoughts drifted to the human. To Lenk.
And the words still bothered him.
“He is not floating, I see.”
Only rarely did Gariath ever take offense at being sneaked up on. Only rarely did anyone ever do it without the consequence of being crushed into a pulp. When he whirled, he caught a pair of yellow eyes peering out from beneath a bone headdress.
Shalake glanced down at the greenshict’s corpse.
“The sea is picky as to who it takes up to the clouds. Perhaps this one would not have fed the sharks as well as the purple things.”
“We are far from the sea,” Gariath pointed out.
“Sky, sea. .” Shalake shrugged. “The difference is pointless on Jaga. Enough blood has been shed here that the island took it as its own, used it to find its own life.”
“Whose blood?” Gariath asked.
“Everyone’s. Demon’s, Shen’s, human’s. . Rhega’s.”
Another word that bothered Gariath. “You speak the name like you’ve been saying it for a long time.”
“We have stories of the Rhega,” Shalake replied, head turning down a bit. “And only stories. You are the first we have seen since the war.”
“A war. .”
Gariath remembered. The bells, the monoliths, the destruction on Jaga. The bones, the corpses, the decaying weaponry on Teji. The spirits. The ghosts. The Rhega.
Grandfather. .
“What kind of war?” he asked. “Who did the Rhega fight? How did they die?”
“I am the warwatcher. I lead the battles. I swing my shenko. Mahalar holds the stories.” He eyed Gariath’s injuries. “Also, the medicine.” He turned about, began to stalk down the road. “Come, Rhega. We will tell you.”
“Tell me what?”
“Everything we can.”
He watched Shalake a moment longer. Then, a stray scent caught his nostrils. The familiar odor of fear and lust and pain and anger that always came with humans. It hung in his nostrils for a single desperate moment, almost overpowering as it cut through the thick air before disappearing.
Back down the road.