He reached out. The fine hairs on her belly rose as his fingers brushed against her midriff, disappearing to encircle around her waist. They returned with a sword held firmly in hand. She could feel the chill from his lips, cold as the steel in his hands, as he spoke.
“Then don’t.”
It hurt to walk away from her. His body rebelled, unseen frozen digits trying to wrench his muscles into their control. And accompanying each twist and jerk, the voice screeched.
“Kill.”
He had no voice to retort with, no words to refuse. Every ounce of his being was focused on holding back what was inside him.
“Don’t turn your back on her!”
He sighed, dragging his sword in the sand as he pressed on, trying to ignore the voice.
“Either of them.”
“LOOK OUT!” Kataria screamed.
He turned and his blade turned with him. The steel saw his foe before he himself did. It whirled up, caught the tomahawk crashing down in a spray of sparks.
The greenshict trembled, holding the weapon in both hands as she tried to drive it down, to break the deadlock and finish it. But her eyes were calm, her lips were still even as the rest of her trembled; she took no pride in this.
He glanced over her shoulder and saw her opposite in Kataria’s face. She glanced from him to her and back to him, eyes wild and confused, hands fumbling between her bow and nothing.
“She can’t help you,” the voice snarled. “She never could.”
It ate the color in his hands, turned his flesh gray. The greenshict’s eyes widened at the sight of it, at the sensation of him pushing back. His blood ran cold in his veins, wouldn’t allow him to feel the strain of the deadlock.
“I can.”
His body twitched.
“I will.”
The blade snapped forward.
“We will survive.”
The metal embrace parted with a shriek as he lashed out a sloppy blow, not entirely sure who was driving it. The blade itself went wide of flesh as the greenshict twisted out of its way, but he snapped it back, caught her on the chin with the hilt. She reeled and he struck again, snarling as he drove the pommel of his blade against her face.
Bone snapped. Teeth fragmented and fell like snowflakes. A mouth filled with blood. A body struck the earth.
The assault was broken as an arrow flew wide over his head. He looked up and saw Kataria holding an empty bow and full eyes. He wasn’t sure which of them she had been shooting at, or how she expected such a sloppy shot to hit anything. And from the looks of it, neither was she. Someone was, though.
“Kill her. KILL HER NOW.”
Not a request. Not even a command. It was a statement of fact, one that turned his eyes upon her, one that moved his feet forward, one that raised his sword above his head.
That which was in Kataria’s eyes was something he could not describe. Despair and fear were evident in her tears, anger and impotence in the clench of her teeth. But there was something else there, in the long, deep breath. Relief? Lament? Regret?
Whatever it was, it consumed all that they both had. She stood, unable to move. His blade held, unable to fall. The voice was screaming at him in words he could not understand.
But it could not move him.
A flash of color out the corner of his eye caught his attention. First green, then, as the female inhaled and spat, red. Thick, viscous red for a moment. And then, nothing but bright, searing pain.
He screamed through burning lips, raked fingers blistering across a face that burned beneath the spatter of venomous blood. It clung to him spitefully, coming free from his face with great effort and greater agony. Through half-blind eyes he could see flashes of movement: a struggle, a limb raised and ending in a glistening tomahawk blade, stilled and trembling as two arms so pale and puny as to look like straws of wheat trying to hold back a tree wrapped around it.
Kataria cast a desperate stare over the greenshict’s shoulder and screamed something to someone, unclear to him.
The greenshict understood and made her disagreement known as she reached up, seized Kataria by her hair and pried her from her shoulder like a pasty tick. With a look between contempt and apology, she hurled the smaller shict to the earth and scowled up at the fast-fading form of Lenk as he fled.
He was limping. His vision was swimming. His body was breaking down. And the voice was still screaming. Screaming to be heard over his pain, over his fear, over the other voices in his head.
But he had nothing left to give them, any of them. No more blood to spill, no more thoughts to consume, no more will to keep going. Behind him, Kataria was still there. She would always be there, always with eyes full of despair and uncertainty. Before him was darkness, emptiness, a long empty road he would simply walk until he could die.
All around him was death. Bones littered the floor. His sword hung from his hand weakly, fell to the earth. Above him, caught in the kelp, a bell hung precariously, swaying along with the purple weeds that suspended it. A cathedral, he thought, singing sermons to skinless people who had seen the same emptiness he had seen and chose to stay here.
Perhaps, he thought as he collapsed into a nearby copse of kelp, they had a point.
She came a moment later, walking calmly into the clearing, unfazed by her elusive quarry or the ruin that had been her face. As though it was just an inconvenience to be missing teeth and weeping blood onto the earth. She slowly swept the clearing for him, searching.
Perhaps the pain distracted her more than she let on. Or maybe she knew what he knew, knew that he had nothing left in him, and was waiting for the inevitable discovery. He didn’t at all doubt she could hear his thoughts with those ears of hers.
Those big. . pointy. . ears.
His eyes drifted up to the ceiling of the cathedral of sand and kelp and bone, to the bell hanging above.
And he burst out of his hiding.
If he died, he died. That would be it. But for now, he was running without knowing why. For now, he was leaping to the kelp and trying to haul himself up. For now, he was giving more than he had, for a reason he didn’t know, trying to accomplish he wasn’t sure what.
For the thousandth time in his life.
She was upon him, loping after him silently as he ran, leaping after him as he climbed. Her tomahawk slashed, always catching the heels of his boots as he scrambled up into the kelp, hand over hand, coral over weed. With a snarl, the only she had spared for him thus far, she reached out, caught his foot.
He winced, swung his sword.
Not at her.
His steel struck the bell. Or grazed it, anyway. It was a glancing, sloppy blow. But the bell shook as though it had been waiting for such a touch for centuries. The kelp tore, the bell shifted and swung.
And sang.
It reverberated off itself, metal upon metal, keening a long, lonely wail. Its metal screeched, howled, whimpered, cackled, gibbered, sang an off-key song like it feared it would never sing again, a thousand iron emotions it had been keeping inside it unleashed in a horrible cacophony that hurt Lenk’s ears to hear.
Though not nearly as bad as it hurt his foe.
She fell like a stone, hands free of tomahawk and kelp and pressed fiercely over her ears. Her ruined mouth gaped in a long, shrieking scream as she collapsed to the earth, her skull a bell unto itself, the sound pounding against ears, bones, brains, sending her vision spinning and her body writhing upon the sand.