“What did you do back there?” Dreadaeleon pressed, suspect. “Back on Teji?”
“What makes you think I did anything?” Denaos demanded, offended. “Are there really not enough things trying to kill people that you automatically think I did something?”
Asper looked somewhat disappointed. “He has a point.”
“Besides, you’re missing the important bit,” Denaos said. “I’m coming to appreciate just how unique a problem this is to us, but we’ve got bigger concerns than the screaming lunatic wizard who sets the earth on fire.”
“He speaks true,” a voice lilted from the water. Somewhere, within the current, Greenhair spoke. Somewhere, beneath them, she began to guide their vessel forward. “The longfaces go to Jaga, just as Jaga begins to stir. Your friends are poised to be crushed between fates.”
She’s saying that just to get them to believe her, Dreadaeleon thought. She’s not concerned about us. . oh, damn, thought-reading. Uh. . uh. . bat guano!
If the errant thought fazed Greenhair, she didn’t say anything. The water moved like a living thing, a sea of blue and white hands that slowly tossed their vessel from grip to grip. Denaos and Hongwe released the oars, unable to resist the artificial tide.
“Sheraptus. .” Asper whispered. “He’s gone to Jaga, too?”
“It’d be a safe bet,” Denaos said. He fixed eyes on Asper, his fingers twitched. “Look, there might be another-”
“There isn’t,” the priestess replied. “Lenk and the others are there. We have to try to warn them, at least.”
“‘Try’ is a good word for it,” Hongwe muttered. “The Shen rule Jaga. They aren’t going to care about what you want to do. If you can even find it, they’ll bury you there.”
“Water heeds no rule,” Greenhair burbled from below, “there are other ways in.”
Note that she didn’t say anything about the burying part, Dreadaeleon thought. Or anything about that whole ‘Jaga begins to stir’ thing. She’s not telling us something. . and that something is probably going to kill us.
It was hard to panic at that thought. Between that something in it, the invading longface army sailing to it, and the bloodthirsty lizardmen already on it, Jaga was looking like a pleasing prospect.
The chances of him dying before the Decay could get him were increasing.
Small comfort.
Growing smaller.
TWENTY-ONE
He called it a man.
There might have been better words for what he stared at, but they were words that he didn’t know or that had not been created yet. But while he called the thing that sat in the darkness across from him with crossed legs and palms upon his knees a man, it was more than that.
His eyes were nebulous and fluid, a river of blue that flowed through like a living thing, drowning pupil, drowning white. It was the only movement from the man. He did not breathe.
There was much wrong with him, Lenk thought, enough that he shouldn’t be called a man. And yet, Lenk had to call him a man. For, save the eyes, he looked exactly like Lenk did.
And Lenk knew his name.
“You,” he said.
The man did not speak.
“I think I’ve finally figured out how you work.” He cleared his throat. “To a point, anyway.”
The man listened.
Lenk made a gesture like he was about to strangle whatever he was about to say. “See, I think you’re just one big hallucination. . or something. You’re something in my head, that much is obvious, and you twist things so I see them as you do.”
The man stared.
“So, these things that you tell me don’t really happen. I make them happen because you make me make them. You take my emotions and. . twist them, somehow, into something worse than they are. You made me think Kataria would try to kill me. You are a lie.”
The man spoke.
“No.”
“Then what are you?”
“Important.”
Lenk rubbed his eyes, sighed into the darkness. “I can’t do this anymore.”
“What?”
“The threats, the commands, the cryptic mutterings. . I can’t. I don’t want to.” He met the man’s stare. He did not blink. “I’m not going to. Not anymore.”
The man blinked. Behind him, a horror of fire was born in the darkness. Images of burning farmhouses and corpses falling beneath wandering shadows flickered like shadows cast by a candle. They shifted to dark chambers, dark waters, and six golden eyes peering out from bloodstained liquid voids. They shifted to a distant figure staring with forlorn green eyes before fading behind a veil of fire.
All moments he should have died.
All moments he was saved thanks to the man in front of him.
“You would be dead without me. I saved you, I preserved you, I kept you from falling into the shadow.”
“And at what cost?”
“Do not pretend to be confused. You call cryptic that which is obvious, you deny that which is inevitable. You know that without me, you will die. Your hand, her hand, someone else’s hand; it does not matter. You will die. I cannot allow that. There is no choice.”
“You say that, but. .”
Lenk faltered a moment as the man’s eyes intensified. A cold fire smoldered behind his stare, too bright to be drowned. It burned through the darkness, brighter than even the flames roaring silently behind him. It forced itself upon Lenk, sought to bow his head, to break him.
It did not.
He did not.
“You couldn’t make me do it.”
“What?”
“I heard you. I heard every word you said. I had the sword in my hand, above her head.” He tried to feel the weight of it in the darkness. “She wasn’t moving. You were screaming at me, along with the other voices, and I could. . I could understand it, but. .”
He looked up at the man. He looked into his burning, flowing, bright-blue eyes. He smiled as though he were pleased.
“With everything, all of what I felt and all of what you told me, you couldn’t make me kill her.”
The man’s eyes widened. They grew wide enough to see further, to see into the future, to see the words that would fall from Lenk’s lips only a moment later on a breathless sigh that had been held in for years.
“You can’t control me.”
“Don’t.”
“You have no power.”
“You need me.”
“You can’t do anything.”
“She will kill you.”
“To her.”
“They will kill you.”
“To me.”
“You can’t just-”
“To anyone.”
“WE STILL HAVE TO-”
“No.”
“LISTEN-”
“No more.”
There was darkness.
There were better words for what it was, that profound emptiness that is left behind when something great and terrible is gone. There may never be such a word created for what he felt when he stared at the space where the man had sat before the flames and the shadow. But he called it darkness.
And he fell into it.
A shadow.
Light.
And then another.
First one, and then the other, in an endless, silent tide. They circled beneath the light, chasing each other with no particular hurry. Their wings were water, black flesh that rippled with silver light as they wove their way between the stars peering through a hole in the world.
Somewhere in the chasm, the earth had opened up overhead. It had let just a hair too much light in for the kelp and coral to be comfortable and they shied from it, lurking in the shadows, while the stars overhead peered through, watching what he watched, watching the two rays circle each other overhead with no particular care for what he did or if he ever rose from the sandy grave upon which he lay.