Fires burned at the foot of the stairs. The coral burned brighter than wood; he hadn’t thought it would, but he supposed that was the least weird thing about Jaga. In ever-increasing numbers, more warbands of Shen continued to emerge from the forest. From here, they seemed like tiny lights, fallen stars burning out on the earth.
He didn’t know how many paces he had taken, how far he had come. He was sure he had started counting, but after a while, as the sand went on and on, he stopped thinking about how long it was he walked and instead wondered about this earth.
And how much blood it had drank.
He had heard the stories.
This is where it happened, the Shen had uttered. They uttered everything. They never laughed or whispered or wept. Here, in this ring. This was where she held court. This was where she fell. She was driven back, into the mountain to be sealed away forever.
The Rhega, they had uttered, not said, were there, too. They fought. They died. Their blood spilled in oceans. When they lay, they lay with Shen. Where they lay, so lay a thousand corpses that went with them. Why they lay. .
He had never heard the end of that story. They had never finished.
Rhega was a word they uttered with the reverence reserved for spirits, as though they-he-weren’t actually real. And when they uttered, there was an envy to their voice, a nostalgic resentment for those who had died and left them behind.
On the day it had happened, there was said to have been carnage. The Shen said that. Uttered it. He had asked Mahalar; the elder Shen had said nothing. He had asked Shalake; the warwatcher had simply smiled. He had no one else to ask. There were no ghosts here.
And so he stared out over the ring and tried to imagine it.
He saw fragments of a vision: the bells of Ulbecetonth’s chosen shattered and mingled into heaps of scrap along with siege engines and statues of mortal armies, titanic corpses of demons forming a soil of flesh watered by blood for the rest of the mortal flowers to wither and die in. He could see red.
So much red. So many unmoving bodies.
It was a vast field. It had taken him a long time to cross it. There must have been a lot of them. They must have lain screaming, cursing, howling to mothers and reaching out to brothers lying beside them and fathers bleeding out and refusing to die.
He could see that.
But he could smell nothing.
Ktamgi had reeked of memory. Teji stank of regret. And Jaga smelled like nothing. No death. No laments. Not even a faded aroma of a long-ago tear, shed into the earth and waiting for him to find it.
There was no smell of memory here.
There were no ghosts here.
There were no Rhega here.
Except for him. And the ones in the stories the Shen uttered.
And could he trust them? Could he bring himself to believe them? To see the Rhega walking here, living here, fighting alongside the Shen, alongside humans, as countless as the stars?
He looked to the night sky for reference and snorted. The analogy might have been easier to grasp had he stars to which he could actually compare. There were lights up there, to be certain: purple ones, yellow ones, even the occasional pale blue glow that might have been mistaken for a star.
But then they shifted. The fish carrying the lights in their bellies and brows twisted and swam from one another, countless and impossible to keep track of.
“We have no stars here.”
To see Shalake standing nearby was no particular surprise. The lizardman had been by Gariath’s side since he had arrived, always the one to tell the stories, always the one to utter. He now stood by Gariath’s side again and stared up into the sky.
“The sky and sea are one here. There’s no room for anything else.” He traced a slow-moving, blue-glowing fish with his claw as it swam across the sky. “And these fish only emerge in the shadow of the mountain.”
Their gazes shifted to the vast stone monument standing stolidly at the other end of the ring. Haloed by storm clouds, the blue rivers veining it bright and glistening against the many firelights below, it stood with an earthen weariness. It had seen much in its time: many deaths, many bodies.
The blood spilled before its stone eyes tomorrow would be nothing particularly worth noting.
“It’s a mistake,” Shalake grunted. “We shouldn’t be fighting here. The Shen way is to strike quickly from the sea and from the shadows. We should be back there.”
He gestured behind them. The kelp forest rose in great masses of twisting, writhing stalks, cleaved neatly down the middle by the stone road leading into the ring.
“Our best chance of success comes from fighting in the forest.”
“Scared?” Gariath asked, unsmiling.
“Intelligent,” Shalake answered him. “There’s no way for the longfaces to move a force as big as the humans claim they have, but for the road. We fight them there at dawn, we paint the sun red with their blood and ours. Their dead are fed to the sharks, ours are sent back to the sea.”
Gariath stared at the kelp forest and wondered if it was that simple. Had he ever spoken so casually of throwing himself to his death? Did he ever have the same sliver of an excited whine that crept into Shalake’s voice when he said the word “blood”?
Perhaps he wondered too loudly. When he looked back, Shalake had an intent gaze fixed upon him.
“Do you agree?” Shalake asked.
“The humans. . think a lot,” Gariath said. “Especially the little one. They spend a lot of time in their heads talking to themselves and wondering how they can stay alive. If they think it’s better to fight here. .”
“You trust them?”
The dragonman hesitated before speaking. “The longfaces are strong. I’ve fought them. I’ve killed them.”
“Then they can die.”
“They have no concept of ‘death.’ They look at blood spilling out of their bodies and don’t blink. They see their others lying cold on the ground and walk on top of their bodies. They die only when you convince them that they can die.”
The smile that creased Shalake’s face was morbid enough without the amorous gleam in his eye.
“And there will be many,” he whispered in a shuddering voice.
Gariath furrowed his eyeridges at the lizardman. “Yeah. A lot.”
“The fight will be a story unto itself.”
“It might not come to that. As strong as they are, it’s the males that are the real danger. The little ones control the others and tell them what to do. If one of them dies, this whole thing becomes simpler.”
“The pointy-eared thing’s plan.” The wistful joy in Shalake’s voice dropped back into a growl. “I don’t trust it, her or the ones that think it’s a good idea.”
“Mahalar did.”
“Mahalar is our elder. Even if we must respect his decisions, I am the warwatcher. I say there should be more warriors in the forest. We can’t entrust it to a stupid, pink-skinned thing like her.”
“Some of her plans are stupid,” Gariath said, nodding.
“The last one almost got you eaten by an Akaneed, you said.”
“Almost,” Gariath replied. “And it brought me to where the Rhega lived.”
“And died,” Shalake was quick to respond. He swept his hands out across the ring. “Atop the demons, atop the humans, atop the steel and the blood and even the Shen. They fought and they died and they bled until the dead were as countless as the stars.”
Gariath looked out over the ring and repeated to himself.
“As countless as the stars.”
He tried to imagine it.
He found he couldn’t.
“And we may join them.” Shalake’s voice grew excited. “In a way that only we know how, in a glory that only we know. The humans, they will scream and weep and beg. But we will know what it is that meets us on the other side.”