“I know you. I know your thoughts. I know what you want, I know what you would do to get it and I know the dark places you don’t dare to tread and they simply do not exist. Your only fear is that they won’t respect you, that you won’t be strong enough to make a difference, that you can’t do what you need to to save her.”
Dreadaeleon felt his eyelid tremble. Somehow the word “her” on the siren’s lips sounded a vulgar thing.
“But you can,” Greenhair said, nodding vigorously. “And I can make it happen. I can give you the power to save her, to save yourself, to save the world. You will die tomorrow, lorekeeper, and she and all of them with you unless you take this power when I offer it to you.”
Dreadaeleon stared at her a moment. That thoughtlessness that had possessed him earlier vanished for but a single moment. And for a single moment, she saw something inside his head, something big and bright and beautiful.
And it made her smile.
And it made him feel sick.
“If, indeed, we’re all going to die tomorrow,” Dreadaeleon said calmly, “then I won’t give everyone the added problem of knowing you’ve suggested what you have. But if it’s over and you and I are both still alive, I will eagerly endeavor to remedy that.”
He turned.
“We are done,” he said.
He walked.
“Your thoughts suggest differently,” she called after him.
He did not stop.
More than anything, it was how horribly candid she was being that irritated Lenk.
She dipped another two fingers into the mixture of ash, water, and dye ground into an ugly, dark-red paste. She drew two lines upon her left cheek, complimenting the ones upon her right and the solid bar of red across her eyes. It matched the stripes encircling her arms, the tiny slashes running along the tops of her ears, the curving barbs running down the sides of her midriff.
She leaned over the edge of the stone bridge that ran over the vast, circular pool below. She stared at her own reflection, checking the application of her paint. Satisfied, she rose back up, dipped another two fingers in, and resumed her work.
As though preparing to go die was a perfectly normal thing.
“For the record,” Lenk said from the other edge of the bridge, “I think this is completely stupid and you’re completely stupid for doing it.”
“Your objection has been noted,” she replied as she drew a single red line from her lower lip to her chin. “And once I’m done here, I will be more than happy to reassure you that it is, in fact, you who are stupid.” She dabbed her fingers again. “And then kick you in the groin.”
“You don’t see the idiocy in this? Painting yourself to be as inconspicuous as a bipedal, wounded raccoon and calling it camouflage?”
“Ordinarily, this would be a poor choice of camouflage,” she said, checking herself in the pool once again. “And, if you can tell me that there’s anything at all ordinary about a forest made out of coral through which fish fly like birds, I’ll gladly stay behind.”
“I misspoke,” Lenk said. “What’s idiotic is the fact that you’re going out there to try and shoot a man who can stop arrows with his brain.”
“Mind,” Kataria corrected. “If he stops arrows with his mind, that’s a problem. If he stops them with his brain, that solves my problem.”
“But-”
“I have an idea.” Kataria whirled on him, narrowing her eyes and baring her teeth. “Let’s you and I just pretend for a moment that I’m actually smarter than a monkey and have already thought about how dangerous this is and how scared I am of doing it and that I’m trying very, very hard not to think about what Sheraptus does to people and what he did to Asper and what he might do to me and then let’s pretend you stop sitting there and telling me how dangerous this is before I pretend to put an arrow through your eye socket just so I can have a moment to tell myself this needs to be done so no one else has to die. How about we do that?”
When she had finished talking she was breathing hard through her nostrils, her lips pressed together to keep from trembling as much as her eyes were as she locked them onto him.
And he was silent.
“It’s not like we have a lot of options,” Kataria said, returning to painting herself. “It has to be this way.”
“I liked Shalake’s idea of attacking Sheraptus through the forest.”
“And then when he realizes something’s up, about the time the arrows start flying, he starts shooting fire. A forest on fire is a death trap, Lenk, one that will waste warriors we need here.” She drew in a long, slow breath. “No. One warrior, one shot is all that’s needed. Right in his neck. Before he knows it. Then I run.” She nodded to herself. “One shot. In his neck. Before he knows it. Then I run.”
She repeated each word, enunciating each syllable carefully until it became mantra, repeating the mantra until it became a deal with some god listening from far, far away.
She was fragile, if only at that moment, if only unwilling to admit it to herself or to him. And so, instead of speaking what he was thinking, he kept it in his head.
There has to be another way, he thought. I mean, Shalake knows the forests. He can find a place that. . doesn’t burn. . in a forest. Okay, maybe she has a point. But there’s got to be another way. There’s clearly no way to win this, right?
It took a moment for him to remember that no one would be answering him this time.
There’s always retreat, he conceded to himself.
“You ever notice how easily we run away?”
It wasn’t the first time he had suspected her ears might just be big enough to hear what he was thinking. She stared into her own reflection, a solemn look upon her face.
“I mean, it’s not like we’re cowards or anything. . or not all the time, anyway. We run when it’s practical, when we’re outmatched or in danger or something.” She looked out from the top of the stairs, out over Jaga and to its distant shores. “We could probably figure a way out of this, if we wanted to; a way to run away and let the Shen fight it out and hope that everything works out all right.”
She glanced at him.
“You’ve probably thought out a few.”
Kill a Shen and steal their boat, kill Hongwe and steal his boat, kill enough Shen and possibly Hongwe to strap them together to make a boat out of flesh and then flee using a sail made out of their skin.
“It hasn’t been on my mind,” he said simply.
“Either way, I like that you haven’t brought it up.”
“And why is that?”
“A couple reasons,” she said, shrugging. “I guess there are some things you can’t run from. I tried.” She looked back at her reflection, her face covered in a red deep enough to be blood. “I tried hard.”
“And was it worth it?”
She looked at him. And did nothing else but look.
“This seems like the sort of thing we can’t run from,” she said. “The sort of thing we shouldn’t try to run from.” She held out a hand. “Demons rising from below. Netherlings coming out to get them. Neither one of them has a problem with us dying. We don’t stop them both, a lot more people die.”
“We’ve seen a lot of people die,” Lenk said. “Killed a lot of them ourselves.”
“There’s got to be a reason for it,” she said. “Beyond money and survival. There’s got to be a good reason for doing what we did here, even if we haven’t done it yet. Because if it is all about the money. .”
She didn’t finish the thought with words. Her frown did it well enough for her.
It was hard to see her hurt. So he looked away. It was harder to look at the other end of the bridge, opposite the top of the stairs, and the stone door ensconced in the mountain’s face.
A simple slab set impassably within a frame hewn of granite stood seven feet within the face of the mountain. The image of Ulbecetonth was carved as a mantle atop it, hands extended from the mountain’s face in benevolence. The rivers that wept from the mountain’s crown turned to thin trickles here, a thousand tiny tears shed every moment to empty into the pool below.