The Skybound Sea (47 page)

“It’s just the one. This one is different.”

“Could have shot him.”

“How would that have helped?”

“How is
this
helping?”

His only answer was to run. He continued on, her at his side, hurrying after the creature that had vanished from sight completely. Shadows engulfed them as the chasm began to close overhead and become a tunnel. The earth grew damp beneath their feet, the sand squishing instead of crunching.

Soon, before they knew it, the earth was gone entirely, swallowed up by still, stagnant water that rose to their ankles. And still, he pressed on, despite a rather strong argument.

“Do you seriously not see what’s happening here?” Kataria called after him. “It’s leading us into water so we can
drown
, because it thinks we’re stupid enough not to turn back.”

Probably not an unjustified thought, given the idiocy of following it in the first place. Lenk did not think about that. Instead, he focused on a flash of light ahead. A golden ray punched through the roof of the wall, illuminating a vast, pale face staring directly at him.

A stone face of a woman he had seen before, adorning the walls of Jaga. A woman with a broad smile, wide eyes, and a neck shattered into pieces as her head lay atop the fragments of her broken stone body.

The statue lay in a heap, half-drowned in the water, her head a crown atop a haphazard burial mound scraping a hole in the ceiling, the last trace of light in the void. A chance at escape, the only thing left in the darkness.

That was reason enough to climb. Without a sound save for the occasional grunt of effort as they helped one another up the rubble, over the
rubble, and over each other. It was only when they stood perched upon the statue’s nose that they shared a look.

“Could be an ambush,” Lenk said.

“It could’ve been an ambush when you first started chasing the thing. Better opportunities back there, too.” She looked up to the hole in the earth, the pit through which the stone lady had fallen. Her ears trembled. “I don’t hear anything up there.”

“What if they’re just … quiet?”

“Well, goodness, I guess if my enemies have learned how to be quiet I’m just a little screwed, aren’t I?”

“Fine,” he snarled. “I’ll go up first.”

“Why you?”

“Well, if you give me a bit, I can come up with something about feelings, heartache, you having protected me and me wanting to return the favor and it’ll probably involve the words ‘my personal autumn.’ ”

She clicked her tongue. “Go on, then.”

He hurled his sword through the opening, pulling himself up after it. The daylight was not particularly bright, filtered through a hue of gray, but after the darkness of the chasm it was more than enough to send him shielding his eyes as he crawled out onto the sand.

And there was plenty of sand. Stretching out like an ocean all its own, bereft of coral, kelp, or bone, it ran flat and featureless for what seemed like miles in a vast ring. Circling it, a low stone wall segregated the small desert from the kelp forests beyond. Stray fish would fly over it, around it, above it as they passed from one copse of kelp to another.

Never through it.

The light that had seemed so bright beneath the world was all but vanished. Much of it was smothered behind the endless swirling halo of clouds that swam overhead, but most of it was muted to a dull, dim gray by the shadow. The mountain stood impassive at the far end of the ring, stoically ignoring the rivers that wept down its craggy face to collect upon a long, stone staircase that ran from its rocky brow down to the sands of the ring.

That would have drawn more attention from him had he not found himself transfixed by dozens of stares upon him.

Cold stares. Stone stares.

She was everywhere. Surrounding the vast, valley-like ring of sand that stretched for at least a mile in all directions, she stood above the coral and kelp swaying in an endless forest surrounding the ring. Tall, proud, clad in stone silks, raising stone arms, stone smile broad, stone hair scraping the sky, the statues surrounded the great ring of sand.

Tall.

Proud.

Broken.

By chain, by boulder, by chisel and grit and a sheer determination to see her fall, she stood in varying forms of decay about the great ring. Here, her head lay in fragments. There, she stood smiling with her limbs torn off. Behind him, she was nothing more than feet, the rest of her collapsed into the pit from which he had climbed.

Even in stone, he knew her. He knew the smile. He tried to look away, but everywhere he turned, even where she was headless, she was there. Looking back at him.

Ulbecetonth. Proud and broken.

Transfixed by her gaze, he stared at the omnipresent smile. Straight stone teeth in cold stone lips. And yet somehow, he swore he could almost see them moving. Somehow, he swore he could almost hear her.

“I took pity on you. I gave you a chance. Never again. You come here to die.”

“How the hell did he get all the way over there?”

When he looked at Kataria, she was standing beside him and staring out toward the far end of the valley. And there the creature sat, on the bottommost step of the long staircase climbing the mountain’s face, beneath a halo of stormclouds slowly circling a hidden peak.

Half a mile away, its yellow eyes were all but pinpricks beneath its cowl. And yet, he could still feel the creature’s stare, as he could feel dust settling upon his skin. It unnerved him.

Not enough to hold him back, though. He shouldered his sword and began to walk toward the creature. Kataria was by his side, though her bow remained in her hands with arrow drawn.

“This is a bad idea,” she whispered to him.

“He’s not running,” Lenk replied. “He has answers.”

“You can’t be sure of that.”

“It was your idea to come here. You said the tome would be here. We don’t have a lot of other leads.”

“It could be an ambush.”

“There’s no reason to think that.”

“Right.” She kept her voice low. The sound of a bestial hiss carried clearly to his ears from behind. “Except for the ambush.”

He glanced over his shoulder into half a dozen yellow eyes. And then a dozen, then two dozen. And more and more as they came from the kelp forest. Seeming to melt off the swaying fronds like water from ice, the Shen came, warpaint bright as blood, eyes sharp and fixed upon the two, weapons decidedly more so.

He didn’t draw his sword; it would have seemed rather pathetic to offer it against the machetes and hatchets drawn on him. Kataria apparently disagreed, as evidenced by the groan of her bowstring.

“I can put one down,” Kataria whispered. “The others might back off for a moment.”

“There are thirty of them. What do we do after that?”

“I’ll shoot you, then myself. We’ll deny them the pleasure.”

“That’s insane.”

“At least I’m contributing.”

Enough bows were trained on them that they’d both be perforated before she could even twiddle her fingers. Enough machetes were drawn to suggest that whatever happened to them next would probably involve the words “fine stew.” And yet, the arrows remained in their strings. The machetes remained in their claws. The Shen remained well away.

“They’re not attacking,” he noted.

“They’re not retreating, either,” Kataria said.

“Then we keep moving.”

More came, emerging from the forest. More arrows were drawn, more machetes slid from their sheaths. More yellow eyes were fixed upon them, more guttural hisses, mutterings in a thick-tongued language followed them.

And nothing else. As they continued to move toward the creature, the arrows did not fly and the hisses did not turn to war cries. They were merely being herded for the moment. Lenk remained tense; herd led to slaughter, eventually.

The creature at the foot of the stairs continued to stare, heedless of the Shen behind them or the Shen appearing around it. Against its fellows, this one, in its dirty cloak and hood, looked positively puny, something old and bony that would probably be made into some piece of tribal decoration. It didn’t seem to mind, didn’t seem to care, didn’t seem to blink.

It continued to stare.

Its gaze, duller, darker, like petrified amber, drew Lenk’s attention. So much so that he narrowly missed the figure moving forward to stand before him. It was more than a little difficult to miss the giant, tooth-studded club that flashed into view.

He took a step back as Shalake moved to impose himself between the ancient creature and Lenk, his sword leaping to his hand and raised before him. Shalake made no move to respond, his massive club resting easily in his hand, staring from his skull headdress. Slowly, his free claw went to the ornament of bone, prying it free to reveal a face scarred by black warpaint and old injuries.

Lenk held himself, but the sheer contempt that radiated from the lizardman was more palpable than any he had felt before.

Almost any, anyway.

A red hand reached down and took his wrist in its grip. He looked up to the tremendous creature standing beside him, taken aback only for as long as it took him to recall that the black eyes staring down at him were ones he knew.

“Gariath,” he gasped. “We thought you …”

The dragonman snorted. “Thought I what?”

“I was going to accuse you of something, but lately I’m never quite sure what the hell you’re doing.”

“At the moment,” Shalake rumbled, hefting his club, “he is stopping you from killing yourselves.”

“Merely slowing us down,” Kataria snapped back. “We’ll kill ourselves when we damn well feel like it and there’s nothing you can do about it.” She raised her bow, aiming the arrow between Shalake’s eyes. “You can come with us, if you want.”

Another bowstring creaked as a Shen, slighter and lankier than the rest, moved protectively beside Shalake, bow in hand. A single yellow eye burned hatefully upon Kataria, the other one, a ruined hole of black flesh in his skull, merely smoldered.

“Yaike remembers you,” Shalake noted with a glance toward the creature. “He says you took his eye.”

She smiled broadly, taking care to show each and every tooth.

“What I did to his eye goes a little beyond ‘taking.’ ”

She snapped her teeth together, the sound of her canines clacking short and vicious. Yaike snarled, the bowstring tensing even further.

“If we wanted to kill you,” Shalake said, “we would have done it back in the coral forest.”

“Or in the chasm,” Gariath grunted.

“Or when you were crawling out of the chasm,” Shalake said, nodding. “That would have been a good time.”

“If it would spare me this posturing, I’d welcome it,” Lenk said, rubbing his eyes. “But somehow, I find myself surrounded by lizardmen who are suddenly not so eager to kill me.” He turned to Gariath. “And
you’re
with them, apparently not killing them.” He looked back, over the island. “And I’m here following a gorge full of tentacles and dead girls to a desert ringed by big, dead, stone demon queens looking for a book to keep said demon queen from being less dead and less stone and less spilling me open and eating my insides like she said she was going to the last time she started talking to me inside my head.”

He paused for breath. It was long and slow. When he looked back up, every eye—black, green, and yellow—was fixed upon him in varying degrees of confusion.

“It has been a long, confusing,
stupid
day.” He threw his arms out wide, turned around to face the lizardmen surrounding him. “So, will someone either kill me right now or tell me what the hell is going on?”

No arrow through the chest, no blade hacking his head off. No one was going to kill him. So much for things being easy.

Instead, they parted. Shalake stepped aside. Yaike retreated. The Shen moved away. Even Kataria took a step back as the creature, nearly forgotten, stood up.

Bones groaned with the sound of stone cracking. An ancient layer of dust fell from the creature’s shoulders as it rose. There was a symphony of sickening snapping, cracking, popping sounds as it stepped from the stone staircase and came to stand before Lenk, staring up at the young man.

He caught a flash of what lurked beneath the creature’s cowl. A glimpse of skin veined by wrinkles that had grown so deep as to become rents in faded green flesh. A flash of white bone where skin had fallen away above brow and beneath jaw. A hint of teeth rotted to black, gums rotted to blacker, tongue a dead thing rolling about inside a mouth full of dust.

Just a glimpse.

More than enough.

“You,” the creature said with a voice of old stone and old dirt, “have been looking for me.”

“I assure you, I haven’t,” Lenk replied, unable to look on any part of the creature’s face for long and yet unable to look away.

“You came to Jaga,” he said, a cloud of dust with each word, “looking for something. You came to Jaga because you were called. You came to Jaga because you are needed here.”

“Well, which is it?” Lenk asked.

“You will tell me, soon,” the creature said. A hand slipped into the folds of his robes. It emerged carrying something so old and tarnished it looked like it belonged on … something like the creature that held it. “But first, I must tell you.” He held the object up. “You know this symbol?”

He did. It had been a while, but he recognized it. A gauntlet clenching thirteen black arrows.

“I suppose I have been looking for you, then,” Lenk said, “Mister …”

“Mahalar,” the creature finished for him. “Warden of Ulbecetonth. Protector of Jaga. Member of the House of the Vanquishing Trinity.”

E
lsewhere and far away.

Somewhere far beneath his feet and behind his brow, burning like a fever.

In the tremble of his hands upon his lap, in the tremble of his eyes as he closed them, in the sharpness of the air as he drew in a breath and held it in his throat.

He could feel it.

They were out there.

And they were speaking. They were speaking to him.

“You are listening to me, aren’t you?” someone asked from behind.