The Skybound Sea (60 page)

The sound of metal, however, he could have heard for miles.

Without a noise beyond the rattle of their boots and the whisper of their spears sliding into flesh, the netherlings moved through the dust, their shadows black. Mechanically, they sought the survivors scrambling to flee, spared a killing thrust, and moved on.

Maybe he was just too insignificant, crawling breathlessly on his hands and knees, for them to notice. Perhaps they were so focused on their goal, as they charged past him and toward the stairs—or where he thought he remembered the stairs were, it was hard to tell—that they simply couldn’t be bothered with him.

Or maybe they see a guy in a dirty coat with a mouth stained with puke crawling around and trying not to piss himself and they just don’t have the heart to finish you off
.

Do not question good fortunes, lorekeeper
.

A cricket chirped in the back of his skull.

Greenhair! Where the hell have you been?

Watching, lorekeeper
.

Ah, was it a good show, then? Saw what just happened? Are all the broken and mangled corpses quite a sight?

What horrors that man has wrought are nothing to what is coming, lorekeeper
.

Oh, good. I was getting really bored with the godlike, limitlessly powerful wizard hurling giant statues around
.

Cease
your weeping, loreekeper
. That thought came with a surge of agony, like someone screeching at him.
I require a wizard, not a sarcastic worm. I
need
a hero
.

He had no thoughts for that. None that came with words, anyway. She didn’t seem to need them. Whatever it was that surged inside him, she sensed.

Come to me
.

No words that he could hear in his ears. A song without language beckoned him, drew him to her. Weaving his way between the iron legs and the bodies falling around him, he followed the song.

The curtains of dust thinned as he crawled out and clambered to his feet. Still more of the black-clad warriors brushed past him, charging into the fray. The screams of the dead and the wounded were fainter here, smothered beneath the gigantic statue of Ulbecetonth that lay, her smile spattered with crimson, upon the stone steps surrounded by sheets of dust and screaming.

The bulk of the netherling force was still midring, as though waiting. Sheraptus was ambling back to them atop his sikkhun, back casually turned to the slaughter, as though it weren’t even remotely the most interesting mayhem he had seen.

Of Greenhair, there was no sign. Nor thought.

Or there might have been. It was hard to hear himself with all the thunder. The clouds were roiling, roaring, groaning. And amidst them, all he could hear was the slow and steady sound of something.

A heartbeat?

No, too fast. Footsteps. Feet? Many feet.

Coming his way.

The gibbering alerted him first, the slathering cackle that turned him about and then sent him lunging to the ground. The sikkhun came roaring past a moment later, its claws tearing up the earth and its wailing laughter cutting the air as it rushed past him.

He looked up, met Xhai’s hateful glare for a moment. And a glare was all he got, spared the great blade in one of her hands and the thin, pale spear in her other. Those were weapons meant for a nastier job than whatever it would take to finish him off. And that job lay in the dust cloud as she charged after the black-clad warriors.

And his job?

Return to the fray?

He glanced back at the dust and slaughter and quickly discounted that.

Run away?

He glanced at the surrounding kelp, netherlings, and aforementioned slaughter.

Find Greenhair? No, she’ll just tell me to stop Sheraptus or something. Not that that wouldn’t be a bad thing to do
.

But with what, he wondered? He was weary, breathless, armed only with an apparently beneficial insignificance and a rather ominous inkling that he was about to explode out of one orifice.

That might work. Position it just right and—no, no, no. Look, you’ve got something that can work here, right? You had one of their stones, didn’t you? If you could use that … no, it’s heresy
.

His fist found itself in his pocket, regardless. His body, apparently, was done waiting for his brain to decide if it was ready to live. He fished around, wrapped fingers around something firm and cold. The stone. The stone that would cure him, that would give him enough power to—

Ah, wait, no
, he thought as he pulled it from his pocket
.
That’s not the right one, is it?

This was the meager granite chunk from a black necklace that Denaos had found. Thick and raw and thoroughly useless.

“Where did you get that?”

It was his head, he was certain, all the noise and the dust was getting into his head.
That’s
how people kept sneaking up on him. Or maybe he really
was
so stupid as to be able to miss the great sikkhun approaching. It remained there, panting as its rider stared down at Dreadaeleon.

The other male, tall and thin and sporting a white goatee. His face was more expressive than the others, full of shock and horror at the sight of the boy. Probably not for the good reasons.

“That stone, I gave it …” He held out a hand, as if to grasp it. “You took it. Qaine, she …”

“Uh …” Dreadaeleon began to back away, hoping he wasn’t necessary in this conversation.

“Qaine.
Qaine
.” The male reiterated.

His lip trembled for a moment, eyes quivered for as long as it took him to draw in a breath. He held it there, shut his eyes tight. When they opened again, they burned red with energy.

“I need you,” he whispered, “to die.”

Gariath was still alive.

He had never been aware of his failure to die without a sigh of disappointment and resentment. He felt a dizzying rush as blood and breath fought to reassert themselves over his body. He swayed as he staggered to his feet, feeling strangely empty, as though his head hadn’t quite realized he was still alive and his spirit had already taken off for the afterlife.

Slowly, it returned, as if rejected and skulking back dejectedly.

There were hundreds more in line before him.

Something brushed his foot. A long, green limb groped blindly across stones slick with a pool of sticky red and black. Five fingers. An elbow joint. Skin. Claws.

All that remained of the Shen, buried beneath the stone. It dragged its claws against the stone until they snapped, tried to pull itself out until the flesh of its fingers shredded.

The emptiness of his head filled with the screams and the blood and the explosion and the twitching limbs and the statue flying through the sky and the scent of death everywhere, rising up on curtains of dust, the resigned sigh of an earth that had seen too much blood already.

Blood and broken bodies and glistening pink matter that had burst out of mouths and spilled upon stones. This was what remained. Of the Shen, nothing else.

But what about the others? Where were the humans? The little one had just been standing here, hadn’t he? Was he somewhere in this broken heap under the statue? Was he one of the shadows rushing about, screaming into the dust?

Was that him there, Gariath wondered? That stark black shape growing closer? He leaned forward, peered into the dust.

The jagged head of a spear shot out silently, found the muscle of his side and bit with iron teeth. His roar was eaten by dust. He reached down, seized the spear’s haft in his claws.

The warrior emerged from the dirt. No face, no eyes, untouched by the dust and the agony. Gariath saw his twisted grimace reflected in the carapace of her helmet as she approached, twisting the spear. He could feel it taste him, express the hatred and fury that the netherling’s faceless stare couldn’t.

This would have been a good death, he reflected briefly. At the end of a long fight, by a worthy foe. It would have, if he was ready to die.

But that time was passed. He saw no reason to reward latecomers.

His fist shot out, caught the female’s chin with the clang of metal. Her grip loosened enough for him to smash his fist again onto the haft of the spear, snapping it in two. He tore its splintered remains from her with one hand, reached out and slammed the butt of the other’s palm against her chin. Her neck twisted back as she lashed out with fist and shield, bending so far back it seemed it might snap at any moment.

That, too, would have been a good death.

Less messy, too. But again, latecomers.

He flipped the splintered haft in his palm, jammed it forward. It punched through her exposed purple throat to burst out the other side. She bled, she staggered, she collapsed and disappeared beneath the swirling dust and sand.

Too much dust, he thought. Too much sand. It wasn’t natural that sand should be this irritated, should linger in the air like a cloud of insects. There
were lots of problems with this particular situation, the biggest one being the spearhead embedded in his side. He reached down to tear it out, braced himself for the scream to follow.

Wait
. He forced himself to stop
.
Pull it out, the blood comes gushing, you’re dead in a few breaths. That’s what the human said, right? That sounds right. Leaving a giant wedge of metal embedded in your skin sounds right …

He blinked. Nothing about this made sense. He had to get away from it. He had to get higher.

He clawed his way up her stone body, over her hand, slipping on a patch of blood, trying to ignore the feeling that he could feel their screams in the palms of his hands. He emerged atop the statue.

He was not alone.

“
Rhega
.” Shalake did not turn around. His eyes were out over the sandy field. His club hung limp in his hands. “You are alive.”

“Shalake,” Gariath grunted, “are you …”

“No,
Rhega
. I am not.” He slowly turned around. His skull headdress was gone but for a single shard lodged into his right eye. “I am dead.”

“You aren’t,” Gariath replied, stalking forward. “You’re wounded. The rest of the Shen are scattered. The longfaces are moving up the stairs. You need to—”

“I can’t. I can’t hear my people. I can’t see my ancestors. I am somewhere else,
Rhega
. My body is down there, in the blood and dirt. My soul is here, talking to you.” He blinked. His eyelid trembled, flickering over the bone shard. “Are you dead, too?”

“No.”

Gariath’s fist shot out, caught Shalake across the chin. The Shen staggered, spat out blood.

“Neither are you,” the dragonman grunted. “Now, get down there. Rally the warriors. We have to—”

“We can’t,
Rhega
.”

“We can, we just have to—”

“We can’t.”

Shalake raised a claw to the coral-splintered horizon and the crown of storms swirling atop it. Thunder crashed, banished the war cries and the screams and the rattle of iron and left the ring in an echoing silence. A great flash of lightning lit the sky and cast in shadow a mountain. A mountain that bled red in great weeping streaks across its body. A mountain that grew steadily bigger.

A mountain that walked.

“They’re already here.”

From the forest, out of the silence, a voice emerged. A distant wail, a bestial gurgle, the echoing reveberation of a bell, a hush of whispers and the flutter of wings and over it all, blending it into a single sound, the beating of a heart.

A cry went out from the netherlings, only barely heard, even echoed amongst the warriors. Their line began to move as they shifted to change their face toward the edge of the ring and the creature emerging from it.

The sheets of kelp parted, trembling as it came forth, a tall and skeletal shadow. On long, thin limbs wrapped in glistening ebon flesh, it strode onto the sand. Through great white eyes, empty as the void between its gaping, fishlike jaws, it surveyed the carnage. Thunder muttered overhead. A drop of crimson rain fell from the sky to splash and leave a weeping red streak across the white of its eye.

Its ribcage buckled. Its webbed claws tightened into fists. The Abysmyth threw its head back and howled to heaven and hell.

And the world exploded behind it.

They came streaming over the horizon in sheets and tides. The Omens flocked in great, sweeping streams, their withered faces alight with an echoing chorus. The frogmen surged out from the forest in a sea of pale flesh and glistening spears, flooding onto the battlefield and rushing toward the center of the ring. The Abysmyths strode amidst the hairless flood, leisurely strolling toward the impending slaughter.

The netherlings were not so patient.

“QAI ZHOTH!”
they roared in their iron voices, challenging the storm and its demonic chorus.

“ULBECETONTH!”
the tide shrieked back.

“AKH ZEKH LAKH!
”

“THE KRAKEN QUEEN!”

“ZAN QAI—”

“ULBEC—”

All of it lost in a crash of metal and flesh as they collided in the middle of the ring in a great spattering, screaming agony.

Gariath’s breath was lost somewhere in it all. He had seen carnage. He had caused carnage. But this was …

“The end,
Rhega
.”

Shalake had a rather good way of putting it. The Shen held his hands out helplessly, the club hanging limp and impotent from his claws.

“This is everything we fought for. The chance to watch it all end and go with our ancestors.”

“I’m not ready,” Gariath snarled.

The Shen’s good eye flickered, dispelling a fog that settled over his pupil. “No, not ready. We can’t go … we … we need to help the others.”

“They’re down there somewhere,” Gariath muttered. “Dreadaeleon is … somewhere. I have to find him.”

“Him? No, no.
Them
. The Shen. There are survivors, lead them to … to …” He stared at Gariath. The shard lodged in his eye wept a thick substance. “We can’t go looking for—”

“There is no ‘we,’ ” Gariath snarled suddenly. “I am not Shen. I am not ready to die. I am
Rhega
. I am the
only Rhega
. I will do what I have always done.” He reached out and tore the club from Shalake’s grasp. “And I need this.”