Black Halo (24 page)

Maybe they accept promises …

Or, he considered, maybe he would just die out here. That could work, too. He’d be devoured by dredgespiders, drown in a sudden tide, get hit on the head with a falling coconut and quietly bleed out of his skull, or just walk until starvation killed him.

All decent options, he thought, so long as he would never have to see her again.

‘Do you remember how we met?’ she had asked, staring at him.

He had nodded. He remembered it.

Theirs had been an encounter of mutual necessity: hers one of tradition, his one of practicality. She was beginning her pilgrimage, to spread her knowledge of medicine to those in need. He was looking to avoid parties interested in mutilating him. Their motives seemed complementary enough.

It wasn’t unheard-of for people with either problem to hang on to an adventuring party to get the job done. Though, it had to be said there were a fair bit more adventurers suffering his problem than hers.

They had met Lenk and the creatures he called companions: a hulking dragonman, a feral shict. They had looked strong, capable and in no shortage of wounds to inflict or mend, and so the man and the woman had left the city with them that same day. They had gone out the gate, trailing behind a man with blue eyes, a bipedal reptile and a she-wolf.

She had smiled nervously at him.

He had smiled back.

‘We met Dread not long after,’ she said. He had thought he could make out traces of nostalgia in her smile … or violent nausea. Either way, she was fighting it down. ‘And suddenly I was in the middle of a pack consisting of a wizard, a monster, a savage and Lenk. I wanted to run.’

So had he. He hadn’t been planning on staying with them longer than it took to escape the noose, let alone a year. But he had found something in the companions and their goals that, occasionally, helped people.

Opportunity, however minuscule, for redemption, however insignificant.

‘And I couldn’t help but think, through it all,’ she had sighed, looking up at the moon, ‘“Thank you, Talanas, for sending me another normal human.”’ Her frown was subtle, all the more painful for it. ‘Back when I had no idea who you were, you seemed to be the only familiar thing I could count on. We were the same, both from the cities, believed in the Gods, knew that, no matter what happened, we had each other to fall back on. So I stayed with them, no matter how much I wanted to run, because I thought you were …’

A sign
, he had thought.

‘But you are what you are.’ She had looked up to him, something pitiful in her right eye, something desperate in her left. ‘Aren’t you?’

‘No,’ he had said.

‘What?’ she had asked.

‘Hot, hot, hot …’ Dreadaeleon had whispered.

And she had turned to the wizard.

And Denaos had dropped the torch and run.

It was a sloppy escape, he knew. She might come looking for him. He hoped she wouldn’t, what with him having threatened to cut her open, but there was always the possibility. He knew that the moment he had looked into her eyes and she had looked past his, into something deeper.

She had seen the face he showed her and realised it wasn’t his. And in her eyes, the quaver of her voice, he knew she would want to know. She would want to know … everything.

And he had worked too hard for her to know. Things had become sloppy even before he beat his retreat. She had heard him whisper over her. She had seen his face slip off. She had seen something in him that didn’t make her turn away.

He couldn’t have that.

Better for it to end this way, he thought as he rested against the wall and took a long, slow sip from the bottle. Better for her to never know anything. If he had stayed, she would keep pushing. If she kept pushing, he would eventually break. He would come to trust her.

And she … she would begin to relax around him, a man that no one should relax around. She would sigh with contentment instead of frustration. She would stop twitching when she heard him approach. She would give him coy smiles, demure giggles and all the things ladies weren’t supposed to give men like him.

She would come to trust him.

And you remember how that turned out last time, don’t you?

He blinked. Red and black flashed behind his eyelids. A woman lay beside him and smiled at him, twice: once with her lips, once through her throat.

He shook his head, pulled the bottle to his lips and drank deeply.

It was all very philosophically sound. It was better for her, he thought, that he leave. That was a lie, he knew, but it was a good lie, a sacred lie blessed by Silf. The Patron would be pleased at such a reasonable, philosophical man.

But philosophy, too, required honesty. And like any philosophical man without honesty, Denaos turned once more to drinking.

He was in a haze, but a pleasant one. The lies were making sense now. The logic was clear and, most importantly, he could close his eyes and see only darkness. The drink did that for him. It made everything quiet.

And everything was quiet. The mutter of the ocean was distant and faint. The sound of stone was earth-silent. The clouds moved across the moon without any fuss from the wind that gently hurried them along. Everything was quiet.

So quiet that he heard the whispers with painful clarity.

They began formlessly, babble rising over the grey stone without words. But as they hung over him, they coalesced, formed a spear that plunged into his head with a shriek. Accusations lanced his mind, condemnations tore at his brain, pleas punched a hole in his skull for so much hateful, violent screaming to pour. It was enough to make him drop his bottle and torch alike and fall to his knees.

His dagger was out and the whispering faded. His head pounded, his eyes sought to seal themselves shut. He strained to keep them open as he looked up and caught a glance at the far end of the wall.

And his blood went cold.

Slender fingers gripped the edge. Half a face peered from behind, locks of long and dark hair framing pale cheeks with a broad and horrifically unpleasant smile. An immense eye, round, white and knowing stared at him.

Into him.

‘No …’ he whispered.

And the woman said nothing in return.

The whispering came back, grazing his skull and forcing his hands over his ears and his eyes shut tight. They dissipated again and when he was again able to look, she was gone.

He rose, plucking the bottle and dagger up from the sand and sheathing both in his belt as he stared at the space where she had just been.

Hallucination
, he told himself,
or delusion or both, wrought by any number of causes, all sinful, of which you have no shortage. Paranoia, drink, sleeplessness. Reasonable, right?

He nodded to himself.

Whatever the cause, we can agree that …
that
wasn’t her
.

It seemed reasonable.

Then why are we following it?

Because Denaos was a reasonable man, he told himself, a reasonable man with plenty of reasons for not wanting to see a woman who he knew was already dead and none of them convincing enough to turn him back.

He rounded the corner and the land changed in the blink of a bloodshot eye. Forest and shore were conquered by a sprawling courtyard: the stone wall was joined by many, crowding the trees above, smothering the sand below. The walls bore carvings, mosaics twisted in cloaked moonlight, of faces he did not recognise, gods that no one had names for.

Those same gods rose over him, massive statues challenging the moon as they towered over the courtyard. Their robes were stone, their right hands were extended, their faces had long crumbled away and been shattered upon a floor swathed with mist, tendrils of fog rising up to shake spitefully at the moon attempting to ruin its shroud. The stench of salt scraped his throat, seared his lungs. But he could not care for that now.

Not when she was standing there in the centre of the courtyard, staring at him.

It was the same gown she had worn when he saw her last, the simple flowing ivory, now the same colour as her skin, rendering her body and the garment indistinguishable. Her hair was the same, frazzled still, undoubtedly still thick with the scent of streets and people. But he couldn’t be sure it was her, not until he took a step closer.

Not until she smiled at him twice.

Once with her mouth.

‘
Good morning, tall man
,’ she said suddenly, her voice still thick and accented from a tongue that had no taste for lies.

He stared back at her, a silence thick as the death that seeped into the courtyard hanging between them. When he spoke, his words wilted in his mouth.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

She said nothing.

‘There was no choice,’ he said, weakly. ‘I had no choice. There were … obligations, promises.’ He swallowed a mouthful of salt. ‘Threats.’

She simply smiled back.

‘But … I made a choice, anyway. I made it. What would you have done?’ His vision was hazy, but not with the fog. Tears were stinging his eyes, their salty stink worse than the ocean’s. ‘
What was I supposed to do?
’

No curses, no weeping, no wailing, no whispers. She simply stared. He stepped forward.

‘Please, just talk to me—’

His foot struck something soft. The sound echoed through a conspiracy of silence. He looked down. He blanched.

As though it possessed a particularly morbid sense of humour, the white blanket of mist parted to expose a face twisted in death. Black eyes glistening in a pale, bony face bereft of blood stared up at him, a mouth filled with needles open in a silent scream as wide as the wound in its hairless chest.

A frogman, he recognised, a servant of the horrific Abysmyths. It was dead. It was not alone. Other silhouettes, black against the mist, corpses gripping spears in their chest, clutching wounds in their bellies with webbed hands.

Beside them, their faces contorted in unquiet death, he could see the longfaces, the netherlings. Their purple skin was painted with crimson, their iron and armour stained and battered with the battle that had just raged between them and their pale, hairless foes.

Something about the scene of carnage was unsettling, even beyond the death and decay that permeated the mist. The netherlings were dead, but not from wounds that would have been delivered with the bone spears and knives that the frogmen clutched. The injuries were universal across the dead: each one large and jagged, having wept the last of their blood just hours ago. They had all been made by the same weapons.

And the frogmen hadn’t killed any of them.

Then
, he narrowed his eyes,
what would make the netherlings turn upon each other?

‘It is the way of the faithless to clean itself of its sins,’ a deep, gurgling voice spoke from nearby, ‘in blood.’

Denaos whirled, his dagger out. The Abysmyth stared back at him, down at him, from its seven-foot height. Its eyes were vast, white voids. Its mouth hung open in its dead fish head, breathing ragged breaths through jagged teeth. Its towering body, a skeleton wrapped in a skin of shadow, stood tall, four-jointed arms hanging down to its knobby knees.

But the arms did not reach. The legs did not advance. It stared, nothing more.

The massive wedge of metal that was jammed through its chest and which pinned it to the wall might have had something to do with that.

He glanced back to the courtyard. She was gone. He was alone.

Almost.

‘Before the Sermonic, the longfaces were confronted,’ the Abysmyth croaked. ‘Before the Sermonic, they beheld their own sins of faithlessness. She spoke to them in the dark places where they could not hide from her light. She spoke to them, she offered them salvation.’

The Abysmyth craned one of its massive arms up. A longface’s corpse hung from its webbed, black claw, a sheen of suffocating ooze coating a face smothered in its grasp.

‘You fought the netherlings, then,’ Denaos whispered. He glanced at the weapon jammed through its chest. ‘Doesn’t look like it ended well for you.’

‘The faithful can never find joy in the slaughter of lambs,’ the Abysmyth gurgled in reply. ‘Our solemn task was to follow the longfaces here, to blind their prying eyes, to silence their blasphemous questions.’

‘They were searching for something?’

‘It is the nature of the faithless to search. They crave answers from everything but She who gives them. In Mother Deep, there is salvation, child.’ It extended its other arm, far too long for Denaos’ comfort. ‘Approach me. My time ends, my service endures. I can save you. I can deliver you from your agonies.’

Denaos took a step back at the sight of the glistening, choking ooze dripping from its claws. He had seen men die from that ooze, drowned on dry land, committed to a watery grave while their feet still touched sand.

‘I already have a god,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’

‘God?
God
?’ It roared. The wound in its chest sizzled with acidic green venom, the same sickly sheen that coated the blade. He had seen this, too, and what it did to the demons. ‘You have
nothing!
Your gods care not for you! They are deaf to your cries! They are deaf to your suffering. To
my
suffering.’