The Skybound Sea (33 page)

He would not waste the sacrifice by being thrown off now.

The pillars thinned out, giving way to open ocean. The Akaneed picked up speed, unable to do anything else in its agony. For a moment, Gariath wondered if he might simply ride the beast out into the middle of nowhere until it died and then, as starvation and fatigue set in, he would die with it.

But as the mist began to thin and, in the distance, a great gray wall of looming, unblemished stone arose, that particular fear was dashed. Along with his brains, he was sure, if he didn’t think of something.

Options being limited as they were atop the back of a violently thrashing sea serpent swimming at full speed toward a sheer wall of stone, thinking didn’t count so much as action. And his actions didn’t count nearly as much as the Akaneed’s.

Thus, when its back twisted and snapped like a whip, he had little choice but go flying ahead of it to land in the water with an eruption of froth. And when it came surging up behind him, jaws gaping in an agonized roar, he had
little choice but to try and keep from sliding down its gullet a second time as he was washed into its open mouth.

And when he saw the wall looming ever closer to them, growing ever huger with each fervent breath, he had but one choice.

And he chose
not
to soil himself.

Of the many,
many
negatives that came with being surrounded by two dozen tattooed, scaly, bipedal lizards with clubs, arrows, machetes, and yellow, wicked stares fixated upon him, Lenk had never once thought that the worst of them would be that they didn’t attack.

But then again, Lenk never once thought that he would be in this position.

Not alone, anyway.

He glanced back up to the fallen monolith behind him and the empty space that Kataria had just occupied. He didn’t know why she left. He didn’t know why she hadn’t come back. He didn’t know why the Shen were apparently taking their sweet time in getting down to the dirty business of smashing his head into his stomach.

But his life had always been full of surprises. And he could do something about only one of them at that moment.

His sword was in his hand, raised as a feeble counter against the threat of the many weapons raised against him. Sturdy and red with Shen blood as it might have been, crude and jagged their weapons might have been, there was little argument his single blade could muster against their two dozen jagged, cruel-edged reasons as to why he should die.

If they were savoring that fact, they had taken an awfully long time to do so.

If they were waiting to see what he would do, they had to know by now.

And so, he had to ask.

“What the hell are you waiting for?” he snarled.

Beyond a collective flash of their yellow eyes, they didn’t reply. He had no idea if they even understood him. All the same, as a throaty, hissing murmur swept through them, as the crowd of tattooed scales rippled and parted, the Shen answered him.

One of them, anyway.

Their weapons lowered, just as their eyes went up to look at the newly-arrived lizardman. Towering over its brethren by a head wrapped in a headdress made of the skull of some fierce-looking beast and shoulders thick with muscle, the tremendous reptile stalked forward, unhurried.

A tail as long and thick as a constrictor snake dragged behind it. A club, big enough that it would take three hands of a human to lift and studded with jagged
teeth of an animal long dead, hung easily from a clawed hand that led to a log-like arm that attached to a broad, powerful body thick with banded tattoos.

All red as blood.

One pace away from Lenk, the lizardman came to a halt. Its eyes melted like amber around two knife-thin and coal-black pupils, peering out from two black pits of its animal-skull headdress. It glanced at the tip of his sword, barely grazing its massive green-and-red barrel of a chest, only barely concerned with being a twitch away from impalement.

Lenk supposed that he might also be unconcerned were he a giant reptile wearing a jagged-toothed skull like it were his own and carrying a club as big as the tiny, gray-haired insect of a man the Shen faced.

“That’s not going to work,” he, for he certainly
sounded
like a man, said.

“I was, uh,” Lenk spoke through a cough, “hoping that you’d admire me for trying.” His blade quivered slightly as the tremendous Shen stared at him. “You know, be impressed with my valiance or something.”

The tremendous Shen tilted his skull-bound head to the side. “And then?”

“I don’t know. You’d all make me your king or something.” Lenk raised a brow. “Do you have kings?”

The Shen shook his head, sent bones rattling. “Warwatchers.”

“Fancy. You’re not going to be making me one, then?”

“No.”

“Really?”

“You sound surprised.”

“Well, your green friends haven’t attacked me yet, so …”

“They were waiting for Shalake.”

“Who?”

The Shen tapped two fingers to his chest. Lenk sneered.

“Warwatchers get to talk about themselves in the third person?”

“I give you my name and your life, for the moment,” Shalake said. “Because I want to know how you got into Jaga. We have the reef. We have the walls. We have the Akaneeds. No one gets past all three.”

“If that were true, there wouldn’t be a whole mess of you waiting for me once I did get past them all.”

“And how did you get past them?”

The young man smiled feebly. “Luck?”

“Just luck,” the Shen growled.

Lenk glanced up over his shoulder, toward an empty patch of stone atop the statue where someone had once stood. Where someone had turned away and fled from him. Again. He swallowed something back as his gaze returned to the Shen.

“Just luck,” he said.

Shalake nodded with a slow, sage-like patience. His sigh was long, sent plumes of dust rising from the desiccated snout of his skull headdress. He hefted his tooth-studded club lazily.

“I see.”

And then he swung.

Shalake growled. He cried out. Shen hissed in approval. All sounds were lost to Lenk’s ears in a fit of panic as he flung himself to the ground. They returned in the sound of stone crunching, splintering, clattering upon his back and rolling to the highway. He looked up long enough to see Shalake pull his weapon free, a great gash left in the statue’s arm.

And then all thoughts were for the sword in his hand. He took the blade in a tight grip, tensed, and thrust upward. A morbid grin creased his face as he felt the steel eat deeply of flesh until it halted, gorged. That lasted just long enough to look up and see the sword’s tip hovering a finger’s length away from the Shen’s kidneys, a clawed green hand wrapped about the naked blade.

The weapon was ripped from him as the Shen’s foot lashed out and smashed against his chest. He slammed against the statue, all thought for his missing weapon going toward desperately trying to find missing breath.

Shalake seemed in no such hurry. Ignoring the blood weeping from his fingers, he tossed the blade aside as he hefted his club with all the urgency that smashing a roach warranted.

Robbed of breath and blade, Lenk was certainly not above scurrying away not unlike a roach. Though once he scrambled to his feet, he became aware of just why the Shen could afford to be so casual. The other lizardmen stood at the ready, weapons clenched and eyes fixated upon him; whether out of respect or morbid curiosity, their reluctance to join the battle clearly only extended as far as the half-circle they had formed.

He could see it in their eyes.

Which were slowly arching up, as though looking at something—

Oh, right
.

The sweeping arc would have taken off his head if he hadn’t thrown himself to the side. That was small solace for the heavy, clawed foot that lashed out and drove a hard kick against his back, sending him rolling across the stone.

Small
and
fleeting, he realized as he crawled to his feet, trying to ignore the sound of his bones popping. He couldn’t take another hit like that. He couldn’t keep dodging. He couldn’t escape.

That left two options. One would be waiting for help. He looked up to the empty air above the stone statue.

“
Foolish
,” the voice said.

Agreed
, he thought in reply.

That left the other option.

He stared at Shalake as the Shen hefted his club and narrowed his eyes to slits behind his skull headdress. Lenk drew in a deep breath.

And charged.

The patience was gone from the Shen’s eyes, as the laziness was gone from his swing. It sucked the very air from the sky; Lenk could feel the wind from the blow itself as he ducked low, ran beneath it, past the Shen.

The tail found him before he could find it, lashing out to strike him firmly against the chest. He embraced the pain as he embraced the tail itself, wrapping both arms around it. While Lenk wasn’t quite certain as to the specific implications of grabbing a lizardman’s tail, he was able to guess as soon as Shalake cast a scowl over his shoulder and roared.

“SCUM!”

He swung wildly in his attempt to dislodge the man’s grip. But his tail followed him with each movement and Lenk followed the tail, evading each wild lash of claw and club with tenacious grip and desperate prayer.

After a few snarling moments, Shalake stopped and Lenk felt the tail tense in his grip as the lizardman heaved, raising the appendage up with the intent of smashing it and its silver-haired parasite upon the ground. Lenk seized the opportunity and the lizardman’s loincloth at once, pulling himself up onto the creature’s back.

As one might expect of any reasonable reptilian horror, Shalake’s protests were loud, roaring, and interspersed with several clawing fits as he tried to reach for the man lodged squarely in the center of a back too broad for his arms to reach. With cries of alarm, several Shen rushed forward to help to be knocked aside by wild sweeps of tail and club.

While it hadn’t seemed like a particularly expert idea in the first place, stuck in the middle of the reptile’s massive back seemed an especially poor position to be in. Particularly once Shalake calmed enough to formulate a plan. The lizardman turned, lined his back up with the stone monolith and, with a snarl and snap of legs, backpedaled furiously toward it.

They struck with a shudder of rock, narrowly knocking Lenk from his precarious perch as he pulled himself up to the lizardman’s shoulders. The folly of that, too, became all too clear at the sight of Shen bows drawn and aimed for the target that had so generously made itself clear of their leader.

Arrows shrieked. An arm wrapped about his neck and pulled back hard. His head struck stone. Shalake tore himself free. In the blur of motion, the only thing that Lenk could even be vaguely sure of was that he wasn’t dead.

Even that was uncertain; he hadn’t expected to see those green eyes staring down at him again anywhere outside of hell.

“Kataria,” he whispered.

“Stay down,” she snarled at him, drawing an arrow back.

“You …” he said, trying to claw his way up, “you left me … 
again
.”

“I came back.” She trained the bow upon the Shen. “And I said stay
down
.” Absently, she pressed her foot upon his chest, pinning him to the top of the statue. “Don’t make yourself any easier to shoot than you already did.”

He craned his neck up and saw her fire wildly down. The arrow found the thick flesh of Shalake’s shoulder, another found his calf, forcing him to the ground. The third remained drawn in her bow, a thin bargaining chip aimed at Shalake’s neck, reminding them what should happen to their precious warwatcher if their arrows left their bows.

And there she stood, facing down two dozen Shen and six arrows drawn upon her, with him under her boot, refusing to move, refusing to leave.

He looked at her, then to the Shen. Their fingers twitched, getting impatient around the fletchings of their arrows.
She’s going to die
.

“Good
,” the voice whispered.

No, I mean, she came back to die. She came back for me and she’s about to die because of me …

“There is still no discussion here. Stay down and let her die, then we escape and … what are you doing?”

“What are you doing?” Kataria echoed, casting a growl out the side of her mouth. “I said stay down.”

Lenk ignored her, pushing her foot aside, crawling up to join her. He stared down the Shen beside her, as bows were trained upon him, as Shalake cast his amber scowl up at him. He stood beside her, refusing to listen, refusing to leave.

“Fool
,”
the voice hissed
.
“Why do we always make such progress and then you go and throw it all away?”

Lenk didn’t have an answer for that. Lenk didn’t have a plan for how to avoid the arrows trained upon him and Kataria. Lenk didn’t have any thought for survival, for betrayal, for anything beyond standing beside her.

Bows creaked. Angry hisses rose from the crowd. Fingers twitched. Yellow-eyed scowls were cast upward. Lenk tensed. Kataria pulled her arrow back farther. Somewhere in the distance, something let out a keening roar growing steadily louder. Lenk drew in a deep breath. Then paused.

Wait
, he thought, looking toward the wall,
what was that last part?

And then everything went terribly wrong.

With the scream of rock and the roar of sea, the wall exploded. Shield-sized shards of stone went flying on a red-tinged mist as the Akaneed tore through the wall with a great, keening wail that spat blood and froth, carried
on a wave that roared alongside it, sliding it through stone, over stone, toward stone.

The impact shook the highway, sent Lenk and Kataria tumbling off the monolith, sent the Shen collapsing to the ground, sent all eyes to the great sea serpent sliding toward them. Mere paces away from the assembled pink and green skins, it came to a slow, sliding halt upon its side, the wave that had carried it onto the road slithering away and settling back, leaving its macabre delivery before them.