He rose, groggily. His legs were beneath him, he was certain, but he could not feel them. He was breathing, he was certain, but he couldn’t taste the air on his tongue. He lurched forward, uncertain of where he was going, but certain he had to get there. His stride was weak, clumsy. He staggered, reached out for balance and laid a palm upon the ice.

  Hatred coursed through him.

  A voice spoke inside his heart.

  ‘They’re going to betray you.’

  He reeled from the sheer anger that coursed into him like a venom. The ice clung to his palm greedily, unwilling to let him go. He pulled away, leaving traces of skin on it. He was in pain, but he could not feel it.

  He continued, swaying down the hall. He brushed against the wall.

  ‘It is in their nature. They are weak. Cattle.’

  Agony; he was sure he should feel that. There was no time to dwell on it, no time to feel pain. Pain was fear, fear was doubt, doubt made strong wills falter and turn back. There was no turning back.

  Another staggering step. Another brush against the ice.

  ‘Man’s destiny is his own to weave, not the dominion of Gods. They would seek to enslave mortals all over again, through churches instead of chains.’

  More pain. More ice.

  ‘The tome was written in case the House was wrong, in case we needed to destroy the Gods as well as the demons. It was written to help mankind. They cower before it, call it blasphemy.’

  A light at the end of the cavern appeared: no welcoming, guiding gold, but something harsh, something seething, something terrifyingly blue. He continued towards it and the voice did not stop, whispering to him as the cavern grew narrower, as the ice closed in around him.

  ‘We’ll show them. We’ll teach them. We can live on our own, without gods or demons. They will all burn. Mortalkind will remain.’

  A wall of ice rose up before him, clear and pristine. A figure dwelled within it, a man cloaked in shadow.

  ‘We have our duty. We have our commands. Darior gave us this gift that we may free mortals. We were made for greater things than heaven.’

  His features were sharp and angular and harsh. His hair was white and flowing. His eyes were shut. His lips were shut.

  ‘They are going to kill you. They are going to betray you. It is their nature. To let you live is to deny their comforting shackles. To let the tome survive is to acknowledge that they might be wrong.’

  A dozen arrows were embedded in his flesh. A dozen knife hilts jutted from his body. A dozen bodies wearing battered armour and stained cloaks were frozen in the ice with him.

  ‘Darior made us that we might serve a greater purpose. It is our nature to cleanse, to purify, to kill. Demons, gods, heretics, liars, murderers … any that would seek to enslave mankind. But it is their nature to doubt, to fear, to hate. They will hate you. They will betray you.’

  Lenk felt his arm rise of its own volition.

  ‘You cannot let them deny you this purpose. You cannot let them destroy you. You cannot fail. You cannot disobey Darior. You cannot abandon your duty.’

  Lenk felt his hand fall upon the ice.

  ‘You cannot let them stop you.’

  Lenk felt the man’s eyes open. Lenk stared into a vast, pupilless blue void.

  ‘Kill them or they will kill you.’

  And then, Lenk felt himself scream.

  Thirty-Nine

  THE KINDEST OF POISONS

  In a blackening row, the frogs smouldered on a thin wooden skewer.

  Kataria stared as their colours, the myriad greens and blues and reds and yellows, vanished under a coat of black as the fire licked at their bodies, made their bellies swell and glisten with escaping moisture. The frogs stared back at her, through eyes growing larger in their tiny sockets, the fear they could not express in life coming out in death.

  Finally, with nearly inaudible popping sounds, their eyes burst. Naxiaw plucked the skewer from the fire, glanced it over, and handed it to Kataria. She took it from his hands, looking it over with a frown.

  ‘You put them on six breaths ago,’ she said, slightly worried.

  ‘They are cooked in six breaths,’ he said, his shictish deep and sure where hers was soft and hesitant.

  ‘They’re still toxic,’ she replied, glancing at their glistening bellies. ‘The poison hasn’t evaporated from them yet.’

  ‘That’s why you use only six breaths.’

  ‘So, they’re still poisonous.’

  ‘They are.’

  ‘Why even cook them, then?’ She managed a weak grin in the face of their charred countenances. ‘Or do they just taste terrible raw?’

  She looked up and found no grin on Naxiaw’s face. He was staring at her.

  Still, she noted.

  And with an intensity too severe for the situation, as though whether or not she were about to chew up some roasted amphibians would answer a dire question she had been privately pondering for ages now, and whether or not she licked her lips afterwards would dictate what he did next.

  Not for the first time, she found herself glancing to the thick Spokesman Stick resting against the rock he sat upon.

  Saying nothing, she bit one of the toasted creatures from the skewer. They were bitter and foul on her tongue, the aroma of cooked venom filling her nostrils. They were quite toxic, quite terrible to taste; she found herself wondering again what the point of cooking them was.

  Texture, perhaps?

  She bit down. A pungent flower bloomed in her mouth, and her lips threatened to rip themselves from her face, so fiercely did they pucker.

  Apparently not.

  Yet, under his stare, she continued to pop them into her mouth, chewing them up as much as she could tolerate before they slid as greasy lumps into her belly. She met his gaze as she did so, watching him as he watched her, as he continued staring.

  No, she realised as she saw the careful steadiness of his eyes, not staring. Her own quivered a bit. Searching.

  She did not ask for what. She didn’t want to know. She tried not to even think about it, for she didn’t want him to find it. Yet with eyes and instinct alike, he searched her.

  She had sensed him reaching out again, as she had all that morning since rejoining him in the forest after reclaiming her clothes from the Owauku. She had sensed him peering through the veil of the Howling, whispering over its roar to her, trying to reach her through their communal instinct. Of him, she could sense nothing. Of her, it was clear by the faint twitch at the edges of his mouth that he sensed only frustration.

  It was discouraging, she admitted to herself, that the connection they had shared on Sheraptus’ ship had been lost so completely. There was a comfort in his instinct melding with hers, a soothing earth to bury her fear beneath, and she dearly wished to feel it again. How had it been lost? she wondered. What had changed since last night?

  She fought to keep the despair off her face.

  Oh, right.

  Meeting Naxiaw should have been the first thing to do that morning, she knew. Going to Lenk should have been something that never happened. She had already made her choice between them, between a human she should hate and a people she should adore, three times. She had made it when she looked into his eyes. She had made it when she heard him scream her name and plea for help.

  She had made it when she turned away.

  She was shict, she told herself. Her loyalty was to her people. She owed him no excuses, would give him no reasons, would offer no apologies. And she had remained faithful to that vow when she came to him that morning, found him shrugging his shirt over a freshly stitched wound.

  She had met his eyes, then, and was unable to say anything at all.

  Perhaps that was why she unconsciously evaded Naxiaw’s probing instinct: a fear he might see what happened that morning, a dread he might know why they couldn’t connect, a gripping terror he might have a solution.

  She looked to the Spokesman again.

  She found herself surprised to see it there still and not, say, embedded in the skulls of one or more of the humans. Naxiaw had seen them, after all, when the two shicts had pulled themselves from the reaching ocean. He had paused, a mere fifty paces from them, and stared. The implications that had seized her with a cold dread then had surely dawned on him as well.

  Despite his captivity, he was still fresh and energetic. Coming from a fight, the humans were not. He was still strong, limber and swift. The humans were weak, exhausted and burdened with each other. His Spokesman leapt to his hands like an eager puppy. The humans’ weapons hung from their hands like leaden weights.

  He was shict.

  They were not.

  She had braced herself, then. For what, she wasn’t sure. The uncertainty paralysed her, rendered her incapable of doing more than staring dimly, unsure what more to do. A shict, she knew, would have rushed down with him against them. A companion, she told herself, would have stood between him and them.

  But a companion would not have stared into her friend’s eyes and turned away when he screamed her name.

  And a shict would not have felt wounded when he stared back into hers the following morning and turned away when she said nothing.

  Kataria had done nothing that night. Kataria continued to do nothing. As much as she cursed herself for it, that did not surprise her.

  What did, however, was the fact that Naxiaw had followed her example and let the humans be. Of all the qualities the s’na shict s’ha were legendary for, tolerance and patience were not among them.

  Why he had vanished into the forest, continued to wait here, she did not know. Why he had met her with nothing more than an offer of cooked amphibians, she could not say. What he hoped to find in her as he stared at her so intently, she had no idea.

  But she wished, desperately, that he would stop.

  He might have picked up on that desire through the Howling. Or he might have seen her squirming upon her log seat with an intensity usually reserved for dogs inflicted with parasites. He looked away, regardless.

  ‘Cook the poison from the frog and there is no point to consuming them,’ he said, producing a pouch from his hip. ‘Venom, you see, has a number of advantages.’

  ‘My father said it’s how the greenshicts keep their blood toxic,’ she replied.

  ‘Your father knew more about the s’na shict s’ha,’ he paused, letting the word hang in the air, ‘than he knew about his own people.’

  ‘You knew him?’

  ‘Many of us did. He was a knowledgeable leader. He knew what he was. He knew what he had to do. He knew he was a good shict, and so did we. He also knew the value of consuming venom.’

  He reached into his pouch and produced a frog, still alive, its red and blue body glistening as it croaked contentedly in his palm, unafraid.

  ‘It is a temporary pain and so snaps one from stupor,’ he said. ‘It sharpens the senses, makes one more aware of the weakness of lesser pains … improves the function of the bowels.’

  He said this pointedly, looking at her. She furrowed her brow in retaliation.

  ‘And?’ she pressed.

  ‘And,’ he continued, ‘it is what cures disease.’

  She stiffened at the word, gooseflesh rising on her back.

  ‘One would assume,’ she whispered hesitantly, ‘that poison would make one as ill as disease.’

  ‘Poison does not make one ill; it merely poisons. It is a temporary element introduced to a person’s body. It enters and, assuming the host is strong enough, it leaves. If the host survives, she is more tolerant to the pain.’

  He watched the frog as it tentatively waddled across his palm, testing this newfound footing.

  ‘Illness is born of something deeper,’ he said. ‘It infects, festers within the host, not as a foreign element, but as a part of her body. And because of this, it does not leave on its own. Even if symptoms disappear, the disease lingers and births itself anew. Because of this, the host cannot wait for it leave. It must be treated.’

  His fingers clenched into a fist. There was a faint snapping sound.

  ‘Cured.’

  She fought to hide the shudder that coursed through her, more for the sudden ruthlessness of the action than for the fact that he subsequently popped the raw amphibian into his mouth and swallowed.

  ‘A cured illness is a purified body. It leaves the host stronger. But this is all assuming she recognises the illness to begin with.’

  He fixed his penetrating stare upon her, sliding past her tender, exposed flesh, past her trembling bones, through sinew turning to jelly. He saw, then, what he had been searching for. She felt the knowledge of it in her heart.

  ‘To infect without being noticed,’ he whispered, ‘is the nature of disease.’

  She could not bear his searching stare any longer. She turned away. His sigh was something harsh and alien, unused to his lips.

  ‘How long?’

  She said nothing.

  ‘What am I to tell your father, Little Sister?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘How am I to tell any of our kinsmen that you have been with humans?’

  ‘Tell them nothing,’ she said, biting her lip. ‘Tell them anything; tell them everything. Tell them you don’t know why and tell them that Kataria doesn’t know, either. Or tell them I’m dead. Either way, we can all stop wondering about it and talking about it and thinking about it and get on with whatever the hell else we were doing before everyone started asking if Riffid even gave a crap if a shict hung around round-ears.’

  Her hands trembled, clenched the skewer so hard it snapped. She looked down at it through blurred vision; she couldn’t remember when she had started crying.

  His stare was all the more unbearable for the sympathy flooding it. Sympathy, she noted, blended with a distinct lack of understanding that made his gaze a painful thing, two ocular knives twisting in her flesh with tears seeping into the wounds. And so she stared into the fire, biting back the agony.

  ‘It’s not what it seems,’ she whispered.

  ‘There are scant few ways for it to seem, Little Sister,’ Naxiaw replied. ‘They are not dead. You are not dead. Why, then, are you with them?’

  She had been avoiding the question since the day she had walked out of the Silesrian alongside a silver-haired monkey. It had been easy to avoid, at first: just an idle wonder thrown from a clumsy and distracted mind. But Naxiaw’s mind was sharp, practised. The question struck her like a brick to the face, and she found that all the answers she had used to excuse away the question before felt weightless.

  For the adventure? In the beginning, she had told herself it was for that – the thrill of exploration and the lust for treasure. But shicts had no use for treasure, and the use for exploration went only so far as scouting for the tribe. There was no word for ‘adventure’.

  Friendship, then? As much as she knew she should loathe to admit it, she had become … attached to the humans. There was no denying it after a year, anymore. But there was no word for ‘friendship’ in the shictish tongue; there was ‘tribe’; there was ‘shict’. That was all a shict needed.

  Perhaps, then, because she found she had needed more than tribe … more than a shict needed. But how could she tell him that? How could she tell herself that?

  As the tears began to flow again, she realised she just had.

  And she felt him: his gaze, his thoughts, his instincts. Naxiaw reached for her, with eyes, with frown, with thought, with ears, with everything but his long, green fingers. The scrutinising had not dissipated, but was mingled with an animal desire, an utter yearning to understand that made his gaze all the more painful, the wounds all the deeper.

  He stared at her, trying to understand.

  And he never would. There was no word for it.

  If he didn’t know what she was feeling, he must have seen something in her tears, felt something in her heart, heard something in her head that made him know all the same that she was feeling something no true shict should. His face twitched, trembled, sorrow battling confusion battling fury. In the end, all that came of it was a shaking of his head and a long, tired sigh.

  ‘Little Sister,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘They’re kou’ru. Monkeys. Diseases.’

  ‘But I’ve been with them so long,’ she said. ‘My skin hasn’t flaked off; my heart hasn’t stopped beating; my blood hasn’t turned to mud. The stories aren’t true. They aren’t disease.’

  ‘They are,’ he snapped back, baring his canines. ‘A disease does not merely infect and kill, it weakens. It makes us vulnerable to other sicknesses, deeper illnesses, ones that cannot be burned out.’

  ‘Like what?’ She was absently surprised to find the growl in her voice, to feel her ears flattening against her head as she flashed her own teeth at him. ‘I’ve seen more in a year than most shicts will see in their lifetime. I’ve tasted alcohol, I’ve seen cities made of stone, I know what it means when a cock crows and what it means to drain the dragon.’

  ‘Symptoms of a weak and ignorant breed, and you’re infected with them.’

  ‘It can’t be ignorance to learn,’ she snarled. ‘A lot of what they know is useless, dangerous and stupid. But I’ve learned about farming, agriculture, digging wells. There must be a reason they became the dominant race. If shicts are to survive, then we have to—’

  ‘Reasons?’ He leapt to his full height, towering over her. ‘There is a reason, yes. They are dominant because when we first met them, we had a disease. Understanding, forgiveness, mercy,’ he spat. ‘These were the symptoms of an illness that claimed thousands of shicts.’

  She found herself falling from her log in an attempt scramble away from him as he advanced, his long strides easily overtaking her. He leaned down, extended his fingers to her.

  ‘The disease rises now and again. I was there the last time it infected us. I was there when I saw the reason humans were dominant.’

  Quick as asps, his hands shot out and seized her by the face. His eyes were massive, intense and brimming with tears as he drew his face towards her own wide-eyed and trembling visage. Then, he uttered the last words she remembered before he pressed his brow to hers.

 

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