‘There are ways to save a host beyond putting it down,’ Inqalle said. ‘Poison can be used to cleanse, to shrivel tumours and drive out diseases.’

‘I have seen enough of her heart to know that it will hurt her,’ Naxiaw replied.

‘The nature of poison is to harm. The nature of disease to kill. It is your choice, Naxiaw.’

He sat silently for a moment. His decision was made known to them in an instant, the Howling full of his cold anger and hardened resolve.

‘The humans die,’ he whispered. ‘I will cure them.’

‘I am with you,’ Inqalle said.

‘As am I,’ Avaij agreed.

‘And we,’ their thoughts became synonymous, ‘will not let another shict suffer.’

The vigour that coursed through Lenk’s body as he strode out of the cavern was one that he had not experienced in a lifetime. Maybe even his whole lifetime, he thought. His muscles were taut and tense; his body felt lighter than it had ever felt; his breath came in deep gulps of air too fresh to have ever existed on this stagnant island of death.

Life surged through him, a vibrant and untested energy that was nearly painful to feel racing through his veins. His mind was aware of his wounds and his scars, but his body remained oblivious. Still, that did not stop his brain from trying to make his body aware of its limitations.

This doesn’t make sense, he thought. Moments ago, I was unconscious. Hours ago, I was in agony. Days ago, I was …

‘Look back far enough,’ the voice replied to his thoughts. ‘You will find only pain, a dark and agonising nightmare, until this moment. You’re awake now.’

How?

‘Don’t believe what the priests tell you. Life is not sacred. Life is simply a tool. Purpose is sacred. Without purpose, life is nothing but a long, pointless, empty sleep.’

And our sleep has been long.

‘Too long.’

And our purpose …

‘We know what it is.’

To find the tome.

‘To slaughter the demons.’

And from there?

‘You’ll know by then. But for now …’

He glanced up and saw Kataria’s back. The shict sat upon a rock, staring into the forest. Lenk felt his hand tighten into a fist.

‘Remember your purpose. Remembers theirs.’

‘I will,’ he whispered.

Her ears twitched. She glanced over her shoulder and frowned at him as he approached.

‘You snuck up on me,’ she said, slightly offended.

He said nothing. They stared for a moment. Her gaze was softer than he remembered. She shifted to the side, leaving a bare space of granite beside her.

‘Walk past,’ the voice urged his legs. ‘Do not look. Do not think of her. Go forward.’

She had abandoned him. She had looked into his eyes. His mind remembered this. His mind did not object as this vigour carried him forth and past her. Her hand shot out and caught his. He stopped. Her fingers wrapped around his.

His body remembered this. It did not object as she pulled him down to sit beside her.

Silence persisted between, but not within. A voice raged at him, hissed angrily inside him, told him to go up. He wasn’t sure why he stayed sitting. He wasn’t sure why her hand was wrapped around his.

‘Through the neck,’ she said, suddenly.

‘Huh?’

‘I’ve got your sword arm right now. If I had pulled just a little harder, I could have brought my knife up into your neck.’ She sniffed, scratched her rear end. ‘It wouldn’t have to be instant, either. I don’t think you could stop me if I ran away and waited for you to bleed to death.’

‘See?’ the voice roared. ‘Do you see? Do you see her purpose? Do you see why she is a threat? Kill her. Strike her down! Strangle her now before she can kill us!’

She hasn’t killed us.

‘Yet.’

Yet.

‘I don’t have my sword,’ he said.

She reached down and plucked up a length of steel from beside the rock, handing it to him. The moment he clenched the weapon, the vigour inside him boiled instead of surged, his muscles clenched to the point of cramping.

‘It washed up on shore just an hour ago. The Owauku wanted to throw it back before you could use it on them. I stopped them.’

‘It has purpose,’ the voice whispered. ‘It knows what it is used for. That’s why it comes back to us. It knows what it craves.’

‘I could,’ he whispered, ‘kill you right now.’

‘You won’t,’ she said, not even bothering to look up. ‘And I haven’t killed you yet.’ She smacked her lips. ‘I’ve had so many opportunities. I’ve thought of a hundred ways to do it: poison, arrows, shove you overboard when you’re doing your business …’

‘Kill her now!’

Right now?

‘If I was a true shict, I would have killed you when I first set eyes on you.’ She sighed. ‘But I didn’t. I followed you out of the forest. I followed you for a year. I tracked you to a dark cave that you went into and I waited on this rock because I knew you’d be all right.’ She bit her lip. ‘You’re always all right.’

She bowed her head for a moment, then rubbed the back of her neck.

‘And that’s all I’m ever sure of these days. I go to sleep not knowing if I’ll dream shict dreams or what shict dreams are, but I know you’re going to be there when I wake up.’ She blinked rapidly for a moment. ‘And back on the ship, when I wasn’t sure, it … I …’

The silence did not so much cloak them as smother them this time, seeping into Lenk so deeply that even his mind was still for the moment. He glanced at her, but she was pointedly looking into the forest, staring deeply into the trees as though she would die if she looked anywhere else.

Perhaps she would.

‘How’s the shoulder?’ she asked.

‘It’s fine,’ he replied. ‘I’ve had worse.’

‘You do seem to have a talent for getting beaten up.’

‘Everyone’s good at something.’ He shrugged, then winced. The pain in his shoulder had returned; it hadn’t been there when he had emerged from the cave.

‘You should let me take a look at it,’ she said. ‘I don’t trust Asper to do a good job anymore. She …’ She shook her head. ‘She’s distracted these days.’

‘I’d rather you didn’t.’

‘I understand.’ A bitter chuckle escaped her. ‘I understand that. I understand you.’ She sighed. ‘And that doesn’t feel as bad as I thought it would.’

He glanced down. Her hand had found his again, squeezing it tightly.

‘What now?’ she asked.

‘With what?’

‘Everything.’

‘We go after the tome.’

‘I thought you wanted to go back to the mainland, forget the tome and the gold.’

‘Things change.’

‘They do.’ She rose to her feet, knuckled the small of her back, and loosed the kind of sigh that typically preceded an arrow in the neck and a shallow grave. ‘And that’s not fair.’ Slowly, she began to walk away, slinking towards the forest. She hesitated at the edge of the brush. ‘I’m not going to apologise, Lenk, for anything.’

‘I don’t blame you,’ he replied.

For the first time, she looked at him. It was a fleeting flash of emerald, nothing more than a breath during which their eyes met. It took less than that for her to frown and look away again.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘you do.’

He didn’t protest. Not as she said the words. Not as she walked away.

Forty

BROKEN PROMISES

Awarm droplet of water struck his brow, dripped down a narrow cheekbone and fell to his chin. He caught it on a purple finger before it could fall and be lost on the red and black cobblestones.

The word for it, Yldus recalled, was rain. He knew only a little about it. He knew it fell from the sky; he knew it made things grow. There was meaning behind it, too. It was a symbol of renewal, its washing of taint and sin considered something sacred. This he had been told by those prisoners who had begged for water from the sky, from the earth, from him.

He had given none. He didn’t see the point. Where he came from, things did not grow. The sky never changed. And as he looked up at the sky now, the rain falling in impotent orange dots against the burning roofs of the city’s buildings, he wondered what reverence could possibly be justified for it.

The fires continued, unhindered, belching smoke in defiant rudeness to the meek greyness. There were faint rumbles of what was called thunder, but they did nothing to silence the war cries of the females or the distant cries of the weak and hapless overscum they descended upon.

He picked his way over the bodies, lifting the hem of his robes as he walked through the undistilled red smears upon the cobblestones. He glanced down an alley, frowning at the flashing jaws and errant cackles of the sikkhuns as they feasted upon the dead and the slow with relish. Their female riders, long since bored with the meagre defences that had been offered to them and subsequently shattered, goaded their mounts to gnash and consume with unabated glee.

Wasteful, he thought. Pointless. Disgusting.

Female.

He left them to the dead. His concerns were for the living.

Or the barely living, at least.

The road was slick with blood, clotted with ash, littered with the dead and the broken. Yldus searched the carnage with a careful eye. He had seen much more and much worse, enough to recognise the subtle differences in the splashes of bright red life. He saw where it had been squandered in spatters of cowardice, where it had leaked out on pleas to deaf ears, where it had simply pooled with resignation and despair.

His eyebrows rose appreciatively as he saw one that began a bright crimson and turned to a dark red as it was smeared across the road, leaving a trail thick with desperation.

He followed it carefully, winding past the stacks of shattered crates and sundered barrels, the spilled blood and split spears that had been the last defence the overscum had offered the females. Some had fled. Many had stayed. Only one lived.

And as the road turned to sand beneath Yldus’ feet, he heard that solitary life drawing his last breaths.

The overscum lay upon the sand. Unworthy of note: small, soft, dark-haired, dark-skinned, maybe a little fatter than most. Yldus watched with passive indifference as the human continued to deny the reality of his soft flesh and leaking fluids, pulling himself farther along the sand, ignoring Yldus and the great black shapes that surrounded him.

Yldus glanced up at the warriors of the First: tall, powerful, their black armour obscuring all traces of purple flesh and bristling with polished spikes. The spears and razor-lined shields they clenched were bloodied, but stilled in their hands.

Yldus offered an approving smile; the First, as the sole females proven to be able to overcome their lust for blood enough to follow orders, held a special place in his heart. They could slaughter and skewer with the best of them, but it was their ability to recognise, strategise and, most importantly, obey that made him request their presence in the city.

He was after answers, not corpses. And this was delicate work.

At his approach, they turned, as one, their black-visored gazes towards him: expecting, anticipating. He indulged them with a nod. One of them replied, stepping forward, flipping her spear about in her grip and driving it down into the human’s meaty thigh.

Delicate, as far as the netherling definition of the word went, at least.

He folded his hands behind him, closing his ears to the human’s wailing as he approached, being careful not to tread in the blood-soaked sand. He stood beside the overscum, staring, waiting for the screaming to stop.

It took some time, but Yldus was a patient male.

It never truly stopped, merely subsided to gasping sobs. That would serve, however. Yldus knelt beside the overscum, surveying him carefully, waiting for the inevitable outburst. The human looked back at him through a dark-skinned face drawn tight with pain and anguish.

‘Monsters,’ he spat out in his tongue, ‘demons. Filthy child-killers!’

Defiance, Yldus recognised, saying nothing as the man launched into a litany of curses, only a few of which he recognised.

‘Whatever it is you came here for,’ the human gasped out, the edges of his mouth tinged with blood. ‘Gold, steel, food … we have barely any. Take it and go. Leave the rest of us in peace.’

Rejection. Yldus still said nothing, merely watching as the man continued to leak out onto the earth, merely waiting until he drew in a ragged breath.

‘Spare me,’ he finally gasped.

Bargaining.

‘Spare my life,’ he croaked again, ‘help me and—’

‘No.’

‘What?’ The man appeared shocked that such was even a possible answer.

‘You ask the unnatural,’ Yldus replied. ‘You are here, beneath our feet. We are netherling. Because of this, you are going to die. It will not be swift. It will not be merciful. But it will happen. Ours is the right to take. Yours … the right to die.’

‘Then do it,’ the human spat back.

‘To demand is not your right. We require something in this city. You will offer it to us.’

‘Why should I? Why would I? You’ve killed …’ He paused to gasp, hacking viciously.

‘We have. We do.’ Yldus turned his gaze to the burning skyline. ‘To kill, to bleed, to die. This is simply what it means to be netherling.’ He glanced back at the man. ‘What does it mean to be human, overscum?’

‘It means … it …’

‘Hard to say, I realise. Females may only be concerned with your breed as to how much you glut their sikkhuns, but I have taken great pains to learn about your breed. It’s been difficult, but I have learned something.

‘To be human,’ he said, ‘is to deny. It is to fight, to flee, to beg or to pray, despite that each action leads to only one outcome. Your people can run, but we can run faster. Your people can fight, but we can kill them. Your people can pray …’ He glanced down at the man, taking note of the chain hanging from his neck. ‘Hasn’t worked so well for you, has it?