Black Halo

Thirty-Seven

The bottle was without label, without an identity: an amber-coloured stranger standing in an alley made of murky glass, plying stale, sickly poison that bore no guarantee of quality or survival.

And Denaos threw it back along with his head, quaffing down the nameless liquor as though it were water. His stomach no longer protested, long since having grown used to the sudden assaults. His mind barely registered the introduction of a new intoxication, having grown too used to them.

His eyes were bleary from sleeplessness and drink as he stared across the small clearing from the log he sat on. He squinted, trying to see the trees, the leaves, the forest and only the forest.

No good.

The dead woman was still there.

Still staring.

Still smiling.

And to think, he told himself, I had gotten so good at this.

After so many years, so much meditation, so much prayer, so much liquor, he had stopped seeing her. Perhaps, in the periphery of his eye, he might have seen her peering around a corner; in a blinking moment of fitful half-sleep he might have seen the flutter of her white skirt; at the back of his head he could sometimes feel her looking at him. But those had been needle visions, fleeting pricks of a pin against his flesh that existed only in the moment he felt them.

This vision …

This was more like a knife.

A knife sunk deep into his skin.

Twisting.

He had given up trying to ignore her; by this point, it just seemed rude. She clearly wasn’t going to go away. She wasn’t going to stop staring at him, no matter how much he drank or wept or screamed.

So he stared at the gaping wound in her opened neck, the blood that wept without end down her white throat, and tried to understand.

A hallucination, probably, he thought. I’ve been eating nothing but roaches for the past week, roaches known for spraying substances out of their anuses and probably undercooked, at that. Yeah, there’s just enough weirdness about that for hallucinations to be all but certain.

Of course, he reminded himself, he had seen her long before he had even sampled the bitter flavour of roach. It had all started back on the shore, amidst the corpse-strewn ruins. It had begun as soon as he heard the whispering, felt the slimy coils of the two-mouthed, angler-laden creature wrapping about his mind.

A poison of the mind, then, he reasoned. It would make sense for a demon to be able to sink her … or its claws into my brain and leave them there. It makes as much sense as anything else we know about demons, anyway. I should probably ask someone … not Lenk, though.

A wasted opportunity, he knew; Lenk had more experience than anyone else with demons. Denaos had reasoned as much when he looked over his shoulder after emerging from the surf the previous night, when he had seen the frogmen swarm over the sinking ship. When he had seen Lenk standing at the railing, staring out.

He hadn’t been sure if the young man was even looking at him, but he had turned away all the same. It would have been madness to go back, he reasoned then; it would have been callous to abandon Asper as she pulled away from him, shivering and nude and huddling on the beach, not so much as blinking as he scavenged a blanket to wrap around her.

And it was better to leave Lenk to die, he told himself. Yes, it was better to stay behind and watch him sink below the sea. You did the right thing … you asshole.

How Lenk had survived, he didn’t know. Why he had gone to Lenk after Lenk emerged from Asper silently stitching him up, he didn’t know. What led to him telling Lenk everything, about his deeper knowledge of demons on Teji, why he had never bothered to tell Lenk, why it wasn’t his fault and why he was glad Lenk was alive and why he knew he should have gone back but didn’t … he did not know.

And when Lenk looked at him, unblinking, expressionless, with absolutely no scorn, no hate, no surprise for what the rogue had done and said: ‘Uh-huh …’

Denaos wasn’t sure why he felt like vomiting afterwards.

‘That’s it,’ he whispered, his voice a hoarse croak. ‘Not hallucination, not madness, not demons. This is all just a manifestation of a guilty conscience, a plague born of shame. How do these things work again? You acknowledge them and they go away.’

He looked up. He blinked once. He sighed.

‘You’re not going away.’

The woman looked back at him and grinned. She didn’t say anything. She never said anything, except when he didn’t want her to, and then always the same thing.

‘Good morning, tall man.’

‘Good morning,’ he replied. ‘How are you today?’

She didn’t answer. She didn’t stop grinning.

‘Me, I’m fine,’ he continued. ‘I’m okay, anyway. Still alive … still healthy, mostly. My tastes are a lot more diverse lately. Not as much curry, but more roaches. Rich in fibre, probably. Good for the bowel movements.’

He cracked a grin. She grinned back.

‘Last night was a little hectic. Sorry I wasn’t there to say hello.’ He smacked his lips. ‘A friend was in trouble. Asper. You’d like her. She’s a priestess. A good one. Went to temple every day before she set out with us, you know. Still prays a lot … or she did, anyway. She’s a little bitter these days, losing faith in … pretty much everything. I can see it in her eyes.’

He glanced up, frowning.

‘I saw it in your eyes a lot. In the beginning, at least, you weren’t sure how to keep going. Not so much towards the end there … and …’ His lips trailed from words to the bottle, sucking out another gulp of whisky. ‘Yeah, it’s cheap. I’m going to have to piss a lot later.’ He chuckled. ‘I think Togu thought it was quality. It was in his cabinet. Maybe he was saving it for something special.’

His nostrils quivered at the scent of smoke.

‘Yeah … that was kind of special, wasn’t it?’ he laughed bitterly. ‘I know you didn’t like fire, but it’s sort of what we do now. He betrayed us, and betrayal …’ He stared at the bottle, wincing. ‘I had to take it. I wasn’t going to, but then I saw this.’

He held up his hand, the thick glove swaddling his skin.

‘I remembered it. I couldn’t leave it. I’m … I’m so sorry.’

His wrist tensed. There was a faint click. Before he could even blink, a thin spike of a blade leapt from the bottom of the wrist, dull and lightless. He stared at it through trembling eyes.

‘A Long, Slow Kiss,’ he whispered. ‘You hated it. You thought it was what was wrong with everything about the city. I … it reminded me of you. Silf help me …’ He winced. ‘No, you hated Silf, too. You loved Talanas. Asper, she’s a Talanite. She does …’

He drew back the tiny latch hidden in the glove, the spike retracting into the leather until it stuck with another clicking sound.

‘I don’t want her to see it. I don’t want her to know anything about it.’ He looked up, stared at her as she grinned at him. ‘And that’s why you’ve got to go.’

She grinned. Her neck continued to weep.

‘Please.’

She wasn’t answering.

‘Go.’

She wasn’t listening.

‘If I keep seeing you, I won’t be able to keep it hidden. If it’s not hidden, if they know, they’ll … they’ll leave me. I’ll never be able to make things right.’ He looked at her pleadingly. ‘But I’m trying. I’m trying. We’re after this tome — it opens gates. It can communicate with heaven. If I keep it out of the hands of demons, gates stay closed and I can talk to Silf, I can talk to Talanas, I can talk to any of them. Everyone can! They’ll be happy! Everything will be fine again and I … I’ll …’ He swallowed back tears. ‘It’ll work. I know it’ll work. Everything will be fine after that happens. They’ll forgive me. You’ll forgive me … won’t you?’

She did not answer.

‘Say yes.’

She grinned.

‘Please.’

The wound in her neck grinned broader.

‘Say something.’

‘Good morning, tall man.’

His wrist snapped, sent the bottle flying at her. She was gone when it reached her. It shattered against a tree trunk, a rain of murky glass falling upon the sand. Tears of whisky wept silently down the mossy bark.

The man was, Bralston thought, exactly as he remembered him.

Perhaps a little paler, with no more deceitful tan to mask his lack of a Djaalman’s deeper bronze, but beyond that, completely the same. He still stood tall and lanky, long arms and long fingers. His face was still the kind of smooth, scarless angle that made one inherently suspicious of anyone who could maintain such a look for so long.

Bralston winced as he heard the bottle shatter against the tree.

The lunacy, though … that was new.

His eyes had a sunken desperation to them, as though they were trying to burrow deeper into his skull. The reek of liquor and fear was apparent even from the twenty feet Bralston stood, staring from the bushes.

He looked the same, but this was not the same man Bralston remembered from Cier’Djaal.

This was not the man Bralston had seen standing beside her, the Houndmistress, with a smug chin raised high and eyes looking down upon the common man. This was not the parasite who had clung to her elbow at social functions, the insect that cowered behind her while she led the raids against the Jackals. This was not the liar’s martyr that had been mourned with her death when he had disappeared from the palace on the night she was found dead, his blood covering the halls as she soaked in her own.

This man seemed far too broken, far too weary to bear the responsibility for over fourteen hundred dead by fire, stone and knife in the riots.

But there was no doubt. Bralston had seen him before. Bralston had heard the news of his disappearance. Bralston knew this man was supposed to be dead.

But he wasn’t. This man stood here, while his mistress had bled to death. This man stood here, wearing a glove with a hidden blade, the favoured weapon of the Jackals. This man stood here, pleading the air for forgiveness, muttering familiar words, describing familiar crimes.

There was nothing to explain this beyond cold, ugly logic … or a miracle.

Miracles were created by gods.

Gods did not exist.

Bralston narrowed his eyes, levelled his finger at the man from the underbrush. At a word, the electric blue leapt to his fingertip. At another, the man would be ash; a short death, a clean death. It would be over far sooner than this man deserved. But it would be over. Fourteen hundred bodies would be accounted for.

Fourteen hundred and one, he corrected himself as he called the word to mind.

The leaves parted from across the clearing, just noisy enough to keep the word from his lips. He turned and saw her, the priestess, approaching from the underbrush. The word instantly slipped from his mind as a frown found its way to his lips.

She looked exactly the same … as someone else.

There was an emptiness in her eyes, not as consuming as the woman he had seen back in Cier’Djaal, the woman who had desperately tried to fold in on herself, but it was there. In her hazel eyes, he could see dead questions, dead dreams, dead hopes. It had all been replaced with a vague, gloomy wonder.

‘What is the point?’

A question that he knew he could not answer, despite how much he wanted to. A question he knew this man could not answer, despite the way the priestess looked at him as she approached.

And yet … approach she did, with a barely alive question in her eyes.

To the man he was so close to incinerating.

Right before her eyes.

He knew what would happen. He knew that the emptiness in her eyes would consume her wholly, that question snuffed out and leaving nothing but a wonder without an answer. No matter whom she had chosen to place her faith in, faith was all she had left.

And he decided, lowering his finger, that fourteen hundred and two lives was too many to give this man credit for.

Bralston would wait, then. Wait until she found herself with a cause. Wait until he found himself alone. It would be a monumental task, to keep himself from killing this man, this traitor, this murderer, this liar.

But he was a Librarian.

He could wait.

Denaos was a man of many fragments, Asper decided as he whirled on her. The masks he had worn, delicate porcelain facades that guarded him, had begun to crumble in different areas. The visage of the cynic, the sarcastic, the indifferent was gone from his face.

Caught without his masks, his face quickly tried to find a new one to don.

At the jaw, there was a clench of animal fury. Around the eyes, weariness and desperation. In the furrow of his brow, worry that bordered on panic. Which of these was the face that lay beneath them all, she was not sure. Nor did she care.

This wasn’t about him.

She knew exactly why she stepped forward, however, under his wide and wary stare, before his tense and trembling form. She knew exactly why there could be no stepping back, no retreat back to contemplation and prayer.

That sort of thing never got anyone anywhere. This she knew now.

‘You don’t look well,’ she said.

‘Thanks, I haven’t been sleeping well,’ Denaos replied.

‘You didn’t sleep at all last night.’

‘How would you know?’

‘I didn’t, either.’

Not for lack of trying, she knew. Exhaustion had come to claim her several times. Her eyes had fallen shut only as long as it took to see grins in the darkness, hear her own shrieks and hear no one reply back.

I asked … I begged … it was my moment of uttermost need. I always believed that-

No, no, NO! She gritted her teeth, forced the thoughts down her throat and into her stomach. No more dwelling on it. No more fear. If you fear, you start wondering. If you wonder, you ask why. Her frown broadened into a bitter gash. If you ask, no one ever answers.

She was keenly aware of the absence of a heavy weight that had once been upon her chest. To leave her pendant, her symbol, was blasphemous, at least as much as the suggestion she made by unlacing the front of her robes. The Gods, she was aware, would not approve.

This wasn’t about them, either.

Bitterly, she hoped they were watching right now.

Though what was happening, she wasn’t so certain of anymore. Nor was Denaos, it seemed, as he backed away from her like a hound beaten, glancing about nervously, hoping for a reward and fearing a lash, too scared to sit still, too curious to run outright. That was fine, she thought; his input was not needed.

This was her decision.

His back struck the tree and his eyes stopped their fervent flutter, focusing on her as she approached him. Her legs did not tremble as she feared they might have. Resolve flooded her body, turned to iron in her blood, so heavy that, with one more step, she tripped and was sent falling into him, her arms flying out to seize him.

His body was cold, she thought as her hands slithered under his vest, his flesh clammy and sweaty beneath as she pressed against him. She had expected him to be warm. His breathing was quick, erratic and hare-like. As she leaned up, thrusting her lips at him like weapons, she hadn’t expected him to pull back, his eyes fighting against the urge to close and give in.

‘You don’t know what you’re-’ he began to whisper, silencing as she pressed a finger to his lips.

‘I do,’ she replied. ‘I know exactly.’

He pulled back again, but she was swifter. She forced her lips upon his, pried his apart with her tongue. They came loose willingly enough after a time, as she had known they would. The man was, after all, a felon. He wanted this as much as she did. His reluctance was only due to her forwardness.

She confirmed this as his tongue came out to touch hers, hers wrapping about his, searching his mouth with a purpose she wasn’t aware of. His body trembled; she pulled him all the closer. He made a soft moan; she drowned it with a chest-borne growl. She could feel him staring at her; she shut her eyes tighter. She didn’t want to look at him. She just wanted to-

She was spared thinking of an answer as she felt his arms deftly slither up between them, breaking her hold. His hands lashed out with a fury normally reserved for combat, slamming against her and knocking her back. The iron resolve left her, a rush of leaden weakness flooding her and sending her crashing to the ground.

And when she met his gaze, it was not a look normally reserved for companions that he struck her with.

‘I don’t know what happened to you on the ship before I got there,’ he whispered. ‘I don’t even exactly know what happened after. But no matter what it was, you don’t want this.’

‘I do,’ she said, drawing herself up to her knees. ‘It’s my choice. Mine.’

‘Not if you keep doing this, it isn’t.’

‘You’re a brigand,’ she whispered spitefully. ‘What do you care where you get it? You think I couldn’t do better? I’m the one settling here.’

‘And you chose to do that?’

‘It … it doesn’t matter,’ she said, wincing. ‘I need this. I need to know that I can still … that it’s still my …’

‘Not this way.’ He turned. ‘Not with me.’

She watched him stalk away, his shoulders heavy, weighing down his stride. She whispered to him on a breathless, stagnant voice.

‘I have been through …’ She shook her head violently. ‘I’ve given so much. And every time I ask for a blessing, try to take a favour, I am denied.’ She stared fire into his spine. ‘At the very least, I thought I could count on you to do what you always do. I should have remembered that what you always do is fail me in every way conceivable. You’re pathetic.’

‘I can live with that, at least,’ he replied, continuing to stalk away.

‘I hate you.’

‘That, too.’

He disappeared into the forest. And she was left alone. She did not weep.

Who would hear it?

The stream continued through the forest, Lenk discovered, and its whispering voice went with it. It murmured between trees, whimpered under rocky brooks, roared through hard ground, grew softer as it thinned into shallows, grew louder as it deepened. Lenk followed it all, listening to it.

It was probably a bad sign that he was beginning to understand it.

Never long enough to get a complete sentence, sometimes not even a full word; the stream was always freezing as he walked past, its flows and ebbs becoming hissing, crackling ice every time he laid eyes on it. But when his own breath grew soft and the water was thin enough to freeze with barely a sound, he could hear it.

The words were ancient, or alien, or simply incomprehensible. He could not understand them, anyway, but he could grasp the message behind them. They were not happy words spoken from a pleasant voice. They uttered, decreed, spewed messages of hate, vengeance, duty.

And betrayal.

Always betrayal.

Every other word seemed to carry that frustrated, seething hatred born of treachery. It rose from the stream, hammering at the ice with its voice, its words mercifully muffled behind the frigid sheets.

It was probably a worse sign that the voice was familiar.

‘I remember it,’ he whispered, ‘in the forest on my first night here. It spoke of betrayal then, too.’

‘This island is a tomb,’ the voice answered. ‘The dead have seeped into it with all their hate and their sorrow. Most have had centuries to let the earth consume them and their emotions with them. For some hatreds, that’s not nearly long enough.’

‘They sound so familiar, like I’ve heard them before.’

‘One of us has.’

He frowned, but did not ask the voice anything more. He pressed on through the forest, following the winding stream and its angry voice. He couldn’t tell if it was speaking to him. He didn’t want to know. If he did, and if it was, he would want to turn back.

And turning back, returning to them, was not an option.

It never was.

Before long, he found the stream’s end. Like an icy tongue from a great, black maw, it slithered into the shadows of a great cave set in the hillside. Here, the forest was at its deepest stage of decay. The leaves hung black off trees that had been brimming with greenery only a few paces back. The air was stale, stagnant and frigid.

It was most certainly a bad sign that he wasn’t bothered by any of this.

He watched as the ice continued without him, continuing down its freezing, murmuring path into the darkness. His ears pricked up, however, as for a few fleeting moments, he could hear them: words, clear and coherent, echoing in the gloom.

‘Don’t like it,’ a voice whispered. ‘Don’t like it and don’t want to go in there. Not with him …’

‘We have our orders,’ another replied. ‘They’ve got to die, all of them.’

‘They helped us at the battle, though, killed more demons than any-’

‘Don’t act like you haven’t been thinking of it. They’re unnatural. Abominations. Make it swift. In the back. Just don’t look in his eyes.’

‘Follow me,’ a third voice, cold as the air outside. ‘This cave is supposed to lead to a way around the enemy. We will cleanse this earth of their taint. Our duty is upheld.’

His eyes widened at the sound of it, the feel of it. It rang inside his ears as he had felt it ring inside his head before. Its rasping chill was all too familiar, the force behind it all too close to him. He heard it as it echoed inside the cavern.

He heard it as it spoke to him.

‘Go inside.’

‘What will I find there?’ he asked.

‘Nothing good.’

‘Then why should I?’

‘We will only find truth in the dark places.’

‘I’ve gone this far living a lie. It’s not been all bad.’

The voice didn’t need to respond to that. Immediately, the memories of the previous night, of the screaming, of the backs of his companions, came flooding into his mind. He sighed, lowering his head.

‘I’m afraid.’

‘Wise.’

‘I don’t understand what’s happening.’

‘You will.’

An urge, not his own, rose within him and bid him to turn around. He beheld the figure instantly, standing upon a nearby ridge. A man, it appeared, cloaked in shadow with white hair. Lenk took in his harsh, angular features immediately, ignoring them as soon as he spied the hilt of a sword peeking over the man’s shoulder.

But before Lenk could even recall he didn’t have a weapon of his own, he found himself arrested by the man’s stare. His eyes were a vast blue that seemed to take in Lenk as a shark swallows fish. They stared at him: intense, narrow …

Bereft of pupils.

The man approached. Lenk found it hard to keep track of him as he walked down the ridge. His form was there, and not there, vanishing each time he stepped into a shadow, appearing when the wind blew dust that became his body. He took a step and was somewhere else, moving with an erratic fluidity Lenk had only seen in dreams.

He did not move as the man approached, held by his great stare. He did not move as the man walked right through him, unflinching. He turned and watched him disappear into the shadows of the cavern, vanishing completely the moment his foot touched gloom.

‘This … this isn’t real,’ he told himself. ‘But it feels so …’ His head began to ache. ‘Have I seen this before?’

‘One of us has.’

He turned and saw more figures approaching over the ridge: more men, though softer of body and eye than the one that had just come. They approached in the same winking step, and each time they appeared in his vision, their faces were harder set. There was fear there, hate there, intent there.

They were clad in old armour, carried old blades, old spears. Their cloaks trailed behind them, stained and battered and torn. Clasping them together upon their breasts, Lenk saw a sigil.

An iron gauntlet clenching thirteen obsidian arrows.

‘The House,’ he whispered. He hadn’t seen it since he had first accepted the task of pursuing the tome, but at a glimpse, he recalled it instantly. ‘The House of the Vanquishing Trinity, the mortals who marched against the demons.’

‘Mortals have the capacity to march against many things. Enemies and allies alike.’

‘They’re going to …?’ Lenk began to ask.

‘You know the answer to that.’

‘They’re going into the cave.’

‘Answers lie in there.’

‘Should I …?’

The voice said nothing. He was left standing, watching as the men vanished, one by one, into the cavern. He was left standing as the river fell silent. He was left standing, watching, wondering. Wiser, he thought, not to follow ghostly hallucinations into lightless caverns born of dead forests.

But he did. Going back, after all, was not an option.

It never was.