The Skybound Sea

TWENTY-TWO

“Are you asleep?”

“Yes,” Lenk replied.

“Are you dreaming?”

“Mm.”

“About what?”

“Nothing,” he said through a yawn. “Nothing at all.”

“That doesn’t sound very good.”

“No, it’s nice. I can’t see any fire. I can’t hear any voices.”

“Should I let you sleep, then?”

“I think I’d prefer being awake.”

“No, you wouldn’t.”

He opened his eyes at that. Kataria lay next to him, her arm coiled protectively around his neck. Her eyes were closed, her body rose and fell with quiet breaths, growling in a dream as he moved beneath her. Unstirring. Unwaking.

The starlight was gone. The dim glow of the kelp had become dimmer, leaving only a vague imagination of what light was supposed to be like. Lenk stared into the shadows of the chasm. Out of the corner of his eye, something slithered away, retreating into the darkness.

“Go back to sleep,” something whispered, somewhere down there.

He blinked. Tears stung at his eyes. The air was thick and lay across his bare chest like a blanket. Even if he could convince himself that this was simply part of a dream, the sensation of gritty sand clawing its way between the flesh of his buttocks was distinctly waking.

For a moment, he wondered if he ought not to just go back to sleep. He wondered if he should lay there, with her body pressed against him, with her scent still cloying his nostrils, and cling to it as though it were a dream.

He was still wondering that as he rose to his feet, but only until he found his trousers. After that moment, even though he wondered why exactly he felt compelled to follow the voice into the darkness, he knew that he would feel better if he went into the unknown wearing pants.

Shadows consumed everything as he descended. Sound went first, so that even the crunching of his feet on the sand was inaudible. Light was next, the purple glow eaten alive. And then he, too, felt as though he were dis appearing into the darkness as it ate everything.

Or almost everything.

Somewhere, incredibly distant and far too close, there was the noise of something sliding across the sand. In glimpses, he caught the reflections of light that wasn’t there against something slick and glistening.

Something was down here with him.

He wondered if that weren’t a good enough reason to turn around.

He didn’t. He had to keep going. To protect Kataria, to find a way out of the chasm. He had a whole slew of reasons he didn’t believe. Perhaps it was just primitive, mothlike stupidity that drew him toward the light.

That light. That tiny little blue pinprick at the very end of his vision that grew steadily brighter as he approached it. He felt compelled to follow it.

After all, it was talking to him.

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” it said from somewhere far away.

“It’s fine.”

“It’s harder to hear you. You were loud before, but now. . sorry. Could you hear me? Up there?”

It was no more than a whisper, faint like a fish’s breath. And because it was so faint, he knew it. He had heard it before. The light grew bigger, not brighter, as he drew closer.

“Yeah,” he said. “Clearly. You tried to warn me.”

“You seemed afraid. I thought I should try to warn you. Did she kill you? Are you dead right now?”

“I’m talking to you, aren’t I?”

“That doesn’t tell me anything. We always talk, even when we’re dead. And when we’re dead, we do nothing but talk.”

“Oh,” he replied. “Then, no. I’m alive.”

“That’s good.”

A great fragment of rock was all that stood between him and the light, something immense and jagged that had been of something even more immense and less jagged. The glow spilled out around it, a blue light that bloomed expectantly.

He had occasionally had cause to doubt the interest of the Gods in the affairs of men before. Here was proof, this single opportunity that Khetashe gave him to turn around from the disembodied voice in the darkness and return to a warm, naked body in the sand.

He had only himself to blame, he knew, as he rounded the stone and beheld the girl.

A girl.

A very young girl.

Despite the gray of her hair and the sword in her hand, she couldn’t have been more than fifteen years. At least not past the age where people stop being a mess of angles and acne and crooked grins that they think look good and start being humans. She had such a grin, a big, bright one full of teeth situated directly between big, blue eyes and a big, black line opening up her throat.

It was the grin that unnerved him. More than the spear jutting through her chest and pinning her to the black shape behind her, more than the sheet of ice that encased her like a luminescent coffin, the fact that she was still smiling as though she might ask him to go pick flowers at any moment made him want to look away.

He still wasn’t sure why he didn’t.

“Don’t stare,” she chided. “It’s rude.”

“Sorry,” he said.

Her smile didn’t diminish. Her eyes didn’t waver, the blue glow from them remained steady. She didn’t even look at him. Yet there was something, a crackle in the ice, a strain at the edge of her grin, that made him turn away.

“Do you have a name?” he asked.

“No.”

“Oh. Well, I’m-”

“I know.”

He was aware that he was staring again. As it happened, not staring at a talking dead girl was somewhat more difficult than he anticipated. He cleared his throat, forcing his eyes away again.

“Sorry, I just thought you’d be older.”

“I am very old,” she replied.

“Less dead, then.”

Though, there was little reason why he should expect her to be that. The last one he met was even more dead than this one.

The image flashed into his mind. A man encased in ice in a cold, dark place, corpses entombed with him, arrows jutting from his body, eyes wide, mouth open and screaming. He thought of it for only a moment, the thought too unnerving for anything more.

“I remember him,” the girl said before he could.

He cringed. Not that it was all that surprising that she could see what was happening in his head, but having people in his mind was something he had vowed to never get used to. She noticed this. . or he assumed she did. It was hard to tell with her face frozen in that grin.

“He talks to me,” she said.

“The man in the ice?”

“Him, too. We all talk to each other, through him. We could hear you through him, but faintly. You keep yelling at him. He doesn’t like that.”

He didn’t ask. He didn’t want to. But he knew all the same. The voice was gone, the chill that came with it was gone, but their absence left a place dark and cold inside him. He could feel her voice in there, and between the echoes, he could hear-

He tried not to think about it. Tried not to think at all. It was harder than it sounded with all the silence.

“Ask me.”

Her voice jarred him from his internal stupor. He stared up into her broad grin. She stared through him.

“Ask me,” she repeated.

“I don’t want to,” he said.

“I know. Ask me, anyway.”

A voice telling him what to do would have been simpler, he thought. He could just say he had no choice, had to do what it said. But it was him that stared at her, the dead girl that talked, him that sighed, him that spoke.

“What are you?”

“No.”

“What?”

“That’s the wrong question. Ask the right one,” she urged.

“What do you want?”

She looked unsettled at that. He wasn’t quite sure how he could tell that, what with her grin unchanging and eyes unblinking. But the silence was too deep, lasted too long.

“I wanted you to come visit me,” she said softly. “I wanted you to survive.”

“And that’s why you’ve been screaming in my head? All of you?” Ire crept into his voice. “You were screaming so loud I wanted to smash my head open.”

“I know. I heard that part.”

“Then why didn’t you stop?”

“We. . it’s hard to hear down here. Everything is muffled. It’s so dark. There’s nothing but dark down here and I. .” There was pain in her voice, pain older than she was. “We can’t hear each other. We can speak, but we can’t hear. But you. . I could. . we could hear you. We wanted you to be safe. We wanted to talk to you.”

“So you’ve been slowly driving me insane with whispering so we could have a conversation? That’s insane!”

“NO!”

Her voice cracked the ice, sent veins of white webbing across the face of her tomb. Her grin remained frozen, but the voice echoing from inside her mouth didn’t belong in a human being, let alone a girl.

But she was neither.

“Don’t call us that! Don’t say that!” she howled in a voice not her own. “They looked at us that way! They called us that for being what we are! Better than they are! BETTER! They betrayed us! We fought back and they called us insane and they killed us for it! We never wanted this! NEVER!”

He hadn’t ever said the words, not those words, not as she had spoken them. But they were known to him. The anger behind them was his, the hurt bleeding from them was his, the fury, the hatred, the cold. .

That voice had spoken in him. It had coursed through his mind as surely as it coursed through her mouth, with all its cold anger.

He didn’t have to ask what she was now. He knew by that voice. She was like him, like the man in the ice had been, like the voices in his head. He knew. He didn’t want to know.

It had been the wrong question.

The cracks in the ice receded suddenly, solidifying into a solid, translucent coffin once more. Her grin was unchanged.

“Sorry,” she whimpered. “He gets loud sometimes. I can’t stop him from doing. . that.”

“Neither could I. It’s all right.”

“It’s not all right. He’s angry with you. He’s worried about you. He thinks you’re going to kill yourself.”

“I’m not.”

“You are. I know why you’re here. I know what you’re after. He told me. We came here to find her, just like you did.”

“Her?”

The girl’s eyes widened a hair’s breadth. The light beaming from her stare grew, chasing away the darkness and bathing the chasm in a soft blue illumination. Lenk’s eyes widened, too, without light, without glow, without anything beyond horror dawning on his face.

The walls of the chasm were glistening.

The walls were moving.

The walls were alive.

They writhed, twisting over each other, bunching up as if shy and recoiling from him before deigning to twist about and display an under-side covered in quivering, circular suckers blowing mucus-slick kisses at him.

Tentacles. In many different sizes. Dozens of them, reaching around the wall and coiling about each other like some slick, rubbery bouquet of flowers. They reached, they groped, they searched, they sought.

Not for him. They seemed to take no notice of him at all, slithering blindly about the stone, slapping the sand, some as big as trees. Something caught his eye, a flash of pale ivory amidst the coils. Stupid as he knew it to be, he leaned forward, squinting, trying to make out what he thought to be a tiny spot of something pale, white, soft. .

Flesh?

He raised a hand out of instinct, not at all intending to actually touch it. But as his fingers drifted just a bit closer, the tentacles shifted, split apart and with a slick sucking sound, something lashed out and seized him by the wrist.

It came with such gentleness that the thought to pull back didn’t even occur to him. Pale fingers groped blindly down his wrist to find his fingers. An arm, perfectly pale, perfectly slender, blossomed from the tentacles, reaching for him with tender desperation.

It sought him, searched his flesh, taking each of his digits between two slender fingers and feeling each of his knucklebones in turn, sliding up and down between white fingertips. It was as though this was something it had never felt before, this touch of a human.

“She is reaching out,” the girl said from behind him. “Her children are calling to her. She claws against that dark place where we put her, trying to escape. But she can’t escape, not yet. She can’t see. She can only barely hear. So she reaches, and she searches for something to touch.”

He knew. Not by touch, but by the warmth behind her fingertips. The warmth he felt on his brow, in his mind, in his body. The warmth that had engulfed him, told him that he deserved happiness, that gave him his life.

He knew her touch.

He knew Ulbecetonth.

And she knew him. How, he wasn’t sure, but her hand tightened. Her nails dug into the skin of his wrist, clenched him as though she sought to pull him into whatever moist hell she reached from.

As the shadow fell over him, he realized her goal wasn’t to pull him in, but merely to hold him. All the better for the giant tentacle swaying overhead to crush him.

He leapt backward, leaving his skin and blood staining her nails. The tentacle came smashing down, shaking the walls and sending its fellows writhing angrily. More reached out, wrapped around his ankles, tried to pull him back. He beat wildly at them, seizing a sharp fragment of coral and jamming it into the soft flesh of the tentacle. It didn’t so much as quiver. Only with great pain did he pull his leg free and scramble away from the tentacle.

He stalked back toward the girl, rubbing his wrist as Ulbecetonth’s slender arm slipped back between the mass of flesh, disappearing.

“And why. . is she here?” he asked.

“Right question,” the girl said. “This is not an island. This is a prison.”

His eyes grew wide. Jaga held Ulbecetonth. And somewhere on the island, the Shen held the key to her cell. But for what? To release her? Did they even know what they had?

“She’s. . coming closer.” He turned back to the girl. “You called me down here to warn me.”

The girl grinned.

“To warn you, to talk to you, to beg you,” she said.

“What for?”

“Not to die.”

“That’s kind of out of my hands.”

“It is not. Ulbecetonth is coming. The walls between her world and ours are weakened, she’s scratched them so thin. She is coming. And she knows you are here. She hates you. She will kill you. You can survive.” Her voice grew soft, fearful of itself. “If you let him back in.”

“No.”

“He can save you.”

“It’s not a he. It’s an it. An it that tried to make me kill my friends, filled my head with. . with something horrifying.”

“To protect you. He only wants you to live. Your flesh is too weak.”

“It’s been strong enough so far.”

“It has not. You didn’t hurt the tentacle, did you? You couldn’t hurt her.”

“That’s not-”

“And you never could. He hurt the demons. He killed the Abysmyths, through you. Without him, you will die. And not by her hand.”

“What do you mean?”

“Look at your shoulder.”

He did. Even the unearthly blue light was not enough to mask the sickly coloration of glistening pink and blackening flesh from where he had attempted to cauterize his own wound. An infection, thriving.

“It was. . it was fine earlier!” he said. “I didn’t even feel it.”

“He mended it. He kept you whole.” Her voice quaked, something else seeping in. “But you sent him away. You may not even survive long enough for Ulbecetonth to have a chance to kill you.”

“Then I’ll find the tome first, keep it from happening. They need that to summon her, right?”

The girl said nothing.

“Or. . if worst comes to worst, I’ll just. . leave. I’ll go somewhere else.”

“You had the chance to do that. You had a dozen chances to do that. You could do that right now, but you won’t.”

“He doesn’t command me! Neither do you!”

“No,” the girl said. “Neither of us. But you’re still here. You know what Ulbecetonth will do when she returns. You’ve seen what her children do without her. You could leave, you could leave it all, you could watch everything drown.”

He said nothing.

“But you won’t,” she said. “And you won’t survive without him.”

“I don’t believe in fate.”

“Fate and inevitability are not the same things.”

“I don’t believe in that, either.”

“Very hard to lie to someone who can look into your head.” Her sigh sent a cloud of fog across the face of her tomb. “Go, Lenk. The chasm ends soon, rises up to the place you need to be if you follow it. But you know you won’t get far without him.”

He stared at her. She stared through him. He glared. She grinned. He sighed, turned on his heel. He had taken two steps before he paused and asked without looking back.

“Who is he?”

She said nothing for a moment. When she spoke, her voice trembled.

“If you really want to know. . ask me again. And I’ll tell you.”

He did not ask.

He walked away.

Trying to ignore the pain in his shoulder and the light that chased him.