Tome of the Undergates

‘Who needs to die?’ he asked.

‘Pirates,’ Lenk replied.

Gariath ran his obsidian glare from one end of the ship to the other in long, patient stares.

‘Which ones are the pirates?’

‘What do you mean, “Which ones are the pirates?”’

‘You all look the same to me,’ Gariath grunted, folding his arms over his chest. ‘Ugly, stupid, smelly.’

‘So look for the ugliest, stupidest and smelliest ones and give it your best guess,’ Lenk replied. ‘Are you going to help or not?’

The dragonman’s thick red legs tensed. His weight shifted to the foot resting on the pirate’s skull. Lenk winced and turned away at the sound of something cracking, the sight of something grey and sticky oozing out onto the blood-soaked deck. Gariath snorted.

‘Maybe.’

Contrary to what her elders had said of the teeming race, Kataria didn’t find humans entirely awful. The only thing that truly annoyed her about them was their grossly underrated ability to adapt. It was a subject of routine discussion amongst those few shicts who grew old enough to stop killing their round-eared foes and start theorising about better ways to kill them.

‘They’re just monkeys, of course,’ it had often been said. ‘They spend their whole lives searching for food and, when they don’t find it, they just run around in circles, smelling their fingers and eating their own scat.’

In the year since she had followed a silver-haired man out of the woods, she had been keeping track of her own addenda that she might someday offer by the fire. And, as the possibility of her living that long quickly began to dwindle, she thought, not for the first time, that the elders’ description neglected to mention that, when faced with food, humans proved particularly motivated.

And the Cragsmen surrounding her proved to be particularly clever monkeys.

Should’ve stayed in the rigging, she told herself, should’ve climbed back up. Easier target for hatchets, sure, but you could’ve shot more of them.

She had hardly expected them to figure out what arrows were, much less corner her against the railing. But they had adapted; they had found her, pursued her, showing the extreme discourtesy of not giving her enough room to shoot them.

And now a trio of them surrounded her, their eyes locked on the gleaming arrowhead that drifted menacingly from body to body.

One shot. One arrow was all that kept them at bay, each one hesitant to rush, to force her to choose him to plant the angry metal seed in. After that, they would be upon her faster than she could pull another one free of her quiver.

Her ears twitched, recalling the threats and declarations they had inflicted upon her from the safety of their ship. Those same threats, that same hunger lurked behind their eyes now, dormant for fear that she would see them in their gazes and extinguish them with an arrow.

The sea roared behind her; the terror of humans was an invitation for her. It would be better that way, she knew, to kill one and then hurl herself into the froth. She would die, certainly, but it was infinitely better than the alternative, better than submitting to the human disease.

A bit late for that, isn’t it? she asked herself, resentful. She forced that from her head, though, determined to think.

Options were unsurprisingly limited, however: shoot and die in the sea, shoot and die in the arms of a human. . skip the third party and just shoot herself?

‘Get down, Kat!’

She heard Asper’s voice first, Dreadaeleon’s second. The instant she recognised the alien babble emanating from the boy’s mouth, she fell to the deck as her assailants looked to the source.

Then screamed.

Fire roared over her head in a wicked plume, the smell of stray strands of her own hair burning filled her nostrils. The stench of burning flesh, however, quickly overpowered it, just as the angry howl of flame overpowered the shrieks of the Cragsmen. She could feel the deck reverberate as feet thundered past her, carrying walking pyres over the railing to plunge into the water below with a hiss.

She got up, patted her head for any stray flames, then looked at the fast-fading plumes of steam rising from the sea.

That works, too.

‘Are you all right?’ Asper’s voice was joined by the sound of bronze on wood as she dragged Quillian to the shict’s position. ‘One moment. I can check you over as soon as-’

‘Oh, yes, sure, be certain to check her over.’ Dreadaeleon wore a look of ire as he walked beside her, one hand folded neatly behind him, the other flicking embers from his fingers. ‘I mean, it’s not like I did something incredible like conjure fire from my own body heat.’

‘Like that’s hard,’ Kataria growled. She pointed out to sea. ‘Those don’t count, by the way.’

‘Don’t. . what?’

‘Only kills you do yourself count. Wizard kills aren’t real kills.’

‘Real kills?’ Asper looked up, disgusted. ‘These are human lives we’re taking!’

‘We?’ Kataria asked with a sneer. ‘What did you do aside from try to choke me with moral indignation?’

‘I. .’ The priestess stiffened, looking down with a frown. ‘I can fight.’

‘Don’t waste your breath on a reply, Priestess,’ came a mutter from the deck, ire unimpeded by her barely conscious stagger. Quillian rose to her feet on trembling legs, turning a scowl upon the shict. ‘One can hardly expect in-humans to understand things like mercy and compassion.’

‘What? Your sword is just for show, then?’ Kataria asked, smiling.

Quillian did not smile back, did not even offer a reply.

Perhaps it was the clarity that the hatchet blow had robbed her of that caused the Serrant’s mask of contempt to crack, or perhaps it was that she simply didn’t want to bother keeping it up anymore. But in that moment, the displays of righteous indignation and palls of virtuous disgust fell away from Quillian’s face.

Hate remained in abundance.

It was a pure hate that Kataria had seen before, albeit rarely, a hate that flowed like an ancestral disease. Quillian hated Kataria, hated her mother, hated her father, hated everything with pointed ears as she hated nothing else, not even the pirates swarming about the deck.

‘Go! GO! He’ll kill us all!’

Or running, anyway, she thought as a tattooed blur rushed past her.

The moment of tense readiness collectively and quickly faded into befuddlement as the Cragsmen rushed towards the companions and then, without even looking, right past them. Precious steel was forgotten, wounded men were ignored, terror shone through every inked face. Kataria watched, baffled and wondering whether shooting them in the back counted.

More men rushed past, these ones belonging to the Riptide’s crew. She knew the source of the panic before she even turned about, much less before she heard the screaming.

‘MONSTER!’ one of the Cragsmen howled. ‘RUN, GENTS! THE LOUTS BROUGHT A BLOODY DRAGONMAN!’

Blood-soaked, she thought, would be a more accurate descriptor of the towering creature striding casually after them. A small heap of broken bodies, twisted limbs and ripped flesh lay behind him: the brave and foolish few who had decided he might not be quite as tough as he looked.

Gariath looked as unconcerned as someone covered in gashes and blood could be. Almost bored, she thought, as he stepped upon, rather than over, the bodies before him, continuing a slow pursuit after the fleeing pirates.

That expression gave her the courage to shoot him a pair of scowls. Once for his cold, arrogant stride when he clearly had only about one more kill to his name than she did, if that. Her deepest