Tome of the Undergates

were here first.’

‘Right …’

Her father had always been hard to deny, for both herself and her tribe. He had shed little blood himself in years past, but had kept their home free of filth and degenerates. It was his leadership that turned back three individual human armies seeking to cross their domain. It was his confidence that led the three tribes to unite under him.

It was his plans, the houses that burned, the wells that were poisoned, the lack of mercy for anything with a round ear, regardless of age or sex, that kept humans far away from their borders.

No one could say what might happen if a human did contaminate a shict. Her father had made certain there would never be an opportunity. Now that Kataria herself felt it, felt the distance, felt the need to ask what it meant to be a shict, his speeches and sermons made much more sense than they ever had when she was small.

And yet, she wasn’t quite ready to pick up arrows and start firing.

It could have been something else that infected her, something else that made her forget the Howling. She had been around many humans, after all, and other races as well. Any number of them could have been the cause.

But then, she told herself, you wouldn’t have been exposed to any of them if not for him.

Kataria lay back upon the sand. Her head throbbed, ached with the weight that had been put upon it. Her father was right, she knew; humans had done too much damage to be considered anything but a threat. She was proof enough. But if he was right, why hadn’t she done what needed to be done in the first place?

Opinions contradicting her father’s were few, but there was one that could be counted on always.

At that, she folded her arms behind her head and stared up at the sky, wondering what her mother would have said.

‘Well, it’s not like it’s some great loss for a human to die,’ the crisp, sharp voice came cutting on the wind, ‘but when is it really necessary?’

‘You killed humans at K’tsche Kando,’ Kataria retorted, ‘many.’

‘Hundreds.’ There was a morbid laughter on the wind. ‘But that was different.’

‘Forgive me for not seeing how.’

‘A human encroaching on our land is no different from any other race encroaching on our land. If they stay on their own side, they can do whatever they want. It’s when they start pretending they belong somewhere else that they need to be culled.’

‘Not quite the message I’d hoped to receive.’

‘Well, you’re forgetting a very important aspect.’

‘What’s that?’

‘I didn’t go to K’tsche Kando for any shict. I went there for you.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘If you did, you wouldn’t be hallucinating now, would you?’

‘I thought this was the Howling,’ Kataria said, frowning. ‘Am. . am I actually going mad?’

‘If you choose to. After all, no matter what your father says, it’s all down to choice. He didn’t want me to go, but I chose to, because if the humans set one foot upon our sister tribe’s land unchallenged, they’d come to our land, too, bolder and more virulent than ever.’

A brief silence hung over them. Kataria absently sighed up to the sky, hoping that whatever was looking down upon her did so with a frown that matched her own.

‘Did you choose to die there?’ she asked.

‘Can you choose that? I chose to kill there. What do you choose?’

‘I’m. . not sure.’

‘Then what do you want?’

Kataria sat up, staring at her hands as they lay in her lap, calloused and well used to the shape of the bow, feeling the breeze kick the feathers in her hair against her notched ears, hearing the distant howl upon the wind.

‘I. .’ she said reluctantly, ‘I want to feel like a shict again.’

‘Then,’ the sky and coconut answered as one, ‘you already know the answer.’

The hunting knife seemed much heavier when she picked it up. Her body felt like lead as she pulled herself up to her feet. The realisation that they were right was so thick as to choke her when she took in a deep breath.

The coconut with its eye put out now looked cold, stale. In the moments before the last of its milk had sloshed onto the sand, its face had changed. No longer did it demand explanation or look at her with disapproval. It merely seemed to stare blankly, as if to ask what it had done wrong to deserve such treatment.

She had no answer for it, no answer for herself as she tucked the knife into her belt and turned to join her companion for the last time. All she had left was a question that she asked herself with every footstep.

How else could it end?

Thirty-Four

WHAT IS LEFT

Irontide no longer loomed against the orange setting of the sun. Irontide was no longer capable of looming. Instead, the massive fortress sagged, leaned drunkenly with a long, granite sigh as though it strained to clutch at the gaping hole in its side and lamented its lack of arms. Instead of looking fearsome, instead of looking forsaken, it looked at peace, a great, grey old man ready to go with a stony smile and an undignified stumble into the water.

Salt still wept from its wound, though in small, murmuring trickles. The tide had settled over its spike- encrusted base. Soon, the whole structure would crumble and vanish beneath the waves. The weapons and bodies entombed within would be forgotten. The sea, ever rising, had already forgotten Irontide.

Lenk, however, had not.

He wondered if he could still swim to the fortress, how long it would take him with his injured leg. How long would it take him to revisit the chamber with the black water and the rocky outcropping? How long would it take him to sink to the bottom once more and leave behind what had come out of the chamber with him?

‘I hear it more often now,’ he whispered, perhaps to whatever God might be listening. ‘It’s so loud, so clear.’ Absently, he rubbed his leg. ‘So cold.’

And with the voice had come the memories, the images that he remembered forgetting before. He saw them in flashes, in the moments when he blinked, and heard them in the moments when he held his breath. He could remember a strange weight upon his head, as though his skull had been coated in lead. He could remember the distinct lack of warmth and not being bothered by such a thing.

He could remember seeing his hands before him, covered in grey skin.

Now they lay before him, pink. But he remembered what they had done, whose head they had taken.

‘Demons can’t be harmed by mortal weapons,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Demons can’t die by mortal hands. That doesn’t happen.’

But it did, didn’t it?

‘Did it?’ he asked himself. ‘Maybe the whole thing was … was imaginary, a hallucination. It could have been a trick of the mind.’

You did take several blows to the head.

‘Yes, several blows,’ he agreed.

Not as grievous as those the Deepshriek took, of course.

‘Exactly, I-’