Tome of the Undergates

‘humans much smaller than you who called me much kinder things than a common beast.’

Dreadaeleon’s eyes went wide with a certain kind of fear that Gariath had seen often in him. With predictable frequency the boy, for he was nothing more than a boy, constantly realised he was not the man he pretended to be. Such a reaction was usually caused by his conversations with the tall, brown-haired human woman or with the taller, red-skinned dragonman. Such reactions, too, frequently had visceral effects.

‘I. . I didn’t. . I mean, I don’t want to-’

Stammering.

‘It wasn’t my intention-’ Dreadaeleon shifted his gaze from the dragonman.

Looking at the ground like a whelp.

‘You must believe me-’ The boy’s knees began to knock.

‘I do,’ Gariath interrupted.

Though he hated to admit it to himself, there was a certain gruesome pride that came with making a human soil himself, but such reactions were reserved for times when he wasn’t on the hunt. Human urine was filthy, yellow and filled with the stinks of liquor. He couldn’t imagine a bat-dung drink smelling any better coming out.

The boy’s sigh, so heavy with relief, did not serve to strengthen Gariath’s faith in the human bladder. Rolling his eyes along with his shoulders, he turned about and began to stalk further down the beach.

‘Well, can I help?’

‘There’s a lot of things you can help,’ Gariath growled in reply, ‘such as your belief that I want to hear you any more.’

‘I meant can I help you find whatever it is you’re looking for?’ Dreadaeleon scurried to keep up with the dragonman’s great strides. ‘I’m not bad with scrying.’

‘With what?’

‘Scrying. Divination.’ He beamed so proudly that Gariath could feel the boy’s smile searing his back. ‘You know, the Art of Seeking. Amongst the wizards of the Venarium, it’s not considered worthy of much more beyond a few weeks of study, but it has its uses.’

Gariath paused, his ear-frills twitching slightly.

‘Magic,’ he uttered, ‘can find lost things?’

‘Most lost things, yes.’

When the dragonman turned to face Dreadaeleon, the boy no longer saw Gariath as he remembered him. In the span of a single turn, the red-skinned brute’s face had shifted dramatically. Wrinkles, once seemingly perpetually carved into his face by an equally perpetual rage, had smoothed out. His lips had descended from their high-set snarl to hide his teeth.

Before, Dreadaeleon had never seen anything within his companion’s eyes, so narrow and black had they been. Now they were wide, so wide as to glisten with something other than restrained — or unrestrained — fury, and they stared at him from a finger’s length away.

‘How does it work?’ Gariath growled.

‘Um, well. .’ The boy struggled for words in the face of this new, slightly less reptilian face. ‘It’s a relatively simple art, which, as I suggested, is what places it so low upon the Hierarchy of Magic.’ He began to count off his skinny fingers. ‘The first of which being the Five Noble Schools: fire, ice, electricity, force and-’

‘Tell me how it works.’

Gariath did not demand, not with any great anger, at least. His tone was so gentle and soft that Dreadaeleon blinked, taken aback.

‘I just need a focus,’ he replied as confidently as he could, ‘something that belonged to the Rhega.’

Gariath’s face twitched. ‘Something that belonged to the Rhega.’

‘Right.’ Dreadaeleon nodded, daring a smile. ‘So long as I have something to focus on, something that bears the Rhega’s signature, it should lead us to more Rhega.’

‘As simple as that?’

‘Just so.’

Dreadaeleon barely had any time to close his eyes before the fist came crashing into his face. His teeth rattled in his skull, chattering against each other like a set of crude ivory chimes. His coat-tails fluttered behind him like dirty brown wings as he sailed through the air before striking the sand, gouging a shallow trench with the force of his skid before finally coming to an undignified halt.

He heard the thunder of Gariath’s footsteps before he felt the thick claws wrap around his throat, hoisting him aloft. His head swam, ringing with the twin cacophonies of his magic headache and the force of Gariath’s blow. Through eyes rolling in their sockets, he could barely make out the great red and white blob before him.

‘There are no more Rhega,’ Gariath snarled. ‘Your breed saw to that.’ His roar was laced with hot, angry breath that would have choked Dreadaeleon had he been able to breathe. ‘And now you want to piss on their memory with your weakling, filthy magic! SIMPLE? ’

The boy’s shriek was caught in an explosion of sand as Gariath hurled him to the earth. With the pain echoing through his body in bells of agony, the vicious kick the dragonman planted in his side seemed nothing more than a particularly bloody comma in his furious sentence.

‘There are no more Rhega,’ Gariath repeated, ‘just so.’

The dragonman might well have been a ghost, so faint were his footsteps, so hazy his outline in the wizard’s eyes. Dreadaeleon tried to speak, tried to choke out a query as to what he had done to deserve such a thrashing, an apology of some sort, or perhaps just a plea for help as he felt something growing smaller within him, deflating as air escaped him without returning.

He had no more mind for questions or pleas, however. The dragonman’s shape faded in the distance as he stalked away, his footsteps now silent, as was everything else. The world became numb, all sounds fading before the ringing in his ears.

All but one.

It was faint at first, a slow and gentle lilting of the wind, a voice carried on a stiff breeze that he could not feel. Slowly, it grew louder, searing his ears as it began to drown out the ringing in his head.

So familiar, he was barely able to think, caught between the symphony and chaos murmuring through his brain. I’ve heard it before, I know.

It grew closer and stronger, something between a hum and a purr, escalating to include a faint whistling and breathless gasp. Soon, it began to tinkle, as though it were a gem of sounds being cut into tiny, euphoric crystals.

A song without words, he thought, so pretty. . so pretty. .

His body was numb now. It no longer hurt to blink; the fact that he could not breathe no longer worried him. He lost himself in the song, agony forgotten as he listened to the delicate voice.

Ah, I remember now. He nodded weakly to himself. From the boat. . it’s calling to me again.

And he let himself be called, slipping away into darkness. His vision went blank, eyes closing so that nothing else in the world would matter, not even the shadow creeping over him and the cold, pale hand reaching for him as he lay motionless in the sand.

Fifteen

YOU, TOO, SHALL HEAR

‘She is speaking so clearly now.’ Had he any nerve left to be shaken, Lenk certainly would have lost his at the near-orgasmic bliss with which the Abysmyth sighed. His courage, however, was long devoured, vanished under the flocks of Omens who gnawed incessantly at the body parts strewn across the ground. They shredded with their teeth, slurped long strings of greasy meat into their inner lips, all the while chattering their