Black Halo

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