Black Halo

through sinew turning to jelly. He saw, then, what he had been searching for. She felt the knowledge of it in her heart.

‘To infect without being noticed,’ he whispered, ‘is the nature of disease.’

She could not bear his searching stare any longer. She turned away. His sigh was something harsh and alien, unused to his lips.

‘How long?’

She said nothing.

‘What am I to tell your father, Little Sister?’

She shook her head.

‘How am I to tell any of our kinsmen that you have been with humans?’

‘Tell them nothing,’ she said, biting her lip. ‘Tell them anything; tell them everything. Tell them you don’t know why and tell them that Kataria doesn’t know, either. Or tell them I’m dead. Either way, we can all stop wondering about it and talking about it and thinking about it and get on with whatever the hell else we were doing before everyone started asking if Riffid even gave a crap if a shict hung around round-ears.’

Her hands trembled, clenched the skewer so hard it snapped. She looked down at it through blurred vision; she couldn’t remember when she had started crying.

His stare was all the more unbearable for the sympathy flooding it. Sympathy, she noted, blended with a distinct lack of understanding that made his gaze a painful thing, two ocular knives twisting in her flesh with tears seeping into the wounds. And so she stared into the fire, biting back the agony.

‘It’s not what it seems,’ she whispered.

‘There are scant few ways for it to seem, Little Sister,’ Naxiaw replied. ‘They are not dead. You are not dead. Why, then, are you with them?’

She had been avoiding the question since the day she had walked out of the Silesrian alongside a silver- haired monkey. It had been easy to avoid, at first: just an idle wonder thrown from a clumsy and distracted mind. But Naxiaw’s mind was sharp, practised. The question struck her like a brick to the face, and she found that all the answers she had used to excuse away the question before felt weightless.

For the adventure? In the beginning, she had told herself it was for that — the thrill of exploration and the lust for treasure. But shicts had no use for treasure, and the use for exploration went only so far as scouting for the tribe. There was no word for ‘adventure’.

Friendship, then? As much as she knew she should loathe to admit it, she had become … attached to the humans. There was no denying it after a year, anymore. But there was no word for ‘friendship’ in the shictish tongue; there was ‘tribe’; there was ‘shict’. That was all a shict needed.

Perhaps, then, because she found she had needed more than tribe … more than a shict needed. But how could she tell him that? How could she tell herself that?

As the tears began to flow again, she realised she just had.

And she felt him: his gaze, his thoughts, his instincts. Naxiaw reached for her, with eyes, with frown, with thought, with ears, with everything but his long, green fingers. The scrutinising had not dissipated, but was mingled with an animal desire, an utter yearning to understand that made his gaze all the more painful, the wounds all the deeper.

He stared at her, trying to understand.

And he never would. There was no word for it.

If he didn’t know what she was feeling, he must have seen something in her tears, felt something in her heart, heard something in her head that made him know all the same that she was feeling something no true shict should. His face twitched, trembled, sorrow battling confusion battling fury. In the end, all that came of it was a shaking of his head and a long, tired sigh.

‘Little Sister,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘They’re kou’ru. Monkeys. Diseases.’

‘But I’ve been with them so long,’ she said. ‘My skin hasn’t flaked off; my heart hasn’t stopped beating; my blood hasn’t turned to mud. The stories aren’t true. They aren’t disease.’

‘They are,’ he snapped back, baring his canines. ‘A disease does not merely infect and kill, it weakens. It makes us vulnerable to other sicknesses, deeper illnesses, ones that cannot be burned out.’

‘Like what?’ She was absently surprised to find the growl in her voice, to feel her ears flattening against her head as she flashed her own teeth at him. ‘I’ve seen more in a year than most shicts will see in their lifetime. I’ve tasted alcohol, I’ve seen cities made of stone, I know what it means when a cock crows and what it means to drain the dragon.’

‘Symptoms of a weak and ignorant breed, and you’re infected with them.’

‘It can’t be ignorance to learn,’ she snarled. ‘A lot of what they know is useless, dangerous and stupid. But I’ve learned about farming, agriculture, digging wells. There must be a reason they became the dominant race. If shicts are to survive, then we have to-’

‘Reasons?’ He leapt to his full height, towering over her. ‘There is a reason, yes. They are dominant because when we first met them, we had a disease. Understanding, forgiveness, mercy,’ he spat. ‘These were the symptoms of an illness that claimed thousands of shicts.’

She found herself falling from her log in an attempt scramble away from him as he advanced, his long strides easily overtaking her. He leaned down, extended his fingers to her.

‘The disease rises now and again. I was there the last time it infected us. I was there when I saw the reason humans were dominant.’

Quick as asps, his hands shot out and seized her by the face. His eyes were massive, intense and brimming with tears as he drew his face towards her own wide-eyed and trembling visage. Then, he uttered the last words she remembered before he pressed his brow to hers.

‘You see, too.’

And then, there was fire.

It was everywhere, razing the forests in great orange sheets, writhing claws pulling down branches and leaves and blackening the sky. It roared, it laughed, it shrieked with delight: loud, too loud, deafening.

Not loud enough to drown out the screaming.

Children, men, women, elders, mothers, daughters, hunters, weavers, sitting, standing, drinking, breathing, screaming, screaming, screaming. She knew them all — their lives, their histories, their loves, their families — as each scream filled her ears, mingled within the Howling and became knowledge to her and all shicts. And she heard them all made silent: some instantly, some in groans that bubbled into nothingness, some in high-pitched wails that drifted into the sky.

She saw them: green faces, mouths open, ears flattened, weapons falling from long green hands. She saw the spears embedded in their chests, the boots crushing their bones, the thick pink hands that unbuckled belts, that dashed skulls against rocks, that thrust sword, stabbed spear, swung axe. She saw their eyes, wide with desire, vast with conviction. They looked upon the faces; they heard the screams. There was no language to let them understand what they did, and they did not try to understand.

The screams mingled as one wailing torrent, shrieking through her mind, bursting through her skull, flowing out of her ears on bright red brooks. She heard her own voice in there, her own sorrow, her own agony, her own tragedy.

Eventually, their voices stopped. Hers continued for a while.

She looked up, at last, and saw Naxiaw. His hands hung weakly at his side. He stared at her firmly. He did nothing more as she scrambled to her feet, staring at him with eyes bereft of anything but pure animal terror, and fled into the forest.

He stared, long after she had disappeared into the brush.

Then, he sat down, and sighed.

‘I should not have done that,’ he whispered.

‘She had to know,’ a voice deep inside his consciousness spoke: Inqalle, harsh and