the trees as though she would die if she looked anywhere else.
Perhaps she would.
‘How’s the shoulder?’ she asked.
‘It’s fine,’ he replied. ‘I’ve had worse.’
‘You do seem to have a talent for getting beaten up.’
‘Everyone’s good at something.’ He shrugged, then winced. The pain in his shoulder had returned; it hadn’t been there when he had emerged from the cave.
‘You should let me take a look at it,’ she said. ‘I don’t trust Asper to do a good job anymore. She …’ She shook her head. ‘She’s distracted these days.’
‘I’d rather you didn’t.’
‘I understand.’ A bitter chuckle escaped her. ‘I understand
He glanced down. Her hand had found his again, squeezing it tightly.
‘What now?’ she asked.
‘With what?’
‘Everything.’
‘We go after the tome.’
‘I thought you wanted to go back to the mainland, forget the tome and the gold.’
‘Things change.’
‘They do.’ She rose to her feet, knuckled the small of her back, and loosed the kind of sigh that typically preceded an arrow in the neck and a shallow grave. ‘And that’s not fair.’ Slowly, she began to walk away, slinking towards the forest. She hesitated at the edge of the brush. ‘I’m not going to apologise, Lenk, for anything.’
‘I don’t blame you,’ he replied.
For the first time, she looked at him. It was a fleeting flash of emerald, nothing more than a breath during which their eyes met. It took less than that for her to frown and look away again.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘you do.’
He didn’t protest. Not as she said the words. Not as she walked away.
Forty
Awarm droplet of water struck his brow, dripped down a narrow cheekbone and fell to his chin. He caught it on a purple finger before it could fall and be lost on the red and black cobblestones.
The word for it, Yldus recalled, was rain. He knew only a little about it. He knew it fell from the sky; he knew it made things grow. There was meaning behind it, too. It was a symbol of renewal, its washing of taint and sin considered something sacred. This he had been told by those prisoners who had begged for water from the sky, from the earth, from him.
He had given none. He didn’t see the point. Where he came from, things did not grow. The sky never changed. And as he looked up at the sky now, the rain falling in impotent orange dots against the burning roofs of the city’s buildings, he wondered what reverence could possibly be justified for it.
The fires continued, unhindered, belching smoke in defiant rudeness to the meek greyness. There were faint rumbles of what was called thunder, but they did nothing to silence the war cries of the females or the distant cries of the weak and hapless overscum they descended upon.
He picked his way over the bodies, lifting the hem of his robes as he walked through the undistilled red smears upon the cobblestones. He glanced down an alley, frowning at the flashing jaws and errant cackles of the sikkhuns as they feasted upon the dead and the slow with relish. Their female riders, long since bored with the meagre defences that had been offered to them and subsequently shattered, goaded their mounts to gnash and consume with unabated glee.
Wasteful, he thought. Pointless. Disgusting.
He left them to the dead. His concerns were for the living.
The road was slick with blood, clotted with ash, littered with the dead and the broken. Yldus searched the carnage with a careful eye. He had seen much more and much worse, enough to recognise the subtle differences in the splashes of bright red life. He saw where it had been squandered in spatters of cowardice, where it had leaked out on pleas to deaf ears, where it had simply pooled with resignation and despair.
His eyebrows rose appreciatively as he saw one that began a bright crimson and turned to a dark red as it was smeared across the road, leaving a trail thick with desperation.
He followed it carefully, winding past the stacks of shattered crates and sundered barrels, the spilled blood and split spears that had been the last defence the overscum had offered the females. Some had fled. Many had stayed. Only one lived.
And as the road turned to sand beneath Yldus’ feet, he heard that solitary life drawing his last breaths.
The overscum lay upon the sand. Unworthy of note: small, soft, dark-haired, dark-skinned, maybe a little fatter than most. Yldus watched with passive indifference as the human continued to deny the reality of his soft flesh and leaking fluids, pulling himself farther along the sand, ignoring Yldus and the great black shapes that surrounded him.
Yldus glanced up at the warriors of the First: tall, powerful, their black armour obscuring all traces of purple flesh and bristling with polished spikes. The spears and razor-lined shields they clenched were bloodied, but stilled in their hands.
Yldus offered an approving smile; the First, as the sole females proven to be able to overcome their lust for blood enough to follow orders, held a special place in his heart. They could slaughter and skewer with the best of them, but it was their ability to recognise, strategise and, most importantly, obey that made him request their presence in the city.
He was after answers, not corpses. And this was delicate work.
At his approach, they turned, as one, their black-visored gazes towards him: expecting, anticipating. He indulged them with a nod. One of them replied, stepping forward, flipping her spear about in her grip and driving it down into the human’s meaty thigh.
Delicate, as far as the netherling definition of the word went, at least.
He folded his hands behind him, closing his ears to the human’s wailing as he approached, being careful not to tread in the blood-soaked sand. He stood beside the overscum, staring, waiting for the screaming to stop.
It took some time, but Yldus was a patient male.
It never truly stopped, merely subsided to gasping sobs. That would serve, however. Yldus knelt beside the overscum, surveying him carefully, waiting for the inevitable outburst. The human looked back at him through a dark-skinned face drawn tight with pain and anguish.
‘Monsters,’ he spat out in his tongue, ‘demons. Filthy child-killers!’
‘Whatever it is you came here for,’ the human gasped out, the edges of his mouth tinged with blood. ‘Gold, steel, food … we have barely any. Take it and go. Leave the rest of us in peace.’
‘Spare me,’ he finally gasped.
‘Spare my life,’ he croaked again, ‘help me and-’
‘No.’
‘What?’ The man appeared shocked that such was even a possible answer.
