Black Halo

asked herself. Right. He’s just so crafty and clever. This entire ‘stalking’ is a farce. If you showed up in front of him and waved, he’d wave back and smile and say how good it was to see you as you clubbed his brains out.

No, she told herself, he liked her, but probably not that much.

Right, she agreed with herself, but the point is, you know this is just a stalling tactic. Pretending to stalk him? Pretending to track him? Go run around the forest screaming his name if you think he’s alive. Wait for him to come out and then embrace him and then crush his neck. If you really wanted to kill him, you wouldn’t even have to try. But …

She snarled inwardly, opened her ears wide to let the sounds of the forest drown out her own thoughts.

You also know this forest is dead. Nothing’s going to make you stop thinking, dimwit.

She sighed. No wind sighed back. And from the dead wind, no trees rustled in response. And from the quiet trees, no animals cried out in response. And all around her, the verdant greenery and blue skies and bright morning sunshine yielded no sound, no life.

Barren forests weren’t unheard of. Plants, inedible and intolerable to animal palates, often thrived where those on two and four legs could not.

Except for roaches, apparently. She flicked away a dried trace of anal sputum.

But there was something different about this forest, this silence. This silence lingered like a pestilence, seeping into her skin, reaching into her ears, her lungs. It found the sound of her breath intolerable, the clamour of her twitching muscles unbearable. It sought to drive the wind from her stomach, to still the noisy blood in her veins.

She shook her head, thumped it with the heel of her hand, scolded herself for being stupid. Silence was uncomfortable, nothing more. It wasn’t a disease. He was. He was the one that needed to be cured, not her. It was him that was the problem.

So the problem is him, she told herself. That makes sense. That’s what Inqalle said. The greenshicts … no, no. They’re the s’na shict s’ha, remember? Greenshicts are what humans call them. The problem is him. Kill him and you’re a shict, right? Right.

Because that was what a shict was, she told herself, pressing forward and following the tracks. A shict killed humans. That was what shicts did. Her father said so. Inqalle said so. Her mother …

Her step faltered. The earth heard her hesitation.

Mother, she told herself, asked you what a shict was.

She stared down at the Spokesman stick in her hand, at the white mourning feather tied to it.

And you said …

Her ears twitched, still listening even if her mind was not. They rose up on either side of her head, slowly shifting from side to side as they heard a sound.

Water?

She followed it, the roar of rushing liquid growing more thunderous with every step. She glanced down at the earth; the tracks continued to it, though the earth still refused to yield the speaker of their stories, even as it became moister.

Soon, the ground turned to mud beneath as forest and river met in battle. The trees refused to yield, leaning in close over the great blue serpent that slithered through the earth. It flowed swiftly, fed by a distant waterfall thundering down a craggy cliff face not far from where she stood at its bank.

Not ten feet away from her, where the water was at its most shallow, an island of earth and stone rose like a rocky pimple. Long and wide, it defied the nature of the river with its stone-paved floors, crumbling pillars and the occasional vine-decorated statue. But the forest challenged even this, those trees and underbrush that had managed to grow over it encroaching upon it, obscuring the finer points of its decay as it strangled the island with leafy hands.

Odd, she thought, but not the oddest part about this place.

She surveyed the river, eyes narrowing. Certainly it sounded like a river ought to. The water was clear and, at a glance, clean enough and suitable for drinking. Her dry lips begged her to drink, her ears told her it was safe. Only her nose rejected it.

The scent of freshness was nowhere present in the air; the aroma of growing things fed by the flow was overwhelmed by a reek that lurked just beneath.

But surely, water was water. Even the water couldn’t be tainted if it caused such plants to grow. There was no harm, she told herself, in simply taking a drink. It would enable her to hunt farther, faster, and do what must be done.

She glanced down at the water, smacking her lips. Her nostrils quivered.

Still, she thought, glancing over to the waterfall, no sense in not taking a drink directly from the source.

She stared up, wondering exactly where the river came thundering from. And, atop the great crags of the cliff, she found an answer pouring from great, skeletal jaws.

The skull, resembling something of a massive, fleshless fish, stared back down at her through empty eye sockets as it hung precariously over the edge of the cliff, wide as a boulder, water weeping through every empty void in its bleached surface. Liquid poured from its great, toothsome jaws, burst from each empty black eye, weeping and vomiting in equal measure.

Not that such imagery didn’t unnerve her, but it paled in comparison to the fact that she had seen this skull before, in a much smaller form. But she had seen it, cleaned of shadowy black skin, sockets where vast, empty white eyes had once been. She remembered the teeth, she remembered the jaws, she remembered the gurgling, drowning voice that went with them.

An Abysmyth. She was staring at a demon’s skull, far more massive than any she had ever thought possible.

But it was just a skull, she thought. Whatever demon it had belonged to was dead now and there was no need for her to fear. Nor was there a need to wonder where it had come from. She had tracks to follow, tracks that had to have led through the shallows, over the island and onto the opposite bank.

Rolling her breeches up to her knees, she carefully waded in. The current was swift, but not deep enough to drag her under. Still, it was a slow and steady pace that carried her across, mercilessly leaving her time to be with her thoughts.

If there are demons here … she thought. I mean, I know that one’s dead and all, but if they’re here … you’re actually doing them a kindness, aren’t you? You’d be killing them before they could have their heads chewed off. Of course, you’d be eaten moments later, wouldn’t you? But that’s fine, so long as they die before that happens. That’s just the kind of selfless person you are, right?

She laughed bitterly.

Sure. I’m certain they’ll see it my way.

Her foot caught. A root reached up from muddy ground to tangle her. She cursed, reached down to free herself and found no rough and jagged tuber. Rather, what caught at her ankle was smooth and came easily out of the water and in her hand, the mud of the riverbed sloughing off to land in the flow like globs of great brown fat.

She might have thought how fitting that metaphor was, if it weren’t for the fact that she was currently staring at a fleshless, skeletal arm in her hand.

Before she could even warn herself against the dangers of doing so, she looked down.

And the small, rounded human skull looked back up, grinning and politely asking for its arm back.

With a sneer, she obliged, dropping the appendage and scurrying out of the water. Suddenly, the vague reek made itself known to her, the familiarity of it cloying her nostrils.

The water was rife with the scent of corpses.

‘Still alive.’