down the slope. Had she not been so exhausted-her body as limp as a doll's-she might not have survived it.
As she took the last steps up to the summit, a thought rose in her. Perhaps she had been the one crying out, Maeben's fury leaping from her mouth. She did not consider this long, however. She crested the peak and took in a panorama of similar hills stretching out all around her, until her eyes tilted downward and found it. It was there, where she suspected it would be. The beast lay sprawled in the next ravine, its wings flung wide and stained bloody from the many bolt piercings and tears, its body twisted and its tail in looping disarray, tangled among the ropes and weights still knotted around it. It looked broken, dead. Mena felt a knot draw tight in her abdomen. She started down toward it, approaching slowly, trying not to kick stones loose.
As she neared it, she drew her long sword. She wasn't truly afraid; the action was instinctive. In truth, the creature seemed much smaller than she remembered. It was less bulky when contrasted to some of the foulthings she had fought, but it was not a creature whose strength should be measured by its bulk. With its lithe torso and the slim, extended proportions of its tail and the confusion of finger-thin bones and membranes that were its wings, it was hard for her to compare it to anything she had seen before. Such an awkward position it lay in, bent around the stones. Its head was upside down, the soft part of its neck exposed. There was so much to it. It hurt Mena just looking at the wounds, the tears, the places where blood had smeared or pooled. The last of the foulthings. Dead.
'They told me you were a dragon,' she said, 'but you're no dragon. You're a foulthing… but you're not. I'm not sure what you are, but you're no monster.'
She had spoken softly, without realizing she was doing so. In the silence afterward she looked around, embarrassed lest she was heard talking to a dead beast. But there was nobody around, not for miles. She thought, for the first time, of Melio and the soldiers who would be frantically searching for her. She knew she should do something to help them: walk back toward the east perhaps, find a settlement or build a signal fire somehow. But looking at the lizard bird, she did not want to. They would find her no matter what she did. She had that faith in them.
Instead, she let her eyes drift over every inch of the creature. It must have been female, she thought. The curves of her neck were sensual, dramatic in her death posture. Mena stepped close and ran her fingers over her. She was soft to the touch, warmed by the heat of the sun. Her coat was close to the skin, something like feathered scales, hued in soft, creamy tones. There was a pattern woven across them, an intricate interlacing that Mena could not get her eyes to fully focus on. It seemed to change even as she studied it.
'My sister would have envied this coat,' she said. Thinking that, she was saddened that she was the one who would deliver it to her.
Corinn would not have envied the damage done to the creature, though. Each wound turned Mena's stomach. She couldn't stand the sight of them, and suddenly she couldn't stand the thought that the others would see the creature like this, her beauty so fouled by the weapons that Mena herself had called into play. Without really deciding to, Mena began to do what she could to hide the damage. She pulled free the crossbow bolts and flung them away. She untangled the ropes and dragged the stone weights down the ravine. She cradled the creature's tail and let it flow out to its full length.
In particular, she worked to gently arrange the wondrous wings. She remembered them as they had been when they first unfurled, so shocking, amazing in their breadth and their deceptively delicate power. It was hard to twin those images with the ragged things she worked to sort out. The bones that framed the wings hardly seemed capable of what she had witnessed. They were as limp as a thousand broken finger bones slipped inside a thin tube of skin. Mena could pick the wings up and arrange them like tattered sheets. The membrane of the wings was just as diaphanous as it appeared, leathery and supple both. It had an oily resin on it. The stuff felt funny on her fingers. It tingled, seemed to course through her fingertips. It smelled faintly of… She wasn't sure what it smelled of, but there was something familiar in it, something comforting. It made it slightly easier to stick together the ripped fabric of the membrane and to feel it might just mend, or at least look like it had.
Mena was at this for some time, working one-armed, stumbling because of her own injuries and fatigue. She could not help but speak to the creature. She kept apologizing, commenting on her features, talking as if she were a nurse and the patient simply holding to silence. Perhaps, she said, not all changed creatures should die. Perhaps she should have taken the time to see this one first. She wished she had.
Eventually, she had dealt with everything but the creature's head. Before she turned to it, she thought she would touch it with care. Lift and twist it over, set it right. She could do that. She would. She owed it that. So thinking, she turned and froze at what she saw.
The creature's head-which had been upside down-was now right side up. Her eyes were open. She was watching her.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Dariel's eyes snapped open. He went from the nothingness of dreamless sleep to complete alertness. His heart, in its first seconds of wakefulness, banged against the cage of his chest like an animal trying to escape. Where was he? He was sitting upright, held in position by a band wrapped around his chest, hands still bound but his mouth free. He had no memory. He knew, though-as if pierced physically with the knowledge-that the things he had forgotten were huge. His gaze flew about the room, taking in individual things one by one: a water stain on the rough stone of the ceiling, iron rings bolted into the wall, a hanging lantern that cast a peculiarly constant light, the bare back of a heavily muscled, completely gray man sitting on a stool several paces away.
On this his eyes stopped. The man appeared to be eating. He made slight huffing sounds, interspersed with wet noises and an occasional crack, like twigs or bones being broken. He was a giant of a man. He was-Of course! It all came back. He was the one Dariel had seen on the docks of the Other Lands, the one who had lifted him bodily and carried him tucked beneath his arm. He was proof that it had all actually happened: the Lothan Aklun killed, the sea dotted with bodies, the strangeness of the city's inhabitants, Devoth of the Auldek stirred to anger, Sire Neen beheaded.
'Giver return,' escaped Dariel's lips, a pious entreaty for aid unusual to him.
The gray man must have heard it. He stopped eating, head cocked, and then slowly eased his bulk around to face Dariel. He let out a low rumble of sound, sinister, bestial. It was hard not hear it that way, for the man's appearance could not have been more frightening. He was preposterously muscled, with two thick legs, a thin waist, and a torso ridged with neat compartments. His bulk flared up and out from there, chest muscles bulging beneath his gray skin, shoulder joints like two round stones, neck as thick as a boar's. And a boar was what he was. A swine in near-human form.
He approached Dariel, who bucked away from him, straining against the strap that held him fast. He kicked out with his feet, but could neither touch the man nor find purchase enough to move on the slick stone. The man brushed the locks of wavy black hair from his face with the wedge of his hand. He was just as tusked and horrific as Dariel remembered. The golden curves punched straight through his cheeks, just below the corners of his lips. 'Ahhh, you awake. Good to see it! Thought you was dead on fright.' He followed this with that same low rumble of sound. It took Dariel a moment to identify it: a chuckle. He was laughing. 'You got tan skin,' the man said in his deep timbre, 'but you looking white just now. What, you think I going to eat you?' He reached out and tapped the ball of a large thumb on Dariel's cheek. 'Truth is, I more like you than you know just yet.'
Hearing Acacian coming from this man's mouth was both welcoming and alarming. His accent was strange. The words were spoken clearly enough, but the inflections he used were kin to no one region of the Known World. Still, Dariel could not help but find some hope. They spoke the same language. That was something to cling to.
The man stepped away, tugged his stool nearer, and returned. He sat down facing Dariel, leaning forward with elbows on his knees and fingers interlaced. 'Name Tunnel. Hear it? Tun-nel.'
Just when Dariel was getting over the surprise of the man's speaking to him in Acacian, he was shoved back into confusion. Name a tunnel? What tunnel? That couldn't be what he'd said. 'What?'
The man smacked a palm against his pectoral muscle. 'Tunnel. Name Tunnel.' He bared his teeth, seemingly pleased. 'Tunnel.'
'You mean,' Dariel sputtered, 'your name is Tunnel?'
