“Lenk agrees with you,” Dreadaeleon said, sighing. “That’s why he’s had Denaos on interrogation duty.”
“Denaos. .” Bralston whispered the name more softly than he would whisper death’s. “Where is he conducting this. . interrogation?”
“In another hut at the edge of the village,” Dreadaeleon replied. “But he doesn’t want to be-”
He looked up. Bralston was gone. And he was alone.
THREE
It always seemed to begin with fire.
As it had begun in Steadbrook, that village he once called home that no one had ever heard of and no one ever would. Fire had been there, where it had all begun. Fire was still there, years later, every time Lenk closed his eyes.
It licked at him now as it consumed the barns and houses around him, as it sampled the slow-roasted dead before giving away all pretenses of being civilized and messily devoured skin, cloth, and wood in great red gulps. It belched, cackled at its own crudeness, and reached out to him with sputtering hands. The fire wanted him to join them; in feast or in frolic, it didn’t matter.
Lenk was concerned with the dead.
He walked among them, saw faces staring up at him. Man. Woman. Old man’s beard charred black and skin crackling. Through smoke-covered mirrors, they looked like him. He didn’t remember their names.
He looked up, found that the night sky had moved too fast and the earth was hurrying to keep up. He was far away from Steadbrook now, that world left on another earth smoldered black. Wood was under his feet now, smoldering with the same fire that razed the mast overhead. A ship. A memory.
A different kind of fire.
This one didn’t care about him. This fire ate in resentful silence, consuming sail and wood and dying in the water rising up beneath him. Again, Lenk paid no attention. He was again concerned with the faces, the faces that meant something to him.
The faces of the traitors.
Denaos, dark-eyed; Asper, sullen; Dreadaeleon, arrogant; Gariath, inhuman. They loomed out of the fire at him. They didn’t ask him if he was hot. He was rather cold, in fact, as cold as the sword that had appeared in his hand. They didn’t ask him about that, either. They turned away, one by one. They showed their necks to him.
And he cut them down, one by one, until one face remained.
Kataria.
Green-eyed.
Full of treason.
She didn’t show him her neck. He couldn’t very well cut her head off when she was looking right at him. His eyes stared into her.
Blue eyes.
Full of hate.
It was his eyes she stared into. It wasn’t his hands that wrapped themselves around her throat. It wasn’t his voice that said this was right. It wasn’t his blood that flowed into his fingers, caused his bones to shiver as they strained to warm themselves in her throat.
But these were his eyes, her eyes. As the world burned down around them and sank into a callous sea, their eyes were full of each other.
He shut his eyes. When he opened them again, he was far below the sea. A fish, bloated and spiny and glassy-eyed stared at him, fins wafting gently as it bobbed up and down in front of him.
“So, anyway,” he said, “that’s basically how it all happened.”
The fish reared back, seeming to take umbrage at his breaking of the tranquil silence. It turned indignantly and sped away, disappearing into the curtains of life emerging from the reef.
“Rude.”
“Well, what did you expect?”
He turned and the woman was seated upon a sphere of wrinkled coral. Her head was tilted toward him.
“I am talking and breathing while several feet underwater.”
“You don’t seem surprised by that,” she said.
“This sort of thing happens to me a lot.” He tapped his brow. “The voices in my head tend to change things. It didn’t seem all that unreasonable that they might make me talk with a fish.” He looked at her intently. “You should know all this, shouldn’t you?”
“Why would I?”
“Can’t you read my thoughts?”
“Not exactly.”
“All the other ones have been able to.”
“I’m not a voice in your head,” she replied.
Amongst everything else in. . whatever this was, that was the most believable. Her voice came from the water, in the cold current that existed solely between them. It swirled around him, through him, everywhere but within him.
“What are you, then?” he asked.
“I am just like you.”
“Not just like me.”
“Well, no, obviously. I don’t want to murder my friends.”
“You said you couldn’t-”
“I didn’t, you showed me.” She leapt off the coral, scattering a school of red fish as she landed neatly. A cloud of sand rose, drifted away on a current that would not touch her. “And before that, you told me.”
“When?”
“When you cried out,” she said, turning to walk away. “I’ve been hearing you for a while now. There aren’t a lot of voices anymore, so I hear the few that scream pretty clearly.”
As she walked farther away, the sea became intolerably warm. The cold current followed her and so did he. He didn’t see when she stopped beside the craggy coral, and he had to skid to a halt. She didn’t even look up at him as she peered into a black hole within the coral.
“Voices?”
“Two of them,” she said, reaching into the black hole. “Always two of them. One in pain, one always crying out, one weeping bitterly and always saying ‘no, no, no.’ That is the voice I follow. That is the one that’s faint.”
She winced as a tremor ran along her arm. She withdrew it and the eel that had clamped its jaws onto her fingers. It writhed angrily as she brought her hand about its slender neck and brought it up to her face to stare into its white eyes.
“And the other?” Lenk asked.
“Always louder, always cold and black. It doesn’t speak to me so much as speak to mine, speak to the cold inside of me.”
He stared at her, the question forming on his tongue, even though he already knew the answer. He had to ask. He had to hear her say it.
“What does it tell you to do?” he asked.
She looked at him. Her fingers clenched. The snapping sound was short. The eel hung limply in her hands, its tail curled up, up, seeking the sun as she clenched its lifeless body.
“To kill,” she said simply.
Their eyes met each other, peering deeper than eyes had a right to. It was as if each one sought to pry open the other’s head and peer inside and see what each one’s frigid voice was muttering to them.
He could feel the cold creeping up his spine. He knew what his was telling him.
“So,” he said softly, reaching for a sword that wasn’t there, “you’re here to-”
“Kill you?” Her smile was not warm. “No.” She released the eel and let it drift away. “It’s not in my nature.”
He rubbed his head. “I don’t mean to be rude, but this is about the time I start losing patience with the other voices in my head, too, so could you kindly tell me why you are here?”
“Because, Lenk, you’re about to kill yourself.”
“The thought had occurred. I’m just worried that hell will be much worse than. .” He gestured around the reef. “You know, this.”
“What makes you so sure there’s a hell?”
“Because I’ve seen what comes out of it.”
“Demons aren’t made in hell. They’re made by hell.” She leveled a finger at him. “The kind of hell that you’re going through.”
“I don’t-”
“You do.” She spoke cold, sharp, with enough force to send the fish swirling into hiding. Color died, leaving grim, gray corals and endless blue. “You hear it every time you think you’re alone, you see it every time you close your eyes. You feel it in your blood, you feel it sharing your body. It never talks loud enough for others to hear, but it deafens you, and if they could hear what it says, you know they’d cry out like you do.