Neither was she.
He had listened when the demons had spoken to him. Specifically, when the demon spoke to him. Ulbecetonth, the Kraken Queen, Mother Deep; he could still hear her voice coming from the faint place his conscience should speak from. And like a conscience should, she begged him not to.
Not to interfere with her plans, not to embark on his errand to retrieve the tome, not to spill the blood of her faithful and her children. Not to force her to listen to the cries of her dying children as they bled out on his sword.
If he let his mind empty, in the moments between his breathing and the voices talking in his head, he could hear them, too. They cried so loud. And so often.
“Why?” she asked.
“She spared my life,” Lenk said, looking at the earth as though his reasons lay in the sand. “She told me things that made me feel better.” He tried to ignore her stare. “She told me I could avoid this. . this whole thing with the tome, with them, with. . with her.”
“And so you want to kill them, anyway? But not the demons? Lenk, how-”
“I AM BREATHING UNDERWATER.” He scowled at her, heart pounding. “This is the third time this has happened to me. The last time involved a giant set of teeth in the earth that tried to argue with a voice in my head that’s kept me from trying to kill myself while also telling me to kill a woman I really want to talk to despite the fact that she left me for dead so she could cavort with a headhunting, hideskinning, green-skinned, long-eared son of a bitch, so forgive me if this sounds a little complicated.”
He rubbed his temples. His head hurt. Suddenly, there was so much pressure. His mouth tasted of salt. The world, this world, began to move beneath him while he stood still. He felt uncomfortably warm as her shadow shifted off of him.
All this, though, he barely noticed.
“I don’t want to do this anymore,” he said. “I don’t want to kill people, any people. I don’t want to feel naked without my sword. I don’t want to feel right when I’m covered in blood and I don’t want to live without-”
The massive hole he only noticed when his heels went over the edge.
He scrambled away from it, falling to hands and knees as he whirled about. The coral and its colors were far behind him. The sea floor was only barely beneath him. Before him, this world had simply stopped, disappearing into a vast and endless blue.
“Where are we?” he asked.
“Hell,” someone replied. Was that her?
“Why?”
“You brought us here.”
“No.” He rose to his feet, shakily. His head was spinning. His heart was thundering. His words drowned in his ears. “No more riddles. No more crypticisms. No more interpretations. You came to me. You brought me here. You have to tell me what to do.”
“Jaga.”
“What of it?”
“Duty.”
“What duty?”
“What we do is not our choice. We weren’t born with that. We’re not lucky people, Lenk.”
“People? Do you mean you and I or. . are there more of us?” He clutched his head, trying to dig into the flesh of his scalp and extract the memories. “There was a man. . man in ice. I remember. . I remember. It’s me. My memories, my friends, my voice. .”
“Ours.”
He was floating now, too. This world disappeared. His world was at the surface, far away. That world opened up beneath him. He was nowhere.
No more heart, no more head with heavy thoughts to weigh him down. In their place grew something cold.
“Our voice.”
His head throbbed, pounded, swelled, expanded.
“Our duty.”
Erupted.
He felt his eyelid twitch, then tremble, then bulge. Ice and skull cracked as a translucent, jagged spike formed where his mind had been and pushed steadily outward. Something came loose within him, with the sound of his eye socket creaking, then shattering.
He didn’t even notice it until his eyeball was floating out before him, staring back at him and the jagged icicle that blossomed from its socket.
“Our death.”
He felt the back of his head split apart as another frigid spike emerged like a horn. He felt his mouth fill with frost, felt the thin layer of his cheek’s flesh burst in a red flower. His fingertips split apart, spine snaked out of his back, shinbones shattered as the icicles grew out of him and continued to grow until they filled the ocean and froze it.
Only when he had no voice did he think to cry out.
The frog was still twitching when he brought it to his mouth. His canines sank into its flesh and he felt the dizzying rush of raw venom on his tongue. Lately, it only took a moment for the sensation to pass.
Bones crunched behind his lips. He swallowed and a mess of pulped flesh and poison slid down his throat.
“I’ve had dreams.”
His voice was raw with venom when he spoke.
“When I was young, anyway. I wonder if every tribesman has them. I don’t think I ever asked.”
His toes twitched, all six pale green digits digging into the soil. He felt connected to this earth, kin to it; poison flowed through it as it did through him.
“We didn’t ask questions in the south. Maybe it’s different in the Silesrian. I don’t know. I once asked my uncle if he knew. He looked at me and didn’t say a word. He slid a Spokesman into my hands, patted me on the head, and pointed me toward the humans.
“I had been alive for. . fifteen years?” He scratched his chin, fingers rubbing over the inked scrawl of tattoos that ran from brow to navel. “Fourteen, maybe. Just married at that point. We did that earlier in the south. Maybe it’s different in the Silesrian. My wife was the first person I ever asked. She just looked at me and shook her head.
“I stopped thinking about it, as much as I could. Time passed. I killed humans. Humans killed my uncles. Humans killed my wife.” He waved a hand. “My son, too. It doesn’t matter. All tribesmen die. They went to the Dark Forest and I continued fighting. We were losing, of course. It’s impossible to fight humans and win. . or it was.
“The dreams. . didn’t stop.” He scratched his bald scalp. “I still had them and they didn’t make sense. Maybe that was how I tried to figure it all out and get an answer. They lasted for a while.”
His ears twitched. He reached up, running a long finger along each length, counting each of the six notches in them, as if to reassure himself that they were still there.
“It was when I learned why we fight that they finally ended.
“I found one of them. I couldn’t tell you what nation he belonged to or what god he worshipped. All humans looked alike to me. But I found one, alone. I suppose it would have been smarter to wait for the others, maybe to interrogate him.
“But I was hungry. And I heard it-” he tapped his temple “-right here. And I wanted to hurt him. So I did. We fought for a bit. I struck his head with my stick. He cut me in the thigh with his sharp sword. When our weapons were lost, we fought with fists and teeth.
“And I don’t know when I had come on top of him, or when I had found his throat with my hands. Everything was just moments, things that happened without me knowing how. One time, my fingers felt the hair on the back of his neck. The next, my thumbs found the hard bump in his throat. I couldn’t remember either when I started to squeeze.
“I wondered if he knew the human who had killed my wife. Maybe he was. It was unlikely. There are so many humans. But this was one less. And because this was one less, there would be one more of us.”