The Skybound Sea (46 page)

“So you’ve been slowly driving me insane with whispering so we could have a conversation? That’s insane!”

“NO!”

Her voice cracked the ice, sent veins of white webbing across the face of her tomb. Her grin remained frozen, but the voice echoing from inside her mouth didn’t belong in a human being, let alone a girl.

But she was neither.

“Don’t call us that! Don’t say that!”
she howled in a voice not her own
.
“They looked at us that way! They called us that for being what we are! Better than they are!
BETTER!
They betrayed us! We fought back and they called us insane and they
killed
us for it! We never wanted this!
NEVER!
”

He hadn’t ever said the words, not those words, not as she had spoken them. But they were known to him. The anger behind them was his, the hurt bleeding from them was his, the fury, the hatred, the cold …

That voice had spoken in him. It had coursed through his mind as surely as it coursed through her mouth, with all its cold anger.

He didn’t have to ask what she was now. He knew by that voice. She was like him, like the man in the ice had been, like the voices in his head. He knew. He didn’t want to know.

It had been the wrong question.

The cracks in the ice receded suddenly, solidifying into a solid, translucent coffin once more. Her grin was unchanged.

“Sorry,” she whimpered. “He gets loud sometimes. I can’t stop him from doing … that.”

“Neither could I. It’s all right.”

“It’s not all right. He’s angry with you. He’s worried about you. He thinks you’re going to kill yourself.”

“I’m not.”

“You are. I know why you’re here. I know what you’re after. He told me. We came here to find her, just like you did.”

“Her?”

The girl’s eyes widened a hair’s breadth. The light beaming from her stare grew, chasing away the darkness and bathing the chasm in a soft blue illumination. Lenk’s eyes widened, too, without light, without glow, without anything beyond horror dawning on his face.

The walls of the chasm were glistening.

The walls were moving.

The walls were alive.

They writhed, twisting over each other, bunching up as if shy and recoiling from him before deigning to twist about and display an under-side
covered in quivering, circular suckers blowing mucus-slick kisses at him.

Tentacles. In many different sizes. Dozens of them, reaching around the wall and coiling about each other like some slick, rubbery bouquet of flowers. They reached, they groped, they searched, they sought.

Not for him. They seemed to take no notice of him at all, slithering blindly about the stone, slapping the sand, some as big as trees. Something caught his eye, a flash of pale ivory amidst the coils. Stupid as he knew it to be, he leaned forward, squinting, trying to make out what he thought to be a tiny spot of something pale, white, soft …

Flesh?

He raised a hand out of instinct, not at all intending to actually touch it. But as his fingers drifted just a bit closer, the tentacles shifted, split apart and with a slick sucking sound, something lashed out and seized him by the wrist.

It came with such gentleness that the thought to pull back didn’t even occur to him. Pale fingers groped blindly down his wrist to find his fingers. An arm, perfectly pale, perfectly slender, blossomed from the tentacles, reaching for him with tender desperation.

It sought him, searched his flesh, taking each of his digits between two slender fingers and feeling each of his knucklebones in turn, sliding up and down between white fingertips. It was as though this was something it had never felt before, this touch of a human.

“She is reaching out,” the girl said from behind him. “Her children are calling to her. She claws against that dark place where we put her, trying to escape. But she can’t escape, not yet. She can’t see. She can only barely hear. So she reaches, and she searches for something to touch.”

He knew. Not by touch, but by the warmth behind her fingertips. The warmth he felt on his brow, in his mind, in his body. The warmth that had engulfed him, told him that he deserved happiness, that gave him his life.

He knew her touch.

He knew Ulbecetonth.

And she knew him. How, he wasn’t sure, but her hand tightened. Her nails dug into the skin of his wrist, clenched him as though she sought to pull him into whatever moist hell she reached from.

As the shadow fell over him, he realized her goal wasn’t to pull him in, but merely to hold him. All the better for the giant tentacle swaying overhead to crush him.

He leapt backward, leaving his skin and blood staining her nails. The tentacle came smashing down, shaking the walls and sending its fellows writhing angrily. More reached out, wrapped around his ankles, tried to pull
him back. He beat wildly at them, seizing a sharp fragment of coral and jamming it into the soft flesh of the tentacle. It didn’t so much as quiver. Only with great pain did he pull his leg free and scramble away from the tentacle.

He stalked back toward the girl, rubbing his wrist as Ulbecetonth’s slender arm slipped back between the mass of flesh, disappearing.

“And why … is she here?” he asked.

“Right question,” the girl said. “This is not an island. This is a prison.”

His eyes grew wide. Jaga held Ulbecetonth. And somewhere on the island, the Shen held the key to her cell. But for what? To release her? Did they even
know
what they had?

“She’s … coming closer.” He turned back to the girl. “You called me down here to warn me.”

The girl grinned.

“To warn you, to talk to you, to beg you,” she said.

“What for?”

“Not to die.”

“That’s kind of out of my hands.”

“It is not. Ulbecetonth is coming. The walls between her world and ours are weakened, she’s scratched them so thin. She is coming. And she knows you are here. She hates you. She will kill you. You can survive.” Her voice grew soft, fearful of itself. “If you let him back in.”

“No.”

“He can save you.”

“It’s not a
he
. It’s an
it
. An it that tried to make me kill my friends, filled my head with … with something horrifying.”

“To protect you. He only wants you to live. Your flesh is too weak.”

“It’s been strong enough so far.”

“It has not. You didn’t hurt the tentacle, did you? You couldn’t hurt her.”

“That’s not—”

“And you never could.
He
hurt the demons.
He
killed the Abysmyths, through you. Without him, you will die. And not by her hand.”

“What do you mean?”

“Look at your shoulder.”

He did. Even the unearthly blue light was not enough to mask the sickly coloration of glistening pink and blackening flesh from where he had attempted to cauterize his own wound. An infection, thriving.

“It was … it was fine earlier!” he said. “I didn’t even feel it.”

“He mended it. He kept you whole.” Her voice quaked, something else seeping in. “But you sent him away. You may not even survive long enough for Ulbecetonth to have a chance to kill you.”

“Then I’ll find the tome first, keep it from happening. They need that to summon her, right?”

The girl said nothing.

“Or … if worst comes to worst, I’ll just … 
leave
. I’ll go somewhere else.”

“You had the chance to do that. You had a dozen chances to do that. You could do that right now, but you won’t.”

“
He
doesn’t command me! Neither do you!”

“No,” the girl said. “Neither of us. But you’re still here. You know what Ulbecetonth will do when she returns. You’ve seen what her children do without her. You could leave, you could leave it all, you could watch everything drown.”

He said nothing.

“But you won’t,” she said. “And you won’t survive without him.”

“I don’t believe in fate.”

“Fate and inevitability are not the same things.”

“I don’t believe in that, either.”

“Very hard to lie to someone who can look into your head.” Her sigh sent a cloud of fog across the face of her tomb. “Go, Lenk. The chasm ends soon, rises up to the place you need to be if you follow it. But you know you won’t get far without him.”

He stared at her. She stared through him. He glared. She grinned. He sighed, turned on his heel. He had taken two steps before he paused and asked without looking back.

“Who is he?”

She said nothing for a moment. When she spoke, her voice trembled.

“If you really want to know … ask me again. And I’ll tell you.”

He did not ask.

He walked away.

Trying to ignore the pain in his shoulder and the light that chased him.

“W
ill you just wait up?” Kataria called after him from far away.

He wouldn’t, so he didn’t bother to call back “no” this time. He kept going, jogging through the chasm. Admittedly, he should be nicer to her given that her scent was still all over him, but he trusted she would understand why he wanted to leave a dark, brooding chasm in which he had nearly died and then spoken to a dead girl.

Of course, he hadn’t told her that last part.

So she hadn’t understood when she awoke and found him hurriedly dressing, taking a quick swig of water, finishing up the remains of a fish they had managed to catch, and telling her to come with him. Nor did she seem to understand now as they leapt over rock and coral, over skeletal hand and rusted sword, hurrying farther into the darkness with no end in sight.

He would explain later, he told himself, when they got out of the chasm.

Explain the dead girl living in a block of ice in a room filled with tentacles as she spoke of how a demon queen from beyond hell was bursting out from her prison and the only way to stop her was to bring back the voice in his head that apparently had a gender and other people he occasionally took up residences in so that his shoulder didn’t rot off and kill him first.

Or maybe he’d just tell her he needed some fresh air.

That would be good, too.

Of course, before any of that could happen, he had to find the way out. The girl had said to follow the chasm and that’s what he had done.

He came to a halt, casting a stare up and down the chasm.

But which way had he been following it?

All right
, he thought
.
Let’s think about this a moment. You passed the skeleton, the purple coral, the purple kelp, then the other skeleton … in that order? Or did you pass the …
He scratched his head
.
So
this
is why people draw maps in their books. Okay, there was a dead shict somewhere and that was back the way you came and you
didn’t
pass that dead shict … unless someone moved the body. Or ate it. Do shicts eat their dead? Is that true or did we just make that up?

He cast a long, curious look at Kataria as she came jogging up, breathing heavily. She shot him a glare.

“What are you looking at me like that for?” she asked.

“Do you eat—”

Don’t ask her, stupid!

“Nevermind.” He looked up at the jagged rent in the earth. “How much farther do you think it goes?”

“Oh, is
that
what we’re trying to find?” Kataria snarled. “Maybe if you had
told
me instead of running off, I could have figured something out.”

“Can you figure something out now? I’m kind of getting tired of this.”

“Well, so long as
you’re
getting tired of it.” She sighed, followed his gaze up to the sky. “No, I have no idea how and I have no idea why you think following this thing will lead us anywhere, anyway.”

He frowned, stared down into the emptiness of the chasm and muttered under his breath.

“I can’t believe she would lie to me.”

“Who?”

“The dead girl.”

“Who?”

What was that? You don’t have voices in your head anymore! You should be saying
fewer
weird things!

He opened his mouth to explain and some jumble of words that sounded vaguely like an excuse tumbled out. It was with some relief that he saw her looking over his head, clearly not listening. Relief that quickly turned to fear as he saw her reach for her bow.

His sword was in his hand by the time he turned around and stared into the yellow eyes staring back at him. It was those eyes—and only those eyes—that betrayed the creature as a Shen. The rest of it, bent back, dirty robes, drooping cowl from which ancient smoke and dust emanated, were so impossibly decrepit they might as well have been lifted from the dead.

It stood there for a moment, watching them. It made no other movement, said nothing, did not blink. And they, in turn, made no move to release arrow or tighten grip on sword. For the moment, anyway.

“Should I shoot it?” Kataria asked.

“It hasn’t attacked us,” Lenk replied.

“Ah.” The bowstring groaned a little. “So … do I shoot it?”

“Give it a moment. It might know a way out.”

“And why would it tell us that as opposed to, say, splitting our heads open … you know, like all the other ones try to do?”

“Because it’s retreating.”

“Slowly shuffling away” might have been a better choice of words for what the creature was doing, even if it didn’t carry the same disdain for how brazenly it turned about and slipped into the darkness, tail dragging behind it.

“After it!” Lenk barked. “It could lead us out of here.”

“Should we give it a longer head start?” Kataria asked. “The thing wasn’t exactly in a hurry.”

Yet even as they hurried after it, the creature seemed ever in the distance. Even as they charged, even as it shuffled, it seemed to draw farther and farther ahead of them, moving from shadow to shadow as a man moves through doors. By the time they were out of breath, the creature was still yards away, disappearing into the shadows once more.

“Not fair,” Kataria exclaimed through heavy breath. “They’re not supposed to be able to do that. How are they doing that?”