The Skybound Sea (56 page)

Kataria stared for a moment, slack-jawed and unblinking. Sheraptus merely raised an eyebrow at the shattered arrow falling to the stones. He looked back up to Kataria. And, as he held out his hands in what almost looked like it could be a gesture of benediction if not for the blossoms of fire blooming upon his palms, she wasn’t quite sure what to do next.

Until someone told her.

Now you run
.

Her head knew, but her legs didn’t. She fell backward, tumbling from her perch, just as the sky exploded.

Fire washed over the coral as a tide, blackening her perch and shattering it. It flooded the forest, turning coral into pyres, kelp into sheets of flame. Kataria could see the Shen now from their hiding places. She could see Yaike as he looked up at her, as unaware that she had been there as she had been of him. She could see him yell something, she could see his eye reflect the fire, she could see his mouth twist and distort as his face became scaly green melting wax as the fire rose up around him in a titanic sheet.

Warriors were fleeing. Fish were swimming. Fire was racing to catch them both and winning, engulfing the forest and eating it alive. Kataria hauled herself to her legs and told them to go. They remembered now, they remembered how to run and how to not stop and how to tell her lungs that they couldn’t stop breathing even as smoke rose up in plumes around her and she couldn’t stop running ever as the fire closed in around her, behind her.

And then in front of her.

The wall of kelp went up in a glorious burst. The coral collapsed around her and in her path, forming a ring of blackening spikes and fire around her. It ate everything, all color, all light, all sound. The screams of the Shen dying were engulfed in the laughter of the fire. The greenery of the forest was bathed in red. The fish fell from the sky, their colors painted black with soot.

Kataria could feel the sweat mingle with her warpaint, streak down her body in long tears of red. She could feel her heart beat as it struggled to free itself from her chest. She could feel the breath beginning to leave her.

She closed her eyes.

She gritted her teeth.

And she prayed. To someone.

From far away, the forest screamed. Its voice was fervent and choked with ash. Its blood was painted in a cloud of black and red upon the gray dawn sky. It wailed through a shudder of kelp and a groan of blackened coral before it finally fell to a broken sigh of ash and embers and then fell silent.

Lenk wasn’t quite sure how long it spoke. Lenk wasn’t at all certain how long he stared at its black blood pooling in the sky, bright embers dancing in it. Lenk didn’t know what to say when he finally found the words to speak.

But they came, anyway.

“Kat?”

As though she might pop up behind him, wrap her arms about his middle and say
“just kidding.”

He whirled about on the stone staircase, casting a furious scowl at the creature one step above him.

“What the hell just happened?”
he demanded
.

Shalake looked down, yellow eyes narrowed through the sockets of his skull headdress. He made no answer. Not as Denaos and Asper both turned irate and suspicious scowls up the stairs. Not as Dreadaeleon looked agog from the devastation to him. Not as Gariath shot him a sidelong glance.

Only when Mahalar cleared his throat from one more step above did Shalake speak.

“They failed,” the hulking Shen said simply.

“Who? Who is they?” Lenk demanded, ascending a step.

“The brave warriors who gave their lives in the ambush,” Shalake replied. “They will be remembered.”

From beside Shalake, Jenaji, nearly as tall and half as tattooed, seized the Shen’s arm.

“How many?”

“Twenty,” Shalake replied, shrugging Jenaji’s grip off. “Twenty who will be honored at sunset.”

“Honored as charred husks of overcooked meat along with Kataria because you are a stupid, scaly piece of
shit
who can’t follow an order!” Lenk all but screamed.

“I am the
warwatcher
,” Shalake roared back, looking down at Lenk and taking an aggressive step forward. “I do not take orders from
you
and I do not trust pointy-eared weaklings to do the duty of the Shen.”

“Whatever just went wrong happened because
your
warriors couldn’t be trusted not to send everything to hell!” Lenk roared.

The hulking Shen glowered as he removed his tremendous warclub from his back, the tooth-studded weapon roughly half the size of Lenk sliding easily into his hands like it had been waiting for this for days. Lenk responded, pulling his sword free and hoping no one saw his hands tremble with the effort.

On the steps below, the green crowd trailing into the sand of the ring, close to two hundred Shen warriors looked up in anticipation of the brawl—or decapitation—about to happen.

Mahalar cleared his throat.

Shalake’s glare did not dissipate, but softened considerably as he turned it toward the elder Shen.

“He challenges me,” Shalake snarled. “He accuses me. I have the right to—”

“Of course. Later.” Mahalar gestured with his chin. “After that.”

“Holy …” Asper began. The rest of her words were lost in the sight that came from the forest, with a herald of smoke and fire.

Like children called to supper, the netherlings came racing eagerly from the forests in a stream of purple skin and glistening black iron. A stream became a tide as they poured into the ring, tearing the earth beneath their boots.

Legion after legion, long face after long face, they came. With shields on their arms, bows on their backs, swords slung over their shoulders, they came. In numbers vast and with bodies blackened by soot and flame, they came. They filled the ring, rushing until they came exactly halfway between the Shen and the forest and assembling into lines.

And there they stopped.

From the top of the steps, no sand could be seen. The ring had become a sea of purple skin, lit by the white of hundreds of empty eyes and hundreds of jagged-toothed smiles.

“KENKI-AI!”

The call boomed from Shalake’s mouth like a drum, echoing down the line. The Shen assembled on the steps drew arrows from quivers, nocked them into great bows of wood and bone. The Shen on the sands below seized their clubs in both hands, banged machetes against shields made from turtle shells and dried leather as they hunkered behind barricades brimming with sharp coral spines.

Lenk felt his attentions drawn to the center of the line, an insignificant white speck of froth amidst the purple sea. From this distance, he could pick the figure out. From this distance, he could see Sheraptus sitting there, smoke still trailing from his fingers and leading to the bleeding sky behind him.

And from a place tenderly close, Lenk could feel a scratching at the back of his skull.

“Kill him,” he hissed. “Kill him now. He’s right there. Shoot him.”

“Not close enough,” Jenaji muttered.

“Then rush out there and
kill
him.”

“Any chance we have relies on them coming to us,” Mahalar muttered. “We wait.”

Lenk knew the wisdom in that. He could see the line of shields and swords stretching out before him. He could see the arrows being drawn back by netherling bows. Any charge would be brief, futile, and end in him lying in a puddle of his own fluids. At the very best, he would die with his sword in a netherling’s chest. Probably not Sheraptus’s. It was a very messy suicide.

But something inside him dearly wanted just that.

“Roughly what we expected,” Yldus commented, “a small number in a fortified position. No other choice for them, really. The ring winds down at the other side, meaning we can only put so many of our warriors there before they start trampling each other.” He gestured to the brightly-colored coral fortifications. “And they set up those … things to try and funnel us further. Smarter than we’d given lizards credit for.”

“Not a problem, I assume,” Sheraptus muttered, though only half paying attention. His attentions were turned outward, over the heads of his warriors, over the spiraling coral thorns, out to the distant sea. Something out there drew his eye as an itch draws a scratching hand.

“It was nothing we weren’t prepared for,” Yldus replied. “We can rip
through those defenses with the …” He paused and glanced at the monstrosity of metal and spiked machinery that stood at the center of their line. “What did you call this thing again?”

A female loading a star-shaped blade into the thing’s flexible, side-mounted arms looked up and shrugged. “I don’t know. It shoots stuff.”

“Of course.” Yldus sighed. “At any rate, the blades are thick enough to shred those barricades. Given time—”

“How much time?”

“A few hours or so. We’ll need to put the low-fingers and their bows up ahead so that—”

“And how quickly can you get this done?” Sheraptus asked, turning to the side.

Vashnear looked at him, then turned a stare out to the Shen assembled at the other end of the ring. He sniffed.

“Quickly,” he answered.

Sheraptus swung his gaze over to Xhai. The female grunted and turned to her nearest subordinate, another Carnassial clad in the storm gray armor of her rank. The Carnassial snorted in response, looking up through the thin slits of a skull-hugging helmet rife with spikes and jagged edges.

“Three fists,” Xhai grunted. “Three Carnassials. Whoever can get to the front first.” She spurred her cohort with an iron boot to the flank. “Go.”

The Carnassial snarled a response, barked an order to the rest of the netherlings. The hungriest ones fought their way to the front, leaving the weaker ones to clean up the soon-to-be mess.

Sheraptus wasn’t sure how they decided who got to charge. Amongst males, it was generally considered wisdom not to try to understand the finer intricacies of the females’ hierarchies. Sheraptus didn’t care, either way. His concerns were beyond the sea.

And drawing ever closer.

“Quickly, Vashnear?” he asked.

“Quickly, Sheraptus,” Vashnear said, spurring his sikkhun forward to take his place at the center of the assembling netherlings. “And with a great deal of mess.”

“What’s that they’re doing?”

“They’re moving … fighting? Yes, fighting. No, now just moving again … faster … closer. Oh. Oh dear.”

“They’re grouping up, are they—”

“Attala-ah-kah, Jenaji. Attala-ah-kah.”

“They’re definitely—”

“KENKI-SHA! ATTALA! ATALLA JAGA!”

“Oh sweet Silf, they’re coming to—”

“QAI ZHOTH!”

They were all talking at once. The mass of green and yellow blending together around Lenk, the great wave of purple washing across the sands toward them, the blobs of pink and blue and black that reached and grabbed at him as he pushed his way down the gray slope.

It was hard to hear them. It was hard to see them. There were too many of them all and he only cared about one of them. And he was far away, seated atop a pitch-black beast and dressed like an angel from hell with a halo of fire and shadow.

And between them came the purple, countless bodies intertwining, countless mouths howling, countless swords in the air. There might have been a lot, there might have been a few.

He had to hurt them. He had to make them bleed. He couldn’t care about numbers or jagged-toothed smiles or the great metal birds flying overhead.

Arms caught him about the waist, a pair of bodies brought him low as the air was cut apart in a metallic wail. Flesh and bone exploded in a bouquet of red and white flowers as the great, jagged star tore through the Shen behind them, carrying through bodies and screams to impale itself in the stone stairs.

“Down! Down! Keep him down!” Denaos cried.

“There’s more coming, Lenk! Stop
moving
, you idiot!” Asper shrieked, trying to hold him down.

“JAHU! ATTAI WOH!”
Shalake howled
.

Shields went up around them, a poor defense against the jagged stars descending from the air. In the distance, between the scaly green legs, Lenk could see them hurled from great wooden arms on the netherlings’ ballista. He could see them fly into the air, whirring violently before falling like falcons, ripping through coral, shields, flesh, bones, sand, stones.

And still, the screams were drowned out. And still, the blood spattering the earth around him was nothing. Nothing compared to the rush of purple flesh and black metal charging toward them.

“ATTAI-AH! ATTAI-AH!”
Jenaji screamed from the steps
.
“ATTALA JAGA! SHENKO-SA!”

His warcry was echoed in the hum of bowstrings, a choral dirge that sent arrows singing through the sky. Fletched with feathery fins and tipped with jagged coral, they rose and fell in harmony, their song turning to battle cry as they tipped and descended upon the charging netherlings.

They sought. They found flesh, digging into necks, thighs, wriggling between armor plates and jutting out of throats. Some fell, some stumbled, some tripped and were trampled by their fellow warriors. But one still stood.

A great hulk of a female, armor stark gray like an angel wrought of iron, swinging a massive slab of metal over a helmet flanged with spikes and edges. She embraced the arrows like lovers as they found a bare bicep, a flash of thigh, a scant spot of skin just beneath the collarbone.

She laughed. She bled. She lowered her head.

And she did not stop.

The Carnassial did not meet her foes. She exploded into them. A coral barricade was smashed into fragments, many of them embedded in her flesh to join the arrows as she met the cluster of Shen warriors full on. For a moment, their warcries died in their throats and their numbers were meaningless.

She swung her slab of a sword, cleaving shields in two, swords from wrists, heads from shoulders in one fell swoop. She stepped forward with each blow, driving the warriors back as more netherlings rushed into the gap she had cloven into the barricade. Those Shen that fell screamed, steamed like cooked meat as sheens of sickly green liquid gnawed at their wounds.