Black Halo

Thirty-Nine

THE KINDEST OF POISONS



In a blackening row, the frogs smouldered on a thin wooden skewer.

Kataria stared as their colours, the myriad greens and blues and reds and yellows, vanished under a coat of black as the fire licked at their bodies, made their bellies swell and glisten with escaping moisture. The frogs stared back at her, through eyes growing larger in their tiny sockets, the fear they could not express in life coming out in death.

Finally, with nearly inaudible popping sounds, their eyes burst. Naxiaw plucked the skewer from the fire, glanced it over, and handed it to Kataria. She took it from his hands, looking it over with a frown.

‘You put them on six breaths ago,’ she said, slightly worried.

‘They are cooked in six breaths,’ he said, his shictish deep and sure where hers was soft and hesitant.

‘They’re still toxic,’ she replied, glancing at their glistening bellies. ‘The poison hasn’t evaporated from them yet.’

‘That’s why you use only six breaths.’

‘So, they’re still poisonous.’

‘They are.’

‘Why even cook them, then?’ She managed a weak grin in the face of their charred countenances. ‘Or do they just taste terrible raw?’

She looked up and found no grin on Naxiaw’s face. He was staring at her.

Still, she noted.

And with an intensity too severe for the situation, as though whether or not she were about to chew up some roasted amphibians would answer a dire question she had been privately pondering for ages now, and whether or not she licked her lips afterwards would dictate what he did next.

Not for the first time, she found herself glancing to the thick Spokesman Stick resting against the rock he sat upon.

Saying nothing, she bit one of the toasted creatures from the skewer. They were bitter and foul on her tongue, the aroma of cooked venom filling her nostrils. They were quite toxic, quite terrible to taste; she found herself wondering again what the point of cooking them was.

Texture, perhaps?

She bit down. A pungent flower bloomed in her mouth, and her lips threatened to rip themselves from her face, so fiercely did they pucker.

Apparently not.

Yet, under his stare, she continued to pop them into her mouth, chewing them up as much as she could tolerate before they slid as greasy lumps into her belly. She met his gaze as she did so, watching him as he watched her, as he continued staring.

No, she realised as she saw the careful steadiness of his eyes, not staring. Her own quivered a bit. Searching.

She did not ask for what. She didn’t want to know. She tried not to even think about it, for she didn’t want him to find it. Yet with eyes and instinct alike, he searched her.

She had sensed him reaching out again, as she had all that morning since rejoining him in the forest after reclaiming her clothes from the Owauku. She had sensed him peering through the veil of the Howling, whispering over its roar to her, trying to reach her through their communal instinct. Of him, she could sense nothing. Of her, it was clear by the faint twitch at the edges of his mouth that he sensed only frustration.

It was discouraging, she admitted to herself, that the connection they had shared on Sheraptus’ ship had been lost so completely. There was a comfort in his instinct melding with hers, a soothing earth to bury her fear beneath, and she dearly wished to feel it again. How had it been lost? she wondered. What had changed since last night?

She fought to keep the despair off her face.

Oh, right.

Meeting Naxiaw should have been the first thing to do that morning, she knew. Going to Lenk should have been something that never happened. She had already made her choice between them, between a human she should hate and a people she should adore, three times. She had made it when she looked into his eyes. She had made it when she heard him scream her name and plea for help.

She had made it when she turned away.

She was shict, she told herself. Her loyalty was to her people. She owed him no excuses, would give him no reasons, would offer no apologies. And she had remained faithful to that vow when she came to him that morning, found him shrugging his shirt over a freshly stitched wound.

She had met his eyes, then, and was unable to say anything at all.

Perhaps that was why she unconsciously evaded Naxiaw’s probing instinct: a fear he might see what happened that morning, a dread he might know why they couldn’t connect, a gripping terror he might have a solution.

She looked to the Spokesman again.

She found herself surprised to see it there still and not, say, embedded in the skulls of one or more of the humans. Naxiaw had seen them, after all, when the two shicts had pulled themselves from the reaching ocean. He had paused, a mere fifty paces from them, and stared. The implications that had seized her with a cold dread then had surely dawned on him as well.

Despite his captivity, he was still fresh and energetic. Coming from a fight, the humans were not. He was still strong, limber and swift. The humans were weak, exhausted and burdened with each other. His Spokesman leapt to his hands like an eager puppy. The humans’ weapons hung from their hands like leaden weights.

He was shict.

They were not.

She had braced herself, then. For what, she wasn’t sure. The uncertainty paralysed her, rendered her incapable of doing more than staring dimly, unsure what more to do. A shict, she knew, would have rushed down with him against them. A companion, she told herself, would have stood between him and them.

But a companion would not have stared into her friend’s eyes and turned away when he screamed her name.

And a shict would not have felt wounded when he stared back into hers the following morning and turned away when she said nothing.

Kataria had done nothing that night. Kataria continued to do nothing. As much as she cursed herself for it, that did not surprise her.

What did, however, was the fact that Naxiaw had followed her example and let the humans be. Of all the qualities the s’na shict s’ha were legendary for, tolerance and patience were not among them.

Why he had vanished into the forest, continued to wait here, she did not know. Why he had met her with nothing more than an offer of cooked amphibians, she could not say. What he hoped to find in her as he stared at her so intently, she had no idea.

But she wished, desperately, that he would stop.

He might have picked up on that desire through the Howling. Or he might have seen her squirming upon her log seat with an intensity usually reserved for dogs inflicted with parasites. He looked away, regardless.

‘Cook the poison from the frog and there is no point to consuming them,’ he said, producing a pouch from his hip. ‘Venom, you see, has a number of advantages.’

‘My father said it’s how the greenshicts keep their blood toxic,’ she replied.

‘Your father knew more about the s’na shict s’ha,’ he paused, letting the word hang in the air, ‘than he knew about his own people.’

‘You knew him?’

‘Many of us did. He was a knowledgeable leader. He knew what he was. He knew what he had to do. He knew he was a good shict, and so did we. He also knew the value of consuming venom.’

He reached into his pouch and produced a frog, still alive, its red and blue body glistening as it croaked contentedly in his palm, unafraid.

‘It is a temporary pain and so snaps one from stupor,’ he said. ‘It sharpens the senses, makes one more aware of the weakness of lesser pains … improves the function of the bowels.’

He said this pointedly, looking at her. She furrowed her brow in retaliation.

‘And?’ she pressed.

‘And,’ he continued, ‘it is what cures disease.’

She stiffened at the word, gooseflesh rising on her back.

‘One would assume,’ she whispered hesitantly, ‘that poison would make one as ill as disease.’

‘Poison does not make one ill; it merely poisons. It is a temporary element introduced to a person’s body. It enters and, assuming the host is strong enough, it leaves. If the host survives, she is more tolerant to the pain.’

He watched the frog as it tentatively waddled across his palm, testing this newfound footing.

‘Illness is born of something deeper,’ he said. ‘It infects, festers within the host, not as a foreign element, but as a part of her body. And because of this, it does not leave on its own. Even if symptoms disappear, the disease lingers and births itself anew. Because of this, the host cannot wait for it leave. It must be treated.’

His fingers clenched into a fist. There was a faint snapping sound.

‘Cured.’

She fought to hide the shudder that coursed through her, more for the sudden ruthlessness of the action than for the fact that he subsequently popped the raw amphibian into his mouth and swallowed.

‘A cured illness is a purified body. It leaves the host stronger. But this is all assuming she recognises the illness to begin with.’

He fixed his penetrating stare upon her, sliding past her tender, exposed flesh, past her trembling bones, through sinew turning to jelly. He saw, then, what he had been searching for. She felt the knowledge of it in her heart.

‘To infect without being noticed,’ he whispered, ‘is the nature of disease.’

She could not bear his searching stare any longer. She turned away. His sigh was something harsh and alien, unused to his lips.

‘How long?’

She said nothing.

‘What am I to tell your father, Little Sister?’

She shook her head.

‘How am I to tell any of our kinsmen that you have been with humans?’

‘Tell them nothing,’ she said, biting her lip. ‘Tell them anything; tell them everything. Tell them you don’t know why and tell them that Kataria doesn’t know, either. Or tell them I’m dead. Either way, we can all stop wondering about it and talking about it and thinking about it and get on with whatever the hell else we were doing before everyone started asking if Riffid even gave a crap if a shict hung around round-ears.’

Her hands trembled, clenched the skewer so hard it snapped. She looked down at it through blurred vision; she couldn’t remember when she had started crying.

His stare was all the more unbearable for the sympathy flooding it. Sympathy, she noted, blended with a distinct lack of understanding that made his gaze a painful thing, two ocular knives twisting in her flesh with tears seeping into the wounds. And so she stared into the fire, biting back the agony.

‘It’s not what it seems,’ she whispered.

‘There are scant few ways for it to seem, Little Sister,’ Naxiaw replied. ‘They are not dead. You are not dead. Why, then, are you with them?’

She had been avoiding the question since the day she had walked out of the Silesrian alongside a silver-haired monkey. It had been easy to avoid, at first: just an idle wonder thrown from a clumsy and distracted mind. But Naxiaw’s mind was sharp, practised. The question struck her like a brick to the face, and she found that all the answers she had used to excuse away the question before felt weightless.

For the adventure? In the beginning, she had told herself it was for that – the thrill of exploration and the lust for treasure. But shicts had no use for treasure, and the use for exploration went only so far as scouting for the tribe. There was no word for ‘adventure’.

Friendship, then? As much as she knew she should loathe to admit it, she had become … attached to the humans. There was no denying it after a year, anymore. But there was no word for ‘friendship’ in the shictish tongue; there was ‘tribe’; there was ‘shict’. That was all a shict needed.

Perhaps, then, because she found she had needed more than tribe … more than a shict needed. But how could she tell him that? How could she tell herself that?

As the tears began to flow again, she realised she just had.

And she felt him: his gaze, his thoughts, his instincts. Naxiaw reached for her, with eyes, with frown, with thought, with ears, with everything but his long, green fingers. The scrutinising had not dissipated, but was mingled with an animal desire, an utter yearning to understand that made his gaze all the more painful, the wounds all the deeper.

He stared at her, trying to understand.

And he never would. There was no word for it.

If he didn’t know what she was feeling, he must have seen something in her tears, felt something in her heart, heard something in her head that made him know all the same that she was feeling something no true shict should. His face twitched, trembled, sorrow battling confusion battling fury. In the end, all that came of it was a shaking of his head and a long, tired sigh.

‘Little Sister,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘They’re kou’ru. Monkeys. Diseases.’

‘But I’ve been with them so long,’ she said. ‘My skin hasn’t flaked off; my heart hasn’t stopped beating; my blood hasn’t turned to mud. The stories aren’t true. They aren’t disease.’

‘They are,’ he snapped back, baring his canines. ‘A disease does not merely infect and kill, it weakens. It makes us vulnerable to other sicknesses, deeper illnesses, ones that cannot be burned out.’

‘Like what?’ She was absently surprised to find the growl in her voice, to feel her ears flattening against her head as she flashed her own teeth at him. ‘I’ve seen more in a year than most shicts will see in their lifetime. I’ve tasted alcohol, I’ve seen cities made of stone, I know what it means when a cock crows and what it means to drain the dragon.’

‘Symptoms of a weak and ignorant breed, and you’re infected with them.’

‘It can’t be ignorance to learn,’ she snarled. ‘A lot of what they know is useless, dangerous and stupid. But I’ve learned about farming, agriculture, digging wells. There must be a reason they became the dominant race. If shicts are to survive, then we have to—’

‘Reasons?’ He leapt to his full height, towering over her. ‘There is a reason, yes. They are dominant because when we first met them, we had a disease. Understanding, forgiveness, mercy,’ he spat. ‘These were the symptoms of an illness that claimed thousands of shicts.’

She found herself falling from her log in an attempt scramble away from him as he advanced, his long strides easily overtaking her. He leaned down, extended his fingers to her.

‘The disease rises now and again. I was there the last time it infected us. I was there when I saw the reason humans were dominant.’

Quick as asps, his hands shot out and seized her by the face. His eyes were massive, intense and brimming with tears as he drew his face towards her own wide-eyed and trembling visage. Then, he uttered the last words she remembered before he pressed his brow to hers.

‘You see, too.’

And then, there was fire.

It was everywhere, razing the forests in great orange sheets, writhing claws pulling down branches and leaves and blackening the sky. It roared, it laughed, it shrieked with delight: loud, too loud, deafening.

Not loud enough to drown out the screaming.

Children, men, women, elders, mothers, daughters, hunters, weavers, sitting, standing, drinking, breathing, screaming, screaming, screaming. She knew them all – their lives, their histories, their loves, their families – as each scream filled her ears, mingled within the Howling and became knowledge to her and all shicts. And she heard them all made silent: some instantly, some in groans that bubbled into nothingness, some in high-pitched wails that drifted into the sky.

She saw them: green faces, mouths open, ears flattened, weapons falling from long green hands. She saw the spears embedded in their chests, the boots crushing their bones, the thick pink hands that unbuckled belts, that dashed skulls against rocks, that thrust sword, stabbed spear, swung axe. She saw their eyes, wide with desire, vast with conviction. They looked upon the faces; they heard the screams. There was no language to let them understand what they did, and they did not try to understand.

The screams mingled as one wailing torrent, shrieking through her mind, bursting through her skull, flowing out of her ears on bright red brooks. She heard her own voice in there, her own sorrow, her own agony, her own tragedy.

Eventually, their voices stopped. Hers continued for a while.

She looked up, at last, and saw Naxiaw. His hands hung weakly at his side. He stared at her firmly. He did nothing more as she scrambled to her feet, staring at him with eyes bereft of anything but pure animal terror, and fled into the forest.

He stared, long after she had disappeared into the brush.

Then, he sat down, and sighed.

‘I should not have done that,’ he whispered.

‘She had to know,’ a voice deep inside his consciousness spoke: Inqalle, harsh and unforgiving.

‘You did as you must,’ another added: Avaij, strong and unyielding. ‘Anything to make her aware of the disease. So long as she knows, she can fight it.’

He said nothing in reply. Through the Howling, though, they heard everything.

‘You fear her weak,’ Inqalle said. ‘I thought her weak, too. She lacks the conviction to kill the humans. She has had days, opportunities beyond counting, and she has done nothing.’

‘If our plight, the suffering of our people, her people cannot move her,’ Avaij said, ‘then perhaps she is too infected. Perhaps she must be put down.’

‘I have seen too many shicts die at human hands,’ Naxiaw whispered harshly. ‘Too many families severed, children lost … I will not let it happen again, not to another shict, not to her.’

He sent these words through the Howling on thoughts of anger, of frustration. The words of his companions came back on sensations of possibility, anticipation.

‘Many Red Harvests approaches,’ Avaij said. ‘The idea here was to test it.’

‘There are ways to save a host beyond putting it down,’ Inqalle said. ‘Poison can be used to cleanse, to shrivel tumours and drive out diseases.’

‘I have seen enough of her heart to know that it will hurt her,’ Naxiaw replied.

‘The nature of poison is to harm. The nature of disease to kill. It is your choice, Naxiaw.’

He sat silently for a moment. His decision was made known to them in an instant, the Howling full of his cold anger and hardened resolve.

‘The humans die,’ he whispered. ‘I will cure them.’

‘I am with you,’ Inqalle said.

‘As am I,’ Avaij agreed.

‘And we,’ their thoughts became synonymous, ‘will not let another shict suffer.’

The vigour that coursed through Lenk’s body as he strode out of the cavern was one that he had not experienced in a lifetime. Maybe even his whole lifetime, he thought. His muscles were taut and tense; his body felt lighter than it had ever felt; his breath came in deep gulps of air too fresh to have ever existed on this stagnant island of death.

Life surged through him, a vibrant and untested energy that was nearly painful to feel racing through his veins. His mind was aware of his wounds and his scars, but his body remained oblivious. Still, that did not stop his brain from trying to make his body aware of its limitations.

This doesn’t make sense, he thought. Moments ago, I was unconscious. Hours ago, I was in agony. Days ago, I was …

‘Look back far enough,’ the voice replied to his thoughts. ‘You will find only pain, a dark and agonising nightmare, until this moment. You’re awake now.’

How?

‘Don’t believe what the priests tell you. Life is not sacred. Life is simply a tool. Purpose is sacred. Without purpose, life is nothing but a long, pointless, empty sleep.’

And our sleep has been long.

‘Too long.’

And our purpose …

‘We know what it is.’

To find the tome.

‘To slaughter the demons.’

And from there?

‘You’ll know by then. But for now …’

He glanced up and saw Kataria’s back. The shict sat upon a rock, staring into the forest. Lenk felt his hand tighten into a fist.

‘Remember your purpose. Remembers theirs.’

‘I will,’ he whispered.

Her ears twitched. She glanced over her shoulder and frowned at him as he approached.

‘You snuck up on me,’ she said, slightly offended.

He said nothing. They stared for a moment. Her gaze was softer than he remembered. She shifted to the side, leaving a bare space of granite beside her.

‘Walk past,’ the voice urged his legs. ‘Do not look. Do not think of her. Go forward.’

She had abandoned him. She had looked into his eyes. His mind remembered this. His mind did not object as this vigour carried him forth and past her. Her hand shot out and caught his. He stopped. Her fingers wrapped around his.

His body remembered this. It did not object as she pulled him down to sit beside her.

Silence persisted between, but not within. A voice raged at him, hissed angrily inside him, told him to go up. He wasn’t sure why he stayed sitting. He wasn’t sure why her hand was wrapped around his.

‘Through the neck,’ she said, suddenly.

‘Huh?’

‘I’ve got your sword arm right now. If I had pulled just a little harder, I could have brought my knife up into your neck.’ She sniffed, scratched her rear end. ‘It wouldn’t have to be instant, either. I don’t think you could stop me if I ran away and waited for you to bleed to death.’

‘See?’ the voice roared. ‘Do you see? Do you see her purpose? Do you see why she is a threat? Kill her. Strike her down! Strangle her now before she can kill us!’

She hasn’t killed us.

‘Yet.’

Yet.

‘I don’t have my sword,’ he said.

She reached down and plucked up a length of steel from beside the rock, handing it to him. The moment he clenched the weapon, the vigour inside him boiled instead of surged, his muscles clenched to the point of cramping.

‘It washed up on shore just an hour ago. The Owauku wanted to throw it back before you could use it on them. I stopped them.’

‘It has purpose,’ the voice whispered. ‘It knows what it is used for. That’s why it comes back to us. It knows what it craves.’

‘I could,’ he whispered, ‘kill you right now.’

‘You won’t,’ she said, not even bothering to look up. ‘And I haven’t killed you yet.’ She smacked her lips. ‘I’ve had so many opportunities. I’ve thought of a hundred ways to do it: poison, arrows, shove you overboard when you’re doing your business …’

‘Kill her now!’

Right now?

‘If I was a true shict, I would have killed you when I first set eyes on you.’ She sighed. ‘But I didn’t. I followed you out of the forest. I followed you for a year. I tracked you to a dark cave that you went into and I waited on this rock because I knew you’d be all right.’ She bit her lip. ‘You’re always all right.’

She bowed her head for a moment, then rubbed the back of her neck.

‘And that’s all I’m ever sure of these days. I go to sleep not knowing if I’ll dream shict dreams or what shict dreams are, but I know you’re going to be there when I wake up.’ She blinked rapidly for a moment. ‘And back on the ship, when I wasn’t sure, it … I …’

The silence did not so much cloak them as smother them this time, seeping into Lenk so deeply that even his mind was still for the moment. He glanced at her, but she was pointedly looking into the forest, staring deeply into the trees as though she would die if she looked anywhere else.

Perhaps she would.

‘How’s the shoulder?’ she asked.

‘It’s fine,’ he replied. ‘I’ve had worse.’

‘You do seem to have a talent for getting beaten up.’

‘Everyone’s good at something.’ He shrugged, then winced. The pain in his shoulder had returned; it hadn’t been there when he had emerged from the cave.

‘You should let me take a look at it,’ she said. ‘I don’t trust Asper to do a good job anymore. She …’ She shook her head. ‘She’s distracted these days.’

‘I’d rather you didn’t.’

‘I understand.’ A bitter chuckle escaped her. ‘I understand that. I understand you.’ She sighed. ‘And that doesn’t feel as bad as I thought it would.’

He glanced down. Her hand had found his again, squeezing it tightly.

‘What now?’ she asked.

‘With what?’

‘Everything.’

‘We go after the tome.’

‘I thought you wanted to go back to the mainland, forget the tome and the gold.’

‘Things change.’

‘They do.’ She rose to her feet, knuckled the small of her back, and loosed the kind of sigh that typically preceded an arrow in the neck and a shallow grave. ‘And that’s not fair.’ Slowly, she began to walk away, slinking towards the forest. She hesitated at the edge of the brush. ‘I’m not going to apologise, Lenk, for anything.’

‘I don’t blame you,’ he replied.

For the first time, she looked at him. It was a fleeting flash of emerald, nothing more than a breath during which their eyes met. It took less than that for her to frown and look away again.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘you do.’

He didn’t protest. Not as she said the words. Not as she walked away.