Black Halo

Five

WHITE TREES



‘Tell ell me, Kataria,’ she had said once, ‘what is a shict?’

‘I learned that ages ago,’ her daughter had grumbled in reply, . ‘I could be learning how to skin a buck right now if I wasn’t here being stabbed with trivia. A buck. I could be coated in gore right now if – OW!’

After the blow, her daughter had muttered, ‘Riffid led the shicts out of the Dark Forest and gave us instinct, nothing else. She would not indulge us in weaknesses and we prosper from Her distance and – OW! No fair, I got that one right!’

‘You told me what your father says a shict is.’

‘Everyone agrees with him! You asked me what a shict was, not what I thought one was! What do you want me to say?’

‘If you could predict what I wanted you to say, you wouldn’t have gotten hit. That’s what it means to be a shict.’

‘So, violent hypocrisy makes a shict? That sounds pretty simple.’

‘You disagree?’

‘I do.’

‘Then tell me.’

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘Whatever I tell you, you’ll just hit me until I say what you want me to say. If I’m saying what you want me to say, I’m not a shict. I know that much.’

She had smiled once.

Kataria stared up at the sky, folding her arms behind her head as she lay upon the shore. The sun was moving slowly, sliding lazily behind the grey clouds, completely unconcerned for her careful scrutiny of its progress. By the time it peered out behind the rolling sheets of cloud, as if checking to see if she were still watching, she estimated three hours had passed.

She craned her neck up, looking past her bare feet.

The shoreline greeted her: vast, empty, eager. It was all too pleased to show her the rolling froth, the murmuring surf, the endless blue horizon stretching out before her.

And nothing more.

There was no wreckage, no movement, not even a corpse.

She sighed, turning her gaze skyward again, wondering just how long it was acceptable to wait for signs that one’s companions might have survived after being cast apart in an explosion of sea induced by a colossal, flesh-eating sea serpent.

What does one look for, anyway? she wondered. Wood? A severed limb? She recalled the Akaneed’s gaping maw, its sharp, flesh-rending teeth. Stool?

Very little sign of any of that, she noted with a sigh. And why should there be? What were the chances of one of them washing up, anyway? And if they did, why would they wash up as she did, having lost nothing more than her bow and boots?

They were dead now, she told herself, floating in the sea, resting in a gullet, picked apart by gulls or about to wash up as a bloated, pale, waterlogged piece of flesh. They were dead and she was alive. She should count herself lucky.

She was alive.

And they’re dead.

And she was not.

And he’s dead.

And she was a very lucky shict.

Shict, she repeated that word in her head. I am a shict. Shicts are proud. Shicts are strong. Shicts don’t fight fair. Shicts were given instinct by Riffid, nothing more. Shicts fight to protect. Shicts fight to cleanse. Shicts kill humans. Humans are the disease. Humans are the scourge that overruns this world. Humans build, humans destroy, humans burn and humans kill. Shicts kill humans. Shicts do not trust humans.

Nature conspired in silence at that moment. The roar of the ocean lulled, the whisper of the breeze stilled, the sound of trees swaying stopped. All for a moment just long enough for her to hear a single, insignificant thought that crept into the fore of her consciousness.

But you did.

The creeping thought became a sudden rush of memory, memories she had tried her best to shove in some dark corner of her mind until she could experience a blow against her skull and lose them.

But they came back, no matter how much she tried to block them out.

She remembered the sight of a silver mane, remembered how she thought it was so unusual to see in a human. She remembered how that had made her lower her bow, lower the arrow that had been poised at his head, a head so blissfully free of suspicions and projectiles alike. She remembered being intrigued, remembered following him out.

Shicts kill humans, she told herself, trying to drown the memory in rhetoric. Shicts slaughter humans. Shicts cleanse the world of humans. Mother told you what shicts were.

But she could not drown the sounds. His sounds, the sounds she had studied and learned: the murmurs that meant he was nervous around her, the griping that meant she had said something he would think about if not talk about, the sighs that meant he was thinking about something she had yet to learn about him.

Humans don’t have thoughts, she growled inwardly. Humans only have desires. Humans desire gold, desire land, desire whatever it is they don’t have. Father told you what humans were.

And through it all, she heard the distant beat of a heart. The sound of a heart that had beat fiercely enough to drown out the sound of a roaring sea. The sound of a heart that she was supposed to cut out, the sound of a heart that had fed the pulse in a throat she was supposed to slit. His heart, his pulsating, hideous human heart that she had heard before they departed. His horrific heart. His human heart. The heart she heard now.

But that’s just a memory. This knowledge came without forcing, the thought resounding in her head only once. Those are just sounds. He’s dead now.

And the memories were gone, leaving that thought hanging inside her head.

He’s dead. Your problems are solved.

She rose up, stiffly. She turned from the ocean, not looking back.

He was dead. He was a dead human. Her world was restored. She didn’t feel anything for a dead human. Dead humans did not have heartbeats. She was a shict once more.

This is more than luck, she told herself. This is a blessing from on high.

That thought gave her no comfort as she walked over the dunes and away from the shore.

She was a shict. For her, all that was on high was Riffid.

And Riffid did not give blessings.

‘What is a human?’ her daughter had asked.

She had paused before answering.

‘Your father should have told you.’

‘You said Father didn’t know what a shict was.’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘You implied it.’

‘And you wonder why people hit you.’

‘If you can’t answer it, just say so and I’ll figure it out for myself.’

‘A human is … not a shict.’

‘That’s it?’

‘That’s enough.’

‘No, it isn’t.’

‘Has anyone ever told you you’re amazingly bull-headed?’

‘Grandfather says they filed down my antlers after I was born. But that’s not important. What is a human?’

She had wandered away from their village, into the part of the forest where the earth beneath their feet and the ancestors that came before them were one.

‘Humans are … not like us, but also like us. They fight, they kill, just as we do. And what we claim is ours, they claim is theirs. Our cause is righteous. They say theirs is, too. We do what we must. They do as they do.’

‘Then how do we know they deserve to die?’

She had stared at a grave marked with long white mourning feathers.

‘Because they knew we deserved it.’

She journeyed over the dunes, through the valleys of the beach as the sun continued to crawl across the sky. Always, she found her gaze drifting off to the distant forest and shortly thereafter to her own belly as it let out an angry growl.

The knowledge that any food to be had would be found in the dense foliage gnawed at her as surely as the hunger that struggled to wrest control over her from a frail and withering hope inside her. In fact, she knew, it would be wiser to go into the woods now, to begin the search for something to eat as soon as possible, lest she find herself too weary and starving to conduct a more thorough search later.

Still, she reminded herself, it’s not like it’s hard to find something to eat in a forest. You’ve never had trouble sniffing out roots and fruits before. Hell, find a dark spot and you can probably find a nice, juicy grub.

The image of a writhing, ivory larva filled her mind. She smacked her lips. The fact that she was salivating at the thought of a squishy, tender infant insect brimming with glistening guts, she reasoned, was likely a strong indicator that she should go seek one out, if only to keep herself from dwelling on how bizarre this entire train of thought was.

And yet, no matter how strong the reasoning, she continued to walk along the beach, staring out over the waves. And always, no matter what she hoped to see, nothing but empty shoreline greeted her.

Stop it, she snarled inwardly. Forget them. They’re dead. And you will be, too, if you don’t find food soon. This isn’t what a shict does. Look, it’s easy. Just turn around.

She did so, facing the forest.

Now take a step forward.

She did so.

Now don’t look back.

That, as ever, was where everything went wrong.

She glanced over her shoulder, ignoring the instant frustration she felt for herself the moment she spied something dark out of the corner of her eye. Tucked behind a dune, bobbing in the water, she could see it: the distinct glisten of water-kissed wood.

Her heart rose in her chest as she spun about and began to hurry toward it, despite her own thoughts striving to temper her stride.

It’s wood, she told herself. It doesn’t mean anything beyond the fact that it’s wood. Don’t get your hopes up. Don’t get too excited. Remember the wreck. Remember the Akaneed.

As she drew closer, the boat’s shape became clearer: resting comfortably upon the shore, intact and unsullied. She furrowed her brow, cautioning her stride. This wasn’t her boat; hers was now in several pieces and probably jammed in one or two skulls right now.

So it’s someone else’s, she told herself. All the more reason to turn back now. No one with any good intentions would be out here. It’s not them. It’s not him. Turn back. She did not, creeping around the dune. Turn back. Remember you’re alive. Remember he’s dead. Remember they’re dead. They’re dead.

And, it became clear as she peered around the dune, they were not the only ones.

A lone tree, long dead but clinging to the sandy earth with the tenacity only a very old one could manage, stood in the middle of a small, barren valley. She peered closer, spying rope wrapped tightly about its highest branches, hanging taut. The grey, jagged limbs bent, creaking in protest as macabre, pink-skinned fruit swayed in the breeze, hanging by their ankles from the ropes.

She recognised them, the humans hanging from the tree. Even with their throats slashed and their bodies mutilated, their blood splashed against roots that no longer drank, she knew them as crewmen from the Riptide, the ship she and her companions had travelled on before pursuing the tome, the ship whose crew was supposed to come seeking them after they had obtained the book.

Apparently, they had found something else.

About the base of the tree, they swarmed. Kataria was uncertain what they were, exactly. They didn’t look dangerous, though neither did they look like anything she had seen before. She peered closer, saw that they resembled roaches the size of small deer, sporting great feathery antennae and rainbow-coloured wing carapaces that twitched in time with each other. They chittered endlessly, making strange clicking sounds as they craned up on their rearmost legs to brush their antennae against the swaying corpses.

And then, in an instant, they stopped. Their antennae twitched soundlessly, all in the same direction. A shrill chittering noise went out over them and they scattered, scurrying over the dunes before whatever had alarmed them could come to them.

But Kataria came out around her cover, unafraid as she approached the whitetree. She was unafraid. She knew its name. She knew the men whose blood-drained bodies hung from it.

And she had seen this before.

‘They had swords.’

Kataria had heard such a voice before: feminine, but harsh, thick and rasping. Her ears twitched, trembled at the sound, taking it in. It was a voice thick with a bloody history: people killed, ancestors murdered, families avenged. She heard the hatred boiling in the voice, felt it in her head.

And she knew the speaker as shict.

‘Humans always have swords,’ this newcomer said, her shictish thick as shictish should be. ‘They always move with the intent to kill.’

‘You killed them instead?’

‘And fed the earth with them. And warned their people with them.’

Kataria stared down at the red-stained ground. ‘So much blood …’

‘This island is thick with it. That which was shed here is far more righteous.’

Kataria clenched her teeth behind her lips, stilled her heart. ‘Have you found others?’

‘I have.’

At that, Kataria turned to look at her newfound company.

She was a shict, as Kataria knew, as Kataria was. But in her presence, her shadow that stretched unnaturally long, Kataria could feel her ears wither and droop.

The shict’s, however, stood tall and proud, six notches carved into each length, each ear as long as half her forearm. The rest of her followed suit: towering over her at six and a half feet tall, spear-rigid and steel-hard body bereft of any clothing beyond a pair of buckskin breeches. Her black hair was sculpted into a tall, bristly mohawk, her bare head decorated with black sigils on either side of the crude cut. She folded powerful arms over naked breasts that were barely a curve on her lean musculature and regarded Kataria coolly.

And, as Kataria stared, only one thought came to her.

So … green.

Her skin was the colour of a crisp apple … or a week-old corpse. Kataria wasn’t quite sure which was more appropriate. But her skin colour was just a herald that declared her deeds, her ancestry, her heritage.

And Kataria knew them both. She had heard the stories.

She was a member of the twelfth tribe: the only tribe to stand against humanity and turn them back. She was a member of the s’na shict s’ha: headhunters, hideskinners, silent ghosts known to every creature that feared the night.

A greenshict. A true shict.

And Kataria knew dread.

‘I have found tracks, anyway,’ she said, pointing to the earth with a toe. Kataria glanced down and saw the long toes, complete with opposable ‘thumb,’ that constituted the greenshict’s feet. ‘There are other humans here, for some reason.’ She stared out over the dunes. ‘Not for much longer.’

‘Why would they be here?’

‘This island is rife with death. Humans are drawn to the scent.’

‘Death?’

‘This land is poisoned. Trees grow, but there is death in the roots. That which lives here feeds on death and we feed upon them.’

‘I saw the roaches …’

‘Unimportant. We come for the frogs. They eat the poison. The poison feeds our blood. We feed on them.’

‘We?’

‘Three of s’na shict s’ha came to this island.’

‘Where are the others?’

‘They seek. Naxiaw seeks humans. Avaij seeks frogs. I seek you.’

Kataria felt the greenshict’s stare like a knife in her chest.

‘I heard your Howling long ago. I have searched for you since.’ The greenshict fixed her with a stare that went far beyond cursory, her long ears twitching as if hearing something without sound. ‘You come with strange sounds in your heart, Kataria.’

Kataria did not start, barely flinched. But the greenshict’s eyes narrowed; she could see past her face, could see Kataria’s nerves rattle, heart wither.

‘What is your name?’ Kataria asked.

‘You know it already.’

She should know it, at least, Kataria knew. She could feel the connection between them, as though some fleshless part of them reached out towards each other and barely brushed, imparting a common thought, a common knowledge between them. The Howling, Kataria knew: that shared, ancestral instinct that connected all shicts. The same instinct that had told the greenshict her name.

That same instinct that Kataria could now only barely remember, so long had it been since she used it.

But she reached out with it all the same, straining to feel for the greenshict’s name, straining the most basic, fundamental knowledge shared by the Howling.

‘In …’ she whispered. ‘Inqalle?’

Inqalle nodded, but did not so much as blink. She continued probing, staring into Kataria, sensing out with the Howling that which Kataria could not hide. Kataria did not bother to keep herself from squirming under the gaze, from looking down at her feet. In a few moments, Inqalle had looked into her, had seen her shame and judged.

‘Little Sister,’ she whispered, ‘I know why you are here.’

‘It’s complicated,’ she replied.

‘It is not.’

‘No?’

‘You are filled with fear. I hear it in your bones.’ Her eyes narrowed, ears flattened against her skull. ‘You have been with humans …’

Funny, Kataria thought, that she should only then notice the blood-slick tomahawk hanging at Inqalle’s waist. She stared at it for a long time.

Amongst shicts, there were those that loathed humans, there were those that despised humans and then there were the s’na shict s’ha, those few that had seen such success driving the round-eared menace from their lands that they had abandoned those same lands, embarking on pilgrimages to exterminate that which had once threatened them.

And for those that had consorted with the human disease, slaughter was seen as an act of mercy to the incurably infected. As such, Kataria remained tense, ready to turn and bolt the moment the tomahawk left her belt.

The blow never came. Inqalle’s gaze was sharp enough to wound without it.

‘Kataria,’ she whispered, taking a step closer. Kataria felt the greenshict’s eyes digging deeper into her, sifting through thought, ancestry, everything she could not hide from the Howling. ‘Daughter of Kalindris. Daughter of Rokuda. I have heard your names spoken by the living.’

Her eyes drifted toward the feathers in Kataria’s hair, resting uncomfortably on a long, ivory-coloured crest nestled amongst the darker ones.

‘And the dead,’ she whispered. ‘Who do you mourn, Little Sister?’

Kataria turned her head aside to hide it. Inqalle’s hand was a lash, reaching out to seize her by the hair, twisting her head about as Inqalle’s long green fingers knotted into her locks.

‘You are … infected,’ she hissed, voice raking Kataria’s ears. ‘Not voiceless.’

‘Let go,’ Kataria snarled back.

‘You speak words. That is all I hear.’ She tapped her tattooed brow. ‘In here, I hear nothing. You cannot speak with the Howling. You are no shict.’ She wrenched the white feather free, strands of hair coming loose with them. ‘You mourn no shict.’

‘Give that back,’ Kataria growled, lashing out a hand to grab it back. With insulting ease, Inqalle’s hand lashed back, striking her against her cheek and laying her to the earth. She looked up, eyes pleading. ‘You have no right.’ She winced. ‘Please.’

‘Shicts do not beg.’

‘I am a shict!’ Kataria roared back, springing to her feet. Her ears were flattened against her head, her teeth bared and flashing white. ‘Show me your hand again and I’ll prove it.’

‘You wish to prove it,’ Inqalle said softly, a statement rather than a challenge or insult. ‘I wish to see it.’

‘Then let me show you how to make a redshict, you six-toed piece of—’

‘There is another way, Little Sister.’

Kataria paused. She felt Inqalle’s Howling, the promise within its distant voice, the desire to help. And Inqalle heard the anticipation in her little sister’s, the desperation to be helped. Inqalle smiled, thin and sharp. Kataria swallowed hard, voice dry.

‘Tell me.’

‘You know you talk in your sleep,’ her daughter had said years later, long after she was gone from the world and her daughter wore a white feather. ‘I could have shot you from four hundred paces away.’

‘Lucky for me that you were only six away,’ the thing with silver hair had said in return. ‘Which, coincidentally, is the sixth time you’ve told me you could kill me.’

‘Today?’

‘Since breakfast.’

‘That sounds about right.’

‘So?’

‘So what?’

‘Do it already. Add another notch to your belt … or, is it feathers with you?’

‘I don’t have any kill feathers.’

‘What are those for, then?’

Her daughter had tucked the white one behind her ear. ‘Lots of things.’

‘Okay.’

‘You’re not curious?’

‘Not really.’

‘You’ve never wondered why we do what we do?’

‘If the legends are true, your people’s connections with my people tend to be either arrows, swords or fire. That all seems pretty straightforward to me.’

Her daughter had frowned.

‘You, though …’ he had said.

‘What about me?’

He had stared, then, as he hefted his sword.

‘You stare at me. It’s weird.’

He hadn’t told her daughter to stop. He hadn’t told her daughter to leave. And Kataria never had.

They stretched out into the distance, over the sand, a story in each moist imprint. They spoke of suffering, of pain, of confusion, of fear. She narrowed her eyes as she knelt down low, tracing her fingers over two of the tracks. The voices in the footprints spoke clearly to her, told her where they were heading.

She knew her companions well enough to recognise their tracks.

‘There are more,’ Inqalle said behind her. ‘They are familiar to you.’

‘They are,’ Kataria replied.

‘They are your cure.’

She turned and saw the feather first. Inqalle held it in her hand, attached to a smooth, carved stick. She held it before Kataria.

‘You know what this is.’

‘I remember,’ she said. ‘A Spokesman.’

‘It speaks. It makes a declaration. This one says that you shall not mourn until you are a shict.’ She regarded Kataria coolly. ‘This one will tell you when you are a shict.’

‘I remember,’ she said. ‘My father told me.’

‘This is a cure for the disease. This is a cure for your fear. This restores you.’ She handed the Spokesman to Kataria. ‘Keep it. Use it. Survive until you become a shict again.’

‘And when I do. You will know?’

Inqalle tapped her head.

‘We will all know.’