Sam Sykes - Black Halo

Sound advice , he thought.

His boat was likely at the bottom of the sea, along with the fortune he had chased. His companions likely weren’t far away, drifting either as half-chewed corpses or long, sinewy Akaneed stool. After both of those images, the fact that he had no food or water didn’t seem quite so worrying.

He would not like to upset the Gods and be sent to hell; he had seen what came out of that place. No, no , he told himself, it’s over now . All the suffering, all the pain he had experienced in his life all led up to this: a few moments of heat-stricken delirium, then off to the sea to be picked clean by crabs and eels.

Sound plan .

A wave washed over his leg; he felt something bump against his bare foot. He explored it with his toes, expecting to find splintered driftwood, maybe from his craft. Or, he thought, perhaps the remains of his companions: Asper’s severed head, Denaos’ chewed leg. He chuckled at the macabre thought, then paused as he ran a toe against the object.

It was not so soft as flesh, not even as wood. He felt firmness, a familiar chill as blood wept from his toe.

He fought to sit up, fought to reach into the surf and was rewarded with hands around wet leather. Almost too scared to believe that he was touching what he thought he was, he jerked hard before fear could make him do otherwise.

His sword, his grandfather’s sword, rose with all the firm gentleness of a lover in his hands. Its naked steel glittered in the sunlight, defiant of its would-be watery grave. The sun recoiled at its sight; there would be no angelic glow of deliverance from this sword, he thought. This was a sword for grey skies and grim smiles.

None had smiled grimmer than Lenk’s grandfather.

‘ Remember, though ,’ he had finished, ‘ you and I, we’re men of Khetashe, men of the Outcast. He has no place in heaven for his followers. He loathes us for the reputation we cast on him. So why should we die when He wants us to? ’

Lenk felt his own smile grow as he struggled to his feet. It might very well be his time. The sword’s arrival might have been coincidence, might have been charity from the Gods: an heirloom to take to his grave. He followed the Outcast, though, and Khetashe had never sent him a divine message he would be expected to listen to.

He turned and looked over his shoulder, toward a distant wall of greenery. A forest, he recognised. Forests were plants. Plants needed water. And so did he.

Water first , he thought as he stalked toward the foliage, sword clenched against his body. Water first, then food, then find Sebast and keep him around long enough for me to find the others .

His smile grew particularly grim.

Or at least something to bury .

‘ 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.