The Skybound Sea

THIRTY-FIVE

Waist-deep in water, Dreadaeleon waded among them, and the dead would not stop looking at him.

Bobbing in the water, their long faces still screwed up in a battle they had not stopped fighting, the netherlings scowled at him. Hollow and empty as they had been in life, the skeletons of the Abysmyths stared at him from fleshless eye sockets as they lay submerged beneath the crystalline water. The Shen. .

The Shen floated upon the lake that had been the ring. Face down. Motionless.

He paused and looked to the mountain. The clouds swirled overhead. Perhaps unable to bear giving the rest of the sky a look at what happened on the earth below. The water still vomited from the mountain’s face, though in a slow, steady stream that twisted down the shattered stone stairs and beneath the ribs of Daga-Mer’s colossal skeleton.

The fleshless titan froze in death, reaching out to the mountain with a bleached-white hand, as though still, in some small way, alive. As though, if he could but try a little harder, he could reach what he sought.

All in your mind, old man, he told himself. There’s no one left here but you.

He looked over the ring. The entirety of it was submerged, the bones and bodies bobbing along its surface like lilies of purple and white.

Somewhere in his mind, someone whimpered.

They’re still alive, he thought. Some of them, anyway. After all that. After all you did to them. . He paused, shook his head. Stop that. You didn’t know. And by the time you did, there was no choice. The power was there, you happened to have it, so you had to use it and. .

He paused and wondered if the Gonwa could hear him as he could hear them. He paused and wondered if they had heard this before from someone else.

Off to the side, he could hear the sound of splashing. He whirled about, hand extended, power leaping to his fingertips. The Gonwa could but groan.

Gariath didn’t even bother to look at him as he trudged through the waters. The dragonman moved slowly, limping. Stray bits of cloth and leather had been tied tightly around his middle, staunching a red stain. Over each shoulder and under one arm, he carried a body.

He paused as he came to Dreadaeleon and grunted. “Alive?”

The boy nodded; considering everything, it didn’t seem a stupid question. “You?” After Gariath nodded, he looked to the bodies. “And what about-” His eyes widened. “Is that Asper?”

“Yes and yes,” Gariath replied. “Alive. Not sure how.” He shook Denaos’s prone body under his arm. “This one either.”

Dreadaeleon looked to the limp, blackened figure of Mahalar and frowned. “And. .”

“You don’t need to ask and you know you don’t. Give me something to put them down on.”

A dull whimper in his mind as he breathed over the surface of the water and formed a small floe of ice from his breath. Gariath slumped the bodies upon it. Sure enough, Asper and Denaos drew in short, shallow breath.

“Anyone else?”

Dreadaeleon looked around the ring. The waters chopped gently.

“What of Lenk and the pointy-eared human?” Gariath grunted. “Did they-”

“I don’t. .” The boy’s eyes widened. “But maybe. .” He tapped his cheek. “Greenhair.”

“What?”

Dreadaeleon ran to where he saw her last and found her there. The icicle that had pinned her to the earth was but a sliver. Her body was torn and twisted where the waves had sought to take her and the frost had sought to keep her. Dreadaeleon reached down and plucked her from the water.

She seemed a fluid thing, then, head lolling in his arms and hair streaming down into the water. Without substance. Without weight. The gaping hole in her body was clean, as though the water had taken her blood with it when it cleaned this cursed place.

“Lorekeeper.”

She spoke. No melody. No song. Words. Crude and painful to hear.

“Lorekeeper,” she gasped.

“I’m here,” he said.

“The Kraken Queen. . dead.”

“I know.”

“I. . did it. For the Sea Mother. Duty fulfilled. I. .” She could not lift her head to look at him. Her arm could only brush against his cheek.

And her arm went limp. And she faded. And she dissolved. Flesh into water, hair into water. She spilled through his grasp, down into the water to disappear into the endless blue.

“She’s dead.” When he finally said it, after so many times he wondered how he might, he was surprised at how easy it was. “Just like that.”

“You were expecting her to live?”

“No. .” He looked away, then back to the water. “But. .”

Gariath didn’t ask. He didn’t have to. Dreadaeleon’s fingers began to weave, knitting into complex, painful-looking gestures. He coaxed the waters to rise in a column and with delicate brushes of his hands, he sheared the liquid away until it resembled something more shapely, something human.

“Sheraptus was right. . in a way, of course, but not the correct way. Magic isn’t meant to be used this way-recklessly, that is-but what are limitations, anyway? We recognize the function of the power as it pertains to our bodies, but what of our minds? He negated the costs of magic-”

Dreadaeleon winced sharply, rubbing at his temple.

“That was a law that could not be circumnavigated. Not until he figured out a way. And if one law can be made pointless, what of others? What else could we possibly do with it? What else can be made insignificant?”

He stepped back. The water hung in the air, no longer a column, no longer even human. She was blue, of course, and liquid, but everything else about her-the flow of her hair, the fins upon her head, the crystalline hum she made when Dreadaeleon flicked her liquid body-was her.

“The siren,” Gariath muttered. “You. . just-”

“I did,” Dreadaeleon said, beaming. “I can. Lenk, Kataria, anyone else, maybe even all the Shen lost today, if we can recover their bodies. If power can be transferred, if a being can be broken down into energy, then surely it can be reconstructed. Surely, with the proper motivations and more thorough thought than Sheraptus, I could. .”

His smile was wide when he turned to Gariath.

“Gods, do you realize what this-”

His smile disappeared when Gariath punched him.

“Yeah.” The dragonman grunted as he caught the boy and tore the crown from his head before letting him drop into the water, the liquid Greenhair splashing into nothingness after him. “I do.”

For as much trouble as it had caused, it was like paper in Gariath’s hands, its iron bending in soft, whimpering creaks as he wadded it up into a mangled, blackened mess.

“What are you doing?” Dreadaeleon sputtered, flailing to his feet. “What the hell are you doing, you moron? STOP! That may be the only chance we have to-”

“There’s nothing you can say that will make me stop,” Gariath grunted, continuing to mangle the crown. “And only a handful of things you can say that won’t make me punch you again.”

He turned and threw it. It tumbled out of sight, disappearing somewhere beyond the line of kelp. Dreadaeleon itched at his scalp, his mind suddenly seeming a very empty, constrictive place.

“WHY?” he demanded.

“It was a cursed, evil thing.”

“Can you tell me why it was a cursed, evil thing? Because you can’t understand it? Because you don’t know how anything works if you can’t hit it real hard and make it do something?”

“Yeah,” Gariath growled, “because I don’t understand it. And because I don’t understand how someone thinks you can pull a dead body up, put something in it, and call it alive again. And I don’t understand how you can think anyone having that kind of power is a good thing.” He snorted. “So, in the absence of understanding, I turned to violence. It worked out pretty well for me.”

Dreadaeleon opened his mouth to retort, found himself silent as his eyes were drawn to the edge of the ring. The kelp forest parted as they came emerging from the shadows. In numbers too small for the leaves to even notice their passing.

At their head trudged a creature with a bent back and a long shard of bone wedged in his eye. Behind came the others, holding the prone bodies of a man with silver hair and a bloodied woman, both unmoving. They came until there were but a few.

Shalake said nothing as he looked past Gariath and Dreadaeleon to the ice floe and the blackened body of Mahalar. He said nothing as he looked to his few brothers, who stepped forward and deposited Lenk and Kataria upon the ice. And he said nothing as he bent low and began to pull a body of one of his fellows from the water.

And they said nothing, as one, as the Shen who knew they were dead were collected and heaped upon the ice by those who had yet to admit it