‘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.’

Six

CHEATING LIFE

The heavens move in enigmatic circles.

In the human tongue, this translated roughly to ‘it’s not my fault.’ Gariath had heard it enough times to know. Those humans he knew had been happiest when they could blame someone else.

Formerly humans, he corrected himself, currently chum. Lucky little idiots with no one to blame.

Not entirely true, he knew. If their heavens did indeed circle enigmatically overhead, and they had indeed gone to them, they were likely hurling curses upon his head from there at that very moment. A tad hypocritical, he thought, to praise their mysterious gods and resent being sent to them.

Or is that what they call ‘irony’?’

But that was a concern for dead people. Gariath, sadly, was still alive and without a convenient excuse for it.

The Rhega had no gods to blame. The Rhega had no gods to claim them. That was what he wanted to believe, at least.

He had been able to overlook his inability to die, at first, throwing himself at pirates, at longfaces, at demons and at his former humans and coming out with only a few healthy scars. They might have cursed him, if he left them enough blood to choke on, but they were lucky. Death by a Rhega’s hand would be as good a death as they could hope for.

When a colossal serpent failed to kill him, he began to suspect something more than just mere luck. The sea, too, had rejected him and spat him onto the shore, painfully alive. If gods did exist, and if their circles were wide enough to touch him, they took a cruel pride in keeping him alive.

Now that is irony.

The former humans, he was certain, would have agreed. And if he had learned anything from them and their excuses, it was that their gods rarely seemed content to allow a victim of their ironies merely to wallow in their misery. They preferred to leave reminders, ‘omens’ to rub their jagged victories into wounds that had routinely failed to prove fatal.

And, as his own personal omen crested out of the waves to turn a golden scowl upon him, he was growing more faithful by the moment.

Like a black worm wriggling under liquid skin, the Akaneed continued to whirl, twist and writhe beneath the sun-coloured waves. It emerged every so often to turn its single, furious eye upon him, narrowing the yellow sphere to a golden slit that burned through the waves.

Just as it had burned all throughout the morning when the sea denied him, he thought. Just as it had continued to burn throughout the afternoon he squatted upon the sand, watching it as it watched him.

He wasn’t quite sure why either of them hadn’t moved on yet. For himself, he suspected whatever divine entity had turned him away from death thought to inspire some contemplation in watching the sea.

Humans often thought sitting and staring to be a religiously productive use of their time. And they die like flies, he thought. Maybe I’ll get lucky and starve to death.

That seemed as good a plan as any.

The Akaneed’s motives, he could only guess at. Surely, he reasoned, colossal sea snakes couldn’t subsist purely on angry glowers and snarls from the deep. Perhaps, then, it was simply a battle of wills: his will to die and the snake’s will to eat him.

Though those two seem more complementary than conflicting …

By that reasoning, it would be easy to walk fifteen paces into the surf until the sea touched his neck. It would be easy to close his eyes, take three deep breaths as he felt the water shift beneath him. It would be easy to feel the creature’s titanic jaws clamp around him, feel the needles merciful on his flesh and watch his blood seep out on blossoming clouds as the beast carried his corpse to an afterlife beneath the waves.

The Akaneed’s eye emerged, casting a curious glare in his direction, as though it sensed this train of thought and thoroughly approved.

‘No,’ he assured it. ‘If I do that, then you’ll have an easy meal and I’ll have an easy death. Neither of us will have worked for it and neither of us will be happy.’

It shot Gariath another look, conveying its agreement in the twitch of its blue eyelid. Then, in the flash of its stare before it disappeared beneath the waves, it seemed to suggest that it could wait.

Gariath lay upon his back and closed his eyes. The gnawing in his belly was growing sharper, but not swiftly enough. Sitting still, never moving, he reasoned he had about three days before he died of thirst and his husk drifted out on the tide. The Akaneed was willing to earn its meal and he was willing to settle for this bitter comfort.

That being the case, he reasoned he might as well be comfortable.

The sounds of the shore would be a fitting elegy: nothing but the murmur of waves and the skittering legs of beach vermin to commemorate the loss of the last of the Rhega. Fitting, perhaps, that he should go out in such a way, shoulders heavy with death and finally bowed by the weight of his own mortality, with only the beady, glistening eyes of crabs to watch the noblest of people disappear and leave this world to its weakling pink-skinned diseases.

The Akaneed hummed in the distance, its reverberating keen rumbling up onto the shore and scattering the skittering things. The waves drew in a sharp inhale, retreating back to the open sea and holding its frothy breath as it went calm and placid. Sound died, sea died and Gariath resolved to die with it.

In the silence, the sound was deafening.

He recognised immediately feet crunching upon the sand. The pace was slow, casual, utterly without care or concern for the dragonman trying to die.

An old enemy, perhaps, one of the many faceless bodies he had torn and crushed and failed to kill, come for vengeance at the tip of a sword. Or maybe a new one, some terrified creature with a slow and hesitant pace, ready to impale him with a weapon clenched in trembling hands.

Or, if gods were truly intent on proving their existence, it might be one of his former companions. One of them might have survived, he reasoned, and come searching for vengeance. He listened intently to the sound.

Too heavy to be the pointy-eared human, he reasoned; she wouldn’t attack him until his back was turned anyway. And likewise, the feet were too deliberate to be the bumbling, skinny human with the fiery hands. That one would just kill him from a distance.

He dearly hoped it wasn’t the tall, brown-haired human woman. She would likely come all masked with tears, demanding explanations in sobbing tones while righteously insisting that the others hadn’t deserved to die. If that were the case, he would have much preferred the rat. Yes, the rat would come and give him a quick knife in the throat; surely that would kill even a Rhega suffering from a severe case of irony.

It pained him to think that the feet might belong to Lenk. The death he so richly deserved then would never come from the young man’s hands.

The others knew how to kill. Lenk alone knew how to hurt.

The feet stopped just above his head. Gariath held his breath.

No blow, no steel, no vengeance. The shadow that fell over him was warm rather than cold. Even against the setting sun, the heat was distinctly familiar and embracing, heavy arms wrapped gently around him.

He hadn’t felt such warmth since …

Almost afraid to, he opened his nostrils, drew in a deep breath. His body jolted at once, his eyes snapping wide open at a scent that instantly overwhelmed his senses and the stink of the sea alike. He opened his mouth, drinking it in and at once finding it impossible that it filled his body.

Rivers and rocks.

He looked up and saw black eyes staring down at him beneath a pair of horns, one short and topped with a jagged break. The snout that they stared down from was wrinkled and scarred, but taut, each twisted line a point of pride and wisdom. The frills at either side fanned out unenthused, crimson petals of a wilting flower that had not seen rain in a long time.

It was the eyes, alone untouched by age, that seized Gariath’s gaze. They were softer than his own black stare, but that softness only made their depth all the more apparent. Where his were hard and unyielding doors of obsidian, the eyes that stared down at him were windows that stretched into endless night.

The elderly Rhega smiled, exposing teeth well worn.

‘You know,’ he rumbled, the Rhega tongue deep and hard as a rock in his chest, ‘for someone who has such reverence for my stare, you could at least get up to talk to me.’

Gariath’s eye ridges raised half a hair. ‘You read thoughts?’

‘I don’t get much conversation otherwise.’ The elder returned the raised ridge. ‘Not impressed?’

‘I have seen many things, Grandfather,’ Gariath replied.

The elder considered him thoughtfully for a moment, then nodded.

‘So you have, Wisest.’

The elder scanned the beach, finding a nearby piece of driftwood half buried in the sand. Lifting his limp tail up behind him, he took a seat upon it and stared out over the setting sun. The light met his stare and Gariath saw the elder’s shape change as beams of light sifted through a spectral figure.

‘You’re dead, Grandfather,’ Gariath grunted.

‘I hear that a lot,’ the elder replied.

Gariath looked up and down the empty beach, bereft of even a hint of any other life.

‘I find that hard to believe.’

‘You would,’ the elder snorted. ‘The fact remains that you are the only one who has come by; you’re the only one who noticed. My point stands.’

‘Why aren’t you at your elder stone?’

‘I got bored.’

‘Grahta never left his stone.’

‘Why would he? Grahta was a pup. He would get lost.’

‘Ah.’

Gariath settled himself back on the sand, staring up at the orange-painted sky above. After a moment, he looked back to the elder.

‘Grahta,’ he said softly. ‘Is he …?’

‘Sleeping, Wisest,’ the elder replied.

‘Good.’

Another silence descended between them, broken only by the sound of the Akaneed’s murmuring keen rising up from below the waves. After an eternity of that, Gariath once again looked up.

‘Aren’t you going to ask me what I’m doing?’

‘Seems a bit unnecessary,’ the elder said, tapping his brow.

‘Then aren’t you going to ask me why?’

‘You are Rhega,’ the elder replied, shrugging. ‘You have a good reason.’

‘So, you won’t try to stop me.’

‘I might have a hard time with that.’ The elder held up his clawed hand to the light, grinning as it vanished. ‘What with being dead and all.’

‘Then why are you here?’

‘I thought you might like some company while you waited to die.’

‘I don’t.’