Tome of the Undergates - Sam Sykes

She shook her head; they hadn’t been shicts, of course. If they were, she would likely feel otherwise. The fact that they were human, weak, close-minded, prone to death, prevented her from feeling anything else.

Once again, her gaze drifted to Lenk, also human.

The young sailor and Lenk: both human, their differences too trivial to note. Why was it, then, that one made her think of food, while she could not tear her gaze away from the other?

‘Are we so fascinating?’

Kataria turned at the voice, regarding her new company quietly. A tall, black-haired woman stood at the railing beside her, polishing a bright red apple on the chest of her toga. Quillian had discarded her armour, her flesh no more yielding than the bronze she had worn. All the skin exposed was as white as the garment she wore, save for one patch of crimson at her flank.

Oaths, Kataria noted. In bright red script, the Serrant wore her profession, the condemnation that kept her from the very priesthood she protected. Her sins, her crimes were scrawled from her armpit to her waist in angry, mocking tattoos.

Kataria averted her eyes; given the nature of the brand, she thought it would likely be considered rude to stare. Such a thing wouldn’t normally concern her, but she simply had nothing left in her to fight with.

If Quillian had noticed her stare, she didn’t reveal it. Instead, she took a bite of her fruit and, chewing noisily, produced another, offered it to the shict.

Kataria lofted a brow. ‘You think enough of me now to offer food?’

‘No.’ The Serrant didn’t bother to swallow before answering. ‘But I thought to spare these brave men the indignity of hearing your belly rumble.’ She followed the shict’s stare to the young man below. ‘You two are lovers?’

Kataria’s ears flattened against her head and her scowl raked the woman. ‘Are you stupid?’

The Serrant shrugged. ‘It would have been the first I’ve heard of such a thing. Given your mutual lack of morality, however, it wouldn’t surprise me. I know of no adventurer who looks at her boss that way.’

‘Lenk isn’t my “boss”.’

‘I thought briefly about using the term “commander”, but I thought you’d be too unaccustomed to proper terms to recognise it.’

‘He’s my friend.’

‘So you say.’

Quillian’s chewing filled the air as she stared out, dispassionate.

‘You don’t have anyone you worry about?’ Kataria asked.

‘I forsook the privilege of worry when I earned this.’ She ran a hand down her tattooed flank. ‘Those who fight alongside a Serrant can take care of themselves. From the way your “friend and leader” fought today, I’d say he can more than take care of himself, too. Even if he was an idiot when he charged that. . thing.’

‘He’s not an idiot,’ Kataria snarled. ‘He was trying to protect everyone, you included.’

‘The only one I need protecting from,’ she narrowed her eyes upon the shict, ‘is the one right before me.’

Kataria resisted the urge to retort. There was no need for it now.

‘I’m not calling him anything more than a good killer,’ Quillian continued with a sneer. ‘He and that dragonman charged a creature that, by all rights, shouldn’t exist.’

‘Lenk is different from other humans. He doesn’t think like you.’

‘While I’m thrilled to see a shict stoop so low as to think so highly of a human, I feel compelled to ask. . how does he think?’

Kataria shook her head; she didn’t know the answer herself. She knew the man well enough to know his patterns, as she knew those of a wolf or a stag. She knew his likes, dislikes, that he wrote in a journal, that he slept little, that he bathed only in the morning, that he made water only when at least two hundred paces from anyone else. What made him think the way he did, however, was a mystery.

All she knew was what he had told her: something had happened in his youth, his parents were no longer alive. She absently wondered what he was like before.

‘So much the better,’ Quillian grunted at the shict’s silence. ‘I’d rather not know how you degenerates think.’ She swallowed another piece of fruit. ‘Argaol, I hear, has taken Rashodd alive. . to use the bounty to cover his losses.’

‘And the other pirates?’

‘Disposed of, not that you care.’

‘The world will make more humans.’

Quillian stared hard at her for a moment before snorting and turning about.

‘One moment,’ Kataria called to her back. ‘That phrase can’t be enough to make you irate. Tell me,’ she tilted her head curiously, ‘why is it you hate me, my people, so much?’

The Serrant paused, her back suddenly stiffening to the degree that Kataria could see every vertebra in her spine fusing together in contained fury. Then, with a great breath, her back relaxed and the woman seemed smaller, diminished. She ran a hand down her muscular flank.

‘For the same reason I wear this crimson shame,’ she replied stiffly. ‘I was there ten years ago.’

‘Where?’

‘I was at Whitetrees,’ she muttered, ‘K’tsche Kando, as you call it.’

Kataria froze twice, once for the name and again for the woman’s utterance of the shictish tongue. Red Snow. She offered no scorn for the woman any more; she could find none within herself. Her hate was no longer misunderstood, no longer unacceptable. Quillian had stood with the humans at K’tsche Kando.

She had good reason to hate.

‘Given that, and my inability to do it myself, I dearly wish you had died today.’ She set the remaining apple upon the railing. ‘Your due, should you get hungry later. Expect nothing else from me.’

She was gone before Kataria even looked at the fruit. She glanced at it for a moment before a smirk crossed her face. Plucking up the fruit, she sprang over the railing and glided nimbly across the timbers. As she neared Lenk, she rubbed the apple against her breeches and gave it a quick toss.

Her giggle was matched by his snarl as the fruit caromed off his skull and went flying into the water below. He whirled, a blue scowl locked upon her, as he rubbed his head.

‘You’re supposed to catch it,’ she offered, smiling sweetly.

‘I’m not in the mood,’ Lenk muttered angrily.

‘To catch fruit? No wonder you got hit in the head.’

‘I’m not in the mood for your. . shictiness.’

‘You never are.’

‘And yet,’ he sighed, ‘here you are.’

‘Call me concerned,’ she said, smiling. She cocked her head, regarding him for a moment. ‘What are you thinking about?’

‘The creature,’ he replied bluntly, scratching his chin.

‘What else?’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Worrying about things you can’t help makes your hair fall out, you know.’

‘Someone has to worry about it,’ Lenk snapped, glaring at her. ‘Someone has to find out what it was and what can kill it.’

‘And that’s your responsibility, is it?’

‘I’ve got a sword.’

‘You can put it down.’

‘I can also get my head chopped off. What’s your point?’

‘Do you really need to think about this now? The thing is gone.’

‘For the moment.’

His hand slid up unconsciously, reaching for a sword that wasn’t there. He had left it below after cleaning it, he recalled. His shoulder reacted to the pressure of his fingers, a sharp pain lancing from his neck to his flank. Asper had plucked the splinters from his flesh, though the wounds still ached beneath their makeshift bandages and salve. Still, such a pain felt minuscule against the sensation that clung to his throat like a collar.

He could still feel the creature’s claws, its digits like moist leather wrapped about his neck, tightening as it lifted him from the deck. At the thought, his legs even felt weaker, as though the thing still reached out from wherever it had retreated, seeking to finish what it had begun.

‘You’re hurt?’

He blinked; Kataria’s question sounded odd to him, considering that she had seen him be smashed against the timbers, hoisted up and nearly strangled in a webbed claw. In fact, it sounded rather insulting. His hand clenched involuntarily into a fist. Her jaw loomed before him, suddenly so tempting.

He snorted. ‘Yeah.’

His shoulder suddenly seared with a lance of pain as she laid a hand upon it. With a snarl, he dislodged her, whirling about as though she’d just attacked him. She matched the murder in his eyes with a roll of her own, placing both hands upon his shoulders and easing him down against the railing.

‘What are you doing?’ He strained to hide the pained quaver in his voice.

‘Hold still; I’m going to check you over.’

‘Asper already did.’

‘Clearly she didn’t do a good enough job, did she?’ She slid back the fabric of his tunic, examining the linen bandage wrapped about his shoulder. ‘Not surprising. Human medicine is roughly where shictish medicine would be if we were just crawling out of the muck.’ She snickered at that. ‘Of course, it’s humans that crawled out of the muck, not shicts, and that must have been centuries ago, so I’m not even sure what her excuse is.’

‘It’s fine. She gave me some salve and-’

‘Bandages. She thinks she can solve everything with bandages and salve.’ Peeling back the white linen, she scratched her chin thoughtfully. ‘A bit of fire would close these wounds, I bet.’

Had Lenk actually heard her suggestion, he might have objected. As it was, her voice was distant to him, second to the suddenly pervasive presence of her scent.

His nostrils flared soundlessly, drinking in her aroma as she leaned over him. His first thought was that she smelled rather unlike what he suspected a woman should smell like. There was no cleanness to her, no softness. Her perfume was thick and hard, an ever-present scent of wood, mud and leather under an ingrained layer of sweat and dried blood. As he swirled her stink in his nose, he became aware that he should find the aroma quite foul; it certainly smelled particularly disgusting on his other companions.

So why, he wondered, was he so entranced with smelling her?

‘That can’t be normal-’

‘What?’

‘What? Nothing.’ He blinked. ‘What?’

‘Fire.’

‘What about it?’

‘You could seal your wounds with fire,’ she repeated, ‘assuming you didn’t break down in tears halfway through.’

‘Uh-huh. .’

Her voice had faded again, ears suddenly less important than nose, nose suddenly far, far less important than eyes. The scent of sweat, that key ounce of her muscular perfume, became suddenly more pronounced as he spied a bead of the silver liquid forming just beneath the lobe of a long, notched ear.

She continued to prattle on about fire, shictish superiority and any number of topics related to the two. He could only nod, form half-decipherable grunts as he stared at the small trickle of sweat. It slid down her body like a snake, leaving a path of tiny droplets upon her pale flesh in its wake. It trickled down, trailing along her jawline to caress her neck, slithering over a perfectly pronounced collarbone, roiling over the subtle slope of her modest chest to disappear down her leather half-tunic.