No part must be undone ~Harlow Yung
A broken link is a broken chain
No part must be undone
~Harlow Yung
I straightened, staring at the Kroan standing before us donning clothing that was not her own.
She looked strange in it, her long, black hair hanging in greasy, tangled locks over her shoulders.
She didn’t blink as she continued to cast her stare at us.
Looking over her, I could not even see any weapons save for the sharp nails tipping her long, bony fingers.
She studied me for a long while, but her expression gave nothing away. Finally, her gaze shifted, settling on Meridan.
“A Naros,” she said. “You’re very far from home, pale one.”
“What home?” Meridan commented.
The Kroan cocked her head. “Indeed.”
I glanced down at the girl, but her expression hadn’t changed. “Is she under your influence?”
“Her? She was overcome by madness before we arrived. A beggar on the streets. She’s no harm to anyone but herself.”
“Where is her family?”
Her eyes narrowed and her head tilted to the other side like a curious bird. “Why do you care?”
When I didn’t answer, she took a step toward me, her bare feet blackened by soot and mud. I rested my hand on Vidar’s cutlass and immediately, she stopped, eyeing the weapon.
“You smell of human filth,” she said flatly. “And hemsbane.” Her hand slowly rose to point a finger at the blade. “Tell me. Is there a bronze blade in that leather scabbard you carry?”
“If there is?”
The corner of her mouth angled upward. “They all say you’re a treacherous bitch.”
“You know who I am.”
She lifted her chin, gently touching her fingers to the soft flesh of her throat, indicating the scar that stretched across mine.
“I know who you are. Reyna’s disgrace of a daughter. Not even Ligeia could properly execute you. They say vermin don’t die easily.”
“Could you have done better?” I said.
“Perhaps.” Her gaze slowly traveled toward Meridan and her bone knife. “But what does it matter now? If you haven’t noticed, things are not as they used to be.”
“Why are you here?” I asked. “You look free enough. Go back to the sea.”
“Free?” she chuffed. “No one is free, Dahlia.”
I swallowed, adjusting my weight to one leg. “You know my name and yet I don’t know yours.”
A humorless chuckle left her as she turned from me and started walking away. “You planning to spare me long enough to care?”
Meridan and I exchanged a confused glance.
“How many of you are here?” I called after her.
She kept walking, ignoring my question entirely.
Determined to get answers, I started walking after her, glancing once over my shoulder to see the young girl crouching down next to a puddle on the street, dipping her fingers into the muddy water and humming softly to herself.
The horse had settled on the other side of the road near a patch of thick grass and began to graze, its ears turning this way and that as if it was still on edge.
“So much for being subtle,” Meridan commented.
When we reached the main square, I surveyed the area to find the church steeple, making sure not to lose our way.
The town was tightly packed. The alleys were narrow and the buildings were many.
In the square, the scent of rotting flesh hit me again like I’d been backhanded.
I wrinkled my nose at the familiar yet unpleasant odor and glimpsed a wagon near the side of a house filled with bodies.
Or what was left of bodies. Mostly, they were skeletons stripped of their meat save for the stunned expressions frozen on their faces.
Those remained, all at various stages of decomposition.
Perched on the freshest of the bodies were crows, squawking as they fed on the soft tissue from the empty eye sockets.
The Kroan stopped, turning to face them once she reached the middle of the square.
“We’re running low on villagers, but a merchant ship is bound to sail this way with fresh stock eventually. Or perhaps the navy. Wouldn’t that be a treat?”
“You ate them all,” I muttered.
“Not all. Some are useful.”
“For what?”
“The orphan girl, for one, screams every time she sees a new face and she wanders the outskirts. She dislikes the smell of bodies, you see.”
Meridan pressed the back of her wrist to her nose, coughing.
Even I was sickened by the smell. Keeping the corpses in the town could only serve to fill it with a foul stench and disease.
But then the slightest bit of motion caught my eye, prompting me to turn my head and spot the shutters of a window swinging closed in a house across the square.
“I thought you said you were running low,” I commented.
“We are.” She sighed, dusting off the sleeve of her shift as if it would do anything to clean the stains off the fabric. “But some have shown willingness to serve us. The more villagers we eat, the more that willingness grows.”
“So you keep the bodies here for morale?” I said, raising a brow.
She shrugged.
I looked around, trying to find signs of others, but the town itself seemed as dead as the carcasses in the wagon.
“How many of you are here?” I asked again.
“Those who ask questions are looking for a reason to do something,” she said. “What is it you want here, Dahlia? With a bronze sword in hand, no less.”
I rested my hand on the hilt again, taking a deep breath, despite the air being filled with that putrid odor.
“What do you know about me?” I asked.
“I know you betrayed your mother. She was favored by the father below. You betrayed her for a human boy and let a mere child kill her and her sisters. Your own blood sister executed you for it.”
She looked me up and down with a soft snort. “She failed, obviously.”
“Dahlia beheaded Ligeia. Did you know that?” Meridan added like it was a threat.
“It does not surprise me,” the woman shrugged. “You are a killer of kin. Now, you carry the weapon of a hunter. I suppose you have made your choice.”
“There are more of you,” I said. “I know there are. You cannot have taken an entire town on your own.”
“I didn’t, of course. But it shouldn’t surprise you that any other sisters that remain do not have the tongue to speak with you the way I am.
The luckiest of us escape. Some of us die, quick and painless, at the tip of a hunter’s bronze blade.
But some… some are met with even worse fates.
They cut them out, you know.” Her eyes glazed over, seeing past me and into a memory.
“So that we cannot use our voice.” Her hand lifted, her fingers lightly grazing over her lips.
“And then they put us in binds. They line us up with others so rich men can find one they like. If you’re lucky, they will tie you down so they can ravage you, again and again and again, and then boast to their friends about the act.
If you’re unlucky, they pry out your teeth.
One. By. One. And then they force your mouth over their unclean cock just to laugh and feign control over something they’ve all feared for hundreds of years. ”
My heart sank thinking of sirens in chains, their tongues and teeth ripped from their mouths. But my heart also sank at the thought of innocent people being slowly ripped apart and devoured. The ugliness of it all made my stomach turn.
Beside me, Meridan’s head dropped a little, turning toward me. I wished I had something to say, but the world was dreadful. Sirens. Men. All of it. There was no defending one or the other.
“But Akareth is a merciful god,” the woman added.
My eyes lifted to look at her again, the sound of his name cutting into me like a hot knife.
“Merciful,” I said under my breath.
“He lent us his sons to rid this town of the human disease that tried to devour us. To offer us a chance at vengeance.”
I tossed a glance at the bodies in the wagon again and recalled the island of Frenchmen bearing my sister’s mark.
She’d tried to gift humans to the xhoth in exchange for protection as well and danced on the same edge of a blade this nameless Kroan was.
In the end, it was all doomed to fail. The xhoth would grow tired of humans and crave more.
“Where are the sons, now?” Meridan asked.
The Kroan laughed, shaking her head as if the question was too ridiculous to answer.
“They will devour all of you as soon as the humans are depleted,” I added. “They’ve already killed two of my companions.”
“Of course, they have. You are the heretic.” She glared at me with disgust, her nose wrinkling as her eyes roamed down the human clothes that dressed my body. “A Kroan that prays to Lune.” She spit onto the ground at my feet. “Ligeia should have cut your head off your shoulders.”
She lunged, hands outstretched. I sidestepped, but she managed to get a hold of my neck, squeezing and digging her long nails into my flesh.
Meridan stepped up beside her, her blade finding purchase in the Kroan’s shoulder.
She screamed, the sound loud and enraged.
Not wanting any more attention, I squirmed from her grip and clutched her arm, swinging her around until her body hit a brick wall.
Her head slammed against the hard surface and she slumped to the ground, limp and unconscious.
“Go,” I said, pushing Meridan away.
The two of us took off down a narrow passage between the buildings, heading toward the church.
“How do we know the one we’re looking for is alive?” Meridan asked.
“We don’t.”
We continued on, ducking under lines of old clothing hanging on ropes and leaping over crates filled with rotting fish and crab carcasses. The more we ran, the more I felt lost and in the narrow passages, I’d misplaced the steeple.
“Which way?” Meridan said.
I chose a direction at random. When we came out onto a main street, I saw the tall steeple before us, the front of it charred and blackened from a recent fire. I spun, looking at the buildings lining the road across from it.