Текст книги "Hastrom City Rising (The Adventures of Letho Ferron Book 2)"

Автор книги: Doug Rickaway

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Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

It was a cat—or a ramshackle collection of skin and ribs that had once been a cat. Someone’s pet, perhaps. More likely it was a generation or two removed from domestication. It did not struggle, even as the abominable tubes that snaked out from Thresha’s gaping throat continued to drain the emaciated body.

“What the hell are you doing?” Letho asked.

But he knew exactly what she was doing. It was what Alastor had done to Letho’s former supervisor, Baran Gall, on the steps of the civil services building of this very Fulcrum station. He had seen it before, but it was so fundamentally obscene to him, so antithetical to his understanding of life and how organisms should function, that he found it just as revolting now as he had the first time he witnessed it.

Thresha tossed the lifeless carcass aside just as one would discard an empty ration packet. Letho watched in mingled awe and disgust as Thresha’s feeding tubes slid back into her mouth, entwining and compacting themselves into a reasonable facsimile of a human tongue. The dry sounds her jaw made as it snapped back into its normal position made Letho’s stomach sour.

Thresha regarded him with a lusty gaze, and his hand went to the pistol at his waist. Then she snapped back, her eyes filling with the antipathy that Letho had begun to regard as her default facial expression.

“I was hungry,” Thresha said.

She eyed Letho’s left hand, which still rested on the butt of his semi-auto. Letho didn’t like her posture, and decided to keep his hand there. Neither of them moved, sizing each other up with the cool eyes of gunslingers. They stayed like that for a moment, and then finally Thresha wiped her face, and her body relaxed a little. Letho dropped his hand to his side. The silence was an unbearable weight upon both of them.

“Well, say something,” Thresha said.

“You want me to say something? After what I just saw you do?”

“I told you: I was hungry. I have to eat too, you know. Would you rather me attack your buddy Deacon? Or one of the slave bears?”

“Can’t you just eat normal food?”

“It doesn’t work that way, ass. The Mendraga condition changes your entire body. I don’t eat, piss, shit, or sleep. I don’t even think I have a stomach anymore.”

“That’s disgusting,” Letho said.

“Yeah, well, thanks for being so sympathetic. I’m not exactly ecstatic about it, you know. If I had known what was going to happen, I probably wouldn’t have accepted Alastor’s little gift. He’s…” She paused. “… rather persuasive. What he promised versus what it’s actually like…”

She fell quiet, her hand absently going to her belly.

A tumor. Or a fetus.

“Aw, man, don’t get upset. I’m sorry. I’m just trying to figure this whole thing out.”

“Well, when you get it all figured out, let me know what the plan is, okay? I’m dying to know what your strategy is.”

“You don’t have to be such a jerk all the time, you know,” Letho said. “I’m doing the best I can.”

“Great! That’s just great. I hope your best is good enough, because if I know Alastor as well as I think I do, things are going to be really bad on Eursus. I hope you’re prepared for that.”

Letho didn’t reply. He stared at the floor, searching for some sort of response, but found none.

“I didn’t ask for this, you know,” he said at last. “At least you had a choice.”

“Yeah, kidnapped by Mendraga and having to choose between being food or becoming one of them. Those were good options for me, huh, Letho?”

“I would have chosen death. I would rather die than become a Mendraga.”

Thresha started to reply, but first she stepped forward and fixed blazing eyes on Letho. “Well, we’ll see how well that works out for you when we find ourselves in the middle of an Alastor/Abraxas sandwich and your life, your friends’ lives, are on the line.”

Letho chuckled, a crazed half-chortle. “Yeah, we’ll see. Can I ask you something?”

“Sure,” she said, still glaring.

Letho felt intimidation creeping up into his chest. “When it comes down to it, whose side will you be on? Are you going to turn on us the moment it suits you?”

“I’m on my own side,” Thresha said coldly.

“Fair enough. What do you say that we keep all of this quiet? The less we remind everyone that you’re a blood-sucking monster, the better.”

“Works for me.”

“All right then, let’s get back to the others. Hopefully we’ll be leaving soon.”

Letho moved to leave the storage room, and Thresha followed, but not before stopping to issue a lewd, two-fingered gesture at his back.

****

It didn’t take long to load the meager results of their foraging. Conversation was sparse, as if they were afraid to spend the calories. Or perhaps it was simply that they were all terrified. None of them know what waited for them on the surface of Eursus. Letho knew from his time in the news sector that the atmosphere was safe, even though the climate had become much less hospitable, as man’s manipulation of the world around him had slowly circumvented the ecosystem’s delicate balance. But it wouldn’t be the air or the boiling heat that killed them. It would be starvation, Letho feared.

They loaded the last of the gathered food and boarded Deacon’s ship. Letho noticed that Deacon’s skin had taken on a sickly hue, and sweat beaded on his forehead and soaked the collar of his flight suit.

“Hey, buddy, you sure you’re all right?” Letho asked.

“Yeah, just feel a little sick to my stomach. Probably those Valhalla Sausages.”

The gnawing sensation of vague recollection. The look on Deacon’s face, the glassiness of his eyes. It was familiar.

“All right. I hope you feel better,” Letho said.

“So where are we headed?” Deacon asked.

“I would say that we need to steer clear of Hastrom City for now,” Letho said.

“Agreed,” Bayorn interjected. “It would be wise to set a course far south of the place where Abraxas dwells and scout for a suitable place to take refuge until we can figure out our next course of action. They likely believe we are all dead, and we should keep it that way.”

Thresha chuckled. “You think those two give a damn about any of you? They’ve probably forgotten you even existed. We could probably land right in the center of town and join the party.”

“They may not remember us,” Maka said through clenched teeth, “but they will certainly remember the Mendraga that betrayed them.”

“Hm. Good point,” Thresha said.

“Does anyone else have any ideas?” Letho asked. “Seems to me our only option is to do what Bayorn said and steer clear of Hastrom City. Deacon, how long can the ship fly before it runs out of fuel?”

Deacon didn’t respond.

“Deacon?”

“Huh? Oh, sorry, could you repeat that? I zoned out for a second there.”

“How much fuel do we have?” Letho asked.

“Well, she’s designed for quick trips from one Fulcrum station to another, so…” Deacon did the mental math. “Traveling through space versus planetary travel, that throws a wrench in it. Gravity, drag, all that good stuff. I’d say we have an effective range of about one hundred to two hundred klicks once we get down there.”

“I say that we head down and fly low, see if we can find any sign of Zedock and anyone that made it out with him,” Letho said.

“It’s as good a plan as any,” Bayorn agreed.

“All right then, let me just put some information into the ship’s computer, and we’ll be on our way,” Deacon said.

He began to enter information into the keypad on his console. The persistent, rhythmic clacks of his keystrokes lulled Letho, easing his mind, and for a moment he forgot the precarious nature of their situation. He envisioned his triumphant return to a planet that had birthed his species, if not Letho himself. He felt like he knew it though, as, in a way, he had visited it: through as many vids and data feeds as he could get his eyes on. How strange a sensation, to feel nostalgia for a place he had never set foot on, based solely on ghostly images generated by his compuscreen.

Letho was not a particularly optimistic person, but for once he felt his spirits rising. He looked around at his compatriots and felt a bittersweet stirring of emotions too entwined with one another to be identified individually. His friends’ loyalty to him touched him deeply—it was at once humbling and edifying. But he also felt a strange pity as he looked upon them; the fact that they had placed their fates in his hands made his heart ache. What if he failed them? He was a young man, barely out of his teens, completely unproven. His previous plan had exploded in his face, and had seen the rise of an ancient evil, a creature the Tarsi regarded as the devil himself. He hoped for better things when they reached the surface. And he longed to see his friend Zedock Wartimer. He hoped that the old man was alive. Maybe he would know what to do next. If Letho could find him—and get those who traveled with him there as well.

Letho was drawn back to reality as the ship lifted from the floor of the docking bay and began to move toward the opening doors of the airlock. Deacon guided the ship through the doorway a little too fast, even before the doors had opened completely.

Does he always have to show off like that?

The ship drifted away from the dormant Fulcrum station, and the image of a forgotten planet filled the portholes of Deacon’s shuttle. If they had seen it a thousand years before, it would have appeared as an azure gem quite out of place in the pinprick black of space, a precious thing indeed. Even in its current state—a brown husk with dim seas and intermittent patches of green—it was a sight to behold.

It was the most beautiful thing Letho had ever seen.

“Okay, folks, the computer is going to get us through re-entry. Once we’re through, I’ll switch over to manual control and we’ll see what we can find.”

Letho nodded at Deacon and offered him a two-fingered salute. “We’re finally going home, Deacon. Can you believe it?”

“Yeah, it’s insane. I never thought I’d live to see the day. Sila would have—” Deacon stopped himself, and his shoulders slumped. He gestured openly with his hands toward Letho. “Aw, hell, Letho, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

“It’s okay. You’re right. She would have been freaking out right now. It’s just a shame she isn’t here to see this.”

“In a way, she is,” Bayorn said. “As long as you carry her with you, she will see what you see, Letho.”

“Thanks, Bayorn,” Letho said.

Though he tried to lie to himself, he resented Bayorn’s platitude. How could Bayorn say such a thing? He had been there when Letho had decapitated the first woman he had ever truly cared for. Hell, she was the first being of any gender or species with whom he had ever felt such a strong connection—with Deacon a close second, of course. If Letho was going to carry anything with him, it would be the image of her head rolling across the floor, eyes staring at nothing, her body slumping and falling with a sickening thud like a sack of ground meat hitting the floor.

Letho shuddered, and he noticed that Bayorn was watching him with concerned eyes. He offered Bayorn a false smile.

The ship continued on its computer-controlled trajectory. It reversed itself to reduce its velocity, and orbital maneuvering engines pushed the the ship out of orbit, toward the planet. It turned so as to point its blunt bottom downward, then began the plummet into the upper reaches of Eursus’s atmosphere. As Letho looked out the window, the black was replaced, first by a warm pink, and then by fireball-red and orange. Heat began to sear the interior of the ship, and Letho began to panic as he realized he was looking from the inside of a fireball outward. The friction of Eursus’s atmosphere against the hull of the ship was setting fire to the air all around them.

Other than this horrifying turn of events, the ship was relatively calm and free of jostling or buffets. Some of the Tarsi were praying in their musical language, and the sweet sound of it brought some peace to Letho. He had no deity to pray to, so he chose to clench his teeth to the point of shattering and grip the straps of his safety harness until his knuckles turned bone-white.

“We are all sure to die!” Maka sang in unapologetic Tarsi-speak. Letho would have placed a comforting hand on his shoulder, but he was two paces away from Maka, strapped into a harness. The Tarsi were much too large to fit in the Eursan harnesses and were merely holding on for purchase. He felt ashamed of his security under the thick straps that held him in place.

“Have no fear, Maka. These ships are designed to withstand such forces!” Bayorn said.

“Re-entry sequence completed. Manual control initiated,” the ship said.

“This is incredible! I never thought I’d get to do this in one of these things!” Deacon shouted, a madman’s leer on his face. He ran his hands over the nav-orbs like a prodigy at a musitron keyboard.

At last the skies transformed from the flames of Infernus itself to the muted blue-white of Eursus’s upper atmosphere. A collective gasp rose as the craggy brown skin of Eursus appeared beneath them. Great landmasses swam in dark seas, monolithic shapes that Letho had only glimpsed in vids. He was simultaneously horrified and transfigured with joy as he saw his home for the first time with his own eyes, his brain attempting to manage opposing images.

The vids had shown a verdant planet with sapphire seas; the truth was much drier, covered in a shroud of apparent death and waste. Letho knew the planet had been ravaged, mined for every last drop of fuel, every last resource consumed past the tipping point. Still, it was his home, and what he saw below resonated in his gut, a kind of recognition that went down to the cellular level. He tried to speak, but he knew the words would come out in an exhilarated gush, overpowered by emotion. He was fighting the urge to cry at the tragic beauty of his ruined planet, though he did not know why.

He was saved from the embarrassment of weeping from an event that could only be described as the worst thing that could possibly happen at that given moment. Deacon, bursting with pride at his perfect execution of a re-entry that he had only completed on simulators, suddenly lolled back in his chair, his hands falling from the nav-orbs, and his face sagged as if all the muscles beneath the skin had been robbed of their tensility. He looked like a man who had recalled a grave memory from the subterranean place where such memories dwell.

He then began to buck with seizures.

“Deacon!” Letho shouted, but the body at the controls was unresponsive, continuing to shake and palsy like a mad dancer. Letho detached himself from his harness and was at Deacon’s side in a blink.

Deacon groaned, clutching his stomach. Letho grimaced as fear began to well up, rising up through his body as though the ship had plunged into the ocean and was now filling with frigid water.

Deacon’s posture set off a chain reaction of remembrance in Letho. He saw himself falling, tearing his leg open on a jutting pipe as he tumbled. He could practically smell the sour sweat, could see the stained gray mattress that smelled of dirty hair and body stink. Bayorn looked at Letho, and they exchanged a knowing glance. Deacon fought against the shakes, trying to return his hands to the nav-orbs, but the ship rocked from the instability of his fingertips.

“He has the drug sickness,” Bayorn said. Letho muttered a few choice Tarsi expletives, to which Maka raised an eyebrow and chuckled. The laughter died quickly, however, stifled by Deacon’s screams.

Letho kneeled by Deacon and placed a hand on his forehead. It was soaked with clammy sweat.

“Letho,” Deacon said through clenched teeth. “What’s wrong with me?”

“Warning: please adjust trajectory,” the computer said.

The ship rolled, slamming the unstrapped Tarsi into the walls, splitting lips and opening red seams on foreheads. The ship was buffeted by an unfeeling wall of turbulence, and the sound of metal tearing and the smell of circuits sizzling filled the confined space. The ship continued to tumble.

“The ship is tearing itself apart! Do something!” Thresha shouted. She was speaking directly to Letho.

“What am I supposed to do?” he shouted back.

The view through the portholes rolled from clear sky to dark earth. The ground was getting closer. The ship’s computer listed a running tally of system failures in a detached voice. One of the Tarsi vomited a column of grey paste into the air, and it promptly splattered back onto his terrified face.

“Sir, my calculations indicate that prolonged inaction is dramatically reducing your chance of survival,” Saladin said.

“That’s great, Saladin. Thanks for the update!” Letho shouted. Deacon continued to do the detox shuffle, trying to regain control but unable to keep his hands on the nav-orbs.

“I am patching in to the system, engaging auto-pilot,” Saladin said, in the matter-of-fact nature of one reciting a grocery list.

“Why the hell didn’t you do that before?” Thresha shouted.

“I did not wish to impugn the honor of my master, Letho Ferron. In your parlance, I believe one would say: ‘All he had to do was ask.’”

Letho had a momentary vision of breaking Saladin over his knee.

“The autopilot service is currently functioning at forty percent. I am attempting to re-route controls to my computing systems. One moment…” Saladin said.

“That’s one hell of a sword!” Deacon said between bouts of seizures.

The ship at last began to right itself, but through the portholes, they could all see the smoke pouring from the re-entry boosters. The air around them roared and bellowed as the ship continued its fall from the sky, occasionally buffeted by the wind, showing no indication of slowing.

Letho closed his eyes. He knew what was coming, but somehow not looking at it, not seeing his friends as they attempted to show bravery in the moment of their deaths, made it not real, somehow more manageable. Still, he couldn’t keep his eyes shut. He had to know, had to see it unfold. He opened his eyes again and looked at Bayorn, and they nodded at one another. Bayorn’s eyes were, against all odds, completely free of fear, filled with a tranquility that soothed Letho’s restless soul.

He knows that he goes to the halls of his forefathers.

Letho thought of Bayorn’s former skepticism, how he had not engaged in celebration of the Tarsi god at a feast that had occurred so long ago. What had Fintran the Elder shared with him to change him so? Letho wished for such assurance now as he witnessed the approaching end to his life. When he considered the timeline of current events and their inevitable conclusion, he did not see white light at the end—only darkness. What would happen to him? Would he blink out like a snuffed candle? Would there be an instant of excruciating pain before his consciousness faded, as the walls of the ship collapsed and crushed his body, or the fire from a massive explosion consumed him? Or worse: what if his healing abilities kept him half alive, trapped in the wreckage until he starved to death?

The ground continued to swell beneath them, and now Letho could make out individual shapes even as the ship continued to spin. Haphazard husks of ancient buildings, once centers of commerce and places of communion where the people of Eursus gorged on caloric indulgences with little to no nutritional value, yawned on the expanding horizon.

“Wait,” Letho said. But the laws of physics were as dispassionate and steadfast as ever, and the bird that had emerged from the clouds in a wreath of flame realized its inevitable trajectory.

  FOUR – Surface

Letho snapped back to consciousness, and pain like iron barbs clawed at his body. He surveyed his surroundings.

The inner hold of the ship was remarkably intact. Deacon was unconscious in his chair, and momentary panic filled Letho as he scanned his friend for wounds. Surprisingly, Deacon’s only injury appeared to be a large knot on his forehead.

Must’ve banged his head on the console.

He found that he himself was not so fortunate. Part of the ship’s hull had collapsed on him, pinning his chest.

Out of the corner of his eye, Letho saw a figure moving among the black smoke and embers that wreathed the crash site. Impossible. He had seen no signs of life on the planet’s barren face before the ship’s awful tumble.

Then he heard a strange chittering, a low form of communication that caused his skin to go prickly.

This is not the way I die. Not on my back, not trapped like an animal.

Letho summoned every bit of his strength and pushed on the girder. It moved, but only slightly. And then Bayorn and Maka were there, gripping the girder with their massive laborers’ hands. Letho pushed with them, and the girder squealed and groaned as it submitted to their combined strength.

Letho sat bolt upright, causing his head to swim. He gripped Saladin’s pommel and pulled it free, surveying the blade. Though he had fallen upon it, the blade had not bent or cracked. The presence of his hand on the pommel brought Saladin to life, and the AI immediately began to feed a flurry of information into his mind. The nano-machines that swam in his bloodstream sent updates on his physical condition.

“There is good news: I have located a comm point and am currently downloading a critical firmware update. Would you like me to upgrade?”

“Not now, Saladin. Tell me about them.”

More shapes moved through the smoke that surrounded Letho and the crash site.

“Very well, but first let me just deploy this upgrade package. It will only take a moment.”

“Saladin, wait!”

But Saladin didn’t wait. Letho’s brain spasmed as new data flooded it. He thought he could feel the nanobots in his system realigning and reconfiguring. The software’s new features began to scroll across his mind’s eye.

He saw satellite maps of a Eursus that had been reshaped by the fall of man, every crevice and crater rendered in spectacular high-definition 3D. He saw flashes of the information he had always longed for as news stories and videos of world leaders shouting flew past, too fast to take it all in at once. Finally he would know. He would see the Fulcrum stations appearing on the outer reaches of his star system. See them hovering there. He would know how the relationship between Tarsi and Eursan had been forged. How they had come to work together to launch each Fulcrum station in the name of the great mission.

A mission that had failed spectacularly.

The upgrade process occurred in the span of only a few heartbeats. Centuries of data flooded his mind in the time it takes for someone to clap their hands twice. But it would take some time yet before his mind could sort it all out for recall.

The remaining Tarsi had begun to form a ring around Letho, and Thresha moved to stand directly to his left. He sought her out with his eyes, and saw her staring at the shapes that were beginning to materialize out of the dust.

The ship had crashed in the middle of what had once been a residential area. They stood now in the great gash the fallen ship had raked across a shattered blacktop street, surrounded by burning flotsam. The remnants of houses, most of them eroded frames that refused to succumb, stood all around them in carefully arranged rows like tombstones. The creatures began to appear from behind these walls and from underneath leaning and fallen rooftops.

They were vaguely human in shape, but everything else was all wrong. Their skin was blackened, mangy, and some of theirs limbs ended in distorted flippers, while others ended in hands with too many or not enough digits. All of them were tipped in claws that looked as though they could at once rend flesh and inflict necrosis. The things began to hiss and threaten with swipes of their claws.

One of them, larger than the others, a creature whose malformed head throbbed with pustulant sores and an extra set of eyes, began to screech in ragged syllables. He pointed directly at Letho with a finger extended from a massive fist.

“We come in peace?” Letho said hesitantly, eyebrows raised.

The larger creature responded with a terse bark deep from within a chest covered in deformed knots of muscle tissue.

“What are they?” Thresha asked.

“I don’t know. But it looks like they want to kill us. Don’t think diplomacy is going to work here,” Letho muttered.

The creatures began to tumble forward. The chaotic nature of their charge indicated a pitiful lack of intelligence, and for a moment Letho felt sorry for them. But their fate had already been decided. Letho let the rage fill his limbs like hot lead, his face taking on the appearance of a snarling samurai mask. He could have held back the anger, allowed his conscious mind to maintain control. But he thought of the wrecked ship, of his friend Deacon, still lolling helplessly in his flight chair. These creatures were at no way at fault for Letho and his comrades’ plight, but they would pay the price and feel his wrath.

The Tarsi roared and charged, but Letho slipped out in front of them, the smoke swirling around him as he moved with oily quickness to the fore. Two of the creatures squared off, circling him and hunkering down low, hissing, tongues flicking between rotten teeth.

Sir, the firmware update has added the blade actuation feature. Would you like to use it now? Saladin said inside Letho’s mind.

But of course.

Saladin lashed out, seemingly of his own accord, moving fast and heavy, cleaving the air above one of the creatures. Letho reveled in the new power as the nanobots in his arms worked in perfect synchronicity with the sword’s grav-assist actuators, allowing him to execute a perfect and devastating sword swipe. The speed and sheer force of the attack was beautiful, god-like. The creature’s body slumped, its severed head spinning as it followed the body to the dust below, its heart pumping life-blood onto the ground in savage gouts. The fear that Letho had been looking for, hoping for, at last appeared in the other creatures’ eyes; they turned to scrabble away. But this retreat was as futile as an insect’s scramble beneath the shadow of a crushing boot. Saladin bit again, and another creature tumbled as it legs were cut away below the kneecap.

Sir, a killing stroke was readily available. Possible trajectory error? Perhaps systems require recalibration?

More of the creatures found themselves in Letho’s path, and they gave up their ghosts just as readily as the first two. The Tarsi were also doing their share of killing. Letho grinned at Bayorn, who had just executed one of the creatures with a mighty swipe of his claws, a grimace on his face. When their eyes met, Bayorn did not return the grin. He looked at Letho like he didn’t recognize him.

Letho felt a wave of dizziness overcome him, and he almost fell. He placed the tip of his sword in the dirt, leaning into it like a walking stick as he waited for the blur in his mind to pass. His body needed water. Food. His vision choked in a sea of black dots that were growing ever larger. But there was one more creature that had to pay the price for daring to attack. The last remaining creature, the one who had pointed at him at the beginning of the attack, fled as fast as his deformed legs could carry him.

You came here to dance, so let’s dance.

Was it a song lyric, or the rattling of a hysterical mind? Saladin outlined the target in orange-yellow, displaying critical target areas and trajectory data, all of which looked like alien hieroglyphs to Letho. He drew his Black Bear, and the nano-machines motivated his muscles to bring the handgun up, lining up the sights for a shot that would split the creature’s head.

Letho forced his arm downward, and the words MANUAL TARGETING ENGAGED appeared across his vision. He fired, and the creature’s left arm detached and spun away from its body. The creature stumbled, but did not fall. A shriek that was all too human rose from its mouth, causing Thresha to cry out from somewhere behind him.

“Letho, stop!”

He aimed lower, firing again. The creature’s left foot disappeared in a cloud of red. It tumbled to the earth, kicking up red dust as it rolled. Letho forced himself to a standing position and strode toward creature, which was now lurching onto the broken street, oiling the asphalt with its blood as it slithered towards the shadowy confines of a remarkably intact brick home. Window frames with shattered panes leered at him like the eye sockets of a skull. The sound of the creature’s claws scrabbling against the road was the only noise save for the whine of an acrid breeze.

In two strides Letho was standing above the creature, which had now given up its attempt to flee. The creature’s first response was to snarl and arch its back to appear as large and menacing as possible. When Letho did not respond, the creature began to mewl, its head falling to its chest on an impossibly thin neck. It raised its remaining arm over its head as if to shield itself from the inevitable blow, and Letho felt a jolt run through his body when he saw some sort of weather-beaten leather band on the creature’s forearm. He gasped and took a step back.

“What the…” he said, but was cut off by another pleading cry from the creature that sounded a lot like the word please.

Was it a cry of mercy? Or was it just asking him to get it over with? He holstered the Black Bear and and brought Saladin crashing down on the creature’s thin neck. The creature’s legs twitched for a few minutes, and then it was still.

Then Letho was spinning. Thresha had grabbed him and turned his body to face her. Even in his rage he marveled at her sheer strength. Her eyes danced with a heat that matched his own, and he was intoxicated by it.

“You didn’t have to do that. Make it suffer. What the hell is wrong with you?”

A thousand responses flooded Letho’s mind. He chose instead to shove her. She fell to the ground, looking up at him with furious eyes.

“You’re one to talk,” he said, his voice husky and wild with anger.

Then with a sudden rush, the anger spilled out of him, leaving his limbs feeling spent and rubbery. The redness that had ringed his vision and tainted his thought processes faded; his shoulders slumped, his fingers loosened, and Saladin dropped from his grip. Letho extended his hand to Thresha, but she recoiled, for it was covered in the black ichor of the ruined creatures he had slain.