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  “Because I love him. For the same reason they love him.”

  Barath pressed the tip of a claw against the soft underside of Mukh’than’s throat. “And that is?”

  The Riirgaan’s black, inexpressive eyes were pools filled with the knowledge of his own oncoming death. Perhaps that is what permitted him to speak without exhaustion, without fear. “Because in a place like this, where we live without hope, where we live among creatures with no hope…all we really own is the magnitude of our own sins.” He closed the opaque lids over his eyes. “Don’t you see that that’s what makes him such a treasure to them? How much it must comfort such a people, to claim ownership of such a demon? How much it comforts me, to care for one whose own crimes were so much worse than mine? Or how much it should gall you, in the presence of such fallen greatness, to remember that your own life was destroyed by a crime so petty?”

  The crushing silence that followed was thick enough to bury any hope of answer.

  “What I did,” the Riirgaan said, “I would do again. It was a sin that made me proud. Can you say the same of your sin, Barath? Was it as grand?”

  Barath gutted him. Thanks to the temperature differential between Kurth biology and the Riirgaan equivalent, the blood that geysered against Barath’s chest plates was a thin cold soup, as unsatisfying a vengeance-trophy as any enraged Kurth had ever known. His rage unspent, Barath raised his forelimbs above his head and brought them down hard, shattering the Riirgaan’s skull, driving the brains and bone fragments into the dirt. It should have helped. But the traitor’s blood hadn’t warmed any; nor had Barath’s rage cooled. It could never cool. Not when he was still dying, and there was no one left to avenge him.

  Part of him thought he still heard trilling.

  Magrison didn’t seem aware that anything unpleasant had happened; he just stared at the ceiling above him, his mouth agape, his slug of a tongue licking his dry withered lips.

  “Ravia,” the human said. “Ravia.”

  Barath didn’t bother to get up off the floor. He just crawled over to the bed and loomed over the ancient figure, wanting Magrison to see something monstrous in his own tusked, blood-spattered face. He needed that; to achieve monstrousness in the eyes of a monster would have been victory of a sort.

  But the old man didn’t see him, really: was no more aware of Barath’s presence than he was of his beloved Ravia’s absence. If he saw anything, it was just the darkness and the fog comprising an exile far crueler than that which he’d chosen for himself so long ago. Perhaps he still experienced memory-flashes of the people he’d hated, the plans he’d made, the atrocities he’d carried out; perhaps they gave him moments of satisfaction, or raw crushing guilt. Perhaps he could live long enough to be taken from here and condemned to whatever execution his fellow humans wanted for him. But time and decrepitude had already provided a darker sentence.

  “I should kill you,” Barath said. “Do what everybody wants done. Get that much satisfaction out of this, at least.”

  Magrison’s lips curled in an expression that might have been a smile. He whispered something in a language Barath didn’t know, coughed, fought for breath, then whispered the same words again; though whether he spoke to Barath or to some phantom resident of the lost world where he lived was something the Kurth would never know.

  Then the human closed his eyes, and did not move again.

  Barath regarded the empty thing for a long time, thinking of a world filled with familiar shapes and abandoned opportunities. He thought of all the things the human had done and all the other human beings who would have danced if they’d known he was dead. He thought of his own crimes, wondered if anybody would have searched entire worlds to bring him to justice, concluded that in the end nobody would have cared, and wondered if that made him more or less pathetic than a monster fading in twilight. He didn’t wonder whether the monster he contemplated was Magrison or Mukh’than, because in the end it didn’t matter.

  When he left the hut some time later, he wasn’t surprised to find the entire population of the village gathered at a respectful distance. Every Trivid was there: every mated adult, every child. They all carried the human’s totems, and they all faced Barath with the incurious calm of creatures who already knew everything that had happened inside. A few made sounds Barath took to be questions, or possibly invitations. He stared back, expecting them to attack en masse, not caring much whether they did or not. Then one—a ridgeback, who Barath supposed to be the same individual who’d represented them before—stepped away from the crowd, approached Barath, and placed a single gentle hand atop Barath’s head.

  It took Barath a heartbeat to understand that the Trivid was offering welcome.

  Of course.

  As a people, they were so bereft that their greatest dream was the chance to replace one dying monster with another.

  The Trivid approached again, and once again placed its hand on Barath’s head.

  Barath growled the last coherent words he’d ever speak to another sentient being. “I won’t be your next bloody human.”

  The Trivids cocked their heads, trying to understand.

  But by then Barath was leaving the village, on the first step of a journey that he knew he’d never live to complete.

  Maybe if he pushed himself to the limits of his strength he’d at least be able to travel beyond their ability to carry him back.

  The bones of our most recent human sit in an honored place. They are massive things, sculpted in proportions nothing like our own, sitting in a mound of scales we peeled from his form after he breathed his last. He died four days from our village, falling apart as he lumbered away from our offers of hospitality, cursing us, snarling at us, and throwing stones every time we tried to draw near. He was not like our other humans: neither the ancient one who lived with us for so many generations, or the black-eyed lover who so often shared his bed. This human was a giant thing with tusks and scales and claws, who walked on all four limbs instead of the two our previous humans preferred. This human looked so little like the other two, who in turn looked so little like each other, that it’s difficult to see how they could all be creatures born of the same world. And unlike the other two, this human never told us of his crime—though the crimes committed by the other two, which they described to us often, were so beyond imagining to us that the offenses committed by the giant tusked thing must have been just as terrible, just as great.

  It is a powerful thing, indeed, to have the bones of three such humans among us, in this place which has known no such wonders…so powerful a thing that skeptics among us sometimes wonder if all three of these creatures were indeed of the same species. After all, they looked nothing alike. How could all three be human?

  But we see no point in such doubts. We have heard what humans are.

  And we know a human when we see one.

  THE END

  Copyright © 2011 by Adam-Troy Castro

  Art copyright © 2011 by John Jude Palencar

  Books by Adam-Troy Castro

  An Alien Darkness

  Vossoff and Nimmitz

  With Stars in Their Eyes (with Jerry Oltion)

  “My Ox is Broken!”

  Tangled Strings

  The Shallow End of the Pool

  Emissaries from the Dead

  The Third Claw of God

  Z Is for Zombie (with Johnny Atomic)

  V Is for Vampire (with Johnny Atomic)

  Gustav Gloom and the People Taker (forthcoming)

  Gustav Gloom and the Nightmare Vault (forthcoming)

 

 

 
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