We crackle and crunch through the forest, tracking gore through the red and silver leaves of this wretched forest so far from home: the centaur, the nyanga, Oberon, and me. And Tchakalaktsa, of course. My love. My life. Skink of my heart. Or what’s left of her…in spirit, in the glass vial that bounces comfortingly against my scales on my chest, with Obie’s every step.
The so-called king of the faeries is limping. Trying to hide it. You’d only notice the slight uneven keel if you were riding the brim of his hat, like I am. My favourite perch because these little gecko legs weren’t made for long distance—and Nokwazi has made it very clear she is nobody’s steed.
The centaur has also been known to skewer a bitch who tries to touch her mane. RIP that guy in Tossa de Mar, impaled on the long twists of her Kudu horns. And also RIP to actually, you know, sitting down for a hot meal and sorghum beer after long weeks on the road because it turns out the villagers in this part of the world aren’t down with casual murder.
Don’t blame me. I’ve tried to tell the guys we need to stick to formal murder only. Avoid drawing attention. More attention. We kinda stick out around here. The locals have a pasty complexion, like raw hippo meat, because the sun here is too feeble to have baked them properly.
Better-hued than Obie, though. He’s white as the moonlight with long hair the colour of blighted grass or dead locust husks. It’s why he wears the wide-brim hat, pulled low over his yellow eyes, to hide his strangeness. You can’t hide Nokwazi’s horns though or Disebo’s lack of pants, which she says chafe her legs and get caught on brambles, or rustle and give her away to the rabbits she is trying to snare. They are a ridiculous invention anyway, she gripes, when she’s not complaining about not being able to find the herbs she needs because all the plants are different here.
There’s quite a lot of complaining, not so much advice-taking, I have to say. I need to remind myself that the guys are doing their best. It’s not their fault they can’t think at gecko speed or that their hulking great mammal bodies lack my nimble reptile reflexes. I’m learning to make compromises, to listen, let everyone have their say and make their own mistakes. We’re together in this. I’m trying to get along. Tchakalaktsa would be proud of me taking the back seat—back hat, really—and letting the warm-bloods lead the charge.
I mean, I complain too. We’re all homesick. Everything is familiar but also queasily different. I try to be open-minded about the Hispanya customs—it’s the scholar in me—but they live like termites all crammed on top of each other and the way they dress is recklessly complicated. Too many layers and frills and nonsense. They brew their beer badly, and their food is weird: lots of meat concoctions wrapped in intestine, and fermented milk goo. Even the bugs taste bad. The plants are wrong and the wildlife too—like nightmare versions of the ones we’re used to.
The demon boars we slaughtered back there, for example, are nothing like the cute warthogs we get back home. These sgebenga were triple the size, hulking beasts with hunched shoulders and double tusks. They came blundering out of the forest to attack us when we were just passing through, minding our business, en route to a Very Formal Murder in Barcan, a.k.a Revenge, a.k.a. Destiny.
We all have our reasons. Fate has brought us together to find the conquista Duvarles in his castle in the great city, and kill him dead, and reclaim what he has stolen from us.
We shared our stories round the fire those first few nights, bared our souls in the flickering flames. (Only flaming at all because I cast a quick rot spell to dry out the wood so Noks could actually light it. Not that she even noticed, let alone said thank you, but I’m used to my efforts being unappreciated.)
Nokwazi told us about her young calves, Khazimla and Kwakhanya, and the prophecy among the Kudu that says twins are cursed. It meant she had to pretend to kill the brother to appease the spirits and steal him away to live high in the mountains with the lightning bird who promised to raise Kwakhanya as his own. But the Impundulu demanded a price for this service. That she must retrieve the electric feather he lost when sailors under a flag with a jaggedy red cross tried to stop the storm by shooting one of their foul harpoons into the sacred lightning bird. It’s taken her long months, across savannahs and deserts and oceans to track it down—to Duvarles castle, where it sits beside a thousand other stolen artefacts from a hundred lands.
…Including Oberon’s magic cup. He says he needs it to return home because the faerie rings are poisoned by the choking smoke in the air from the new machines and the muck that flows down the rivers. The mushrooms are dying, pale and sickly as he is. He says only his cup can purify the waters, bring the land back to itself, restore the fungal kingdom and return him to his own.
Which miiiiight be true, but I’ve heard him muttering when we’re walking together. He forgets I’m right there with him, riding his hat. Something something, stupid prank, something about pissing off his wife and not being allowed to come home until he makes amends, ere long.
Sebs is purely mercenary, which I appreciate, although she sells it as reparations of a kind for the way she was tricked into coming across the sea under the grossest false pretences. Duvarles’s castle is rumoured to contain not only treasures but may also house the greatest apothecary in the northern lands, outside of Phoenicia, with some of the rarest herbs and healing spells. She intends to raid it, thoroughly. Does it make up for what those scumbags tried to do to her? “It’ll help,” she says. Cheeky. And grim.
And me? It’s revenge. Obviously it’s revenge.
I will rip Duvarles’s heart out of his chest and watch him die, and then ask Noks if I can borrow that electric feather for a moment, to use with my dark magick to restart that bloody organ, so I can watch him die again. And again. And again. For what he did to my love, my Tchakalaktsa.
I’m so lost in the fantasy, it takes me a moment to realize we have stopped in the trail. Noks is scuffing her dainty-deadly hooves on the ground to try and dislodge the clinging viscera from those massacred boars, a snag of some bristled fur. I notice the gash on her flank at the same time as Disebo does. She makes a soft cluck of sympathy. “Nokwazi.”
I shout: “Oh dung, Noks! They got you good! You’re lucky you didn’t get disembowelled!” She really is. Boars will do that. Get up underneath your belly and open you up at the seam.
“Tsk.” Oberon chides. This is his best attempt at my name, which is actually TrkTkTskTkTrkTs and not that hard to pronounce if you take the time, maybe honour my ancestors and a thousand generations of cold-bloods before mammals and spirits and fey bothered to show up. It’s pure petty revenge to give them all cutesy nicknames too. Obie for Oberon, Noks for Nokwazi, Sebs for Disebo.
I hate it when he talks to me like this. He thinks I’m too excitable. No one expects a necromancer to be the life of the party, but I’m not your average death magick gecko. The king of the fey wishes he had a shed of my charm. That’s “shed,” by the way, as in dead skin, not “shred.” Because reptiles love a pun and even my cast-offs are wittier and more charismatic than thingamie-kingamie over here.
“We need to keep moving,” he warns. “Keep it down. We’re close to the city walls, there may be patrols.”
Disebo ignores him. “You’re hurt,” Disebo says to the centaur. “Let me see.”
“It’s nothing,” Noks scowls, furrowing the white band across her eyes—homegrown warpaint—that makes her look even more angry than usual. “Leave it alone. We’re nearly at the city gates. I’ll survive.”
“Oh sure, tough Kudu,” I scold from my perch on Obie’s brim. He’s taken the chance to lean against a tree—the old boy must be hurting too. “Why don’t you just leave it to get infected, and I can break out the maggots when it’s turned all nasty and gangrenous.” I have eggs with me, in a pouch around my waist along with other spell ingredients for death magick. Also good for cleaning wounds in a pinch.
Sebs doesn’t respond to me. There’s this unspoken thing between us that she finds necromancy distasteful. Lovely for her that she got to choose the path of a nyanga, brewing up medicinal plants to tend the wounded, heal the sick, save some lives.
It was way too late for a healer when I found Tchakalaktsa on the beach. I didn’t know what I know now. Hadn’t even heard of necromancy back then, and I definitely didn’t have access to a borrowed lightning feather to try and shock her little crushed and bloody heart back to life.
“You’re a stubborn mule!” Sebs mutters, dabbing at Noks’s wound with a mix of aloe and buchu paste, grey-green and pungent. “This is exactly the kind of infection that would kill you. Do you know how dirty boar’s teeth are? You could die!”
“I’m not going to die.”
“Hope not,” Obie quips, our droll king. But then, he says something so heinous, so disgusting and vile and shocking, I nearly fall off his hat. “Not like anyone could resurrect you.”
He says it like it’s nothing. So casual. So unnecessarily cruel.
Not like anyone could resurrect you.
I know fey are callous, but this?! Throwing the worst agony of my life in my face? My greatest failure? As a snarky aside?!
This is what happens when you let people get close to you, when you let them in, and make compromises, when you share your stories, when you are brave enough to share the pain underneath them.
We all revealed our deepest wounds—at least those of us who aren’t fey assholes.
Our gruff Kudu warrior let it slip about how hard it is to be in exile, leaving two young calves behind: a daughter who thinks her mother abandoned her and a son who has to pretend he’s dead while he’s working as the servant of a bird spirit in the mountains where the air is so thin you have to gasp for breath and you can’t hear yourself speak for the thunder and crackling. She wept and wept to leave him there.
Sebs only knows about the Barcan apothecary because she was nearly the victim of so-called “healers” who wanted to study her and maybe cut her up for parts, like you would carve up an ilabatheka root.
She met two pasty men in Hui ǃGaeb where the sky folds over the mountain, who said they were healers too and if she came with them across the ocean they would bring her to the place where their greatest share their learnings and it would be a privilege to have someone so wise and knowledgeable to teach them her ways.
But when they got to Pikadili, or whatever the place was called, their “doctors” and “scientists” wanted to examine her as if she was a specimen. They poked and prodded at her and tried to lift up her hide to peer underneath, which Sebsy was not going to stand for. They held a fancy banquet with a bunch of frilly nobles, supposedly in “her honour” but really they wanted to parade her like some exotic bird.
So, she drugged their food with herbs that would make them shit and puke for a week. She figured if they wanted to see her insides so bad, they might like to see what they were made of too. She escaped while they were purging themselves of their own ugliness and made off with those books and medicines she deemed worthwhile.
She fell in with Oberon in the green and pleasant lands, and agreed to accompany him to Barcan if she could have first pickings of the apothecary.
Me? I told the story of how I lost my love. How the conquistas came to Guanche where the cliffs are so high and craggy the humans use long poles to vault themselves across the jungle crevasses, and whistle messages to each other like birds because their voices don’t carry. Tchakalaktsa and I learned to imitate the whistles to mess with them or distract them so she could steal their precious things, at least the ones that were small enough for a pair of reptile rapscallions to carry, and sell them right back to them.
She was the big adventurer, and I was the scholar, who wanted to study the ways of tides and wind from the birds and fish. I was going to be the greatest oceanographer of all reptilekind, never mind that I had never set foot on a ship. Not until after she died.
She dreamed of us going to Tombouctou, where I could learn calligraphy and bury myself up to the eyeballs in the learnings of the continent, and she could set herself up as a merchant skink rather than a petty thief, buying and selling wild and strange things from all across the world. We were going to build a nest of our own in that incredible city. And in a year or two, when we were settled maybe, we could even lay some eggs…
I told her to avoid the invaders, but she was reckless, my love, and they had the shiniest things on their ship, which flew that same flag—white with the barbed red cross and the name on the front in some Hispanya language. Duvarles’s vessel, I only found out later.
Did the conquistas catch her stealing from them? Or did they kill her just because, like they killed everyone else? The animals, the birds, the people. They torched the woven houses and set the forest alight. Crueller even than fey.
I found her on the beach at the foot of the cliffs near where they moored their ships. Her little body was scrunched under-boot. She didn’t deserve that. Her perfect tiny bones were broken and jabbing through her gold-green scales. Her skull was crushed, dark blood staining the white sand. Her tail was gone, leaving only the nub. That was the worst part. It meant she saw it coming. My sweet skinkling had tried to escape, dropped her tail as a lure to distract those vile invaders.
I wasn’t there. I had been basking on my favourite rock, idly chewing on a dragonfly and thinking about barrier islands. Normal reptile things in the times before the murder.
Maybe she called out for help, but her voice didn’t carry across the cliffs and valleys. It’s not as high-pitched as human whistles, and I didn’t hear…
I wasn’t there. I didn’t hear her. I couldn’t save her. She was already dead by the time I got to her. I lifted the wreckage of Tchakalaktsa in my arms and held her tight against me. Her blood stained my scales, soaked into the sand. I hissed, I screamed, I shook.
“And then…in my terrible grief, I did the only thing that made sense to me. It was the only way to keep her with me.” I remember telling the guys this where we sat huddled in a cave near Zargoza. I’d moved from Obie’s hat to perch on a jutting bit of rock near the fire. Centre stage, as it were, and so I could be eye-level, which was a waste, because no one could bear to meet my eyes. They’d all fallen silent. The kind of dread quiet that makes the air thicker. They didn’t want to hear. I can’t blame them. I didn’t want to say it.
But I did.
“I ate her,” I told them that night when we were all being so open, so vulnerable. I’d never told anyone before. “It was the greatest act of love, the greatest act of pain. Consumed by grief, I consumed my love. It took two days to eat her all up. I couldn’t bear for her to be apart from me. This was the only way I could keep her with me always.”
“I know. I know,” I said, waving away their obvious questions before they could open their mouths to ask them. “I am a geckomancer now, but this was a year ago. A year before I knew about the dark magick that can bring someone back from the dead. Her murder is what set me on this path. But I’m not good enough yet. Maybe I won’t ever be. But if I keep studying the dark arts…maybe if I can find an artefact powerful enough, I could try.”
They stared into the flames, my companions. Still saying nothing. Weighed down by my words. Oberon’s golden eyes gleamed bright in the firelight—a little glassy, I thought. They must have known what was coming. They’d all seen the vial I kept around my neck. I touched it with one sticky-padded toe.
“You might know enough about necromancy, that you need remains to bring someone back. But I told you…” I swallowed hard, licked one eyeball with nerves, then the other. “I told you I ate her all up. And I did. Even her bones. And her sweet little tail, which I found down the beach. I told you Tchakalaktsa is with me in spirit. And she is. But she is also with me in body…or rather, the digested waste of my body. In spirit. And also in scat.”
Maybe Disebo gasped. Or a branch popped in the flames. “I know,” I said, “I know. It’s disgusting. But the real horror is that she died when she didn’t have to. And this,” I held up the vial, the tiny calcified bit of gecko poop within, “is all I have left of her and maybe it’s enough. The best necromancers are able to raise the dead from a claw or a single hair or a scale. One day, one day I’ll be great, the greatest geckomancer to ever have lived. And I’ll bring her back. She’ll be here with us. Restored, alive. I can’t wait for you guys to meet her.”
“Tsk.” Oberon said at last, a grudging acknowledgement.
Nokwazi wiped at her eyes. “Ugh, this smoke,” pretending like that was the reason, because Kudu warriors are supposed to be tough guys.
That was two weeks ago I bared my soul—two weeks we’ve been travelling together, fighting dangers untold, sharing adventure and stories and what beer we can find, and eating wild squirrel and wood lice and grubs, and maybe I was looking forward to some scraps of demon boar tonight. I thought we were united, by a common cause, a common enemy. I was so naïve. Never trust a faerie. Never rely on royalty.
Not like anyone could resurrect you.
“You bastard. You monster. You fey fucker.” I hiss at Oberon. “I should kill you. Slowly. Blight your skin, turn your flesh to carrion, make you rot from the inside. I can do that, you know! I’m powerful enough.”
“What’s that noise?” The Kudu leans forward, suddenly, tufted ears twitching beneath her curling horns.
“I don’t hear anything.” Sebs looks up from wound-tending.
“Oh, I’m sorry, did you miss this fey dungbag dishing out the most egregious insult of my whole gecko life?”
Noks squints, unbecomingly. Her ears swivel and flick. “That chirping, hissing sound. Don’t you hear it? It’s the same noise that’s been going on for weeks, especially at night. I thought I was imagining it.”
“Are you hearing yourself right now?” I yell.
Oberon grunts. “Tsk.”
I can’t see exactly what he’s doing, because there’s a whole hat in the way, but I see him raise his creepy long moonlight fingers from his chest and hold them out to them like an offering. They’re covered in blood.
“I hope it’s fatal you callous bastard!” I scream.
“Oh ancestors, you’re hurt too.” Sebs moves towards him. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
“And spoil the party?” he tries to sneer, but the pain jags in his voice and I’m glad. I’m thrilled. Sebs dips out of my view under the brim, so she can examine the wound.
“This is bad,” the healer says. “You’re going to need stitches.”
“Ow,” Oberon says as she prods at him.
“Ow is going to be the least of it!” I screech.
“You’re both stubborn idiots,” Sebs berates him and Noks who is clopping around with her ears pricked forward and her tail flicking, seeking something out. As if this is the time for side quests.
The rage is red and pounding, all the hate and grief that has driven me this far, around the world, to strange lands, to stranger companions.
“Sebs, you stitch him up, you heal him good. So I can kill him myself, slowly. Horribly!”
“There!” Noks yelps, neck stretched out like a giraffe, ears like flags signalling up ahead. She’s pointing somewhere into the forest behind us. I twist my head to see. It would be just like the conquistas to attack us now, right when I’m about to murder this faerie king. But she’s not pointing into the trees. She’s indicating something much closer.
“It’s on your hat, Oberon! Right there!” She stamps her hooves in agitation. “Kill it!”
I whip around in alarm, whole body, nearly losing my grip, even with my sucky toes. But there’s nothing on the hat. No bird spider leaping from the tree above in ambush, no rabid mongoose or the warped Hispanya equivalent that has scrambled up over Obie’s shoulders to confront me with its sharp little teeth.
“Kill it!” the Kudu yells, this dread warrior, stamping her hooves and yelping. It’s got to be terrible. The most terrifying creature on this continent. “Kill it! Kill it! Kill it!”
Maybe it’s invisible. I wheel around again, clutching the vial containing Tchakalaktsa with one foot, protectively. “Where is it?” I scream. “What is it?”
“The frog!” she squeals. “On your hat!”
It takes me a moment to realize she’s talking about me. In such grotesquely unflattering terms.
“Excuse me!” I sputter, “How dare you! I’m a gecko not a fucking frog!”
Are they bewitched? We’ve blundered into some cursed grove that is going to make us all turn on each other. That would explain Oberon insulting me. The red rage that descended over me.
“I think it’s a lizard.” Disebo is amused.
“On my hat?” Obie reaches up blood-stained fingers, feeling around. I snap at those spindly digits, twist away from his warm-blooded grasping. I feel very small, suddenly. And very alone.
“Whatever it is! Frogs, snakes, lizards, they’re all squirmy and slimy and disgusting.” She shudders. “Just kill it. Kill it!”
Noks lunges forward and swats at the hat. I dive away and she catches Oberon across the face instead with the full force of her centaur strength, knocking him sideways into the tree, so his head smacks into the bark and the hat goes flying.
He peels himself away from the tree, rubbing at his face.
“Oh dung, Oberon, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to…”
His golden eyes flare, like there is a sun shining from inside his head, spilling out. It lights up the clearing in an uncanny yellow glow.
“You dare…You, mortal?” His bleached hair swirls up around him, golden light blazing in his hands.
“Guys!” I yell from my new vantage point. “Guys, calm down. It’s magic, some kind of protective spell we tripped off. This is what Duvarles wants—for us to destroy ourselves before we can even reach him!”
“Oberon, I’m sorry. It was the lizard frog thing. It’s still there! It’s probably poisonous.”
I’m not though. Either of those things—venomous, thanks, or still on his stupid hat. I’ve scrambled off just in time, scaling the tree when Noks bounced Oberon’s face off the bark. And I’m skittering higher into the branches. This is really bad. Obie’s about to unleash faerie fire and burning death.
“Guys, please!” I implore them. “Everything’s being twisted up. How long have we known each other? This is not us.”
Sebs is trying her best too. “Oberon, she didn’t mean any insult to you! It’s a phobia! It doesn’t have to make sense.” The glow is growing in his palms. The light is spilling into the trees, lighting up the whole forest like a beacon. “We all have quirks. Nokwazi is scared of reptiles and you…uh.” She casts around. “You hate it when people chew too loud!”
The sun orbs are blazing in his hands, white light coruscating with unearthly green, but not unleashed. Not yet. He pauses, the king of the fey.
“It’s true, Obie!” I shout. “She got you there! You’re so squeamish! You cover your ears and moan when Sebs is tearing into a squirrel.”
He stands a moment longer. Poised on the edge of calamity. And then the fire in his eyes flickers and fades away. The animosity spell or whatever it was, is broken. Obie’s lips twitch. A little smug faerie smirk.
“It’s disgusting. You mortals.”
“Ohhh, I’m so sorry we can’t all live on nectar and the essence of human suffering,” Sebs jibes.
“I also drink mead.”
Nokwazi laughs in relief, nearly whacks him between his scrawny shoulder blades—and thinks better of it. “I thought you were going to obliterate me.”
“I was.” He folds his arms, winces in pain.
“You really need to let me tend to that,” Sebs says. “Stitches. Faerie.”
“We need to keep moving.”
“Yeah, cos your little light show tantrum probably tipped off the whole of Barcan city!” I yell. I’m not over this. I would cry if geckos could. “Every patrol in the forest knows where we are!”
“I’m sorry I hit you,” Noks says. “Accidentally.”
“I’m sorry I was going to burn you to ashes,” Oberon replies. “With all intention.”
“Uh, how about me?” I chitter from the tree. “Anyone want to apologize for the cruel words? The reptile-hate-mongering?” I’m more hurt than I want to let on. It’s going to haunt me, this. “Uh, guys, you want to wait up?”
“You’re annoying too, you know,” Sebs says.
“The king of the fey? I’ll have you know I’m delightful. Everyone says so.”
“Everyone you glamour. But they don’t have to travel with you wafting around making that hissing little huff all day.”
“What do you mean?’”
“That sound between your teeth. You know…”
“Sssch.” Nokwazi chips in. “Like that. All day. Sssch. Sssch. Sssch.”
“Do I?” Oberon says. “I really hadn’t realized I was doing that.”
“See, everyone has bad habits,” Sebs says. “Except me. I’m obviously perfect.”
“Guys!” I shout. Or want to. It kinda dies in my throat. A strangled chirp. I want to yell, “Wait for me!” Or maybe, “Look out, the conquista soldiers!” Who are coming through the trees, guided right here by Oberon’s light show. Much more stealthy in the underbrush than demon boars, on quiet leather boots, with their swords drawn and their faces full of hate and death.
“Guys,” I gasp, but my breath is gone, like I’m trying to suck oxygen from the too-thin air on the lightning bird’s mountain.
I’m heaving and gagging, like the poisoned guests in their frills at a terrible banquet.
Sobbing, like a small gecko who has lost the love of his life.
And now his friends.
Who are fighting for their lives. Fighting so bravely, but they are already wounded from the skirmish with the demon boars, and it’s an ambush and they weren’t ready and the soldiers already had their blades drawn.
And they’re dying, on this foreign shore, so far from home.
I can’t look. I can’t bear it. But geckos don’t have eyelids so I lick and lick and lick and lick until the shouting has stopped and the screaming and the gurgling, choking.
A last rattling sigh.
Tsskkkkk or maybe Sccchhhhhhhhh.
And I clamber down from the branch and I do the unthinkable. I do what I have to. To keep them near. Sobbing and gagging and shaking.
And one day, maybe, I will be great enough, powerful enough to do the rest.
(Editors’ Note: “The Geckomancer’s Lament” is read by Luyanda Unati Lewis-Nyawo with sound designer Em Edwards on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast, Episode 61B.)
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