The Aftermath of an ***

Beku clapped twice. Instantly, Ranzthyld and Chugardth made their way through the mob, zeroing in on the young man who had dropped the head. I almost felt bad for him and his friends; they couldn't have been much older than myself. As if in a state of paralysis, he did not resist as the two guards hauled him toward the stone slab. Sygnus stood nearby, his gleaming axe raised.

No, no, Beku stopped them. The three creatures froze and looked blank-faced at him. Bring him to me.

They obeyed. I looked on silently, another face in the crowd, as the pair of warriors dropped the kid at Beku's feet.

"Stand," Beku ordered aloud.

He shuffled to his feet, keeping his head lowered like a child expecting to be scolded.

"I'm going to assume you've never played this game?"

He nodded.

"Would you like me to explain the object?"

The kid didn't respond, but Beku continued anyway.

"At the release of the head," Beku began, "the game has officially begun. The player who is nearest the end of its trajectory must catch the head and throw it to someone else when it gets too hot. Its temperature decreases slowly, and players can hold the head longer between throws. When the holding time is long enough—usually around eight seconds, or three in Sygnus' case,"—Sygnus smiled proudly behind his armor; seconds later his face was stone again—"players begin to take bites from the head, if they dare. In a perfect game, this continues until the head is entirely consumed; typically the last of it is left to those of us who can digest bone.

"In a good game, we at least break into the skull and begin to eat the brain before someone loses." Beku looked down at the young man, the venom in his fangs seeming to reflect in his cold eyes. "In a decent game, the head is dropped prematurely, but it could not, by any means, have possibly been caught. In a bad game, someone ducks."

Something in the stranger's silver-grey eyes spoke to me. The message I received was one I had only heard in the dialect of humans—Oh, shit.

Sighing, Beku went on. "Whether he dives to catch the head and misses it by mere inches, or he dodges out of its way, whoever drops the head is the loser. Do you know what happens to the loser?"

Gulping audibly, he guessed in a squeaky voice, "You kill him?"

"No," Beku answered. "He is made to endure immense amounts of ridicule."

The boy's brow furrowed. He thought Beku was kidding.

"I mean it," Beku insisted. "We make jokes at his expense and call him crude nicknames. Only in very extreme circumstances would we ever kill our own kind. What kind of monsters do you think we are?" I thought of Leboni's narrow escape from death at Beku's hands and really analyzed that question for the first time. What kind of monsters are we?

"So," the teenager began uncertainly, starting to chuckle, "you're just gonna call me some names? You don't have to kill me?"

Beku's scaled face became extremely grave. "Wrong," he answered. "We may not kill our losers, but we kill humans."

Beku stood from his throne, his tall and broad build towering over the small human's. The boy turned, trying to run, but Beku wrapped one hand around his scrawny neck and lifted him up into the air, choking him to death. His eyes bulged out of his face, and his skin was turning colors. For the first time in all my experiences witnessing Beku murder humans, I began to feel uneasy. All at once, it hit me that I was going to watch this kid die.

Beku dropped the boy suddenly, his eyes going wide. He clutched at his own neck, where I noticed a knife was buried. Beku collapsed to his knees, crying out to us in a language that only he spoke fluently. I picked out a few words, and perhaps others did as well, but on most of us his dying words were lost. Finally, he fell, face forward, into the grass and lied there, motionless.

The members of the Alute tribe exchanged glances with each other. We had lost our leader. Should we mourn him? Avenge him? It would only be right.

Still, I was of the opinion that, somehow, upon Beku's death, a sort of spell had been broken. Perhaps without his tyranny, we could change our merciless ways, starting with freeing our four captive humans.

I didn't think any harder on it. My opinions mattered very little to these creatures. I was just a fifteen-year-old kid; what did I know?

I knew that I had mattered to someone once. Now he was dead.

I also knew that none of the Alute around me had made out Beku's very last words, the ones meant only for me.

Keep me in your heart, Pip, and I shall be immortal.