Magrius nodded. “True, but my spearmen cannot go to the bottom of the sea, where I believe the cult has sent him. I have heard—stories.…”
“About my immortality?” I offered. Magrius nodded and tugged at his beard nervously. Speaking about his son’s kidnapping was no easy feat, I was sure, but few men sat in the presence of a monster and spoke to it of its very nature as an abomination.
“Yes,” he said, “That you need no air, nor food or water.…”
I smiled, mirthless as stone. “I’ve heard most of the tales. Few of them are true. I cannot fly, nor change my shape. I don’t feed on human flesh or blood, nor do I take souls. Let me speak plainly: I am not human any longer, that much is true. I am dead but not dying, and few things will send me from this world. Deep water is not one of them.”
“So you could walk the bottom of the sea, then?” Magrius asked.
“With weighting, yes. Whether or not I can kill Setrepais is another matter. Weighted or not, I am still only a swordsman and Setrepais is said to be like a god among the sea serpents.”
Magrius leaned toward me, hope overriding his fear. “But you have slain more than mere men. You slew a coatl-serpent that rides the wind, star-demons that haunt the night. You slew the Sorcerer-King Amiyya and his Golem Queen. If anyone can slay Setrepais, it is you.”
“And the cult?”
“They know the way to Setrepais’s domain. After you deal with them, I shall have matters made ready for you,” he said.
Magrius looked me dead in the eyes for the first time since the graveyard. “Save my son, and I will stand an obelisk in that graveyard, in honor of your family. Twice as tall as a man, bearing their names in gold. I swear it by the gods of this very temple.”
A length of bright scarlet silk was wrapped around the hand guard and hilt of my sword, keeping it locked in its sheath. I undid the knot with one hand and unraveled it for the first time in decades. I gave the red silk cord to Magrius. “Keep that until I return. I’ll be back before nightfall.”
I kept my promise and found Magrius waiting for me at the edge of the Latrian Sea that evening, the wind heavy with the smell of brine. The sun sat on the horizon behind him, limning the sea with an edge of gold where the water met the sky. Beside Magrius stood a handful of soldiers, stripped down to their tunics with only daggers or short swords at their waists. Each soldier carried a weighty piece of bronze, shaped to its particular purpose.
“The cult is dead.” I climbed off of my horse and scooped up a handful of sand. I ran the grit across my blade, cleaning away the half-dried gore. The cultists had proved my suspicions true: rich, slovenly men and women for the most part, interested only in the forbidden fruit of worshipping a monster like Setrepais. Sacrilege was a fashion for them. They’d scattered like seeds in the wind when I burst into their congregation.
I’d found the handful of true believers to be more fervent in the defense of their hidden temple, but they had only spears and cudgels to ward my sword away. Their leader, a necromancer of some small talent, believed that she could control me. She realized otherwise when I buried bronze in her chest.
I told none of this to Magrius and let the last flashes of violence fade from my mind. “Is everything in order?”
The Polemarch nodded. “I have everything here. Will you take a boat?”
I shook my head. “I’ll walk into the sea. Plunging in from a ship won’t give me time to find my bearings.”
The soldiers brought the weights to me, like young men coming forward to clad a hero in their shining armor. Or to bind a monster in chains, perhaps. Thick bronze clasped around my wrists and ankles. Metal laid across my shoulders like a yoke and girded my waist in a leather belt laden with plates of bronze, each as thick as my thumb. My sandaled feet sank into the wet sand with every added burden. Bands of bronze ran up my forearms and hung from my neck, clinking every time I moved. A thin mask of glass, bulbous like a bell to fit over my features and rimmed with a seal of bronze, framed my face.
Being sheathed in bronze made moving difficult, but not impossible. I rolled my shoulders and did my best to settle the weight as evenly as I could before turning to face the sea’s rolling waves.
“Are you ready?” Magrius offered me my sword. I took it and slipped it through a loop on the weighted belt I wore.
“I am.” I trudged to the edge of the water and paused, letting its warm waves wash over my feet. “For what it’s worth—your father was one of the only men I ever killed worth remembering. I hope your son grows to be like him.” Magrius stared at me in silence and I began my descent.
The wine-dark sea rose to welcome me, sloshing across my legs, its water barely touched by autumn’s cooling air. Its embrace inched upward from my ankles, then my knees, and finally to my hips before it began to slow my stride. I dug my heels into the sand and pushed onward, allowing the sea to swallow me up.
One glance to the shore showed me a half-dozen hazy figures, standing like sticks stuck in the sand. Would Magrius and his men wait until his son and I returned? If we didn’t, how long would the father stand on that windblown beach, waiting for a child that might never return? I turned away and continued on. Seawater lapped across the glass plate that guarded my face, leaving rivulets in its wake. I watched the line of water rise up the glass mask until it disappeared over my head, and then I was beneath the water’s surface and in another world.
The bronze carried me deeper into the water when I hit the long slope that led down to the sea’s bottom. The water’s surface flew away from me, a shimmering cascade of light above my head that slowly took the place of the dusk sky. The shallows were murky and impossible to see through for all the kicked-up sand and sea-grit; only when solid stone crunched beneath my feet did the water clear.
To a living person, the depths were dark and without substance; a cold, liquid darkness that provided no sense of distance or size. The water pressed in from all sides, making one feel simultaneously buried alive and adrift in some great void. The only hint of light came from above, rippling and wan as the darkness devoured it from beneath. Silhouetted fish flitted above me in the dying light, refusing to delve into the darker waters.
Monsters see things differently, however. I saw as well in darkness as in the light of day, whether that darkness came from night or from the sea’s depths, it mattered little. The shambling undead lacked minds while the thanatophagoi—the death-eating vampires—lacked souls. I lacked humanity, and my damnation ran deeper than theirs, for when I finally did die, I would never be able to leave the Graylands.
The bottom of the sea looked much like what I had always imagined the Graylands to be: an open, rugged expanse of stony ground, its features worn flat by the weight of the water. Here and there rose moldering, weathered structures that I knew to be ancient ruins. Broken pillars of marble and limestone towered over me as I walked along the rotted cobblestone path that led me out to sea. A great school of azure and ocher fish whorled around an ancient statue. Seaweed clumped together around rocks, billowing in the sea’s invisible currents and tickling my calves.
The watery world around me never made a sound. I reached out and scraped my fingertips across one of the algae-crusted columns. A puff of verdigris green came free but I heard nothing. Above water, sound was a constant: the wind, one’s own breathing, the hundreds of subtle shifts in movement. Below, all was stifled and silent. The only constant was the pressure of the sea as it wrapped me in its cold, heavy embrace. I felt, rather than heard, my bronze weights clank with every step.
Without the sun and stars, I had no way to gauge how long I traversed the sea’s floor. The farther I went, the more hoary and ancient the ruins I found: the skeletal remains of cities, built one atop the other until the waters swallowed them all. I knew from the cult’s leader that Setrepais held court in the ruins of an ancient temple at the edge of this area, right at the precipice where the se
afloor sheared off and the true depths began. Immortal or not, those black waters would swallow me whole. Mankind had tried to explore those deep, dark places in centuries past, but only crushed remains had risen to the surface.
A towering pile of black stone rose up in front of me, a silhouette garbed in the darkness that my inhuman vision failed to penetrate. Every step brought the shape into clearer focus, its lines growing hard and distinct. Massive blocks sat atop one another, massive slabs of basalt fitted together into a towering ziggurat. The foundation disappeared into the ground, sunk partway into the murk by its own weight and age, but the remaining tiers stood tall. A line of obelisks marked a forgotten boulevard leading up to the temple, each thrice as tall as a man.
Carmine-shelled crabs, each as large as a horse, skittered across the temple, scraping its surface clean. The multitude shifted and moved as one, threading back and forth across the structure like ants in a line. I must have crossed some threshold in their awareness when I strode past the first pair of marble obelisks: I saw dozens of eye-stalks shift in my direction, black, unblinking eyes fixed on me. The creatures froze in their ministrations. My hand drifted down to the hilt of my sword. I wondered whether or not I could carve through their shells.
The temple’s custodians scuttled off of the structure, but instead of rushing toward me in a horde of scarlet claws and darting legs, they buried themselves into the mud at the temple’s base until only their eye-stalks remained visible. Their movements threw up a cloud of murk from the sea’s floor that hung like a drab, brown mist. Only when a long, sinuous shadow rose up from behind the temple did I realize that the creatures were prostrating themselves before their god.
Setrepais slithered out of the darkness that formed the horizon beyond the temple and coiled itself around the building, an action that shook the ground beneath my feet until I felt it rattling my bones. Beyond the sun’s light, the sea serpent’s scales were bone-white, layered across one another like plates in an armored corselet. Its enormous head resembled a mixture between a viper’s and a shark’s with liquid pools of inky darkness for eyes. A wreath of spikes, each longer than I was tall and bright azure, framed its head like a lion’s mane.
I have fought all manner of man and beast but I had never, until then, stood before a creature that called itself a god and could rightly claim the title. Whatever Setrepais was, it was beyond my sword and my slaying. I knew that as soon as I laid eyes on it, and for the first time in centuries I felt something like fear.
The sonorous voice that rumbled forth from the temple reminded me of the deep thunder of a sea storm, or the sound of the earth quaking. It made the water ripple around Setrepais, and I couldn’t tell whether or not I heard it in my mind or through the cold water.
“You slew my priestess.” Setrepais’s gaze settled on me. The sensation reminded me of how it felt to look off a cliff, or up a mountain—a sense of sheer, incalculable enormity.
“Your priestess would not answer my questions,” I said, “and if she was so easy to kill, then perhaps she did not deserve to be in your service.” The glass and bronze mask over my face made my voice resound in my ears and I knew the water swallowed my words well before they reached the temple, but I doubted the sea serpent before me relied on something so simple as hearing.
What Lies Beneath by Maksym Polishchuk
“Perhaps. Why have you come? To do to me what you did to my priestess?”
I shook my head. “I come only for the boy, Amandros. I could not kill you, and trying would be folly.”
The mane of spines around Setrepais’s head ruffled. “The boy is mine. He was born under my stars and will serve me in the Above-Waters.”
That explained why the diviners had seen no death in Amandros’s future: the cultists sent him to serve Setrepais, not to die as a sacrifice. There was no telling how long the sea serpent might keep the boy hidden away, until Amandros was properly groomed to serve.
“A callow youth makes for a poor warlord,” I said. “No matter the powers you imbue on him, a sword through the heart will still lay him low.”
The ground beneath my feet lurched with Setrepais’s laughter. “When the stars come right and the realms align, I will make my champion immortal. When he sets foot Above-Waters once more, he will be more than a man.”
Setrepais didn’t want a man, it wanted a monster. The same stars that made me into what I was could do the same to Amandros. I’d made that choice. Setrepais intended to make it for the boy, and at so young an age it would be easy to strip away his humanity until something hard, sharp, and cold remained in its wake. The idea of that, of Amandros being turned into what I chose to be, made my stomach churn with anger. He didn’t deserve that, and the world had no dearth of monsters. It scarcely needed another.
“Turning a boy into a man takes years,” I said, “and there is no certainty that Amandros will be a warrior of any caliber. Release him into his father’s care, and I will serve you, Setrepais.”
The great serpent writhed and coiled around its ziggurat. Even through the water, I heard its scales sliding across the black basalt. Its inscrutable gaze watched me for a silence that stretched across interminably long seconds.
“What can you offer me?”
I drew my sword from its sheath in a single motion, and held its double-edged blade of bronze up for the serpent’s inspection. I had carried the sword since before my transformation, replacing the pieces—blade, hilt, hand guard, and pommel—with exact replicas as time took its toll on the weapon. To my foes, it gave the illusion that my sword was as ageless as its wielder.
“I am already immortal. I have wielded this blade in war for more than two centuries, and I have no ties that bind me to the world beyond your waters. You want to make an immortal champion—one stands before you now.”
“You swear to serve, in exchange for the boy-child’s freedom?”
I held out my right hand and drew the sword’s edge across it. The water’s currents carried my blood away in a fading cloud of scarlet. “I so swear to serve Setrepais, god among sea serpents.”
The weight of my oath grew hard and heavy in my chest, a second heart of stone beside the dead one. Sorcery more ancient than Setrepais’s temple bound me to his service. I leveled my gaze at the serpent.
“Is it done? Is the boy returned?”
“It is so. That was your price.”
“Show me.”
Just a few strides from where I stood, the water began to whirl into a wild whorl, tightening and shaping itself into a sphere, separated from the rest of the sea by the tenuous surface of a bubble. It shimmered, mirror-like, and grew lambent with sorcerous light. An image began to resolve itself in the sphere of water as Setrepais turned the sea into a scrying pool.
I saw Magrius and his men standing on the beach. It was dark, but not quite night. The first stars had begun to shine as the sun’s light faded into the dark. Out from the surf stumbled Amandros, his tunic and hair sopping wet. He lurched and staggered ashore and Magrius ran to meet him, sweeping the boy up in his arms. No sound came from the image, and as quickly as it came, it dissolved back into the water. The sphere slackened, pulled apart by the current until no hint of it remained.
Setrepais might have shown me an illusion, but the serpent-god needed to keep its end of the bargain to seal the pact. With me as its champion, the sea serpent no longer needed Amandros. It and I were bound together by blood and by oath. It could take no other champion and I no other patron.
Explaining years of war, decades of venting my wrath and angst and vengeance—that I could do, perhaps. My family might wring their hands and hide their faces for a time, but what did it mean compared to serving Setrepais? When I eventually passed from the living world into the gray beyond, would they accept me, knowing that I’d lent my sword to the serpent, or would they turn their faces away forever?
“The pact binds us, no
w?” I asked.
“It does.”
“Then you must wait another star cycle for your champion.”
Plunging the sword into my chest proved easier than I’d ever thought possible. I guided it with both hands, keeping the blade poised just so, allowing it to slide between my ribs and pierce my heart. I felt no pain in the act, only a dull, distant warmth that grew in my chest.
The bronze burden I carried forced me to my knees beneath its weight. My hands slipped from the sword and when I looked down I saw its hilt jutting from my chest, the bronze blade transfixed through my torso. The mud beneath my knees rippled and shook as Setrepais thrashed in its inhuman fury, raging at me in its own sibilant tongue.
Perhaps the passing of immortality took longer, or I only felt my dying gasp stretch onward, but I found a strange sense of peace within myself. Afraid, I had clung to my eternal mockery of life for centuries. Now, as my unlife ebbed and waned, I wondered in those lingering moments why I had waited so long.
Dying by my own hand had always been my intent: once I paid the vengeance I owed to the empire that slew my family, I would join them. It had taken the better part of two centuries, but I had destroyed that dynasty root and stem. Yet, when the time came, I didn’t.
Fear stayed my hand, fear of death and shame at the depths I’d sunk to in order to pursue revenge. When I made the pact with Setrepais, I put those fears to rest: unmaking the serpent’s schemes until the next celestial alignment seemed a worthwhile reason to die. Worth enough, perhaps, to outweigh my earlier shames. I passed from the world beneath its waters.
I spent what time I could with my family and ancestors in the Graylands. I left my venom and vitriol at the bottom of the sea and found some measure of the peace and joy that had eluded me for two centuries. My family has passed into the beyond, to live again with new faces and new hearts, but for a time—for a time I was allowed to see Ladirus’s and Maira’s smiling faces again, to feel Etanna’s embrace once more. I remain a shade for my twisting of life’s laws, but I have let go of my regret. Here in the Graylands I will remain, until the realms turn in on themselves and birth something new from their ashes. I am content with so small a punishment for sins as great as mine.
L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future 34 Page 27
