by Samuel Sykes
The frogmen did not seem to hear. Packed into the cracks of crumbling stone, perched upon the smashed pillars, leering out from the darkness, they paid no mind to their mass captives. They showed no fear. Even if they could feel such a thing anymore, they would have had none of it. For even if their prisoners could rise up and break free of them, there was nowhere to run.
Beyond the prison, there was water and darkness. In water, in darkness, there were things for which there were no tears.
Out of the corners of his eyes, he could see their lights. And from the corners of his skull, in whispers, he could hear them speak.
Seethemyearningbeggingpleadingwailing.
Weepinggnashingcryingscreaming.
TalktothemtellthemsoothethembethereforthemHerwordsHerwordsHerwords.
NoliesnogodsnonothingHerwordsHerwordsHerwordsonly.
He ignored them, or tried to. He didn’t need to be told what was expected of him.
The whispers followed him into the temple, too loud to ignore, not nearly loud enough to drown out the sounds of the people.
The crying, the wailing, the weeping, the pleading, the cursing, and the silent people. All gathered together in a trembling pond of glassy eyes and gaping mouths, each one a little fish staring dumbly at the sky.
They didn’t seem aware of him, the man that had walked amongst them as neighbor a few days ago, the man that walked amongst them now as prophet. Their eyes were fixed on the heavens or staring back up at them from bitter puddles beneath their feet.
Only one bothered to look up at him, to scowl at him. Two men who shared neither gaze nor knowledge of each other. Two men who might not ever exchange more than a single word.
“Betrayer.”
And at that single word, the Mouth stopped. The Mouth turned and met the man’s scowl.
He tore the blade from his belt, the jagged sliver of bone clenched in one trembling fist, the scruff of the man’s tunic clenched in another. He pulled the man to his feet, tore him from the pond that wailed as though a finger had been torn from them each collectively.
Amidst the wailing, amidst the shrieking, amidst the many, many more words that the man shared with him, the Mouth pulled him to the edge of the pool, the liquid prison.
The waters stirred, black as pitch. And within, things blacker than pitch moved.
The Mouth shoved the man to the edge, sent him teetering upon it. The man craned his neck to turn a face, one that was just as indistinct and useless as the rest of them, upon the Mouth. And he shared one more word.
“Please.”
The knife moved with mechanical precision. One thrust in, one yank out. A moment’s exertion. The measure of a man, bleeding from the throat and falling, vanishing into water without a splash.
There was shrieking, there was wailing, there were hundreds of voices crying hundreds of names. None spoke louder than the Mouth’s, his hands thrown out wide and his face turned to heaven.
“SAVE HIM!”
The oddity of the statement turned their wailing to a burbling mutter. Or perhaps they wished to save the screaming for something more astonishing.
“Save any of us,” he cried again to heaven.
The skies remained still, without blood and without tears. He looked around at the silence, turned around, as though checking to see if he had missed something.
“Strike down this vile betrayer,” his voice lowered with his gaze, both sweeping over the crowd assembled before him. “Deliver justice to us, as we are promised. Deliver to us.” He lowered his arms to his sides. “Deliver us from the betrayer.”
He dropped the blade. It clattered on the floor, echoing in the silence, droplets of blood staining the floor.
“No one is answering,” he said. “No one is coming. No one will save us.” He smiled, bemused. “And I am the betrayer?”
They were staring now, eyes torn from the sky. Their mouths hung open, a glimpse of the emptiness within their bodies.
“I am the betrayer,” he continued, “yet you placed no faith in me. I am the betrayer, yet I never claimed to be your salvation. I am the betrayer …” He shook his head. “And I never asked of you anything.
“And them?” He pointed a finger to the sky. “They, who have promised you everything, demanded everything and given you nothing? They, who claim to be salvation and enlightenment and truth? They who let that man die? Who let you die? They are offered deals and promises and praise if only they come down and deliver you?
“I am standing in their house. I am speaking for their foes. I am speaking to their flocks. And they do as they have done when your coin ran dry, as they have done when your family went hungry, as they have done—” he choked on something, cleared it with a cough, “when your daughters died.
“Nothing. Your temple was too small. Your sacrifices were too meager. All that you gave was not enough. And after everything you’ve given, in your hour of need, they are not here.” He shook his head. “They were never here. No one is here but me.
“And Her.”
He turned, knelt beside the pool, stared into the darkness.
“And She is there, listening. And She is there, weeping for you.” He thrust his hand into the water and it rose up to meet him like a living thing, liquid tendrils rising up to caress his flesh, liquid lips suckling upon his fingers. “And She is there … for him, as well.”
He tore the man free from the waters, cast him silent and naked upon the stones. The man lay there, limbs trembling with infantile weakness, wailing through the words of a newborn. Arched upon his back and staring up at the world through eyes made of obsidian, drawing in breath between needlelike teeth. He reached his hands up to clutch his throat, healed of the wound that had been there and colored like bone.
“Someone listened to me,” the Mouth said, kneeling beside him, easing his hand away from his throat. “Someone saved him.”
And his eyes turned back to the pool, to the dark shapes rising from the water. Great webbed talons reached up, dug into the stone. Their emaciated bodies were hauled up, glistening with the water that slithered and danced across their visible ribcages and over their wide, white eyes. They rose on their long legs, their jaws gaping open as they stood, unmoving but for the claws they extended, dripping with something thick, something glistening with life.
“And someone will listen to you, too.”
The Mouth rose up, looked out over the sea of humanity. Their faces rippled, some twisting from fear to revulsion, some quivering with curiosity, others bubbling with awe as they looked upon the Abysmyths ringing the pool, as they looked upon the glistening substance dripping from their claws in oozing bounty.
“But this is a choice,” he said. “Your life belongs to you, for now. If you choose to take it and leave, then do so. Take your life, savor it while it is yours. Savor it before it’s taken from you by the armies that claim to protect you, by the priests who swear it is theirs to take, by the people who take it simply because they want it. Take up your life. Hold it in your mouths. Leave …”
He opened his arms wide, gestured to the beasts that stood behind him in silent, monolithic stoicism.
“Or give it to Her. To the only one that listens. Give it to Her … and feast.”
There was an eternity before they stirred, a familiar eternity he had felt when he had been presented the same fruits. The moment in which he stood bound and free at once, beholden to no one but himself and shackled by the tremendous fear that such freedom came with.
It had taken him an age to make a decision back then. But he had made it.
And, as a single soul rose from the crowd, a single woman with no more tears to give and no face that he knew, a single woman with an empty space beside her that someone should fill, he knew what their decision was, too.
In silence, they came forward. In silence, they walked past him. In silence, they took the Abysmyths by their claws, given no resistance as they let the gelatinous substance slide into their craws.
And th
en, the silence was over, yielding to the sound of smacking lips and slurping tongues, to the gentle moans of unexpected delight, to the wet gagging sounds of those unprepared. The silence was gone. The Mouth had been given an answer. The Mouth heard it.
It was Hanth who lifted his hands to his ears, trembled a moment, and then let them fall at his sides.
They were there before.
When light and sound meant things. Before song was bastardized with words. Before light knew how to cast a shadow.
They saw those things taken away.
By mortals. By stone. By heaven.
They had learned to live without them.
There was no light down here; the fires of the stone city above had been snuffed out and the moon turned its eye aside. There was no sound down here; the water did not know what sound was.
But there was life down here.
They watched it from four golden eyes as they swam in slow circles about him. The faithful moved over his great skin with their hammers, driving arm-long nails into him with soundless strikes that blossomed in fleeting sparks.
He did not complain. He sat there, amidst the rocks and the sand, free at last. Yet his heart was weak, beating faint. Free he might have been, but the years in his prison had left him with pain. Pain that left him numb to the nails driven into his skin and the sparks blooming across his body.
Far away, something stirred. Far away, someone spoke in a song without words, a language without meaning. They turned their twin heads to its source.
“Can you hear it?” they asked him. He said nothing and they frowned. The pain had left him deaf. “They did this to you. Shackled you in silence, with nothing but the thunder of your own heart to listen to.”
He spoke. His voice the last star falling out of the sky and leaving a black hole above the world.
“Ah,” they said, smiling. “You do not care about them. Only about Her.”
He demanded. His words the burbling and bubbling of the muck from which living things crawled.
“We hear Her. The faithful hear Her.” Their voice brimmed with sorrow. “And you do not.”
He asked a question. Somewhere, grass withered and an infant cried out in pain.
“We will wait no longer,” they said, swimming around. “We will not let Her suffer longer. The faithful must hear Her clearly. The world must hear Her rise. Let it be done.”
Somewhere within the mountain that was him, a light bloomed. A red light that the darkness did not understand, growing larger with each ominous beat of his heart until he was all sound, all light, everything.
“Rise,” the Deepshriek whispered, “Daga-Mer.”
The faithful fell off of him, their white bodies and their hammers shaken from him like snow and ash as he stirred. He rose to his feet, the rocks shattered silently beneath them. He drew in a deep breath. He opened his eyes.
And the world was bathed in light.
He walked, over reef and rock, over sand and stone, the crush and quake of earth silent against the storm that thundered within his chest. He walked, and they followed.
In shadow, in whiteness, in a sea of blue stars, they followed. The Shepherds, the Sermonics, the faithful. His sons and his daughters and his followers, betrayed by the Gods, loathed by the earth and the sky. They followed him as he followed Her.
Daga-Mer walked with his flock. To Jaga. To Mother Deep.
And earth cried out without language behind him.
ACT TWO
FORGOTTEN SKY, RISING SEA
TEN
IF MADNESS ISN’T THE ANSWER, WHY DO WE EVEN KEEP THE VOICES AROUND?
The Aeons’ Gate
Reef of Dead Men (might not actually be reef name, but much more impressive sounding than whatever lizard trash they call it)
Fall … summer? I really can’t tell anymore
I think the voice in my head might be lying to me.
And this perturbs me for a few reasons.
The big one is that I’m finding the fact that a giant red lizard who respected me enough to say my name like it wasn’t a curse being eaten alive by a giant sea snake is not as joyous an occasion as I had hoped it to be.
I’m not sure how to feel about that.
Of the many profanities I would use to describe Gariath, “reliable” was never one of them. Though he might have limited his attempts to actively murder us to the single digits, he never really gave a damn about whether we lived or died. Couple in the fact that he came with us to seek out the Shen and this paints a rather bleak picture.
Summation: a lunatic dragonman who once threatened to reverse-feed me my own lungs, who abandoned me and left me to die at several occasions—most of them recent—and who sought contact with creatures possessing a vested interest in jamming pointy things into soft parts of my anatomy is gone.
And this isn’t making me happy.
Maybe I just miss his conversation?
Or maybe the prospect of going into a forbidden island of doom from which no man has returned without the benefit of having a murderous reptile at my side is proving daunting. I mean, there certainly are giant, murderous reptiles out here. They just happen to be lurking in the mist.
Along with Gods know what else.
The mist goes on forever and the walkway goes with it. Or rather, walkways, since there are just a few more than way too damn many of them out here. Barely any of them go anywhere, most of them leading to shattered bridges, pillars whose tops are littered with bones, or shrines with statues long smashed.
I should probably be more respectful. Clearly, something happened here. Clearly, it was big. Clearly, a lot of people died and a lot of things were smashed. But I can’t help but think in terms of practicality. How are we to find anything in this? It’s like a giant web of stone built by a spider who thought it’d be much easier to simply annoy its prey to death.
We walked until nightfall. Or what I think is probably nightfall. It might also be morning. The mist won’t tell me. It doesn’t matter. I won’t be sleeping tonight.
I see them in the mist. Some of them are moving, some of them are not. There are statues there. Robed men, gods for faces, hands extended. They were on Teji, too, mounted on treads like siege engines. Here, they’re on the bows of ships. Sunken ships. Some are crashed on the pillars, some are tossed on their sides like trash, some look like they’ve been sinking into the sea for years … centuries, probably.
Those aren’t the moving ones.
The moving ones make noise. Wailing, warbling cries in the mist, like they’re talking to each other. Not human. Not that I’ve heard. If they know we’re here, they’re not talking to us. Or not to me, anyway. I see Kataria stop and stare out there sometimes, like she’s trying to listen.
That’s when those noises stop and the other ones begin.
These ones are voices. Not the usual ones, mind. They’re … hard to hear. Like whispers that forgot what whispers are supposed to sound like. I can’t understand them, but I can hear them. Sometimes the other way around. They are … calling out.
Maybe they’re like us, got lost in the mist somewhere way back before language had words and are still trying to find their way out.
Maybe I should count myself lucky that I’ve only been lost for a day.
Or two days? It’s hard to keep track, what with no sleep, no sun, and the whole fear of being disemboweled in my sleep … thing.
I should ask Kataria.
I should ask Kataria when she wakes up.
I should kill Kataria now.
It would be easier right now, when she can’t fight back, when she can’t look at me, when she can’t …
It’s hard to think.
And I can’t think of anything else.
Voices in the head will usually do that: make a man single-minded. And I can’t help but feel angry at her, like I want to hurt her, like I should. Like the voice tells me I should.
But it doesn’t tell me that. It isn’t threatening me. It isn’t demanding I
do anything. All it does is talk …
It talks about that night on the ship. It talks about how she looked me in the eyes and left me to die. After that, everything is me.
I’ve gotten close. I’ve raised my sword. I’ve seen how my hands could fit around her neck. But every time I do, I remember why it is I wanted to cry and I think …
… there must be something else. Why did she abandon me? I never asked. I tried not to think about it. She never told me why. She looked me in the eyes. She left me to die.
I remember she looked sad.
And I remember the woman in my dreams, telling me it won’t stop if I kill her, telling me that I can’t listen to the voice. And then the voice starts screaming. Not talking, screaming. It tells me all about her, what she did, what I must do. And I still remember the woman and I still remember Kataria and I still want to cry and die and kill and fight and drown and sleep and never have to think again.
… like I said, I try not to think about it. Too much.
She has to live for now. She’s got the skills for tracking and the senses for getting us out of here and to Jaga and to the tome. The tome that we need to find again. The tome that the voice wants me to find again.
No.
That I want to find.
Me.
I think.
Too hard to think.
Too hard to kill Kataria.
Should have killed Asper first.
That’d have been easier.
ELEVEN
SLEEP NOW, IF NOT SOUNDLY
He had just closed his eyes when he caught the scent. It cloyed in his nostrils: silk, orchids, perfumes for wealthy women that fought and failed to quell the natural aroma of femininity. Stars. Candle wax. Violet skies.
He wanted to sleep.
His eyelids had just begun to tremble when he caught her voice.
“No, no,” she whispered, a light giggle playing across her words. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?” he asked.
