Black Halo

by Sykes, Sam

  ‘What,’ he had raised his voice then, ‘happened?’

  ‘Some …’ she had gasped, ‘some clients prefer to be rough … I’m told. This one … he brought in a cat.’

  ‘A whip? That’s against the rules.’

  ‘He paid extra. Someone working for the Jackals with a lot of money. He … he wanted it …’ She pointed to the hall. ‘He’s going down the halls … to all the girls. He had a lot of …’

  Bralston rose at that point, turned to walk out the door again. She had grabbed his coattails in her hand and pulled with all that desperation demanded. No one troubled the Jackals. It wasn’t as hard a rule then as it was now, the Jackals being a mere gang instead of a syndicate back then, which was the sole reason Bralston never had to raise his voice again. No one troubled them; not the nobles, not the guards, not even the Venarium.

  Bralston pulled away sharply, left the room. His boots clicked the length of the hall. She heard the scream that ensued, smelled the embers on his coat when he returned and sat down beside her.

  ‘What did you do?’ she had asked.

  He had paused and said. ‘Nothing.’

  She had barely noticed him pulling on his breeches now. He did not dress so much as gird himself, slinging a heavy belt with several large pouches hanging from it and attaching his massive spellbook with a large chain. He pulled his tunic over the large amulet, a tiny red vial set within a bronze frame, hanging from his neck. It wasn’t until he reached for his final garment that she realised he wouldn’t be stopped.

  ‘Your hat,’ she whispered, eyeing the broad-rimmed leather garment, a steel circlet adorning its interior ring. ‘You never wear it.’

  ‘I was requested to.’ He ran a finger along the leather band about it, the sigils upon it briefly glowing. He traced his thumb across the steel circle inside it. ‘This is … a special case.’

  She watched him drape the great coat across his back, cinch it tight against his body. She watched the sigil scrawled upon it shrink as he walked to the balcony. She never thought she would get used to the sight of it.

  *

  ‘You’ve … come back.’ She had gasped not so many years ago, astonished to find him standing on her balcony, clad in his coat and hat. ‘You said it was a special case.’

  ‘It was. I came back, anyway.’ He smiled, shrugged off his coat. ‘I’ve already paid.’

  ‘Paid? Why?’ She pulled away from him, tears brimming in her eyes. ‘I thought … you were going to take me away when you came back. You said …’

  ‘I know … I know.’ The pain on his face had been visible then, not hidden behind years of wrinkles. ‘But … the case got me noticed. I’m being made …’ He had sighed, rubbed his eyes, shook his head. ‘I can’t. I’m sorry. I won’t lie again.’

  ‘But … you … you said …’

  ‘And I never will again. It was stupid of me to say it in the first place.’

  ‘It wasn’t! You were going to—’

  ‘It was. I can’t. I’m a Librarian. I have duties.’

  ‘But why?’ she asked then. ‘Why do you have to be a Librarian?’

  ‘Why?’ she asked now, shaking her head. ‘Why do you have to be the one to avenge her?’ She held up a hand. ‘Don’t say duty … don’t you dare say it.’

  ‘Because I have a gift,’ he said without hesitation. ‘And so rarely do I get the chance for that gift to be used in a way that I consider more worthwhile than duty.’

  ‘Will I see you again?’

  He paused as he opened his coat and held open his pocket.

  ‘Maybe,’ he answered.

  His next word was something she couldn’t understand, something no one else but a wizard could understand. She certainly understood what it was, however, for no sooner did he speak it than the sound of paper rustling filled the room.

  Silent save for the rattle of their wings, the cranes came to life. Their eyes glowed in a thousand little pinpricks of ruby; their wings shuddered in a thousand little whispers. They fell from bookshelf and basin, rose from tile and chair, hung a moment in the air.

  Then flew.

  She shrieked, shielding herself from the thousand paper wings as the room was filled with bone-white cranes and the sound of tiny wings flapping. In a great torrent, they flew into Bralston’s coat pocket, folding themselves neatly therein.

  She kept her eyes closed, opening them only when she heard the larger wings flapping. Opening her eyes and seeing nothing standing at her balcony, she rushed to the edge and watched him sail over the rooftops of Cier’Djaal on the leather wings his coat had once been. And with each breath, he shrank until he wasn’t even bigger than her thumb.

  And then, Bralston was gone.

  Four

  THE PRISTINE MADNESS

  ‘Pretty,’ he whispered.

  ‘Hmm?’ the voice replied.

  ‘I was simply noting the beauty of it all,’ Lenk replied as he stared out over the vast, dreaming blue around him.

  The ocean stretched out, engulfing him in a gaping, azure yawn. A yawn seemed fitting, Lenk decided, for the sheer uncaring nature of it all. It did not move, did not ripple, did not change as the sky did. There wasn’t a cloud to mar his perfect view of the sprawling underwater world.

  The sky had betrayed him too many times. It had hidden his sun behind clouds and sullied his earth with rain. The sky was a spiteful, wicked thing of thunder and wind. The ocean didn’t care.

  ‘The ocean … it loves me,’ he whispered. His face contorted suddenly and his eyes went wide, not feeling the salt that should be stinging them. ‘What did I just say?’

  ‘I wasn’t listening,’ the voice said.

  ‘No, I said the “ocean loves me.” What a deranged thing to say. I said the sky was spiteful, it betrayed me.’

  ‘You only thought that.’

  ‘I thought you weren’t listening.’

  ‘Not to your voice, no.’

  ‘Then …’ He clutched his head, not feeling his fingers on his skin. ‘It’s finally happened. I’ve gone insane.’

  ‘You didn’t stop to think that when you realised you weren’t breathing?’

  Lenk’s hands went to his throat. The panic that surged through him left his heartbeat oddly slow and his pulse standing still. He knew he should be terrified, should be thrashing and watching his screams drift to the surface in soundless bubbles. But, for all that he knew he should, drowning simply didn’t bother him.

  But it should, he told himself. I should be afraid. But I’m not … I feel …

  ‘Peaceful.’

  The voice, or rather voices, that finished his thoughts were not his own, but they were familiar to his ears. Far more familiar, he knew, than he would have ever liked. He recognised them, remembered them from his dreams and heard them every time his leg ached.

  It would have seemed redundant to call the Deepshriek by name, even as it drifted out of the endless blue and into his vision. Three pairs of eyes stared at him. The pair of soulless black eyes affixed to the massive shark that served as the abomination’s body was simply unnerving. He didn’t truly begin to worry until he looked into the glimmering golden stares of the two feminine faces with hair of red and black, swaying upon delicate, grey stalks from the beast’s grey back.

  ‘It could always be this way, you know,’ the one with the copper hair said. ‘Drifting. Endless. Peace. Lay down your sword.’

  ‘I can’t,’ he replied.

  ‘Why do you want to kill us?’ the black-haired one asked, her lips a pout. ‘We merely wish to deliver the peace you feel now to all who have been lied to by the sky.’

  ‘It deceives,’ the red one hissed. ‘Tricks. You are told to pray to it, to give your troubles to the sky.’

  ‘It gives warmth,’ Lenk noticed, seeing the beams of sun that even now sought to reach him below. It was warm down here, far too warm for the ocean he had come to know these past weeks.

  ‘Fleeting. When you need it most, where is the light? W
hat does the sky offer then?’ the black one sighed. ‘Rain, thunder, sorrows. How can you trust something that is so fickle? So changing?’

  ‘It lied to you,’ the red one growled.

  ‘It sent you down here,’ the black one snarled.

  ‘But we embrace you,’ they both replied in discordant harmony. ‘We give you peace. We give you …’

  ‘Endless blue,’ Lenk finished for them. He narrowed his eyes. ‘I’ve heard that before.’

  ‘Have you?’

  ‘From every one of your demon servants, yes.’

  ‘Demons?’

  ‘What else would you call them?’

  ‘Interesting question,’ the black one muttered.

  ‘Very interesting,’ the red one agreed. It looked to its counterpart. ‘What would you call Mother Deep’s children?’

  ‘Hellspawn,’ Lenk chimed in.

  ‘Dramatic, but a bit too vague,’ the red one said. ‘Deeplings?’

  ‘A tad too predictable,’ the black one replied. ‘What are they, after all? Creatures returned from whence they were so unjustly banished. Creatures from a place far beyond the understanding of mankind and his sky and earth.’

  ‘They had a word for such things,’ the red one said.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ the black one said.

  ‘Aeon,’ they both finished.

  Lenk felt he should ask a question at that, but found that none in his head would slide into his throat. He felt the ocean begin to change around him, felt it abandon him as he began to fall, his head like a lead weight that dragged him farther below. Above, the Deepshriek became a halo, swimming in slow circles that shrank with every passing breath.

  It was getting warm, he noted, incredibly so. His blood felt like it was boiling, his skull an oven for his mind to simmer thoughtfully in. Every breath came through a tightened throat: laboured, heavy, then impossible.

  Breath. His eyes widened at the word. Can’t breathe. His throat tightened, heart pounded, pulse raced. Can’t breathe, can’t breathe!

  ‘What a pity,’ came another voice, one he did not recognise.

  This one was deep, bass and shook the waters, changing them as it spoke. It drowned the sky, doused the sun with its laughter. It sent the waves roiling up to meet him.

  He tilted his head, stared down into a pair of glimmering green eyes that he knew well. They stared up at him from above a smile that was entirely too big, between long ears that floated like feathery gills, as a slender, leather-clad hand reached up to beckon him down.

  ‘But where we must all go,’ she whispered, her voice making the sand beneath her shudder, ‘we do not sin with breath.’

  His scream was silent. Her stare was vast. The sun died above. The ocean floor opened up, a great gaping yawn that callously swallowed him whole.

  *

  After so many times waking in screams and sweat, Lenk simply didn’t have the energy to do it this time, even when his eyes fluttered open and beheld the eight polished eyes that stared back at him through a thin sheet of silk. His scream withered and died in his chest, but the dredgespider loosed a frustrated hiss before leaping off of his chest and scurrying away into the surf.

  He stared up at the sky through the gauzy webs the many-legged creature had blanketed him in. Air, he thought as he inhaled great gulps. He remembered air.

  He remembered everything, he found, between the twitches of his eyes. He remembered the Deepshriek, what it had said. He remembered Kataria … had that been Kataria? He remembered the ocean, uncaring, and the darkness, consuming. That had all happened. Hadn’t it? Was it some temporary, trauma-induced madness? His head hurt; he had been struck in the wreck, he recalled.

  The wreck … They had been wrecked, destroyed, cast to the bottom of the ocean.

  But he was alive now. He breathed. He saw clouds moving in a deceitful sky. He felt treacherous sunlight on his skin. He was alive. He forced himself to rise.

  The pain that racked him with every movement only served to confirm that he was still alive. Unless he had arrived in hell, anyway. He doubted that, though. The tome had told him of hell. It had mentioned nothing of warm, sunny beaches.

  Nor, he thought as he spied a slender figure standing knee-deep in the surf, did hell possess women. Not ones that didn’t sever and slurp up one’s testes, anyway. The sunlight blinded him as he squinted against the shimmering shore. He saw pale skin, long hair wafting in the breeze, a flash of emerald.

  ‘Kat …’ he whispered, afraid to ask. ‘Kataria?’

  The gale carried a cloud across the sun that cloaked the beach with the cruel clarity of shadow. The figure turned to regard him and he saw green locks tumbling to pale shoulders, feathery gills wafting delicately about her neck, fins extending from the sides and crown of her head as she canted her head and regarded him.

  ‘Oh,’ he muttered, ‘it’s you.’

  Greenhair was not her name, he remembered, but it was what they had given her. She was a siren, a servant of Zamanthras, the Mother. She had aided them in locating the tome. But she had fled afterwards, he recalled, fled from the duty to find the tome and slay the Abysmyths, fled from the duty she claimed was holy.

  Why?

  ‘Young silverhair is awake.’ The siren’s voice was a melody, a lilting lyric in every syllable. He remembered it being more beautiful before, rather than the dirge it was now. ‘I feared you dead.’

  ‘I suppose it would have been a waste of time, then, to keep the bugs off of me,’ Lenk muttered, pulling the dredgespider’s webbing from his body.

  ‘They feed where they can, silverhair,’ she replied. ‘It has been a long time since they found something substantial and alive on this island.’

  ‘Except me?’

  ‘Except you,’ she said, sounding almost disappointed. Seeing his furrowed brow, she forced a weak smile. ‘But you live. I am glad.’

  ‘Don’t get me wrong, I’m awfully pleased, myself,’ he said, trying to rise, ‘but—’

  A shriek ripped through him alongside the fire lancing through his leg. He collapsed back to the sand, looking to his thigh. Or rather, to the scaly green mass that had once been his neatly-stitched and bandaged thigh. The wound had been ripped open, the meat beneath the skin glistening and discoloured at the edges.

  ‘Do not tax yourself,’ Greenhair said, wading out of the surf. Her webbed fingers twitched as she approached him. ‘Your wound festers. Your life flows with your protest. The scent is sweet to predators.’

  He glanced out over the sea. The dredgespiders skimmed across the surface, casting eight-eyed glares at his unsportsmanlike decision to live. The pain coursed through him with such agony that he absently considered lying back and letting them have him.

  Still, biting back both the agony and the obscenities accompanying it, he rose to one foot, fighting off the dizziness that struggled to bring him back down.

  ‘Where am I?’ he asked.

  ‘The home of the Owauku,’ she replied. ‘Dutiful servants of the Sea Mother, devout in their respect for her ways.’

  ‘Owa … what?’ Lenk twitched. ‘No, where am I? What is this place?’

  ‘Teji.’

  ‘Teji …’ The word tasted familiar on his tongue. The realisation lit up behind his eyes, gave him strength to rise. ‘Teji. Teji!’ At her baffled glance, he grinned broadly, hysteria reflected in every tooth. ‘This is where we’re supposed to be! This is where Sebast is going to meet us, who will take us back to Miron, who will pay us and then we’re done. We did it! We made it! We’re … we …’

  We.

  That word tasted bitter, sounded hollow on the sky. He stared across the shore. Empty sand, empty sea met him, vast and utterly indifferent to the despair that grew in his belly and spread onto his face.

  ‘Where are they?’ he asked, choked. ‘Did you find no one else?’

  She shook her head. ‘Teji is not where people go to live, silverhair.’

  ‘What? It’s a trading post, Argaol said.’


  She fixed him with a dire gaze. ‘Silverhair … Teji is a tomb.’

  She levelled a finger over his head. At once, he felt a darkness over him, a shadow that reached deeper into him than the clouded sky overhead. He turned and stared up into the face of a god.

  The statue looked back down at him from where it leaned, high upon a sandy ridge. A right hand wrought of stone was extended, palm flat and commanding all who beheld it. A stone robe wrapped a lean figure set upon iron, treaded wheels. In lieu of a face, the great winged phoenix sigil of Talanas was carved, staring down at Lenk through unfurled wings and crying beak.

  The monolith was a vision of decay: wheels rusted and sand-choked, stone rumbling in places, worn where it was intact. Against that, the pile of skulls that had been heaped about its wheels seemed almost insignificant.

  ‘What?’ he gasped. ‘What is this place?’

  ‘It is where the battle between Aeons and mortals began in earnest,’ Greenhair replied. ‘The servants of the House of the Vanquishing Trinity opposed the Aeons, the greed-poisoned servants of the Gods. Ulbecetonth, most spiteful and vicious of them, was driven back before their onslaught. Her children and followers faced them down here. They died. The mortals died. And when the last drop was spilled, the land died with them.’

  ‘Died …’ he whispered. ‘My companions …’

  ‘Unfortunate’ she said, moving closer to him. ‘The Akaneeds are vigilant, voracious. They leave nothing behind.’

  ‘Nothing …’

  ‘Even if your companions survived, there is nothing here to feed them. They would die, too. They would find nothing here.’

  Nothing.

  The word was heavier than the whisper it was carried on, loading itself upon Lenk’s shoulders and driving him to the earth. He collapsed in the shadow of the monolith, the sigil of Talanas looking down upon him without pity, as he was certain the god Himself did at that moment.

  ‘I am sorry,’ Greenhair whispered, her voice heavy in its own right as her lips drew close to his ear. ‘I found nothing of them.’