by Jack Conner
Her fingers traced his jaw. Her voice softened. “I missed you, Francis.”
The terrible thing was, he’d missed her, too. How did things get so complicated? “I’m glad you’re here,” he said. “My mermaid.”
Slowly, they leaned in toward each other and exchanged a long kiss.
In the morning, they had breakfast with the others, such as it was. The food consisted of boiled eggs and black bread, washed down with black coffee, and they were lucky to have that. Layanna’s generals, in conjunction with several of the Core’s generals, gave Layanna their report. She issued orders to her own people and offered suggestions for how to coordinate their efforts with the Core. Next her priests arrived, asking if she required any sacrifices; they had captured quite a few pirates over the night. She told them yes, to prepare for a sacrifice later that morning.
“I must keep my strength up,” she told Avery and the others afterward.
Sheridan grunted. “Well, we want you strong, don’t we?”
Layanna narrowed her eyes but thankfully said nothing. Avery wasn’t sure how much Sheridan had overheard last night, but he noticed that she avoided his gaze whenever possible, and part of him shriveled inside.
Reports trickled in as new refugees joined them, and it soon became apparent that Segrul still herded captives into the various pens he'd had erected through the city, especially the largest one in the mall before the Triarch's mansion. He was taking thousands of captives.
“I don’t understand,” Avery said. “What does he need so many prisoners for?”
“They’re obviously not sacrifices to Thraish,” Sheridan agreed. “He only needs a few at a time.”
“Who knows,” Janx said.
“When the navies attack, we’ll find a way to release those prisoners,” Avery said.
They camped in ruins for three days, moving with the army. They looted abandoned, shell-struck residences for food and access to water, medicine and weapons, and took turns on watch while the others slept, none of the group completely trusting the locals, even though they slept in whatever temporary headquarters Layanna occupied at the moment. Every night Avery dreamt of the sea rising up, mad and electric, and flooding the coasts and cities of the mainland, then sweeping inward, drowning hills and mountains and valleys and steppes, until at last the entire world was covered with the foaming, crackling, deadly waters of the Atomic Sea. And although he couldn’t see her, he could hear Ani screaming and crying, wailing out for him to save her.
Huos, the dead priest, stayed in his dreams, too. Avery had been forced to kill many people since this whole business had begun (Janx had been right when he’d prophesized that outcome long months ago) but Huos remained the only person Avery had ever murdered. He’d just killed the priest in cold blood—cold, scared, shivering blood.
The image of Huos the seahorse man thrashing about with his throat slashed and time parasites covering him haunted Avery, and still he dreamt of the priest rising from the crystal floor where he had died and having long conversations with the doctor. Even with blood pumping geysers from his wound, he would, with a watery, croaking voice, detail his life’s story to Avery, speaking about his childhood in southern Ghenisa, his failed marriage, his disappointing son—and, of course, his gleeful, overriding love for Layanna, the being who had finally given him purpose and allowed him to embrace his mutation and accept whom and what he had become—what the sea had fashioned him into. Only his love for Layanna had allowed him to stop hating himself, and, almost comically, he would try to convert Avery to the worship of the Pool of the Deep One between vignettes about his childhood with his delinquent brother and widower father.
You’re kissed by the sea, too, he would tell Avery. Surely you can feel the power of the Great Ones running through your veins. Embrace it, my friend—embrace who you were meant to be!
Avery would wake trembling and drenched in sweat only to discover that Layanna lay next to him (when she wasn’t off running the war or eating someone), and then he would start sweating anew. It wasn’t that he had stopped loving her. It was that he had finally accepted his truer love for Sheridan … and his stark, raving fear of Layanna. It was all he could do to get hard for her anymore. A large part of it was that she had just become so absolutely relaxed about accepting human sacrifices. She had her new priests conduct several ceremonies a day during which she would consume pirates caught in battle along with various criminals from among the islanders. The screams of the doomed sounded in Avery’s dreams, too. Sometimes Huos would comment on them with a rueful smile: That’s the Mistress again. Ooh, sounds like that was a spicy one!
Meanwhile Segrul had the city bombed continuously. Smoke twisted up from pockmarked red pyramids and crumbled buildings in every direction, while bodies piled in the roads. As well, the pirates continued rounding up prisoners, some of whom wound up in sacrificial offerings to Thraish, or in the pirates’ “brothels”; still, most survived to be put in one of the pens to await whatever it was that fate had in store for them.
“It’s for the Sleeper, it must be,” Layanna said as the group of four was taking a break.
“Why would the Sleeper need sacrifices? It’s dead,” said Janx. “Isn’t it?”
“I don’t think so. I think the Muugists have kept it alive somehow, in some capacity. And, I believe, in its weakened state it might require a great suffusion of psychic energy; remember, it drained minds much as it created the Ysstral royal family to do, but to much greater effect. The Ygrith were mighty beings and it’s possible that even now the Sleeper is not beyond recovery, not if its head is still intact on this plane.”
“So they’re feeding it to give it energy enough to open the Monastery?” Avery said.
“I’m sure it will take the form of a mass sacrifice,” Layanna said. “After all, the Ygrith are Heralds of Lig. It was a great blasphemy for Thraish to do what he did, and he might be trying to beg the Sleeper’s forgiveness or pay it amends. But the main reason for all these offerings is because they need it to open the Monastery. To bring it back to this plane.”
“What will happen then?” Sheridan said.
Sudden, overwhelming gunfire stopped Layanna from answering, and all four looked to the west. Unable to see from here, they ran in that direction, rejoining some resistance fighters, and came to peer out a window facing toward the sea. With buildings blocking their way, they climbed several stories to the rooftop, and Avery laughed in delight.
“They’re here!” he said. “Thank the gods.”
Indeed, the combined might of Ghenisa and the Ysstral Empire, and, Avery thought, what looked like a token appearance of a few other countries besides, assaulted the pirates. From here Avery could see the great harbor and the united navies approaching it, guns blazing. Pirate ships sank or went up in flames as the navies bore in, and hundreds of pirates frantically ran down the cliff-side steps to the harbor (which Avery, looking on from an angle, could clearly see), where they piled into the ships and set out to meet the enemy. Overhead flew Ghenisan planes and zeppelins, side by side with those of the Dark Lands, plus the Ysstral Empire’s vassals and allies.
The pirate air force, which was considerable, met them over the city of Vinithir, and Avery and the others leapt back in fright as ships started flaming and smoking through the air overhead. One plane shot another’s tail off, and the damaged plane spiraled into a zeppelin, which then caught fire and listed from the skies, gouts of smoke rising from one end. It smashed into the building just opposite the one Avery and the rest stood on, and they all flinched at the noise, recoiling from the violence and pieces of flying shrapnel. Avery coughed at the smell of smoke and patted himself down to make sure he hadn’t been hit; he hadn’t, and the others looked okay, too. But that didn’t mean it would stay that way.
“Gods,” said Janx. “It’s like front-row seats at a fireworks show. Only the guy in charge is a madman with too much powder.”
The whole group was all smiles, though, everyone thrilled
at this development. Beside them the locals whooped and cheered, and they rejoiced further when Layanna explained to them that the attacking navies were allied with Avery.
“The time has come,” one of the generals said, as the Ysstral and Ghenisan navies hurled the pirate navy back and began storming the beach. “We should push forward and squeeze the pirates between us and the navies.”
“Make the arrangements,” Layanna said.
Avery thought fast. “When they’re at their weakest, we should make a move to free the prisoners.”
“You sure we should?” Janx said.
“What do you mean?”
The other three stopped to stare at the big man. Janx’s face was grave, his eyes all but dead. Suddenly Avery had a dark foreboding.
“I’m not sure we should free them,” Janx said.
“Of course we should,” Avery said.
Janx’s expression didn’t waver. “If those people don’t die, Thraish can’t get the Monastery open, and neither can we. We were hopin’ the Muugists had another way to open the thing, but all along this was it. The only way. If there was another, I’m sure Thraish’d be doin’ it; whatever it’d be, I’m sure it would be easier. We stop them, we either abandon the Doc’s plan ...” His voice lowered even further. “... or we carry out the sacrifice ourselves.”
Avery swallowed, then exchanged glances with Layanna and Sheridan.
At last Sheridan said, “He might be right. The thought had occurred to me before, but once I learned Ani was coming I’d been hoping she would be able to open it.”
“No,” said Layanna. “If Ani could open the Monastery, Segrul’s people would have taken her, not the Sleeper. She would have been much easier to deal with.”
“You can’t seriously be considering this,” Avery said. “We cannot let that sacrifice be carried out.” He met their gazes fiercely, and they looked uneasy. “We will not let those people die.”
“Then what choice is there?” Janx said.
“I don’t know, but there must be one. Letting them die is all very easy to say when we don’t know any of the victims. Imagine if it was Hildra down there, Janx.”
Janx’s face was stone. “I am.”
“There must be a way,” Avery repeated. “Perhaps …”
“Yeah?”
“Perhaps we can capture the pirates and sacrifice them.”
Janx grunted. “I like it, but I don’t see how, not in time. And we don't know how to do it, anyway. There could be rites and such.”
“Whatever your plan is, think of it fast,” Sheridan said, and pointed toward the center of town. Avery saw she was indicating the largest pen, the one between the Courthouse and the Triarch’s mansion. A zeppelin had moved above it, and from the bottom of the airship a strange light was glowing, and swelling, from what was probably an open hangar door on its underside, the sort that often opened to let bombs fall. The prisoners, and there were at least ten thousand of them, were screaming and throwing back their heads in fear.
“Damn it all,” Avery breathed. “Thraish is doing it right now. He’s aboard that ship, ready to give the Sleeper’s head its last meal.”
“He must’ve seen the navies and panicked,” Janx said.
“Maybe we can hope they don’t have enough prisoners to sacrifice in order to open the Monastery,” Sheridan suggested, but Avery wondered if she said it for his benefit only. She seemed to agree with the others on this. Part of him thought they were even right. Just the same ...
“Well?” said Layanna. “Do you have any ideas on how to save them?”
Avery scowled and shook his head. “Damn it, no. The pirates are still too thick in the middle of town. We’d never get through. Thraish must have been ready to go. That must mean he thinks he can do it.”
Below, the pockets of the city that had been in revolt began to flare up. Layanna ordered her people to attack, and they succeeded in pushing the reavers back; too many pirates had gone to reinforce the other front. Unfortunately that only swelled the pirate population downtown. Shit, Avery thought, as he and the others traveled with Layanna in her jeep. I’m going to have to let the sacrifice continue. There’s nothing I can do about it. He tried not to think, And damn it all, Janx is right. If this doesn’t happen, the R’loth will complete the fashioning of the Atomic World.
Reaching a high point, Avery saw the prisoners in the pen below what must be Thraish’s zeppelin fall under its red light, becoming suffused with it. Slowly they began to scream and claw at themselves, even turning on each other. Avery felt sick as he watched a woman claw out a man’s eyes, then dig her fingers into her own abdomen and pull out her intestines. The violence was brief, though. However the process drained the victims’ minds and drove them mad also killed them within a small handful of minutes. Soon those who had lived that long twitched on the ground, fading, foam and blood on their mouths.
The zeppelin rose a bit, slithered through the busy skies toward a new pen, and then another. Pirate airships surrounded it, rebuffing any attempts by the new-come militaries to shoot it down. Before the zeppelin reached the final pen, it stopped and rose into the air about a quarter of a mile, and lights began to hum around it.
“It’s gotten all the power it needs,” Layanna said. “However he’s operating the head, Thraish has got it charged now.” Her eyes shone. “Now he’ll do it. He’ll open it.” Avery thought she was holding her breath. To his surprise, he was, too, and hairs stood up on his arms.
“I can’t believe it’s actually happening,” Janx said. “After all this.”
“Neither can I,” admitted Avery, hating himself a little for the thought. All those people, dead, just for this. For this one moment. And not just them, but all those who died in Xlatleb and Salanth, too, not just in the fighting but in the gladiator pits and riots. All those deaths were a direct result of accessing the Monastery.
And no wonder, he thought. The power to rule the world ...
Even as the thought filtered through his brain, the Monastery, at last, arrived.
The air above Vinithir began to shimmer, then boil. People screamed and fled through the streets as a large area west of downtown begin to ripple most violently, reality shaking and twisting as something from beyond this sphere, something that had divorced itself from this reality long ago, returned. The blurring in the air didn’t just occur below, though. What began there quickly fanned out into the skies, radiating for miles and miles in all directions. Avery gasped as the air rippled and hitched overhead, and he could see the phantom shapes of great limbs or branches, each a mile thick, begin to solidify where there had been nothing just moments ago. Violent blasts of blue energy snapped and flared, pulsing up and down the limbs, and with every pulse the limbs grew more and more solid. Whatever it was, it was taller than the tallest skyscraper in the world—hells, taller than some mountains—and as broad or broader than the city.
“It’s like a tree,” Sheridan said, and Avery was forced to agree. Indeed, he dimly recalled the Blue Ghost mentioning “the Tree”. The area that had rippled into existence on the ground west of downtown was like the object’s trunk, and it was thick and wide, but as soon as it rose the limbs or branches—and, yes, Avery thought, they were very much like branches—radiated off from the central column, some straight, some crooked, some curling and twisting and seeming to defy all laws of gravity and physics. As the object became more and more solid, then snapped into this reality with a pop that made the ground shake and Avery’s eardrums rattle, it was revealed as being something like a vast, surreal tree with no leaves, all made of pulsing, twinkling red crystal. Avery thought he’d become used to the diamond-like structures fashioned by the Ygrith, but this was on a scale undreamt of by him till now.
“It’s beautiful,” he heard himself say, and he felt a lump in his throat as he stared upwards at the mighty crystal limbs arcing overhead.
“It’s like a city,” Janx said. “A city in the air ... a city lifting into the air ...”
“The Blue Ghosts,” Avery said. “They’re going to help prepare for their Masters’ return …”
“And lookat that,” said Janx, indicating.
It took Avery a moment, but then he saw what Janx meant. The mysterious staircases spiraling up from the needle pyramids didn’t terminate in empty space. No, they vanished directly into the lower tiers of the fantastic structure. The ground had shifted over time, and some of the staircases were out of alignment, but, amazingly, some still connected, and blue forms pulsed and flickered up them as the phantoms entered the Tree.
“That’s what the staircases are for,” Sheridan said.
Layanna’s eyes were moist. “We did it. We found the Monastery. We really did it. The beacon, the bastion of the Ygrith ...”
“Now we just have to get inside before Thraish does,” Avery said. “Come, let’s go toward its base. My navies have already pushed into that quarter, so it should be safe enough once we get there.”
Layanna ordered her troops toward the Monastery’s central trunk, and the pirates melted away, no longer willing to fight. The Rim army passed people gawking in the street. For a long moment, the city fell silent as all gunfire ceased, and the whole population stared up in awe, slack-jawed in amazement. Avery felt it too, that surging sense of giddiness. He had never seen anything so fantastic. Lights from the structure pulsed over him, flashing down the long, slender-looking but in reality ridiculously thick limbs, from one end to the other in all different colors, though the branches themselves were always red and winking.
Soon, though, the shooting resumed. Avery saw people streaming away from the fighting, then saw the fighters themselves, the pirates, flee the battle. Layanna ordered her troops to press the pirates back, then brought her other-self over and stuffed Avery, Sheridan and Janx into organelles to protect them. Propelling them into combat, she slipped through men firing at each other from all sides, taking positions in rooftops and second-story windows as well as pouring against each other in the streets. Avery saw the mounds of several dead lobsters, smoke still rising from them. When Layanna started to weaken, she simply scooped up some pirates and began eating them, one after another, keeping a couple alive for later. Avery was forced to watch one screaming infected man after another be dissolved alive by acid just inches away from him.
