The Skybound Sea Page 3

  “I promised …” the woman said to the darkness.

  “Kee​phi​msa​fen​eve​rle​thi​mfe​elp​ain​eve​ryt​hin​gis​saf​edo​wnb​elo​wen​dle​ssb​lue​awo​rld​ofe​ndl​ess​blu​efo​ryo​uan​dyo​urc​hil​d …”

  “Child,” he said.

  He caught sight of the boy, crawling out from under his hiding place. He ran to his mother’s blood-covered arms.

  “That’s right,” she said through the tears. “Come to me, darling. We’ll end this all together.” She collected him up in her arms, stroked his sticky hair and laid a kiss upon his forehead. “Father’s down there. You’ll see.”

  She turned toward the ocean.

  “Everything we’ve ever wanted … is down below.”

  “NO!”

  He screamed. It was lost in the storm.

  So, too, was the sound of two bodies, large and small, striking the water and slipping beneath the waves, leaving nothing more than ripples.

  The creature turned to him. The blue light illuminated the frown of one of its mouths, the perverse joy of the other.

  “Cou​ldh​ave​sav​edt​hem​cou​ldh​ave​sto​ppe​dth​isc​oul​dha​veg​one​muc​hea​sie​r …” It whispered to him and only to him. “Yourfaultyourfaultyourfault …”

  The beast lowered itself to the ground, hauled itself to the edge of the water on two thin limbs.

  “Bet​ray​edH​era​ban​don​edH​erf​ors​ook​Her​aft​era​llS​hep​rom​ise​d …”

  It looked at him. He saw his horror reflected in its obsidian eyes. It spoke, without whispers. And he heard its true voice, thick and choking.

  “But She will not abandon you, Mouth.”

  He saw the creature disappearing only in glimpses: a gray tail slipped beneath the water, azure light winked out in the gloom.

  And he was left with but ripples.

  His back buckled, struck with the sudden despair that only now had caught up with him. Realization upon horrifying realization was heaped upon him and he fell to his knees.

  Hanth would die here.

  Daga-Mer had risen. The faithful ran rampant throughout Yonder, a tide of flesh and song that would drown the world. Ulbecetonth would speak to that world and find ears ready to listen, ready to believe that everything they wanted lay beneath the sea. His family was dead.

  Kasla was gone.

  He remembered despair clearly.

  “No …”

  Denial, too.

  He clambered to his feet. Hanth would die soon, but not yet.

  Where? Where could she have gone? She had said something, hadn’t she? Before he left, she had said … what was it? Something about them, not leaving them. Who were they?

  The sick. The wounded. She would have tried to find them. Because she was the person he would run through hell to find.

  He slipped through the alleys, found himself back on the streets. The tides of panic had relented, the people vanished. Those who hadn’t been hauled away lay trampled in the streets.

  He could not help them now. He walked slowly, wary of any of frogmen that might lurk in the shadows. It only took a few steps to realize the folly of that particular plan. If any frogmen came for him, they would be aware of him long before he was of them.

  The Omens, lining the rooftops in rows of unblinking eyes, would see to that.

  “Denial is a sin,” they chanted, their voices echoing each other down the line. “The faithful deny nothing. The penitent denies heaven. The heathen denies everything.”

  Empty words to those who knew the Omens. Risen from the congealed hatred that followed demons and the faithful alike, they were merely parasites feeding and regurgitating the angst and woe their demonic hosts sowed in quantity. Without anything resembling a genuine thought, they could say nothing he could care to hear.

  “She’s going to die, Mouth.”

  Or so he thought.

  He looked, wide-eyed, up at the dozens of chattering mouths, all chanting a different thing at him.

  “She’s going to die.”

  “You’re going to watch it.”

  “She’s going to suffer, Mouth.”

  “Sacrifices must be made.”

  “Promises must be kept.”

  “You could have stopped this.”

  And he was running again, as much to escape as to find Kasla. Their voices welled like tides behind him.

  “Why do you deny Mother Deep?”

  “You could have saved her.”

  “This is how it must be, Mouth.”

  “Mother Deep won’t deny you.”

  “She’s going to cry out, Mouth.”

  “All because of you.”

  Ignore them, he told himself. They’re nothing. You find her. You find her and everything will be fine. You’re going to die. They’re going to kill you for what you’ve done. But she’ll live and everything will be fine.

  It was the kind of logic that could only make sense to the kind of man who ran through hell.

  He carried that logic with him as he would a holy symbol as he found the decrepit building. He carried that logic with him through the door and into it.

  Before they had taken to housing the wounded here, it had been a warehouse: decaying, decrepit, stagnant. When it was filled with the sick and the dying, it had been no cheerier. The air had hung thick with ragged breaths, gasps brimming with poison, groans of agony.

  But it was only when Hanth found the room still and soundless that he despaired.

  In long lines, the sick lay upon cots against the wall, motionless in the dark. No more moaning. No more pain. Lightning flashed, briefly illuminating faces that had been twisted earlier that morning. A sheen, glistening like gossamer, lay over faces that were now tranquil with a peace they would have never known before.

  His eyelid twitched. He caught the stirring of shadows.

  “Hanth?”

  And he saw Kasla. Standing between the rows of beds, she stared into a darkness that grew into an abyss at the end of the room, like blood congealing in the dead. He laid a hand upon her and felt the tremble of her body.

  “We have to go,” he said firmly.

  “The city …”

  “It’s not ours anymore.” He tugged on her shoulder. “Kasla, come.”

  “I can’t, Hanth.” Her voice was choked. “It won’t let me.”

  He didn’t have to ask. He stared into the shadows. He saw it, too.

  There was movement: faint, barely noticeable. He would have missed it entirely if he didn’t know what lurked in that darkness. Even if he couldn’t see the great, fishlike head, he knew it turned to face him. Even if he couldn’t see the wide, white eyes, he knew they watched him.

  But the teeth he could see. There was no darkness deep enough.

  “Child,” its voice was the gurgling cries of drowning men. “You return to us.”

  It was instinct that drove Hanth to step protectively in front of Kasla, old instinct he strove to forget once. Logic certainly didn’t have anything to do with it; he knew what lurked in that shadow.

  “And where are your tears?” the Abysmyth asked. “Where is your joy for the impending salvation?” It swept its vast eyes to the dead people lining the walls. “Ah. The scent of death may linger. It should not trouble you. They are free from the torments their gods saw fit to deliver to them.”

  The demon moved. A long arm, jointed in four places, extended from the shadows. Viscous gossamer ooze dripped from its webbed talons.

  “They were cured,” it said, “of many things at once.”

  “Keep them,” Hanth said. “Keep the dead. Keep the living. The girl and I will leave.”

  “Leave?” The Abysmyth’s head swung back and forth contemplatively. “To what, child? Do you think me so compassionless as to you let you run to a deaf and lightless eternity? To cast you from bliss?”

  “I will keep my burdens.”

  “What does a lamb know of burden?
What does it know beyond its pasture? There is more to life. Mother will show you.”

  It shifted. It rose. A painfully emaciated body, a skeleton wrapped in ebon skin, rose up. Its head scraped the ceiling. Its eyes were vast and vacant as they looked down upon Hanth.

  “Mother will not abandon any of her children.”

  He heard a scream die in Kasla’s throat and leak out of her mouth as a breathless gasp. Hanth met the demon’s gaze.

  “Ulbecetonth is gone,” he said flatly. “And she’s gone for a reason.”

  He began to step backward, forcing Kasla to move with him toward the door.

  “She can have her endless blue. You and the rest of your faithful can join her. One hell’s as good as another.”

  The demon merely stared. Its eyes were dead, unreadable. Hanth held his breath as he continued to back away with Kasla.

  “You don’t belong here,” he said, “and neither does your bitch of a mother.”

  The moment the demon lunged forward, he suspected he might have gone too far.

  A great black fist emerged from the darkness and smashed upon the floor in a splintering crater. The demon’s head followed, a great fish skull, skin black as the shadows from which it came. It trembled to show the fury its dead eyes could not.

  “You’re wrong!” it gurgled. “We belong here! We do! It was you who drove us out! You who rejected us!” It pulled the rest of its body out of the shadows, tall and thin and quaking. “We offer you everything and you deny us still! Call us monsters, call us beasts, call Mother a … a …”

  Its voice became a formless roar as it burst out of the shadows, sprinting forward on long, skeletal legs. Hanth seized Kasla’s hand. Without a word, he hauled her toward the door, as fast as fear would carry them.

  “You don’t even care!” it bellowed after them. “You don’t even care! Look at what you’re doing! You’ll ruin everything!”

  They burst out the door, fled down the wet, sticky streets. The Abysmyth’s voice chased them.

  “He comes! You’ll see! You’ll see we’re right!”

  The roads were thick with stale fear and moisture. The heavens roiled and bled like a living thing. The city was bereft of humanity, but not life.

  The frogmen came out in tides, pouring out of every alley mouth, leaping off of every roof, bursting from every doorway. Hanth swept his eyes about for escape and wherever they settled another emerged. They ran from reaching hands and needle-filled mouths.

  Every egress was blocked by pale, hairless flesh. Every movement monitored and met with a shrieking chorus from the Omens flying overhead. Every word he tried to shout to her was lost in the whispers that rose from the waters beyond and sank into his skull.

  “Can’tfleecan’tfleecan’tflee …”

  “Nogodsnoprayersnoblasphemynothingnothingnothing …”

  “Hecomeshecomeshecomes …”

  And then, all noise from nature and demon alike, went silent before the sound.

  A heartbeat. Like thunder.

  A great tremor shook the city, sent them falling to their knees. There was the sound of rock dying and water wailing and skies screaming. Hanth tried to rise, tried to pull her up, tried to tell her she would survive, tried not to look to the temple.

  He failed.

  Cracks veined the domed roof, growing wider and wider until they shattered completely. Fragments of stone burst and fell as hail. A shadow blacker than night arose to kiss the bleeding heavens. The creature turned; a pulsating red light at the center of its chest beat slowly.

  Water peeled from its titanic body, mingling with the red rain. With each tremor of its heart, roads of glowing red were mapped across its black flesh. It groaned, long and loud, as it rested its titanic claws upon the shattered rim of the temple’s roof. Its head lolled, eyes burned, jaws gaped open wide.

  Daga-Mer, alive and free, turned to heaven.

  And howled.

  TWO

  IN THE GRISTLE

  Beneath Lenk’s feet, a world turned slowly. Not his world.

  That world was back on dry land, back where the dawn was rising and people still slept in dread of the moment they would have to open their eyes. That world was full of traitors and fire and people who walked around pretending he had no reason to kill them.

  That world was where he had slept for the last two nights with the sound of a voice in his head, a voice that whispered plots and told him he had no choice but to kill those people. That world was where he had fallen asleep last night.

  He suspected he might be dreaming, still.

  That would explain why he was standing on the water like it were dry land.

  That world swirled beneath him. He had watched it all night. When he should have been dreaming of flames and betrayal and his hands wrapped around a slender throat beneath wide green eyes, when he should have been hearing something whisper in his head, something telling him those eyes would see nothing.

  He had been staring at fish.

  Beneath his feet, they stirred as the morning returned color to that world. Coral rose in bright and vivid stains. A fish came out, something drab and gray with bulging eyes and clumsy fins. If it were possible to waddle underwater, it would have done so, clumsily navigating over the coral that seemed all the bleaker for its presence.

  It drew too close to a shadowy nook within the coral. A serpentine eel shot out, eyes glassy even as it rent the fish with narrow jaws. It gobbled up what it could before slinking back into its lair, leaving a few white chunks to drift up to the surface and bump against the soles of Lenk’s boots.

  In an instant, he had seen hope, betrayal, and death. Fitting.

  “How do you figure?” something responded to his thoughts.

  A voice rose up from the water, something cold and distant. He didn’t blink; voices in his head were nothing new. This was not the cold and distant voice he knew, though. This was less of a cold blade sunk into his skull and more like a clammy hand on his shoulder.

  “As near as I understand,” he said, “every day for a fish begins with them rising out of the water to go scavenge for food.”

  “Is that hope or necessity?”

  “Little difference.”

  “Agreed. Continue.”

  “Thus, to go out when one expects to find food and instead finding death …”

  “Betrayal?”

  “That was my thinking.”

  “Counterpoint.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “If one could even argue a fish is aware enough of its own existence to feel hope, one might think it wouldn’t feel a great deal of hope by going into a world infested by things that are much bigger and nastier than itself with the slim chance of finding enough food to avoid dying of starvation and instead dying of eels.”

  “That’s betrayal.”

  “That’s nature.”

  “I disagree.”

  “Go right ahead.”

  “I would, but …” He rubbed his temples. “Kataria usually tells me about these things. I’m sure if I talked it over with her—” That thought was cut off by a frigid, wordless whisper. “Look, what’s your point?”

  “Hope is circumstantial. Betrayal, too.”

  He stared down into the water, blinked once.

  “I’m insane.”

  “You think you are.”

  “I’m having a conversation with a body of water.” He furrowed his brow contemplatively. “For the … fifth time, I think?” He looked thoughtful. “Though this is only the fourth time it’s talked back, so I’ve got that going, at least.”

  “It’s only insanity if the water isn’t telling you anything. Is this not a productive conversation for you?”

  “To be honest?”

  “Please.”

  “Even if I could get past the whole ‘standing on the ocean talking to the ocean’ … thing,” he said, “I’ve had enough conversations with voices rising from nowhere to know that this probably won’t end well. So just tell me to kill, m
ake some ominous musings, and I’ll be on my way to kill my friends.”

  “Friends?”

  “Former friends, sorry.”

  “Former?”

  “Is that how I sound when I repeat everything? The others were right, that is annoying.”

  “There’s no hate in your voice when you speak of them. You don’t sound like a man who wants to kill his friends, former or no.”

  He didn’t listen to himself often, but he was certain he had spoken with conviction last night before he went to sleep. The conversation with another voice in his head—the one cold and clear as the night—had seemed so certain. They went over their plans together, again and again: find Jaga, find the tome, kill everyone in their way, kill the people who had betrayed them.

  Betrayed them … or betrayed him? It was harder to remember now what they had spoken of last night. But his had been a voice full of certainty, full of justice and hatred and nightmare logic.

  Unless that hadn’t been his voice.

  A chill crept up his spine, became a frigid hand at the base of his skull. It gripped with icy fingers, sending a spike of pain through his body that did not relent until he shut his eyes tightly.

  And when he opened them again, the world was on fire.

  He was back on a ship full of fire and of enemies that lay dead on the deck, except for the one that held him by the throat and pressed a knife down into his shoulder. He was back in his world and he was going to die.

  And she was there. Short and slender, her green eyes wild and feathers in her hair. There was a bow in her hands and a hand around his throat and a blade in his shoulder and an arrow on the string and blood. Blood and fire. Everywhere. And she did nothing.

  He was going to die and she was going to do nothing.

  That wasn’t how it ended. He hadn’t died back then. Someone else knew that, but not him and not in this world. In this world, something else happened. He ignored the hand around his throat and the knife in his shoulder. He got to his feet and she was watching and she was screaming and her throat was in his hands and it felt like ice. And he started to squeeze.

  That hadn’t happened, either.

  He opened his eyes. That world was gone. The water was back and talking to him.