by Samuel Sykes
“He didn’t, no. Algi watches his cell now.” He could sense the question before she asked it. “How did you know his name?”
“He’s a Cragsman,” Hanth replied, evading it less than skillfully. “A shallow intellect and all the savagery and cunning of a bear. If we’ve two more men to spare, then put them both on watch with Algi.”
“That’s difficult,” she said. “Everyone not busy with the dead are busy with the dying. We’ve still got the sick to think about.”
Hanth had been avoiding the problem and the ill alike, never once coming close to the run-down building that had been used to house them. He could handle the dead. He could quell unrest. He could not handle illness.
Not without remembering his daughter.
And yet, it was a problem to handle, one whose origins were not even agreed upon. Plague and bad fish were blamed at first, but the disease lingered. More began to speak of poison, delivered from the hands of shicts ever dedicated to ending humanity. Whispers, rumors; both likely wrong, but requiring attention.
One more problem that he would have to face, along with the dead, along with dwindling resources, along with the prisoner Rashodd, along with Daga-Mer, along with the fact that he had once entered this city with the intent of ending it. He would tell them and they would hate him, someday.
Kasla …
He would never tell her.
She would never hate him.
He cast his gaze skyward. Clouds roiled, darkened. Thunder rumbled, echoed. A lone seagull circled overhead, soundless against the churning skies.
“Rain?” Kasla asked.
“Water,” he replied. One problem alleviated, at least.
Yet the promise of more water did not cause him the relief it should have, not so long as his eyes remained fixed upon the seagull.
“That’s odd,” she said, following his gaze. “It’s flying in such tight circles. I’ve never seen a gull move so …”
Unnaturally, he thought, dread rising in his craw. Gulls don’t.
His fears mounted with every moment, every silent flutter of feathers, even before he could behold the thing fully. He swallowed hard as it came down, flapping its wings as it plopped upon two yellow feet and ruffled its feathers, turning two vast eyes upon him.
He heard Kasla gasp as she stared into its face. He had no breath left for such a thing.
“What in the name of …” Words and Gods failed her. “What is it?”
He did not tell her. He had hoped to never tell her.
But the Omen stared back at him.
From feet to neck, it was a squat gull. Past that, it was a nightmare: a withered face, sagging flesh, and hooked nose disguising female features that barely qualified as such. Its teeth, little yellow needles, chattered as it stared at them both with tremendous white orbs, a gaze too vast to be capable of focusing on anything.
It was not the monstrosity’s gaze that caused his blood to freeze, not when it tilted its head back, opened its mouth, and spoke.
“He’s loose,” a man’s voice, barely a notch above a boy’s, and terrified, echoed in its jaws. “Sweet Mother, he’s loose! Get back! Get back in your cell! Someone! ANYONE! HELP!”
“That’s … that’s Algi’s voice,” Kasla gasped, eyes wide and trembling. “How is … what’s going—”
“Zamanthras help me, Zamanthras help me,” Algi’s voice echoed through the Omen’s mouth. “Please don’t … no, you don’t have to do this. Please! Don’t! PLEASE!”
“Hanth … what …” Kasla’s voice brimmed with confusion and sorrow as her eyes brimmed with tears.
“In oblivion, salvation,” a dozen voices answered her. “In obedience, salvation. In acceptance, salvation. In defiance …”
He looked up. Seated across the roof of a building like a choir, a dozen sets of vast eyes stared back, a dozen jaws of yellow needles chattered in unison and, as one dreadful voice, spoke.
“Damnation.”
“What are they, Hanth?” Kasla was crying. “What are they?”
“Hide,” he told her, taking steps backward. “Run. Get everyone as far away from here as you can.”
“There are boats, we could—”
“Stay on dry land! Stay out of the water! Tell them to leave the dead and the sick.”
“What? We can’t just leave them here to—”
No finish to the plea. No beginning to an answer. He was running.
People cast scowls at his back, shouted at him as he rudely shoved through their processions, cursed his blasphemies. That was easy to ignore. Kasla called after him, begged him to come back. That was not.
They could despise him. He would still save them. He would try.
Thunder clashed overhead, an echoing boom that shook his bones. He glanced up. The clouds swirled swiftly as if stirred in a cauldron. At their center, a dark eye of darker calm formed.
Directly over the temple. It followed the heartbeat.
“He wears the storm as a crown.”
He charged through the city streets, toward the warehouse turned into a prison. He would have prayed that its charge was still there. He would have prayed that the Omen was nothing more than a sick joke from a spiteful beast. He would have, if he thought any god still had ears for him.
He rounded a corner and the warehouse loomed before him. Its doors had been shattered. Algi, young and scrawny, stood against the doorframe, his legs dangling beneath him as his own spear pinned him to the wood through his chest. Algi’s eyes, wide and white, were staring at Hanth with the same fear Hanth knew would be reflected a hundred times over if he didn’t act fast.
A thick drop of rain fell upon his brow. It trickled down, sickly and hot, sticky and odorous to dangle in front of his eye. Red.
“The skies bleed for him.”
He was sprinting now, heart pounding in his chest as he made for the temple. The trail was marked, through streets and over sands, by immense footprints painted in blood.
Hanth could barely remember fear, but it was coming back swiftly. Overhead, thunder roared, lightning painted the skies a brilliant white for a moment. And for a moment, in shadows, he saw them, a hundred wings flapping, a hundred gazes turned to the city.
And its people.
He ran faster.
The temple doors were smashed open, the bar that had held them fast lay shattered on the ground. Darkness loomed within, the loneliness that only came from a god neglected. He charged in.
The temple was dark inside, darker than it was the last time he had been here. Dominating the center was the pool twenty men across. The waters were calm, placid, not a ripple to them.
Despite the thunderous heartbeat pulsing from beneath them.
Hanth stared at the water, wincing. The beating heart was almost unbearable here, an agony to listen to as its pulse quickened, blood raced with anticipation. Yet he forced himself to stare at it.
“Their jealous waters hold him prisoner.”
And then, to the tower of tattooed flesh and graying hair that stood at its edge.
“They call you Hanth, now, do they?”
Rashodd’s smile would have been repellent even if not for the hideous scarring of his face. Still, his half-missing nose, the crimson scab where an ear had once been, and his wiry beard certainly didn’t make him any more pleasant to look upon.
“When last I saw you, they called you the Mouth of Ulbecetonth and I called you ally.” He gestured to his face. “And this is what came of that.”
Still, Hanth found it easier to overlook both the Cragsman’s imposing musculature and his disfigurement when he spied the man’s great arm extended over the pool, a hand missing three fingers precariously clutching a dark vial containing darker liquid.
The only remaining mortal memory of the demon queen herself, the only thing capable of penetrating the smothering waters and calling Daga-Mer to a world that had long since forgotten him.
And as Hanth’s ears filled with the thunder of a heart beating, he knew
he was not the only one to recognize it.
“I hid that for a reason.”
Hanth’s words and his tentative step forward were both halted by the precarious tremble of Rashodd’s maimed hand.
“I found it,” the Cragsman replied. “For a different one.”
“Why?”
“Can you truly be so dull, sir?” Rashodd asked. “That I am here suggests that I am charged with doing that which you cannot.” His eye twitched, his smile grew hysterical at the edge. “I’ve heard Her voice, Mouth. I’ve heard Her song. And it was beautiful.”
“I am here, too, Rashodd,” Hanth said, recalling delicateness. “I heard her song. I heard her voice.” He stepped forward, remembering caution. “And because I am here, I tell you that whatever she has promised you is nothing. Whatever she offers is meaningless, whatever she demands is too much.”
“You forsook Her,” Rashodd whispered, watching him evenly. His hand stood mercifully still, the vial clenched in his fingers. “You turned your back on all that was promised to you. The Prophet told me.”
“The Prophet is her lie,” Hanth said, taking another step forward. “They tell you only what you wish to hear. They can’t offer you what you truly wish.”
“They offered me everything,” Rashodd said, his eyes going to the floor. “My face … my fingers …” He brushed a mutilated hand against a scarred visage. “And the man who did this to me.” His gaze snapped up with such suddenness to make Hanth pause midstep. “And you … they told me they offered you much more.”
“They offered me nothing I wanted,” Hanth replied.
“They offered you a release from pain,” Rashodd whispered, “so much pain.”
“Pain that I need. Pain that I need to be my daughter’s father, pain that I need to exist.”
The Cragsman’s scarred face twitched, his head shook. It was as though he heard Hanth’s voice through one ear and was assaulted by another, inaudible voice through the scab that had once been the other.
“Need pain … to exist,” Rashodd muttered. “But that doesn’t … what could that—”
Hanth recognized the indecision, the torment upon the man’s mutilated features. He had felt it enough times to recognize that whatever other unheard voice was speaking to Rashodd louder and more convincingly.
So when Rashodd’s eyes drifted to the floor, Hanth’s drifted to the vial, and he made ready to leap.
“Hanth.”
He froze when Rashodd looked up. He felt his blood go cold at the tears brimming in the man’s eyes. Tears belonged on people who flinched and felt pain and knew sin. Hanth knew enough of the Cragsman’s deeds to know that tears on him were a mockery.
“You’ve suffered so much,” Rashodd whispered.
“And I would prevent more,” Hanth said, his eyes never leaving the vial.
“I suppose I’ve been terribly selfish, haven’t I?” The Cragsman chuckled lightly. “I thought She could give me everything I wanted, everything I needed.”
“I once thought the same, too.”
“You did.”
The gaze he fixed upon Hanth was bright, hopeful, and horrifying.
“And that’s why I have to do this.”
Fingers twitched.
“For both of us.”
And Hanth screamed.
It was a formless noise, impossible of conveying anything beyond the very immediate sense that something had gone very wrong. It was long. It was loud. It, along with his lunge, were completely incapable of stopping the vial from falling out of Rashodd’s maimed fingers.
Into the waters, where it landed without a ripple.
Hanth hit the floor, his hand still outstretched, his mouth still open. He could not see Rashodd, focused only on the air that the vial had once occupied. He could not hear Rashodd, focused only on the sound of a heartbeat steadily growing fainter.
The time between each fading beat stretched into an agonized eternity, until finally, it stopped altogether—and Hanth’s with it.
It began, first, as a pinprick: a faint crimson barely visible amidst the darkness of the water. Hanth could only stare, watching it grow with each breath he took, watching it grow with each rising sound of the beating heart. Soon, it was the size of a fist, then a head, then a man.
When the hellish red glow consumed the field entirely, the water began to churn. The red became consumed, devoured by a black shadow that rose from beneath. A shape colossal rose swiftly to the surface, split it apart.
A great hand, webbed and black and tall as a man, burst from the water and set itself down upon the water’s edge, stone rent beneath its long claws.
Rashodd was saying something, laughing, crying maybe. Hanth didn’t hear it. Hanth didn’t hear him scream when he disappeared beneath another black claw. The heartbeat was thunder, the groan that came from below was the sound of ships breaking, tides flowing, earth drowning.
Daga-Mer was free. The sky wailed and shed tears.
And through the storm, sea, and stone, Hanth could hear but one thing. He heard Kasla’s scream. And at that, he was on his feet.
“I prayed for a better way, Hanth.” There was a macabre tranquility in Rashodd’s voice as the Cragsman called from the deep. “Heaven gave no answer.”
No time for Rashodd. No time for Daga-Mer or the ominous creak of the temple’s roof or the thunderous roar of water as another arm pulled free of the pool.
The sky bled. Thunder roared. The world ended around him. But he could still save a small part of it.
He prayed he could.
He sprinted out of the temple doors into Yonder’s streets. Hell greeted him.
Their songs were wretched to hear, their plump bodies sitting in rows innumerable upon the roofs of houses. Their gazes, bright and bulbous and countless like stars, were turned upon the city streets. The Omens sang.
“Salvation comes,” they lilted in dire unison. “Shackles rust. Fires cease to burn. The blind shall still hear and the deaf shall still see. She comes for you. Rejoice!”
Their chants chased fat globs of red falling from the sky even while a tide of wailing terror rose up from the throngs of people choking the streets below.
The chaos was not yet terrible enough to blind him to the sight of his former followers, those he had led as the Mouth. The frogmen slinked through the crowd in thick veins of white, hairless skin. Eyes black as the storm overhead and as pitiless, they waded through the crowds, knives aloft and webbed hands grabbing.
There was wailing. There was shrieking. There was begging and pleading and prayers to gods that couldn’t hear them over the thunder. The Omens sang and the frogmen gurgled and the blood continued to fall from the sky. Hanth could but cry out and hope to be heard.
“Kasla!”
The roof of the temple cracked behind him. A howl, centuries old and leagues deep, rang out from a hollow heart. Hanth threw himself into the crowd.
“Kasla!”
At every turn was he met with flesh and fear: the people whom had to be shoved past, the frogmen that had to be knocked over. The former clung to him and begged him for help, accused him for bringing this down upon them. The latter would take them, webbed hands sliding into mouths, groping throats, hauling them into the dark, their screams drowning.
And he ignored them all.
“Kasla!”
She would never hear him. He clung to her name to block out the terror. He clung to her name to remind himself of who had to walk away from this when the city was dead and its people sang songs in the deep.
He spied a gap in the crowd, an exposed mouth of an alley. He seized the opportunity, slipping through the chaos and into the darkness without knowing where he was going. Stopping was not an option. If he stopped, he would think and he would know the odds of finding Kasla alive.
But he had to think. Not long, not hard, just enough to consider.
Sound was smothered in the gloom, but the terror was as thick as the red on the streets. He could but hear his own
breath and those screams so desperate as to reach the dark.
“Kasla?” he called out.
“Here …” a voice answered.
Hers? A woman’s, certainly … wasn’t it? He followed it, regardless. He could not afford to think what else it might be.
“Come on, then,” the voice spoke again. A woman’s, certainly. “It’s safe out here. I promise.” He strained to hear it, so soft and weak. “Yes, I know it can be scary. But I’ll take care of you, all right?”
“Kasla?”
“Yes,” she whispered back. “Yes, I’m sure. Yes, I’m really sure. Remember the promise I made you when your father left?”
What was she talking about?
“I promised you I’d never let anything hurt you like that again. I haven’t, have I?”
He rounded the corner and saw the sea lapping at the streets. The wall here had decayed and crumbled away, the alley ending where the ocean began. He saw the woman who was not Kasla, kneeling with her hands extended, her face painted with blood, her tears shining.
Lightning flashed soundlessly overhead.
And he saw the creature looming over her.
It rose on a pillar of coiled gray flesh, a macabre flower that blossomed into an emaciated torso, withered breasts dangling from visible ribs. A spindly neck gave way to a bloated head and black, void-like eyes. A fleshy stalk dangled from its brow, the tip of it pulsating with a blue light that would have been pleasant had it not illuminated so clearly the woman.
“Thisisthewaytherightwaytheonlyway …”
The whispers rose from a pair of womanly lips, twitching delicately within a pair of skeletal, fishlike jaws. They were meant for the woman. It was Hanth’s curse that he could hear them, too.
“Somuchsufferingsomuchpainandwhocomestohelpyouwhowhowho …”
“So much pain,” the woman sobbed. “Why would Zamanthras let him be born into such a world?”
“Noonewilltellyounooneanswersnogodslistennoonecaresnooneevercares …”
“I hear a voice. I hear Her.”
“No,” Hanth whispered, taking a tentative step forward.
“MotherDeepknowsyourpainfeelsyourpainknowsyourpromise …”