by Jack Conner
Jynad colored. “No, my lord. These are guests. Visitors from the Front. You recall, General Rossit—”
“Ah, now there’s a man that knows his boots! He polishes ‘em night and day, he does, but give him a whore and he don’t know which end is up!” More laughter.
Jynad persisted with the patience of long suffering. “General Rossit said they were very important, you remember. Said they were great enemies of Octung and wanted to confer with you privately about some favor they wish to ask of you, something that could harm Octung.”
“Favor!” The Emperor roared, laughing, his face red. “I’ll give them a favor!”
He stood up drunkenly, with some help from his mates, then reached down with his human hand, grabbed hold of his member, which had more or less gone flaccid, and, after some fits and starts, began pissing at the ground at Jynad’s feet. When Jynad jumped back—droplets splattering—the Emperor urinated wider, sprinkling the marble floor. Avery felt drops bounce off the marble and strike his legs. He and the rest leapt back, while the Emperor and his friends roared with drunken hilarity.
“How d’you like that favor?” the Emperor said.
Jynad sighed and turned to the others. In a half-whisper, he said, “I am most sorry.”
Avery could find no words to say. He no longer felt angry, he felt numbed. I need a drink.
Janx looked ready to rip the Emperor apart with his bare hands. Hildra laid a restraining hand on his arm.
A man in the robes of a priest approached the Emperor and whispered in his ear. Haemlys nodded sagely. He finished pissing, wiggled his member to get out the last drops, then flung a wave to his mates as he lurched away from the table, the priest at his side. They wound their way through the revelry toward the dais that held the throne.
“Where are they going?” asked Hildra.
Janx smashed a fist into his palm. “To find someone to shit on next, I reckon.”
“Let’s try again,” Avery told Jynad.
The aide, resigned, straightened himself and said, “Follow me.”
He led the way through the orgies and feasting toward the throne. In the distance, animals bleated in fear and mewled in pain, competing with the sounds of orgasms, grunts, clattering silverware and laughter. Ahead, the God-Emperor reached the throne, passed around it, and vanished into a small, ornate entrance behind the royal seat, slipping through a curtain of coral-colored beads. Jynad led Avery and the others in the God-Emperor’s tracks, and in moments they rounded the throne and, with only a brief hesitation, passed through the coral curtain.
“Be quiet as you enter,” Jynad cautioned. “It’s a holy place.”
Lips sealed, Avery followed the aide through the rattling beads and into the chamber beyond. Janx and the others did likewise.
It was not a large chamber. It was rounded, domed, made of bricks that appeared to be a mottled blue-violet color. An altar stood in the center of the chamber, but the altar did not resemble the ones in the Throne Room. Instead, it appeared to be a tiered fountain. Crystal water tinkled from the top level, where the statue of a fish-man not unlike Muirblaag stood in a kingly pose, cape draped from broad shoulders, trident thrust high into the air.
“Lord Tallis,” Jynad explained. “The first God-Emperor.”
Water trickled from Tallis’s mouth, down over his scaly hide, to fill the first basin, the highest, which took the shape of a seashell, as did they all. A waterfall splashed from this tier to the next, and the next after that. Every basin spread wider and deeper than the one before.
Avery could not repress a shudder as he beheld the fourth and lowest tier. The widest and deepest, perhaps thirty feet in diameter and four feet deep, it was completely choked in dead bodies. They were not human bodies, but ngvandi. The reek of old ngvandi corpses filled the tight chamber, redolent of rotting fish and seaweed. Some of the corpses were bloated, some had split, some were mainly bones with ragged streamers of flesh trailing from them. A few crabs and fish had been placed in the basin, and they pinched and nibbled at the corpses, but not fast enough to prevent the foul odor that plagued the room. Avery tasted bile in the back of his throat.
“What the hell?” said Hildra.
Hastily Jynad motioned her to silence, and she glared but obeyed.
Oblivious, Lord Haemlys knelt before the seashell basin of the lowest tier, praying silently. The priest knelt beside him, and they prayed together, in some language Avery did not know. It seemed to be eerily similar to that the ngvandi spoke, and the unnatural, susurrus noises complimented the tinkling of the water as it sloughed over the corpses, stirring their ink-like blood.
Avery had not noticed the small opening to the rear of the room, but now four soldiers stepped out of it bearing a thrashing ngvandi between them. He howled and screeched, but his tongue had been torn out, as had his eyes. He could not protest or even see what fate held in store for him. Just as well.
Haemlys and his priest rose while the soldiers manhandled the thrashing ngvandi into position over the basin right where the two had knelt.
“Is he going to do what I think he is?” Hildra asked.
Jynad glowered at her. Hildebrand huddled low on her back, making scared little mewling noises.
“Yeah,” Janx said. “I think so, darlin’. Y’ may wanna close those pretty eyes.”
“Fuck you.”
Avery wished there was some way to prevent what was about to happen, but he knew there was not.
The priest produced a curved dagger from his robes. After some more chanting, he jerked the ngvandi’s head back with one hand and slit his throat with the other. Blue-black blood sprayed into the basin, and strong, fishy limbs twitched and jerked. The ngvandi made pathetic gagging noises, and Avery looked away. At last the creature died, and Avery breathed a sigh of relief that his pain was over. Without ceremony, the soldiers heaved the corpse into the waters, and the bodies already in it bobbed at the movement. A bit of bloody water splashed over the lip and spattered the floor.
“You may go,” the priest told the soldiers.
They bowed and left. The priest eyed Avery and his group next, seemed to consider asking them to leave, but then noticed Jynad. Apparently the presence of the royal aide was enough to legitimize their presence, and the priest ignored them after that.
Haemlys approached the basin, bowed his head and allowed the priest to cup water in his hands and drizzle it over his forehead and face, baptizing him in the fetid, foul water. That done, the God-Emperor looked up, smiling drunkenly, serenely, as if blessed. Beaming, he stared up at the drooling statue of Lord Tallis.
“I feel you, Father of my Fathers,” said Haemlys, slurring the words. “I feel you ‘oursing through me. Teach me, Father. Show me the way.” He waited, staring up at the statue, clearly expecting—hoping—for something. Nothing happened. Water tinkled. Corpses bobbed. The God-Emperor broke wind.
“Fuck!” Haemlys said at last. In anger, he rose to his feet, made a fist, and crashed it down onto the ngvandi he’d just had sacrificed. Bodies bobbed more violently, and more water splashed over. Crabs scuttled out of the way. “Fuck fuck fuck!” Furious, he turned red-rimmed eyes on the priest. “Fuck you too, you fucking char’atan! How man’ of these mis’rable shits do we ha’ to go through t’ get a fuckin’ res’onse? Huh? A hun’red? A thousan’? Why won’t he answer me?” He stabbed a meaty finger at the statue.
The priest cowed before the wrath of his lord. “I-I don’t know, Your Majesty. W-we’re doing everything in our power. Following the ancient scriptures. Making sacrifices of those with otherworldly flesh, just like the slaves the Great Ones gave your Father of Fathers. I-I don’t know why it’s not working!”
Haemlys struck him in the face, sending him flying back to the floor. Chest heaving, lobster claw clacking, the naked God-Emperor stood over his priest and glared down at him. “You’d be’er figure it out, old man! Al’eady I’ve had to beg the other gods for advice! An’ even they won’t answer!” He snorted in
bitter amusement. “I’m the laugh’in’stock of the country! I pray and sacrifice to every god, e’en those that aren’t my own—and nothing!” He threw back his head and let loose an animal roar. In a rage, he kicked the priest, again and again.
Avery stepped forward to intervene, but Jynad, white with fear, jerked him back and shook his head violently.
“You’d better find out!” Haemlys thundered, giving the frail old man one last kick in the ribs. “Or mebbe the nex’ one I sacri’ice ‘ll be you!”
Sobbing and begging for forgiveness, the priest picked himself up with care and scurried from the room, as fast as his withered legs would take him.
Glaring, fuming, hairy chest heaving, Lord Haemlys turned his attention to Jynad and his visitors. “You!” He marched over. His lobster claw clacked loudly. “What do you want?”
Jynad cowered back. “N-nothing, my lord! I only wanted to i-introduce you to some v-visitors. They’re supposed to be g-great enemies of—”
Haemlys snorted. After screaming at and kicking his priest, his rage seemed to have drained from him, at least for the moment. He’d already lost interest in Jynad. With a burp, he reeled from the chapel. “Fuckin’ gods,” he muttered. “If they won’ answer me, maybe the ‘tunggen will.” Still muttering, he tottered away.
“B-but my lord!” begged Jynad, hurrying after him—with some courage, Avery thought. “What shall we do with our guests?”
“F-find ‘em a room!” laughed the God-Emperor. “Give ‘em some wine and tell ‘em to join th’ par’y. The las’ days’re up’n us. Enjoy as much pussy and grub while y’ can.”
With that, he passed through the bead curtain, leaving Jynad behind.
The aide paused, staring at the curtain, as if wondering if he should try one more time. Then, with a sigh, one of many, he turned back to the guests. “I ... I’m sorry.”
Janx grunted. “I should take that claw and shove it up his ass.”
Jynad’s eyes widened. “Don’t even say such things.”
Hildra laughed. “I’d like to see that.”
Avery cleared his throat. “About those rooms ...”
Jynad swallowed, nodded. “It will be cozy, I’m afraid. Half the nobles in the land have taken refuge in the palace. Their homes have been razed, their people killed or put to flight. They’re the lords of none now. All they can do is revel, leech off His Eminence and wait for the arrival of Octung. So ... it’s crowded. But when I heard that you were coming, I managed to set aside a room.”
“One room?” Avery frowned.
“Whatever,” Hildra said. “Let’s just do it. I’m tired.”
Avery released a breath. “Very well. Jynad, if you would show us the way ...”
The aid bowed and led the band out. Before he left, Avery turned to Layanna, who had been very silent through all of this. She eyed the corpse-filled basin strangely, and for a moment he wondered at the odd expression on her face, but then he realized what it was, and he felt cold.
She was hungry.
* * *
“Well, this is the fuckin’ pit,” said Hildra. Smoking, she leaned back in an expensive chair and stared up at the crystal chandelier. The rooms were large and splendid, the doorways arched and inlaid with gold and turquoise. Jewels glimmered from candelabra, and antique mirrors hung from the walls, their glass warped but strangely beautiful. Priceless oil paintings adorned the spaces between, and pale-looking lords and ladies, some showing undeniable signs of mutation, stared out from eerie, inky landscapes. Alchemical lanterns filled the room with exotic smells, nutmeg and lavender and fresh leather. It was a sumptuous suite, with several handsome bedrooms that spilled out into this common living area. Gold and burgundy rugs rested on the floor.
“At least the booze is good,” Janx said. He tipped back his fancy goblet and slurped some of the aged spicewine. “Hells, I’m tempted to join the fuckin’ orgy.”
“Don’t you dare,” Hildra said.
“Why not? What’s an orgy for if not to orge?”
“I would be wary of contracting disease,” Avery said, perusing the bookshelf, wineglass nearby.
“You gotta learn to live a little, Doc,” Janx said.
Nodding absently, Avery selected a volume and thumbed through it. All in Ungraessotti, of course, but that was fine. He read it better than he spoke it. Unfortunately the volume recounted some lord’s adventures, just the sort of thing he had enjoyed many times in the past, reveling in his fantasy of L’oh, but right now the last thing he wanted was to relive his boyhood dreams, or remember that he had once dreamed them in the first place. I was such a fool. He shoved the volume back and selected another. From time to time he glanced at Layanna, who reclined on one of the handsome divans, eyes closed but not sleeping. He downed frequent sips of his wine.
“Look, I’m just gonna say it,” Hildra said. “That fat fuck was trying to worship the same shitwads the ngvandi were. Things like her.” She indicated Layanna. “What’d she call ‘em?”
“The R’loth,” Avery said. “Otherwise known as the Collossum. Or, I suppose, it would be more accurate to say the Collossum are R’loth in human form.”
“Yeah, them. Wonder why they didn’t answer?”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“Guess not,” Janx said, taking another slurp.
“They didn’t use the stones,” Avery said. “Don’t you remember, at the ngvandi city, the ngvandi used stones quarried from the mines near the grottoes; that’s what they’d set their slaves to doing. I can only assume that the power of the Mnuthra leeched through the stone. Suffused it. They used those blocks to make their monoliths with, their altars, where they made their sacrifices, and that provided a connection to the Mnuthra. They could actually sacrifice to and commune with the ones they worshipped through the monoliths. I’m sure the altar we’re traveling to, the one in Cuithril, operates on a similar basis. Somewhere during the history of the God-Emperors, though, the God-Emperors lost that knowledge. It occurs to me we could get into the good graces of His Eminence by telling him how to resolve the problem—only I wouldn’t want to help him do so. Gods know what would happen if he actually did get in contact with the R’loth.”
“It would work not, anyway,” Layanna said. She had cracked her eyes and was looking at him mildly.
“And why not?” Avery asked.
“Even if quarried stones from ngvandi mines, he only able commune with Mnuthra. Serves them no he. Their masters he serves.” A look of frustration crossed her face. “I hate Ghenisan,” she said in Octunggen. Then, more slowly and working the words out, she said in Ghenisan—obviously she had been practicing, if only internally—“He would have to quarry stones from the deep, near one of our cities, or use our machines to awaken the altar. Such is what my kind gave Tallis, that and sacrifices he could use to breed, to continually bathe the altar in extradimensional energies. But those machines must have been lost to history.”
“So it was your lot.” Janx watched her with interest. “I wondered about that when Hunried mentioned fish gods.”
She stared up at the ceiling. “We tried to convert L’oh, but we were new to world. Misjudged things. Created civil war, brother against brother. Caused end of L’ohen Empire.”
Janx and Hildra shared a look. A strange smile, half admiration and half dread, flickered across Hildra’s scarred face. “You caused the Fall of L’oh.”
Layanna met her stare. “Not me. My kind. But yes, we set events in motion that brought about Fall.”
“Amazing.”
“They’ve helped shape our world—for thousands of years, it seems,” Avery said. “They caused the Atomic Sea, they caused the Fall of L’oh, they caused the current world war, and gods know what else.” He rubbed his cheek. “Did it bother anyone else that our lord host was talking about how the Octunggen might listen to his pleas as he walked away?”
Janx’s eyes narrowed. “Yeah. I heard that too.”
“Think he’d really betray his ow
n country?” asked Hildra.
“He’d do whatever it took to save his own neck.”
The night continued, and fire crackled in the fireplace. Logs snapped, and sparks flared. Avery worked on one bottle of wine—Janx was right, it was superb—and started another. He couldn’t get the image of the orgies and the sacrifices out of his mind. The flame burned lower and lower in the fireplace, and the members of the band began to retire. Janx and Hildra traipsed to the same room together, and someone in there turned on a gramophone to mask their noises—unsuccessfully.
Trying to ignore them, Avery repaired to his own bedchamber, leaving Layanna on her couch to meditate.
Just as he began to undress, he heard knocking on his doors and opened them to see her standing before him. For a mad moment he thought the example of Hildra and Janx had motivated her to do something similar—she had mentioned taking human lovers, after all—but an instant later he realized it was not lust in her eyes. It was hunger.
He cleared his throat. “May I help you?”
She nodded, seeming uncertain, perhaps nervous. She still looked sickly.
She approached him and laid a hand on his arm. Her touch was warm. “Doctor,” she said. “I need your help.”
“Yes ... ?”
She gathered her nerve. “The bodies in the chapel. I need them, their extra-planar energies. They will be weak now that they’re dead, energies drained off, but there are enough bodies there that I can still derive a substantial meal from them, more than any eelfish.”
“How so?”
“Sentience breaks barriers, creates extradimensional facets that don’t exist in lesser creatures. Doctor, I can heal. But I need you to stand guard while I do. We must do it before dawn, when there will be renewed activity in the Throne Room.”
“But—”
“There is no time. Come!”
She pulled him after her. Fumbling for words, he allowed himself to be tugged along.
“Layanna, are you sure this is the right thing—”
“It’s the only thing.”
They left the suite and ventured down a hallway. As they rounded a bend, a pair of drunken nobles stumbled past, one male, one female, both groping at each other as they went. They didn’t seem to notice Avery and Layanna and they surely wouldn’t have cared if they had.