It towered over him. He didn’t want to see it, but he was made to. Gnarled and twisted, fanged, eyes like tunnels of darkness, yet sparkling with a Hellish light from deep within. A weave of bone and sinew, powerful and dark, and it was so awful to see that face, to have that black Thing rise up before him, its clawed hands, huge enough to hold the Universe and the box it came in, reaching out … Its black reptilian wings, stretching up and out to touch the corners of infinity, and between the shards of bone were flaps of putrid skin. Within its folds were black pits of eyes, each with that glint of eternal Hell in, directing their arrows of light at … him.
William Teague screamed and screamed. As his own eyes opened he was aware of spinning streams of smoke – other souls! Trapped and spinning toward those eyes, and disappearing into them. He saw pits all around him now, black, full of crawling creatures, advancing to tear him into morsels of smoke to feed to their master—
Erebis.
Those vile streams of smokey forms went up; up away from the creatures, the spikes, the spinning prisons…
Teague half ran, half staggered. His memories slipped away from him, trailing in his bloody footprints. He could feel himself being dragged upward by those eyes, rended apart, the vestiges of his smoky soulform dissipating as he ran madly into the nearest pool and through its misty, reflective substance, into the whirling stream. He received images of creatures – there are creatures here with me! – that rose up alongside him. He got a taste of blood in his mouth. Revolted at the half-remembered thoughts of savagery and dismemberment in his past life, he pushed the cravings away. The mist propelled him upward with the creatures, and, as it did, he sampled their minds – such fury!
They mix their blood! he heard.
His spirit was pushed upward, the furious heat from that black monstrosity boring into his body, and he suddenly caught a glimpse of something that he realised must have once existed in his memory:
Light.
He was blinded by it, by everything, and suddenly he seemed weightless as air, like he was expanding suddenly, a great pressure having been lifted from around him.
He felt different, and he couldn’t get his eyes or limbs to work. He suddenly felt so much stronger, but he wasn’t even strong enough to breathe properly.
He saw the world, the real world. A blue sky spattered with white-grey clouds. Blinking against its blinding beauty. Hellish pain was still a strong memory, but only a memory. He saw trees and the shifting of colours their leaves in the wind.
He sensed air on his face.
Something pulled at him. He began to gain consciousness proper, feel something approaching sanity. There was a new pain at his throat, but in the memory-fade of his recent experiences it was almost nothing. More tugging, on his arm, and at his throat. Sharper pains in his neck. Sour blood on his tongue, and he licked his lips.
He couldn’t speak. What held him?
He pushed and touched something solid and furred. A yellow form loomed over him, blocking most of his field of vision, and he saw the half-decomposed stomach, chest, neck. The head of the creature was out of his line of sight.
Dizzily, Teague pushed harder, forced, and the pain went for a brief moment; the iron teeth were out of his neck, and he was able to move. He heard a snarl, and the thing shoved back, grabbed him with long nails.
Teague’s fists lashed out before he realised. He punched it once, twice, in the face, then smashed his elbow into its chest and it fell. He spun and took its head in his arm, flexed his muscles, and twisted – crack! – then pulled. The head came off as the body collapsed onto the ground. He dropped the head.
So weak! He knew from memory that the thing on the floor in front of him was a sanguilac. Suddenly a great calmness washed over, and he tumbled to his side. The mossy ground rose up to meet him as he fell. Real moss. Real ground. Hadentes no longer.
As Teague felt consciousness slip from him, he looked out. He saw a hill of rock, some kind of tunnel boring into it. A startled horse, with broken reins, stood unnerved by a pylon. He saw three yellow-grey bodies, heads severed, and two humans: one was male, dark skinned, in golden-bronze armour. He lay, bloodied and weeping weakly, over the body of a woman with ermine fur around her neck, its white stained with blood.
The man died, face streaked with tears, there over her body.
Teague lost consciousness.
*
Twelve
A BOLT IN THE STORM
For two days and nights the boat sailed over the calm, flat waters of the Lual. By day, the water was a sheet of glass, reflecting only the heavy mist that filled the sky, and revealing from underneath nothing but the muddy depths of the great lake. No life could be seen under that placid skin.
By night, however, it was alive with lights. Fireworks exploded out of earshot from somewhere on the other side, coming from the city of Goya, where any excuse to celebrate was good enough to set the clouds on fire. The colours could not be seen in the sky; rather they filled the smog with light and turned it into a murky curtain of reds and greens. It was eerie to say the least, and it unnerved Rowan, who didn’t enjoy being enclosed. She felt trapped by the wall of mist that was so thick it put an end to any impression of movement: they were just a small vessel on a disc of darkness, resting on a cushion of cloud.
The first morning on the Tractatus had been tour morning. The bosun’s mate, Lanark, showed them the particulars of the cabins and the layout of the vessel. The main cabin was symmetrical, divided into five respective parts: the front spanned the whole width, and was the bridge. Behind were two small rooms, with their own doors facing outward: on the port was the head, and on starboard was the shrine. Behind both were the two substantially larger berths, fitted for two people each. Underneath, in the bowels of the ship, were the engines, the waste collection tank and the crews’ quarters, two rooms smaller than the passengers’ own with a pair of hammocks in each, joined by a door and leading upstairs onto the bridge. This was where the captain, the bosun and his mate slept.
The captain explained that they were not going straight across the diameter of the Lual, but a third of the way in and then around the centre. There was a dangerous reef there that caught ships and caused them to sink, leaving behind what the few witnesses dubbed the “graveyard”. Of course, the captain explained, the place had its myths about it, but there was no danger other than the collected silt and debris on the bottom that had constructed the reef, which reached abruptly up near the centre and split vessels in two. They would steer clear of the place altogether.
~
‘How big is this graveyard?’ Caeles asked.
‘Takes up ‘bout twenty percent of the lake,’ said the captain. ‘We steer her pretty wide just to be sure. The reef is alive, it’s more animal than plant. It grows its way outward at about few centimetres a year. Enough to make me wonder how far out it stretches now, after all these years.’
Caeles was looking down at the equipment, working out which light said what and which button had what purpose. He spent most of his time on the bridge learning about how to steer the vessel, and he’d figured out most of it in the two days he’d been there.
‘When were the first crashes?’
‘I don’t know, a long time ago,’ said the captain. ‘After the war, obviously.’
‘Right. The lake wasn’t here before then.’
‘Well, not in these dimensions. It was there, only a lot smaller. Apparently following what you call the Conflict the ground was cracked, and let half the sea in before it closed itself up. It’s practically a sea in its own right now.’
‘What’s the usual crossing time?’
‘Travelling straight through takes about six days in good weather,’ he explained. ‘Our route takes eight or nine. But it’s worth it, believe you me.’
Caeles wandered onto the forecastle, which was cluttered with barrels of fuel and fishing equipment, all lashed down and bolted. He rested his worn hands on the side and looked out, peering thro
ugh the fog, attempting to make out any shoreline behind them. They were already way too far out for either.
Things had changed so much for Caeles. Once a child with only his own fire to sustain him, he never felt so detached as he did then. With his father dead and his mother a religious nut, he was surprised he hadn’t turned out worse. Or rather, different.
The young John Parland had been arrested three times before he could legally be charged, mainly for petty theft. One other time he’d boosted his neighbour’s mag-prop Camaro and turned it into a concertina against the second storey of the bank. When his mother had learned of that little incident, she’d attempted to force upon him more of her H’ouando nonsense, their “first level tenets of integrated living”. Prior to the start of the Conflict he had left her behind to work with Claire Havre in cyberbionics and never looked back; following the onset of open hostilities, he never saw his mother again. He knew that by now she had most likely been dead for at least a full generation, but still he couldn’t bring himself to mourn for her or even miss her.
The only thing he had cared about had died so far away from anything like where he was now. No water in the wastelands of New ‘Frisco, only sentinel buildings of stone.
Now he sailed over so much water he could barely fathom it. Most of a traveller’s journey was spent with no sight of terra firma in any direction. Instead, they just experienced the gentle movements of water caused by the moon, and the never-ending, ever-present universe of mist.
He spotted Gabel, sitting on the ramp by the stern deck. The hunter was gazing over the same expanse of water, the same wall of fog, yet didn’t see a third of what Caeles saw. Caeles could see the tiny pieces of debris in the lake, almost microscopic, washing against the hull. He could see particles drifting silent and unseen in the mist, suspended by warm currents. He could also hear things, distant through the wall of cloud all around him. He couldn’t pinpoint the exact direction, nor identify the sounds, but they rang echoes in his mind of the music he had heard on the shore three nights before.
A door closed behind him. Not the head, but the shrine on the other side. Caeles walked around, taking the aft past the bridge. He stood by the door to the shrine and knocked.
‘Yes?’ asked a voice.
‘Rowan,’ he said.
‘Yes.’
He opened the door. Rowan was kneeling in the tight space, back to the door, eyes closed with her hands clasped in front of her. The colourful iconic ribbons of the H’ouando religion hung from the wall, pinned up in elaborate patterns. They were of various colours, but in deep and metallic tones; purples, reds, oranges, hues of blue and green. They were the closest things to idols that the faith had, and there were no rules about praying to them. Irenia would always listen, Rowan would say.
‘Aren’t you cramped in here?’
‘I can manage, Caeles.’ Apologies bubbled up inside of him, regrets regarding their conversation on the shore, but she spoke again before he could think of something to say: ‘I’ll be finished in a few minutes.’
He was about to say how he wanted to talk to her, not some fabricated deity, but instead he said nothing and closed the door, waiting outside and sensing, rather than breathing, the salty air. It was mid-morning.
Rowan emerged fifteen minutes later. She looked stiff, tired and ill.
‘Rowan,’ he said. ‘I wish to speak to you, if possible.’
‘Don’t lapse into an uncommon tongue on my account, Caeles. Speak as you normally would. There is no need to allow our world to force itself onto you.’
He was taken aback for a moment. Her comment seemed to imply that she saw him as completely alien, somebody who didn’t belong at all in the “world” that had developed post-Conflict. It was true that he felt dislocated now that things had changed, but he had never considered himself disparate. He was about to say this when Rowan spoke again.
‘Just speak to Irenia first,’ she said, then turned and wandered toward Gabel. Caeles watched her go.
Talk to Irenia first? He had said enough times that he was an atheist. He had said that to her after leaving Pirene, over one of the many fires they had lit in the forest to keep them warm while they ate and slept. He rarely entered those discussions; she had dragged him into that one. Why should he talk to her God, who was so obviously counterfeit?
To me it’s obvious, he thought. To them, it’s all they know.
He shut himself into the shrine and knelt before the symbolic ribbons, which seemed to shift in the candlelight. As the boat rocked almost imperceptibly, the candles swayed too, and their illumination swam up the foil-like display causing it to move and twist. It didn’t take much imagination to see it as a thing inhabited by God.
Back in his teenage years, he’d endured as much as he could stomach of his mother’s inane prattling about Irenia the Goddess and Erebis the Daemon. He’d languished in an atheist’s nightmare, putting up with the Sundays at church, the prayers before meals. He had been baptised at the age of one year old: In the eyes of Irenia, her Sentinal, and the Energies, I mark thee John Parland…
The family Parland were a lot more religious than others, often seen as peculiar. He never suffered from it, but it bothered him, especially since he had decided and set in stone his opinion of God: that is, its non-existence.
The ribbons swam before him. He’d allowed his eyes to go out of focus during his reverie, and the blurred lights had dazzled him for a second.
Closing his eyes, he thought in silence. When he opened them several minutes later, he found his hands were clasped together.
~
The cabin had the feel of a once stuffy room recently blessed with fresh air. It was cold and the wood had a muted sound to it when stepped on, like stone covered in a layer of moss. It was damp; the whole ship was damp, but it would hold up.
Caeles closed the door behind him.
‘Rowan?’ he asked.
Her eyes fluttered open. She’d been sleeping. ‘Yes?’
‘I’m sorry for the night on the shore. I didn’t know what I was saying.’
‘It’s okay.’
‘I heard you singing.’
‘I remember you saying so,’ she replied, sitting up with her hands in her lap.
Caeles didn’t remember, and it showed on his face. Had he said that? Or simply thought it?
‘Don’t worry about it,’ she said, and her face lit up with a weak smile. ‘But there is … something I want to ask you.’
‘Yes?’
‘Who is it I look like? You compared me to someone.’
He stood, didn’t know why, and sat down again. He turned and looked at the wall. His eyes followed the subtle lines in the polished timber. Left. Right. Left again. The tarred wood gleamed as the light rode across it, glinting as if wet.
‘Someone from a long time ago. Before the war.’
Rowan didn’t say aloud how that hadn’t answered her question.
‘I’d like to know about the war,’ she said quietly.
‘I’m sure the old man can tell you everything about that,’ Caeles muttered, picking at the tarred wood with his fingernail. ‘Have you asked him?’
‘No.’
‘Then ask him.’
He stood, and this time he made to leave. He couldn’t remember why he’d followed Rowan at all. He opened the door and the breeze rushed in to greet him, heavy with moisture and high in air pressure.
Stormy weather.
~
Something approached the boat like a giant bullet. It was an insect, whipping across the surface of the lake with its barbed legs dangling, now darting over the deck of the Tractatus through the mist. It sensed the thing that had drawn it, an electro-chemical kind of beacon that was somewhere … there. It lurched toward the cabin and shot through the open door.
Caeles saw it in painful slow motion as it rushed past his eyes. The thing was large for an insect: its heavy abdomen swelled with its pulse – he could see its heart beating through the semi-transpar
ent torso – rhythmic and vulgar. Tiny bristles twitched around its bulbous, multi-faceted eyes. Plates of chitin surrounded its swollen mouthparts, which bit into the air like a reflex from between stretched strips of black skin.
The hornet rushed into the cabin, humming like a propeller, and as it swayed heavily in the centre of the cabin, became confused. There were two targets. Its twin pairs of wings dragged it around in a steep curve, antennae twitching, and it staggered mid-air and hovered again, uncertain; something moved by the bed, another figure.
The movement attracted it and it lashed out, sting pulsing with its own brand of static poison. A hand came up, and the monstrous insect scrambled over it, hooked legs pinching the skin; the sting caught the dermis, puncturing it twice with uncanny rapidity, and then the hornet leapt off, away, its job done.
~
Rowan brought her hand down and rubbed the back of it. The skin was red, already burning slightly; she hadn’t felt the sting puncture the skin.
‘Caeles…’
He moved from the door to the back wall before she had spoken, fist slamming against it, half-crushing the insect that had stung her. The hornet dropped to the floor, pulsed, scrambling desperately. Caeles slammed his fist down again, then stamped hard with his boot.
Rowan felt her head swim. Her vision got darker, her mouth dry all of a sudden, her skin prickling. The burning rushed up her arm, past her shoulder so fast she lost her breath. No-one noticed, but ten or twelve loose hairs on her head rose up slightly and crackled. She fell back against the bed.
‘Rowan!’
Caeles was beside her, holding her stung hand, which was bright red but only swollen around the puncture mark: a tight pink ring of flesh that had risen up from the back of her hand. He lowered into a kneel as her limp body began to slide downward.
He ran his palm over her head, incidentally smoothing the static hairs. Her eyes rolled back in their sockets, mouth opening and closing convulsively. Her spine shuddered once, and then her breathing stopped.
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