“That has all changed, Halva,” I said. “There will be manhood ceremonies for all men now, including those that have swum beneath the dome. Your father is equal to all men at this moment.”
“Except for me and my crew,” Halva said, pride and hurt in his bearing. Would he care if Little Brother ate his unfortunate father? I wondered.
“Yes, except for you and your crew,” I agreed and withdrew from the villa.
Halva remained on the front steps while I navigated a sloping garden of rocks and greenery to where benches were arranged in shade. Under an expansive tree, I looked down at the harbour and counted the number of ships that had come in since yesterday. There were many, some sailing in even now, some departing. What tales would they bring back to their people? What stories would they spread far and wide?
That Vaal had come to eat Verdant, perhaps. But it seemed commerce attempted to go on as usual, and despite the many black flecks I noted in the water—too large to be anything but smaller forms of Uncle, for I should not be able to see Little Brother from my current position.
Odd to see Uncle down there. What was Vaal thinking?
As if my thoughts had invited him, he slipped onto the bench beside me and answered. “Those ships leaving, they aren’t just filled with goods.”
“Oh.” People. Citizens fled Verdant, fled before the proper ways of worship were instituted. Yes, the rumours must have spread, how we Brellin venerate our god. Some attempted to escape before they were required to make the same sacrifices. “And so Uncle watches,” I said.
“And Uncle will visit them in the deeper waters. Very large Uncle.”
I didn’t look at Vaal, just observed a ship cutting around a harbour point; then I turned back and shouted for Halva. “Hi, you!”
“Yes, Lord?” His high voice hailed from the distance. It seemed he would not come closer now that Vaal was with me, so I used my best seaman’s bellow.
“Spread the word! Uncle will eat all ships that leave harbour with citizens of Verdant!” I glanced at Vaal. “What of sailors?”
He gave a disinterested shrug, his black eyes yet fixed on Uncle’s latest meal. A small smile curled the corners of his lips. I grimaced and looked back at Halva again.
“Just ships bearing citizens without cause to sail!” I shouted to him. “But Uncle may take sailors if they think never to return home!”
“Understood!” Halva bellowed back and went running to give his crew their orders.
“He was braver yesterday,” Vaal remarked.
“He thought Yrrylos would really take my head off,” I said, smiling. I peered down at the harbour again, and my smile collapsed. “He was brave for my sake. I don’t think he likes being brave for his own.”
Vaal laughed. “Yes. He was quick getting back into the harbour to save that girl when she fainted.”
“You saw that?”
“I thought it was comical how he organized them all to jump in at once. Quite the leader. Perhaps a little mad.”
“Ah, I had best watch him for great things.”
Vaal laughed again, then leant over and kissed my cheek just beside the ear. “I’m hungry,” he whispered. He didn’t mean for food. I knew it and my skin prickled all over. “There’s a bath in this place. Heated,” he told me. “Come inside.”
“Were you responsible for this villa?” I asked, standing with him. It seemed he would never bother with clothes, not that it mattered. I liked to look at him, long and lean, every muscle just right, the shape of him perfect.
Here, in the full light of the sun, I perceived a lustrous black coating on his spine that hadn’t been there yesterday. It almost seemed shark skin, but shark skin had never been this luminous. A pebbling of black pearl, perhaps?
Less man, more shark. I hoped the patches wouldn’t be harsh to the touch.
“I visited your new slave while you were having your late nap yesterday and mentioned your need for a residence,” he said. “I believe he convinced the former owner to vacate or die.”
Well. At least I didn’t have to envision bloody, watery deaths throughout the villa.
“Exactly,” Vaal murmured. “You are so squeamish.”
“And whose fault is that?”
“Mine. I have strong shoulders. Blame me for everything, if you like. The weight doesn’t bother me.” He turned up the slope.
It wasn’t so much to do with having strong shoulders as big teeth. If his culpability had weight, he’d eaten it. But I stared at his muscular shoulders all the same, the glossy hair that played down his back, the curve of spine, bottom, legs.
Creation. The wicked things he made me think.
“Let’s fuck in the bath after we fuck here,” I said.
He stalled and turned back to me.
“I’m hungry,” I answered his surprised look and stepped in to grasp him about the middle. My hands at once slipped further south, passing along the darkness I had seen on his back. It wasn’t too harsh to the touch, just a light roughness that added definition to the spine.
Damn. What a glorious bottom.
“Haru, I will not play your subordinate before all the world,” he all but growled at me.
“In the bath?”
“No!”
“All right. In the dark?”
He laughed. “You’re wicked, Haru. Think of whom you are asking these things.”
“I am. You might like it.” I released him and began struggling with the clasps of my vest. “Why shouldn’t you like it? You should let me adore all of you, not just the outside. Help me, damn it! Just don’t rip my clothes!” Eagerness provoked clumsiness. My fingers fumbled and became increasingly more useless.
“I’m not letting you,” he said, his hands coming up to my vest.
“Yet,” I amended. He ripped my vest in retaliation. Didn’t matter. It hadn’t been my best. I shrugged out of the tatters and pressed hard against him, tugged his head down for a scalding kiss. “Fuck me, you indecent monster,” I breathed against his lips. “Fuck me here on the slope. In front of Uncle. In front of the world! Just fuck me!”
And that he would do. My passion, my crudeness, had excited him. His greater form manifested all about us, a shadowy configuration of shark, and it seemed to rise out from his pearl-encrusted back and then envelop us from all sides. But I didn’t feel the chill like I had when I’d walked in his belly yesterday. This time his power brushed my naked flesh with heat alone. I grew impatient to bare more of my skin.
Squeamish. Yes, perhaps I was still squeamish, but not when I hungered for Vaal. Then it seemed I lost my humanity and became a thing that wanted beyond reason. Hungry. Shark hungry. He’d bathed me in blood and souls yesterday, and I was truly his minion now.
“Not minion,” he whispered, kissing down my cheek to my neck. “Mine. My lover. My beautiful Haru.”
Gentle adoration I didn’t want, and I bit his chest to let him know it.
“Ah!” He gave me hard. My trousers became shreds. My boots I managed to kick away. He shoved me face first into the green lawn and inflicted hurt.
Teeth gripped my shoulder and pricked the skin. A hand slid through blood, went down the length of my back and into the crease of my buttocks. Fingers slipped inward. I hissed, jerked into the lawn, squirmed to feel more of the intrusion.
“You’re missing Intana, aren’t you?” he breathed into my ear.
Yes. I was. And I hated it. Oradhé separated from his slave. Oradhé detested by his slave.
“I don’t want to think!” I cried. “Hurt me! Just hurt me until I can’t think!”
His fingers left my warmth. His long body settled over mine. I heaved back into him the moment his shaft broached the entrance, and he slid in more quickly than he’d intended. He hissed. I hissed. His torso clenched, the muscles so hard I felt the ridges all along my back. Ah, it was good. How he burned me and filled me. I clenched grass in my fists and twisted into his groin.
“Haru, you’ll squeeze me to death,” he cried
, then lifted up and pounded me mercilessly, exactly as I wanted.
“Ah, Vaal! Fuck me! Fuck me!” I wailed.
Thinking. There was no thinking. There was only this animal need. I wanted him to touch me on the insides until I had my little mental death and felt some peace again.
But while he touched my insides, I was in his. The grass of the slope became translucent, the shark more real. His abuse shoved my shaft hard into his divine shape. I twisted against power strong enough to erode the body of a common mortal, yet experienced only the most delicious burn of pleasure. I slicked myself over Vaal’s innards more violently, set my face in viscera and licked.
“Aaah!” Vaal cried and tunnelled into me in one violent last attack. His passion in me, mine in him. I humped backward into his groin, and my front no longer touched the grass at all. Slippery, necessary. Vaal’s gut. Vaal’s power. I soaked in it. I shot my warmth into it and felt the shark shape heave all around me.
“Haru,” Vaal whispered when the last of our excitement had settled into satisfied warmth. He kissed my shoulder where he’d bitten me. “In the dark. In the dark tonight.”
The shark vanished, and there was grass, and sky, and a breeze, and my laughter bubbling up out of my chest.
“Don’t laugh, you detestable pervert,” Vaal complained. “You make me want things no god should admit.”
“No god should admit to declining whatever pleases his senses,” I answered. He bit me for daring to say it, but licked my wounds after, and I smiled with my cheek resting on the lawn.
Tonight. In the dark. “I might go mad having to wait.”
“If I can wait decades, you can wait hours.”
“Very well, Lord. I’ll wait hours.” But for that small moment of tranquility, we both waited—his body still on mine—and enjoyed the warm feel of each other on the slope of Verdant’s harbour. While Vaal held me, I could endure Intana’s absence.
Chapter Nineteen
The rest of that morning and on into the afternoon, I listened to the citizens of Verdant lament in the streets. They had lamented yesterday as well, but the weeping had quieted after Vaal’s march down from the temple. The populace had cowered in their houses and gone quiet like small fish with a predator prowling the reef.
But today they mourned as one and without pause, fear and desperation provoking waves of humanity to go rushing down streets and back up again. There was howling and beseeching, though I doubted Vaal listened, and there was violence when the poorer folk broke into shops to take what they pleased, feeling they had no reason to be deprived any longer.
Men and women of low willpower gave in to self-destruction and threw themselves in the harbour to Little Brother. Through reports from my crew, I learned that even women were eaten, children too, for parents jumped in with their offspring. I knew Vaal attended these sacrifices, for he’d gone from me, hungry again for pleasure other than the touch of a cherished mortal.
The warning I had sent out into the streets, that escape from Vaal’s dominion was impossible, had provoked the people of Verdant to demonstrate their hopelessness. Had I been caught directly in the flow of panicked humanity, rather than forced to listen to it in safety, I would have found the experience no less gruelling.
I went into the wine cellars of the villa to avoid the horrific noise, but even there, the sense of desolation was thick and seemed to come out of the ground itself. The sensation that the collective despair wanted to swallow me down became unbearable. After only a few minutes, I returned to the bench outside, and watched with a stoicism learned from my years of witnessing the rites of passage in Blood Bay.
By the late afternoon, I ordered my crew to stay within the confines of the villa and not to dare the streets again for fear that some of them would be crushed in a mob. Halva wept openly and begged to understand why Little Brother ate children today when he had not yesterday.
“Because their parents have given them,” I told him and left it at that. Blunt, naked truth.
Halva’s rite of manhood little resembled the events occurring below. On this day, men and women discarded all they treasured into Vaal’s mouth—life, children, hope. And he accepted it. He accepted it all. Those without the strength to live, didn’t, and nor would their line.
I had servants in the villa by this time and directed them to brew possets with tranquillizing herbs to help my young crew calm their nerves. I had a posset as well, but it didn’t help. The insanity of lamentation did not break physically into the villa grounds, other than for the noise, but its indelible presence burdened all our minds. And I wanted Intana, wanted him worse than that morning. The more horrific the day became, the more excruciating the longing for him.
We were not meant to be apart. I felt his torment and I think he felt mine. Impossible to gain a sense of perspective that wasn’t partially his. We were one, for as long as I owned his seal.
When the sun began to creep toward the resting horizon, I surrendered and called to him. I didn’t need the seal to do it. I didn’t need my voice. I just wanted him back, and he came. Power tingling, creating a strange scent in the air. A rush of wind, and he was there.
“Haru?” He crouched at my knees, set a hand on my thigh. Dirt within dried silver blood caked his fingers.
“Ah! I’ve hurt you!”
“What did you expect? You sent me to excavate a mountain range!” Rue at once replaced the outburst of anger, then concern. He lifted me off the bench and took to the air again.
He was weak. I felt it, but he soared on despite this. We fled far from the city, on into the inner valleys of the island, where small farms grew fruits, and farmers husbanded goats and pigs and went on with life as if Vaal hadn’t happened. But perhaps they didn’t know yet. Perhaps they thought it didn’t affect them, who were not living directly upon the coast.
“Where are you taking me?” I asked.
“A lake, an inland lake. It’s higher up, and colder than most men would like it, but you shouldn’t mind.”
No, I shouldn’t mind. Even up here, with the wind biting through my clothes, the chill didn’t bother me. We began to see less and less of rich farming valleys below and more of the wild lands that Verdant’s emperors had claimed and left to grow uncultured. The trees I beheld, the timber that could have been used for shipbuilding: wasted, unmanaged.
“They have been such a lazy people because of you,” I murmured.
“I know it. They have let everyone come to them, certain of their supremacy and safety, certain that all things would fall as they wanted it. And now they find they are the ones falling.”
And so were we, plummeting, a controlled descent that placed us on the lip of a tarn in the highlands between mountains. The water was crystal clear, the mountaintops perfectly mirrored. Ice from a glacier rested at the further end. Very few trees grew around the bank, and all of them were stunted.
“A glacier? Here?”
“Yes. We’re high,” Intana said. “All of Verdant is high, really. This is a mountain range shoving its highest point up into the sky. And I should tell you, the moment I hit the shafts where magma flows, all those tunnels you’ve asked of me will be filled with molten rock.”
“Oh. Well, that’s a nuisance.”
He snickered. So did I. Verdant’s volcanoes had been dormant for so long I’d forgotten they existed. Most everyone had forgotten. The eruptions of the past were spoken of now as myth, but if I insisted on this course, Intana’s excavations might set in motion a cataclysm and make the myth a reality again. Wouldn’t that irritate Vaal.
Or would it? I’d discovered in him a wicked sense of humour. He seemed to me the type to let me continue on with a course until I did something unutterably stupid, just that he might laugh at me after.
“Don’t bother tunnelling any further,” I said.
Smiling, Intana hitched me higher and kissed me briefly. He hadn’t set my feet down yet, and I didn’t complain. The feel of his arms, his grip, comforted me.
&n
bsp; “You told me to find the oldest snow on the highest mountain, but here is the oldest ice,” he said, jerking his chin toward the glacier.
I smiled. “I’ll remember that.”
Again he lifted me, this time to kiss me some punishment, but his teeth didn’t nip, and his grasp remained gentle. The dust of a mountain’s innards covered his lips. I had grit on my tongue when he released my mouth.
“Let’s wash you,” I said, and he loosed me at last.
I stripped off my clothes—another old set. I didn’t dare put on my better things, for I had few left of them. We knelt in the water and commenced the cleansing.
His hands had suffered the worst. The nails had cracked and split in many places, and some bled underneath. The power in him, to scrape a hole into a mountain, but still he had suffered to do so. I was as gentle as I could be, using only water at first, but he grew impatient and dunked his hands into gravel to scrape away as much dirt as he could.
“They’ll heal,” he said. “They’ll heal quicker, now that you love me again.”
“I never stopped.”
“You never really started.”
“Let’s just talk in confusing circles, shall we?”
He laughed. I did as well. His image in the lake, whenever the ripples ceased, settled over the surface with inspiring clarity. Impossible not to see a bit of the truth that was Intana. That leg, so short on such a long, sinuous body. Was he salamander, then? Ardu, dragon, salamander.
“Very big salamander.”
“Dragon!” he cried and splashed me down my front with a frustrated whack of his palm against the water. The image of sinuous silver disappeared in ripples. “Wash me!”
Smiling, I laved water up his back and flank. “I remember First Servant saying you would not let anyone but the Oradhé touch you, but yesterday you permitted three lovely women.”
“I was dirty and sore and wanted clean fast.” He lay down in the shallows to get his hair wet. I spread the strands out to help the dust fall away. The grime billowed into a cloud of grey all about him.
Loved Him to Death: Haru of Sachoné House Page 20