He could smell the sea. It was always there, the water like a black mirror, upon which glided the enormous black ships with the seven-pointed star on their hulls. From time to time spells crackled in the air above the port. Wind-mages and speakers-to-whales and astrologer-navigators and sun-talkers and battle-sorcerers with the power to level whole cities. Goliris’s fleets sailed across the World and brought the civilising influence of the empire to its furthest reaches. They came back laden with the World’s goods; with all the riches the World had to offer.
The docks were a maze of busy industry, porters and loaders, supervisors and officers, and all moved aside for the queen and her son, this heir of Goliris. He could feel their eyes; even as they looked down or away he could sense them, their attention, their greed and fear and lust for power.
As Gorel watched, a trawler came into port with a giant squid caught in its net. It dragged the enormous beast behind it still alive, its eyes staring, its beak opening and closing without words. It was brought to port and set to, quickly.
They stopped that day in a quayside stall where a wizened old man with three eyes on his face served fried squid. Gorel held a chunk as large as his arm. The flesh was so soft and tender, fresh from the kill. The old man had used a black blade, standard navy issue, with the seven-pointed star etched on the handle. His hands moved quickly, dextrously, chopping off chunks of squid flesh from the giant arm that flopped on the ground. Gorel found himself hypnotised by the movement, the flash of metal, the rhythmic chopping, the pieces falling effortlessly into the hot oil.
Gorel of Goliris opened his eyes.
He stared around him, at the grey featureless walls, the grey ugly carpet, the waiting room. None of it was real. It was just another spell, another trap. Jericho still sat there, his lips moving over the same piece of dried fish. He was too far gone.
Gorel said, “I wish to see the High Mogg.”
Two of the creatures materialised by his side.
“Please take a number.”
“To make an appointment please fill in Form 46 dash 3—”
Gorel said, “No.”
He lifted the blade.
The creatures said, in unison, “Just think of the paperwork.”
He knew they couldn’t be killed, not here, not like this.
Instead, he wrapped his fingers round the blade. It was so very sharp.
The Moggs stared at him, their eyes inscrutable behind their spectacles.
Gorel drew the blade through his fingers.
The pain burst like fireworks in his mind.
It cleared away the confusion in his head. The walls seemed less defined. He thought he could see trees through them, and stars. A night sky. He drew the blade again. When he opened his palm it was flowing with blood.
The blood was real. It was his. He let it drop on the carpet. The carpet hissed and shrivelled underfoot, became the jungle floor. He saw tiny creatures scuttle and hide.
He said, “I am Gorel of Goliris.”
8.
The small brown-robed creatures stood still. They adjusted their spectacles. “No,” they said, in unison. “No, it is impossible. There is no form for Goliris.”
Gorel held the bloodied knife. He stabbed at the nearest wall. The wall parted. Beyond it were stars, the sound of insects and free flowing water, the smell of mangrove swamps. He cut until he made a door.
“Wait!”
When he turned the Moggs were gone. A giant thing stood there. It was made of all of the Moggs. Humanoid bodies writhing and merging together in a roiling mass. The wall behind Gorel attempted to repair itself, to shut out the stars and the world.
“I am the High Mogg,” the creature said.
Gorel drew his gun and aimed it. His bloodied hand enveloped the metal. He popped out the shells. His blood coated them. He jammed them back in. He stared at the thing before him. It was some weakened godling, feeding on unwary travellers. Before they’d arrived it must have been starved of faith. Now the crew all worshipped him, doomed to forever wander its maze in search of an exit that was never there.
“Do you protect the ship?” he said.
“There is no ship. You know not what you ask for. I cannot be killed—”
Gorel fired. The bullets, caked in his blood, tore through the High Mogg’s flesh. The creature screamed. The walls faded. Jericho blinked. His men stood from their benches, seeing each other again as though for the first time.
A howl of rage and pain, and a searing hot breath of wind, the stench of sewers and fish guts, and then the creature was gone.
Gorel found himself standing in a forest clearing. The volcano belched smoke up ahead. It was night-time, and the air was warm.
Beside him, Jericho blinked again. He stared at the dry fish in his hand and threw it away in disgust. He looked at Gorel. Gorel’s hand bled onto the forest floor.
“You know, you might want to put a bandage on that,” Jericho said.
9.
They baptised Gorel to the Drowned God at dawn the following day.
A shallow rock pool, and tiny fish darted here and there and tried to nibble on Gorel’s toes. Gorel did not understand how any of it worked. It made no sense.
The Drowned God was dead.
Yet somehow, his priests still had power.
One of them stood over the pool now, holding a battered old book in his hand. The book was woven of reeds and was meant to be read underwater. The renegade priest was one of Jericho’s men.
He said: “And so it was that though the God had sailed for many weeks in sea Above, he was not deterred, for all that storms battered his way and the very elements, it was said, rebelled against him. For he had many enemies. Then the God came to his Domain and thought it well. “I welcome the Water’, he said, as his ship was torn asunder and he Drowned.
“The God and his Warriors descended to the Down Below.
“And he said, “I must die, for I shall be reborn.”
“And he bestowed upon his Warriors the Black Kiss of the gods, so that they might breathe the air in their new Domain. And so that they would not forget him, nor his Miracles. And as they went into their new Life, so did the God remain, to await His resurrection.”
The priest drew a breath. The assembled Merlangai hung their heads. The priest made the sign of the Drowned God, like looping a noose over a person’s head.
“Do you accept the Drowned God as your Lord and Saviour, so that he may claim you for his own?”
Gorel said, “Do I have a choice?”
The priest said, “We always have a choice.”
Gorel sighed. “I do,” he said, without much enthusiasm.
“Then by the power vested in me, and in the name of the Drowned God, I baptise you Gorel, to be welcomed by the Deeps and be sustained by the Belief in the One True God, amen.”
“Amen,” the assembled congregation said.
The priest waded into the water and knelt over Gorel. He held Gorel’s head and lowered him into the water. As the water closed over him, he fought the urge to panic. The priest leaned down, and his rough lips closed onto Gorel’s. His breath blew into Gorel’s mouth, into his lungs, and Gorel felt, for the first time in weeks, the shocking, exhilarating touch of the Black Kiss. His whole body felt alive then, aflame with need, greedy for pure unadulterated faith. His body shuddered. The priest pushed him down, deeper into the pool. He couldn’t breathe. The priest’s lips left Gorel’s. He tried to fight, but it was no use. The priest pushed him down.
Gorel drowned.
He opened his mouth. He took a last, desperate breath of air. Expected water to come flowing in, to choke him, to end his life.
Instead he breathed warm, clean air. Gorel opened his eyes. Through the shallow pool he could see the distorted reflections of the men standing above, watching him. He could see the sun rising on the horizon and the movement of leaves on the trees. He breathed out, and in again. Every time he did, bubbles rose up to the surface.
The pries
t’s grip slackened, and he let go of Gorel.
Gorel rose back to the surface.
He took a shuddering breath of air.
“You are Reborn!” the priest said.
Everyone clapped, politely.
“What the fuck?” Gorel said.
“It’s a temporary measure,” Jericho said, “but it will do.”
They’d gone over it the previous night, but Gorel hadn’t really known what to expect. He was not a Merlangai, did not have gills, and for all their belief, they were not human; they were creatures who had adapted to living underwater.
Yet the ceremony had worked. He could breathe under the sea.
The Black Kiss coursed through him, so powerful that he nearly swooned. He had tried so hard to break free of his addiction, this time around. But the priest had just hit him with enough of the stuff that he knew he could not get off it again. Not anytime soon.
“Come on,” Jericho said. “It’s time to dive.”
Gorel rose from the pool and followed the Merlangai to the shore. He was handed a slim pack, weapons, a harpoon. The air tasted strange.
He followed them into the sea, and the water closed over his head. He took a breath, and he didn’t drown.
“How temporary?” he said. The words came out in bubbles. He followed the Merlangai down, down, beyond the breakers, where the island fell down into a smooth rockface with no bottom in sight. Gorel stared into the Deeps.
“Long enough,” Jericho said, complacently.
He dove down, and his men followed him, moving as quickly as fish. Gorel followed more slowly.
“Here,” someone said. They handed Gorel a rope. He held on to it for dear life and half-swam, was half-pulled.
Down and down and down.
10.
The light slowly faded. Gorel, traversing the cliff face of the mountain, could no longer tell which way was up, which way was down. The sun disappeared. He was aware of things moving in the Down Below. Presences, some small, some large, of shadows fleeting at the edge of vision. For a long time he couldn’t see.
Then—some function of the baptism, the Black Kiss that was within him—his eyes began to adjust. Schools of fish, darting with rapid, precise movements. Two giant octopi, mating in a silent frenzy. A shiver of sharks passed the divers but did not attack.
They were climbing down a mountain. Down and down and down.
And Gorel thought. His mind drifted. He thought of the Yug-Nossah, for instance. Who’d sent the turtles? The defences on the island he could understand. That maze of the Mogg was old, had nearly done its job and held them there but for his blood.
And why was that? he thought. And why did the Yug-Nossah seem like something sent in haste, and newly armed at that...
The priests?
Something felt wrong, and he worried at it.
This was meant to be just a simple job, standard salvage and retrieval.
A ship of Goliris, he thought. Something real, something concrete at last. Something to point him on the right way home.
How long ago? The empire had been ancient long before Gorel was born. And he, last of his line. His parents murdered, and Gorel flung across the World... he’d never found a trace of it.
Until now.
Down below, a bright explosion. He flinched. The rope tugged at his hands, down, down. Flames shot up, lit the underwater vista.
“Volcanic eruption!” someone shouted up. The words rose up in tiny bubbles, passed him by. It was a long way to the surface.
In the eerie glow of the explosion he could see the bottom of the sea, at last.
He almost laughed. No wonder there had been hardly any defences.
There was no need.
The bottom of the sea was full of ships.
They stretched all the way from the mountain to the horizon, in all directions. Clippers and galleons, longships and dhows, dreadnaughts and junks and schooners and brigs. Fish swam amongst the dead ships, octopi and sharks made their living in their hulls and circled in and out of the portholes. The volcanic illumination appeared on the horizon like a false dawn. No wonder there was no protection, Gorel thought. How would you ever find just one thing, in a graveyard full of them?
He let go of the rope. Swam down. The men assembled on the sandy surface. A semi-circle. Grim-faced. Hands on knives. Gorel landed with a soft bump.
“What is this, Jericho?” he said.
“I... don’t know.”
“What is this!”
Jericho brought out the map. Gorel snatched it from his hand. Stared at it. It was useless, it was worse than useless.
It was...
Shit.
There was that niggling feeling again, that voice in the back of his head. Trying to warn him.
This was a trap.
“Shit!”
His knife hand rose. Jericho shouted, “Gorel, it wasn’t me!”
“Then w—”
He turned. He wondered if his guns would work in water. He rather doubted it. They were strapped to his back in a waterproof pouch. He only had his knife. He and Jericho stood, back to back, together.
Jericho’s men surrounded them.
No, Gorel thought. Realised. They were never Jericho’s men.
The men held guns. They pointed them at Gorel and Jericho. Gorel had seen this sort of gun before. The Drowned God’s cannon. They fired ghosts.
He said, “Who are you?”
The priest who had baptised him took a step. “My name is Father Enoch. I am a servant of the Drowned God’s.”
“Who hired you?”
“No one hired us, Gorel of Goliris. We work for the God.”
“Your god is dead!”
The priest’s lips curled into a smile. “Until such time as otherwise,” he said.
And why did Gorel not like the sound of that?
“You’re no true priests!” Jericho said.
Enoch shrugged. “We are a new church, if you will.”
“You mean you’re renegades.”
“We seek only the Truth!”
“You hired Jericho to break into that old man’s home,” Gorel said. “And find the map. You knew where it would lead him. And knew that he would come to me. Why me, priest?”
“We can take you to the ship,” Father Enoch said. Side-stepping the question.
“It’s real?”
“The legend tells it is.”
“What’s in it?”
The priest shrugged.
“Something valuable,” Jericho said. His words bubbled out angrily. “You’re just cheap crooks.”
“Takes one to know one,” Father Enoch said, and his men laughed. “Besides, we don’t need you, Jericho Moon. Only your one-time partner.”
“Wait wait wait, hold on...”
Jericho made a swim for it. He jumped and twirled, and Gorel saw again his old comrade-in-arms, the one he’d fought beside in Mosina and elsewhere. Together they’d survived the sands of Meskatel and the horror that was found there...
The guns fired. Ghosts emerged. The souls of drowned sailors, suffocated, angry, and insane. Jericho swam; in his natural environment he moved as fast as a marlin. He vanished into the graveyard of boats. The ghosts chased him, howling insanity in a multiplicity of tongues.
The priest re-cocked the gun. Smiled at Gorel. “And you?” he said. “You want to try it, too?”
Gorel stared into the priest’s dark eyes. “No,” he said. “I think I’m good.”
“Then come.”
It wasn’t as though he could get away. Gorel could barely swim, and they had guns. He didn’t need to be chased by any more ghosts. He had more than enough of his own.
The Merlangai began to move with purpose, pushing him with them. What did you call a group of them? he wondered. A murder of Merlangai. A litany. A swarm. It didn’t matter.
They swam over the wrecked ships. What did you call so many ships. A graveyard. The priest led them. The Merlangai moved fast, with confidence. They di
dn’t expect any trouble, not now. Gorel thought of Jericho. Hoped he would die quickly. He wondered how many other corpses littered this ocean floor.
Thought of his ghosts.
11.
That day on the docks with his mother—the was air warm, Gorel’s hands were greasy from the fried squid and salt on his fingers—the workers studiously ignored the presence of the royals in their midst. Later, in his journeys round the World, Gorel would visit many principalities and kingdoms. Some were tiny, some were vast. But their rulers were different; had set themselves above their people in a way the royals of Goliris had not. In some way that Gorel, as a child, could not articulate and didn’t understand, the royals of Goliris were of Goliris, or were Goliris, like the rich dark soil and the deep dark forests and the awful dark secrets buried deep underneath the royal palace. As a child, Gorel could go anywhere. As the queen, his mother could be seen on her throne or in a roadside shebeen, consulting with the weapon-makers in the royal labs or discussing ancient spells with the librarians—or eating fried giant squid on the docks.
That day he saw a new ship come in, and he and his mother stopped and watched as it was being offloaded. He saw all manner of creatures and things in cages, hauled off the ship onto the docks. Some were human and many more were not. Remembering it now, he could not say that he had come across any of them again in his later travels across the World. But the World was large, and Goliris ruled across it.
Many of the caged creatures spoke and pleaded and screeched, without attention, and Gorel had watched them, fascinated; their attempts at invocations, their curious incantations, and he said, “What are these things?”
“Priests,” his mother said.
“What are priests?” Gorel said.
“People who worship gods.”
“Do we have gods?” Gorel asked.
His mother smiled at him, tolerantly, and pointed at the cages, and said, “We do now.”
“What is it?” Gorel asked now. “What is it you expect to find? What is it you expect to accomplish?”
“Answer an old riddle,” the priest, Enoch, said. “Satisfy an unsatisfied curiosity.”
Gorel whispered, “The Drowned God.” He began to laugh. His laughter bubbled up overhead. Eventually, it would reach the surface.
Lavie Tidhar - [BCS314 S02] Page 3