“Look.”
I followed Freddy’s pointed finger back toward the land and down the walkway, and saw a gargantuan Ferris wheel looming over all. Gondolas dangled from both the outer rim and an inner loop, silhouetted by the city’s glow. The contrast between the sea and this exuberant human construction reminded me strangely of San Francisco, where mountains pressed against ocean so that you could not, in the liminal space beside the waves, forget the immensity of either.
“There was a lot more here when I was a kid,” said Frances. “The amusement park is dying; in a few years they’ll knock it down and put up more houses like Levittown. That’s what people want now.”
“Not me,” said Freddy.
“They’re doing the same thing in Massachusetts,” I said. “We’re trying to buy up the Innsmouth land before they build over it, but…” Frances was right. In the shadow of the Ferris wheel I could see a couple of boarded-up bathhouses, and part of the walkway had either collapsed or was under desultory repair.
We descended to the beach.
At the base of the stairs I took off my shoes. Broken glass glinted among the pylons, but I needed the familiar sensation. Night-cooled sand slipped around my calluses. The susurrus of waves whispered beyond, achingly like home. Yet unfamiliarity shook me. It was the absence of dunes, or the inescapable city lights, or the alien colossi stretching behind. It was glass and crumpled paper. It was the sand itself subtly shaped by thousands of footprints, a change I could not describe save that daylight visitors had left some mark on the normally imperturbable beach. I flinched at what the elders might think.
Where the sand grew damp, I knelt to draw the summoning diagram. But my discomfort, the irrational shame at the land’s encroachment on the ocean, slowed my hand. I also felt strangely shy about showing the Lavernes their first taste of magic. I felt instinctively that they must carry some vestigial understanding of what the thing should look like, enough to find me wanting. Utterly irrational: magic was no more or less natural to men of the water than those of the air, and Freddy’s experience was so far removed from mine that he could hardly make the comparison. Still, I turned to Charlie.
“Would you like to lead today?” I asked him. He gave me a sharp look, but nodded at last.
Audrey tapped my shoulder. “Go wash your face,” she said quietly.
She came with me and lowered herself at the water’s edge, heedless of her dress. The tide was on its way out. Reluctant waves plashed against my knees. I dipped my hands and raised salt water to my lips. Audrey nodded and did the same. The taste cut through my self-indulgence.
The water had a sour bite. All manner of horrors had washed into it from the land above. But the mill run-off in the Miskatonic was worse. The elders would be able to make this last part of the journey with small hazard.
“You all right?” asked Audrey.
I nodded. “I think so.”
“You’re not normally unsure of yourself.”
“I’m not used to this sort of strangeness. I don’t know what to do with it.”
She smiled. “Your instincts are usually pretty good.”
“Not here.” I shook my head. “I know how to deal with my own insignificance—with things that are bigger than me, that see my worst problems as trivial if they see them at all. But every building in this city is a testament to human ambition. It feels like it’ll go on forever and like it’s crumbling around me all at once.”
She started to say something, but instead pressed wet fingers to my forehead. “New York is beautiful, but it lies. Just keep going like you usually do, and you’ll be okay.”
We returned to the others. Charlie was tracing the symbols with a steady hand. He drew the shape to call people of the water, and the inner glyph that would hold our blood and name us callers rather than called. He used the variation we’d learned from Trumbull’s guest, the one that “invites but does not flatter.” Whatever insecurities made me urge him to lead, I was glad to see him take the ritual on. It was a little foolish to take pride in his accomplishments when we’d learned so much in tandem—but he was still my student.
Freddy looked over his shoulder with curiosity, murmuring questions. This might be very different from the form used by the Outer Ones, but it wasn’t his first taste of magic. But Frances’s pupils rippled wide. Her lips parted. Would I soon have another student? It didn’t seem right for me to take on so many. But of course there was no one else to do it.
My grandfather, on land, had spoken of the gods to sailors wherever he went, even men of the air. He’d sworn, rumor claimed, never to fear speaking truth. But he’d had no cause to spread our sacred arts beyond Innsmouth. Nor was I a wild-haired proselytizer, with a captain’s lash to keep those who disliked my speech at bay.
To rebuild Innsmouth, I’d have to do both: teach about the gods, and keep teaching magic. The tasks daunted me. At some point, I could not afford to multiply the intimacy I shared with my confluence. Looking at Freddy and Frances, I felt again the premonition of mourning.
Ïa, Cthulhu, lord of the patient depths, let me take on this pain only when it’s time. Let it wait, I beg you.
Charlie interrupted my reverie with a proffered blade. I pricked my finger and bled into the sand. I felt the summoner’s diagram stir, a tiny sacrament of control.
At twelve, I learned that we honored the gods with such acts of anomalous order. Through ritual, we reclaimed a few precious moments from entropy. I had loved the flicker of candlelight, the taste of salt water, the moment of proud courage when the blood welled against my skin. But I had not understood.
With the call complete, there was nothing left to do but wait. Those familiar with the rite leaned back on the sand, or tucked up their knees to stare at the waves. Frances and Freddy followed suit.
“What are they like?” Frances asked me. “What will they want from us?”
That second seemed the real question. “The same things we do. Meeting you will be enough for now.”
“Aphra’s elders can be startling, the first time,” said Charlie. “And not just the way they look. They don’t hide what they’re thinking.”
“After you’ve been around that long,” said Audrey, “why would you?”
“The Outer Ones are the same way.” Freddy spoke quietly to his knees.
I chewed my lip. “Maybe they’re honest with you. I still don’t understand what they want.” And it worries me.
He ducked his head, and said nothing.
“That,” I continued, “the elders will ask for certain.”
He sighed. Frances held very still, as if any movement might startle him off.
“They told you that they’re not sure what’s next for humanity. Whether the next war will be the last. And you have to understand that they care. Not just about humans, but about—” He laced his fingers, pulled them apart, looked at them as if some cryptic secret lay between. “They’re connected with everyone they’ve ever met, every place they’ve ever been. They outlive most of those people and places, but they care what happens to all of them. So the question of whether humans are going to survive or not, and what they should do about it, matters to them. A lot.”
Some unspoken implication hung on his words, and I still didn’t understand. Frances said: “You mean they argue about us, the same way the papers argue about how to handle Russia and Germany.”
He sat back on his heels. For the first time all night, he looked directly at his mother. “Yeah. It’s more personal for them—everything is. The New York mine has people on all sides trying to prove their case. It gets pretty tense.”
“What does Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt think?” I asked.
He hunched his shoulders. “Hard to explain. You should ask it yourself.”
That brought up a more trivial question, but one that mattered if I intended to ask Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt such questions civilly. “Do they really like to be called ‘it’? I can’t tell their genders, if they have them.”
Freddy rela
xed visibly at the change of subject. “I know that sounds weird, but they seem to like it, and it’s how they talk about each other. Their genders are complicated, and I think they change sometimes. There are a couple of people at the mine who just use ‘he’ or ‘she’ for everyone, and Rudolph—he’s one of our travel-mates who used to teach literature—says ‘they’ was good enough for Shakespeare. But Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt treats that like … like the dirty jokes you think are really funny when you’re twelve?” He looked at me expectantly, and I nodded vague understanding. I tried to recall what my friends and I had joked about during the brief part of my twelfth year when laughter was possible. Clever wordplay about our study texts, mostly, or sometimes not-so-clever, and rude stories about men of the air. The memory of those casual insults, and of friends who might have grown into more, brought doubled pain.
I let the conversation trail. I tried to meditate, seeking calm against the myriad uncertainties raised by my newfound cousins. On Innsmouth’s beach, this would be easy. The hiss of incoming waves, the chirp of peepers in the bogs to the north, would make comfort of near-silence. Far from any city lights, clouds would smear the moonlight into a diorama of shadows. They’d give the sky a depth that human eyes could understand, where the far stars and the faint glow of the galactic disk could not. The Milky Way, men of the air said, trivializing it even more than the R’lyehn V’hlchaja P’tych—the stream of night, as if the vast spread of stars were merely a tributary of the Miskatonic.
In Innsmouth, I could stare upward and imagine the lives and deaths, civilizations blooming and fading, aeon-forgotten ruins and new-evolved limbs pulling through muck, which must exist in endless profusion throughout my field of vision. My harshest memories and newest fears, my people’s desire for survival, humanity’s ever-growing ability to threaten its own ambitions, would lie small against that backdrop. But now, starlight obfuscated, I found my gaze drawn to the Ferris wheel. I imagined how it would look in a few years or decades: a rusting edifice with spurs askew. Later still the sea would rise, eroding this coastline, and wash away these fragile structures. New York, for all its height and humanity, was a breath from the ocean, and would pass in a geological instant.
I knew Grandfather had argued hard, in Y’ha-nthlei, for Innsmouth’s rebuilding. But to the watching elders, swords and muskets had spawned the atomic bomb in an eyeblink. They tasted the poisons washing into the Atlantic with every storm, and many thought humanity’s extinction must come soon. In the deep crevasses sheltering R’lyeh, our remnant of the species could survive the sterilization of continents. The outposts and spawning ground, if left in place, would not be so fortunate.
Grandfather thought we should breed, and make new life and bring in new ideas, as long as we could. Not all agreed. On bad nights, I doubted it myself. I wanted children to come after me and join me in the water—and feared children who’d inherit too much air from a mistblooded father, and sicken and age beyond my power to help.
Frances gasped, a single sharp indrawn breath. Freddy clambered to his feet and ducked his head, polite but wide-eyed. I turned from the amusement park in all its imagined ruin, and knelt to greet the elders.
CHAPTER 9
Tonight only three elders joined us, though they must have been accompanied south by an entourage carting goods and tending the nurse sharks. Frances, I suspected, would see only the elders’ commonalities. Outsiders sometimes described them as hybrids of man and fish, or frog, or lizard. They were a head taller than any ordinary landsman, armored in slick scales that iridesced in the night’s diffuse glow. Thick pads of muscle, webs spanning fingers and long toes, ears sunk into skulls, all told how perfectly they adapted the human form to the ocean’s demands. Sharp talons and teeth told how dangerous those demands could become. And their scent, of oil and seaweed and the sea’s own mix of salt and subtler minerals, told of home.
To me, their distinctions burned more brightly. Khur S’vlk, eldest by far, was nearly eight feet tall, her frame eel-slender by the standards of the depths. She moved with swift jerks or held sculpture-still, a hunter of ideas with patience honed by millennia. I’d only met her a couple of months ago, when she came up to study with Trumbull. It hadn’t taken long to see that she’d earned the respect due her age and title.
Captain Obed Yringl’phtagn Marsh, my grandfather. The emerald and amethyst mottling of his scales was as familiar as my own raw skin.
Chulzh’th, Archpriest Ngalthr’s acolyte, was less than a century old, and not yet at her full growth. But her midnight scales, shading to deep purple over palms and breast, drew the eye, and her bearing proclaimed the confidence of one who would someday be an archpriest in her own right. She put her hand to my forehead in a brief benediction. Her cool touch cleared my fog of confusion and fatigue.
“Your search has borne fruit,” she said.
“More than we planned. I’ll introduce you, but then there’s danger elsewhere that we need advice on.”
Grandfather twitched—he’d marked his grandson’s absence immediately. And he’d none of his warriors with him, and went unarmed as an elder could be. An ill-considered attempt to protect me had cost him his spear, and though I loved him I wasn’t sorry for that. There were other aspects of his penitence, I knew, that weren’t discussed out of the water. Dark eyes scanned the amusement park and the city beyond.
“I don’t expect the danger to find us here,” I assured him. “Just … there have been complications. Caleb and Deedee are fine, but—They’re elsewhere tonight.”
“You’ll explain that, of course,” said Grandfather. But he relaxed from his defensive stance.
His attention released from the alien skyline, I introduced our newcomers, and told the elders what little I knew of their history. Freddy, unafraid, went down on one knee before them.
“I’m honored to meet you,” he said.
Chulzh’th touched his forehead, frowned, and licked her fingers thoughtfully. “We welcome you back among your own.”
Frances, at last, joined us. She put her hands on Freddy’s shoulders, bowed her head. Her arms shook.
Chulzh’th started to reach out, then hesitated. “You need not fear us. We are your kin.”
I spared Frances the burden of explaining. “Their air-born ancestors fled Innsmouth, and told stories of being chased down by elders. We haven’t always treated such people well.”
“I see from how you stand,” said Grandfather to her, “that you would do anything to protect your child.”
She straightened, and I saw a flash of the dignity I expected from women of the water.
“So would we,” he continued. “That is what your ancestor feared, and I hope you will not hold it against us. You are both our children.”
Some of the steel drained from her shoulders, but she asked, “And how do you plan to protect us? Why would we want your protection?”
Chulzh’th sat down in the sand beside us. Frances blinked and eased herself down as well. Freddy settled beside them, gaze lingering on his mother. Chulzh’th said: “Whether you want it is for you to say. But we have strength, and millennia of stored wisdom, and the words to the stories that flow in your blood. And gold, which is a pedestrian sort of protection but one that has always mattered a great deal on land.”
S’vlk had remained still throughout this discussion, eyes distant. Trumbull had drawn near, but hadn’t interrupted her reverie. Now the older scholar snapped into focus. “Tell us swiftly of this danger.”
I rocked back on my heels, pinned by her attention. “There are Outer Ones in the city. They claim to be friendly, but I don’t understand what they’re doing. Freddy has been living with them.”
“Ah,” said Chulzh’th. She sniffed her fingers where they’d touched him.
“That’s what I picked up,” said Grandfather. He sounded relieved, an anomaly resolved. In R’lyehn he added, without rancor, “Void-drunk vagrants. Aphra, there is a story I must tell you later. Trust their words, and never their action
s. I expect your brother isn’t with them, or you’d have said so.”
“No,” I answered in the same tongue. “He hasn’t even met them yet.”
“I can’t understand you,” Freddy said. “but I can guess what you’re talking about. The Outer Ones are good people. I wish you’d stop acting like they’re about to jump you in an alley or something.”
“I met them too,” said Neko. “I don’t have any reason to think they’re better than humans, but they welcomed us as Freddy’s family.”
S’vlk leaned in to take the boy’s scent. “They hide in mountain mists and moonlit nights. They steal children and give nothing back. And they have always claimed some part of this world as their due.”
Trumbull touched her shoulder. “Is that your opinion, or theirs?”
S’vlk blinked up at her. “Both. Though I cannot blame the cone-shaped young for sometimes choosing the underhill, I lost someone in my own youth that I still hold against them. Besides, they are obnoxious in negotiation, and they have little respect for others’ territory.”
“Excuse me,” said Freddy. “I decided to travel with them on purpose. All their companions do. I’m not property to be stolen or bartered.”
“Don’t you realize how easily they can shape minds to their liking?” asked S’vlk. She looked around at the rest of us. “Do you understand what he means by ‘travel’? The meigo flense mind from body with the most delicate tools. The meigo place these minds in metal baskets where they can see and hear and speak, but nothing else. Then the meigo carry those minds far beyond Earth—utterly helpless and utterly dependent. Their victims become accustomed to it. They grow loyal to the creatures who make them helpless, because they recall only being protected while they could do nothing for themselves.” I shuddered; her description seemed to crystallize the fears that had gathered, awaiting form, since I first spoke with Freddy.
Freddy stood. “That’s not—that’s not even—it’s not like that at all! They show us things we could never see if we stuck around safely on Earth! And we’re only helpless if you think talking doesn’t count as being able to do anything. Which, you’re talking to me now, and you seem to think it’ll do something, so don’t treat me like a ninety-seven-pound runt because I spent a week debating philosophy on another planet!”
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