by Alex Pheby
‘Where does it lead?’ Nathan said.
‘You’ll find out.’
The tunnel was barely wide enough for one of them to pass and ran towards a jagged spot of light in the distance. Beneath their feet were copper rails engraved with sigils with struts between them like the tracks laid down in a mine for carts to run on. As they progressed towards the light, what had previously been just an opposite to the darkness was now blue-coloured and textured, shimmering and eerily hued. It moved, too, like oil on the surface of water, curving and flickering and never resting.
Nathan stopped. ‘I’m not going any further until you answer me. What’s at the end of this?’
Dashini turned and faced him. She frowned, and made a long, appraising examination of him which only made her frown deeper. ‘Can’t you guess? Did your father never speak to you about his work? Your mother?’
Nathan shook his head. ‘No one tells me anything.’
Dashini smiled, sadly. ‘With me it’s the reverse. My mother would tell me everything. Even if I didn’t want to hear it.’ She sighed and put her hand on Nathan’s shoulder. ‘At the end of this passage is God’s corpse. Your father found heaven, and drew God out from it. He summoned him like I summoned Rekka. Your mother trapped him on a rack. They claimed him, bled power from him, used it to build Waterblack. Then, accidentally, they killed him. How? No-one knows. But because of that, we find ourselves in the situation we find ourselves in.’
Now it was Nathan who frowned. ‘I don’t believe it.’ How could a child who had seen the things Nathan had seen believe something like that? His father, doubled over and choking on a worm. His mother, blacking her eyes. The slums, damp and joyless. ‘Not them.’
Dashini smiled. ‘Why? Because you think they’re weak? They’re not weak. They have the strength to suffer, to sacrifice.’ She seemed to be warming to her subject, and she put the knife on the ground, sat cross-legged in front of it, and gestured for Nathan to do the same. ‘Take that knife,’ she said, ‘and stab me through the heart with it.’
Nathan pulled back, but she grabbed his wrist. ‘Take the knife.’
When he wouldn’t, she put it in the palm of his hand. He wanted to drop it, but she held his hand closed on the pommel. She was stronger than he was, and the knife vibrated against the bones of his fingers, sensing something in him.
‘I want you to kill me, Nathan. Now.’
‘No,’ he said.
Dashini made him put the knife point below her breast bone. ‘Why not? You killed my mother when she asked you, right?’
Tears came at the corners of Nathan’s eyes, and he shook his head. ‘That was the book. It made me do it.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘So let it make you kill me.’
Nathan didn’t understand what was happening, but Dashini pulled the knife point closer, until it pierced the fabric of her dress.
‘When you killed my mother, you killed her because she wanted you to. She wanted her power to pass to me, because there are things I can do that she never could. She was the sacrifice that creates me. Your father was the sacrifice that created you. Can you kill me?’
Nathan concentrated, searched for the Spark, but the locket prevented it. The book prevented it. The Manse prevented it. If he had found it he wouldn’t have killed her, he would have used it to take his hand from the knife.
Dashini was grimacing now, the point of the knife in her skin. She was pulling his hand towards her, pulling the knife into her, hard enough so that he wasn’t sure he could resist. If he pushed, the knife would be in her heart in a moment.
Would he push? Should he push?
But then Dashini let him go and he dropped the knife to the floor. It lay between them, but they were looking at each other.
‘Killing me is something you don’t want to do. But what if you needed me dead? Sometimes power is a thing you have to take, and sometimes it’s a thing you have to pass on to others. Either way, it’s difficult to know what to do. You may come to regret not taking this opportunity. Or you may not. How can you tell? Your father has passed his power to you for reasons you don’t know, and now you must decide what to do with it.’
Dashini stood up, brushed herself off and turned. ‘One thing that is always true, regardless of anything else: if our power is not enough, we can use God-Flesh to help us.’ She pointed down the corridor. ‘We only need to find God’s corpse and we can do anything. The Master hid it down here and, since your father wouldn’t reclaim it, here it remains. The Living Mud, the dead-life, the flukes, they are all side effects of its power. It’s overkill, no doubt, and too much for either of us to handle, but it’s more than enough to get us out of here. Anyway, enough chat. We’ve got company.’
At the end of the tunnel, crouched and advancing, were two silhouettes.
LXXXV
The gill-men moved down the tunnel, slender, glossy as eels, naked and glistening. Nathan stepped back, but too late – the foremost one caught his scent, the rents in his face raised and twitched, the eye slits closed, the neck strained and stretched. The other came closer, long fingers reaching over the front one’s back, tracing the lumps of his spine almost affectionately, leaning in and whispering.
The tunnel echoed, reflecting the tiniest sound.
‘He’ll fight us.’
‘Will he?’
‘Won’t he?’
‘He will.’
Nathan stopped; his stomach clenched.
‘The Master wants him.’
‘The Master can have him.’
‘He’ll kill us first.’
‘Will he?’
‘Won’t he?’
‘So what? If the Master wants it, we do it.’
‘Little filth!’
They were nothing like humans now, to look at, these gill-men – fish-like and black, featureless and smooth – but as they moved there was still something of the boys they had been in the way they related, in the soft touches they exchanged: brotherly, reassuring.
Nathan walked slowly towards them down the tunnel and Dashini came too. ‘Don’t let them get too close – not with God-Flesh so nearby. I can’t guarantee anything.’
Nathan ignored her. ‘Do you remember me?’ he said to the gill-men.
The gill-men did not stop. The front one raised his hand and on the palm was drawn a sigil or an icon, glowing in the near dark with a subtle light.
‘Do you remember me? I’m Nathan Treeves… from the slums.’
‘Its talk hurts.’
‘Make it stop. Its stench is sour.’
‘Do you remember me?’
‘He’ll stop if I can choke him. My fingers will stopper the words in his throat.’
‘He’ll stop.’
‘Will he?’
‘Won’t he?’
‘Let’s see.’
They rushed him, hands grasping and, instinctively, Nathan fell back, tripping over Dashini, who was coming forwards, and they were on him.
‘Shut his neck!’
‘Stop the air!’
Dashini scrabbled free in the absence of anyone concentrating on her and got to her knees.
‘Get back, Nathan. I can’t use the fire without burning you.’
‘Leave them alone!’ Nathan cried. He pried at their hands with his fingers. Their skin was slick, but the bones beneath them were hard and strong and their fingers so long that they met behind his neck and there was nothing to breathe.
‘Will he die?’
‘He will! He will!’
‘Let me kill them. I have a spell.’
He couldn’t. Beneath the skin, behind the thick-brined tang of their sweat, at the margins of their dull black irises, were the cheeks and chins of the boys he’d shared the carriage with, the juvenile sweetness of their odours, the naivety of their gazes even if they were street scum. Their fingers around his throat tightened and there was no doubting their intent – they would have him dead – but this was the Master’s work. As their flesh was his, so wer
e their minds, and these boys only wanted what the Master wanted. His vision filled with blackness, with blood, the sigil burning into his neck, and even the physical struggle became hard to maintain.
‘Let me do it, Nathan.’ She was above him, staring, but he couldn’t let her do what she asked: wouldn’t. He tried to let her know, to apologise, but there was no movement he could make that would communicate it.
‘Enough!’
She laid her hands on them and they stiffened. She spoke meaningless words and the gill-men fell into pieces, living cockroaches that scattered into cracks in the walls, pressed themselves down, paralysed by fear.
Nathan got to his feet and pushed past Dashini, made his way into the chamber at the end of the tunnel. There was no time to delay, no time to wait. He understood now: they would come, all of them, the boys, the copper slaves like him, street scum, slum filth. The longer he stayed the worse it would be, waves of them would be sacrificed against him, drawn from the vats like they had been drawn to Rekka. His vengeance would be acted out on the blameless, never on the prime mover, never to any effect, only loss.
LXXXVI
Nathan stopped when he reached the light; the ground beneath his feet was gone. When Dashini put her hand on his shoulder he felt like he might topple over, fall. The corridor opened into a sphere cut from the world: it was so huge he could not see the boundary of it, except by its colour, which was a nauseating, corrupt blue-orange-grey, like a putrid and mouldering piece of fruit. The sphere extended in every direction, containing nothing but empty space. Nathan knelt through a vertiginous anxiety which clutched his chest and when his hands touched the edge nearest him, he pulled it away. Beneath his fingers had been something horrible, something repulsive – like the fluke he had turned into a rat in the slums – and by reflex he had blanched from it. Everywhere there were half-formed organs – eyes, teeth, livers, lungs, veins – and these shifted and changed, developed into other things – hearts, fingernails, bile ducts, bowels. Nothing remained what it was for more than a moment, each thing evolved into something else, and when that did not happen it changed instead into a ghost of itself, giving off the strange sick light that filled the sphere, and boiled away.
‘It is like the Living Mud,’ Dashini whispered, almost awestruck. ‘God’s corpse is animating the material of the wall. Look!’ She pointed off to nowhere. ‘There. In the far distance. Do you see it?’
At first Nathan saw nothing, but as his eyes adjusted to the light, as he turned his attention away from the primeval chaos that surrounded them on all sides, there was a speck of blackness, a pinprick. ‘Is that him?’ Nathan said.
Dashini nodded. ‘Give me something. Anything.’
Nathan didn’t understand what she meant, but then her hands were in his pockets. She pulled out his handkerchief. ‘Perfect,’ she said.
She held it up, reaching into the sphere, moving it around. ‘It’s as I thought. Watch.’
She moved her hand from left to right, up and down, holding the handkerchief by one corner, and even Nathan could see it. Regardless of where she held it, it pointed away from the centre, away from the speck, rippling as if it was being blown. ‘The corpse is repelling everything. It’s repelling this handkerchief, it’s repelling the wall, and it will repel us.’
Dashini returned the handkerchief. ‘We’re going to need to get to the corpse. How?’
Nathan already knew. The copper rail at their feet was not a cart track at all. He stepped to one side of it, gestured to Dashini to do the same, and then pulled one of the struts between the rails. It came easily, jutting out into the space inside the sphere. The more he pulled the further it extended, never seeming to lessen or run out. ‘I think this is a ladder,’ Nathan said, and the moment he spoke the ladder rushed between their fingers and extended of its own accord.
Dashini grabbed at it and it pulled her away into the sphere, lighting her blue.
Nathan, suddenly feeling her absence, grabbed it too.
The ladder extended endlessly, it seemed. For an hour at least the two held tight, taken further and further into the nothingness, moving silently as if through a vacuum. Nathan was one side, Dashini the other, and they ascended face to face the whole way.
Every inch of the metal was engraved with runes – Dashini said that it was Crusader magic from the Assembly, but Nathan didn’t know what that was – and in places it was thickened with solder.
‘The sphere must be expanding,’ she said, her voice oddly resonating in the absence of any other sound. ‘The Master’s made the ladder longer over the years. You know what that means?’
Nathan shook his head.
‘It’s encroaching into the foundations of Mordew. If this chamber is anything like as big as it seems,’ Dashini went on, ‘the Master’s in trouble. Mordew isn’t the great city he makes out: it’s built on an eggshell, waiting to crack. One leak in the Sea Wall and the water will bring it all collapsing.’ Dashini smiled, took Nathan’s hand in hers. ‘Let’s get on with it.’
Eventually the ladder stopped and they climbed what rungs remained.
At the centre of the sphere there floated the corpse of God.
It was just a body. He was naked, crooked, limbs bent against themselves, flesh flattened as if God had melted onto a surface that was no longer there. He was brown like bog leather.
He had once been a man, or close to it: perhaps larger, perhaps broader, but the same type of thing. He had no features, or they had been removed – eyes, ears, nose, mouth – and instead skin covered the bones entirely, if bones were beneath.
Here, beside God, the force that repelled them subsided and they felt, at last, that they could rest.
‘This isn’t God. It can’t be,’ Nathan said. He reached out, tentatively, but found he couldn’t touch him.
Dashini put her hand up to the corpse’s legs, grabbed an ankle, pulled, and when it didn’t move, she hoisted herself up until she sat across his waist, kicking her legs.
Nathan stayed on the ladder. ‘It’s nothing. Just a dead man.’
Dashini smiled. ‘You underestimate it. And yourself. He was responsible for everything – the world and everything in it.’
‘The stars?’
‘That was his belief. And is it so unlikely? The Master created Mordew. Your father created Waterblack. My mother created Malarkoi.’
‘But…’
‘But what? What should God look like?’ She leaned over, held the Nathan Knife up to its face. ‘What do you think is under the skin?’ She put the knife to its eye socket, to the place where that thing would have been.
‘Don’t!’ Nathan cried.
Dashini stopped. ‘He’s dead; he won’t feel it.’ Despite her words she hesitated, the knife resting, finding resistance in her arm. Then she bit her lip and the knife slipped in. ‘My mother was of the opinion that a god must have eyes.’ She angled the blade, digging beneath the flesh. ‘It seems she was right.’
Onto God’s cheek popped a shiny ball, like a small onion.
Nathan climbed until his feet were on the last rung of the ladder. Even though it was disgusting, this corpse, its eye, the leaking of lymph onto its skin, he touched it anyway, slid the eye back up its cheek to the new dark mouth the knife had created. He forced it back in.
Dashini let him, but when it was done, she slit it again on the other side.
‘We can’t leave without something. God-Flesh vs God-Flesh, and he trumps your father.’
Nathan put his finger to the new wound – and this time it reacted to his touch, flesh scarring over, meshing, and as it did the solidity ebbed from Nathan’s skin, making him vaguer, less opaque, until the wound was almost healed.
Dashini grabbed his hand. ‘No. You mustn’t. It’s not time.’ She pushed him away, so he almost fell from the ladder, but she grabbed his wrist, held him tight. They looked at his hands, through the skin, to his ligaments.
‘Sorry.’ She eyed him warily, as if he might do something stupid. ‘We
’ve got to leave. We can take the eye; it’ll let us get out. Let’s go. Now. Back the way we came. We need to find a way out to the docks. Get out of this place before the Master comes back.’
LXXXVII
The worms in his father’s lungs, the worm on his father’s cheek, the worms in their thousands writhing in the bowl beside the bed, were tiny things. Inside Nathan’s father they caused damage to his organs, burrowing into the soft tissues, eating through what they could find, until he was killed by them. Nathan was close then, in those times when they both slept in the same shack, and he dreamed of these worms in his sleep.
But which came first, the worms or the dreams?
Nathan had believed that he dreamt of those parasites because they preoccupied his thoughts, since they persecuted his father, and so they came to him in nightmares. But what if it was Nathan’s dreams of worms – the most basic of things which till the earth and consume the dead – which brought them forth into the world? What if he had made these creatures, like he had made the limb-baby, from his Spark and the proximity of the corpse of God beneath the soil of Mordew? What if his father had died of a disease that Nathan caused in him? Because now, having claimed God’s eye and left the sphere with it, huge lungworms, six inches long, dropped from where he held God-Flesh, falling and thrashing blindly on the ground as he walked.
Dashini went ahead, carving a path through gill-men with her knife, and Nathan could feel the Itch building, the desire to Scratch returning, and when he was needed he burned what Dashini had stabbed, suggested directions, but these worms were always in the corner of his eye.
The Manse was a maze, filled with danger, but with the Master absent, the gill-men distracted and Dashini revelling in her freedom, Nathan barely noticed anything but the thrill of God’s eye in his palm and the dread of the worms slapping the ground behind him.
Down a flight of stairs, past a portrait of the Master as a young man, there was a rectangle of light so bright that their eyes watered at it and they had to wait until they could see again.