Mother of Slag

by Timandra Whitecastle

  Diaz’s mind reeled. He felt tired, exhausted. He had been dozing in a drug-induced haze only an hour or two ago, and now sobriety hit him in the face with a chill clarity that made the bloodwitch’s touch seem like a warm ray of sunshine. His wet clothes, the drenched coat Bashan had lent him, dragged at him, pulled him toward the ground. But he resisted the pull. He stood tall, though still weak.

  “What do you say, Telen?” Bashan repeated, still grasping Diaz’s shoulder.

  A gulf lay between them.

  Diaz could see it very clearly, as though Bashan’s feet were alight with sparks from running in circles. He could run with him, and indeed he had. Had done so for years. Spinning and spinning. The perpetual motion making them think they were actually getting somewhere. The see-saw of life. The idea that escape was a string of places and events on a long chain until you came back to where you began, and you just had to keep going, keep moving, keep fleeing.

  Exhausting.

  Or he could stop and choose his own direction. Maybe it was time. Although he wasn’t sure where this undefined path might lead him, he had an inkling.

  “I need a boat,” Diaz said finally.

  Chapter 19

  “You can’t be serious,” Bashan said for the umpteenth time in the last three days as Diaz made his way down the narrow stairs from their room, a small bag slung over his good shoulder and his one remaining sword strapped to his side. He had given it a precursory swing in the room, and even that little training made him feel all wrong, as though his body no longer knew how to fight now that his arm and shoulder were gone.

  He had contemplated leaving the sword behind then. It wouldn’t do him much good. However, he ended up taking it along since it was the only thing of true worth he had left.

  He was drenched in sweat already, huffing down the staircase, Bashan behind him. The toxins from his smoking were being expunged, and his sweat had a sickly sweet smell. He stopped at the bottom of the stairs, one hand against the wall, waiting for the black and white spots to stop dancing in front of his vision.

  “Three days ago, I had to literally drag you outside from your drug-addled squalor,” Bashan said, “and now you want to journey to an island everyone keeps telling you is uninhabited.”

  “It’s not, though. The ladies. They came from there.” Diaz pressed on. He had arranged to meet with a fisherman at the docks, and he was already running late. “They’re bloodwitches, ancient priestesses of the Temple of Water.”

  “But that’s ridiculous.” Bashan clicked his tongue impatiently. “Nessa and its priestesses have become a folktale peasants tell each other in order to get themselves through another dismal day. Telen, I brought you to them to show you that you and I, we’re not like them. We don’t pray and hope and wait for some ancient magic to oh please come and heal us, heal the world. Don’t you see it? We’re free now. We can do whatever we want, go wherever we want.”

  “I want to go to Nessa and see the Temple of Neeze,” Diaz said simply, working the strap of the bag to a more comfortable position.

  “To do what?” Bashan overtook him and stood in his way, keeping him inside their inn. A faint drizzle had set in. Puddles formed between the crooked cobblestones outside. The split mermaid in the square before them was black and gray with wetness. “To do what exactly?”

  Diaz shrugged lightly, trying not to show his annoyance. He and Bashan had been having this kind of conversation repeatedly over the last few days, and he was done providing answers he didn’t have. “I don’t know.”

  He pushed on, past Bashan, who was shaking his head.

  “What?” Bashan blustered. “Are you going to hang out with these ladies, smoke a bit more, ask them how they get their skin to glow?”

  “No.” Diaz trudged on down the busy street. After the buzz of the ladies’ visit, the Wards had gone back to their usual business of profiting from the despair of the sick and old. The streets were still quite full with stalls heaped with powders and potions.

  “They already couldn’t heal you,” Bashan snapped. “Nothing you say or offer them is going to make them be able to regrow your arm.”

  Diaz shot Bashan a weary look.

  “Oh. I get it,” Bashan grinned. “You want to climb to the peak of the Needle and meditate all your sorrows away.”

  “I might.” Diaz answered.

  “Really? That’s what you want to do with your life after I saved you? Meditate? You’re not a pilgrim master anymore, so why bother with all the esoteric trimmings?”

  Diaz halted, patience thinning.

  “What do you plan to do, Bashan?”

  “I told you.” Bashan lowered his voice and leaned closer. “Now that you’re obviously feeling better, we go back to the empire, organize a few provisions, and then go directly to the heart of Shinar by desert road to finish off the Seeress. Suranna won’t suspect us. I’ve been in and out of Shinar since I was a teenager. And you? She’d never refuse to see you.”

  This was unfortunately true, he thought, but would not voice it.

  “And then?”

  “And then what?” Bashan asked back.

  Diaz sighed. “Let’s just assume that everything goes exactly as you see it in your head. We march into Shinar, and we overthrow Suranna, just the two of us. Your shiv of rage and helplessness has carved out a piece of whatever justice you think you deserve. So. What do you do then, Bashan? When Shinar is in ruins, and Arrun is still burning, and the Living Blade is still out there on a rampage, and the north is bleeding, and the wights are restless—what do you plan to do?”

  “Well, I—I could … we could—”

  “You don’t know,” Diaz interrupted him. “Because you never look beyond instant gratification. And when you attain it, it never satisfies. So there’s always a next thing. And a next thing.”

  “Just shows that there’s a lot of things we could do together if we set our minds to it.” Hands on his hips, standing in his path once more, Bashan gave Diaz a wide grin.

  “No.” Diaz walked on, nearly at the long piers. At the far end, he could see the little red boat of the fisherman he had persuaded to take him across the sea to the isle. The boat was a welcome sight. He hadn’t gone far but the walking had strained Diaz considerably. He wasn’t yet fully recovered and his knees trembled as though they were about to give way underneath him, but he willed them forward, onto the pier. He’d be able to rest in the boat.

  “So you’re not curious at all?” Bashan jogged up once more, a final attempt to sway him from his chosen course.

  Diaz gave him a sidelong glance.

  “What she’s up to?” Bashan continued.

  “No. Her evil has been purged from me in a most painful way. I’m glad to be rid of her curse and hope to never have to see her again. I have no vested interest in what she might be scheming,” Diaz lied as nonchalantly as he dared. Another furtive look at Bashan showed that Bashan did not believe a word.

  “Oh good for you. But I wasn’t talking about Suranna. I meant thingy, the wench.” Bashan’s finger tapped his chin demonstratively. “Whatshername—the Blade.”

  Pain flared in Diaz’s mutilated shoulder, an ache threading through his body. He grit his teeth and replied nothing.

  “It’s just … I always had the feeling that there was something between the two of you. A deep connection, maybe, between master and student. No?”

  More nothing.

  “I understand, though, now she’s the Blade and you’re, well, broken, it would seem as if she were the master. The tables have been turned. You’re not her equal, and never will be.”

  “What is your problem, Bashan?” Diaz spun around. “Nora has become the Blade now. She took it from you, and you said good riddance because it was eating you from within. You know its power far better than I do. And Nora has been consumed by it. She’s—” He stopped himself before saying it, having to hear himself admit it, but Bashan was not as merciful.

  “Dead?” he suggested.

&
nbsp; “Out of control,” Diaz amended.

  “Well, she kinda was out of control even before she stole the Blade from me,” Bashan argued. “Now she’s just tearing down the empire that was built over centuries, and there’s no one out there who can stop her. Except…”

  He pointed at Diaz and then at himself, raising his eyebrows expectantly.

  “There ye are, sir,” the fisherman hailed Diaz from the little boat.

  He was a family businessman whose wife had an uncommon, consuming illness and languished here on the Wards. He and his sons took on fishing and ferrying to pay for the medicines, he had told Diaz, but there was no direct route to Nessa anymore. The sea herself prohibited passage, he had said. For enough coin, though, he’d make an exception, sympathetic to the loss of Diaz’s arm.

  His sons were working in the belly of the boat as the fisherman stepped up to help Diaz board. The old man looked from Bashan to Diaz.

  “Will your, uh, friend be coming with ye, sir?”

  “No.” Diaz held out his good hand, and the fisherman clasped it with strong, broad hands, guiding him onto the boat.

  “Oh come on,” Bashan sneered, beginning the cycle all over again. “You cannot be serious?”

  “I am utterly serious, Bashan.”

  Diaz sat down on a wooden bench to which the fisherman had directed him, relief washing through him.

  “We can push off now, if you wish, sir?” The fisherman muttered.

  Diaz nodded wearily.

  “I saved your life.” Bashan’s finger jabbed the air in accusation, puncturing it as the sons untied the tiny craft from the pier. “Does that mean nothing to you?”

  The men rowed the boat out between the other vessels, and Diaz saw Bashan’s stiff, rigid figure stand at end of the pier, brow furrowed.

  “You’re going to die out there!” he shouted at the boat. “What do you expect you could do on your own, you selfish crippled bastard?”

  “Fare well, my lord,” Diaz yelled back, his one good hand resting over his heart for a moment as he bowed his head respectfully.

  Then he settled into his spot, determined not to look back at the forlorn figure screaming at him across an ever-greater distance.

  “Come back, right now!”

  Diaz closed his eyes.

  “You can’t just leave me here like this. I’m warning you!”

  The boat rocked him gently, taking some of the tension out of his back.

  “Telen!”

  The call of his name echoing over the waves followed Diaz into a fitful doze.

  Chapter 20

  Diaz slept for an hour, maybe not even that, before the fisherman woke him with a firm shake. It was darker now, near twilight beneath the low rainclouds. Out on the open water, the drizzle had been joined by a stiff wind that had blown back his hood. Waves rocked the boat, slapping against it, but Diaz had slept through it.

  He opened his eyes and saw the man flinch at the alienness of them.

  “We’re there, sir.” The man caught himself quickly, and averted his gaze to the horizon. “Can’t take you farther than this.”

  Diaz rubbed over his face, pulled the hood lower, and peered at the looming nearness of the lonely island. They were much closer. He could see the collapsed domed harbor in front of him, large sea-worn boulders with washed out mosaics only a few hundred feet across the waves.

  Still unreachable.

  “Is there no way closer to the temple?” he asked the man. “There was a bay on the other side of the island, if I remember correctly. Open to the northeast. Maybe you could sail around—”

  “Like I said, sir, the sea herself prohibits passage.” The man made a rough hand gesture towards the water.

  Diaz peered over the railing.

  And large black eyes peered back at him.

  Gjalp.

  Daughters of the sea goddess.

  He could see at least a dozen, their faces just breaking the surface, and who knew how many more swam beneath? They hung back in the shadows of the ruins, swimming in a loose circle around the boat. Waiting.

  No, he realized. Not waiting. They’re guarding the temple.

  “No man has set foot on the Holy Island since its priestesses left, sir,” the fisherman said slowly, eyes fixed on one of the gjalp lingering nearby. She bobbed out of the water and hissed at the boat, showing off several rows of gleaming teeth. “’Tis the realm of the mermaids now, and they suffer none to go near. Boats have been tipped over. Men have been dragged down.”

  He sighed.

  “Even if I were to sail around the island, there are more of them in the bay. No. This is as far as I will go, sir.”

  Diaz glanced around the small boat. The fisherman’s sons were standing ready with nets and spears, and the man himself clutched a wicked gutting knife in his hand.

  Fear.

  An air of oppressive violence lay coiled around them, hatred ready to be unleashed at the slightest cause.

  Diaz remembered the dried bodies of gjalp he had seen on sale at the market stalls, their limbs and eyes dried and ground down into powders. Little love lost between men and gjalp in these waters. He had no doubt that they would attack the boat should the fisherman press on forward.

  So.

  The fisherman would likely turn his boat soon and go back to the Wards. For Diaz that would mean back to Bashan. Back to being wrapped up in the man’s father issues and his wrath against an unjust world.

  Where do we go from here?

  “No.” Diaz shook his head. “I have to get to the island.”

  The fisherman stole a glance over his shoulder at Diaz’s eyes. He hid a shudder remarkably well, passing it off as a reaction to the rain.

  “I’m sure you feel that way, sir, but this is as far as I can take ye.”

  “Take me just a little bit farther, please,” Diaz tried to bargain. “Maybe there’s a place where you could lower me on to a rock?”

  “I’m sorry, sir, but no.”

  As though they were drawn to his agitation, the gjalp swam a little closer to the boat. One of the sons on the boat raised the spear to a throwing position. Three gjalp dived under without a sound.

  “You said you wanted to go to the island, sir. I have taken ye. More was not in our deal.”

  “I have more money if that’s what you mean.” Diaz reached into a pocket. He didn’t have much left, but it might be enough to bribe his way just a bit nearer.

  “Ye paid already, sir. This is the closest we can get. Around the rest of the island are sharp, jagged rocks you wouldn’t be able to sit on, never mind us dropping you onto them. Look, sir, I don’t want your money if it means risking my life or that of my sons.”

  “I paid you for transport to the island, not for a roundtrip to see its ruins.” Diaz pointed at the collapsed dome structure. “How do you expect me to get there from here?”

  “Swim, sir?”

  “With one arm?”

  The fisherman shrugged. “I figure,” he said, drawing out his words once more, “you might have a chance with them mermaids.” He met and held Diaz’s stare for a moment, but then averted his gaze back to the eyes just above the waterline. “Sir,” he added as an afterthought.

  He nodded at the waves, not daring to look at Diaz.

  For a moment, Diaz wavered. He was torn between the urge to fall back onto his bench and let himself be carried wherever, dissociating himself from whatever happened next—giving up—and the strong desire to leap into the sea.

  It called to him.

  Deep in his gut, he could sense a faint pull towards the island. He had felt it since the night with the bloodwitches, as though a thread had been unraveled within him, and the loose end had been carried back to this island.

  He had to come here. He knew the truth of it as he stood by the railing, vibrating in his soul. He had to go there or die.

  And if he didn’t, if he returned without trying—well, that would be a kind of death, too. Forced to live a bitter life of
someone he wasn’t and didn’t want to be. It would be better to be ripped apart by gjalp.

  Months ago, he had swum with gjalp, with Nora unconscious clutched to his chest. He had sense some degree of … kinship with gjalp then. Enough to communicate at least.

  Could he do so again? Swim one-armed to those ruins, trusting the gjalp not to attack, and pull himself up without coming to any harm?

  “Sir?”

  Diaz took off his boots, bundled them up into the long, sleeveless coat Bashan had given him, and swung a leg over the railing. He looked at the fisherman for help with a knot, and the man came over and fastened the bundle tightly around his chest.

  When he was done he patted Diaz on the remaining shoulder and stepped away as though embarrassed.

  He was potentially sending a paying customer to his sure death, Diaz thought. A slight discomfort was the least of the reactions the man should be showing.

  Nonetheless, the corner of his lips twitched, curling upwards for a moment. He felt the sting of the rain on his skin, the roar of the wind and sea in his ears, the beating of his heart in his chest. He was alive.

  Right now, he was alive.

  Breathe in, breathe out.

  He stared at the churning waters below him, the ruins he wanted to reach, and the faces of the gjalp around the boat. It was a bit like meditation.

  Diaz took a deep breath and plunged into the ice cold sea.

  Immediately, Diaz knew that this had been a very foolish idea. He kicked his legs to dive, sensing a motion to his right, but his one-armed body didn’t exactly glide through the water. He struggled to use the momentum from the plunge to propel himself a little deeper, but found himself flailing futilely with his good arm. For a moment, he considered going back up and calling it off, turning back to the surface and begging the fisherman to help him back into boat.

  Something touched his wrist. Grabbed hold of him.

  He was running out of air.