Mother of Slag

by Timandra Whitecastle

  Or maybe that was a ruse? A test of his will? At the pilgrim temple in Arrun, candidates who wanted to join the order as initiates were always turned down on principle. If they looked older, they were told they were too old. If they were young, too young. Over the course of three days, one or more pilgrims would pass them by on the steps leading up to the temple and either berate them or tell them in the most friendly manner that their coming there had been a mistake, that they should go home. If they stayed, if they held out, they were admitted as initiates after three days. Maybe this was something similar?

  He spent the rest of the afternoon crawling around beneath the overgrown bushes in the flowerbeds, seeking some shade, a place where he could sleep a while if he truly meant to try his hand at climbing up the temple walls at night. His rustling disturbed a number of birds from their nests which he checked for eggs. No luck, though. At this time of the year, the eggs were hatched and the young birds were fluffy little balls of feathers. Their black, beady eyes gazed into his as they chirped in alarm for their parents’ return.

  He made the trek to the other side of the promenade, and found a natural path leading up the cliff of the main island. After a short climb, the path flattened out. He stood on a vista overlooking a spread of bare, brown-black rocks below, the water churning white in a sharp divide between the main island and a small crop of brownish sea grass on a small, brown islet. Beyond that, another. Tiny lumps of barren land spanning the entire circle.

  He could make out what looked like sea lions on one of the larger islands, but realized, due to their trills and melodious sounds, they were mermaids sunning themselves on a sandbank. After a while, though, they slipped silently into the waves. To the northwest, a steep cliff fell to the dark sea. Out in the distance, in that direction, he could make out the hazy outline of the Wards, which was surely good to know. He saw tiny white triangles of sailing boats, but saved his energy and refrained from yelling and waving. They were too far.

  A trail cut through the jagged rocks to the east, the volcano casting its shadow, looming over everything. A flock of huge white birds stood on precipices that were white with their droppings and called into the wind. The rocks climbed in terraced slabs, though, and dropped treacherously. He inched closer, but the gray and white seabirds squawked and flapped their huge wings at him, so he retreated, walking back to the promenade, and sat on the step by the double doors, sheltered from the breeze by a grove of sprawling dark green foliage budding white, star shaped flowers. Fragrant.

  All was silent, restful. A balm for the soul. In the evening, he watched the sun set into the sea behind the breakers, rays of light spilling fire onto the surface of the waters.

  So the first day went by, and he’d decided he wouldn’t try the climb, but would rather sleep and save his energy. He lay on the cold stone step, back to the doors, and slowly drifted off into sleep, listening to the water gently lapping against the steps.

  He dreamed he held his twin swords in his hands as he was pursuing something through twisting corridors, leading him downwards, into darkness. He was looking for something. An entrance to somewhere. But his guide was elusive. A soft, throaty laugh led him on. A shadow on the wall as she turned the corner just in time for Diaz not to see her face.

  A splash woke him, and as he glanced to the sky, he saw that he hadn’t been asleep for long. An hour, two at the most. He scanned the bay but saw nothing out of the ordinary. He looked down to where he had felt his leading sword rest in his right hand, certain it would be there just like in his dream, but of course it wasn’t. The whole arm was still missing, and yet … and yet he could still feel it. A keen sense of loss and frustration filled him. Maybe just a wisp of his dream following him into the real world. He shook his head to rid himself of the feeling.

  Just as he was about to settle down again, he heard a faint scratching sound, as though someone were dragging a wet robe across a washing stone. He sat up again and tried to locate where the sound was coming from.

  Another splash of water in the dark night.

  There.

  He watched in growing horror as a black shape emerged from the waves, dripping like molten wax, pulling itself forward across the stones with that wet sound. Claws tap-tapped on the stones as its long-fingered hands scrabbled for purchase, and then heaved the rest of its strangely deflated body towards him in serpentine twists.

  His good hand went for his sword.

  He was ready.

  The thing raised its head, and in the half light, Diaz caught the flash of wight eyes, the black orbs picking up even the dimmest light from the stars and reflecting it back.

  He relaxed the grip on his pommel.

  He didn’t need to hear the quiet trill to know who his haunting visitor was.

  “Hello there,” he whispered, rising. “You scared me for a moment.”

  The same gjalp who had saved and helped him in the harbor cave dragged herself another arm’s length toward him, her lips puckered to make airy whistling sounds. Maybe a chuckle?

  “Wait, I’ll come to you.”

  He walked over to where she lay, propped up on what would be her elbows if she were a wight or a human. Her limbs were thin and rubbery, like the tentacles that formed the larger part of her lower body, a curling, writhing mass that looked like she had spread her skirts to dry behind her. She cocked her head to one side, regarding him with those ink black eyes, then sang him a longer song.

  It sounded like the melody of an old ballad he had heard once a long time ago. Loss saturated the song. When it ended, she stared at him, obviously expecting a response.

  “I don’t understand what you want,” he replied. “I’m sorry.”

  She clicked her tongue impatiently behind the sharp rows of pointed teeth, then glanced back over the bay.

  He followed her gaze, and this time he could make out a few other pairs of eyes watching him from just above the surface.

  “Your sisters look out for you.”

  She gave him a look that he couldn’t decipher, though it could be annoyance. She pushed herself back towards the bay. Then waited, looking at him again.

  “You want me to come into the water with you?”

  She nodded, and shoved herself backwards again. But no, he realized, she wasn’t shoving herself towards the waters. Her writhing tentacle skirt had grabbed hold wherever it could, pale suckers locking onto the smooth stone surface, and was pulling the rest of her towards her goal.

  Diaz remembered her display of strength when she had pulled that large rock obstructing his passage into the depths. It made him pause.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t feel safe among the gjalp. After all, if they had wanted to kill him in the water, they could have done so. And if they had wanted to eat him like in the stories the human sailors told, surely it would have been easier for them to just let him drown and then tear him apart. But there were more of them than of him, and they had each their own set of teeth and maws and claws and pincers, seemingly depending on which sea creature they had descended from. On top of that, he’d have to fight them one-handed and water was not his natural element.

  His gjalp had reached the steps that led into the bay and with a sigh of relief let herself ease into the waves. She looked back at him, sensing his hesitation, and let out a soft keening sound.

  “Fine,” he said, slipping out of his coat, shirt, and boots. “I’ll come.”

  She bared her teeth and slid into the sea.

  Chapter 24

  The bay stretched out before Diaz, the spray of the waves crashing against the breakers gleaming a ghostly gray. The reflecting eyes of the waiting gjalp flickered like stars in the expanse above. The waves curled around his feet, the foam coiled sea serpents, twisting and turning around his legs as he strode into deeper water.

  It was cold, but he walked on in, following his gjalp, kicking off of the sandy underground when the water came to his chest. The water lifted his body, but he found no center to steady himself and wa
s jostled rudely by the gentle waves.

  The gjalp swam around him and pressed up against his ruined side, wrapping a long limb around his shoulder to brace him.

  He shot her a grateful glance, and together they swam on out, far out, an honor guard of her sisters following in their wake.

  The open water behind the breakers was wild and cold as Diaz struggled to navigate the tossing waves. The touch of the gjalp was soft and sensuous, warm like shallow water gone tepid through a day’s worth of sunlight. Her pale embrace in the dark starlit sea kept him steady, more than welcome. The more he struggled against the harsh cresting waves, the more she enfolded him.

  He looked back over his shoulder at the black peaks of the breakers behind them and for a moment he was seized by a paralyzing terror at leaving the waters of the bay, at leaving the temple grounds.

  He was out in the open sea, no land ahead of him for days, no destination he could reach with his own strength. He was flailing. He went under, swallowed the salty brine, felt the exhaustion in his bones and the dark invitation of the depth beneath the surface to just let go.

  But his gjalp would not allow it. She gently pulled him up again, and he took a deep breath. She met his eyes and pointed southward toward the stony islet wall of the breakers, back towards the highest peak. The ancient volcano. The Needle. She mimed taking a deep breath—she had gills but had some understanding of how his body worked differently from hers—and then dunked her head into the waves.

  Dive? She wanted to dive with him? He nodded, his arm and legs tired of being pounded by the rolling waves.

  He took another deep breath, leaned into her, and let himself be dragged down.

  A cold current bit at his toes, and though he paddled with his feet and stroked with his good arm, it was clear to Diaz that she was the one doing most of the work, pulling them along the current. They went on and on this way. Every now and then a short break at the surface for him to breathe, then plunging down again and being swept farther along the outskirts of the atoll until his lungs felt they were going to burst.

  He wondered where they were taking him, but the longer they traveled this way, the more the exhaustion pressed in on him, until he didn’t really care anymore, giving himself over to the sea daughter’s judgment. Breathe, that was all he could do. Breathe, and go with it.

  They came up on the south side of the island, at the foot of the mountain, and after one last deep breath, she guided him into a natural tunnel, eaten out of the mountain by salt and water, through the mass of black rock. The passageway twisted and turned, and in two cases, he watched her squeeze her lithe body through tiny openings. He was sure he would not fit, and yet he did, though with scrapes and cuts. And after an eternity of close darkness, the pressure in his lungs to breathe nearly unbearable, the tunnel finally opened up before them, and he broke through the surface, gulping air.

  They were in a cave, a high-ceilinged dome of rock towering far above them through which light filtered down dimly through cracks, man made, though crudely hewn and rough so as to blend in better with the fissured rock around them. The water within the cave made Diaz feel like he was on the back of a living creature, a beast whose ribcage rose and fell with a roaring rumble and with each long inhale and exhale lifted them upwards, only to drag them down again.

  The whole cave was only a few arm strokes wide. An ancient bubble of air trapped when lava freely flowed down the slopes of the rising volcano, once upon a time. Except for the evidence of subtle manipulations of the cave to make it a chamber, like the window cracks above, and the gaping mouth of a portcullis in the wall.

  Utterly out of place.

  A tunnel carved into the rock wall seemed alien and uninviting, a hungry maw waiting to be fed, though never sated. It didn’t seem to lead far in, and yet, straining in the semidarkness of the sea cave, Diaz could not see anything but pitch black. In fact, he had seen more of his surroundings diving alongside the gjalp in the open sea at night than he could here. And that worried him. The air in the sea cave seemed to be sucked into the tunnel, as though a vast gullet lay beyond, and it seemed to Diaz that he heard a soft wail, akin to the gjalp’s song. Perhaps only the wind. Bronze teeth of a raised gate gleamed in its open maw.

  However, it was the reaction of the gjalp wrapped around him that made the water taste of fear. Her supple flesh recoiled and rippled at the sight of the doorway. She moved closer to it, though, and gestured at it with her head, a questioning trill escaping her lips.

  “You wanted to show me this?” He grabbed at the doorway’s threshold, limbs quivering with exhaustion, and after a moment’s hesitation, pooling his last amount of energy, he hoisted himself onto it to sit and peer into the darkness. It seemed warmer in there, though his skin was covered in goosebumps. His legs were still dangling in the water, and every rising wave shoved him around on the stone.

  She gently laid a hand on his knee and gestured once more.

  “You want me to go in?”

  A nod.

  “It’s another way into the temple, isn’t it?” he mused. “A backdoor.”

  The tunnel revealed its manmade origin in the sharp angles of its rectangular design. Nothing he had yet seen in the decades that spanned his life made functional things as ugly as humans did. All the wonders of the world, all the outstanding beauty, the temples, the courts, the palaces, all were remnants of his paternal heritage. Wightish ruins now appropriated and inhabited by humans who wore the former grandeur over their shoulders like a boy donning his father’s cloak, not seeing that it pooled around his feet in heaps, making him look smaller than he already was.

  A man could stand upright in that tunnel and the seawater would flood around his knees perhaps, maybe a little higher. If the man were, in fact, a bloodwitch of an ancient cult, it would be easy for him to banish the water out of the tunnel entirely and walk through with dry feet, or flood it entirely.

  Entry into and exit from the temple was easily defendable with little manpower. And yet, there was something about the gaping maw that seemed off.

  He looked up at the bronze metal of the gate hidden in the rock. If the gate were down and you were trapped in the tunnel, there’d be no escape. You’d be trapped in a waterlogged coffin to drown. He shuddered, recalling the panic that had grasped him and imagined what it’d be like to feel that frantic terror, knowing those were his last seconds alive.

  He looked at the gjalp.

  Maybe it was a coffin, but not one meant to drown in. Rather, a tight, enclosed space through which you could see, smell, and taste your watery home, your elementary safety, and yet never be able to reach it. What would it feel like to die that way?

  “Are you coming with me?” he asked her.

  She bobbed back down into the water again, only her head showing, and turned to sing imploringly at the other gjalp. They slunk back to the far wall, shaking their heads and making soft noises of distress.

  “You don’t have to,” he told her immediately, placing his hand over hers resting on his knee. “You have done me a huge favor, showing me this. Again. I thank you.”

  She stared at him, so he gave her a smile.

  She smiled back, yet it was a humorless thing, baring her sharp teeth and making him wish he hadn’t smiled at all.

  “I will investigate, and return here in a while.”

  She stared at him further, so that he wasn’t sure she had understood him. He rose to his feet, the water dragging at his weary legs, and put his good hand on the wall to steady himself.

  Every muscle ached. He hadn’t rested enough, felt dizzy and weak, and he was thirsty. Such a terrible thirst, a pain in his throat whenever he swallowed. He’d hoped he’d find sweet water on the other side of the tunnel, but first he turned back to the gjalp.

  “Stay,” he urged her. “Please.”

  This time she nodded.

  He took a deep breath and walked into the dark, alone.

  Chapter 25

  It took Diaz mere minutes t
o walk through the tunnel, to finally see a patch of gray light at the end. But it had felt longer, traveling through the lonely dark, the rasp of his breath echoing against the moist walls, hearing nothing but the strange siren song of the wind passing above him, the slosh of water around his calves, and the thunder of his own rapid heartbeat.

  For a moment, about halfway in, nothing but black all around, he had hesitated, nearly turning back to the gjalp, missing her clinging to his side nearly as much as he missed his arm.

  But there was something that drew him forward, like a distant call across time and space. Among the mixed scents of damp rock and salt, he was sure he caught a whiff of his mother’s scent. Rosemary and sheep’s wool.

  But that was impossible. She had died forty years ago, and he hadn’t seen her for even longer. Still he hastened forward and was relieved when he passed under a second bronze portcullis and came out of the tunnel into a large space. A rock chamber, similar to the sea cave he had just left, but much, much larger.

  It seemed to have once been a natural cavern, a domed ceiling high above, the porous lava rock gleaming dull in different colorations, brown and black and green. It had been hollowed out by seawater, perhaps, but then extended and shaped by human hand.

  Diaz walked along a narrow causeway that led from the tunnel to a raised shelf on the far side of the cavern. He could make out huge sealed clay jars, lining the wall, and a door that led out of the chamber.

  To each side of the causeway, deep cisterns had been hewn into the rock in a cascade of pools. When the waves spilled from the tunnel’s exit into them, the two closest to the tunnel filled and brimmed over, while those closest to the far side were dry. He counted six cisterns in all, and when he peered down into one, his vision swam and he nearly lost his footing on the wet, smooth stone.