‘Very interesting,’ the red one agreed. It looked to its counterpart. ‘What would you call Mother Deep’s children?’
‘Hellspawn,’ Lenk chimed in.
‘Dramatic, but a bit too vague,’ the red one said. ‘Deeplings?’
‘A tad too predictable,’ the black one replied. ‘What are they, after all? Creatures returned from whence they were so unjustly banished. Creatures from a place far beyond the understanding of mankind and his sky and earth.’
‘They had a word for such things,’ the red one said.
‘Ah, yes,’ the black one said.
‘Aeon,’ they both finished.
Lenk felt he should ask a question at that, but found that none in his head would slide into his throat. He felt the ocean begin to change around him, felt it abandon him as he began to fall, his head like a lead weight that dragged him farther below. Above, the Deepshriek became a halo, swimming in slow circles that shrank with every passing breath.
It was getting warm, he noted, incredibly so. His blood felt like it was boiling, his skull an oven for his mind to simmer thoughtfully in. Every breath came through a tightened throat: laboured, heavy, then impossible.
‘What a pity,’ came another voice, one he did not recognise.
This one was deep, bass and shook the waters, changing them as it spoke. It drowned the sky, doused the sun with its laughter. It sent the waves roiling up to meet him.
He tilted his head, stared down into a pair of glimmering green eyes that he knew well. They stared up at him from above a smile that was entirely too big, between long ears that floated like feathery gills, as a slender, leather-clad hand reached up to beckon him down.
‘But where we must all go,’ she whispered, her voice making the sand beneath her shudder, ‘we do not sin with breath.’
His scream was silent. Her stare was vast. The sun died above. The ocean floor opened up, a great gaping yawn that callously swallowed him whole.
*
After so many times waking in screams and sweat, Lenk simply didn’t have the energy to do it this time, even when his eyes fluttered open and beheld the eight polished eyes that stared back at him through a thin sheet of silk. His scream withered and died in his chest, but the dredgespider loosed a frustrated hiss before leaping off of his chest and scurrying away into the surf.
He stared up at the sky through the gauzy webs the many-legged creature had blanketed him in.
He remembered everything, he found, between the twitches of his eyes. He remembered the Deepshriek, what it had said. He remembered Kataria … had that been Kataria? He remembered the ocean, uncaring, and the darkness, consuming. That had all happened. Hadn’t it? Was it some temporary, trauma-induced madness? His head hurt; he had been struck in the wreck, he recalled.
The wreck … They had been wrecked, destroyed, cast to the bottom of the ocean.
But he was alive now. He breathed. He saw clouds moving in a deceitful sky. He felt treacherous sunlight on his skin. He was alive. He forced himself to rise.
The pain that racked him with every movement only served to confirm that he was still alive. Unless he had arrived in hell, anyway. He doubted that, though. The tome had told him of hell. It had mentioned nothing of warm, sunny beaches.
Nor, he thought as he spied a slender figure standing knee-deep in the surf, did hell possess women. Not ones that didn’t sever and slurp up one’s testes, anyway. The sunlight blinded him as he squinted against the shimmering shore. He saw pale skin, long hair wafting in the breeze, a flash of emerald.
‘Kat …’ he whispered, afraid to ask. ‘Kataria?’
The gale carried a cloud across the sun that cloaked the beach with the cruel clarity of shadow. The figure turned to regard him and he saw green locks tumbling to pale shoulders, feathery gills wafting delicately about her neck, fins extending from the sides and crown of her head as she canted her head and regarded him.
‘Oh,’ he muttered, ‘it’s you.’
Greenhair was not her name, he remembered, but it was what they had given her. She was a siren, a servant of Zamanthras, the Mother. She had aided them in locating the tome. But she had fled afterwards, he recalled, fled from the duty to find the tome and slay the Abysmyths, fled from the duty she claimed was holy.
‘Young silverhair is awake.’ The siren’s voice was a melody, a lilting lyric in every syllable. He remembered it being more beautiful before, rather than the dirge it was now. ‘I feared you dead.’
‘I suppose it would have been a waste of time, then, to keep the bugs off of me,’ Lenk muttered, pulling the dredgespider’s webbing from his body.
‘They feed where they can, silverhair,’ she replied. ‘It has been a long time since they found something substantial and alive on this island.’
‘Except me?’
‘Except you,’ she said, sounding almost disappointed. Seeing his furrowed brow, she forced a weak smile. ‘But you live. I am glad.’
‘Don’t get me wrong, I’m awfully pleased, myself,’ he said, trying to rise, ‘but-’
A shriek ripped through him alongside the fire lancing through his leg. He collapsed back to the sand, looking to his thigh. Or rather, to the scaly green mass that had once been his neatly-stitched and bandaged thigh. The wound had been ripped open, the meat beneath the skin glistening and discoloured at the edges.
‘Do not tax yourself,’ Greenhair said, wading out of the surf. Her webbed fingers twitched as she approached him. ‘Your wound festers. Your life flows with your protest. The scent is sweet to predators.’
He glanced out over the sea. The dredgespiders skimmed across the surface, casting eight-eyed glares at his unsportsmanlike decision to live. The pain coursed through him with such agony that he absently considered lying back and letting them have him.
Still, biting back both the agony and the obscenities accompanying it, he rose to one foot, fighting off the dizziness that struggled to bring him back down.
‘Where am I?’ he asked.
‘The home of the Owauku,’ she replied. ‘Dutiful servants of the Sea Mother, devout in their respect for her ways.’
‘Owa … what?’ Lenk twitched. ‘No, where
‘Teji.’
‘Teji …’ The word tasted familiar on his tongue. The realisation lit up behind his eyes, gave him strength to rise. ‘Teji.
That word tasted bitter, sounded hollow on the sky. He stared across the shore. Empty sand, empty sea met him, vast and utterly indifferent to the despair that grew in his belly and spread onto his face.
‘Where are they?’ he asked, choked. ‘Did you find no one else?’
She shook her head. ‘Teji is not where people go to live, silverhair.’
‘What? It’s a trading post, Argaol said.’
She fixed him with a dire gaze. ‘Silverhair … Teji is a tomb.’
She levelled a finger over his head. At once, he felt a darkness over him, a shadow that reached deeper into him than the clouded sky overhead. He turned and stared up into the face of a god.
The statue looked back down at him from where it leaned, high upon a sandy ridge. A right hand wrought of stone was extended, palm flat and commanding all who beheld it. A stone robe wrapped a lean figure set upon iron, treaded wheels. In lieu of a face, the great winged phoenix sigil of Talanas was carved, staring down at Lenk through unfurled wings and crying beak.
