looked to his side and saw the pale, slender arm in the air that he quirked a brow.
‘Really?’ he asked Kataria. ‘I would have thought you to be his only supporter.’
‘Wouldn’t be the first time you were wrong, would it?’ she growled at him.
He frowned. ‘I … guess not.’ With a sigh, he rubbed his eyes. ‘Well, that’s that, then, isn’t it? If he is alive and we go through with this, I suppose we’ve got one more thing that can and will kill us.’
‘All the more reason to leave,’ Kataria agreed.
‘Which you still haven’t explained how you intend to do,’ Denaos pointed out.
Whatever Lenk had to say in response was suddenly drowned out by the sound of a heavy breathing, heavy footsteps and a heavy stick being dragged through the sand. It was hard to ignore the sight of Bagagame approaching the group, and outright impossible to miss the sight of the screeching writhing roach he dragged by its antennae alongside his stick.
‘Okay, cousin,’ he gasped, pulling his twitching prize before Lenk. ‘Ol’ Bagagame got you covered. Took some whacking, but m’found you a nice slab to chew on.’ With a grunt, he hurled the insect forward. ‘Eat hearty.’
‘That’s … nice?’ Lenk said. ‘But there’s something else you can do for us.’
‘Ah, right. Rude.’ The Owauku’s tiny muscles strained as he hoisted his stick high above his head and brought it down in a shrieking splatter of foul-smelling ichor. His tongue flicked out from behind his grin to slurp up a glistening gob on his mouth. ‘Juicy enough for a king, eh?’
‘I was thinking the same thing,’ Lenk said as he turned his smile from the lizardman to his companions. ‘Bagagame, show us to Togu.’
Nineteen
He crept quietly through the city’s backstreets, hood drawn up, cloak held tightly about him. He navigated them quickly, quietly, the sins of his memories still embedded in the stones when he walked without webs on his feet, when he could bear the sensation of earth on his soles. He once had done so. He once had walked among them and they had called him neighbour.
He glanced down at the vial in his palm, the thick, viscous liquid swirling with a nebulous life all its own. Mother’s Milk. The gift of Ulbecetonth. The agent of change.
Change, he reminded himself, was what it was all about. Change needed to lift the blinders from mortalkind, to show them that their gods were deaf and uncaring. It would be violent, he knew. People would die. More would live, guided by a matron that heard them and spoke to them in return. But they would never understand.
They would call him a monster.
He called himself the Mouth.
But before that, he had called himself something else, he recalled. He’d had a name. He’d had a home. He’d had memories; he still did. The Prophet was cruel to keep him from being absolved of them, but perhaps there was a point to their withholding. Perhaps he needed to remember why he forsook name, home, land and sky alike.
And so, when he came to the rotting doorframe of a house long abandoned, when he felt his heart begin to ache as he laid a hand upon the splintering door marked with a large red cross, he fought against the urge to turn away. He pushed it open. He went in.
Shadows greeted him. They still knew him. They had been around for a long time, ingrained into the wood of the house itself. They had seen all. They remembered all. And he read their lightless testimony as he drew his hood back and walked across the rotting floorboards.
He walked past a doorway; the shadows told him of a kitchen that had never been stuffed, but had enough to make stew every night. He walked past a rotting table; the shadows spoke of three bodies seated there, breaking a single loaf of bread to share. He walked to the decrepit stairs at the edge of the house.
And the shadows asked him to turn away. They remembered what happened. They told him he would not want to see again.
But he went up, regardless. The stairs knew him, offering the same creak of complaint they had offered him for years. He paused beside them, staring at a barren spot upon the wall where the shade was a tad lighter than the rest of the decay. A holy symbol had hung there once, the great cresting wave of Zamanthras, the Sea Mother, as a ward against the woes of life and an invitation for the goddess’ boon.
He remembered that symbol. He remembered when he had hung it up. He remembered when he had taken it down. He remembered when he had screamed questions at it, demanded answers and received nothing. He remembered when he had hurled it into a dying fire. He had forgotten to stoke it that night. Someone else usually did that.
But there had been no one else left that night.
He glanced back to the door, frowning. A lesson learned, he told himself; he knew that the Gods were impotent and did not care. Surely, nothing more could be gained from venturing farther upward.
But he went, anyway. The shadows lamented his return and told him of the long hallway he had once paced back and forth across. They warned him against going to the room at the far end. But he went, anyway.
And he saw the shadows in a small, decrepit room. And he saw the shadows of a small, decrepit cot. It had been a tiny thing, one that he had built hastily when the girl who lay in it grew too big for her crib.
He smiled. The shadows did not have to remind him of when he sat beside that cot and told stories. He remembered them all on his own: the Kraken and the Swan, Old King Gnash, How Zamanthras Stained Toha’s Sand Blue. He remembered the promises made beside it: how the girl who lay in it and he would go to Toha one day and she would see the blue sand, how she would one day captain a ship that would dwarf his little fishing skiff, how he would build her a bigger bed in a few months, at the rate she was growing.
But it was only a few days later that the girl who lay in it stopped growing altogether.
The shadows didn’t have to tell him that. He remembered it all on his own.
But the shadows were not silent. The shadows spoke of the healer who had knelt beside the little cot. The shadows spoke of heads that shook, eyes that closed, condolences offered and arrangements advised. The shadows spoke of threats, of pleas, of prayers he had offered to the healer, to their Talanas, to his Zamanthras, to anyone who would listen.
No one answered. No one ever answered.
The shadows spoke of the day when that little cot lay empty. The shadows spoke of the day when he sat beside it and cradled his head in hands. The shadows spoke of the day when he pressed his hands against his ears to drown out the sound of the waves. The waves that the girl lay in.
That was where their memory stopped. That was where his stopped. That was where he was no longer neighbour, no longer father, no longer slave to the Gods.
He narrowed his eyes; that was the day when, in the silence, he had heard the voice of Mother Deep. That was the day when he forgot his name. That was the day the Mouth had left the shadows and the wood and the city behind entirely, swearing he would not return until he could change the world.
And now, he had. And now, he could.
He stared down at the vial of Mother’s Milk, narrowing his eyes. This was what it had come to. This was how the world would be changed. The Mother would be free. But for Her to reign properly, to guide mankind from their blind darkness, She would need a consort.
The Father must be freed.
