The Void Ascendant, page 32
“Then why...?” The lights swirled, grew dark halos, brightened, became pink, became gold again. The Advisor’s great face leaned over mine for a moment.
“I think he’s blacking out,” he said.
“No I’m—”
Light returned; I was still on the floor, and there was still shouting. Had I only been out for a minute or two? No, longer. A bandage had been wrapped across my chest, under my right arm and back over, as thick and stiff as plaster. I felt lightheaded and cold, and my whole body was covered in sweat.
Someone helped me sit up, and I swayed, accepted a scratchy blanket, smelling of wood chips. My left arm, the hand also bandaged, felt heavy but not paralyzed. That was something.
The others had formed a circle around Liandan, who had been bound at the wrists, and sat on the floor with his legs in front of him. Blood stained and stiffened his tawny hair. I hoped it was his, but the stuff on his shirt was probably mostly mine.
These people. Not that I had trusted them, no, but we had been through so much together, we had eaten, fought, even bathed together, there was nowhere else we could go, nowhere to hide, this ship was our floating refuge and the refuge was not safe—it too contained monsters. I couldn’t believe it had taken this long, I thought bleakly. That was the only surprise really.
Maybe they had all wanted to do it. Maybe from day one. And had drawn straws, and Liandan had lost. Or won.
I glared at him. Ksajakra knelt in front of me, and unfolded a ripped piece of cloth to show the dagger: stunningly long, covered in blood from tip to hilt. I was shocked at how long it was. I don’t know what I had been expecting. Yenu’s daggers were barely longer than her hand. And the hilt brightly decorated with blue glass, that must have been what I saw sparkling and taunting me in the light, before they had pulled it out.
“Let me loose, you fucking fools!” Liandan snapped.
“What are we going to do with him?” Ksajakra said to me and, it seemed, Yenu, sitting cross-legged next to me, painted in crimson from her chin to her hips.
“Ask him why he did it,” she whispered, taking the cloth-wrapped dagger. “Then we can decide.”
“Why would that make a difference?” he said, then shrugged at her expression, and stood, returning to the prisoner. “You said to hear you out. Go on.”
“The real question is why none of you have done anything!” Liandan shouted, spluttering blood in long, sticky strings onto his already-stained shirt. I hadn’t realized I’d hit him so hard, and felt a split second of remorse before remembering that I had done so while he’d been trying to murder me. “That’s the real question! For three nights now I’ve listened to the bastard talking in his sleep—yes, and you all would say you’ve heard nothing! I heard him! It’s because he’s still on Their side! He is! He talks, it’s mixed with languages I’ve never heard before, old ones, evil ones, you can tell just by hearing—no, not the ones you people talk, I mean Their tongue, and who’s he talking to, huh? There’s—he stops, he talks, he stops again, he listens. I’ve heard it!”
His voice rose to a scream. “He wants to help Them find us, kill us all! And use that thing inside him to do it! It’s no god, I tell you! It’s no god! It’s under his control and it’s worse than any of Them! Now let me up so I can fucking finish the job!”
Ksajakra stared at him, mouth open, apparently genuinely shocked; and when he looked back at me, there was enough of a shadow of doubt in his eyes that fear pinned me to the spot for a moment, even the pain of the stab wound receding in a burst of adrenaline. Fight or flight, motherfucker, I thought. Or, of course, freeze.
No. What had Johnny told me all those years ago. They used to say fight or flight. Then fight, flight, or freeze. And one last one: appease. Not always an option, she admitted, but a good one when it was.
“I have no control over the god,” I said. “And he is a god. Yenu spoke with him. Are you saying I’m lying? I understand that. But are you saying she’s lying too?”
That stopped Liandan short, and he stared around at the others in mute appeal. Here it came, I thought clinically. Where we see what kind of control she has over them, where we see what kind of cult leader she really is... All of these people had known each other, and her, far longer than they had known me. It wasn’t a matter of trust, only the snap judgement of soldiers at war wearing the same uniform. We were bonded by necessity, them and me, but they had been bonded by her, and this grand idea of resistance, of hope...
“We’ll lock him up for the rest of the voyage,” Yenu said, standing up. “We’ll...”
“You better make sure those locks hold!” Liandan screamed. “Because he needs to die, and whatever thing is inside him! He’ll kill us all! He’ll sell us to his Masters for meat!”
“We’re locking you up,” Yenu said. “If you say we can’t trust you not to try again, we’ll stop somewhere and leave you there.”
The others relaxed minutely but visibly; I saw it in their shoulders, in the dark circles beneath their eyes. We were all exhausted by death, surrounded by it. We did not need to add to it needlessly. Their brother-in-arms might be exiled, but he would not be dead, like all the others. And part of me wanted to say, “Hey, wait just a fucking minute, as the person he is trying to kill, do I not get a vote?” but my vote was the same as hers; Liandan wanted us to kill him, and that didn’t sit right with me. He was capable of premeditated murder at close range. I did not think I was. Nor did I want to find out.
“Ceth,” Liandan said as Ksajakra dragged him upright, kicking and trying to lash out with his bound hands. “Saloc! Sal. Come on! Look at him! He lies, you know he lies, look at his face! Look at his eyes! Just kill him and the thing inside him dies too! Do it! Or our plan comes to nothing, and he gets the war he wants!”
“We don’t have anywhere to put him,” Ksajakra said, struggling to hold him, skinny as he was. Itzlek came over and pulled the man’s arms tightly behind his back. “I could tie him into a bunk for now.”
“Well, we’ll have to figure something...” Yenu trailed off, and the room fell into a hush, even Liandan’s struggling ceasing. “No one’s on watch.”
I looked around, counting, rubbing my throat. She was right; we were all in the hold. Well, and so what? Aside from the infrequent golden things in the River that looked like fish, nothing was here with us. We sailed alone. The watch, which I had been exempt from anyway as an outsider, as had Sudworth and the Advisor, had been perfunctory, for things like broken lines, fires on the deck, that kind of thing.
Yenu looked at Ksajakra. “Tie him up,” she said. “I heard something.” In a blink she had eeled up the ladder again, snake-slick, leaving in her wake only the hushed, stuffy air below.
There were no screams, no cries for help. Only a sound I had not heard before: a bell ringing frenziedly, on and on, irregular as a heart stuttering to a stop, and then another silence, breaking off the bell’s alarm mid-clang.
Behind us the stars had vanished, or the things in the darkness that looked like stars, blotted out by a seething, roiling cloud, all pale blues and grays, and at its centre something writhing, enormous, an impossible serpentine creature, pale and faceless except for a gaping mouth lined with hooked silvery teeth. Inside lolled an obscene white tongue, glistening wet and visibly quivering, as if coated in pus.
I clung to the Advisor, wheezing, stunned. It would have been one thing if the creature were silent; but it made a low, thrumming roar, and something beat behind it. Again I thought of heartbeats. Or drums.
How far away was it? I wasn’t sure, but it was catching up, twisting and coiling around itself like a snake climbing a tree, breaking up the River into so much fog, and carrying its own fog around itself like a cloak.
I was bleeding again; the stab wound, so recently and hastily bandaged, had not been stitched or packed with anything, and it did not like even the short trip to the deck, ten steps. I shouldn’t be moved, the Advisor had said, and I said, Fine, then leave me down here with my murderer, and he said, Come on, then. I thought I was going to throw up from pain and vertigo. And then this thing. Coming after us in the void.
Fight, flight, freeze, appease. Well we couldn’t freeze, could we? It had already seen us moving. And it was chasing us. And was it the reflex of a cat going after something darting across the floor, or had it been sent? It didn’t matter now. It was catching up.
Good job dodging death for a whole twenty minutes, I told myself. Well, this would probably be better than dying of gangrene from the wound, anyway. And the god inside me would be silenced. Or further silenced.
Help us, I said.
No reply. Ogruthon had been weakened by getting us out of the ship inside the lake; had he been further weakened by the lake of blood I had left all over the bunk and the floor and the ceiling and the walls and the others? Had he been killed? Had Liandan, without meaning to, actually succeeded in his aim—killing the god that he thought made me so powerful? Was there a place inside me that the god physically resided, and had it been bisected by the dirty blade?
And I felt the rise of something else, something not-him, that felt powerful, a clean something that despite all my small, dirty, petty angers I had not felt for a long time: rage. I saw only the creature, a sickening impossibility approaching us like a spurt of pus, surrounded by infectious spores, I saw only the darkness that it contaminated, I heard silence inside myself, I saw the mouths of the others moving, screaming, swords being drawn, uselessly, and lanterns being lit, a little chain of light securing us to one another, and I did not hear myself screaming to the god, You son of a bitch! You useless fucker! You said your only mission was to protect life, and now this? You call yourself a god? The word means nothing! You mean nothing!
The blood-sodden bandages came away as easily as tissue paper, a clot flying across the deck and skidding several feet. Something enormous and velvety caught at my hand, and with my free one I calmly wound up and struck where I judged the face to be, hitting from my hip, the way I had been taught by the guards, striking solidly, and the blood came again, and still the god did not speak, still it did not save us.
“I know you’re in there! Come out! You coward!” I screamed; warmth flooded down my bare chest, soaked into my beard, re-wetted my britches, cooling at once. The deck was going dark, the figures around me not paying the least attention.
My little drama did not matter. The great mouth approached. How it danced in its cloud, how it coiled and curled through space. We couldn’t outrun it now that it had found us, and I had a sneaking suspicion that no one here could fight it. I waited for the voice of a deity to rise inside me and save us, or for all the old spells I had once known to sprout out of the concrete slab I had laid over my old life, but nothing happened, only blood, and the Advisor stunned a dozen paces away, obviously unwounded by my punch, staring at me who had never struck him in our entire acquaintance; I could see the sky-blue whites of his eyes, which you did not often see.
Life! That was what the thing inside me was eating. And now, dying, I jerked the plate away from his greedy hands: No more for you. I will not pay for nothing. You’re the only one who can get us out of this. Yenu always thinks it’s her. She’s not even used the past few weeks to see how wrong she’s been about that, again and again and again. It’s you, it has to be you. It must be you, or I will end you.
Save these people. All of them. I demand this of you.
Not even a demurral, and the thing swung closer, and now it blocked out what I would have called the horizon if we had one; all I could see was teeth. Most sinister and disturbing about this was that I was sure it was still hundreds or even thousands of miles away, that when it eventually consumed us it would not be like a shark choking down a seal but like a whale somehow consuming a single speck of plankton. What we would have to be to evade it was anything but what we were: tiny, pitiful. Mortal.
And now a fresh horror, small, so small I actually laughed with what meagre strength remained. Liandan, trailing ropes behind him at a level that made me think for a split second they were loops of intestine, bloodied, frenzied, grinning in triumph. I was falling, landing elbows-first then ass, and he was still advancing. “Go on then!” I shouted over the noise of the drums, the roaring approach of the thing, the voices of the others. “Go on!”
Had he heard me? I didn’t think so. I tried to rise, swayed, failed. My body felt very far away, controlled not even by strings but by spiderwebs, blown away and broken in the slightest breeze. There was light now: the monster had brought its own light. Fog began to seep through the railings. A herald.
Everyone else had gathered near the prow of the ship, screaming and fighting foes I couldn’t see. Smaller things, thudding across the deck. The drumming filled my ears, something faint and high behind it, not screaming but a song. I was alone and I would die alone. Nothing but my rage was with me.
And then in the span of seconds, something else: Yenu, running towards me, shouting something about a spell, not seeing Liandan until she was nearly on top of him, and then skidding, startled, caught between us, both of them still moving towards me. His hand came up, holding a blade, and hers came up empty, and in a split second I rose from the deck and arrowed towards them, the noise now so loud that I could not hear either of their screams, only see their mouths moving.
He was closer to her, but I was bigger, and in motion. Distantly, in the few seconds it took for us to collide, I imagined us from above like a physics problem in a textbook: three dots in straight lines, moving far too fast to change direction.
I hit her from behind with my deadened left side, twisted Liandan’s wrist with my right hand, and came down on him with my full weight, landing so hard we slid across the deck for several feet.
Yenu rolled me off him, teeth bared. Oh my God, she said, unheard. We knelt at Liandan’s side, the hilt of his knife protruding from his neck, blood flooding out, moving easily as water, meeting the seams of the boards and flowing between them. Fog blew across the deck, enveloping the lanterns, surrounding us in a golden glow till we could see nothing else, not the others, not even as far as the mast. Hiding this small tragedy in the larger one. His eyes were still open, flickering between the two of us, slowly beginning to dull, finally closing.
She put her mouth to my ear. “We have to—” she began, and screamed, leapt backwards, pawing at her coat. The wooden box with the dead god tumbled to the deck and exploded into light, spraying us with splinters.
Something clattered and unfolded, unseen at first in the fog, then visible: eight feet tall, nine, ten, vaguely humanoid, or at least two arms and two legs and a face like a helmet, all of it brassy and tarnished, a skeletal or insectile arrangement of strings and points like barbed wire, spikes protruding from its shoulders and back, two small spherical eyes, a glow within the brass like the coral and lilac of dawn. We stared up at it.
If it spoke in the din, we did not hear it. But I heard the god inside me awaken in response, roaring: Yes!
The ship shot forwards, the pursuing pale beast twisting futilely in the impossible distance, and then just as quickly up, flattening us to the boards, my face sticking to Liandan’s blood. The darkness around us vanished, the River vanished, replaced with pale white light and silence, the drums receding, the chanting vanishing, leaving only silence, stunned and absolute.
The new god declined to heal me; or at any rate she did not offer, and I felt that, there having been no offer, I would be out of place to ask. Sudworth heated a curved needle in a candle and, after the reopened stab wound had stopped seeping, stitched the edges together. I would have black carbon dots there for the rest of my life, she said.
She complimented me both on my survival after losing an amount of blood that would have killed a lesser man, and on staying still while she sewed. “Please trust me,” I said, “the stitches hurt much less than the actual stabbing.” It was true; I’d barely felt them.
“If it gets infected, you’ll die,” she said.
“I know. I suppose the god will have to move into his second choice of apartment then.”
“Tacky,” she said. “Secondhand god, too.”
“Slightly used.”
“Slightly.” She pursed her lips, from which a fragment of the red thread hung, stuck with saliva to the corner. “I suppose there’s no will.”
“I’ll write a will,” I told her. “I’ll leave you everything.”
“Hmph.” She stuck the needle into a folded scrap of leather, set it aside, and got out a glass screw-top jar of iridescent gray ointment. “I was supposed to tell you that this will sting.”
“Again,” I said patiently, “I suspect it will sting less than having eight inches of metal stuck into my torso.”
“...Are you all right?”
“I think I may have gone a little more insane than usual,” I said after a minute. “It’ll wear off. It usually does.”
She dabbed on the waxy stuff, and glanced back at where the others were talking. The new god, Caustur, unlike Ogruthon, was a talker; her voice came, slightly unsettlingly, from somewhere low on her torso rather than her head, but you got used to that quickly.
And unlike Ogruthon, Caustur had volume and mass—inexplicably, I thought, given that she had been a tiny droplet of nearly weightless metal inside the wooden box. The already-scratched deck was covered with thousands of tiny fresh scratches from her spiked feet.
Most importantly, she had snatched us away from the monster, though she cautioned us that she knew of this thing, that it would once again track us; our scent or signature or the marks we left by our very existence would be muddled thanks to her route, but eventually it would strike upon our trail again. We had paused to put ourselves back together, but we must keep moving.
She had taken us to a world where we could breathe, and I was thankful for that much. The air felt a little thin, but you didn’t have to fight to breathe. Sudworth looked terrible: sunken and anemic. I suspected I looked worse. I certainly felt worse. I had apologized to the Advisor for striking him, and he had accepted it with his usual graciousness; and if he had asked me to explain why it had happened, I would not have been able to, and it seemed like a blessing that he had not.
