Black Halo

Perhaps it was that doubt that no shict could ever feel for the Howling that brought the tears to her eyes. Perhaps those came from a different instinct altogether. She didn’t dare think on it. She brushed them from her face with the back of her hand. If she began weeping now, over a human, over the doubt, that knowledge would become shared.

And she could not bear the thought of descending and finding her kinsman weeping as well.

The sight that greeted her in the vast ship’s hold, however, was one of emptiness. Benches and cots lined the hull, presumably for the netherlings to sleep upon when they weren’t fighting, crushing, killing, shoving jagged blades into throats from which her name emerged on blood-choked screams …

Stop it, she told herself.

Stop it, the Howling agreed.

And she did. It was powerful here, speaking to her with greater clarity, greater urgency. It needed only to speak once, and she knew it to be true. She felt her eyes drawn to the darkness at the end of the cabin, the great void that ate the light of overhanging oil lamps. She could see the shadows of a cage’s cold iron bars, and while she could see nothing beyond that, she could hear something; she could feel something.

A heartbeat. A thought. A knowledge that was hers. A knowledge that was theirs.

A shict.

She had barely taken another step when she noticed the lone netherling in her path, and then only after she noticed the jagged blade hurtling towards her. She fell to the deck, hearing the blade’s frustrated wail as its teeth sheared only a few hairs from her head.

‘Just how many colours do you things come in?’ the longface grunted.

Kataria’s answer came with a growl.

The arrow was up and in the bow, drawn back as far as she could force the rigid thing to go, and launched a moment later. A moment was all it took, however, for the longface’s shield to go up, sending the missile ringing off.

Stupid piece of … Kataria thought irately, glowering at the weapon. Who the hell would call this stick a bow?

The netherling, apparently, agreed, if the broad grin with which she raised her sword was any indication. Still, she refused to advance, holding her shield up defensively as she watched Kataria draw her final arrow back. Such lack of a willingness to have a piece of iron wedged in one’s brow, the shict figured, was likely what led this one to be below.

And yet it served her frustratingly well as Kataria aimed and launched, slipping past the longface’s shield to find an unyielding iron breastplate below. It was clear, then, that what the black bow lacked in accuracy it made up for in power. The longface was driven back a step, nothing more than an inconvenience before she readied to charge upon the now-defenceless shict.

Still, Kataria smiled. A single step was all she had needed.

The green fingers that came slithering out between the bars would handle the rest.

The longface’s cry was brief as the long fingers, attached to longer hands and longer arms still, wrapped around her throat in five tiny pythons. They scarcely trembled as they intertwined and pulled her back towards the bars, possessed of a cold passionlessness that suggested this was just one more neck, like all the other necks that had been strangled. Cold hands. Killer hands.

Shict hands.

Kataria forced herself to watch as the crown of the long-face’s head was pulled between the bars, her screams choked as she was fed head-first into an unyielding iron mouth. There was nothing to silence the sound of bone groaning and popping as, hairsbreadth by agonising hairsbreadth, she was pulled between bars that would not accommodate her thick skull.

This, she reminded herself, was what shicts did. Shicts did what they had to. The world, filled with diseases of pink and purple, left them no choice.

The long, purple face was consumed in the void of the cage. Her body twitched soundlessly for but a moment before her legs went slack, bending her back at an awkward angle as she lay still, thick neck wedged between the bars and suspending her in standing, artificial rigour.

Cold, killer fingers slipped out and calmly reached into a pouch at the longface’s belt. A few moments of deft search revealed a wrought-iron key that was drawn out neatly between two green digits. A faint clicking noise emerged after those fingers vanished back into shadow. The cage door groaned as it swung open, dragging the corpse frozen in its grip across the deck with it.

He stepped out of the void, a great green plant out of dark earth, stepping lightly on feet bearing thumbs. Countless time in a cramped cage had done nothing to stunt his stature as he rose high enough for his bald pate to scrape the underside of the oil lamp above him. From his groin up, a long line of symbols ran the length of his body, each one a story.

And each one a death. Of wife. Of child. Of their murderers.

Each symbol was no bigger than a thumbprint, but each sorrow and every hatred was condensed into a pattern of lines that only a shict would know.

Kataria knew.

‘What is your name?’ she asked.

He stared at her with even blue eyes.

‘You already know.’

Upon his lips, the shictish tongue, their tongue, sounded so eloquent. She wondered absently if he could hear the dust on her own tongue.

She searched herself, listened to the Howling.

‘Naxiaw,’ she said, looking up at him. ‘I am … pleased you are well.’

‘Pleased?’ His lips peeled back into a broad smile, his canines twice as large as hers. Long arms parted in a gesture almost warm enough for her to forget they had just been used to pull a longface through bars. ‘Sister. We are not strangers.’

She would have been shocked to find herself laughing, possibly a little worried to find the sound so hysterical. That thought was lost in a sea of emotion that carried her on running feet to leap into him. His arms wrapped about her, drew her close to a broad chest. A great weight had fallen from her, evidenced by how easily Naxiaw drew her up off her feet.

In his arms, she found memory. She found a hand on her shoulder, reassuring her after her ears were notched. She found the scent of rabbits cooking and fires. She found the dirge of bows and the song of funeral pyres. She found memories of her father, his sternness, his words, his speeches, his memories. Of her mother, she found only lightness.

She found everything the Howling said she would find.

‘Little Sister,’ Naxiaw said, holding her closely, ‘you are far from home.’

‘The world is our home,’ she replied. ‘No matter what round-ears say.’

‘It heartens me to hear such words.’

Her father’s words.

‘The creature above,’ the greenshict said, ‘that caused you such sorrow. I felt him. Is he dead?’

No, she thought, he wouldn’t die so soon. He’s above, bleeding out under a rusty knife. Right where I left him.

Not that creature, stupid, she scolded herself.

‘You are worried,’ Naxiaw said.

Watch what you think, moron, she hissed mentally. And don’t look at him! If he can’t tell through the Howling, it’ll be obvious once he sees your face.

‘I was,’ she replied, keeping her voice steady. ‘But I draw strength from my people.’

‘As all shicts should.’

Her grandfather’s words.

‘It is well now, Sister,’ Naxiaw said, easing her down and laying her head upon his chest. ‘I live. You live. We are safe.’

Her ear against his chest, she could hear the sound of memory in his heartbeat. Slow and steady, purpose resonating with every pump of blood through it. It was comforting to hear, at least at first.

The more she listened, however, the more she was aware that she had never heard such a thing before. She had heard nothing so slow, so certain, so sure. And it caused her to pull away, her ears attuned to her own body. There was no more thunder in her ears; there had been, she was certain, when the Howling spoke to her, had urged her to hear it.

Now, she heard her own heart. It was swift, erratic, uncertain, conflicted.

Light.

Unpleasant.

Terrifying.

‘Sister,’ Naxiaw said, furrowing his brow. ‘What is wrong?’

You, she thought. You’re wrong. Your heartbeat is too steady. You’re too sure of yourself. You know everything a shict should know and you hear the Howling like it was another shict. You’re probably hearing this right now because the Howling is … isn’t it?

She said none of that. Instead, she shook her head and spoke words that none of her family had ever said before, that came from her light, erratic heart.

‘I don’t know.’

Naxiaw looked certain, as though he were about to speak with the voice of the Howling and whatever he were to say next would assure her of everything. She watched eagerly as he stared back at her, then said nothing, looking down at the floor of the hold.

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘they are almost here.’

‘Who?’ Kataria asked, confusion overriding despair.

‘You cannot hear them?’ Naxiaw asked. He released her, knelt down on long legs to stare at the floor thoughtfully. ‘They have been following this ship for hours now. They are waiting for something.’

His fingers ran over the wood. His ears, six notches to a lobe, perked up. She heard it, too: the groaning of wood, a cry of protest that it knew was useless as something insistent pressed up against it. Naxiaw looked up at her, his eyes keen and his face dire.

‘And now,’ he whispered, ‘it has come.’

The boat rocked suddenly as something struck it from below, sending tremors through the floor, past Kataria’s feet and into her heart. The ship’s groan became a scream as jagged rents veined the wood and bled saltwater.

Naxiaw leapt up and back, putting himself between her and the rapidly spreading crack in the floor. He’s trying to protect me, she realised. Who … no one’s done that for me before. The thought should have caused her less distress than it did.

She herself took a step backwards as another great blow shook the ship. From beneath the widening crack, she heard them: voices, proclamations, hymns, chants, urges, each one brimming with purpose, each purpose rife with death.

Another blow and the floor erupted into a spray of splinters, the crack became a wound leaking clear, salty blood onto the floor. And at the centre, like a black knife, the arm rose: titanic, emaciated, jointed in four places and ending in a great webbed claw.

‘Not them,’ Kataria whispered with what breath she had left.

‘What are they?’ Naxiaw asked.

His question was answered as another webbed fist punched through the hull, ripping the wound into a great, gaping hole. Claws sank into the wood, gripped tightly and hauled an immense black shape onto the floor.

A skeleton wrapped in shadow, crowned with a wide head sporting vast, gaping jaws, it pulled itself free from a womb of water and wood. Its flesh glistening under a cowering flame, it rose from its knees, each vertebra visible beneath its black skin as it rose to its full, imposing height. On webbed feet, it slowly turned about and levelled the head of a black fish upon the two shicts.

The Abysmyth stared at Kataria, its eyes wide, white and empty.

‘At the midpoint on the pilgrimage,’ it said, its voice choked with the voices of the drowned, ‘I looked upon the pristine creation and saw a floating blight. Mother bade me to act on her behalf, unable to bear the agony of the faithless longfaces upon her endless blue. And within the black boil, I found the lost and the lonely.’ It extended a great webbed hand, glistening with thick, viscous ooze. ‘Come to me, my children. I will take the agony of this waking nightmare from you.’

‘Run,’ Kataria said as much to herself as to Naxiaw, ‘run.’

‘What is it?’ the greenshict asked.

‘Salvation,’ the Abysmyth answered.

‘The Shepherd has come,’ a chorus of voices burbled on the rapidly rising water. ‘The faithless tremble. The fainthearted cower. Fear not, fear not …’

‘For I am here,’ the Abysmyth continued, ‘to ease your agony.’ It gestured to the wound. ‘Rejoice.’

And, as one, they came boiling through the hull like a brood of tadpoles. Glistening bodies, bereft of hair or pallor, rejected by the great blue body of the sea and vomited out in a mass of writhing flesh, gnashing needle teeth, colourless eyes. The frogmen came in numbers immeasurable, pulling themselves out of the rising water in a gasping, rasping choir.

‘We have come,’ the great black demon said, ‘to deliver. Messages. Sinners. Everyone.’

‘Run,’ Kataria said, grabbing Naxiaw by the arm. ‘RUN!’

Naxiaw heard and did not question, following her as they sprinted for the stairs leading to the deck. Struck breathless from fear, they spoke in short gasps of air.

‘How do we escape?’ the greenshict asked.

‘The shore isn’t far from here,’ she said. ‘Shicts can swim.’

‘Those things … they came from the water. Is it wise to go in?’

‘We don’t have a whole lot of choice, do we? The ship will go down in a few moments and we’ll be drowning, anyway.’

‘Then we swim. I trust you, Sister.’

Someone else trusted me once, she thought with a pain in her chest. I … I need to. I have to go back for him.

‘Wait!’ she cried as they neared the companionway. ‘I have to …’

He paused, looked at her curiously. What could she say? That she had to stay on this sinking tomb, now rife with demons as well as longfaces, for the sake of a human? The great disease? How could she tell him that? How could she tell herself that, after all the time she had yearned to feel this knowledge, hear this comfort, feel this lightness?

How could she ask herself why her heart beat different than his?

She could not say that, any of that.

‘I have to do what I must,’ she said instead, continuing up to the deck, ‘for my people.’

Someone’s words.

Not hers.

Thirty-Four

MOTHER AND CHILD

Gariath was not dead yet.