Black Halo

Thirty-Five

The statue of Zamanthras was well tended. Her high, stone cheeks had been polished. The waves of Her flowing hair were lovingly carved so that each granite strand was distinct and apparent. Her bountiful breasts, uncovered by the thin garment about Her hips, were perfectly round and smooth.

The rest of the temple was in decay, ignored. It had been easy enough to sneak into, unseen. The pillars that marched the crumbling walls were shattered and decayed. Those tapestries that still hung from their sconces were frayed and coated in dust. Supplies, crates and boxes had been stacked beneath them. It appeared that the church had lost its original purpose and had been resigned to storage and other practical needs long ago. He would have accepted that. He would have smiled at that.

If not for the statue.

Zamanthras stared down at the Mouth through stone eyes, smiled at him through stone lips. She was confident in Her own care, smug in Her own polish. They still worshiped, She told him. No matter how deaf She might be, no matter how long their prayers went unanswered, the people would still polish Her statue. The people would wait for Her to save their dying children, to give them enough wealth to buy a loaf of bread. It would never come. They would die and praise Her name even as She watched them languish.

‘No more,’ he whispered. ‘No more wasted prayers. No more dead children.’ He glanced at the vial in his hand, the swirling liquid of Mother’s Milk. ‘It ends here. In Your house.’

Resounding through his skull and the temple alike, a distant heartbeat voiced its deep, droning approval.

Stretching between the Mouth and the Goddess, the temple’s pool stretched as long as ten men in a vast, perfect circle. The waters upon it were placid, unstirred and quiet, not the silvery flow of a lake. This water was dense, heavy, like iron.

A door to a prison.

As he leaned over the edge, staring into the water, the heartbeat grew faster, louder. The Father sensed his presence, sensed the scent of his consort, his mistress, in the Mouth’s hand. Through whatever prison held him, Daga-Mer scented the faintest trace of Mother Deep.

And beneath the iron waters, Daga-Mer railed against his liquid bonds.

Free him, an urge spoke within him, born of anger, tempered by sermon. The Father must be freed before Mother Deep can rise. Mother Deep must rise before this world can change. Remember why She must.

Change, he reminded himself. Change that mortalkind might not tremble in fear. Change that mortalkind might not waste their words on deaf gods. Change that children would not die while their parents languished in doubt.

He stared back up, saw the statue of Zamanthras looking back at him, smiling, challenging him to do so.

Mocking him.

They would tremble, She knew. Change was terrifying. They would pray to Her when Mother Deep rose, She said with a stone voice. Change bred a need for the familiar. She would watch children die, parents die, all in darkness, all in doubt. Change was violent.

Then … A doubt spoke within him, blooming in darkness and watered with despair. What’s the point?

He heard a scrape of feet against stone floors. His own heart quickened; had he been seen? He reached for a knife that wasn’t there. Where was it? He had left it elsewhere, in another life, another house, when he had seen …

He paused, noting the silence. No one was emerging. No one came out to stop him. He glanced about, spying a shadow painted upon the walls by the dim light of the hole in the ceiling.

‘I know you’re there,’ he said. The shadow quivered, shrinking behind the pillar. ‘You shouldn’t be here, you know.’

A bush of black hair peered out from behind the pillar, the girl staring at him with dark eyes that betrayed wariness, caution. She was not panicked. He shouldn’t have smiled at her, he knew. His smile shouldn’t have been intended to reassure her, to coax her out. Change was coming. Many would die. She would likely be among them.

And yet …

‘Neither should you,’ she said to him, leaning out a little more. ‘Mesri says that no one should be in here.’

‘In the city’s temple?’

‘There’s less call for prayer these days,’ she said, easing out from behind the pillar. ‘More call for medicine and food.’

The Mouth eyed the crates stacked against the walls. ‘So they are left here to rot?’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ she sneered. ‘If we had any, Mesri would have distributed them.’

‘Priests serve the Gods, not man.’

‘Well, if there were any in here, I wouldn’t be scrounging in dark, abandoned houses with weird, pale-skinned strangers,’ she replied sharply. ‘This’ — she gestured to the crates — ‘is what was left behind when the rich people left Yonder.’

He glanced to a great, hulking shape beneath a white sheet. ‘And that?’

The girl traipsed over to it, drawing it off to expose a well-made, untested ballista mounted on wheels, its string drawn and bolt loaded. ‘They bought it when fears about Karnerian and Sainite incursions were high.’ As if she suddenly remembered who she was talking to, she tensed, resting a hand on the siege weapon’s launching lever. ‘I know how to use it, too.’

Hers was the look of childish defiance, the urge to run suppressed because someone had once told her that running was for cowards. It was familiar. He fought the urge to smile. He fought the urge to point out that the ballista was pointing at least ten feet to the right of him.

‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ he said.

‘And I’m sure you’re telling the truth,’ she replied snidely. ‘Because, as we all know, only reasonable hairless freaks chase young girls through alleys with knives, screaming like lunatics.’

‘I left the knife in the house,’ he said. ‘My house.’

‘Not fair,’ she snapped back. ‘Squatters can’t claim the houses. It’s a rule.’

‘I’m not a squatter. I used to live there.’

‘Liar.’

‘What?’

‘If you used to live there, you’d be a Tohana man. If you were a Tohana man, you’d be like me.’ She tapped her dark-skinned brow. ‘I’m not quite convinced that you aren’t some kind of shaved ape.’

‘I could have been from another nation,’ he pointed out.

‘If you were, you’d have been rich and you wouldn’t live in a little shack.’ She eyed him carefully. ‘So … who are you?’

‘There is no good answer to that.’

‘Then give me a bad one.’

He glanced from her to the pool. ‘I lived here with my family once. They’re dead now.’

‘That’s not a bad answer,’ she replied. ‘Not a good one, either. Lots of people have dead families. That doesn’t explain what you’re doing here.’

He knew he shouldn’t answer. What would be the point? When the Father was freed, people would die. That was inevitable. How could he possibly tell her this? There was no need for him to even look at her, he knew. He didn’t have to kill her or anything similar. All he need do was open the vial, pour the Milk into the water, free the Father. It didn’t even need to be poured — he could just hurl the whole thing in and the objective would be achieved.

Change would come.

People would die.

He had tried to bite back his memories, to quash the pain that welled up inside him. He had served the Prophet to achieve oblivion, as the rest of the blessed had. And yet, gazing upon the girl roused memory in him, nurturing instincts that he had not felt since he sat beside a small cot and told stories.

Chief among these was the instinct to lie.

‘I’m here to help,’ he said.

‘Help?’

‘This city was my home once. I raised a child here. I want to help it return to its former glory.’

‘Glory?’ She raised a sceptical eyebrow.

‘Prosperity?’

‘Eh …’

‘Stability, then,’ he said. ‘I’m going to change this city.’

‘How?’

He smiled at her. ‘I’ll start with the people.’

She stared at him for a moment, and as he gazed upon her expression, he knew an instinctual fear. Doubt. It was painted across her unwashed face in premature wrinkles and sunburned skin. It was the expression of someone who had heard promises before and knew, in whatever graveyard inside of her that innocence went to die, that some lies, no matter how nurturing, were simply lies.

He had seen that expression only once before. He remembered it well.

And then, her face nearly split apart with her grin.

‘That’s pretty stupid,’ she said. ‘I like it. I don’t believe it, but I like it.’

‘Now, why wouldn’t you believe it?’ He grinned back. ‘If a shaven monkey can sneak into a temple unseen, why wouldn’t he be able to change people?’

‘Because everyone tells the same story. I’m too old to believe it now.’

‘How old?’

‘Sixteen.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Kasla,’ she said, smiling. ‘What’s yours?’

He opened his mouth to speak, and the moment he did, her grin vanished, devoured by the expression of fear and panic that swallowed her face. He quirked a brow at her as she turned and fled, scampering behind a pillar and disappearing into the shadows of the temple. He was about to call after her when he heard the voice.

‘I’m not going to ask how you got in.’

He turned and saw the priest, portly, moustached and clad in fraying robes. The man eased the door shut behind him, making a point of patting the lock carefully. He turned to face the Mouth, his dark face dire.

‘I’m not going to ask who you were talking to,’ he said, taking a step forward. ‘Nor will I inquire what you’re doing here. I already know that.’ A hand slipped inside his robe. ‘All I wish to know is how a servant of Ulbecetonth thought he could walk in my city-’

His hand came out, clenching a chain from which a symbol dangled: a gauntlet clenching thirteen obsidian arrows. Mesri held it before him like a lantern, regarding the Mouth evenly.

‘-without a member of the House knowing.’

The Mouth tensed, precariously aware of his position by the pool. He glanced down, all too aware of the vial clenched in his hand. He looked back to Mesri, painfully aware that he hadn’t thrown it in yet.

‘How much else do you know?’ he whispered.

‘Only what you do,’ Mesri replied. ‘We both know what’s imprisoned beneath this city. We both know you’re carrying the key to that abomination’s release.’

‘The Father is-’

‘An abomination,’ Mesri insisted. ‘A beast that lives only to kill, only to destroy in the name of a cause that exists only to do more of the same. We both know that if he is released, that’s all we’ll see. Death. Destruction.’ He stared at the Mouth intently. ‘And yet … we both know you’ve had opportunities in abundance to do so. And we both know you haven’t.

‘This is where my knowledge ends,’ Mesri said. ‘Why?’

‘Just …’ The Mouth hesitated, cursing himself for it. ‘I’m just taking my time, making certain that when the change comes, when the Father is freed, he-’

‘Stop,’ Mesri commanded. ‘I know now why you haven’t thrown it in.’ His stare went past the Mouth’s hairless flesh, plumbing something darker, deeper. It seized something inside him that was supposed to have been starved to death, banished into gloom. It seized that thing within him and drew it out. ‘We both know.’

The Mouth cringed, turning away from the man’s gaze.

‘What I want to know is why,’ Mesri said. ‘Why you turned to the Kraken Queen and her empty promises.’

‘Mother Deep’s promises are not empty,’ the Mouth hissed back. ‘She demands servitude. She demands penance. Only then are the faithful rewarded.’

‘With?’

‘Absolution,’ the Mouth said, a long smile tugging at the corners of his lips. ‘Freedom from the sin of memory, oblivion from the torments of the past, salvation from the torture inflicted upon us by the Gods.’

‘The benevolent matron does not demand,’ Mesri retorted. ‘The benevolent matron does not reward you by stealing what makes you human.’

‘I am not human,’ the Mouth snarled, holding up his webbed fingers. ‘Not anymore. I am something greater. Something advanced enough to see the hypocrisy within you.’ He narrowed his eyes to thin slits. ‘You speak of benevolence, of rewards. What has your goddess brought you?’

The Mouth gestured wildly to the statue of Zamanthras, her smug stone visage and self-satisfied stone smile.

‘Your city is in decay! Your people lie ill and dying! The seas themselves have abandoned you!’

‘Because of your matron,’ Mesri snapped back. ‘The fish flee because they sense her stirring. Your presence here confirms that.’

‘We won’t need fish,’ the Mouth snarled. ‘We won’t need bread, we won’t need healers and we won’t need gods. Mother Deep will provide for us, absolve us all so that we need never suffer again. We’ll live in a world where someone hears our prayers and guides us! We’ll live in a world where we can talk to our gods and know they love us! We’ll live in a world without doubt, where no one has to spew empty words at empty symbols while his child dies in her bed!’

The Mouth liked to think himself as in control of his emotions, his memories. Perhaps he wasn’t. Perhaps they had been building up all this time, behind a dam of hymns and rehearsed proclamations, waiting for the tiniest breach to come flooding out. Perhaps Mesri’s stare went deeper than he thought, pulled things up that even the Mouth didn’t know he had inside of his skin. None of that mattered; the Mouth had said what he said.

Only now, when tears formed in his eyes, did he realise what it was he had just spoken.

‘How long ago?’ Mesri asked.

‘She would have been sixteen now,’ the Mouth said, aware of how choked his voice sounded. ‘Plague got her. No healer could help. She would be too old for stories now. Too old for gods. They’re one and the same: lies we tell each other to convince ourselves that our fates are beyond our own control.’

‘That was roughly the time I gained these robes,’ Mesri sighed, rubbing at his temples. ‘I believed, at the time, it was a blessing. Port Yonder thrived and I thought it was the will of the Gods.’

‘The Gods have no will beyond the desire to be worshiped and do nothing in return,’ the Mouth spat. ‘They don’t hear us. They don’t do anything except fail us, and we keep coming back to them, scrounging at their feet!’

‘I believed,’ Mesri whispered, ‘that we need simply continue to pray, to receive the blessing. I was wrong.’

‘Then you see? This is the only way …’ The Mouth looked to the vial. ‘The Father must-’

‘I was wrong in thinking that the Gods would treat us like sheep.’ Mesri seized his attention with a sudden chest-borne bellow. ‘I was wrong to think that we need simply to graze upon the blessings they gave us. The Gods gave us wealth and we squandered it. The Gods gave us prosperity and we wasted it. This temple could have been tremendous, like the church-hospitals of the Talanites. We could have helped so many people …’

‘But the wealth vanished. The ill and hungry are everywhere. The Gods failed us.’

‘The wealth is gone and the ill and hungry are as they are because of what we did. The Gods did not fail you.’ Mesri closed his eyes, sighed softly. ‘I did.’

The Mouth was at once insulted and astonished, unable to find words to express it.

‘I could have helped your child. I could have saved her.’ He tugged at his garments. ‘These robes commanded respect. I could have brought the finest healers.’

‘You wouldn’t have.’

‘I wouldn’t have, no,’ Mesri said, shaking his head. ‘I would have languished in my gold and my silks and thought that the Gods would have solved it. But that is not their fault. It is mine for believing that it would happen. If I had knowledge, if I had opportunity … we wouldn’t be in this situation.’

‘But we are,’ the Mouth snarled. ‘And we are left with no recourse but the inevitable.’

‘Inevitability does not exist,’ the priest spat back. ‘There is only mankind and his will to do what’s right. What we have here is knowledge. What we have here is opportunity.’ He held out his hand. ‘Give me the vial.’

There were a thousand replies the Mouth had been conditioned to offer such a demand, most of them involving some form of stabbing, all of them involving a total denial. What he did, what he hadn’t expected to do, was to stare dumbly down at the vial, the key to change, the key to freedom.

To absolution.

‘What will they say when you free Daga-Mer?’ Mesri asked. ‘What will they do when he destroys their lives, their homes, their families? They will do as you did: plunge themselves into a darkness deeper than sin. They will suffer as you have. They will try to convince themselves that they need no memory, that they need none of that torment.

‘What we cannot count on is that they will be in a position to do as you have,’ Mesri said softly. ‘We cannot count on them to realise the value of memory, the treasure that is the image of their daughter’s face.’ He stared intently at the Mouth. ‘You can hurl it into the pool. You can hurl her face, her life, with it.

‘Or you can give it to me. And we can spare a thousand people what you’re feeling right now.’

The Mouth had no desire to inflict what he currently felt on another. The Mouth wasn’t even certain what it was that he was feeling. Despair, of course, blended with anger and frustration and compulsion, but they churned inside him, whirling about so that he received only glimpses of them. And at each glimpse, a memory: his daughter’s laughter, his daughter’s first skinned knee, his daughter’s first toy, his daughter’s death …

And he wanted them to be gone forever.

And he wanted to cling to them always.

And he wanted the world to see how false the Gods were.

And he wanted no one to go into the dark places he had gone to.

‘I don’t know your name,’ Mesri said. ‘I don’t know your daughter’s name. But I know the names of every person in this city. I will tell you all of them so that you know whose lives you hold in your hand.’

‘Do you know Kasla?’ he asked.

‘Her parents are dead. She refuses to come to me for help. She is proud.’

‘My daughter was proud.’

He looked up. He saw Mesri smile at him.

‘Then I think you’ve made your decision.’ He took a step closer. The Mouth did not retreat. He raised his hand. The Mouth raised the vial. ‘It is a wise one, my fr-’

‘QAI ZHOTH!’

The howl rang out over the city sky: an iron voice carving through the air, cleaving through a chorus of screams that reverberated off every wall.

‘WE’RE UNDER ATTACK! RUN! RUN!’

‘ZAMANATHRAS, WHAT ARE THEY?’

‘MESRI! WHERE’S MESRI?’

And for every scream, a war cry answered.

‘AKH ZEKH LAKH!’

‘EVISCERATE! DECAPITATE! ANNIHILATE!’

‘WHERE IS IT? WHERE IS THE RELIC, SCUM?’

Mesri did not have to ask what was happening. The sounds of fire, of pain, of death filled his ears. He did not have to ask who was invading. He did not care. And he did not have time to.

He turned. The Mouth had vanished, fled into some dark recess of the temple and of his own thoughts. He cursed, sparing only a moment to look at the pool. It was still there. Still untainted. Still holding its prisoner.

A muttered prayer was all he could spare for the Mouth as he turned and rushed into the city.

In the temple behind, fate lay in the hands of a troubled servant of demons.

In the city ahead, fate lay in the reek of smoke and the screams of the dying.