Solitudes and Silence
Chapter 13
Crawl and Claw
Terredor was alone in the silence and darkness of the jail. Keeping his eyes shut to sharpen his Deepdark senses, he could only perceive the cage bars and the flapping gills of his companions as they slept. All was still and black, suffocating in its deprivation. Terredor wondered if he was conscious at all; he couldn’t tell if he was sitting on the floor, or floating, or dead. He had to grab himself physically, digging his water-softened nails into his skin. The pain reminded him of his continued life, and oriented him to his environment.
He sensed guards swimming toward the cell. His heart pounded, gills trembling, as he woke his companions, who groggily came to and then fell silent when they sensed the serious mood of Terredor and the guards.
“You can’t do this,” Gelvid said, “We are Soulclaine.”
“We are loyal to Argon,” said a guard.
Terredor wanted to panic, attack like a crazed beast and flee from this place. He knew they faced no ordinary execution, no painless beheading followed by a civilized soulcleaving. His mind obsessively listed every painful way to die. Terredor wanted to battle the guards but he knew that, even if they succeeded, there was no way they’d get all the way out of Ehuun.
“But will Argon cleave your soul?” Waimbrill asked, “Will Argon comfort your family?”
“Argon hath promised us eternal life-“
“That’s a false promise!” Waimbrill shouted, “It is neither possible nor desirable.”
“Don’t bother,” Sir Esterhund said, “They are brainwashed.”
“Argon hath not the power to give you eternal life,” Gelvid said, while a guard wrenched Terredor’s arms behind his back, tying them to each other with a tough string made from sinew.
“When you die, you will join his army just like the victims of the monster you release!” Waimbrill said, “Don’t you see that?”
The guards bound the wrists of Gelvid, Sir Esterhund and Waimbrill, leaving them unable to swim effectively. They could only kick and writhe their way out of the cell, as the guards beckoned them to follow.
They came to a wide chamber decorated with delicate sculptures, lined with dangling fringes alongside ornate tubes twisting and turning in a lacy pattern that ran the length of the room. Hundreds of people were gathered, swimming up and drifting down, in unison, their regular movements rhythmically lulling. They wore scalloped metal armor of uranium.
Terredor and the other prisoners stopped over a wide platform, contorting to keep water flowing over their gills despite their bound arms. Sir Esterhund, stifling moans of pain, made demands in the name of the Knights of the Noble Fin. Waimbrill and Gelvid only floated, their faces tense and still. A guard swam to the foursome and tied heavy rocks to their feet.
A man spoke, and Terredor recognized him as Untegrin, his voice ringing and echoing in the high-ceilinged chamber. “Greetings, fellow faithful,” he said, thrusting his hands upwards. The crowd roared in response.
“Today is the culmination, the reckoning, the day when all that we have worked so hard to prepare for will come true. A few short years ago, any man or beast in the Deepdark would have said that none could hope to challenge the great Modroben. Argon? They would have laughed at the possibility.”
The crowd rumbled in agreement, murmuring to each other and repeating his words.
“Those very same wise men laughed at all of us, didn’t they? They always do. Those who think they know what is best for everyone, they tell us what is and is not possible, and the followfish among us always believe them. But we know the truth, don’t we? What they call impossible is merely difficult, merely inconvenient for them, merely unbalancing to the status quo. Well, I say the status quo has had the church of Argon sharing and suffering with a thousand kinds of refuse, and I swim here before you today to say never more!”
The mob’s screams echoed off the rock walls, generating waves that washed through the room and almost knocked Terredor down. He heard the cultists near him whispering insults and threats, promising that he would suffer as an undead peon in Argon’s service. The thought sent a chill through Terredor’s stomach, and his gills twisted into knots.
“I’m sorry, Terredor. I am no hero. I should not have brought you here,” Waimbrill whispered, the tears apparent in his voice. Terredor tasted their saltiness in the water that flowed through his mouth while the crowd cheered and chanted for their deaths.
“For years we have suffered in solitary silence, and seen our enemies flourish, and we could do nothing. Why?”
Gelvid, his voice hoarse and ragged, screamed to be heard over the roaring din of the crowd, “Modroben is not responsible for your suffering. It is a part of life. Listen not to pretty words, for Argon can not abolish death!”
“Silence, heretic!” shouted Untegrin, “Thy lies are of no matter here. Thy god created death so mortals would worship him. Argon will grant us life, everlasting!”
The crowd cheered again, stopping when Untegrin held his hand up.
Terredor said, “No, I pushed you to let me come. I’m sorry. I just wanted a reason for us to stay together. And I’m glad we did. I can’t think of anyone I’d rather spend eternity as a tortured ghost with.”
“Me too,” Waimbrill said, smiling.
“Your hard work pays off on this day, my friends. As ye well know, our army can not be activated without one thousand and one Mortiss-” The crowd hissed, and Untegrin had to raise his voice to be heard. “And today we have acquired our last two, ahead of schedule. They brought a pair of ordinary souls along as well. More fodder, I suppose.”
Guards swam forward and dragged the foursome to an upraised platform carved with arcane symbols.
“Ye will see an era most glorious, as soon Petromyza shall rise and use all her power to serve Argon,” Untegrin said, “Begin the Chant!”
The crowd began a ritualized chant in an unfamiliar, unearthly-toned tongue, which emanated throbbing insistence and cruel detachment, an entrancing baritone that shook his bones. The chamber filled with palpable potentiality, like prior to a thunderstorm on the Surface.
As the chanting grew in speed and potency, it became louder and more insistent, more menacing and grim. The chanters paused momentously, and in that period of penetrating silence, Terredor saw that the platform beneath him was spreading, dividing into two plates and revealing a chute underneath. The smell of rotten flesh spread into the room, and Terredor screamed.
In the chute was a wide mouth ringed with sharp teeth, oozing fetid yellow ichor. Terredor and the others realized that the tall lip of the platform would push them into its mouth when the plates finished retracting, so they swam upward. The weights attached to their ankles made it a difficult proposition for the Deepdark-dwellers. Terredor and Waimbrill, however, floated magically regardless of their weight, encumbered only because their arms were still bound, keeping them from swimming, so they could do nothing but tread water.
His mangled arms and legs flapping, Esterhund was unable to ascend at all, and he frantically flopped straight into Petromyza’s gullet, which filled the whole of the platform, some fifteen feet in diameter. The plates retracted far enough that Terredor saw into the beast’s mouth. The maw was circular and jawless, double rows of teeth undulating. The large open maw was not empty, corpses and loose body parts writhed within it, a pile of limbs and heads and gnashing fangs, contorting and screeching, hands reaching and pulling the screaming Sir Esterhund into the center of the mass. Terredor closed his eyes, wished he could close his ears as well, so he wouldn’t hear Sir Esterhund’s screams as the snarling zombies tore him limb from limb.
Waimbrill and Terredor were treading above the platform, barely rising despite their exertion because they could use only their feet and contorting bodies to gain momentum. Gelvid was sinking despite his frantic efforts.
“I guess this is it, friends,” Gelvid croaked, lurching downward a few inches then struggling to regain some altitude.
Terr
edor shouted, tears streaming from his eyes into the water, which filled with the warm stench of decay wafting from Petromyza’s mouth. He wished for it to be over, but he knew that might never happen once he was swallowed.
A bony hand clasped Gelvid’s thin slick ankle, and he screeched, sinking into the teeming mass of death thronging in that wide maw. Terredor saw the flashing white of teeth and a burst of blood as a dozen zombies sank their jaws and claws into Gelvid’s soft flesh, ripping limbs and organs apart.
“Terredor,” Waimbrill shouted through tears and clenched teeth, “If my soul is cleaved, she shall not be permanently freed, her mind shall remain dull, and Argon shall not control her. I am sure in circumstances such as these, Modroben will let you cleave even without the proper training. You have seen me do it. You must time it perfectly so I am cleaved before they grab me.”
Waimbrill finished talking and winked, his weary eyes glimmering with faint droplets of hope for the first time since leaving Crikland. He pushed the ring off his finger, and its gleaming brilliance vanished in the shadowy mess of bodies beneath them, leaving Terredor alone in his own bubble, the last light in the Deepdark. Waimbrill began drowning and frantically treading water, struggling to keep himself above the undead horde. He opened his mouth, shuddering violently. The crowd of cultists continued, entranced by the chant, failing to notice the events unfolding before them.
Pale skin shriveled from relentless moisture, Waimbrill smiled faintly, calm spreading across his face. Terredor rubbed his bound hands together, heart pounding, mind screaming to save Waimbrill. He felt a deep pit of longing, let out a small sob and forced himself to concentrate.
Terredor cleared his mind and focused on the water flowing through his gills as his muscles relaxed. He attempted to recite the High Prayer in his mind, but he blanked, unable to look away from Waimbrill’s drowning body.
An object in his pocket gleamed in the remaining light of Terredor’s ring. It was the cantallion Sendralya had given him. He leaned his hips to the side, hoping it would tumble into his hand, so her song would calm his heart and mind as she had promised, or at least that he would die hearing her sweet voice.
The cantallion fell out of his pocket and sank, then stopped, its hinged face swinging open. It was a small cube, carved out of metal as white as Deepdark flora, arranged in a delicate feligree, a symmetrical, fractal prison that housed a tiny green spot of glowing magical power. The green orb floated out of the cube, and there was a flash of light. The sound of a woman clearing her throat echoed. Even the fish stopped, their head darting to and fro as though searching for the sound.
The female voice, Sendralya’s, that came out of the box was somehow even more beautiful than it had seemed on the Surface. Maybe, Terredor thought, it was the acoustics of this room, filled with pure, clean water and entombed by hard rock. Her voice was dulcet and gilded, the high notes warmly spreading like the first rays of dawn; the low notes lingered like the echoing crash and clash of thunder, and Terredor wondered if the tortured souls beneath him understood the feelings of her song. Her voice was so clearly evocative of those Surface phenomena that he thought surely no denizen of the Deepdark, even a living one, could understand it. But he saw that even these undead beasts did. The creatures who crawled and clawed at each other beneath him fell still and silent in waves as her song spread over them. Waimbrill shivered and perished, his inert body descending slowly towards the great mass of monsters who, were it not for the soothing song of the cantallion attracting their attention, would have reached his ankle and pulled him to uncleaved doom.
As Waimbrill had taught him, Terredor concentrated on visualizing his fears: the fear that Modroben would judge him unworthy, that he would make a mistake in the words, that he would fail calamitously. He pictured them as pebbles floating out of his hand one by one, dissolving away to nothing. His mind cleared, and he focused on the incessant, rhythmic quivering of his gills and the sharp chill they imparted to his blood as it traveled close to the icy cold water of the Deepdark. The only sound he allowed himself to hear was the relentless thump of his heart, which echoed from his head to his toes. His voice filled the dark chamber of Argon’s church over the pulsating volume of the chant.
Master of life and death
Let us thy servants give thanks in thy name,
For it is through thy gifts of glory and grace
And our fidelity grown great,
That thy way bringeth rest in the end
And not turmoil and grief.
Through thy gentle tapping of time’s relentless beat
Dost thou pound the march of our lives, and the rhythm of our deaths.
In thy name, we thus give thanks
For the mercy thou dost grant in death
Even unto the meekest of us, the least, the lost, the lame,
Even unto our most terrible foes, who shall find redemption at last.
Thy works give serenity to evil and good the same, and man and elf
And paupers and princes, and all of them alike.
Though our hearts may ache despite thy words which bear truth
It is through thy will that, with the strengths of our souls and the songs of thy spirit,
We shall find peace amid the pall of death
Terredor’s left hand tingled, skin stretching, hardening, fingers fusing into the bone-white pincer of a Deepdark crab. His mind was assaulted by an armada of thoughts that were not his own: flashes of crustacean shells, crabs, crawling atop each other on piles of carrion; a primordial mind entered his own, just for a moment, and a million years of gently flowing water filled his gills, as he heard a deep boom like the sound of a god being born.
Waimbrill’s eyes rolled into the back of his head, the whites flashing like snow as Terredor’s crab claw burst through his sinew bindings and smashed into the Modrobenian’s skull. Terredor felt the pincer crack into Waimbrill’s brain. As the cantallion finished its song, emotions flooded Terredor’s mind, a confusing torrent of feelings washing over him: grief at a life ended too soon, regret at words unspoken and deeds undone, guilt at wrongs unrighted and waves of sadness and loneliness.
The transformation into the crab claw tore his bindings, so Terredor easily glided to the edge of the platform, forcing himself to turn away as Waimbrill’s body floated into the pile of undead, torn to shreds in seconds, amid shrieks with glee.