The Voice From the Deep

Shath sat on the ember throne and brooded on his fate, and the war that was not yet over. The great hall was silent, for his barbarian warriors were still out in the city, gathering their dead and slaying the last of their enemies. It would be days before they had hunted out the last remnants of the legions and piled their heads into great towers. In time they would decorate the walls of the city with the skulls as a reminder to all who would think to set themselves against the new emperor.

He looked up as a shadow flitted high in the towering columns, and he watched with pleasure as Ellai flew on her delicate wings among the great pillars, gliding with grace and a lightness that made her seem weightless. Her silken robes and veil billowed like colored fire in her wake, as light as she, and then she spiraled down, easy as a fallen leaf, and touched the floor with no more sound than a breath.

She came to him and he held out his hand, embraced her when she came close. Shath had never sired a child of his own kind, and he doubted he ever would. But this small child of the wilderness was as beloved to him as a child of his own blood.

“The battle is done,” she said in her small voice, relieved and weary. “I hope you shall never again have to preside over such destruction.”

“As do I,” he said. “In my youth I sought a great battle, a battle that all men would tell tales of and bow their heads in reverence at the carnage and the terror of it. Now I have fought such a battle, and I will be content if I never see one to equal it.”

“And yet you are not content. I can feel that within you,” she said. She touched his face, her small hand on his rough-hewn cheek.

“Kurux escaped me, at the end,” he said. “The power that sustained him, that rose him up, took him away at the end, and I cannot allow that to endure.”

“No,” she said. “No you cannot.”

“Can you tell me where he is? Help me, as you have so many times. Guide me.” He held her hand. “I could not have reached this throne without you.”

“You could have taken a throne,” she said. “But I would have you be a great emperor, not simply another murderous tyrant. I would have you become wise, now that you have conquered.” She closed her eyes. “I do not need to seek him. He is known to me. I know he has gone into the darkness, and it waits there. It is a power you must destroy, yet I do not know if you can.”

“Tell me,” he said.

“Zur is an ancient city, but it was built as a shadow of one even more ancient. An echo of a past age. Once there stood a city of the ancients, to the north, out to sea, where once was land. It was a great city, with high black towers and deep roots that plunged into the earth. It had tendrils that drew in power from over the land and across the sea, and it was endless, so they believed in those days.” Ellai stood with her eyes shut and held up her hands, as if to conjure an image of a lost age.

“Then came the wars, and the dark ages that followed. We still dwell within a dark age, when knowledge has been forgotten and history is myth. The wars sundered the earth, cracked the land and undid the webs of power that encircled the world. The skies burned, and the towers fell, and then the sea rushed in and claimed the great city, and it sank into the waters.”

Her wings furled about her like a robe. “But it is not gone. It lives there, beneath the waves. A remnant, a last piece of the glory it once possessed. It lies whelmed by the dark waters, washed by the tides. Unseen, below, it is the Black City. The Dead City.”

“But something lives there,” Shath said.

“Yes, if it lives in truth. It is a power I can feel, and have felt it growing as we draw ever nearer to it. It is something from the lost ages. Something from the ancient world that has survived. It is, perhaps, not what it was, or what it was meant to be. It is something that has changed to maintain the strength to endure. It is like a god, now. Or it imagines itself to be a god. It holds knowledge of the old world and so it believes it is right that it should rule what remains. Yet it is bound in that place. It cannot leave, it cannot go forth into the world.” She looked at him. “It is trapped there, and so it called forth to Kurux, and he answered. He became its high priest, and I believe all his powers were born from it. I believe it was black knowledge from lightless ages that allowed him to create and tame the beasts he sent against us. It gifted him with unclean sciences, and would have had him conquer the world in its name.”

“And what is that name?” Shath said.

Ellai shrugged her slim shoulders. “If it has one, it has not been spoken in a very long time. It does not say what it is to be called. It is the last of its kind. The only one, perhaps, that ever existed. It is neither alive nor dead. Neither free nor a prisoner. Neither mortal nor a god. It is a black poison eating away at what remains of the world, and if there is ever to be another age of light it must be destroyed.”

Shath stood slowly from the ember throne, and he touched the sword he bore in its sheath, the dreaming ancient steel yet hungering for war. “Than I shall destroy it.”

o0o

It was a gray dawn when Shath went down to the sea and climbed aboard a small boat his men had found on the shore. The iron fittings were dark with corrosion, and he wondered how long it had lain here. The oars were almost black with years of salt breath, and he liked the feel of them. His warriors looked on, their ferocity muted in the mist, for they knew their master went to seek a great evil, and there was a fear on them that was strange to the beasts of the waste.

He heard the chime of small bells, and he looked to see Ashari carried through the mist on her litter hung with a thousand beads. The men set it down and she emerged into the half-light, robed and veiled in silks, gleaming with jewels. Her small hooves left delicate prints upon the sand.

“Your treasures will not serve you in this battle,” Shath said. “Take them off.”

Ashari laughed as she climbed into the boat with him. “If I am marked to die, then I shall be cast into the void wearing the ransom of a kingdom. I will not crawl to the void clad in rags. Ask of me many things, barbarian, but not that.”

He snorted. “I do not ask you to join this battle with me.”

“And only a fool would join you on this errand, and yet here I am, a fool in truth. Twice I have tasted the power you seek to destroy, and twice it was too strong for me. Still, I will contend with it again.” She seated herself and looked at him with her golden eyes. “For you, I will do this. Strange, is it not?”

“It is,” he said, and he turned away and set his hands to the oars. The Urugan pushed them into the waves, and he bent his arms to rowing. Both hands – one flesh and one metal – pulled against the tide and easily sent them out to sea. Shath did not know the way, and so Ashari sat in the prow of the little boat and looked ahead.

“I can feel it,” she said, and he heard fear in her velvet voice. “Like a shadow that towers against the distant horizons. It knows we are coming. It is awaiting us, and it is angry.”

“I do not fear its anger,” Shath said, drawing on the oars. “I will cut it from the world like a dead child from a womb. My long path has led me here, and I will not fail to destroy my final enemy.”

They turned north, out of the sight of land, and rowed into the mist that hung cold over the surface of the water. The waves rolled heavily, coated with something that glistened with many colors, and the smell was bitter and unclean. Shath saw things moving in the water, pale and serpentine, and he kept his sword close to hand, so it would be ready if he needed to spill blood.

It would have been fine to fly to this place on one of the great eagles, but the sky was not his domain. He thought of Tathar then, and wished him fortune in his flight into the dark world beyond. The battle had taken him, and for days his red eagle had circled the skies, crying for his master. Shath glanced back at Ashari and wondered if she would mourn so if he were slain. Perhaps she would.

Shadows emerged from the fog, and he saw the black ruins of ancient towers slimed with sea-growths and marred by corrosion. At first it was only a few beams of metal jutting up from below, and then it was larger and larger ruins. He remembered what Ellai had told him, of how this had once been a great city, and he wondered what it had been like in the days of its glory.

Sea weeds and vines climbed from the black waters and covered the ruins that thrust up from the heavy waters. The waves seethed and gasped among the wreckage, and in places bubbles rose up and churned from below, as if something breathed in the deeps.

More ruins emerged, and then he saw plainly that they were the remains of the towers that had lined a great avenue that led through the heart of the dead city. The waves were nearly slack now, only heaving the surface slowly up and down, like the pulse of hidden life.

“We are here,” Ashari said, her voice low. “It is close to us now. Below.”

“Yes,” Shath said. “This is the place at the heart of everything. I can see it.” He could, indeed. The scrawls and lines of the unseen power moved behind his eyes, filling his mind with the knowledge that came from out of the past. He felt his metal arm twitch as information flowed into him. He brushed it aside. The Ancients had known what was here once, they did not know what it had become. Time had made a servant into a master.

The sea began to boil, and steam rose from the black waters. Shath set aside the oars and stood in the boat, taking his sword in his iron hand. He watched as the surface heaved and shifted, and then he felt the presence of the thing like a weight pressing against his mind. It was like a cloud of blackness made palpable, a stench in the thoughts and not the lungs.

You have come. I did not think you were so foolish as to place yourself in my power, barbarian. Yet here you are, and in this place where my strength is limitless you cannot prevail, and no power will protect you. The voice was in his mind, as though some vast mouth spoke from just behind him. So close it seemed it was already all around them, upon them, within them.

Shath spat into the black waters, seeing pale, writhing things crawl upon the ruins and stare at him with blank black eyes. “You are a ghost,” he said. “A phantom of a dead world. It is time you passed away among the other ghosts.”

Something gray and slick with slime erupted from the waters, and then he saw the size of it, water shedding from a misshapen brow. Eyes opened, black and featureless as stones, and yet he felt the intelligence behind them, the ages-old hatred and the burning resentment of all life, like the heat of a bonfire against his mind.

Besides eyes, it had no face, only a mass of metal cables thick with sea-growths hanging from where a mouth should have been. Shath sensed the power flowing through those conduits. Power drawn from deep places long-buried from sight, which fed this thing and kept it alive. Great arms with flabby, sagging gray flesh lifted from the waters and gripped the ruined walls and pushed the thing more fully from the waters. Its spine was hunched and jagged with spines and barnacles larger than a human skull, things that fluttered and gasped at the air.

You think you can unmake me? The voice came again. You are an insect beneath my hands, a creature no more significant than any other thing that crawls and cries in the slime of life. You have no power that I fear.

Shath looked with his other eyes, seeing the lines of power flowing through the cables down into the water, and he marked the greatest one. “I have one power,” he said. He looked back at Ashari. “Hold him, if you can.” He turned and looked at the dead god from beneath the sea. “I place my curse upon you, and now I will place my blade as well.” He looked at the roiling back waters, and then he hurled himself overboard and dove beneath the reeking surface.

o0o

Ashari cursed when the boat pitched beneath her, and then she was alone, Shath vanishing beneath the waters to leave her face to face with the thing from beneath the sea. It looked down at her with those depthless eyes, and she sensed the power of its mind towering overhead like a pillar of black smoke. She looked up at it and folded her hands, lacing her fingers together. “Very well,” she said. “Let us contend, you and I.” Her heart thundered with the fear she forced back, and then she closed her eyes.

She fell into her inner awareness, seeing through the haze to the pillar of black fire that was the being of Ix, and she hurled all her strength against it. She knew that strength would not be enough, and yet she found she was eager to try regardless; she wanted to see this terrible power recoil from her blow.

It did, and she felt the sea quiver as the thing flinched back from her stroke. Then it gathered itself in wrath and truck back, and she felt herself borne up and carried away on the tide of that assault. She was pulled almost to the limits of her power to return to herself, and then she writhed free and tried to strike back, but the being shrugged aside her attack. Now on guard, its strength was too great for her to oppose, and she felt herself a moment from utter dissolution.

o0o

Shath dove through the blackness, and then he saw threads as the thing that lived in his iron hand and lived behind his eyes showed the way in the darkness. He saw the long tangle of cables that led down from the sea-thing and to the deeps at the heart of the city, and he swam toward it. It was not easy to move, the water was dense and the current pulled him away, and his right arm was heavier than flesh and dragged at him. But Shath was made of more than human will, and he fought through, sword in hand, until he grasped the slime-covered metal of the conduits.

There was one he sought, and he pushed through the others to reach it. It was heavy and black with corrosion, scabbed over with growths and vile weeds. The moment he touched it, the other cables came alive and coiled around him, trying to drag him down. He stabbed in with his sword and pierced one, then another, filling the water with black ichor that tastes of death. He tried to reach the ancient conduit, but then a pale, clawed hand plunged down from above, reaching through the waters, seeking him with talons outstretched to kill.

o0o

Ashari felt the grip on her mind weaken and fought free. The mountain of slimy flesh before her shuddered, and she saw it reach down into the water, seeking with one blubberous hand. It was distracted, and she reached out and struck it again, inflicting quick, lancing blows that stung even if they did not wound. The mass of it quivered and turned its eyes on her once again.

Something erupted from the water, and Ashari opened her eyes and saw a human form crash against the prow of the boat. For a moment she thought it was Shath, but then she realized it was Kurux – or more what remained of him after his failure.

His face was pale and sunken, and below the waist he was nothing but a mass of cables where there had been legs. He clawed at the boat with scarred arms, his eyes black within black and seemingly sightless, and yet he saw her.

His mouth yawned open, and she felt his mind attack even as he crawled over the gunwale and reached for her with his emaciated hands. His mind was like a hollow vessel, all of his personality burned away to make him into a part of the being he had served.

He fell on her, hands groping for her neck, and she fought him with both body and mind, hammering at his damaged psyche even as she held him away from her. Had she been merely human, he might have won, but she was the last of the Shedim, and that strength was hers. She caught his wrists and pushed him back, bending his arms more and more until she felt the left one snap under her grasp.

Kurux gave a cry, like something unformed moaning deep underwater, and he bludgeoned at her with his mental power. Here, at the center of his masters might, it was great, and she flinched from his assault. He bore her down, and she twisted, and then they both fell from the boat and he dragged her down, into the dark below the foul waters.

o0o

The hand descended on Shath like a wall, crushing him down beneath it, closing around him to envelop him in thick, slime-covered flesh. He drove his sword into the palm and felt it bite, tasted black blood in the water and felt the hand jerk away from him. He struck again and again, piercing the hand five times, and he felt rage boil in his mind like poison.

Tiny creature, you cannot stop me. I am the god of this place, and I will be a god of this world. I drink from the heart of the world. I feel its power and it is mine.

Without waiting, Shath dove deeper, farther into the black, and he found the cables that fed the being began to separate, to trail off into the murk to their different destinations. This city had been a center of many things – of information, of knowledge and wealth, and of power. The conduit he sought was a taproot of power drawn up from the earth itself, feeding on heat and the motion of the world. It fed the being with energy that never failed, but it could not leave this place and still drink from it.

He found it, the black, encrusted cable, so covered in weeds and growths he could not see the steel beneath it. The bleeding hand reached for him again, and the power of the remnant assaulted his mind. He remembered the feeling of being mastered, of his will not being his own, but now he was guarded against that power, and he gritted his teeth and struck his blow, driving the sword of ancient metal into the conduit of power.

Sparks jolted up his arm, and the force of the power flowing out into the water threw him back as though he had been struck. Pain suffused him and he twisted in the water, feeling his chest burn for air, and he fought free of the agony and struck for the surface. Beneath him, the deeps began to glow.

o0o

Furious, Ashari fought the shell of the emperor, and she loosed her strength and tore his arm from its socket, clouding the black waters with blood. He struck at her mind, but then she saw a light below and she felt him weaken, and in that moment she reached through the blood and closed her hand on his face and crushed it, bone crumpling under her fingers until they sank through his skull.

She ripped out a handful of his brain, and then he was gone, sinking away into the deeps. The waters surged, and the presence of the remnant roared up in fury, even as she felt its strength begin to ebb. She reached out, quick as a blade, and plunged a deadly attack deep into its mind, and she saw a great swath of it go dark. The waters heaved around her, and she felt the god of the deeps begin to die.

o0o

Shath broke the surface and found himself in a tempest. The towering form of the sea god was thrashing and heaving in the waters, bellowing wordless cries of agony and wrath. He struck out toward it, clawing his way through the waves and the currents until he could grasp the hanging conduits and drag himself up them like ropes.

The thing did not seem to notice him, not until he was almost to one of the great black eyes, and then it reached for him, roaring as he drew back his arm and plunged his sword in, bringing forth a gout of black bile and a scream of pain.

He saw veins beneath the surface of the gray flesh bulge and darken and then burst through the skin. The thing slewed aside and hurled him away to splash down in the fetid water, and he had to fight his way to a ruin and drag himself up from the sea. When he looked, it was plain the thing was dying. Its flesh was falling away, sloughing off into the water, and as it writhed, the cables began to break and sink out of sight.

For aeons the thing had nested here, feeding off the blood of the old world, growing greater and more bloated, like a parasite. Whatever it had been, once long ago, it had become a thing that fed and fed and created nothing. Without anything more to feed on, it could not sustain itself.

Shath saw Ashari climb up from the waters, back into the boat. Her eyes blazed like stars and the being recoiled as though struck by a great blow. It reeled back and smashed into the ruins of a great tower, and jagged spines of broken metal pierced it in a dozen places. It shuddered, bled in rivers, and then it sagged in place, and fell still.

He looked down at Ashari. “Is it truly dead?”

She nodded, breathing heavily. “It is. It was a strangely fragile thing. I do not think it was ever meant to be what it became, and the structure that supported it was more delicate than any of us knew.” She gestured. “You weakened it, I wounded it, and then it began to fail, and nothing could stop the collapse.”

He saw fire in the deep, and he climbed down to join her in the tiny boat. “The earth bleeds. Even with the dark one slain, I do not think this will ever be a place for men.”

“It was a place for men once,” she said. “But that was long ago.” She leaned back against the stern of the boat. “I will be content if I never see it again.” She gestured grandly. “Row.”

He snorted, and then he sat and bent his back to row them away from the ruin of the black city. The sea rolled heavy beneath the keel, and the sky was hidden in mist. Pale things lay on the ruins of that place, crying out for the death of their god.

o0o

The empire rose again. The city of Zur was rebuilt, and towers once again reared against the red sun. Armies went forth and conquered in the name of Shath, and those places brought beneath his banner were put in order and governed with fairness, and even wisdom. Shath was a war-emperor, and he sought war against those who displeased him, but his consort and his soothsayer were both women of restraint and of subtle mind, and they tempered his fierceness. The Skylords watched from above, and all beneath the star-sundered sky for ten thousand years remembered the reign of Shath, First of his Name. The Iron-Handed.

The world was not renewed. The sky was still dark, and the sun still a faded red jewel. The world was a poisoned place of ancient wounds, and no one could heal them all. Always there would be dark places. Always there would be shadows that lurked in the forgotten corners of the world. Always there would be things that abided, and hated, and counted the ages until their time would come round once again. And there was no end to the Age of Chaos.