Black Halo

Sixteen

He found he could not remember his name.

Other memories returned to him, vivid as the city that loomed in the distance.

Port Yonder. He remembered its name, at least.

He had lived there once. He’d had a house on the land, back when dry earth did not burn his feet. It had been made of stone that had seemed strong at the time and bore the weight of a family once. He had known the witless, bovine satisfaction of staring up at a temple and praying to a goddess that priests said would protect him. He recalled living through each night, when such knowledge was all he needed.

He had known what it meant to be human once.

But that was long ago. That was a time before he knew the weight of humanity could not be set on flimsy, shifting land. That was a time before he knew that stone, trees and air all gave way before relentless tides. That was a time before his goddess had found his devotion and offerings not enough and had spitefully taken his family to compensate. His name, too, was from that time.

Before he had become the Mouth of Ulbecetonth.

‘Do you desire to know your name, then?’

The Prophet’s twin voices lilted up from the deep. He looked over the edge of the tiny rock he squatted upon, saw the black shadow of a tremendous fish circling his outcropping. He remembered when he had first seen that shadow and the golden eyes that had peered up at him. There had been six of them, then; now there were only four, two of them put out forever by heretical steel.

‘I desire nothing,’ he answered the water, ‘save that the Mother is liberated.’

The real Mother, he reminded himself, not the Sea Mother.

The Sea Mother was a benevolent and kindly concept, one that took pity upon the land-bound folk and blessed them with the bounty of the deep. The Sea Mother was a concept that rewarded thoughtless prayer, asked for nothing more than humble sacrifice and protected families in return.

The Sea Mother was a lie.

Mother Deep was mercy.

‘Liberation is a just cause, indeed,’ the Prophet replied. ‘And it is because of that cause that we ask you to return to the prison of earth and wind once more. The Father must be freed for the Mother to rise.’

He found a slight smirk creeping upon his face at the naming of the city a prison. Truly, that was what it was, he knew — nothing more than thick walls constructed by fear, doors made of ignorance and the key thrown away by unquestioning faith.

That smile soured the instant he remembered that they were sending him back there, to feel cruel stone beneath his unwebbed feet and languish in the embrace of air. His brow furrowed and he could feel the hairs growing back even as he did, tiny black reminders that the Prophet commanded and the Mouth sacrificed.

And for what?

As if summoned by his thoughts, he heard the sound of flapping wings. He looked up and saw the Heralds descending from the unworthy sky, their pure white feathers stretched out as they glided to the reefs jutting from the surface. Upon talons that had once been meagre webs, clutching with hands that had once been pitiful gull wings, the creatures landed silently upon the risen coral.

He remembered what they had been before: squat little creatures, wide-eyed crone heads upon gull bodies, incapable of even the slightest independent thought. The faces that stared at him now, still withered, were set upside down upon their crane-like necks above sagging, vein-mapped teats. Their bulging blue eyes now regarded him with a keen intellect that had not been present before. The teeth set in mouths that should have been their foreheads were long yellow spikes that clicked as they chattered relentlessly.

He had once looked upon them as evidence of Mother Deep’s power, the ability to effect change where other gods were deaf and powerless. Now, he saw them only as items of envy, proof that even the least of Her congregation evolved where he stood, painfully and profoundly human.

‘Do we sense uncertainty in you?’ the Prophet asked, stacking accusation upon scorn.

‘Uncertainty?’ the Heralds echoed in crude mimic of the Prophet. ‘Doubt? Inability? Weakness?’ They leaned their upside-down heads thoughtfully closer. ‘Faithlessness?’

‘My protests are unworthy,’ the Mouth replied. ‘All that matters is that the Father is freed. I have no other desire.’

‘Lies,’ the Heralds retorted with decisiveness.

‘Irrelevant,’ the Mouth replied. ‘Service is all that is required. Motive is unimportant.’

‘Ignorance,’ they crowed in shrill chorus.

‘What great sin is desire, then? What is the weight that is levied upon my shoulders for my want of vengeance? Mother Deep’s enemies are my enemies. Her purpose is my purpose.’

‘Blasphemy,’ the voices hissed from below.

The Prophet’s twin tones contained a wailing keen, the subtlest discordant harmony that shook his body painfully and caused him to wince. How he longed to abandon his ears with what remained of his memories. How he longed to embrace the Prophet’s shrieking sermon with the same lustful joy as the others.

Mother Deep demanded sacrifice, too, however.

‘You suffer doubts, then,’ the Prophet murmured, four golden eyes regarding him curiously.

‘Intolerable,’ the Heralds muttered. ‘Inexcusable. Unthinkable.’

‘I had not expected to be asked to return here,’ he replied, staring out over the walls. ‘I left this place, and all its callous hatreds, on land where it belonged.’ He hugged his legs to his chest. ‘I found reprieve in the Deep.’

But not salvation, he added mentally. He had been granted gifts: the embrace of the water, freedom from the greedy liquid hands that sought to steal air and quench it, and the loyalty of Her children. But the true mercies of Mother Deep had been withheld from him, for the moment.

And yet, he lamented, that moment had lasted for years that only made his awareness of the passage of time more profound.

He gazed down into the water, below the swimming shadow of the Prophet, and saw the faithful congregate in pale flashes as they boiled up from below. The fading sunlight shifted on the water hesitantly, wary to expose the creatures bobbing below it. And, as the golden light speared through the waves, a great forest of hairless flesh, swaying on the waves, met his eyes as hundreds of glossy stares incapable of reflecting the light looked up.

They floated so effortlessly, bodies lent buoyancy with the absence of memory. They were oblivious, ignorant to what their lives might have been when their feet lacked webs and could abide the feel of land beneath them. They were blind to the meaning of the rising and setting of the sun. They were deaf to the world, save the wailing chorus of the Prophet’s twin mouths, which he could not abide, and the distant call of Mother Deep, which he could not yet hear.

And, he thought resentfully, they sacrificed nothing.

They gave themselves fully, ate of the fruit of the Shepherd’s births, and were freed from their memories and the embrace of greedy, lying gods. He had abstained, at the Prophet’s request. He had become the Mouth and was denied their serenity, their bliss.

Their freedom …

And he … he had given everything. He had abstained from the embrace of Mother Deep’s children, and for what? That he could be tormented still with his own ignorance? Taunted with the years he had wasted on a goddess that spared not his family? Agonised with the visions of their faces, the memories of their laughter?

And now, now they asked him to return to the land, to bear the stain of solid ground and recall the memories they had promised to take away from him. What he saw when he looked up across the channel at the docks he had walked off of, following three voices in the night, was a return to sinful memory and the company of ignorant airbreathers.

Not the salvation he had been promised.

‘And for what?’ he muttered. ‘This brings us no closer to the book.’

‘An ocean is a vast and tremulous thing,’ the Prophet replied coolly. ‘Its sheer magnitude makes it incomprehensible to view with mortal eyes. Where a gale blowing from the west may seem separate from a wave roaring in the east, they meet in the middle as a raging maelstrom.’ The shadow of the fish’s body paused thoughtfully. ‘And even then, it cannot be fully fathomed unless viewed from below.’

He could see flashes of white in the darkness as two broad mouths split open in wide, fanged smiles.

‘She sees where we cannot,’ the Heralds burbled in agreement. ‘Thinks in ways we cannot comprehend. The maelstrom whirls, swirls chaotically, inexplicably.’

‘But it is nonetheless felt,’ the Prophet added quietly. ‘The Mouth should not concern itself with the book. Mother Deep has seen to its return.’

He might have asked how. How could any creature, even one that made such promises and delivered such freedom as Mother Deep, affect anything beyond the bonds of her prison? How could she promise the salvation so freely, knowing that hers was a hand still wrapped in chains?

He might have asked, but recalled too keenly the wisdom of the Shepherds, delivered from their gaping jaws to the unworthy grasped in their oozing claws.

Memory was a burden. Knowledge was a sin.

‘A key, after all,’ the Prophet continued, ‘is but one part of a door. There must be hinges upon it to swing and hands to turn the knob.’ Golden gazes drifted toward the distant city. ‘If those hands should be freed from unjust bondage, so much the better.’

‘Better,’ the Heralds echoed. ‘The sons need a father. The faithful need a leader.’

Beneath the waves, something stirred in agreement.

Below, he saw the thousand glossy stares of the faithful turn in unison toward the city, as though something had called to them in a great, echoing call. Darkness stirred beneath them, where the light did not dare to touch, and he saw the great white stares of the Shepherds rise to add their attention.

It angered him that he could not hear what they heard, see what they saw. Before them loomed a prison in their eyes, an unjust and foul dungeon of stone and wind wherein lay the salvation he could not claim. All he could see was the lies and hate that had driven him to the deep in the first place.

What they heard, he could only make out faintly. Even as far away as he was, through the roiling waves and over the murmur of wind, he could hear it. Slowly, steadily, with a patience that had outlasted mountains and earth, it droned like small hands upon a large door.

A single heart, beating.

He supposed, he thought dejectedly, he should be thankful that he was blessed enough to hear even that. His ears burned enviously with thoughts of what the congregation might hear, what bliss it might bring minds wiped clean of memories and lies.

‘Impatience does not become the position She chose you for,’ the Prophet said coldly, as though sensing his thoughts.

‘At times, the reason for my choosing becomes obscured,’ he replied just as brusquely.

‘Is devotion no longer reason enough?’ the Prophet asked.

‘Recall the maelstrom,’ the Heralds agreed. ‘It is-’

‘I cannot subsist on metaphors,’ the Mouth snarled suddenly, his patience lost in a sudden surge of grief. ‘Words do nothing to diminish the memories, to make me forget that I am denied the gifts of Mother Deep that are promised to the less faithful!’

‘In time!’ the Heralds squawked in protest. ‘In time, there will be-’

‘Will be what?’ His frustration inspired words that he knew he should not speak, gave force to will that he knew was sinful. ‘All your promises, all your great plans have availed us nothing! The tome is lost, the longfaces drive back the faithful time and again, even desecrating the Shepherds with their vile poisons! And now, while they sniff out the book like landborne hounds, you sit here and point me toward the very city I turned to you to free myself of?’

He drew in a sharp breath whose saltless taste was yet not foul on his lips. He narrowed eyes that were not glossed over, clenched fists that were not webbed, as weak, sinful emotion came flooding into him.

‘Occasionally, Prophet,’ the man hissed, ‘gales and walls of water are nothing more than mere winds and waves, each without substance.’

Satisfaction was something he knew he should not feel. It was, like all sensations outside of unrelenting devotion, a sin, and he made himself stern with the knowledge that it would be punished. He imagined himself being torn to shreds by the Prophet’s shriek, the same wailing doom that had wrought ruin upon the faithless and blasphemers that stood in the way of the faithful.

Perhaps, he thought, that was as close to hearing the harmony in its words as he would ever come.

The Prophet circled his outcropping silently. The Heralds’ relentless crowing had fallen silent; they tilted their heads right side up in curiosity. The golden eyes were dark below. The congregation was still, suspended motionless in the water. Even the white stares of the Shepherds had vanished, as though afraid of what wrath awaited their former preacher, Ulbecetonth’s Mouth.

But after several painful breaths, all that emerged from below was a pair of melodic whispers.

‘Our pity is well given to you,’ the Prophet said softly. ‘Perhaps we have become too much like the Gods that ignore your cries. But we are not deaf …’ The voices snaked up like vocal tendrils, caressing him with slender, shimmering sound. ‘Your agonies are heard. Your faith shall be rewarded.

‘You wish your sinful memories to be absolved, the tragedy of your life to be eased inside your mind,’ the Prophet continued. ‘It shall be done. Yours will be ears closer to the Mother’s song than any of the faithful. All that is asked of you is that you grant Her one more favour.’

He drew in another deep breath, felt his heart pound with anticipation.

‘Free the Father,’ one Herald whispered, its voice carried on the wind.

‘End the injustice of his imprisonment,’ another hissed.

‘Lead the faithful to salvation,’ more crowed.

‘Free him,’ they burbled. ‘Free him … free him … free him …’

‘Let him crush the earth beneath his feet again.’ The Prophet’s voices silenced the chorus. Gold eyes turned upward again, burning with purpose. ‘Liberate Daga-Mer.’

As the Prophet’s voices echoed, fading with each moment, another sound grew stronger. As if in the moment before a great drawing of breath, it echoed from the deep and carried to his ears.

A heartbeat.

The Heralds scattered at the sound, taking wing on shrieks of ecstasy as they twirled and writhed in feathery columns stretching toward the sun-stolen sky.

Another beat, louder.

The faithful stared up, their mouths splitting open in broad, toothy grins. Their eyes quivered in the rising starlight, as though they might add their own joyful salt to the sea.

Another.

The Shepherds dropped their jaws open, exposing sharp teeth as they howled some ancient hymn that went unheard, rising to the surface on bubbles that popped soundlessly.

Another beat, loud and clear as if it were that of the Mouth’s.

And he felt himself smile to hear it.

The water called to him and he obeyed, sliding in. It embraced him like a family that would never leave him, never deny him. He swam silently upon its tide towards the distant prison of earth and air. He swam, sliding through the waves as a world of dark flesh, dark eyes and glorious faith moved beneath him.

He swam, dipping his head below the surf.

And through it, he heard the Father calling.