‘ Noonenothingnobodyleftleftleft …’

‘But Mother hears you,’ the Abysmyth said, its eyes growing wider at the mention. ‘Mother wishes you to hear Her, to know what we know, to feel what we feel. Let Her speak. Let the pain end. Let the sinful thought end.’ Its claw reached out not to seize, but to offer, to beckon. ‘Let yourself hear.’

‘I … no …’ For lack of thought to do anything else, for lack of voice to say anything better, he shook his burning head. ‘I can’t … I can’t.’

‘ Nolongeryourchoice …’

‘ Nolongeranychoice …’

‘ Letushelpyou …’

He heard the water rip apart beneath him, an eruption of froth at his back. He managed to see them in glimpses: soft lips within gaping needle jaws, bulging black eyes set in bulbous grey heads, long grey stalks of flesh pulsing with soft blue light. He managed to feel them as they wrapped scrawny grey claws around him, coiled eel-like tails about him, pressed withered breasts against his body.

He managed to scream only once before the mast shattered under their weight and they pulled him below.

Drowning wasn’t so bad.

Lenk absently wondered what the fuss was all about, really, as he continued to drift, pulled lower by liquid hands. The water was not as cold as it looked, enveloping him in a gentle warmth. It wasn’t as dark as he had suspected it would be, either. The creatures saw to that.

To call them ‘demons’ seemed a little insulting. Demons were twisted beings, foul things that found the natural world intolerable. These creatures, circling the waters far above him, their azure lights forming a bright halo, did not look so twisted. They were emaciated, true, with their bulbous heads at odds with their bony torsos, their slithering eel tails in place of legs. Below the surface of the water, though, they looked delicate instead of underfed, graceful instead of writhing.

And their whispering had become song.

He could hear it more clearly the deeper he drifted: lilting, resonating, wordless songs that carried through water and skin, seeping into him. They sang everything at once, lullabies and dirges, love and agony. It was a familiar song, one he had heard before. But he could not think of where, could not think of anything. With the song in his ears, there was no room left for any other sound. He found comfort in that. He found peace in the deep.

So much so that he didn’t know he shouldn’t be able to breathe.

That didn’t seem so important, though. There was no fear in the warm, welcoming depths, for drowning or for the corpses that sank around him. Down here, the anger was erased from the netherlings’ long faces, their eyes open and tranquil as they sank softly, shards of the ship drifting around them like unassembled coffins. Down here, the creatures that swam around him, with their black eyes and white skins, didn’t seem so menacing.

Down here, for the first time in weeks, he felt no fear.

‘Enjoying yourself?’

The voices came from nowhere, clear as the water itself. He caught a glimpse in the shadows surrounding him as something swam at the edges of the halo of light. A grey hide shifted, an axe-like fin tail swept through the water, manes of copper and black wafted like kelp in the water.

He remembered the Deepshriek.

She appeared. No, he reminded himself, it’s not a she. Rather, a face appeared, a soft and milk-white oval, framed by long and silky hair the colour of fire. Its eyes were golden and glittering above soft lips set in a frown. It drifted closer to Lenk and he saw the rest of it, the long grey stalk that served as its body snaking into the darkness.

Another head emerged, black hair lost in shadow, attached to an identical stalk. They circled him, as the hulking grey-skinned fish that the stalks crowned circled him. There was another stalk, hanging limp and bereft of a head. He remembered there had been another head. He remembered taking it.

He remembered the Deepshriek wanted to kill him for that.

That thought prompted the realisation of his lungs working. That realisation prompted his question.

‘Why am I alive?’

‘There was a time when sky and sea were not the petty rivals they are today,’ the Deepshriek answered in disjointed chorus. ‘They shared all. We remember that time. Ulbecetonth remembers that time.’ Their eyes narrowed to four thin slits. ‘This is Her domain.’

‘No, that wasn’t what I meant. Why am I not dead?’

‘Not because of us,’ the creature said. ‘We wanted you to die.’ The heads snaked around him, golden scowls and bared fangs. ‘You took our head. You destroyed our temple. You took the tome. You ruined everything. We wanted you to drown, to die, to be eaten by tiny little fish over a thousand years.’

‘And yet … here we are,’ he said, no room in the depths for fear.

‘We were overruled.’

‘By whom?’

The heads glanced at each other, then at Lenk, then through Lenk. He felt himself turning, spinning gently in the halo as unseen hands turned him upside down to face the sea floor. He stared for a moment and saw nothing.

And then, he saw teeth.

He tried to count them at a glance, absently, and found the task tremendous enough to make his head hurt. Rows upon rows of them opened, splitting the endless sandy floor into a tremendous smile.

‘Lenk.’ They loosed a voice, deep and feminine. ‘Hello.’

He stared into the void between them, vast and endless.

‘Hello,’ he replied, ‘Ulbecetonth.’

It laughed. No, he thought, it’s a she. And her voice was far more pleasant and matronly than a demon’s ought to be, he decided. Then again, he only knew the one. It was a comforting warmth, a blanket of sound that soothed the ache in his head, banished chill from his body.

He remembered this voice.

‘You’re not real, are you?’ he asked the teeth. ‘You’re in my head, just like your voice was.’

‘Voices inside your head can be entirely real,’ Ulbecetonth replied. ‘Have you not learned this by now?’

‘It’s simply a form of madness.’

‘If you hear voices, you’re mad. If you talk back, it’s something far worse.’

‘Point,’ he replied. ‘So are you real, then? Or am I dead?’ He glanced around the shadows. ‘Is this-?’

‘No,’ she replied. ‘This is a far too pleasant to be hell; your hell, anyway. Murderers of children go to far darker, far deeper places.’

‘I have killed no-’

‘I told you to stop,’ the teeth said, twisting into a frown. ‘I beggedyou to spare my children. You killed them, regardless. Both of you.’

‘There was only one of me.’

‘There is never only one of you.’

He took in a deep breath that he should not have been able to.

‘You’ve heard it, then?’

‘Many times,’ she replied. ‘I remember your voice well. Both of them. I heard them many times during the war that cast my family into shadow. I heard them on blades that were driven into my children’s flesh. I heard them on flames that burned my followers alive in their sacred places. When I heard them in your head again …’

The teeth snapped shut with the sound of thunder, sending his bones rattling. The echo lasted for an age, after which it took another for him to muster the nerve to speak.

‘Then I ask again, why am I alive?’

‘Pity, mostly,’ Ulbecetonth said. ‘I have seen your thoughts, your desires, your cruelties and your pains. I have seen what you have. I have seen what you want. I know that you will never have it and it moved me.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘You do,’ she said. ‘You don’t want to, though. We both know this. We both know you desire something resembling peace: sinful earth to put your feet on, blasphemous fire to warm your hands by, a decaying thing of tainted breath and aging flesh to call your own. But not just any flesh …’

‘I’ve heard this rhetoric before,’ he snapped back, finding resolve somewhere within himself. ‘They say that I’m mad to want her.’