‘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 nothuman,’ 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 needfish,’ 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!’