Half Discovered Wings (18 page)

That voice came once more in his head, whispering,
torturing:
You are dead. You will always
be dead, and always will you suffer
! The
hideous Charos, his guide in this perpetual den of torment, was
inside him, inside every atom of his ethereal self.

He didn’t know who he was,
what
he was; and the pain prevented
his recall.

This, the fourth
soulform of William Teague, the embodiment of
Heresy, was going somewhere different to where his other three
selves were being taken, away from the never-ending fortress with
its towers of pain, its walls of suffering, and away from the river
Achronne and its murky depths; far, far away, deeper into the very
core of the place, where the fires burned hotter, the smoke writhed
thicker, and the pain was infinitely, infinitely more
potent.

‘
Where are you taking me?’ he cried.

The voice replied:
We are here.
Remember your sins.

The smoke disappeared. Even Charos couldn’t linger there. It
vanished somewhere else, back to the courtyard perhaps, and as the
smoke cleared something tugged at Teague’s form. He looked down. He
had skin again, cracked and grey: he was flesh and blood once more,
not merely smoke. Or was this merely an illusion? He felt his face
with his nail-less fingers: he had no eyes, so how could he see?
But he felt a new pain where a deep gash had emptied his stomach,
and sheets of rubbery flesh hung out of him. His mouth was filled
with the blood that poured from the holes his teeth had once
occupied.

The thing
tugging him was the wind. He was falling.

A tunnel stretched out below, and all he could see were the
gloomy red walls of fiery clay around him. He rushed toward one
side as he fell, tearing past a thousand squirming creatures inside
the wall, and issued a scream as he collided with it. Skin and
muscle tore from him in chunks that spun rapidly upward. Spines in
the wall, sharpened to points that could cut molecules, slashed at
him as he tumbled, shredding his sides … He bounced away, free
falling, and his speed increased.

He drifted toward the other side of the wall of the tunnel,
heard snippets of voices made of breezes, and once more he struck
the spines, shaped like axes, knives, maces. Unending
pain…!

Then suddenly his bones shattered into tiny shard, dicing him
from the inside; his face was smashed to a pulp, his ribcage forced
out of his back, his knees cracked into bits so small they ceased
to exist.

He had landed on one of the rocky precipices that jutted out
from the sides of the tunnel. Even thought his body had been
pulverised by the impact, he was surprised to find he had the
strength to haul himself onto his side and look around.

Creatures
clambered all over him, some small and spider-like, some larger
than he, in shapes he never imagined or could even retain in his
mind. The monsters swarmed, tearing at him, sucking out the chopped
bones, tearing his tattered flesh, squeezing his organs of their
juices.

A large
something
approached and gave a banshee wail: it was tall
and black-skinned, with a long neck and arms and legs coming out
everywhere. It opened its many mouths and shrieked, extended one
disproportioned limb and knocked him screaming from the ledge. He
fell again.

His mind, if
it had once been hollow, a tiny portion occupied by his conscious
self, was now full and solid with pain. He could neither think nor
speak. So much agony-but Teague knew that he had felt nothing yet.
He freefell for millions of miles – as just a millionth of a
millisecond passed – before his body was suddenly driven once more
into something solid.

He blacked out for a second, somehow.

They allowed
him that.

~

He woke, stood, unable to think through the curtain of pain
and despair, and slumped against something hard. A globe made of
stone was developing around him. Its granite strips criss-crossed
each other in a diamond latticework. He slithered down the inside
of the globe, unable to comprehend his situation.

Something lifted him, some invisible force, and crushed him
mid-air. He was gripped in the centre of the globe prison and his
eyes were forced open; he saw the latticework begin to move, grind
against itself, spin, each strip – a loop in or around the other
loops – rotating madly in opposite directions. It all moved around
him, grinding. The noise, like a memory of sand between his teeth,)
made his skull throb. Objects appeared in the latticework as it
moved, and they flashed and suddenly they became spears. The
spinning stopped instantly as he was punctured by needles of light
from every direction, every pore a spike through it. The infinity
of pain multiplied itself.

The prison
disappeared.

Darkness again, and when he woke it was like a touch of
Heaven, that moment of oblivion. It all returned to him, including
the agony. But something had changed in home. The spears had killed
something inside his spirit, some inherent light. Shivering
uncontrollably, he found himself lying on a huge slab of black
marble. It reached out forever, and when he rose, trembling,
shuddering, he could see nothing.

He turned.

He screamed the name of the Goddess,
Irenia, Irenia!
and pleaded; tears
of liquefied pain rolled down his cheeks, incinerating his flesh.
No-one was there to hear his pleas, no-one except the Thing that
was before him.

It towered over him. He didn’t want to see it, but he was
made to. Gnarled and twisted, fanged, eyes like tunnels of
darkness, yet sparkling with a Hellish light from deep within. A
weave of bone and sinew, powerful and dark, and it was so awful to
see that face, to have that black Thing rise up before him, its
clawed hands, huge enough to hold the Universe and the box it came
in, reaching out … Its black reptilian wings, stretching up and out
to touch the corners of infinity, and between the shards of bone
were flaps of putrid skin. Within its folds were black pits of
eyes, each with that glint of eternal Hell in, directing their
arrows of light at …
him
.

William Teague screamed and screamed. As his own eyes opened
he was aware of spinning streams of smoke – other souls! Trapped
and spinning toward those eyes, and disappearing into them. He saw
pits all around him now, black, full of crawling creatures,
advancing to tear him into morsels of smoke to feed to their
master—

Erebis
.

Those vile streams of smokey forms went
up
; up away from the creatures, the
spikes, the spinning prisons…

Teague half ran, half staggered. His memories slipped away
from him, trailing in his bloody footprints. He could feel himself
being dragged upward by those
eyes
, rended apart, the vestiges of
his smoky soulform dissipating as he ran madly into the nearest
pool and through its misty, reflective substance, into the whirling
stream. He received images of creatures –
t
here are creatures here with
me
!
– that rose
up alongside him. He got a taste of blood in his mouth. Revolted at
the half-remembered thoughts of savagery and dismemberment in his
past life, he pushed the cravings away. The mist propelled him
upward with the creatures, and, as it did, he sampled their minds –
such fury!

They mix their blood!
he
heard.

His spirit was pushed upward, the furious heat from that
black monstrosity boring into his body, and he suddenly caught a
glimpse of something that he realised must have once existed in his
memory:

Light.

He was blinded by it, by everything, and suddenly he seemed
weightless as air, like he was expanding suddenly, a great pressure
having been lifted from around him.

He felt
different, and he couldn’t get his eyes or limbs to work. He
suddenly felt so much stronger, but he wasn’t even strong enough to
breathe properly.

He
saw the world, the real world. A blue sky spattered with white-grey
clouds. Blinking against its blinding beauty. Hellish pain was
still a strong memory, but only a memory. He saw trees and the
shifting of colours their leaves in the wind.

He sensed air
on his face.

Something pulled at him. He began to gain consciousness
proper, feel something approaching sanity. There was a new pain at
his throat, but in the memory-fade of his recent experiences it was
almost nothing. More tugging, on his arm, and at his throat.
Sharper pains in his neck. Sour blood on his tongue, and he licked
his lips.

He couldn’t
speak. What held him?

He pushed and touched something solid and furred. A yellow
form loomed over him, blocking most of his field of vision, and he
saw the half-decomposed stomach, chest, neck. The head of the
creature was out of his line of sight.

Dizzily, Teague pushed harder, forced, and the pain went for
a brief moment; the iron teeth were out of his neck, and he was
able to move. He heard a snarl, and the thing shoved back, grabbed
him with long nails.

Teague’s fists lashed out before he realised. He punched it
once, twice, in the face, then smashed his elbow into its chest and
it fell. He spun and took its head in his arm, flexed his muscles,
and twisted –
crack
! – then pulled. The head came off as the body collapsed onto
the ground. He dropped the head.

So weak!
He knew from memory that
the thing on the floor in front of him was a sanguilac. Suddenly a
great calmness washed over, and he tumbled to his side. The mossy
ground rose up to meet him as he fell. Real moss. Real ground.
Hadentes no longer.

As Teague felt consciousness slip from him, he looked out. He
saw a hill of rock, some kind of tunnel boring into it. A startled
horse, with broken reins, stood unnerved by a pylon. He saw three
yellow-grey bodies, heads severed, and two humans: one was male,
dark skinned, in golden-bronze armour. He lay, bloodied and weeping
weakly, over the body of a woman with ermine fur around her neck,
its white stained with blood.

The man died,
face streaked with tears, there over her body.

Teague lost
consciousness.

*

Twelve

A BOLT IN THE
STORM

For two days and nights the boat sailed over the calm, flat
waters of the Lual. By day, the water was a sheet of glass,
reflecting only the heavy mist that filled the sky, and revealing
from underneath nothing but the muddy depths of the great lake. No
life could be seen under that placid skin.

By night,
however, it was alive with lights. Fireworks exploded out of
earshot from somewhere on the other side, coming from the city of
Goya, where any excuse to celebrate was good enough to set the
clouds on fire. The colours could not be seen in the sky; rather
they filled the smog with light and turned it into a murky curtain
of reds and greens. It was eerie to say the least, and it unnerved
Rowan, who didn’t enjoy being enclosed. She felt trapped by the
wall of mist that was so thick it put an end to any impression of
movement: they were just a small vessel on a disc of darkness,
resting on a cushion of cloud.

The first morning on the
Tractatus
had been tour morning. The
bosun’s mate, Lanark, showed them the particulars of the cabins and
the layout of the vessel. The main cabin was symmetrical, divided
into five respective parts: the front spanned the whole width, and
was the bridge. Behind were two small rooms, with their own doors
facing outward: on the port was the head, and on starboard was the
shrine. Behind both were the two substantially larger berths,
fitted for two people each. Underneath, in the bowels of the ship,
were the engines, the waste collection tank and the crews’
quarters, two rooms smaller than the passengers’ own with a pair of
hammocks in each, joined by a door and leading upstairs onto the
bridge. This was where the captain, the bosun and his mate
slept.

The captain explained that they were not going straight
across the diameter of the Lual, but a third of the way in and then
around the centre. There was a dangerous reef there that caught
ships and caused them to sink, leaving behind what the few
witnesses dubbed the “graveyard”. Of course, the captain explained,
the place had its myths about it, but there was no danger other
than the collected silt and debris on the bottom that had
constructed the reef, which reached abruptly up near the centre and
split vessels in two. They would steer clear of the place
altogether.

~

‘
How big is this graveyard?’ Caeles asked.

‘
Takes up ‘bout twenty percent of the lake,’ said the captain.
‘We steer her pretty wide just to be sure. The reef is alive, it’s
more animal than plant. It grows its way outward at about few
centimetres a year. Enough to make me wonder how far out it
stretches now, after all these years.’

Caeles was looking down at the equipment, working out which
light said what and which button had what purpose. He spent most of
his time on the bridge learning about how to steer the vessel, and
he’d figured out most of it in the two days he’d been
there.