Stephen Hunt - From the Deep of the Dark

‘You’re wrong about that too, Gemma.’

‘Been sowing your wild oats out there have you?’ sneered the commodore’s sister. ‘Yes, your noble bastards are probably scattered in every port from Spumehead to Thar. But don’t expect me to mourn one less of your seed, brother. Your half of the family tree is about to come to an abrupt end, while mine is only just beginning.’

‘Ah, sister,’ wheezed the commodore, ‘you’re sixty now if you’re a year. There are no more children for your old body.’

‘That’s where you’re wrong. The Mass are going to alter my flesh to make me like them. I will live forever, my youth restored, my womb fertile again. By the time I am finished, this world will be filled with nothing but my descendants. You and everyone else in the world are nothing but my meal ticket to power, quite literally. So let me tell you how things sit. Your pathetically desperate plan to alert the State Protection Board to the sea-bishops’ presence has failed. The siege at the Isla Furia is about to end the only way it could, and you two fools are going to live just as long as it takes for that gate out there to be opened.’ She smiled coldly at them before she turned to watch the seed-city swallowing their craft. ‘After all, it is true. The Mass must feed.’

When the door on the seed-city’s dimly illuminated cell opened it was more like a mouth widening. The manacles were unlocked on Charlotte and the commodore before royalist sailors shoved the two of them inside. The surface of the cell was wet and slippery and a silhouette rose up out of the shadowy prisoners huddling on the floor towards the cell’s rear. As he drew closer, Charlotte recognized the man. ‘Sadly!’

Barnabas Sadly rubbed at raw red eyes, as if he didn’t quite believe what he was seeing. ‘They’ve caught you too?’

‘That they have, lad,’ said the commodore. ‘My sister and the sea-bishops both.’

‘Sea-bishops?’ said Sadly. ‘Is that what you’re calling those things?’ He saw the look of confusion on the commodore’s face and continued. ‘Those monsters have the spit of me walking around. My face, a parcel of memories they ripped out of my mind inside the gill-neck prison camp. But I, it certainly ain’t. It’s one of the wobble-headed beasts. I’ve been here ever since they stole my shape and shipped me out of the prison camp, trying to avoid looking chuffing fat enough to make a good mouthful for these monsters.’

‘That’s how my sister knew we were coming,’ groaned the commodore. ‘Sadly a cuckoo in the nest. You’re well out if it, Barnabas. The Court of the Air is about to fall to the enemy on your people’s island. Me and the girl here were the Kingdom’s last hope to survive.’

‘That’s a poor turn,’ sighed Sadly. ‘So my cover’s blown and the Kingdom’s odds are as low as the rest of ours?’ He indicated the prisoners huddling sullenly at the rear of the cell. ‘Meet the survivors of the convoy that weren’t sent to die on the Island of Ko’marn. The beasts dispatched me here along with the choice cuts, so you lot wouldn’t spy the fact there were two Sadlys limping about the prison camp.’

Charlotte looked at the whimpering mass of broken prisoners hugging the cell wall behind the Court’s agent. This was a terrible sight to see. The sailors in the feeding pen were utterly broken. Men of action and violence and discipline, used to facing death. Withdrawn into sullen madness, shaking and trembling and mercifully unable to engage with the daily routine of being available for consumption. But not Barnabas Sadly. He was still here, dirty and unkempt and soiled, still standing and thinking and ready to fight back with whatever his hands could fashion and his mind devise. ‘You’ve lasted all this time down here?’

Sadly thumped his mangled leg. ‘I think the first few weeks they kept me in case they needed to pick through my mind again. Now, I’m limping along on the fact I’m hardly choice meat. But I don’t know what’s worse. Being selected, or being left for another meal day after day. It’s as good as running mock executions for breaking prisoners’ souls. Look at these poor devils. They were our fighting men, once, the bravest of the brave.’

‘You seem to have outlasted them, lad,’ said the commodore.

‘Well, as you seem to have rumbled during my absence, I’m with the Court of the Air. They take out our souls shortly after we join.’

‘What you believe of your essence is irrelevant. We only select cattle based on your vitality,’ said a familiar voice behind them.

Charlotte swung around. Walsingham was standing at the entrance, two hideously wizened sea-bishop guards either side of him, clutching long dark rifle-shaped crystalline weapons, their elongated heads black bishops’ mitres, swaying as they stood ready to open fire. ‘Not too much fat. Plenty of tender young flesh. We can’t abide the oily taste overweight over-aged animals like you-’ he pointed at the commodore, ‘-leave on the palate. But that’s fine, your sister wishes to toy with you a little, so for the sake of diplomacy I shall humour her.’

‘Why don’t you show us your real form, Captain Twist,’ said Charlotte.

‘Oh, I am sure the members of the Mass all look alike to mere animals,’ said Walsingham.

‘You can eat my cursed sister, then,’ said the commodore, ‘and let us three go.’

‘That would be a poor decision,’ smiled Walsingham. ‘A farmer must use dogs to hunt down wolves, even if he has to eat a little hound during the depths of winter when the larder runs low.’ Walsingham raised the amulet Gemma Dark had ripped from Charlotte’s neck. ‘Not quite the gem I hired you to retrieve for me, but judging by my reports from the siege at the Isla Furia, I should hold that by the end of the day too. As for my animal semblance, it serves as a good example.’ He called out to the corridor and a miniature sea-bishop walked tentatively inside the cell, passing a pair of royalist sentries outside, the creature standing no higher than Walsingham’s waist. Like the two sea-bishop guards, it wore a rubbery skin-suit with a crystal held in the centre of its chest as though it was a beating heart. The royalist sentries outside were trying hard not to look in the prisoners’ direction. They knew what was coming next.

Walsingham placed a hand on the little monster’s shoulder. ‘This is my son, Child 722 from my twelfth brood-wife. Select your animal. Speak only in Jackelian.’

The alien child walked forward, lights in the ceiling growing painfully bright in response to an unseen command from the child’s crystal. It pointed to one of the men at the back: tall, strong, a tattered sailor’s uniform reduced to filthy rags by his incarceration. ‘That one, father.’

‘An excellent choice. Now, switch to amplification mode and focus.’

As the gem glowed in the centre of the young creature’s chest, the sailor stumbled away from the rear wall, mumbling the same name over and over again — Sally, Sally — one of his own children, perhaps. Charlotte looked on, frozen in horror. Behind the selected sailor the other prisoners were shaking and keening, an animal noise she didn’t think it was possible could rise out of any human throat.

‘Maintain your hold,’ ordered Walsingham. ‘Bring the animal in closer, closer.’

The sailor was a foot away from the miniature sea-bishop, when the child monster produced the same style of crystalline tuning fork-shaped blade that Corporal Cloake had once tried to use on Charlotte. It seemed to seal into the child’s tiny hand, growing and moulding into the veins around its black, withered wrist, then the thing stabbed upwards with the blade while the sailor was bending down, reaching out with his arms to hug whatever projection of familial love was in his mind’s eye.