Page 121 of The Death Wish
He did not protest.
‘I assume your fish takes us to the halo?’ He smoothed his voice clear of sentiment.
‘As close as can be. I have made her as large and layered as the centuries would allow, but the heart of Blood Lake is treacherous. We shall take you as close as the Leviathan’s strength, and my own, can abide. The rest is for you to endure.’
She still held him with a coil at his waist, for the unpredictable passage of the Leviathan had not abated. But Pitch had agency enough to reach for the cracked bone he’d spied. A shard that held the point of a knife. He tugged against Satine’s hold until it slackened enough that he could drop to his arse on the creature’s soft innards. He set to hacking at the fine taffeta, cutting himself a shorter skirt; bringing it roughly in line with his knees. If he’d known he was to be dropped straight from the ballroom to the lake, he might have chosen his clothing more carefully. But never had he been more grateful for the cinch of the corset, the pressure reminding him to temper his breath; the rigidness adding steel to his spine.
The Leviathan nosedived. Pitch let out a cry, barely avoiding slicing his leg when the bone knife slipped. Shock morphed to anger, and he took hold of his rage, as firmly as Satine wrapped him in her coils. Her beast thrashed and twisted in the slow, laboured way of giant animals.
‘Let me go, damn it!’ Pitch shouted. ‘Do not restrain me. If I cannot stay on my feet in here, then I shall be fucking uselessoutside.’ His flame shivered from his fingertips, rising along with his temper, and he glanced his hand against the lady’s rose-gold tinged scales.
A serpentine hiss erupted. Satine let him go at the exact moment the Leviathan righted, and water rushed into their fleshy cavern. Carrying with it a fresh corpse. Pitch threw himself out of the way of the grotesque, bloated figure. He’d never seen such a creature: one solitary leg and one arm on a torso filleted with bleeding cuts, green blood flowing from the wounds. The head was like an enormous egg, and had only one lone eye, dull and yellowed like an old newspaper.
‘What the fuck is that?’
‘The purebred legends call it a fachan.’ Satine lowered her triangular mouth near to the corpse, tongue flicking over skin that was covered with thick, saturated feathers. ‘But it has no true name. It is one of Blood Lake’s spawn. The halo continues to make monsters, even in the absence of Samyaza, and gives life to aberrations such as this.’
The Leviathan’s killing work was ongoing. The creature’s flesh bubbled, peeling away to expose bone, black as an apple seed.
Pitch stared in revulsion at both the messy deconstruction and the deformity itself. ‘But if this is Blood Lake’s creature, how do the purebreds know of it?’
He braced against the marshmallow pinkness of the Leviathan’s side, too irritated to mind the damp, doughy feel beneath his hand. Satine drew her tail in, keeping it clear of where the fachan dissolved.
‘The halo’s potency did not create only the Blight, it bred these creatures, too. The Order names them the Fuath, those born of Blood Lake. And though the Leviathan does well with her hunts to keep their numbers low, they are too quick to multiply. Their existence creates a pressure beneath the Seals, and at raretimes that pressure is vented through the angels’ protective veil. The number of Fuath they allow to enter the purebred world is tightly controlled, and only the weakest among them are ever freed; the fachan is one, the selkie and the nucklevee, among many others, though I have argued since the first purge that last one is too dangerous, considering a nucklevee’s appetite for flesh of any kind.’ Her tail vibrated, shook like a rattle. ‘Mr Ahari and I always loathed those times, when word reached the Order of their presence.’
‘Gods.’ Pitch breathed, ever more grateful that Silas’s journey into the lake had not come to pass. To hear that not only were lost human souls haunted by the lake, but their living were cursed with its predators, too, would have given him great pains. ‘So, the Blight…those bastards are venting it also, aren’t they? The angels allow that menace into the world.’
He did not need to ask the question. The answer was so starkly, horribly obvious. Satin’s bulging quartz eye could not seem to find him. ‘Yes. The Blight is difficult to control, as it is not so easy to see as these monsters. There is a propensity for it to escape in high measures at a venting. And that is when –’
‘That is when the Pale Horseman is summoned to deal with it.’ Pitch balled his fists and stepped up to the rapidly decaying fachan. Much of the flesh was eroded from the skull, with only the enormous bulge of the eye remaining. ‘You are fucking cunts, the damned lot of you. Arcadia treats this world as nothing more than a drain in which to dump its sewage.’
His blood was heated, his eyes searing with flame.
‘Do not include my cunt in your assessment, Vassago.’ The Lady Satine writhed, her coils flexing and tightening. ‘We djinn are nature’s children, born of her might and balance. For two thousand years, I’ve had to watch over this place, a birthplace of chaos, and try in vain to prevent it from ruining the perfection of the natural world. And now I must watch, as they send youto stir this cauldron of strife once more. It is your arrival that has unsettled all things. Now, should you fail, and this turmoil bubbles over, it will be I and the Order left to deal with the maelstrom. I am tired of being Lady of the Lake. Do not fail.’
‘Your motivational skills are fucking appalling.’ His throat thickened with anger; at the unfairness of the comment, the weight of expectations, and the sharp bite that fear of failure brought. ‘And do not speak to me of maelstroms. I have known nothing but chaos.’
Save for a precious few moments–unexpected and unlikely–journeying at a dead man’s side.
Pitch pressed his bare heel into the jellied mass of the fachan’s eye, and the dull pop and slow flow of bodily fluid brought a sickening release. A sense of falling back into his old skin; atrocious daemonic skin, of flint and rock and molten heat, and utter distaste for all other living beings. The simurgh came alive, creeping into his sinews, into the fine hairs upon his body, his return to himself encouraging it, coaxing it deeper. Pitch ran his tongue over his lips, re-tasting all the blood he’d spilled over the centuries, re-breathing forgotten air: that of a mad warrior upon the Hellfield.
‘Do you know what you must do?’
Satine’s question drew him back to dull existence. His smile was lifted by bitterness and loss.
‘Forget and remember.’ Pitch pushed at the hem of velvet and taffeta at his wrist, tracing a fingertip over fine skin; where veins were stark and bulged like worms. ‘Forget this suit of flesh and all its memories. And recall the truth of my nature.’
He should be eager to do so. For humankind was crude and pitiful. Readily built to break down. It would not be so terrible to shrug off the mantle he wore. It was an illusion, anyway. He’d been designed differently; and no layer of silk or skin that bloomed under a lover’s touch could change what the CreationFlame had made him. What imbecile had he been to imagine otherwise?
‘Then make haste, Prince of Arcadia.’ Satine’s hiss lifted the hairs on the back of his neck. ‘For you cannot take this creature to face the halo. It shall be your downfall.’
‘The simurgh? It is the reason we are here at all.’
A terrible vibration moved through the Leviathan. It was, Pitch suspected, a watery roar as it negotiated its sea of hellions.
‘I speak of you, daemon.’ Satine’s body moved like a ribbon of silk falling from a table’s edge. ‘There is no place for Tobias Astaroth here, and yet he stands before me, hesitant and unhappy. You have softened, and it will make you vulnerable. You are not the daemon Seraphiel chose, and you must be, to see this done.’
‘Softened?’ he spat, welcoming the molten fury that filled him, sucking upon it like marrow from a bone. Feeding his monster. ‘I remember all too well what it is to hate, I assure you.’