Page 132 of The Death Wish

Red light. The colour of a fresh cut.

Vassago took another step, kicking at the skull of some unfortunate creature that had snagged in a fold of spongy flesh. He breathed into the restlessness of the simurgh, the yearning to be set free.

The Leviathan opened wider, allowing more light to filter in, and reveal this place that had stolen so much from him.

Blood Lake did not live up to its name.

The water was clear. Crystalline to the point of barely being visible at all. There was certainly no hiding place for the dense layer of bones upon the lake bed, some of which were piled till they pierced the surface. But those piles were not large. The lake here was barely a foot deep.

‘It is shallow?’ he said, taken aback.

‘This close to the halo, yes,’ Satine replied. ‘Elsewhere, the fathoms are great. This shoal is the first of many, then you shall find a more treacherous reef. The halo stands there at its centre.’

Vassago turned to ask another question when the howls came.

The morose, anguished cries took him straight back to Goodrich Castle. An age ago it seemed, since he’d shattered theBlight-filled prism and freed the Spirit of the Forest. But he’d not forget the cries of tormented dead.

‘The lake does not welcome us,’ said the lady.

‘You don’t fucking say?’

The cacophony told of endless sorrow, of grief-spiked rage, of all things lost and unknowable. Vassago wavered on his feet, bent over by the wretched. But as he braced himself upon the thick baleen hairs at the Leviathan’s mouth, he smiled.

‘You will never know him,’ he whispered. ‘You will not take him from me.’

A small, but important victory.

Leaving Silas had pained Pitch, like no torture he’d ever known. But this moment was a sweet justification for his betrayal. If he was so hammered by the despair of all the long, lost dead here, how much torment would they have brought Silas?

‘Your Highness, do you hesitate?’

The question stirred up his anger nicely, and he let it ripple through him, feeding it to the simurgh who took it up greedily.

‘Of course I do not hesitate.’ Flame stoked in Vassago’s eyes, and warmth filled his skull.

‘The cries are terrible.’ That much was obvious. Even the Hellfield had not sounded so rotten at its fiercest battles. Vassago said nothing. ‘What blessed relief it will be when you silence them for the angel, at last.’

‘There is no surety in this.’ He glanced back at the serpent, where only her head was visible, the rest of her long length extending into the Leviathan’s gullet as she stretched to follow him. ‘And I don’t do this for Seraphiel.’

‘Your reason is far greater. And it is why are you are best placed to succeed. Now go, Vassago. We can draw off the creatures of the lake only so long, but they will return in greater number.’

She stretched her body long, slipping her head between the corner of the Leviathan’s lips. With a forked tongue taking place of the wave of a hand, she drew Vassago’s attention out to the deeper waters on their right. Enormous swells disturbed the surface, froth lifting from their tips; the triangular fin of an gigantic creature cut a path through the pandemonium. Another identical point of calamity lay just west of the first; another fin moving like a knife through sponge cake.

‘There are more Leviathan?’ he asked.

‘No. Only one. She creates illusion to draw the dwellers of Blood Lake away from here.’

Vassago clenched his fists and looked away. He’d seen such a talent for replication in other djinn before: in the Red Horse, and Pale Horse.

Vassago pressed thoughts of Lalassu aside. The Berserker Prince did not mourn.

He stepped up to the lip of the massive creature who bore him, gripping the baleen hairs, coarse as a dead man’s beard.

The Berserker Prince did not suffer heartache, either.

Vassago took all thought of the ankou and set his flames to them. Burning them upon a pyre of rage that was ever-growing. A curl of hunger gripped him, the bloodlust of old stirring.

Here he was free to be nothing but the lady’s Horseman of War.