Page 140 of The Death Wish
He knew exactly where he was.
The utter chaos of deathnotes made it impossible not to know this for Blood Lake. The sullen drag of the Blight was formidable. The weight of centuries spent mourning loss and despising failure, made this an unpleasant place to be. But Silas had been to so many unpleasant places before, and survived them all.
And Blood Lake had his daemon. He’d never been so fucking happy to be in such a terrible place.
Silas laughed, the sound bubbling the water; he felt a little delirious, a little wild, with a raging hunger to reach his lover. He kicked out, challenging the waters to stop him, until he recalled the scythe’s transformation in the cockaigne. The place where he’d taken on a goddess and won. He set about reshaping the ring, intending to create the kite that had lifted him out of the mud, and flown both him and Pitch out of the tower.
The current beneath him shifted. Turning from dragging anchor to forceful uplifting pressure in the blink of an eye. A great force was rising.
Silas abandoned the kite for the spear, as a movement from below displaced the water. A mammoth disturbance. Rushing up at him from the abyss.
His arm was drawn back, the tip of the spear pointed down, and all but ready to throw, when Lady Satine’s melody drifted up from the darkness.
Leviathan. Lady of the Lake.
Impact came a moment later; a breathtaking slam into his midriff. His cry was engulfed by the waters, and he was rapidly ascending at a speed that gave him little option but to grip tightly; hold on to a great bulk that had him clasped between gentle, vast lips. He scrambled for a handhold, and found the roughness of barnacles, cutting his hands as he clung onto them. He’d take what he was given. It felt like he was being shipped along by an island. The force pressed him flat against smooth, cool skin.
‘You took your time, my Horseman.’
Satine’s voice was more vibration than sound, coming through the beast that lifted him.
‘How does he fare?’ Speaking underwater, when moving at a rate of knots, was like talking into a gale. Silas did not ask if Pitch lived. He knew that answer.
‘He is lost. The halo leads him astray, and he has forgotten himself. But you are here now, he will remember.’
‘I hope so.’ Silas’s cheek was pressed so hard against the Leviathan he could barely open his mouth to speak.
‘You shall need more than hope here, my Horseman. Now go. Show your sire Samyaza that he could not make monsters of all men.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
THEY BROKEthe surface, soaring into a world that hummed with the lament of the dead. The Leviathan lifted him high, high above the water, through air tinged red, as though somewhere a great fire burned. Silas blinked through watery eyes, seeing a lake far more beautiful than he’d imagined. Crystal clear, mostly, save for another hint of red, this one far distant, upon the surface; like a lone rose sought to bloom.
He wiped at his eyes, as the Leviathan’s arc reached its zenith and the downward plunge began. The creature had a slow movement, like the dragging shift of a great ship. Silas took in the spread of stark white coral that lay beneath the water like fine lace.
He saw it for what it was and felt its enormity grab at him.
These were bones. An astonishing numbers of bones. Ringing out their notes in one impossibly wretched song of the dead. Most lay beneath the surface, with only mere tips poking forth–like perilous caps of icebergs–save for one huge pyre, far in the distance. Beyond the spread of red.
His pulse raced. The scythe grew tight and fixed.
He could see no sign of a golden-haired daemon.
The Leviathan spat him out. Sending him like a man shot from a cannon, soaring him towards the shallows. Silas landed amongst the bones, crashing through them with such speed hefeared he would sink right back down to the depths. He sank into the haphazard assembly and was buried in a hard sea of white. Covered by Blood Lake’s long-dead. Caught beneath the bitter, tepid waters.
But Silas was exacting; purposeful and unafraid. He’d spent enough years being fearful of the water. Now he shrugged it off, like an uncomfortable coat that pinched at the neckline.
The ring worked fast, eager for the command, shaping itself into a familiar, and unexpectedly calming, bandalore. Silas punched his hand skyward, crashing through bone, the cracking amplified beneath the water. The boxwood flew from his palm, humming along the long, long length of its string; unsullied now by their arduous journey with a thin thread of silver replacing the stained white string. Shooting up through the surface. Finding an anchor point.
Silas pulled at the silver string, testing the steadiness of the bone. Finding it strong, he hauled himself upright. His head cleared the shallow water. He spat out the liquid and shook his head, spraying it from his hair.
The water buffeted him as the Leviathan’s wake reached him. There was no sign of the creature but out where the waters were a deeper shade with depth, white peaks sat atop turbulent waves; a thrashing about in the water showing a distant turmoil.
Silas pocketed the bandalore and kept on, towards the largest of the protrusions of white bone, seeking some height to view this world. The bones shattered beneath his feet. It was like walking through a field of sharp mud, each footfall needing to be dragged from the depression it made. He frowned at the strange conglomerate of tangled bones. So many were shaped in confounding ways, as though fused together, or from a creature so foreign to him, it was unrecognisable. Silas climbed atop a massive piece, thick as an oak, but puckered with holes. These were not creatures of the purebred world. That much was plain.And he did not know what lay beneath the sublime skins that the angels and daemons wore.
Perhaps Pitch lay here.
Silas reeled at the vicious doubt. And the cries of the lake lunged at him, hammering at him harder, seeing a fault in his resolve. But he was no stranger to the devastation of their laments. He knew far better how to deafen himself to them.