Work Text:
The sea slips in everywhere.
In Pandyssia there are great salt flats that the ships of long-ago got lost in, broke open, spilling bodies and treasure down into the ancient deep. The wind has long since washed them clean, and time has long since ground them into dust. But they are his, still, as are all men who die by drowning; and when the rains of that place fall upon the impressions of long-since decayed or hauled away bones, he smiles in the Void.
The skies of Pandyissa are strange. He makes the rain fall sideways, sometimes, or sends it streaming upward. Turns the gravity into the gravity of the sea. Even far inland in the belly of the continent that is so far from the great dark ocean, he is watching: he sings upon the wind and dances fingertips down the backs of the people in the guise of the sideways rain, and sometimes he comes down and slips inside their human skin.
It is a game that is so easy to play, in Pandyssia. The bodies here are more accepting of belief. The teachings of the Abbey do not live inside blood and bone and brain and do not force him out like an infection when he tries to slither in. So he slides in under their skin, speaks with their tongue, makes the sound of the wind howl out of a human throat. Sometimes it is a wonderful thing and sometimes it is ugly – human bodies are strange, cumbersome, all heat and heavy limbs, and he finds himself stumbling like a child. Sometimes the people see this and run from him. Sometimes they take his hands. Sometimes they shun him; sometimes they sit him down and call him by a hundred names, offer him the proper gifts, draw the proper designs on his human face in paint that tastes so perfectly like sea-salt.
Sometimes there are fires and he dances with them, hand in borrowed human hand; sometimes the spirits that live in other veils of the Void come down too. Spirits of fire or metal or spoken word, of half a hundred other things. And they dance together until the dawn, until they shuck their mortal skins like snakes and flit back to where they belong.
It is an easy thing to do in Pandyssia, where all the other spirits are thick, where their names are not forgotten and the land itself bends into impossible shape in their worship.
They know him, here. Or at least they believe they do. They hold love in their legends, along with fear. There is a people in Pandyissa who carve love of him into their skin, scar themselves with his mark, paint themselves from head to toe in runes that they believe will echo his power. They are wrong, but he tells them no wiser.
Deep in the continent, there is a people who offer him every hundredth child. They dress them in lapis or jade and tell them stories to make them cry and send them downriver in boats that are too heavy with stones to float, weighted down with gold to appease him or seeds to herald a harvest. He takes the children, gently. Every one. He quiets their sobbing. He does not particularly desire them or their small lives, but he licks the tears from their faces just the same.
It is, after all, such an interesting human thing.
Along the shores of the continent is where they love him best of all. Here, the fisherman bow their heads to every whale that passes beneath their fragile boats, call each one “lord.” When they find one dead upon the shore they drape its great body in blue cloth. They mourn the passing of each leviathan as if it were their father. He supposes, for what little he understands of this practice, that they believe it is.
These are only a few. There are a hundred other customs.
There are shrines made of bone and shrines made of driftwood and shrines made from flowing blood. There are caverns that open down to the ruins of past civilizations, an ancient temple carved from the bones of a whale with runes worked into every vertebrae and rib. There are men who curse his name and women who whisper it like lovers. Pandyssia is a land of a hundred spirits and a hundred different peoples, and reality here bends like the reflections of a hundred firelights on the sea, and he whispers through every single one.
They believe that they know him so well. They believe, in Pandyssia, that he and all his siblings can be summoned or bought or brokered with. They are not exactly right. Neither are they wrong.
In the lands across the sea, they know him in a different way. The Abbey here is powerful. It scorns knowledge and teaches ignorance as a virtue, tells the people that he is a thing not meant to be known. Here, they think of him as evil. Absolute. Negative space. Predatory. A shadow thrown over their frail mortal light.
Pandyssia is a land shaped by magic and belief that flows like water, that bends and curves and leans toward him and his kind, that embraces the chaos he sows wherever he goes. The northern Isles are very different. They are cold and unloving, rigid and set in their doctrine and their ways. It is not simply chaos that he sows, not here. It is also fear.
In Serkonos, he is still half-beloved. The Abbey holds tighter than ever; but the Oracular Order is strong here, and the eyes of the Order are perfectly blind. They see into the future and turn a blind eye to the streets, the realities of the common men. On every turning of the year, at the close of the Fugue Feast, the men and women of Serkonos count the hours down and mark each one with the black roe of a deep-sea fish upon their tongue. Thirteen, for the thirteen months of the old year. And though they tell themselves that it is harmless tradition, only – that the salt and bitter of the roe is only their way of eating the sorrows of the year that is past – there are many who swallow them down and remember the color of his eyes.
In Serkonos, the pirates who haunt the straits still carve his charms of bone to seek his favor or his ignorance. When the wind blows in the night, when the storms break their ships upon the rocks, his is the name they pray to and his name that they curse.
Their wives on shore light candles to frighten him away, ring bells that are tuned to hurt his ears, and even this hatred is a bitter-sweet belief.
In Serkonos, it is the men who come to the white-eyed women for prophecy and faith; and it is the men who come to the common women for the gospel of his name. Serkonos is a land of exchange, of things sold or stolen. It is the women who sell his power. Witches. The Abbey hunts them, viciously. He gives them the power to take the skins of cats, to charm sea-water to their will, to dance through the Void and live on the edge of a knife. In Serkonos, they hate him as in all the Isles; but hate is a kind of knowledge, too, and there are women who do his work and bear his mark and love him best of all.
In Morley he is hated as well, along with all the others.
The men here believe in the stories of their fathers, in the stories of spirits who will take them away in the night. They set out offerings to scare him away. Gifts. Traps. He does not know the difference, and he does not know if the men do either. They offer him river-stones and coins and scraps of fishnet. Sometimes it amuses him to let them believe that they work. Sometimes he comes in anyway, and breaks the windows, and rains inside the house, a sideways rain that carries the smell of Pandyssia and time.
There are tall white cliffs here, torn and craggy, and the mist is thick, and whales breach just offshore. He walks the precipice of those cliffs, the border between sea and air. He takes on the skin of a girl with the Void in her eyes and sings a song for the spirits that this land forgot. There is a particular cave that he loves. The wind here licks and bellows upon the rocks, and the wind howls inside the hollows like a dirge, and when it storms he makes it sing so that the air and sea shake with all his music.
He is a great lover of music. If he has a weakness, it is this.
He gives men the power to hear the music of ravens and speak their tongue. He lures men to the river in the guise of a black horse with sea-greens woven in its mane, and drowns them, and draws them alive again from the water and kisses his powers into their air-starved mouths. He lures women down to the river and trips them, throws them down into the mud, gives them visions of those who are soon to die. He takes the dead as is his due, washes their clothes on the riverbank, lets their bodies drift naked and lovely down to the bottom of the sea. He holds a cemetery for the drowned in the deep. The fish pick their bones white as pearls, and the weeds wind between their ribs and the crabs undress the layers of their skin, and their hair becomes a garden of black and red and pale gold, and they are perfectly dead and perfectly lovely and perfectly, perfectly his.
In Morley, blood and nationalism run thick, and the old superstitions are strong. Men lock their doors and dust their windows with salt and turn their eyes away from the eyes at the bottom of wells. They fear him. Their fear is not so rigid and distant as the academic fear of the Abbey. They remember.
The men of Tyvia like to think that they do not remember at all. They hold devotion up like a shield. The Overseers here were the first to wear masks of gold or bronze or painted porcelain, snarling and strange, and it is a custom that has since spread to all the Isles. But even the Tyvians do not remember that it began as a devotion to him: that they took on his face to frighten and amuse him away.
It never worked. It never will.
In Tyvia, he takes the skin of a girl with yellow hair and climbs the willow-branches out of the water to dance with men and women, sing to them, take the hands of children and whisper in their tiny ears. He walks through town and leaves a trail of slender, wet footprints. Leaves a whisper of slime or salt wherever he touches. In Tyvia, he takes the skin of a man with gills and claws and scales upon his brow and winds his way down to the docks to share cigars with fishermen. He listens to them laugh. Laughs when they call him “grandfather” without an ounce of true belief, and he takes the cigars of the ones who do believe and blows the fire back into their lungs. He gathers up their ashes and stores them in hollowed-out cups of whalebone that other men will someday turn into charms that they will love, and curse, and adore.
He stands in corners and whispers in the sibilant voices of loved ones long dead, and only the truest of true believers hear. He riddles them with all the proper questions. When they speak of the love of the color of his eyes, he sucks out their breath. When they speak of the fear of the great glass-clear glaciers that spear out of the northern seas, he gives them the power to freeze men with a touch. He does this because it is the opposite of what they expect.
In Tyvia, the snow falls thick, and the streets are cold, and the men are colder. The walls of the Abbey are high and painted and beautiful. In Tyvia, all the teachings of the hate for him are gilded and richly colored and gleaming, and the icons that show him as a monster are made from purest eggshell-hammered gold. And this is a kind of worship, too.
The fear of him is strong in Tyvia. It makes him strong as well.
If the Tyvian Abbeys are beautiful and bright, the ones in Gristol are stark. Rigid and unyielding and bare. Gristol is the center of belief and Gristol stripped itself of all superstition long ago. Here, the people would have nothing to believe in but the Abbey itself. The Abbey is a thing with no loveliness or grace and so the people have only its doctrine to bend themselves to, and the doctrine of the Empire it represents. It is not religion. It is politics. It is a thing that has no music.
Here, the old traditions are all but dead.
Here is where they bring the whales to shore to die.
The harbors run thick and red with blood, and the screams of the whales hang night and day upon the air. The flensing knives are cold and unyielding and do not love. The Empire here has grown fat on the blood of the sea, fat on the bodies and backs of slaves from Pandyssia who believe in him. It wraps itself around the world like water-weeds and seeks to drag under and devour. It seeks to do what he has done for years and years.
Here, he is barely known. He is only a children’s-story to be whispered in the dark. He is only a border-walker, a half-thing. A monster who cannot bear the pipes and drums and thundering sermons of righteous men.
He finds a man who drowned in the harbor on a day the whale-blood ran thick. He takes his form, walks the grey streets with water dripping from his coat and decay hissing at his back, rot in his dead black eyes. Here, in Gristol, they teach that he is strong but ultimately powerless, and so he gives them power over the things that have none: rats and moths, the empty air, fish that live in sewers, things that scuttle and sneak and do not love.
He has no desire to slip inside the frame and see through the eyes of men who are so tied down by faith. He marks faith upon their skin instead. Keeps himself distant. Gives them gifts they cannot hope to understand and then vanishes back into the darkness of the Void with a smile on his face, watching – because these men do not know him, and their desperate heretical finding out is a gift in and of itself.
They think they have banished him, in Gristol. The Abbey thinks it has banished him from all the Isles and soon all the world. They think they can hunt him with pitchforks and sermons and torches, smash idols, tear down shrines, rip apart the great leviathans and redden the sea with his blood. They are so very wrong. They do not know.
They are right only in the knowledge that he is a thing that cannot be known.
Their fear is not fear enough. Their heretics’ love cannot hope to reach him. He can walk in the skins of mortal men for only moments, and his Void is only an echo of their world or perhaps the other way around. He is a thing outside. He cannot be known, he cannot be touched, and he cannot ever, ever be denied.
He is not the shrines, or the bones, or the runes carved with his signature. He is not the marks upon the skin. He is not the witch howling in the sea-wracked cave or leading the man to the water, not the drowned girl dancing in the snow-capped willow-reeds, not the storm lashing the shore and being beaten away by the ringing of bells. He is not the ancient ruins in Pandyssia or the nights when they build fires in his name or dance with him and hold his hands and wrap their arms around his borrowed human frame and taste the salt of sea and sweat upon his husk of human skin. He is not even the whales, not quite – even though he loves them, though he swims through the Void in their shape, though his song is theirs and he feels each cut upon their skin as if it is his own.
No. Never only that.
The men of the Abbey are wrong. The sea slips in everywhere. He is the sea, and the rain, and the still pools of water that came from the sea, and the river that returns to it, and the wind that carries its mist upon the air; he is the breath in the lungs that holds the wind and the blood inside the human heart. Blood possesses the exact same salt as the sea. The taste is the same. The sound of blood in the veins is the same sound of wave on crashing wave. As long as man lives, he is there; and when every man dies, he takes him down, and the skies of the Void open, and belief does not matter anymore to the dead because the sea crashes on and on and its depth shall never be found.