Chapter 35: A Sudden Outbreak Of Thalassaphobia

It was some time before I relented to Eris's inquiries. She wanted to know if we were safe from the Devils, which I assured her we were. But when she asked for details about what I saw I withdrew, sometimes physically. I explained that I only knew how the scene appeared because I made it a point to steel myself to it, and that I had no desire to recollect such a tragedy, or report it to anyone in detail. Mostly, though I kept this to myself, I did not want to spoil Eris's improving humor. The medicines we found in lower Haven were working well, and she gained strength every day. Only when she expressed a desire to catch up with Turk and join his fight did I decide to regale her of the full terror of the ruptured corpses heaped inside the Boardroom. Then my Eris played at being defeated, but I know now what she knew then, that I was the one defeated. If anything, the scope of the devil threat had awoken a brave, warrior's spirit in her heart. I would have acquiesced, but I kept seeing her face amid the mounds while I dreamt, and each day I refused more vehemently until she stopped trying.

We helped as much as we could from our mausoleum, gathering material for bandages and making herbal dressings, as well as storing imperishable foods. When Turk's ever fluctuating band arrived, we did our best to help them heal and keep them fed, repaired their footwear and gave what we could spare when they left. This is when I began to notice Eris's medication dwindling more quickly than it should have. I spoke harshly against her sharing it, but she simply geared herself up and next I knew we were spelunking into lower Haven to find more. During her burgeoning health, she said silly things that made me laugh, and often provoked me to the brink of frustration before revealing some elaborate joke at my expense, which she would follow with playful punches that led to semi serious wrestling and more than a few joyful couplings under the war-weary sky. It is strange, I'm sure, to you, but given my experience with our world I find it fitting that our halcyon days took place in such a time.

I encourage all to take a pen to their lives, as the past is dramatically clearer when seen through the eye of the stylus. The medication we found was marvelously effective, but Eris required more and more as the weeks wore on. This taught me much about the lives lived on the lower decks. Turk offered to look out for any supply he could find elsewhere, and occasionally brought some back from a lazarette found in the deep wastes. The effects were not as intense, but lasted longer. Eris preferred the latter treatment, but Turk's battles were fought where the Devils lurked, not where they struck, and those beasts cared nothing for sickness or injury. Only the drugs to drive one into a mad rage could be found on their corpses. In time, we were forced to search deeper into Haven than I wished to replenish Eris's new lifeblood. It was on such an excursion that we found ourselves lost in the city's deepest bowels, and we stumbled upon the Boardroom. I refused to go through its mystifying doors, and Eris came back to me shaken to her very core. She didn't eat for days.

There were other times we got lost. Once I found our way back by locating the nexus where I met with Nashandra and Tarion. I went to Caduceus's quarters afterward, sitting on his couch as I had done before, and looking sadly at the table where we shared meals as friends. Eris sat by me and held my hands while I cried. As we left, though we lingered long, she happened to spy a small depression in the floor under his bed. I thought even more sadly how he was sleeping in it alone in the days before his detainment. Whatever game his wife and her cohorts were playing, it had all come to nought when the Devils attacked. Had I the power, I would have called that fool woman back from the grave so she could look upon her house and regret her treachery.

"There's something down here," Eris said. She had pressed on the lowered tile and it slid away. She smartly dropped a flare into the space before lowering her head. "There's a passageway that leads to... well, I'm not sure what it's called. The space between decks. Victor! There's a case with your name on it!"

She huffed and heaved as she pulled a footlocker through the tight space. It was indeed marked with my name, Victor 39, in phosphorus ink across the deep blue lid. I looked at it briefly to figure out the locking mechanism, then flipped the latches and opened it. The few tools and nicknacks I owned had been taken from my silo and placed in there, but what stood out to me were the two things I had kept from my childhood. The worn, faded brown robe I was issued when chosen from Labor Pool 9, and the armored shroud I wore over my head and face when I rode to war; a hood of shimmering mail that looks like a ghostly drape until struck, where then the rings tighten like so many microscopic hands to grasp the point of any weapon that strikes at me. It was given to me by a dubious merchant as I fled my ruined home. I wondered then if that merchant were still alive. I doubted it, though, as she had a devil captive in her cave, and it had been freed during a perfect storm of orchestrated crises. While I heard tales of the Spinner, a creature of her kind that turned long dead corpses into profane automatons, I never again saw Matoya, and when I did at last return to her cave, it had become the lair of her captive devil, now known as Patches the Traitor.

The armored shroud had never fit me as a boy, but it fits me well now. Eris draped it over my head, shifting it around until she discovered the right way to don it. By the same power it tightened around weapons and projectiles, it clung lightly to my skull when properly set. It felt strange wearing it then. It made me think of my flight from the village of Ossary, and of the giant I watched slowly die, as well as many others who perished along the way, a few whom I held dear. My adolescence was a time of strange duties and imposed isolation. I knew very little of the world, save what I read in books and saw at the Protora Memorium, the monument around which the township of Ossary was built. I might have learned of the world from the Ossarians, but they were uncomfortable around one branded as I am, and the grim tasks I performed caused them to view me as a ghoul. Kendra was my only friend, and she was afflicted in a way I never did discover the truth of, no matter how hard I searched through memory. Always I encountered a mist that swallowed any recollections I might have had locked away behind my cellar door. So I contented myself with a life of quiet service to the Dolomites, those technomages and necromancers who lived far beyond the natural span of any kindred.

Yes, I served them, as did all Boys of the Batch. If you decide now to not read any further, I will not blame you, but I hope you do, for they are gone now, and unless you find yourself on the white shores of Elvedon, you will only hear their truths from me. In our time they were degenerate qliphoth, but they once were the champions of all the world, laboring tirelessly to forge a weapon to drive away the dread spirit that bars us from the light of the Sun.

Turk beamed when he saw me wearing the shroud. Not only did he beam, his chest swelled to bursting, and he laughed loudly as he pulled me in for a bear hug, then shed tears after letting me go. Never have I been more confused. They had ridden hard to find us gone, and he came down to look for us in case we needed his help. As it would turn out, my help would be needed, and I deeply (I ask you now to pardon the pun, and you'll soon see why) loathed the nature of my gifts when I was called to use them there.

We were en route to a dock worker's clinic that Turk knew of through Caduceus when the city buckled. After the attack, the generators had been mostly destroyed, if not severely damaged. We mostly depended on our own torches and lanterns on our excursions, or the dark adaptation of my eyes, but many corridors flickered, and some illuminated where feet fell and hands waved. The strain on these shattered systems had gone too far, and the failure of the last plant had rocked Haven's very foundations. Doors did not open, torches did not burn, and the jinn no longer answered their summons. Turk was quick to warn us not to panic. Eris and I held each other's hands tightly in the dark.

"There is a way," Turk reassured us, "but it will be hard. Victor, only you can survive it."

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The immense drum that is the city proper was housed within a miles deep chasm. Thousands of structures and habitats were built into the surrounding rockwall, connected by tubular bridges and scaffolding so large as to put that of upper Haven to shame. To the east was the massive, submerged dock where deep vessels once arrived by the hundreds every day. There are rumors that the doors of this dock opened to the full height of lower Haven, birthing in some the preposterous notion that the entire magnacity was built on the surface, then lowered into its underground cradle by megatherian machines. Even in the height of our fabled golden age, such a feat would be stupendously far fetched, and one would tend to assume that in a golden age the builders were wise, and would avoid such pointlessly elaborate processes. In any case, I only needed the doors to crack, for once outside, I could rise to a higher deck where a hardened emergency plant could be activated. The letting in of the sea would cause a terrible strain on the city, however, and I would be sorely pressed for time, lest Eris and Turk not be able to find an elevator before the weight of the ocean broke through the city's thick hull.

Turk knew a series of access tunnels that led to the airlock. There was a mechanical access port, which I entered through after stepping into a dive suit. Once I stood on the dock platform, I was alone, doing my best to remember the complex procedure by which I could coax the grand gateway into the sea to open a minute amount. And so I went from platform to platform, pulling levers and opening or closing valves, until the cold fury of Ulmo flooded in with a world breaking roar.

I was forced to wait until the entire platform was flooded before I could exit. As I swam to the doors I could think only of my precious love and my old friend, but when I pressed my feet against the outer wall and launched upward, my whole body froze in abject terror. I was as vulnerable and alone as a mote of dust in the vastness of the sky, as insignificant as a single grain of sand in the widest of deserts. Black nothingness so dense that its mere sight was suffocating swallowed me, and the light from my helmet only seemed to add to the incomprehensible enormity of the ocean. I looked around and below, desperate to see the face of the cliff I just vaulted from, or perhaps the metal of the great doors, anything solid and reminiscent of dry land. The approach lamps on the dock doors were mostly dead, and the few that still burned only illuminated a ghastly shadow of substance that I somehow found even more terrifying than the appearance of void around me. Something drew my gaze downward, and in the thick haze beyond my helmet lamps I saw a vast body moving far beneath my feet.

I whirled around, searching madly for some hint of the surface, even though I knew no such thing existed at this depth. My feet were kicking on their own, and I struggled to focus my vision on the lighted display within my helmet. There I had a compass, and through diamond hard will I managed to still myself long enough to read it, then swam upwards as quickly as I could, all the while hoping to outrun the fullness of the unknowable world that was all around me, and to outpace the inevitable seizing of my muscles and spasms from my panicked breathing.

Soon I managed a rapidly failing veneer of calm, but then I became keenly aware of my most imminent threat, the cold. In the rush of activity that followed Turk's instructions, I had not taken the time to learn how to fully utilize all my dive suit's functions (such learning would have taken hours), and so had not activated the climate control suite. While the thick, leather lining my limbs and neck fit tightly into was warm upon entry into the suit, it was now paralyzingly cold, and was quickly becoming as rigid as a steel beam. I raced against a foe I could not outrun, knowing that the more quickly I moved the stiffer my suit would become, and the slower I moved the more likely I was to freeze. I may handle the cold air of the surface better than most, but even the chosen of the abzu could not withstand these extremes. I chanced a look upward, reflexively expecting to find a sign, and so impossibly dark was the roof of the ocean that I longed to look into the oppressive vaults of the sky.

Again by some cozening I was compelled to look downward, and again I saw a moving body in the distance beneath me. I looked back upward, trying so very hard not to let my breathing go completely wild and rupture my pounding heart, and in my panic I lost my bearings. Then all began to collapse around me and I was being swallowed not only by the depths but by fear and the fear of fear that begets yet more fear. Then all stood still when I looked to the west. I saw the hatch I was to reenter by, and the lamps ringing its approach were fortunately all kindled. I was so taken by this momentary relief that I happened to notice the word Batch painted on its surface.

But then I saw something else. Between me and my goal was a glowing orb no larger than my own skull. It hovered still in front of my face, and when I reached out for it, my arms ensorcelled, it became three orbs in a chain that swayed like a charmed snake. As I drifted closer to it I saw a web of luminous filaments spanning between the orbs, and, my whole being captive to a circumambient carillon, I looked down to the long tentacle that the filaments sprang from. Into the deep it plunged, until I saw the rising of white fires in the endlessness beneath me. Two planets of bright light now made their slow way up from the graves of the yotnar, bringing with them a rush of warm water that spoke of the rising of continents, and I felt myself being lifted by the force of the planets as they came close. The three orbs became six, then nine, and between them the net of filaments spread outward to engulf me. In a fit of lucidity, I remembered how Belial had clutched at me, only to feel his hands pass through air, but I had reached a degree of terror so far beyond that that no faculty of mind or body could save me, other than a quick duck and a desperate flight to the hatch.

The opening mechanism was simple; a large, yellow lever shaped like a wishbone, primed by a green button the size of my fist. Were my diving suit properly prepped and fully activated, my blood warm and the link to the suit's myomer sinews immediate, I would have made a clean getaway. But I was so cold now I could barely move, and as I primed the lever I saw the nine become twelve, the shimmering net ever expanding around me. I was pressing the button with both hands, frequently slipping off of it as I pressed. Finally I heard the gurgle of decompression and the clear housing over the lever opened. I grabbed at it, but one of the glowing filaments managed to hook around one of my thumbs and pull me away. Miraculously, I remembered the depleted uranium knife sheathed in the left breast of the diving suit. I drew it with my free hand and cut my entangled one loose, but before I could sheath the knife I was again being pulled away. I lifted my leg as I was dragged downward, watching my knife float out of reach, and I managed to kick the lever into place with my heel.

Now I was caught in the net, salvation drifting upward away from me, and I did the only thing I could think to do. I uttered a word of madness, and the suit cracked open. The net offered heat, but my path lead through cold. I struggled free and bolted upward, swallowing liquid ice when I screamed involuntarily at the intense pain of the frigid sea touching my skin, and as I dragged myself through the hatch, my veins stabbed me with that unbearable burn the senses run to when we are cold beyond reckoning. Pain stabbed through my stiff little fingers as I groped for the lever to activate the airlock, and I vomited buckets worth of water when the sea had been drained from the room. With more effort than I knew I was capable of, I rose and limped all the way to the nearby engineering chamber and activated the emergency generator.

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