Black Halo by Sam Sykes Page A

you?’
    ‘From every one of your demon servants, yes.’
    ‘Demons?’
    ‘What else would you call them?’
    ‘Interesting question,’ the black one muttered.
    ‘Very interesting,’ the red one agreed. It looked to its counterpart. ‘What would you call Mother Deep’s children?’
    ‘Hellspawn,’ Lenk chimed in.
    ‘Dramatic, but a bit too vague,’ the red one said. ‘Deeplings?’
    ‘A tad too predictable,’ the black one replied. ‘What are they, after all? Creatures returned from whence they were so unjustly banished. Creatures from a place far beyond the understanding of mankind and his sky and earth.’
    ‘They had a word for such things,’ the red one said.
    ‘Ah, yes,’ the black one said.
    ‘Aeon,’ they both finished.
    Lenk felt he should ask a question at that, but found that none in his head would slide into his throat. He felt the ocean begin to change around him, felt it abandon him as he began to fall, his head like a lead weight that dragged him farther below. Above, the Deepshriek became a halo, swimming in slow circles that shrank with every passing breath.
    It was getting warm, he noted, incredibly so. His blood felt like it was boiling, his skull an oven for his mind to simmer thoughtfully in. Every breath came through a tightened throat: laboured, heavy, then impossible.
    Breath . His eyes widened at the word. Can’t breathe . His throat tightened, heart pounded, pulse raced. Can’t breathe, can’t breathe!
    ‘What a pity,’ came another voice, one he did not recognise.
    This one was deep, bass and shook the waters, changing them as it spoke. It drowned the sky, doused the sun with its laughter. It sent the waves roiling up to meet him.
    He tilted his head, stared down into a pair of glimmering green eyes that he knew well. They stared up at him from above a smile that was entirely too big, between long ears that floated like feathery gills, as a slender, leather-clad hand reached up to beckon him down.
    ‘But where we must all go,’ she whispered, her voice making the sand beneath her shudder, ‘we do not sin with breath.’
    His scream was silent. Her stare was vast. The sun died above. The ocean floor opened up, a great gaping yawn that callously swallowed him whole.
*
     
    After so many times waking in screams and sweat, Lenk simply didn’t have the energy to do it this time, even when his eyes fluttered open and beheld the eight polished eyes that stared back at him through a thin sheet of silk. His scream withered and died in his chest, but the dredgespider loosed a frustrated hiss before leaping off of his chest and scurrying away into the surf.
    He stared up at the sky through the gauzy webs the many-legged creature had blanketed him in. Air , he thought as he inhaled great gulps. He remembered air.
    He remembered everything, he found, between the twitches of his eyes. He remembered the Deepshriek, what it had said. He remembered Kataria … had that been Kataria? He remembered the ocean, uncaring, and the darkness, consuming. That had all happened. Hadn’t it? Was it some temporary, trauma-induced madness? His head hurt; he had been struck in the wreck, he recalled.
    The wreck … They had been wrecked, destroyed, cast to the bottom of the ocean.
    But he was alive now. He breathed. He saw clouds moving in a deceitful sky. He felt treacherous sunlight on his skin. He was alive. He forced himself to rise.
    The pain that racked him with every movement only served to confirm that he was still alive. Unless he had arrived in hell, anyway. He doubted that, though. The tome had told him of hell. It had mentioned nothing of warm, sunny beaches.
    Nor, he thought as he spied a slender figure standing knee-deep in the surf, did hell possess women. Not ones that didn’t sever and slurp up one’s testes, anyway. The sunlight blinded him as he squinted against the shimmering shore. He saw pale skin, long hair wafting in the breeze, a flash of emerald.
    ‘Kat …’ he