Chapter Thirty-Three

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

PITCH'S BELLOW held fear and anger entwined. He passed through a strange assembly of fine fillets, like the gills beneath a mushroom, and tumbled head over heels, his dress an appalling companion as he struggled to keep its copious layers under control. He slid down into a gullet so wide, his hands could not reach the sides.

The smell was atrocious on entry, but as he moved deeper, with his gown dampened and a slipper missing from his foot, the stench abated.

Darkness prevailed, and Pitch summoned his flame to hand.

‘Don't you dare burn us. Hold your fire, daemon.'

The unexpected, but familiar, voice sent shock hurtling through him. Pitch drew the flame back beneath his skin.

‘Satine? Where the bloody blazes are you?'

He landed on his arse, in a tangle of petticoats and taffeta, upon a surface that had him thinking of marshmallow. When a pinkish light cracked open the oppressive darkness, he saw it was far from a sweet treat he'd landed upon. He was in the beast's belly, amid bulges of innards and unpleasant scatterings of bones.

‘Oh, shit…gods.' He jumped to his feet, his wet hair falling into his eyes and forgetting he'd lost a shoe until the squelching between his toes reminded him. ‘Fuck, that is disgusting. Satine, is it truly you?'

Or had he just been eaten, by the very first fucking predator he encountered in the lake?

‘Truly me.'

He was gripped by the arm. Pitch dragged the hair from his eyes, revolted by the syrupy wetness there. ‘Shit!'

‘Don't be afraid, Tobias.'

It was no hand upon his arm, rather something tubular and white, like the tentacle of an octopus. He whirled about, straining against the tight hold. Not an octopus, but a massive serpent lay behind him, curled around a pile of bones. The monster was white as the bodily remains; save for a faint rose gold patterning upon the scales which were each the size of saucers. Huge eyes of faceted, clear quartz regarded him.

‘Satine…you are a…I didn't expect…'

‘My true form to be so beautiful?' A long tongue, forked at its tip, shot forth from between lips of pearl white. ‘No, I don't suppose you did.' Her voice was perfectly clear, no hissing, no slithering, as one might imagine from a snake, as though her long tongue wrote the words in the air and they took life from there.

‘You are beautiful, it has to be said. And I never imagined describing a serpent so.'

Satine's diamond head lowered, acknowledging the compliment. ‘And how do you wish to be known, prince of many names? Who stands before me now?'

The Lady Satine had always been rather decent to him. Standing by silently, as he acted out to deal with his pains. Protective, too, though he'd failed to notice it as he struggled. And now, here in the guts of this mammoth creature, the lady offered him what he craved. A choice. However small.

‘Vassago.' He stumbled with the roiling motion of the sea creature. ‘Those other pitiful sods, Tobias and Pitch, could only ever exist in the world I have left behind.'

‘You are wiser for having known that world, restless prince.' Satine's coils twisted and shifted around her mound of bones. Curious bones they were, of shapes and angles he was unfamiliar with. ‘You understand the need to shed those gentler skins and return to your given form. So that this might, at last, be done.'

The beast tilted wildly to the right. Pitch had no hope of keeping his footing and was saved by Satine's tail at his waist; keeping him mostly vertical, while all else was adrift. The lady could not, though, stop all the loose bones from moving. One glanced against his head, earning it a cursing cry of protest.

‘What damned creature holds us? It shall kill me before I even set eyes upon the halo.'

‘Leviathan. She is the djinn, and the djinn is she.'

‘Whatever it is, it cannot seem to swim in a direct line.'

‘Nor would you, if the waters of Blood Lake boiled with cretins who sought to bring you harm.'

Pitch lowered his hand from his bruised head. ‘This is it, then? I am here…in the lake.'

‘You are here…in the lake. Does the Cultivation not tell you so?'

The beast, the Leviathan, now tilted in the opposite direction, even more drastically this time. Pitch was left dangling in Satine's hold, like bait at the end of a hook.

‘It tells me,' he grunted, ‘that it prefers not to be hurled about like this. I'd like to face the halo with my intestines where they ought to be, if you don't fucking mind.' His struggle stilled with a thought. ‘I thought you claimed to have no idea of the lake's location, nor the Sanctuary? Yet, here you are. Have you made this journey far more arduous than it needed to be?'

As if in contempt the Leviathan bucked, a movement that had everything loose in its belly rolling like cargo on a storm-blasted ship. Satine stayed even, which meant, thankfully, Pitch did too.

‘Do you not think I wouldn't have had Sanu carry you here at the first moment if I had known such things?' Satine's disdain filled her hiss. ‘Besides, we did not know what the Seraph intended for you in the beginning. All Lucifer understood was that you had to be protected. He held onto the watch for a long time, before deciding to pass it to you. Then we learned along with you what must be done.' The lady's coils flashed as she adjusted her position. ‘But even if I had known sooner, I could not have shown you to the lake, for its position is not stagnant, and the Seraph alone maps its place in the world.'

‘They move the lake?'

‘Rarely, but yes. Its weight upon the world is great, even if it is only the Seals that connect it now to the purebreds' domain. In moving the lake, they seek to maintain a balance that will not rend the world apart.' Her massive head lowered. ‘But even if the lake remained where it was grown, I still could not have shown you here. I was not privy to where the events of the Day of Reckoning took place. The djinn were chosen by the Lord Enoch on that dark day to harness their nature-given power in this single, magnificent creature. A great guardian of the lake. I was the djinn chosen to tend to her, to bring her the sustenance of the natural world that would sustain her. But I was born within the Leviathan, and this is as far into Blood Lake as I have ever been, or may go.'

The beast dived at a gentle angle, then returned to level, its fleshy sides flexing and contracting as it swum. Pitch stared at the serpent, at the djinn who lay like a parasite in the belly of a beast.

‘You have been like this since that day?'

Pitch was a mere four hundred years old, and he already felt haggard with what it was to be a servant of the Lord Enoch. Satine knew thousands of years chained to his will.

‘I have. Of course I can enter the purebred world to feed, so there is some respite, but always I must return.' Her tongue darted more slowly, her scales lifted and lowered like huge thickly woven fans. ‘I am tired of this place, Vassago.'

The Leviathan stole Pitch's chance to reply. The beast rolled, and all the world turned upside down. Pitch's gown, a terrible choice in hindsight, flipped like an umbrella thrown inside out in a violent wind, covering his face entirely. As he was averse to drawers, and Seraphiel must have remembered it, he was also giving Satine an almighty show of his arse and cock and balls. ‘Fucking Malik's taint. This is ridiculous.'

‘I see the ankou did not cure you of your foul mouth.'

Despite the gentleness of the jest, and the flush of sympathy he'd felt on hearing the lady's story, her comment grew hot fury behind Pitch's eyes.

‘Don't you dare speak of him.' He knew very well how threatening he sounded. That was entirely the point. ‘Say nothing of him again, unless you wish to see your fish baked to a crisp.'

Quartz eyes watched him, wide and without blinking, just like the wisp. At least that was one goodbye he'd not had to endure.

‘Has Silas fallen? Have I lost my rider and my steed? I see nothing else keeping him from being at your side.'

The Leviathan drew back onto an even keel, and the moment Satine set him down, Pitch lunged for her. He wrapped his hands about her neck: thick as a drainpipe, smoother than the taffeta of his stained gown, and hard as rock. Even with his formidable strength, he barely made an impression.

‘Silas is safe.' The hurt was physical, the ankou's name a razor to his tongue. ‘I left him behind so he would not be harmed. Do not mention him again. I warn you.'

Coils shifted. ‘I understand.'

‘Make sure you do.' He loosened his hands, stepping back, the wretched softness of the beast's belly making him unsteady. Pitch exhaled, calming the fire that had risen. Seeing how grossly he'd overlooked another pain. One Satine would know well. ‘I overstep…my apologies, my lady. I must…I am…' But truly there was no time for hesitancy. He considered going to a knee, but the thin, slimy covering on the leviathan's innards decided him otherwise. ‘I ask your forgiveness for Lalassu's death.'

The words scoured his throat, but gods, their release was blissful.

Satine's tail tip shook, standing bolt upright. ‘My Pale Horse knew your importance. She made her choice accordingly. It was not you who struck her.'

‘But if I had not been so reckless –'

The hiss blew the sodden hairs from his face and made the damp lengths of his skirt rustle. ‘Enough. You cannot be like this.'

‘Like what?'

‘Sorrowful, repentant.' Her solid head weaved back and forth. ‘Frightened for those you love. You said you were Vassago. Then be him. Not Tobias or Pitch, or a man broken by the loss of his lover, and the downfall of a mare. Leave them behind. Be the prince the angel chose. And if you truly wish for my absolution, then become the single-minded beast that is needed here.'

If you are not the mad prince, you are not enough.

Seraphiel had said it.

They needed the Berserker Prince. He who knew no allies, certainly no friends, and absolutely no lover who might distract him from his purpose. He who could be a destructive maniac, precisely because he desired to be nothing else.

That prince was exactly why Seraphiel had chosen him.

The simurgh seemed to swell inside him, reach up between his ribs and into the crevices at his joints. Shaking loose the pieces of himself that Pitch had tried to hide. Rattling at them, desiring them free.

He did not protest.

‘I assume your fish takes us to the halo?' He smoothed his voice clear of sentiment.

‘As close as can be. I have made her as large and layered as the centuries would allow, but the heart of Blood Lake is treacherous. We shall take you as close as the Leviathan's strength, and my own, can abide. The rest is for you to endure.'

She still held him with a coil at his waist, for the unpredictable passage of the Leviathan had not abated. But Pitch had agency enough to reach for the cracked bone he'd spied. A shard that held the point of a knife. He tugged against Satine's hold until it slackened enough that he could drop to his arse on the creature's soft innards. He set to hacking at the fine taffeta, cutting himself a shorter skirt; bringing it roughly in line with his knees. If he'd known he was to be dropped straight from the ballroom to the lake, he might have chosen his clothing more carefully. But never had he been more grateful for the cinch of the corset, the pressure reminding him to temper his breath; the rigidness adding steel to his spine.

The Leviathan nosedived. Pitch let out a cry, barely avoiding slicing his leg when the bone knife slipped. Shock morphed to anger, and he took hold of his rage, as firmly as Satine wrapped him in her coils. Her beast thrashed and twisted in the slow, laboured way of giant animals.

‘Let me go, damn it!' Pitch shouted. ‘Do not restrain me. If I cannot stay on my feet in here, then I shall be fucking useless outside.' His flame shivered from his fingertips, rising along with his temper, and he glanced his hand against the lady's rose-gold tinged scales.

A serpentine hiss erupted. Satine let him go at the exact moment the Leviathan righted, and water rushed into their fleshy cavern. Carrying with it a fresh corpse. Pitch threw himself out of the way of the grotesque, bloated figure. He'd never seen such a creature: one solitary leg and one arm on a torso filleted with bleeding cuts, green blood flowing from the wounds. The head was like an enormous egg, and had only one lone eye, dull and yellowed like an old newspaper.

‘What the fuck is that?'

‘The purebred legends call it a fachan.' Satine lowered her triangular mouth near to the corpse, tongue flicking over skin that was covered with thick, saturated feathers. ‘But it has no true name. It is one of Blood Lake's spawn. The halo continues to make monsters, even in the absence of Samyaza, and gives life to aberrations such as this.'

The Leviathan's killing work was ongoing. The creature's flesh bubbled, peeling away to expose bone, black as an apple seed.

Pitch stared in revulsion at both the messy deconstruction and the deformity itself. ‘But if this is Blood Lake's creature, how do the purebreds know of it?'

He braced against the marshmallow pinkness of the Leviathan's side, too irritated to mind the damp, doughy feel beneath his hand. Satine drew her tail in, keeping it clear of where the fachan dissolved.

‘The halo's potency did not create only the Blight, it bred these creatures, too. The Order names them the Fuath, those born of Blood Lake. And though the Leviathan does well with her hunts to keep their numbers low, they are too quick to multiply. Their existence creates a pressure beneath the Seals, and at rare times that pressure is vented through the angels' protective veil. The number of Fuath they allow to enter the purebred world is tightly controlled, and only the weakest among them are ever freed; the fachan is one, the selkie and the nucklevee, among many others, though I have argued since the first purge that last one is too dangerous, considering a nucklevee's appetite for flesh of any kind.' Her tail vibrated, shook like a rattle. ‘Mr Ahari and I always loathed those times, when word reached the Order of their presence.'

‘Gods.' Pitch breathed, ever more grateful that Silas's journey into the lake had not come to pass. To hear that not only were lost human souls haunted by the lake, but their living were cursed with its predators, too, would have given him great pains. ‘So, the Blight…those bastards are venting it also, aren't they? The angels allow that menace into the world.'

He did not need to ask the question. The answer was so starkly, horribly obvious. Satin's bulging quartz eye could not seem to find him. ‘Yes. The Blight is difficult to control, as it is not so easy to see as these monsters. There is a propensity for it to escape in high measures at a venting. And that is when –'

‘That is when the Pale Horseman is summoned to deal with it.' Pitch balled his fists and stepped up to the rapidly decaying fachan. Much of the flesh was eroded from the skull, with only the enormous bulge of the eye remaining. ‘You are fucking cunts, the damned lot of you. Arcadia treats this world as nothing more than a drain in which to dump its sewage.'

His blood was heated, his eyes searing with flame.

‘Do not include my cunt in your assessment, Vassago.' The Lady Satine writhed, her coils flexing and tightening. ‘We djinn are nature's children, born of her might and balance. For two thousand years, I've had to watch over this place, a birthplace of chaos, and try in vain to prevent it from ruining the perfection of the natural world. And now I must watch, as they send you to stir this cauldron of strife once more. It is your arrival that has unsettled all things. Now, should you fail, and this turmoil bubbles over, it will be I and the Order left to deal with the maelstrom. I am tired of being Lady of the Lake. Do not fail.'

‘Your motivational skills are fucking appalling.' His throat thickened with anger; at the unfairness of the comment, the weight of expectations, and the sharp bite that fear of failure brought. ‘And do not speak to me of maelstroms. I have known nothing but chaos.'

Save for a precious few moments–unexpected and unlikely–journeying at a dead man's side.

Pitch pressed his bare heel into the jellied mass of the fachan's eye, and the dull pop and slow flow of bodily fluid brought a sickening release. A sense of falling back into his old skin; atrocious daemonic skin, of flint and rock and molten heat, and utter distaste for all other living beings. The simurgh came alive, creeping into his sinews, into the fine hairs upon his body, his return to himself encouraging it, coaxing it deeper. Pitch ran his tongue over his lips, re-tasting all the blood he'd spilled over the centuries, re-breathing forgotten air: that of a mad warrior upon the Hellfield.

‘Do you know what you must do?'

Satine's question drew him back to dull existence. His smile was lifted by bitterness and loss.

‘Forget and remember.' Pitch pushed at the hem of velvet and taffeta at his wrist, tracing a fingertip over fine skin; where veins were stark and bulged like worms. ‘Forget this suit of flesh and all its memories. And recall the truth of my nature.'

He should be eager to do so. For humankind was crude and pitiful. Readily built to break down. It would not be so terrible to shrug off the mantle he wore. It was an illusion, anyway. He'd been designed differently; and no layer of silk or skin that bloomed under a lover's touch could change what the Creation Flame had made him. What imbecile had he been to imagine otherwise?

‘Then make haste, Prince of Arcadia.' Satine's hiss lifted the hairs on the back of his neck. ‘For you cannot take this creature to face the halo. It shall be your downfall.'

‘The simurgh? It is the reason we are here at all.'

A terrible vibration moved through the Leviathan. It was, Pitch suspected, a watery roar as it negotiated its sea of hellions.

‘I speak of you, daemon.' Satine's body moved like a ribbon of silk falling from a table's edge. ‘There is no place for Tobias Astaroth here, and yet he stands before me, hesitant and unhappy. You have softened, and it will make you vulnerable. You are not the daemon Seraphiel chose, and you must be, to see this done.'

‘Softened?' he spat, welcoming the molten fury that filled him, sucking upon it like marrow from a bone. Feeding his monster. ‘I remember all too well what it is to hate, I assure you.'

‘Do you? You are so careful with your hatred now. You hold it in check too well. That is not how you lived before. You had no regard for its collaring, you were careless with its distribution. Quick to a fury that left you mindless and almighty. Your time here has reshaped you. I should have put an end to your partnership sooner.'

‘Partnership?' he asked, though he knew her meaning well.

‘You and the ankou. I had not expected the alliance to bear anything but tolerance and strength. Instead, this closeness you have formed weakens you both.'

‘I am here in your fish's gut because of that alliance.' The realisation formed even as he spoke. ‘If not for the ankou, for all those along the way who helped us, I'd not be here.'

The lady hissed, her scales clacking with her annoyance, and he was glad to see he had pissed her off. ‘You should be here because you hunger to destroy, as you did upon the Hellfield. I do not see the mad prince before me. I see one possessed of a broken heart at leaving behind his dead lover. I see grief, not rage.'

‘Keep talking this way and you'll see enough of the latter to satisfy you.'

‘But that is my point entirely. You are in control. You hold your temper, your nature, in check, despite what I know to be a great turbulence inside you, a turbulence that needs your ferocity to feed on. Let him return, Vassago. Stop denying yourself. Allow the Berserker Prince to take hold. Remove this disguise you wear, for you know as well as I, it is false. You play a game here, as surely as the angel does with his simurgh.'

Pitch's skin glowed with barely suppressed flame as the lady chipped away at him, breaking down his charade piece by piece. Seeking to expose the beast at its core.

Satine's head swayed low, quartz eyes shifting away from him. ‘Let go the false belief there was ever a place for you in this world. You ride the Red Horse. And she will accept none but those who carry the flames of strife and carnage. You are my Horseman of War, Vassago. That is the nature of you. The ankou may love Pitch or Tobias–he has fallen for the illusion you made for him–but he could never love that which lies behind the mask. And you know it.'

He'd lied earlier when he said he knew what it was to hate. He'd forgotten, somewhere in the gardens of Holly Village, and the hold of a dead man; what it was to hate so fiercely his blood caught fire.

But he recalled now.

He despised her, because every word that left Satine's mouth was true.

Even his fucking horse had known it. He was corporeal chaos.

Had he not told Silas from the beginning that he was a terrible creature? That he was one of those harbingers of death the ankou fought against.

Pitch could change his appearance but this pretty body had only ever hid a savage core.

The ache in his chest splintered.

The simurgh stretched itself, its wingtips caressing the bones in his arms, its tail moving through the columns of his legs, making his marrow itch.

An inferno ignited at the tips of his toes, eating its way upwards, urging the simurgh ever higher, ever closer to the surface. The Cultivation wrapped itself around every vein.

‘Let me out.'

‘We're not close enough.'

‘Command your leviathan to release me. Now, Satine.'

It was not the voice of Tobias Astaroth that left him. It was not even that of Vassago.

Pitch heard himself as though listening to a stranger. A stranger who could command a thousand legions.

The serpent, the Lady of the Lake, retreated from him. Sliding back to create a distance. One she bowed low into.

‘Your Highness,' she said in a small voice. He'd never thought of her as small. Satine had always been a force to be reckoned with. ‘May the gods go with you.'

‘I need no gods.'

His insides swelled, and the simurgh grew ever larger. His flame lit up the insides of the Leviathan, as if every gas lamp from the London streets was planted in its flesh.

The beast tilted at a sharp angle upward, and Pitch allowed threads of his flame to release from his back and splay out like tentacles to brace him. The roar from the beast reverberated through Pitch's body. His feeble body, dressed in all the whimsy and ineptitude of the purebreds. He was a child's fable; the wolf dressed in sheep's clothing. And he could barely wait to shed its layers. He relished the damage the flames did to the delicate garb now; the first of much destruction to come.

Shifting bones and half-digested corpses were cremated in his fire, their fine ash coating the leviathan's innards like cruel bruises. The creature levelled out, and Pitch straightened, setting his shoulders back. He made his way forward, and Satine slithered ahead, clearing the detritus, removing all obstruction from his path.

Vassago paid her no mind.

She mattered not.

Very little mattered but reaching the mouth of the beast, finding those hanging folds of fibrous mass that acted as strange teeth.

With each step he took on spongy flesh, the simurgh beat its wings, a powerful brush that seemed to inflate Vassago larger. Returning him to his true vastness.

The Cultivation readied to play its part. Now the Berserker Prince would do the same.