DAEMON OF THE DEEP

  Rob Sanders

  Even the storm was beautiful.

  The churning clouds were lined silver, and lightning streaked across the sky in pastel blues and pinks. The thunder was a melodic boom and the Glass Sea a smashed mirror, the metallic waters reflecting the tempest above. From the bountiful ocean to the Shattered Isles with their jewelled beaches, all was fair to look upon. The islanders, too, were a handsome people. All but Silas.

  Silas sat hunched on his bed watching the pretty patterns of the storm through the window. Lightning flashed colour across the room. His chambers were situated in the highest tower of Castle Sheldrac. His window commanded the best view on Ersatz Island. This was not because he commanded such respect – although he was the old chieftain’s youngest son. The view served as a reminder of the beauty of the realm. A contrast to the hideousness of his own form. Silas wore no chains and the chamber doors were not locked, but they might as well have been, for the chieftain’s son never left the tower. He could not bear to see the shame in his brothers’ eyes or the averted gaze of his aged father. He could not walk the clinking beaches of the gem-lined shore for the startled screams of fishwives, the pointing of fine children and island clansmen who shook their heads.

  For a few horrible seconds, there was no lightning. The darkness of the casement became a momentary mirror and Silas had his appearance reflected back at him. Anyone would think that the chieftain’s son suffered from a horrific deformity of the face or that a disfiguring disease had ravaged his body. This was not the case. He was an islander. A son of the Shattered Isles. A Sheldrac, well bred. He was as handsome as his brother Rodric. His hair was a lustrous bronze, like his brother Hearn’s. He had his departed mother’s striking green eyes and the noble features of the old chieftain. But for the hump on his back and the curvature of his spine, he was as handsome as any noble son of Clan Sheldrac.

  Silas heard shouting from the banquet hall below.

  ‘You cannot do this,’ a voice cried out. ‘You must not do this.’

  It was Teagan. Lady Teagan had come to Ersatz Island from the small kingdom of Tesseraq. Like Ersatz, Tesseraq was a wondrous paradise of precious stone and fine people. The Shattered Isles were an assorted patchwork of dominions, held together by marriage alliances. While the people of Ersatz worshipped the Everqueen and local deities of the depths that blessed their island with bounty, the God-King was popular in civilised Tesseraq. Norvik, a priest of Sigmar, carried the word of the God-King to Ersatz. He had also brought one of King Tynarch’s one hundred daughters – noble maidens that carried his name and were used to forge alliances with distant dominions, like Ersatz.

  ‘Get out of my way, woman!’ That was Rodric, Silas decided. His brother’s steps echoed up the stone staircase.

  ‘You must not do this, my lord,’ Lady Teagan implored.

  ‘This is none of your concern,’ Hearn rumbled. Silas could hear his heavy step also. ‘This is clan business.’

  ‘But I am to be part of the island clan, am I not, my intended?’ she said to Rodric.

  ‘Get off me, girl,’ Rodric snapped back. ‘Know your place.’

  ‘Master Norvik, please,’ Teagan begged, her father’s imperiousness creeping into her voice.

  ‘It is the will of the God-King,’ Norvik told her in his cracked and aged voice. ‘If our kingdoms are ever to be part of the heavenly realm, we shall need noble men, worthy of Sigmar’s divinity. The healthy. The hardy. Men of clean limb. Men who are a reflection of His own perfect form. We dare not anger the God-King, my lady. Now step aside. This must be done.’

  ‘Somebody, help,’ Teagan called. ‘Your island prince is in danger.’ Nobody would come, however. No servant would act against their master on Ersatz. Every islander knew their place. Fishermen and seafarers were kings in their coastal cottages and aboard their own boats. They adorned their sharkskin vestments with gem and pearl, dining only on the finest fish the ocean had to offer. They took pride in hard work, married and were happy. They would do nothing to upset a paradise of their own making. They would not speak against their masters – and certainly not for one of the malformed like Silas.

  The door burst open. Once more, lightning flashed through the window, casting the room in stark blue. Rodric entered. Silas could see righteous determination in his brother’s eyes. The hulking Hearn stood behind, framed in the doorway. Master Norvik, a bag of bones in a set of robes, leant upon his staff. His mouth might have been full of platitudes for Lady Teagan, but his bearded face was hard and uncompromising.

  ‘Well met, brothers,’ Silas said nervously, stepping down from the bed. ‘What troubles you on this stormy night?’

  Teagan pushed past the men, putting her slender form between the hunchback and the brothers.

  ‘You would do this to your own kindred?’ the lady said. ‘What kind of monsters are you?’

  ‘My lady,’ Silas said, his head low and his eyes looking up at the interlopers. ‘My brothers mean me no harm. We are clansmen. We are blood.’

  His words were delicate and full of false confidence. He felt Rodric waver. Hearn looked away.

  ‘Rodric,’ Teagan said. ‘Don’t do this. The gods abhor the spilling of brotherly blood.’

  ‘Not when it is in their service,’ Master Norvik said, the priest attempting to bolster Rodric and Hearn’s resolve. ‘The God-King demands it. He asks you for a pure bloodline and descendants worthy of the heavenly realm. Do not disappoint him, my lord. Think of your people. Think of yourself.’

  ‘Rodric?’ Silas said, his words atremble. ‘Hearn?’

  ‘This…’ Rodric said, ‘must be done.’

  ‘The net,’ Hearn called back down the staircase, his voice a faltering boom.

  ‘No,’ Teagan said, grabbing Silas and hauling him back towards the window. Servants of the coastal castle rushed in with a fishing net. As Rodric pulled Teagan away, the lady fought and shrieked. Silas couldn’t believe what was happening. He fell to his knees and begged for his life. He looked for a compassion in his brothers’ eyes that simply wasn’t there anymore. He felt the hands of servants on him and the net across the hunch of his back. As he resisted, the castle servants beat him down with marlinspikes.

  Clawing and rolling within the net, Silas was dragged from his chambers. He was hauled past the turtleskin boots of his brothers and the skirt tails of Norvik’s robes. Out through the door and down the staircase. He cried out as he bumped down the harsh, stone steps, feeling his bones crack. Near the bottom, Silas’ temple was dashed against the stone. He felt blood in his eyes and the terrifying ordeal his life had just become faded in and out of focus. He could still hear Lady Teagan held back by servants, while his older brothers and their priest followed him down the stairs.

  The servants hauled him across the polished, pearl floors of the castle chambers, through archways and by ancient furniture. In his panic and confusion, Silas became aware of light and heat. The great fire of the banquet hall was raging. Before it, in a whalebone chair, was his father. The islanders called the chieftain Old Lundal. With his years catching up to him, it had been Lundal who had accepted King Tynarch’s offer of an alliance and set in motion the events that would make Rodric chieftain.

  ‘Father!’ Silas called out. ‘Father, help me…’

  Old Lundal was a dark blur before the fire. He turned his head slightly, before fixing his gaze back on the roaring flames. Charms and talismans jangled about his neck. Icons of his faith. The symbols of the Everqueen and the deities of the deep that were worshipped about the Shattered Isles.

  ‘Father! Father, don’t let them take me.’

  As he was dragged through the banqueting hall, the net cutting into him, he heard the boots of his brothers pause by their father. Nothing was said. As Silas was hauled out of the great castle doors and across the rough stone bridge leading from the castle to the island, the brothers followed, out into the storm.

  Above, the clouds swirled and churned. The path was lit up by bolts of blue and pink lightning, cutting up the sky. The servants crunched through the sand. Instead of tiny grains, the path – like the beach – was made up of tiny slivers of gemstone. Instead of pebbles, jewels lined the trail, slicing at Silas’ netted form. It was raining. The drizzle created a polychromatic sheen and faint rainbows in the gloom. Norvik and the brothers crunched up behind, soaked to the skin in the storm.

  As Silas was dragged through the fishing village surrounding the castle he called out for assistance. His voice, full of disbelief and terror, was largely lost to the bombast of the storm. Those fishermen and their wives who did hear him opened their doors, not to help their clansman but to look on in silence. Children came to their windows to get a glimpse of the hunchback being dragged away.

  Silas’ voice trailed miserably off to nothing. The people of Ersatz would not help him. Theirs was an idyllic existence. They did not want it tarnished by one whose presence only reminded them of its potential for ugliness and imperfection. Even fish that displayed the slightest hint of a flaw in their scales or fins were discarded. Those whose taste did not meet expectation were dumped. The islanders wouldn’t blemish their jewel-encrusted cottages and silver shoreline with rotting fish and the stench of decay, however. Children were sent across the island to throw rejected morsels and leftovers into a collapsed sea cave called the Grotto. Silas had even heard dark stories of islanders taking ailing or
disfigured newborns across to the Grotto and pitching the disappointments into the depths.

  As he was dragged across the island’s rocky interior with Rodric, Hearn and master Norvik striding through the rain behind, Silas Sheldrac came to the heart-scalding conclusion that he was about to die. He moaned the pain of his broken bones and gashed head. Finally, his lips found their way back to his wretched entreaties. To his brothers’ names. To prayers. The path became bumpier and more rugged on the approach to the Grotto, bare of the island’s vegetation, where islanders had come for generations to dispose of things unwanted.

  ‘Rodric,’ Silas sobbed as the servants heaved the net to a stop at the craggy edge of the Grotto. ‘Hearn. Brothers, I beg of you. Do not listen to this godless priest. Look at me. I am your clansman. Your kin. I am Silas.’

  As the lightning flashed above them and thunder fell like song from the sky, Silas saw his brothers. Drizzle dripped from their taut features. They were steeling themselves but they were resolved. Master Norvik stabbed his staff into the ground. He looked to the pair and then to Silas.

  ‘You are a thing unfinished,’ Norvik said. ‘Unfit for this realm. We are destined for the heavens, to sit by great Sigmar’s side. You will not hold us back.’

  Knowing that the brothers would struggle to give the order, the priest nodded to the servants. They picked up the net on both sides with Silas rocking like an infant in a cradle between them. He shrieked as the net swung back and forth over the lip of the collapsed cave. Even the flashing lightning could not illuminate its foul depths. For a moment, Silas entertained the thought that this was all some terrible jest or nightmare. That the priest, the servants and his brothers might break out in laughter or that he might wake up in his chambers, the sun flooding through his casement.

  And then he was plummeting. Plunging into darkness. The collapsed opening, and the men who had pitched him to his death, flashed before his eyes as he tumbled down through the cavernous Grotto. He could not even flail, for the net entangling his limbs. He readied himself for the end.

  Silas Sheldrac fell.

  The light of the storm faded.

  Darkness became everything.

  Whatever Silas hit, it wasn’t rock. It wasn’t seawater either. Still wrapped in the net, he bounced off something soft and wet. Liquid fountained up about Silas. Broken ribs grated inside his chest with every tumble. It was dark and disorientating, but he definitely got the feeling he was rolling down some kind of slope. His ears were filled with the buzzing of disturbed flies. It was difficult to breath, but when he did, he wished he hadn’t. He gagged and retched. The stench was overpowering. With clouds of fat, black flies swarming and cold slime whipping about his rolling form, Silas endured the descent until he finally levelled off, the momentum carrying him into cold water.

  He lay there for a moment, in the stinking shallows. He blinked his disbelief. It was a miracle he was alive. The Grotto was thick with putridity and gloom. Silas could hear the whoosh of stormy waves and the hiss of spray. Flashes of lightning found their way into the cavernous chamber from the collapsed entrance above and from a cave entrance, half-submerged by the sea. They gave the momentary impression of a large, craggy chamber. A rancid, forgotten place.

  The light of the storm also revealed to Silas the reason that he had survived. He had plummeted down through the cavern only to land on the rotting mountain of fish and detritus thrown into the Grotto by the islanders over the years. He was soaked through with oily spoilage and dripping with entrails. He reeked to the heavenly realm but still he was thankful for the colossal heap of decomposing flesh.

  Silas untangled himself from the fisherman’s net and crawled out of the shallows. He sat on the rocky floor of the Grotto, clutching broken ribs and a shattered arm that ached with agonies to come. Still, he was alive, and the ironic circumstances of his survival were not lost on Silas. Looking up at the mountain of rot that he had been due to become, he chuckled to himself. An expression of hysteria that escaped his pain-lined lips. It died in his throat as the mountain chuckled back.

  Scrabbling back through the rock pools and the filth of the chamber, Silas sensed great movement. Towering above him and edged in the light of the storm, the huge mound of decaying flesh seemed to turn. Its outline was suddenly a deafening swarm of flies, while an avalanche of maggot-infested fish tumbled down it, almost burying Silas. Beneath the carpet of insects and crustaceans feeding off the rot, a monstrous creature was revealed. Kicking away from the living mountain, Silas found his feet slipping on the slimy cave floor.

  Framed in the flash of lightning, Silas got a measure of the thing, its true dimensions and the horror of its form. Beneath the rot pile was a green monster – hunched like him. Its leathery hide could barely contain its own diseased flesh. A huge belly was ripe with infection and dribbling pus, while its pudgy arms and legs were leprous and scaly. Its skin was encrusted with coral blooms, barnacles and anemones. Its form was draped in seaweed and swarmed with scuttling crabs. Shattered horns of dead coral sprouted from its fat head, while hooded rolls of fat all but obscured the searing intensity of the creature’s blood-bright eyes. The corners of its grotesque mouth retracted in a horrific smile that revealed rows of needle-like teeth. Its body quaked with an infernal chuckle that built to a cavern-shaking laughter. Its monstrous form throbbed with sour malevolence.

  Silas lay there, at the mountainous creature’s mercy, under the baleful scrutiny of its gaze. It waited until he built up the nerve to part his lips.

  ‘What are you?’

  ‘I am the unwanted,’ the monster told him, its voice echoing horribly about the Grotto. ‘The waste. The dread and detritus. The rot forgotten. I am ugliness itself. The devourer of every imperfect thing.’

  ‘How can this be?’ Silas marvelled with his heart in his throat.

  ‘How does anything come into being?’ the diseased mountain asked him back. ‘Through industry or neglect. I am the product of both. Your wasteful people have dumped all that is unworthy of their lips and loins in this dark place. Like a bottomless pit. Except, this isn’t a bottomless pit. I am. For generations, the flawed flesh has been my meat and the sacrificial soul my drink. Souls like your own. A soul I chose to spare.’

  ‘Then I live no less at your mercy than I did at my kindred’s,’ Silas spat.

  ‘Careful, boy,’ the monster warned him with a grotesque grin. ‘You need not live at all. Besides – I can help you with that.’

  ‘Help me?’ Silas said.

  ‘In time,’ the monster told him. ‘Time is a powerful thing. It turns the most glorious warriors of the realms into feasts for maggots. The most savage creatures to legend. Kingdoms to dust.’

  ‘Why would I want your help?’ Silas said, shaking his head. ‘You are the darkness that infects my lands. That poisons the people. That afflicts my brothers with a fever of the mind – for they know not what they have done.’

  ‘They know,’ the repulsive creature insisted. ‘Just like every hollow parent and spiteful sibling to have pitched some broken unfortunate into these depths. We are the same, you and I. We are the afflicted. The forsaken. There are many forms of darkness. Some split the sky with their power. Some worm their way into hearts and homes. And some fester in piles of rotting flesh. You would know if my darkness had benighted your tiny island. Let me help you, hunchback, and it will. ’

  Silas held his broken arm to his smashed ribs. He looked wretchedly about the cavern, at the sea water washing in through the entrance of the Grotto and at the colossal daemon before him. His brothers had thrown him to his death. The islanders had stood by and done nothing. And the monster had saved his life. Hiding in the Grotto, with only the flies and the creature for company, Silas had few options. Still, he knew this thing that offered to help him must be an infernal servant of the Dark Gods. A dread entity of the beyond.

  ‘You can trust me, mortal,’ the daemon said. ‘There is an evil sweeping your land, with its hooks in your family and clan. I am not that evil, but I can help you purge it.’

  ‘How?’ Silas shouted, his pain-threaded voice echoing about the Grotto. He lifted his broken arm. ‘I am a brother betrayed. A hunchback, broken of body and spirit.’