“Killing him was my first act, but it was a mercy, with his face gone. You’ll be coming with us, now, sir, you and your friends–”

  “Shoot him, Diana,” Sanford said.

  But before Diana could comply, someone jumped from the hillside and landed on her back, driving her to her knees and sending the gun spinning away. Ruby caught a glimpse of Abel being pinned by two men – comets, they were all comets, pouring down the hillside. She ran for the gun. Before she could reach it, someone slammed into her from behind, and ground her face into the dirt.

  “Careful!” Altman shouted. “One of them has the jar. Don’t break it, Cain will have our heads!”

  “I thought you could sense them,” Sanford said.

  Abel said, “Only the ones that come from Cain!”

  Altman chuckled. “Of course we knew that, and planned accordingly – Cain plans for everything.”

  Sanford laughed and said, “Nonsense. He’s an amateur. You should know that, Altman, if this so-called god hasn’t addled your brain.”

  Ruby couldn’t stand listening to them banter and bicker anymore and shouted, “Shut up, shut up, shut up!” Then someone slammed her head hard into the ground, and everything went swimmy. When the person on her back yanked her head up and pressed a handkerchief reeking of chemicals to her nose, everything simply went away.

  •••

  Ruby woke, groaning from an ether headache. “No credit for originality,” she muttered. This was twice in two days she’d been knocked unconscious with a drug-soaked bit of cloth. That couldn’t be good for her brain. She hoped any deleterious effects weren’t cumulative.

  She was tied to a chair, this time, so it wasn’t quite the same as the Berglunds’ basement. It was somebody’s basement, though, stacked with dusty boxes and lit only by a bulb at the foot of a wooden staircase. As far as she could tell, there was no one down here with her, unless they were hiding behind her. They must be holding Diana and Abel and, ugh, Sanford somewhere else. Unless… they weren’t holding the others at all. Unless they were already dead. Ruby shook off the dark thought. She had to solve her own predicament. Then she could worry about her allies.

  The ropes bound her wrists to the chair arms, and her ankles to the chair legs, and another looped around her chest, pinning her upper arms to her sides and securing her to the chair back. She tried to fling her body weight to tip the chair over, hoping the impact would break the wood and set her free, but the chair was immovable. Tied to a post behind her, maybe? Clever.

  Ruby tensed against the ropes, testing for slack, but they didn’t have much give in them. Whoever tied her up this time was a lot better at knots than the Berglunds had been. Maybe Cain himself had done the honors – he was a sailor, sort of, and sailors knew their way around ropes.

  She moved every part of her body she could as far as she could and discovered that she could generate some slack around her wrists, but only at the expense of tightening the ropes around her chest – the lengths were all connected in some fiendish way. She’d squeeze the air out of her lungs before she got a hand free. She stomped her feet in frustrated fury, then forced herself to calm down.

  She considered all the available options. The post the chair was tied to was immovable and unbreakable. Her body was breakable, but she preferred not to break it – if she could get loose without dislocating any fingers, that would be preferable. The weakest point she was willing to break was still the chair, which as far as she could tell was old, wooden, and not sturdy. When she wiggled as hard as she could, she heard creaking in the joints and felt a certain looseness.

  Okay. This was going to be unpleasant. She bent forward, pressed down with her toes, and lifted her butt, bringing the chair as far off the ground as she could – which was only a couple of inches, given the lack of play in the ropes and the complication of the post. Then she slammed herself down, jarring her tailbone in the process. At least the resulting bang of chair legs on concrete wasn’t very loud… though if it had been louder, it would have also been more effective, so bit of a mixed result there.

  She rose again, and slammed the chair down again, and then repeated the process, to no avail. The ropes burned around her chest as she rose higher and sat down as hard as she could, forcefully enough to make her teeth snap together – and she was rewarded with a faint crack somewhere under the chair, though the structure didn’t collapse.

  Emboldened, Ruby banged down the chair again, and again, and that last time, there was a louder crack, and one of the arms came loose from the back. Once the chair’s structural integrity was compromised to that degree, it didn’t take many more repetitions before one of the legs snapped underneath her and the whole chair canted over, increasing the stresses on its weak joints. And on her joints, too, but her freedom was worth a little discomfort.

  With a lot of twisting and grunting, Ruby managed to stand up, and she was – not free, exactly, but close. There were chair arms tied to her wrists and chair legs tied to her ankles, but now she had enough freedom of movement to reach the razor blade she’d sewn into the cuff of her left sleeve. Once she had that in hand, she made quick work of cutting one hand free, then the other, and then her legs.

  Good. Now to deal with her greater confinement. She cast around the basement looking for weapons, and settled on a rusty old screwdriver she found on a cluttered workbench. Thus armed, she crept up the stairs with glacial slowness to avoid making the risers creak, and then listened at the door.

  Two voices, both male, spoke. “…see why we’re even keeping them alive.”

  “Cain wants to make a comet of Sanford after he’s finished at the temple – says the old man knows all sorts of secrets we could use to protect our god. As for the others, we’ll feed them to the Ravening Deep so they can suffer being digested for all eternity.”

  “All eternity?” The first voice sounded aghast. “Is that what happens?”

  “That’s what Cain says. If you go willingly into the maw as a sacrifice, you experience an eternity of bliss, but if you’re an enemy of the true god, you wallow in acid forever, conscious and in pain.”

  “I’m glad I’m on the good side of our god, then,” the first said. “I had no idea. I only just joined up yesterday. Well, I say joined up, I mean, came out of the brine. This is all new to me.”

  “I’ve been with Cain for almost two weeks,” the other voice boasted. “I’ve been inducted into all the innermost mysteries.” Ruby heard a chair creak as one of them rose. “We should go check on the old man and the dressmaker, see if they’re awake yet.”

  “How about the other girl?”

  “She’s tied up and locked in a basement,” the second voice said.

  “Sure, but I heard she got away from the Berglunds–”

  “They were fools, and she had help. Anyway, we’re being extra careful with her this time. Come on. I’ll check the Stanley woman, and you look in on the old man.”

  “The old man is creepy,” the first voice whined.

  “I know. That’s why you’re checking on him and not me. Seniority has its privileges.”

  Two sets of footsteps tromped off. She listened a bit longer to make sure they wouldn’t come back, and that there wasn’t a third person loitering, and then felt assured she had privacy.

  Ruby considered the door. The lock was nothing much, but she couldn’t exactly pick it with her fingers. She went back downstairs and dug around on the messy workbench until she found a mallet. She nipped back up, pressed the tip of the screwdriver into the crack of the door, right where the tongue of the lock fit into the groove. Then she slammed the end of the screwdriver with the mallet. The screwdriver’s end popped the tongue free, splintering the doorjamb in the process. The door swung open easily after that. Usually cat burglars left as little trace as possible, but she cared about escaping now, not covering her tracks.

  It turned out everything was easier when you were willing to break things.

  Ruby slipped into the kitchen – and, wonder of wonders, her bag and Diana’s were both resting side-by-side on the counter. The jar was gone, of course, and the gun was too, damn it… but Sanford’s cane was leaning against the counter. His sword cane. Either they hadn’t realized it was a weapon, or they hadn’t bothered to lock it away. It was good to remember these comets weren’t professional criminals, or soldiers, or police. They were ordinary civilians, albeit with supernatural powers and zeal, but they didn’t have street smarts or guile.

  Ruby had done a little fencing in school, and she drew the blade and gave it a couple of experimental swishes. The stick was weighted differently than an epee, but she would manage, even if she didn’t know how to make the blade blaze with light.

  She moved to the kitchen door, peered through the crack, then went shadow-soft into a living room lit only by a single dim lamp. The furniture here was shabby, the whole place filled with an air of neglect. The door to the outside world was unguarded, and there was even a key protruding from the lock, but to her surprise she wasn’t tempted to flee. She wanted to save Diana first. Sanford, on the other hand, could save himself. The two men hadn’t mentioned Abel, and Ruby feared that meant he was beyond saving, at least right now.

  A narrow set of stairs led to the second floor. Ruby moved up with her usual silent swiftness and reached the landing, where she had her choice of two bedroom doors, both ajar. Voices were coming from the room on the left – one of them was Sanford, bored, saying, “You will be richly rewarded if you set me free, young man.”

  She wanted the one on the right, then. She moved on light feet to the other bedroom door and peeked inside.

  Diana was on the bed, spread-eagled, wrists and ankles lashed to the bedposts with rope. She appeared unconscious. A man in a blue shirt with immense sweat stains in the armpits stood over her, head bowed. He reached out and caressed her cheek.

  Ruby scowled and slipped into the room without a sound. His back was to her, and she lifted the sword… and then hesitated. She’d never killed anyone. She was a criminal, but she wasn’t a murderer.

  But this wasn’t really homicide, was it? These weren’t people. The people they looked like were dead, wrapped in tarps in basements all over Arkham. These were the monstrous spawn of a monstrous god.

  So Ruby stepped forward, and stabbed him through the back. The sword seemed to thrum in her hand, shifting of its own mysterious volition, in order to pass cleanly through his heart and out the front of his chest. He fell to his knees and then slumped forward, forehead resting on the edge of an end table. Ruby pulled the sword out and stared at its bloody length.

  Then Diana’s eyes popped open – she’d been feigning sleep, it seemed. “Ruby,” she said, astonished.

  “We have to get out of here.” Ruby tugged at the ropes on Diana’s wrists, unwilling to use the sword to cut them – what if it decided to plunge into Diana’s heart?

  “We need to rescue Sanford first,” Diana said.

  “What? Why? He’s the head of the Lodge, and you want to bring down the Lodge – why not let the comets help you?”

  “Because Cain took Abel,” Diana said. “They’re going to the temple. And I think Sanford knows the way.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Into the Sea

  Sanford was a hard man to drug, but he feigned unconsciousness after they were assaulted in the empty lot, hoping to pick up some useful information in the process. Listening to Altman’s voice, but knowing it wasn’t really Altman, troubled him greatly. He’d have to kill the twisted copy soon. It was the least he could do to honor the memory of a longtime comrade.

  “I got the jar!” Altman crowed after his enemies were subdued. The other comets – there must have been eight or ten of them – cheered.

  “I can feel it,” a woman’s voice said. “Let’s see, let’s see!” Then a hush, and a man’s voice, low and suffused with wonder. “Look at those eyes. Asterias sees us. Our lord sees us.”

  “We should get this to Cain,” the alternate Altman said. His voice was choked with emotion in a way the original’s never had been. That Altman’s capacity for reverence had been burned out of him long before, in the tunnels beneath Kashmir. “He wants to go to the temple right away, and begin the ritual.”

  “What do we do with the heretics?” the woman asked. A boot nudged into Sanford’s ribs.

  “They’re to be sacrificed,” Altman said. “Possibly inducted into the order first. Cain wants them alive for now. Let’s get them over to Sonia’s house. It’s closest to the dock where Cain’s boat is moored.”

  Sanford permitted himself to be carried and loaded into the back of a truck, like cargo, next to the unmoving bodies of his allies. They weren’t the allies he would have chosen – the fool who’d started this cult in the first place, the thief who’d robbed the Lodge, and the Seeker who’d betrayed his trust – but he’d had stranger bedfellows over the year. The point was outcomes, and his outcomes now were a bit uncertain.

  Sanford had certain gifts and capabilities, but he wasn’t capable of overcoming eight comets possessed of superhuman strength and resilience, especially when one of them possessed all of Altman’s memories, and knew many of Sanford’s nastier tricks. It was a good thing Sanford had never mentioned his resistance to chloroform and ether – in truth, he possessed a general immunity to noxious gases, a gift he’d first acquired in order to visit a certain miasmic demi-realm. He would have to wait for a better moment to free himself and turn the tables on his enemies.

  The truck trundled down bumpy streets for a short time, only fifteen minutes or so, and then they stopped, and Sanford was unloaded again. He cracked one eye, just a little, enough to see a row of short piers with boats moored here and there. They were near one of the small marinas along the river, just across from a row of shabby little houses, most darkened at this late or, rather, early hour. One of those shabby little houses was their destination, and Sanford allowed himself to be conveyed upstairs along with Diana Stanley. Ruby was carried off elsewhere on the ground floor, and Abel… Abel wasn’t being taken into the house at all. Curiouser and curiouser.

  Sanford’s captors dumped him on a lumpy mattress, and then tied his arms and legs to the bedframe. That was a problem, but not an insurmountable one – Pain exploded on the side of Sanford’s face and his head snapped to one side, forcing an involuntary gasp out of him. “Thought you were awake,” Altman’s voice said. “You breathe differently when you’re really asleep, old friend.” Then Altman’s hands were around his throat, squeezing. Sanford did not possess any particular resistance to having the blood supply to his brain cut off. His vision clouded, fuzzing black at the edges, and then he saw no more.

  •••

  Sanford woke some time later when his door creaked open, the sound stirring him from groggy underwater dreams. He didn’t think he’d been unconscious for long, but he was disoriented, his mind a cloud of associations and sensations and thoughts arrayed in no particular order.

  “Wake up, oh great one,” a man said, and chuckled.

  Sanford looked into the face of a young man with a wolfish grin. “You’re an Initiate,” he said, the force of his will allowing him clarity. “Ronnie Shiflet, isn’t it? You joined last year.”

  “My father was a member, is the only reason,” Ronnie said. “I thought the Lodge was a bunch of fusty old nonsense. I would have never believed you had a god locked up downstairs.” He shook his head. “Anyway, I’m not Ronnie Shiflet, or not exactly, anymore. You know that, unless Altman choked you so long you got brain damage. He said that was a possibility, but not to worry about it, because your comet’s brain would be just fine.”

  “How reassuring,” Sanford said. “Mr Shiflet, you have been press-ganged into a doomsday cult, and no sensible person wishes for doomsday. A world consumed in scarlet fire, or inundated by rancid water, or overrun by crawling monstrosities, is not a pleasant world in which to exist. Whereas the world, in its current state, can be pleasant indeed for those who have the right friends and resources. I am an excellent friend to have, and I possess ample resources.” Sanford didn’t think this approach was likely to work, since zealots were difficult to bribe, but if nothing else, he was stalling for time and fishing for information. Both were always good to have. “Whatever you hope to achieve, I can get it for you. You will be rewarded if you set me free, young man.”

  “I am not young,” the comet said, eyes faraway and dreamy. “I am not a man. I am as ancient as the sea. I am the spawn of the Ravening Deep. You are meat for my god’s hunger. I will watch you slide into the maw of Asterias, and I will cheer.”

  “That’s very short-sighted of you,” Sanford said. “Do you know your god’s ultimate goal? If it can even be called a goal. A tumor doesn’t have goals – it just grows until its host is consumed, and the beast you call god is the same.”

  “Asterias will devour this world,” Ronnie said. “And when it’s done, the Ravening Deep will set out for the stars, and find new worlds to conquer.”

  Ah. That answered Sanford’s curiosity about whether Asterias was native to this world, or a visitor from somewhere else. The latter, it seemed. How many dead worlds had the Ravening Deep left behind, covered in copies of itself? Or did every copy on a given world launch out into the universe, seeking new planets to consume? The universe was mostly clouds of gas and barren stones floating in the void – Sanford had learned that much from his contact with beings from beyond Earth – and it was heartening to think that most of the monsters would starve in the emptiness.

  Sanford wrapped his hands around the ropes binding his wrists to the bedposts. He hated to expend more of his resources on something so trivial as escaping his captors, but it wasn’t as if anyone else was going to step in–

  Ronnie cocked his head at the sound of a muffled thump. “Did you hear something?” he asked.

  “I heard a great load of nonsense pouring out of the mouth of a spoiled brat of a boy who never learned to honor his elders,” Sanford said.