Chapter 131
No matter how I exert myself, not a single ripple rises on the sea. No — I am the sea, and without some difference in wind or temperature, it is only natural that no current should form. And yet there have been times I moved: when I left my place for a while, and when I crushed and killed something that had begun to take shape.
Perhaps it is only the difference between inside the fishbowl and outside. I fill this bowl completely, and all I can do is look past a wall I cannot cross. Even so, I have the distinct sense that this place is the very bottom, so that explanation is unlikely. Climbing upward is heavy and exhausting in equal measure, while falling down is simple.
Sorting through my memories, I feel oddly cleverer than before, and I look around. I am passing the time that way when a thread comes drifting slowly down from above.
At last. Ah. Oh. That — it doesn't reach me. The distance is far too great. High overhead it glitters, throwing its sparkle toward an enormous light adrift in the heights. Even calling it a floating light, it is only on the order of glimpsing another planet from the faded memory of Earth.
Sparkle, sparkle. Who is it mocking, shining like that? It will never reach me, and the irritation of that makes me wish it would simply take whatever it came for and go. Why is it sitting there, pretending not to notice?
Pretending not to know? No. I have been down here. I know how greedily those things try to gather light. Just as Dagon did, they will not miss light that can be taken easily — the chance to climb up there. That thread truly cannot be seen.
Then why am I the only one who can see it? To mock me? Has word of what I am spread that far? The second world — do I have to find some way to the place where the immortals live and smash the glass bottle?
No. Wait. This looks like a call for Dagon. A light-signal only Dagon can see. A telephone number only one specific person can receive.
Well, of course. The underlings have finished every preparation for the descent; all that remains is to arrive. If someone beside you squeals that a seat has opened and snatches it, even I would use any means necessary to make them regret having stayed alive. So they devised a method only they themselves can see — so that when someone summons them, they know at once and can go, and so that no one else can tell it is happening.
It is right there in front of me. But everything about it falls far too short to reach me. There simply are not enough resources to come all the way down to this bottom.
And yet. What if I could pass myself off as Dagon? I swallowed everything that was Dagon and took that place in his stead. Is that not essentially the same thing? Not me seizing it, then — Dagon seizing what belongs to Dagon.
I caught the slender thread that had descended to the floor. I could not do it in a single try, of course, but a faint sensation of having brushed it remained, and after tens of thousands of attempts — shwaaak! — the sensation of being hauled upward.
And I opened my eyes.
Before me, a fish-person caught somewhere between human and fish brandishes a staff and shouts. Around him, more of his kind lie in a circle with enormous stakes driven through their necks, chanting a spell without end even as they die. And at the entrance of the room, a girl with an iron staff in her hands looks up at me, her face sunk in despair.
The body is tall enough that you would have to stack ten people to match it. A fish's head set on a human frame, gills along the torso, webbing on the arms and legs, and below the pelvis a long tail that is an awkward mix of fish and shark. I have never entered a giant's body like this before.
So what do I need most, at this moment? Yes. Information.
Until now I have always been summoned into a lower place, forced to shift this way and that while watching the summoner's mood, and that has made me act passively whether I liked it or not. For the first time, the choice is in my hands. In front of me are the summoner who has mistaken me for Dagon, and his subordinates — and a girl who seems to have come all this way alone to stop him.
If she were alone and holding something like a pistol, I might have taken her for a victim on the run. In her right hand is an iron crowbar dripping blood and bodily fluids; in her left, a great nail inscribed with strange characters. It is the face of someone who, an instant before collapsing in terror, forces strength into her legs and stays on her feet, eyes darting for any way to live. A person with the courage to meet fear head-on. The third world is a peculiar one.
So I ought to greet them.
"Hello. But I'm not Dagon."
I state only the fact. It is not the manner of speech one would expect from a giant in the shape of a fish-person, but it is too late to change how I talk. I shivered in the cold until I went mad, and even then I could not go mad enough, so I begged and begged to be killed until the end of eternity came into view — and now even my thoughts are dyed with it, past any turning back. It is a scar that will not fade.
The voice, at any rate, is unexpectedly high and sharp. Some fish are hermaphroditic, or can change their sex, so I decide to let it be.
Then, all at once, every head of the fish-people chanting around me drops away, and the spell breaks.
Ah. I know this. Fail to introduce yourself properly, and the spell itself is warded to cancel the summoning at once. They made it a law that a god must give an account of itself, and if it does not, the whole thing is treated as never having happened. Not a bad method.
First I sweep my hands through the air and skim the warmth from the corpses around me before it vanishes. Bodies that have not been dead long often still hold light and warmth. I take both the information and the warmth.
"Y-you who have descended into the body of our god! If you grant our wish, we will follow you even if you are not Dagon! Give us safety! Dagon promised as much — so if you are a being greater than Dagon, make a contract to do the same!"
Oh. A quick cutting of losses, and the wit to lay a new contract on whatever stands in front of him. I like it. Going forward as the fish-person race this time might not be so bad.
There is just one problem. Pak! The head has flown off.
Dagon does not forgive betrayal. He set any number of devices so that those who believe in him enough to call him cannot harbor other thoughts. I already looked through the memories as a whole, long ago. They do not surface on command, though — only after something has happened do I realize, ah, so that was it, which is terribly inconvenient. Perhaps the problem is simply that I am not very bright.
I catch the fish-person's head as it bounces free. I crush it for the warmth, and lick the light for the memories.
By this world's common calendar, the year is the thirty-sixth century. The way of life around here, though, is no better than the nineteenth century by the standards of the faded world. The fish-people are creatures of the ocean, so I can only see things from the sea's vantage, but the ships are essentially all wood. Magic, however, is commonplace. Vessels float through the sky rather than on the water now and then, and so do mages flying alone, and magical beasts.
The ports the fish-people raid look much like the nineteenth century, except that what comes flying is magic rather than gunfire — if that counts as a difference. There is a memory of them invading at the head of great living weapons, and of something like a steamship coming out to fire something like an electromagnetic cannon, which lets me guess at the navy and the rough level of their science. The impression is of a world a little more advanced than the first.
Which is why they prepared in a hurry. The race called the Sahagin in this place were life-forms Dagon sowed himself — vanguards sent into other worlds back when he was invading many of them. Cast down first as a bridgehead, they were meant to dominate their surroundings, and once a world was cooked just right, to call Dagon and offer it up.
Where Dagon went, there was the Celestial Church. Was there a power that strong here as well? No. They simply lost to nature. The living weapons built with the arts Dagon gave them were torn apart by wild animals, and even when they fled to the sea, where it was easier to live, the deeps held wild things more terrible still. In the end they became an invasion force reduced to one faction among barbarians, creeping along somewhere between the coasts those monsters do not visit and the surface of the water. That is what they are. Tribespeople who believe in an ancient god.
They are a people who practice theocratic rule as a matter of course, so sliding into the shape of a cult was unavoidable. Even so, they had arts of their own; they should not have fallen to mere savagery. The high-grade resource required for their powerful techniques and abilities is the soul of a creature with intelligence above a certain threshold, and the easiest material from which to take it was human beings. A petroleum civilization with no petroleum.
They needed resources. Go after them outright, and they would be beaten and lose. So they settled on a radical strategy: the navy was slow compared to fish-people, and they would use that, raiding every village in the region at once, taking what they needed, and going home. If they simply called the god, he would see to the rest — the optimism of a religious society — and on that faith they went through with it.
But heroes, it seems, spring up anywhere. Who would have expected that a single human girl, dragged in to be used as a resource, would awaken out of nowhere, break through every ward, loot the important things while she was at it, assassinate the fish-people's key figures one after another, and then come all the way here to stop a god's descent?
This fish-person, though, had been competent. He had even succeeded in calling Dagon. Perfectly prepared, he survived the human girl who had turned into a butcher of Sahagin, and brought a god down into the world. The problem is that Dagon is already gone, and that I stole his place and appeared here instead.
The human girl glares at me, glancing around as she weighs whether she can see an angle to kill me — since I am saying I am not the dangerous god called Dagon. She is terrifying.
"The summoner went and died on his own. What do I do?"
The girl blinks, her face asking whether I am really putting that to her, freezes for a moment, and then says:
"Go back?"
The killing intent she shows at once, in answer to me, is frightening. Is this that rumored lone high-school girl? So I say:
"I don't want to go home."
The girl looks up at me with an expression of profound bewilderment.