Return to the Black Gate by Joseph Sale

Author:Joseph Sale [Sale, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Science Fiction, General
ISBN: 9780244855291
Google: 6sNtzQEACAAJ
Amazon: B085VKGBBD
Publisher: Lulu.com
Published: 2020-02-04T23:00:00+00:00

28. THE EMISSARY

(THE DOGKIN)

The emissary kneels before something vast yet unseen. It hovers over the black ocean, and yet is the black ocean. It is both sky and land, buildings and sand.

And it is hideous.

So hideous that the emissary can only stare at its own feet.

The dogkin can smell it, more acutely at most, and putrid does not describe it. The smell is itself living and aggressive, washing over it like the waves advancing again and again up the sandy shoal. From the lips of the thing-not-thing, its master, drips white milk, which is not really milk, but soul-stuff, the bare components of life. As each thick, creamy droplet touches the sea, there is a foaming as microbial lifeforms squirm into being, twitch and drown, dying finally moments after they are born. Broken life.

‘Master, we have encountered unexpected resistance.’

There are no answering words. Instead, the emissary feels fetid breath upon the back of its neck. A host of milky eyes regard the dogkin, stripping the servant down to atoms and cells. The emissary can feel them; its gaze, like its smell, is physical. Its eyes are stars, perhaps, and to be under their light is to feel cosmic radiation of enough magnitude to slay most living things.

‘It is partly the populace, oh great sire. They have proved more capable than we first surmised. But it also appears that the world has only one gateway left.’

At this, there is a surge. The waves boil then erupt, and something sinuous as an eel, phallic yet tensile, towering as a skyscraper, rises from the black cauldron. The emissary is showered with freezing water gritty with expunged life. Little many-legged forms now litter the beach, translucent and insectoid, with a host of ill-fitting limbs. The emissary knows it must now look at its master, but the sense of revulsion is so potent that bits of him are already falling away, turning him again into the sludge from which he was made. Filth-thing. Godless uncreate. It would weep had it been given the capacity too. Misbegotten is a word made for it.

Slowly, the emissary raises its eyes.

It has been a long time since its master had such… definition. While its master had lain dormant in the black casket, the emissary had had millennia to forget. A moment to dream of what life free from its master’s will might be. Even when it had awoken, it had been a sliver of its former self.

But now, fattened on worlds, it fills every atom of space, until the emissary is not so much looking at its master, but rather, into. The blackness between stars. The point of darkness in a pit where vision utterly fails.

‘I know it seems impossible, sire. But they have been destroying their bridges with our worlds for some time now, it appears,’ the emissary continues, sensing its master’s grave displeasure. ‘They are a godless race, severing all their ties with magic. It will be their downfall! Rest assured. But, progress is slow. We need a battering ram, good sire, to break through the stranglehold.

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