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"That's about as well-pla
"Listen!" Jack shouted. A few of the cultists glanced at them. "You didn't have to come along, but I was trying to do something for you because I felt bloody guilty about what happened in London and now that we've managed to end up like this, I just feel bloody stupid, neither of which is improving my mood, and on top of it all I feel a hangover coming on, so you can just bugger the bloody hell off, Petunia!"
Pete blinked, fury for just a moment overriding her fear. Then she hissed, "You are a selfish, self-absorbed git, Jack, and if you'd bothered to check on me after you almost died and I had to kill a ghost that sucks out people's souls—and do you know how hard it is to kill a ghost, Jack? Sodding hard!—if you'd just thought for one second about doing what I needed instead of what was easy, we wouldn't be in this mess!"
"Silence!" Gerry bellowed. He had do
"Mnarhoteph, fear his Name," the cultists chorused unevenly.
Pete met Jack's eyes, and even though she wanted to loose her chains and wrap them around his ski
"Every cycle of the seasons we feed the unending and bottomless anger of Mnarhoteph, and when his hunger has been satiated, he grants us the power of his hatred."
"Mnarhoteph, praise his Fury," the cultists droned.
Gerry hit the gong again, three times, and it reverberated inside Pete's skull like a rusted dull blade scraping bone. "Mnarhoteph, the moon is high! Arise!"
The waters in the pit began to boil and heave and then in a vast sigh of fetid air and a groaning of chains, a massive body filled the pit, reaching for the temple roof. Mnarhoteph had row upon row of eyes, tentacles the size of tree trunks, suckers and feelers rimmed with teeth all studding a gleaming black hide. Pete felt his magic hit her, felt as if her sanity and her skull had split by gazing upon Mnarhoteph's silently shrieking edifice. "He's the source… the source of what I feel here…" And she lost the ability to speak, mesmerized by the awful beauty of the creature.
Jack went paler than usual, making him look dead. "Bollocks. I thought these gits were just playing at chaos worship." He began to jerk his chains frantically. "Pete, we need…" His eyes roamed over the witchfires in the alcoves and the poisonous yellow air, over Mnarhoteph and the great salt-bitten chains studded to his skin with harpoon spikes that held him in the pit. "We need a spark," said Jack finally.
"Thrice we have brought you sacrifices to fuel your towering hatred!" Gerry cried. "A female, a male, and now both aspects of the human filth lie before you in offering. Feed, master, and be strong!"
"A spark," Pete repeated, clinging to Jack's voice as her breadcrumb trail of sanity. Her words were lost as Mnarhoteph opened its maw and roared, a sound of pain that shook the temple to the stone bones.
Pete sobbed as Mnarhoteph's cry went through her and wrapped around her heart, filling her with agony heavy as iron.
"Pete," Jack muttered urgently as Mnarhoteph's tentacles snaked across the floor, bleeding black ichor from the piercing iron bonds. "Pete, make a spark. Small, large, in-between, just hurry!"
Her mind still raged with Mnarhoteph's cry—trapped, alone and in pain—but Pete gathered herself, just as she had when the sorcerer's ghost took Jack's face, and banged her wrist against the stone column she was shackled against. The wet stone elicited nothing but pain in her hand.
Jack's eyes went milky and rolled back in his head, and he murmured wordlessly as Mnarhoteph moved inexorably out of the pit. His chains shrieked against the rock.
Pete made a fist and banged the shackle against stone again, and again. Purple bruising and crimson blood sprouted around the edges of the band, but she kept hitting stone, chipping off centuries of muck until, sure her hand was pulp, she hit dry rock.
A bright orange spark flew off the iron and Jack's eyes snapped back, twin flames replacing the color. "Aithi
Tracers of fire floated through the air, catching cultists as they attempted to run and roiling a bluish smoke from the burning algae. Donovan, robe and hands aflame, slid in the burning muck and cracked his head against broken rock, falling still.
Pete slipped her shackle with her blood-slicked hand and went to Jack. He was bleeding from a cut in his forehead and lying still, but breathing.
Pete turned to watch the fleeing cultists as the fumes burned away, leaving the air damp and salty as it had always been. "I guess that was a plan, all right. A bloody stupid plan, but a plan nonetheless."
From the pit, Mnarhoteph groaned. In a voice bottomless and liquid as the sea, he said, "Please."
Pete's heart thudded as she walked ankle-deep into the water pit and stood, close enough to touch Mnarhoteph's hide. "What did you say?"
"Please…" he grumbled. "Hurt…"
Jack stirred and pulled himself up, freeing himself now that his shackles were loosed. "What the bloody hell are you doing, Pete? Get away from that thing!"
"It's hurt," Pete said. Jack's sight let him perceive the dead, but Weirs were the conduits for the old gods, shapers of magic who spoke to all of the Black. Jack couldn't hear the creature's pain.
Pete placed a hand on Mnarhoteph and this close, the dark churning of magic was loneliness, not evil. "What do you want?" she whispered.
He pulled against the massive chains and harpoons that held him. "Home…"
Pete looked at the carvings along the temple walls, the deep waves and open seas—not a shallow and polluted bog on the edge of civilization.
Jack came to her side. "Guess he's not such a nasty chaos beastie, after all. Some ancestor of those blithering idiots in the robes must've summoned and trapped him here."
"How long, do you think?" said Pete. Jack shrugged.
"Centuries, at least."
To be trapped and forced to feed power into these small, grasping people… Pete met Jack's eyes. "Could you—?"
He sighed and she felt the crackling of air as his magic took hold. So different from the bottomless darkness of Mnarhoteph's power, but just as strong. The chains fell away from their bolts in the stone, and Mnarhoteph shuddered, the harpoon spikes falling away from scarred and rendered flesh.
"Go," said Pete, stepping back. "We don't mean you any more harm."
Mnarhoteph's nearest row of eyes focused on her, and he trumpeted. "Home."
Pete and Jack followed in the shining trail Mnarhoteph's body left as he slithered down the temple steps and splashed into the water. The light was the gray of a nearing sun, and the mist had disappeared so that Pete could watch him swim, all the way to the sea.
AFTER PETE HAD CALLED THE BLACKPOOL POLICE FROM a cultist's unmelted mobile, she sat next to Jack on the steps of the temple. He produced a lit Parliament. "Fag?"
"I'd murder one."
Jack handed it to her, and then exhaled before he said, "You really meant what you said before the bloody creature from the black lagoon showed up, didn't you."