North. It’s known the way one knows their own pulse, without being told and without being able to say how. How far? As far as the edge of the maps, where words stop and only vague pictures continue?
A hall of black stone, and the whole of it is a working. Rings cut into the floor, one inside the next, the runes in their grooves lit purple. The grooves are wet.
Along the walls, figures hang in iron, and the channels beneath them feed the rings. Demonic figures stand at the edges in the dark and chant.
At the centre Utiog kneels, and every line in that floor ends at her.
The silver circlet is still on her brow and the blue stone in it is still bright. The gown was white once. The irons fit her wrists exactly, and the blood grooves come to them. The stone under her knees is worn into two shallow hollows.
The thing bent over her stands twice the height of a man and has to fold itself to reach her. Six arms. The lower body coiling. An Abyssal Lord. The face too calm for her body.
The Abyssal Lord is not angry. The Abyssal Lord works Utiog the way a man works a hide: not in temper, not in haste, simply without stopping.
One of the arms comes down. Utiog does not brace. When the Abyssal Lord lifts her fist away Utiog’s head is sagging more and with more blood.
The chanting climbs until the words run together. Then all of it stops at once, and the silence is worse than the sound was.
Purple tendrils come up out of the grooves and climb the walls.
Two of the arms take Utiog’s shoulders. Two hold her hips. The last two set themselves against her ribcage and open her the way you open a shutter.
What comes out of her is light-blue light.
Utiog fights this. Her body suddenly full of a vigor for fighting, but she’s also too weak from all the torture.
The Abyssal Lord goes in headfirst, slowly. One arm follows. Then another. The coil of it narrows and narrows and feeds in behind the Abyssal Lord, and Utiog’s ribs stand open the whole while, and the blue thins.
And behind all of it, faint, the way a thing is seen through water: a far greater god, opening in the same way, taking the same purple, and not resisting at all.
The last of the coil goes in. Her ribs close.
The purple goes out of the walls, the grooves and the runes, all at once, inward.
Utiog lifts her head. The stone on her brow is now red.
The thing looking out Utiog’s eyes gazes, knowing she’s being watched. She smiles. “My servant is coming for you.”
