In a lot of ways, it reminded me of home.
From the ceiling, high above us, a whole Leviathan skull hung from thick cables. I wasn’t quite sure how Marsh’s lot had gotten hold of it—it wasn’t worth much by itself but skulls usually got broken down for scrimshander plates—and could only imagine how long it must have taken to haul the thing up here, because there was no elevator that ran the full way.
“Et venerunt in locum qui dictur Golgotha,” whispered Q beside me, “quod est Calvariae locus.”
Something about the whole place felt wrong. I mean, I saysomething. Something other than the bones and viscera all over the place. Like there was a whispering at the back of my mind that I couldn’t quite block out. Voiders sometimes said that the sperm sang to them when it was gathered in large quantities and I’ve never believed it, partly because I could never quite stop laughing long enough to work out if it might be true. Buthere in Marsh’s shrine of guts, I could almost hear the song myself. And I was keen to get out of there as soon as possible.
Unfortunately, Marsh and Truelove had other ideas.
“I didn’t think to find you here, sister,” said Truelove, who I could have sworn wasn’t behind me when I walked in but was now.
“A sister driven into desperate terms,” Marsh added, looking past me into the darkness.
“Just seeing what you were about,” I offered, but it sounded weak even to me.
Truelove looked down at me with a fearful benediction. “We would welcome you, if you chose to come to us. As we would welcome all, even the lowliest.”
“Lowliest?” I asked—he could have meant several things, none of them good.
“I have petitioned the captain to release the pirate and his followers,” Truelove clarified. Because of course he had. Because that was going to end so well. “Even now our people bring him to the chapel for his anointing.”
“Anointed,” Marsh echoed, “crowned, planted many years…”
And that, that was something I couldn’t not see.
So I waited in a converted storage bay full of rotting not-exactly-meat while a group of deckhands led a pirate to kneel before a man whose only qualification to lead was that he’d fallen into a bucket of alien brain goo that made him talk weird.
Honestly, it was no stranger than any other religious ceremony I’ve been to.
Wolfram swore on his life and his name and everything he held dear—which I privately suspected wasn’t very much—to keep a bunch of promises that he certainly didn’t intend to keep, and that his erstwhile crewmates would do the same. Then he had his shirt manhandled off by two of Marsh’s acolytes, to be replaced with a Leviathan-skin robe (was it cock skin? Maybe. Or maybe that was just a joke, you’ll need to join the hunt yourself to know for sure) and then to have his head marked with a thick slurry of the Leviathan’s intestinal juices.
Q watched the proceedings with polite confusion. I wondered if she assumed all Exodites behaved like this. I suppose in many ways she wouldn’t have been wrong. Sometimes, when I watch a ceremony like the one that was then playing out in bay nineteen (okay notliterallylike that, but any ceremony from a faith I wasn’t raised in), I remind myself that as unusual as it appears to me it probably makes complete sense to the people inside it. Except, honestly, that’s not been my experience.
I’m not saying my experience is universal, or even typical, but as alienating as other people’s customs have always felt, my own have felt worse. And sure, these were recent converts, so probably they were at least somewhat convinced of the theology. But I couldn’t imagine none of them had doubts. That none of them felt even a twinge of the uncertainty I always had. The hollow ache that saysWhy doesn’t this feel more right?
Then again, it was a nihilistic apocalypse cult. Maybe hollowness was the point. Maybe it was the appeal.
Maybe in another world I’d have joined them. Except I’d already picked my destroyer-god, and she was in her cabin poring over her charts.
The ceremony complete, the celebrants dispersed and Wolfram, to my mild surprise, allowed himself to be escorted back to his cell.
I shouldn’t have been surprised at all. He wasn’t planning to stay there long.
CHAPTER
SIXTY-TWOA Comparative Theology of Leviathanism
I know, I know, it’s chapter sixty-two and things are just getting good and here she is on another tangent.
If it helps, imagine me narrating this bit while I get railed hard from behind by a drunk space pirate.
So far I’ve mostly restricted these long, unfashionable expository segments to explaining the mechanics of the hunt; you’ve probably never seen a Leviathan yourself, you’ve almost certainly never hunted one, any images you may have seen will have been generated by neural networks trained on badly flawed datasets and even if that weren’t the case you’d still not understand the beasts the way those of us who’ve fought them do. So I’ve tried in my flawed, erratic, occasionally hyperfixated way to give you some sliver of a part of a fraction of what it’s like to be where I’ve been and to do what I’ve done. What so many people I knew died doing.
But from here on out, we also need to talk about the religious side. Because it’s going to matter.
Marsh and his crowd of the desperate and forgotten aren’t the first to feel a near spiritual awe at the sight of the Leviathan. Hell, people have been worshiping creatures like thissince before they even knew they existed. Our records of Old Earth are patchy (much was lost in the wars before the Exodus, and much more was purged as heresy or discarded as an inefficient use of resources, which, in my own faith, is the far greater sin) but remnants remain, and echoes. I’ve seen references to Dagon and to Hydra, to the Kraken—the beast which gave the modern, Jovian creatures their common name—and to Leviathan itself.
The nameLeviathanfeatures in the catechism, along withwhale, which is a less figurative term and refers to an Earth beast long since extinct. We know nothing about the whale now, except that it must have been physiologically capable of swallowing a man and his raft, and its digestive processes must have been slow in the extreme.
