The spawn of the leviathan, a leviathan far greater in size than those the clan had battled and even hunted for generations upon the broad oceans and teeming seas, continued to advance up the hillside and into the wooded heights that they had so recently fancied as a sanctuary. Beneath them, barely a stone’s throw back, the wood swarmed with the amphibious squid that were the teeming sperm of the ship-eating beast that had crushed their home and even now devoured their nation: men, elders, children, women and even the precious palm trees that had been cultivated on the decks of the barge since the oil ran out and the solar-powered barges set sail from Sacred Saud hundreds of years ago.

‘Suck-splat’, sounded the myriad horrors as they lurched from tree to tree, adhering to the trunks with the star-fish like sucker that was the base of the hideous frog-like appendage that propelled them two-meters at a time ever up the hillside that was now completely wooded. Mishar recalled his wonder at the wooded hilltops that rolled off into the distance, at how many game animals these shadowed vastnesses might support, not for a moment venturing to dream that he might one day be counted among the game that fled therein from the hungry hunter that pursued.

His ribs ached from the hard hairy shoulder that supported him even as his head throbbed from the bearded servant who had cuffed him insensibly in the skiff below when he had ordered an attack on the leviathan. He yet clutched his Fez air rifle—his ancestral weapon—as he was borne like a swooned maiden ever upward by the tireless Domingo, his insensible Christian slave, a year ago caught among the heights of Flores Island in the Azores by his Great Uncle, Shir Teriff, the renowned slave-hunter of Clan Barge Lahab.

He looked morbidly behind from his upside down perspective hanging over the back of his hustling bearer as his head bobbed like a fishing lure. Daybreak—Oh to say the Daybreak prayer—spread His radiance over the Hudson Sound even as the ‘suck-splat’ sound rose to such a crescendo that the noise of Domingo’s machine-like breathing beneath him was drowned out as was the cursing of Ismail as he dragged dumbstruck Ibn along—and there they fell behind them! Ismail and Ibn went down in a tired heap as Domingo passed them by like a hurrying Azore shepherd with a lamb over his shoulder would, desperately scaling the mountains of his home island when uncle Shir Teriff landed with his Collarmen and Infidel-eating hounds.

The radiant glory of Daybreak, his skiff-crew’s patron Angel, sparkled slightly in his upside down field of vision, but was wretchedly corrupted as the child-sized monstrosities blotted out the light. These ravenous leviathan sperm scaled the trees as readily as the bank from which they sprang and leaped from trunk to trunk gripping with their flesh flaying hooked suction tentacles. On they came, leaping in terribly hare-like fashion from trunk to bark-scared trunk.

Forever in his mind’s eye would this wicked scene out of Satan’s dream be emblazoned to wake him in the night, cold in his nightmare sweat. For the creatures—this devil spawn—were not taking to the trees as a matter of course. The kindred creatures making their way up the fiord bank to left and right kept to the ground. Rather the hideous spawn of Hell directly on their trail took to the trees in order to overtake their quarry, among which he and Domingo were currently counted, and would soon be the exclusive members of this swiftly vanishing species.

He leaped down from Domingo’s back in a sudden frenzy of vengeance and unlatched the safety catch on his air bolt, somehow keeping his feet. Before him down the slope a stone’s throw into the mouth of Hell, cowered Ibn, babbling incoherently and barely audibly above the ‘suck-splat’ sound of the spawn. He cowered in the arms of Ismail who looked upslope to Mishar with a plea of mercy in his eyes.

All around, framed in the faint and spawn-shadowed light of the Daybreak Angel, loomed swarming squid-like tree-frogs just crawled up from Hell waving their single trunks and razor-hooked tentacles hypnotically as their other tentacles and their great sucker leg gripped the bank or the trunk of a tree or an overhanging branch. There seemed to be a collective pause as all the creatures swayed as one and reached longingly inward at their surrounded prey.

Ismail snarled an oath and ripped out his knife as he held Ibn’s head in hand. As the boy bubbled tearfully his adopted father plunged the knife home into his neck, as if he were an impoverished version of Abraham who had not gotten his reprieve from God and hence went forward with the slaughter of his son.

Ismail—a tear rolling over his cheek—then looked defiantly to Mishar as the leviathan spawn let out a plaintive cooing moan of despair, as if their collective devil mind now knew itself to have been denied a still striving feast.

Ismail barked his dog-like war cry at the unseen sky and raised his knife to take toll of his devourers even as they leaped into a single converging net of tentacles—gracefully linking like an undulating gelatinous being just before striking him with their many sucker feet from toe to shoulders as if each and every horror had and knew its assigned perch. The man’s knife found a home in one gelatinous head at the very instant that some twenty sucking mouth-feet clamped onto his every part—every part but his head and crotch.

Ismail’s eyes bugged.

Domingo’s breath sucked in.

Every wicked creature on the mountainside other than those feeding stopped their noisy ascent.

Mishar thought, vengeance or mercy? and then chose mercy with a calm squeeze of the trigger. The 100 centimeter steel rod bore through Ismail’s defiant head ending his misery just in time, for the trunk like projections of the higher and more central creatures attached themselves dart-like to his every orifice high and low even as the many loose tentacles of those creatures who did not so feed upon his brains and bowels and manhood skinned him with their many cruel hooks.

There was an instant of pause as Ismail’s form seemed to implode from the action of the greedily sucking trunks and the gelatinous heads attached to these monstrous organs waxed from gray to red. Then, as his defiant form collapsed inward the twenty or so creatures flew apart, taking his flesh and skin in as many directions, leaving only a sinuous skeleton without a drop of blood dripping from it, to teeter forlornly before collapsing in a rubbery heap.

Mishar stood as if hypnotized. But inspired by the resumption of the hellish parade up the mountainside and the revelation that the things were taking to the trees again and leaping from trunk to trunk in their direction, Domingo, with the savage survival instincts of his debased strain of humanity, hoisted Mishar over both shoulders and locked him blindly into place like a martyr bent as an inverted U over a muscular cross—his weapon dangling dishonorably from his shoulder harness to drag muzzle first in this accursed dirt—and raced uphill like all of Hell was nearly upon them. And despite their mutually exclusive creeds, and having no common language, they could in this instance find absolute grounds for agreement as to the face of evil and its place in the world—namely salivating upon their heels.

As he was borne ever more quickly beyond the sucking sound of the devil spawn, Mishar did find time for a prayer of thanks.

“Oh God Most Merciful, though I see not why you have chosen to spare me from the guttered fate of Clan Lahab, I nevertheless accept your judgment without question and also do now see the sense of your design of our Christian slaves. Thank you Great God On High for damning this infidel’ soul in order to imbue him with a robust physical form stout enough to haul this chosen soul of yours up a mountain and out of Hell’s very maw! In your name I shall feed Domingo a double portion of meal scraps henceforth and forever.”

By the time his prayer was said they had crested the rise and the sound of the horror behind had entirely vanished, only to be replaced by the racket caused by Domingo crashing his thick shins into a fallen and rotten log that burst into dust and sent them both hurdling head over heels down a rocky defile as deep as the very Hudson Fiord itself.