It was in the nature of the man’s profession that he knew a few hexes: passes to send dogs to sleep; words that made him sticky to shadows; hedge-magic and trickery. But he doubted very much that it would protect him here.

With a sigh, the man reached for the cloth-wrapped package tied to his belt. He felt a gust of foreboding.

And a trembling excitement.

As he unwrapped the heavy thing, he reflected nervously that if he really understood how to use it, the stiff lock of the service hatch and the unpleasant night swim could probably have been dispelled like breath. He was still a fumbling ignorant.

He picked the last of the stiff cloth away and held up a carving.

It was larger than his fist, cut out of a slick stone that looked black or grey or green. It was ugly. It curled around itself like a fetus, etched with lines and coils that suggested fins or tentacles or folds of skin. The work was expert but unpleasant, seemingly designed to make the eye recoil. The statue watched the man with its one open eye, a perfect black half-sphere above a round mouth ringed in little teeth like a lamprey’s. It gaped at him with a darkness in its throat.

Twisting down the little figurine’s back, curving tightly back and forth in layers, sandwiching its folds together, was a flap of thin, dark skin. A sliver of tissue. A fin.

It was embedded into the fabric of the stone. The man ran his finger along its length. His face wrinkled in distaste, but he knew what he had to do.

He placed his lips close to the statue’s head and began to whisper in a hissing language. The sibilants echoed faintly in the big room, threading through the still machinery.

The man recited puissant doggerel to the statue and caressed it in prescribed patterns. His fingers began to numb as something leached from him.

Finally, he swallowed and turned the statue so that its face regarded him. He brought it close, hesitated, and turning his head slightly in a ghastly parody of passion, he began to kiss its mouth.

He opened his own lips and pushed his tongue into the statue’s craw. He felt the cold thorns of its teeth, and he probed further. The figurine’s mouth was cavernous, and the man’s tongue seemed to reach into the center of the little piece. It was very cold to his mouth. He had to steel himself not to gag on its taste, musty and salt and piscine.

And as the man wriggled his tongue in the stone throat, something kissed him back.

He had expected it-hoped for it, relied on it. But still it came with a jolt of nausea and shock. A little flickering something tonguing his own tongue. Cold and wet and unpleasantly organic, as if a fat maggot lurked at the statue’s core.