Naked to the waist, the men chanted in the ancient tongue taught to them by Zall, the priest from Xuphar. They pointed the blood-covered knives in their hands at the ground, for their god dwelt deep within the Great Sea and they wished to do him honor. The stone altar they circled was stained with fresh human blood. A gold statue stood on it, ten inches tall, unsoiled save for two smears of blood across its eyes so that Thosk could see their sacrifice.

Faster and faster they chanted, as the hooded priest brought the tails of his leather flogger onto their backs to drive them into a frenzy. Their bodies reeked of sweat. They had been drilled in the language of Xuphar, but the foreign tongue did not come naturally to them, and as their ecstasy and pain intensified, one of them misspoke.

Zall was angry, but he dared not disturb the ritual further by berating the Solanthian who had made the mistake. A dark shadow coruscated over the altar; it had not made a difference, after all. What rough demoniac beast, hungry for the blood of a defiled woman, would come forth, sent by Thosk himself to slay the witch who had caused so much trouble? A thrill ran through his bones. This was power! If the hungry beast devoured a few of his compatriots, they were replaceable. Thosk had few worshipers in Solanthe now, but worship always followed power.

The dark void shimmered, and from the void and onto the gory altar stepped not a demon, but a man.

Perhaps a demon in human form. He didn’t look like any human Zall knew. He was a well-built man, tall and muscular, with the blond hair of a barbarian, but it was his clothes that marked him as alien. His trousers, fashioned of a sturdy blue fabric, fit him snugly, unlike the pantaloons the men of Solanthe wore. There were metal buttons on them, and their method of fastening in the front was unclear. His chest and arms were covered by armor that looked bulky but lightweight, quilted and covered with a black silk-like fabric. He wore socks, like a noble woman might, and strange blue and yellow leather shoes held on by means of a blue rope that wound between rivets in them. Rather than a weapon he clutched a paper-wrapped hunk of bread that oozed a reddish slime.

 Around the altar, the Solanthians looked to Zall. He had taught them the words, their looks seemed to say. Why had the words not summoned something more monstrous? Because you said them wrong, fools.

A few moments earlier Steve Crawford had been crossing Wilson Boulevard on his lunch break, thinking about how to break up with his girlfriend Kelly.

The air was crisp and cold. Snow dusted the sidewalks, but the flurries had stopped two hours before and the black street was merely wet. Steve held a Reuben sandwich in one hand and a cup of fizzy water in the other. Technically, he was jaywalking, but so were a dozen other people, as did hundreds every day. The intersection needed a proper light. A car horn honked. He paid enough attention to assure his safety, but his mind was elsewhere.

Steve planned to hit the courts after work tonight and play a little pick up basketball at the rec center. He wanted to see his hooping friends, who he hadn’t seen for a while, and it would delay going home to Kelly. There would be going away sex. There was always going away sex. She was going to sleep with someone else while she was at the sales convention, he knew that. Theoretically he was free to do the same. That was her rule, which he had never quite agreed to — it wasn’t cheating if it happened more than five hundred miles away from the other person. But he wouldn’t look for some one night stand. Instead, he’d bury himself in work, rewriting code that was running too slowly for his company’s client.  When she got back they’d have the discussion.

Another car honked. Steve turned his head to look as his foot came down on the curb near the coffee shop in the corner of his building. But there was no curb. Nothing but space.

He windmilled his arms for balance. The cup slipped from his grasp and vanished in the space between the planes, but he held onto the sandwich as he fell to his knees on hard stone. Cold, wet, sticky stone. The air was warm and smelled of sweat and blood.

He looked around. Torches burned in sconces on the stone wall, their flickering fire the only source of light. Half a dozen men surrounded him. One wore a dark gray robe with a hood, the others only loose flowing pants. Curved knives eight inches long pointed toward Steve. There was red gunk on the knives, on the stone table where Steve had landed, and on his blue jeans. Where the blood had come from wasn’t clear.

“Did Thosk send you?” The man in the hood demanded.

“Who is Thosk?” Steve asked. “And who are you, and where the hell am I?”

“I am Zall, priest of mighty Thosk, who has risen from his home beneath the sea. And you are in Solanthe, a city upon the river Lethe, that we seek to claim for Thosk’s name.”

“He doesn’t look like I expected,” said a man behind him.

“He looks like a man,” said a fat bare-chested guy. Same accent. They spoke slowly.

“He is strangely dressed,” said the skinny dude next to him. Bold words from a man wearing pantaloons. “Perhaps he is a demon.”

Given the blood, the altar, and the knives, Steve wasn’t sure whether being a demon in this situation was something the thin man desired or feared, but it sounded like it was something he expected. Steve got to his feet, careful not to slip on the wet, gross stone, and knocked the gold statue over. At least the statue seemed normal enough. One might even imagine the figure depicted to be friendly, if you cleaned the blood from the face. He stayed on the table, which he reclassified as an altar. It disgusted him, but he didn’t want to get any closer to the men with knives.

“What do we do?” asked the fat guy, looking to the man with the hooded robe. “We have made the sacrifice.”

“Who are you?” asked Zall.

“Who do you think I am?” Steve stalled, looking for an exit. His voice sounded strange to him, too. Slowed down, somehow. He spotted a stone stairway that led up to a trap door. It was the only way out, but the men surrounded him.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

“You could be a being from beyond the planes. You could be as you appear, a mortal man, summoned by mistake. What shall we call you?”

“Steven,” He said. He reserved Steve for people he liked.

“Your speech is passing strange. And you do not know Thosk. Are you prepared to do his bidding, and slay our enemy?” 

“Are you?” Steve countered. No matter where one goes, it’s always the other guy who has an accent.

The question took the man aback. “Of course. Bow down before Thosk!” He reached out and put the statue upright.

“Thosk is the statue?” He asked.

“The statue is but an image of the mighty God of the underwaves,” Zall replied.

“Um, thanks, I’ll pass.” Steve knew the smart thing to do was to go along, but bending a knee to a god who wanted blood and demons to slay his adversaries was more than he was willing to do, even to save his skin.

“Kill him. And we’ll try again.”

“That’s not a good plan,” Steve said.

“Why?”

“Because.” His mind races for something to say. “Because Thosk will be angry.”

“You just said you did not know who Thosk is.”

“My people make bad sacrifices. It’s like an allergy. I’m allergic to being sacrificed.” It was the best he could come up with, and he knew it wasn’t good.

“Kill him,” said the man.

Surrounded and unarmed, height was his only advantage; he was on the altar, and they were on the floor. They advanced from their position  a few feet away, brandishing their knives. Time felt like it had slowed down. He jumped, trying to leap over the fat guy. He doubted his standing long jump was that good, but he had to get past him to reach the stone staircase.

He wasn’t any better at leaping than he remembered, but he could see everything clearly and in slow motion. He considered his trajectory in mid air, watched a knife rise upward, and twisted one leg out of the way of the blade while placing his other foot solidly on the fat man’s head. He pushed off. The head gave way. He used the leverage to take another leap forward, landed gracefully on the stone with one foot and kept running. He seemed to be running though a thick liquid, he was moving so slow when he wanted to sprint and be gone, far away from the men with knives. But they were moving just as slowly, as if time itself had changed speed. He had time to optimize his form and foot placement on the uneven stone floor.

“Aaftuuhr hiim,” the robed guy said. Two more steps got Steve to the stairs, and he ran up them. He tossed his sandwich — two slices of rye, along with some sauerkraut, corned beef, swiss cheese and Russian dressing that had soaked through the paper, back toward his pursuers, because he needed both hands free to push through the trap door and in the hopes of distracting them. The trap door gave, and he breathed a sigh of relief. 

The room above had a wooden floor. He scanned quickly for a way out, and found it: a closed door, unpainted, next to a window with a thick black curtain. He took in the room as he ran, and saw an iron chamber pot, some mangy beds, and a big wooden tub. The tub had a woman in it: naked, bloody, and dead. Between the sight of the body and the smell of waste from the chamber pot, his breakfast rose in his stomach, but there wasn’t time to throw up if he didn’t want to be the donor for the next batch of blood on the altar. His pursuers weren’t going to be slowed down by the sight or smell.

The wooden floor creaked under his running shoes. He made it to the door as his pursuers reached the top of the stairs. The door was bolted from the inside, and he had to stop to throw the bolt. His hands shook, but with everything moving in slow motion he managed to open the door in time. He ran through, and pulling it closed behind him to slow them down.

The alley outside waslit only by a gibbous moon. The hot air smelled of sewage and rotten food. It was too warm for the parka he was wearing but he didn’t want to slow down to take it off. He ran left, hoping it would lead to a street, that men with bloody knives weren’t welcome in public, and a man wearing a parka on a summer night was. Maybe people didn’t go out at night at all in this place, for fear of being sacrificed. He wanted to know more and make informed decisions, but the immediate need was to get far away.

The men chased him to a wider alley. One could imagine a bicycle going down it, or more likely a rickshaw, but it was too narrow for a car. He turned right, the menacing footsteps behind him getting quieter. As he let himself believe that he might be in less danger, time started moving at a normal speed again.

He kept running, down crooked empty streets, through narrow alleys, until he got to a major thoroughfare. There, candle lanterns hung from red-tinted windows, and in their flickering light one could make out the denizens of the street: drunk revelers; flirtatious women with low cut blouses, cheap perfume, and eyes rimmed with kohl; a pair of men armed with swords, wearing armor of overlapping bronze plates, content to stand and be present without participating in the debauchery. He took off his parka and tied it around his waist, thinking he’d found some measure of safety. If he had to guess the arms and armor were more ancient than medieval, and there were no other signs of anything more modern. Wherever he was, it was the wrong time of day, wrong season, and wrong millennia. Still, the men had the air of cops on the beat. He would ask them for help.

A woman saw him and screamed, and the guardsmen ran in his direction.

He’d forgotten about the blood that stained his pants. He started running again, conscious that flight was evidence of guilt. How could he even speak and be understood in a place like this? Yet the men in the cellar had understood him, and he, them. In a few minutes he’d gotten lost in the twisted back streets again, and no one seemed to be following him. He paused to catch his breath.