—Vii—
For the first time since she had entered the village, a lightheaded Irina felt accepted. Resident mersons waved at her, or blew kisses, or ignoring her origins and setting aside their initial fears, extended invitations to visit. Could one blush underwater, she found herself wondering? She forgot her situation, forgot what had happened to her, forgot her displacement in time and reality as she let herself sink into the sheer shimmering splendor of the mass manyarm mating that was occurring all around her. Cuttlefish flashing every color of the rainbow locked and parted. Squid wrestled and writhed, the bands of color shooting through their bodies giving visible expression to their orgasmic release. Out of mutual delight and joy in sharing the celebration, mersons coupled nearby. She alternated between looking on in fascination and turning away awkwardly. The warm water that enveloped her was brimming with music and with moans.
What would it be like to make love underwater, she found herself wondering? To be locked in intimate embrace there among the bioluminescence and the warmth, drowning emotionally but not literally in a cosmic dispersion of liquid pheromones and an ocean of light? Without a hard surface to bruise one’s body, drifting together effortlessly, plunging and swaying in perfect time with one’s partner as if suspended in magic itself.
Then, without warning, as the tumult of music and flurry of activity and the frenzied discharge of bioluminescence blurred together in a maelstrom of orgiastic bliss, clouds of a different kind of phosphorescence began to illumine the sea in the space above the sand slope and below the mirrorsky.
Expelled almost simultaneously by several thousand female manyarms, a billion glistening eggs filled the water. Glowing pale blue and white, they pulsed with unnatural inner radiance. Within moments spawn, musicians, dancers, the exhausted cephalopodan birthing brood, and a dazed and dazzled Irina found themselves adrift together in swirls of dynamic milt that fluoresced a pale pink. Sunk in this sea of resplendent reproduction, a visitor from outside was presented with a choice of drifting in sticky enthrallment or vomiting. Though a lover of underwater life, Irina kept her mouth shut tight as she gazed in astonishment at the nova of luminous procreation now surrounding her. Gazed but did not gape. It was one thing to marvel at the miracle, quite another to inadvertently swallow some of it.
It struck her then that by taking her hands in his tentacles and the burden of her depression on his heart, Glint had sacrificed his time and opportunity to participate fully in the festivities—in other words, to reproduce. She would have shown her gratitude with a kiss, except that she was unsure how to work her way through the basket of sucker-lined arms that surrounded his face to find his beak. She settled instead for thanking him verbally.
He shrugged it off, the cuttlefish equivalent of a shrug being a slow ripple of gray down the length of his body. “I can reproduce anytime. There will be another Colloth next month. It’s not every night I get to initiate a changeling.” His ease turned to sudden concern as he looked at her. “What’s wrong?”
Irina had begun brushing furiously at herself. “It’s gooey—all of it, eggs and milt.”
“Of course. What else would you expect? But there are other side effects. Look down at yourself.”
Pausing in her futile brushing, she complied. Her eyes widened. Much of her body was covered with the combination of freshly laid manyarm eggs and fertilizing milt. From drifting strands of hair to the tips of her now webbed toes, she was glistening blue, white, and pink.
“You look beautiful,” Glint told her unexpectedly.
She made a face. “Maybe to another manyarm. I sure don’t feel beautiful. Not to give offense, Glint, but I feel—I admit that the phosphorescence is striking, but I’m afraid for someone like me there’s an inescapable concurrent ick factor.”
He gestured understanding. “Just relax and enjoy the rest of the celebration. Once the eggs have been fertilized, they’ll drop off.”
Arms spread wide, she gazed down at her shimmering self. “What about those that don’t get fertilized, and the milt that doesn’t manage to do any fertilizing?”
He moved toward her. “Don’t worry. I’ll eat them for you.”
She hastily backed water. “That’s okay. If you don’t mind, I’ll just keep brushing.”
* * *
From the grotto he called homeor at least the place where he slept and stored his few possessionsChachel could hear the music as it rose to a crescendo, signifying the cumulative reproductive vehemence that was Colloth. He could see the lights, too, enough concentrated in one place to send upward a glow sufficiently intense to light the underside of the mirrorsky itself. Drawn to the atypical brightness, all manner of nocturnal planktonic life danced and spun in a frenzy beneath the uncharacteristically illuminated ceiling of the world.
Sitting atop the flattened disc of dead shelf coral that marked the entrance to his abode, he watched as the ghostly shapes of half a dozen silky sharks swam silently past to disappear into the darkness downreef. They too had been drawn to the celebration, but they would find no sweet pickings in Sandrift tonight. Not with every one of the festival’s non-participants drafted for patrol duty.
He ought to have been among those standing guard on behalf of the celebrants, he knew. But doing so would require voluntarily inserting himself into the social life of the community, something he declined to do. He would not stand guard for them. Conversely, should sharks or other dangers invade his own space, none would come to his aid no matter how loudly or desperately he called for it.
That was just fine with him. He already knew how he would handle such a potentially fatal situation. He would fight for himself and, should he lose, he would die. He was perfectly willing to accept either outcome. Except …
Except something had changed. As was true of most unforeseen changes, it was not one he had sought. Given a choice, he would have avoided it. But it had been forced on him by circumstance and accident and, like most accidents, could not be taken back.
In spite of himself, he found himself growing more and more curious about the changeling.
Don’t think about her, he told himself angrily. Put her out of your mind. She’s Oxothyr’s problem if she is anyone’s. Not your responsibility. In saving her you’ve already stepped beyond the bounds of noninterference you set for yourself. Concentrate on something else. On your inability to share, to participate in, to enjoy something as purely pleasurable as Colloth. Focus on your bitterness. Gnaw your own soul.
That was better, he told himself. He generated bile the way a mourner seeps grief. In his renewed melancholy he was once again content. What were the right words? Oh yes. Muttering under his breath, waving a hand, he numbed the water just outside his cave. It muted the thrum of joyful music emanating from town and dulled the distant effervescent light. Satisfied with this modest if idiosyncratic bit of amateur aqueous sorcery, he turned back toward the darkness of the inner cavern. A few forlorn shrimp and small-minded crabs muttered to themselves in its black back reaches. Each managed to emit a single unvarying and decidedly uncelebratory pinpoint of light. It was all the illumination Chachel desired.
It was all that he sought.
* * *
The light and the music, the gaiety and celebration, did not reach into the depths of the reef where Oxothyr made his home and his magic. Lit by a single shaft of moonlight, the vaulted entryway where the visitor from the void had been transformed into a proper merson was all but empty. The soft argent glow from overhead made of swarming many-legged zooplankton a snowstorm of dancing gems.
Deep within thick coral that had accumulated over hundreds of thousands of years, acidic dissolution and natural erosion had hollowed out a maze of interlocking tunnels and chambers. At the center of this warren of wizardry Oxothyr held thaumaturgical court. Powerful yet sensitive tentacles drew special stones from their resting places on shelves that had been cut into the surrounding walls. From carefully tilted pots and jugs, oily spirals of liquids denser than seawater trickled into a waiting bowl fashioned from half a tridacna shell that had once been home to a now absent giant clam. Plucked from the transparent tunicate containers that contained them, select pinpoints of living light were carefully added to the expanding brew. Held in place by the shaman’s spells, unable to escape, they infused it with an unearthly green glow.
As Oxothyr hovered above and to one side of the concoction within the clamshell, Tythe and Sathi darted hither and yon within the chamber, fetching ingredients and components for the increasingly concerned sage. The octopus’s voice grew louder and more strained as the blend grew brighter and more potent. What it all portended the two famuli did not know. The intense olivine radiance was deviant and the faint moaning that was beginning to fill the chamber bore little relation to the music that underscored the delights of Colloth. Never before could they recall having seen their master so intense.
“Look at him,” Sathi whispered in the near darkness. “His color stays dark brown and does not change.”
“Not even a ripple,” a troubled Tythe agreed. “What manner of magic it is that he works tonight I do not know—and do not want to know.”
Sathi gestured with several arms. “Nor do I comprehend its import, save that it is of manifest significance. What spirits does the Master talk to, what demons does he invoke?”
An explosion of ruby light from the central concavity of the clamshell saw them simultaneously sink into silence. The green luminosity became edged with black, as if the magic the mage was so forcefully propagating had acquired a literal as well as metaphysical edge. The ominous emerald shadows cast on the walls reminded Sathi of a shallow cave he had once wandered into that turned out to be choked with noisome, poisonous algae. As he contemplated the resemblance, the unwholesome luminance seemed to prickle with tiny tendrils that sought to ingratiate themselves into the very walls of the chamber.
Even in the Master’s moments of casting most serious, Tythe had never heard him speak in timbre so profound. Oxothyr sounded simultaneously worn and angry, frustrated and demanding. As he intoned, the two famuli clustered closer to one another. It felt as if the walls of the inner chamber were closing in around them as more and more of the green glow was overtaken by the expanding blackness.
Throughout it all Oxothyr continued to add to the insidious fusion that threatened to overflow the clamshell. Words cajoling and soul of periwinkle, threats implied and tincture of void. The calcium-white shell seethed with resonance. Green gave way entire to black, and then black to a discoloration that was not only new to the assistants but new to the realworld. This essence coiled and writhed upward from the shell, rising so strong and unforgiving that Oxothyr found it prudent to retreat slightly. Arms entwined, Sathi and Tythe looked on wide-eyed at this new phenomenon that had taken physical shape in the chamber before them. Their reaction was hardly surprising.
It was the first time either of them had ever seen cold.
Waving every one of his eight arms, Oxothyr uttered an incantation as commanding as any he had ever summoned forth. For a terrifying instant, nothing changed. Striking outward from the center of the gruesome conjecture that coiled snake-like above the clamshell, something touched Tythe. It was unlike anything he had ever experienced before. He screamed.
Then, just like that, it was gone. Reality returned to normal. Feeble though it was, the blue-green light that now returned to the chamber was soft and familiar. No more noisome green, no more oozing black, no more—cold. Sitting alone atop its supporting pillar, the tridacna bowl once more gleamed lustrous, white, and empty. Behind it—behind it Oxothyr floated; eyes shut, arms coiled in a ball around him, his boneless body a lightly-spotted drifting brown balloon.
“Master!” An alarmed Sathi rushed forward. Still trembling from his brief contact with what the mage had summoned, Tythe was slower to respond.
One eye opened. Tentacles unfurled. Sathi let out a sigh. The shaman was unhurt. Physically, anyway.
“What—what was it, Master?” the squid inquired hesitantly.
“Coldness.” Oxothyr replied without hesitation. “Chill. Frigidity of a kind I have read about in the Old Tablets but never expected to encounter myself.” He looked past the worried famulus. “Are you all right, Tythe?”
Trembling slightly, the other squid gestured in the affirmative. “I don’t know exactly what you’re talking about, Master, or even what I just saw. But I do know one thing about it. It bites.”
Oxothyr indicated understanding. “Indeed it does. It will also kill.”
“Why did you bring it here?” Sathi was not normally so forward with his master, but the experience had emboldened him. Given the gravity of the occurrence, Oxothyr took no offense.
“I did not bring it, little silver dart. I went looking for something else, and the coldness came in its stead. Something is using it. Something or someone is manipulating it. For what specific purpose or to what eventual end I do not know. Only that it cannot be good.”
Tythe had recovered enough to ponder. “This something is a danger to Sandrift?”
The mage rotated toward him. “This is something that endangers the whole world as we know it.”
The two assistants exchanged a glance before turning back to the shaman. “What is it then, Master?” Fear and wonder inflected Sathi’s query.
Oxothyr let out a sigh so substantial it disturbed the volume of water within the chamber. “I wish I knew, Sathi. I wish I knew.” He turned away. “I have been brooding on it much. I must brood on it a while longer still. Leave me now. Even serious contemplation must eventually surrender to fatigue, and fatigue to sleep.”
Obediently, they gestured their goodnights and turned to depart. As they did so, Tythe looked back long enough make sure that the shaman was squeezing comfortably into his filament-lined sleeping hole.
“I can still feel the touch of this thing called ‘cold.’” He shuddered. “And its appearance haunts my thoughts. Is the danger as serious as the Master says, do you think?”
“I don’t know.” Like his friend, Sathi traveled in reverse by pumping short, sharp spurts from his siphon. “But that is the first time in all the years I have apprenticed myself to him that he has called me by name.”
Swimming together toward the sleeping chamber they shared near the main entrance to the shaman’s lair, the two famuli continued to discuss what they had just seen and experienced. While their exchange was not especially reassuring to either of them, they knew it was better to talk about what they had just witnessed than to leave the foul memories alone, to fester and grow.
* * *
The aftermath of the festival manifested itself in the village the following day in the form of dead silence. Nothing stirred. Every shop was closed, no school of children made its way to the schools in North and South Sandrift, no cuttlefish idled peacefully above their favored hunting promontories. The migratory squid who had come to town for one night of hyperactive merriment had departed. Those who had survived the frenzy of celebratory copulation had returned to the open ocean in search of the vast shoals of small fish on which they fed. The drifting bodies of other thousands, their life-force exhausted by the mating madness, had been gathered up the previous night by community patrols and suitably distributed among the survivors, both of their own kind and the resident mersons.
Local cuttlefish remained secluded in their homes within the labyrinth of coral. Currents had swept away the remainder who had given their lives in the service of reproduction. Schools of bemused reef fish wandered unchallenged through the community, free for a change to pick and nibble as they wished at local dwellings as they searched for morsels usually off-limits to their kind. Beneath the brightly lit mirrorsky, the village lay clean and calm.
Not all were asleep or dead, however. Not everyone had participated in the previous night’s hysteria. Disinclined to work for another to earn his daily fillet and inherently unsuited to begging, Chachel had to hunt if he wanted to eat. The morning after Colloth, or one of the many other fetes that were so popular among mersons and manyarms, was always a good time to be out on the westernmost reef line because he usually had the best hunting spots to himself.
He had settled in at one of his favorite locales—a point where the last thrust of high reef protruded out into the blue. The currents sweeping around the promontory were a magnet for flavorsome pelagics. This early in the morning plenty of potential dinner was out and swimming. Aware of the turbulent celebration that had taken place the previous night, open-ocean swimmers who normally stayed away from the reef and out in the safety of deep water felt confident hunting in close, unaware that they themselves were being watched by a pair of eager predators.
Well, by one, anyway. Drifting just above a nearby stand of staghorn coral, Glint was neither eager nor in predation mode. His lateral fins barely rippling, he was, in fact, sound asleep. More irritated than disgusted, Chachel was forced to turn his attention away from the outer reef in order to repeatedly nudge his friend awake.
“Hmm—what?” Cephalopodan eyes cleared. “Is it food yet?”
“I haven’t speared anything,” Chachel growled by way of reply, “and for someone who’s supposed to be helping with the scouting you’ve been a non-presence.”
“Sorry.” Tentacles spread out in all directions, quivering as the cuttlefish stretched. “It was a good Colloth. A fine Colloth.” One eye focused, albeit tentatively, on the merson who hovered stretched out above the last piece of land before the drop-off. “Your changeling friend is a good dancer. If encouraged, she can do multiple spins. It’s wonderful to see that long hair stretched out behind her. Reminded me of the waltz of the golden garden eels, it did.”
“She’s not my friend.” Chachel made no effort to hide his annoyance.
“Well, she’s mine—I think,” the cuttlefish shot back. “Even if she is a bone bag and out of her element.” Advancing effortlessly, he halted just above and slightly behind his friend’s left shoulder and joined him in gazing out into the limitless expanse of open ocean. “Anything?”
“Many things,” an exasperated Chachel replied softly. “Whitetips, rays, big wrasses, some grouper. Enough so that I feel comfortable waiting for just the right meal and just the right moment.”
Glint nodded. Since he had no neck, mimicking the merson gesture required him to rock the whole front of his body up and down. “Maybe this is the right one now.” A tentacle gestured straight ahead. “I can’t imagine an easier kill, since it’s coming straight toward us.”
Trailing through the water a wake saturated with color, the rainbow runner was indeed heading directly toward them. How very odd, Chachel found himself thinking. Rainbow runners were swift, streamlined, open ocean swimmers. They sometimes came in close to reef systems, but not onto them. At any moment, he expected this one to turn aside and head north or south parallel to the coral ridge. Instead, it just kept coming. In fact, he realized, if it didn’t stop it was going to swim right into them. He was not particularly waiting for rainbow runner, but this one presented such an easy kill he could not justify passing it up. And their flesh was tasty. His fingers tensed on his spear.
“Get behind me, idiot!”
“What? Oh, right.” Half-asleep again, Glint let himself sink back behind Chachel and out of sight.
A steel streak, the sleek silver-sided fish showed no sign of slowing down or changing its course. Even as he prepared to make the kill, Chachel found himself wondering if perhaps it was sick. They would have to gut it carefully. A bad meal could lead to much worse than indigestion depending on which toxins a free-swimming dinner might have ingested prior to its death.
Then he saw the sharks.
There were two of them. Silkies. Big, husky, powerful swimmers. Since they were never normally seen this close to the shallows, it followed that they had been pursuing the rainbow runner from deeper water. He found himself hesitating. Taking on one silky, even if he could rouse Glint to help, would be a challenge. Tackling two would be foolhardy, especially over a single fish when there was so much other food ambling about. Letting himself sink down below the ridge, he intended to let both prey and predators swim right over him—assuming, of course, that the silkies would continue to pursue their quarry into shallow reef territory.
“Help me! For the love of your own, help me!”
He could see the blood now, trailing from a nasty gash just behind the runner’s left gill slit. It was also missing most of a ventral fin. No wonder the silkies continued to persist in the hunt. Strangely, the open wound looked more like a blade strike than a bite. In any case, he had no time to analyze it. The visitor had nearly reached the reef.
He hated it when circumstances gave him no time for contemplation.
Glint saved him the trouble. Ascending vertically, the cuttlefish was waving every one of his arms simultaneously, beckoning to the frantic fish. “Here, over here, color master!”
“Glint, don’t …!” Though only seconds had elapsed it was already too late. Trailing streamers of color, the desperate rainbow runner had already altered its course ever so slightly. Now it was definitely going to run into them.
He had no time to rebuke Glint. The frantic fish would duck down into their hiding place and the silkies would follow. Trapped in the slight depression in the reef, they would find themselves cornered together. Unless …
His back up against the coral, he started counting to himself. One, two … having observed the silkies swimming, he could estimate how fast they were traveling. Seeing their intended victim dip behind the slight rise of pale blue coral, they would be likely to put on an eager burst of speed. That would mean they ought to be …
Kicking hard, he shot upward, spread his arms and legs wide, and bulged his eyes as he flailed madly at nothingness with the spear.
“ARRRAGHHAAA!”
His timing was nearly perfect. One moment the silkies had been preparing to dive down to pluck their prey from among the coral—and the next, something that might have been an insane merson or a reef spirit or who knew what magically materialized barely a tail length directly in front of them. It was as if Chachel had sprung from a twist in the water, had stepped whole and entire from the line of a particularly dense thermocline.
Startled and shaken, both sharks whirled instinctively and vanished back the way they had come as fast as their tails could propel them.
“Well done!” Chachel felt a tentacle on his left ankle.
Kicking it away, he looked down angrily. “Yes, they ran. They might just as easily have bitten me in half. What were you thinking, calling the runner right to us like that?”
Glint shrugged. “I saw someone in need.”
“I saw dinner.” Chachel swam downward. “I still may.”
They found the trembling refugee backed up against a concealing, protective mass of yellow stinging coral. Longer than Chachel’s arm and twice as thick, the normally confident swimmer was a mess. Blood continued to dribble from the ugly slash in its side. Able now to take a closer, more considered look at the wound, Chachel decided it definitely was not the result of a bite; not from a shark or any other predator. As for the missing ventral fin, it looked as if it had been cut rather than chewed off. What had caused such peculiar injuries?
Confronting the runner, he was his usual tactful self. “You came seeking help. Why should we not help you to dinner?”
Wide eyes flicked swiftly from merson to manyarm. “You are in danger. Both of you. All of you. Have me to eat if you will, but know that the normal order of things that permits such an understanding is itself at risk!”
Chachel frowned. He had never heard a fish talk like this. Especially not one fully aware that it was on the verge of becoming a meal. “What are you gibbering about? And what was that wild shout ‘For the love of your own’ about?”
Gasping for oxygen, the rainbow runner struggled to respond. Only after filling its gills was it able to wheeze a reply.
“Shakestone is destroyed! I—I have been sent from there to—warn you. To warn Sandrift and—any others I can reach.”
“‘Destroyed’?” Chachel took a closer look at the injured fish. Its attendant rainbow swirled behind its tail, a fitful swathe of trailing color. “You’re not making any sense, visitor. Shakestone is much larger than Sandrift, and they have sturdy defense nets. How can it be ‘destroyed’?”
Once more the rainbow runner struggled to breathe. Exhausted, clearly drained, he could only manage one word.
“Spralakers.”
Merson and manyarm exchanged a look. Then Chachel, his attitude having undergone an instantaneous and dramatic shift at the mention of that word, extended a hand. Trying to draw back, the weakened runner found it no longer had the strength.
Pulling the erstwhile meal gently to him and cradling it firmly with his free arm, Chachel spoke grimly. “You’d best see Oxothyr.” With a last glance backward to make sure the two silkies were nowhere to be seen, the three of them, hunters and refugee, started back toward Sandrift.
This was turning out, the stolid hunter reflected, to be an unusually busy week for the normally reclusive manyarm shaman. First the void demon found and then made into a changeling, and now this. Could two such singular events be somehow connected?
What, in the name of every snail track in the sands, was going on?