—Ix—
Hovering in respectful silence within the meeting hall that had been carved from beneath a high arch of rock and coral, the Sandrift village council listened in silence to Oxothyr’s presentation. When the shaman finished, he was peppered with questions from several of the representatives. These were more perfunctory than heartfelt, as the majority of those present were shocked and enraged by what had apparently befallen their neighbors to the north. At the conclusion of the emergency meeting, multiple shouts of “To arms!” and “Revenge!” resounded through the warm water.
Preparations for a response proceeded apace. They did not include Oxothyr, who together with his assistants had arrangements of his own to make. They did not involve Chachel, who hung back in the murky depths of his cave and brooded on the inexplicable decision that had resulted in his moment of uncharacteristic altruism. They did, however, engage the attention of a fascinated Irina.
As an outsider who had volunteered to participate in the expedition to aid Siriswirll, she was granted grudging acceptance even by those who remained suspicious of her presence and possible motives. As such, she was not challenged as she moved around both halves of the village observing the measures that were being taken. Though unable to contribute directly to the somber, disciplined preparations, she was allowed to swim freely anywhere she wished.
Having previously caught sight only of spears and knives, she was surprised to encounter several dozen archers loading their weapons into large carryalls. The latter had been fashioned from treated, flexible sea fans that had been fastened together. Fashioned from baleen that had been salvaged from the skeletons of dead whales, bows were sleek and extremely flexible. Bowstrings came from a variety of organic sources. Arrows of sharpened bone were common, as was a dizzying variety of tridents, halberds, and related long weapons. Some of these were tipped with vicious sea urchin spines or lined with embedded razor clams.
Though she looked for clubs, maces, knobkerries, and their ilk, she saw none. While not a fighter, much less someone with personal experience of such weapons, their absence did not surprise her. She might not know much about primitive weaponry, but she knew water. You could stab through it fairly effectively, whereas trying to swing an object of any mass would meet only increasing resistance the wider the arc it encompassed. Underwater a rapier would be far more effective than a broadsword. Not that she viewed the available arsenal with any proprietary interest. She had decided that if caught up in any confrontation she would stay back and rely on her knife for defense.
It was a small but impressive company that finally set out. Cheered along and waved farewell by those too young or too old to participate, the relief force consisted of more than two hundred male and female mersons. They were accompanied by half again as many manyarms. In addition to octopods and cuttlefish of varying size, there were species of squid larger than any she had yet seen. Some had bodies four feet long, as big around as her own, with arms that trailed behind them another twelve feet. Cylinders of pure muscle, they were given the task of hauling most of the expedition’s supplies. Though they could sense direction quite well while traveling backward, while they were occupied in pulling the supply carryalls they often relied on others to assure them that they were indeed headed in the right direction.
Sweeping out of the canyon in a flat, winding column, the soldiers of Sandrift followed the lead of half a dozen scouts both merson and manyarm. With the mersons singing songs of defiance while the manyarms produced an accompanying lightshow by alternating colors and patterns in time to the music, Irina found herself dazzled by the martial display. She was not the only one. A familiar cuttlefish ascended directly in front of her.
“Isn’t it grand, oh isn’t it so grand!” Weaving up and down in the water, Glint generated small pressure waves in his wake as he stayed just ahead of her.
Irina could hardly deny it. Spectacle was spectacle, the last thing she wanted to do was rain on the cuttlefish’s parade (though that could be done only in a figurative sense), and in any case, it would not have been polite. Still, she could not keep from adding somewhat circuitously, “Parades are what armed forces do best.”
“‘Armed forces’?” Glint eyed her with interest. “Is that what you call soldiers where you come from?” He spread his ten arms as wide as possible; a blossom with suckers. “I like it.”
“It doesn’t mean forces with lots of arms,” she tried to explain, “it means—oh, never mind.” As she swam behind him, quietly exulting in the extra propulsion Oxothyr’s changeling spell had bestowed on her transformed limbs, she studied the procession surrounding her. Her present location was near the center and slightly to the rear. The biggest squid who were towing the largest carryalls full of weapons, supplies, and foodstuffs seemed to move through the water without any effort at all, their powerful siphons often ejecting hundreds of gallons of water in tandem. Such cephalopodan precision was wonderful to see.
Something bumped her hard from behind, throwing off her flutter kick. It took her a moment to regain her stroke. She was not entirely surprised to see Poylee swim up beside her.
“Sorry, Irina.” Her erstwhile hostess smiled, an expression that conveyed mixed messages. “I need to look where I’m going. You’re not hurt, are you?” Irina was unable to tell for certain from the merson’s tone whether the query expressed concern or anticipation.
“It’s all right, I’m fine. How are you?”
“Looking forward to a fight.” A hand indicated the multiple bone spears that were strapped securely to her back. “I’m always ready for a good fight. As you’ll see when the time comes.”
Irina stared back evenly. “I’m sure when that time arrives I’ll be prepared to defend myself. Where’s Chachel? I thought he’d be with you.”
The smile, sham or otherwise, disappeared. “He hovers around Telnarch, Kesreach, and the others, listening as they plot strategy. Sometimes they invite him to participate, but he always declines.” Her expression brightened. “One day he will join fully in the life of the village. I know it. He just needs the right kind of encouragement.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Irina murmured by way of response. “I get the feeling he really enjoys his isolation. I’ve known men like that. Afraid to commit to anything. They live out their lives in isolation; sometimes happily, sometimes not.”
Poylee’s visage darkened again. “He just needs the proper encouragement,” she repeated, more tersely this time. When she turned to swim away, her right foot came close to smacking the other woman in the ribs and Irina had to kick hard and fast to one side to avoid taking a nasty blow.
“She doesn’t like me very much. I thought she did at first, but now she doesn’t.” She returned her gaze to the escorting manyarm. “Doesn’t she realize I have no interest in Chachel?”
“It doesn’t matter if you do or not,” Glint replied. “All that matters is that she thinks you do. It would be much worse if my friend showed any interest in you.”
“He doesn’t—does he?” What an odd thing to add, she mused.
“Chachel is like a manyarm with its skin turned inside out. He has no interest in anyone—often not even himself.” Glint proceeded to relate to her the lamentable details of his companion’s personal history.
Afterwards Irina was quiet for a long time, swimming in silence behind the cuttlefish, feeling little but the occasional push of water against her face when he drifted close enough for her to sense the pulsing output of his siphon.
“That’s terrible,” she finally muttered. “It explains a lot.” She looked up at the manyarm. “It doesn’t bother Poylee?”
A flash of orange running from tail to head rippled through the body of the cuttlefish: a cephalopodan shrug. “She has made it her mission, I think, to rescue him from himself. Better odds to be had in recovering a turtle that has lost its shell. These relationships are so much easier for my kind. Once a month we go crazy, and the rest of the time we are sane.”
Irina’s thoughts wandered back to her world; a reality that seemed increasingly distant and strange. “I have friends like that. But with them it’s more a mental imperative, not a physical one.” She hesitated, suddenly desirous of changing the subject. “You know what I miss from my home?”
The most developed of all invertebrate eyes stared back at her. “Your friends and family?”
“Coffee,” she told him.
Ten minutes of subsequent explication failed to enlighten the cuttlefish as to the nature and severity of that particular deprivation.
She had not thought to ask how far it was to Siriswirll or how long it would take to get there. Having built her spirits up to deal with whatever kind of violent confrontation might be forthcoming, she was therefore somewhat disappointed to learn that Oxothyr and the council had decided to stop at Shakestone first. Not only to ascertain the truth and the depth of the dead rainbow runner’s account, but to see if a hasty examination of that village would yield any useful information about its assailants.
As soon as she set eyes on that town several days later, she forgot about everything else.
In the water in front of the column, the village slowly took on shape and form. Unlike canyon-clinging Sandrift, it had been built on the westward, seaward-facing side of a gently sloping reef. Customized coralline dwellings and other structures descended in terraces from near the top of the reef downward toward darker depths. Or at least, they once had done so.
If anything, the doomed herald Zesqu had understated the state of affairs when he had reported that Shakestone had been destroyed. Obliterated would have been a better description. After squads of mersons and manyarms had chased off the remaining sharks and other scavengers, a stunned Irina joined the rest of the expedition in fanning out to assess the totality of the devastation—and to see, unlikely as it seemed at first glance, if there were any survivors.
The inspiration for the name of the village had manifested itself early on. Eons ago a towering granitic monolith whose peak had reached nearly to the mirrorsky had been severely fractured by some unknown tectonic cataclysm. The collapsed pile of rubble that was the result of this violent geologic disturbance now stood mute sentry over the devastated town, a crumbled headstone that would forever serve as silent reminder of what had once been a thriving community of mersons and manyarms.
Though she had by now come to think of the continually gesticulating Glint as a good friend, she still had to remind herself that his kind had suffered here as severely as the population of more human-like mersons. It was a realization difficult to avoid, given the substantial number of brutally amputated sucker-lined arms that lay scattered throughout the ruins of the community. She did not have to hunt for them. All one had to do was look for a cluster of excited fish swarming to the attack. A dismembered cuttlefish arm, several of squid, another of octopus usually lay at the center of these morbidly enthusiastic piscine revels.
Less often, she came across reef fish picking bits of flesh from a piece of merson: a hand or arm, a leg or severed torso. She was able to cope with the appearance of a still largely intact dead squid. The two-foot long vacant-eyed body had been sliced open lengthwise as if by an enormous knife. Entrails drifted in the gentle current like deformed, attenuated balloons.
That encounter was not sufficient to prepare her for sight of a dead merson child. The six-year old’s corpse was wedged in a crevice in the reef. It had been jammed there on purpose, or else the boy had tried to use it for a refuge. Proving that whoever had attacked Splitrock played no favorites, the small body had been opened up as neatly and efficiently as that of the squid. As with everything else she had seen thus far, this morbid tableaux proved educational. For example, she learned that it was perfectly natural and possible to throw up underwater.
As she struggled to recover from her nausea and the spontaneous evacuation of her insides, eager schools of three-inch long anthias and damsels, gobies and blennies, appeared as if out of nowhere to pick and choose from the rapidly dispersing upchuck. Acknowledgement of their unbridled enthusiasm for the undigested contents of her stomach threatened to resuscitate a tremulous urge to regurgitate. Despite her churning intestinal discomfort, she willed herself not to puke again and to swim away.
It had been a challenge to look directly at the bodies—or rather, at the fragments that remained. The dead boy was the most intact of any she encountered, perhaps because of his hiding place in the coral cleft. Elsewhere, teams of mersons and manyarms from Sandrift were recovering what they could. She wondered what would become of the salvaged tissue. Did the merson inhabitants of this world bury their dead, or their remains? She decided that was a question whose answer could wait for another, kinder time.
Not only were the inhabitants of Shakestone missing, so was a good deal of the village itself. In the course of her stay in Sandrift, she had seen enough of construction techniques and long-standing buildings to know that flattened dwellings and crumbling shop fronts were not representative of some new and eclectic architectural style, but rather a destructive force of unfamiliar power that had been ruthlessly applied.
As she swam through the natural passageways that had been cut in the coral by eons of tidal action she was unable to find a single intact structure. Strips of protective window and door netting clung like shredded rags to decoratively bred staghorn coral. Occasionally a loose piece would tumble past her like a sheet of newspaper caught in the wind. Roofs had been caved in, walls had been pulled down, and doorways smashed open wide. What sort of weapon or creature was capable of doing such damage to coral that had the consistency of solid rock?
“Spralakers” she had been told. She still did not know what a spralaker was. She was very much afraid that before too much more time passed she was likely to find out.
As it happened, the members of the Sandrift village council who had joined the expedition were at that same moment contemplating many of the same questions as their changeling visitor, and having as little luck in coming up with answers. Having positioned themselves outside the ruins of the town hall, the conversation of the ten venerable mersons and manyarms alternated between expressions of commiseration for the fate of the deceased, whose bodies had been so rudely treated, and sometimes heated argument over what to do once the last body part had been properly disposed of.
It was amid this emotional and tactical turmoil that Chachel arrived, accompanied by the ever easy-going Glint and escorted by the far more somber pair of armed squid who had been sent to fetch him. Detaching himself from the ongoing debate, counselor Telnarch swam over to greet the hunter.
“What’s going on here?” Chachel nodded toward the discussion, the tenor of which was rising and falling with disarming irregularity. The shaman Oxothyr, he noted, was right in the middle of it all, verbally as well as physically.
“Having seen what has happened here and garnered some notion as to the gravity of the destruction,” the counselor explained, “we are trying to decide how best to continue onward to the relief of Siriswirll. Or indeed, even if we should.” Instead of the usual commanding tone, the senior representative’s tenor verged on the apologetic.
Chachel nodded once, briskly. “What has that to do with me?”
Telnarch’s voice shifted further down-volume, from the apologetic to the obsequious. “You have roamed farther than most who call Sandrift home, Chachel-hunter.”
“I never call Sandrift ho …”
“You have seen and encountered many things,” the counselor continued quickly, cutting him off, “that the rest of us would find alien and strange.”
Like me, Chachel thought, keeping the reaction to himself. “Go on.” He could see that the counselor was increasingly uncomfortable with the line of conversation he had chosen. Good, the hunter thought. Let him twist in the current awhile longer.
“We—I—the council would appreciate your input. We must decide how to move to Siriswirll and what to do if we encounter any hostile force.”
“So the council is seeking my counsel? How novel.”
Telnarch swallowed. None of this was coming easily to him. He held the testy hermit in no more esteem than did any of his colleagues. With the possible exception of the village shaman, of course. But then, as befitted a mage it was to be expected that Oxothyr’s tastes would occasionally run outside the mainstream.
“We would welcome any useful suggestions you might have,” Telnarch finished stiffly. It required an effort for the counselor to articulate the request without scorn. Remembering the number of bodies of the innocent that he had encountered that morning helped him to moderate his tone.
Coming from a counselor as respected as Telnarch, the request qualified as barely a step above outright begging. Chachel therefore condescended to render a reply. Conversation ceased as counselors young and old turned to pay attention.
The hunter had barely opened his mouth to speak when Glint zoomed in front of him.
“It’s a good thing you’ve decided to listen to us.” The cuttlefish started in without waiting to be introduced. “Whatever attacked Shakestone are like no spralakers we have dealt with before.” Waving tentacles gestured over the heads of the assembled. “See how the town hall was destroyed! Not just entered and wormed, but taken apart as if it was made of sponge.”
A smaller, senior cousin of the daunting Oxothyr, Councilor Vararem let all eight of his arms drift in the indicated direction. “Tell us something we don’t already know, idle-arms. We have seen the devastation for ourselves.” One set of S-shaped cephalopodan eyes glared at another. “Hopefully your limb-challenged companion will not speak so eagerly of the painfully obvious.”
Taken back but still defiant, Glint squirted a couple of sharp pulses from his siphon and backed up, once more relinquishing the water to Chachel.
“What Glint is trying to point out,” the hunter clarified as he continued his friend’s animated refrain, “is that this was no ordinary spralaker raid and that those who are responsible for it were interested in more than just pillage for the sake of spoils.” When he gestured, it was to take in the entire scene of annihilation and not just the ruined village hall behind them.
“What makes you believe so?” Bigger than the shaman’s assistants, the squid Golorn gestured with his two hunting tentacles as a deep blue flowed the length of his body.
Chachel was quick to respond. “Too many body parts left lying about.” His gaze traveled around the assembly, meeting merson and manyarm stares with equal assurance. “Spralakers may be inconceivably ugly, they may be innately nasty, but one thing they are is efficient and deliberate. On the occasions when they do manage to carry out a successful raid, they don’t leave anything edible behind.”
“Then why commit such oversight here?” Merson counselor Serenda’s hair was almost as long as that of the changeling, but black streaked with much gray.
“To frighten,” Chachel explained. “To terrify. To discourage any pursuit or thought of revenge.” Once more he indicated the carefully groomed and customized coral structures that surrounded them. “Why else expend the effort to destroy dwellings and storerooms, shops and schools?”
Oxothyr chose that moment to come forward. “I believe the hunter is right.” Cable-like tentacles motioned. “This was more than a raid. This was an effort to exterminate and to intimidate.”
“I don’t follow you, shaman.” Counselor Herremot rubbed at his short beard as he regarded the octopod.
Oxothyr looked past him, into the north. “Something is abroad in the world that has not been here before. It swims just beyond the edge of my vision. Every time I seek it and think I might be close to an understanding, it darts away quick-swift as a bluefin. I cannot get hold of an image of it. But this I do sense: it means to merson and manyarm alike no good, and it is spreading.”
Anxious murmurs arose among the assembled counselors. Bony hands lightly made contact with soft mantles while tentacles of varying length stroked arms and torsos.
“What must we do, wise one?” The only cuttlefish present besides Glint, Abrelorn was young but eager.
“I can drift and dream in my abode in Sandrift,” the shaman replied, “and hope explanation and answer come to me. Or,” he added more forcefully, “we can do what we came for. Fight, and perhaps learn from one of those who carried out this atrocity what lies behind their motivation.”
“Onward to Siriswirll!” Counselor Dyanbre thrust his spear toward the mirrorsky.
With varying degrees of enthusiasm the defiant cry was taken up by the rest of the assembled. Glint added his own exuberant screeching to the call as Sathi and Tythe chimed in with keen squeaks of their own. Only two among the gathering did not voice their zeal. Oxothyr refrained in order to maintain his dignity, and Chachel never cheered for anything.
But as the meeting broke up, the counselors dispersing to inform their constituents of what had been decided, the hunter drifted over to confront the brooding mage.
“I listen to your voice, shaman,” Chachel murmured quietly. “As your skin talks, I mark carefully the patterns and the colors. You speak of more than spralakers. You say you cannot see what is behind them or the uncommon ruination that has befallen this village, but I find myself wondering: do you have any thoughts on the matter that for whatever reason you choose not to voice to the majority of merson and manyarm?”
As his famuli hovered nearby, Oxothyr focused his attention on the hunter. “You are perceptive, Chachel. You would have to be, to survive and find food by yourself. Regrettably, I spoke the only truth I have. I see nothing.” Reaching out, he rested the tip of one arm on the hunter’s left shoulder. Chachel did not shake it off.
“The marks of the spralakers are all over the ruins of Shakestone. Evidence of their fury lies everywhere like a trail of slime. I only know that there has to be more to this than what appears. I can taste it!” Suckers gripped the merson’s shoulder as the shaman’s grip tightened. “But I cannot see it. Until I can, we must fight not only spralakers but our lack of knowledge.” The arm withdrew. “Hunting solitaire, one learns how to fight. On my recommendation, the council will put you in charge of a squadron.”
Chachel backed water. “Coming from you, revered conjurer, that’s an honor. But I must decline. I take charge of no one but myself.”
Little more than a soft sack of flesh, skin, and organs, the shaman’s body shimmied in the current. “I understand. I am not pleased, but I understand.” Obtruding his siphon, he jetted away, flanked by his assistants. Glint came forward to rejoin his friend.
Poylee had watched it all from a distance. Too far away to overhear and too uncertain to understand what had transpired solely from the gestures she had been able to observe, she knew only that Chachel’s expertise had been called upon. Shunned until he was needed, she thought derisively. How typical of the council. At least they had eventually recognized what he had to contribute. She turned to rejoin the other volunteers from her neighborhood.
She, of course, had been touting the hunter’s attributes for years.
The general queasiness that had invested Irina ever since the relief expedition’s arrival at ravaged Shakestone continued to wax and wane. Convincing herself that it was not due to her system undergoing another sea change, she gathered up enough courage to start looking for possible remedies to her persistent nausea. Pills and potions failed to alleviate the fluctuating discomfort. When eventually she approached him for advice, Oxothyr told her that she was suffering from a sickness of the spirit: something only time and determination could cure.
Such counsel was of small comfort as she wandered among the busy mersons and manyarms. Everyone was working with a purpose. Everyone had something to do—except her. Having rediscovered a little of herself in the village, she now felt lost all over again. In a few days’ time, it was possible that many of her newfound acquaintances were going to die. Every bit as aware of this as she was, none of them had time for small talk or was in the mood for idle chat.
In due course she came upon Chachel. Characteristically, the hunter had found a place off by himself in one of the ruined homes. Who it had belonged to originally he did not know and did not care. There was no sign of Glint. She swam down to greet him. Entering the abandoned dwelling was easy. The roof had been torn off by some unknown, powerful force.
Not roof, she told herself. Oshenerth structures did not have roofs in the manner of buildings in her world. There, a roof was intended to keep out sun and rain and wind. None of those threats were present here. Dwellings existed to provide privacy. Weather consisted only of currents of varying strength. In a sense, buildings served the same function as clothing, only on a larger scale.
When she found him he was busy sharpening one of the half dozen long bone spears he had brought with him. “Hello, Chachel.” His acknowledgment of her arrival consisted of a curt grunt. She indicated the spears lying nearby. “You don’t use a bow?”
“I can,” he told her as he pushed the well-worn whetstone repeatedly along one side of the bone blade. “But I prefer the spear. I believe it’s more ethical to look into the eyes of the enemy you kill rather than to slaughter from a distance.”
The ethics of slaughter not being a topic she’d had much occasion to discuss, she chose not to pursue that particular line of questioning. Then what to talk about? Hovering nearby, she watched him in silence until the rope that had been wound around her innards decided to knot once again.
Seeing her grimace and crook sharply forward, he paused in his honing. “You’re feeling unwell?”
She tried to smile. The resulting expression was unflattering. “I don’t know if it’s something I ate, or just seeing all the death here. The decomposing body parts, the putrefying organs …” She swallowed deliberately, hoping to hold off the worst of the symptoms.
He turned back to his work, indifferent. “People died. That’s all. People die every day.” He gestured at their surroundings. “The only difference here is that more met their end as part of a mass killing instead of as individuals. Ask one of the villagers working as a server to prepare some of the scraps for you. Maybe if you eat a little of those who were here.…”
She threw up again. Not much this time, since by now her stomach was mostly empty. He looked on with interest. Apparently a changeling vomited no differently than did an ordinary merson. He remarked upon the similarity.
“You heartless bastard,” she snapped when she could finally speak again. Then she began to sob, her eyes stinging in the absence of tears.
His tone softened—a little. “Why are you crying, Irina?”
“Why am I …?” She fought to regain control of herself. “Oh, I don’t know. My world is gone, my body’s been transformed, nobody here likes me, I miss my home and my friends and my work, I’m stuck with people who eat everything and anything including each other.” She eyed him pleadingly. “I don’t want to be in somebody else’s war. I don’t want to be in anybody’s war. I just want to go home.”
“You think I want to be in this fight?”
She sniffed, sucked in ocean, and coughed, her gill slits flaring. “But I thought …”
“What? That I like to kill? It’s true I enjoy hunting.” With a wave of his hand he indicated the center of the devastated village where the bulk of the expedition from Sandrift had set up temporary quarters. “Like many others, I hunt to live, to eat. Not, despite what you may have heard or may think, for the joy of killing. The realworld is a cruel and indifferent place, Irina. It doesn’t care whether you live or die. You can fight to live, or you can become food for another whose will to exist is greater than your own. There are many out there, in the deep blue, who would be happy to relieve you of your anxieties. Life is a choice, not a right. Civilization is sustained by determination. It can’t survive on its own indifference.”
A little stunned, she blinked at him. “You—you sound like Oxothyr.”
Picking up the spear he had been working on, he studied his handiwork out of his one eye. “He would not be flattered by the comparison. Because I choose to live apart from others does not mean I reject knowledge. Or wisdom, on those rare instances when it can be found.”
Kicking lightly with her bare toes, she stirred sand and tiny mollusks underfoot. “I think there’s more to you, hunter Chachel, than you like to let on.”
“And I think you are a weak, nosy, irritating intruder whose return to her own place of being will certainly find both our worlds better off.”
Queasiness and fear gave way to anger. “You—you think you’re the only one who’s suffered a loss in life? Glint told me your story. You think you’re the only one capable of sorrow or deserving of sympathy? Just when I think there’s a spark of humanity in you, you say something like that!”
He frowned at her. “What’s ‘humanity’?”
“Something that doesn’t seem to exist here—or at least not in you.” Kicking hard, she shot upward out of the ruined residence. Once clear of the walls, she angled toward the center of the village. The last he saw of her she was swimming full out in the direction of a small knot of females.
Glint arrived not long thereafter. He hovered in front of his friend, staring. “Something’s the matter. Something has happened.”
“Nothing’s happened.” Setting aside the now razor-sharp spear, the hunter selected another and began working on its business end with the whetstone.
Turning maroon, the cuttlefish moved closer. “Don’t lie to me, Chachel. You’ve no one else to talk truth to, so don’t lie to me.”
He looked up. “It’s nothing. The changeling was here, feeling sorry for herself. Either she ate something that upset her stomach, or else she doesn’t have the stomach for this kind of work. She was seeking a remedy. Nothing more.”
Cocking an eye sideways, Glint reached out with one tentacle to pluck a pair of passing copepods and thrust them into his open beak. “A remedy for upset guts, or for something else?”
The hunter’s expression contorted. “What are you prattling about, finger-face?”
Swallowing the snack, the cuttlefish commenced a slow ascent. “You really have no idea, do you?”
“You know how I hate facile accusations that are made without any subject attached.” Reaching up, Chachel took a half-hearted swipe at the rising manyarm. “Where are you going? You just got here.”
“To find the changeling and see if I can help.”
With a shrug, Chachel returned to his sharpening. “Why waste your time? Either she’ll get over what’s unsettling her or she won’t. It has nothing to do with you.”
Turning his tail end toward the center of ravaged Shakestone, the cuttlefish pushed water through his siphon and shot backward, leaving only a last observation in his wake.
“And they say that my kind are cold-blooded.…”