Oshenerth (28 page)

When a manyarm catches its breath in amazement, it simply goes motionless in the water. When a merson does so, the gill flaps of males and females alike tend to open as wide their mouths. Such was the case with every one of the visitors, Irina included.

Constructed on a ledge that projected outward from the city’s highest terrace, the Palace of the Tornal commanded a sweeping view over all of Benthicalia. As they swam slowly up to the main coralline arch that marked the entrance, the visitors could look out upon all twenty-five remaining levels of the great metropolis spread out below. Illuminated by tens of thousands of streaks and spots of blue and green, yellow and red bioluminescence, Benthicalia seen from above resembled the Milky Way viewed on a clear night from above the mirrorsky.

Following behind Oxothyr, Irina turned onto her back as she continued swimming. Gazing upward from this highest point of the city, the faintest of pale blue glows tickled her retinas, indicating that high, high above in the shallows it was now midday. Somewhere up there the sun slanted down through clear warm waters, eliminating the need for bioluminescence, phosphorescence, and all manner of internal biochemically-generated illumination. Her first weeks in Oshenerth had seen her pining for dry land. The most recent ones found her yearning for a glimpse of the sun. What else, she wondered, would she next be forced to miss, to give up, to surrender in order simply to survive here?

She pushed such thoughts and the clinging depression that accompanied them aside. Ahead lay a new wonder that, if it did not exactly compensate for the absence of daylight, was at least striking enough to distract her from looming melancholy.

Cultivated largely from muted yellow and dark red fire coral, the walls and spires of the palace were their own defense. In addition, anemones the size of trucks had been transplanted to the walls and roofs, the turrets and hollow living quarters, and nurtured until they had reached gargantuan size. A sting from a single tentacle of any one such stationary giant would be more than strong enough to kill a merson, spralaker, or any other uninvited intruder. The correspondingly larger than normal anemone fish who dwelled within the lethal arms were trained to raise the alarm in the event of an attack.

In addition to the anemones and the walls of fire coral, more nimble sentries were also present. Mersons armed with halberds tipped with razor-sharp mother-of-pearl flanked the main archway. Emblems of office fashioned from found gemstones set in beaten gold hung from their wrists and ankles and covered their shaved skulls. Chain mail armor that was ceremonial more than functional covered their torsos and lower bodies. Composed entirely of strung pearls that ranged in hue from gray-black to pure white, they glistened like platoons of fireflies in the light emitted by the bioluminescent growths that bedecked the walls.

Corridors high and wide flared off in multiple directions from a spherical entry hall that had need of neither floor nor ceiling. Drifting together in its center, the visitors waited until the most magnificently ornamented cuttlefish Irina had ever seen came jetting importantly toward them. In addition to the strobing luminescence it generated within its own body, it trailed streamers of colored pearls backward from its mantle while the edges of its gently rippling lateral fins had been lined with hundreds of tiny colored diamonds. Catching the surrounding bioluminescence, the gems sparkled with a hundred different colors. In sunlight near the surface, so wondrously bejeweled a manyarm would have thrown back too much light for a mere mortal to gaze upon directly.

“My name is Qespangl,” he informed them. “The Tornal await your presence.” Gold-flecked eyes of piercing black flicked rapidly over each of the visitors before coming to settle on Oxothyr. If the majordomo was impressed by the shaman’s quiet charisma, he did not show it. “Keep your questions brief and to the point. The Tornal are alert and miss nothing, but they tire easily.”

Awestruck by both the magnificent surroundings in which they found themselves and by the self-evident solemnity of the occasion, scarce but a few whispers passed among the travelers as they followed their glittering guide deeper into the palace complex. It was, a silent Irina reflected as she marveled at one dazzling artwork and architectural fillip after another, a long way from the simple coral homes and shops of distant Sandrift.

Eventually the corridor opened into an enormous bubble. Soaring arches of deep red fire coral supported huge curved panels of transparent, impossibly thin crystal. Such a structure would have been impossible to sustain on the surface, where gravity would have collapsed it as if it had been made of spun sugar. Underwater, filaments of quarried quartz served as supports in the absence of steel. Still, it seemed to an enthralled Irina that the pressure at Benthicalia’s depth would crush so expansive and fragile an edifice.

“The assembly is held in place by something stronger than stone,” Oxothyr explained in response to her question as they swam slowly forward.

“Something crystalline?” she speculated.

“Something charmed,” he corrected her. “Not all magic is fleeting. Sometimes sortilege can be called upon to serve as superstructure.” The tip of one tentacle curved around to touch his beak. “Quiet now.”

They were approaching the Tornal. As they drew near, the august members of that esteemed company turned to face the recently arrived supplicants. Irina was startled to see that unlike her and her companions, the revered members did not swim or float but were compelled to sit upon a platform built up out of swirled and beaded gold. While each of them was a manyarm true and through to the core, as indisputably so as Oxothyr or Glint, Sathi or Tythe, the most sprightly of them could swim but feebly at best. Though not inherently infirm, each would have to be helped from place to place by more robust assistants.

It took Irina a moment to recognize the Tornal for what they were. The knowledge that enabled her to identify them came from university studies concluded long ago. She breathed in her astonishment softly, her gill flaps collapsing against the sides of her neck as she did so.

The Tornal was comprised of ten individuals in all, the total possibly representative of the number of arms boasted by cuttlefish and squid, though not by octopods or the more primitive nautiloids. The manyarms who formed the body of the Tornal differed not only from all those she had so far encountered in Oshenerth, but from those she knew from the seas of home as well, except in one respect.

Every one of the incredibly aged beings now confronting the visitors had an external shell.

Ammonites
, she thought to herself. Living relics from a time that was ancient to both Oshenerth and to her world. Unlike modern manyarms they wore their huge, coiled, thick-shelled homes on their backs. Alternating with the five ammonites were five orthoceras: manyarms whose shells resembled those of an ammonite that had been stretched out straight as an arrow. In addition to their natural markings and patterns, each individual was decked out in jewels and bits of bright metal that had been set into recesses that had been engraved into their respective shells.

How old was the Tornal, she found herself wondering? A few hundred years? A few thousand? A million or more? She whispered her wonderment to an attentive Oxothyr.

“No one knows,” he murmured in response. His arms were fully extended and coiled at the ends. “Not even the Tornal themselves. Their collective memories are so vast and comprehensive that the earliest of them have withered with the passage of time. Fortunately our request involves specifics of a far more contemporary nature.”

Mindful of the shaman’s earlier admonition to keep conversation to a minimum, Irina nodded but did not reply. Peering past the hovering octopod she espied Chachel and Glint. Both struck her as being as overwhelmed by their present surroundings as everyone else. She expected that of Glint, but this was the first time since she had made his acquaintance that she had ever seen Chachel the hunter truly impressed.

Laboriously pulling herself forward until her heavy shell and body rested near the front edge of the golden platform, the glittering ammonite nearest the center flourished her short, thick tentacles at the visitors and addressed them in a voice that reeked of eons—but not senility. As she spoke, the light in the remarkable and nearly transparent chamber brightened and the curving crystalline panels themselves took on a warm amber hue. The huge, coiled shell emitted a pallid blue light that strengthened and faded with the speaker’s voice. It seemed that even the very words of the Tornal, an awed Tythe whispered to Sathi, were charged with prickles of enchantment.

As she regarded the line of glowing ancients arrayed before her, Irina found questions coalescing inside her like the rising bubbles in a newly opened bottle of champagne. Could they answer queries about the birth and evolution of life in her own world? What did they know of the connections between both worlds and their respective oceans? Between them, the primeval hard-shelled sages might hold the answers to questions that had teased and tormented researchers for centuries.

So powerful was the sudden lust for knowledge that she felt herself growing queasy as she contemplated the multitude of possibilities. Once Oxothyr had asked his question, would any of the rest of them be given the opportunity to pose some of their own? Having at last made the acquaintance of the Tornal, she could hardly imagine herself retiring from their august presence in submissive silence.

As events developed, not even Oxothyr would have the chance to voice the query that had driven him and his multi-species escort to fight their way all the way from the upper reefs down to deep Benthicalia.

Having emerged in front of the others, the shaman calmly and confidently introduced himself and his companions. He then began to lay out, in the simplest terms, their reason for coming to the city and requesting the present audience.

“Currents are changing, venerable ones. Incomprehensibilities speckle the calm waters of the reefs like a plankton bloom, blocking one’s vision and confounding perception. Change is coming that I sense bodes not well. Possibly not for the deep, but certainly not for the reefs. I am myself as pregnant with questions and concerns regarding this matter as is a wrasse heavy with roe.”

The ammonite who had trundled painstakingly forward eyed her fellow ancients on her left, then on her right. “We live not in the light of the reef and so do not share the unsettling sensations of which you speak, shaman.”

“It is not clarification of my nightmare dreaming that I seek,” Oxothyr explained respectfully, “but illumination of a different kind. All I and my companions would ask of you is that …”

“Revered teachers!”

Every one of the visitors turned in the direction of the unexpected interruption, which was as loud as it was impassioned. Even the thus far silent members of the Tornal bestirred themselves to stare.

The disruption came from the cuttlefish majordomo who had escorted the travelers into the Tornal’s presence. He did not look particularly wild-eyed, a dumbfounded Irina decided. At least, no more so than Glint or any other specimen of his kind. An abnormal trembling had taken hold of his exquisitely adorned fins. Most telling of all, his body had gone completely white—an unmistakable sign among cephalopodan folk of fear, terror, or the deepest possible anxiety.

The ammonite who was serving as Speaker for the Tornal responded placidly. “Verbal intimation of panic is insufficiently informative. Explain this intrusion.” When the cuttlefish hesitated, eyeing the visitors, the old one added, “In this chamber there are no secrets from honest supplicants. Speak.”

Plainly, the cuttlefish was struggling to control himself. “A group of commercial scavengers was scouring the valley to the east of the Halatanea Smokers. They returned as fast as they could in order to pass on the news.”

One of the long, spear-shaped orthoceras spoke up, grumbling. “What news?”

Since it could not turn its head, the cuttlefish shifted its entire body to more squarely face the speaker. “Spralakers! Tens of thousands of them, armed and eager, coming this way from not one but two directions.” As he spoke, the cuttlefish gestured wildly with all ten arms. Seen from the front, Irina thought, the agitated major domo looked like a nest of cobras on drugs.

“Two separate armies,” the cuttlefish continued frantically. “One approaching the terraces from the southern plains, the other advancing along the middle shelf.”

Edging together until their tentacles all but touched, the Tornal hurriedly caucused among themselves. They did not talk long.

“Alert those in charge of the city’s defenses,” commanded the ammonite speaker stridently. “Let those who would flee in the face of danger do so. All who remain will be expected to stay, stand, and fight!”

“This is an outrageous provocation,” declared another ammonite, his short tentacles writhing in front of his face. “Outrageous, and futile.”

“They will all perish.” The orthocera beside him spoke knowingly. “The spralakers understand only how to fight among themselves. They do not know how to contest with an adversary who is organized and determined. What can they possibly be hoping to achieve in trying to attack Benthicalia?”

Before another member of the Tornal could comment, Oxothyr raised several arms to attract their attention. In order to do so he had to shove aside the pair of frantic famuli who tried their utmost to restrain him.

“I believe I may have an answer to that.”

The Speaker-for-the-Tornal turned incredibly aged eyes on the octopod shaman from far Sandrift. “Any explanation for this apparent outbreak of mass spralaker lunacy would be most welcome.”

“You may not think so after you have heard it.” Oxothyr plunged on in spite of his assistants’ obvious unease.

“I believe they may be looking for us.”

— XIX —

Gubujul had to admit that the trappings of power which attached to the nominal commander of a vast military force exceeded in allure even those that accrued to the position of Paramount Advisor to the Great Lord. In the absence of Kulakak himself, the ranks of dedicated and determined soldiers were left looking up to
him
. The senior officers of the two armies felt otherwise, seeing the Lord’s hand-picked Advisor as inexperienced and untested. In the course of the long march southwest, however, Gubujul managed to win them over one by one. To some he promised favors of a personal nature, to others promotion, to still others an assurance that despite his position he would not interfere with their decisions on the field of battle.

“I know my abilities,” he informed them, “and I know my limitations. I am here to give you support, not to obstruct your efforts. The last thing any of us want is to return home in failure. Better to die here, in glorious struggle on behalf of all our people!”

His words went down well. They ought to, he reflected. Having survived many years rising through the murderous, self-aggrandizing levels at court, they had been honed to perfection.

Though not in line for the throne—he could never defeat the prospective challengers in combat—his official position was so fraught with uncertainty that it was not actively sought. Living every day on the cusp of death, living or dying at the whim of the Great Lord, was not a way of life that appealed to many. Gubujul, in contrast, thrived on the pressure. Compared to dealing with the Great Lord’s unpredictable moods, supervising a vast military campaign bordered on a vacation.

Regular communications reached him from the Second Army. The intent was to approach Benthicalia from two directions; from the flat, shelving plain at its base and from the deep reef above. A coordinated attack by the two spralaker armies would force the city’s defenders to divide their forces. Gravity would aid his own troops as, once over the outer walls, they cast themselves upon the inner city like grains of sand stirred up by an earthquake. The tremors that would shake and finally destroy Benthicalia would come from the feet of his soldiers.

The senior officers were confident. Few of them had supported the previous limited incursions into the southern reefs, even though these had resulted in the destruction of the town known as Shakestone and the near taking of the much larger community called Siriswirll. The Marshals had always argued for an all-out onslaught in force. Now they felt they had been given the troops to do the job.

“The mersons and the manyarms are swifter and far more agile,” Mud Marshal Cavaumaz had pointed out, “but we are individually strong, and we have the advantage of numbers. If we stick to our strengths we will surely win the day.”

Certainly the First Army was an impressive force. Incorporating soldiers drawn from throughout the many species of spralaker who lived in the northern waters, they covered the reef lines and ridges with their bodies, advancing sideways in endless number. Legions of impressed or engaged eagle, bull, golden, and manta rays transported hundreds of fighters at a time across chasms too deep to scuttle or too wide to swim.

Though they brought supplies with them, both armies felt free to live off the sea bottom, scavenging as they marched. Entire reef systems were scoured of life as the two armies advancing in parallel consumed everything along their route down to the coral polyps themselves. Unallied fish, inadvertent invertebrates, slow-moving mollusks, innocent worms and panicked nudibranchs—all vanished into the thousands of voracious, ever-hungry maws of the two spralaker forces. Small villages unfortunate enough to lie in the path of either army simply vanished. Such pleasant encounters offered the tirelessly marching soldiers welcome diversion in the form of entertaining opportunities to pillage and murder. As for the fate of the residents of these unceremoniously obliterated communities, the usual taking of prisoners was superceded by the need for both armies to continuously replenish their respective larders.

For the one in charge, the long march to the southwest passed pleasantly. Never in any danger, Gubujul essentially had an entire army at his personal beck and call. The day eventually came, however, when the lights of Benthicalia could be discerned as a faint glow in the distance, and the time for relaxation and effortless if minor triumphs was at an end.

Crouching respectfully before him on the last ridge line facing Benthicalia was the trio of spralakers who comprised the First Army’s strategic brain trust. Each had risen through the ranks to assume the exalted title of Mud Marshal of the Hardshelled. Two were crab-folk. Bejuryar was a smaller but no less fearless member of the same species as the Great Lord himself. Cavaumaz was a fiddler, whose great metal-inlaid right claw was ever poised to snip off a piece of any subordinate who disappointed him—or the head of a merson. Smallest but perhaps toughest of all was Taww, a squat lobster whose mastery of tactics had seen her overcome physical inadequacies that would have soon discouraged a lesser spralaker.

“Everything is in readiness, Paramount Advisor.” In a sign of deference Bejuryar dipped his eyestalks forward. “We await only your command to begin the assault.”

Gubujul wished for more light so as to render the jewels he was wearing suitably magnificent. He felt certain that their bioluminescent bezels were insufficient to adequately accentuate his carefully sculpted splendor.

“What word from Marshal Xorovic and the Second Army?”

“They are in position, Paramount Advisor.” Cavaumaz gestured with his oversized right claw. The inner edges of the enormous pincer had been ground to battle-ready razor-sharpness, their gripping edges refined and filed down to killing points. “Xorovic and I have worked together in the past, on traditional smaller raiding expeditions in the far north. We know each other and our mutual stratagems well, and will act as one.”

Gubujul’s multiple antennae bobbed and weaved as his much smaller front pincers opened and closed nervously. The magnitude of what he was about to unleash weighed heavily on him.

“I have complete confidence in you all. I will look on, and be available to give what advice and suggestion I can, but will otherwise stay out of your way.”

Insignia gleaming in the reduced light, Marshall Taww scuttled slightly forward. “We will be relying on you, should the need necessitate, to introduce into the forthcoming clash those special weapons with which you alone have been furnished, Paramount Advisor.”

Nodding, Gubujul glanced reflexively across the stone mount in the direction of his personal retinue. Squatting there among other attendants and servants, four stout spralakers surrounded an oval container that had been fashioned from the upper shells of a pair of captured and long-since consumed hawksbills. Polished to a high, dark brown sheen, the shimmering turtle-shell crate contained certain disturbing talismans the use of which the dread Sajjabax had charged to Gubujul’s care and to Gubujul alone.

The Paramount Advisor quite understood the Marshal’s concern. Knowing what sinister devices the box held and having been instructed in their use, Gubujul was as afraid for himself should he have to make use of them as he was for their intended targets. In fact, he was downright terrified of the glistening container’s contents, though of course he dared not show it.

“Do not worry,” he assured the diminutive Marshal with more bravado than he felt. “If and when the need for such intervention arises, I will be there to support you with a sampling of the supreme sortilege of which only the great shaman Sajjabax himself is master.”

If what lies within doesn’t tear me to pieces first
, he concluded bleakly to himself.

O O O

At first there was panic. It was to be expected. While remote villages and far-flung foraging parties working the most distant northerly reefs had historically been subject to occasional isolated attack by roving packs of enterprising spralakers, Benthicalia’s size and strength had kept it from ever being assaulted. That reputation combined with the status enjoyed by the resident and revered Tornal had been sufficient to ensure the city’s security for hundreds of years. Suddenly finding itself threatened by not one but two entire spralaker armies came as a shock that found its residents unprepared.

Order was restored quickly enough, however, as municipal authorities unlimbered long-dormant plans for the city’s defense in the event of such an unlikely assault. A principal reason Benthicalia had never been attacked was simply because it
did
boast strong, if untested, defenses. When broken, the seals on long disused armories revealed mountains of weaponry. This was rapidly dispersed among an increasingly resolute citizenry. The giant deep-water anemones that thrived atop many buildings were alerted to their forthcoming duties via communication with the fish that lived among them.

Comprised of thousands of coral structures, the maze that was Benthicalia was turned into a death trap for any spralaker that might make it past the city’s outer defenses. Even an aged manyarm, if well-armed, could prove nearly impossible to extract from a hole. Any merson could swim circles around an armed spralaker. Citizens invested with long-established rank were quickly assembled into a determined, mobile fighting force under the supervision of the professionals who were responsible for defending travelers and the general population from marauding sharks and other more conventional threats.

Befitting a community its size, Benthicalia rapidly put into the field two contingents of willing fighters each of which by itself was far larger than the force that had driven the invading hardshells from threatened Siriswirll. Confidence and determination soon replaced the panic that had greeted the initial reports of the spralaker incursion. Now under arms, citizens and soldiers alike prepared to defend their city, increasingly confident in their abilities and in the knowledge that in the collective wisdom of the Tornal they were supported by an accumulation of strategic skills that stretched a thousand years and more into Oshenerth’s storied past.

Like a flat stone caught in a slow but strong current, the bemused contingent from Sandrift and Siriswirll found itself swept up in the frenzied preparations for the defense of the city. Drifting above the ancient, eroded outer wall of coral blocks that enclosed and protected the north side of the terraced metropolis from spralaker attack, the visitors from the upper reefs argued among themselves how they could best be of assistance in the forthcoming clash. As transients they constituted an independent entity that would be allowed to make its own decisions and operate according to its own rules. So long as their actions did not conflict with Tornal-transmitted tactics, they could participate in the forthcoming fight however they saw fit.

While there was little doubt among the visitors that they were obligated to take part in the great battle to come, there was at least one who was not afraid to dissent.

Floating in near darkness high above the city wall, his face visible only because of a necklace of semi-soft luminescent tunicates, Chachel peered into the dark distance and voiced his discontent.

“We helped to save Siriswirll and nearly got killed for our trouble. We’ve come all this way to Benthicalia so that Oxothyr could ask his question of the Tornal.” Turning slightly in the water, he looked to his right. “If the danger that brought us here in the first place exceeds that threatened by this impending onslaught, shaman, shouldn’t you ask your question and see us away from here before chaos erupts all around like the black smokers that surround the city?”

“I might have expected you to say something like that.” Nearby, Jorosab growled his contempt. “I’m only surprised it took you this long. Of course, someone missing half a leg and a whole eye might be expected to be hesitant to go into battle against a fully-equipped army.” When Chachel refused to be baited and simply ignored him, the muscular Sandrift soldier used his spear to gesture at the city behind them. “These people need our help.”

Chachel gazed stonily at his colleague. “So does the shaman.” His attention snapped back to Oxothyr.

Everyone needs my help
, the elderly octopod mused tiredly. Individuals like the changeling. Towns like Siriswirll. Cities like Benthicalia. Perhaps all of Oshenerth. With every passing day he was increasingly aware of the burden that had been placed on him by his damnable perception. He would have been happy to be free of it. Yet he could no more ignore what he sensed than he could blind himself to the neediness of those depending on him.

I should have mated
, he thought wearily.
I should have had offspring.
How he longed for the peaceful, scholarly confines of his secure, silent abode in the reef near Sandrift! For the time to study, to learn, to analyze. Instead of private revelation he found himself compelled to spend precious life-hours preserving public welfare. He was only able to rationalize his continuing efforts by reminding himself that if the lands of the reefs fell to the looming threat from the north, his cozy refuge would be overwhelmed as utterly as that of any simple villager or farmer. While not a deciding factor, it was nice when private needs inadvertently benefited the public good.

He could have simply fled. To the distant west, perhaps, and its mysterious but purportedly hospitable waters. He could have taken Sathi and Tythe with him and left the defiant Chachel and the confused changeling Irina and all the bewildered and panicky inhabitants of Sandrift and Siriswirll and Benthicalia and all the other towns and cities of the south to their own devices. But that, in its turn, would have given rise to another problem.

He would have been obliged thereafter to live with himself.

He became aware they were all staring at him, his two anxious famuli included. So many eyes, so many needs—merson as well as manyarm. Knowing they were expecting him to respond, he raised one arm.

“You are both correct. Jorosab is right when he declares that the people of Benthicalia deserve our support.” Penetrating eyes shifted in the dim light. “Chachel is right when he says that we should stay focused on the greater danger. You ask me to resolve the conundrum. I need not do so because it is resolved for us.”