Oshenerth (3 page)

“How many skins does the creature have?” a bemused Glint wondered as he watched the operation.

Dragging the last of the limp black husk off over the artificial fins, Oxothyr cast it to one side. It drifted to the floor like a dead thing.

“Why are you surprised? Most spralakers shed their skin many times. True, this visitor far more nearly resembles a merson, but we must not suppose that superficial similarities necessarily hold true throughout the entirety of its demonic form.” Extending an arm, he prepared to remove the second, shimmering green inner skin.

This time the demon resisted, strongly. Not wishing to force the issue, Oxothyr promptly withdrew the probing arm-tip. Setting aside for the moment the matter of skins within skins, he reached up and let the tentacle tip crawl across the transparency that covered the upper portion of the demon’s face. It was hard and unyielding, like the clear crystals the mersons sometimes mined on another part of the sea shelf. Then there was the matter of the peculiar bubble-emitting construct that the demon continued to hold tightly in its mouth. Reaching up fast, he gently but firmly plucked it out.

It immediately began to discharge a free flow of bubbles, not unlike certain special places on the ocean floor. Clutching at it desperately, the demon took it and shoved it into her mouth. The continuous flow of bubbles ceased, to be replaced by periodic bursts from one side of the apparatus.

Waving an arm through the flow in order to sample its composition and consistency, an astonished Oxothyr pulled back. “Remarkable! Simply remarkable.”

“Remarkable enough to eat?” wondered Sathi aloud.

“Remarkable enough to kill?” added a hopeful Tythe.

Ignoring them, the shaman turned toward the attentive hunters. He made no effort to hide his shock. “It seems impossible, yet there can be no doubt of it. The demon breathes void!”

Though he had more respect for the shaman Oxothyr than he did for any of his fellow mersons, Chachel was not quite ready to freely countenance such an outrageous claim.

“Wizened One, how can something breathe nothing?”

“I do not know.” Oxothyr continued to hover directly in front of the motionless visitor. “Tales tell only of dead demons found. It is certain that the dead do not breathe at all. But I am convinced this wonderment before us is real.”

Using his two padded hunting tentacles to keep the pair of hungry servants at arm’s length and away from the tasty corpse of the blacktip, Glint exhibited as much curiosity as his merson companion. “How can you be sure, Master Oxothyr, that the demon is not a scout for the still unidentified danger of which you have previously spoken?”

“Admittedly, I cannot be certain of that because the nature of the peril is still unknown to me.” Extending and spreading two arms wide, Oxothyr drew them slowly up and down the merson-like flanks of the creature. The gentleness of his touch seemed to calm her. “I can only say that for a demon, this she-thing behaves in a decidedly undemonic manner.”

As if to deliberately give the lie to the shaman’s charitable assessment, the creature raised her left arm, jabbed a finger at the crystalline face of its strange bracelet, and started to swim upward, using the light shaft that split the chamber for a guide as she kicked hard toward the surface. It took Chachel, Glint, Sathi, and Tythe’s combined strength to hold her down. She struggled violently for a moment, trying to free herself. Then, as if resigned, she simply went limp in the water.

Leaning in close, Chachel peered at the transparency that covered the demon’s face. “Its eyes are closed.” He shook the figure. The feel of the bare arms was strange under his fingers, almost as if he was gripping a manyarm instead of a merson. In response to his shaking, the eyes behind the plate fluttered slightly but did not open more than halfway.

Coming nearer, Oxothyr brought one eye close to the peculiar bracelet. “This is a device of some strange manufacture.”

Freed for the moment from the need to defend the shark from the darting depredations of the shaman’s servants, Glint offered his own opinion. “Whatever its function, the demon is obsessed with it. During our journey home, she looked at it every other moment. Do you have any idea what it does, Wisearms?”

Oxothyr turned dark brown spotted with white, a sign of negativity. “The unobvious requires study.” Reaching out with a tentacle tip, he felt of the apparatus that protruded from the creature’s mouth. The irregular flow of bubbles it had been emitting had undergone a sudden and dramatic decline. With another arm he pushed at the body. It drifted backward in response as the creature made no effort to ward off the shove. Its eyes remained closed and its head lolled to one side.

“I think it is dying,” he murmured. “The void it inhales to live is gone, or going. Something must be done, and quickly!”

“Why?” An indifferent Chachel had drifted backward. “It’s a demon. Perhaps it is time to let it die.”

Oxothyr favored the hunter with a reproving gaze. “I do not know why the other villagers take the time and trouble to insult you when you do such a commendable job of doing so yourself.” Arms curling, he pushed away from the hovering body. “Consider that while this creature may not be a component of those disturbing rumors I have been perceiving, it may know something about them. In contrast, dead persons are notoriously uninformative.” Extending his eight arms in all directions, the shaman made simultaneous contact with both sides of the chamber.

The chromatophores in their skin flashing excitement in rippling waves of silver and gold, the two famuli obediently released their respective grips on the hovering demon’s legs and shot into the tunnel that led into the depths of the shaman’s home.

“Magic be coming!” Sathi squealed excitedly.

“Coming is magic!” Tythe added redundantly.

Clutching the dead blacktip tightly, Glint started to back toward the entrance to the mage’s lair. One eye fastened on the drifting Chachel. “You heard the squirts! Aren’t you coming?”

“No.” Chachel remained hovering where he was. “I want to watch.”

“Those who linger too close to a shaman’s magic sometimes find themselves caught up in it,” the cuttlefish warned him.

“Go if you want. I’m staying. I might learn something.”

“Like how to be turned into a limpet,” Glint muttered nervously. But despite his apprehension, he stayed his flight to remain with his friend. It would not do to admit, even to himself, that a merson could be braver than a manyarm.

Before their eyes, Oxothyr began to spin. His extended arms churned the water until Chachel and Glint had to grab onto the surrounding rock to keep from being swept up in the strengthening maelstrom. As its velocity increased, the whirlpool the shaman was generating began to acquire color. The deepening of hue, the change from transparency to a fiery blue, suggested that everything in its vicinity had begun to descend. It had not. The shaman’s home remained where it was, solid rock and coral affixed to the seabed. Only the light deepened.

Oxothyr’s voice rose as he recited ancient axioms. Intoning the phraseology of the primordial depths, he summoned forth the deep water magic that was known to only the wisest of the wise. Within the roaring water outlines began to appear; streaks of light that seemed alive, flashes of mindful brightness, flares of shape-shifting scintillation that were the essence of ocean. Within the tunnel that led to the rest of the shaman’s house, the two squid alternately gushed expressions of exhilaration and fear. Reflecting their heightened emotions, their slender bodies rippled with color.

Glint managed to maintain firmer control of his chromatophores, though he was still frightened. Never before had placid Oxothyr demonstrated this degree of power. This was intoxicating conjuring indeed. The water spun as the wizard spun; faster and faster, threatening to sweep up the sand below and drag down the plankton above, not to mention pull in his visitors and his servants alike.

But not the demon. It remained as it had been, hovering vertically in the water, eyes closed, head lolling to one side. Now not even small bubbles issued from the device held loosely in its mouth. Oxothyr reached toward it with an arm. How the shaman managed to do this while the rest of his body continued to spin like a vortex was a puzzlement sufficient to cause Glint to doubt the evidence of his own eyes.

The powerful suckers on the mage’s extended arm pulled first one flexible fin and then the other off the demon’s feet. They were instantly swallowed up by the howling maelstrom. Reaching forward again, the tip of the probing tentacle gently grasped the transparency covering the demon’s face. Pulling it up and off, the mage cast it aside. Coiling its way around the creature’s back, the powerful limb that somehow stuck straight out of the roaring whirlpool gripped the metal contraption lying against the demon’s spine, pulled it free, and allowed it to be swept up in the screaming eddy that filled the chamber. As the cylinder was flung toward the mirrorsky, it trailed several lengths of black tubing. One such tube terminated in the no longer bubbling device that had been clamped between the demon’s lips. Eyes closed, the demon continued to drift motionlessly.

Then, as Oxothyr’s manipulating arms started to spin the demon in a dark blue vortex of her own, she began to change.

Between fingers and toes, proper webbing appeared, thickening and securing each digit to its neighbor. On the back of each calf, the first hint of fin burst through the skin to thrust upward and out. The flesh on either side of her throat began to ripple. Not from the movement of water against it, but from within. Distinct as grooves cut in rock, four lines appeared on each side of the demon’s neck. Mere streaks at first, they quickly darkened in response to the mage’s resonant drone. Soon eight flaps of skin, four to a side, were open and undulating. Open and breathing. Squinting hard while clinging to a rocky outcrop, Chachel was just able to make out a hint of redness behind each open flap.

Sucking in a sudden, sharp breath, the demon gasped, choking visibly. Its lungs cleared and its eyes opened. Eyes whose lenses had become thicker. The creature looked around wildly. Oxothyr slowed his spinning. Like a scallop caught in an eddy, the octopus drew his arms in toward his body. As they contracted, so did his voice. The ferocious swirling that had filled the chamber slowed, shrank to a tiny spiral, and vanished. The blue-black of the ominous deep was replaced by normal daylight falling from beyond the mirrorsky overhead. Behind the shaman, Tythe and Sathi slowly began to emerge from the tunnel. Their eyes were wide with astonishment. But then, Chachel mused, a squid’s eyes are always wide, though not always with wonder.

Letting go of the outcropping, he finned curiously toward the floating demon. Emerging from where he had taken shelter in the entryway, Glint joined his friend. Chachel was pleased to see that the cuttlefish still held the body of the dead shark. Awe was all very well and good, but it did nothing to fill an empty belly.

Hovering in the water column, the demon blinked; first at Oxothyr, then at Glint, her gaze finally coming to rest on Chachel. Not knowing what else to do, he put his fingers over his mouth in a sign of friendship. Hesitantly, she raised a hand to imitate him. That was when she discovered, or realized, that the bubbling-emitting device was no longer clamped between her lips. Eyes widening, she thrashed frantically for a few seconds. When she finally calmed down, she drifted and gaped at the webbing that now linked her fingers. None of those present had any idea what she might be thinking.

Turning a slow circle, the transmogrified demon examined her surroundings. Absently, she reached up to scratch an arm, her chest, then her neck. When her newly webbed fingers reached her throat and encountered the first of her gills, they paused. Fingertips felt gently, then more urgently of the distinctive flaps. Two fingertips pushed inward. Understandably, she choked.

A changed demon perhaps, Chachel thought, but not necessarily a more enlightened one. This supposition was further confirmed when both her hands came up to feel more fully of the gills on either side of her neck, her mouth opened surprisingly wide, and she fainted.…

— III —

Irina Malakova loved the sea. Simply sitting in it, treading water, or lying on her back on the surface literally washed away all the weighty cares and concerns of everyday life. Her love had only deepened when she had learned how to scuba dive. It became her release, her vacation, and her therapy. Her passion for the hobby sometimes exasperated her friends and family, but she didn’t care. Whenever she could find the time, she would go diving. Whenever she managed to scrape up enough money, she would book a trip to some faraway place with a strange-sounding name where the underwater scenery and its flora and fauna were new and exotic.

But not this new. Not this exotic. And certainly not this threatening.

The danger had initially manifested itself when, entranced by a patrolling moray free-swimming out of its customary hole in the reef, she had wandered away from her dive partner to follow the serpentine shape as it hunted along the rim of the steep coral drop-off. Her enchantment had only deepened when she had been lucky enough to see it actually catch and devour a brilliantly colored queen angelfish. Only then had she come back to reality long enough to realize two things: none of the other divers, including her partner, were in sight, and her tank was half-empty.

As she worked to retrace her route along the reef’s edge, her usual quiet confidence in her diving abilities gradually gave way to increasing concern. Hadn’t she come this way? Or had she first swam outward from that odd-shaped bommie? Despite the presence of deeper water below and the sky overhead, the reef seemed to take turns and twists she didn’t remember. Once, the sky itself seemed to contort crazily, as if she was swimming at an angle instead of parallel to the light. She was starting to get hungry, and dehydrated. Still there was no sign of the other seven divers from the boat.

Something was wrong. The reef itself was all wrong. Though the coral looked familiar enough, and the creatures that crawled over it, and the fish that swam among it, somehow it did not feel right, did not feel natural. Had she been down longer than she thought? Or deeper, and having come up too fast, was now suffering from the hallucinations that could be caused by nitrogen narcosis? She glanced at her left wrist. Though her dive computer appeared to be functioning normally, there were worse things than a complete failure of the vital device. Defective instrumentation supplying faulty information could be more dangerous than one that had gone dead and displayed no information at all.

Of one thing she was now certain: it was time to terminate the dive. Once on the surface, even if she did not see the dive boat, she could utilize everything from the blare of her dive alert horn to a bright orange safety sausage to a dark emergency slick contained in the breakable tube in her buoyancy compensator pocket. Ascending slowly, careful to rise no faster than the bubbles from the regulator in her mouth, she paused at ten feet for a four-minute safety stop before kicking the rest of the way to the surface.

Once her head was clear of the water she let the regulator fall from her mouth, inflated the BC, and sucked in fresh air. Turning a slow circle, she scanned the sun-filled horizon for the friendly silhouette of the dive boat. There was no sign of it. Its absence was no immediate cause for panic. Searching for her, it might have gone first around the other side of the island where she and the other divers had been dropped off.

Except there was no island.

She blinked. Everything was far, far more wrong than she had initially thought. Uninhabited and fringed with coconut palms, the island had been there, several hundred meters of solid ground extending to north and south. As she stared, the sun blazed down, heating the synthetic material of her black and blue diveskin. She spun wildly in the water, looking frantically to left and right.

Where was the island? Where was the dive boat? In every direction, on every horizon, there was nothing to be seen but flat blue-green sea.

Impossible
, she thought as a fearful panic began to take hold. It was impossible. How could she have drifted so far? She had kept the reef on her left or right at all times. Could she have swam, underwater, from the island where the dive had commenced to a shallow reef so far distant that the first could no longer be seen? If that was the case, how could she be sure of finding her way back? If she descended and tried to retrace her route along the submerged reef, how could she be certain it would lead her in the right direction? For the first time in hundreds of dives, she found herself wishing she had carried a compass. But who needed a compass when one always dove with a group?

Now almost directly overhead following the late morning dive, the sun was no help in determining direction. She tried to stay calm. Keep your BC inflated, she told herself firmly. Deploy your safety sausage, crack the emergency vial and spread the surface slick, and wait for someone to find you. Let off periodic blasts from your dive alert horn. Don’t waste energy swimming to nowhere. Taking deliberate, deep breaths, she initiated the relevant emergency procedures. All the while, she fought not to think of sharks. As an avid diver, she loved being around sharks. But not like this. Not alone and trapped at the surface.

Of course, she wasn’t trapped. She still had a fair amount of air in her tank. But going down would solve nothing. Assuming her absence had been noted on the boat and they were now looking for her, it was imperative that she remain on the surface where she could be seen.

Current, she told herself. Maybe she had been caught up in some kind of unusual and powerful inshore current and it had swept her far from where she and her fellow divers had entered the water. It was true that she had gone off a little ways on her own. But she had felt no surge, experienced no dislocation. Could she have fallen asleep and then become caught up in a current, to finally awaken unaware of what had transpired? Such incidents had been documented, had been known to happen to exceptionally relaxed divers.

Surely she had been missed by now. Surely her dive partner or someone among the crew would have noted and reported her failure to return to the dive ladder at the stern of the boat. Surely.

She clung to that thought all the rest of the day and on into the night, until darkness and exhaustion overcame her. The gentle swell rocked her to sleep as ably as any consoling hand.

She knew no sharks had found her during the night because she was still intact when she awoke. A quick scan of her surroundings revealed the continuing and increasingly distressing absence of islands and boat. If an island, any island, had been close at hand, she could have swam for it. If nothing else, an island would have coconuts, which (if she could manage to open them) promised food and water.

Thinking of food and water while adrift on a landless sea was not conducive to her continued mental health.

The tropical sun, so often a welcome visitor on her vacations, had turned into an unresponsive, remorseless, soul-sucking antagonist. While the thin suit-integrated hood of her diveskin provided some protection from the direct unrelenting rays, the synthetic fabric’s dark color also absorbed heat. By afternoon she was half-delirious.

At least, she thought crazily, I can always splash cool water on my face. It was her last conscious thought before she passed out for the night.

Her second morning adrift brought no relief. Pivoting in the water to keep her face pointed away from the rising sun, she slipped the regulator into her mouth and started kicking feebly toward a point of reef that rose to within a few feet of the surface. If she was not too weak, she could try standing on it for awhile. While it would not make her that much more visible to any searching boat, it would allow her to stimulate different muscles in her legs.

She stood thus, with only her upper body out of the water, for as long as she could maintain her balance. Despite the heat, she dared not slip out of the diveskin for fear of becoming sunburned. When her thigh muscles could stand it no longer, she slipped reluctantly back into the water, letting her inflated buoyancy compensator carry her wherever it might.

She had the regulator in her mouth when she passed out. It was still there when she felt herself being pulled under, though the sight of the big cuttlefish that was dragging her downward nearly caused her to spit it out as she screamed.

O O O

Memory of her abandonment and desperate situation vanished as she contemplated her remarkably revised circumstances. Apparently, she no longer needed the regulator, nor the pressure hose attaching it to the aluminum air tank, nor the contents of the tank itself. Or her rubber fins, or any of the other accoutrements that were normally required to keep a human being alive and mobile while underwater. If the touch of her own fingers were to be believed, she had sprouted gills, along with webbing between her fingers and toes and fishy fins on the backs of her calves. Almost as amazing as her new gills were the altered lenses of her eyes. Though open wide, they did not burn, and she found herself able to see as clearly as if she was still wearing her mask.

She had been transformed. By the same process that had transformed the one-eyed spear-carrying male who was staring curiously at her? Her attention flicked back and forth between him and the shark-toting cuttlefish drifting nearby. Was it the same colorful cephalopod that had initially dragged her under? As if they were not enough to ponder, there was also the gentle giant of an octopus hovering nearby and the pair of two-foot long squid who kept darting in to cop exploratory feels of her emerald green swimsuit and its contents.

She realized with a start that she was no longer cold. She ought to be on the verge of hypothermia. The water surrounding her might be bathtub warm, but body heat would still migrate from ninety-eight point six degrees internal to dissipate in eighty-eight degree seawater. Everything about her body had been altered. No, not altered, she corrected herself. Adjusted. Fine-tuned. In the most literal sense of the term, she had undergone a sea change. The alternative having been a slow death from exposure or drowning, she was in no hurry to question the transformation.

His skin color darkening to a black-flecked beige, the octopus appeared to be consulting with the two squid. That was insane, of course. Almost as insane as her male counterpart swimming suddenly toward her, halting, and asking in clipped no-nonsense tones, “What happened to you, demon?”

She understood him. Clearly. Underwater. She was not sure which was more remarkable: the fact that she could now hear clearly at depth, that his words were comprehensible, or that she hardly reacted at all when he lifted up the patch that covered his left eye and began to use a finger to wipe out the empty socket. Was she capable of replying? Surely her words would not be understood. Shaping her lips around a response, she found that when she opened her mouth to speak she did not drown. This was reassuring.

“I—I’m not a demon.”

Lateral fins rippling to propel it forward, the big cuttlefish let the dead blacktip it had been holding float free. Though its tentacles made it longer than she was, it weighed considerably less. Of course weight here, she reflected, did not have the same meaning as it did on land. Was it going to grab her again? And if so, should she resist?

Glint did not grab her. “If you’re not a demon,” he declared, “then what are you?”

She could understand cuttlefish chat. Why should she be surprised? Was this all a heat-induced dream from which she would shortly awaken, to find herself floating once more alone and abandoned on the surface of an apathetic sea? Until then, she decided, she might as well go literally with the flow.

“Yes.” The male with the spear confronted her in a manner brusque enough to be considered threatening. “You must be a demon. You were found breathing void.”

“Void?” She looked bewildered. “Oh, you mean
air
. Yes, that’s what people breathe. Or rather, that’s what I used to breathe.” She looked over at Oxothyr. “That thing
did
something do me.”

The shaman’s boneless mantle bobbed slightly toward her—an octopodian bow. “The ‘thing’ respectfully acknowledges your thanks,” he replied dryly. “Without my intervention you would have surely suffocated.”

A talking octopus. A talking cuttlefish. I’m dreaming for sure, she told herself. If only she didn’t feel so—so—overtly
wet
. Could she be sweating in her sleep, inside her restrictive diveskin?

“I’m a human being.” A hint of desperation had crept into her voice. She turned to the spear-carrier. “A person, just like—well, maybe not just like you.”

“A merson?” Chachel frowned. “It is true that you look like one now, but that is thanks to Oxothyr’s miraculous intercession. Before, you looked like a demon. The dead of your kind are known to us, albeit they are found very rarely.”

“Dead …?” It was her turn to look confused. “Oh, you mean drowned. You call yourselves ‘mersons’?”

“We do not ‘call’ ourselves anything.” Be it demon or mage-inveigled changeling, he was finding this creature less and less to his liking. “Merson is what we
are
. Do you have a name, dem—do you have a name?”

“Irina.” She did not see any point in giving her full name.

“I am Chachel.” He gestured to his left. “This is my friend and hunting companion, Glint. You have been save-transformed by the esteemed shaman Oxothyr, whose skills are celebrated throughout the length and breadth of the Keleagh Plain and even unto the depths beyond. And you still have not explained what happened to you.”

She nodded understandingly. Apparently the gesture meant the same in her dream as it did anywhere else. “I was diving—I am diving. I got separated from the rest of the group, I don’t know how. We were diving around an island. I went off by myself, which I know I shouldn’t have done, but I did it. When I surfaced there was no sign of the island, the dive boat, or my fellow divers. All I can think is that I fell asleep or otherwise lost consciousness for awhile, got caught in a strong current, and swept away. I’m not sure how long I spent drifting until now—a day, two days, a week. It was hot, and I think I lost my mind for awhile. I don’t know. All I do know is that I’d really, really like to
wake up
.”