Oshenerth (30 page)

“I honestly cannot speak to the eventual outcome, Irina. I don’t know enough about formal military tactics. I know how to cope with a school of makos, or engage in formal duel with a billfish, but military matters of this scope are outside my experience.” He gestured with his spear. “There is a difference between a hunter and a soldier.”

“I’m neither one,” she murmured softly. “My trade involves healing, not destroying.”

Kicking once, he crossed the rest of the way to her. His voice lost some of its habitual hardness. “You did well at Siriswirll. I saw you thrust.”

She looked over at him. “It wasn’t as hard as I thought. I was fighting oversized prawns and crabs—spralakers—and not people. I don’t know if I could kill a merson, for example.” Suddenly uncomfortably aware of his proximity she glanced to one side, where Glint was looking on patiently and, uncharacteristically, in silence. “And I don’t know if I can ever eat calamari again.”

“What’s ‘calamari’?” the cuttlefish asked curiously.

“Not you,” she was able to explain truthfully. “Right now I don’t want to go there.” She turned back to Chachel. “I’m helping Oxothyr because he’s helping me.”

The hunter nodded somberly, his chin almost touching hers. She was breathing faster. “Poor, honest changeling,” he murmured gently. “Nothing more could be expected of you.” Pivoting in the water, he backed off as he returned his attention to the looming spralaker horde. She swallowed. Something had just happened, and she wasn’t sure what.

“They’ll be coming soon,” he announced in his familiar curt tone. “Don’t forget—with the sidewalkers, aim your spear for the open mouth and your knife for the eyes. Watch always the sideways swing of the main claws.”

“I—I’ll remember,” she assured him. She felt she had to say something else. Something more. Keeping her voice low, she added, “Whatever happens, Chachel, I want to thank you and Glint again for everything you’ve done for me. And no matter the outcome, I want you to know that I don’t think—I don’t think that you’re a hostile, antisocial recluse.”

He looked back at her. She thought he might have smiled, albeit briefly, but she could not be certain.

“Ah, Irina-changeling, that’s where you’re wrong.”

Kicking forcefully, he moved farther away from her and toward Glint. Using every one of his ten arms, the cuttlefish had begun notching arrows simultaneously into both bows. Looking on, she considered Chachel’s words in light of his actions, seeking contradiction. Seeking, and hoping for it.

Finding it, and possibly other revelations, would have to wait until later.

Uttered in unison by ten thousand inhuman throats, a great grating, nerve-tingling ululation had arisen in the north.

The spralakers were coming.

— XX —

There seemed no end to them.

Whether the marching masses ended at the limits of her vision or extended onward all the way to the distant reaches of the lower reefs Irina could not tell. Then the first lines of foe, all spears and knives and scimitar-like claws, were assailing the great outer wall of the city and reality overcame speculation.

Just as it had been at Siriswirll, the collective assault bore only passing resemblance to an attack on land. Projectiles shot or thrown through water were soon slowed by the medium that surrounded them, though short-range thrusts and heaves were sufficiently robust to frequently find their mark. Unlike a human army, the spralaker horde had no need of scaling ladders to ascend the wall. Powerful gripping legs allowed the weakest of them to commence the vertical ascent under their own power, their climbing abilities putting to shame the most accomplished human mountaineers.

Their ease of ascent was countered by defenders who could, essentially, fly. Swimming at high speed, troops of mersons and manyarms soared above the advancing hard-shelled host, diving upon them to attack with spears and arrows. Teams consisting of four mersons apiece carried nets each of which supported a single large, heavy rock. Dropped from a safe height, each massive stone could crush the protective shells of one or more spralakers below. With so many massed targets to choose from, the stone-droppers did not even have to aim.

Their inner lights dimmed, a squad of unseen, nearly blind spralakers succeeded in scaling the wall at the level of the seventeenth terrace. In the absence of illumination their intrusion passed unobserved until they were over the top and in among the city’s noncombatants. There they murdered in darkness and with abandon until their presence was frantically noted and a troop from the community’s reserve forces was sent to surround and exterminate them.

No such difficulties of discernment declared themselves on the main field of battle, where the presence of bioluminescence in abundance permitted defender and assailant alike to see each other clearly with an eye to mutual destruction. Used to yellowish light, Irina found the blue-green-lit chaos unsettling, though no more so than the casualties that were rapidly mounting into the hundreds on the spralaker side and the dozens on that of Benthicalia. Plucked from where they lay or drifted, the wounded were rushed to medical facilities deep within the city. Stopping bleeding under pressure and under water, she learned, required the application of carefully conserved organic materials and, in some cases, more than a little Tornal-taught magic. The result was that people died, but not in numbers that would otherwise have been the case.

The clash along several sections of wall generated light enough to illuminate the surrounding black water for hundreds of feet in every direction. Still, the line of battle was so long and deep that she could see only a portion of it, and nothing at all of the equally ferocious clash that was taking place at the same time between the defenders of the city’s westernmost terrace and the spralaker Second Army. Though not privy to the reports that passed between the commanders of both locations, she gleaned enough from what little she overheard to know that the struggle transpiring to the west was every bit as hard-fought and extensive as the one taking place before her.

Lit by their own internally generated luminescence or that of the smaller creatures traveling upon them, galaxies of spralakers threw themselves at star clusters of defenders. The water above the advancing multitude of red and white and blue-tinged shell and claw was shot through with sprinting mersons and even faster manyarms. Occasionally descending to engage in hand-to-claw combat, mersons dodged around claws capable of pulling off limbs while manyarms relied on their greater agility and an occasional burst of disorienting fluorescent ink to protect themselves. Everywhere, water was suffused with blood.

It was disturbing to see that the spralakers had solved the problem of almost always having to attack while moving sideways. Riding atop their larger brethren like turrets atop tanks, smaller spralakers were able to turn and fire in any direction while their mounts maintained a steady sideways advance. This unsettling development represented yet another new and unexpected tactic on the part of the enemy.

“So much cooperation, so much preparation.” Watching the battle from a portico of purple coral behind and above the city wall, his arms writhing with anxiety, Oxothyr scrutinized the continuing offensive with evident alarm. “Something has happened to alter their customary fighting technique. The spralaker spirit has been imbued not only with new fervor, but fresh ideas. That is what unsettles me.”

“You still have no idea what’s behind all these changes you see?” Irina stayed close to the shaman, feeing safer in the shelter of his waving tentacles than anywhere else.

“Only that every time I fixate on such things I feel afresh the coldness of which I have so often spoken. I think that if I could only reach through to the source, I would find the explanation I seek. Despite my most forceful efforts to that end it remains tantalizingly out of reach.” His body turned a quietly amused pale orange. “When one has eight arms and something still remains out of reach, it is more disconcerting than you can imagine.”

To change the subject and hopefully relieve the mage of his restless discomfort, she used her spear to point toward the raging battle. “So many of the spralakers generate no light of their own, yet these thousands appear well-equipped with illumination.”

“As are mersons,” the shaman reminded her. “Yet there are some spralakers who can produce their own illumination, as can many of my own kind.” Reaching out with one cable-like arm, he eased her slightly forward. “There, to the northeast. The defense weakens. I see spralakers coming over the wall. Ready yourself.”

Clutching her spear tighter, she looked where he was pointing. Having cleared the upper parapet of defenders, lines of white shell were scrabbling over the top of the stonework despite the death frenzied mersons and manyarms were raining down on them from above. Burbles and cackles of jubilation emanated from the triumphant spralakers.

They were in for a surprise.

The enemy’s screeches of triumph proved premature. Hidden behind Benthicalia’s outer wall was a second barrier. Lower than the one that fronted it, at first glance it seemed as if it surely would prove even easier for the invaders to surmount than the first. Unlike the outer wall, it was composed entirely of deep-water red and black coral. Polyps that had been grown, cajoled, and manipulated to create an obstacle that instead of being smooth-faced like the outer wall was riddled with points, projections, and protuberances. The resulting coral maze was deep enough, tortuous enough, and sufficiently convoluted to stop a line of tanks or paralyze a mathematician.

Surprised by the presence of the second barrier, the intruding spralakers immediately started to clamber up this unexpected inner fortification. Their efforts soon gave rise to growing confusion. Amalgamated arcs and upthrusts of sharp coral defied easy ascent. They scored and sometimes even punctured the shells that scraped against them. Surmounting the initial stone knots, one heavily armed adversary after another found themselves confronting a dip, or hollow, or series of sharp extrusions. Crack spralaker troops became lost or trapped within the impenetrable, unyielding maze. Unable to advance or retreat or even move sideways, they became easy targets for the boneless manyarms who could slip effortlessly through the very same gaps that had ensnared their brawny but blundering enemies.

The scenario was repeated along the length of the central terraces. Time and again, groups of spralakers would succeed in driving the defenders from the top of the outer wall, only to find themselves cornered when they attempted to penetrate the second and far more difficult inner fortifications.

Which was not to say that damage was not done and destruction not meted out by the attacking horde. Massive spralakers swinging clubs studded with needle-sharp sea urchin spines ripped apart manyarm and merson bodies alike. Smaller aggressors hurled bundles of razor clams, urchin spines, and nematocyst sachets from short slings, bringing down swooping defenders who in search of the easier kill dipped too close to the marching multitude.

When word of the existence of the previously unseen inner defensive wall finally reached the general staff of the spralaker First Army, it developed that Gubujul’s experienced Mud Marshals had a countering tactic for it as well. Like so many of the stratagems that infused traditional hardshell warfare, it relied for success on the engagement of the slow but steady.

Big as buses, hulking multilegged representatives of the homaridae were brought forward. More heavily armored than any of their smaller cousins, they set to work with their huge front claws at chewing away sections of the outer wall. Once it was breached, they would not repeat the mistake of trying to climb over the inner coral labyrinth. They would simply, if slowly, chew their way through it as well, and into the unprotected city proper.

Seeing what was happening and quickly divining the intent, Benthicalia’s defenders immediately launched a fresh succession of attacks from above. So heavily built were the coral-grinding homaridae that stones dropped from above simply glanced off their body armor. Meanwhile, the cream of the spralaker First Army did its best to keep the increasingly desperate merson and manyarm defenders from slowing the relentless, disciplined assault.

At the same time, swarms of much smaller spralakers, lesser cousins of Gubujul and his ilk, were sent scampering over sections of outer wall from which the defenders had been driven. Armed only with small knives, these thousands of prawns and other minor crustaceans were little threat to well-armed and trained merson and manyarm soldiers. But where their larger cousins found themselves slowed or trapped by the inner coral maze, these smaller invaders were able to negotiate the tubes and tunnels, hollows and cracks. By themselves they could not take the city—but they could occupy the attention of defenders whose skills were needed more urgently elsewhere, and sow panic and confusion through the community at large.

Several came swimming fitfully up toward Oxothyr and his companions. Sheathing her spear, Irina gripped her dive knife in one hand and the curved merson weapon she had been given in the other. These diminutive crustacean warriors were weak swimmers even by hardshell standards and she had no trouble dispatching dozens of them, as did Poylee and the others. Spralaker body parts were soon raining down on the section of inner city wall immediately below. A few mersons suffered superficial scratches in consequence of the massed attack while the swifter and more agile manyarms avoided injury altogether.

But while Irina and her friends were occupied in dealing with the widespread but ultimately feeble attack with all the gusto of a clutch of amateur ninja turned crazed sashimi chefs, they were therefore unable to assist elsewhere in the defense of the city. The widespread assault by thousands of lesser spralakers was not intended nor expected to conquer, but rather to divert, tie up, occupy, irritate, and otherwise buy time for the brute homaridae to complete their task of gnawing several routes through Benthicalia’s inner as well as outer walls.

As soon as the swarm of lesser, poorly armed spralakers was sufficiently reduced in number, Irina and her friends were ordered to join in a group assault on the trio of homaridae who had breached the outer wall and had by now eaten a wide path halfway through the inner coral barrier. Weeks ago she would have been helpless to assist. Her legs would by now have been dead in the water. But day after day of swimming instead of walking had strengthened the muscles running from her hips to her feet to a degree where she could have competed seriously among the better swimmers back home. It was good that her endurance and speed had increased to the extent that they had. She was not competing for points now, or for gym club medals. Like her new-found friends, she was swimming for her life.

Soaring over the three mammoth homaridae, she joined her companions and dozens of reserve troops in launching spears, arrows, and rocks at the armored, bulldozing monsters below. “Aim for the eyes!” she had been instructed, and she tried her best to do so. Meanwhile, she had to take care to keep out of range of the weapons wielded by the homaridae’s escorts. A few of these armored bodyguards struggled to swim upward to confront the counterattack. Devoid of fins, they had to kick hard with their many legs to gain any height. While the best of their continuing attempts were invariably ineffective, Irina found herself admiring the effort that was put into them. Courage and determination were not the sole province of mersons and manyarms.

Though blinded by arrows shot from diving manyarms, one of the homaridae continued to grind resolutely forward until a succession of well-aimed stones eventually cracked the shell covering its head. Spears flung through the resulting fissures finally pierced its brain. It slowed, stopped, and was unceremoniously shoved aside by one of its still functioning brethren. A lucky arrow severed a vital nerve in a second monster, sending it running in wild circles to trample a number of its own followers. Able at last to concentrate all their efforts on the final surviving homaridae, the increasingly confident Benthicalian forces were preparing to put it permanently out of action and out of life when the spralakers launched a full-scale fresh offensive.

Chaos ensued.

Embracing a diversity of lethal jellyfish, the spralakers riding on an assortment of rays dove down on the wall’s defenders from above. The deadly coelenterates the hardshell riders wrangled had been trained to fire and release their nematocysts on command. By surrendering their poison cells in this unnatural fashion they would eventually be left without the means to defend or feed themselves, like honeybees deprived of their stingers. This concerned their handlers not in the slightest.

Caught unawares by this new kind of symbiotic attack, soft-skinned mersons and manyarms were hard-pressed to dodge the tiny but lethal missiles. While the forcefully expressed nematocysts could not travel very far underwater, at close range they could be fatal.