Oshenerth (35 page)

For the first time since the two spralaker armies had laid siege to Benthicalia, mersons and manyarms alike found themselves outmaneuvered in the water column. The mersons were stronger than the barracuda but not nearly as fast. Their manyarm allies were as fast but not as agile. Dashing in and through the ranks of the startled defenders, the spralaker riders picked off merson and manyarm alike before they could even strike back. Arrows and short spears did the damage. Arrows and spears—and the great barracuda’s terrible, terrible teeth.

A silver silhouette chevroned with black shot past Irina before she had a chance to fling a spear at it. Below her, Poylee thrust out sharply. Her blade cut only water. Looking back, the spralaker riding the rear of the barracuda that had just grazed the two women let loose an arrow whose momentum thankfully was sufficiently reduced by the intervening distance so that it only nicked Irina’s left shoulder.

She looked down at herself in surprise. In all the battles in which she had participated, this was the first time she had been cut. Dazed, she gawked at the gash and the free-flowing fluid, black at this depth, that was leaking out. The sifting curlicues of her blood reminded her of Arabic calligraphy.

Something slammed hard into her right side. Blinking in shock, she found Poylee gazing angrily back at her.

“Are you going to rise whitebelly up like a dead fish or are you going to
fight
?”

“I—sorry, Poylee.” There was nothing wrong with her right arm, Irina realized. “You strike. I’ll cover you.”

The merson’s responsive nod was curt but approving. Soon the two of them were joined by half a dozen other defenders, a mix of mersons and manyarms. As minutes passed, Irina found herself agonizing less and less over what she had come to realize was little more than a surface wound.

In addition to the weapons wielded by their riders, each barracuda carried slung beneath its missile-like body a narrow, cylindrical tube of hollow bone. These slender, capped containers had been carefully treated to give them an impermeable lining commensurate with Sajjabax’s special instructions and incantations. As the school of predators dispersed across the city, their riders began to unstopper the tubes. Whenever a barracuda dipped head-down, some of the contents spilled out.

Spilled. Looking on from a distance, Irina had not expected that. She could see the thick, cohesive fluid, heavier than water, catch the blue-green light as it trickled and coiled downward in dozens of sinuous semi-transparent streams. Only when the first drops touched upon a structure and she could see the consequences did the truly invidious nature of the spralaker assault strike home.

“Poylee! Tell the others. Tell everyone: don’t get near the liquid the barracuda are spreading!”

Though waiting attentively for the next spralaker ground assault, the fighters around her were sufficiently alarmed by her tone and conviction to turn in her direction.

“Why not?” Poylee wondered. “If it’s only liquid …”

“It’s not just ‘liquid.’” With the point of her spear Irina indicated the place where she had seen the syrupy fluid make contact. “It’s
acid
!”

Sure enough, where the diving barracuda had spilled the partial contents of its slender container a hole had been eaten right through the roof of the affected building. Irina feared that if she swam over to the cavity and looked in, she would be able to see the powerful unidentified acid continuing to eat its way all the way through to bedrock.

She found herself wondering: if the spralakers had possessed such a weapon all along, why had they not used it instead of the lumbering and far more vulnerable homaridae to try and take down one or more sections of the inner wall? A possible explanation struck her: their supply of the corrosive solution must be limited. They had held it and its special barracuda delivery system in reserve for a time when it could be unleashed to inflict maximum damage on the city—and maximum psychological damage to its stressed inhabitants.

There was a horrible logic to it. She could imagine how the city’s non-fighters must be reacting to this new and unexpected means of assault. Thinking themselves safe, children and the elderly would now flee in mindless terror as the supposedly solid structures of their community literally dissolved around them. The resulting confusion and panic would find them inadvertently interfering with the city’s hard-pressed defensive efforts—and in fleeing and exposing themselves, they would present the easiest targets of all to the waiting spralakers, who as she had already seen drew no distinction between fighters and non-combatants.

It was happening before her eyes, as more and more of the blurringly fast barracuda spread the contents of their containers across the length and breadth of the city. The crowns of elegant spires were reduced to lumps of melted calcium carbonate while expansive holes appeared in the roofs and walls of prominent public and private buildings. Even the graceful filigreed Palace of the Tornal was not spared from the attentions of the acid. The water resounded to the battle cries of triumphant spralakers, the challenges of still-defiant mersons, the gallant hisses of manyarms, and the screams of fear and alarm as panic began to spread like a virus throughout the metropolis.

What of the city’s other battlefront, she suddenly found herself thinking? If another squadron of the seemingly unstoppable barracuda had also attacked from the deep west, then all might be lost. It struck her abruptly that she might well die here, far away from not only her own world but from the sun. Doomed to sink to the bottom of an alien ocean, there to decompose and become food for mindless scavengers.

Well, if that was to be her fate, at least she would not die alone. Poylee was on her right, flashing eyes alert, lethal spear aimed outward. The spralaker riders were coming so fast and from so many directions now that there was no need to seek out a place where the enemy was present. They were everywhere. Gripping her own weapon, her shoulder throbbing where she had been cut, Irina prepared to sell her life dearly.

Stationed above Benthicalia’s nearly silent south wall, a pair of bow-armed cuttlefish could both see and hear the spreading breakdown of the city’s defenses. Though they longed to swim to their companions’ aid, they had been explicitly charged with defending this so far unassailed side of Benthicalia lest the ever-devious spralakers seek to open a new front to the south. So preoccupied were they with the raucous, mounting chaos inside the city that they nearly forgot to run the occasional check on the section of intact wall they were supposed to be guarding.

When they finally did turn and take notice of the astounding emergence from the far south, it was almost upon them.

The two stunned cephalopods gazed outward in awe. The lights coming toward them out of the darkness were brighter than anything either of them had ever seen. Well, that was not technically true. They were not as bright as the hot yellowness that illuminated the shallows beneath the mirrorsky. They were not as intense. To be entirely honest, they only did just qualify as breathtaking.

Both guards tilted their bodies back, back, their tails eventually pointing toward the ground as they gazed upward at the thousands upon thousands of discs and streaks and splotches of blue and green and red bioluminescence passing directly above them. Thousands that shone from barely one or two hundred bodies.

Drinking in the awe-inspiring sight, the smaller of the two cuttlefish found herself at a loss for words. Her cohort was struck almost as speechless, but finally did manage to blurt out a few words of greeting, as forcefully as he could.

“Welcome to Benthicalia—cousins!”

— XXIV —

Having already released their containers of acid, a trio of barracuda riders had trapped Irina and her companions against the side of one of the city’s tallest coral towers. As the swift silver slayers and their pale riders drew closer and closer, tightening the circle around the increasingly disheartened and fatigued defenders, out of the corner of an eye Irina saw another group of swimmers approaching from the vicinity of the Tornal’s palace. That holy of holies itself was threatening to succumb beneath a steady, withering assault; not only from the barracuda-riding ghost crabs but from the first columns of spralaker ground troops who had begun to pour into the city through the broad gap that had been made in the North Wall.

The small band that was hurrying toward her now was not comprised of spralakers or their allies, however. While she recognized none of the other fighters, there was no mistaking the bulky cephalopodan figure in the middle.

“Oxothyr!”

Hearing Irina’s joyful shout, Poylee took her attention off a circling barracuda long enough to join in the changeling’s excitement. Recognizing the shaman from Sandrift, she let out an elated cry of her own. The relief he was bringing with him might only be temporary, but it was most welcome.

Rushing in upon the circling barracuda from behind, Oxothyr and his followers managed to wound one and scatter the others. However fleeting, it was a victory of sorts, though the fighters surrounding Irina barely had strength enough left to taunt the retreating enemy with a few defiant shouts of their own.

“Thanks for coming, Oxothyr.” Irina regretted she did not possess sufficient armature to greet the mage appropriately, in the manner of his own kind.

“I could see you were in serious trouble.” A familiar S-shaped iris rotated toward her as a pair of arms gestured back the way he had come. “There was little more I could do at the palace in any case.” Another tentacle slipped around her shoulders, and a fourth around Poylee’s. “I am glad to find you both still alive, with all limbs intact.”

“More or less.” Irina pointed out the cut on her arm, then nodded forward. Doubtless awaiting reinforcements, two of the barracuda who had attacked the small group continued to patrol back and forth in front of the cluster of exhausted defenders. Their spectral hardshell riders held their short bows loaded and ready, waiting for an opportunity to strike.

“I am prepared to die.” Hovering beside Irina, scarred and weary, Poylee looked resigned.

“Do not be in such a hurry to give up your life, which has enriched and irritated so many others in equal measure.” Raising his voice, Oxothyr addressed the surviving defenders who had gathered around him. “All of you, hold your positions and stay alert!” Turning in the water, he looked back across the ravaged but still radiant city. “Something terrible is coming out of the south. I
feel
it.”

Open-mouthed and open-gilled, Irina stared fixedly at the inscrutable shaman. “I’m sorry, Oxothyr, but if that was meant to be encouraging, it wasn’t.”

His body turning an unexpected pale blue striped with jade, the wizened octopod turned back to her. “I suppose I should explain further. This time, little changeling, the something terrible is on
our
side.”

Spears aimed outward, remaining bows drawn taut, the small band of mersons and manyarms waited. The pair of barracuda and their spectral riders continued to sweep back and forth in front of them to prevent any escape. Ominously, they were soon joined by two more. Setting aside the shaman’s perplexing assurance, Irina steeled herself for a final fight, expecting the quartet of barracuda and riders to charge at any moment.

And then, just like that and without warning, the four argent assassins and their deadly riders turned tail and shot away, disappearing at high speed in the direction of the despoiled North Wall. In their wake they left a small knot of stunned mersons and manyarms. Even well after it was clear that they had fled, neither Irina nor Poylee lowered their weapons.

“What …?” Irina started to say.

Her question was interrupted by a new disturbance. Something was roiling the water. Looking around, she saw that every one of her fellow defenders was also struggling to maintain their position. Something was seriously perturbing the sea around them. Whatever it was, to displace so much volume at once she knew it had to be massive.

They were.

She saw the lights first. So strong was the approaching phosphorescence that whole sections of city around her were thrown into increased relief. Struggling against the disturbance and mindful of Oxothyr’s pledge, she fought her way around the tower and against the push of moving water to see what was coming.

Squid. But not just—squid.

The force of oncoming manyarms were electric with their own bioluminescence. And riding the one in the lead was none other than the master of merson moroseness, the phlegmatic yet ever defiant Chachel. Stretched out flat, his legs trailing behind him, he clung with both hands to the leading edge of his mount’s right fin. Beside him, a manyarm of modest size hung on with all ten—no, seven—of its tentacles. On the other side a small but determined octopod rode proud, for all that he was facing backward. All that kept them from being swept off the fins to which they were clinging was a cone of calmness: a small but very useful bit of water magic that had been called forth by the merson hunter.

The tail fin from which their bodies fluttered like flags was bigger than they were.

The water displaced by their collective mass shivered the towers of Benthicalia as nearly two hundred giant and colossal squid came thundering into the city. Spreading out, they began to pick off would-be pillagers; sometimes singly, often in whole groups. Giant squid with bodies more than twenty feet long snatched up spralakers and crushed them in powerful hunting tentacles extending another eighty feet in length. Desperate barracuda and their frantic ghost crab riders were plucked from the water as if they were standing still. Not as long but more massive, with enormous glowing eyes greater in diameter than a merson was tall, colossal squid weighing many tons crunched their way through the terrified invaders, ripping them apart with telephone-pole thick arms whose suckers were lined with brutal, curving hooks.

Rallying to the enormous swarm, the city’s surviving defenders let out a collective bellow of defiance as they counterattacked. Driven from pathways and walls, rooms and acid-eaten buildings, panicked spralakers fled toward the open plains of the north and the depths to the west.

In Benthicalia, it began to snow.

At first taken completely aback, Irina finally managed to catch several of the drifting flakes in her hands. It was not snow, of course, but rather bits and pieces of shell. Spralaker shell.

Her reverie was interrupted by the chirupping arrival of two cephalopods considerably smaller than the leviathans who were driving the invading spralaker armies from the city and its surrounds.

“Good thing you sent us to look after the others, Master.” Floating before Oxothyr, Sathi was letting his arms do additional talking.

“Yes, they never would have made it without our intervention,” piped up a cheery Tythe from alongside his colleague.

“The thing was—well enough done,” Oxothyr conceded by way of grudging compliment.

Irina expected him to say much more, but that was not the shaman’s way. But if his words belied what he was feeling, the chromatophores in his skin did not. He turned a bright, congratulatory mauve as he shifted his position slightly to face the emissary Oultm.

“It is plain that I do not have to press you, noble one, for the details of your diplomacy, as the success of your efforts is self-evident.”

Fluttering his eight arms just enough to position himself in front of the two famuli, Oultm the envoy halted before the shaman. For all that he was significantly smaller, the emissary managed to appear no less impressive.

“As had been surmised, the task did not prove to be an easy one, esteemed mage. Normally of a gruff and solitary disposition, the great ones of our kind had gathered, as they do in one place only once a year, exclusively to mate. Needless to say they did not take kindly to our presence, to our persistence, or to our entreaties.”

“They talked of making us food!” Tythe blurted indignantly.

“Yes, quite,” murmured Oultm, dismissing the interruption. “Yet by dint of perseverance and, need I add, the execution of great skill …”

“Nearly got
us
executed,” Sathi muttered from behind him.

“… I was able to convince them that the danger of which you spoke, venerable Oxothyr, would ultimately expand to embrace and overwhelm even them, in all their solitude and strength. Better for all, for them as well as for their smaller relations and their ancient friends the mersons, to begin to confront that danger here, at Benthicalia.”

Arms drifting petal-like about his person, Oxothyr gazed thoughtfully at the diplomat. “But the danger of which I spoke involves a malevolence as yet unidentified, and may have nothing at all specifically to do with rampaging spralakers and their noxious ilk. That is why we need to consult the Deep Oracle.”

The envoy shrugged orange. “Yes, well, I left that bit out, you see. In diplomacy as in other endeavors, avoidance is not a lie.”

He would have said more, much more. After all, even the lowliest diplomat delights in the opportunity to elaborate on a triumph. But Oultm did not have the opportunity, as he soon found himself swarmed by jubilant mersons and elated manyarms anxious to offer their personal congratulations.

Beyond this and the many other pockets of joy that were springing up among those who realized that the city was saved, outside Benthicalia’s walls a slaughter had commenced on a scale not witnessed in Oshenerth since primeval times. What little she could see of it from her present high location left Irina appalled. Despite the depredations they had inflicted, she found herself feeling almost sorry for the fleeing spralakers.

Able to do little enough against free-swimming mersons and normal-sized manyarms, the besieging hardshell armies had no counter for the two species of gigantic squid. In their defense, neither would most any other creature in the sea. Tentacles like steel cables swept the ground clean of whole platoons of soldiers. Beaks powerful enough to bite through iron crushed the shells of the largest invaders. Tooth-lined suckers ripped fleeing fighters inside out, paving the battlefield with internal organs that had been pulled from their protective shells. From a distance the bobbing, weaving bioluminescent lights of the giant and colossal squid gave the battlefield the look of a nocturnal airport gone berserk.

The shrieks of the hundreds of dying were no less terrible for not being human.

O O O

Defeat came to the spralaker First Army on the cusp of its greatest victory. One moment its multitude, led by the acid-deploying barracuda and ghost crab strike force, had begun to swarm into and take the city. The next, all found themselves overwhelmed by prodigious horrors from the deep.

To Gubujul’s credit, though no master of battlefield tactics himself, he was quick to descry the catastrophe in the making. As soon as he saw the gargantuan manyarms descend upon and begin to wreak unstoppable havoc on his troops, he gave the order to flee and disperse. He did not wait for confirmation from his Mud Marshals. The critical avoidance of complete annihilation could not wait on an afternoon of respectful discourse. Nor did he hesitate to apply this universal ruling to himself. Gathering his personal staff around him and commandeering a squadron of crack reserve troops, he set off on a northeast heading at the maximum speed that could be made. He would deal with any recriminations and second-guessing later. Were he not to keep himself alive, he reasoned, he would not be able to participate in any such post-conflict discussions.

Certainly the logic of his flight was unassailable.

Bejuryar received word while he was trying to withdraw to join up with the Paramount Advisor and his unit. As he was retreating from the vicinity of the North Wall, the plain around him was suddenly thrown into bright relief. Along with the troops accompanying him he found his eyestalks tilting back as he looked upward.

Something was descending toward them. Back home in the northlands on certain especially clear nights, when the mirrorsky was at its most tranquil and transparent, he had witnessed a similar phenomenon. Ripples in the mirrorsky shattered the night light into a thousand shimmering points of radiance. It was a sight that delighted the eyes and pleased the hearts of all who were privileged to observe it.

Here at depth the resemblance to that grand vision now found itself echoed. Echoed, and transmogrified into a tangled, writhing horror that was soon ripping the legs and claws off screaming soldiers all around him. Scuttling to find a way clear, shoving and pushing his way through ranks of terrified troops, the Mud Marshal sought to escape the hook-lined arms that reached and tore and eviscerated. Turning wildly, he caught a brief glimpse of a glowing blue-green eye that was bigger around than his shell was broad.

Then something angry and irresistible yanked his eyestalks out of his body, purging him of both vision and consciousness.

Though smaller than many of the fighters who were fleeing all around her, Taww dug her short but strong legs into a small thumb of rock that protruded from the plain and tried to rally them. Her efforts were futile. No shouted words, no furious commands, no orders no matter how forcefully delivered could stem the rout. Discipline within the First Army of the Northlands had imploded completely. It had become every hardshell for themselves.

Occasionally and in desperation she would thrust the long, curved knife gripped in her left claw at random into the fleeing rabble. Such warning thrusts did nothing to slow the retreat or stem the panic.

“Cowards!” she screeched. “Abandoners of eggs, deserters of burrows! Fugitives and renegades! Stand and fight! Are the claws of the First Army now good for nothing but the scraping of algae from rocks?”