Queen of the Depths (24 page)

The fierce current bashed her once more then whirled her lifeless, flopping body beyond the reef. Small fish came to feed on her then fled when a colossal shadow engulfed them all.

Though dead, Tu’ala’keth could still see the prodigious octopuses and weresharks when they writhed and glided across her field of vision. What she couldn’t do was turn her head to behold the far huger entity whose familiars they were. She both yearned to see and was glad she couldn’t. Her instincts warned that the sight would be too much to bear, that ecstasy or terror might extinguish her utterly.

But she could pray, if only silently, and it seemed appropriate that she do so: I am trying to do my duty, great queen, as best as I understand it. It has taken me to strange places. Places where I am clumsy and ignorant. Places where I lose my way. Still I persist.

The answer came back as a wordless surge of passion as nuanced and intelligible as speech. At its core was malevolence. Umberlee hungered to destroy any creature who engaged her attention, her own priestesses included. But cruelty wasn’t the dominant note in the complex harmony that was her thought, but rather, subordinate to exhortation and a sort of cold, conditional approval.

The message, reduced to its essence, was this: You are on course, but the time grows short. Kill for me. Kill everything that stands in the way of your goal.

With that, the goddess and her retinue moved on, disappearing as quickly as they’d arrived. Tu’ala’keth’s heart thumped and kept on beating thereafter. The water flowing into her gills washed the blighted immobility from her limbs. Her broken bones knit, and new skin flowed over her wounds.

It was time to reconstruct physical reality. She quelled the currents then added the contours of the vault, the heaps of eggs, and Yzil to her visualization.

In so doing, she shifted her awareness back to the mundane world, but remained deep in trance even so. Though free of pain, her body was exquisitely sensitive, as if from the battering her spirit had endured. It

enabled her to feel water flowing and yielding all the way across the chamber.

She was reluctant to move or unveil her eyes for fear it might dull her newfound powers of perception. Still, Yzil, an acute observer in his own right, discerned a change in her.

“Can you speak?” he asked.

She decided she could. “Yes.”

“You traveled a long time.”

“I journeyed all the way to the Blood Sea, in Fury’s Heart.” It was there Umberlee herself had deigned to recognize her. She felt a pang of wonder and wished she could speak of it, but it was too holy and private an experience to share with an unbeliever.

“Did it do what it was supposed to?”

“Yes, but this is new to me. I did well to send the guards away. As I suspected, their movements might have confused my perceptions and blinded me to the emergence of our foe.”

“I hope it does emerge. While your spirit was away, it occurred to me that the enemy, if it understands our situation, need only take a night off. Then we won’t be able to vanquish it and will have to endure the consequences of our failure.”

“Nonsense. If the entity does not destroy any eggs, we will claim victory, and how can Shex refute us?

The ‘chitl chuckled. “When you put it that way, I don’t suppose he can. I’ve missed that shrewd mind of yours. I’m lucky you returned just when I could make use of you.”

“As I am fortunate your situation is desperate enough that you were willing to promise aid in return.”

Except that it wasn’t truly a matter of luck. It was possibility, pattern, and energy rising from the boil of coincidence that was the universe to guide and empower those who embraced the furor. But she knew she didn’t

need to explain it. Yzil, himself a cleric of chaos, albeit vowed to a lesser deity, already understood.

“You never really told me who it is you want to attack,” he said.

“Dragons and the coven of necromancers who worship them.”

He eyed her askance. “I’m not sure I ever heard you joke before.”

“Nor have you now. I told you it would be difficult, but-“

She sensed surreptitious motion and pivoted in that direction. Something was there, hovering above a pale mound of eggs, but she couldn’t make out what. It clutched one of the soft orbs in its jaws, fingers, or claws and squished it to jelly then it was gone.

“Do you see it?” Yzil said.

“Almost,” she said. Trailing strands of slime, an egg bobbed up from another pile and ruptured into goo and drifting specks.

“We need better than ‘almost,’” the ixitxachitl snarled. Flat, flexible body writhing, lashing tail defining mystic figures, he rattled off a prayer. A virulent darkness billowed across the chamber like an octopus’s ink, but lacking a clear target, failed to achieve an effect. As it faded from existence, a third egg crumpled and burst.

Tu’ala’keth focused … focused … gradually discerned intermittent flurries of motion… then suddenly saw the creatures clearly.

They weren’t invisible in the technical sense, but might as well have been, for they were made of the same saltwater that surrounded them, congealing from it to break the eggs then dissolving back into it. It was the reason no ward could keep them out. They could manifest wherever water was, and in Seros, that was everyplace.

Their forms were flowing, inconstant, swelling

and dwindling from one second to the next. A double-headed eel became a crab then passed from existence into lurking potentiality. A dolphin-thing abandoned any semblance of a fixed shape for the oozing bell-shaped body and trailing tendrils of a jellyfish. The constant transformations made them difficult to count, but there were at least half a dozen.

That was too many, but Tu’ala’keth reassured herself that at least she had a fix on them now, and they were some breed of water elemental, subject to the innate authority of a waveservant no less than fish and ixitxachitls. She gripped the drowned man’s hand and evoked a flare of Umberlee’s majesty.

The intangible blast hurled them backward, and their presence on the physical plane became more definite. Though still twisting from one shape to the next, they were no longer bleeding in and out of the world entirely, and Yzil exclaimed as he spotted them at last. Tu’ala’keth’s display of faith hadn’t destroyed or cowed them, but it had, for the moment, frozen them in a condition that would enable her and the ‘chitl to come to grips with them.

If Yzil’s eyes could make out the elementals, so could hers, and the profound relaxation of a trance could slow her in battle. With a pang of regret at sundering her mystical communion with the waters, she unveiled her eyes and embraced her normal state of consciousness. A thrill sang along her nerves as her physical senses regained their former immediacy.

The elementals charged, agitating the water around them and blowing apart two of the egg mounds. The gleaming ovoids tumbled and rolled.

Yzil snarled an incantation. The spirit in the lead, currently clad in the form of a hammerhead shark, frayed apart and crumpled in on itself at the same time as the magic cast it back to the otherworld of limitless water that was its natural home.

The others kept rushing forward.

Trident leveled, Tu’ala’keth declaimed a prayer of her own, to exert a momentary mastery over the watery substance of the remaining spirits’ bodies. When she felt the elements of the spell lock into place, she bade the creatures rip apart. Two of them faltered, flailed, and when the spasm passed, continued the advance as if afflicted with palsy.

But they kept racing in as best they could, and their comrades with them. A murky thing shaped like an enormous angler fish opened its jaws wide to seize Tu’ala’keth in jagged fangs.

She drove the coral trident into its face. Its substance writhed, and she hoped she’d struck it a mortal blow. But it started to resolve itself in the guise of a squid, its long, fleshy lure becoming one of the tentacles. The limb lashed her across the face.

The blow snapped her head back and mashed and cut her lips against her teeth. But she refused to let it stun her, and when the elemental reached to enfold her in its arms, she dived beneath the writhing tangle, rolled, and speared it in the body. It gave a cry like a wave shattering on a rock then burst into a thousand droplets, which at once lost cohesion in their turn.

Two more elementals were maneuvering to close with Tu’ala’keth but weren’t in position quite yet. She had time to begin another incantation and to look about and check on Yzil.

Despite his needle fangs and toxic vampire bite, the devitan, like most members of his race, had no liking for close combat. Accordingly, he’d fallen back into a corner and sealed it with a curtain of seething, whispering gloom. Elementals probed it and battered it but hadn’t yet managed to break through. He proclaimed another banishment and shoved a spirit in the form of a sea snake back to its proper level of reality. In so doing, he punched a hole in the wall between the worlds

that, in the instant before it healed, made Tu’ala’keth’s entire body ache like a rotten tooth.

She retreated, dodging attacks, giving herself time to complete her conjuration. Fangs locked on her shoulder. The pressure was excruciating, but the bite didn’t pierce her silverweave or spoil her prayer either. A second blue-green trident sprang into existence and launched itself at her attacker, a malformed, translucent mockery of a tiger shark. The elemental recoiled from the stabs, releasing her in the process.

Just in time: her other adversary lunged at her. Presently in mid-shift from lobster to fish, it was pincers, eye stalks, and segmented shell in front, fins and undulating piscine tail behind. Alas, the ongoing metamorphosis didn’t make it awkward or unsteady.

Tu’ala’keth faked a dodge in one direction then kicked in the other, flummoxing the spirit for an instant. She rattled off a spell, and an earsplitting howl roiled the creature’s liquid body. It didn’t kill it, though.

Pincers stabbed and snapped, trying to shear her to pieces, then flowed together and became a set of gaping jaws big enough to swallow her whole. She cried Umberlee’s name, praying for rage and the power it brought, and lashed out with all her strength. The green coral tines of her weapon plunged deep into the roof of the elemental’s mouth. She reached inside herself, evoked another measure of the pure raw essence of soul and faith, and sent it blazing up the shaft. The spirit exploded into harmless water.

Once the threat disappeared, she realized Yzil was declaiming the rhyming words of a spell. His shadowy shield was gone. An elemental in the guise of a moray had him in its gnashing jaws and was chewing him to bloody shreds but without disrupting his concentration

The eel-thing wavered. Holes burst open at various

points along its form as though several unseen blades had stabbed it all at once. It screamed and flew apart, and across the vault, its kindred suffered the same fate.

All but one. “Wearing the guise of a porpoise, it fled for the exit. Yzil called the trigger word, activating the magic pent in the arch. Seething with a hint of gnashing jaws, darkness bloomed in the opening.

Trapped, the elemental wheeled to face its foes. Yzil rattled off the opening words of another banishment. His body was a patchwork of gory wounds, but thanks to his vampirism, they’d already started to close.

“No!” said Tu’ala’keth. “Do not!”

Yzil abandoned the spell uncompleted. The spirit rushed him. Fortunately, the disembodied trident Tu’ala’keth had conjured remained in existence and, at her silent command, hurtled through the water to interpose itself between the porpoise-thing and its target. The elemental veered off to avoid being impaled.

“Why shouldn’t I kill it?” Yzil demanded.

“Because,” she replied, “it is unlikely the elementals found their way from their world to ours by themselves or would have cared about smashing the eggs even if they had. Someone conjured them, and if we break this one to our will, it can tell us who.”

“You have a point,’ said Yzil. “What about the V’greshtan binding?”

“If you carry it ready for the casting, I can supply the responses.”

They began the intricate contrapuntal incantation. The gathering magic turned the water hot one moment, chill the next. The elemental lunged at them repeatedly but couldn’t slip past the darting trident of force.

As Tu’ala’keth declaimed the final syllable, a complex symmetrical structure of glowing red lines

and angles sizzled into existence around the elemental. It looked like a geometer’s model of an essential three-dimensional form rendered in light. Additional strands of power passed through the center of the cage, connecting the vertices defining one face with corresponding points elsewhere. Suddenly transfixed by dozens of the needle-thin scarlet beams, the spirit howled and thrashed.

“Submit,” said Yzil, “and I will lessen the pain.”

“I submit,” groaned the elemental, its voice like the hiss and rumble of the surf. Its porpoise body melted into shapelessness.

“Who sent you?” the devitan asked.

The spirit hesitated. “Master, you bound me, I acknowledge it, but I still bear another’s yoke as well. I cannot—” Tu’ala’keth felt Yzil assert his will, bidding the magical cage to hurt its prisoner. The elemental broke off speaking to scream and flail anew.

When the paroxysm passed, Yzil said, “I control you now. I have the power to torture and kill you. I and no one else. Answer my question.”

The spirit shuddered as incompatible compulsions fought for dominance. Finally, it whispered, “Wraxzala.” Its liquid substance churned with agony.

“Wraxzala,” Yzil echoed, surprise in his voice.

“Who is that?” asked Tu’ala’keth. Her torn lips throbbed, and she evoked a small pulse of healing energy to blunt the discomfort.

“The vitan of one of the temples here in the city,” Yzil said. “She’s ambitious, like all of them, so it makes perfect sense that she’d try to discredit me. If His Holiness strips me of my offices, it makes room in the hierarchy for her to move up. I’m only surprised because I imagined Shex responsible for this particular treachery.”

“Because, being the Vitanar’s envoy, he seemed by far the greater threat.”