A Triumph of Souls (14 page)

“Want me to spell you awhile, bruther?” he called out.

The herdsman’s face turned upward. Somehow, he managed to grin.
He’ll grin when he’s on his deathbed
, Simna mused.
It’ll be the last expression he wears
.

“Thank you, friend Simna, but all is well.”

“Well as what?” the swordsman retorted. “What is it you hope to do?”

“Light a way through this confusion.” With the effort of looking upward putting additional stress on his body, Ehomba lowered
his head.

Hunkapa dropped a massive, shaggy arm over the side. “Look, look! More prettinesses!”

Simna squinted. Something was rising from the depths of the ocean. It was not large—no longer than one of the
Grömsketter
’s small boats—but it was lined with lights that flashed bright yellow and pale red. As it loomed nearer the surface he saw
that it was a fish—but a fish unlike any finned denizen of the deep he had ever seen before, either in kitchen or in art.

Its body was more than nine feet long and silvery black, but it was no thicker around than a ribbon. A single long fin ran
the length of the spine, and two tiny pectoral fins fluttered just beneath and back of glaring eyes the size of dinner plates.
Above the head three long spines bobbed and weaved, and each was tipped with a bright yellow light. Prominent in the narrow,
gaping mouth were fangs like shards of broken glass.

It was soon apparent that it was not alone.

Drawn by the light of the sword, all manner of wondrous deepwater creatures were rising to the surface. They swam and drifted
and hovered about the cerulean halo of the sky-metal sword like moths romancing a candle on a summer’s eve. As the abyssal
ascension gave rise to this luminescent benthic epiphany, more and more of the crew crowded to the port side to gape. Though
somewhat muted by the persistent fog, their reactions were a mixture of awe, wonder, and sheer childlike delight in an exotic
and beautiful phenomenon the likes of which none of them had ever encountered before.

Up came a pair of fish like bloated black bladders, one thirty times larger than its companion. Each had a single long, curving
appendage like a thin filament fishing line
attached to its forehead, from whose tip twitched a lure of irresistible intensity. Their eyes were so small as to be almost
invisible, and they burned with the fire of a hundred natural lights. Nearby swarmed a school of a thousand small silvery
fish, each flashing a thumb-sized soft blue light from just aft of its eye.

There were jellyfish larger than any the sailors had ever seen, their pulsing bells decorated with blue and green and yellow
lights that trailed fifty-foot-long tentacles of unbroken luminescence. Deep-sea sharks swept tails full of sapphire light
in steady arcs, like glowing oars in the water, and all manner of toothy fish darted to and fro in balls of intense yellow
or green.

But it was when the tiny lanterns of natural luminescence finally arose that the sea around the
Grömsketter
turned from dark to light. There were billions of them, seemingly in as many shapes and sizes, many so small that even sharp-eyed
seamen wearing spectacles could barely make them out. Ehomba could. The herdsman’s vision was particularly acute.

Then the mid-ocean merfolk arrived, showing oval, slightly protuberant eyes and gills that flashed gold around the edges.
They displayed elegant patterns of light along their sides and fins and carried short staffs tipped with transparent crustacean
bodies scavenged from the hidden places of the sea. These were filled with glowing krill individually selected for their color
and brightness. A number of merfolk rode in shell chariots drawn by man-sized seahorses that glowed brown and were harnessed
with kelp and sea-grass strips radiating an intense crimson.

The lightwhals came too. Looking like crosses between oversized dolphins and blind seals, they radiated a ghostly,
pellucid purple. There were night penguins that emitted green light only when hunting in dark seas, and merlions whose manes
were fringed with pallid lavender. The mournful, watery moans they exchanged with their land-bound cousin Ahlitah resounded
regretful and forlorn across the mist-shrouded swells.

There were deep-ocean crabs whose shells boasted imbedded iridescences in lines of intense green spotted with azure, and strange
turtles whose carapaces wore diadems of lights like pulsating jewels. Eels slithered and writhed like living lightning, while
squid and cuttlefish ranging in size from palm-sized to giants that might have been family of the Kraken itself sent waves
of opalescence rippling through their skin. Sea butterflies more colorful than any of their terrestrial counterparts flew
beneath the surface on wings tinted emerald and topaz and tourmaline, occasionally emerging from the water in jubilant bursts
of dazzling effulgence.

Drawn by the incomparable blue glow emitted by the sky-metal sword, all this great upwelling of light and life swirled around
the
Grömsketter
, disturbing neither water nor sky but overwhelming and beating back the darkness imposed by the clinging fog. Whereas before
Stanager and her crew could barely see one another clearly enough to avoid running into each other on the deck, now the excess
of spectacular natural light illuminated the sea around the ship for nearly half a mile, making not only onboard activity
but also navigation possible.

“Terious!” the Captain shouted. “Set the mains’l and the lower fores’ls! Let’s punch through this murk before our herdsman’s
flock grows bored and decides to sink back from whence they came.” Her classic profile was aglow
with light from the thousands of luminescent deep-sea dwellers that had gathered around the ship.

Simna had not left his position by the rail. “Better to worry not about losing their interest, but about my friend losing
the strength in his arm.”

It was a procession never to be forgotten by all who saw it: the graceful
Grömsketter
, sails set and making her way southwest, englobed by millions of colored lights worn by as fantastic a profusion of undersea
life as could be assembled in one place. Even experienced seamen would have been paralyzed by all that beauty, had they not
been so busy. Stanager Rose kept her crew occupied lest they lose themselves in the embarrassment of natural magnificence.

Thrust back by the luminescence, the fog began to shrivel and disperse, until a single light brighter if not more beautiful
than all those assembled began to illuminate the scene from above. Then even the blue intensity of the sword could not sustain
the interest of the visitors from the deep. In their tiny millions and larger pairs and trios they began to sink back into
the abyss from which they had risen, untold numbers of lights descending and dissipating, until, with a last silent wave of
a phosphorescent scepter, one of the deep-sea mermen saluted the ship and turned his glowing chariot ultimately downward.

The sun burned away the last of the fog, enabling the crew to put on still more sail and to flee from that darkling, benighted
patch of ocean. Then it was time to bring forth a small quantity of the ship’s precious supply of ice, kept sealed in the
darkest, coldest depths of her hull. Not to cool her crew, who were certainly sweating heavily enough to deserve it, but to
ice down the muscles of one of her passengers. Held in one position for so long, Ehomba’s left
arm and fingers had become badly cramped. The application of ice wrapped in towels might not equal the recent display of magic,
but it was blessedly effective.

While the herdsman sat on the helm deck trying to restore the flow of blood to his aching muscles and tendons, Simna gingerly
held the sky-metal sword. As always, the crosshatched lines on the blade fascinated his eye.

“How do you make it work, Etjole, if you are not the sorcerer you keep insisting you’re not?”

The herdsman would have shrugged, but his cramped shoulders would not allow it. “Practice, friend Simna. Otjihanja showed
me some things, and other elders had suggestions. It is not something to be described. You must
feel
the proper motion, the way the weight of the metal travels through the air and fights the pull of the Earth.”

Simna nodded. “You know, it’s funny. When I was younger I would have taken that as a challenge, and as a result probably tried
something stupid.”

“I do not see much that has changed with age.” Curled up against the railing that separated the helm deck from the main deck
below, the black litah murmured sleepily.

“And I do not take criticism of my profession from a yowling devourer of carrion.” When the big cat chose not to respond,
Simna turned back to his lanky friend. “Having seen what this remarkable blade can do, I would no more try to make use of
it than I would a sculptor’s chisel or a musician’s lute.”

Ehomba smiled softly. “You did, once.”

A startled Simna looked sharply at the seated herdsman. “I thought you were asleep!”

Ehomba looked away. “I was.”

The swordsman started to reply, discovered that he did
not have an adequate response at hand, and decided against it. Instead, he laid the wondrous weapon carefully down alongside
his seated friend and pulled the thin blanket a little higher on Ehomba’s narrow shoulders. The herdsman had spent far too
much time with his hand and part of one arm immersed in the cold water. Sorcerer or not, he was starting to shiver.

“I will be all right.” He smiled reassuringly up at his concerned companion. “The ocean below my village is much colder than
this, and I have spent many an hour wading and swimming in its waters.”

“I don’t care,” Simna told him. “Any man can catch a chill and die from the complications.” He looked out to sea. “Attract
like to like, you said. More like light to light. It was a grand sight. I never dreamed quite so many splendid phantasms dwelled
in the sea, and all of them lit from within by sorceral glow.”

“Not sorceral,” Ehomba corrected him. One hand held the edges of the blanket tight against his throat. “The lights you saw
were all natural, manufactured from within their own bodies by the creatures themselves. There was nothing of sorcery about
it.”

The swordsman’s forehead furrowed. “How do you know that?”

“Because many such creatures wash up dead on the beaches near my home. Their bodies are flaccid and their lights dimmed, but
they still glow for a little while after dying.” He nodded toward the clearing sky. “The waters offshore from my village go
down very deep. It must be exceedingly dark in the depths, like a perpetual night, for the creatures that live there to need
to make their own light.”

“A handy property,” Simna agreed. “There have been
times when I would have liked to have been able to shine a little light from my own body.”

The herdsman looked at him strangely. “Everyone does so, Simna. It is just that it is difficult to see. It takes practice
to separate it out from the natural light that surrounds us every day.”

The shorter man laughed easily. “So you’re saying that I glow like those fishy things? Like a jellyfish, maybe?”

“No, not like a jellyfish. The light that people, or at least most people, emit, is something very different. But you do glow,
my friend. Less intensely in ways than you would like to believe, and more brightly in other kinds. There are many, many different
kinds of light.”

“Well, at least I’m not dark.” Simna enjoyed the notion, even though he was not sure he understood at all what his cryptic
companion was talking about. “How about everyone else?” Turning, he gestured at those nearby, not really expecting the herdsman
to respond.

Instead, Ehomba rested his chin on his knees and squinted, pausing once to wipe away a lingering droplet of salt water. “The
Captain, she glows only a very few colors, but those colors are as pure and strong as I have ever seen in a person. The helmswoman
Priget emits light in fits and bits, like the sparks from a fire. That man working the ropes over there, his lights are few
and dim, but far from being absent.” The herdsman’s gaze roved the open decks.

“The lights of the first mate are also strong and unadulterated, but not nearly of an intensity approaching that of the Captain.
Certain shades and tints are completely absent in Ahlitah, but those colors he does manifest are almost overpowering.” He
sniffed and, lifting a hand from beneath the blanket, rubbed his nose.

Simna’s natural reaction to all this was to laugh heartily. But seeing the seriousness with which Ehomba was rendering his
appraisals, the swordsman could not quite bring himself to do so. The herdsman was jesting, of course. Having one of his silent,
slightly taciturn chuckles at the expense of a friend. People, much less cats like Ahlitah, did not glow. If they did, someone
as sharp-eyed as himself would surely have noticed it by now. But he was happy to run with the joke, enjoying the fertility
of his laconic companion’s imagination. His friend might or might not be the mighty sorcerer Simna supposed him to be, but
he was certainly a fine storyteller. The sincerity with which he spun his tall tales only added to their seeming veracity.

“You overlooked someone.” He indicated a large, unkempt gray mass resting on the deck like a pile of discarded rugs. “What
about Hunkapa Aub?”

Ehomba gazed thoughtfully in the direction of their humble companion. “He is a strange one. I can descry occasional bursts
of light from him, but they are very subdued and difficult to catch.” He grinned gently. “Maybe it is all that fur. Certain
things can block out a person’s light. Although I have never before known hair to do it, neither have I ever known anyone
covered with quite so much hair.” His attention drifted. “I think the rest of the day will be fine. I wonder how far we are
from Doroune?”

Simna straightened. “I’ll go and ask Stanager.”

“Yes,” Ehomba commented, “I have noticed that you and the Captain have begun to get along better these past several days.”

The swordsman winked conspiratorially. “You’ve been around me long enough by now to know that I’m a very persistent fellow,
long bruther. And not just in the matter
of lost treasures to be found.” Grinning, he turned and marched off in the direction of the helm, where Stanager Rose was
conversing with Priget.