Oshenerth (23 page)

“None of us did.” Having pushed a reluctant Poylee away from him, a plainly bemused Chachel was struggling to make sense of what had overcome them all. Irina was as curious as anyone. Unsurprisingly, it was Oxothyr who hazarded an explanation.

“In this place of darkness, the action of so many bright lights blinking in rhythmic sequence combined with suitably complimentary music had the effect of numbing one’s perception. I myself was not aware of what was occurring.” An arm gestured expansively. “There is not one of you here who is not adept with spear or knife, bow or axe. These are weapons of heft and solidity. They are far easier to parry than soothing sensations.” He turned to his assistants. “Yet when all others were entranced you two were not affected. I am most anxious to know why.”

One famulus looked at the other. It was left to Tythe to respond.

“I do not know, Master Oxothyr. I can only say that I did not feel myself influenced as you describe.”

“Nor I,” added Sathi. He seemed as mystified as his companion by their immunity to the medusas’ mesmerizing music and dance.

Oxothyr pressed for enlightenment. “You did not find the lights dominating your thinking, the music anesthetizing your emotions?” The two smaller cephalopods were united in their response.

“I just heard ringing noises,” insisted Sathi.

“I just saw some colored lights,” declared Tythe.

Oxothyr pondered their replies for a moment before turning to his attentive audience. “I think I understand what happened. While exhibiting an admirable eagerness in their chores and a demonstrable willingness to learn, neither of my attendants has ever revealed anything that might be construed as exceptional curiosity. Or even, to be charitable, what might be called average curiosity. They are loyal, and efficient, and reasonably competent at carrying out those tasks that I choose to give them. Initiative is an unknown concept to them. If they suffer from any explicit affliction, it is a certain quality of overarching dullness.” Reaching out, he put a tentacle around each of them. It was a gesture of gratitude, not intimacy.

“We need all of us to be thankful for their keen lack of imagination. They were not affected by the medusas’ spellbinding music and captivating luminance because they were incapable of appreciating it.”

As Oxothyr backed away, the rest of the expedition crowded around the two famuli to further express their gratitude. Irina was among them. It was instructive to see that even the best led and most carefully planned outing could suffer from an excess of intelligence. Come to think of it, she could remember more than one night out with her girlfriends that had ended badly when they had allowed themselves to be overcome by too much light, too much music, and too much physical attractiveness on the part of the opposite sex. On those occasions, however, salvation had not been a matter of abbreviated squid id, and had usually involved immersion in liquids of a kind other than salt water.

For their part, the two famuli soon sought surcease from the surfeit of gratitude, and were visibly relieved when the expedition resumed its journey in the wake of the near-fatal melodious interruption.

O O O

Days later they had lost not only the last of the light but whatever residual heat filtered down from the surface. She ought to have been freezing, Irina knew. Instead, she was cool but comfortable. Despite wearing next to nothing, her merson companions also showed no signs of discomfort. As for the expedition’s manyarms, they could remain comfortable throughout a significant range of temperatures.

“Why aren’t we cold?” she asked Chachel, swimming parallel to his dimly lit form. “Don’t your kind ever get cold?”

“Of course we do.” Though he would have preferred to avoid casual conversation, now that she had swum up alongside and formally engaged him, he could hardly just swim away. The hunter could be curt, he could be abrupt, but outright rudeness did not make for pleasant journeying. In such a small group it behooved everyone to remain on at least minimally polite terms with as many traveling companions as possible. So instead of brushing her off, he offered what he hoped would be a brief yet adequate explanation.

“People—mersons—can tolerate cold quite well.” He gestured downward. “Were we to go much deeper than this, we would indeed begin to suffer. But we are not so deep yet that the chill affects us seriously.” Reaching out, he touched the center of her chest, just between a pair of Oxothyr’s enchanted blue lights. Her instinctive recoil caused him to frown.

“I was just trying to make a point about pressure. Your changeling form has adapted to that also.”

“Oh. Of course.” She felt foolish. And perhaps also just a little disappointed. “I was going to ask about that, too.”

“You have a proper body now. One that is comfortable in and suited to the realworld, as opposed to your previous ugly demon form.” She did not argue his point, fully aware that any countervailing arguments she might offer would carry no weight here. “The temperature should not bother you unless it drops considerably more—which I do not think it will.” He gestured down into the blackness below them. “Do you understand?”

“I think I …”

“Good!” Having discharged his obligation to be civil, he kicked hard and shot ahead, his personal lights fading into the distance.

The man would rather kill than converse, she told herself irritably. She’d met more convivial sharks. Not to mention octopods, squids, and one particularly ostentatious cuttlefish. Why should she care about his reactions, anyway? Because he happened to have been one of two who had saved her? The more she got to know Chachel, the more convinced she became that if not for Glint’s presence on the same hunting excursion that had led to them finding her, the gruff merson would have left her to rot on the surface. He was as
boorish
a man as she had ever met.

No, not man, she reminded herself. Merson. They had even less in common than met the eye. Oxothyr was a better friend, Glint continually expressed more interest in her welfare. Then there was Poylee, who continued to treat her like some sort of otherworldly infection. Finding herself drawn closer to exotic cephalopods than to fellow bipeds suggested it was definitely time to press for a return to where she belonged.

Except that she could not find the way home without help and she could not plausibly pester Oxothyr into spending the time to facilitate the attempt. Not with a war going on. She caught herself. It was the first time she’d thought of what she had seen over the course of the past several weeks in terms of a war. The word had not been used by the mersons or by the manyarms. An oversight, she was certain. What else to call it when hostile species invaded your territory, destroyed innocent communities, and slaughtered the inhabitants? Did the mersons think by not using the word that they might somehow minimize the consequences? Surely these folk were not that foolish?

Everyone had spoken repeatedly of the abnormality, even Oxothyr. Had she landed, or rather sunk, into the first real war this world had ever experienced? Fighting was not unknown, as evinced by the enmity that existed between mersons and manyarms on one side and spralakers on the other. But perhaps such hostile encounters had previously been restricted to isolated, petty disputes. Rightly or wrongly, that was the impression she had received whenever such matters were discussed.

If that was the case, then what could have happened to change things? What was different that had caused skirmishing to blossom into full-scale hostilities?

Me.

No, that couldn’t be. She had done nothing. Only arrive, and that not of her own free will. She could not possibly be responsible for the unprecedented upsurge in aggressive spralaker activity. The cause had to lie elsewhere. It had to.

She could not bear to think otherwise.

Despite making a strenuous effort to put the unsettling notion out of her mind, she was still thinking about it that evening (evening being a relative term at such sunless depths) when she began to take notice of a phenomenon as peculiar as it was welcome, and which related directly to the question she had posed earlier to Chachel. As she continued to slowly descend, along with the others she ought to have been getting colder. But for the last hour or so the surrounding water had been growing warmer. That made less than no sense. You didn’t get more comfortable the deeper you went.

She heard the roaring before she could see the source. Faint at first, little more than a background hum, it rose gradually in volume to become a dirge, a bellow, and finally a sustained tectonic chant. Swimming just a few feet above the gray, gently undulating sea floor she reached down to touch the ground. The rocky surface was unmistakably warm to the touch, and noticeably warmer than the surrounding dark water. In addition to the heat it was emitting, the rock was transmitting subtle vibrations. She lifted her gaze. Somewhere not far ahead, the Earth was howling. These increasingly intrusive geological incongruities did not appear to trouble her companions in the least. They showed no reaction to the rising temperature or noise.

Catching up to Glint, she swam alongside the manyarm hunter. Like his fellow cephalopods the cuttlefish was a free-swimming bundle of red and green lights, a tiny tentacled blimp who occasionally cut loose with a burst of blue-white light that gave him the appearance of an escaped advertisement for some otherworldly cinema.

“Black smokers ahead,” he explained in reply to her question. “Phenomenal protrusions they are. Generating heat, and interesting smells, and supporting all manner of wondrous beings. I wish we had some on the reef: we could make more metal. But you find them only down deep.”

Black smokers—what little she knew about them had been gleaned from sporadic encounters with relevant science articles. Volcanic vents spewing all manner of superheated gases and fluids from inside the Earth precipitated out exotic minerals that condensed in deep cold to water to form stalagmite-like towers. The creatures that dwelled in similar infernal conditions in her world were so bizarre as not to be believed. What might their counterparts here be like?

She soon found out.

Not knowing what to expect, she envisioned a dozen or so erupting chimneys. As revealed in the lights of the expedition, the reality was quite different.

She was unable to count the number of smokers. By the dozens, the thundering towers stretched off into the dark distance, sending an equal number of black plumes fuming impressively upward. It was the Devil’s own calliope, belching superhot mineral-laden black smoke and water. While Chachel and Glint and the rest of the party continued toward them without pausing, she hesitated.

“We’re not going
into
that hell, are we?” she asked Arrelouf , one of the group’s two female merson soldiers.

“Into and through it, I would imagine.” The glowing necklace around her neck casting her features in soft relief, she smiled thinly. “Are you afraid, changeling?”

Irina considered. “Yes. Yes, I’m afraid. Superheated sulphides and poisonous gases have that effect on me.”

“I don’t understand your wordings, but it’s good to be afraid.” With a quick scissor kick the other woman darted forward. “It keeps one from going to sleep at the wrong time.”

Aware that by now most of the expeditionary force had passed her by, a resigned Irina hurried to rejoin them. The stentorian escaping-steam thrum of the smokers was frightening, but far less so than the prospect of being left behind in the black of the deep.

Clouds of phosphorescent blind shrimp swirled around the smokers, ribbons of living red and white that prospected the algae that in turn thrived on the rich deposits of minerals. Here in the complete absence of sunlight there was life abundant. Other bizarre creatures scrambled to make a living among the storms of shrimp, including a number of spralakers. But these were small, scattered, and few in number. Their pale white half-blind selves posed no threat to the travelers, though they invariably ran to hide when the group came into view, and hurled undersized curses at them once the mersons and manyarms were safely past.

“Be careful!”

Strong fingers wrapped around Irina’s left arm and yanked her painfully in that direction. Looking around, she saw Poylee glaring back at her.

“I’ll thank you not to grab me like that.” Irina’s tone was hard and flat.

“Fine. Next time I’ll let you boil.” With a couple of kicks, the merson moved away.

Boil? It took Irina a moment to spot the crevice she had nearly swam directly over. Little more than a crack in the earth, it had only just begun to precipitate out the accumulating mineral deposits that would one day lead to the formation of another tower. Cautiously extending an arm, she let her fingers flutter forward—only to hastily pull them back. The temperature of the narrow jet of water emerging from the unobtrusive vent was in the hundreds of degrees. Because the aperture was unobstructed and not laden with the usual dissolved dark minerals, she hadn’t noticed it. Had she continued swimming in the same direction she would have passed right over and through it—and received a severe scalding.

As the expedition moved deeper into the forest of smokers, some of which towered hundreds of feet overhead, it took her several moments to find Poylee again.

“Why did you do that?” She searched the merson’s face, seeking nonverbal explanation. “Why didn’t you let me burn myself?” She lowered her voice. “I know you wouldn’t object to that, even if I’m not sure why.”

The other woman was silent for a moment. Then, “I don’t want you to die. I don’t even, really, want you to be disfigured. That’s not who I am. I just wish, I want—I’d rather you just wouldn’t
be
.” For the second time in the space of a few minutes, she swam off into the darkness. Leaving Irina to follow more slowly and wonder why she should feel guilty for “being.”

It wasn’t long before a new noise rose above the constant, continuous rumble of the hydrothermal vents. The sound was familiar yet foreign. The nearer the group came to it the more recognizable it became. Yet Irina was still unable to identify it. There was an edge to the collective din that reminded her of something so commonplace that she was simultaneously intrigued and frustrated. Very shortly it revealed itself to the group. Awareness did not keep several of the mersons from smiling, while she found herself grinning from ear to ear.