“Sorcery!” The assailant who had been pushed aside whirled and fled, not even bothering to see if his companions were following. It happened that they were, as fast as their finned feet would propel them.
Slowing their gestures, Chachel’s hands drifted out in front of him as he watched his erstwhile assailants flee. To Irina those webbed fingers appeared unchanged. She moved toward him, wonderfully aware that the water between them had lost its momentarily inexplicable solidity.
“You firmed water,” she murmured. “Is it sorcery?”
He spoke without turning to her. “No, of course not. A ruse I learned, that’s all. If one has time to study and practice, one can do all manner of tricks with water.” Now he finally did pivot to look at her. “I have lots of time.”
Something swift and svelte zoomed in between them. Wrapping herself around Chachel and ignoring Irina, Poylee proceeded to plant a swift succession of kisses on as many exposed portions of the hunter’s face as she could reach with her mouth.
“Chachel, are you all right! Are you hurt? I was so worried!”
Off to one side, Glint thrust half his arms toward the mirrorsky and the other five straight down in an unmistakable cephalopodan gesture of disgust. Though conscious of being snubbed, Irina simply drifted to one side and looked on. The mini-drama being played out in the water in front of her was none of her business.
Still, it was evident that despite Poylee’s impassioned concern, Chachel had little more use for her dogged affection than he did for that of any of the other inhabitants of Sandrift. Pushing her away, he finned slowly over to where Irina was carefully replacing her knife in its scabbard.
“That’s a fine piece of work.” He gestured at her leg, added, “The knife, I mean. Demonic metallurgy, I suppose. What kind of metal is it?”
“I don’t know how they’re made. It’s just something I bought in a store. It’s titanium.”
Chachel’s one eye half closed in a speculative squint. “Titanew … I’ve never heard of such a metal.”
Hardly surprising, she thought. How metal of any kind came to be forged underwater was but one more mystery whose explanation eluded her. As she was trying to envision an underwater forge, he surprised her by kicking forward and taking her right hand in his.
“Thank you for helping me. It wasn’t necessary.” He squeezed her fingers. Submerged or not, his grip left them tingling slightly.
“I—you’re welcome. I would have done the same for anyone.”
“I know.” Eye-patch and blue eye shimmered in the light from above the mirrorsky. “That’s why I wanted to be sure to thank you.”
“That’s why I wanted be sure thank you!”
“That’s why I wanted to sure thank!”
“Why I wanted be sure to thank you!”
The brilliant red and blue-spotted sextet of coral cod who swam past just below them echoed his words almost perfectly, each repeating the declaration of appreciation in a fashion slightly different from its swim-mate. Annoyed, Chachel took a kick at them with his good leg. Their evasion of his chiding, verbal as well as physical, was effortless. Meanwhile Poylee hovered off to one side, arms crossed and expression grim. Irina was left drifting in bewilderment.
The brief adrenaline rush she had experienced in hurrying to the hunter’s aid was beginning to give way to mounting despair. Until now it had been held in check by the need subsequent to her rescue to deal with one captivating impossibility after another: humanoid folk fully adapted to living in the sea, conversational cephalopods and muttering fish, chittering crabs and a shamelessly shamanistic octopus, manyarms who boasted beaks and parrotfish that did not; all marvels suborned to the fact that she had somehow been swept up among them and co-opted to their environment. Even worse, there was nothing to indicate that anything remained of her own world. That increasingly distant reality was gone, all gone, swept away by currents marked on no map and measured in no meter.
What was she to do when the marvels grew mundane and the wonderment of it all turned sour? What skills and abilities did she have that might enable her to survive here? She could work no magic, spring no spells, tend no crops and hunt no fish—even if she could get past the unnerving fact that most of the prospective prey hereabouts was inclined to gossip. She had become a watery wastrel cast loose beneath the waves, with no way home and no prospect of finding one. Thus far she had made a number of acquaintances and no friends—least of all the capricious Poylee. Of everyone she had met, the most gracious by far had been a creature equipped with ten arms and a quick comeback. She was lost, lost, without anyone to share her peril or her pain.
What was to become of her? She didn’t know where home was and she didn’t know how she got here. She would have discussed her predicament with Chachel except that he was being swarmed afresh. Under the guise of tending to his very minor injuries, Poylee was trying her best to ingratiate herself with the hunter physically as well as emotionally.
Strong arms suddenly wrapped around Irina’s left forearm as if the extended limb was being gently gift-wrapped in a series of sucker-lined scarves. His body flashing multiple color changes and patterns, a sympathetic Glint was trying his best to distract her from the funk into which she had fallen.
“You mourn for your lost homeland.”
She mustered a smile, wondering at the same time why her eyes were not burning. Plainly, Oxothyr’s changeling thaumaturgy had altered more than just her respiration.
“I can’t help it. Wouldn’t you react the same if you found yourself physically altered and torn away from your friends and family?”
“Not really.” Proceeding to draw his tentacles in close to his body, collapse his mantle, and change his color to a lightly mottled dark brown, the cuttlefish assumed the exact shape and color of a floating rock. “As for being physically altered, I can do that any time I like. Concerning friends and family, I can meet the former anywhere and some of the latter would probably eat me if the opportunity presented itself. In a multitude of ways other than just appearance, manyarms are not like mersons.”
Neither am I, she thought bitterly.
Unfolding himself, Glint turned a bright yellow. Green ripples flowed through his body from his tail toward his head; emerald rings of enthusiasm. “Be cheerful. Tonight is the festival of Colloth, when the night light above the mirrorsky is at its brightest. Tonight you will see things you have never imagined.”
Sighing, she turned away from the sight of Poylee and an increasingly irritated Chachel. The female merson could not have wound herself tighter around the reluctant hunter had she been an eel. Not that any of it mattered to Irina.
“So the mersons have celebrations just as do my people.”
Tentacles waved at her, one snapping out to just miss a passing ocellated cardinal fish. “They certainly do, but Colloth is not their festival: it is mine.”
That disclosure was enough to engage her attention. “Cuttlefish have celebrations?”
“Not just my kind, but the squid participate as well.” He proceeded to jet around in several tight circles, like a cylindrical dog chasing its tail. “You will see, Irina-changeling, you will see. Colloth is a wondrous time for all, including mersons. Including maybe even you.” Though absent eyelids, she could almost have sworn that the cuttlefish winked at her.
What, exactly, was the significance of Colloth?
O O O
A full moon. Of course, she told herself as Poylee escorted her out of the house and they swam together toward South Sandrift. Any proper nocturnal celebration anywhere calls for a full moon. She recognized it by the light it cast through the clear water.
As they passed through the wide-open gate in the coral mesh dome that covered the north side of the village she expected to be led across the sand-filled canyon that separated the two halves of the town. She saw immediately that was not to be the case. Something different from everything she had encountered thus far was afoot. Something new.
The sweeping ca
scade of fine sand and crushed shell that occupied the slope between the two halves of the community and gave it its name was alive with busy mersons, darting cuttlefish, and several species of squid. In contrast to their more sedate cousins the cuttlefish, the more mature squid dashed about like teenagers. The slippery, silvery rockets ranging in size from a foot in length to some individuals who stretched more than eight feet from tail to tentacle tip.
While the intense moonglow penetrating the water was sufficient to provide more than enough light for making out the coral buildings that flanked the sandy central slope, the surrounding rippling reef, and its increasingly energetic residents, it was far from the most striking type of illumination at hand.
Attenuated colonies of permanently affixed bioluminescent salps outlined the doors and windows of shops and homes like so many strands of elastic Christmas tree lights. Clusters of glowing jellyfish trailing ten-foot long luminescent tentacles that resembled strips of organic neon had been tethered to the tops of individual residences. The transparent bells of their fragile bodies pulsing steadily and softly, they cast light and shadow in every direction as they strove instinctively to go somewhere.
As a by now only erratically dutiful Poylee guided her toward the middle part of the canyon that separated the two halves of Sandrift, Irina paid attention as her increasingly preoccupied hostess waved at distant friends and spoke to passersby. Visibly distracted by the escalating celebration, even those who were wary of the newcomer paid the hesitant changeling little heed. Their attention was focused elsewhere, their hearts and minds concentrating on the light prevailing over the night.
In addition to the radiant salps and lustrous jellies, Irina’s vision was assaulted by a profusion of bioluminescent fish she did not recognize. Having ascended the water column in order to join in the celebration, these flamboyant denizens of the neither regions supplied their own light. Blue, white, and red were the most common hues. All this organic illumination, however, paled beside the burst of new light that suddenly filled the canyon.
Ejected from hundreds, from thousands of participating cuttlefish and squid, ink charged with radiance spread like a luminescent blue-green cloud until it flooded much of the canyon. In the absence of current, the glowing ink lit the sandy slope with cold fire. Swirls of brighter luminescence were intense enough to occasionally force her to shield her eyes or turn away from the light. As more and more partying invertebrates arrived and added their own incandescent squirts to the accumulating mass of liquid luminosity, the slope became brighter than day.
In addition to the light they expelled, each visitor flaunted colors of their own via the chromatophores in their skin. To an awed Irina, it appeared as though the babbling streamlined shapes slicing through the water in all directions around her were engaged in a contest as chaotic as it was glorious to see who could blink the most intense hues and flash the most outrageous patterns. Utilizing their ink, some drew glowing phrases in the still water, employing an invertebrate script as alien to her as ancient Sanskrit. Others hovered in one place while turning their bodies into living approximations of nightclub strobe lights. Still others confronted one or more of their own kind to engage in exchanges of artfully patterned phosphorescence that were part dialogue, part competition, part cooperative hallucination. Coloration, pattern, writing, and verbalization carried out conversation on four levels at once. No human could have duplicated it—or made sense of it.
Neither, she surmised as she looked on, could the more limb-challenged residents of Sandrift. Though admiring of the lively exchange taking place among their cephalopodan friends, the community’s contingent of mersons kept apart from it. Clad in jewelry fashioned of gems, shells, uncorroded gold, woven pearl, and wearing their finest bikini-like garb, they chattered among themselves while making their leisurely way through the spectacular living light show.
Marveling at the pulsating spectacle, dangerously close to sensory overload, an overwhelmed Irina thought to herself, I am a butterfly, adrift in a sea of electric candy.
The presence of so much light in one place attracted reef and ocean dwellers who were active at night. While allowing curious fish to pass through, joint patrols of manyarms and mersons kept avid packs of peevish sharks and other large nocturnal predators at bay. In addition to the spears and knives that were by now familiar implements to Irina, the patrols carried the first Oshenerth equivalents of terrestrial bows and arrows she had seen. Strips of scavenged baleen made for powerful bows, while arrows were fashioned from sharpened lengths of bone feathered with bits of sea fan and salvaged gill rakers. Even very hungry predators were wise enough to avoid such deadly weaponry, especially when a big skilled squid could handle, load, and fire three bows at once. Though merson archers, with their binocular vision, were more accurate than their soft-bodied allies.
She was aware that Poylee, having finished conversing with several friends, had taken her by the hand and was urging her forward through the water.
“Come, come this way, changeling Irina! The night nears midpoint and the all-consuming ecstasy beckons!”
Letting herself be drawn forward, Irina did not know what her vivacious hostess meant by those words. She comforted herself with the conviction that no matter how one chose to interpret them, they were anything but threatening.
Then she heard the music.
It came from a band—no, she corrected herself, from an orchestra—composed of dozens, perhaps as many as a hundred mersons and manyarms. In a serpentine procession, they streamed downslope to finally coalesce into a huge ring of sound near the very center of the rising celebration. As they puffed and pounded away on an extreme assortment of instruments even the smallest of which was new to Irina, shoals of squid and clusters of cuttlefish began converging from every direction, each trying to outdo the other in the intensity and variety of brilliant colors and shifting patterns their bodies were generating.
There were drums made of stretched skin and flutes carved from hollow bone; tootling panpipes of wrasse ribs and deep-voiced horns fashioned from coral tubes. Something like a crazed set of bagpipes gone amok employed a trio of hard-working puffer fish to power it. A xylophone-like instrument composed of a school of well-trained, well-tuned silver gars was being played by a merson wielding a pair of delicate gold-tipped hammers. Hand-held tom-toms were thumped by clusters of synchronized longtoms. Last and largest of all was a living organ comprised of trained fish of every shape and size, each of whom when their tail was flicked uttered a single, differently pitched note.
Mersons appeared to favor percussion while the participating manyarms, including the first octopods she had seen that night, gravitated toward anything that could be blown. With mouthpieces affixed to their siphons, they could generate greater volume and hold it longer than any of their merson counterparts. The fact that the performance was taking place entirely underwater only served to magnify the sound. Though the melodies and rhythms, not to mention the actual sounds, were all strange and new to Irina, she thought the performance magnificent. She told her hostess so.
Poylee looked back at her and laughed. “This is not the ecstasy, silly changeling! It is all part and parcel of Colloth, to be sure, but it is not the ecstasy.” She waved a webbed hand at the storm of sound and color. “Splendid it is to see and hear, but it is not breathtaking. It does not hold your gills open to gasp. It is not all-consuming, like the ecstasy. Ah, there!” As she gestured toward the churning, thundering ring of musicians, her words were accompanied by a long, heartfelt sigh. “The nightglow is at its strongest and the ecstasy begins now.”
As if by magic (and maybe it was by magic, Irina realized), the vast cloud of glowing cephalopodan ink began to dissipate and fade. Within the bounds of the canyon itself, soon only the general glow generated by the participating manyarms remained. Those individual lights began to swirl faster and faster, the patterns they formed to change more rapidly, more frantically—almost explosively, she thought.
It had
grown dark around her. Not that far away but still in the distance she could make out the salp and jellyfish lights that lined the homes and shops of South Sandrift. Clearly the gathering darkness, the steady increase in the activity she was seeing, the strange aqueous music rising toward a barely perceived crescendo, all portended something of great significance. But what?
“Poylee, what does …?”
She spun around in the water, looking in every direction. There was no sign of her hostess. In fact, there was no sign of anyone she knew. Only the barely glimpsed silhouettes of merson shapes darting and swimming at the limits of her vision, visible only when they encountered groups of strobing manyarms rocketing to and fro through the reef’s reassuring embrace.
A shape passed close by her, moving at a different kind of speed of light. Something unseen brushed her floating tresses and she flinched instinctively though no solid contact had been made. What if, say, a preoccupied hundred-pound squid traveling at full speed ran into her in the sparkle-lit shadows? How were injuries treated underwater, where omnipresent moisture would inhibit healing? Crossing her arms over her chest and drawing her legs up to her stomach, she struggled to espy a path out of the escalating pandemonium.
“Poylee. Poylee!” She found herself yelling, then screaming. It was fruitless. Her shouts could not be heard over the hiss of sleek bodies shooting through the water around her and the jubilant thunder of the musicians.
“Here, Irina!”
A familiar voice, though not a merson one. A shape materialized out of dark water rendered hallucinogenic by drifting constellations of phosphorescent ink. She exhaled gratefully, the bubbles momentarily blocking her vision.
“Glint! So glad to see you.” She looked around. “Poylee abandoned me.
“Left you to participate, no doubt.” Pulsing orange and cyan, the cuttlefish pivoted in the water. “I suspect she is searching hopefully for Chachel. I don’t think she will find him, and it will do her no good if she does.” He turned back to her. “But why are you not joining in? Colloth is a celebration for all.”