“Nothing is known until it’s proven.” A single kick brought her close enough to put an arm around the downcast merson.
What was she doing mumbling profundities, Irina asked herself? Wasn’t that Oxothyr’s job? Who was she to be offering comfort at a time and in a place like this, where she was the most outside of outsiders? She knew next to nothing of this world. Maybe Poylee wasn’t merely speculating. Maybe she really was “sensitive” to such things. In a world like Oshenerth, where octopod shamans and ancient ammonites repelled magic cast forth by murderous crab-folk, was it any greater leap of faith to believe that a water-breathing humanoid might be able to tell when someone she was emotionally close to had expired?
She found herself holding Poylee a little tighter. Some things, it seemed, transcended physical reality. The need for friends. The need to be comforted. When the time came, she wondered dejectedly, who would comfort her?
“The enemy has breached the Wall to the south of the Clarion bulwark!” Darting to and fro among the scattered ranks of the greatly reduced reserve force, a streaking squid flashed emergency alternating bands of white and black. “Everyone is to move there to try and staunch the incursion!” Shouting alarm and strobing mad colors like a light bar ripped from the top of a police car, the squid vanished into the thinned ranks of reservists gathered behind the two females. In response to his alarm, the armed mersons and manyarms began to swim off in the designated direction.
Letting her consoling arm drift free, a solemn Irina backed away from Poylee. “We’d better go. From the sound of it, they’ll be needing every spear.”
“Yes.” Poylee collected herself, and Irina could see a little of the merson’s momentarily dimmed spirit return. “Let’s move.”
“That’s better.” Irina offered an encouraging smile. “Nothing like killing a few spralakers to take your mind off depressing thoughts.”
Poylee all but snarled. “No, you’re wrong there. I need to kill a lot of spralakers!”
“One day,” Irina told her as they swam south in parallel, “I’ll have to tell you my aunt’s recipe for cioppino.…”
O O O
Bejuryar could hardly contain his excitement when the courier delivered the report. He forced himself to steady the waving of his eyestalks as he hurried to share the news with his fellow Marshals and the amateurish but well-meaning Paramount Advisor who had been placed in command over them.
He found both Taww and Cavaumaz debating tactics over a meal of diced beche-de-mer. Rubbery tidbits halted halfway to mouths as he burst upon them.
“Stop what you are doing, my friends! Stop now!”
Sardonic as ever, Taww threw her colleague an arch look. “Stop planning the battle, or eating?”
So delighted was Bejuryar that the mockery barely registered. “Both!” He waved the sheet of flexible, flattened cartilage on which the essence of the report had been inscribed. “Thanks to the relentless effort and great sacrifice of our homaridae diggers, an entire section of the enemy’s North Wall has collapsed.”
Accepting the news thoughtfully, Gubujul was far from ready to make merry. “The outer wall?” he asked hesitantly. “Or the cursed inner?”
“As I said—both! The outer and that damnably frustrating interior maze. At last we have a clear path into the city.”
Cautious and argumentative to the last, Taww piped up. “An excellent opportunity for the enemy to lay a trap, catching our forces in a gap such as you describe when they attempt to rush forward.”
“I do not think so.” Bejuryar oozed newly minted confidence. “According to the report I received, the breach is much wider than any we have managed thus far. Too wide to pin down our brave troops as they advance.” Remembering protocol, he aimed both eyestalks at the Great Lord’s personal representative, who thus far had not commented. “The decision is yours to make, Paramount Advisor. Should we attack now with all our strength and reserves?”
Confronted with the need to render a crucial decision, Gubujul naturally hesitated.
Cavaumaz took advantage of the Paramount Advisor’s silence. “This may be our best opportunity to at long last break both the fighting strength and the will of the city’s defenders. If the gap is indeed sufficiently expansive, they will only be able to attack and slow the advance of our entering force’s flanks, near where their defensive wall remains standing. Our soldiers in the center should be able to press forward relatively unimpeded.”
“And if we hesitate too long,” Bejuryar pointed out, leaving Gubujul little room to equivocate, “they will have time and opportunity to rebuild the outer wall and regenerate the inner.”
Still Gubujul was silent. Unable to proceed without his consent, his general staff waited impatiently for him to deliver a verdict. Seeing the Paramount Advisor sunk deep in thought, Taww was convinced he must be mulling over every aspect of the critical strategic determination that had to be made. She was wrong.
Would only that I were back in court, Gubujul was thinking anxiously, being asked to deliver a decision on what style of preparation to apply to the Great Lord’s evening meal. Seeing the three Mud Marshals staring unblinkingly back at him he knew he could no more avoid the answer they impatiently awaited than he could the responsibility that he had accepted.
“If you think now is the moment of conviction, then what can I do but concur?” Unable to escape liability, he chose to seize the moment. It having been thrust upon him, he more or less had no choice anyway. Inclining all six antennae in the direction of the besieged city, he raised both long, slender, red-and-white arms, and opened his pincers wide.
“Death to the mersons! Death to the manyarms! Victory or dismemberment!”
O O O
By the time Irina and Poylee arrived with the rest of the armed reserve in the vicinity of the devastated section of North Wall, the merson had recovered much if not all of her customary vigor. Clutching her spear, eyes aflame, the smaller female was now spoiling for a fight. Even the disheartening sight of the lengthy segment of shattered city defenses that came into view as they swam over the top of the last intervening building failed to dampen her revived spirit.
“Let them come!” she growled, bubbles spurting from between her clenched teeth as she restlessly swapped the spear back and forth, back and forth, from hand to hand. “I embrace the ecstasy of evisceration!”
Irina only half heard the remainder of her companion’s bloodcurdling oaths. Her attention and her focus were on a peculiar glowing mass that seemed to be approaching the city from the northeast, streaking toward them at a height well above that of the howling spralaker horde that thronged the plain outside the walls. As she stared, it grew visibly in breadth and brightness. Had all the fighting and tension over the past stress-filled days taken such a toll that now she was seeing things? She quieted Poylee long enough to point out the oncoming phenomenon.
“More spralakers riding rays?” she asked.
“Has to be. An awful lot of them, too.” Drifting alongside the changeling, Poylee strained to see into the distance. “No, wait. On second sight, I think not. The profiles are too attenuated.” Her fingers tightened on the shaft of her spear. “This is something new.”
Irina felt herself tensing. “Whatever it is, it’s coming this way awfully fast.”
“Too fast.” Poylee’s passion gave way to new pessimism.
The lights continued to race toward them. As they passed over the rearmost ranks of the spralaker First Army, a great crustaceanal cry arose from the mass of pushing, shoving fighters. Without slowing, the vaguely cylindrical smattering of lights came straight for the city, aiming not at the wide gap that had been made in the broken inner and outer walls but at the open water space above it. By now the luminous mass was close enough for the individuals that comprised it to be identified.
Irina found herself swimming frantically backward and down, away from this latest incursion. The lights came from attacking spralaker troops, all right.
But they wer
e not riding rays.
However the spralaker invaders had managed to make allies of the huge school of great barracuda was a mystery others would have to unravel. Those who were present to witness it and increasingly to be slain by it had neither the time nor the skill to expend on hasty analysis. Two highly-trained spralakers rode each of the lightning-fast predators: one to steer and guide, the other to unleash arrows of bone and urchin from behind. Pilot and gunner, Irina thought involuntarily, employing the only references she could think of to describe the ghost crab riders who clung to the spines of the swift marauders.
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 coul
d.
“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.”