“More or less.” Irina pointed out the cut on her arm, then nodded forward. Doubtless awaiting reinforcements, two of the barracuda who had attacked the small group continued to patrol back and forth in front of the cluster of exhausted defenders. Their spectral hardshell riders held their short bows loaded and ready, waiting for an opportunity to strike.
“I am prepared to die.” Hovering beside Irina, scarred and weary, Poylee looked resigned.
“Do not be in such a hurry to give up your life, which has enriched and irritated so many others in equal measure.” Raising his voice, Oxothyr addressed the surviving defenders who had gathered around him. “All of you, hold your positions and stay alert!” Turning in the water, he looked back across the ravaged but still radiant city. “Something terrible is coming out of the south. I feel it.”
Open-mouthed and open-gilled, Irina stared fixedly at the inscrutable shaman. “I’m sorry, Oxothyr, but if that was meant to be encouraging, it wasn’t.”
His body turning an unexpected pale blue striped with jade, the wizened octopod turned back to her. “I suppose I should explain further. This time, little changeling, the something terrible is on our side.”
Spears aimed outward, remaining bows drawn taut, the small band of mersons and manyarms waited. The pair of barracuda and their spectral riders continued to sweep back and forth in front of them to prevent any escape. Ominously, they were soon joined by two more. Setting aside the shaman’s perplexing assurance, Irina steeled herself for a final fight, expecting the quartet of barracuda and riders to charge at any moment.
And then, just like that and without warning, the four argent assassins and their deadly riders turned tail and shot away, disappearing at high speed in the direction of the despoiled North Wall. In their wake they left a small knot of stunned mersons and manyarms. Even well after it was clear that they had fled, neither Irina nor Poylee lowered their weapons.
“What …?” Irina started to say.
Her question was interrupted by a new disturbance. Something was roiling the water. Looking around, she saw that every one of her fellow defenders was also struggling to maintain their position. Something was seriously perturbing the sea around them. Whatever it was, to displace so much volume at once she knew it had to be massive.
They were.
She saw the lights first. So strong was the approaching phosphorescence that whole sections of city around her were thrown into increased relief. Struggling against the disturbance and mindful of Oxothyr’s pledge, she fought her way around the tower and against the push of moving water to see what was coming.
Squid. But not just—squid.
The force of oncoming manyarms were electric with their own bioluminescence. And riding the one in the lead was none other than the master of merson moroseness, the phlegmatic yet ever defiant Chachel. Stretched out flat, his legs trailing behind him, he clung with both hands to the leading edge of his mount’s right fin. Beside him, a manyarm of modest size hung on with all ten—no, seven—of its tentacles. On the other side a small but determined octopod rode proud, for all that he was facing backward. All that kept them from being swept off the fins to which they were clinging was a cone of calmness: a small but very useful bit of water magic that had been called forth by the merson hunter.
The tail fin from which their bodies fluttered like flags was bigger than they were.
The water displaced by their collective mass shivered the towers of Benthicalia as nearly two hundred giant and colossal squid came thundering into the city. Spreading out, they began to pick off would-be pillagers; sometimes singly, often in whole groups. Giant squid with bodies more than twenty feet long snatched up spralakers and crushed them in powerful hunting tentacles extending another eighty feet in length. Desperate barracuda and their frantic ghost crab riders were plucked from the water as if they were standing still. Not as long but more massive, with enormous glowing eyes greater in diameter than a merson was tall, colossal squid weighing many tons crunched their way through the terrified invaders, ripping them apart with telephone-pole thick arms whose suckers were lined with brutal, curving hooks.
Rallying to the enormous swarm, the city’s surviving defenders let out a collective bellow of defiance as they counterattacked. Driven from pathways and walls, rooms and acid-eaten buildings, panicked spralakers fled toward the open plains of the north and the depths to the west.
In Benthicalia, it began to snow.
At first taken completely aback, Irina finally managed to catch several of the drifting flakes in her hands. It was not snow, of course, but rather bits and pieces of shell. Spralaker shell.
Her reverie was interrupted by the chirupping arrival of two cephalopods considerably smaller than the leviathans who were driving the invading spralaker armies from the city and its surrounds.
“Good thing you sent us to look after the others, Master.” Floating before Oxothyr, Sathi was letting his arms do additional talking.
“Yes, they never would have made it without our intervention,” piped up a cheery Tythe from alongside his colleague.
“The thing was—well enough done,” Oxothyr conceded by way of grudging compliment.
Irina expected him to say much more, but that was not the shaman’s way. But if his words belied what he was feeling, the chromatophores in his skin did not. He turned a bright, congratulatory mauve as he shifted his position slightly to face the emissary Oultm.
“It is plain that I do not have to press you, noble one, for the details of your diplomacy, as the success of your efforts is self-evident.”
Fluttering his eight arms just enough to position himself in front of the two famuli, Oultm the envoy halted before the shaman. For all that he was significantly smaller, the emissary managed to appear no less impressive.
“As had been surmised, the task did not prove to be an easy one, esteemed mage. Normally of a gruff and solitary disposition, the great ones of our kind had gathered, as they do in one place only once a year, exclusively to mate. Needless to say they did not take kindly to our presence, to our persistence, or to our entreaties.”
“They talked of making us food!” Tythe blurted indignantly.
“Yes, quite,” murmured Oultm, dismissing the interruption. “Yet by dint of perseverance and, need I add, the execution of great skill …”
“Nearly got us executed,” Sathi muttered from behind him.
“… I was able to convince them that the danger of which you spoke, venerable Oxothyr, would ultimately expand to embrace and overwhelm even them, in all their solitude and strength. Better for all, for them as well as for their smaller relations and their ancient friends the mersons, to begin to confront that danger here, at Benthicalia.”
Arms drifting petal-like about his person, Oxothyr gazed thoughtfully at the diplomat. “But the danger of which I spoke involves a malevolence as yet unidentified, and may have nothing at all specifically to do with rampaging spralakers and their noxious ilk. That is why we need to consult the Deep Oracle.”
The envoy shrugged orange. “Yes, well, I left that bit out, you see. In diplomacy as in other endeavors, avoidance is not a lie.”
He would have said more, much more. After all, even the lowliest diplomat delights in the opportunity to elaborate on a triumph. But Oultm did not have the opportunity, as he soon found himself swarmed by jubilant mersons and elated manyarms anxious to offer their personal congratulations.
Beyond this and the many other pockets of joy that were springing up among those who realized that the city was saved, outside Benthicalia’s walls a slaughter had commenced on a scale not witnessed in Oshenerth since primeval times. What little she could see of it from her present high location left Irina appalled. Despite the depredations they had inflicted, she found herself feeling almost sorry for the fleeing spralakers.
Able to do little enough against free-swimming mersons and normal-sized manyarms, the besieging hardshell armies had no counter for the two species of gigantic squid.
In their defense, neither would most any other creature in the sea. Tentacles like steel cables swept the ground clean of whole platoons of soldiers. Beaks powerful enough to bite through iron crushed the shells of the largest invaders. Tooth-lined suckers ripped fleeing fighters inside out, paving the battlefield with internal organs that had been pulled from their protective shells. From a distance the bobbing, weaving bioluminescent lights of the giant and colossal squid gave the battlefield the look of a nocturnal airport gone berserk.
The shrieks of the hundreds of dying were no less terrible for not being human.
O O O
Defeat came to the spralaker First Army on the cusp of its greatest victory. One moment its multitude, led by the acid-deploying barracuda and ghost crab strike force, had begun to swarm into and take the city. The next, all found themselves overwhelmed by prodigious horrors from the deep.
To Gubujul’s credit, though no master of battlefield tactics himself, he was quick to descry the catastrophe in the making. As soon as he saw the gargantuan manyarms descend upon and begin to wreak unstoppable havoc on his troops, he gave the order to flee and disperse. He did not wait for confirmation from his Mud Marshals. The critical avoidance of complete annihilation could not wait on an afternoon of respectful discourse. Nor did he hesitate to apply this universal ruling to himself. Gathering his personal staff around him and commandeering a squadron of crack reserve troops, he set off on a northeast heading at the maximum speed that could be made. He would deal with any recriminations and second-guessing later. Were he not to keep himself alive, he reasoned, he would not be able to participate in any such post-conflict discussions.
Certainly the logic of his flight was unassailable.
Bejuryar received word while he was trying to withdraw to join up with the Paramount Advisor and his unit. As he was retreating from the vicinity of the North Wall, the plain around him was suddenly thrown into bright relief. Along with the troops accompanying him he found his eyestalks tilting back as he looked upward.
Something was descending toward them. Back home in the northlands on certain especially clear nights, when the mirrorsky was at its most tranquil and transparent, he had witnessed a similar phenomenon. Ripples in the mirrorsky shattered the night light into a thousand shimmering points of radiance. It was a sight that delighted the eyes and pleased the hearts of all who were privileged to observe it.
Here at depth the resemblance to that grand vision now found itself echoed. Echoed, and transmogrified into a tangled, writhing horror that was soon ripping the legs and claws off screaming soldiers all around him. Scuttling to find a way clear, shoving and pushing his way through ranks of terrified troops, the Mud Marshal sought to escape the hook-lined arms that reached and tore and eviscerated. Turning wildly, he caught a brief glimpse of a glowing blue-green eye that was bigger around than his shell was broad.
Then something angry and irresistible yanked his eyestalks out of his body, purging him of both vision and consciousness.
Though smaller than many of the fighters who were fleeing all around her, Taww dug her short but strong legs into a small thumb of rock that protruded from the plain and tried to rally them. Her efforts were futile. No shouted words, no furious commands, no orders no matter how forcefully delivered could stem the rout. Discipline within the First Army of the Northlands had imploded completely. It had become every hardshell for themselves.
Occasionally and in desperation she would thrust the long, curved knife gripped in her left claw at random into the fleeing rabble. Such warning thrusts did nothing to slow the retreat or stem the panic.
“Cowards!” she screeched. “Abandoners of eggs, deserters of burrows! Fugitives and renegades! Stand and fight! Are the claws of the First Army now good for nothing but the scraping of algae from rocks?”
A surge of displaced water nearly knocked her off the mound, but she held tight to the top of the small finger of rock. Dropping down in front of her was an enormous tangle of arms lined with razor-edged suckers. Several of the tentacles were already engaged in the gruesome task of separating spralaker soldiers from their limbs. One arm lunged toward her. Springing to one side and out into the water column, she deflected the strike with her knife. The massive questing appendage slid past.
It was so unjust, she reflected as she found herself floating free, to suffer this loss at the very moment of victory. Bringing the monsters of manyarm kind into the fray was unfair. So of course was the use of magic, the employment of which by the Great Lord’s Paramount Advisor had been a key component of spralaker strategy. One invidious turn deserved another, she supposed. Continuing to parry and block the coiling tentacle that searched for her, she did not see the even more massive hunting arm that came curling around behind. Probably it was just as well.
It cracked her like an egg.
Of the three Mud Marshals who constituted the First Army’s general staff, only Cavaumaz escaped to join up with Gubujul’s force. Seriously reduced in strength, remnants of both the First and Second armies gradually gathered around their surviving leaders in straggling northeastward toward home. Each exhausted soldier had left many comrades and fellow fighters behind, usually in bits and pieces. The battlefields to the north and west of still unconquered Benthicalia were littered with the limbs and shells of the dismembered.
Only when they were many days march out from the defiant city did the Mud Marshal find the strength of spirit to speak to the Paramount Advisor.
“What will you do when we get home?” Looking nervously back over his shell, Cavaumaz added, “Assuming the monsters do not pursue and we succeed in safely reaching the northlands.”
“Do?” Skittering along on slender, fragile, but still intact legs, Gubujul turned a doleful eye on the tactician. “I will beg for my life, of course. As will you and any other survivor of rank. I would expect we will all end up as part of a ceremonial meal in the palace.” One long, red-banded arm gestured in Cavaumaz’s direction. “I will be honored by being a component of the main course. I fear you will have to be satisfied with being relegated to the rank of appetizer.”
Cavaumaz did not look flattered. “You think it will be as bad as that?”
“As bad?” Bubbles burst from the Paramount Advisor’s mouth as he failed to contain his laughter. “Why, that is my most optimistic assessment of our prospects, respected Marshal! More likely and much worse, we will be kept alive for the amusement of those who charged us with the success of this unfortunate enterprise.” Like the bulk of the two spralaker armies, the laughter soon died. “But even that, I fear, is still not the worst option.”
Though loath to hear the answer, a distraught Cavaumaz still found himself asking the inescapable question. “What might that be, Paramount Advisor?”
The stenopus turned to look more sharply at him. “At the Great Lord’s discretion, we will be given to Sajjabax. I would far, far rather be consigned to the tender mercies of the kitchen or the torture chamber than to the exquisite ingenuity of the mad mage.”
Cavaumaz swallowed hard. “Perhaps it lies within the demented wizard’s province to prove merciful?”
“Yes,” murmured Gubujul. “I am as confident of that as I am that when word of our final disposition is received, I will be sure to take steps to kill myself in as painless and expedient a manner as possible. You might consider preparing your own demise. One option would be to offer yourself up to the beaks of the manyarms before chancing the benevolence of the black-shining Sajjabax.”
Cavaumaz was silent for awhile, still sneaking furtive glances back the way they had come. “We had no chance against them, did we?”
Gubujul gestured wearily. “Just one more day and we would have overrun the city, dealt with its inhabitants, and ensconced ourselves so thoroughly in its maze of passageways and buildings that not even the greatest and most powerful of the manyarms could have rooted us out. One more day.” For the first time, he joined the Marshal in looking back in the direction of the distant city.
“Though diplomacy and protocol are more my métier, I have discovered that war is much like the currents that surge through all of Oshenerth. Never take anything about them for granted, for on a moment’s notice they can sweep you up and carry you away, smash you against the rocks, or spin you into the center of a maelstrom from which you may not be strong enough to extricate yourself. Nothing about a strong current is predictable or certain.”
“The judgment of the Great Lord …,” Cavaumaz began plaintively.
“No.” Gubujul lengthened his stride slightly to take advantage of the slight following current. “That much, at least, is certain. Unless …”
Though he knew his chances of surviving the fallout from the rout at Benthicalia lay somewhere on the downside of nil, the Paramount Advisor found himself beginning to plan, and to scheme. It was not in his nature to go quietly into the Empty Water.
An aide, all fluttering arms and quivering palps, intruded on his meditating. “Your pardon, Paramount Advisor, but we should increase our efforts to depart from this place.”
“Why?” Cavaumaz had enough strength left for contempt. “The battle for Benthicalia is over. We have lost. There is no need now for haste. Only for recrimination.”
The smaller crustacean inclined his body forward as a sign of respect, but a hint of defiance crept into his tone. Defiance, and dread. “Your pardon, my lord, but there is. The sharks who have been waiting Outside are now coming to seek the reward for their patience.” One claw, trembling visibly, pointed out into the darkness. The darkness that was closing in inexorably around the ragged lines of exhausted, retreating troops. Wounded, bleeding troops.
“There are thousands of them, my lord.”
O O O
Though it was a long way indeed from battered Benthicalia to the great volcanic palace of the northlands, the illustrious and all-conquering Lord Kulakak did not have to wait for a herald to bring official word of the total defeat of his armies. All that was necessary was for him to confront the tightly restrained figure of Sajjabax where the mage was held captive in his alcove.