Kai crossed both arms. “Uh huh. What kind?”
“Winner finds largest starfish in five minutes. Beat me, and I’ll convince Heracles to let you ride the kraken he imported from Crete. She’s a real—”
“Deal.”
“You didn’t even wait to see what I get if I win.”
“You won’t. I want on that kraken.”
“For the sake of full disclosure, when I win, you’re taking on an additional hour of weight training each day—”
“Ew.”
“—underwater with Loto’s junior Myrmidon infantry recruits—”
“The kids?”
“—as their mentor,” he concluded while she stared at him.
“You’re serious? Ugh, all right. It’s not like I intend to lose.” They shook on it, and at the start of the minute, rushed to their knees on the algae-covered ocean floor to sift through stars, gathering their best finds and comparing each tasty, gilded creature with another.
A flicker of luminescent gold caught Kai’s attention in passing, shining brighter than the others. She brushed a few stars aside and plucked up a few tufts of hairlike algae, unearthing a glossy, polished gem.
“Hey, Cosmas. I found a really pretty rock over here.”
“Are you trying to distract me so you can win?”
“No, for real.”
Clutching her largest star in one hand and the gem in the other, she rose and picked her way over to him across the green patches, watching each step. A sandworm had been poking the tip of its tail—or was it the head?—from one of the soft burrows littering the area, and she also didn’t fancy an enormous hermit crab testing the limits of her bladder control by dragging her inside.
Cosmas already had an impressive star in his hand. He rose to meet her as she held up her discovery. A subtle glow surrounded it when Kai raised it on her palm. “It’s so pretty.”
The moment his eyes went big, anxiety roiled through her. “Kai. That’s not a rock.”
“Please tell me this isn’t some small monster or creature’s shit.”
“No.” A quiet moment passed, during which her heart tried to break free from her chest. “I think you found the King’s Treasure, the pearl missing from the king’s trident.”
“Really? But…I thought my parents died hundreds of miles away from here, closer to—” Kai caught a hint of something rancid, strong enough to cut her off with a gag. “Do you smell that?”
“Huh. I thought I smelled something rank, but there’s always some detritus on the ocean floor. Could be a hermit crab eating a snack nearby.” He gestured to the golden sea to emphasize his point, only to go rigid, tension filling his spine. His nostrils flared, then he said in a quiet whisper, “Kai, head to Leilei. Now.”
“What’s wrong?”
“There’s a Gloombeast in the area. Possibly many. Mount up and get out of here.” He tapped the comm pinned to his shoulder. “Commander Cosmas to Central Command. We have a breach within the Atlantian perimeter. Possible scylla in the Fields of Gold.”
Central Command did not answer.
“Central Command! We have a breach in the perimeter approximately ten leagues west of the city. I need a coral glider fireteam in the Fields of Gold. Do you copy?”
Silence continued. He tapped the device a few times, then the green light blipped red and went dark.
“What the fuck? It has a fresh charge.”
The smell intensified from a subtle odor to an overpowering stench that flew up her nose and choked her with its foulness.
“Cosmas, we need to go.” She tugged his hand. “They don’t hear you.”
The sand floor swelled and rolled with movement beneath it. Cosmas shoved her toward Leilei, urging her to mount up, but when she grasped the saddle pommel, a gray tentacle shot from one of the many sandworm burrows. Panicked, Leilei shot away into the darkness, damned near taking Kai’s fingers with her.
Then the rest of the creature emerged from the ground with an enormous conical shell on its back, though it had the sucker-covered arms of an octopus. Cosmas lunged between her and the monster with his trident, features grim. His tail returned, muscular thighs merging together.
“Go after her. Push yourself and you won’t be far behind her. She knows the way home to Atlantis.” Cosmas squeezed his trident in a white-knuckled grip and eyed the ocean floor. It shifted, rolling with hidden Gloombeasts beneath the sand.
A cold wave broke out over her body, beginning in her chest and spreading until it reached her toes. “You’re not coming with me?”
“They’ll follow us if I do. They’re fast as we are, sometimes faster.”
Fuck. That. “I’m not leaving you behind.” To die for her as her parents had likely died for her. In recent days, they never strayed far from her mind.
Kai wondered if it was a memory surfacing.
“You have to. Where there’s one, there’s always many. Now follow my damn order and get out of here.”
Hoping to disguise the trembling in her voice with rage, Kai extended her spear and moved into battle stance. “I don’t have to do a damned thing you tell me, because you’re not the boss of me.”
“Kai,” he said, a warning in his tone. The thing advanced, feinting with a tentacle to break through Cosmas’s defenses. Testing them. It whipped forward and tried to sneak past the commander, but he slapped it aside with his tail.
“Myrmidons don’t abandon each other. Myrmidons battle together until the end.”
“You aren’t one of us.”
A ripple cut through the water to Kai’s left. Whirling, she followed blind intuition and thrust, impaling it on the first stroke. Sparing only a glance at the slaughtered squid on its end, she kicked it off with her boot and shot Cosmas a look.
“You’re not getting rid of me.”
Cosmas grunted. “Fine. Then listen to everything I tell you to do, and maybe we can survive this until my communicator comes online again.”
28
Blood and Gold
If Manu had blinked, he would have missed it. He hadn’t slept the previous night and had been drowsing during a portion of the patrol, searching to no avail for a plague of Gloombeasts sighted west of one of their rural settlements. He’d led a strike team with five other coral gliders into the wilderness, and none of their scouts turned up a single monster.
But to his left, his headlamps reflected off the glossy surface of a glowing shark eye. He saw it for only an instant, the telltale turquoise shade of a dusktip. As the color was a special morph designed by a topnotch breeder, it wasn’t possible to find their kind in the wild.
Manu tapped the comms. “Hold up, mers. Veering out of formation to investigate an unusual sighting at eleven o’clock. Cover me.”
He banked left and accelerated to catch up to her. Nearing her allowed him to see the fine details, making her a distinct figure with colorful patterns instead of a svelte silhouette against the blue tones of the ocean bottom.
His blood rank cold. He knew those patterns, because he’d babied that shark for three long months. He knew that pattern; he’d thought Leilei’s fins resembled a dazzling nebula and wondered if the princess would appreciate a piece of the sky even while underwater in their realm.
The shark was swimming in a panic, slicing through the water fast as a knife and without her rider. Kai was nowhere in sight.
“It’s a domesticated dusktip belonging to Princess Kailani. She’s saddled and riderless. Spread out and begin a search. I’m going to follow her into the stables.” One of the earliest things they trained their young sharks to do was return home, differing from a battle shark trained to fight alongside a Myrmidon. Some were better suited for combat than others. Leilei had been bred for speed, but she was a frisky thing, young and still skittish. But he’d seen a fire in her he thought would match Kai perfectly. What he didn’t expect was for Cosmas to agree with his observation.
Why the fuck was Leilei loose in the wilderness?
He
tapped the comms again. “Commander Manu to Central Command. Has Princess Kailani left the city?”
“She checked out about a half hour ago from South Gate with Commander Cosmas as her escort, sir. They went for a ride.”
Manu checked in with Cosmas next, praying the young shark had merely gotten away from Kai and been too spooked by an ocean predator to heed either of their commands. “Cosmas, this is Manu. Where are you?”
No answer. He tried again, stomach twisting into knots.
“Cosmas, report!” he finally barked.
His ribs hurt and the heart behind them thrummed erratically, desperately, sending tendrils of pain through his chest. This wasn’t normal.
Leilei fled back to the stables. After parking, he met her there and a young merwoman with a bucket of chum strode up to meet him, grinning. “Commander Manu, hi! Did Her Highness enjoy her first ride on Leilei?”
“I wouldn’t know, as I found Leilei alone and followed her here.”
The girl blinked. “Alone?” Her gaze darted to Leilei, thrashing in the corral and looking increasingly agitated. “She’s afraid.”
No shit, genius. “At any time did they mention where they’re going?”
“Something about gold fish…or…was it gold starfish?”
Manu stepped away and spoke into his communicator again. He needed a full patrol of gliders to the Fields of Gold, and he needed it yesterday.
Loto disagreed with Manu’s assessment. “No Gloombeast would come within one hundred leagues of Atlantis. That’s the clearance zone. Everything within the borders is clear. You know this. I understand that you’re concerned about our princess, but she’s capable of holding her own now. You’ve said as much yourself after Fare, remember? Besides, Cosmas is with her.”
A gnawing in Manu’s gut wouldn’t allow him to let it go, however. If it was so safe, why did they take so many precautions with Kailani’s life within the city? Anything could have occurred once they were beyond the wall, including an attack from the Loyalists. He leaned over the console in the communication bridge and called Cosmas three more times, waiting for an answer. “Commander Cosmas, report. What is your status?”
“I’m telling you. There’s no reason to be alarmed. The shark is young; she got away from them or was spooked while they were indisposed and too distracted by other acts to control her. It happens.”
“I don’t believe that, Loto. Assemble a squad.”
Loto raised one hand to his brow and groaned, scrubbing the same hand down his face. “Manu, if you do this and it turns out nothing is wrong, that they’re only having a bit of private time, your father is going to assign you to whale shit detail for a year. By Styx, he’ll take it out on me, too.”
“It isn’t a bit of private time. They’re not answering comms.”
“I turn mine off when I’m having a romp with the missus.”
“It’s against protocol. Anything could happen during your…five minutes.”
Loto barked out a sharp laugh. “Five is generous these days, man. When you have five children, you’re not given a lick of time or privacy. You need to get in, do your business with the wife, and be out again. We snuck a quickie in the closet three days ago with our hands over each other’s mouth so the little blighters wouldn’t find us.”
Manu blinked. “Really? I thought—anyway, back to the matter at hand. Something is amiss. It isn’t like Cosmas to do this.”
“We’ve never known Cosmas to be engaged either.”
Manu’s heart sank. Fuck, he wanted to be happy for Kai and Cosmas. He could understand the man wanting a few private moments with his new beloved, disabling his comm, and setting the device aside for a private moment. Kai deserved that.
But he also couldn’t leave it to chance. If they died because he didn’t trust his gut, he’d never forgive himself. “Then it’s all on me, brother. If I’m overreacting, feel free to tell General Lago you tried your best to talk sense into me. I’ll take responsibility for it all.”
Manu grabbed the speaker, pressed the broadcast button, and called their people into duty.
And he prayed that they interrupted a romantic early morning tryst between two newly engaged mers, because the alternative—that they were already dead—hurt too much to consider.
A squad of coral gliders cut through the algae-choked countryside west of Atlantis, zipping along the sea-road leading to the Fields of Gold. Manu piloted the craft at the lead of the formation, with a dozen more behind him. That was all he could round together and call into action on short notice, unwilling to wait longer.
Prior to their departure, he’d set Captain Leander to the task of organizing additional squads to follow in their wake, demanding no less than a platoon, overkill for a small incursion, but appropriate for the swarm that had felled Helike and Fare.
“Commander Cosmas, we are currently en route to your last known location,” Lieutenant Philemon barked into the communication channel. “If this has changed and you are no longer at the Fields of Gold, please respond. I repeat, we are en route to the Fields of Gold. Please respond if your location has changed.”
Manu’s pulse thudded louder with each league they crossed. If he was wrong, there’d be blood to shed when General Lagos returned from his tour of the other Atlantian outposts. If he was right—and gods, he prayed he wasn’t—Kai and Cosmas were already in danger.
The odor of Gloombeast was already in Manu’s nose, death and rot, the offensive stink of it searing into his nasal passages, though it wasn’t possible for it to permeate the sealed craft. It had to be his imagination. Yet the smell assaulted him, and it only grew stronger the closer they came to the Fields of Gold.
His heart only raced faster, hurting his chest and making him fight for every breath.
A blip darted across Manu’s console screen, followed by additional specks of orange against the sonar’s black field. “I’m picking up activity due west, Commander,” Philemon said.
“As am I.”
A few became a dozen, and a dozen became a hundred colorful pinpricks of light indicating mass movement over the starfish spawning ground.
“A lot of activity. Arose out of nowhere, though we’ve been scanning since we left the city. Do you think it’s a swarm?”
There hadn’t been a Gloombeast swarm within three hundred leagues of Atlantis in years, and even then, it had been a passing danger headed north.
Manu rolled the accelerator forward, pushing the coral glider to maximum speed until it shot over the top of the hill and came within view of the fields.
A warzone awaited them below the mound. As Manu decelerated and initiated the targeting system, fingers a blur of motion over the console, battle reflexes came into play and he saw every inch of the field before them in astonishing clarity, burned into his mind and frozen in time. He saw his princess and his best friend fending off an onslaught with their backs together, the former armed with her spear, Cosmas with his trident. Clouds of blue Gloombeast blood dyed the water around them, turning the fields murky with their filth and disturbed sand. Corpses littered the ocean floor and floated around them in a nimbus of slain creatures.
He also saw the scylla looming above them, an ocean chimera with a dozen venomous sea serpent heads connecting a squid’s tentacles to the bloated torso of a merwoman resurrected to serve the Gloom. Such was the fate of all mers taken by Calypso.
Manu fired a salvo of bolts from his harpoon guns. Each shot forced the monstrosity backwards, ripping into her tentacles and tearing through flesh. Cosmas snapped his head toward them and palpable relief shone in his eyes.
Thank the gods they’d held out. Thank the gods he’d followed his instincts and listened to his gut.
In a few more shots, he reduced her lower half to harmless pieces in the current. For fear of striking Cosmas or Kai, Manu redirected his assault to the encroaching hoard. The once-golden field was reduced to a land of craters and sinkholes.
“Fan out, men. Alleviate the pressure
from Commander Cosmas and Princess Kailani. Philemon, cut off the swarm.”
“Understood, Commander.”
The moment Kai and Cosmas dispatched what remained of the scylla, a Doomlantern glided toward the pair, emitting a sinister dark violet glow. It shone brighter than a living black light with a long stinger trailing behind it across the sandy bottom. Manu caught the diseased beast in his sights and squeezed the trigger, but he only clipped the edge of its gelatinous mass, wounding it. It shot away into the dark, and his remaining energy rounds hurtled harmlessly into the Gloom where they crashed against an upraised swell on the far side of the field.
Manu’s gaze darted back to Kai. His chest could have burst from pride when she launched her spear into the chest of a hippocampus taken by the sickness, the once beautiful creature twisted by Calypso’s curse. The spear flew back into her hand again, and she whirled, turning a somersault in the water, powerful tail propelling her from the path of a monstrous hermit crab with ridges of spines on its shell.
Together, she and Cosmas made a deadly pair, his future king and queen. She was quicker than her battle companion, moving with the preternatural speed he’d expect of a mer with divine blood rushing through her veins.
“Commander,” Captain Leander spoke over the channel. “We are fast approaching the Fields of Gold. What is your status?”
Meters ahead of him, a tangle of octopuses converged on a glider, crushing it in their inescapable arms. The glass cracked and water flooded the craft. Their tentacles had prevented the escape hatch from opening and ejecting the pilot.
They crushed him inside it, even as Manu and another glider fired upon them.
“Overwhelmed,” Manu replied. “They’re surging from the old sandworm tunnels beneath the fields. We need to cut them off at the source and secure an escape route for Commander Cosmas and the princess.”
“Acknowledged.”
The fight wore on, a never-ending tide of aberrations rushing from deep within the Earth itself, coming from gods only knew where. Another glider fell, and they were down to Manu and three others.
Return to Atlantis: a Fantasy Romance (Kingdom in the Sea Book 1) Page 21