by Chris Howard
Alexandros?
A raspy voice called him with the same variation on his name that Nikasia had used, but it wasn't her. He looked over his shoulder, back toward the beach for some other nut from the sea who wanted to drown him. He wasn't even sure he'd heard the voice. It felt as if his name had just appeared in his head without coming in through his ears.
"Yes?" Suspicion in his voice.
His gaze moved along the shore, halting on a big Victorian house that stooped over the Atlantic where Ocean Boulevard followed the shoreline around Little Boar's Head. He wanted to turn east. That was where the danger had to be, but something held his eyes on the house. It was one of his favorite old places along the coast, Kassandra's house, sort of weird and old and scary and exciting all at the same time.
His face relaxed, and the force that held his focus on the shore, released him. He spun in the water, back to the horizon, and then turned inward on an image planted right in the middle of his imagination: a thick brown book rested on seaweed covered boulders at the bottom of an aquarium.
The image vanished. The spidery fingers on his back dissolved, and Alex Shoaler scowled. He blinked, trying to bring the outside world into focus.
"What kind of idiot puts a book in an aquarium?"
And then he thought of someone who might, someone who lived in that house.
Kassandra?
He held his breath, rolling softly with the surge, waiting less than ten seconds before her voice filled his head—her concerned voice, not the same rasp that had called him a moment earlier.
What's wrong, Alex?
Nothing. Uh...just wanted to see if you're still there.
He felt her smile—which was creepy, and then a tickle in the sand under his toes.
Always.
Chapter 9 - Nothing Left For Me
Nikasia woke in pure darkness, snapped her fingers to start a light, but she was too tired to kick off her bed. She stared at the ceiling, singing through every muscle in her body, a quick tug on each, pulling them from sleep. The water in her room tasted stale.
"It is time."
She sang the words, and they struck a chord inside, stirring memories that made restless, and got her off her bed. She rolled toward the bolted door to her room, locked against her own family. Me against the world.
It is time.
Theoxena had sung the same words to her once.
"Now, I even sound like you, mother."
Nikasia let her thoughts slide into the past, dreaming of her mother teaching her to sing, and her soul being pulled in two directions, torn between the sorrow of her father's death and the envy and hate of her sisters—one feeding the other, the sorrow filling the spaces between her and the rest of the family,
How many younger siblings who get the bleeding are murdered by the older ones? Many, I would guess. The best you can hope for is their scorn, their hatred, their curses; the worst, a knife in your back or your throat cut in your sleep.
Bleed...bleed to death.
And so she'd locked her bedroom door every night since her eighth year. How many times since then had she repeated the thoughts, asked the same question, and heard the same answers—always in her mother's voice.
Who would refuse the bleed?
The bleeding power from one of your parents, every child hopes for it and dreads it. You would think that anyone would kick in joy when they feel the invading drive of magic from a mother or father. It can only bleed into one child, and you are chosen by the Fates to receive it. Who would not be filled with joy? Tell me?
Nikasia heard her father's voice, some old memory talking to her, telling her how power passed generation to generation among the seaborn.
When it decides to bleed from the parent it flows to only one child. That is how it works for all of us, great houses and lesser houses alike. When a child dies with half the father's or mother's magic, the power dies with them, which is why so many families in the Nine-cities have nothing but the strength in their arms and cleverness in their souls.
Only the old Telkhines could multiply their bleeds among all of their offspring, and it's said some ancient member of the Telkhines line paid a terrible price for this, but all his descendents were rewarded. This is also why the Alkimides, when they broke House Telkhines, hunted them down—because every new one of them was as powerful as the last one.
We know that hundreds of Telkhines escaped to live out their lives in isolation, exile, until their lines dwindled to nothing. Every House feared the Telkhines, and the Alkimides are heroes for bringing them down and destroying so many of their tools of power—their fire magic, their dragons, their demon slaves.
Nikasia wheeled her dream into the far cold north, the battle lost to House Rexenor, and the woman wearing the Wreath of Poseidon commanding their army.
Then there is the Wreath, the gift the Earth-encircler Poseidon gave the Alkimides family, a victory wreath, a crown for a new line of kings and queens when the old line abused their power. The Telkhines enslaved many of Poseidon's own kin. The Alkimides freed the slaves, took the throne, and have ruled the Nine-cities for two thousand years. The Wreath itself was thought to have gone out the oceans with King Tharsaleos' first wife, Pythias Alkimides—only to be found in a girl who grew up as far from the ocean as anyone could get, some place called Nebraska.
Nikasia's own voice barged into her dream, and everything shifted to the world seen from her eyes.
The Wreath-wearer Pythias was blessed and cursed, and died alone. I will most likely share her fate, killed by my sisters or the king for the weight that has landed on my shoulders.
Time blurred into the past.
"Nika."
"Yes, mother?"
My mother looks into my eyes, into my soul, and says, "It is time."
I know it is, mother.
The dream shifted, and Nikasia became the storyteller, the eyes of her audience pinned to her—audience, not friends. I have no friends.
When you have a mother like mine—Lady Theoxena—the bleed is an instant burden, weighing you down like a sack of stones about your neck. My mother has killed a hundred times—maybe a thousand times—for King Tharsaleos. Years ago she brought the walls of the Rexenor fortress crumbling to the sea floor after the Olethren departed.
She brought the walls down with one song.
My mother looks like a goddess, tall and commanding with long black braids hanging over one shoulder. Goddesses are never truly beautiful—or it is a terrible beauty. It is a beauty that has a high cost, not to my mother, but to those who look on her. Of my great ancestor, Kirke, they say that my mother has two parts out of ten of the great one's power. They say this, boasting of the magic that we Kirkêlatides have managed to keep in the bloodline. I can only think that if mother has two parts, then Kirke must have been terrible indeed. Men's eyes ought to have burned to pasty lumps in their sockets for one good look at her. My mother is deadly beautiful. What must Kirke have been like?
Nikasia's thoughts spun through a rolling series of images of her mother.
Everyone fears Theoxena. Armies fall before her... I think even the king fears her. They do not fear her beauty, but her voice, her fingers on a lyre and kithara—Theoxena the kitharista.
But you have failed when your own sovereign is afraid of you, never a good position, thin footing, fleeting trust.
Fear dilutes loyalty.
"When kings and queens fear you, your loyalty becomes like a ghost." My mother tells me this as I float upside down against the high walls of the delphidrome. We are alone because she has pulled me away from my sisters, ordering them home after the races are over. I am eight years old and still think it funny to watch someone's lips move with words when their face is flipped in the opposite direction. I watch my mother's lips and grin.
"Nika, you are not listening to me."
Listening—so important to our family and the musical powers we possess. My mother grabs my shoulders, pushes me hard against the wall, pinning m
e there. The stones dig into my back.
"You are keeping a secret from me, Nika. Why did you not tell me?"
My mind goes numb; my whole body follows. She releases my shoulders and I can't move. My mother, the war-bard, never yells or curses like other mothers. Why bother when the right song can shatter your bones, can make the blood turn to sludge in your veins, can make your own hands claw open your own mouth and rip out your own tongue. I'd bet if she were in a particularly foul mood, she could sing you back a new tongue just to make you thank her for making you tear out your old one.
"Nika, my child." She sings to me and every thought in my head but one lines up to be commanded by her. I use every drop of strength I can find to hold back that one path of will.
"Nikasia, why did you not tell me at once that you have been chosen to receive my gift? We Kirkêlatides are slow bleeders, but I feel my power seeping from me." She's disappointed in me, and that makes my skin go cold and prickly. "One mistake allowed and you have spent it already, and cheaply, my daughter. Why did you not tell me?"
She pleads, tears blurry around her face.
I can't speak for a moment because I have never seen her cry, and this surprises me. I use the one thought remaining to me to say, "Because I fear you, mother. All your loyalty is spent on the king. I fear that you will have none left for me."
Chapter 10 - Strange and Wonderful
"I am not weak."
Nikasia repeated the words all the way to her dawn lessons, kicking hard through the city's channels, wiping the sorrow off her face just before she entered Korthys' music studio. She wasn't due to appear—wearing her justice-binding chain—at the King's square until mid-day, but she couldn't keep her focus on her singing or her fingers on the strings.
She held out her practice lyre as if to some imaginary second musician, and then let it go, watching it seesaw in the water to the floor.
Jolly old Korthys, teacher of music, glided through the water toward his studio, eyes half-closed, pulling his senses inside and binding them to his soul, so that the one that mattered most reigned over all the others—as it should—the sense whose instruments were his ears. He lifted his arm high, bending his wrist with a flourish. He kicked gently. His voice reached the room before he did, a fluid baritone.
"Come, clear-voiced muse, begin your song. Give voice with your lyre."
He waited for the sweet notes, motionless, a poised smile, neck tilted back, webbing tight between the fingers fanned out over his head. He opened one eye to peer into his music studio. The smile soured on Korthys' face. Nikasia was gone, leaving her lyre behind on the floor next to her chair. There was nothing beautiful about it now.
Korthys shook his head in time with a soul-emptying exhale and the drop of his shoulders. Nikasia had the talent to rival her mother. She was fine and brilliant with a lyre, but only when you could get her to sit and play the damned thing.
He swam to the open windows and closed them, hesitating over the latch, and then locked them.
Nikasia kicked through the backstreets of the Nine-cities high in the water, skirting the squid vendors' stalls. Keeping her distance, she stared across the street at the squid butchers, grimy, cadaverously discolored men with huge muscular shoulders, their skin an ink-saturated grayish-purple. The butchers lurched over their blocks, swinging their cleavers through clouds of black, looking like lumbering vent-ghouls or belydria, blood-greedy denizens of unfathomed depths.
She looked up at the cluster of towers at the city's center, floating fortresses of the great houses, battlements with archers and abyss mages, and somewhere in the heart of it all swam the king—King Tharsaleos—ruler of all the seaborn.
"This is the city I know." She sang the words longingly as if—after the Vents—she wasn't going to be able to see the lanes and dark walls the same way.
There were villages in gulfs and seas around the world, outposts at different depths, but only one city, the great Nine-cities.
"Ruled by a king who does not have the courage to find my father's killer."
Nikasia kicked off at the end of the street of the squid-sellers' stalls and snaked through the crowd of shoppers at Deimis market. She slid low along the bedstones, a bright blue blur in the shadows of long dragon-like chains of Thalassogenêis, entire families with servants, tutors and children in tow.
A wave of anger swept through her body, and she kicked harder.
"The Rexenor Lord will die, father. I promise you."
Her thoughts were lost in hate, and she swam headfirst into Demarchos as he loaded his father's float-cart along the Lykaithos row. Demarchos staggered forward to his knees but kicked upright, still holding the boxes in his arms steady.
"Watch where you're—."
"Sorry, Dem," said Nikasia quickly, recognizing the son of the cook, Aristaion. She back-kicked, somersaulted in the middle of the street, and came around to face him.
"Dropped nothing. It's all right," said Demarchos, pulling the other knee up to regain his balance about three feet off the ground.
"A song from your mother?" Aristaion called from behind the cart. He was an old version of his son, tight black curly hair gone gray, with longer fuzzier eyebrows.
"Not a note. She has sent us nothing."
Aristaion tilted his head forward and Nikasia moved on with a nod, catching sight of a couple acquaintances among a larger market-going group, their arms linked, forming a ring halfway up the wall of one of the silk merchant's homes at the edge of Deimis.
Nikasia kicked, arched her back and swung straight up. Her hands shot out, rigid to slow down in the center of them, stopping a little higher in the water.
She picked up their conversation, and repeated someone's words. "The dead army will not return. Strange things happening." She smiled. "Indeed."
The ring of seaborn, twelve of them, went silent, their eyes pinned to Nikasia—which was exactly where she wanted them. She spun, an even turn that carried her focus to each face, locking momentarily with each of their eyes. She didn't know all their names, and she wasn't on friendly terms with most of them. Her bright orange gaze stopped a little longer on the one's she knew well, and she whispered their names: "Kleariste, Adraios, Klodia, Herakon, Thares."
"Tell us of the Americas," said one excitedly.
"No."
"I heard you broke the King's Protection and you've been sent to the Vents."
She nodded. "I'm on my way to Justice now. Adventure waits for me." She smiled and gave them a nod of her head. "So, I cannot tell the latest tale before it ends."
Nikasia pushed one hand above her, opening her fingers in a cupping gesture as if she held something in them. She sang softly at first, catching a rhythm, and then her voice captured them and would not let them go.
She picked up the tale where they had left it.
"The dead army lost? Many strange and wonderful stories. The gates of the Nine-cities closed for years, and no one is allowed in or out without leave. The doors locked. The King's Protection strengthened. King Tharsaleos awakened the Olethren, the dread army of the dead, thousands of them, some say. Others say there are millions—that their home in the barren fortress in the mountains to the south is an open gate into death itself."
Nikasia spun slowly in that direction, pointing, conjuring an image of dark stone walls at the foot of sharp black peaks.
"With the army of the drowned dead awake, all that swims between us and death...is the King's Protection."
Friends and enemies followed her vision, enthralled. Klodia opened her mouth and sucked in one of her braids to chew on it nervously.
Nikasia snapped away the vision. "So many strange things have happened in the last three, four, five years, and no one has made a story of them all—out of fear. The storytellers are afraid."
She let that sink in.
"I have no fear. First, my father's murderer escapes from his prison in the abyss of the Lithotombs. Then my mother departs, vowing revenge. Then the king wakes the dead a
rmy and sends them. . .somewhere."
Nikasia spun west, casting a bright blue sky and Helios burning fiercely, blinding her audience. More seaborn gathered around, drifting in from the market channels, some of them much older than Nikasia and her friends, unable to resist the lure of a story.
"Some said it was back to the fortress in the north, the home of the exiled Rexenor, but soldiers in the king's army who had been on that campaign—the First North Campaign, said it wasn't Rexenor. They said you only lose once to the Olethren, because the army of the dead does not stop until it has slaughtered everything in its path. Even the king's own armies must wait for the Olethren to return before they can get to what is left of their enemies."
"What of Lady Theoxena?" One of the older newcomers butted in, and got a cold orange glare back. "I heard—"
"Not my mother—she does not have to wait, but that is a different story. The dead warriors do not know good houses from renegade houses. They cannot see the men and women in different armor. The dead warriors have other means of detecting the living, a taste of their souls, smell of their shapes, the halo of their power. Their hunger is a curse, a mindless envy for life that is forever out of their reach. The dead hate it and destroy it."
Most of her audience was pulling nervously on their braids. Everyone else stared, leaning in toward Nikasia. She spun every listener into her net, holding them against their wills.
"The strangest of the strange events that have happened recently is that the gates of Nine-cities opened and King Tharsaleos' living armies—" she circled and pointed at each of them. "—some of you, or your fathers, your mothers, rode out, waiting for the return of the Olethren. They paraded and formed into ranks and practiced with long spears, ranks of orcas dashing, lances down for death. They chanted cries of war. They sang of the heroic deeds of past battles. They grew weary and returned to Nine-cities, closing the great gates and sealing the city inside the King's Protection. You have listened to the rumors? King Tharsaleos shook in fear and rage when his army did not return."