Seaborn 01 - Saltwater Witch

by Chris Howard

  Who’s there? I wanted to scream the question just to cut through the tension thickening around us.

  “Ochleros? It is me,” said Ephoros into the darkness.

  A long tense minute passed and then I saw something drift out of the gloom. It was another watery shaped monster similar to Ephoros except that this one had a more rounded head and deeper, cruel looking eyes. I stepped back and brought up my sword as if years of training had taught my muscles what to do on their own.

  Ochleros had enormous claws, almost ten feet long, coming to points so fine he could probably pick up a grain of sand between two.

  “Brother,” said Ochleros without the slightest movement, not even a hint of a bow or “how are you doing?” He didn’t even say the word as a question. It was the least of actions, the smallest thing he could do to acknowledge Ephoros.

  “We are here for Gregor Lord Rexenor.”

  Ochleros’ body stiffened and he swung away from us, throwing his claws out like the framework of two gigantic black umbrellas. I swallowed hard. There were more shapes coming into the edge of the glow, ten or eleven of them, hulking ugly creatures that looked like lumps of sand come to life. They waddled side to side as they moved into the glow, and I leaned forward to study the dark shiny eyes staring hungrily back at me.

  Ephoros spoke in a rumbling voice, and not in English, but I picked out the words, “phasma nerterôn,” and thought it meant something like, phantom of the deep, phantom of the lower world.

  Then his growl shifted to English.

  “They’re here to eat anything that happens to fall from the surface, living or dead. Or anyone trying to escape.”

  I shuddered. The sand lumps were animals of some kind, but not like anything I’d ever seen. The closest thing that came to mind, squeezing in between all the frightening thoughts, was that they were kind of like walruses without tusks and with armored with slabs of stone. They had small knobby heads that stuck up from their massive shoulders like a rocky outcrop with eyes.

  Under my helmet, my hair felt like it was standing on end. The lumps sidled to the right of Ochleros where they could get a better look at their prey, not Ephoros, but me. Rocking back and forth, they shuffled into each other. One of them snapped its mouth open and closed, and I saw a dull gleam of teeth.

  Ochleros hadn’t moved, waiting for something, which made me duck lower. The mutant walruses didn’t even appear to see his hulking semi-transparent form, or his giant claws. Their little eyes were pinned to me.

  Then one opened its mouth, let it fall wide, and I felt my own drop in surprise. The front of the monster peeled away down to the sand. The little outcrop head was just a place to hold the eyes. After that, it was mouth all the way down to its club-like feet.

  I screamed in my head. No walrus ever did that! My hands shook. Something told me to change my stance, because the sand thing was going to strike. I spun sideways to it, bracing myself with one foot against the cliff wall and the other at the edge of Ephoros’ shoulder. Then in one movement, I swung the sword grip around in my fingers so that the back of the blade followed my forearm. I held the sword, a downward stabbing hold, blade edge facing out. I pulled up my left hand.

  One of the monsters made its move. The thing lurched forward as if it was going to vomit something big.

  Like an enormous frog going after an insect, the sand lump launched thirty feet of thick, corded tongue at me. The end was pointed and barbed like a harpoon, coming straight at my face.

  In the same instant Ephoros ducked, I pulled my left hand to my hip, snapped the sword in an arc with a thrust of my forearm and a twist of my wrist. Ochleros clamped two of his claws closed. The sand lump snapped back like a released rubber-band. Its severed tongue contracted and dropped to the seafloor, squirming like a dying worm.

  Ochleros had moved blindingly fast, cut his end with his claws, and I had sliced right through my end, leaving the harpoon stuck into the cliff face just above my head.

  The sand lumps noticed Ochleros for the first time, still didn’t seem to be frightened of him. Instead, they turned away to fight over their wounded companion. I watched them surround the tongue-less one with mouths gaping, lunging aggressively.

  In a few seconds, they’d ripped its body apart in a cloud of stirred up silt and shredded tissue. Ten harpoons stabbed into it, hooked hunks of meat and shot back to their owners’ cave-like mouths.

  “Follow me,” said Ochleros calmly, as if the attack had been some weird greeting ritual that had to be completed before any real business could be started.

  Ephoros moved after him and the glow followed us. Fifty feet in front, Ochleros moved at the edge of the light, not looking back.

  My arms went prickly, like a cold current washing over them. I felt things—living things—in the water close by.

  I dropped into my ready stance. Something large and dark loomed into view off to my right. I lowered my sword a fraction. It was a squared off stone, twice as long as I was tall, floating off the seabed. From my height, standing on Ephoros’ shoulder I couldn’t see the chains underneath, but I knew they were there, anchoring the lithotomb to the earth.

  There were more, another floating stone passed on Ephoros’ left. We moved across the floor of the abyss past twenty of them. I couldn’t see beyond the nearest row of tombs, but I knew there were many more out in the dark, possibly thousands of them, beyond my ring of light.

  Someone screamed, a thin hollow shred of noise, followed by sobbing. Ephoros looked, but only for a second. He turned his attention back to the slow pace of his brother. Some of the lithotombs swayed back and forth, the prisoner throwing himself against one side in a mindless rage. Below these, the chains made little ringing and clicking noises with the motion.

  Ochleros stopped in a clearing and turned to face us. There were giant links of chain, each one as thick as my arm, and they curled in a heap in the sand, two broken rings off to the side. Ochleros picked at the links with his claws, moving them as if they were toys, making them clink together loudly.

  “Brother, the Rexenor lord is no longer here. The king sent his guards at the light’s rising and they moved him. I do not know where.”

  I brought up my sword as soon as I felt Ephoros tense up. Ochleros stood motionless, his arms at his sides and claws sunk halfway into the soft floor.

  “I will not fight you, but I am bound here by the spells of the king. I must tell him that I saw you and this girl who wears the gift of our earth-encircling ancestor.”

  Ephoros didn’t answer.

  The two brothers, descendants of Poseidon, stared at each other. They’re talking in a way I can’t see or hear. I didn’t want to interrupt, but I had so many questions. What was the “light’s rising?” Certainly no sunlight this far down.

  Tilting my head back, I tried to take in how I appeared underwater. Ochleros could see the Wreath? How? Parresia said the same thing.

  I looked down at the links of chain, thin sparks of greenish light flashing along them when I moved.

  The chains that had held my father’s prison were a tumble of loose rings in the sand. That meant they didn’t release him, but just moved the whole lithotomb itself. Where would the king move something that large? And if it took chains that big to hold the lithotomb down what happened when they cut them? Did it shoot to the surface?

  “Praxinos?” I whispered, not wanting to disturb the two brothers.

  Let me guess, he said sarcastically. Your father is not there?

  I let out a heavy sigh. “No.”

  Praxinos said nothing but it was a gloating, I-told-you-so sort of silence.

  “But he was here not long ago, I think. The king moved him.”

  How do you know?

  “Ochleros told us. He said—”

  Ochleros! Praxinos and Andromache shouted together. That’s—

  “—Ephoros’ brother, I know. They’re talking right now. I think they are anyway. What’s the light’s rising mean?”

&n
bsp; There was a brief pause among the past Wreath-wearers. My question had no context and it took Andromache a few seconds to figure out what I was talking about.

  The start of a day just like the sun dawning oversea, said Andromache, and then her tone went bitter. The seaborn like to think they’re better than the surfacers, the humans who live on the lands, but they steal, copy and borrow from them when it suits them.

  In my time there was no rising or setting of lights. They were always lit, said Praxinos boastfully. That’s a modern invention.

  Andromache muttered under her breath, Anything in the last thousand years is modern for you.

  I chewed my lip. Light’s rising made sense. I’d seen the blue glow on the horizon before we’d descended into the pit.

  “Praxinos, you said your grandfather freed Ephoros and his kin.”

  Yes. My grandfather, Polemachos. And the sea demons helped him defeat the Telkhines.

  “How did he do it?”

  Do what? Free them? I...don’t really know. He told stories of the freeing but they seemed to change with his audience, and he never really said what he did. It may have been as simple as taking the keys from the Telkhines king and unlocking their shackles.

  He didn’t use the Wreath, said Andromache.

  That is why he was given the Wreath, for freeing them and overthrowing the ones who enslaved them.

  “Hold on, something happening.”

  “Go,” said Ochleros slowly, almost sadly, and then pointed up. There was a wide band of black metal on his arm, looked like it was made from the same material as my sword. I hadn’t noticed it before, the world was so dark and Ochleros’ body wasn’t quite solid, blending into the background. He was bound by the spells of the king.

  “Is that what binds you here, Ochleros?” I asked, pointing at the metal band on his arm.

  Through my toes I felt Ephoros tense up as if my question was a serious breach of etiquette.

  Ochleros swung his eyes to mine and I felt the rage he held inside, like looking through a tiny fissure in a mountainside and discovering there was nothing beneath the soles of my feet but a thin layer of rock over a seething, turbulent molten ocean of wrath.

  “Do you know what your father was doing when King Tharsaleos caught him, girl?”

  No one knew anything about Gregor’s disappearance. Even my mother, with spies and desperate inquiries, found little. If I’d known, then Praxinos and Andromache would also have known.

  “No,” I said softly and shook my head.

  “He is a powerful Thalassogenês. He traveled far over the oceans, to the caves of the Telkhines on the isle of Rhodes, which long ago was called Telkhinos. And Gregor spoke with the old ones who still keep some of the stories of their ancestors before their downfall. They told him where to find the pieces of a book of their magic. He went to the Arctic, the top and bottom of every ocean, and returned with pages covered in moving letters, ink like darting squid on each. He gathered more of the scroll fragments from the poles of the earth, out of volcanic tunnels in the Pacific Ocean, from deep burial grounds in the canyons of faraway seas. And when at last he had bound them all into a complete book, he had a way of teaching himself spells and new methods for forging devices that he planned to use to defend the Rexenor fortress in the North from King Tharsaleos.”

  “Where is this book now?” The question burst out of me. That’s exactly what I needed to stop my grandfather and his army of the dead.

  Ochleros went on as if he hadn’t heard me. “That was when we caught him. I was doing a favor for the king because I thought him honorable. He sent me and the trusted eight of the royal guard, oktoloi, to capture the exile prince. The king’s spies had tracked Gregor to a cave in the mountains not far from the Nine-cities, but when we attacked, the Rexenor prince cast a spell that caught us by surprise. The fire and sound hit us. What he did nearly took my life. I have not seen power that strong and wild wielded for a long time. All eight of the king’s guard went down, some with their spears in their hands, others had their swords drawn but unused, none of them dead but seriously hurt.”

  “Then how did the king capture...my father?” I had hesitated because I thought I knew where part of the story was leading. My father had nearly killed Ochleros.

  “I do not think the Rexenor prince was ready with the powers, and he cast them in distraction, for he too was hit with some part of the blast and fell to the light, hurt as badly as the oktoloi. The king appeared soon after and took the book without any of his following soldiers seeing it. But the first wave, his own royal guards—now wounded, had seen the book, understood its power. It gained them nothing. Nothing good. The second group of the king’s guard took your father away in chains.”

  “But how did you become under the control of the king?”

  “I was very weak and King Tharsaleos ordered his men to bring me back to the Nine-cities to recover. And while I was weak, he took the book your father had made and studied it. Using the same horrible powers the ancient Telkhines discovered, he bound me with the ring you see on my arm. He enslaved me. Your father rebuilt that ancient book and it led to the downfall of his house, for not long after the book came to the king, he doubled the size of his dead army and destroyed what was left of House Rexenor.”

  Ephoros sensed some sort of tipping point in the rage brewing in Ochleros. He shifted to the right, pivoting me away from him.

  “We must go, princess.”

  Ochleros swung up one set of claws. “It is your father’s fault that I am a servant of the King Tharsaleos. Now Go!”

  Mr. Henderson balanced his body awkwardly, shuffling the bundles of books in his arms. With a few unemployed fingers, he tugged the knob on the door at the end of the school wing. It was locked. He nodded and turned from St. Clement’s, heading toward the parking lot, trying not to shift the load in his arms.

  Henderson looked up at the black starry sky as he headed off the sidewalk across the grass toward the cars. Two of the streetlights were out and he saw more stars than he normally could this close to the school.

  A whisper gusted out of him. “Damn.” He fumbled with a couple shifting books. Some were slipping from his grasp as he walked.

  Crossing the parking lot, mostly empty, except for the live-in staff who always took the nearest spaces, Henderson’s car, an old Chevy with a quarter million miles on it, was out by itself in the dark.

  He stumbled and dropped one of the books, then he dropped his keys. He blew out a breath in frustration, left them there and continued on to his car. Slamming the rest of the books down on the roof, he turned and went back, but as he picked up his keys and the book on coastal invertebrates of the Pacific Northwest, there was a rustling noise. It might have been someone whispering. He looked down at his hand. Maybe the keys made the noise, scraping together, but it hadn’t really sounded like that.

  And it had come from behind him.

  Heading back to the car, He tried to focus deeper into the darkness beyond the parking lot.

  Henderson dragged the books off the roof, went around to the passenger side, and tossed them to the seat. Half of them spilled ended up on the floor. He cut across the front of the car and got in on the driver’s side, starting it up, pressing the gas pedal a few times. The old Chevy rumbled and sputtered. He gave it a minute and then threw it in gear, glancing back in the mirror as he drove away from St. Clement’s.

  Ms. Matrothy’s sneering face showed up in his thoughts and he knotted his brows angrily, looking past the hood of the car, down the road. “Maybe I’ll teach the kids about water chemistry tomorrow too,” he said in a defiant whisper.

  Without looking in either direction—no one would be out on the road this late, Henderson turned onto a bumpy two-lane road, and headed east along the river. His headlights lit up a hemisphere in front of the car, nothing visible but alternating yellow strips of paint and the rough gray surface of the road.

  A flicker of light off on his right, and he glanced out the side
window at the river running by, mysteriously deep and black, like something he could dip a pen into and write sonnets.

  He waved irritably, brushing aside Matrothy’s repeated appearance in his thoughts.

  “And next it’ll be the oceans and atolls and carnivorous fishes and all kinds of interesting things about the sea.”

  He gestured with an open hand facing up and went on as if speaking to a group of invisible students. “For instance, did any of you know that barnacles, the pointy volcano-looking things that grow on rocks at the seashore are related to crabs?” He nodded. “Yeah, they’re arthropods, just like crabs and shrimp and lobsters.”

  He looked up in the mirror again. Nothing but darkness on the road behind him, and the last outlines of. St. Clement’s fading behind a small hill.

  “I did know that,” said a man’s heavily accented voice, and a face materialized in the rearview mirror. The man continued speaking but in a different language.

  Mr. Henderson whirled around. Something hit him like a jolt of electricity. His hands jumped from the steering wheel. The car shot off the road, spanned a ditch on the right side and flew down a shallow bank into the black river.

  Henderson couldn’t move. He stared into the bright green eyes, holding him immobile. There were little wrinkles in the skin around them. The man had a wide nose with a square bridge that blended into a jutting ridge above his eyes. His dark brows were thick and curly with a little gray in them. A fleeting thought went through Mr. Henderson’s mind, that the man could have played a convincing Roman army commander in a movie.

  The car tilted forward and the water rose above the windows. Even as he sank in the river and the cold spread up his legs, he found himself listening to the man’s voice and thinking, “Isn’t that ancient Greek?”

  It had been a decade since he’d had the ability to translate the language, but his mind worked on it anyway. He knew the man in the backseat had said something about a “home in the dark sea” and “speaking secrets.”