A Kingdom Beneath the Waves

by Bowles, David;

  Johnny couldn’t help but look at everyone with some suspicion. He really hoped the explosion had been a booby trap or enemy attack, but he couldn’t shake the idea that there might be a traitor in their midst. He knew just how crappy human beings could be to each other, and he figured merfolk weren’t much different. All it took was for some overly gung-ho supporter of Prince Maxaltic to decide he was going to give his hero a fighting chance. Somebody who agreed that humanity’s time was up, who wanted to see civilization totally underwater. That fanatical urge to remake the world was already making nut jobs blow stuff up. It wasn’t hard to imagine tritons as terrorists, too.

  As these grim thoughts kept him occupied, Johnny noticed a group of guards returning from the south under the white luminescent glow of Tenamic’s scepter. The command staff gathered to meet the Archmage, and Johnny joined his sister, Ana and Mihuah at their side.

  Tenamic reached them and gestured at the glowing ruins of the waystation. “What has happened?”

  “An explosion,” the castellan explained. “Origin uncertain. It killed most of our pack sharks and wounded twelve of my guards. This tragedy came on the heels of an apparent attempt on the life of Princess Anamacani within the structure—a minamicqui, conveniently awaiting her exit from the map room.”

  “Then the haste that I would urge is made even more necessary.”

  “Why? Did you discover the legendary current?”

  Tenamic twisted his fingers round his goatee. “Indeed I did. Atoyatl emerges from a massive vent 300 rods south of here. Beside it sits a strange dock, with large crystal pods berthed in three bays. A fourth bay is empty, though it is difficult to determine how long it has been in that state, as the motion of the water allows no build-up of detritus. I estimate each pod can hold fifty individuals with minimal equipment.”

  Marshal Cenaman glanced behind her at the guards, who were busy aiding the wounded and retrieving what supplies they could. “If we sent back the wounded with an escort, the remaining force could make the journey in the three transports.”

  “But is the current sufficiently swift?” Castellan Nalquiza asked.

  “At Atoyatl’s present speed, I fear the journey would take a day and a half. However, I have discovered that the current is capable of much greater velocity with magic.”

  Johnny pumped a fist. “Yes! Well, you’ve got that covered, right?”

  “The difficulty, Johnny, lies in the sort of sorcery required—eztemalli, the blood magic of the tlacamichimeh. Therefore are we fortunate to have a pair of twin shapeshifters among us.”

  Carol tapped her necklace. “There’s a problem, then. We don’t have any man-fish DNA.”

  Arching an eyebrow, Tenamic glanced at her with a twinkle in his dead-white iris. “So I had imagined. The Little People were in this instance short-sighted. Yet I believe I have a solution.”

  He gestured at a guard, who placed a white object in the sorcerer’s hands. Tenamic turned and lifted it—a strange humanoid skull with bizarre ridges and jagged teeth. The cranium of a tlacamichin.

  “Will this suffice?”

  “You’d think so, yeah. But,” Johnny said, as he accepted it from the Archmage, “we’re not supposed to use DNA from the same organism, according to the Little People.”

  “Ah, understood. That restriction presents no problem, fortunately, as we discovered a startling expanse of bones not far from the dock. It was clearly the site of some awful internal conflict. We found no atlacah skeletons at all.”

  Gesturing at her aides to stow the maps, Castellan Nalquiza made a decisive announcement. “Our course is clear. Marshal, select a group to accompany the wounded back to Tapachco and to inform the Queen and King of our progress. The rest of us—including Princess Anamacani—will head to the dock and use these ancient transports to reach Atlan and confront Maxaltic. We leave in ten.”

  Johnny knew that she meant hundred-beats, which were a little longer than a minute. He decided to spend that quarter hour examining the skull of the man-fish, which looked like it had been bashed pretty hard from behind, judging from the weird dent in the skull.

  He was still trying to imagine his brain inside this bizarre cranium when his sister’s voice echoed throughout his thoughts.

  Johnny! Look up! We’re under attack!

  A school of thirty massive predators was looming into the artificial light. They looked a lot like sleeper sharks, only ten meters long and with large, roving eyes that sparkled with malicious intelligence.

  “Wayxocob!” Captain Xicol shouted from nearby. “Weapons free! Fire and attack at will!”

  As the guards rushed into action, Johnny spun to find Ana. He caught her eye and called out, “What are these things? I need to know what we’re up against!”

  “Sentient sharks!” she called back. “They have long been servants of the tlacamichimeh!”

  Almost as if they’d heard her, a trio of wayxocob broke off and began spiraling toward the princess. Johnny urged his tonal to absorb the shape of the man-fish and transform. He rocketed off toward Ana, yanking the knowledge of how to control the leviathans from the depths of his new form.

  STOP! he commanded, using a form of speech that blended telepathy with sonar.

  The lead wayxoc pulled aside, confused. The others reluctantly followed as they adjusted their course toward Johnny.

  Why? Command is attack siren. Kill her.

  New command. Siren off-limits. Atlacah mission permitted.

  The beasts slowed as they approached him. Johnny felt terror in his gut, but he continued trying to fake them out.

  Unusual. Identity. Now.

  I am—Johnny dredged up the name—Sawin Maam. Break off attack. Retreat. Await new command.

  The lead wayxoc bared its gruesome teeth.

  No Sawin Maam among the Centlanicah. Well known, the Dwellers of the Deep.

  Johnny glanced beyond them. A group of guards had surrounded Ana and were guiding her away as others hurled lances, shot harpoons and used blades in close quarters with the remaining wayxocob.

  Another trio of sentient sharks broke off and headed toward Tenamic.

  Carol!

  I see them. Don’t worry. I’ve got an idea.

  Johnny had no chance to watch her actions or lend a hand. The wayxocob began to circle around him, moving in closer.

  What lineage? What shoal? What driver?

  He knew he could probably find the answers to those weird questions if he tried, but it was pretty obvious that Sawin Maam had been dead too long to matter anymore.

  Instead, Johnny scanned the man-fish’s fractured memories for information on blood magic. What he found surprised him. Frightened him a little.

  Whoa. That’s pretty sick. I kind of have no choice, anyway.

  Wincing at the pain and the strange coppery taste, he bit into the palm of his right hand. With only a glance at the jagged bite, he dove and quickly swam under the wayxocob, smearing his blue-green blood along their white bellies.

  As they twisted and snapped at him, he clenched his webbed fingers into a fist. Xoxal honed his senses, let him see his blood penetrate their cold flesh, seep into their muscles.

  He jerked his fist in the direction of the waystation, still writhing hotly in whatever chemical reaction the explosion had set off.

  The sharks’ bodies went rigid.

  Come, he growled at them. New destination.

  With several punch-like movements of his bloody fist, he send them rushing mindlessly toward the ruins.

  Satisfied that they were no longer a problem, Johnny searched for his sister. She had become a school of stargazers, he discovered, butt-ugly fish cursed with eyes on the tops of their heads and gifted with both poison and electric shock. She was harrying the sharks away from Tenamic, stinging them over and over, attacking other wayxocob that came close.

  The Archmage wasn’t defenseless, of course. He blasted at the enemy with white energy from his staff and intoned quick snatches of sacred song, s
tunning wayxocob or spinning them unconscious into the Deep.

  Between the three of them and the nearly two hundred guards, they managed to win the battle in fifteen minutes, driving off or destroying their attackers.

  In the aftermath, the number of wounded had doubled. Johnny was horrified to learn that Enehnel had gotten a huge chunk of his tail bitten away. Shifting back into triton form, he swam to his new friend’s side, gripping his hand through the netting that would allow him to be dragged back to Tapachco with the other injured guards.

  “Oh, man, I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t be, boy. Veterans are pampered in our kingdom. And besides, I was getting a little tired of your embarrassing attempts at humor.”

  Biting his lip, Johnny kept his emotions in check. “Sure. You’re just trying to avoid another brutal game of patolli. Getting beaten over and over by a teenager messes with your reputation, huh?”

  The young guard gave a weak smile. “Any time you want to look me up in the Hall of Heroes, I’ll be ready for a rematch, nagual.”

  “Okay, then. After we save the world, I’ll take you up on your offer.”

  Letting that be his final goodbye, Johnny joined up with the command staff. Castellan Nalquiza was giving final orders before they set off.

  “Our mission’s importance is made even clearer by this attack. The princess and the Archmage were specifically targeted, and the twins’ intelligence about the make-up of Maxaltic’s army seems clearly verified. We can only assume that the prince has taken the missing transport from the dock, leaving the wayxocob behind to impede our pursuit. But we will not be deterred. We leave immediately. I want to be in Atlan before the end of another watch. Then we will confront the traitor and wrest the Shadow Stone away from him if he has already retrieved it.”

  ~~~

  Thirty minutes later, the army—minus the wounded and their escort—reached another bizarre man-fish structure, one that looked like an outbreak of boils or pimples on the ocean floor. Just beyond it, bubbling hot and fast, the legendary current Atoyatl emerged from a huge crevice, faintly illuminated by deep magma. Partly ringing the source, like two arms pointing into the flow, was a semicircle of stone hollowed out in the center. Into this gaping groove, three transparent pods sat, the way train cars might rest on a track with two on one side and one on the other. There was a huge empty space in front suggesting that a fourth had once been there.

  Carol turned to him. “That’s the same sort of crystal the water elementals have in their chests.”

  Tenamic heard her.

  “A form of beryl,” he clarified, “a mineral compound uniquely able to store great amounts of spiritual energy, whether pure teotl or ihiyotl.”

  “Okay,” Johnny said. “Weird. So the plan is to get inside those gem ships, somehow activate the current’s super speed, and then pilot them to Atlan. But they’re thousands of years old, and we don’t have a clue about how they work.”

  Gesturing with his staff, Tenamic pointed out a column that jutted up where the arms of the dock came together. “There stands a control tower of sorts. Though I could not decipher all of the inscriptions, it appears there is a way to set a destination and velocity beforehand, and the pods then pilot themselves. While the castellan sees to the loading of guards into each, you and Princess Anamacani should examine the controls and determine the particulars of the process.”

  “What about my sister?”

  “Lady Mihuah and I will accompany Carol to the site of the battle so that she can select a suitable tlacamichin bone to aid you, as from what I could glean, the blood magic required must come from two individuals.”

  Johnny gave a thumbs-up, dumbfounding his merfolk companions, and made a bee-line toward the tower with Ana by his side. As they approached, strange encrusted veins like those on the waystation lit up.

  “Let me see,” muttered the princess, floating in front of several columns of inscriptions. “Ah, here it is. ‘For automated transport. Controllers activate palm interface with eztemalli. Select destination glyph.’ Then…blood and salt! I cannot read the next glyph. Something ‘velocity.’ What is this symbol?”

  Grinning at her frustration, Johnny touched her arm. “Relax, Princess.”

  He shifted into tlacamichin form, startling her.

  “By the goddess, Johnny! Give fair warning before you do that. You are absolutely horrid-looking!”

  “Ha!” he snarled in the man-fish tongue. “You just can’t appreciate all this scaly goodness. Let me look at that glyph.”

  Peering with his obsidian-black eyes, he nodded. “Got it. Wahr-hal. ‘Mind-speak.’ Like what I did with the sharks that tried to kill you. Look: ‘Select transport number.’ Damn, I hope they’re just ‘1’, ‘2’ and ‘3’ or something.”

  Ana gave him an odd look.

  “What?”

  “It is hardly fair that you can learn in seconds a language that I spent several years studying, Johnny.”

  He laughed, a horrible sound coming from his fishy lips. “I’m sure we’ll find even deader languages in Atlan that I won’t know. Your mad translating and historian skills will be put to the test then, big time.”

  That made her smile despite herself, and Johnny tried not to think of how pretty she looked, blue rosettes on her cheeks crinkling a little as her eyes glittered with humor. “I suppose you are right, as long as I can keep you from seizing a random bone from the ruins and assuming the shape of an ancient human.”

  “Yeah, I’d pretty much die instantly if I did that.” He gestured at the cold, dark water all around. “Pressure would turn me to jelly.”

  “Ah, thereby eliminating the competition!”

  They were still laughing at this macabre idea when Tenamic, Mihuah and Carol rejoined them.

  “Figure it out?” his sister asked, gesturing at the tower with a small bone she had recovered.

  Johnny lifted a green, scaly, webbed hand and bent his index finger twice.

  These dudes have a hard time speaking merfolk or Nahuatl. But yeah. Need your help, though.

  Carol nodded. “Okay, here goes nothing.”

  She shifted into a tlacamichin—the same scaly humanoid form as Johnny, with large webbed feet and hands, glassy black eyes, fish-like mouth, frilly ridges on the head and body and gaping gills.

  This is gross, getting inside the spiritual residue of a dead, thinking being.

  Yeah. Lots of bits missing, too. But you should be able to get the language and magic stuff easy enough. It’s the personality and so on that’s pretty much gone.

  “I’m ready,” Carol said in that guttural, bubbling language. “Where do we put our palms?”

  “On either side of the tower, in the weird glowing polygon.”

  Carol gestured at Mihuah, pointing at the dirk she wore at her waist. While she used it to slice open her palm with a little squeak of pain, Johnny bit into his again.

  This feels kind of like black santería, Johnny.

  Yeah, I know. But what choice do we have?

  They slapped their palms against the cold stone, smearing the activation panels with blue-green blood. The tower hummed to greater life, new inscriptions lighting up all over its surface.

  Johnny looked up at the line of glyphs that represented possible destinations. With his free hand, he touched Atlan.

  Do I do the same? his sister asked.

  Yeah, I think so. Knowledge of the procedure had begun bubbling up from within his new form, confirming what he and the princess had worked out. Yes. We both have to do everything. Now we have to use wahr-hal to tell it maximum speed. Then, do you see the grid of numbers? One is dark, but we’ve got to click ‘2’, ‘3’ and ‘4’.

  Got it. Ready?

  “Ready,” he snarled. “Three, two, one…”

  Maximum speed, they commanded in unison. Johnny felt his blood trigger whatever ancient mechanisms lay below the dock, a physical as well as spiritual grinding that ended in a hollow click.

  Behind them,
the current’s rumbling flow became a thundering, bone-rattling rush. Ana and Mihuah exclaimed something, but it was drowned out by the Atoyatl. Quickly, the twins punched at the numbers.

  “COUNTDOWN TO LAUNCH.” A gruesome voice boomed even louder than the gargantuan gush of water. “THIRTY. TWENTY-NINE.”

  Pushing away from the tower, the twins spun to swim with the other three toward the pods, which were now lit up by an aquamarine luminescence. By gestures, Tenamic instructed Ana and Johnny to enter one, Mihuah and Carol another, while he headed toward the third.

  Johnny had barely made it inside, pushing the princess through and sealing the door with a slap of his bloody palm, when their pod was shot like a harpoon into the Atoyatl’s impossible flow.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The fifty individuals inside Carol’s pod, through some inexplicable magic, were not shoved back by the sudden thrust. The water sealed in with them shimmered with blue energy as the transport dove deep into the current. Once they’d reached top velocity, the glow receded to a mere illumination in the transparent walls around them.

  As they hurtled down the Acapulco Trench at the speed of an airliner, Carol peered ahead at the pod that contained her brother, the princess of Tapachco, and another forty-eight guards. Reaching out, she called to Johnny.

  Hey, can you hear me?

  Yup. You guys okay?

  Pretty much. Por poco se nos pasa.

  Ha! We barely made it inside, too. So I guess now we just enjoy the ride, huh?

  Sure. Talk to you later.

  Mihuah drifted close. “Was that your brother?”

  Carol nodded. “Yes. They’re all fine.”

  Pirouetting slowly, she looked over the guards and their officers. Most were impassively resting, but several had nervous looks on their faces. A few gestured at the dark around them, twittering quietly to each other.

  “What’s got them so panicked?” Carol asked Mihuah.

  “Do remember that our older relatives fill our childhoods with tales of the Abyss and the terrors that await mischievous sirens and tritons there. No matter how mature these guards fancy themselves, the fears of our youth tend to survive well into adulthood. Now that we are descending at this breakneck pace into the realm of monsters, you will forgive them a few moments of unease.”