Oshenerth

by Alan Dean Foster

  “I don’t know what the Tornal are, either,” the hunter divulged uncomprehendingly, “much less where they might be found.”

  “As to what they are, you will see. Because you are coming with me, hunter-who-thinks-more-than-he-thinks-he-does.” Before Chachel could protest, Oxothyr added, “As to their whereabouts, the last I knew of them, they were residing in Benthicalia.”

  That was a name familiar even to the cloistered Chachel. A powerful name. Benthicalia. A legend that leached charisma. And that was how most reef folk thought of it—as a legend. As a myth, a fable, not a real place. Yet Oxothyr talked casually of going there. Sometimes the shaman spoke in riddles, but there was nothing of the tease about him this time.

  As they neared the festivities, the sights and sounds of general celebration began to make him uneasy. Yet feeling himself on the verge of some great discovery, he was loathe to leave the shaman’s presence.

  “I’m not coming with you,” he yelled as he started to drift clear of the current’s main thrust. “Not if it means traveling with others.”

  “Others are brothers,” Oxothyr called back to him as they parted. “You will change your mind, you’ll see.”

  “What should I do now?” Chachel had been swept almost out of hearing range. An attempt at a restraining spell failed, further delineating the erudition gulf that separated hunter and shaman.

  “Convince yourself you’re not going,” the mage yelled back. “It will do you good to get it out of your system!”

  A spire festooned with coils and curlicues of gardened barnacles slid between them and the master of magic was seen no more. Though Oxothyr could doubtless have made headway against it, by allowing the current to carry him into the midst of the rejoicing the shaman had deliberately cut himself off from Chachel. If so, why?

  To give me time to think, Chachel realized. To force him to think. To compel him to cogitate. To oblige him to consider everything just discussed and imparted, whether he wanted to or not.

  The shaman was not only intelligent. He was clever.

  O O O

  “Benthicalia!”

  Unable to restrain herself, an eager Poylee swam round and round in such tight circles that she generated a vortex beneath her feet strong enough to suck up sand, fragments of shell, and a whiskered goby that let her know in no uncertain terms what it thought of her before fighting its way back down into its disturbed burrow.

  “I’ve never been to Benthicalia,” she admitted when she finally stopped spinning. “In fact, I don’t know anyone who’s been to Benthicalia.”

  “That’s because no one from Sandrift has ever gone there.” Chachel’s tone was dry and matter-of-fact as he pointed out the obvious. “Except for Oxothyr.” He turned to the shaman, who was resting on the warm white sand of Siriswirll’s broad village square, his eight arms splayed out around him like the petals of a brown flower. Everywhere villagers were going about their daily business, happy to revisit a normalcy that had so recently suffered from violent disruption. “You have been to Benthicalia, esteemed mage?”

  The octopus paled to a reassuring beige spotted with green. “Several times, I am pleased to say. I only wish the journey before us was not haunted by so foreboding a purpose.”

  Nearby, Irina grabbed Glint’s right fin and tugged to get the cuttlefish’s attention. He went all over black for a moment until he located the cause of the feathery pinch.

  “What’s this ‘Benthicalia’?” she asked him. “Another village?”

  In the absence of either a neck or shoulders, Glint could not shake his head. Not physically. Cuttlefish conveyed the same response by flashing a particular shade of dark green accentuated by black bands.

  “Hardly. Benthicalia is a true city. A great city. The greatest in all the lands encompassed by the southwestern reefs.” Multiple arms gestured, taking in the village around them. “I have not been there myself, but I have heard the tales told by those who heard the tales told by those who listened to the tales told by experienced and knowledgeable travelers. They speak of wonders a simple hunter like myself can only imagine.” He flushed cobalt. “To see it will be a life zenith, of sorts.”

  Reaching out, she nearly succeeded in snatching a preoccupied hawkfish. Realizing it had come too close, it hastily turned tail and shot off mirrorskyward. What would she have done had she caught it? Popped it into her mouth? She licked her lips distastefully. The longer she was here, the more she found her instincts and tastes changing to match those of her new friends. It was unsettling.

  Busy conversing with Chachel and Poylee, Oxothyr did not appear to have heard anything of the exchange between cuttlefish and changeling. Irina knew that by now she ought to know better. The shaman missed nothing.

  “You will come too, changeling?” he asked her. “There are colleagues of mine in the city who will find your presence and the story of how you came to be among us entertaining as well as instructive.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” she replied uncertainly. “I’m still not really sure of myself in these surroundings, in this altered body. I don’t know if I’m ready to make a change again so soon. Everything’s all still pretty new to me. I’m getting better at making adjustments, more comfortable at doing certain things, but I’m still …”

  “Afraid.” Poylee’s dismissive tone bordered on contemptuous.

  Tensing, Irina glared at her. “On the other hand, the best chance I have of finding a way home is probably to consult with as many educated minds as possible.” She nodded forcefully. “Yes, I’ll come too, Oxothyr.”

  “Excellent. Your presence may bring you good and will certainly do me credit.” The soft body turned. “And you, matchless hunter?”

  Chachel kicked backward. “Not I, master flatterer. You can work magic on me, but not words. I thought about everything you said the other night, and I’m still going back to Sandrift with the others.” His gaze shifted to his companion. “Go with them if you want to, Glint. I haven’t been to Benthicalia, but I know the way is strange and dangerous.”

  Turning bright yellow, the cuttlefish darted up to him, his arms practically touching his friend’s face. “You find those designations off-putting. I find them enticing.”

  Nose to tentacle, Chachel straightened in the water. “Go and be enticed, then. Or dismembered. Whatever tickles your cuttlebone.” Snapping out a hand as efficiently as any manyarm, he snatched a passing leafy seahorse, popped it in his mouth, and chewed defiantly. Even at a distance, Irina could hear the crunch. She winced.

  “As you will.” The cuttlefish backed off. “I don’t understand your lack of curiosity. We’re all going to die someday anyway. It might as well be in the service of others and a search for novelty. How fortunate for you that you suffer from neither concern.”

  Chachel turned away, glancing back over a shoulder. “You should know by now, Glint, that you can hold me with suckers but not with words.”

  “Let him be.” Drifting forward, Oxothyr wrapped an arm around the cuttlefish’s tail and pulled him gently backward. “We’ll do better without his constant complaining. Jorosab can come in his place.”

  Chachel paused and looked back. “A fine choice. He’ll be a perfect complement to you, shaman. All muscle and no brain.”

  Oxothyr shrugged green. “We must make do with what we have, even though the future of every village and town and all who live in them is at stake. Come, my friends,” he told the others. “We will draw additional volunteers for our escort. There are many who will be glad of the opportunity to serve—and to see the wonders of the great city.”

  “Who cares?” Chachel shouted after them. “I have my cave! I have peace of mind!”

  Jetting backward in the usual fashion of his kind, Glint offered his friend a parting word. “Piece of mind, you mean. Don’t worry. You’ll still get to see Benthicalia—in word pictures, when I speak lavishly of it upon my return.”

  “Fools.” Muttering to himself, Chachel turned and finned toward the te
mporary camp the members of the expedition from Sandrift had set up on the other side of the town square. “Fools preparing for a fool’s errand. The shaman doesn’t need a one of them. He just wants company on the long passage. Someone to talk to and pliant supplicants to venerate him.” Swimming away, he noticed that Poylee was following him. He halted abruptly.

  “What do you want? I thought you were going with the old bag?”

  She looked and sounded uncertain. “I thought surely you were coming too, Chachel. If you’re not, perhaps I should …”

  “What?” he interrupted her curtly. “Stay behind? To look after me? I need no looking after, womb-with-fins. And you—you have your best friend to keep you company wherever you go. Your mirror.”

  Her mouth opened, her expression contorted, but she said nothing. Instead, she whirled and swam furiously to catch up with Oxothyr and the others. Chachel watched her go, relieved to be rid of her. He was sick and tired of her frequent attentions, the constant little touches she thought passed unnoticed, and hopeful insinuations. Better she disappear into the distance in the company of an aging sage, flighty manyarm, and incomprehensible changeling. As for himself, he had food to find, fish to fillet, and thoughts to ponder.

  What thoughts? The saving of Sandrift, his own salvation, the color of the water or the changing sheen of the mirrorsky? How much time was needed for that? The rest of his life?

  Benthicalia. Could he not do all those things as well there as here? Perhaps even better? If he didn’t go, he would never know. Worst of all would be when Glint returned enhanced and enlightened. Chachel was sure he would never hear the end of it. He knew the cuttlefish. Not a hunt would proceed without the garrulous manyarm regaling him endlessly and at length with interminable anecdotes of his adventures. There was only way to prevent that inescapable harangue. Pre-empt it.

  O O O

  The following morning when the small but skilled group Oxothyr had gathered around him assembled in the village square, a certain dismissive hunter was among them. Chachel was going along not to fulfill a desperate desire to set eyes on fabled Benthicalia, not out of any need to assist his fellow mersons, nor out of guilt or embarrassment.

  He was going because despite everything he believed about himself, more than anything else he feared becoming an irrelevance.

  — XIII —

  There was no coral, but there was algae. There were fish, but they had no color. Subdued of scale and anxious of eye, they swam mostly alone. In this place of gray gloom and dark shadows, schooling was not a wise defense mechanism. Better for one to be eaten than dozens.

  The milieu through which they darted furtively had once been the throat of an old volcano. Like an actor shedding a toga, the softer exterior rock of the underwater mountain had eroded to expose hexagonal columns of cracked basalt where lava had rapidly cooled, as if a colony of giant morose bees had given themselves over to processing and regurgitating gray stone instead of wax.

  Over millennia the raw minerals had been chipped and gnawed away, had been shaped and sculpted by generation after generation of spralaker masons until the core of the submerged volcano had been chiseled into a royal court whose majesty was matched only by its somberness. Here held sway the greatest of all spralaker rulers; monstrous and ugly, ruthless and powerful. Bioluminescent swimmers held captive in stringy cages hung from the walls and vaulted stone ceiling, illuminating their surroundings with a fitful, unwholesome gleam. Courtiers with decorated shells and claws scuttled to and fro in the tubular corridors. Here and there, slaves with scales and slaves with shells scurried about their tasks while doing their utmost to avoid the attention of their masters’ spiteful claws. There was even a captured merson or two, or a lumbering, blubbery niracson. Tarazoks, cousins to mersons but far more fish-like in appearance, swam freely among the chambers.

  Where the innermost core of the old volcano had once sent bloodrock gushing upward to pierce the mirrorsky, a sprawling circular chamber had been laboriously hewn from the solid basalt. When directly overhead, the sun shone straight down the ancient volcanic throat all the way to the bottom of the artificially enlarged cavity. This momentary appearance of vivid illumination was both worshiped and shunned as a harbinger of everything bright and vile that threatened the lives of spralakers, who naturally preferred the darkness of their burrows to the brighter world outside.

  The terminus of the deep cylindrical shaft was marked by the bleak grandeur of the reception room. There could be found the ancient throne of the spralaker High Lords; a huge, flat slab of raw jadeite that had been polished to a glistening sheen. Even in the dim light of the chamber, its surface shone ever green. Intricate bas-reliefs depicting scenes from the glorious history of the hardshell peoples ran completely around the exterior. No soft pillows were piled high atop the perfectly flat slab. A harsh folk, spralakers preferred to take their ease on surfaces that offered protection and reassurance rather than comfort.

  Kulakak was no different. With a merson-size body covered in stubby, irregular protuberances and legs that spanned the entire breadth of the jadeite throne, he was an intimidating presence even if not the largest of his kind. His eyestalks when fully extended were as long as a person’s forearm. Sitting in front of him on the flat polished surface was a sea fan basket half full of live smelt. Periodically dipping a claw into the basket, he ate steadily. Flopping and writhing on top of one another, the terrified smelt did not swim away because all of their fins had been amputated before they had been served.

  A dedicated personal guard of urchins clung to the circular walls and stone floor. Equipped with bristling black and violet spines, at a command they could instantly surround and impale any prospective assassin—or simply someone who happened to displease the spralaker ruler. A thick, strong shell would turn and defeat such weapons—except that they were present in such numbers on the walls that at least a few of the poisonous spines were sure to find a vulnerable place or two on any attacker.

  The urchins did not have the walls to themselves. Dangling from the sculpted stone were the twisted skeletons of hollow-eyed mersons, the frayed and shrunken corpses of manyarms, and the occasional smartly engraved cuttlebone.

  Relaxing within the throne room, Kulakak felt both secure and at home. As he systematically downed another squirming, helpless, softly screaming smelt, a new shape came sweeping into the room. Passing between the pair of massive sculptures of armed spralakers that flanked the vestibule, Advisor Gubujul’s multiple legs propelled him toward the jadeite slab at a steady pace. Though ever wary, as Paramount Advisor to the throne the oversized stenopus shrimp knew protocol better than most. Otherwise he would long ago have joined in the royal food basket the unfortunates who had preceded him in his position.

  Despite his confidence, he was not looking forward to the incipient presentation. With the Emperor, not all news went down as easily as did helpless fish.

  Embedded jewels glittered on the Paramount Advisor’s carapace. Gold dust glittered on his antennae forelegs where he’d had them shaped into a cosmetic bowl of glue-impregnated powdertuff. Looking more than anything like a handful of bejeweled candy canes, his pure white body highlighted by the natural crimson-red bands that striped his torso and limbs worked its self-important way across the stone floor. As he neared the throne, the half-dozen long, ivory-hued antennae that sprouted from his head dipped low and his voice segued smoothly into a well-practiced fawning.

  “You look well this day, my Lord. Your shell gleams like the Whiteness that is Scraped, and your …”

  Spitting out small bones, Kulakak devoted one eye to his Advisor while keeping the other on his food. Gubujul did not take this as a sign of indifference. Nothing escaped the Great Lord’s attention.

  “Spare me your customary obsequiousness this morning.”

  Bending his forelegs beneath him, Gubujul bowed toward the throne. “As usual, my Lord wastes no time.”

  “And has my Paramount Advisor enjoyed his usual breakfast of sun
rise refuse?” Another despondent definned fish vanished into the seemingly bottomless toothless maw.

  “Gourmet refuse, my Lord,” Gubujul replied unflinchingly. “I am blessed that others find my choice of cuisine unpalatable. It leaves that much more for me.”

  Kulakak belched memorably, sending forth a cloud of half-digested fish flesh, skin, and entrails. Tempted to snack on the spray of waste, Gubujul thought better of it, not wishing to appear the glutton before his master. It was difficult to resist, though, when one’s sensitive antennae were enveloped in so much delectable emancipated garbage.

  “Word has come from the southwest, my Lord. A messenger has arrived with intelligence.” The Advisor’s many legs fanned the water, keeping him upright.

  That news drew the Great Lord’s full attention. “Send him in.”

  That the him was a her did nothing to diminish the Great Lord’s anticipation. With its red-speckled ivory-white body and white eyes, the porcelain crab was among the most beautiful of all spralaker-kind. But the one who scuttled in, claws held deferentially low to the ground, showed evidence of having been battered by time and distance. Kulakak was willing to overlook the messenger’s unceremonious dishabille. It was a very long way indeed to the despised southwestern reefs, and she had clearly ridden long and hard to return as swiftly as possible to the ancestral home. That did not mean he was inclined to waste time waiting for her to catch her breath.

  “How goes the cleansing?” he demanded to know before she could even give her name. To her credit, she did not waste time trying to interject it.

  “Shakestone, the town that was selected for the first assault,” she hissed wearily, “was easily taken: its habitat destroyed, its inhabitants killed or consumed. All went as intended. Our arrival was unexpected, our surprise complete, our victory total.”

  “I wish I could have been there.” Off to one side Gubujul’s long, delicate forearms stabbed through the water in bold martial gestures, the narrow pincers snapping at drifting fragments of latent organic debris.