Oshenerth

by Alan Dean Foster

  He didn’t have to look far. The mêlée raged around him. Oultm and Glint both had their own short swords out, the spralakers having closed too tight to allow the cuttlefish to make any further use of his bows and arrows. Thus far all the dark blood swirling around the combatants belonged to the attackers. Chachel feared that if the fight continued for much longer that was likely to change. There were too many of the hardshells. Unless he and his companions could get farther off the sea floor and gain enough height to make full use of their superior mobility, the likelihood of them completing their mission, much less seeing Benthicalia or Sandrift again, was small. If only that damned oarfish …!

  “Glint!” he roared. “Cover me! I’m going up.” Before the embattled cuttlefish could respond, Chachel was already kicking hard and ascending.

  Anticipating that sooner or later their quarry must try to make a break for open water, spralaker riders were waiting for him.

  Several dozen still clung to the back and sides of the huge oarfish. Illuminated by the lights they carried or had attached to their bodies as well as by those of the oarfish itself, they were easy to pick out in the dark water. Woven double-pouches holding hundreds of short throwing blades and curved knives were slung on either side of the willowy, flattened fish like elongated saddlebags. There was only one way to avoid the manifold riders and their lethal arsenal of weapons. There was only one possible angle of attack that would make it difficult for them to strike at him as Chachel came near.

  Ignoring the added danger and taking a deep breath, Chachel swam directly for the head.

  Luminous, convex blue eyes wider than his face gazed blankly back at him as, spear fully extended from his right arm, he came rocketing toward the front of the oarfish. Detecting the fast-closing non-hardshell swimmer, the spralaker riders took aim with their various blades as their monster mount snapped at him. The oarfish was not fast, but it was surprisingly quick for such a large predator. In addition to avoiding the mouthful of long, needle-like teeth that could swallow him whole, Chachel had to deal with the efforts of the spralakers on its back. Spinning its way through the water, one accurately-flung, palm-sized metal scythe just missed taking off his left foot.

  Failing to skewer him on its furiously gnashing teeth, the enraged oarfish twisted sharply to its right. This whipped a section of its heavy body directly toward Chachel, allowing the spralakers on its back to let loose with a broadside of cutting edge weaponry at close range. Some of it he was able to dodge. Only skills honed from years of solitary hunting or later, in tandem with Glint, allowed him to deflect the oncoming spears, knives, arrows, and throwing blades. His own spear was a whirlwind in the water, a white blur the hunter manipulated with a skill that to his chattering, howling, and increasingly frustrated attackers seemed to border on the supernatural. They had no way of knowing that he was in fact manipulating the water as well.

  Leaping from its perch near the tail of the oarfish as it snapped around to try and deal the maddeningly evasive merson a stunning blow, one spralaker flung itself straight at the hunter. Claws extended with every intention of ripping out the merson’s gills, the hardshell flew straight at his face. Noting the attack at the last possible instant, Chachel strained his remaining calf muscle as he kicked sharply upward. Claws snapping, the weak-swimming spralaker passed just beneath him. Drawing his knees up toward his chest, the elusive hunter simultaneously thrust straight down with his principle weapon. Aided by the sudden density of water a murmuring Chachel put behind the spear butt, it went right through the spralaker’s shell to pierce its brain. Flailing claws stilled as the multiple feathery legs ceased swimming.

  Grabbing onto the body of the dead hardshell and using it as a shield, Chachel kicked as hard as he could toward the oarfish, which had curved back to make another pass at him. As the great fish drew near, its spralaker riders let loose with another fusillade of lethal weapons. All of them glanced off the dead spralaker’s thick shell or stuck harmlessly into its lifeless body. When the oarfish opened its jaws wide to once again snap at the hunter, its teeth clamped down instead on the spralaker corpse.

  The instant those narrow but deadly jaws closed on the body of the deceased hardshell, Chachel shot forward over the fringe-topped skull to plant the metal point of his spear in the center of the oarfish’s head, directly above and between the eyes.

  The giant serpentine shape convulsed. The spralakers riding on its spine and flanks forgot about the lone merson in their midst as they fought with all their strength to hang onto their mortally wounded mount. Water displaced by the spasming oarfish sent Chachel tumbling backward as helplessly as if he had been caught in an upcurrent. When he was finally able to regain his balance, the oarfish and its remaining riders were a pale blue blur receding into the darkness in the direction of distant Benthicalia.

  Reaching over a shoulder toward the spear quiver strapped to his back, he found that he had one weapon left. He would have to take care not to waste it. Arching his back and pointing his feet toward the mirrorsky, he swam straight down to where a flurry of bioluminescence showed the location of the ongoing battle below.

  He arrived just in time. Swirling about a common axis, Glint and Oultm had been unable to find an escape route leading upward. Spralakers could not swim fast enough to catch any cephalopod in the open water, not even the languorous nautilus, but they could stay afloat well enough to keep quarry trapped beneath them. Slamming into them from above, Chachel surprised the hovering hardshells from behind. Striking out with his spear and knife, he put several of them down before his return was even noticed. That enabled the two hard-pressed manyarms to finally climb to a level where their much greater maneuverability meant they no longer presented easily cornered targets to their assailants.

  Seeing that their quarry had succeeded in safely rising clear of the sand and that the oarfish on which they relied for transport had unaccountably gone missing, the surviving spralaker soldiers decided that no mere trio of softbodies was worth the sacrifice of any more of their lives. Breaking off the engagement, the hardshell survivors went scurrying off in the direction Benthicalia and their vanished mount. Chachel followed for awhile, harrying the retreat from above, until he realized that neither of his companions was participating in the rout. The envoy Oultm he expected to hang back, but where was Glint? It wasn’t like the cuttlefish not to share in a hard-won victory. Concerned, he spun about and returned to the scene of battle.

  Above a dark sandy plain strewn with the corpses of dead spralakers whose bodies were already the subject of tentative nibbles from small scavengers he found the usually aloof Oultm attending solicitously to the cuttlefish. Something was not right. Coming closer, Chachel soon saw the source of the envoy’s concern.

  There was not a lot of blood, but it was clear that Glint had been hurt. The cuttlefish’s eyes were half closed. Reflective of his pain, bands of white cascaded in waves down the length of his body from head to tail. Unexpectedly unsettled by a surge of emotion he had not experienced since his youth, Chachel swam close to his injured friend.

  “How bad is it, Glint?”

  Opening his eyes fully, the cuttlefish looked over at him. “I’ve felt better. The spralakers?”

  Chachel jerked his head to his left, briefly glancing back over his shoulder. “Done. Finished. Gone. I don’t know if their fish will survive. The rest will have to walk all the way back to Benthicalia.”

  “Would that we had the time to pick off each and every one of them from above. Ah well.” One eye shifted to regard the unexpectedly attentive Oultm. “Critical undertakings do not allow time for such pleasurable diversions as revenge.”

  It was then Chachel noticed that his friend was missing an arm. He looked closer. Two. A merson suffering the loss of both arms would be condemned to a gradual, unpleasant death. Counting the absence of a third limb, Chachel swallowed.

  Noticing the direction of his companion’s gaze, Glint made an effort to suppress the tell-tale bands of white pain
that were shooting through his body. “Not to grieve, my friend.” Two tentacles longer than the rest flicked forward to just tap the tip of Chachel’s nose. “Both my capturing arms are intact. As to the loss of the others, well, better an arm than an eye, of which I like you have only two. I can still hunt.” A blush of pink flushed his mantle. “I may just tilt to the left a little while doing so, is all.”

  They stayed there awhile as Chachel tended to Glint’s wounds. A concerned Oultm looked on. Only when the ends of the cuttlefish’s amputated limbs had been treated with sticky salve and patched with nudibranch intestines did they prepare to resume their journey, moving to recover the supplies they had been forced to drop in the heat of battle.

  Preoccupied with thoughts of his fellow manyarm’s injuries as well as the challenging task that still lay before them, Oultm was picking his backpack off the sandy patch where it had come to rest when the badly wounded but by no means deceased spralaker that had been lying in wait in the sand in hopes of just such an opportunity jumped him from behind. The envoy never saw him. Engaged in recovering their own provisions, neither did Glint or Chachel. The emissary should have died right there, on the spot, his soft mantle torn apart by the spralaker’s glistening curved blade.

  Instead, it was the hardshell that went down. The two spears that pierced its shell just above and between its eyes were short, but no less lethal for their abbreviated length. Hearing the assassin’s death cries, an alarmed Chachel and Glint rushed to the envoy’s side. Arriving to see that he was not alone, they slowed. One of Oultm’s saviors promptly pivoted in the water to face the two startled hunters.

  “Oxothyr felt that any group attempting to escape Benthicalia that consisted of more than three individuals stood a good chance of drawing the attention of outriding spralaker patrols.” The famulus Sathi looked at Glint. “Apparently three was enough to do so.”

  “I’m sorry we arrived too late to help in the fight.” Flashing his own cheerful internal glow, a curious Tythe swam up to inspect the damage to Glint’s arms. “Maybe the shaman can grow you some new ones.”

  Bobbing in the water, Sathi concurred. “Oxothyr is very good at making things grow.”

  Spreading his eight arms wide, Oultm turned red as he politely embraced first one squid and then the other. “You saved my life.”

  “We know,” said Tythe matter-of-factly. “What matters is that this vital diplomatic mission will go on.”

  As he watched the diverse assortment of cephalopods—squid, octopus, and cuttlefish—converse via an enviable fusion of words and color changes, Chachel found himself having to deal with a jumble of emotions. There was no doubt that the mission had been saved only thanks to the timely arrival of the two famuli. On the other hand, he experienced a rush of resentment at the realization that the shaman must have thought from the beginning that the two hunters might need looking-after and additional help. That this had turned out to be true did nothing to mitigate Chachel’s annoyance.

  “Well, I’m glad you’re here,” he finally snapped as he swam off to pick up his pack. The quartet of manyarms watched him go.

  “What’s wrong with your friend?” a puzzled Sathi asked Glint.

  The injured cuttlefish was already feeling better. Manyarms healed very fast. He flashed a shrug. “Who can say? If I ever come to truly understand mersons and what motivates them, then I’ll be ready to proclaim myself master of all Oshenerth.”

  Nearby, Tythe indicated agreement. “I think it must be all those bones they have to carry around inside them. Must grate on the nerve endings.”

  “As do your interminable simpleton’s explanations on everyone else.” Rising slightly above the others, Sathi gazed in the direction of Benthicalia. “If the master was here he would say we are talking too much and moving too little. The spralakers who fled may encounter and inform others of their kind. If any return to this spot, we should not be here.”

  Acknowledging the wisdom of the famulus’s observation, his fellow manyarms moved to gather up the rest of their own gear. As Chachel chose not to explain his perplexing mood change, his tentacled companions left him to his brooding. His humor gradually improved, and very soon thereafter the unexpectedly enlarged group was once more swimming hard into the darkness, into the west, and into the unknown.

  — XXIII —

  As one sunless day after another passed with no sign of relief and the tightening siege wore on relentlessly, the mood within the walls of Benthicalia did not turn altogether defeatist, but it most assuredly reflected an increasing sense of desperation. With Oxothyr consulting regularly with the Tornal, every non-traditional assault attempted by the spralakers was turned back. These intermittent defeats of the enemy’s repeatedly ineffectual and sometimes supernatural efforts comprised the only good news for the city’s residents, who increasingly had to do without the staples usually supplied through foraging or trade. The former had been rendered impossible by spralaker patrols, and the latter by the blockade that seemed to strengthen day by day. The city was in danger of being overcome not by frontal martial assaults, though these continued on a regular basis, but by slow strangulation.

  Every day at the same time, Oxothyr would swim to the highest level of the city. There he would hover alone and for a long while, staring off into the south. Whenever he would espy a distant glow his tentacles would flex in anticipation and his mantle would turn a hopeful yellow. And every time, the outlying lights turned out to belong to a spralaker patrol, or other enemy forces maneuvering in the distance. Then he would sink back down, speaking to no one on the way, and sequester himself silently in the small residential burrow he had made his temporary home.

  Irina felt sorry for him. Laboring under a tremendous and largely self-imposed sense of responsibility, the shaman was a prisoner of his own melancholy ruminations. Isolated by his own skills and abilities, he had no one to talk to, no one to confide in. Certainly not an otherworldly changeling. He could not even take pleasure in the usual emotional release to be gained by railing at his famuli, whom she finally learned had been sent off in secret to watch over the Tornal diplomat and his resilient but tiny escort.

  It was while waiting in armed reserve as the spralakers mounted yet another in their series of interminable assaults on the north wall that a touch on her arm made her turn. It was Poylee. Despite displaying a recent slow-to-heal scar on her left cheek and another on the front of her right thigh, courtesy of slashing spralaker weapons that had both just missed their intended kill, the merson who had first taken Irina in was still beautiful. At the moment, though, her usual feistiness was absent and she appeared atypically subdued.

  Expecting to endure the habitual chiding that would lay out in detail everything she was doing wrong, from the way she was holding her spear to her posture in the water, Irina was surprised by the merson’s muted tone. It was unlike Poylee to approach her with anything other than criticism.

  “Are you feeling all right, Irina?”

  “What?” It took the pale blonde a moment to adjust the defenses that had gone up the instant she had spotted the other woman coming toward her.

  In lieu of customary sarcasm, Poylee offered a smile that was almost shy. “I asked if you were doing well. How are your injuries?” She did not have to inquire if Irina had suffered any. Every defender of the wall had taken at least one hit.

  “I’m okay.” Irina stared back at the lithe female shape hovering before her. “Bruised, almost got knocked out during this morning’s attack, but okay.” She nodded in the direction of Poylee’s leg. “Not as bad as you.” Turning, she gestured in the direction of the current skirmish. “One thing I don’t understand: with all this blood in the water, I’d think every shark in Oshenerth would be patrolling these battlefields.”

  Poylee’s smile faded. “Be assured they are out there, in the distance, just beyond the fighting. You can bet your gill filters on that. But remember: sharks are food like any other fish. They are not especially wise, but they are
ever cautious, attacking in strength only when the numbers are on their side and preferably when their intended prey is already sick or injured. Out in the dark they wait to pick off any stragglers who come their way.” With the point of her spear she indicated the battlefield beyond the wall. “When this is finally over, it is they who will emerge victorious—no matter which side wins. It is their tribe that will thrive on the leftovers.”

  Irina nodded, paused a moment, then added, “How about you, Poylee? Are you all right? You seem different. I don’t know—pleasant.”

  The merson turned away. “I—I’m sorry, Irina. I haven’t been very nice to you recently, have I?”

  “No,” Irina agreed without hesitation. “You haven’t. I know how much you think of Chachel, and I’ve tried to prove to you every way I know how that I’m not interested in him. All I’m interested in is finding a way back to my own world, my own life.”

  “I know, I know.” Poylee turned back to the visitor. “I can’t help myself about such things. If Chachel would show some interest …”

  “I think he does,” Irina said gently. “I’ve seen evidence of it.”

  “No,” Poylee protested more vociferously, “interest. What you are seeing is tolerance. Kindness, at best.” She inhaled deeply, her gill flaps flaring wide as she exhaled. “I don’t suppose it matters any more. By now he must be dead. Him and that foolish cuttlefish who hunts beside him and gives him bad advice.”

  Cold water seemed to leak into Irina’s heart, chilling her soul as well as her body. “You’ve heard something. You know something.”

  “No,” Poylee murmured. The other female’s reply left Irina more relieved than she would have thought possible. “It’s just a feeling. I’m very sensitive to such things. Just a feeling, and the fact that he and Glint and that ridiculous envoy have been gone for so long.” Her face came up and she looked straight at Irina. In the soft blue-green glow illuminating the city below, her eyes were pleading. “Oxothyr agrees, though he won’t commit himself and outwardly, at least, refuses to give up hope. But I know it, Irina. I know it!”