Rising Tide

by Mel Odom

  The stones clicked and repeated the message. She felt the words in her lateral lines, then felt them through her webbed toes as the rock beneath her picked up the resonance even more strongly.

  Seek Out One Who Swims With Sekolah

  SEEK OUT ONE WHO SWIMS WITH SEKOLAH

  SeekOutOneWhoSwimsWithSekolah

  SEEKOUTONEWHOSWIMSWITHSEKOLAH

  The words drummed into her mind, demanding action.

  “Favored one,” Viiklee called. “The stones—”

  “I hear them,” Laaqueel replied. She knelt, dropping to her knees in the heated mud, finding it near scalding.

  “Look.” Saanaa pointed at the ribs of a giant lizard sticking up through the rock and mud.

  Laaqueel was familiar with the creature from her studies and from her time among the sea elves and surface dwellers, knowing it had come from the nearby land of Chult. The creature’s huge skull gleamed bright white against the dark water. A man’s bones, crushed and twisted, hung in the huge mouth between the teeth. Whatever had killed the giant lizard had been quick.

  Laaqueel listened to the savage beat of the command initiated by the whirling stones. She knelt in the mud, ignoring the heat, and bowed her head. She prayed with all her heart to Sekolah, knowing that the Great Shark seldom involved himself even in the affairs of the sahuagin, his children. He was a demanding and ungenerous god.

  Saanaa and Viiklee knelt and added their prayers with hers.

  SEEK OUT ONE WHO SWIMS WITH SEKOLAH!

  Though involved in her prayers, Laaqueel also heard the hollow echo of the sound played in the rock strata beneath her. Her lateral lines echoed with it as well. Despite the sea above and around her, she knew that an empty chamber lay below her, a pocket created by the cooled magma from a volcano. Her knowledge of Chult, the primordial land to the southwest of her current position was slim, but she knew about the massive quakes and volcanoes that had shaped and reshaped the land. It was possible that the bones of the great lizard in the mud nearby had gone down with a piece of what had been Chult at one time. Possibly it was from a small island that had existed in a chain around the major continent.

  The great lizard’s death had been quick, too quick for it to even finish the meal it had caught. An erupting volcano could cause such a death, the malenti knew. The fires and heat created by some volcanoes could strip the meat from a body, even sour and poison the water.

  The abyssal hills themselves were formed from volcanoes that had cooled. These dead volcanoes often left chambers and empty pockets located within them.

  Laaqueel rose to her feet and walked away from the spot where the stones whirled. The reflected cadence coming from the rock strata lessened with each step she took. Twenty paces away, she couldn’t feel it anymore.

  She returned to the stones, feeling the cadence grow again. She experimented in the other directions as well, finding it to be the same with all three. The stones had marked the spot.

  “Something lies below, honored one,” Saanaa whispered.

  “I know.” Laaqueel knelt in prayer again, taking the circlet of shark’s teeth from a tie to her harness at her waist. Like the singing bundles of her people, and the spinning ring of stones, the shark’s teeth had been knotted and tied to reproduce sounds that were a prayer in the sahuagin language.

  The shark’s teeth rattled as she shook them, crying out Sekolah’s name. She listened to the chant, pacing the words of her prayer with the cadence, growing faster as she summoned the power the Great Shark had given her. Feeling it reach its peak within her, she shoved her hand forward.

  The power surged through the water from her hand, leaving a wake of brightly colored bubbles. When it struck the rock, a hollow booming gong sounded deep inside the cavern below. In seconds, the rock changed, softening, turning to loose mud. When the power had drained her, leaving her weak and gasping water in big gulps, Laaqueel swam to the site below the stones. She shoved her trident deep into what had once been rock, raking aside what was now mud.

  It only took a minute to breach the outer shell of the chamber. Saanaa and Viiklee helped her widen the hole. Darkness gaped up at them, but the echoed resonance of the rattling stones sounded louder, echoing still more as the first chamber funneled the noise into another chamber further on.

  When the hole was wide enough, Laaqueel waved the other priestesses back. Even their sahuagin vision couldn’t penetrate the gloom trapped inside. She spotted a school of luminous fish out beyond the one hundred pace mark from the open chamber. They glowed pale blue-green. Gathering her trident in both hands, she swam toward the fish, bursting in among them too quickly for them to save themselves. The trident flicked out rapidly, impaling five of the fish.

  She adjusted her air bladder and hung motionless in the water. For the first time she noticed that not even the perpetual ocean currents moved through the dead zone. She popped her retractable claws from her fingers and quickly gutted the fish. Saanaa and Viiklee swam close and snapped up the floating strings of intestines.

  “Meat is meat,” Saanaa said in appreciation. Still, she saved several choice bits of the fish for Laaqueel.

  Reaching the light-producing organs of the fish, the malenti carefully freed them. When she had all five, she took a glow lamp from the bag of holding tied to her harness. Carefully, she nicked each of the organs with a claw to open them, then squeezed the liquid contents up into the neck of the translucent bladder of the glow lamp. All five fish barely gave up a handful of the luminous gel. Keeping the bladder tight, she brought it to her mouth and breathed in, further inflating the glow lamp and giving it some buoyancy. At that depth, it was hard breathing enough air into the bladder to inflate it.

  Sealing the bladder, Laaqueel swirled the gel around, causing it to glow more brightly. It wasn’t enough to hurt her sensitive eyes, but it would serve to illuminate the chambers below the ocean floor. She used a seaweed cord to tie the glow lamp to her trident.

  “Here, favored one,” Saanaa said, offering the fish pieces she’d saved.

  “Meat is meat,” Laaqueel acknowledged. She ate the repast quickly, then swam back to the rough-edged opening. She entered without pause, summoning her belief and her courage. There was nothing she wouldn’t do to improve her standing among her people. Her findings, she felt certain, would empower the sahuagin race as it had never been before. The surface dwellers would live in fear even on land and never darken the sea with their ships again. That hope gave her more reason to go on than any.

  The glow lamp illuminated the chamber, showing the rough, uneven walls created by the cooling lava. The interior looked like a patchwork of blacks and grays even with the light. A narrow fissure in the floor of the first chamber led down into the second. As Laaqueel surveyed it, pushing the glow lamp down inside with the trident, the glowing stones went into motion again. They whirled and clacked, and dropped through the fissure.

  Seek Out One Who Swims With Sekolah

  SEEK OUT ONE WHO SWIMS WITH SEKOLAH

  SEEKOUTONEWHOSWIMSWITHSEKOLAH

  After only a brief hesitation, Laaqueel ventured through the fissure, a prayer on her lips. The light from the glow lamp reflected from the tiny bubbles streaming from her mouth as she prayed.

  The next chamber was bigger, and the chant given off by the stones was echoed in basso booms. A tunnel that had been created by an explosion of trapped gases opened the wall to the malenti’s right. She stayed alert for anything moving around her, but nothing lived in the chambers.

  Eight more chambers came and went, each of varying size. Laaqueel was no longer sure of what direction she was headed in—save down, always down. The water warmed around her, conducting the heat from the trapped volcano around her.

  She swam through the next chamber, arriving in an oblong cave that was larger than anything she’d been in so far. The illumination from the glow lamp wasn’t strong enough to reach from side to side. She released air from her bladder, losing enough buoyancy to drop herself and the infla
ted glow lamp through the murk, straining her vision to spot the floor below.

  Only a few feet up, she spotted the mosaic in the floor. Squares as long as her arm, reduced only to light and dark by the pale blue glow of the lamp, connected with each other. Even then, the squares were only a remnant of the floor as it had been.

  Laaqueel held the glow lamp aloft and paced as she measured the section. Irregularly shaped, and twenty strokes by thirty, the floor section canted across the bottom of the volcanic chamber. Black charring scored the surface. Broken furnishings, furniture as well as crafted coral pieces, piled amid the broken clutter gathered at the lowest end of the floor section.

  The malenti sorted through the debris, using the long knife from her shin sheath to shift the broken pieces in case anything dangerous lived in it. However, whatever enchantment kept living things from intruding above also kept them from below. She took four beautiful coral pieces that captured her eye, watching as Saanaa and Viiklee found treasures of their own.

  “Beware,” she told the other priestesses. “It may be that these are Sekolah’s possessions and we’ll have to give them back.”

  “Until then,” Viiklee agreed covetously, “but only until that time.”

  The debris left no doubt that it had come from a civilized place, but whether it was carried a long distance or still more of it lay under the rubble of the chambers, Laaqueel didn’t know. She glanced upward, remembering the whirling stones. The constant chanted command had faded into the background of her hearing, but still throbbed inside her mind.

  The stones circled above and to her right, waiting. “Come,” she told the others, “we’ll explore further later.” She increased her buoyancy again and swam to the stones. She held the glow lamp before her, the trident still at the ready.

  When she neared, the stones fluttered and took off again. They whirled through the water and through a long, narrow shaft. It lead to a small room still and cold as a tomb despite the heat coming from the volcano trapped below. Primitive fear of the unknown prickled the malenti’s skin as she neared the mouth of the shaft.

  In the light given off by the glow lamp, a shadowy figure took shape out of the darkness. Instead of being illuminated, it seemed to take the darkness into itself, turning darker even than black pearl.

  “What is it, favored one?” Saanaa called from behind.

  “A man,” Laaqueel answered.

  “Not a sahuagin?”

  “No.” The malenti let the disappointment sound in her voice. She knew she’d spoken the truth, yet that didn’t explain the fear that cut through her.

  “Maybe we should look for another chamber,” Viiklee said. “There must be others.”

  Laaqueel stared at the stones hovering over the top of the still figure of the man.

  Seek Out One Who Swims With Sekolah

  SEEK OUT ONE WHO SWIMS WITH SEKOLAH

  They came to an abrupt stop, and the silence struck as forcibly as a whale sounding.

  “No,” she replied. “This is where we were led.”

  She forced herself to go forward. Once inside the room, the chill grew stronger, became an arctic cold. She couldn’t fathom how the water wasn’t frozen solid by whatever glamour possessed the room. She had no doubt that the room was enchanted.

  She lifted the glow lamp and played it over the figure. Resembling a surface dweller, he stood a full head taller than the malenti, and inches above the other priestesses. His hair was pulled back in a cluster of tangles secured by carved bones with intricate runes. Harshness tightened his face, narrowed his single eye and turned it down at the corners. The other eye was a hollow socket surrounded skin puckered by the scar of a long-healed burn. He wore a mustache that ran down to his chin, then flared back up his jawline to join his sideburns, leaving his dimpled chin clean-shaven. Hollow-cheeked, he looked wasted and emaciated, that fact showing even more starkly since he was totally naked, starved yet wiry. In the pale light of the glow lamp, his skin tone was as pale as a bled corpse. Dark tattoos scribed in broad strokes covered his body, creating a mosaic of color and sharp lines on every square inch of skin.

  His solitary eye stared through her.

  Fearful but needing to know, Laaqueel reached out and touched him with her knife point. The sharp edge grated on the man’s petrified skin, not even leaving a mark in its passage.

  “He’s dead, favored one,” Saanaa said. “He’s not the one we came for.”

  “Let’s leave this tomb,” Viiklee pleaded.

  Laaqueel stepped closer to the petrified man who looked so unlike anything she had expected. “No,” she commanded, “this is the one we came for.”

  “This can’t be One Who Swims With Sekolah,” Viiklee argued. “He looks like a—a surface dweller. A human, not even an elf.”

  She glanced up at them as they hovered over the petrified man, then back at the statue’s hard face. “ ‘There in his cold grave’ ” Laaqueel quoted from the text she’d read, “ ‘barren of life and bereft of the powers he’d once commanded, lost to the luxuries he’d once had, lies One Who Swims With Sekolah. Dead—yet undead, too, turned as hard and as cold as his heart that left love forsaken.’ ” The common tongue she’d learned as part of her training was sometimes less precise than the sahuagin tongue, so there was a margin for error, but the stones didn’t lie.

  “What love?” Saanaa asked.

  “I don’t know,” Laaqueel admitted.

  “Humans only know to love another human,” Viiklee stated. “Their understanding of that emotion is pathetic. Wisdom dictates loving your race, not an individual. The race is what will persevere.”

  That was the sahuagin view, Laaqueel knew, and one seldom shared by the humans or elves. Those races tended to think individuals first and race second.

  “If this is One Who Swims With Sekolah, who did this to him?” Saanaa asked.

  “The book didn’t say.”

  “What are we supposed to do with a dead human?” Viiklee demanded.

  “He isn’t dead,” Laaqueel answered.

  “The story said he lay in his tomb,” Viiklee pointed out.

  “It also said he was dead, yet undead. Maybe he can’t be killed.”

  “He’s dead,” the younger priestess argued. “Even a hatchling would know that.” Sahuagin knew about death; the weak died early, eaten by its fellow hatchlings.

  “We’ll see,” Laaqueel said as she opened the whalebone container around her neck again and removed a ring. Cast in gold, the ring was a simple band studded with diamond chips that reflected the pale blue-green luminescence of the glow lamp.

  “What’s that?” Saanaa asked.

  “A ring.”

  “I can see that, honored one.”

  “A very special ring.” Laaqueel slid the ring onto the petrified man’s forefinger. The magic in the ring caused it to adjust to the man’s finger with an unsettling fluid grace. It slid into place, then began to glow. “This ring was mentioned in the book,” she continued. “It took a year and a half to find. It’s supposed to return One Who Swims With Sekolah to life.”

  “More magic,” Viiklee spat in disgust. “Only the magic bestowed by Sekolah is trustworthy.”

  “I have prayed,” Laaqueel said, “that these things be blessed in Sekolah’s hungry gaze. We’ve been brought here without harm.”

  “Thuur died,” Viiklee reminded.

  “By choosing to thwart Sekolah’s plan for us,” the malenti reminded her companion. As Laaqueel watched, the petrified man took on a different pallor, adding color to the bone-hue he wore. She touched him, finding his skin slightly pliable now. “It’s working.”

  “How long will it take, honored one?” Saanaa asked.

  “However long it takes, we’ll be here,” Laaqueel said. “We’re not leaving.”

  Sudden movement sensed through her lateral lines woke Laaqueel, letting her know something had moved in front of her. She blinked her eyes open and searched for the glow lamp. Hours after the discovery o
f the petrified man, she’d assigned shifts, taking the first one herself. Saanaa and Viiklee had protested, not wanting to stay in the cold tomb. Laaqueel had ignored them. The cold might be uncomfortable, but it wasn’t harmful. Still, she’d surprised herself by being able to sleep.

  “Saanaa,” the malenti called out.

  There was no answer, and she couldn’t see either of the two priestesses in the illumination given off by the glow lamp.

  Laaqueel pushed herself to her feet and leaned toward the glow lamp attached to her trident. Earlier, the luminescence had almost filled the room. Now it covered less than half of it. The gel hadn’t lost its ability to illuminate so quickly.

  The preternatural chill vibrated through Laaqueel again. Her lateral lines registered more movement, but it didn’t feel like either of the two priestesses. She was attuned to their physical motions and would know them even in the dark.

  This was different.

  She pushed the glow lamp toward the area where the petrified man had been. He was gone, but the light played over the twisted corpses of the two junior priestesses. They lay in pieces across the cavern floor, shredded by a large predator.

  Disbelief paralyzed Laaqueel. They’d been killed while she slept—without her waking. She had no clue why she’d been spared. Sensing the movement again, she turned quickly to face it, bringing her hands up to defend herself.

  A hand, hard as stone and cold as ice, battered through her defenses and locked around her throat. Hooked fingers painfully invaded her gill slits to further choke her.

  The man’s face illuminated gradually at the other end of that impossibly thin arm, like he’d allowed the light to finally touch him. He smiled, and it was the cruelest expression Laaqueel had ever seen.

  His words touched her mind without being spoken. They were cold and hard, singing like gong notes inside her head, but came across as a whisper. You thought to sneak quietly in here and steal from me, didn’t you, little thief, he accused. His words were heavily accented, lilting and almost musical.