The Medusa Plague

by Mary Kirchoff

  Justarius watched the interplay of Guerrand’s emotions on the young man’s face. Shaking his head sadly, the archmage turned to leave. “I have things I must attend to while I’m here at Wayreth.” He eased his crippled leg to the door and placed his hand on the knob. “Let me just say this, Guerrand. If public adoration or the trappings of comfort represent success to you, then turn down the job. But if you seek the opportunity to use your skill for something important, you’ll jump at this chance.” The archmage squinted through one eye at his former apprentice. “You’ll probably never get another.” Justarius wrapped his cloak more tightly about himself and stepped from the room.

  Guerrand was staring, unseeing, at the closed door when he became aware of something moving about on the small, thick window ledge. Turning, he spied Zagarus. He’d not even heard the bird arrive. Zagarus merely stood staring expectantly at his master.

  “What? Why are you looking at me like that?” Guerrand demanded. “Let me guess. You heard our conversation, and you think Justarius is right?”

  It doesn’t matter what I think. I’m just a bird, Zag shot back. Don’t expect me to solve all your problems. What do you think?

  Guerrand already knew the answer to that. Both Esme and Justarius, the two people who unquestionably knew him best, had so easily recognized in him what he had refused to believe until now. He had been hiding out in Harrowdown, at least for the last few years. He had already lost Esme because of it. Justarius would not recommend him twice for the position of high defender. He had to accept the offer, or he would always wonder what his life might have been. Besides, if he failed, he could always return to Harrowdown, couldn’t he?

  Guerrand yanked open the door and stepped out of the room. Justarius stood a dozen paces away, conversing with another red-robed mage. Both looked up as Guerrand entered the hallway.

  “I wouldn’t miss this opportunity for the world, Justarius,” Guerrand announced. “I’m your man.”

  “There it is!” breathed the old fisherman, pointing a knobby finger to the churning water off the New Coast peninsula. “The Boil above Itzan Klertal.”

  Lyim Rhistadt looked over the bow of the small fishing boat to where a swath of sea appeared to boil in a wide, dark, frothing circle. Dead fish and other sea creatures bubbled to the top as if in a stewpot. Since its birth more than three hundred fifty years before, New Sea had roiled here, like an eternal flame, to mark the spot where the evil city once known as Klertal had stood. Lyim had never seen anything like this angry black water, and it fascinated him.

  “Take me closer,” he ordered the fishermen he’d paid handsomely to ferry him to this locally feared triangle of sea. Lyim’s eyes never left the spot where angry black water boiled and churned.

  “This is near enough,” hissed the sailor’s son, a thin lad with a wispy mustache and fly-away hair the color of mouse fur. His eyes grew wide as he saw bloody bits of fish float nearer their small boat. His lips trembled. “We’d best turn back, Pa.”

  Lyim’s left hand stopped the old man as he leaned into the oars to turn the small craft. “I paid you a year’s wages to take me to the Boil.”

  “And that we have done,” said the old fisherman, beads of sweat forming on his upper lip. “Any closer, and we’ll surely be pulled into the maelstrom.”

  “If it’s a closer look he wants, I say push him in and let him swim,” grumbled the man’s other son, a surly, suspicious lad with thick, veined forearms. He had strongly opposed his father accepting the job from the first, when the strange, secretive man had approached them on the dock back in the tiny fishing village of Balnakyle.

  Lyim’s coal-dark eyes pierced the burly son’s, saying what his lips did not. I have not searched five long years to let your pitiful fear stop me now. The surly lad drew back to the farthest corner of the dinghy, and still it was not far enough from the shrouded man who hid his right hand.

  “You’ll take me wherever I say.” Lyim turned his back on all three of the fishermen dismissively, mentally measuring the distance to the angrily boiling waters. He could easily swim the distance, and yet it was the principle of the thing. He had paid these fainthearts well.

  The boat shifted abruptly. It was too silent behind him. Lyim whirled around to find father and sons, hands outstretched, closing in on him slowly. They froze in the dark shadow of Lyim’s gaze.

  The mage’s left hand reached into his dark shroud and withdrew a small, wrapped cocoon. He didn’t hesitate for a heartbeat before locking his eyes on the surly son and mumbling the words to the spell that had come to mind. There came one short, high-pitched scream, then a hideous slurping and popping sound. Where once stood a dark-haired human was now a flapping mass of tentacles trying desperately to support a heavy, soft body with bulging eyes. The squid fell against the side of the dinghy, then slipped overboard into the sea.

  “Maginus?” yelped the father, leaning overboard with his other son. Both desperately searched the surface of the rippling sea. When Maginus didn’t answer, his family drew back from the edge in horror and looked to Lyim’s face. The mage sat and calmly crossed his legs.

  Lyim derived great pleasure from watching them realize his profession. The sailors looked fearfully from him to the seething water and back, as if trying to decide which was more dangerous, a mage or the angry boiling sea. They decided to take their chances with the sea, because both men wordlessly snatched up the oars and paddled the dinghy closer to the roiling water.

  Satisfied at last, Lyim stood carefully once more and shrugged the simple shroud he wore down from his shoulders, letting it dangle from his forearms. He was naked from the waist up and oblivious to the quaking fishermen. The mage closed his eyes and concentrated on the remembered pattern of the spell he sought; its only component was verbal, so it was more important than ever to be precise. At last Lyim opened his eyes and let the shroud slip to the bottom of the dinghy. He saw the men’s eyes shift from his nakedness, searching for the source of the odd hissing sound. Both gasped aloud when they found it at the end of Lyim’s right arm.

  The appendage that was no longer an arm.

  The limb was a writhing thing covered not with flesh, but with scales of brown, red, and gold, patterned symmetrically in rings and swirls. At the end of the limb, where a hand should have been, thrashed the head of a snake, its eyes inky black and malevolent. Sighting the two frightened fishermen, the hideous creature hissed and flicked its tongue.

  The younger man backpedaled in undisguised horror. The father had to grab his son’s arm to keep him from falling overboard and joining Maginus.

  Lyim had never grown used to the looks of revulsion his snake arm drew. He had a difficult time not recoiling from it himself. Nearly six years had passed since his own master, Belize, had viciously thrust Lyim’s right arm into a magical portal at Stonecliff. When then-apprentice Lyim had been allowed to withdraw his arm from the extradimensional bridge, he found his limb had been replaced by a living snake.

  Soon, Lyim reminded himself, people would no longer draw back from him in horror. Below, in Itzan Klertal, he would learn the secret for removing, once and for all, the hideous thing his arm had become.

  The thought propelled the mage on, made him mumble the words that would polymorph him into a sea creature. The sensation was an odd, painless stretching that sounded worse than it felt, with all manner of pops and crackles. Lyim grew to tower nearly twice the height of the witless men in the little dinghy. He gingerly passed his thick, insensitive tongue over hundreds of needle-sharp teeth. Though he could feel nothing through his thick, green-scaled hide, he knew the luxurious mane of hair of which he was so proud was now like limp seaweed. His left arm had lengthened as if made of hot taffy; he could touch his wide, webbed feet, so useful for swimming, without even bending.

  But no amount of research had prepared the mage for what it would feel like to be a scrag, a water troll. Despite years of living with his repulsive limb, Lyim was still vain enough to be glad he couldn’t
see how grotesque he must look now. Yet the water troll was the safest form to adopt to explore the ruins of Itzan Klertal in search of the Coral Oracle.

  The boat was pitching dangerously with the added weight of Lyim’s new, ten-foot-tall form, not to mention the fishermen’s frantic scrabbling to get away from him. Lyim threw himself overboard, heedless of the huge wave he left in his wake. The men were as good as dead anyway.

  The mage-turned-scrag instinctively reached out his long, green arm toward the swirling maelstrom and drew powerful downward strokes, kicking his wide, webbed feet. Lyim wasn’t surprised to see that even as a scrag, his snake arm remained. Nothing he had tried in nearly six years had removed it for more than a day. He had starved himself, but while he withered, the limb flourished. He had chopped off the snake, even doused it in oil and burned it in his desperation, willing to live with only one arm. But the grotesque limb always regenerated. Illusionary spells to disguise it simply misfired, even when cast by the most powerful mages he could bribe. He had journeyed far and wide looking for anyone who might know how to fix his magically mutated limb. Each fruitless trip left him more bitter and frustrated. He hoped fervently that this trip to the sunken city would end that pattern.

  Strangely, the failure that had left him the most bitter was the first. Oh, the Council of Three had been kind enough when he’d agreed to return to Wayreth with Justarius after the fiasco that had caused the mutation at Stonecliff. They’d taken him under their wing, so to speak. Par-Salian, LaDonna, and Justarius had given him lodging for more than a month while they searched their books and their collective memories for some way to banish the snake from his limb. Justarius had even encouraged him to take his Test while they searched. Despite the handicap of his right arm during spellcasting, Lyim’s natural ability had helped him to struggle successfully through the arduous trial of magic taken by all mages who wished to progress beyond rudimentary spells. He saw it as vindication for all that he had suffered, and somehow he connected that positive sign with the belief that the Council of Three would find some way to cure him.

  That was why Lyim had been stunned—beyond stunned—when they called him into the Hall of Mages to inform him that they had been stymied in all efforts to discover a cure for his hand. The problem was, they said, none of them knew what Belize had done, what spell had caused the mutation. Though Justarius specialized in rearranging magical patterns to create new spells, he needed to see the old pattern, which was known only by Belize, who had been tried in a tribunal and put to death.

  Justarius had concluded the meeting by encouraging Lyim to overlook the handicap and get on with his life; obviously it had hindered Lyim little in his Test. The newly appointed Master of the Red Robes had even pointed to his own crippled leg and said, “We’ve all given up things for the magic.”

  Justarius knew nothing about Lyim, if he didn’t realize how much the mutation had altered his life. How could anyone compare a game leg with the monstrosity that was Lyim’s hand? Night and day the thing hissed and thrashed, until he could hear nothing else, until he thought he would go mad. Nodding numbly, Lyim had backed out of the Hall of Mages and left Wayreth without another word exchanged.

  Lyim believed they had spoken honestly, that Par-Salian, LaDonna, and Justarius had tried. What he could neither understand nor forgive was that the three most powerful mages on Ansalon were unable to find a solution to his problem. It confirmed what he had always suspected: You had only yourself. For the umpteenth time in his life, Lyim had set off alone to alter the cards the cruel fates had dealt him. That day had been the first of the five-and-a-half-year search that led Lyim to a city sunk by the Cataclysm.

  A whispered conversation in a dark Nerakan inn had brought him here. There had he met Ardn Amurchin, an evil mage who resided in the corrupt city dominated by volcanoes. Amurchin was a sinister and hideously wizened old dark elf who told Lyim at their first meeting that he knew of one who had an answer to every question. At a second meeting, Amurchin divulged the secret of an oracle who was trapped in the submerged city of Itzan Klertal. Of course, he revealed this only after Lyim handed over three of his best magical scrolls. Eager for any lead that might cure him, Lyim had readily paid the mage.

  He was eager, but not hasty. Lyim had first traveled back to Palanthas, to the Great Library. He found pre-Cataclysm encyclopedic entries written by the city leaders to be unrevealing whitewash, though he did learn that before the gods’ wrath had reshaped the world, the city he sought had been known only as Klertal. The prefix Itzan, meaning ‘submerged’ in old Kharolian, was added to the name of the ruins after the Cataclysm, as well as to all nearby cities that suffered a similar fate.

  Lyim’s most fruitful research came from recovered journals written by traveling clerics and merchants. By all those accounts, Klertal had been an old, highly developed inland city, a cynical place of cutthroats and thieves. It had been the primary city along a busy trade route between Xak Tsaroth and Tarsis. One account referred to Klertal as a “blasphemous place, without morals or redemption.” Obscene wealth abutted rank poverty. As a rule, everyone, including city officials, cheated and lied.

  Including the potentates. Unlike kings, who were born to their stations, the leaders of Klertal apparently bought, bartered, or beheaded their way into the position. Each remained ruler as long as he staved off his enemies. The last potentate, Sullento the Profane, was evidently exceptionally good at squashing rebellions; he held the position for nearly ten years.

  Lyim found one entry, written by a merchant who had dealt directly with Sullento, particularly interesting. Although there was no mention of an official oracle in Klertal, the merchant recalled having had the rare honor of meeting one of Sullento’s concubines. Reported to be the potentate’s favorite, she claimed to be something of a seeress. The merchant recalled the meeting clearly, primarily because the woman had accurately predicted that a world-shaking cataclysm was imminent. Of course, no one had believed the dire predictions of a concubine. Luckily, the merchant had traveled on, thus living to tell his tale.

  Lyim stroked the chilling water with his strong, elongated arm, kicking with his webbed feet. He looked for the city ahead in the dim, murky light of the sea. Bubbles from his own many-toothed mouth swirled about his head, obscuring his view. He turned his head to release breaths, and at last got a view of the city of Klertal.

  Even if the citizens of Klertal had believed the concubine’s prediction, it wouldn’t have prevented their city from becoming the rolling expanse of kelp-covered rubble Lyim was now seeing. Former streets were distinguishable only as the clear spaces where debris had fallen three centuries before. Seaweed waved and bowed in patchy forests scattered across the tumbled city. Schools of fish, undaunted by the area’s sinister reputation, darted above the sunken city like madly dashing clouds. Aside from them, the ruins were unnaturally quiet and dark, save for a soft glow that radiated from a spongy green moss that crawled across the surface of every crumbled stone. There was no sign of the source of the churning water on the surface of New Sea.

  Lyim realized now that he had seen a miniature version of the sunken city in the wizened mage’s home in Neraka. Amurchin had built a glass-sided water tank in his laboratory, filled it with exotic fish (for spell components, he said), and constructed shipwrecks and buildings for them to swim through. Lyim had thought it an odd hobby at the time, but for reasons of his own, the old mage had apparently recreated the sunken city in his home. It was a minor thing, but it spoke volumes about the significance Amurchin placed on the underwater ruins.

  Lyim paused in his descent to orient himself above the ruins. There were very few two-story structures; most buildings of any size had long ago crumbled under their own weight and the debilitating effect of the sea. What remained of the city was obviously very old. The architecture was an ancient, classical style, not unlike that used in Palanthas. Given the journal entry that cited tumbledown shacks surrounding great opulence, Lyim realized he must be seeing
the ruins of the wealthier homes and official city buildings; the shacks would have long ago been swept away by the sea.

  Off in the distance, Lyim spotted the broken remains of an open-ended oval-shaped colonnade. It led to a lone structure that rose above the others, reminding him of the pre-Cataclysm woodcut print of the potentate’s palace he’d found at the Great Library. Though greatly reduced by both the earthquakes and the years underwater, the palace retained a suggestion of its former opulence. A double-sided central staircase led to a small balcony, where potentates had undoubtedly once addressed the citizens of Klertal. Behind the balcony, seven narrow archways still rose three stories above the courtyard encircled by the colonnade. Lyim was too far away to discern more, but he was determined to make his way through the endless debris to reach the palace.

  Where the streets were not littered with rubble, Lyim spotted many skeletons of humans, elves, and dwarves. The mage assumed them to be the original inhabitants who ran in panic into the streets as the city submerged. But there had been no escape from the city’s doom. Even large ships would have been dragged below in the massive wake, as evidenced by the many rotting hulks scattered incongruously across the empty streets and rooftops.

  Movement caught Lyim’s eye as he surveyed the scene. Several blocks from where he floated, a large body of creatures was swimming slowly, following the path of an old street. He swam toward the group until he could see that these, too, were original inhabitants of the city. But these had not been not lucky enough to die in the Cataclysm. Somehow they had gained a state of unlife, and now lurched down the avenue as zombies. The bloated and discolored beings ranged in age from the very young to the very old, but all had empty eye sockets, and most had twisted or missing limbs, injuries suffered during the Cataclysm that caused their deaths.