* * * *
Dropping spread-eagled like the proverbial stone, Chulib abided the repugnance of his oceanic dip. Despite the lateness of the season, the sea remained pleasantly tepid, but the salty water irritated the sensitivity of his osmotic skin. He smiled unrepentantly. 1,499 fellow frogmen were feeling equally discomfited. Misery loved company.
Executing Eskaa's command to deliver an unforgettable reprisal to the manimals, damning them to whatever hell fish fried in, Chulib was spurred on more by his personal need to avenge the deaths of Ryops and Knalli, a hankering for retribution bringing recklessness to his actions. Folding his arms and unwieldy spear behind his back, he straightened his kinked legs as much as the backwards facing bones allowed and dove steeply, picking up speed and depth with equal measure. His escort duly copied.
Catching up to his web of warriors, unfurling to completely drape the submerged bastion of the amphibs unfathomable foemen, he left them behind with a brisk croak of encouragement. That was the extent of directing his forces for now, his brief from Eskaa expectedly crude: fan out and fish for the enemy.
Don't be flash and improvise. Simply engulf the Fish-with-Hands beneath a breaker of death. Kill and conquer them.
Chulib understood the direct purity of violence better than any other Piawro, with the exception of his new master. Learning about his enemy was unimportant to Chulib. Sharks gulped down other fishes without devouring their life history. Curiosity never his bag, Chulib operated on the “no need to know” basis, exemplified by his unthinking obedience. When asked by his master to jump, the frogman only wanted to know how high. All Chulib required to neutralise an adversary was the where and when, not the why.
The lead search party swarmed through the royal sea caves, followed closely by other invaders pouring eagerly into the varying sized undersea grottos a hundred feet farther down. All emerged disappointingly empty-handed. The trailbreakers vented their frustration by desecrating the terraced ridge flat, smashing to a pulp the vividly coloured coral gardens no longer appreciated by the forlorn Merqueen. The one-eyed scout reported true. The enemy had seemingly abandoned their stronghold, giving up the bountiful reef without a fight.
Chulib suspected otherwise, or at least Eskaa did. The rundown given by the Subos on likely Fish-with-Hands habits before their embarkation, wholly piecemeal extrapolations more conjectural than concrete, pointed to a fierce territoriality on their part. Chulib thought the theory sound. Willing to cross the channel to besiege Lunder Atoll, the handy fish were unlikely to surrender Castle Rock without a protest. Chances were good they lurked in the vicinity.
"Go deep!” he called up to his stymied frogmen. “If they're anywhere hereabouts, we'll flush them out."
"How far down must we drop?” a clubber queried.
"Until you come out on the other side of the ocean, if need be. Just find and butcher them."
Unconcerned about the danger of the Fish-with-Hands getting the jump on his crew, the decisive senior Shurpeha was confident he commanded superior numbers to repel an ambush.
Continuing their rapid descent, Chulib and his escort plunged down to 300 feet, the steadily blueing and cooling water doing nothing to dampen the hot vengefulness firing his belly. Drawing parallel with the dungeon grottos, his oversized eyes normalising the gloom to an acceptably reduced level of vision, Chulib was unsurprised when confronted by challenging Fishers streaming out of the unlit openings. Obviously the scout, afraid of diving too deep, failed to inspect the bottommost caves.
"About time,” he muttered, yanking his ripcord. The weight-belt fell instantly away into the depths, freeing Chulib up for the frog versus fish competition. And his first contestant happened to be Lasbow.
* * * *
Leading by example, the kingly Seaguardian surged from Durgay's former cell, ironically using the merfolk vessel of imprisonment to jumpstart safeguarding Cetari freedom. By now Castle Rock's refugees were well away from the battle zone, benefiting from a half-day's head start. Turning a blind eye to commonsense, Lasbow quashed Ahlegra's protest over his decision to captain the small force stationed behind valiantly fighting a delaying action, granting the populace precious more time to escape unmolested. He and Cerdic shared the same regal streak of independence.
The choice to impose self-exile upon the Rockers proved far easier to make than implement. Resistance to the idea of cowardly swimming away, abandoning their ancestral homeland nearly proved impossibly strong to overcome. In the end, trust in their newly accepted Merking, vouched for by his undyingly loyal Seaguard, swayed the intractable merpeople to forsake Bounty Reef forever. With the odds stacked against them and no real prospect of routing this larger army of frogmen, the best hope for the Cetari lay in starting afresh somewhere beyond the reach of Lunder's hostile natives.
Loosing off disabling sonar blasts which knocked Chulib's escorting frogmen off-guard, the ambushers zeroed in on the middle Landhopper who, judging by his carriage, was clearly some sort of commander, probably their vanquished leader's replacement. They veered off at Lasbow's insistence to leave the burlier amphibiman for him.
"Remember, hit and swim,” he whistled to his mermen. For every Cetari submariner, ten amphibiman usurpers were sinking fast to anchor the Piawro claim on not just Castle Rock or Bounty Reef, but the whole of Pah Ocean. Accordingly, the Rockers method to harass the Landhoppers to the point of distraction, and not engage them in a full frontal, head-butting contest they would surely lose, was a sensible decision on Lasbow's part. Survival, not suicide, was the catchword for today. Forming into squads of three, each individual sporting a reworked, barbless trident mandated by their recently installed regent to be a radically more effective instrument of war, the grimly heroic Fishers ascended to play tag with the intruders.
Putting his own advice into practice, Lasbow fired his inbuilt sonic bioweapon at the oncoming Shurpeha and rolled smartly away. Assuming the kingship also meant receiving the bequeathment of the Merking sword, an inheritance he swiftly consigned back to the ceremonial closest to be dusted off—the sand, that is—for special occasions. Like Chulib, he preferred the comfortableness of standard weaponry.
Listing as if he had been bludgeoned with an invisible club, Chulib somersaulted backwards. Tough as he looked, the leading Shurpeha recovered stupendously fast and jabbed at the banking merman before he swam out of range. Startled by the prick from the obsidian spearhead scraping across his tail flukes and leaving a ragged, red smear, Lasbow revised his strategy and reversed course.
Thrusting at the retaliatory Landhopper, Lasbow found his questing trident deflected by Chulib's expert parry. This frog was no softy, but another of those mysteriously better and thankfully rarer combatants previously encountered, as evidenced by his greying skin gone largely unnoticed in the darkish water. Imprudently drawn into a protracted duel, the Seaguard captain traded unsuccessful lunges with the practised amphib, quickly realising he was far out of his depth. Chulib's recent mastery with pole weaponry outstripped Lasbow's spearfishing proficiency with the trident. Sparring with identically armed peers resulted in a greater level of expertise than that which stemmed from lancing fish that do not stab back.
Before he could regain his lost edge by unleashing a second, stronger pulse of immobilising sound waves, Lasbow reeled from Chulib's savage bout of jabs and feints, ending with the point of the Landhopper spear hurtfully grazing his left shoulder. Strike two. The third hit would no doubt put the adopted royal out of action, probably for good. Realising conventional fighting techniques would not defeat his expert foe the newest Merking tried the unorthodox.
Displaying a supreme effort of will, Lasbow flung aside his prized trident, savagely yanked the offending spear out of Chulib's grasp and grabbed for the surprised frogman, seizing a wrist in each of his strong hands and head-butting his enemy for good measure. Now that is called using your noggin! Boasting a skull nowhere near as thick as his opponent, Chulib rashly returned the favour and neatly brained himself in th
e process. But the duel was not over just yet. Dazed as he was, the disarmed amphibiman looked to have plenty of fight left in him.
Mindful of Cerdic's horrific poisoning, Lasbow feared shifting his grip to throttle his Landhopper catch in case this boss possessed the same devious defence. Their respective lances rapidly sinking out of sight left Lasbow his belted knife and Chulib outwardly weaponless. But as the informally crowned Cetari king contemplated drawing his fearsome fish tooth, an enamelled saw equally deadly in or out of a megashark's terrifying maw, Chulib stirred and thrashed about.
Left with one option, Lasbow flicked his tail and dived, pushing the squirming Piawro ahead of him. Arms pinned helplessly to his side gave Chulib no choice but to go along for the ride, spouting abuse at his captor. “Release me immediately, fish face, or I'll disarm you—literally! I'll rip them off at the armpits and beat you about the head with them, you brainless brute. Do as I say! By the gods, fight me like a frogman, you underhanded, overgrown goby."
Not taking the threats onboard, not the least because the bullying Landhopper's ribbits were merely an incoherent babble more galling than terrorising, the Merking focused on powering the up and down strokes of his sweeping flukes, propelling him toward the inky depths even as the intrinsic phobia of the abyss rose within, fluttering his stomach. Even the dashing and daring former captain could not avoid an unsettling panic attack.
Skimming downwards over the reef slope, the fan-shaped gorgonian corals brushing irritatingly against Chulib's exposed back, the pair swept over the abrupt ending of the incline and out into fathomless space. His belly seemingly rushing up into his mouth, Lasbow angled straight down, totally letting go of his inhibitions. Recognising his peril as the gloomy rock face walling the foundations of the reef hurtled past his upside down vision, the frogman's croaky bluster fled him as the twilight blue dimmed frighteningly into directionless black. Crossing the drop-off marked the point of no return for Chulib. He was perceptibly exceeding the maximum survivable depth for any unprotected humanoid. From hereon, the Shurpeha boss lived on borrowed time.
The clear-cut, clamorous din of battle also receded the deeper they plunged, muted not so much by distance but the dampening effects the darkly suppressive seawater generated. Submersed in the silent blackness with no reference points other than the undersea crag at his back, Lasbow grittily maintained his precipitous dive. In a little under two minutes he transported his unwilling passenger to the thousand-foot mark and showed no sign of slowing, let alone stopping. For Chulib, this indeed would be a one-way trip.
Were it not for his induction into the Seaguard ranks and rapid rise to his captaincy, Lasbow's selection as a vaunted whalebone diver would have been a certainty. Given the proper training, the Cetari innate fear of the Deep was not an insurmountable debilitation for those deemed physically and psychologically fit for undertaking such arduous and chancy plunges. Every handicap can be overcome with perseverance. And potentially Lasbow might have turned into the best Retriever since Hulcer dived phenomenally deep into fishtory.
Though the pitch-blackness masked Chulib's alien countenance from him, the merman acoustically monitored the resigned amphibiman, felt the mannish frog's quickened pulse through his limp wrists, actually saw in fuzzed ultrasound images the Shurpeha's frantically beating, frangible heart. Chulib's terror was corporeal and Lasbow detested the brutalities of war, despised himself for contributing to the inflicted carnage. That shame did nothing to halt his giddying descent.
Chulib suddenly became animate again and distraughtly blubbered, “I am Shurpeha! I'll not meet my end at the bottom of the sea at the hands of a mutant fish!” In an act of pure desperation he wrapped his legs around the merman's tail, pluckily trying to stem their freefall. Lasbow easily bucked free and speeded up, or rather down.
Pressure sickness gradually afflicted Chulib. Starting with tremors, his useless hands trembled frenziedly, followed by his shaking feet. Next his vision turned blurry and impaired, although in the liquid blackness loss of sight was no inconvenience.
At 1,500 feet the deepening coolness of the inky water nipped tellingly at Chulib's extremities, reducing his struggles to feebler protests and steadily numbing his resistance, even though his involuntary spasms continued undiminished. Every osmotic breath he drew in spread the frigidity further through his body, crystallising his icy cells, plunging his body's core to an unpleasantly cold level. It was as if he was freezing from the inside out. By comparison, the chillier depth for Lasbow was a minor irritant, the layer of thick fat sandwiched between his skin and muscle tissue superb insulation against the plummeting temperature. Added to that, mermen benefited from being thermally warmed, enabling them to withstand punishing coldness. You might say they enjoyed organic central heating.
Already bettering his own personal dive record by 104 feet, the elevated Seaguardian never ceased to marvel at the thirst of prepubescent Fishers to explore ever deeper when the undersea scenery at this sunless depth and beyond stayed a characterless and static black desert of watery cold.
The mounting pressure trampled Chulib's will, but despite his body progressively suffering irreparable tissue damage he stubbornly clung to life, his deadening fingertips and toes twitching madly. Frustrated by his foeman's tenacity, Lasbow was forced to plunge even deeper than envisioned.
Scheming to see the intolerable pressures associated with the extreme Deep squish the life from the fragilely boned Landhopper, Lasbow lacked the anatomical acumen to know 80% of an amphibiman's body was composed of water. In physical terms, this meant a frogman's internal pressure equalised to that of the forces of the surrounding environment pressing in on his frame from all sides, cancelling any discrepancy and rendering him incompressible. Until he passed crush depth for the Piawro, after which the bodily gases present in dissolved form, ubiquitous oxygen and nitrogen, could no longer maintain their pressurised equilibrium, compacted, and ... boom! But since no islander had braved the briny inner space further than 150 feet down, nobody living in or out of the water had any inkling of the dive tolerances for frogmen. Sadly, Chulib, about to make an important scientific discovery, would not live to boast about the unenviable acclaim of becoming the deepest plunging Landhopper ever.
Lasbow's headlong pitch down through the mesopelagic zone continued unchecked. The fathoms ticked monotonously by for the speedily sinking Merking and he inexactly gauged his depth at around 2,000 feet from the nuances the intensifying water pressure exerted upon his finely tuned bodywork. The bony nodules ringing his eyes tingled from compression, as did his digits, cramping now with the extended effort of holding firm his deadweight prisoner.
A full mile down saw the acute cold utterly leach the fight from Chulib, paralysing his shivers and sucking from his insensate body what scant warmth remained. A frosty dread encrusted his icing bones with deathly permanence, weakening his grip on life. The time for prayer, beseeching Enayres, the Piawro God of Water, for deliverance from his fate, lay out of reach above Chulib's head. Not that the Landhopper deity held much sway over the Cetari sea god; He and Nupterus were scarcely on speaking terms! Fogged with cold, Chulib's chilled brain started shutting down, the cogs of his cognisance freezing solid. His wits disjointed and scrambled, the doomed amphib did not have the presence of mind left to assemble any thought but formless despair.
Organically, Cetari were outfitted to swim unconstrained at any and all depths, the only limiting factor to their range being tiredness and the fact that food and oxygen were scarcer at the deepest levels of the ocean trenches. Boasting skeletal scaffolding stressed to withstand the imposing rigours of deep sea diving, their engorged ribcage was a prime example of natural bioengineering. The twinned swim bladders that critically regulated buoyancy and capacitated the merfolk to operate anywhere between the wavy surface and frigid seafloor sat encased behind bony framework stronger than mild grade steel but one-sixth the weight, flexibly elastic, and pressurised by water-filled capillaries reinforcing the core of the bones t
o solidify them against damaging compression.
Landhoppers were nowhere near as robustly built. Hypothermic effects aside, they could tolerate the fluctuations in liquid densities thanks to their permeable skin, internal pressure matched to that of the embracing water. But not indefinitely. Freshwater compression at the bottom of a 300-foot lake was a mere fraction of the enormous pressures encountered in sea dives ranging over a mile or more. Not only that, Chulib's overstressed body bore another hardship to contend with. The salinity of the briny deep was enough to salt the frogman's flesh ten times over, and he had reached saturation point.
Perceiving a constricting of the frogman's compressed biorhythms, Lasbow increased his pace even as a giant, invisible fist clenched Chulib's body.
The imperilled amphib literally began falling apart. First his protuberant eyes cracked like eggs, the vitreous humour—the jellied, transparent filling which maintains an eyeball's sphericity—spilling like a runny yolk. The blinding pain barely impacted on the wilted frogman, mercifully spared feeling the escalating torment. Next his eardrums burst, creating a domino effect embroiling his respiratory organs. Amphibs registered sounds twofold, their hearing boosted by an uninterrupted air link from the ears to the lungs which assisted in determining from where a noise emanated; a direction finder unique to frogkind. Thusly, Chulib's rupturing tympanic membranes triggered his lungs to flatten to one-sixteenth their normal size, preceded by his unfortified chest wall collapsing in on itself.
From there, health-wise, things spiralled from bad to worse for him. Arteries sundered amid rippling organic implosions, the uncontained blood deluging the wreckage of the delicate kidneys and spleen, crushed by the overbearing sea. Not even the miraculously regenerative powers of the liver prevented the biggest gland in the body from destructing implosively, the vital chemical processor mashed to worthless pulp. Lastly, Chulib's premier workhorse muscle, his triangular three-chambered heart, imploded, its robustness no protection against the concerted pressure. Deprived of its powerhouse pump, Chulib's frozen and fractured body shutdown completely.
Three Times Chosen Page 26