Well nearly. Its final act expelled a heavily diluted gush of urine, mixing with the warm blood trickling from his body's orifices and briefly taking the chill off the cold water.
Immediately letting go of the peeing frogman, crinkling like a crumpled piece of paper, Lasbow whistled his relief. Crushing the frogman had taken far longer and gone far deeper than planned, but his accomplice prevailed in the end. The sea always was a fickle mistress ... mother one day, murderess the next. He latched on to that perception, grasping it as if it were a life preserver before guilt over killing the frogman barehanded sucked him down. Technically, the ocean was his murder weapon, perfectly silent and untraceable.
Suspended in the weightless dark, Chulib's contorted corpse floating motionless horribly close, the Merking considered fishing about for his discarded trident and regrettably flagged the idea away. He could ill afford to squander precious time on that wasted task. His narrow-beam biosonar was poorly suited for general searches, and the ocean immeasurably vast. He could be scouring the inky seas for hours without any luck, his unclaimed trident drifting within spearing distance and him none the wiser. Lost to the Deep, the whalebone weapon would return to its original resting place on the sediment thickly muddying the seafloor.
Looks like I'll have to become a swords-merman after all.
From fathoms below a groan like the shuddering of continental plates locked in a perpetual pushing match sawed intermittently through the black water. Only it was not a tectonic murmur.
Lasbow should have ascended urgently to rejoin his band of hopelessly outnumbered marauders but hung about, listening attentively to the faraway growl. The intangible disturbance bothered him. Tapping into the faint pulsation of the deep ocean, his entire body an extension of his heightened senses, made the noise no less definable. The Fisher Merking could only establish the bass rumble was incredibly deep, miles beneath his flukes, and churning slothfully through the black, liquid coldness.
Versed in Cetari mythology—what maturing merboy was not enthralled by tall tales of mysterious sea monsters plying the unsounded depths—Lasbow had outgrown those fables, adulthood dismissing them as hogwash and the wild, unverifiable claims of near-miss encounters logged by Retrievers simply the hallucinatory products of deep pressure sickness. But the folklore maintained that the fabulous giant squid and octopus ran silent. There was no way those titanic, tentacled monsters uttered anything more than a burp, if you believed in that tripe.
Then the nebulous noise filtered upwards again, and faded hauntingly into the distance.
It's only the current he tried convincing himself, knowing full well there was no underwater wind that deep.
Delaying no more, the Merking rose hurriedly, driven by the irrational fear the unknown instilled, his internals automatically adjusting to the changing pressures. He would collect the survivors out of his harrying Fishers and beat a hasty retreat northwards, handing over Bounty Reef to its new tenants by default. The question was, would the occupation force be content with their hollow victory, or give chase aboard their exotic overwater vessels to the deep cruising escapees they probably paddled over unawares on their inbound journey? Catching up to Castle Rock's refugees was going to be taxing enough for his mermen battlers without side-swimming hounding frogmen. In charge of their escape, Ahlegra knew to exhort the frightened merpeople to swim hard, particularly the children and old folk. Nothing and nobody could slow their flight.
Ochar proved especially difficult to shift out of her grotto. Entrenched in her ways, the Rock's senior citizen refused to budge from her home, prepared to float alone against the invaders. Unable to dissuade her from her suicidal stance, Lasbow ordered her forcibly removed. Time had run out for subtleties. His last image of the stalwart old mergirl was Ochar glowering resentfully from between the two Fishers mermanhandling her out of seclusion before indelicately fastening a padded towrope around her hippy waist. She would not easily forgive him her indignities.
Lasbow's ascension, to power, and not his physical climb, presented an unforeseen complication. Not exactly harbouring religious zeal, the custodian of Cetari ethnicity also shepherded the spiritual welfare of his merpeople. Gaining the impression from their earlier discourse of the Merprincess being far less practically minded than him, Lasbow hoped getting better acquainted with the regal mermaid might help clue him up on his remissible lack of divinity.
But that issue could only be dealt with when the homeless merfolk were safely ensconced elsewhere. The fate of the relocating Cetari rested squarely with two distant merpeople. And no, surprisingly not Durgay and Najoli.
Chapter Seventeen
"You've gotten us hopelessly lost."
Doing her utmost to ignore her beau's glum criticism of their unhappy situation, Najoli had to concede Durgay's correctness. The cold clarity of truth reflected the tremblingly frigid polar waters they had been aimlessly negotiating for two frustrating weeks. The permanent sea ice yet to undergo its seasonal break up in another month, the eight-foot dense floes sheeting the surface remained a solid deterrence to the Fisher's spyhopping habit. Prevented from indulging in his hobby only made the disenfranchised Seaguardian crankier and he channelled that frustration into bitching yet again about being off-course.
"It's hopeless. We might as well be swimming in circles. You're not entirely sure where we should be heading or how best to get there, other than Ochar's vague allusion. I'm sincerely starting to question the wisdom of that belief. I love the old dear like an aunt, but her memory is hardly watertight. She has sprung leaks of forgetfulness. Maybe “Grams” unintentionally sent us on a wild goosefish chase."
"My faith in her isn't misplaced and neither should you feel that yours is. Grammy Ochar is wise beyond her seasons."
"That doesn't solve our immediate problem."
"You're better acquainted with Nupterus than me, Durgay. You could always try asking Him for directions."
Najoli's levity did not improve his humour. “Must these waters always be so damnably dark? I swear the blackness of night is frozen in place and will never sink back into the depths."
Durgay's complaint was a valid one. Midwinter in the northern latitudes dusked the region with three months of perpetual twilight. Until springtime daylight peeped over the horizon, the desolately arid icescape, runner up in the dryness stakes only to the sandiest hot weather deserts, would remain dimly brightened by pale starshine and the locally famous aurora borealis.
Like a dogfish with a bone, the Fisher did not drop the issue of Ochar. “Did she give any other clues, anything that'll be helpful in finding the Sea God's frozen lair?"
Suppressing a discontented sigh, the mermaiden gazed up at the whitish ceiling of unbroken pack ice, the only point of reference in a liquid blue-blackness devoid of undersea landmarks that rendered Arctica Blue less than navigable.
Frozen water was completely foreign to the tropical Cetari. Sure, the occasional berg calved by glacial flows ending at Icesand did drift southwards past the meridian and into equatorial seas, shrunk and reduced to eventual meltwater beneath the broiling sun. But, by and large, such floating islands of mountainous ice passed innocuously unseen down the eastern seaboard of the southern continent, never encountered by the fishmen out west.
Understandably, Najoli exhibited a wonderment bordering on awe with the solidified seawater. The nippy polar ocean was at first a shock to the system for the warm water denizens, a discomfort which pleasantly turned into enthralled astonishment when they began bumping into sporadic ice floes that had snapped free of the main pack to roguishly float wherever the whims of sea and sky dictated they flow. Durgay's own captivation was all too soon tarnished by the chillness of the northernmost sea seeping into his old bones and soon his attention focused back on to their imperative quest. But for Najoli the ice held its rapturous beauty for the better part of their first week in the Far North.
Exhibiting an almost childlike curiosity, she investigated the crystallised water, hesitantl
y prodding the touchable frostiness before plucking up the courage to run her hands fully over the grooved and cracked underside of the ice sheet, the sensation thrilling her no end. Craving to make passionate love then and there, the ice oddly inflaming her desire, Durgay would have none of it. He was looking for god, not a good time.
Water was a shapeless constant, fluidic and without structure unless wrought by the sculpting wind into surface waves, which existed sadly for only the briefest moment before rejoining the oceanic collective, their transient independence an expression of nature's practical artistry; function with form. But here, at the bleakly frigid top of the world, water was delineated three-dimensionally, frozen in time and space into aesthetically warring angles and curves, a tactile feast of blue-tinged, architectural transparency. Here, water did not slip through Najoli's fingers, but could be physically handled, even remodelled if desired. Imagine what artistries these untapped blocks of ice might yield beneath the fashioning hands of a whalebone mastercarver.
Seeing unlimited possibilities to this world of hardened water, she experienced only a disappointing sadness that her lover could not open his mind to the glories the iced sea had on offer. All Durgay comprehended was a glaciated desert washed of all colour, inhospitable and unforgiving, forbidding in its cold beauty. Intuiting otherwise, Najoli strangely became the one who saw the hand of Nupterus suffusing this surreal place. No wonder the God of Seas and Skies settled in this place after his exhaustive world-forming labours. This virginal region was a boundless canvas for His stupendous creativity as a hobbyist now.
But as Najoli regarded her merman she understood that nothing captivates unendingly and a fortnight cruising Arctica Blue was dulling the initial magic the spellbinding ice held even for her. Pretty as it was, frozen seawater is just salty ice.
"There's no point rehashing what little Ochar imparted to me, Durgs. That scant information won't change. It got us this far and now it's up to us to figure out the rest.” Her hand clasped his, cold to his touch. “Have patience, lover. I didn't expect searching for Nupterus was going to be either easy or quick."
He sneered up at the impassable rafters of ice grinding ceaselessly. “Just as well we aren't air gulpers then. We'd have suffocated by now.” Death by drowning was generally inconceivable to the merfolk. How could anyone fail to breathe water?
"I guess we go back to tediously quartering Arctica Blue,” he grumped. “We can't possibly get any more lost than we already are."
That they did. Another week of unproductive seeking dragged by, turning up no results whatsoever, not a single encouraging lead as to the whereabouts of the Sea Lord's unlisted residence surfacing. And the further they penetrated the polar seas, hedged as it was by a wasteland of dry ice scarcely watered by even a drizzle of rain, the more they lost hope of ever locating Nupterus and his fabled citadel.
They fished as they went, their subsistence diet of smelt and herring pitifully small snacks barely adequate fare to meet their energy requirements and quell their growling hunger pangs. During the sunless winter months the arctic ecosystem fell into a harsh torpor, reviving when day-shine returned ahead of the wildlife that wintered in warmer climes, migrating back to take advantage of the spring bounty when life briefly flourished anew under the mildly warming rays. On occasion they could hear cod grunting in the blacker water immediately below them, a tantalisingly close meal a mere few hundred feet down which might as well have been the other side of the world. Neither of them risked diving beyond visual range of the frozen roof for fear of the unknown, blacker Polar Deep. They would rather starve than court separation.
The capping ice was at its furthermost radius, extended into continuous sheets from the shelf fringing Icesand by winter's additives. In subzero arctic conditions the ocean's surface readily iced over into a crust kept in perpetual motion by the formative exertions of tide, wind, and current. The questing couple's arrival in the roofed northern waters was well timed. Any later and the fracturing, buckling ice posed a shipping hazard even to submariners. Bergs carried the bulk of their mass underwater and once adrift in the sea-lanes from the parent ice these mobile islets brushed aside any flotsam along their unscheduled route. Getting mowed down by runaway iceblocks would bring a premature end to merfolk voyaging.
That is not to say the run in had not been without other perils. On the outskirts of the polar cap, the couple suffered the narrowest of escapes when the raucous clicking from a pack of ravening killer whales betrayed its deadly approach. Stuck out in the middle of the ocean with nowhere to hide, the vulnerable Cetari made the pact to go down together fighting. Sounding was no escape, for the toothed whales were equally capable divers and persistent hunters. His trident held staunchly at the ready, Najoli gripping their work knife unswervingly, Durgay's relief was inestimable when the honking pod swerved away toward the shoreline before the potential merfolk takeaways registered on their underwater radar, the orcas” attention trapped by a shoal of salmon corralled into a shallow coastal bay for easy pickings.
It was not their first brush with cetaceans. Way before that near miss Najoli had, to Durgay's infuriation, tried fraternising with a gam of narwhals lounging in pleasanter waters at the southernmost range of the pack ice, waiting for the disassembling spring melt and its subsequent retreat northward which prompted the smallish whales to summer again in the prosperous Far North gorging on fish and squid. Patently aloof and downright snobbish, one of the hornless cows patronisingly conversed long enough to snootily tell her to push off. Unnerved by the menacing ten foot long grooved rapier each of the tusked males aggressively sported, Durgay speedily hauled his rankled merwoman out of the slightly less frigid waters the impolite narwhals used for their winter retreat. What was with the lesser whales and their unprovoked disdain of the Cetari?
Lucky for the merfolk time held scant meaning, as the dusky sea was a maddeningly unchanging vista of whitened ice above, blackish water below. The couple dozed whenever the need to slumber drowsed them, uneasily taking short catfish naps. In an everlasting night, you did not want to give yourself totally over to sleep, in case wakefulness never came.
Over the course of their wanderings neither of them broached the unspoken concern that even if their venture was miraculously successful Nupterus's intervention, if he deigned to intervene at all, might come too late for the Castle Rockers. Durgay and Najoli could well be lumbered with the dubious distinction of winding up the last merman and merwoman left alive anywhere in the voluminous world ocean. Might that not be His divine intent all along? Wipe the slate clean to start afresh with a blank sheet, giving the seekers a makeover into the Adam and Eve of the Seas tasked with repopulating the nurturing oceans with a newer, improved race of merpeople. If so, the runaway criminals felt unworthy with such an entrustment.
The twenty-second day of listless meandering started out much like the miserable days that went before, silently cruising the invariable dullness, their tedium and hunger broken by the odd fishfinger food which chanced their way; a welcome disruption to the monotony, lamentably all too short and not wholly satisfying.
"I've never been so hungry before,” moaned Durgay.
"That's the price of freedom,” Najoli said, trying to lighten his resurging moodiness. “Exile means leaving the creature comforts behind."
"Some benefit. At least in jail you're fed regularly."
Such was the sum of their daily conversing; forced, unfunny sarcasms to take their minds off the gnawing hunger and growing futility of the quest. Feeling as if they had practically circumnavigated the Arctic Circle without success, the luckless journeyers grew lethargic with despondency, their slothful pace little more than piteous wallowing.
Durgay was first to register a disturbance in the eerily waveless polar constancy. Preoccupied with her search, Najoli became aware of the irregularity when Durgay, cruising in her backwash, tugged sharply on the mermaid's tail for her to stop. She turned angrily to him, the annoyance playing across her dusky features c
hanging to a look of hope upon reading the curiosity in his tensed stance. “Found something?"
"Not the thing we're after."
"What then?"
"I'm not entirely sure. All this ice clutter is playing havoc with my echolocation.” The mirroring ice cap not only reflected the warming sunrays back into space, furthering the polar chill factor, it also bounced back the Fisher's biosonar returns, confounding him with a muddle of indecipherable echoes he struggled to make sense of. “At least two contacts, maybe more, somewhere behind us on our left, or possibly the right.” It was impossible for him to be exact.
"Orcas?” The note of worry in her whistle was plain enough.
"Only if they're midgets."
"I thought you couldn't tell."
"I can't entirely, yet going by size they're unlikely to be killer whales."
Najoli sensed he was holding back. “Give me the “but", Durgs."
"They could be mother and calf.” That could be troublesome. An overprotective mammy of any species was a force of nature to be reckoned with. “And they're coming our way."
Trusting that the interpretative skills of a Fisher garnished with greater seagoing experience were better than her own, she made the suggestion to dive out of harm's way. For once, Durgay did not argue. Hand in hand they mutely sank out of sight into the swallowing blackness. They dared not descend far, hovering a megashark's length beneath the bounding ice.
The intruders soon hove into view. Etched against the wan ceiling, the silhouettes belonged to bizarre creatures that, while broadly unfamiliar to the Cetari adventurers, elicited a splash of subliminal recognition. Wildlife designs adhered to standard blueprints to be patterned after and the profiles of a bird and sea lion, albeit ballooned with giantism, were categorical.
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